One Shot (2 page)

He was on the garage's second level but the way First
Street ran uphill meant the plaza was much less than
one storey below him. There was a definite downward
angle, but it was shallow. On the right of the plaza he
could see the new office building's door. It was a
shabby place. It had been built and it hadn't rented. He
knew that. So to preserve some kind of credibility for
the new downtown the state had filled it with
government offices. The Department of Motor Vehicles
was in there, and a joint Army-Navy-Air Force-Marine
Corps recruiting office. Maybe Social Security was in
there. Maybe the Internal Revenue Service. The man
with the rifle wasn't really sure. And he didn't really care.

He dropped to his knees and then to his stomach. The
low crawl was a sniper's principal mode of movement.

In his years in the service he had low crawled a million
miles. Knees and elbows and belly. Standard tactical
doctrine was for the sniper and his spotter to detach
from the company a thousand yards out and crawl into
position. In training he had sometimes taken many
hours to do it, to avoid the observer's binoculars. But
this time he had only eight feet to cover. And as far as he
knew there were no binoculars on him.

He reached the base of the wall and lay flat on the
ground, pressed up tight against the raw concrete. Then
he squirmed up into a sitting position. Then he knelt. He
folded his right leg tight underneath him. He planted his
left foot flat and his left shin vertical. He propped his left
elbow on his left knee.

Raised the rifle. Rested the end of the forestock on the
top of the low concrete wall. Sawed it gently back and
forth until it felt good and solid.

Supported kneeling, the training manual called it. It
was a good position.

Second only to lying prone with a bipod, in his
experience. He breathed in, breathed out. One shot, one
kill. That was the sniper's credo. To succeed required
control and stillness and calm. He breathed in, breathed
out. Felt himself relax. Felt himself come home.

Ready.

Infiltration successful.

Now wait until the time is right.

He waited about seven minutes, keeping still,
breathing low, clearing his mind. He looked at the library
on his left. Above it and behind it a spur of the raised
highway curled in on stilts, like it was embracing the big
old limestone building, cradling it, protecting it from
harm. Then it straightened a little and passed behind the
black glass tower. It was about level with the fourth
storey back there. The tower itself had the NBC

peacock on a monolith near its main entrance, but the
man with the rifle was sure that a small network affiliate
didn't occupy the whole building. Probably not more
than a single floor. The rest of the space was probably
one-man law firms or CPAs or real estate offices or
insurance brokers or investment managers. Or empty.

People were coming out of the new building on the
right. People who had been getting new licences or
turning in old plates or joining the army or hassling with
federal bureaucracy. There were a lot of people. The
government offices were closing. Five o'clock, on a
Friday. The people came out the doors and walked right
to left directly in front of him, funnelling into single file
as they entered the narrow space and passed the short
end of the ornamental pool between the two low walls.

Like ducks in a shooting gallery. One after the other. A
target-rich environment. The range was about a
hundred feet.

Approximately. Certainly less than thirty-five yards.

Very close.

He waited.

Some of the people trailed their fingers in the water as
they walked. The walls were just the right height for that.

The man with the rifle could see bright copper pennies
on the black tile under the water. They swam and rippled
where the fountain disturbed the surface.

He watched. He waited.

The stream of people thickened up. Now there were so
many of them coming all at once that they had to pause
and group and shuffle and wait to get into single file to
pass between the two low walls. Just like the traffic had
snarled at the bottom of First Street. A bottleneck. After
you. No, after you. It made the people slow. Now they
were slow ducks in a shooting gallery.

The man with the rifle breathed in, and breathed out,
and waited.

Then he stopped waiting.

He pulled the trigger, and kept on pulling.

His first shot hit a man in the head and killed him
instantly. The gunshot was loud and there was a
supersonic crack from the bullet and a puff of pink mist
from the head and the guy went straight down like a
puppet with the strings cut.

A kill with the first cold shot.

Excellent.

He worked fast, left to right. The second shot hit the
next man in the head.

Same result as the first, exactly. The third shot hit a
woman in the head.

Same result. Three shots in maybe two seconds. Three
targets down. Absolute surprise. No reaction for a split
second. Then chaos broke out. Pandemonium.

Panic. There were twelve people caught in the narrow
space between the plaza wall and the pool wall. Three
were already down. The remaining nine ran. Four ran
forward and five spun away from the corpses and ran
back. Those five collided with the press of people still
moving their way. There were sudden loud screams.

