The Threateners

Spooky was behind me again as I headed for the rifle range, which is about five miles southwest of the city of Santa Fe. It’s a fairly complete gun-club operation and also includes facilities for pistol shooting, but at the moment I was concerned only with long guns, and only in .22 caliber. It was kind of a return to the womb. Like most ranch kids, I’d been given, as my first gun, a single-shot .22 just like the Anschutz now resting behind my seat in its fancy foam-lined case. Well, maybe not just like it. Back then, the little old Iver Johnson birthday rifle had cost my dad seventeen bucks secondhand at the local general store; the Anschutz, ordered new from an importer in the east, had recently set me back well over seven hundred. It was a special rifle made for a special kind of shooting.

The Mexicans started it, I believe, and called it
Siluetas
Met
á
licas
. They set up silhouette targets cut from heavy sheet steel,
gallinas, javelinas, guajalotes,
and
borregos
, at distances ranging from two hundred to five hundred meters. The original idea was that, standing on your hind legs like a man instead of lying on your belly like a worm—most serious target shooting is done from die prone position because it’s the steadiest—you d try to knock over these heavy metal chickens, pigs, turkeys, and sheep with one shot each, using your ordinary hunting rifle. It was a challenging sport, it caught on fast, and pretty soon it spawned some fairly specialized equipment and several variations, one being a small bore version using .22-caliber rifles at shorter ranges with smaller targets.

I love the big guns, but in this line of business—never mind what business—I have to lire a lot of heavy stuff for practice. I don’t go out of my way to tenderize my shoulder and rattle my eardrums for pleasure. But I still enjoy all kinds of shooting, and I’d read about this small bore silhouette stuff, so when a man I met at the range while I was checking out a new .38 revolver mentioned that there was to be a match there the following Sunday, I borrowed a secondhand .22 from a friendly dealer, had him dress it up with a secondhand telescopic sight, spent a couple of hours on the range on Saturday calibrating the half-baked outfit after a fashion, and drove back out bravely on Sunday to see what it was all about.

With that inadequate gun and no experience, it was a slaughter as far as I was concerned. I only hit—hush, don’t tell anybody—five of the little steel animals out of the possible forty; but I had a lot of fun.

Now, with the proper gear, and another match under my belt, I was hoping to graduate from Class B, the cellar division, into Class A. Two scores over fourteen were required, and I’d recorded a sixteen last time out, so I only had one more to go. Maybe this seems like a small ambition for a man who’s spent most of his life using firearms for real—at least, being such a hero marksman, I should already, on my third competitive outing, be knocking off twenty-fives and thirties with my eyes shut and shooting for Triple A or even Master, right?

Well, few new sports are that easy to conquer, and that goes for new target rifles, too. My Anschutz had a special trigger mechanism with a tricky two-stage pull much lighter than I was accustomed to. Furthermore, my skull had acquired a bad bullet crease on a recent mission, and I’d also taken a slug lower down. The physical machinery had recovered pretty well, and I’d spent some time at our training and rehabilitation center in Arizona, known as the Ranch, being healthified until I could hardly stand myself; but while I’d managed to fudge enough qualifying targets with rifle and pistol to get myself sprung out of the hands of the doctors and trainers, I knew that the mental apparatus was still a bit shaky and my concentration wasn’t all it should be. The discipline of shooting offhand (our jargon for standing) at unreasonably small targets at unreasonably long distances, with a gun that produced hardly any noise or recoil to lacerate my nerves or aggravate my healing injuries—pure, basic marksmanship—was exactly what I needed.

Except for Spooky. Spooky I didn’t need at all. Actually, I’d spotted four Spookies over a period of weeks. The one escorting me around today was Spooky Three—I’d numbered them in the order I discovered them—the only female member of the crew, a sturdy, dark-haired dame in her midtwenties, wearing a teenager costume of tom T-shirt and faded skintight jeans ragged at the knees, and driving a battered tan Volvo wagon that must have been brought over from Scandinavia by Leif Eriksson about the year 1000 for his tour of Vinland the Good. That was her image today. Last week she’d been a neatly dressed blond matron in a beige pantsuit and high heels, driving a shiny blue BMW.

