“Seriously, dude?” JP asked. “You don’t get enough of this shit at work?”
Carlos took the rifle from the car. He held it for a moment and his blue eyes shimmered like water spread thinly on a plate.
Then he handed it to JP, who pulled the lens cap from the scope that lay long and heavy on top of the Remington. He wedged the buttstock into his shoulder, rested his cheek on it, and set his eyes behind the aperture. He chased the image inside, like a moon struggling to eclipse a sun. Then he lined himself up, and the full eclipse was made. Suddenly he held the world with the intimacy of fifteen-powered magnification. He lingered in the scope.
He had always been more interested in the art of spotting than the mechanics of shooting. In a sniper team, the spotter searches for the targets, weighing a million variables, both natural and human, against each other: wind, the grain count of the ammunition, the way moisture in the air would suppress dirt from the muzzle flash, the chance of collateral damage. The spotter takes all of this information and delivers it to the shooter, who distills it into the one action. Usually a pair of snipers would rotate the job of spotter and shooter between deployments. This allowed them to develop both skills. JP’s weakness was that he avoided the shooting half of his job. He wasn’t sure he could do it.
Carlos hadn’t had that problem. The more he pulled the trigger, the less he cared for anything else, let alone the million variables that obsessed his best friend. Nothing could compare with that long slow squeeze, the smooth tightening that always ended with something certain—a miss or a hit. Only the hits count—that’s what Carlos had been taught on the long, grassy training grounds in Quantico. Nothing else matters. He’d always lacked a spotter’s patience. He’d come into the Marine Corps on his seventeenth birthday without finishing high school and with a forged GED, courtesy of his recruiter. When his mother signed the consent forms, the dangers of war didn’t seem nearly as immediate as the poverty of home. Individually, Carlos and JP didn’t possess a full inventory of skills, and they knew this, but as a composite they were good, and between them had the kills to prove it.
Standing next to the Honda, JP pulled his gaze from the scope’s aperture. “Very nice, Carlos. Just seems like a waste of money is all. Why don’t you get a real hobby?”
Carlos snatched the rifle like a hurt little brother taking back a toy. “This is a real hobby.” He pressed the buttstock into his shoulder, pulling the trigger against an empty barrel.
Click.
On the floor of the lodge, JP unzips the nylon case. He runs his hands over the Remington’s disassembled pieces. A week ago he punched the barrel and oiled the action, but since then a scaly layer of rust has gummed onto both the bolt and muzzle. JP takes a bottle of gun oil, a wire brush, and some paper towels from a pouch on the side of the case and scrubs hurriedly, wanting to finish before Steve returns.
Soon he has reassembled the rifle. He wipes the oil from it and burns the dirty paper towels in the fire. Standing above the stove, JP’s eyes linger on a photo framed between the many trophies on the wall. It is old, faded to a chrome and sepia color, and parts of it stick to the frame. In it, a man poses in front of what looks to be this lodge, standing over a great cat, a mountain lion, perhaps even a jaguar. The brim of his bush hat is pulled low over one eye. He is young and looks happy, a rifle in one hand, its barrel to the sky. He looks like a better version of Steve.
JP hears Steve’s pickup, an ’82 Silverado, park outside, and pours the second cup of coffee, just as he used to do for Carlos. Steve opens the door of the lodge. He’s wearing his jeans and a tan Carhartt jacket, its hood up and drawstring tightened around his face.
“Cold ’un last night, huh?” he says. “Ready?”
JP shoulders his pack and rifle. Then he holds up the sec- ond cup of coffee, offering it to Steve.
“Already got some out in the truck,” he answers. “Got donuts too, Krispy Kremes from town. Want some?”
JP shakes his head no. He throws the cup of coffee onto the fire. In a splash, the last embers are snuffed out. The two walk into the cold morning.
Elliot Ackerman, author of the novel Green on Blue, served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. A former White House Fellow, his essays and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Ecotone. He lives in Istanbul, where he writes on the Syrian Civil War.