Tim Gladden said, “Trust the numbers, Kyle. Trust the numbers.” He felt the big yacht, which handled like a sports car, settle into a smooth glide.

Kyle had gotten to know Jeff Cornwell while running joint special operations, and their friendship had grown tight over the years. When Cornwell had set his engineers and scientists to work designing a state-of-the-art weapon for long-range precision firing, he asked the Pentagon to loan him Kyle Swanson as a consultant periodically when he was not on other assignments, and the generals had agreed.

Swanson had loved the weapon from the moment he saw the raw diagrams, and Jeff knew how to speak sniper talk. Together with the engineers in a span of three years, they built a sniper’s wet dream.

It was a very smart weapon, and fired a hand-crafted.50-caliber round that increased the power of a punch over longer distances. Developing experimental material, with Kyle and Jeff insisting on a lightweight weapon that would be easy to carry in the field, the engineers had developed a super epoxy for the stock and a special alloy for the trigger assembly. The rifle was surprisingly light, only 19.9 pounds with a full magazine, a critical factor for the man who would have to lug it around all day in combat. The normal.50-caliber sniper rifle weighs in at 37 pounds unloaded. The free-floating barrel provided space and could whip up and down when fired but not throw off the sight, which was further strengthened with an internal gyrostabilizer. The gyrostabilized infrared laser worked with a small geopositioning satellite transmitter and receiver in the stock to triangulate the precise distance between the rifle and the target. The GPS provided a further element of safety by letting a sniper know his exact position anywhere in the world.