Then, immediately above him, he heard what sounded like the breaking of a hundred ice cubes and he looked up into the radiant sun. Amid a sleet of glass, a man had launched himself crazily from a fourth-story window and Nick watched him fall with a sickening acceleration toward the ground, except that fifteen feet into it, he landed with another stupefying, dust-rising whack on the slanted roof of a bay window, rolled akimbo down it, and fell again, this time by some miracle of grace and agility gaining enough control over his body so that he landed on his feet, more or less on the wooden stairway which ran up the side of the house. He lurched down the steps.
Nick stared at him dumbfounded.
The guy looked like death itself, a lean-boned, blond-headed man with squirrely-slit eyes and a deep tan. He was in blue jeans, boots and a blue workshirt. There was blood on him everywhere, and as he tried to stand, he fell back, then got his feet under him and lurched up.
Nick threw out the 10mm and screamed, “Don’t move, don’t move, FBI, goddammit, don’t move!”
The man went to his knees as fatigue and blood loss overwhelmed him and his head pitched forward; he seemed almost to collapse and Nick raced forward, yanking his cuffs from the compartment on his belt, got behind him, and got one cuff on a limb with his one free hand, holding the Smith 10 in his other, even as he smelled blood and sweat and felt the man shiver and groan.
“Fucked me,” the man kept saying, “fucked me so bad, fucked me, fucked me, fucked me.” The voice was cracker-South, a twang drawn over a banjo string.
Holding the cuffed hand up and tight, Nick slid the 1076 back into his pancake, and reached for the other wrist to bring it up to the cuffs.
For just an instant Nick knew he had him, and then the whole thing turned shaky as the man, with a force that stunned Nick, drove up and under him, and Nick felt his center of balance going, reached back for his Smith, but by that time had somehow lost leverage as well as balance as the man beneath him turned into nothing but snake.
The world splintered as Nick, judo-flipped expertly, hit the ground, his breath driven from him. He tried to right himself, but what he saw instead was the man above him, filling the entire horizon of his vision, but now coiled like a cavalry trooper with a saber, except there was no saber but only an elbow, which exploded into Nick’s cheekbone.
In the next second, amid the roar in his head and the shock, he felt a hand groping on him and as he tried feebly to prevent it through the throbbing that had overwhelmed his face, he felt the pistol being slid from his holster.
“No, God!” he shouted, grabbed the hand, but even then failed.
Now the man stood above him, the pistol leveled at his head, its bore a ravenous black mouth that would in an instant spit flame and that would be all.
Nick was dead; he accepted his own death, felt it swell in him, but then was astounded to look past the gun to the man’s looming and anguished face, as if he were looking up at a man hung out to die, his face mottled with suffering and despair, and yet in the gray eyes something terrible and abiding.
Compassion, Nick thought, but he could not believe it even as he recognized it.
Then the man was gone, scuttling off in a half-run, leaking blood.
Nick stood to give chase but a bullet whistled by his ear, fired from above, and smacked up a cloud of dust at the fleeing man’s feet. Two more came, two more misses and then the man was out the gate and in Nick’s car.
Oh, Christ, he thought, because in his urgency he knew he’d left the key in it.
The car started, revved and was gone.
“Goddamn, goddamn, missed him, shit, hit the fuck twice, dammit.”
Nick turned to see a fat and sweaty New Orleans cop racing toward him down the steps and yelling, Beretta waving about in a fat hand.
“I’m FBI! Call it in,” Nick yelled, noting the man’s radio unit.
“Ah, Base Six, where the hell are you, this is Victor Seven-twenty, I have hit the suspect twice, but goddamn, he’s still running, and he jumped some guy and got his car. What’s the number, bubba?”
Ah! Nick didn’t know. He’d checked it out of the interagency motor pool that morning.
“It’s a goddamn Ford, beige, don’t know the number. A Taurus, I think. They’d have the number at the pool. But it’s got a radio in it, he’ll be listening. Who are you?”