There was a solid stalled mass of panicked humanity,
right in front of the man with the rifle. Range, less than
thirty-five yards. Very close.

His fourth head shot killed a man in a suit. His fifth
missed completely. The Sierra Matchking passed close
to a woman's shoulder and hissed straight into the
ornamental pool and disappeared. He ignored it and
moved the Springfield's muzzle a fraction and his sixth
shot caught a guy on the bridge of his nose and blew
his head apart.

The man with the rifle stopped firing.

He ducked low behind the garage wall and crawled
backwards three feet. He could smell burnt powder and
over the ringing in his ears he could hear women
screaming and feet pounding and the crunch of
panicked fender benders on the street below. Don't
worry, little people, he thought. It's over now. I'm out of
here. He lay on his front and swept his spent shell cases
into a pile. The bright Lake City brass shone right there
in front of him. He scooped five of them into his gloved
hands but the sixth rolled away and fell into an
unfinished expansion joint. Just dropped right down
into the tiny nine-inch-deep, half-inch-wide trench. He
heard a quiet metallic sound as it hit bottom.

Decision?

Leave it, surely.

No time.

He jammed the five cases he had in his raincoat pocket
and crawled backwards on his toes and his fingers and
his belly. He lay still for a moment and listened to the
screaming. Then he came to his knees and stood up.

Turned round and walked back the same way he had
come, fast but in control, over the rough concrete, along
the walkway planks, through the dark and the dust,
under the yellow and black tape. Back to his minivan.

The rear door was still open. He rewrapped the warm
rifle in its blanket and slid the door shut on it. Got in the
front and started the engine. Glanced through the
windshield at the parking meter. He had forty-four
minutes left on it. He backed out and headed for the exit
ramp. Drove down it and out the unmanned exit and
made a right and another right into the tangle of streets
behind the department stores. He had passed under the
raised highway before he heard the first sirens. He
breathed out. The sirens were heading east, and he was
heading west.

Good work, he thought. Covert infiltration, six shots
fired, five targets down, successful exfiltration, as cool
as the other side of the pillow.

Then he smiled suddenly. Long-term military records
show that a modern army scores one enemy fatality for
every fifteen thousand combat rounds expended by its
infantry. But for its specialist snipers, the result is better.

Way better. Twelve and a half thousand times better, as
a matter of fact. A modern army scores one enemy
fatality for every one-point-two combat rounds
expended by a sniper. And one for one-point-two
happened to be the same batting average as five for six.

Exactly the same average. Simple arithmetic. So even
after all those years a trained military sniper had scored
exactly what his old instructors would have expected.

They would have been very pleased about that.

But his old instructors had trained snipers for the
battlefield, not for urban crime. With urban crime, factors
unknown on the battlefield kick in fast.

Those factors tend to modify the definition of
successful exfiltration. In this particular case, the media
reacted fastest. Not surprisingly, since the shootings
took place right in front of the local NBC affiliate's
window. Two things happened even before a dozen
panicked bystanders all hit 911 on their cell phones
simultaneously. First, every minicam in the NBC office
starting rolling. The cameras were grabbed up and
switched on and pointed at the windows. Second, a
local news anchor called Ann Yanni started rehearsing
what she knew would be her very first network
breaking-news report. She was sick and scared and
badly shaken, but she knew an opportunity when she
saw it. So she started drafting, in her head. She knew
that words set agendas, and the words that came to her
first were sniper and senseless and slaying. The
alliteration was purely instinctive. So was the banality.

But slaying was how she saw it. And slaying was a great
word.

It

communicated

the

randomness,

the

wantonness, the savagery, the ferocity. It was a
motiveless and impersonal word. It was exactly the right
word for the story. At the same time she knew it wouldn't
work for the caption below the pictures. Massacre
would be better there. Friday Night Massacre? Rush
Hour Massacre? She ran for the door and hoped her
graphics guy would come up with something along
those lines unbidden.

Also not present on the battlefield is urban law
enforcement. The dozen simultaneous 911 cell phone
calls lit up the emergency switchboard like a Christmas
tree and the local police and fire departments were
rolling

within

forty

seconds.

Everything

was

despatched, all of them with lights popping and sirens
blaring.

Every

black-and-white,

every

available

detective, every crime scene technician, every fire
engine, every paramedic, every ambulance.

Initially there was complete mayhem. The 911 calls had
been panicked and incoherent. But crimes were plainly
involved, and they were clearly serious, so the Serious
Crimes Squad's lead detective was given temporary
command. He was a high-quality twenty-year PD