“Would it matter if I said it was a matter of life and death?” Janson flashed what he hoped was a winning smile.

“My gawd, you Yanks, you think you own the bloody world. Take no for an answer, would you?”

Too many seconds had elapsed. The breeze had subsided. Janson could picture, in his head, the sniper he could not see. Hidden in foliage, or braced on a strong lateral tree branch, or perched on a telescoping boom crane, the steel lattice and base hydraulics minimizing any sway. However positioned, the sniper’s main camouflage was his very stillness.

Janson knew the terrible, emptied-out clarity of the sniper’s mind firsthand. He had received extensive sniper training in Little Creek, and had been required to draw upon those skills in country. There had been the afternoons spent with a Remington 700 braced on two sandbags, the barrel itself resting on nothing but a cushion of air, waiting for the shimmering motion in his scope that told him his target was emerging. And, on radiophone, Demarest’s voice in his ear, coaching, coaxing, reassuring. “You’ll feel it before you see it, Janson. Let yourself feel it. Relax into the shot.” How surprised he was when he took it and hit his target. He was never in the same league as those who now pursued him, but he did it well and reliably because he’d had to. And his having been on the other side of the scope made his current position that much more nerveracking.

He knew what they saw. He knew what they thought.

The master sniper’s world would be reduced to the circular image through his scope, and then to the relation between the darting body and the scope’s crosshairs. His gun is a Remington 700, or a Galil 7.62, or an M40A1. He would have found the spot-weld, the contact point between his cheek and the rifle stock; the rifle would feel like an extension of his body. He would take a deep breath and let it out fully, and then another breath, and let it out halfway. A laser range finder could tell him the precise distance: the scope adjusted to compensate for bullet drop. The crosshairs would settle upon the rectangle that was the subject’s torso. More breath would be expelled, the rest held, and the finger would caress the trigger … .

Janson dropped to the ground, adopting a sitting position by the crying girl. “Hey,” he said to her. “It’s going to be all right.”

“We don’t like you,” she said. Him personally? Americans in general? Who could fathom the mind of a seven-year-old?

Janson gently took her binoculars, lifting the straps from around her shoulders, and quickly set off.

“Mummy!” It came out somewhere between a scream and a whine.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the mother bellowed, red-faced.