The Crisis (7 page)

All of which explained what SEALs were doing three hundred miles from the nearest salt water. He released Skilley's arm and introduced Dooley and Kaulukukui. Skilley shook their hands too, but not as competitively.

“What've you been doing, Doc?”

“Pickup team to Afghanistan. Showing the spooks which end the bullet comes out of. You?”

“Got a new Samurai. Did some of that mud bogging, rock crawling, up in Silver Lake.”

Kaulukukui was hauling ammo boxes out of the van and handing them into the lead Humvee. “He's got no idea what you're talking about, dude.”

“Silver Lake, Utah. Four-wheel drive. Cross country, fun shit, you'd like it.”

A driver leaned out to shout over the diesel clatter. “Turn off your cell phones, beepers, any radios.” He sounded ticked off at having to truck Navy types around a desert the Army had already pissed on all four corners of. Teddy checked his cell.

The master chief said, “That's right, you were a motorhead, not just a pussy hound. That all you do, chase poon and race them mud cars?”

“Me and Sumo here saw a little action. Chasing that rocket torpedo.”

“Catch any?”

“Tell you sometime, buy me enough beer.”

“How much is enough?”

“In Saudi? I'm a cheap fucking date, Mas' Chief.”

Black smoke shot out the Humvees' stacks. Oberg, Skilley, and Kaulukukui rolled into the lead vehicle and slammed the doors, which had been hastily armored with bolted-on quarter-inch steel. Dooley parked the van in the long-term area, locked it, and jogged toward the second vehicle. Seconds later, the vast rectangles of the base, the glitter of windshields in the rising sun, the flat wavering tarmac of the airstrip, were gone in a cloud of rolling dust.

 

ONCE they left the ring road behind, there was nothing but desert from road to horizon. Tan bedrock covered with sand fine as talcum, and here and there in pleats of the land visible only because the sun was still low, sparse huddles of shriveled brush. Oberg sat with boots on the dashboard, glove wrapped around a handgrip, watching morning wake northern Saudi. Over the curved horizon black smoke rose from Iraq. He liked the dry air, the brilliant sky that was almost blue today, for a change. He'd grown up in the desert, or next to it: in LA, running up in the canyons to get away from the assholes his mother was always bringing home.

The driver said grudgingly there was lemonade in the container in the back, and red licorice, Chex Mix, Slim Jims, and dry-roasted peanuts in the box on the floor. A handheld GPS was cooking on the dashboard but Obie didn't say anything. It wasn't his vehicle, and he had his own GPS.

“Gonna tell me about this torpedo?” Skilley asked. Obie nodded at the driver, and the chief squinted and changed the subject, to a new digital marksmanship training system they were installing at Atterbury.

“Digital? Meaning what? You shoot electrons?”

“Pretty much. Lie on this rubber mat that criticizes your hold. Shoot a toy gun at a screen. Cost five million bucks, I heard.”

“Buy a lot of live rounds for five million bucks.”

“Tell me about it. But they're talking lead contamination, the air handlers got to be rebuilt on the indoor range, it's gotta be filtered—it's a fucking nightmare. Who let the EPA on base?”

 

TWO hours later the Humvees turned off the highway and began climbing into the hills. Not mountains, but steep enough to make the automatic transmissions take a strain. Goatherds in black cloaks faced away as they passed. The Saudis didn't like Americans in what they called Holy Country. The only locals Teddy had seen since he got here were their Saudi Guard liaison officer for Maple Gold and these distant, aloof goatherds, glimpsed as he sped along the long, line-straight, empty roads.

By ten o'clock it was 115 degrees and heat shimmered up off the baking rocks and ledges. The drivers stayed with the Humvees, the music from their CD players following the SEALs as they climbed. Oberg, Kaulukukui, and Dooley carried Camelback water bladders and sidearms. Skilley carried a black rifle from one of his cases.

Oberg considered it as they climbed, since he was directly behind the master chief. The heavy barrel was longer than the standard twenty inches and ended in the black tube of a sound suppressor. The skeleton stock was covered with foam plastic. The top of the receiver was flat with a backup rear sight that folded down and a scope that wasn't any night vision sight he was familiar with. From time to time Skilley would bend and squint through it up toward the hilltop. A spray can hissed as he colored a six-inch spot of fluorescent orange onto a large rock.

