The scope, called a PSO-1, was Russian, of course, of highest optical quality. It was affixed to the rifle by a clamp bolted to the side of the receiver, which held it, solidly and perfectly, over the piece, perfectly vectored to his dominant eye when he was in the prone position. He slid the rifle to his body, his right hand easing onto the familiar contours of the pistol grip, the buttstock tight, hard, without mercy, against the pocket of his shoulder, the support arm running directly under the rifle, jutting upward at the elbow so that the hand could grasp the wooden forestock, but not tightly, for a shooter’s enthusiasm could compress the forestock so that it touched the free-floating barrel and thus bring imperfection to the system. He twisted, tested, squirmed, and wiggled, as any shooter will do, building the perfect position, so that the weapon was supported off bone, not muscle, and the legs splayed behind him, in full contact with the support of the planet itself. He lifted the rifle to his eyes from the ground a dozen times just to make sure he’d found his natural point of aim. He tested the electronics of the scope, switching them on to see the reticle etched in glowing red against the night, the chevron denoting point of impact, the crude range finder, an inverted arc in the right-hand quadrant, which denoted the height of a six-foot-tall man at eight ascending ranges, unnecessary to him because he’d already zeroed the chevron to two hundred and thirty-four meters, appropriate to task.

Now he attached the suppressor. Another battlefield pickup, possibly found still screwed to the muzzle of a marine M40 destroyed along with its owner in a roadside bombing and salvaged for use against its inventors. It was a well-machined tube that was something like a nautilus shell, encasing a series of chambers that ran its eight-inch length, each chamber leading to the next by a small orifice. The gases released by the shot emerged at supersonic speed from the muzzle but expanded into the surrounding tube, and raced, chamber to chamber, through the apparatus, so when they emerged at the end of the trip, they had lost most of their energy. The result could be measured in decibels by a sophisticated electronic device, but the number meant nothing. What mattered was that the blast of the rifle was reduced, not to the pfft! so beloved of the movies but a generic snap, like that of a door closing stoutly, not merely quiet but so diffused it was impossible to track. A small-arms genius somewhere in the Islamic State apparatus had machined a kind of linking device that united the rifle and the suppressor, which bore the name Gemtech.