American Gunfight by Stephen Hunter & John Bainbridge Jr

Author:Stephen Hunter & John Bainbridge, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

24. Oscar Alone

Oscar was being shot at from all sides. He stood out there, right at the foot of the steps, while four men from no distance farther than thirty feet (Birdzell), and more likely twenty feet, shot at him. He never flinched, he never panicked, he never really acknowledged the mortal peril he was in.

Oscar was shooting. The gun emptied itself in 13 percent increments each time he pulled the trigger. It leaped and barked in his hand, tossing spent casings to the side. He pirouetted this way and that, he twisted, he turned, he moved. He had astonishingly done exactly the correct thing from a tactical perspective. He moved slightly to the right, closer to the stairway to the Blair entrance, and between him and two of the men shooting at him (Boring and Davidson) was a wrought iron fence. They could see him. He was there. They could aim at him, as Floyd did, or they could point-shoot as Davidson did, with reasonable expectations, from that range at a target so close, of drawing copious amounts of blood. Yet they came up zero.

Is this because they were bad shots? No, indeed. In fact, they were superb shots. But what was happening is that as they fired at him, they were concentrated first of all, as they had been trained to do, on their sights. Thus the sights were crisp and clear to them, and that is exactly the path to accuracy with a handgun. In the background was the target, blurry but nevertheless distinct and immensely hittable. What they did not see was the wrought iron fence between them and the target, which had the attribute, though it was invisible to them, of a bulletproof barrier. Or at least it was bulletproof to those bullets.

They were firing the Treasury Department duty load, a round-nose .38 Special 158-grain bullet. When the bullet hit the wrought iron, it did not penetrate, though it must have made a hellacious reverberation. The lead, even moving at speed, was much softer than the wrought iron; instead, depending upon the angle at which the bullet struck the iron fencing, it either deflected, skewing off to left or right, its ballistic integrity and its lethal velocity hopelessly compromised, or it shattered, dissolving into a jet-propelled mist.

And that was what Oscar experienced. He did not feel the heavy whack of a bullet hitting him, but more the spray of fragments, extremely irritating but not lethal. One large one cut through his nostril. Another ticked an ear. There must have been a thump or a gouge of some sort when Toad’s first bullet plowed through his hat and etched a groove in his skull, but he did not evince much discomfort and nothing interfered with his task at hand, which was to shoot back. He was so full of adrenaline and other chemicals that if he felt these minor wounds at all, he did not respond. The Secret Service agents had discovered that you cannot end a gunfight against a determined opponent by grazing him.

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