“Timmons, Traffic Division. Seen something up on the fourth floor moving up near the goddamned roof line. Called in that chopper, but they didn’t see nothing. Went in, heard the goddamn shot, and bounced the guy. He made a jump at me and damn if I didn’t put a Silvertip right through his chest and knock him down. And two minutes later the guy is up and running. Took another shot, hit him in the shoulder, and then he’s out the fuckin’ window. Took three more shots after he decked you, but missed.”
Nick just shook his head. He tried to figure it out, but one thing he knew for certain, and that was he was in big trouble. Getting your piece taken from you by a presidential assassin who’d already soaked up two bullets was a definite bad career move.
“Man, I’m screwed,” he said in a little burst of self-pity.
“Shit, no sweat,” said the cop. “I seen ’em hit like that before. You may not get ’em with a one-shot stop but they bleed out in ten minutes. He’s a dead guy right now. They’ll find him half a mile away, piled up against a dipsy dumpster in an alley.”
“No,” said Nick, knowing that the fates would not be so kind to him. “Not that guy.”
He turned.
“Get on that thing and put out an all points bulletin. Bob Lee Swagger. Of Blue Eye, Arkansas, and the United States Marine Corps.”
“You know him?” the cop said.
“Yeah,” said Nick, suddenly feeling all sorts of pain begin to fire away all over his body, but the physical pain wasn’t so much as the anguish for the terrible days ahead. “Yeah. I know him.”
Bob drove through waves of hallucination, skidding left- and right-hand turns, watching alleys fly by, terrified most of all of the bird. He knew if a bird had him, he was dead and gone, because a bird could stay with him.
But no bird came. In a second, over the car’s police radio, he learned why.
“Base Six, that medevac all set with Flashlight and other wounded aboard, let’s clear the air so we can ASAP to Shock Trauma.”
“Roger, Shock Trauma, I want all birds to go to ground level while we get the man to the hospital. Any word, Alpha?”
“Lots of blood, that’s all I can tell you, Base Six, and we got paramedics working hard. You let us worry, he’s in our hands now.”
Then other messages broke in and the whole thing degenerated into a cascade of possibilities, of rumors, of men yelling for attention and assistance. He heard a couple of references to “five-one-four Saint Ann” and the fleeing suspect, but that baffled him; he’d been in 415; 514 was a block away, on the other side of the street. Where did they get that number? What was going on? Then he had it. Sure, that’s how well planned it was. Timmons gives the wrong address, as if he’s flustered. The whole outfit goes to the wrong house a block away. That gives Payne and the colonel the time to slip away.
He drove onward, down deserted streets, and now a new problem began to eat at him. His head kept trying to float back to Vietnam. He fought with it, feeling very much two men, a weak one who wanted to return and a strong one who would not let him. He’d been hit in Vietnam too, and once you’ve been hit, it always feels the same. He slid for a second, unrooted in time, the dead past floating up big as a movie in front of him. There was an enormous amount of pain that day, and the pain he now felt brought that back. But this wasn’t anything like it. The pain of the hip had been absolute.
This pain was stunning and pointed but he knew he could beat it. He’d had worse pain than this, plenty of times. This was nothing. He snorted, trying to get out of the ’Nam, and made himself concentrate on old Jack Payne and the happy glint in his pig eyes as he pulled the trigger.
&n
bsp; He felt himself slipping into numbness and stupidity. He hated himself for that moment of utter strangeness when he’d been shot.
Gun-simple fool. He’d been easy for them because he wanted Solaratov so bad, that was it. That was the best trick, how they played on what he wanted. These Agency fucks had somehow found out about him and Donny and how they got nailed by a Nailer coming over the crest, and they used it on him like a club, used his most private thing. Agency hoods, working on something big and dark and complicated, meant to turn on his stupidity and his vulnerability and his need.
Now, I got to stop the blood or I die. He looked about him. On the seat was a bag that said Dunkin’ Donuts. He reached in, pulled out a wad of waxy paper. He tightened it into a ball and stuffed it into the entrance wound, the one that was bleeding so badly.
There. Wasn’t much, but it was what he had.
