X-ring.
He’d made a mistake when he’d charged toward York Bridge: the two shots they’d
just taken was proof of it. It meant, from the vantage of his assailants, that
the movement had changed his distance but not his angle, which was harder to
correct for. That was another piece of information: he would have to make use of
it if he wanted to survive another minute.
Now he made his way around two sides of the tennis courts, which were set off
with mesh fencing. Ahead of him was an octagonal gazebo, made of
pressure-treated lumber decked out to look rustic and old. It was an
opportunity, but a risk as well: if he were a sniper, he would anticipate that
his subject would seek temporary refuge there, and cluster his shots in its
direction. He could not approach it directly. He ran at an angle, veering away
from it altogether; then, when he was some distance past it, he ran jaggedly,
bobbing and weaving, to its shadow. He could walk behind it for a bit, because
it would serve as a barrier between him and the tree stand where the team of
marksmen was based.
An explosion of turf, a yard from his left foot. Impossible!
No, it was all too possible. He had been guilty of wishful thinking—assuming
that the snipers had restricted themselves to the tall trees behind the boating
lake. It made sense that they would station themselves there; professional
snipers liked to keep the sun to their backs, partly for viewing purposes, but
even more to prevent a visible glare from flashing off their scopes. The spray
of dirt suggested that the bullet had arrived from the same approximate
direction as the others. Yet the tall gazebo would have shielded him from a
tree-mounted marksman. He surveyed the horizon with a sinking feeling.
Farther away, much farther away: the steel lattice of a twenty- or thirty-story
crane, from a construction site on Rossmore Road. Distance: about three-quarters
of a mile.
Christ! Was it possible?
The sight line was direct: with proper optics and perfect zeroing, it would be
possible, just, for a top-of-the-league marksman.
He scurried back to the gazebo but knew that it was only a very temporary place
of refuge. Now an entire team would know his precise location. The more time he
spent there, the better coordinated and more effective the sniper fire would be
once he tried to leave. They could wait him out. Not that they needed to. They
would be able to radio backup—summon a stroller, as pedestrian adjuvants were
known in the trade. A stroller in a tweed jacket with an ordinary silenced
pistol would be able to pick him off, conceal the weapon, and resume his walk,
with nobody alerted. No, the seeming safety of his position was spurious. Every
moment increased the risks he would face. Every moment made escape less likely.
Think! He had to act. Something like annoyance was welling up in him: he was
tired of being used for target practice, dammit! To maximize his safety at this
second would be to minimize his safety five minutes from now. Immobility was
death. He would not die cowering behind a gazebo, waiting to be picked off from
the air or the ground.
The hunted would become the hunter; the quarry would turn predator, or die in
the attempt: this was the only option he had left.
Facts: these were marksmen of extraordinary expertise. But they had been
deployed in such a way as to put those skills to the test. All the shots were
long-range ones, and however extraordinary the shooter, there were dozens of
uncontrollable variables—small breezes, an interceding twig—that could put the
bullet off its intended trajectory. At great distances, even tiny factors became
enormously significant. Nor was the shooting heedless: there clearly was a
concern to avoid bystanders. Berman was doubtless seen as an accomplice of his,
his possible death of no account, perhaps even beneficial to the mission.
Question: Why was the team stationed at such a remove? What made the pursuit so
unnerving was the fact that he could not see his pursuers. They stayed well out
of the way. But why?
Because they—or their controllers—were risk-averse. Because they were afraid of
him.
Dear Christ. It was true. It had to be. They must have been commanded to avoid
close contact at all costs. Subject deemed unpredictable and dangerous at close
quarters. He would be destroyed at long distance.
A counterintuitive conclusion was unavoidable: the reflexive tactic of evasion,
increasing the distance between himself and his assailants, was precisely the
wrong response.
He had to embrace his enemy, move toward his attackers. Was there a way to do so
and live?
Standing near the Inner Circle, the stone path surrounding Queen Mary’s Garden,
a stocky woman in a denim skirt was handing a pair of binoculars to her girl.
The woman had the sort of complexion, pale but splotchily reddened, that must
have had suitors calling her an “English rose” when she was a teenager; but the
once becoming blush had coarsened and grown definite.
“See the one with the blue on its wing? That means it’s a bluebird.”
The girl, who looked about seven, peered through the binoculars
uncomprehendingly. The binoculars were the genuine article, a 10X50 by the looks
of them: the woman must have been a devoted bird-watcher, like so many Brits,
and eager to show her child the wonders of the avian world. “Mummy, I can’t see
anything,” the little girl bleated. Her mother, with her trunklike legs, leaned
over and adjusted the binoculars so that the eyecups were closer together.
“Now try.”
“Mummy! Where’s the bird!”
There was another safety factor just now: a breeze was passing through, ruffling
the leaves of the trees. A distance shooter would be vigilant about evidence of
wind, especially irregularly gusting winds, knowing how much it could disturb
the shot’s trajectory. If a shot had to be made under such conditions, there
were rules for compensation, for “doping the wind.” Estimation of wind speed
followed rough rules of thumb: a four-mile-per-hour wind was a wind you can feel
on your face; between five and eight miles per hour, tree leaves are in constant
motion; in twelve-mile-per-hour winds, small trees sway. And then the angle of
the breeze had to be figured in. A direct crosswind was rare; most winds were at
an irregular angle to the line of fire. Moreover, wind zones downrange often
varied from the wind experienced by the sniper himself. To complete the
necessary calculations before the wind changed was infeasible. And so accuracy
was inevitably diminished. If they had any choice, and they did, the snipers
would wait until it subsided.
Janson approached the mother and daughter, his heart thudding. Though conscious
of his lethal halo, he had to trust to the professional self-regard of the
marksmen: snipers of that order prided themselves on their precision; hitting
such bystanders would look like unacceptable amateurism. And the breeze was
still gusting.
“Excuse me, madam,” he said to the woman. “But I wonder if I might borrow your
binoculars.” He winked at the little girl.
Immediately, the girl burst into tears. “No, Mummy!” she screamed. “They’re
mine, mine, mine!”
“Just for a moment?” Janson smiled again, swallowing his desperation. In his
head, the seconds ticked off.
“Don’t cry, my poppet,” the mother said, caressing the girl’s purple face.
“Mummy will buy you a lollipop. Wouldn’t that be nice!” She turned to Janson.
“Viola’s very sensitive,” the mother said coolly. “Can’t you see how you’ve
upset her?”
“I’m very sorry … ”
“Then please leave us alone.”
“Would it matter if I said it was a matter of life and death?” Janson flashed
what he hoped was a winning smile.
“My gawd, you Yanks, you think you own the bloody world. Take no for an answer,
would you?”
Too many seconds had elapsed. The breeze had subsided. Janson could picture, in
his head, the sniper he could not see. Hidden in foliage, or braced on a strong
lateral tree branch, or perched on a telescoping boom crane, the steel lattice
and base hydraulics minimizing any sway. However positioned, the sniper’s main
camouflage was his very stillness.
Janson knew the terrible, emptied-out clarity of the sniper’s mind firsthand. He
had received extensive sniper training in Little Creek, and had been required to
draw upon those skills in country. There had been the afternoons spent with a
Remington 700 braced on two sandbags, the barrel itself resting on nothing but a
cushion of air, waiting for the shimmering motion in his scope that told him his
target was emerging. And, on radiophone, Demarest’s voice in his ear, coaching,
coaxing, reassuring. “You’ll feel it before you see it, Janson. Let yourself
feel it. Relax into the shot.” How surprised he was when he took it and hit his
target. He was never in the same league as those who now pursued him, but he did