"Ah, Charlie Four, I'm getting real bad reports from people in the field, they're telling me this guy is waving his gun and screaming at the hostages and that every time he sees a police vehicle he acts a little crazier. He's bad news, bad, bad news."

"Reading you, Base."

"Charlie Four, you think you'd be able to make that shot?"

Bob squinted through the scope at the road down which the hostage vehicle would travel.

"I have it big and clear, Base. The shot is there for me if it's there for you."

"Charlie Four, this guy could go off at any moment and hurt some more people."

"I read you, Base. You got an ETA for me?"

"He's at Lincoln, Charlie Four, Lincoln and Chesley, and a uniformed officer says he's really flipped out. Makin' me nervous, very nervous."

"Base, I make the shot three hundred twenty yards. I can put it in a fifty-cent piece at that range. Confidence is high here."

"Ah, Charlie Four, I've been in contact with command and it's getting real hairy in that car. We're, um, we've decided to authorize a green light for you, Charlie Four."

"I'm reading you, Base, and making ready to shoot. I'll be off the air now."

"Ah, Charlie Four, that's a negative. I've got two spotters here; I'll be notifying you when suspect gun is pointed in safe direction and you can go for a head shot, Charlie Four. We can't risk a spasm shot, do you read?"

"Negative, Base, I can't be concentrating on anything but my shooting."

"Then, stand down, Charlie Four, I won't authorize a green light unless I've visually verified suspect's gun position, just like the book says."

So there Nick Memphis had had it. Caught right on the horns. He'd have some guy yelling in his ear as he was shooting, or he'd have to stand down and walk away from it.

"All right, Base, you talked me into it. I'm sliding into shooting position now. You sing out when your people say it's clear."

Bob slid the rifle into his shoulder, watched as the scope came up big and bright and clean, a movie-screen world, all in primary colors bold and furious.

"Charlie Four, he's turned down Ridgely, he's coming into your kill zone right about now."

Bob threw the bolt, feeding one of the Accutech .308's into his chamber. He drew the rifle to him, found the hands-free mike got in the way of his spot-weld, and thus quickly and savagely bent it out of the way, to take his place behind the gun.

It was a modified sitting position, with the weight on his left ham, his body canted slightly as the rifle was pulled to him, while resting solidly on the sandbag barricade. It felt completely moored to the bags, its weight entirely on them. His upper body supported itself on elbows, and the rifle rode a fulcrum of the sandbag, guided by his hands pulling it tight against his shoulder. His hip flared a bit under the strain, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle.

As he looked through the scope, Bob made subtle corrections in his grip and body position, trying to find, given the circumstances, an equipoise: one position where everything was tucked just right, where he felt most comfortable, less stressed, where his breathing was natural and loose, and yet through it all he still felt anchored into his chair and the bench and the bags.

Through the scope, he watched the slight tremble of the cross hairs, matching his breathing. That was the enemy, really: not Willie Downing or Nick Memphis or Accutech or anything -- no, it was his own heart, which he could not quite control (nobody could) and which would send random messages of treachery to the various parts of his body. At these last moments, the heart could betray anyone, firing off a bolt of fear that would evince itself in a dozen tragic ways: a trigger finger hitch, a breath held too long, a weirdly detonating synapse that caused the eye to lose its sharpness or its perspective; an ear that suddenly heard too much or not enough; a foot that fell asleep and distracted its owner from the serious business at hand.

Bob blinked quickly, ordered himself to chill out, and tried to see in the lazy tremble in the cross hairs not something to hate (his own weakness) but something to make peace with -- something to forgive. Self-forgiveness was a large part of it: you can't be perfect all the time. Nobody can: accept your weakness, try to tame it and make it work for you.

Bob breathed slowly, letting the air hum half into his lungs, then humming it half out. He didn't want a lot of oxygen in them, ballooning out on him at the awkward moments. But dammit, he still didn't quite feel comfortable. It was all so strange: sitting up there in the pretend building, pretending to be an FBI agent, pretending it was 1986, trying to pretend it was real.

