“The name even comes from Bay of Pigs,” said Nick. “RamDyne, large R, large D: it has no meaning except R and D, which a guy I used to know said computed out in Army lingo, sixty-two-style, to Romeo Dog, which was the call sign for the Second Battalion of Twenty-twenty-six Brigade at Red Beach, the force that got cut off, chopped up and captured. So calling it RamDyne, maybe that’s somebody’s way of commemorating the past and setting course for the future. That sound right to you, doc?”
“They were zealots,” Dobbler said. “They were true believers. They had a sense of building from the ruins, like Hitler, I suppose. It guided them. To God knows what.”
Bob just sat there, listening to the pitch, running the rod, with its bright crown of bronze bristle and its dank lubrication of Shooter’s Choice, through the bore guide and up and down the rifle barrel.
“Bob, we can put them away. In a jail. There can be a happy ending. There can be justice.”
“He’s right, Mr. Swagger. Terrible wrongs were done. But the world can be restored to order. And some of us in this room—there’s a provisional salvation for us, too. You can be at peace.”
Bob looked at them harshly.
“It’s just words,” he said. “In Vietnam we had a saying. ‘Don’t mean a thing.’ That’s what this is. It don’t mean a thing.”
He put the rod down, removed the Delrin bore guide from the action, and began to scrub at the insides of the chamber and the receiver with a blackened toothbrush, giving the weapon his full attention.
“It’s all here!” Nick exploded. “Or most of it. I don’t quite know what mission first got them together in the early sixties. That’s lost to history. And the early stuff is mundane, when they worked for the Agency as a cover organization for shipping illegal cargos to various hot spots in the world. It gets interesting in sixty-nine when this nutcase Shreck was recruited after the Army sacked him, with the mission of building an operational and training arm. He seems to have created a kind of Green-Beret-for-Hire unit. These boys saw some action, no shit. Africa in the early seventies. Lots of time in the Mideast in the late seventies and eighties, and, lately, lots of time in Central America. Whenever some tin-pot country had a job that needed doing but not the capacity, RamDyne could field an operations nasty-ass team. But never so nasty as with Panther Battalion on the Sampul River last year. They talk about that much, Doctor?”
“Nothing. They had perfect professional discipline. I didn’t know until I saw the tape. And the job on the bishop—they said he was a secret guerrilla and that he was working to sabotage the peace process. He had to be stopped so that peace could be achieved. He was an enemy of peace.”
Nick leaned toward Bob.
“This is the key part. Two hundred civilians, most of them women and kids, all wiped out. But it wasn’t a mistake. That’s the secret of the Sampul River. It’s what this thing has always been about. They did it on purpose.”
He had Bob’s attention now.
“Here’s the killer,” Nick said. “Here’s the only thing in Annex B that’s worth a damn. It’s what puts Shreck, Payne, and all the RamDyne yo-yos in the chamber when they drop the little pill.”
He handed it over to the doctor.
“It’s a note from Shreck to—name obliterated, notice how the big guys protect themselves—dated 2 May ’91, sent through U.S. diplomatic pouch from the embassy in El Salvador. Read it to us, Doctor.”
Dobbler cleared his throat.
Eyes Only: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Washington, D.C.
Re: Panther Bn. training operations, Ocalupo, Salvador.
General de Rujijo agrees that punitive measures must be taken against the peasant population but finds that his soldiers, drawn from the same population, are reluctant on the scale we have conceptualized. My training cadre has isolated two platoons of Panther Battalion and we seem to be making real progress in bringing them to the proper level of willingness. Will be moving onto Sampul River district in June and commencing counterinsurgency ops that area. Anticipate sanitation program to commence that date.
Signed,
Raymond F. Shreck
There was a moment of silence.
