“It gets worse,” said Swagger. “You haven’t asked about caliber. I am all but certain—remember, I was in Hell, and the Devil himself was trying to turn me into a marshmallow—that the bullets were of a diameter of three hundred and thirty-eight hundredths of an inch. This would mean the load in question was a caliber called the .338 Lapua Magnum. It’s currently the go-to sniper round in Afghanistan for long-distance situations—which are most situations in Afghanistan. In 2009, a British sniper named Craig Harrison used the .338 Lapua to hit the longest documented shot in history. He popped a Taliban machine gunner at over twenty-three hundred yards. That’s a mile and a half. That’s the point of the .338 Lapua: it lets you strike from a different time zone. So I would conclude that Juba is putting together a .338 Lapua Magnum load to put someone down from a long, long way out. He’s methodical, skillful, dedicated. He’s going about it the right way. However jazzed up his jihadi half is, his shooter half is professional, cool, cunning, taking no chances, no shortcuts. They’ve spent a lot of money and a lot of effort getting him exactly what he wants. There don’t seem to be no limit on the purse strings. My guess is, he’s got either a stolen or a recovered Accuracy International Magnum—the best sniper rifle in the world—and all the gadgets to support it. All that stuff had to be somehow gotten and smuggled into Syria. So you’re looking at a major effort by someone’s intelligence agency. Only one conclusion: he’s going after a high-value target.”

“This news is extremely bad,” said Gold.