“So, what’s the story?” Kit said as he got back.
She seemed to have wrapped up what she’d been looking for, Gannon thought as he watched her packing a camera back into her bag. He thought about how hard it had to be, her coming back here. Then he put it aside.
“This guy was damn good, Kit,” Gannon said as he sat on a rock and wiped sweat from his forehead with the sleeve of his light fleece. “Even with a one-half minute of angle precision rifle, it was some pretty incredible marksmanship.”
“One-half minute of what?” she said.
“Minute of angle,” Gannon said. “Think of a slice of pizza with the distance between the side edges as one degree of angle. At the tip of the pizza, the distance is tiny, right? But as you head up toward the crust, it starts to spread wider and wider. The better the rifle, the more you can tighten that spread. Even at long distances, a precision rifle chocked into a bench stand will put rounds on target consistently within a fraction of an inch of each other. You see?”
“Not really. You’re saying there’s a lot of variables that only an expert would know?”
“Yes. A thousand-yard shot from a higher to lower elevation at high elevation in high erratic winds with no test shot to get a better read on the windage is professional shooting. I mean, with this distance and elevation and this crazy wind, if a novice with a good rifle missed within two hundred feet, you’d buy him a beer. Because under long-range conditions, the temperature of the barrel or even the temperature of the ammo being off a degree or two could cause a wide miss. A human head is only seven inches wide. This guy laid into two of them twenty feet apart from way the hell up there in quick succession. It’s not long-range black magic wizardry stuff, but it’s damn close.”
“Not Tiger Woods, but he’s on the tour?”
Gannon nodded.
“Well put. You’re looking at a highly experienced hunter for sure or an extreme hobbyist. Probably ex-military shooting with a top-shelf rifle.”
Gannon stood.
“I could talk for hours about it if you want, but maybe at a diner or something. I’m starting to get hungry. You hungry?”
“I’m starving,” Kit said. “When you were talking about pizza a second ago, I started to salivate.”
Gannon laughed.
“Let’s get going then. That Twix you gave me was my breakfast. I’m about to eat one of these rocks.”