In the perfect O of the scope, he became the crucifier. He laid the cross wire of the lens on the forms cowering before him, twelve times their normal size, twelve times more confused and frightened, twelve times more desperate for leadership, and he began to destroy them. They seemed so innocent; it was so easy; they died without protest or awareness that he had come to nail them. But he didn’t care.
He hunted yelling men—sergeants and platoon leaders, heroes—and blew them away. He shot for center body, and in the jump of the recoil, he could still see that instant deflation that signified a hit. If he saw a man, he hit him. If he only had a head to see, he shot that and when he hit a head it snapped back brokenly, leaking and wrecked.
He shot fast to break the charge. He knew if they did he was history. That was their only hope—to move up the slope aggressively, under the doctrine of maneuver and fire, taking casualties in the dozens but closing for the ultimate kill. But not today; these boys had lost their stomach for carnage in the first few seconds, when his bullets unerringly picked and took out their heroes.
A brave corporal slithered lizardlike to a fallen RTO, and Bob broke his spine. An automatic weapons team tried to maneuver to the left to set up a suppressive fire; Bob gutshot the gunner and when the loader tried to pull the weapon from his stricken hands, Bob shot him low in the abdomen. A private stood to shame his comrades into the advance; Bob rewarded him with 168 grains of hollowpoint delivered at two thousand feet per second.
“Come on, you fuckers,” he yelled hoarsely, as his system loaded itself to the hairline with adrenaline. It was the An Loc all over again, a valleyful of NVA and he was there on his lonesome to take them out. In the circular universe of the scope some men quit; they just settled back and waited in the trees for him to find them; others fled, racing across the road, their rifles abandoned. A few tried to move up toward the cover of enfilades or arroyos, but by now his eyesight was verging on the supernatural; he was into the zone, the rifle so a part of him that it felt organic; he could not remember, ever, not having the rifle, not having a world of targets. He slipped into craziness, the sniper’s twisted identification with an angry God and he shot faster and better still. He shot through the heat and the mirage and when now and then a ragged volley of shots rose toward him, he was incapable of caring. Let them come. Let them all come.
Lon Scott lay with his mouth on the cement, listening to the relentless cracks of the rifle, dry and far away. It was astonishing with what speed the man could fire. In the trees, now and then, Lon would hear a scream or see the thrashing of someone mortally hit. He knew it was only a matter of seconds before there’d be a lull in the shooting, and Bob would swing on back to pot him. With his strong arms he tried to pull himself along, hating the mutilated thing that was his body, hating his father for doing this to him all those years ago, hating his life for the strange paths it had taken. He began to cry. He had thought he was ready to die, but he wasn’t. He was terrified.
“Help me,” he screamed. But no one helped him.
Oh, please don’t let me die, he prayed.
Suddenly he heard footsteps. Some fool ran across the naked cement, bent to him, and with incredible strength hoisted him over his shoulder. The man ran, Lon bouncing and clinging, the two of them vulnerable to Bob’s whimsy for what seemed an eternity. But they made it, and with an animal leap, the man jumped from the edge of the deck to the cover in its lee. Lon banged against the bony shoulders and rolled off.
“Oh, Christ,” he said to his savior, “oh, Christ, that was the bravest thing I ever saw in my life.”
Colonel Shreck merely said, “No,” and pointed to the top of the hill. “That’s bravery, that sonovabitch.”
Then they heard the sound of a helicopter.
When the helicopter arose from behind the tree line, its hatch door bristling with guns, and began to swoop toward him like a hawk homing on some prey, Bob simply pulled himself from his belly to his knees and found the braced offhand position, his right or strong-side elbow held above the level of the scope as if his arm were a guy wire to brace the rifle. He saw the pilot’s white face blurred behind the windscreen in a split second when the bird pulled from pitched forward, to shield the canopy by the whirring of its rotor, to pitched upward, to shield the fliers by virtue of the armor of the nose cupping them from beneath.
He fired. Fuck you, he thought. Fuck you all.
The bullet hit low in the Plexiglas windscreen; through the scope he saw the sudden quicksilver of fracture smearing the glass and behind it the mortal squirm of a man hit badly and slipping into shock. Bob threw himself down, reset the rifle on its bag, and began to engage targets downhill, where a group of men who’d broken to the right as he was attending to the helicopter were skipping around the base of the hill, and he took them down like skeet, one, two, three, and four, coming dry on the fifth. He was rolling five new cartridges into the Remington when the pilotless chopper slid back into the trees, gnashed violently as it fought them, then gave up as it whirred to the earth. In another second, it had detonated, throwing a fountain of oily flame high into the sky.
The brilliance of the flash momentarily drained the color from the day, and the bright green trees; Bob didn’t notice. He was looking for targets.
Come on, he was thinking. Come on, fight me. I want to fight some more.
Shreck sat with his back to the action, beneath the deck level of the pool in a niche by the walkway out of the house, breathing hard from his run with Scott. Scott wheezed noisily and might even be weeping, but he took no notice.
