He fired his first shot when the closest infantrymen were thirteen hundred meters away, and the nearest vehicles were nearly two thousand meters out. He alternated his fire between the closest of the infantrymen and the vehicles that were farther back. With the long travel time of the bullet—just over a second on the close shots, and much longer on the more distant shots—he was able to ride the recoil and get his optics back on target before each bullet hit. He kept up steady fire for twenty minutes, stopping occasionally to rest and reload his magazines. After he fired more than thirty rounds with uncertain results, he saw his first sure kill. It was a radioman at just over twelve hundred yards.
He declared, “That’s one for sure. I won’t count the ‘maybes’ or try to figure how many I get inside the trucks and APCs,” keeping tally for a nonexistent audience.
His second sure hit was on an out-riding motorcycle scout. The rider went over backwards, and the dirt bike went down in a cloud of dust. There was still no breeze evident. “That’s two,” Fong said, as he worked the big bolt handle on the McMillan.
He paused to switch magazines. Fong switched back to firing at the dismounted infantry. Some of them were now within nine hundred yards, a distance that Fong considered uncomfortably close. Confident of their range, he hit each man with a single shot.
“That’s three, four, and five.”
He put a fresh magazine in the rifle, and then noticed that he now had far more empty magazines than loaded ones. He paused for a few minutes to refill his magazines. The sound of the growing pile of fired .50-caliber brass in the bottom of the foxhole made Dan smile. After taking a few deep breaths and working his shoulder in a small circle to relax his muscles, Dan brought the scope back up to his eye and resumed his work.
Fong placed the Trijicon’s center dot on the chest of another soldier who was carrying what looked like a flame-thrower. The McMillan barked again.
“That’s six.”
Fong noticed a point man only six hundred and fifty yards out, an easy range for the big .50 caliber. “That’s seven.” Clearly smarting from the casualties they were taking, the infantrymen were slowing down and now moving by bounds. With the infantry now in the open and fairly close—at least by the standards of his McMillan—they made fine targets.
He rapidly expended three full magazines for the McMillan. The troops still had no idea where Fong was, other than somewhere to the south. They could hear the supersonic crack of his shots, but couldn’t see exactly where they were coming from. Most of Fong’s body was in the foxhole, and the little that protruded was well camouflaged.
As he again reloaded magazines, Dan murmured to himself, “That’s eight more kills for sure, which makes it fifteen.”
He had saved his four magazines of precious SLAP cartridges for the APCs, which were maneuvering some nine hundred yards away. He went through all four of these magazines in less than ten minutes. Only one of the APCs stopped moving, but he was sure that he had made good hits on the sides and backs of at least three of the BTR-70 APCs. The APCs fired back blindly, spraying the hillsides with 14.5 mm and 7.62 mm rounds. A few rounds came within fifty yards, slapping into rocks with a loud clatter. The close hits made Dan nervous.
He reloaded two of his empty magazines with loose AP cartridges, and fired again, firing them rapidly at the two closest up-armored Humvees. Both of them came to sudden stops.
The brass in the foxhole was up above his ankles now. He looked down to his magazines and ammo boxes at the lip of the foxhole, and was astonished to find that he only had two loaded rounds of .50-caliber ammunition left. He fired these last two rounds single shot through the McMillan at the cab of a deuce-and-a-half truck that was nine hundred yards distant. With his second and last shot, the truck careened into a ditch on the side of the road and rolled over onto its side. Fong smiled in satisfaction.
The dismounted infantrymen were close enough now that he could hear them shouting. A few small arms bullets kicked up dust and ricocheted off rocks on the hillside above and below him. He guessed the distance to the closest of them was less than five hundred yards. He glanced at his watch. It was just after 10 a.m. Fong realized that he had to move quickly to keep any distance between himself and the enemy.
He folded the rifle’s bipod and set it down beside the foxhole. Then he deliberately pulled back the camouflage net. He knew any sudden movements might be spotted by the approaching infantry. Dan cradled the big rifle in his arms and deliberately walked up and over the hilltop, using the brush for concealment. Once he was over the top of the hill, and out of sight to the valley below, he put his head down and began to run.
Halfway down the reverse slope of the hill, Dan stopped and carefully laid the McMillan next to the hole in the ground that he had prepared the day before. He pressed down the release button and pulled out the big rifle’s bolt assembly and stowed it in his butt pack. Then he pulled the SSG out of the Pelican case and put the McMillan in its place. He snapped the heavy closure catches into place and ensured that the pressure relief vent knob was cranked closed. The entire case went into the hole. Then, with an audible grunt, rolled a log that he had prepared the day before over the hole to conceal it. “Don’t worry, baby, I’ll come back for you in a few days. You’re just too big to carry, and I’m out of .50 ammo.” He picked up the SSG and resumed his run down the hill.
He was out of breath when he stopped again, three quarters of the way up the next hill, roughly nine hundred yards from his first firing position. This was the secondary position he had picked out and prepared the day before. His backpack and two full canteens of water were waiting for him there. Only a few moments after he got down into a low prone position behind the Scharf Shuetzen Gewehr, the infantry crested the first hill that he had been on.
Dan paused a minute to regain his breath and to pick out the most important targets. He felt fine, other than a slightly sore shoulder from firing the .50.
His first was a man that was gesturing in a forward arc with his arm. He went down thrashing and clutching at his chest. “That’s sixteen. I’m a fisher of men.”
He methodically reloaded the rifle’s chamber with a loose cartridge to bring it back up to a full six cartridges. When he had time, Fong preferred the “shoot one, load one” method that kept the full magazine capacity in reserve.
Dan had two hundred rounds of Federal match-grade .308 Winchester ammunition, in cardboard boxes, for the Steyr in his pack. In the pouches of his web gear, he had seven of the five-round capacity rotary magazines loaded with Federal match-grade 168-grain ammunition for the SSG. He normally kept only two magazines loaded, to prevent their springs from taking a set, but for the occasion, he had all seven fully loaded. He also had just one ten-round box magazine, which was loaded with AP ammunition. Despite their larger capacity, Dan actually disliked the ten-round Steyr magazines. He had owned two others previously. Both were replaced in succession by the factory, due to internal mechanical problems. He’d heard similar stories from other SSG owners, including the famous gun guru, Colonel Jeff Cooper. If they were that unreliable, he reasoned, he should stick mainly to the more robust five-round design.