Killer Instincts v5 (16 page)

"Sounds about right to me."

"The best part," I said, "was that at the end, you welcomed me into your brotherhood, and I followed you off into the darkness."

Richard nodded, not even looking at me. "Still sounds about right."

"Me dreaming you’re demon from Hell and corrupting my soul sounds about right to you?"

Richard finished loading the magazine in his hand, laid it across his leg, picked up another empty magazine, and continued loading. "I've been on the warpath for forty years. I've probably put a thousand men in the ground. Women too. Hell, probably some kids mixed in along the way, although I can't say for sure. And I know some good guys got caught in the crossfire, too; cops, security guards, watchmen, even your run of the mill innocent bystanders. Wrong place at the wrong time and all that."

I stared off into space. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Because you need to remember I'm not a nice guy. I'm not far removed from that thing in your dream. Call me a war criminal and you'd probably be more right than wrong. I always thought at the time I was working for the good guys, fighting for the right reasons. But the Cold War was still a bloody business and I was always there at its bloodiest. Afghanistan, Burma, Egypt, Iran, India, Brazil, Russia...I've been all over, always where the fighting was the dirtiest. Tore up some places here in the States as well. Things the press was threatened to keep quiet about, or bribed into silence, or worse."

"Just keeps getting better and better," I said.

"And just remember, I'm one of the good guys. Some of the animals I worked with, they make your run of the mill concentration camp guard look like he's gentle enough to run a daycare center. Some of those older guys, they probably
were
concentration camp guards back in the day. Plenty of the grey-hairs I went into the field with, those were the war addicts, the guys who couldn't go back home. Saw it after 'Nam, too; men who lived for death, lived for the blood and the thrill of the kill. They weren't much better than the dummies we were gunning after. Matter of fact, most of them were probably worse. At least the guys at the end of my gun usually died for a cause: communism, Islam, even plain old fashioned world domination. Some of the savages I fought with, they killed simply for the fun of it. The money? That was just gravy."

I turned to look at Richard, slouched in his rocker, hat pulled down low over his blue eyes. "So what about you? Killing for a cause, or was it the fun?"

Richard finally turned and looked me square in the eye. "You ain't figured that out yet? I killed for profit, kid. And back in the day, business was good. Business was
really
good."

I finished my meal in silence.

Although it was mid-morning, and the sun was already setting the sand on fire, Richard and I did our stretching, calisthenics and run. Neither of us said anything; we just worked through our routine in silence with the occasional gesture, nod, or inarticulate grunt. It was perhaps the closest I’d seen Richard get to being embarrassed, although I didn't think that was necessarily the problem. I think he had to remind himself now and then I was struggling to come to grips with a great deal in a short amount of time, and he needed to throttle back sometimes or risk burning me out.

After we finished our exercise, Richard called me back into the cabin. He had laid out the DeLisle carbine on the table top, broken down into its constituent parts.

"We've spent a week working on the basics of submachine guns and pistols. Last night you proved you know how to use those tools effectively. Now it's time to move to something a little more exacting."

"The sniper rifle," I replied.

"Not exactly a rifle, a carbine. It's a longarm firing a pistol round, but that's just being pedantic."

I stepped closer and took a good look. The wooden stock had a folded aluminum butt, spray-painted black. The magazine was removed, and a box of pistol ammunition sat next to it. The scope was removed, and set next to the DeLisle's receiver. The bolt had been pulled free, and sat next to the receiver as well. A small black collapsible bipod lay folded underneath the barrel.

Richard gestured to the parts. "I want you to put it together for me."

It took a couple of minutes for me to figure out, but eventually I locked the bolt in place, reattached the scope and the bipod, loaded and inserted the magazine. The parts were meticulously machined and well-oiled, and the weapon clicked and snapped together effortlessly.

"Take it apart, unload the mag, and do it again," Richard stated.

I reversed the process, and put the gun back together again. This time I assembled and loaded it within a minute.

"How was that?" I asked.

