Filed to story: American Sniper: The Last Round (Carl Oliver) Book PDF Free
“All right, Base, you talked me into it. I’m sliding into shooting position now. You sing out when your people say it’s clear.”
Carl slid the rifle into his shoulder, watched as the scope came up big and bright and clean, a movie-screen world, all in primary colors bold and furious.
“Charlie Four, he’s turned down Ridgely, he’s coming into your kill zone right about now.”
Carl threw the bolt, feeding one of the Accutech .308’s into his chamber. He drew the rifle to him, found the hands-free mike got in the way of his spot-weld, and thus quickly and savagely bent it out of the way, to take his place behind the gun.
It was a modified sitting position, with the weight on his left ham, his body canted slightly as the rifle was pulled to him, while resting solidly on the sandbag barricade. It felt completely moored to the bags, its weight entirely on them. His upper body supported itself on elbows, and the rifle rode a fulcrum of the sandbag, guided by his hands pulling it tight against his shoulder. His hip flared a bit under the strain, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.
As he looked through the scope, Carl made subtle corrections in his grip and body position, trying to find, given the circumstances, an equipoise: one position where everything was tucked just right, where he felt most comfortable, less stressed, where his breathing was natural and loose, and yet through it all he still felt anchored into his chair and the bench and the bags.
Through the scope, he watched the slight tremble of the cross hairs, matching his breathing. That was the enemy, really: not Willie Downing or Nick Memphis or Accutech or anything-no, it was his own heart, which he could not quite control (nobody could) and which would send random messages of treachery to the various parts of his body. At these last moments, the heart could betray anyone, firing off a bolt of fear that would evince itself in a dozen tragic ways: a trigger finger hitch, a breath held too long, a weirdly detonating synapse that caused the eye to lose its sharpness or its perspective; an ear that suddenly heard too much or not enough; a foot that fell asleep and distracted its owner from the serious business at hand.
Carl blinked quickly, ordered himself to chill out, and tried to see in the lazy tremble in the cross hairs not something to hate (his own weakness) but something to make peace with-something to forgive. Self-forgiveness was a large part of it: you can’t be perfect all the time. Nobody can: accept your weakness, try to tame it and make it work for you.
Carl breathed slowly, letting the air hum half into his lungs, then humming it half out. He didn’t want a lot of oxygen in them, ballooning out on him at the awkward moments. But dammit, he still didn’t quite feel comfortable. It was all so strange: sitting up there in the pretend building, pretending to be an FBI agent, pretending it was 1986, trying to pretend it was real.
There is nothing to pretend, he told himself. There is only shooting, and that’s never pretend.
He’d figured the math out much earlier. Having memorized the ballistics table, he knew that at 320 yards the 150-grain bullet was programmed to drop about ten inches and would have slowed, by this distance, to a velocity of about 2,160 feet per second. But he also knew that this Accutech stuff was a bit hotter than the standard. And so he figured it would only drop eight inches. But he was shooting downhill, a slightly different problem than shooting flat; this meant he’d add more of a drop, because bullets fired at an angle fall farther; he took another inch out of the equation. That put him nine inches low at 350 yards, except that the wind, just a slight breeze, would move the bullet as it traveled perhaps four inches to the left. So he had to hold nine inches lower and four inches to the left. Then he had to lead to compensate for the speed of the car; and he had to do it on cue, when he got the green light command over his earphones.
“Charlie Four, do you read?”
Fuck it, thought Carl, what does he want?
He said nothing. The mike was bent under his chin and to pull it back into place was to blow his spot-weld, his hold and his peace. He would not give that up.
“Charlie Four, goddammit, where are you?”
Carl was silent, awaiting the arrival of the vehicle in the bottom right quadrant of his scope.
“Charlie Four, goddammit, get on the air! Do you acknowledge? Call in, goddammit, Charlie Four, I need you authenticated.”
Carl was silent, trying to flatten out that bit of tremble from the reticle. He tried to make his mind blank and cool and drive out any sensation of his own body. There should be only two things: finding the right hold and preserving it through the trigger pull.
“Charlie Four, you don’t call in, I’m not gonna green light you, goddammit, I have to have you on the air so I know you’re reading my commands!”
Carl held silent. His breath was rougher now; he felt like tossing the earphones away! Talking to him! Now!
He tried to clear his head, to make everything go away except the shot. He could not.
“Charlie Four, green light canceled. Abort it. Hang it up, if you’re there, Charlie Four. Do you read? Shot authorization is canceled. There’ll be no shooting, goddammit, Charlie Four.”
And now he saw it.
The limo body, hauled by the chain, slid into view. Its angle from him was not acute but more like forty degrees; the car appeared to be moving at about twenty miles per hour; Carl had no trouble pivoting the rifle on the bag through a short arc as he tracked the car, looking for his hold. He tried not to note the details, but he could hardly help it. Downing, for example, was, preposterously, a watermelon; the four hostages around him were balloons. It was crude but effective, especially in the way the wind made the balloons waver in unpredictable ways and the bump and grind of the two made the melon queerly elastic, nearly human. Carl almost laughed. All this money to shoot a melon! And he knew it was absurd, too. A hundred men could hit a melon like this, but only one of them could hit a head.
And then that was gone too, as, suddenly, Carl had the position, had it, knew it, had the shot, had it right, had it perfect. He held as the car continued to slide and involuntarily, without having consciously decided to disobey orders, he began to take the trigger slack out. He was going to shoot anyway, fuck it.
“Charlie Four, gun is down, green light, green light, green li-“
But Carl had fired already by then, having already made the decision at some subconscious level. His brain had yielded to his finger; his finger had decided and in the instant before the blur took it all away from his eye, he saw the melon detonate into a smear of red against the green Maryland countryside as the bullet tore through it and mushroomed. And when the scope came back from the recoil he saw all four ballons still waving in the wind and the melon blown in half.
“Congratulations,” said Hatcher. “You win all the marbles. You solved it.”
Carl said nothing, just fixed him with a cool eye. He had climbed down from the tower, to be surrounded by admirers.
“When did you decide to shoot?”
“It just happened.”
“You were so fast when you got the green light. Damn, you were so fast!”
Carl didn’t tell them he was halfway through the pull when the word came.
“Here, you can read the transcripts yourself.” He handed them over to Carl, who looked at them briefly, enough to satisfy himself that yes, indeed, Base had been on the earphones to poor Memphis until almost the last second.
BASE
: Have you acquired the target?
AGENT MEMPHIS
: Yes, sir, uh, he’s at the bottom of my scope, he’s rising into my cross hairs, uh, he’s-
BASE
: Hold your fire, Charlie Four, until I have a confirmation that his piece is down.