He knew exactly where he was going, if he could only stay smart enough to get there.
He’d studied it, after all. There was only one escape route. Now, he had only one problem and that was the fact that he was dying.
Or was he? Shouldn’t he be dead by now? The first bullet had gone right through him, for some crazy reason, and he suspected that it was a ball round, overpenetrative, it had missed major body structures, taken out no arteries, whatever. As for the shoulder hit, that part of his body had gone to numbness, but there wasn’t much blood and he had a sense, maybe illusory, it didn’t matter, that no bone had been broken. So on he drove, by this time calmed down and no longer roaring. But he had to dump the car, that was the thing. The car was death.
He drove toward water.
In water there was safety.
“Attention all, units, we have a definite confirm, we have Government Interagency motorpool car, a beige eighty-eight Ford Taurus, plate number Sierra Doggie one-five-niner-Lima, that’s Sierra Doggie one-five-niner-Lima. Suspect is armed and dangerous, a white male, about forty, wounded but considered dangerous, and an early ID for the name Robert Lee Swagger, I say again, all units, he’s armed and dangerous, approach with caution.”
Oh, shit, he thought.
But Bob had seen the water.
He rolled off the road, raising a cloud of dust behind him, slewing through weeds and mulch. Suddenly it was before him, the vast band of blue-black Mississippi, a sinewy, bending thing. He had no real idea of what he was doing because of blood loss. And of course the rage which was making him insane. He had no sense of making a decision. The car just surged ahead and he felt a sense of liberation, of release, similar in fact to the one he’d felt as he blew through the window, and then suddenly there were bubbles and blackness all around him, pulling at him. In the pocket of the cab, the water line rose as the car sank. He rose with it, until his head struck the ceiling. He felt the torrent blasting through the car’s open windows as he sank, and he knew he’d die now, trapped beneath the surface.
But again his rage helped and it released a last pump of energy and adrenaline, and with half a body and the thrust of his legs, he managed to get the door open. He was almost born again. The water was warm and green now and he rose toward sunlight, and then suddenly tasted the air. The plunge off a dock had carried the car maybe fifteen feet out; overhead a helicopter made a sweep of the river, the way the Hueys had buzzed the Perfume during Tet. But it was far off and couldn’t see him.
He flipped to his back, and propelled himself toward shore. Drifting, he eventually found himself among green reeds weaving in the current. Barges plied the water a half-mile or so away, but the river was so wide here it looked to be a placid lake. Bob waded woozily, his hair plastered against his scalp, his wet shirt heavy against his skin, his body drugged with fatigue. He couldn’t believe he was still alive and able to move. It seemed a miracle.
He found a rotting log floating in the weeds. If he stayed there he’d die or get caught and he knew if he got caught, he couldn’t kill them all, kill Payne and the colonel—and kill Solaratov, who made it all possible. If it was Solaratov. And if it wasn’t, he’d kill whoever it was. That’s what he wanted.
Bob got his belt off, stopping momentarily to discover with surprise the gun he’d taken jammed into his waist. Thank God it was stainless steel and probably wouldn’t rust. As for the bullets, would they corrode? He didn’t know. What choice did he have? He slid it to his jean pocket, a tight fit that would hold good. Then he buckled the belt around the log and wrapped his arm through it, and pushed off. With surprising swiftness, the log carried him into the center of the river, and the current picked him up. But he felt amazingly good. Now and then a chopper buzzed by but he wasn’t visible against the log and when darkness came, he swore at the flashing lights here and there along the shore. But Bob just let the current carry him along through the afternoon and the night, and when the dawn broke, he was right where he wanted to be. He was in the jungle.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The lead editorials mourned the passing of the great man, of course, but the off-leads quickly got to the matter of blame.
And so he returns, ran the piece in the Washington Post the next day, the seedy little man with the grudge and the rifle.
