He still thought of it as The World. It was the place where all things were, where women and liquor and pleasure and temptation commingled. Now he was back in it. He landed at Baltimore–Washington International Airport after a crazed flight that took him to St. Louis from Little Rock, then east. He was worried that his rifle, with the bright orange airline tag on the handle of the gun case, hadn’t made the trip; you always worried that some person in the airlines system would see the thing and snap it up.
But sure enough, the case came out of the luggage chute and moved along to him on the rubber belt so that he could pluck it up.
“Damn,” someone said, “hunting season’s long over, pardner.” It was early January, though surprisingly mild.
“Just a target rifle,” Bob said easily to the man, scooping up the case. He felt a little silly with the long, hard thing, so weirdly shaped among all the other luggage, and knowing that he himself looked so cowboylike to these Eastern people, in his best black Tony Lamas, a nice pair of Levi’s, a pointed-collar shirt with string tie and a black Stetson, all under a sheepskin coat, his best coat.
Getting the car turned out to be no problem at all as the reservation in his name was waiting and the girl at the counter was especially ingratiating. She thought he was some kind of cowboy hero; her eyes lit with joy at what he took to be his incredibleness and when he called her “ma’am,” she was doubly pleased.
He left the airport, found his way to the Baltimore Washington Parkway, from there to the Baltimore Beltway, and then west out I–70, across Maryland. Even in the yellowed state of high, dead winter, he could see that it was a lovely place, rolling, not so savage as Arkansas. Soon he came to mountains, old, humped things, ridge after ridge of them. In three hours, beyond Cumberland, he found himself in Maryland’s wildest pastures in its farthest, westernmost regions, not wild like the Ouachitas but nevertheless free of the poison taint of the city and just barely tame enough to accommodate the most provisional sort of farming. It looked to be fine deer country, way out in Garrett County. He was searching for a town called Accident, and halfway between it and nowhere, just where they’d said it would be, he found the small Ramada Inn nestled under the mountains. He checked in, his reservations all made and an envelope waiting for him with a hearty welcoming letter and detailed instructions on how to reach the headquarters of Accutech at its shooting facility a few miles down the road. There was also his per diem, ten crisp twenty-dollar bills.
Bob went to his room and lay down on the bed and didn’t go out anymore that night. He just thought it all out, trying not to be bothered that he had been followed his whole long trip out from the airport by a very good surveillance team.
Like everything associated with RamDyne, the trailer was small and seedy and cheap. The outfit never did anything first-class and seemed only to have cretins of the prison guard mentality working for it, like the horrid Jack Payne. And now it was jammed with men Dobbler was supposedly briefing.
The doctor sighed, looking at the dull faces in his audience.
“Er, could I have your attention please?”
He couldn’t. They paid him no attention at all. He was irrelevant to them.
How far he’d fallen and how fast! Once the youngest member of the Harvard Medical School psychiatric faculty and the sole proprietor of one of the most flourishing private practices in the Cambridge-Greater Boston area, he’d had the life he’d dreamed of and worked for so furiously. One day, however, when he was tired and his resources nearly depleted, on a last appointment, he’d let his discipline slip. He’d touched a woman. Why had he done it? He didn’t know. In the nanosecond before he did it, it hadn’t even been in his mind. But he did it. He’d touched her and when she looked at him he realized that she wanted him to touch her more, the sexual savagery that spilled out stunned him. He made love to her right there in the office. It was the start of his out-of-control phase, abetted by a severe amphetamine habit. He seduced nine patients. Inevitably one had gone to the police; the charge was rape. The squalor played itself out over six melancholy months, climaxing in his acceptance of a plea-bargained second-degree assault conviction, which delivered him, courtesy of a feminist judge, to the ungentle ministrations of Russell Isandhlwana. The symmetry was perfect, even awesome—justice at its finest: Dobbler had fucked nine neurotic women in his office; in prison he was fucked by an immense man, who called him his dickhole.
