Free Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter

temperatures to give it the strength to stand up to a thousand-yard cartridge.”
    “Okay, let’s give it a whirl. You have the ammo?”
    Hatcher handed over a box of Accutech Sniper Grade .300 H & H Magnum.
    LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY , it said in red letters.
    Bob opened the box, took out one of the long .300 H&H’s: it was like a small ballistic missile in his hand, close to four inches of shell and powder and bullet, heavy as an ostrich’s egg.
    “What kind of ballistics?”
    “It’s a thumper. We’re kicking it out off 70 grains of H4831 and our own 200-grain bullet boattail hollowpoint. About three thousand feet per second.”
    Bob thought numbers and came up with a 198-inch drop at a thousand yards; figure maybe 355 for fourteen hundred yards.
    Bob took the rifle. His first love had been a Model 70, often called the Rifleman’s Rifle, and he now owned several, including that recalcitrant .270 that had consumed him before coming up to Maryland, and whose problems he hadn’t quite mastered. So the rifle was like an old friend.
    “Where can I take it to zero?”
    “Uh, it’s zeroed. One of our technicians has worked it out to the yard. It’ll shoot to point of aim at the proper range.”
    “Hold on, there, sir. I don’t like to shoot for money with a rifle I haven’t tested.”
    “Ah—” said Hatcher, embarrassed at Bob’s flinty reluctance. “I can
assure
you that—”
    “You can’t assure me of a thing if I haven’t done it myself.”
    “Would you like me to get the colonel?”
    “Why don’t you just do that?”
    “All right. But I can tell you that the man who zeroed the rifle to that load and range—he won a thousand-yard championship with it in the mid-fifties. It’ll shoot. Iguarantee you it’ll shoot. He’s got the trophies to prove it.”
    Bob squinted.
    Finally he said, “Goes against my principles, but, goddammit, if it says Winchester, I’ll take a crack at it.”
    Bob lay in a spider hole. It was cramped and dirty. The walls seemed to press in. His view of the world consisted of only a slot, maybe six inches by four inches, and through it he saw a series of low ridges. Far, far away, there was a raw wall where the earth had been bulldozed up to form a bulwark.
    “He waited in that hole for two weeks,” Hatcher had told him. “Just be glad we don’t put you through that. And after all that waiting the shot came, and he missed it. A shame.”
    Garcia Diego, for this was the dope dealer’s name, was a careful man, and had extended his security arrangements out a thousand yards from his hacienda. He was the most hunted man in Colombia after wiping out the team in Miami. Now DEA had tracked him down and knew that if he slipped out, it would be at dawn, over the back wall of his hacienda, and he’d be visible for just a second or two before he scurried away to his ATV and disappeared into the jungle.
    “What you’ll see, Bob,” said Hatcher, “is a remarkably lifelike human form. It’s an anatomically correct dummy. We’re pulling it over the ridge on guy wires that won’t be visible to you, and it’s suspended in a frame, but it should, from this distance, look startlingly like a man. You’d best go for a center body shot.”
    Now, alone, Bob settled in behind the rifle. The old Winchester was the rifle he’d learned to shoot on all those deer seasons back in Arkansas. It was like a letter from home, or from the early fifties, and it made him think of his old dad. Earl Swagger was a dark and hairyman, with a voice like a rasp being drawn over bare iron, a man of solemn dignity and quietude, well packed in muscle, who nevertheless never ever raised his voice or struck anybody who hadn’t first broached the issue of violence himself and who treated all men, including what in those days everybody called niggers, with the same slow-talking courtesy, calling everybody, even the lowest scum of earth, sir.
    He stood over Bob patient as the summer sun, endlessly still and