“You see,” said Nick, “some genius in an office somewhere wants to get the guerrillas to the peace talks. But there’s no pressure on them. Nothing’s happening. They’ve made some kind of deal with the rural population. So he dreams up this idea: send in some crack troops, line up the peasants and blow ’em away. It was a massacre ordered up out of a catalogue. Atrocity, one each, OD, Summer Issue, Number 5554442. Murder-R-Us. The point being to scare the peasants so fucking bad they’ll never help the guerrillas again. The guerrillas have to come in and make powwow. And here’s the worst part: it worked. He’s probably even proud of himself. He did the hard thing. He made the world a better place, and it only cost two hundred or so women and kids. That’s RamDyne, isn’t it, Doctor? I mean, that’s classic RamDyne.”
“The hard thing,” said Dobbler. “Yes, they could have done that. Yes, that’s what the tape shows.”
“Anyway,” said Nick, “with the tape and Annex B, Shreck’s dead. The whole fucking program is blown out of the water. And anybody who sailed on the ship—that includes the Bureau’s Lancer Committee, who bought the National Interest bullshit hook, line and sinker—goes down with her. Down to the bottom.”
Bob just nodded grimly.
“There’s only one problem,” said Nick. “This file was sent to the general prior to the operation against the archbishop. It was meant to keep him from going hog-wild. And boy, the stink it’s going to make when it gets out. Man, it’ll make Watergate and Iran-Contra look like tea parties. But maybe it’ll get you off the hook. And maybe it won’t.”
Bob was done with the action. He took an aerosol can of Gun Scrubber and began to blow compressed-air-driven solvent into the trigger mechanism with a sharp, wet hiss.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Bob.
“Here’s the plan,” said Shreck. “Very simple. It’s how we bring Bob into Scott’s kill zone. Scott says he can deliver the one-shot kill at ranges no man, not even Bob, can guarantee. He’ll take it at between fifteen hundred and seventeen hundred yards. A mile, perhaps. He’s operating at the very edge of the envelope, where not even Bob has been before. And that’s our advantage. This is how we do it.”
Payne leaned forward to listen.
“Scott goes in independently about a day in advance of our arrival. He’ll never hit Blue Eye, so nobody will see him or even know he’s there, and no one will believe that a man with his infirmity could penetrate so deep in the wilderness. He’ll go in by ’chute, a HALO job, high altitude, low opening, the night before, landing in Hard Bargain Valley. Nicoletta goes in with him and we’ll drop an ATV. Nicoletta will be his legs and get him up to the ridge and dig him a spider hole.
“Meanwhile, our end of the operation takes the form of a barter. We have the girl. Bob has the cassette. The woman will mean more to him than the cassette to us. We make contact with him, just as he said, in Blue Eye. We’ll offer him the woman for the cassette.”
Payne wanted the woman, too.
“We’ll offer him the woman and a fresh start,” the colonel continued. “We’ll tell him that we can set it up so that he’s no longer a marked man. He can have his life back, he can have the woman. He’ll seem to accept, but of course it’ll be a lie. He’ll make the exchange, then count on his skills to double around and kill us from afar. But he can’t do it until the woman is safe. That’s the key. We have to preempt him.”
“How do we set up a swap?” Payne asked.
“We tell him that we’re worried about his ability to pick us off at long range. We can’t give him that opportunity. We tell him that at 1000 hours on November third, we’ll fire a flare in the sky, a red flare. He makes a compass fix on it and has one hour to make it to the site. When he’s there, he finds a flare pistol. He fires an answering flare so we know he’s in position. We fire another answ
ering flare. Again he has an hour to reach the spot. Again he finds a flare, and lets us know he’s arrived. In that way we bounce him through the mountains. He never has time to get set up because he’s got to stay on the move to get to the site so that he can fire the pistol so that we fire our flare pistol. We maneuver him into Hard Bargain Valley. He should be exhausted and desperate. In the middle of the valley we wait for him. He’ll feel safe there, because the closest shooting range is well over fifteen hundred yards, and he knows nobody can hit at that range. He can’t hit at that range. Plus, how could we get poor old crippled Lon in to even attempt such a thing? At one hundred yards distance, he sends over Memphis with the cassette, we send over you with the woman. When I see the cassette is all right, I simply press a button on my watch that emits a high pitch of noise that Lon’s radio can pick up. Hearing the signal, Lon takes Bob down from fifteen hundred yards; you and I shoot Memphis. It’s over.”
