Free Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter Page B

half a hundred minute corrections in a time span that has no human measure, found his spot in that weird moment of clarity, and felt the trigger go back on itself and break, and lost the picture from the scope in the blur of the rifle’s buck, and knew he’d sent the shot home, for he’d had a flash of the figure going instantly limp on him, and it fell and rolled without dignity down the slope.
    Now Bob saw what he had done—what they had made him do.
    And for the first time, Bob felt as if he’d blasphemed with a rifle.
    Their enthusiasm didn’t mean a great deal.
    “Mr. Swagger, by God,” burbled Hatcher, “do you realize we’ve had twenty-eight men in here. We’ve had some ex-Delta Force shooters, some top FBI people, the top gun on LAPD SWAT and half a dozen other big city SWAT teams, we’ve had the top shooters from the NRA thousand-yard championships, and nobody, noneof them, not a one of them, has hit that shot! You put that bullet within an inch of the heart. A one-shot kill at fourteen hundred yards.”
    Bob looked at him, squint-eyed.
    “It’s a nice rifle,” he said. “And whoever you got loading for you knows what the hell he’s doing. Yes, sir.”
    Even Payne, so unimpressed yet curious, now looked at him with some strange glint in his eye.
    “Hell of a shot,” he said, in a voice meant to suggest that in his time he too had seen, and maybe even taken, some hellacious long shots.
    But Bob still felt tainted. It was like waking up after a night with a low woman, and hating yourself for what you sold to have her.
    “Mr. Swagger, you all right? Damn, if you’d have been with DEA, Diego Garcia would be historical right now, instead of the richest man in Colombia.”
    Bob smiled, trying to pin down the peculiarity he felt.
    Daddy, what did I do? he thought, remembering when he’d taken his first shot at a deer, and gut-shot the poor creature and he’d felt shame and hatred for himself. His daddy had told him that it was all right, and tracked the creature down himself to finish it off, three long hours of following blood trails up and down some of the roughest slopes in the Ouachitas. His daddy had told him God forgives the bad shots if God knows that in your heart you were trying to put meat on your family’s table and that you truly loved the creature you were hunting and were making it and yourself a part of nature.
    If God didn’t want man to hunt, why did he give him the brains to figure out gunpowder and the Model 70 Winchester rifle?
    “Oh, I figure I know where I stand,” he said, becauseit just flashed into his head and he knew what they’d done to him.
    “And what I figure is, you’d best go get that phony colonel of yours, and get him fast, so he can explain to me why it is you went to all this trouble to turn me into the gook who hunted
me!
”
    He turned, glaring.
    “You motherfucker, you turned me into the sniper who crippled me and then killed my best friend.”
    He felt like fighting. He turned and drove the Model 70 rifle butt into Payne’s mouth, literally lifting the man off the ground with the blow, and driving him to earth leaking shattered teeth and blood. He hated to tarnish the rifle’s glowing wood with such dreadful matters, but certain things demand to be done. The blow sounded like somebody hitting a haunch of beef with a steel pipe and it completely destroyed Payne’s fat ugly face and put fear into his little pig eyes. Then Bob reached down and yanked the hidden cut-down Remington 1100 from Payne’s shoulder holster, jacked the six red shells out into the dust, and tossed the piece behind him.
    “My dog doesn’t like you and I don’t like you, Payne. I don’t like a man who carries a sawed-off semi-auto 12-gauge full of double-ought because he doesn’t want to miss.”
    He turned back to Hatcher to find the educated man’s stunned disbelief at the rapidity and absoluteness of the violence.
    “You still here? Get your colonel or I’ll whip up on