They climbed in. They were in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn, getting ready to call on General Jack Preece, of JFP Technology, Inc.

"What was that address again?" Russ asked.

Bob told him.

"I think it's near the airport," he said.

"Go to it, Junior."

They drove in silence for a while. Then Russ said, "You'd better brief me on some stuff."

"Why?"

"If you and I are supposed to be doing a book on sniping and it turns out I don't know shit about it, this guy is going to kick us out on our butts and we get nothing."

"So what do you want to know? 'What's it feel like?' I used to get asked that a lot. 'What's it feel like?'"

"What's it feel like?"

"Smart-ass punk kid."

"All right. Why do you hate him?"

"Who, Preece?"

"Yeah."

"I don't hate him. He's a fine man."

"You hate him. I can tell. Even behind the famous Swagger reserve, you hate him."

"He was a fine officer. He ran a superior program. His people got hundreds, maybe thousands, of kills. They saved the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of American soldiers. He's a fine man, a patriot, probably a father and a Republican. Why would you say I hate him?"

"You hate him."

"Well ... it's just a thing. You wouldn't understand it. I'd say it to another sniper and to no one else. What I said to you earlier, that's what's important. He's a fine man, a great officer."

"You have to tell me. I can't get through this if you don't."

Bob paused. He wondered if he had the skills to articulate what lay at his heart. Or the energy. Damn this kid, with his smart-ass ways and his penchant for always coming up with a question that was pretty damned good.

"If you do write a book, you cannot cannot put this in it. Ever. Do you understand?" put this in it. Ever. Do you understand?"

"Yes sir."

"I don't want it said, Bob Lee Swagger, he had hard words for an American soldier who in good faith and out of duty and honor risked his life for his country. I won't have that. That's shit. That's what's killing the country."

"I swear."

"Then I tell you this now, and I will never hear of it again."

"Yes sir."

"It's about killing."

Russ said nothing.

"In war," Bob said, "death comes in three forms. Usually, it comes from far off, delivered by men who never see the bodies they leave behind. That's how we done most of our killing in Vietnam. The B-52s did the most, man, they'd turn that goddamn jungle into pulp and chew up everything for a square mile. And artillery. On the ground, the artillery does most of the killing. The king of battle, they call it. You may not like it, but that's how it is."

"Yes," said Russ.

"Second is in hot blood. Firefight. You see forms moving, you fire. Some of them stop moving. You may never see them up close, you may never know if you got a hit or not. Or you may: you see the little fuck go down, you see the tracers cut him up, that sort of thing. What's going on is really fighting. It's you or him. You may not like it, but goddammit you do it, because if you don't, you're the one goes home in a bag."

"Yes, I see."

"The third and last form is cold-blooded killing. That's what we do. We, being the snipers. We put a scope on a man from a half mile out and we pull a trigger and we watch him go still. Nothing pretty about it, but I would say it's necessary. I believed believed it was necessary. I know it makes people nervous. You're death. They call you Murder, Inc., and God knows what they say about you behind your back. They think you're sick or nuts or something, that you enjoy it." it was necessary. I know it makes people nervous. You're death. They call you Murder, Inc., and God knows what they say about you behind your back. They think you're sick or nuts or something, that you enjoy it."

"That's what you did."

"I did. But still, distinctions can be made. Somehow distinctions got got to be made. I didn't shoot women or children and I didn't shoot anyone that wasn't out to kill me. If someone has a hard time with that, well, tough shit. I was a to be made. I didn't shoot women or children and I didn't shoot anyone that wasn't out to kill me. If someone has a hard time with that, well, tough shit. I was a hunter hunter. It's called fair chase. You go into the jungle or along the paddy breaks. You hunt your enemy and you try and find a position where he can't get you. You take him down. You hit him, you get fire. We lost a lot of men. We had rewards on our heads. The VC put ten thousand piasters out for me and eventually a Russian bastard claimed it, but that's a different story. What we did was war. Find and destroy the enemy. Shoot him. Try and go home. Finish the mission.

