The sniper enjoyed variety with his lunches. Yesterday was tuna fish and barbecue potato chips and soda. Today he had packed a turkey BLT, sour cream and onion potato chips, and iced tea.
He was enjoying his lunch now, sitting in the shade of the steel hut, both of the battery-controlled fans cooling him off while he crunched on the last couple of chips. He crumpled up the bag and tossed it in the cooler. He stood then, stretching his legs, swirling the dregs of his drink around the bottle before taking one last swallow. He deposited the bottle in the cooler and ducked his head as he stepped outside the hut.
The sun was stark and brutal, the air dry, and the sniper couldn’t wait to call it a day.
“Howdy,” said a man standing several feet away, the man from the bar last night, the Mustang’s owner. The man nodded his head at the hut. “Nice digs you got there.”
The man wore jeans and a gray T-shirt. A canvas bag hung off a strap across his chest. In the man’s hand was an air-compressed nail gun. He held it at his side, not aimed at the sniper, but clearly making it known that it could be aimed within the matter of a second.
“Yeah, about that,” the man said, gesturing with the nail gun, “it doesn’t look pretty, and it’s heavier than I would prefer, but it does the trick.”
To demonstrate, the man tilted the nail gun and squeezed the trigger and a nail embedded itself in the ground a couple inches from the sniper’s feet.
“Not quite a bullet, but I’m sure it stings. Now why don’t you turn around, get down on your knees, and place your hands on the back of your head.”
The sniper said nothing. He didn’t move.
The man gestured again with the nail gun. “Are you really going to make me shoot you with this thing?”
Still the sniper said nothing.
“What are you doing out here, anyway?”
The sniper said nothing. He was too busy thinking. Too busy assessing the situation and his surroundings and deciding just what his options were. Besides the nail gun, there was a canvas bag slung across the man’s chest, and there was no telling what other goodies were stored inside. And the man, the sniper knew, was more than just a regular guy—he was a pro, ex-military without a doubt, and after seeing what the man was capable of last night, the sniper didn’t want to give the man any more advantage than he already had.
“Well?” the man said.
The sniper thought about it for another moment. He could try to duck back inside the hut, scramble for the XM2010, but the rifle wasn’t loaded. Even if it was, it wouldn’t matter anyway. The moment he turned away, the man would shoot him with the nail gun. Not that a nail would kill him, but it would certainly slow him down, and who was to say how many times the man might keep shooting?
Gritting his teeth, the sniper raised his hands and turned around. He lowered himself first to one knee, then the other, but kept his hands up at his sides.
“Place your hands on the back of your head,” the man said. “Come on, you know the drill. Thread them together.”
The sniper did so, slowly, his eyes shifting down to the ground around him. Sweat was beginning to bead on his forehead. As the man began to make his approach, the sound of his shoes on the dirt slow and steady, the sniper knew that the man would have to put down the nail gun if he intended on binding the sniper’s wrists together. Which was exactly what the man started to do—the space between them less than five feet—and as soon as the sniper heard the man pull something from the canvas bag, he made his move.
Grabbing fistfuls of dirt, then standing and spinning, he threw the dirt at the man’s face—the man who hadn’t put down the nail gun, after all, but still had it in his right hand. It all happened in less than a second, but even in that second it gave the man enough time to fire off a nail.
The nail dug deep into the sniper’s shoulder but he didn’t let it slow him, advancing on the man who was turning away, coughing, reaching for his eyes. The sniper kicked the man in the back of the knees, sending him to the ground, then grabbed the nail gun the man had dropped and aimed it at the man’s face.
The sniper pulled the trigger but the man was already leaning back, out of the nail’s way, and then jumping quickly to his feet, swinging a fist at the sniper’s face. The sniper saw it coming but only managed to turn away just slightly, enough that the man’s fist met the tip of his jaw. He tried to bring the nail gun back up but it was swatted out of his hand, and the next thing he knew he felt an elbow in his stomach. The sniper managed to block the next blow and threw a fist of his own, and for the next several seconds that’s all it was, a flurry of fists and kicks and elbows, the man finding a weak spot, then the sniper finding a weak spot, neither one speaking as they parried, until suddenly one tripped the other and they were on the ground, rolling around on the dirt, one’s hand on the other’s throat, then one’s fist digging into the other’s stomach, and the nail in the sniper’s shoulder was completely forgotten until the man, straddling him on the ground, grabbed a nearby rock and used it to hammer the nail even deeper into the sniper’s shoulder.
The sniper groaned in pain. He tried to push the man off him but the man used the same rock against the side of the sniper’s head. It didn’t knock the sniper out, but it certainly caused him to lose focus. The next thing he knew he was flipped over and his hands were being pulled behind his back. He felt plastic touch his skin and tighten, binding his wrists together, and then the pressure decreased as the man stepped away.
“So”—the man clapped the dust from his hands, clearing his throat—“did that nail sting or what?”