The Afghan

The surgeon’s arctic clothing was simply too good. The pony was sweating as it neared exhaustion and showed up clearly, but the man on top of it, leaning forward along its neck to urge it onward, was so well muffled he blended with the animal.

“Sir,” said one of the engineer sergeants, “I’m from Mi

“Save your problems for the chaplain,” snapped Li

Li

Four miles ahead, back in deep forest, Izmat Khan, who had ambushed Lemuel Wilson, was himself ambushed. The mountain lion was old, a bit slow for deer, but cu

He had been lucky the mountain lion had gone for the pony and not himself, but he had lost his mount. The animal was still alive, but ripped round the head and shoulders by claws with 135 pounds of angry muscle behind them. The pony was not going to get up. He used a second bullet to finish its misery. The pony crumpled, lying half across the body of the mountain lion. It did not matter to the Afghan, but the torso and front legs of the mountain lion were under the pony.

He unhitched the snowshoes from behind the saddle, fitted them over his boots, shouldered the rifle, checked the compass and moved forward. A hundred yards ahead of him was a large rock overhang. He paused under it for a brief respite from the snow. He did not know it but it masked his escaping heat. “Take out the moose,” said Captain Li

The operator studied his image again.

“You’re right,” he said. “I can see six legs. He’s paused for a rest. Next circuit, down he goes.”

The “destroy” part of the Spectre’s role is provided by three systems. Heaviest is the 105mm M102 howitzer, which is so powerful that using it on a single human being would be a tad excessive.

Next comes the 40mm Bofors ca

“Thank you. Echo-Foxtrot,” said Li

The Spectre, mission accomplished, returned to McChord AFB. The snow stopped, the skis hissed over the new powder, making the sort of progress that skis ought to make with a skilled athlete on them, and the Alpha team came across the remains of the pony. Few fragments were bigger than a man’s arm, but they were definitely horse, not human. Except the bits with tawny fur. Li

They arrived twenty minutes later on a bluff overlooking a valley that ran from their left to right. Below was a logging road that constituted the Canadian border. Right across from them was another bluff, with a clearing containing a cluster of log cabins, a facility for Canadian lumberjacks when the timber concessions resumed after the snows.

Li

By the norms of soldiering, snipers are a strange breed. They never get near the men they kill, yet they see them with a clarity and an apparent proximity greater than anyone else. With hand-to-hand combat almost extinct, most men die not by the hand of the enemy but by his computer. They are blown away by a missile fired a continent away or from somewhere under the sea. They are destroyed by a smart bomb loosed by an aircraft so high they neither saw nor heard it. They died because someone fired a shell from two counties away. At the nearest, their killers, crouching behind a machine gun in a swooping helicopter, see them only as vague shapes, ru

The sniper sees the enemy like that. Lying in total silence, utterly immobile, he sees his target as a man with three days’ stubble, a man who stretches and yawns, who spoons beans out of a can, unzips his fly or simply stands and stares at a lens a mile away that he ca

They also live in a private world. So total does the obsession with accuracy become that they lapse into a silence peopled only by the weights of projectile heads, the power of various powder loads, how much a bullet will wind-drift, how far it will drop over various distances, whether yet another tiny improvement can be made to the rifle.

Like all specialists, they have their passions for rival pieces of equipment. Some snipers like a really tiny bullet, like the Remington M700.308, a slug so small that it has to be sheathed in a detachable sleeve to go down the barrel at all.

Others stay with the M21, the sniper version of the M14 standard combat rifle. Heaviest of all is the Barrett “Light Fifty,” a monster that sends a bullet like a human forefinger over a mile with enough speed times weight to cause a human body to explode.

Lying prone at Captain Li

What he cradled as he squinted across the valley was the.408 Cheye