“Excellent. We lose a man now and then that way. If someone will guide me to the rifle, please.”

Bob and an operator brought Grogan to his rifle. Bob lifted it and handed it to the man.

“Mr. Swagger, the ammunition, if you please.”

Bob went to a red box of fresh Black Hills.308 match loaded with the 168-grain Sierra boat tail hollow point, that sniper’s preferred number one, slid three out, and said, “Want me to load it?”

“No sir,” said Grogan, “and the loading can count in the five seconds.”

Everyone watched.

“Gentlemen, ears on, glasses on. Me too, Jimmy,” and Grogan’s boy slipped earmuffs over his head. All the muffs, of course, were miked up to allow normal conversation, yet were engineered to close down instantly when the decibel count spiked upon a shot.

“Now, Mr. Swagger, pull off the bandana, and you other fellows count to five in your head and see where you are.”

Bob put his hands on the bandana and-

“Oh, wait,” said Grogan.

He paused, milking the theater of the moment.

“Won’t it be more fun with some stress? Let’s do a game. Since Mr. Swagger is a champion, let’s let him shoot against me. Blondie, you’re his spotter. You go ahead now, work your range finder, tinker the Kestral, run the numbers and the proper ballistics through the Palm Pilot, get coordinates and click ’ em into Mr. Swagger ’s scope. Then when the bell goes up, Anto goes up against Bob the Nailer, not man on man-no doubt who’s the better man-but system on system, so we may learn which is the better system.”

“It ain’t necessary,” said Bob.

“Mr. Swagger, sir, them smart boys who run iSniper have instructed me to do all I can to sell 911 to the Energy teams, and this is part of my initiative, begging the gentleman’s pardon. I’m after showing the toy in game against the best.”

“Well, that ain’t me now, if it ever was. And outshooting an old goat like me ain’t going to get you much in this world,” Bob said, “but if it’s what you want.” He turned to Blondie.

“Okay by you, son?”

“Be an honor, Mr. Swagger.”

“You good on the numbers?”

“I can run ’em fast as anyone and have done a fair amount of it under incoming.”

“Then you’re the hero here. You run the brainy stuff and diddle the scope and I’ll just pull the trigger.”

Bob took a seat, wedged himself close to the bench, as Blondie placed his own M40A1, by which Bob knew him to be a fellow marine, and watched as the young man swiftly loaded and locked three 168s. Bob squinched behind the rifle, and it was all familiar. He settled in, feeling the tension in the trigger, finding his stockweld, sliding to the eyepiece, and seeing the world through the mil-dot-rich reticle of the Unertl 10X Marine Corps-issue scope, a unit overbuilt so powerfully you could use it to break down doors. He diddled with the focus ring, waiting for it to declare the world pristine and hard-edged at five to eight hundred yards, and when it did, he nodded to Blondie.

“I’m gittin’ bored, me just standing here like a fella on a pier, watching ships,” said Anto, drawing laughter.

“Almost ready, Sergeant Anto,” said Blondie, and then went all serious pro on them, first laser-ranging the three distant brightly colored dots in the thousand yards of green beyond them with his small Leica unit, then pulling out his Kestral 4000 weather station and noting the wind, humidity, and temperature. Then he ran the data through his Palm Pilot and came up with three solutions. He dialed the first into the scope of the rifle, clicking mostly elevation but some windage, for there was a drift of light wind that rustled undulations in the grass.

He whispered to Bob, “Okay, you’re set up on the first target, which is 492 yards out, in a quarter value left to right wind. When you take that shot, I’m quickly turning you eighteen clicks up for the next one, which is at 622 yards, and then up fifteen for the last one, at 814 with a wind correction of five clicks. Are you ready?”

“Good work, son,” said Bob. He was firing off a bench on sandbags while Grogan stood to do his offhand.

“Sure you don’t care to sit, Colour Sergeant Anto?”

“Nah, I’m fine this way. Some other fellow come up and pull the bandana when you’re ready.”

Bob realized that Anto would pass the first target because he himself was already set up to that range and Anto would have no advantage. Instead he’d lase and shoot the second, then the third, while Blondie worked the clicks up for Bob’s second. He had a rogue impulse toward anarchistic victory: he’d shoot the second one first, taking away Anto’s advantage, then shoot the farthest, them come down to pick up the closest. That would be the way to win.

But what would that prove? That he was smarter at a stupid game? That he was an asshole? That he couldn’t go with the agenda out of some petty vanity?

Don’t do it, he told himself. Don’t be an asshole.

“Someone start us off,” said Anto.

Someone did.

“Pull on one, ready now, three, two, o-”

Bob was alone in the world of the scope. He was home, really; it was all familiar, the feel of the rifle, the smell of the cleaning fluid, the touch of hand to comb, cheek to fiberglass, finger to trigger, the rifle firm, the breathing stopped, the body nothing but steel except for the littlest tip of the trigger finger, and he saw the bright, tiny dot nesting at the confluence of the crosshairs and, as usual, some inner voice commanded his finger’s twitch and so deep was his concentration that he neither heard the shot nor felt the recoil, just watched the tiny blot of color leap.

With his practiced hand, he got the bolt thrown and felt the vibrations of clickage as, hunched close, the young man called Blondie rocketed through his eighteen clicks. Bob put the hairs on the even smaller dot just in time to see it scoot into the air as Anto nailed it dead solid perfect.

No need to cock then, but some impulse came to him from a trick bag of shooter’s savvy that just seemed to be there when you needed it, and he waved off Blondie and went for the shot on intuition, his gift for hold, knowing that Blondie couldn’t click fast enough. His mind was a blur of numbers. He reasoned that at 800 yards, each mil-dot below the crosshair represented an increment of 35 yards off the last zero at 622, which meant that the 92 yards further out to the third target represented about 2.7 mil-dots, and at a speed that has no place in time, he found the segment of line between second and third mil-dots that represented the 2.7 hold and involuntarily fired, just as did Grogan.

The ball leaped up, then jagged hard right.

“Whoa!”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Damn!”

Grogan’s shot, dead-on, had knocked the ball upwards as it deflated, but Bob’s, arriving a nanosecond later and off-center, had banged it hard to the right, and it squirted off and bled its atmosphere out in the grass, signifying death.

“Well shot, Bob the Nailer,” cried Grogan. “Damn, sir, that’s shooting!”

Applause arose, and Bob was shamed at the vanity of his wanting to win, but at the same time pleased he’d done all right and impressed all the young guys who’d done it for real much more recently than he had, and would be Out There again soon, beyond the point of the spear.

Grogan was all lit up.

“Lord God, many’s the time I’ve done my little trick, yes sir, and no one has ever come even half so close. You was what, a hundredth of a second behind me, and here I am with all the techno gizmos and you just shot on pure instinct. What a shot, what a bloody damned shot.”

For just a second there, it seemed like the point of the whole exercise was to congratulate the old lion on his near-win in a game that proved nothing. But Anto was the leader in this development; he led the celebration.

“Tell me, Mr. Nailer, how you done it. I never could, not in a thousand years, no matter the rifle.”