"Well, this isn't the Marine Corps. As long as you can put it together quickly, and then break it back down, that's good enough for me."

"Glad to hear it. I'm no Forrest Gump."

Richard cracked a ghost of a smile. "Now, let's go shoot."

We went back outside, me with the carbine, Richard with several boxes of ammunition and two sandbags draped over his shoulders. We walked out to our makeshift shooting range, and I saw Richard had set up some bulls-eye targets earlier this morning, perhaps a hundred meters away from our normal shooting position.

"The .45 ACP can fly hundreds of meters, but you're going to want to keep your distances short, a hundred meters or less. That puts you within a good-sized city block of your target, maybe a little more or a little less."

"But bullets drop as they fly, and a pistol bullet is going to drop faster than a rifle bullet."

"Correct. The key is to know that drop, anticipate it, and compensate for it by altering the windage and elevation of the scope."

Extending the bipod legs, I laid down on the ground, propping my elbows on one sandbag and the bipod on the other, so there was a steady surface underneath me and the carbine. I worked the bolt to chamber a bullet, then hit the button to pop open the scope cover. Peering through the optics, I could see the target a hundred meters away, concentric rings of black and white perhaps a foot across at its widest point. The scope used a simple set of crosshairs, and I slowly settled myself in, watching the crosshairs wobble around on the target.

"Whenever you're ready, just go through the seven round magazine and get a feel for it. Keep the crosshairs settled on the center of the target, breathe in, let it out a little, and then squeeze off the shot. Don't drop the hammer until you feel you're ready. It's all about patience and timing."

I took perhaps four minutes to fire the whole magazine. When I was done, we walked over to take a look at the target. All my shots were clustered in a space as big as the palm of my hand, right at the bottom of the target.

"Subsonic 230-grain hollowpoint loads like these are going to strike six or seven inches low at this range," Richard told me. "You're going to want to adjust the elevation and try again."

We changed out the targets, marked the old target with the date and time, ammunition and weapon used, range and firing position.

"A sniper is like any precision craftsman; he wants to look back at his body of work and be able to remember when and how he accomplished that particular task. By keeping these notes, you'll begin to build a body of knowledge you can refer to in your own mind in order to adjust the scope or correct for windage."

After reloading the carbine, I adjusted the scope several clicks and emptied the magazine downrange again, this time taking all seven shots in two minutes. Checking the target, the grouping had tightened up a little, and was only halfway below the bulls-eye.

"What you've got dialed in now would be a good general-purpose adjustment. Too fine-tuned, and you'll shoot too high up close, say within 20 meters or so. Better to aim a little low at a distance so you're not aiming too high if you have to use it quick and can't adjust the scope. But for good measure, let's pin down the range."

Two more magazines' worth, and I worked out the range so all my shots clustered around the bullseye. My grouping tightened up a little more, but Richard explained to me that pistol ballistics at this range just wouldn't lend themselves well to precision shooting.

Once we had zeroed-in at one hundred meters, we pushed the targets back in 25-meter intervals, all the way out to two hundred meters. At this distance, I was aiming over a foot above the target itself, but I felt confident I could hit a man at that range, given a little preparation time.

The carbine was a pleasure to shoot; there was almost no recoil, just a slight jump, and with the suppressor, we weren't wearing hearing protection. All that emerged from the DeLisle was a muffled "foomph". After the thrill of firing a submachine gun on full automatic, or rapid-firing a pistol as fast as I could acquire the target's center of mass, I found this kind of shooting - relaxed, methodical, precise, studied - to be far more enjoyable than I thought it would be.

After I adjusted to shooting at various ranges, and knew what to expect in terms of trajectory and groupings, Richard shifted me from more stable to less stable firing positions. Instead of firing prone, I fired sitting up with my elbow resting on my knee, then kneeling, and then finally standing upright and firing unsupported. My accuracy was progressively worse with each position, but Richard assured me that with time, I would get better.

"Your uncle was right; you've got a good eye and you're a fast learner. Over the course of the day you've improved significantly, and now it'll be a matter of refining technique."

