Three hundred yards to the northwest up the curving wall of the hollow, Westergaard watched the head-shot sheriff teeter and fall away off the scope’s reticle as he jacked the glass-smooth bolt back and forth.
Then he pivoted the rifle very, very slightly left to the male FBI agent, huge in the precision German optics, and took him through the back of his neck just below his brain stem with another .338 Lapua Magnum round.
The long crashes of the rifle were still whining and reverberating off the bare rock as he jacked the bolt again. He pivoted back where the other two were, but they were wisely sucking ground now behind the clearing’s low trail rocks.
Westergaard watched patiently. He had put a tiny pebble in his mouth as he had tracked them all down the rock trail, and now he rolled the smooth little bit of basalt back and forth behind his teeth with his tongue as he calmly assessed.
The ranger and the woman were pinned behind half a dozen close-together squarish boulders. The rocks were actually quite small, each about the size of a mini-fridge.
No matter, he decided as he blinked through the Schmidt & Bender scope.
He flexed his jaw against the soft chamois that padded the Accuracy International AW sniper rifle’s cheekpiece.
He just needed to wait but a second or two.
It actually didn’t take that long. Just between two of the squarish rocks, there was movement, and then the heel of Ranger Rick’s boot was on the pin of the reticle.
Westergaard lay breathing calmly, looking at it. The boot had a high serrated heel and nice reddish-brown leather and looked expensive.
The ranger probably oiled them every night before bedtime with some special hiking boot leather maintenance oil he learned about in the Eagle Scouts, the killer thought.
He wondered about the FBI woman down there with him. She was quite the little number. He wondered if she had the hots for the ranger there in the close confines. He was older but a flat-bellied rugged stud. For some, it was all about older, wasn’t it? He knew all about that.
Oh, well. Back to work, he thought as he pulled the silk-smooth trigger and blew the ranger’s beautiful boot to smithereens.