Filed to story: American Sniper: The Last Round (Carl Oliver) Book PDF Free
November had come in mean. West Arkansas lay soaked and shivering beneath a slate-colored sky, dawn breaking like an insult after a night that had already done its worst. Sleet hissed through the pine tops and rattled against stone outcroppings clawing their way from the earth. Low clouds charged overhead, bruised and angry, while sudden gusts tore through the ravines, whipping the sleet sideways like gunsmoke from a battlefield.
It was the day before hunting season.
Carl Oliver waited just off the final climb into Hard Bargain Valley, that flat, stubborn tabletop high in the Ouachitas. He sat pressed against an ancient pine, rifle resting across his knees, utterly still. Not pretending at stillness-being it. This was Carl’s first gift. He hadn’t learned it. It had simply always been there, drawn from some inner reservoir untouched by panic or strain. In Vietnam, men whispered about it-the way he could quiet himself beyond breathing, beyond pain, stiller than a corpse without ever losing awareness.
The cold had long since punched through his wool leggings and slipped beneath his down vest, creeping up his spine like a clever little thief. He clamped his jaw shut to keep his teeth from rattling. His hip flared now and then, an old wound waking up to complain. Carl acknowledged it once, then dismissed it. Pain was just noise. He was past that. Somewhere else now.
He was earning Tim.
Because, as Carl would explain to the very few men he trusted-old Sam Vincent, the retired prosecutor; Doc LeMieux, who’d filled more cavities than he could count; or Sheriff Vernon Tell-you didn’t just shoot an animal. Anyone could do that. Any city idiot could climb into a warm stand, sip coffee, wait for a doe to wander close, then jerk the trigger on a cheap rifle and blow her open, only to track her bleeding misery across three counties.
No. A shot had to be earned.
You earned it by sharing the animal’s time. Its cold. Its waiting. Whatever the creature endured, you endured too. Fair was fair.
Through the pines and young saplings, Carl watched the clearing below, about 150 yards out, slowly emerging from the dim gray light. A trail cut through it clean and familiar. At dawn and twilight, the deer always passed through-single file, patient, predictable. The night before, he’d counted twelve of them: three bucks, one a solid eight-pointer, trailing their does.
But Carl hadn’t come for them.
He’d come for Tim.
Old Tim-scarred, battered, stubborn as bedrock. Tim didn’t run with a harem anymore. Didn’t need one. Years back, some lucky fool from Little Rock had clipped off a prong of Tim’s antler, leaving him crooked for a season. Another year, Sam Vincent-slower now, hands not what they once were-had hit him sloppy with a .45-70 softpoint. Too much gun. Sam always loved that old Winchester. The shot would’ve killed any normal buck.
Tim wasn’t normal.
Carl respected that. “Tough” was the kindest word he had for anyone, living or dead.
Seventeen hours now. He’d sat through the night, through the cold, through the sleet that started falling around four. He was soaked, numb, barely alive. Memories tried to surface-old ones-but he shook them off each time, dragging his focus back to the clearing.
Come on, you old bastard, he thought. I’m earning you.
Movement.
But it was only a doe and her fawn. They drifted down the trail, unhurried and stupidly confident, noses low, unaware that somewhere below, some city fool would almost certainly end their lives.
Carl didn’t move.
Dr. Dobbler swallowed hard, searching Colonel Shreck’s eyes for some hint of mercy, some crack in the armor. There was none. Shreck sat rigid, his permanent scowl carved into blunt features that radiated power, impatience, and a kind of menace that unsettled everyone in the room. He was frightening-more frightening than anyone Dobbler had ever known. More frightening even than Russell Isandhlwana, the dealer who’d raped him in the showers at Norfolk State Penitentiary and kept him broken for three long months.
It was late. Rain hammered the tin roof of the Quonset hut. The air reeked of rust, old leather, dust, unwashed socks, and stale beer. It smelled like a prison-though this wasn’t one. It was the field headquarters of RamDyne Security, squatting on hundreds of forgotten, unworkable acres in central Virginia.
The planners sat facing the darkened room. Across the table loomed Jack Payne, brutal and silent, the second scariest man alive. And that was it. A handful of men. A tiny team, staring down an enormous, bleak task that waited just beyond the walls.
On a small screen, four faces had been projected, now glowing in the dark. Each represented a hundred other possibilities; these men had been discovered by Research, investigated at length by Plans, watched by the pros from Operations, and then winnowed to this sullen quartet. It was Dobbler’s job to break them down psychologically for Colonel Raymond Shreck’s final decision.
Each of the final four had a flaw, of course. Dr. Dobbler pointed these out. He was, after all, still a psychiatrist, if now uncertified. Flaws were his profession.
“Too narcissistic,” he said of one. “He spends too much on his hair. Never trust a man in a seventy-five-dollar haircut. He expects to be treated special. We need somebody who is special but has never been treated special.”
As for Number 2, “Too smart. Brilliant, tactically brilliant. But always playing the games. Always thinking ahead. Never at rest.”
Of the third, “Wonderfully stupid. But slow. Exactly what we need so far as certain qualities are required, and experienced in the technical area. Obedient as a dog. But slow. Too slow, too literal, too eager to please. Too rigid.”
“I hear you flirting again, Dobbler,” said Colonel Shreck, brutally. “Just give us the information, without the charm.”
Dobbler winced.
“Well,” he finally said, “that leaves us with only one.”
Jack Payne hated Dobbler. The softy Dobbler, with his big head, scraggly beard and long sensitive fingers, was everything pussy in the world. He had tits. He was almost a woman. He tried to turn everything into show.
Jack Payne was a dour, nasty-looking little man, tattooed and remote, with blank, tiny eyes in his meaty face. He was enormously strong, with a pain threshold that was off the charts. His specialty was getting things done, no matter what. He touched the cut-down Remington 1100 in its custom under-shoulder rig beneath his left arm. In the long tube under the barrel there were six double-ought 12-gauge shells. In each shell were nine .32 caliber pellets. He could fire fifty-four bullets in less than three seconds. Got lots of stuff done with that.
“The details are impressive,” Dobbler was saying. “He killed eighty-seven men. That is, eighty-seven men stalked and taken under the most ferocious conditions. I think we’d all have to agree that’s impressive.”
There was a pause.
“I killed eighty-seven men in an afternoon,” Jack said.
Jack had been stuck in a long siege at an A-team camp in the southern highlands, and in the last days the gooks had thrown human wave attacks at them.
“But all at once. With an M-60,” said Colonel Shreck. “I was there too. Go ahead, Dobbler.”
Dobbler was trembling, Jack could see. He still trembled when the colonel addressed him directly sometimes. Jack almost laughed. He smelled fear on the psychiatrist. He loved the odor of other men’s fear.
But Dobbler pressed ahead. “This is none other than Gunnery Sergeant Carl Oliver, USMC, retired, of Blue Eye, Arkansas. They called him ‘Carl the Nailer.’ He was the United States Marine Corps’s second leading individual killer in Vietnam. Gentlemen, I give you the great American sniper.”
Carl loved their magic. When he had hunted men, there was no magic. Men were stupid. They farted and yakked and gave themselves away miles before they moved into the killing zone.
