I, Sniper
By Stephen Hunter
Simon & Schuster
$26.00, hard cover, 415 pages, 978-1-2019-6515-4 (2009)
What rock have I been under to have missed Stephen Hunter and his Bob Lee Swagger novels? Move over Spenser, step aside Jack Reacher – there’s a new guy in town. Well, new to me at least.
Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger (Bob the Nailer) has seen the big 6-0 come and go – he’s a retired Marine sniper who served three tours in Vietnam and ended up credited with over ninety kills. Not that age has slowed him down much.
In this novel, four radicals from the 1960’s are gunned down at long range by a sniper who the FBI quickly concludes is Carl Hitchcock, a war hero. Hitchcock’s ninety-three kills was the highest on record during
The case against Hitchcock seems to fit perfectly – perhaps a little too perfectly. Just to be sure,
Now Swagger needs to use all his Marine skills to find out why Hitchcock was set up and who is behind this plot. This quest sends Swagger to a company called iSniper that has manufactured a new weapon that can revolutionize the industry, called the iSniper911.
It combines all the functions of ranging, weather analysis, algorithmic computation, ballistic prediction, and scope correction into but one instrument. There’s little devils inside move all them knobs, smart little leprechauns who can do the calc in their cute little heads in suppertime. You simply lase the target and wait for the answer in the TV set up top, and in less than a second you’re on target. I mean completely and wholly on target.
Following the investigation to
Swagger hit the floor hard amid a spray of glass sleet from the windshield as the burst atomized the glass, a bullet flying so close by his neck he felt the breeze, He wedged himself low into the cave under the dash, thanking God he’d forgotten to buckle up for safety, hearing the bullets bang hard off the hood, the engine block, back again to the windshield as the gunner dumped his mag into the vehicle. He blinked hard to force himself to face the reality of what was happening, knowing that if he stayed there in the fetal curl on the floor, the gun boy would come out, stick the snout his sub-gun through the window, and dump the next mag entirely into Mr. B.L. Swagger, late of planet Earth.
Inspiration came from – well, who knows? God? Intelligent design? A hundred previous gunfights? The obviousness of what was before his nose, which was Denny’g gigantic foot resting on the gas pedal? Swagger craned upward, spun the wheel against Denny’s dead foot, pushing pedal to floor. The car leaped and, as the distance was short, built no killing momentum, but still it hit the killers’ car on the oblique with a clanging charge of energy, enough to spin Bob himself almost backward against the seat.
But now he had a plan, and a man with a plan is a man with a chance. He reached up, pushing Denny’s jacket aside, and plucked the Sig 229 from his hip holster, unsnapping it and making sure to pull it straight out, duplicating the draw angle so that the sights wouldn’t get caught in the holster and no security device would pin it. Out it slid, and now he had a plan and a gun, and he had his opponents possibly in a daze from the unexpected smash of car one into car two. He squirmed back to his own off-driver’s-side door, hit the latch, and tumbled out.
These wouldn’t be the first armed men that made the mistake of thinking they were hunting Bob Lee Swagger, when he turned the tables and was hunting them. For anyone old enough to remember the Vietnam War and young enough inside to believe men of that age still have a little life left in them, read I, Sniper.
How much did I like the book? After finishing I, Sniper, I immediately found out there were five previous Bob Lee Swagger novels, bought one at Borders (Night of Thunder), and read it the next day. Two months later, I’ve now read all the previous Swagger books. My favorite: Time to Hunt.
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