“If he stays, he’s dead,” said Shreck.
“And if he goes, he’s dead,” said Payne.
Bob appeared to have disengaged. He stood away from them, unmoving, as Memphis did all the screaming. Finally, Shreck could just barely make out through the scope that he was saying something; then he turned and walked away. Shreck watched Memphis bend quickly to Dobbler, the yellow letters of his FBI raid jacket flashing as he opened it to peel his own canteen from his belt, and hand it to the man. Then he turned to run after Bob.
Shreck, Payne and the woman had achieved Hard Bargain Valley from the southwest, coming across a screen of trees and over a little creek. They were more than an hour ahead of Swagger and Memphis, though in the hours since dumping poor Dr. Dobbler, the two pursuers had closed the gap considerably.
It had not been an easy approach, for no roads lead to the valley and it must be earned by several hours of desperately difficult hiking over rills and hills and gulches, up stony mountainsides, through dense trees.
And then a splurge of yellow openness. A mile wide at its most open, it is one of the largest, flattest geological phenomena in all of Arkansas, a virtual tabletop in the middle of the mountains.
At one side is the ridge that could be said to overlook it, although it’s not high, and it doesn’t afford much in the way of observation. On the other side is just a forest, which leads downhill eventually to a valley and then to another mountain. Not even the deer will roam on the flatness of Hard Bargain Valley, because they are creatures of the forest, and feel vulnerable in the open. So it is predominantly the kingdom of the crows, who wheel overhead on the breeze like bad omens.
“I want us to be on that side,” said Shreck. “We’ll have the meet in the dead center, fifteen hundred yards from the nearest shootable elevation.”
“Where is he?” asked Payne. Snipers made Payne a little nervous. Even snipers on his own side.
“Oh, he’s up there. You can count on it,” Shreck said tersely.
Lon’s mood had darkened. He sat alone in his spider hole, fifteen hundred yards from the flat yellow center of Hard Bargain Valley on its western rim. He suddenly felt cursed.
It had begun as a lovely day. But a few hours ago, a huge red buck had pranced down the ridge in front of him. He remembered the deer hunts of his boyhood, before his father shot him. It filled him with a kind of joy. On impulse he brought the rifle to bear on the buck. The animal was about 250 paces out, gigantic in the magnification of the Unertl 36x. Lon put his cross hairs on the creature and felt a thrill as he played with the notion of making the creature’s beauty his own by extinguishing it forever.
The animal, a bearded old geezer with two stubs where his antlers had been sheared off in some freak accident, paused as the scope settled upon him. It turned its magnificent head and fixed two bold, calm eyes upon Lon. It appeared not to fear him at all; worse, it had no respect for him. This enraged him in some strange way. He felt his finger take three ounces of slack out of the six-ounce trigger, until the animal lived only on the stretch of the thinnest of hairs. The buck stared at him insolently, as if daring him to go ahead and shoot. He knew this was impossible: the animal could not have seen him. But haughtily, nevertheless, the old creature cast its evil eye on him, until he became aware of the pressure in his trigger finger and the beads of sweat in his hairline. He slackened off the trigger.
The animal spluttered, threw his beautiful red-hazed old head in the sunlight, then trotted away with an aristocratic saunter as if to snub him, and make him feel unworthy.
Yet he was strangely agitated.
Be still, he told himself. It’s nothing. But he could not get it out of his mind.
The hours had passed. Now, moodily, he scanned the far ridge of trees in search of human motion. He had glanced at his watch for the thousandth time; it was well past three and time for the action to begin.
Ah! There! There!
He made them through the spotting scope as they came out of the trees and began their slow trek across the open space to the far side. Though at this range it was impossible to make out details or faces, he could read them from their body types. The tall one was Shreck; the stumpy one, hunched and dangerous, was the little soldier Payne. And third was the woman, the tethered bait.
He watched them walk across the field, and set up below him; now their faces were distinct, but they could not see him. Then, suddenly, commotion: the two men both stood and looked and pointed.
Yes, there it was, just as Colonel Shreck had promised, though a bit late: a yellow flare, barely distinguishable in the bright sunlight, floating down behind the ridge line.
He saw Payne fire an answering flare, letting the pursuers know their next move, and upon what field the game would be played.
Lon flexed his fingers and tried to will his body to alertness as he slid in behind the rifle once again.
He touched the radio receiver that would receive the bolt of sound that meant Shreck was green-lighting the shot. He touched, as if to draw on their magic, the .300 H & H Magnums laid out before him, tapering brass tubes close to four inches long, glinting, their heavy, cratered noses stolid and somehow faintly greasy.
Now it was merely a matter of waiting.
The buck was forgotten at last; he thought only of the hellacious long shot he had to make, that no man had a right to make, that he knew he could make. He’d made them before.
“All right, Payne,” said Shreck as they languished on the far side of Hard Bargain Valley. “This is the easy part. Get her ready.”
“Yes, sir,” said Payne.
He turned to Julie.
“Okay, honey,” he said. “Just this one last little thing.”
She looked at him with drug-dumb eyes. There wasn’t a flicker of will or resistance in their glassy depthlessness. A stupid half-smile played across her mouth.
Payne shucked his pack and reached into it. There he removed his cut-down Remington 1100 semiautomatic shotgun. It held six 12-gauge shells in double-ought buckshot, each of which contained nine .32 caliber pellets. It was possibly the most devastating close-quarters weapon ever devised. In less than two seconds it could blow out fifty-four man-killing balls of lead with an effective range of fifteen yards.
