Bob blinked quickly, ordered himself to chill out, and tried to see in the lazy tremble in the cross hairs not something to hate (his own weakness) but something to make peace with – something to forgive. Self-forgiveness was a large part of it: you can’t be perfect all the time. Nobody can: accept your weakness, try to tame it and make it work for you.
Bob breathed slowly, letting the air hum half into his lungs, then humming it half out. He didn’t want a lot of oxygen in them, ballooning out on him at the awkward moments. But dammit, he still didn’t quite feel comfortable. It was all so strange: sitting up there in the pretend building, pretending to be an FBI agent, pretending it was 1986, trying to pretend it was real.
There is nothing to pretend, he told himself. There is only shooting, and that’s never pretend.
He’d figured the math out much earlier. Having memorized the ballistics table, he knew that at 320 yards the 150-grain bullet was programmed to drop about ten inches and would have slowed, by this distance, to a velocity of about 2,160 feet per second. But he also knew that this Accutech stuff was a bit hotter than the standard. And so he figured it would only drop eight inches. But he was shooting downhill, a slightly different problem than shooting flat; this meant he’d add more of a drop, because bullets fired at an angle fall farther; he took another inch out of the equation. That put him nine inches low at 350 yards, except that the wind, just a slight breeze, would move the bullet as it traveled perhaps four inches to the left. So he had to hold nine inches lower and four inches to the left. Then he had to lead to compensate for the speed of the car; and he had to do it on cue, when he got the green light command over his earphones.
“Charlie Four, do you read?”
Fuck it, thought Bob, what does he want?
He said nothing. The mike was bent under his chin and to pull it back into place was to blow his spot-weld, his hold and his peace. He would not give that up.
“Charlie Four, goddammit, where are you?”
Bob was silent, awaiting the arrival of the vehicle in the bottom right quadrant of his scope.
“Charlie Four, goddammit, get on the air! Do you acknowledge? Call in, goddammit, Charlie Four, I need you authenticated.”
Bob was silent, trying to flatten out that bit of tremble from the reticle. He tried to make his mind blank and cool and drive out any sensation of his own body. There should be only two things: finding the right hold and preserving it through the trigger pull.
“Charlie Four, you don’t call in, I’m not gonna green light you, goddammit, I have to have you on the air so I know you’re reading my commands!”
Bob held silent. His breath was rougher now; he felt like tossing the earphones away! Talking to him! Now!
He tried to clear his head, to make everything go away except the shot. He could not.
“Charlie Four, green light canceled. Abort it. Hang it up, if you’re there, Charlie Four. Do you read? Shot authorization is canceled. There’ll be no shooting, goddammit, Charlie Four.”
And now he saw it.
The limo body, hauled by the chain, slid into view. Its angle from him was not acute but more like forty degrees; the car appeared to be moving at about twenty miles per hour; Bob had no trouble pivoting the rifle on the bag through a short arc as he tracked the car, looking for his hold. He tried not to note the details, but he could hardly help it. Downing, for example, was, preposterously, a watermelon; the four hostages around him were balloons. It was crude but effective, especially in the way the wind made the balloons waver in unpredictable ways and the bump and grind of the two made the melon queerly elastic, nearly human. Bob almost laughed. All this money to shoot a melon! And he knew it was absurd, too. A hundred men could hit a melon like this, but only one of them could hit a head.
And then that was gone too, as, suddenly, Bob had the position, had it, knew it, had the shot, had it right, had it perfect. He held as the car continued to slide and involuntarily, without having consciously decided to disobey orders, he began to take the trigger slack out. He was going to shoot anyway, fuck it.
“Charlie Four, gun is down, green light, green light, green li – ”
But Bob had fired already by then, having already made the decision at some subconscious level. His brain had yielded to his finger; his finger had decided and in the instant before the blur took it all away from his eye, he saw the melon detonate into a smear of red against the green Maryland countryside as the bullet tore through it and mushroomed. And when the scope came back from the recoil he saw all four ballons still waving in the wind and the melon blown in half.
“Congratulations,” said Hatcher. “You win all the marbles. You solved it.”
Bob said nothing, just fixed him with a cool eye. He had climbed down from the tower, to be surrounded by admirers.
“When did you decide to shoot?”
“It just happened.”
“You were so fast when you got the green light. Damn, you were so fast!”
Bob didn’t tell them he was halfway through the pull when the word came.
“Here, you can read the transcripts yourself.” He handed them over to Bob, who looked at them briefly, enough to satisfy himself that yes, indeed, Base had been on the earphones to poor Memphis until almost the last second.
BASE: Have you acquired the target?
AGENT MEMPHIS: Yes, sir, uh, he’s at the bottom of my scope, he’s rising into my cross hairs, uh, he’s -
BASE: Hold your fire, Charlie Four, until I have a confirmation that his piece is down.
AGENT MEMPHIS: Base, goddammit, I have him, I have him, I -
BASE: No authorization. Hold it, Charlie Four, I can’t let you shoot, I -
AGENT MEMPHIS: [garbled] – have it, dammit, I can -
BASE: Negative, negative, Charlie Two, can you give me a visual?
AGENT O’BRIAN: I can’t see his gun, Base, I, oh, Christ, he’s going to fire -
BASE: [garbled] Shoot, green light, fire, goddammit, take his ass down -
AGENT MEMPHIS: [garbled]
BASE: God, you hit the girl, he hit a girl, oh, Jesus, in the back -
AGENT O’BRIAN: Suspect is firing on his hostages, Jesus, will somebody hit him, Nick, hit him, hit him, hit him!
AGENT MEMPHIS: I can’t see, he’s behind, oh, Jesus, he’s shooting them, I can’t get another shot, oh, Jesus, help them, help them, somebody, help them!
AGENT O’BRIAN: He just blew his own head away. [obscenity], Nick, he put that gunbarrel in his mouth and blew his [obscenity] head away, he -
BASE: Get those people medical aid, get those people medical aid, Jesus Christ, get those -
AGENT MEMPHIS: Shit.
That was enough. Why hadn’t Memphis had a spotter, someone sitting next to him up there? Sniping was a two-man job, or it was a one-man, on his lonesome, job. It wasn’t for a guy with a radio playing in his ear. And Base. Base was the real enemy; Base had made it impossible for the guy to hit that shot, blabbering away like an old woman.
“They fucked him, but good,” said Bob through tight lips. He thought of the poor jerk, watching the great Tulsa massacre through his scope, helpless, enraged, and most of all unforgivingly furious at himself for having missed the shot and hit the woman.
“What happened to him?”
“He married the woman he hit. He quadded her, and he married her. Still in the Bureau, with a poor woman in a wheelchair to care for the rest of his life.”
Well, here’s to you, Nick Memphis, thought Bob. If I were still a drinking man, I’d lift a glass to you, and if I ever become one another time, then I’ll lift one for you too.
“It’s remarkable how institutions reveal themselves under stress,” said Hatcher. “See, the Bureau is basically a bureaucracy, and under everything it does, there’s a bureaucratic imperative. So Base had to monitor Memphis, even at the moment of firing. Had to, neurotically, pathologically. That was Base’s first operating principle, to cover his own ass. And poor Memphis, being a team guy, even though the solo artist, poor Memphis played along. And in so doing, completely compromised his shot.”