“The woman?”
“Payne, that’s a stupid question.”
“Yeah,” said Payne.
Nick looked at him for just a moment; the way he processed information somehow got fouled up and then he realized that indeed Bob had said what Bob had said.
“It doesn’t matter?” he exploded. “Are you kidding? It does matter. You’re innocent! This whole thing has been about your innocence! Not because it’s you but because that’s how the system works: the innocent go free, the guilty go to jail. That’s America. That’s what’s at stake—”
Bob put down the cleaning implements.
“Pork, this here thing isn’t about getting me off a hook. It’s about something else. I got a woman who did me good who is now Payne’s playtoy. I got a dog that stuck by me when no one else would and ended up in the ground. I got a country that thinks anybody who fought in Vietnam is some kind of crazy sniper who shoots at the president and any man who owns a gun is a crazy man. Those are debts that have to be paid first off. And then there’s the goddamn tape and that letter. I don’t want that goddamn thing playing on the TV like a movie, and all those reporters getting rich and writing books off that letter for years to come. No, sir, not by me, not if I have breath to stop it.”
“You have to let the cards fall where they—”
“The cards fall where I put them. And here’s where I put them. Plain and simple, we’re going to zip the bag on those boys, and save that woman and then I’ll deal with the other thing. Agree with me or get out of here. Julie first, Shreck and Payne second, and nothing third.. Got that?”
Nick looked at Bob sitting there, stolid as a rock. He felt like Geraldo Rivera interviewing Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok at the same time. There was no bend in Bob’s furious rectitude, his nutty conviction that he would do what he had to do.
“Jesus, you are a stubborn bastard, Bob,” he said. “Your only way out is with this letter and the tape and—”
“Play it my way or don’t play it. That’s all. Got that? If I don’t believe you’re on my program, I’ll ship you out of here. You can go back to New Orleans and that little girl and let me take care of the men’s work.”
Nick didn’t have to think a second. He was in. Always had been. Had to see how it would finish. He’d given himself to this strange bird, and so he elected to stay the course, not that he had a real choice.
“Sure,” he finally said. “It’s fine. We’ll do it your way.”
“I haven’t told you everything,” said Dobbler. “And now I will.”
They both turned to look at him.
“What makes Shreck such a powerful antagonist. One of my duties at RamDyne was to interpret tests. He had once been tested, when he went to work there. The psychologist then was an idiot and didn’t understand. But the results are clear. Shreck is more than a sociopath, he’s one of those rare men who is simply not afraid to die. Who, in fact, wants to die. Payne is the same way. You see, that’s why they are so frightening. Most men care about life. In the end, most men always act out of self-preservation. But these two don’t care and won’t act that way. It’s a function of self-hatred so passionately held that it’s off the charts.”
Another pause. Then Bob said, “You know, doctor-man, you must come from some pretty soft places to find that so remarkable. You could be describing one half of the world’s professional soldiers and both halves of its professional criminals. Truth is, I used to be one of those boys. Didn’t give two hairs about surviving. Now I have something to live for. Now I’m scared to hell I’ll die. Will it cost me my edge?”
He almost smiled, one of the few times Nick had ever seen anything so gentle play across the strong, hard features of his face.
“Sure is going to be damned entertaining to find out, isn’t it?” Bob said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Nick said he’d do it.
Bob was stern. “No funny business. No heroics. You play hero, you kill us all. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, I understand. I can handle this.”
“I know you can. I’m just telling you. Whatever they say, you agree. You listen hard, and you agree.”
Nick climbed into the pickup and drove down the mountain in the dark. It was a wet, shaggy predawn and tendrils of fog clung to the hollows and valleys. For Nick, it was like driving through some half-remembered land from his childhood, as if dragons lurked in the tall pines and the deep caves.