And now, he was Raymond Shreck’s dickhole. Not sexually, of course, but even Dobbler found a certain black humor in the irony: he’d gone from the ignominy of the prison to somehow secure a position in subservience to a man with the same (though somewhat modulated) sense of physical power and ruthlessness as Russell Isandhlwana, a man whom, like Russell, he totally feared but whom he needed for protection and strength.
“Earth to Planet, Doctor!” It was the horrid Payne.
“What?”
“Hey, get with the program. You lost it there, man.”
Ah! He’d lost his place again, wasn’t sure what question he was answering. It was the last briefing before the subject showed up.
Oh, yes, he was holding forth on Bob’s unique capacity for utter near-death stillness, explaining to Payne’s perplexed listeners why it was that Bob, though in his room from five-thirty P.M. on the previous evening, had simply ceased to exist for their listening devices. He was trying to get them to see how important this was, for it got to the very nature of Swagger’s uniqueness.
“Ah—yes, he has an ability to shut down and let the world go about its business while he’s frozen; and then when he’s become a part of the environment, then and only then, will he strike. But like any skill, it’s a skill that simply has to be practiced. He was practicing nothingness.”
Somebody yawned.
Somebody farted.
Somebody laughed.
“All right,” said Shreck, vigorously, climbing up front and by sheer body heat exiling the doctor to the wings. “Thanks, Dobbler. Now, listen up, I want eyes front, Payne, get your people to pay some attention for once. It’s very close to the most sensitive part of this operation, the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”
Shreck’s dark eyes seemed to beam with strange force.
“Let me tell you who you’re dealing with, so there’s no misunderstanding. This guy is mule-proud Southern, as stubborn as they come. He doesn’t want to be pushed and he won’t stand to be insulted. He’s also still got some gung-ho Marine in him. He’ll be a fucking ramrod; you try and bend him and he may kick your ass. So the way we play him is slow and steady. You don’t push; you don’t order. You just smile and go along. Any questions?”
Shreck’s sudden dramatic appearance had its desired effect: it silenced the troops.
They were fools.
“Sir?”
Someone had leaned in.
“Yeah,” said Shreck.
“Sir, it’s 0730 hours. Surveillance called; subject just left the motel. He’s on his way.”
“Okay,” said Shreck, “I hope you were listening to the doctor, because if anybody screws up I’ll have his ass. Now let’s get cracking, people. First day on a new job.”
If nothing else, it had a comforting feeling. It was, after all, a rifle range, one of those peeling, flaking, sagging, yet grand places where men have always gathered to plunk themselves down before a piece of paper with a black circle imprinted on it and discover the secrets of their own rifles and their own selves. Bob had spent a lifetime, it sometimes seemed, in such a place, and always the talk was good and the feeling among the shooters easy and generous.
He stood on a concrete apron, before a series of T-shaped shooting benches, green, always green, on every shooting range in America they were green. Bob could see the place had been built sometime in the thirties, the private preserve of some hunting and shooting club or other, and he knew that under the sagging roof that shielded the apron and the benches there’d been many tales told of deer that had gotten away and of loads
good and loads bad, and rifles worth as much as a good woman and rifles worth as little as a dog with the clap.
The only unusual thing about this place, a mile or so off the main road by a series of convoluted gravel tracks, was a trailer off to one side, which while not new looked as if it had just been dumped there. Before it stood the sign of the sponsors of this day’s labors, Accutech.
He could see the targets across the faintly sloping yellow meadow beyond the line of benches, a black dot at a hundred yards, a black period at two hundred and a black pinprick at three hundred.
“Coffee, Mr. Swagger?” asked the colonel, still in his raincoat. Next to him was the morose little noncom who always looked ready for a fight. Everybody else was a gofer, except one pear-shaped city boy with a goatee who looked like he had a finger up his ass.
“No thanks,” he said. “It jitters the nerves.”
“Decaf?”
“Decaf’s fine,” he said, and Colonel Shreck nodded to a man who quickly poured Bob a paper cupful from a thermos.
It was surprisingly temperate, around sixty, and a gentle breeze pressed over the range; above a pale-lemon sun stood in a pale-lemon sky. It was the false spring, a phony of a day, too sweet to be trusted this month.
“All set, then?” asked the colonel.
“I suppose,” Bob said.