The rifle range is, of course, located well out in the boon-ies so that if a ricochet or wild bullet should sneak over one of the bulldozed dirt backstops, which doesn’t happen often, it won’t find anybody to hurt. It’s the usual arid, rolling New Mexico landscape: stony yellow-brown earth scantily covered with tough yellow-green grass and weeds, and an occasional cactus, and dotted with widely spaced, dark green piñons and junipers not much higher than a man. Bulging up against the horizon to the north are the Sangre de Cristo peaks; to the east are the more distant Jemez Mountains; and on a good day—and we have lots of them out there—you can see Los Alamos. If you want to see Los Alamos.

Ms. Spooky was still astern when I left the pavement and headed out the gravel county road. The weather was clear and dry, and I could see the dust kicked up by the ancient Volvo a discreet distance behind me. This early on a Sunday morning there wasn’t much traffic to confuse the issue. My sturdy lady was still hanging on back there when I negotiated the steep dip where the road ran through the arroyo near the county dump; but soon after that there was no more dust behind me, and I knew that shed taken the turnoff to the dump. Well, these double-talk days I believe I’m supposed to call it a landfill or maybe a sanitary refuse disposal area, but I’m old-fashioned and it’s still a dump to me.

If she followed their established routine—I’d been coming out here several times during the week to practice on the deserted, or almost deserted, range, and after a while they’d settled on this observation scheme—she’d park there, probably leaving the wagon open in the rear as if she’d just finished unloading the family garbage. She’d hike a hundred yards to a small hill that let her look down on the distant club grounds beyond. From there, she could keep an eye on my activities with binoculars and see me preparing to leave in time to get back to her car and pick me up again on my way home.

There were already eight or ten cars, vans, and pickup trucks in the gun club’s parking area when I drove up. Stopping at the end of the row, I turned the pup loose to run while I opened the rear of the Subaru I was driving that autumn to get my gear out. I’d owned a Mazda RX-7 for several years. It had been fast, reliable, and pleasantly flashy, and it had got the sports-car kinks out of my system, but the low-slung little two-seater had never been an ideal vehicle for a man who went in for hunting and fishing. After I acquired a young Labrador retriever and he filled out to a solid ninety pounds, the situation had become critical. When a gent with a Mazda deficiency offered me a respectable sum for my pretty car one day when I was having it serviced at the local dealership, I took his money and borrowed a company vehicle I’d used on a recent assignment to keep me rolling while I was making up my mind what personal transportation to buy next.

I got the rifle and associated gear from the rear of the station wagon. After lugging the stuff to one of the tables under the long canopy behind the firing line, I went over to be signed in by a guy named Jack, who told me I was shooting with a guy named Mark, second relay, meaning that at each distance Mark would shoot his two five-shot strings first while I scored him, after which he’d score me while I shot mine. Then we, and all the other pairs of shooters on the line, would move over one set of targets and repeat the process.

Today Mark and I were scheduled to start with the pigs— excuse me,
javelinas
—at sixty meters, after which we’d do the turkeys at seventy-seven, the rams at a hundred, and then crank our sights back down to handle the chickens at forty. To give you an idea of the accuracy required: the rams, also called sheep, are about six inches long, and the other targets are scaled down in proportion to the shorter ranges at which they’re shot at so they all look about the same size from the firing line. Think of trying to hit, from a wobbly standing position, a six-inch toy woolly-woolly at the far end of a football field.

Looking around for Mark, I was careful not to glance at the distant, low hill from which Spooky was presumably watching; if she was dumb enough to think herself undetected, I didn’t want to disillusion her. Mark was busy undermining the loyalty of my one-man dog; they’d got acquainted during various practice sessions when we’d happened to pick the same time of day to use our range keys. As a matter of fact, he was the man I’d encountered out here earlier in the summer, who’d got me into all this by telling me about the following Sunday’s match. He was scratching Happy’s ears expertly and laughing at the big yellow dog’s blissful reaction.

“That is truly one friendly Labrador,” he said, straightening up and giving the pup a final pat. “Well, they all are. It looks like we have a good day for it. No wind to amount to anything. How has the gun been shooting?”