The grudge does not make him special; only the .38 caliber rifle does. Like a figure from our darkest, most atavistic nightmares, he returns, and writes himself into history. If, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation has alleged, the perpetrator of yesterday’s shooting tragedy in New Orleans turns out to be Bob Lee Swagger, the Vietnam War hero fallen on hard times and embittered because his country would not award him the Congressional Medal of Honor he felt he deserved, or if he turns out to be another man with vainglorious notions of what he deserves but could not get, it really doesn’t matter. What matters—what has mattered since 1963—is that in this country alone history can be written with firearms precisely because firearms are available; small men can become, momentarily and delusionarily, big men, because firearms are available. In the case of Lee Harvey Oswald it was a cheap Italian war surplus rifle. In the case of yesterday’s tragedy, it was a high-powered American sporting firearm, manufactured by Remington. Again, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that guns have no other purpose but to kill, and that they kill so frequently has begun to erode the illusion of the “American sportsman.” Isn’t it time for everybody, in the terrifying wake of another bloody American tragedy, a typical American tragedy, involving guns and dreams that would not come true, to begin to work toward the day when only policemen and soldiers and a few forest rangers have guns?
The New York Times, by contrast, took a more geopolitical view:
The terrifying events in New Orleans yesterday merely reconfirm that as a nation we have not yet recovered entirely from the great cataclysm that was the Vietnam War, no matter our nearly bloodless victory over Saddam Hussein last year. A veteran of Vietnam, much decorated and held in great esteem by his peers, perhaps propelled into bitterness by the glory of the recent battle in distinction to the lack of glory in his own, evidently descended in hatred to the point where he could commit a terrible act, and thereby blaspheme his own well-established heroism and the cause he fought so valiantly for 20 years ago. It is to be hoped that Robert Lee Swagger, the Marine gunnery sergeant and champion sniper who yesterday apparently achieved his 88th kill, may be captured alive, his psyche examined, the seeds of his violence exhumed. The first interest here must be justice. If Sergeant Swagger is indeed guilty of this crime, he must be punished. But we hope that the punishment is tempered with mercy. Like few other men, Sergeant Swagger was a product of his times. The wounds from which he has bled internally over the past two decades were wounds inflicted by his own country and its vast and careless disinterest in his struggles and the struggles of the men with whom he served. That is why, although he is not a victim, he is certainly a tragedy. When he is apprehended—if he is not already dead, as some law enforcement officers have conjectured, given the gravity of his wounds—perhaps these issues will be answered; but perhaps they will not.
And perhaps finally, the largest perhaps of them all will be if Bob Lee Swagger comes at last to have some peace himself. When that happens, perhaps we as a nation can also have some peace, when we at last accept the evil of our enterprise in Vietnam, and the squalor of our position in the world as we attempt to impose our way on other nations. Once again, our way, the “American way,” has been shown to be the way of death.
The Baltimore Evening Sun wondered:
Who needs a long-range assault rifle capable of shooting a man dead at over 400 yards? Certainly not the thousands of children who perish accidentally at the hands of such militaristic-styled guns each year nor the thousands more innocent citizens killed by such multi-shot long-range guns when carried by drug dealers on our city’s streets. Nor do the innocent animals slaughtered by such weapons in our nation’s forests. Only the powerful gun lobby, drug dealers, the demented men who kill animals for pleasure … and assassins, as yesterday’s tragedy in New Orleans proved, need such a gun. Congress should act immediately to ban telescopic-powered long-range multi-shot assault rifles. That way, we can give life a chance.
In fact, it was not the murdered man’s face that appeared on the cover of Time and Newsweek; it was Bob’s. In an instant, he had become a world celebrity, by virtue first of the killing and second of the miraculous escape, and third for what he represented: the Dixie gun nut with all that trigger time in the ’Nam, gone off on his own twisted route. He was Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray and Byron De La Beckwith all squashed into one mythic figure, the sullen white trash, yankee-hatin’ shooter, a character out of Faulkner, a Flem Snopes with a rifle.
The case had been swiftly developed by the FBI; Nick Memphis’s visual ID of the suspect minutes after the shot had been fired only hastened matters by an hour or so, and the media and police computer networks were far faster and more sophisticated than they’d been in 1963.