Seven feet of reinforced concrete protected him from the fire. He was safe. He breathed hard, trying to work it out. From the shooting, and then the explosion of the helicopter, he read the course of battle. He understood now that Bob had been a step ahead of Dobbler and had somehow found Lon Scott on his own. He’d let them think they were luring him in when he was luring them in. He tricked them into the killing ground where the odds were to his advantage: high ground, protected shooting, and a world of skittish, leaderless targets before him.
The shooting was dying down now.
On the other side of the summit, Nick watched them move out of the trees. They were a good three hundred yards out. Without a scope on the Mini-14, that was quite a shot for a .223. But if he had to defend an entire horizon against an infantry company with a single semiautomatic rifle, he knew that he’d do better to hit them early than to let them get too close where they could carry the crest in a single rush. He could hear Bob still firing on the other side. Now it was his turn.
He was also in the classic prone, aiming through a tuft of ragged bushes that he had artlessly pulled and thrown together into something like a shooting blind. He was breathing hard but he felt surprisingly calm. He could still hear Bob laying down fire but he had no idea what was going on over there.
Carefully, he drew the rifle to him, found what he took to be a spot-weld, let his bones hold the weight of the piece, and squinted through the peep sight until it no longer existed. He saw only the body of the leader, behind the wedge of the front sight. He hoped he’d hit something this time.
Front sight, front sight, he told himself, ordering his pupil to contract until it was as clear as a dollar bill and behind it, the target was a blur. Why this worked he didn’t know, but it was the essence of shooting.
He willed the trigger to break and somehow it did.
The gun bucked; the sight picture was gone, an empty shell popped away. And when he returned again to see what could be seen, what could be seen was nothing.
“Goddammit, gimme that gun, you missed again, you jerk,” Bob yelled in his ear, and yanked the Mini-14 from Nick’s grasp. He threw it to his shoulder and cracked off the rest of the magazine, all twenty-nine shots. The shells popcorned from the breech, a bright cascade of sunlit brass. Below them, on the far side of the trees, they could see the survivors of Panther Battalion running raggedly for the far crest line.
“They’re w
ay out of range for that gun,” said Nick.
“Oh, yeah? Well, not for this one.”
He retrieved his Remington, threw the bolt, and rammed it home.
Bob was breathing heavily. His face looked crazy with fury, his eyes shrunk to hard, glaring kernels. He was blinking a bit strangely. His face was smeared with greasy smudges from all the gunsmoke he’d breathed, and his hands and shirt were almost black. He kept blinking crazily.
“Jesus,” said Nick again. “Let ’em go. They’re running. They’re broken. What’s it prove?”
“He ain’t broken,” said Bob, gesturing savagely to a hill a mile away. “There’s a goddamn spotter over there, Donny. Seen the flash of his lens. He’s been glassing us all along. You know your ballistic tables?”
“No.”
“Well, a goddamn .308 drops about eighteen feet at a thousand yards. Wind’s about five miles an hour. I’m gonna hold eighteen feet high and a mite to the left for the wind drift.”
He dropped to prone, found his spot-weld and his shooting position. Then he cranked off five shots in four seconds, flicking the bolt and ejecting a shell each time.
“That ought to fix him. Now come on, Donny.”
Nick gaped at him.
“Huh? Are you all right?”
“Come on, Donny. I want to see what we bagged. I have to find out what they did with my woman.”
“Bob, my name is—”
“Come on, boy. We’ve done enough for today. Time to get out of the zone.”
And with that the sniper headed off the mountain, his rifle in his blistered hands, to the copse a mile away where they’d stashed Bob’s truck two days earlier.
Nick went running after.
Eddie Nickles thought he’d bleed to death. His Celestron 8 was shattered, a bullet having drilled it through its wide lens and rattled through its insides. It was nothing but a tube full of broken shards.
He himself had been hit twice, once high in the head—a glancing shot, without penetration, he thought—and in the leg, a ricochet as he cowered shitting and weeping in the split second after he saw the tall man through the scope suddenly spin to zero on him.
He knew he’d never get out. He’d be gone before help arrived. There simply wasn’t much help left. He’d watched Bob shoot, the motherfucker, and shoot and shoot. He knew what that meant.
“Hey, asshole.”
He looked up to see the man himself. He was attended by a Beach Boy with a crew cut.
“You killed me,” he blurted.
“I doubt that, sonny. From the looks, you’ll recover, that is if you’ve half a heart.”
“Don’t shoot me. I just sat here and watched.”
“Was Payne here?”
“No. No, they sent Payne somewhere. They sent him to get your girl.”
“Goddammit,” Bob said.
“They’ll do her, Swagger. These guys, they’ll do anybody. This guy Shreck, runs the outfit, he can do stuff like that.”
Bob seemed to think this over.
“Was Shreck here?”
“Yes.”
“If he isn’t dead, and I don’t think he is, you tell him to leave the woman alone. If he wants me, I’ll tell him where he can find me. But he’s to leave the woman alone, or so help me Christ what’s gone before will seem like Sunday school.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Good. You tell him to look for me in the Ouachitas, because that’s where I’m going. If he’s man enough to come alone, that’s where he’ll find me.”