A gun club like ours is an odd place: you know a lot of first names and the faces that go with them, you talk guns and hunting with the guys, but you seldom know their last names or what they do. They just kind of spring out of the woodwork once a month on match Sundays. Occasionally you say hi to one of them and chat a bit, if you happen to meet him practicing on the range between matches, or maybe you bump into one in a local sporting-goods store, but there’s no real social contact. Whether it’s the same around golf courses and tennis clubs I have no idea, since, having found a sport I like better, I don’t mess with those bat-and-ball games.

Mark was a bit of an exception to the general run of gun-club relationships, as far as I was concerned. He was a solidly built gent in his forties with thick, straight, black hair combed neatly back from his forehead. Say five nine or ten, say a hundred and seventy or eighty. He had a round face, bright brown eyes, a short snub nose, and smooth olive skin. I knew that he shot in Class AAA, and that his last name was Steiner, which had surprised me a bit when I first heard it since it had sounded like a Jewish name to me and I’d have guessed at Latin heredity, not that it mattered. I knew that he had a thin blond wife who looked considerably younger, and two little girls; and that he lived in a development at the south edge of town. I also knew that he was a helpful guy and clever with tools.

I knew all this because when I first got the Anschutz I’d been having trouble getting the big Bushnell telescopic sight properly lined up and he’d invited me to his house and solved the problem in a little workshop he had in his garage—a couple of shims cut from a Coca-Cola can had done the trick, in case you’re interested. I still didn’t know what he did for a living, and I hoped he didn’t know what I did. It’s information that’s not supposed to be available to the general public. As a matter of fact it’s not supposed to be available to anybody except on a strict, official, need-to-know basis.

“Nothing wrong with the gun,” I said. “Now it’s just the guy behind it who needs fixing. I’ve got our scorecards here; you’re shooting first.” The pup at my feet looked around sharply as a .22 cracked at the firing line; the targets are set out early to allow us to warm up our guns with a little prematch practice. Gunfire means birds to a retriever; and birds are his business in life. I said, “I’d better put him in the car or he’ll be out there looking for some crippled tin chickens to retrieve.”

A rifle match, to an observer, must be about as exciting as watching the snow melt in the spring, although silhouette shooting is a little better in this respect than drilling holes in paper targets: at least you get to see the distant little black metal figures leap into the air at the impact of the bullets, or go spinning off to one side or the other or, heartbreaking for the shooter, turn a little at a glancing hit but remain standing firmly on the base for a big fat zero on the scorecard. Or stay totally unmoved by a miss. But there’s nothing boring about it for the shooter, who, once the match has started, has his past misses to mourn and future hits to hope for.

The one thing you must not do, if you get off to a good start, is start calculating what a wonderful score you’ll make if you can just keep it up. So I did it. I cleaned off the first five pigs without a miss. Then I left one standing out of the second five; but that was still better than I’d ever done in competition, and I began to imagine myself finishing right up there with the local experts, or maybe even beating them. So of course I tightened up like any stupid novice—you wouldn’t know I’d been shooting all my life—and blew it on the turkeys, missing all but two. Well, never mind the play-by-play. I wound up with a score of eighteen, sending me up one class, which after all was what I’d hoped for; but I couldn’t help wondering how much better I’d have shot if I hadn’t been constantly aware of the binoculars watching from the distant hilltop, and asking myself who the hell were these creeps anyway, and what the hell did they want? I was getting a little tired of constantly wearing an extra shadow.

But Mac’s original instructions had been for me to play it cool and continue to pretend the fearsome foursome didn’t exist while he had the situation investigated.

“Only four, Eric?” he’d said when I first called Washington to report that I seemed to have acquired a guard of honor. My real name is Matthew Helm, but except under special circumstances, we use the code names for official communication.

I said, “Four are all I’ve spotted so far; three men and a woman. Of course, they could be deliberately showing themselves to hold my attention while a backup crew plays it cagey and keeps out of sight, but I don’t think they’re being that clever. My instinct tells me that they don’t feel any need to get fancy because they think they’re still invisible as far as I’m concerned.”