"Now, the army ..."

He paused. Something in him recoiled at this; but he had to get it out.

"Different doctrine, developed first at this Project BLACK L LIGHT and then deployed through Tigercat, the 7th Infantry Division Sniper School. What they'd do, they'd night-insert four-man teams into a zone, three security boys with poodle shooters and one sniper with a rifle. They liked to do it just after a sweep. So Charlie was out and about, and feeling safe. He thought he owned the night. The shooter had what they called their M-21, which was an M-14 7.62 NATO rifle-.30-caliber, Russ-worked over and accurized by the Army Marksmanship Unit. It carried a suppressor-since you been to the movies, you'd call it a silencer-and a night-vision device, an AN/PVS-2, called a Starlight scope. So these boys set up in the jungle and they just wait; the sniper's on the scope, the other guys have night-vision binocs. They pick something up and the sniper moves into position. He puts the scope on them. It's like they're moving through green water, but he's got them out to eight hundred yards. The gooks never knew what hit them. They couldn't get a read on the sniper's hide because there was no sound. They couldn't believe he could see them, but through the scope, bright as daylight, he could put them down. Lots of kills. It was easy. One boy got a hundred fifteen kills in about five months. They was getting six, seven kills a night. Were they hitting soldiers? Hell, from eight hundred yards out on a Starlight, who the hell can tell? If they're moving at night, I guess they're soldiers, but maybe they were kids going to the john or families trying to move at night so they wouldn't get bounced by our Tac Air. Who knew? Then, at 0700, a chopper evacs the team the fuck out of there and it's back to base camp for pancakes and a good night at the body-count factory." and then deployed through Tigercat, the 7th Infantry Division Sniper School. What they'd do, they'd night-insert four-man teams into a zone, three security boys with poodle shooters and one sniper with a rifle. They liked to do it just after a sweep. So Charlie was out and about, and feeling safe. He thought he owned the night. The shooter had what they called their M-21, which was an M-14 7.62 NATO rifle-.30-caliber, Russ-worked over and accurized by the Army Marksmanship Unit. It carried a suppressor-since you been to the movies, you'd call it a silencer-and a night-vision device, an AN/PVS-2, called a Starlight scope. So these boys set up in the jungle and they just wait; the sniper's on the scope, the other guys have night-vision binocs. They pick something up and the sniper moves into position. He puts the scope on them. It's like they're moving through green water, but he's got them out to eight hundred yards. The gooks never knew what hit them. They couldn't get a read on the sniper's hide because there was no sound. They couldn't believe he could see them, but through the scope, bright as daylight, he could put them down. Lots of kills. It was easy. One boy got a hundred fifteen kills in about five months. They was getting six, seven kills a night. Were they hitting soldiers? Hell, from eight hundred yards out on a Starlight, who the hell can tell? If they're moving at night, I guess they're soldiers, but maybe they were kids going to the john or families trying to move at night so they wouldn't get bounced by our Tac Air. Who knew? Then, at 0700, a chopper evacs the team the fuck out of there and it's back to base camp for pancakes and a good night at the body-count factory."

"I see," said Russ. "You don't-it wasn't-"

"I don't know. I haven't sorted it out yet. But it's different."

"It isn't war," said Russ, "and I'll say it if you're reluctant. It was straight execution work."

"Yeah, well, you hide that. You got me? You hide that, and don't be so quick to judge unless you walked in the man's shoes. Now, this is how it's going to work. I'm going to tell him how much we-all in the Marine Corps admired admired the army way of doing things. They got so many more kills than us. Damn, don't that beat all. Get him to feeling all puffed up." the army way of doing things. They got so many more kills than us. Damn, don't that beat all. Get him to feeling all puffed up."

"He'll know you're bullshitting."

