The Destroyer - 67 - The Destroyer 067 - Look Into My Eyes by Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir

Author:Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir [Murphy, Warren & Sapir, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pulp Action
Publisher: PINNACLE BOOKS
Published: 2010-03-19T14:51:07+00:00

Chapter 10

At five hun­dred yards Gu­sev Bal­bek could put a bul­let through a per­son’s eye dur­ing a wind­storm. At a thou­sand yards he could bi­sect a chest. At fif­teen hun­dred yards he could guar­an­tee hit­ting a run­ning man and stop­ping him.

That was with a sniper ri­fle. With a pis­tol he could shoot the beaks off low-​fly­ing birds. He would do these things for two hours ev­ery morn­ing, part­ly to keep in prac­tice, part­ly to keep the smil­ing com­mis­sars hap­py.

They would come, some­times in the com­pa­ny of gen­er­als, and they would say most po­lite­ly:

“Don’t let us dis­turb you. We just wish to watch.” And then Gu­sev would put on the spe­cial per­for­mance. The hon­ored guests would sit on a wood­en stand made to look like a repli­ca of an Amer­ican in­au­gu­ra­tion plat­form. A dum­my in a for­mal suit was made to move its arms by means of a small mo­tor.

Gu­sev Bal­bek would walk fif­teen hun­dred yards away, slow­ly, to im­press up­on them all how great a dis­tance it was. Fif­teen hun­dred yards was out­side the cor­don of pro­tec­tion of a head of state. All high of­fi­cials knew that. Any­thing be­yond a thou­sand yards just mer­it­ed a cur­so­ry in­spec­tion to make sure no large band of men or a how­itzer was lurk­ing out there. A sin­gle per­son was not some­thing se­cu­ri­ty men would wor­ry about at that dis­tance. Ev­ery­one knew that.

And then just for dra­ma, in the stands that rep­re­sent­ed an Amer­ican in­au­gu­ra­tion, the Amer­ican pres­iden­tial song, “Hail to the Chief,” would play. And speak­ers would blare the noise of crowds ap­plaud­ing.

Then from the mo­tor­ized dum­my would come the record­ed words of the in­au­gu­ral speech. When this first was used, Gu­sev would fire on the lines “Ask not what your coun­try can do for you, but what you can do for your coun­try.” The lat­er speech­es lacked that sort of dra­mat­ic high point. In fact, none of them were very good at all.

At the prop­er mo­ment, Gu­sev, bare­ly a speck in the dis­tance, would fire. He al­ways hit the dum­my. Mil­itary men were al­ways the most im­pressed.

Then Gu­sev would come in to a thou­sand yards, and while the spec­ta­tors’ eyes could bare­ly make him out, Gu­sev would put a bul­let right in­to the heart of the dum­my, or a sec­ond, re­place­ment dum­my if the first was bad­ly dam­aged.

And then at five hun­dred yards, where se­cu­ri­ty men were un­afraid of sim­ple hand­guns, Gu­sev pro­vid­ed the piece de re­sis­tance.

A pho­to­graph of the cur­rent Pres­ident of the Unit­ed States was taped to the head of the stat­ue, and faster than they could fol­low, Gu­sev would whip out a hand­gun and shoot out the pho­to­graph’s eyes, two quick shots. Then the ex­act scale pho­to­graph of the head would be passed around to the im­por­tant vis­itors: They would look at the eyes and nod. Some smiled. Oth­ers said:

“If we have to. If we have to.”

There were oth­er demon­stra­tions. Shots got­ten off in a crowd­ed room, a press con­fer­ence, and the ul­ti­mate dis­play. Fir­ing three bul­lets in suc­ces­sion

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.