At last, at the top of a rise, Skilley stopped and looked back down the valley. He unslung the rifle and took a knee. He was panting, flushed, and Teddy held out the tube to his water. The older man sucked at it, nodded, and handed it back.

“We use snipers to destroy enemy morale. Nothing saps your motivation faster than seeing your lieutenant's head blow apart, then your sergeant's. We deployed them in two-man teams, shooter and observer, back when we were shooting bolt-action thirties and then when we went to the M14. Problem with the M24 and M14?”

“Range,” Kaulukukui said, hunkered on his heels in a way Oberg couldn't believe was as comfortable as the big Hawaiian made it look.

“Well, half right. Problem's really not range, it's dispersion. That 173-grain boattail will only reach out six, maybe eight hundred yards till the cone of fire widens so much you can't count on connecting with a trunk shot. Just not good enough these days, when you're working from a hide in the open, or trying to overwatch an urban area ten blocks in every direction. And more of your high-value targets are wearing some kind of personal armor.” Skilley dusted his hands and adjusted the weapon on his lap. “Obie, remember what we did to fix that?”

“Went to the fifty cal.”

“That pushed us out to a thousand meters or better. But then we had to go to three-man teams, to carry that son of a bitching rifle and all the fucking gear. And forget trying to conceal it in a hide site.”

“So what's this?” Teddy pointed to the black weapon. “A sixteen with some kind of superheavy barrel? What makes this so shit hot, Dick?”

Skilley explained that indeed it looked like an M16. The SR-25 was its big brother. The barrel was a twenty-four-inch stainless steel Obermeyer, cut-rifled and floated to isolate it from sling tension. The trigger was
a Geissele match model, and the scope had been improved with larger objectives, higher magnification, and a new stabilization system that reduced tremor and heartbeat. It also had a laser rangefinder built in.

“Caliber?” Dooley asked.

“Still seven-six-two. Standard thirty caliber.”

“That the wind pushes around like a piece of dandelion fluff.”

“That's been the problem,” Skilley agreed. “Plus, velocity dropped so much at long ranges you had to place the shot in the head, the heart, or the spinal column to turn the lights out. So we had to get in to seven, eight hundred meters.”

“But this is still a thutty-cal.”

“Oh, only technically.” Skilley shifted on the rock and pulled a blue plastic box from his trousers. Opened, it showed the tips of twenty cartridges, like filed, blackened teeth. He slapped one into Oberg's glove. “Over three thousand feet per second. Don't try these in your regular chambers. You'll blow pieces of your face all over the landscape.”

It was much heavier than even the long-range sniper rounds Teddy was used to. A shiny black, queerly elongated bullet with a dull green plastic tip. He turned it over and inspected the base. “Why's it so heavy?”

“Depleted uranium, with a tungsten core for penetration. Both heavier than lead. So we get a three-hundred-grain bullet, and a ballistic coefficient off the charts.”

Kaulukukui whistled. “Who thought of this?”

“Like a lot of the new stuff, it came out of long-range competition. The Army Marksmanship Unit was up against the stops with the Sierras they were shooting. Somebody says, why not go to a denser metal, see what happens. Course, they can't shoot these at Perry. Be over a hundred dollars a round. Plus, anything with the word ‘uranium' in it sets the nut fringe off. Next thing, they'd be calling them atomic bullets and yammering to ban 'em.” Skilley turned one of the cartridges before his eyes as if admiring some rare ruby.

Teddy looked at Kaulukukui. “So this gives you less wind drift.”

“Less drift, a spin of one in five, and image stabilization on the scope. Bottom line: a quarter MOA. A steady hand, you can hold a head shot at a thousand meters.”

The Hawaiian whistled again. Skilley stood. He handed the rifle to Oberg. “I run my mouth enough. It takes forty-two muscles to frown, seventeen to smile—”

“But only three for proper trigger control,” Teddy finished.

“Hooyah. Shoot the fucker.”

