Free Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter Page A

steady.
    “Now, Bob Lee,” Bob could remember him saying, “now, Bob Lee, rifle’s only as good as the man using it. You use it well, it’ll stand by you come heaven or hell. You treat it mean and rotten like an ugly dog, or ignore it like a woman who complains too much, and by God it’ll find a way to betray you. Hell hath no fury, the good book says, like a rifle scorned. Well, the good book don’t say that exactly, but it could, Bob Lee, you hear me?”
    Bob Lee nodded, swearing that he’d never mistreat a rifle, and these many years later, that was, he felt, the one claim he could make: he’d never let a rifle or his father down.
    He looked down to the firing ground.
    There was no movement at all. It was quiet, except that the wind had picked up; he could hear it thrumming like a cicada, low and insistent.
    Beyond a thousand yards, you’re in a different universe. The wind, which under three hundred yards can be a pain in the butt, becomes savage. The bullet loses so much velocity on its down-range journey that its trajectory becomes as fragile as a child’s breath. The secret is to make the wind work for you, to read it and know it; it’s the only way to hit.
    Beyond a thousand yards, even with a scope, there’s no chance of bull’s-eye, no talk of X-rings; you’re justtrying to get on the target, though an exceedingly gifted shooter with the best rig in the world can bring his shots in within four inches.
    With his thumb, he snicked the safety off the Winchester, locked his hands around the grip and pulled it in tight to his shoulder, and ordered his body to relax as he looked for his spot-weld.
    Scrunched into the spider hole among the stench of loam and mud, he was in something as close to the classic bench shooter’s position as he could get, rifle braced on sandbags fore and aft, with just the softest give in the rear bag so he could move the piece in the brief period of time he’d have to track the moving man. His breath came in soft wheezes, half a lung in, half a lung out, as he adjusted to the lesser stream of oxygen.
    Finding the spot-weld at last, he was amazed at how bright and clear the world looked through a Unertl 36.
    Good thing he was indexed in the right direction. The bigger the scope, the smaller the field of view; if he’d had to hunt for it through the little bit of world the scope allowed him, it could take all day.
    And then he saw it. It was just a shimmer of motion, right at the crest line of the earthen wall fourteen hundred long yards away. A man’s head peeped over, and peeped back. He was coming.
    Bob felt the tension in him begin to rise.
    And then he realized, suddenly, though not in words, for there was no time for words in the blaze of the moment, that this shot was what it was all about. The rest of it, Accutech, Sniper Grade ammo, Nick Memphis in Tulsa, a DEA mission against a dope king—all that was prelude. This was the moment they’d been nursing him toward, by slow degrees, an inch at a time, coming onto it the way a man would come upon a final, and much waited for, much anticipated, threshold.
    It was a terribly long shot, he now saw: almost nobodyin the world could make it. He calculated the ballistics roughly and quickly, because he’d done it a hundred thousand times before, trying at least to bracket what the bullet ought to do at the range from what other bullets of similar weight and trajectory had done, and felt the wind, and tried to dope his way toward a hold, tried to instinct his brain into the shot. But he felt that he was way out there. He was in undiscovered territory. Nobody had ever been where he was before. Who’d risk a shot like this? It was criminally dangerous, dope king or not.
    All these thoughts, of course, fired through his head in nanoseconds. The man emerged from the wall, slithered over the top, and stood there, for just a moment, sloppy as shit, happy as a lark. He was a dot, a period, a pill. He was so very far away.
    Bob made