Many switchbacks and crossovers later, he came to flatland, farmland and a highway, passed the burned church, and then drove on in to the town of Blue Eye itself, which even in the rain looked festive. The sun was up as he arrived. THE BUCKS ARE STOPPED HERE, the sign still said, fluttering over the town square. Bright shiny pickups and Rec-Vs lined the street, rifles visible hanging in the racks in their back windows. Everywhere Nick could see men proud in their blaze-orange camouflage. Tomorrow was the first day of deer season.
Nick parked and pushed his way through the crowd, which seemed to have been drawn to some epic pancake feed put on by the Kiwanis or Jaycees. The boys were talking rifles and loads, hunting techniques, telling stories of giant animals who’d soaked up bullet after bullet and then walked away. There was a common anticipation and a sporting crowd’s fever in the air. All agreed that, what with a moist and succulent summer, the Arkansas whitetails were everywhere. It would be, everybody said, a great year for a venison harvest.
But Nick, melancholy as always with the approach of action, ignored all this, went to the square, and sat himself down on a bench near a statue of some ancient Confederate hee-row in pigeon-shit-green copper. There he slumped, a glowering figure in jeans and a rough workman’s coat, his Beretta in a speed holster upside down under his left arm, not three inches from where his right hand just happened to fall.
He sat and he sat, and in time—he had no sense of it at all—a man came and sat with him. It was very smoothly done, but then everything these birds did they did smoothly. They were professionals.
“Memphis?”
“Yes.”
“Good. There,” said the man. “Can you see her?”
“No,” said Nick.
“See, the Plymouth Voyager van. The back door is open. She’s sitting there. Can you see her?”
He could. She was a lean middle-aged woman, handsome and composed, dressed in a sweater and jeans, and with a grave look on her face. There was something stiff in the way she sat.
Sitting next to her was Payne. He remembered Payne from the swamp, and the jaunty, relishing way he had interrogated Nick and got him ready to die. And he remembered Payne from Annex B: Payne, of the Sampul River.
“Yeah, I see them.”
“Do you want to talk to her?”
“No.”
“You have the cassette?”
“The cassette, you bet. But we’ve got more than that. I also managed to dig Annex B up.”
“Oh,” said Shreck.
“There’s enough to send you and Payne to the electric chair three times. Man, they’ll deep-fat fry you to a crisp.?
??
Shreck laughed.
“Not this time, sonny. Now you know how this has to happen. We need that cassette. Swagger thinks the woman is important. And we both know Bob has a stubborn, romantic streak, don’t we?”
Nick turned. He looked at Raymond F. Shreck for the first time. He wasn’t disappointed. He thought of the word tough and imagined it carried out to some science fiction degree. Short-haired, steady and strong, the colonel looked like a .45 hardball round in flesh. He was all blunt force, hard eyes, sitting ramrod straight, not a tremor or a line of doubt anywhere about him.
“You know if it were up to me, and I was still with the Bureau, I’d bust your ass so fast you’d leave your teeth in the street.”
Shreck smiled.
“Sonny, people have been trying to kill me for nearly forty years. They’re all dead and buried and I’m still here. So don’t try to scare me. It’s a little late in the day for that.”
He was wearing a Trebark camouflage suit and a blaze-orange baseball cap that said in gold sans serif across the front, AMERICAN HUNTER AND DAMN PROUD OF IT. His eyes met and held Nick’s as forcefully as an assault, and it was Nick who finally looked away.
“Tell Swagger if he crosses me, I kill the woman. Kill her dead. Cut her throat, watch her die, walk away. I’ve got tons of money and a thousand new identities I can slip into. I’m home free at any second if I want to be.”
“But you want that cassette. And those documents.”
“Frankly, I don’t really give a shit about the documents. But the cassette does have my face on it; it’s the only absolute record of my appearance. Life could be difficult if it got out. But the people I work for will be excited about the documents. So bring them too, or I kill the woman. Now this is how we play it.”
Nick listened intently as the colonel laid out the plan.