“He won’t come alone.”
“I know it. But you tell him anyways. Tell him to bring the woman and Payne. Tell him to come Sunday morning, nine A.M., the town square, Blue Eye, two weeks from now. That’s the first Sunday in November. We’ll set it up.”
Then he was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The call came at seven-thirty that evening.
“Go on,” said Payne. “Get it.”
She picked up the phone and listened.
“Are you Payne?” she asked.
He took the phone.
“Payne?”
“Yes.”
“It’s bad. We didn’t get him. He led us in.”
Payne listened numbly to the details.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “In two hours. No sweat.”
He put the phone down.
“Your unlucky day, honey,” he said, watching her face. “My orders were to kill you if they got Swagger. I was just going to walk away and say I did. But they didn’t get him. He got them. Your boyfriend killed forty-four men today, honey. And that means you and I got bad trouble.”
Payne had to laugh. Swagger wasn’t good, he was beyond good. He was so fucking good it was scary. He could hear the fear in Shreck’s voice. Forty-four men dead, including nine of his best guys who’d climbed aboard a chopper in an attempt to get some firepower on Bob from a new angle, and had been rewarded with a flaming death. Then, dozens wounded, Panther Battalion spread all over North Carolina, all kinds of cops hanging around, drawn by the smoke from the burning chopper, the whole thing a complete fuckup.
“Let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“East. Your boyfriend’s gonna wanna meet you. We need you for that. You got a job to do for us.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I cap you here. You want that? You just drive with me in the desert. Chopper picks us up, ferries us to an airfield, where a private jet has us in a few hours. No sweat.”
“I’m the bait, that’s it? You think you’ll get Bob because you have me, is that it?”
“Lady, I don’t think the stuff up. I just follow orders.”
“Bob will eat you alive. Bob will chew you up and spit you out. You’re dead, you know that?”
Payne laughed. The bitch had some edge.
“There’s lots of blood between him and me, honey. Lots of it, and more to come. But I got one thing he wants, and that makes me a god to him.”
She looked at him.
“I got you, bitch.”
Deputy Director Howard D. Utey of the FBI was known far and wide in his own organization and several others in the federal security sector as the man who “got” Bob Lee Swagger.
This reputation had not done his career any harm; in fact, his recent promotion to the DD level and the fine corner office he now occupied on the fifth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., was largely a result of the successful manhunt. Moreover, the image of the burning church, ingrained in the national subconscious, was a lesson to those who would trifle with the security of the president of the United States, a lesson provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and not the Secret Service, which had provided no lessons.
Everywhere he looked, all was serenity. He had nurtured contacts carefully over the course of his career, worked diligently, extracted maximum performance from those beneath him, formed relationships with powerful men, shed himself quickly of those who couldn’t perform and, most important, knew the difference, instantly, between those who could and those who couldn’t. He was careful to have men under him who were not quite as bright as he, and he particularly understood the dangers of talent, which was that while it was capable of producing spectacular results, it was just as apt to go off by itself to nurse obscure grudges or lick psychic wounds after gross expenditures of energy. Talent wasn’t consistent or loyal or pliant enough to be trusted; Howard deeply hated talent, and made certain that none of the men who worked for him ever had any talent. He’d driven seven talented men out of the Bureau and only one had stood against him, the idiot Nick Memphis, once so bright and brimming with enthusiasms, carefully betrayed at each step of the way, and yet stubborn in his refusal to leave the Bureau.
But now he had Nick at last. It was the hearing. Suspended agents are given two months off without pay and then are asked to present themselves at a certain time and place to defend their records. Most
understand that their careers are over, and quietly turn in resignations, in exchange for good recommendations. Some fight the inevitable at the hearing, but Howard had always prevailed.
But nobody had ever done what Nick had just done. Nobody simply ignored the suspension hearing, simply didn’t show. Added to everything else—even subtracted from everything else—it alone was cause for dismissal.
Howard didn’t hate Nick. He looked on him as a young man who just never learned the lessons of the team. In Tulsa, Nick had blown his shot all those years ago by refusing to acknowledge Howard’s control. And look at how it had cost him and that poor young woman he ended up marrying.
Then in New Orleans, Nick had screwed up and screwed up again. It was as if he’d learned nothing from the hold that had been put on his career. He still thought he could do it his way, by his instincts, his talents and his guts. A supervisor cannot run a well-oiled, professionally disciplined unit under such circumstances.
Now Howard looked at the separation order before him. He had merely to sign it, as had three supervisors on the hearing board that Nick had ignored, and Nick was gone.
He never enjoyed this part. He was not a cruel man who relished his power. What he relished was the system itself and his own mastery of it. He believed that what was in his best interest was also in the Bureau’s best interest. Nick’s greatest sin was that he couldn’t be a team player. He couldn’t get with the program. Poor Nick. Doomed to be an outsider, a loser, his whole life.
Howard’s pen poised over the document. He paused, just a second, then—
“Ah, Mr. Utey?”
He looked up. It was his assistant.
“Yes, Robert.”