Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller Read Free Book Online

for a week on nothing but water and basic C-rations—peanut butter, jelly, cheese, and crackers. Four more killing days to Christmas, as a major had said before the chopper took off last night.
    Lying there, concentrating, looking for a movement of brown or green in a wall of brown and green. Scanning the natural lines of drift where people tend to walk or rest. Mornings and evenings are best. Charlie’s just waking up or tired and careless after a day’s work.
    The beat of your heart against the earth, the smell of solvent residue coming off your rifle bolt, a flat-shooting Remington 700 with a Redfield nine-power scope.
    “There he is,” your spotter whispers. “The hamburger in the door, epaulets and clean uniform, binoculars. NVA colonel.”
    Officers: Always look for the clean uniform, the binoculars, the one with a radio man close by. Dumb bastard’s standing in the door of a hut, yawning.
    Check your body position and scope picture.
    “I make it eight five zero yards,” you whisper.
    “Eight fifty, eight seventy-five,” your spotter whispers back.
    It all seems kind of… kind of dreamlike. “four teacher, White Feather, calls it his “bubble,” going into a place of concentration and focus so clear that it becomes a universe of its own where nothing and no one can intrude.
    Check again: the bend of grass, the heat waves.
    Wait for the flattest part of your breathing cycle.
    Control the trigger pull, the follow-through.
    The recoil against your shoulder, and on the other side of the valley, a man jolts back into the darkness of a hut.
    Your spotter gives you a thumbs-up, and the two of you begin a reverse crawl down your escape route.
    The world of Clayton Price.
    A strange world, and a long, strange life, aloneness mostly, loneliness sometimes. Never a woman for any amount of time. Nothing like the one riding close behind him, the one he could smell in the compressed space of a Bronco called Vito when they slowed and the breeze no longer blew away the pleasant mix of perfume and sweat coming off her. He straightened in his seat and glanced back. Luz María was looking at him.

    In the Learjet hammering southwest, different smells. The distinct, unalloyed scents of coffee and gun oil. Walter McGrane glanced up when he heard the soft click of a rifle bolt. One of the men across from him was examining the sniper rifle. He watched the man work the bolt, checking over the tool of graceful agony that could have been a candidate for an award in contemporary design, curving metal and angular parts machined to a level of precision usually reserved for fine watches. The man, machined to precision like the rifle and known to him only as Weatherford, ran a soft cloth along the barrel as if he were touching a woman.
    The rifle, forty-four inches long and weighing a little over fourteen pounds with its scope, was chambered for a match-grade 7.62,173-grain bullet. One second after being fired, the bullet would hit the center of a man s chest at a thousand yards, over a half mile away, every time, in the hands of a skilled marksman, and the men across from Walter McGrane were skilled. Sometime in the next few days, if things went well and the Mexican government stayed out of their way, the reticles on the sniper’s scope would lie across the chest of Clayton Price, who would never hear the sound that killed him.
    Walter McGrane didn’t like going after one of their own. He didn’t much like any of this anymore. But so be it and so it lay. He was a field man by his own preference, and he’d been ordered to do it by the Pure Intelligence office boys, the suits, the idiot theoreticians, “espiocrats,” as le Carre or somebody had called them. Those who’d never used a dead drop in Bucharest, had never worn goggles in the blowing dust of Algeria while a jeep climbed rocky outcrops, had never done a goddamned thing except go to school. Had no idea what the field was like, the calm and concentration on the face of a man