The shop, the ranch
The rifle is not beautiful. Its designers yielded on aesthetics from the very start. They knew and loved the look of rifles—the sweep of dark wood, the glow of deeply blued metal, the grace, the symmetry. It was in their blood, but they knew, as well, that they had to ignore that siren call. Theirs was a single-minded objective, not dedicated to the kill so much as to the shot. There was no kill without the shot and thus the shot was everything.
The rifle acquired the configuration of a prosthetic limb with a hole in it, and two giant tubes organically absorbed into it. The hole afforded the shooter’s trigger hand purchase on the grip, just under the bolt. Its placement was not arbitrary, its angle was not arbitrary, its size was not arbitrary, nothing was arbitrary. Everything was designed, tested, adjusted, and retested, before it became part of the specifications. The stock behind the thumbhole was itself a spectacular construct: it was a monstrosity of bulbous swellings and pads, all in play at the convenience of screws. They could be adjusted almost infinitely, so as to fit length of neck, arm, and hand, the thickness of shoulder, breadth of chest, strength of muscle, firmness of grip. All human variables were accounted for, and the shooter before he took his first shot needed to find the ideal harmony of parts, so that the whole fit to and against his body and took advantage of his unique skeletal alignment and musculature. All these adjustable parts were issued in high-strength plastic, giving the thing in question the dull gleam of, perhaps, reptile skin, something without warmth or life. It was not meant to be loved, but respected. It was not meant to please the shooter’s heart, but the intelligence officer’s, the general’s, the president’s, the mullah’s. It was policy as firearm.
All angles machined into it were true. All springs of the finest metals. All steel of that superb blend of strength and flexibility. The trigger was almost as soft as a woman’s most private part, and it took a refined finger that had already pulled a trigger a hundred thousand times to nurse the finest action from it. People don’t realize how much of the gun is about the machinework and what miracles a man who has spent his life shaving pieces of metal to an exact measurement can do. The receiver is epoxied and bolted into the stock, so that the hold is again true, so that no oddities of alignment will haunt a shooter years on down the line. You could use it as a hammer and build a house with it, though to its owners such a thing would seem a desecration. The barrel—barrel making is an art in and of itself—drew even more attention than the other parts, because the barrel, that long steel tube embracing the supersonic missile driven down its bore toward the target, couldn’t be merely excellent, it had to be perfect. Perfect is never cheap, neither in effort nor cost. The men who made the barrels had practiced their crafts for years in such British houses as Purdey or Holland & Holland or Westley Richards. They knew the interior dynamics of steel and how it responds when grooves are engraved along the tube’s polished interior. They hunted with spectroscopes for inner flaws that might play hob with vibrational patterns, because they knew the vibrations must be true as a violin’s strings to deliver the kind of accuracy that they demanded. None of this happened easily, but only after so much experimentation, so much trial and error, all of it piled atop the years of experience.
Then came the scope. It was German, as are all the best optics, a thirty-four-millimeter tube of aluminum, steel, plastic, and polished glass, studded with dials that control adjustments for magnification, focus, windage, elevation, even a laser whose pinprick of red light focused on the target’s center, making it stand out to the shooter’s eye in the dark world of the lens. Its magnification runs from a power of 5 to 25. And the internals on such an instrument are dazzling, as is the machinework that makes everything not merely function but function smoothly as if sheathed in petroleum lubricant so that the sliding between focal distances or in and out of magnification is accomplished without notice by the adjuster. All scopes do this reasonably well, but the S & Bs do it better.
But, of course, the scope does not make all things copasetic. For if the scope magnifies the target, it also magnifies you. That means every tremor, tremble, or twitch, every breath, sniffle, gulp, burp, or fart, is instantly transmuted into action. Accuracy demands mastery of these animal impulses, which a few can achieve but most cannot. And the farther the range, the stiller the body attempting to engineer the connection must be. It is no small thing, and a Juba or a Bob Lee Swagger or any of the great rifle killers have subsumed stillness to a transcendental level. It is a skill that even with talent takes years to master, a discipline that clamps steel expectations on something so prehensile and spontaneous as a human body. Take the trigger finger and the little twitch that fires the weapon: so easy, yet so hard. You can do it a million times and fuck it up on one million and one. Why? Because for the greats, it is a part of their identity, yet beyond knowing, becoming that way only by those endless repetitions, in concert with breath, muscle, and sheer willpower.
He now opened a package and removed a cartridge. Remington—green-and-gold box—.338 Lapua Magnum. He would of course not use factory ammunition in his shot, for so much more could be gotten out of a hand-loading program, half of which he was already through. Still, the round itself was instructive, even inspirational. It seemed like a small missile, heavier by far than one expected, more than three inches long and almost half an inch wide. It was dense, far heavier than it looked, and indeed it looked heavy. It also looked absolute, without any softness about it. It was a serious thing—in its way, more serious than anything.
He held it in his hand, feeling its cool weight against the palm. He turned it to look at the perfect concentricity of the rim, the primer in the perfect center of the head, which was a perfect center again. He traced the smoothness of the brass, with its slight taper, as it rose to the shoulder, where the cartridge reduced itself and formed a neck to sustain a bullet. The bullet itself was all seriousness—copper sheathing over some kind of lead alloy, again concentric to an extreme degree. These bullets were from Sierra, a world-class expert, and since the ammunition was premium, no expense had been spared in achieving their perfection. He looked at the shanks of the thing, admiring the perfect grace of its curve in accordance with the laws of streamlining, the smoothness of the skin, for a nick or a gouge might throw it from true to meplat, as the technical call the tip, and saw again concentricity as a small hole that precludes the tip from becoming a point, absorbing the rushing atmosphere as it flies, and work, with the spin facilitated by the grooves in the rifle’s barrel, stabilizing it during its time in flight before it arrives exactly at its destination, for better, for worse, for whatever purpose filled the head of the shooter.
The statistics of the event are impressive. Muzzle velocity is near twenty-five hundred feet per second for a 250-grain bullet, the kind Juba would shoot, and at the muzzle it delivers 4,813 pounds of energy. It was with such an instrument that the British infidel Craig Harrison had killed in Afghanistan at a distance of 1.54 measured miles.
Now what remained? He’d continue his development, having found three loads of three different powders, three different seating depths, and two different primers that were superior to all the others. Now he could shoot at eleven hundred yards, twelve hundred, thirteen hundred, moving a hundred at a time, easing his way so that what seemed gigantic at the start seemed tiny by the end. He knew how far he had to shoot. He knew where the sun would be, what the temperature should be, what the humidity should be, what the velocity of the breeze should be. All these facts had to be factored in until he could do it on the first shot, cold bore, over and over again. Because on the day when the time finally came, after all the months of preparation, he would have only one chance to speak for God.