Glass Tiger by Joe Gores

Author:Joe Gores [Gores, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Thriller, Mystery, Suspense
ISBN: 9780151011216
Google: N1d2BwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0156032740
Goodreads: 262417
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2006-10-01T11:00:00+00:00

23

Not quite mugging for the cameras, President Gus Wallberg shook hands with Ranger Rick and Sam Jones beside the steel-barred cages that held Smokey and Pooh. He had already chatted and posed with Laura Givens and Sean McLean for the media.

‘We’ll be opening the cage doors to release the bears when you start your speech, Mr. President,’ Ranger Rick explained.

‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’ objected Jaeger. ‘At the end of his speech, not the beginning.’

Jaeger could just see a pair of grizzly bears charging the podium in the middle of the President’s speech and being cut down by automatic weapons fire on the six o’clock evening news.

‘We know these two bears really well, sir,’ said Rick. ‘We’ll have to coax them out. The timing will work out.’

Wallberg wasn’t so sure. Vicious black deerflies buzzed around them, and he had forgotten that wild things smelled so… well, wild. He gladly started away, encased by a moving diamond of Secret Service agents.

Jaeger had been right. If Corwin was lurking here, he would die. Nothing bad could happen to Wallberg on this day.

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.

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