Like the surgeon he and other snipers were often compared to, he drew on close-fitting rubber gloves, while behind him the trooper tied a mask to the lower part of his face, slipped a surgical cap over his hair, and slipped a pair of Bausch & Lomb yellow shooting glasses over his eyes, hooking them over his ears. Now he was ready for the computations.

He recognized that what lay before him was a fairly simple hunting shot, but it was far enough away and precise enough that it couldn’t be sloppy. He’d been told the distance and height of tower, but he was still going to check. So, since the rifle had a Leupold scope on it, he had chosen and programmed a Leupold laser range finder, the new one designated RX-1600I TBR, the TBR standing for “true ballistic range.” He ran through the functions. The range finder’s inclinometer verified the angle at about forty-two degrees. This meant the actual straight-line distance to the target would be about twenty percent farther—call it three hundred and fifty-seven yards versus the sea-level distance of two hundred and ninety-seven; that would seem to make a big difference with a 6.5mm Creedmoor. But the counterintuitive reality was, the shot was still two hundred and ninety-seven yards, regardless of angle and distance. Gravity is picky; it doesn’t care about angle, it only cares about the sea-level distance. So, since he was zeroed at three hundred yards, his data was validated.

Now verified, he knew it was time for the instrument. He put the range finder in his pocket, bent over as the soldier opened the gun case and removed the rifle. It held four rounds of Hornady’s superb 140-grain Match ammunition. Sleek and graceful, its proportions refined toward the sublime, it was, like any firearm, a weird blend of the charismatic and the mundane. It was tan through the stock, dappled with abstractions conceived to blend against someone’s idea of a desert landscape. The barrel, receiver, and trigger guard were all finished in a kind of dun, somewhere between gray and tan, as neutral and invisible as any color could be to the unsophisticated human eye. The scope was black, simply because most scopes were black, and there hadn’t been time or interest to find a Leupold 10 that matched the rifle.

He removed the suppressor from the case, put it to muzzle, and screwed it on. It just looked like a big black tube squashed onto the end of the smaller khaki tube of the barrel, extending its length by perhaps eight inches. It added but a few ounces weight, and although it could not by any means silence the sound of nearly 45 grains of smokeless powder igniting in a ten-thousandth of a second, it could diffuse it. If it registered at all, the noise would come from everywhere.