The sweat dribbled near his eye, filling the wrinkles on his leathery face. He had been standing there for hours, not daring to wipe away the sweat. This shot meant everything. The lives of hundreds. The wellbeing of Fallujah. He gripped the warm steel in his clammy hands, not daring to move an inch.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted movement. He swung the rifle, lining up the scope on the robed man leading the schoolchildren onto the bus. At first he thought he was a teacher, but there was something off about the man. He realized that the man was wearing a suicide vest, armed with enough bombs to wipe out an apartment building, and gripping a Glock 40. As the children piled onto the bus, the man began shouting in a heavily accented voice, “Let me live, or the children get it”.
The sniper’s eyes widened. The robed man danced around the street, taunting the panicking civilians, waving the remote. The sniper leveled the hard steel, lined the man’s head up, and fired, killing him instantly. However, instantly wasn’t fast enough. That last twitch of the nerves, the last flinch of the fingers to push that remote. The bus exploded, a mushroom cloud lighting up the town.
The sniper fell to his knees, the realization of what he had done slamming into him. He looked at his hands, trembling. Shrieks narrated the scene as a heavy stench filled the air, and he turned away from the scene, the weight of his guilt heavier than the ruined bodies of the children lost beneath the rubble. That was his last mission.