He turned and threw a cover off a portable blackboard next to him, to show a chart that diagramed the 911 reticle design. Busy, busy, one might say, and all the young snipers involuntarily groaned at the density of it, all the knowing and learning that it demanded and the stress of doing all that while possibly being shot at. The iSniper reticle wasn’t just the old standby crosshair, not even the crosshair with its mil-dot ranging diodes on the hairs; it displayed indeed the central crosshair, its nexus a kind of anchor point. From that spot, a veil of lighter netting seemed to descend, in the shape of a Christmas tree, a sort of delta of interfering imagery. Upon closer inspection by all it became evident that the netting itself consisted of rows and rows of smaller crosses. It looked like a cemetery on a hillside.
“See all them markers?” said Grogan. “Sure, they’re the tombstones of men who’ve stood against iSniper. In a manner of speaking. They’re all points of aim.
“You press the lase button to initiate the targeting sequence. In one tenth of a second, you have distance, while at the same time this little unit”-he tapped a collection of dials mounted behind the bell of the scope-“reads temp, wind, atmospheric density, and humidity and automatically inputs to the minicomputer, where some kind of mysterioso chip runs it through the mathematical universe, also taking into consideration the ballistic template of the weight, speed, design, and trajectory of your chosen round, and when it’s all done, a little voice pipes out, ‘Honey, let’s fuck.’ ”
Laughter, of course, as the boys were used to the metaphorically imagined sexual dynamics of sniping and had heard and issued the cry “Get some,” which had once meant “Get some pussy” and now, in the War Against Global Terror, meant “Get some kills.”
“It does not, of course; even the head university boys at iSniper aren’t that clever. No, instead what happens is that once the solution is produced, automatically again and again in supertime, that data is crunched as target coordinates are impulsed up here on the screen of the monitor, so you get a readout. ‘D thirteen, seven R,’ it’ll say, something like that. You go back to the scope, count thirteen hashmarks down, seven tiny cross-hashes to the right, and that’s your aiming point. You put that little cross, that reticle, that pip, on Johnny Taliban and use your good shooter’s discipline, enjoying all the fundamentals you’ve worked so hard to master, and when you shoot, the thing you shoot dies. Not usually. Not sometimes. Not if luck is with you or God is your copilot and the wind be mild, but always.”
A hand came up, from a thick-necked young man who looked like a linebacker. But then, they all looked like linebackers.
“Yes, mate?”
“Sir, I-”
“Mate, I’m just a sergeant rating, like all you boys are, and ‘sir’ makes me hair stand up. You could call me Colour Sergeant if you can get your tongue around something so Waterloo-sounding, but I’ll settle for Anto.”
“Anto, like all of us here, I ain’t no Bob the Nailer, but I know enough to know that there’s nothing made that don’t get beat to hell in combat in three days or less. I look at that little thing and it looks like an iPod or something. I just get worried that after that long crawl, I turn it on and I get ‘does not compute’ or some such and there ain’t no IT to call and bitch at where I’m hunkered down.”
“Excellent, chum. Most excellent. I imagine you’re all worried, no? Mr. Swagger, yourself same, sir?”
“It’s a concern,” said Bob, trying to wear his designated celebrity status gracefully and not come across to these young men as a pompous asshole. “Busted more than my share of glass in the boonies and they didn’t have no batteries in ’em.”
Anto Grogan smiled at the fellas, all confident and pleased, then at his cadre of three other boys, and then he hoisted the rifle and threw it hard upon the ground.
An involuntary groan arose from the little audience, for all were shooters and knew to cherish the weapon as long habit, and if rough stuff happened to it, you hoped it stayed true, but under no account did you abuse it yourself.
“Let’s give it a right and proper licking,” Anto said, picking it up, turning it wrong side out in his strong hands so that he gripped it like a batsman by the barrel, and whacking its stock three times hard against the beam that supported the roof over the shooting benches, the collisions sending a buzz of vibration through the ramshackle structure.
Then he held it up and began to spin the windage and elevation knobs randomly in one direction, then the other.
“Gentlemen, if you could see your own faces now you’d be laughing yourselves. Ever see a man treat a fine rifle so poorly? No, and I don’t recommend it neither, but let’s see what we’ve done. I’ll take two volunteers please, that would be you and you. Jimmy, get the boys the ATV.”
Jimmy detatched himself from the line of cadre and went to a parked ATV, keyed it to life, and brought the three-wheel rough-ground bike up to the bleachers. In its cargo tray behind the second seat, everyone could see three bright round objects, red, yellow, and blue, beachballs actually.
“Now here’s the drill. You two boys are going to go on a little drive out into the field, and whenever the spirit moves you, though I hope it’s beyond five hundred yards, you’ll kick a beachball out, with the last one way far out there. Maybe the wind will come along and move ’em even further about. I, meanwhile, will sit here and continue to talk to the other lads, with the somewhat odd situation being that I’ve been tightly blindfolded”-he pulled a red bandana out of his back pocket-“by Mr. Swagger; that is, after Mr. Swagger has checked the bandana to make certain it’s up and fine. The point is, I can have no idea at what ranges the beach balls have been placed. When all is done, I will turn, Mr. Swagger will pop off my blindfold, and using iSniper, I’ll shoot cold-bore offhand and bang all three in under five seconds. I’ll range, compute, acquire, and fire on three unknown-range targets and hit ’ em dead-on. Sure, I’ve practiced some, and sure, I’m deft with the thing, but not at a level any man here willing to work and follow instructions can’t himself achieve over the next five days. And when you see that, imagine your same selves in that hole, only it ain’t beachballs, it’s boys with RPGs moving against your site, and enjoy watching me pop them. And mind, this is after all the abuse you’ve just seen.”
“Anto?”
“I am.”
“Anto, seems like you’re taking the sport out of it,” someone said.
“True, I am, but for sport I butt heads in Irish football and chase a chesty whore now and then, or curl up for a nice read with a book by Agatha Christie. For shooting infidels, by that I mean ‘non-Irish,’ I want no sport at all, just piles of dead Johnny Muhammads feeding flies and scorpions fast as possible. Gentlemen, shall we?”
There was no point in “examining” the bandana; it was just a bandana, and Bob folded it in thirds, looped it about the Irishman’s eyes, and tied it tightly, Grogan going, “Say, that fella’s going to squish me head; easy, old man,” to much laughter, while two of the young operators took their ride on the ATV, this also ginning up laughter because like all young men with too much IQ and too much testosterone all stirred up in a lethal mix and driving them forward, the man piloting the bike took it to the limits, while his bud hung off it, waiting till he was way out there, and then gave each beachball a wicked toss until it came to rest at the farthest reaches of the range. Then they sped back, just barely in control, and came up short in a slithering, too-much-damn-brake powerslide that kicked dust and grass a hundred feet.
“Did anyone die?” asked Anto from behind his blindfold.
“Colour Sergeant, all will live to fight again,” said Jimmy.