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sir.”
    “All right, gentlemen, let’s move away. Eyes and ears on.”
    Bob uncased his rifle, lodged it on a sandbag rampart and slid the bolt back. He cracked open a box of the Lake City Match rounds, threaded five, one after theother with a brass clicking, into the magazine, pushed home and locked the bolt which flew forward and rotated shut with the gliding ease of a vault door closing on ball bearings and grease. He pulled his Ray-Ban aviators on, hooking them behind the ears, and slid his earmuffs down across the top of his head, clamping his ears off from the world. He felt the roar of blood rushing in his brain.
    Bob slid up to the rifle and found his bench shooter’s position, his boots flat upon the cement apron of the range as if making the magic construction of stability up through his body that would translate to the rock-hard hold of the rifle itself.
    He pulled the rifle up, and in, chunking it against his shoulder, placing his hand upon the comb tuned so just the faintest smudge of fingertip caressed the lightened trigger, adjusting a bunny-ear bag underneath the butt-heel. His other arm ran flat along the shooting bench, under the rifle which itself had been sunk just right into the sandbags.
    Bob found his spot-weld, and closed his left eye. The image was a bit out of focus, so he diddled with the ring to bring it back to clarity and for his effort was rewarded with the black image of perfect circumference, quartered precisely by the stadia of the scope, ten times the size it had been, now as big as a half-dollar at pointblank range.
    He exhaled half a breath, held what he had, and with that wished the end of his finger to contract but a bit and was rewarded with the thrill of recoil, the blur as the rifle ticked off a round. As he was throwing the bolt, he heard a spotter.
    “X-ring. Damn, right in the middle, perfect, a perfect shot.”
    Bob fired four more times into the same hole.
    “I guess I’m zeroed,” he said.
    A man called Hatcher briefed him on the test.
    “Mr. Swagger, one of my associates will load your rifle with five rounds. You’ll not know if you’re shooting your own handloads, the Federal Premium, the Lake City Match or our own Accutech Sniper Grade ammunition. You’ll fire four groups of five rounds each at a hundred yards, four at two hundred yards and four at three hundred yards. Then we’ll compute the groupings and see how the ammunition stacks up. Then, this afternoon, we’d like to run a similar series of tests, but from offhand or improvised positions, with a stress factor added in. I think you’ll find it quite interesting.”
    “You’re paying the bills. Let’s get shooting,” Bob said.
    Bob shot with extraordinary concentration. What separated him from other shooters was his utter consistency, his sameness. He was a human Ransom rest, like the mechanical gizmo they use to test pistols, coming each time to the same strained yet perfectly built position, cement to bone to wood, bone to rifle, fingertip to trigger. Each time, the same: his cheek just so against the fiberglass of the stock, the same pull of rifle into shoulder, the same cant to his hand on the grip, the same angle and looseness of his off-hand, the same distance between eye and scope, the same half-breath held, the same three heartbeats in suspended animation, the same infinitesimal backwards slide of trigger as the slack came out, the same crispness like a grass rod snapping as the trigger broke, the same soundless detonation and blur as the rifle shivered under the ignition of its round.
    “X-ring, little high, maybe a third of an inch high at two o’clock.”
    “X-ring, within an inch.”
    “X-ring, inside an inch.”
    There were no flyers, no glitches, no mistakes. Bobfound the groove and stayed there, throughout the long morning, hardly moving or breathing or wasting a second or a motion. It pleased him queerly that the rifle was taken from him empty, then brought back loaded, that