Jimmy had gone to binoculars, so much easier to manipulate than the tripod-mounted spotter’s scope, if somewhat less steady. He fixed on Anto as he came down the hill, watched him course this way and that, detected no nervousness. And what happened if Swagger simply killed Anto, shot him dead on the spot? Then he, Jimmy, would find the sniper’s hide and give the site to Raymond and talk Raymond into the shot, and Raymond, steady as an ingot, would put the man down.
Then they’d bring their fallen Michael Collins back and give him a burial Irish style that he’d deserve. There’d be drinking and keening and piping, with the banshees howlin’ of a great man’s death on the glens and in the bogs. But it would be all right: that was Anto, giving himself up for the team and the mission, without even a thought to the sadness of it all.
“Would you see anything?” asked Ray, stuck in the smaller field of vision of the iSniper911 atop the AI.
“I do not,” said Jimmy, “only fat Anto’s fat arse scrunched up on the bike’s seat. Not a pretty vision, I’m telling yis.”
“No man should have to look on Anto’s great ass, sure,” said Raymond, and Jimmy couldn’t tell if it was Raymond’s first joke or if he meant that with his customary earnestness.
Anto arrived at his designated location, stilled his machine, and slid off. He moved to the side in odd steps, keeping his hands high. From the site of the boys, he was on a slight oblique.
Raymond, as practiced on the iSniper as any of them, shot the distance and reported it to be 297 yards in 0-5 wind, a downward angle of 13 degrees over the yardage, not enough to require any correction. The device then told him three down,.5 to left, and so he went back to the scope, traced three lines down the axis of the center of the reticle from the larger reticle, adjusted the rifle ever so slightly until the fat, slightly angled, red-dappled shape that was Anto’s naked back rested exactly in the space between the third hashmark of the vertical axis of the crosshair and the first small + to its left, and there he rested. He could kill Anto easy enough, but that wasn’t the point then, was it?
Jimmy ran the binoculars over the known world fast enough to make time, slow enough to see what he was looking at. He was just on the edge of blur. It should be happening soon enough now.
Suddenly he saw Anto jump, not as if hit, but startled. All of Anto’s muscles became tense, even his buttocks, clenching in the drama, and he turned, stopped as if commanded, and began to speak.
“What the fuck,” said Jimmy, shifting his binocs after concluding from the evidence that somehow the sniper was close to but behind Anto. “Raymond, Raymond, look at where the bastard is!”
Ginger didn’t jump when Anto appeared at the edge of his vision; nor did he twitch, tighten, or kick. He was professional. He just let the scene unfold. He saw Anto arrive at the creek, not thirty yards away.
So it begins, it does, he thought.
He double-checked his weapon under the camo tarpaulin, ran his thumb up to the safety to see it was indeed swung all the way around to full-auto, then broke contact with the grip to crawl his fingers up the receiver to test the cocking handle, pulling it back toward the butt to find it loose, which signified the weapon was cocked fully with a round in the chamber. He slid his hand up higher on the receiver to the face of the Eotech holographic sight, a clever tactical enhancement that looked like a small TV set mounted in a smooth plastic streamline bolted tight on the receiver’s Picatinny rail. Activated-Ginger did that, pushing a button first for power-up, then pushing it a dozen more times to elevate the brightness-it beamed a holographic circle on its screen of glass, a powerful icon glowing red against the clear, so perfect for close-quarter battle because you didn’t even have to look for it, it was just there to your eye, and you put it on target and squeezed and sent a fleet of 5.56s off to do the job right and proper. Now he was ready and sure that what might happen to need his assistance in settling would be occurring soon enough, and he said a brief prayer to Jesus to grant him the favor of putting a mag into the Yank, to pay him back for the fooking cracked skull he took and the embarrassment of being the fella to let the team down.
That done, he screwed up his focus, his concentration, his war persona, and watched as poor naked Anto just stood there, his bollocks all loose, his shoulders red, waiting for whatever.
Surely soon the American would appear, coming on down the far hill, approaching for the exchange, and it would all-
What the-?
Jaysus, will you look at that?
Who’d have guessed? Not a man among them.
The earth moved.
It did, it did. Twenty yards behind naked Anto, a smallish knot of brush and grass quivered and gave and transmogrified itself as beneath it rose, like a prehistoric beast coming out of a millennium or more’s sleep, a shape that soon enough took on the damned image of a man in ghillie, black pistol in hand, face a green-black-brown silent killer’s mask. He rose to both legs and extended the pistol toward Anto, as if to shoot.
Ginger had a moment of panic: should he rise himself now and fire the killing burst? But before he could commit, it appeared that the enemy sniper was not about to fire. He too, it appeared, wanted a little chat.
Anto seemed to wait forever and almost put his arms down out of sheer fatigue, ready to throw them up again at any sign of the approach, but then he heard a voice from too close to be real but real indeed say, “All right, Potatohead, you stay frozen,” and felt himself jump in surprise.
What in God’s name?
He turned halfway and saw in his peripheral the man himself, or rather a man disguised as planet, all fronds and frills and floppy hat, as ghillied up to perfection as any sniper could be, a Sig pistol in his grip, the camo smock falling away. He wasn’t a mile away, he wasn’t a half, a quarter, a hundred yards, a hundred feet. He was right there, almost in spit’s distance.
“Move another inch, Irishman, you’re dead as shit.”
Anto froze. The fellow was there, unseen by Jimmy and Raymond and even close-in Ginger. He’d been there all along. He had to have gotten there ahead of them. He’d planted himself in the earth and outwaited the stillest, best men in the business!
Anto’s mind hurried then to another ramification; who’d been on the radio, who’d been guiding him in?
“Is it Ginger?” asked Raymond.
“No, no, get on the damned gun, man, put the bastard down. It’s him, it’s him, can’t you goddamn see how dif his camo is from ours? Do it, do it now.”
Raymond didn’t panic, professional that he was, but reacquainted the rifle butt with his shoulder, settled microscopically, tried to quell a heart rush, took a breath or so. Then he reshot the iSniper911 laser ranger to initiate the target acquisition sequence, committed to screen, and saw that it was 281 yards off, and the angle had risen to 16 degrees, still too little for a cosine correction, and the new shooting determination was still three down, but now without the.5 left adjustment, so he found stock-weld, acquired reticle, acquired new target-large man in grassy ghillie suit-tracked downward on the central vertical axis of the reticle to the same third hashmark but this time didn’t need to make the same.5 to left, let the rifle settle, let his breathing settle, and began to take slack out of the trigger.
“How much did you get, Anto?” asked Bob mildly.
“’Tis over two hundred thousand for the sniper’s pleasure,” said Anto with a merry, comic lilt to his voice. “Oh, sure yis be having some wicked pleasures on that swag. It’s yours, Sniper. Want me to bring her to ye, or will yis grab it yourself?” him thinking, now, prang the boyo, finish him with Mr..308, blow lungs and heart out, Raymond, don’t let your old sarge here down.