Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter Read Free Book Online Page A

it was just at the minute of angle limit, the group playing across three inches, though in truth one of them might have been a flyer, because if you subtracted it the group fell to 2.5 inches.
    And Bob saw that the Accutech stuff had beaten him. His own group still had the illusion of a circle, the punctures clustered within 1.386 inches; he was sub-minute of angle still, but the damned Accutech was 1.212 inches, with one three-shot triangle within .352 inches!
    “Damn,” he said.
    “That’s shooting,” someone said. “That’s
fine
shooting. Most men can’t see at three hundred yards, even with a 24x.”
    “No,” said Bob, awed. “That’s ammo. That’s
fine
ammo.”
    It
was
fine ammo. Only fifty to sixty men in the world could handload ammo that fine, Frank Barnes maybe, a couple of the sublime technicians at Speer or Hornady or Sierra, a few wildcatters of a dying breed, old gnarled men who’d lived with guns in machine shops their whole lives. A few world-class benchrest shooters whoagged in the 1’s. A few Delta or FBI SWAT armorers. Whoever put this stuff together knew what he was doing. Bob had an image in his head of some old man who’d done it a million times, working the brass down to the finest, smallest perfection. It took more than patience; it took a kind of genius. He felt him. He felt him on the range: the presence of an old shooter who knew what he was doing.
    Bob knew then. He’d suspected before but now he knew. They were playing him, guiding him; they weren’t what they said. Then who were they?
    Bob smiled.
    “Now what, colonel?”
    “Well, let’s eat; then, this afternoon, we’d like to take you to another range, where you’ll be gunning for targets at even farther ranges … beyond five hundred yards. Out as far as a thousand.”
    “Sounds good to me,” said Bob.
    “Then, tomorrow morning, Mr. Swagger, I’m going to give you some
real
fun!”
    That night, Bob turned down an invitation from the Accutech crew for a nice feed at a restaurant in Thayersville, and instead took his rented car and simply drove alone until he found an unpretentious place farther out, away from the built-up areas, a country place where he could sit by himself and not be paid any mind.
    They didn’t follow him. They now kept their distance, thinking sure they had him.
    And maybe they did. He was damned curious where all this was headed. He knew in a general sense, of course, what it had to be. It had to be about killing.
    His reputation had preceded him. People in certain zones knew of him. Occasionally something weird would come his way—a nibble, a veiled hint, just theslightest indication that some really nice money could be his if he’d only meet so-and-so in St. Louis or Memphis or Texarkana and listen to a certain proposal. These offers came from strange sources, over the years. Certainly, some were from what he took to be organized crime interests. Others came from what had to be intelligence sources—Bob, after all, had done two jobs against civilian targets in the ’Nam, when ordered to in writing by higher headquarters. Still other approaches were simply well-off men with pathological inclinations who wished to use him, in some way, to solve a business problem, to right a wrong, to avenge an infidelity.
    No, Bob always explained. It was against the law.
    Go away, please.
    Most of them did. Though occasionally, one didn’t: there was one breed of hater it took special effort to drive away—those who knew that the country was entirely theirs, and that all good things would flow if others were removed. Of course what they meant, usually, was the black people. Bob had served with too many fine black NCOs in the ’Nam to listen to this kind of shit, and though he had more or less given up on violence, he had broken the nose of a fellow from some outfit calling itself the White Order. The man had said through blood and anger they’d put Bob on The List too, and Bob had grabbed the man and