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

thrust the blunt muzzle of his Colt Government Model down his throat and explained simply, “Mister, if you can’t do your own killing, you don’t scare me worth a drink of spit!” The man had pissed in his pants and disappeared off Bob’s mountain but fast.
    But now—these others, this damn Colonel Bruce with his medal and his little bird dog Payne. Rich enough to buy this whole spread, bring him way out here, have someone make up these excellent cartridges.Who were they? Who was worth killing to go to this much trouble?
    Agency.
    He could smell it all over them. This was how the Agency worked, at odd angles, never quite out in the open, bringing you halfway in so that by the time you figured out what was what it took more effort to get out than to stay.
    So? He sat and considered, perplexed, aching for a taste of liquor, a cold splash of beer against his throat, to soften up his mind so that he could think better. But he knew one drink and he was lost, so he fought his way through stone-cold sober.
    Agency wants me hunting again.
    But who?
    Bob thought and thought on it in the little restaurant, his head and hip aching, and got nowhere and only after many hours did he notice the place was about to close, and the waitress was making hungry eyes at him. He’d have no part of that, no thank you. No women, no liquor, never again. Only rifles and duty.
    But what was duty?
    Who was worth hunting?
    Who had loaded the Accutech ammo?
    Bob got in his car and drove back; he slept dreamlessly, still setting course by a single star: nothing is worth killing.
    He’d tell them tomorrow after hearing them out. He would not kill again.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The next day they met at the three-hundred-yard range, but without explanation the colonel was absent. Without his intense presence, his people seemed a little more relaxed. The man Hatcher seemed to be in charge, though only barely. He was a wiry fifty-year-old redhead, with spaces between his teeth, a pocketful of pens nested in some kind of plastic envelope in his breast pocket, and the distracted air of a man who knows too much about one thing and not enough about a lot of things. He herded Bob into a black Jeep Cherokee and with two others, including the stolid Payne, they drove over a network of back roads, around the hilltop, to another area.
    What he saw shocked Bob some—a large, clearfield on the down slope of a hill, at one end of which stood a jerry-built scaffolding, pipes bolted together, the whole mad structure held stable by guy wires sunk into the ground at a variety of points around its perimeter. It looked like a circus tent without the canvas, or the skeleton of a building without the cement.
    Bob saw a series of ladders to its upper reaches, and up there he saw a platform where a shooting bench and a chair had been installed.
    “It’s a building in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” said Hatcher. “Or, rather, the height and the distances equal exactly the height and distances of a building in Tulsa, Oklahoma. See the car?”
    At one end of a dirt road that ran before the whole ridiculous structure there was an old limousine chassis, its engine long since gone, its body rusty, but its passenger compartment reasonably intact; it was attached by chain and winch to what must have been an engine a half mile away.
    “Now what the hell is this?”
    “It’s our SWAT scenario,” said Hatcher. “We’ve gamed out a situation where we’re going to ask you to fire on a moving target in a hostage situation. You’ll be operating off cues—you’ll be earphoned into a network and you’ll get an okay to fire at a bank robber who’s fleeing the scene surrounded by hostages. You’ll have an envelope of about five seconds to go for a head shot. It’s based on an event that took place in Tulsa in 1986, where an FBI sniper had to take the same shot.”
    “What happened?”
    “Ah, he hit a woman hostage in the spine, paralyzing her. The bad guy shot two other hostages to death and