Snipers aim for the “apricot,” better known as the medulla oblongata, the part of the brainstem that controls the heart and lungs. To reach Charlie Clark’s, Gretchen Lanier needed to fire from the barely opened window of the third-floor hotel room, across and through more than three hundred yards of parkland, and into the barred detention rooms.
If only every job were so simple, she thought. A year ago in Afghanistan, she’d recorded a kill from 2,267 yards away, or 1.29 miles, on icy and mountainous terrain.
She dropped to a kneeling position at the foot of the bed. In her year and a half of sniper school, her instructors had placed almost as much emphasis on proficiency in camouflage and concealment as on marksmanship. More often than not it involved wearing a ghillie suit in order to pass for a bush or clump of weeds. Tonight’s camo involved surrounding the rifle with a well-placed pillow and the blankets bunched just so. Wrapping the comforter over the works simulated a person lying in the bed she and Stanley had rolled against the window.
She needed to accurately estimate and balance the many components in a bullet’s trajectory and point of impact. Range was simplest. From this relative proximity, she would have zero difficulty placing the red laser dot smack on the base of Charlie’s head. But if she made a mistake in calculating the effects of wind direction or velocity, among other factors, the round might fly several feet wide of Charlie and bore instead through the far wall of the detention room, possibly taking out the marine guard stationed on the other side.
Shooting at a downward angle also complicated matters. Gravity could wreak havoc on a shot traveling three thousand feet per second. Fortunately, the wind was almost nil, the conditions otherwise were practically ideal, and sniping technology had advanced at a head-spinning rate lately: The ballistic calculator in Lanier’s telescopic sight-and this was an el cheapo telescopic sight available in a Caribbean version of a hick gun shop-all but offered a glimpse at the future in the form of an animated preview of the shot.
She leaned into the stock’s cheek-piece and squinted against the cold scope to find not a view of an impromptu detention room, as she’d expected, but the profile of a young man with sandy blond hair. Charlie Clark, no doubt about it. The back of his head was centered almost exactly within the crosshairs.
She half expected him to turn around, feeling her eyes upon him.
He stood still, an ear pressed against the door, as if trying to hear through it.
She disengaged her conscience. The target became a piece of paper with concentric circles around a bull’s-eye rather than a human being with loved ones who would suffer from his loss.
Rather than draw attention with the laser range finder, she used the mil dot reticle in the scope-a sort of electronic slide rule-to find the range. 194.8 meters, or, as she thought of it, nothing.
Anticipating the target’s behavior was integral to a precise shot. With moving targets, the point of aim was ahead of the target, the distance depending on his speed and angular movement. A stationary target like this was the sniper’s version of a three-inch putt.
Lanier zeroed the scope, then looked over her shoulder at Stanley, who sat in an executive-style simulated-leather desk chair with a gash in the back.
“How’re things in the Sound Department?” she asked. He tapped nine digits on his BlackBerry. “Just waiting on your cue now.”
When she pulled the trigger, he would dial a tenth number, sending a radio signal to detonate a C-4 shaped charge not much larger than a Tic Tac. She’d stuck it to a transformer hanging within easy reach of the roof. The blast would obscure the thunderous report of the M40. The simpler solution, a suppressor, would skew her shot. When possible, she opted for loud sounds heard in the environment, exploding artillery shells in an Afghanistani combat zone, for example, or, in places like Martinique, fourth-rate transformers that blew as often as the wind.
She pressed her eye against the scope, locating Charlie where she’d last seen him.
The bullet would require.93 seconds to reach the point of impact. She would squeeze the trigger straight back with the ball of her finger to avoid jerking the gun sideways. She took a deep breath, then let the air out in small increments, the idea being to hold her lungs empty at the moment she took the shot. To further minimize barrel motion, she would fire between the beats of her heart.
As always, a calm enveloped her, removing Stanley and the room and the rest of Martinique from her consciousness-everything but herself, her weapon, and her target.