He accepted it gingerly. With the long, thick barrel, the suppressor, and the heavy sight, it had to weigh at least twenty pounds. He twisted the sling outward and got his left arm through it and snugged tight under the handguard. He stretched out on the ground and hitched a leg up. As he set the buttstock into his shoulder Skilley reached in to turn a dial on the scope. “Got to load one round at a time. That cartridge won't fit in the magazine. But you can carry another mag full of regular rounds, to slap in if they rush you.”

The bolt snapped closed, and his thumb rotated the safety to FIRE.

When he put the scope to his eye the sight picture was the standard reticle. A grid at the top, so you could estimate range by the arc an erect male figure subtended. Below that were aiming dots for various distances. On the right was something new: the laser range finder. He moved back for eye relief, and steadied the sight on the distant orange fleck Skilley had painted. The spot quivered with the involuntary tremor of his muscles, and of the heat waves cooking off the desert floor.

That was the mirage. A subtle shimmer that took training for the eye to read. He focused back and forth, reading that trembling of the atmosphere halfway between him and the target, then a quarter, then three-quarters. Each time he focused, the mirage rolled like surf in a different direction at a different rate, or simply boiled in place, a milling scramble of heated gas.

No bullet ever went where you pointed it. Gravity, spin, the wind, the very rotation of the earth pulled it off track. Some of those you could allow for. Some you could guesstimate, if you fired enough thousands of rounds. But in that boil of the mirage, no one could be absolutely certain where a projectile would go.

“About a three-minute wind? Right to left?”

“Crank it on. Estimate your range,” Skilley breathed.

The range finder would be more exact, but Teddy didn't like to put out a laser beam. Protective details were starting to carry laser detectors. He calibrated the top and bottom of the rock against the upper grid, then doubled it, since it wasn't six feet high. The mirage hesitated, then began to roll left to right. Sweating, he adjusted his windage, hoping he wasn't overcorrecting.

“Eight hundred fifty meters.”

“Check again. When you have time, use it.”

He breathed out, took his eye away, put it back to the eyepiece. “Eight fifty.”

“With the laser?”

“Fuck the laser. That's a solid range.”

“All right. Check your windage again. The wind never stops changing.” He bit back a retort and checked again. Right to left again, and the nearly invisible moiré pattern eddied more swiftly now. He blinked sweat away and corrected. Kaulukukui and Dooley squatted, hands dangling. “You guys look like baboons,” he said.

“You look like a baboon's prick.”

“You suck baboons' pricks.”

“Yeah, but not on Sunday.”

“Shut up. Watch this,” the master chief said.

He reached in past Obie's shoulder to flick a toggle on the scope. It emitted a faint whine powering up.

Teddy blinked. Like magic, the tremor had disappeared. The only motion now was that of the boiling air escalatoring smoothly and silently across the field of view. He checked left, then right, to make sure none of the goatherds were wandering around downrange. Just blank rock, sand, the shrunken shadows of near-noon. He took up the slack in the trigger. Found the second stage. Centered the sights above the eight dot and below the nine. Breathed out and applied pressure, ready to stop if the scope wavered.

But it was rock solid, and the recoil slammed his shoulder like no M16 ever had. The suppressor damped the report, but no way it could silence metal ripping air at three thousand feet a second. The supersonic crack tolled back from rocks and hillsides. He'd stopped blinking when he fired years ago, so he could track the wavering comet of the bullet's trace all the way.

It struck in the bottom half of the fluorescent spot and the rock split apart, exploding into flying fragments and an ocher cloud that hung suspended for a moment, as if contemplating being released from the matrix in which it had spent the last million years. Then uncurled like a blossoming bud and drifted off downwind.

He rolled away from the rifle. The other SEALs looked impressed. “DRT,” Dooley murmured. Dead right there.

“If they run, they'll just die tired,” Kaulukukui said.

“A little farther than you figured,” Skilley pronounced. “But better under than over, if you're going for a head shot.”

“I could do some work with this,” Teddy said. “This one mine?”

“On the way. Two, maybe three weeks. With a national stock number, hard case, sling, and butt and handguard weight set.”

“And this hot shit ammo?” said the Hawaiian.

“That's different.” Skilley laid the plastic case beside Oberg. “So far, the only agency approved to use this has three initials. You won't find it
in the supply system. You'd have to depend on what you . . . found lying around.”