Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller Read Free Book Online Page B

four or five of the old ones were left now. But within the Covert Operations Unit, where Walter McGrane drew his pay,
     they were legends of a sort, discussed over coffee and after-dinner drinks at good restaurants.
    “Christ, can you believe this: Morelock once hit a VC at twenty-five hundred yards with a fifty-caliber machine gun converted
     into a sniper weapon. Shot him right off a goddamned bicycle.”
    “I know Morelock holds the all-time kill record from ’Nam. Who’s second?”
    “Tortoise—Price—I think. If I recall correctly, he had eighty-two confirmed, something over two hundred more classified as
     ’probables.’ “
    The stories went on, the legends endured, about White Feather and Centipede and Tortoise and the rest. They were the colorful
     ones. White Feather had become an instructor at Quantico; the rest, those who weren’t dead or retired, were still out there
     someplace, lying in wait until called upon by whatever or whoever required their services. And McGrane knew their credo, their
     simple and overriding criterion for success: one shot, one kill. In Vietnam, the average number of rounds expended per kill
     by ordinary soldiers was in the range of two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand. The snipers had averaged 1.3 per kill.
     At three for two, Price had fallen below the standard in Puerto Vallarta.
    In his associations with the shadowmen, Walter McGrane had always been surprised at how ordinary they seemed, no spectacular
     failings that one might notice right off. But he’d read the psychological evaluations: “The subjects all possess great courage,
     a high tolerance for discomfort and for being alone for extended periods of time. However, they share a common trait of being
     unable to form lasting emotional relationships with other people. Though they perceive reality much more directly, quickly,
     and accurately than most, they are limited in their capacities to respond to it emotionally For example, the exhaustive studies
     by Ingram and Marks have disclosed a remarkable lack of hate directed at the enemy. On the contrary, the so-called shadowmen
     seem to have only respect for the enemy and no thought of killing for revenge. According to Ingram and Marks, that latter
     characteristic is partly a tactic for completing the mission, partly a matter of survival. Maintaining an emotional distance
     from the quarry focuses concentration and prevents the man from making foolish mistakes based on personal reasons, which would
     render him both ineffective and vulnerable.”
    Walter McGrane looked out the window at black night roaring by. “Personal reasons”… Therein lay the fault and the flaw of
     what had once been a perfect killing machine. Clayton Price had made that mistake, reducing his emotional distance from a
     target. Had taken that distance down to zero, in fact, and got too close, even though he’d been warned years ago to forget
     his one personal vendetta.
    Click, and click again—the sniper rifle. Walter McGrane looked at the man called Weatherford and the other muscled windbreaker
     beside Weatherford. They were the new and improved versions of Clayton Price, routinely produced by special operations units
     in various branches of the military. Better trained, disciplined, more reliable, it was said, unlike the shadowmen, who were
     viewed by some as too individualistic, too eccentric, too likely to just take off and do things their own way. “Cowboys,”
     they were sometimes called, the word accompanied always by a derisive shake of the head. Still, others in the COU, Walter
     McGrane included, preferred the old way of working, using the shadowmen who left no paper trail of temporary assignments from
     the military, a set of specialized arrows that could be drawn from a quiverful of options when the time arose. The few who
     were left could be called on when the times got tough and the work got extremely dirty, “wet” in agency parlance, in Africa
     or the