“Do you want to recheck your zero before we start the testing rounds?”
“Yes sir.”
“All right, gentlemen, let’s move away. Eyes and ears on.”
Bob uncased his rifle, lodged it on a sandbag rampart and slid the bolt back. He cracked open a box of the Lake City Match rounds, threaded five, one after the other with a brass clicking, into the magazine, pushed home and locked the bolt which flew forward and rotated shut with the gliding ease of a vault door closing on ball bearings and grease. He pulled his Ray-Ban aviators on, hooking them behind the ears, and slid his earmuffs down across the top of his head, clamping his ears off from the world. He felt the roar of blood rushing in his brain.
Bob slid up to the rifle and found his bench shooter’s position, his boots flat upon the cement apron of the range as if making the magic construction of stability up through his body that would translate to the rock-hard hold of the rifle itself.
He pulled the rifle up, and in, chunking it against his shoulder, placing his hand upon the comb tuned so just the faintest smudge of fingertip caressed the lightened trigger, adjusting a bunny-ear bag underneath the butt-heel. His other arm ran flat along the shooting bench, under the rifle which itself had been sunk just right into the sandbags.
Bob found his spot-weld, and closed his left eye. The image was a bit out of focus, so he diddled with the ring to bring it back to clarity and for his effort was rewarded with the black image of perfect circumference, quartered precisely by the stadia of the scope, ten times the size it had been, now as big as a half-dollar at pointblank range.
He exhaled half a breath, held what he had, and with that wished the end of his finger to contract but a bit and was rewarded with the thrill of recoil, the blur as the rifle ticked off a round. As he was throwing the bolt, he heard a spotter.
“X-ring. Damn, right in the middle, perfect, a perfect shot.”
Bob fired four more times into the same hole.
“I guess I’m zeroed,” he said.
A man called Hatcher briefed him on the test.
“Mr. Swagger, one of my associates will load your rifle with five rounds. You’ll not know if you’re shooting your own handloads, the Federal Premium, the Lake City Match or our own Accutech Sniper Grade ammunition. You’ll fire four groups of five rounds each at a hundred yards, four at two hundred yards and four at three hundred yards. Then we’ll compute the groupings and see how the ammunition stacks up. Then, this afternoon, we’d like to run a similar series of tests, but from offhand or improvised positions, with a stress factor added in. I think you’ll find it quite interesting.”
“You’re paying the bills. Let’s get shooting,” Bob said.
Bob shot with extraordinary concentration. What separated him from other shooters was his utter consistency, his sameness. He was a human Ransom rest, like the mechanical gizmo they use to test pistols, coming each time to the same strained yet perfectly built position, cement to bone to wood, bone to rifle, fingertip to trigger. Each time, the same: his cheek just so against the fiberglass of the stock, the same pull of rifle into shoulder, the same cant to his hand on the grip, the same angle and looseness of his off-hand, the same distance between eye and scope, the same half-breath held, the same three heartbeats in suspended animation, the same infinitesimal backwards slide of trigger as the slack came out, the same crispness like a grass rod snapping as the trigger broke, the same soundless detonation and blur as the rifle shivered under the ignition of its round.
“X-ring, little high, maybe a third of an inch high at two o’clock.”
“X-ring, within an inch.”
“X-ring, inside an inch.”
There were no flyers, no glitches, no mistakes. Bob found the groove and stayed there, throughout the long morning, hardly moving or breathing or wasting a second or a motion. It pleased him queerly that the rifle was taken from him empty, then brought back loaded, that regularly someone ran to record and change the targets.
He lost count. It was like the ’Nam. You just shot and watched the bullet go where you sent it, with the tiniest of deviations. It became almost abstract, completely impersonal; you didn’t brood on it, merely broke it down into small rituals, small repetitions. And on and on the score mounted, so that nobody could stay with him and he got closer and closer to Carl Hitchcock’s legendary figure of ninety-three.
“X-ring.”
“X-ring.”
“X-ring.”
When he was done, had shot all four five-shot strings at all three ranges, he put the rifle down, while technicians ran out to secure the targets and calculate the group sizes.
