I would doubt that is very likely, but you did say fiction. If you want some true sharpshooter tales, pick up Gysgt Carlos Hathcock’s book Marine Sniper. It’s a quick read of his biography and time in the Marine Corps as a sniper in Viet Nam.
Two stories there that may interest you. The first is about his longest shot which was from around 2300 yards. He had an M-2 with a mounted Unertl scope. It was a kid on a bicycle carrying AK’s on the back of his bike. He did not want to kill the kid just scare him away from the guns. He shot the tire out of the bike. The kid came up shooting at the origin of the shot with one of the AKs and Hathcock ended up dropping him.
The other story has to do with a time when he was out hunting one of the NVA’s best snipers who was knocking people off at their base. Hathcock was out for weeks tracking this guy. He saw a glint off in the distance, sighted in on the glint and fired. He tracked up to where he shot and found the sniper with a bullet through his eye. The guy was sighting in on Hathcock and before he could get a shot off, Hathcock shot him through his telescope into his eye. This was shamelessly taken to make the movie Sniper with Tom Berenger.
Those are two real life stories of sniper accuracy.
I have read tales of Gunny Hathcock. Very impressive!
I’m not writing this, another woman is. She supposedly got her info from a woman sniper for the Army.
Are you sure that's what he wrote? If so, I really hate to question Sgt Hathcocks memory of his no doubt deadly sniping exploits in Viet Nam, but the account of shooting out the tire of a moving bicycle at a range of 1-1/3 miles is simply preposterous no matter how skilled a marksman he was or how accurate his equipment was.
It would have taken at least the mathematical computations required to land a vehicle from the orbiting earth on a certain spot of orbiting Mars or Venus to have even come close to making that shot, and I have to seriously doubt that he could have made those computations in his head on short notice even if he could have seen the tire at that distance. Just the unknowable variables of numerous factors such as wind speed, bicycle speed, and the difference in elevation of the area between shooter and target would have been enough to make the shot so highly improbable that it stretches credulence past the breaking point.
I don't have the audacity to say that Sgt Hathcock possibly stretched the truth a bit in his memoirs, but if what you say is what is in his book, I will suggest that evidently somewhere between his writing the story and the publisher's printing it someone made a mistake in transcribing the account of his bicycle tire shooting incident.
A similar scene was used in Saving Private Ryan as well. It almost defys belief that it was a *real* occurrance, not just Hollywood BS.
Of course, Hathcock wasn't trying to shoot the enemy sniper in the eye... it just happened that way. Which points out the problem with the scenario proposed at the top of this thread.