But a mile was different country. It was way the fuck out there, practically on a different planet, with winds that played on the bullet’s flight, humidity that thickened or thinned the air, a trajectory like a rainbow’s arc but without the colors, and time in flight of more than five seconds. Its execution demanded the rifle be placed as if embedded in rock, while, at the same time, administered with so delicate a touch that a heartbeat, a tremor, a microscopic twitch in the trigger push, or a moment of doubt or broken concentration, and the whole thing was off. Even with a 25× Schmidt & Bender, the finest optical system in the world, the human figure was but a dot. For its part, the post was impossible for him to pick out, even if the image was clear. It was just too small, too blended into the jagged background of trees. Through his binoculars, he saw nothing.

First move: the iPhone with the Altitude app. That drill revealed an altitude of 1,572, a difference of sixty-seven feet. He noted that figure as well.

“Okay, hand the thing up.”

The thing was a Tecna LH40 military-grade range finder, borrowed from the FBI sniper school and good out to twenty thousand yards. Oddly enough, it didn’t have the Star Wars look, with dials and buttons and all kinds of sci-fi stylistics. Instead, it resembled a slide projector from the ’60s, with which the family’s trip to Disneyland was documented for the neighbors. It took Swagger a bit of fiddling to get it set up on its tripod on the bench, then some more fiddling to get it on the target and focused, but finally he was ready.

Nothing.

“Can you get a guy to stand by the post. I can’t see it to take the reading,” he called.

He heard the team commander on the radio, and in a few seconds somebody—presumably, one of the men of the cadaver team that was looking in the area near the post for buried bodies—walked out and stood by the post. Swagger put his eye to the device, put the red dot on the tiny figure, and pushed the button to shoot a laser beam that far. The device would measure how quickly it bounced back and, in that way, solve the distance algorithm. He did it five times. The distance consistently turned out to be 1,847.5 yards.

He wrote the figure on the back of his hand in ballpoint under the altitude recordings, as insurance against a seventy-two-year-old memory.

“You get it?”

“Yeah, a little over a mile. Hell of a long way.”