Glass Tiger
- Автор: Горес Джо
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Quercus
- ISBN: 978-1-84724-072-9
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Glass Tiger». Краткое содержание книги:
Corwin was in the classic prone, the rifle rock-steady on its tripod. He moved his optic almost leisurely across the assemblage in the meadow below. People filled his scope.
The president had just mounted the viewing platform where the governor of Idaho was stepping toward the podium to introduce him. Jaeger waited to the president’s right in an almost belligerent pose, Crandall beside him in a similar stance. To Wallberg’s left, slightly behind, were his wife and Quarles.
Corwin was in the zone: as he waited for Wallberg to approach the podium, his pulse dropped into the low sixties that he knew from a lifetime of experience gave him his best shots.
This was the shot of that lifetime.
Thorne’s only edge was that the most deadly shot, the head-shot, was also the riskiest. The head was highly mobile and the brain was protected by a great deal of bone. Any slight movement, and a high-velocity round fired at distance could ricochet, even miss altogether. Corwin wouldn’t risk it. He wouldn’t shoot until Wallberg had started his speech, and then it would be a body-mass shot.
But when in the speech? Think, dammit! Of course. Corwin would wait until Wallberg made the gesture any politician on earth made at least once during a speech: turning and raising an arm to shoulder height to gesture. This would expose his underarm. A shot into the underarm vent of the Kevlar protective vest would rake the chest and explode the heart.
And where was Corwin? At 950 yards? At 1,195 yards? At 1,210 yards? Or at some site Thorne had never even considered? As Morengaru had taught him, he closed his eyes to look through the tracks to the animal he was stalking. Here, he was stalking himself. Where would he fire from?
He opened his eyes. If he had Corwin’s genius behind the gun, he would take his shot from 1,210 yards out.
Thorne scrambled down through the rocks, rifle in hand, striving for speed and silence at the same time. He was staking everything on a tumble of boulders about a hundred yards above the 1,200 yard ravine where he now believed Corwin was hidden.
Corwin’s breathing slowed. He moved his scope across the assemblage one more time, then back to his target. Everything fell away. Against all conventional wisdom, he would shoot just as Wallberg started his speech, and it would be a head shot.
The rangers slid up the steel barred cage doors. The bears were suspicious. Yes, over there was the forest, and freedom, but what if this were just another of the humans’ tricks?
Jaeger stared out over the crowd, but saw only Nisa Mather. His sexual obsession hadn’t ended with her death. Sharkey in LA would find him a woman who at least superficially resembled her, a woman he could possess phsyically, repeatedly, could bend to his will as he never could bend Nisa while she was alive.
Gus Wallberg looked out over the meadow, over the bears in their cages at the edge of the forest, over the faces upturned below him. But he saw only the millions of people at their TV screens that night. He felt the same surge of power he had felt when giving his acceptance speech, in his gut and in his groin, felt what sex was supposed to give him but never had. He lusted for their power, they offered it, he took it. Now it was his.
‘My fellow Americans, today we begin a grand journey...’
Thorne dropped to his right knee, brought up his rifle, released the safety, sat back on his right foot and braced his left elbow on his left knee, his upper arm jammed into the kneecap just above the elbow. He began taking controlled breaths to slow his pulse. He looked through the optic. There he was!
But Christ! In the scope, Corwin was taking up trigger slack! He was going for the head shot even as Wallberg started speaking! Thorne’s finger contracted ever so gently against the six ounces of slack in the trigger pull. The rifle bucked in his hands, and even before it steadied again he knew he had made his shot. But in the exact micro-second he had fired, Corwin’s rifle also had recoiled. He had gotten off his shot, too.
As Corwin’s rifle recoiled he was struck a great blow in the side. No pain, not yet: just the dizzying sensation of a giant fist swung against him. He had felt it all before, eighteen months ago. Then, Mather. Now, the tracker, not dead after all, had done him. So what? He had seen the red mist. The halo of blood around the ruined head. Nothing else mattered.
He crawled in a half-circle like a stepped-on landcrab, to face the rear of the V and the life-saving torrent. He was already going into shock, but he would make it. The stream would carry him down, far away from all pursuit forever.
Thorne paused to momentarily scope the scene below. Men shouting, women screaming, Secret Service agents springing to the platform. Smokey and Pooh, terrified by the noise, smashing out of their open cages and charging toward the forest and freedom.
The forest Rangers were making motions as if to draw their sidearms, but by presidential fiat they were unarmed this day. The students were slapping high-fives: the bears were free.
People were milling on the platform around the man lying on the planks with little of his head left.
Corwin was in the burn again on that icy November night, crawling for the cabin a thousand feet away. Blood stained the earth beneath his turtle-slow body at each movement. Dark, rich blood. Arterial blood? If so... No. He would make it. Get into the icy water so it would stop the bleeding...
Dead men. So many great shots. So many dead men.
Terry. Laughing with him in front of the fireplace on Marshall Avenue while Nisa, age ten, lay on the floor swathed in a blanket, watching TV cartoons.
Nisa, an adult, dead herself. No! No...
Crawl. Would the tracker get to him before he could get to the rushing torrent? His vision dimmed. Tired. Drop your head into the dirt. No. Crawl. Arm. Leg. Again. Again. He was trying to float up out of his body. No! Just a few feet now... He had done it all before.
Thorne covered the last twenty yards in one sustained rush and slide to drop down into the sniper’s nest, like running the half-frozen scree on Mount Kenya far above the tree line. Corwin’s gun was still in place. Away from it, going toward the stream, crawl-marks etched in blood. Like the scrabble of just-born turtles in the Seychelles, heading for the sea once they had broken from their shells and crawled up out of the warm sand.
At the very point of the V was Corwin, an arm moving feebly, a knee flexing, pushing. Trying to reach the stream. To escape. Except that he was already dead.
Crunch of boots. The tracker. Corwin found the strength to turn his head. He could see the man looming over him even though the light was dimming. No matter. He would soon be away, free, where they could never touch him.
Thorne knelt down, leaned in so his face was close. Corwin was deathly pale, dirt and blood were smeared across his features. He was trying to speak. A murmur. A whisper.
‘You, me... we are...’ The voice trailed off. Then, another great effort. ‘...the same man...’
Thorne said coldly, ‘I didn’t murder my daughter.’
‘I...’ Corwin stopped, his voice choking off.
Dead? No, Goddammit! Thorne had a sudden cruel need to take everything from Corwin, to send him on his way shorn of any smallest shred of triumph.
‘Corwin!’ he barked. The eyes opened. ‘Here’s something for you to take with you through the wall. You missed.’
Blood dripping from Corwin’s slack mouth outlined his teeth in red like the teeth of a Halloween warlock. Then, he grinned.
And asked, very distinctly, ‘Did I?’
He thrust with a foot, rolled over into the rushing water. Thorne caught a boot heel for a microsecond, then it was jerked from his grasp by the stream, and Corwin was gone. He stood up slowly, exhausted, silently mouthing Corwin’s final words.