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uniqueness.
    “Ah—yes, he has an ability to shut down and let the world go about its business while he’s frozen; and then when he’s become a part of the environment, then and only then, will he strike. But like any skill, it’s a skill that simply has to be practiced. He was practicing nothingness.”
    Somebody yawned.
    Somebody farted.
    Somebody laughed.
    “All right,” said Shreck, vigorously, climbing up front and by sheer body heat exiling the doctor to the wings. “Thanks, Dobbler. Now, listen up, I want eyes front, Payne, get your people to pay some attention for once. It’s very close to the most sensitive part of this operation, the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”
    Shreck’s dark eyes seemed to beam with strange force.
    “Let me tell you who you’re dealing with, so there’s no misunderstanding. This guy is mule-proud Southern, as stubborn as they come. He doesn’t want to be pushed and he won’t stand to be insulted. He’s also stillgot some gung-ho Marine in him. He’ll be a fucking ramrod; you try and bend him and he may kick your ass. So the way we play him is slow and steady. You don’t push; you don’t order. You just smile and go along. Any questions?”
    Shreck’s sudden dramatic appearance had its desired effect: it silenced the troops.
    They were fools.
    “Sir?”
    Someone had leaned in.
    “Yeah,” said Shreck.
    “Sir, it’s 0730 hours. Surveillance called; subject just left the motel. He’s on his way.”
    “Okay,” said Shreck, “I hope you were listening to the doctor, because if anybody screws up I’ll have his ass. Now let’s get cracking, people. First day on a new job.”
    If nothing else, it had a comforting feeling. It was, after all, a rifle range, one of those peeling, flaking, sagging, yet grand places where men have always gathered to plunk themselves down before a piece of paper with a black circle imprinted on it and discover the secrets of their own rifles and their own selves. Bob had spent a lifetime, it sometimes seemed, in such a place, and always the talk was good and the feeling among the shooters easy and generous.
    He stood on a concrete apron, before a series of T-shaped shooting benches, green, always green, on every shooting range in America they were green. Bob could see the place had been built sometime in the thirties, the private preserve of some hunting and shooting club or other, and he knew that under the sagging roof that shielded the apron and the benches there’d been many tales told of deer that had gotten away and of loads good and loads bad, and rifles worth as much as agood woman and rifles worth as little as a dog with the clap.
    The only unusual thing about this place, a mile or so off the main road by a series of convoluted gravel tracks, was a trailer off to one side, which while not new looked as if it had just been dumped there. Before it stood the sign of the sponsors of this day’s labors, Accutech.
    He could see the targets across the faintly sloping yellow meadow beyond the line of benches, a black dot at a hundred yards, a black period at two hundred and a black pinprick at three hundred.
    “Coffee, Mr. Swagger?” asked the colonel, still in his raincoat. Next to him was the morose little noncom who always looked ready for a fight. Everybody else was a gofer, except one pear-shaped city boy with a goatee who looked like he had a finger up his ass.
    “No thanks,” he said. “It jitters the nerves.”
    “Decaf?”
    “Decaf’s fine,” he said, and Colonel Shreck nodded to a man who quickly poured Bob a paper cupful from a thermos.
    It was surprisingly temperate, around sixty, and a gentle breeze pressed over the range; above a pale-lemon sun stood in a pale-lemon sky. It was the false spring, a phony of a day, too sweet to be trusted this month.
    “All set, then?” asked the colonel.
    “I suppose,” Bob said.
    “Do you want to recheck your zero before we start the testing rounds?”
    “Yes