There is nothing to pretend, he told himself. There is only shooting, and that's never pretend.

He'd figured the math out much earlier. Having memorized the ballistics table, he knew that at 320 yards the 150-grain bullet was programmed to drop about ten inches and would have slowed, by this distance, to a velocity of about 2,160 feet per second. But he also knew that this Accutech stuff was a bit hotter than the standard. And so he figured it would only drop eight inches. But he was shooting downhill, a slightly different problem than shooting flat; this meant he'd add more of a drop, because bullets fired at an angle fall farther; he took another inch out of the equation. That put him nine inches low at 350 yards, except that the wind, just a slight breeze, would move the bullet as it traveled perhaps four inches to the left. So he had to hold nine inches lower and four inches to the left. Then he had to lead to compensate for the speed of the car; and he had to do it on cue, when he got the green light command over his earphones.

"Charlie Four, do you read?"

Fuck it, thought Bob, what does he want?

He said nothing. The mike was bent under his chin and to pull it back into place was to blow his spot-weld, his hold and his peace. He would not give that up.

"Charlie Four, goddammit, where are you?"

Bob was silent, awaiting the arrival of the vehicle in the bottom right quadrant of his scope.

"Charlie Four, goddammit, get on the air! Do you acknowledge? Call in, goddammit, Charlie Four, I need you authenticated."

Bob was silent, trying to flatten out that bit of tremble from the reticle. He tried to make his mind blank and cool and drive out any sensation of his own body. There should be only two things: finding the right hold and preserving it through the trigger pull.

"Charlie Four, you don't call in, I'm not gonna green light you, goddammit, I have to have you on the air so I know you're reading my commands!"

Bob held silent. His breath was rougher now; he felt like tossing the earphones away! Talking to him! Now!

He tried to clear his head, to make everything go away except the shot. He could not.

"Charlie Four, green light canceled. Abort it. Hang it up, if you're there, Charlie Four. Do you read? Shot authorization is canceled. There'll be no shooting, goddammit, Charlie Four."

And now he saw it.

The limo body, hauled by the chain, slid into view. Its angle from him was not acute but more like forty degrees; the car appeared to be moving at about twenty miles per hour; Bob had no trouble pivoting the rifle on the bag through a short arc as he tracked the car, looking for his hold. He tried not to note the details, but he could hardly help it. Downing, for example, was, preposterously, a watermelon; the four hostages around him were balloons. It was crude but effective, especially in the way the wind made the balloons waver in unpredictable ways and the bump and grind of the two made the melon queerly elastic, nearly human. Bob almost laughed. All this money to shoot a melon! And he knew it was absurd, too. A hundred men could hit a melon like this, but only one of them could hit a head.

And then that was gone too, as, suddenly, Bob had the position, had it, knew it, had the shot, had it right, had it perfect. He held as the car continued to slide and involuntarily, without having consciously decided to disobey orders, he began to take the trigger slack out. He was going to shoot anyway, fuck it.

"Charlie Four, gun is down, green light, green light, green li -- "

But Bob had fired already by then, having already made the decision at some subconscious level. His brain had yielded to his finger; his finger had decided and in the instant before the blur took it all away from his eye, he saw the melon detonate into a smear of red against the green Maryland countryside as the bullet tore through it and mushroomed. And when the scope came back from the recoil he saw all four ballons still waving in the wind and the melon blown in half.

"Congratulations," said Hatcher. "You win all the marbles. You solved it."

Bob said nothing, just fixed him with a cool eye. He had climbed down from the tower, to be surrounded by admirers.

"When did you decide to shoot?"

"It just happened."

"You were so fast when you got the green light. Damn, you were so fast!"

Bob didn't tell them he was halfway through the pull when the word came.