"Like hell he will. He's a general, ain't he? He's used to being buttered up. He'll want his place in history set straight. He'll want to show us some hardware. Son, I was a sergeant in the Marine Corps for fourteen years. I know how these birds work."

"There," said the general. "There, do you see them?"

He did. The phantasms rose in the green gloom, two, three, then four, dancing ever so softly, their movements fired by incandescent phosphors in the tube of the device, which was a Magnavox thermal sniperscope. It was the latest thing, a lens that truly penetrated the darkness. No living thing could pass unnoticed in its view through the night.

The figures danced and one of them came at last to the red dot reticle in the center of the view.

"Go ahead," said the general. "Take them."

It was too easy. Bob was welded to the scope and felt the stock against him, his finger on the trigger. It was some kind of M-16, only swollen, enlarged. His hold was rock-solid and the weapon itself secured against the sandbags beneath it; he pressed the trigger and the rifle spoke once with a sound somewhere between a cough and a sneeze, or maybe a hiccup. There was no recoil, no sense of having fired, yet the action cycled and an empty shell was jettisoned and the first target went down. He moved the red dot ever so slightly and fired again: same thing. Twice more.

"End of mission," said the general, snapping on the lights that filled a long shooting tunnel off of this sandbagged position. "Let's see how you did."

He turned to a computer terminal and punched in a command. The computer answered immediately.

"Superb shooting," said the general. "Exactly as expected. You X'd the bull's-eye on the first two cleanly, you broke a line on the third and you X'd the fourth again. Four kills. Elapsed time, 3.2 seconds. Recorded noise, ah, under one hundred decibels, about the sound intensity of someone firing a BB gun."

The general reached over and hit a switch and the thermal scope died; Bob set the rifle, which looked oddly distended with the huge gunmetal-gray tube atop it, on the sandbags; he looked downrange at his targets and at the end of the tunnel, saw flattened metal silhouettes, clearly on some kind of uneven conveyer belt that gave them the lurching movement of human beings on patrol.

"How do you heat them?" said Bob.

"Essentially, you were shooting at a common household appliance. You just got four toasters. Or, rather, their heating elements. Congratulations."

"There's no infrared-light source on this piece," Bob said.

"No sir," said the general. "We're beyond that. We're beyond even ambient light, the Starlight scopes. That's passive infrared; no infrared beam and it doesn't need illumination. The problem with the ambient-light pieces was that they didn't work in total darkness, they didn't work in smoke, fog or rain, they didn't work in daylight, even. They were limited. The Magnavox collects all the infrared energy from the target scene by a single-element silicon aspheric lens. The emerging convergent beam is horizontally scanned by an oscillating mirror and then focused on a vertical linear array of sixty-four lead solenide detector elements which traduce the IR energy into electrical signals. Each detector's output is fed to a high-gain pre-amplifier. The signals from the sixty-four pre-amplifiers are then multiplexed to a single composite video signal. The composite video signal is then amplified and applied to a miniature cathode-ray tube that is viewed through the monocular eyepiece. It's MTV for snipers."

"Pretty goddamned slick," Bob said. The box did in fact look like a television set, a long rectangular 66 tube with the huge round eye up front for a screen, leading back to the eyepiece.

"Well, we've come a ways. The Germans used to shoot at concentration camp prisoners. That's how they tested their first-generation Vampir Vampir sight. We shoot at decommissioned toasters." sight. We shoot at decommissioned toasters."

"Can the boy try it?"

"No, that's all right," said Russ.

"You sure, son?" asked the general.

"It's fine," said Russ.

The general turned back to Bob. "It's not just that the thermal sniperscope is the highest refinement in the night-vision electronics. But what we sell is a whole system. We wholesale from Magnavox, we mount it to the rifle, we manufacture our own suppressor, we pack it into a kit, and we provide trainers and a constant technical hot line and emergency system. That's not an M-16."

"It felt heavier than one."

