“Here’s your huckleberry. It’s got all the necessary components I just described. As I said, you can see at the southern end where someone has chewed up a furrow with a backhoe or something to chart the bullet strikes against the raw dirt. Do you have distance? I’d guess close to a thousand yards.”

“About right,” said Cohen. “Ten twenty-seven, to be exact.”

“If you know so fast, that means you’ve had your photo hotshots on it, and this is the one they went for too. They’ve given you all the numbers.”

“Sergeant Swagger is no fool,” said Cohen. “He misses no nuance. Continue, then.”

“A thousand yards. Very long shot, by combat standards, but not so much anymore for sniping. The great shots in Afghanistan are much farther, well over a thousand, even over a mile. A couple of things to look for: if he’s teaching himself to go this far, he’ll need a better rifle. The ballistics on the Dragon 7.62 round drop way off, and, yep, you might get some hits from over a thousand, but you’ll get a lot more misses. He’s right at the distance limits on the Dragon. So he’ll upgrade the hardware.”

The somber old man whispered something to Cohen, who nodded, then turned to Swagger.

“Our Director is a man of few words,” he said, “and I am a man of many. So he turns to me to blabber for him. He said: ‘Add it up.’ What he means is, given all that you have learned from the photos, what is your read on the situation? Can you project a scenario in which all this information comes into play?”

“Sure. He’s a long way from being retired. If it were my call, I’d say he’s in this location with this setup for a specific purpose. He’s preparing for a job. It’s a big one too, because look at the assets they’ve invested in it. They scoured the country and found exactly the place where he’d be safe, they went to great trouble to keep it secret, and we tumbled on it only because of Mrs. McDowell—”

“God bless Mrs. McDowell,” said Cohen.

“Look,” said Swagger, “maybe I’m out of place here, it’s your country, but what I’m getting seems sort of undeniable. He is getting ready for something. He’s either going operational or onto another step in his training before he goes operational. That means at any second he could disappear. It’s your business, not mine. But if I was you, I’d chopper in the tough boys and hit this motherfucker tomorrow. Payback for lots of bad shit, yes—but, more important, you make sure there’s no more bad shit down the road. I’d go tomorrow.”

“Why tomorrow, Sergeant Swagger?” said Cohen. Do you think us miracle workers? We couldn’t possibly hit him tomorrow.”