"Here, you can read the transcripts yourself." He handed them over to Bob, who looked at them briefly, enough to satisfy himself that yes, indeed, Base had been on the earphones to poor Memphis until almost the last second.

BASE: Have you acquired the target?

AGENT MEMPHIS: Yes, sir, uh, he's at the bottom of my scope, he's rising into my cross hairs, uh, he's -- BASE: Hold your fire, Charlie Four, until I have a confirmation that his piece is down.

AGENT MEMPHIS: Base, goddammit, I have him, I have him, I -- BASE: No authorization. Hold it, Charlie Four, I can't let you shoot, I -- AGENT MEMPHIS: [garbled] -- have it, dammit, I can -- BASE: Negative, negative, Charlie Two, can you give me a visual?

AGENT O'BRIAN: I can't see his gun, Base, I, oh, Christ, he's going to fire -- BASE: [garbled] Shoot, green light, fire, goddammit, take his ass down -- AGENT MEMPHIS: [garbled]

BASE: God, you hit the girl, he hit a girl, oh, Jesus, in the back -- AGENT O'BRIAN: Suspect is firing on his hostages, Jesus, will somebody hit him, Nick, hit him, hit him, hit him!

AGENT MEMPHIS: I can't see, he's behind, oh, Jesus, he's shooting them, I can't get another shot, oh, Jesus, help them, help them, somebody, help them!

AGENT O'BRIAN: He just blew his own head away. [obscenity], Nick, he put that gunbarrel in his mouth and blew his [obscenity] head away, he -- BASE: Get those people medical aid, get those people medical aid, Jesus Christ, get those -- AGENT MEMPHIS: Shit.

That was enough. Why hadn't Memphis had a spotter, someone sitting next to him up there? Sniping was a two-man job, or it was a one-man, on his lonesome, job. It wasn't for a guy with a radio playing in his ear. And Base. Base was the real enemy; Base had made it impossible for the guy to hit that shot, blabbering away like an old woman.

"They fucked him, but good," said Bob through tight lips. He thought of the poor jerk, watching the great Tulsa massacre through his scope, helpless, enraged, and most of all unforgivingly furious at himself for having missed the shot and hit the woman.

"What happened to him?"

"He married the woman he hit. He quadded her, and he married her. Still in the Bureau, with a poor woman in a wheelchair to care for the rest of his life."

Well, here's to you, Nick Memphis, thought Bob. If I were still a drinking man, I'd lift a glass to you, and if I ever become one another time, then I'll lift one for you too.

"It's remarkable how institutions reveal themselves under stress," said Hatcher. "See, the Bureau is basically a bureaucracy, and under everything it does, there's a bureaucratic imperative. So Base had to monitor Memphis, even at the moment of firing. Had to, neurotically, pathologically. That was Base's first operating principle, to cover his own ass. And poor Memphis, being a team guy, even though the solo artist, poor Memphis played along. And in so doing, completely compromised his shot."

There was a pause.

"But Mr. Swagger, you didn't. Because you're not a member of a team, and you have no norms and traditions to live up to. You can just go for it. You see through to the necessary which is utmost concentration. That shot was probably within the furthest reaches of Memphis's envelope, and under perfect circumstances, he'd have made it. But he got fucked. We tried to fuck you, and you just sailed on through it. Man, you whacked Willie Downing good."

There were several other fans clustered around Bob, besides the gooney Hatcher. He could sense their admiration, and despised them for it.

"Now, Mr. Swagger, we've got one more test for you. Do you still want to play?"

Bob launched another gob into the dust, queerly uncomfortable but not entirely displeased with the awe that was being thrust upon him.

"I'll take another shot," he said. "Maybe I'll get lucky again."

"This one is straight up your alley. It's pure sniper war. This one is based on an incident that took place outside Medellin, in Colombia, in 1988. It's highly classified so I've got to ask you never to disclose specifics to anybody. Fair enough?"

"I'm just here to shoot, not talk."