"It's a Knight-Stoner SR-25 in .308, shooting a subsonic load. And our JFP MAW-7 suppressor. Unbelievably silent, accurate, lethal, isn't it? Muzzle blast is caused by high-pressure gases suddenly escaping from the end of the barrel as the bullet exits. Reducing the pressure results in less sound generated. We reduce the pressure by increasing the volume for gas expansion, reducing the gas temperature, delaying gas exit by trapping and turbulence. Damn, it's a good unit!"

"Yes, it is," said Bob.

"Nothing like your old 700 Remington?"

"I'd hate to be matched with my old rifle against a fellow with that outfit."

"You wouldn't have a chance. The night belongs to the man who can see through it. Imagine the kills you could have gotten in combat with this outfit."

Bob rose; the demonstration was over.

"Come on back," said the general. "We'll talk in my office."

Jack Preece was a stocky man, with the short neck that was common to many championship shooters; he was handsome and rather slick, with a mane of silver hair and a smooth way about him. He radiated confidence and charm; his skin was tan and his teeth, capped, were white and perfect.

He led them back from the firing range through workshops where the system-the Knight rifle, the night-vision device, the sound suppressor-was being assembled into kit form, a single plastic case, after assembly, zeroing and disassembly, for shipment at no doubt a pretty penny to the elite marksmanship units of the world-Delta, various special forces units, SEAL Team Six, a Ranger battalion, the FBI's HRT, various big-city SWAT units.

"That Knight rifle gives us an enormous advantage over even the M-21s. We can get minute-of-angle accuracy out of a semiauto; we can get second or third shots without breaking the shooter's spot-weld with a bolt gun's accuracy. Bob, the days of the bolt gun are over. By the decade's end, all the world's elite sniper teams will be shooting semiauto."

"I think I'll keep mine awhile," said Bob, and the general laughed.

He ushered them into his office, a small paneled warren, one wall of which was filled with marksmanship trophies from a hundred forgotten high-power rifle championships the world over, as well as photographs of men with rifles standing or kneeling around a trophy, each with a fancy target rifle in his hands. Bob glimpsed and read a shooting history etched on brass plates: Interzonal U.S. Army Champion, 1977; Panama Games, Standing Rifle, 1979; NRA High Master; Alabama High Power, Sitting Champion, 1978; and on and on.

"No Wimbledon Cup up there," said the general. "My best year, you took it. Nineteen seventy-one."

"Sir, if I'd have known you had a gap in your trophy case, I'd have dropped a shot or two!"

The general laughed. "It's all shit, of course. But I have customers in here all the time. It impresses them. Now, what's on your mind, gentlemen?" He lit a cigar and leaned back in his chair comfortably, as if looking forward to a good time.

"Sir," said Russ, "I've been hired to coauthor Bob Lee Swagger's story for the Presidio Press in San Francisco. We wanted to at least touch on the wider shape of the story: that is, American sniping in Vietnam as programs and how they affected the war. There's not a lot of data on the army's, yet I understand the army snipers got much higher kill rates than the marines."

"It had nothing to do with the quality of men," said the general with an executive's practiced smoothness. "At the senior noncommissioned officer level, the American services all have extremely talented and motivated individuals. The marines have stayed wedded to marksmanship as the core of their service; that's fine, as history has proven out time and again. The army has been charged with staying at the cutting edge of ground combat technology. That was my job. That's where Tigercat came from. We started in the early fifties trying to develop a technology that would give the night to the American sniper."

"The M-3 sniperscope," prompted Bob.

"A piece of junk," said the general, expelling a large curling cumulus of smoke. "Bulky, clumsy, awkward, with a distressing propensity toward showing the vegetation more clearly than the enemy. So heavy it could only be mounted on a light rifle like the puny carbine. But ... a start."

"Yes sir," said Bob. "No doubt, if we'd have had your gear in the Nam, we could have kicked ass big-time."

