SOAR: A Black Ops Novel

Weaver was faced with a sniper’s operational nightmare. All sniping is based on a few basic principles. Consistency is the most elemental of these, because consistency equals accuracy. Breathing, sight picture, spot weld, trigger pull, body position, platform stability, rifle, sight, and ammunition — the more these elements of shooting are kept consistent, the more accurate the sniper will become.

He adjusted the sling, then slipped into an open-legged sitting position. In most circumstances, Ty preferred not to use the sling. But there were times — like this one — when he needed every bit of help he could get. He extended his left leg slightly to provide himself a little more stability as the chopper bounced, pressed his cheek against the stock, swung the big rifle right/left, then left/right, found himself an imaginary target, and eased his finger onto the trigger. As he did, the HIP hit an air pocket and he lost his spot weld. The shot would have gone wild. Solution: Concentrate, schmuck. And hold the damn rifle more securely.

The rifle, ammo, and scope were no problem. Ty could play this particular 7.62 instrument like a bloody Stradivarius. He’d put thousands of rounds through the MSG90. He knew how it would perform with a cold barrel, and where the rounds would go after two, three, four, five, even ten shots. He’d tuned his own body to the rifle’s unique vibrations, and so was able to read and understand even the most minute variation in the tuning-fork sprong that coursed through the gun and through him every time he pulled the crisp, beautifully unfluctuating three-pound trigger. Those things wouldn’t change.

But Ty knew he could forget about platform consistency. The platform was the chopper deck, which was not only vibrating from the engines and rotor blades, but moving left, right, up, and down. Not to mention the ear-shattering noise. Body position? He could shoot offhand — standing up — but only if the chopper remained in a steady hover. Not bloody likely in combat. Shooting from a prone position was out of the question, because the field of fire from the chopper would be way too narrow. That meant he’d be reduced to using a kneeling or a sitting position. Sitting also restricted his field of fire to some degree. But it was a lot more stable than kneeling — especially given the chopper’s constant bumpy motion.

Sight picture was another important element of consistency. But it, too, was going to be problematic. Back at the CAG, Ty had worked for hours to maintain the consistency of his sight picture. His spot weld — the placement of his cheek against the rifle’s stock — was exactly the same whenever he pulled the trigger. That uniformity produced the exact same eye relief — the distance from his eye to the scope’s rear lens — every single time he put the rifle to his shoulder. Consistent eye relief, in turn, resulted in an identical sight picture through the scope. Today, the HIP’s motion would make maintaining consistent spot weld and sight picture problematic. Not impossible: Ty had worked to develop sniping proficiency from virtually any kind of platform, including choppers. But the HIP added hugely to the degree of difficulty he’d be attempting.

Follow-through was also going to be a predicament. In normal circumstances — like the ambush at Yarkant Köl — Ty had been able to maintain the consistency of his shooting through the stability of his follow-through, which meant that between the time he fired the shot and the bullet actually left the gun there was no movement of the barrel. Stability ensured that the sight picture never changed, not even by a hairbreadth, in the roughly quarter of a second between the trigger pull, the sear release, the firing pin striking the primer, and the bullet traveling down the MSG90’s 23.62-inch barrel and emerging from the harmonic stabilizer or the sound suppressor. Proper follow-through was going to be difficult when, even though the rifle might not move, the platform was guaranteed to shift between trigger pull and bullet departure.

Then there was angle compensation. It is easiest to shoot straight across a flat space — shooting on a target range, for example. The flatter the angle, the less the shooter has to compensate for uphill or downhill trajectory, which has to be figured differently from bullet drop, crosswind, or temperature and humidity fluctuations.