We returned to the cabin by mid-afternoon, and Richard showed me what needed to be done to clean the carbine, making sure all traces of dust and fouling were removed and the gun was carefully lubricated. After the previous week, the ritual of stripping and cleaning weapons had gone from a puzzle and a chore to a familiar activity I used to reflect on what I had learned that day, and more importantly, what it would mean once I went back to Boston.

After I finished cleaning the carbine, Richard set me to the task of reading and learning a number of ballistics tables and other data pertaining to using pistol-caliber weapons at long ranges. I could hear him in his room, and assumed he was using the communications gear he kept stored in a foot locker inside the room. He had shown it to me a couple of days after I arrived; a secure satellite cellular phone hooked up to a laptop computer, with a heavy-duty battery power supply. By spending a month with me here in the desert, Richard was taking a lot of time out of his usual schedule, and like any businessman, he needed to keep in contact with clients, vendors, and information sources.

Although he had pointed it out to me, so I didn't grow suspicious or curious when he disappeared into his room for extended periods of time, Richard forbade me from opening the foot locker and "playing around" with his communications rig.

"The foot locker is booby-trapped, and if the laptop isn't given the right password, it'll self destruct. I don't mind letting you know I've got this rig, but you gotta know right now, this is confidential; I catch you snooping around in here, I may just have to tell Jamie you suffered an accident with your gun and shot yourself in the back of the head."

Richard's expression was all I needed to know he wasn't joking.

When Richard emerged, I could tell he had something to share with me, "We're going to head into town. Going to pick up a few necessities, and we've also got a plane to meet. Some items are being flown in."

"What time is the meet?" I asked, glancing at my watch; it was two in the afternoon.

"Flight's coming in at eight. We want to be there ahead of schedule, before it gets dark, so let's get going."

We drove into town in order to stock our larder, buy water, and pick up a few other supplies. Driving down the quiet streets, passing pedestrians minding their own business, I began to idly imagine lining them up in the sights of my Uzi and riddling them with bullets. A man walking towards us, newspaper tucked under his arm, cowboy hat pulled down tight; I saw him jerked backwards in my mind's eye, riddled with slugs and thrown against the wall of a nearby store. A mother with two small children, holding their hands and walking away from us as we drove by; I saw myself empty half a magazine into her back, spinning her around before she tumbled to the sidewalk.

The daydreaming disturbed me, because it wasn’t anything I’d done before. Sure, when pissed off I sometimes saw myself kicking some douchebag in the crotch or giving a really bitchy classmate a slap across the face, but I couldn't recall ever imagining killing anyone, certainly not random strangers in an imaginary drive-by.

"What's the count so far?" Richard suddenly asked me.

"What do you mean?"

He pointed a thumb towards my side of the street. "Body count. I've been watching you track 'em with your eyes as they go past. Your trigger finger spasms occasionally. Having a little imaginary fun?"

Jesus, it was weird, the things he noticed.

I turned away from the side window and felt myself blush with embarrassment. "It just sorta happened. Never thought like that before today."

Richard smiled as he glanced at me from the corner of his eye. "Nothing to get too worked up about, it comes with the change. You'll get used to it."

I frowned at him. "'Change?' I'm not a goddamn werewolf, Richard."

This time he laughed out loud. "Sure you are! Maybe you ain't got claws and fangs and overdeveloped facial hair, but believe me son, you've changed. You didn't piss your pants or throw up or toss away your gun and run like you were yellow. You stood fast and cut yourself some scalps last night. That's not something just any ordinary person can do, even after a week on the firing line. There's a switch inside you gotta flip that says ‘killing people that deserve to die is something I can do’. Son, that switch is now 'on' inside you. There's no going back after that."

I had nothing to say after Richard's comment. I turned away and continued to look out the window of the Suburban.

Eventually we finished our shopping errands. Richard bought several cases of water, more perishable foodstuffs, and most notably, several large sacks of big round red apples.