The general wasn't really listening.

"Do you know what the difference between the marine and the army sniper programs was? I mean, speaking frankly. I love the spirit of the marines, but our kills were so so much higher. Do you know why?" much higher. Do you know why?"

Russ inwardly blanched. He knew this was the last thing Swagger would want to hear from this grinning, self-promoting baboon.

"No sir," said Bob evenly.

"The marines somehow couldn't commit at the conceptual level to the idea of technology. At some fundamental level, they believed still in the romantic notion of individual heroism. They somehow refused to enter the modern age. You marine snipers were like World War I pilots or cowboy gunslingers, going off on your own to do battle with the enemy and taking him out one-on-one. We believed in team spirit, sophisticated technology and body counts. Our body counts were so much so much higher. We saw through to the heart of it: it was about killing the enemy, not dueling him. And our sniper teams moved in and left nothing but step-ons. When we put a V.C. down, we didn't count it until the next morning we could put our boot on his chest. We called them step-ons." higher. We saw through to the heart of it: it was about killing the enemy, not dueling him. And our sniper teams moved in and left nothing but step-ons. When we put a V.C. down, we didn't count it until the next morning we could put our boot on his chest. We called them step-ons."

"Yes sir," said Bob chastely, nothing showing on his bland face. "I sure wish I'd had a chance to work the jungle with that kind of equipment."

His piece said, the general returned to the technical and the arcane.

"The M-3 was a great advance over the M-2 system of World War II, yet in Korea the troops hated it and the army itself didn't really understand or follow up. It was my idea to run the thing through a night-battle wringer and try to develop doctrine. Fortunately, somebody read my idea in Infantry Journal Infantry Journal and I was given a chance to practice what I'd preached. We called the project B and I was given a chance to practice what I'd preached. We called the project BLACK L LIGHT and ran it out of Camp Chaffee, where we tried to devise some data for night operations with vision devices. We were stuck with the goddamned M-3s. But at least we were able to and ran it out of Camp Chaffee, where we tried to devise some data for night operations with vision devices. We were stuck with the goddamned M-3s. But at least we were able to show show the R&D boys what was necessary in a night-combat environment. No one really knew until that time. They'd just copied the German hardware." the R&D boys what was necessary in a night-combat environment. No one really knew until that time. They'd just copied the German hardware."

"Tell us about BLACK L LIGHT."

The general launched into a long and somewhat self-serving account of the project, and it soon developed that the problem with him wouldn't be getting him to talk but getting him to shut up. His chatter soon evolved into performance, soliloquy, ultimately a one-man show, punctuated by theatrical blasts of smoke. He looked like the god of war, Mars himself, sitting there under his reasonable gray hair as the clouds swirled and he gave pronouncement. Much of his presentation seemed to turn on obscure issues, like trying to find the right number of men that stayed within command parameters and yet were adequate to provide security for the shooter. Months were spent determining if six or eight or ten were better, and the ultimate choice was four, given that the sniper himself could do double duty in a firefight with a greasegun. Night command vocabulary was tested; night map reading was examined and night navigation; radio techniques were explored. The shooting was a relatively late part in it.

"About '55 we got to the shooting."

"What did you use for targets? The Germans used people, you said."

"On the record? On the record, heat-generating targets were not mandatory, because we were only beginning to understand the principle of ambient light, that is, passive night vision. We used the M-3's active infrared, that is, an infrared searchlight. We could have shot at anything. But there was a ballistic component to the project which mandated load testing on living organisms. Off the record, we shot sheep and goats. Cattle would have been preferable because their respiratory system most resembles humans, but I had no stomach for trying to bring down a steer with a bullet that at its best generated muzzle energies somewhere between a .38 Special and a light .357 Magnum."

On and on it went, through the construction of the units, problems with the clamps that secured them, difficulty with the webbing that supported, and so forth and so on. Russ thought he'd doze.