“That is right, Mr. Swagger. Even to the point of measuring the firing pin to make certain that it was up to spec, even to the last two or three thousandths of an inch, so that nobody could have cut it and soldered it back so that it wouldn’t fire. We learned that one the hard way.”
“Yes sir. Now, is it not true that any object in the world picks up microscopic debris of some sort? A record at the smallest level possible of where it’s been, what it’s done.”
“Yes sir, just like on the CSI shows.”
“Never seen one. Figured it out on my own. Now, a sniper rifle would be particularly rich in such a micro record, wouldn’t it? I mean, mostly it’s kept cased or in a safe, so it’s not picking up a lot of random crap. It’s rarely used, and when it’s used, it’s used in some dramatic enterprise. So the stuff aboard ought to tell a straightforward story, yes?”
“True again.”
“And a rifle is a particular kind of vacuum then, right? I mean, it’s always slightly lubricated, and lubrication has an attraction factor on its own. It’s like glue. Lot of tiny fragments and stuff sticks. Some can be identified, some can’t.”
“That’s right.”
“If it were paint or carpet fibers, you’d have a huge database to compare anything you found against. You could do it by computer in a few seconds. Right?”
“Right.”
“But if I’m reading correctly, you came up with an amount of ‘unknown baked paint debris.’ ”
“That’s what it says. That’s what I wrote.”
“And it’s unknown because you ain’t got no ‘baked paint debris’ database, nothing to compare it to.”
“Right again.”
“Now,” said Swagger, “here’s where I am. That baked paint debris-my thought is that it’s some kind of peelings, fragments, dust, motes, whatever you call it-”
“We call it ‘microscopic shit,’ Mr. Swagger,” Jacobs said, and everyone laughed, even Bob. Good one for Mr. Jacobs, and the laugh let a little tension out of the room.
“My read is that some of it came from the scopes. In other words, whenever you tighten the rings on a scope to mate it to the rifle, you leave microscopic trace amounts, ‘shit’ ”-another laugh-“off the finish of the scope. You do it a lot, you have a lot of shit. You do it rarely, you don’t have much. But it’s always there, right? However, since rifles with scopes are so seldom used in crimes, no one’s bothered to accumulate a database, when of course paint samples from cars and carpet fibers are always found at crime scenes.”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” said Swagger. “Here I am. Here’s what the old man is driving at. This kind of scope I described-as I said, there’s only six makers in the world. Well, in America. They are Horus; the Tubb DTAC, which is made by Schmidt & Bender; Nightforce, an American outfit actually manufactured in Australia; Holland, which has a contract through both Leupold and Schmidt & Bender to manufacture a scope with a ranging reticle and a series of aiming points; the BORS from Barrett, which fits on and adjusts the scope itself; and finally a company out west called iSniper, which makes a top-dollar variant called the iSniper911, said to be the best of the bunch. One of those brands of scopes this joker used. Therefore, you have to go to a big firearms wholesaler who has all these scopes in stock, you have to obtain one of each and test them. And one of them will yield baked paint debris identical to the microscopic baked paint debris you found on Carl’s rifle. And that’s the kind of scope this sniper used, while Carl was all alcohol-stupored up. Then his old scope was remounted and zeroed. So my question is, if you find it and make that match, would you withdraw your question about this thing being a Swagger fantasy? In other words, ain’t that your, whatchyoucallit, objective evidence?”
“Once again, Mr. Swagger, you’re the smartest boy in the class.”
Nick said, “We can track the sales records of the scope. Someone on that list-and I’m guessing there can’t be many because it’s new and it costs a lot of money-someone who’s bought one of these things, he’d be our person of interest.”
“So why again do we need to send an undercover, Mr. Swagger?” asked Ron Fields.
“This is why,” said Swagger. “The flaw in this system is that it’s tricky. That’s why an old guy like Carl never could have mastered it, and that’s why these things will always be primarily for the government, because they demand basically a professional, highly trained shooter to get them to do what you’re paying all that money for them to do, which is head-shoot Taliban field commanders at sixteen hundred meters cold-bore. You got to be good with numbers, good with small machinery, confident with higher logarithms and minicomputers, familiar with software, all that tech-weenie stuff, plus be able to use it all in the dark or the cold or the jungle or after three days of sitting in a hole in the ground under a net on a mountain slope in someplace that ends in ‘stan.’ It’s a highly refined skill. So most of these companies run schools to teach potential shooters-mostly special ops people, or high-contact military like Rangers or some government SWAT outfits, highly trained contract operators like Blackwater or Graywolf, people who need to know, your elite professionals-to teach them how to run the stuff under pressure and in field conditions. Our man will have gone through that training.”
“We get the records-”
“You have to subpoena the records. The records can be diddled or destroyed. You don’t know who or what is behind this, what the point is, where the trail leads. You need to send a man who can play in that league to the shooting school to see what he can come up with. You need to do it fast. I have a recommendation.”
He couldn’t believe he was about to say this, but there it was. In for a penny, in for a pound. Last mission of a long-dead war. And as in all wars, who else was there to send?
“I recommend me. Let me hunt this bastard.”
13
He didn’t introduce himself. He simply strode to the front of the small group of shooters assembled in the bleachers next to the benches under the bright Wyoming sun and said, “Your insert was at 2200, you got to the target zone at 0500 in the dark after a long uphill, over-rock belly crawl, so you’ve no time to range the target area by light. You’re in a hole. You’re bleeding everywhere. The scorpions are crawling over your backside, looking for the breakfast you yourself ain’t had. It’s cold. There are Taliban all over the place. The light comes up, and that’s when you see the Cherokee. It putters along and finally stops at a hut in the valley, and out pops the tall fellow for his dialysis. You’ve maybe two to three seconds clear shooting when he stops to talk to a kid. You’d also like to go home afterwards and have tea with the boyos, right? Oh, you fellows would have a Bud and a steak, but you take my point. How do you do it?”
He stood in front of them, burly, with a bristle of dark hair and a taut NCO’s face from any army in the world, his seemingly an Irish one. He was muscular, powerful, built for war or football, little else. His small eyes burned darkly and it was clear he was high clergy in the church of the sniper. He wore the uniform of the trade-the tac pants, a military-cut shirt and jacket, assault boots-and his eyes ran from man to man. His cadre stood to the right at parade rest, same uniforms, same burly men, or at least two were, the third being scrawny and dark and feral, all fast-twitch muscle.
“You, Blondie? How do you make that shot?”
Blondie was actually redheaded, about thirty, with his own set of sniper’s hard eyes. He was one-seventh of this quarter’s iSniper five-day tutorial, out here in the wastes to learn how to run the tech. Like his six colleagues, and like the speaker, and like the three other silent members of the teaching cadre, he was sunburned, tattooed, thick-armed, and he knew the drill as to kit, appearing in the de rigueurs of the tactical trade, complete to assault boots from Danner, khaki cargo pants from 5.11, polos from Blackhawk, scrunched boonie hats or weatherbeaten LaRue Tactical dusky green baseball caps, and a whole sales rack of tear-shaped, mucho-dinero sunglasses including Wiley Xs, Gargoyles, and Maui Jims.