Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [99]
Shooting from such an angle makes a bullet hit below the point of aim, while shooting through glass will cause the bullet to rise. I had spent the idle time lasering ranges on various points in my zone and doing calculations in the gun book, and since snipers have formulas for everything, there was no real mystery to work out. I already had the dope figured and dialed it into the scope so the rifle would adjust the path of the bullet, which would change several times. This wasn’t skeet shooting.
I lined up on the rear window of the moving target as it headed north, then fired. The bullet crashed through the glass to smoke-check the guy in the backseat right between the shoulder blades, only four inches above my aim point. Not bad for a high-angle, glass-stressed shot on a moving target in a combat zone. The Mercedes accelerated out of the area with the passenger in the backseat slumped over dead.
Downstairs, the grunts were charging hard and fast into the warren of apartment buildings, shops, and homes, under the watch of curious, not hostile, Iraqi civilians. A civilian car turned a corner and braked to a hasty stop when the driver found himself looking down the big barrel of an Abrams tank cannon and a Humvee’s heavy machine gun. He shifted into reverse and sped away, and no one fired. We were pushing, but no one seemed to be pushing back, and the stillness of the battlefield bothered me. Where are they?
At 10:20 A.M., I spotted a guy on a distant roof and lased the distance at 1,025 meters, almost three-quarters of a mile away. Being up high, I had a clear sight line on him and the AK-47 he held. He was an amateur sniper hunting Marines from a rooftop, so he had to go. I did not think for a moment about him being another human being with a family, and in fact didn’t really think about him as a person at all. He was a threat who had stepped into my world, and those would be the last steps he ever took. I calculated the wind to be about three minutes left, tweaked the scope, and brought the crosshairs to his belly, right about where his navel would be, so if my bullet drifted either up or down, there would still be plenty of target area. I fired and watched as the big bullet covered the distance in an instant and struck the soldier in his right chest with terrific force. The impact yanked him around in a pirouette; he dropped his weapon, fell over, and didn’t get up.
Casey scanned his binos back to our north, the area in which I had shot the Mercedes, and saw one of the CAAT teams in a fight. They had taken some fire from a large field alongside the road and had called in mortars to suppress the enemy and opened up with their own chattering machine gun. They were justified in returning fire, but there was no way they could have seen exactly who they were shooting at, and vehicles of all sorts fled the area. “Oh, my God!” Casey shouted, and grabbed his microphone. One of the vehicles under fire was a van filled with a family. “CAAT Two, Hotel Five!” Casey barked, identifying himself to the CAAT commander. “Those are civilian vehicles you are engaging, and they have women and children in them. Stand down!”
The CAAT machine gun stopped immediately, and Casey watched with relief as women and children jumped from the van; then other civilians emerged from other cars, confused and scared, with their hands up. From his rooftop vantage point, from which he could see more than the guys on the ground, he had probably prevented a slaughter.
There were still threats in the area, and we had to be careful, not foolish. After another fifteen minutes of slow scope movement, I found a target, a uniformed soldier with an RPG launcher on his shoulder, in the third window from the left on the fourth floor of an apartment building. I checked my range card—exactly 427 yards northeast of our position. It was in Dino’s zone, but he didn’t have the angle, and I had a clean shot, so I killed the dude with a round dead center in his