"As I explain it to you, I think you'll understand the need for delicacy in the matter. It involves a DEA agent who took a fourteen-hundred-yard shot at a drug dealer who was responsible for the murder of a DEA team. The guy had fantastic security, bunches of Colombians packing a lot of automatic heat. And the word was out, if anybody tried to take the guy down, the Colombians would just start blasting. So, reluctantly and unofficially, DEA decided to take the guy out with a minimum of fuss. Highly illegal, but it was felt a message had to be sent to certain parties in Colombia."

"So it was a straight hit?" Bob asked.

"Yes. Your kind of work. No hostages, nothing. Just a man and a rifle and a hell of a long shot."

"You're not making any fourteen-hundred-yarder with a .308, I'll tell you that."

"You're anticipating us again. The DEA shooter used a .300 H & H Magnum, with a Sierra 200-grain slug. Here, here's the rifle. The same one."

He nodded, and one of the technicians brought a rifle case over and opened it. Bob only saw a rifle.

But what a rifle.

"Goddamn," he said almost involuntarily, "that's a honey of a piece. Damn!"

It was a bolt-action Model 70 target, pre-'64, with a fat bull barrel and a Unertl 36x scope running nearly along its entire barrel length. Its dark gleam blazed out at him in that high sheen that was now a lost art but had reached its highest pitch in the great American gun-making days of the 1920s and '30s. It was almost pristine, too, clean and crisp, well tended, much loved and trusted. But it was the wood that really hit him. The wood, in that slightly thicker pre-'64 configuration, was almost black; he'd never seen a walnut with such blackness to it; but it wasn't like black plastic for it had the warm gleam of the organic to it. Black wood?

"That's a hell of a rifle," he said. He bent quickly to look at the serial number: my God, it was a one followed by five beautiful goose eggs! 100000. The hundred-thousandth 70! That made it infinitely desirable to a collector and marked it as having been made around 1950.

"From the Winchester plant in 1948. The metal was heat-treated at higher temperatures to give it the strength to stand up to a thousand-yard cartridge."

"Okay, let's give it a whirl. You have the ammo?"

Hatcher handed over a box of Accutech Sniper Grade .300 H & H Magnum.

LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY, it said in red letters.

Bob opened the box, took out one of the long .300 H&H's: it was like a small ballistic missile in his hand, close to four inches of shell and powder and bullet, heavy as an ostrich's egg.

"What kind of ballistics?"

"It's a thumper. We're kicking it out off 70 grains of H4831 and our own 200-grain bullet boattail hollowpoint. About three thousand feet per second."

Bob thought numbers and came up with a 198-inch drop at a thousand yards; figure maybe 355 for fourteen hundred yards.

Bob took the rifle. His first love had been a Model 70, often called the Rifleman's Rifle, and he now owned several, including that recalcitrant .270 that had consumed him before coming up to Maryland, and whose problems he hadn't quite mastered. So the rifle was like an old friend.

"Where can I take it to zero?"

"Uh, it's zeroed. One of our technicians has worked it out to the yard. It'll shoot to point of aim at the proper range."

"Hold on, there, sir. I don't like to shoot for money with a rifle I haven't tested."

"Ah -- " said Hatcher, embarrassed at Bob's flinty reluctance. "I can assure you that -- "

"You can't assure me of a thing if I haven't done it myself."

"Would you like me to get the colonel?"

"Why don't you just do that?"

"All right. But I can tell you that the man who zeroed the rifle to that load and range -- he won a thousand-yard championship with it in the mid-fifties. It'll shoot. I guarantee you it'll shoot. He's got the trophies to prove it."

Bob squinted.

Finally he said, "Goes against my principles, but, goddammit, if it says Winchester, I'll take a crack at it."

Bob lay in a spider hole. It was cramped and dirty. The walls seemed to press in. His view of the world consisted of only a slot, maybe six inches by four inches, and through it he saw a series of low ridges. Far, far away, there was a raw wall where the earth had been bulldozed up to form a bulwark.