Of course Bob had made the loads early on, by the slight difference in the kicks. He knew his own rounds right off, and was just a bit slower in marking the difference between the Federal and the Lake City loads, but in time he could tell; that left by process of elimination only the Accutech Sniper Grade ammunition. It shot a mite high, he felt, and he had the impression of the shots clustering just over the X-ring, carrying a bit. Lots of ooomph though, a hot round, very consistent.
“Mr. Swagger, would you like to see your results?” asked Hatcher.
“Yes, I would,” said Bob.
He went over to a bench where the results were being tabulated, by two men with a set of dial calipers.
“Okay,” said Hatcher, “I think you’ll be pleased. I’ve marked each target according to the distance and the ammunition you fired. At a hundred yards, you fired Federal Premium, Accutech, Lake City Match M852’s and your own handload, in that order. Here are the targets.”
Bob looked at the mutilated X-rings, the small spatters of perforations dead center where the bullet holes had cloverleafed.
“The group size, as we make it, is as follows. Federal, .832 inches, Accutech .344 inches, Lake City Match .709 inches and your handload .321 inches.”
Bob examined them; yes, the Accutech stuff was about as good as his own handloads, and quite a bit better than the two best factory loadings. He nodded.
“Let’s see how she holds out a bit,” he said.
“Okay, at two hundred you drop the four and a half inches the ballistics table says you’ll drop but you’ll see the group sizes remain under a minute of angle, though the Federal begins to push it.”
Again, Bob saw the neat clusters of punctures; this time, however, cloverleafs were rarer, almost a function of coincidence. Each group was between one and a half and two inches in diameter, and each about two inches off the X-ring, as the bullet had dropped. The Federal, surprisingly, yielded the sloppiest grouping with the holes spread out at almost two inches exactly; again, Bob’s handloads held truest,
at .967 inches, center of outer hole to center of outer hole, less than half a minute of angle, but the Accutech lot was pressing him closely, with a .981-inch rating, also less than half a minute of angle, and Bob felt he might have done better because he sensed his own round immediately and relaxed, having the confidence in its ability to perform.
“And now, our pièce de résistance,” said Hatcher. “Mike, the three-hundred-yard targets, please. Mr. Swagger, I think you’re going to see why we call our ammunition ‘Sniper Grade.’ You, above all others, should grasp the significance.”
He handed the four targets out.
When Bob was impressed, that respect took the form of a low, involuntary whistle. He whistled.
At three hundred yards, cloverleafs were a thing of fantasy. At three hundred yards, the groups fell between nine and eleven inches from the X-ring, at six o’clock, outside of the black. The groups opened up and the Federal revealed its fraudulence: it had exploded beyond minute of angle to a full 4.5 inches.
Bob shook his head with an evil snort, deeply disappointed. The group looked like the random pokings of a child.
The Lake City did a bit better, but not much; it was just at the minute of angle limit, the group playing across three inches, though in truth one of them might have been a flyer, because if you subtracted it the group fell to 2.5 inches.
And Bob saw that the Accutech stuff had beaten him. His own group still had the illusion of a circle, the punctures clustered within 1.386 inches; he was sub-minute of angle still, but the damned Accutech was 1.212 inches, with one three-shot triangle within .352 inches!
“Damn,” he said.
“That’s shooting,” someone said. “That’s fine shooting. Most men can’t see at three hundred yards, even with a 24x.”
“No,” said Bob, awed. “That’s ammo. That’s fine ammo.”
It was fine ammo. Only fifty to sixty men in the world could handload ammo that fine, Frank Barnes maybe, a couple of the sublime technicians at Speer or Hornady or Sierra, a few wildcatters of a dying breed, old gnarled men who’d lived with guns in machine shops their whole lives. A few world-class benchrest shooters who agged in the 1’s. A few Delta or FBI SWAT armorers. Whoever put this stuff together knew what he was doing. Bob had an image in his head of some old man who’d done it a million times, working the brass down to the finest, smallest perfection. It took more than patience; it took a kind of genius. He felt him. He felt him on the range: the presence of an old shooter who knew what he was doing.