He walked around behind the woman.
“You just relax now,” he said. “This is nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
She looked as if she’d never worried about anything in her life.
Setting the shotgun down momentarily, he plucked a roll of black electrician’s tape from his pocket. With swift and sure motions, he unstripped the end of the tape, planted it squarely in the middle of her forehead, and began to run loops of the tape around her skull, drawing them tight.
She whimpered as the greasy stuff was yanked tight about her head, cutting against her eyes so that the vision was destroyed, between her lips so that her voice was stifled and across her nose so that the breathing was impaired and around her hair, where its adhesive quickly matted to her skull, but he said, “There, there, it’s nothing, baby, it’s nothing.”
Having constructed a snare of tape, he then brought the little shotgun up and began to unspool yet more tape, wrapping it crudely about the barrel and fore end of the piece, entwining the woman’s head and the gun in the same seven-yard-long constriction, until both were joined. Then he cut the tape.
He reached down with his left hand and engaged the pistol grip of the weapon, inserting his finger in the trigger guard. He felt the tension in the trigger.
“Colonel Shreck?”
Shreck took the spool and continued the ritual of the binding, until Payne’s hand was almost one with the shotgun’s pistol grip and trigger in a solid, gummy nest of tape. Shreck bent and jacked the shotgun’s bolt, and both men felt the shiver as the bolt slid back, lofted a shell into the chamber, then plunged forward to lock the shell in.
“You know what to do?”
“Yes, sir,” said Payne. In case of trouble, he was
to blow the woman’s head off; then swing the short-barreled weapon and blow away whoever stood against them. At the same time, he was untouchable: no bullet could penetrate his vest and a head shot would produce either by spasm or by the weight of his fall the blast that would destroy the woman. Nobody was going to play hero with Payne booby-trapped to the woman like this.
It wasn’t going well. These Arkansas types were close-mouthed, clannish and not terribly interested in helping.
Still, the reports that reached the headquarters of Task Force Swagger, now in the basement of the Sheriff’s Office, were persistent, if vague. Two hunters off on a preseason scouting hike had watched through binoculars as a stocky man had laid and moored coils of rope to a ridge deep in the Ouachitas. They didn’t move any closer because through the glass the guy had looked as tough as a commando. And no, they probably couldn’t find the place again anyway.
“Maybe just some other hunter,” said Hap. “Laying in ropes to get up that ridge in the dark on the first day of the hunting season.”
“Ummm,” was all that Howdy Duty would commit himself too.
Then someone swore he’d seen a lean blond man talking to Sam Vincent, the lawyer who had sued the magazine on Bob’s behalf. He was Bob’s oldest friend, demi-daddy and hunting buddy of years gone by. The man could have been Bob the Nailer, and the talk took place on a high road miles off a main highway that the observer, a postman, had just happened to breeze by.
But Sam Vincent was a wily, tough old bird and he knew the law as well as any man alive.
“Now, sir,” the old lizard had said to Utey, leaning forward and fixing him with what was known as the “chair-eye” (for Sam, as a state prosecutor in the fifties and sixties had sent thirteen men to the electric chair), “you know a damned sight better than I do that I cain’t be compelled to cooperate unless I want to, and no subpoena and no threat of government harassment’s going to change that. I’m too old to scare and too stubborn to budge. If I seen Bob Lee Swagger and ain’t told you, I’ve committed a federal felony. So essentially”—and here his shrewd old eyes knitted up—“you’re asking me to testify agin’ myself. Against the Constitution, young feller. And against Arkansas state law, Code D-547.1, see Conyers v. Mercantile Trust. You got that?”
Howard got it indeed, but assigned a tail on Sam. No such luck; within the hour an injunction arrived from the Third District Court of Arkansas, the Hon. Justice Buford M. Roubelieux presiding, requiring the government to show cause for assigning surveillance upon a distinguished eighty-one-year-old citizen like Sam Vincent and issuing, until such compliance could be met (the next available court date was July 1998), a cease and desist order, under penalty of law.
That had been the low point.
There hadn’t been any high points.
Until today, just now, when the phone rang.
Hap answered it, spoke for two minutes, then said, “I’ll call you right back.”
Howard looked up; two of the other men watched as Hap shot over to Howard. They gathered round.
“Maybe this is nothing, I don’t know,” said Hap. “But I just got a call from a guy in the National Forest Service. Says three hunters, at three different times this morning, saw military flares being shot into the air deep in the Ouachitas.”
“Somebody in trouble?” asked an agent.
“More like a signal,” somebody else said.
“But no fires started,” said Hap. “The service ordered up a couple of flybys out of their spotter planes, but there were no fires. And the flares seem to be coming from different locations, spread over about a twenty-mile-square area.”
Howard concentrated on this. Who would use flares in daylight? Who would even see a flare in daylight, unless they were looking for it? It had to be a kind of signal.
“Did they get a location?” he asked.
“Well, they’ve had several, but the Forest Service guy says his people plotted it out on a big map they’ve got, and the direction is largely trending north by northwest.”
“Okay,” said Howard. “Toward what? Toward anything?”
“There’s a big flat, nearly inaccessible valley way up there they call Hard Bargain Valley,” said Hap. “It’s way the hell off the mainstream. The Forest Service says hardly any hunters go up there because the deer much prefer the lower forest land. It’s flat and barren and almost a mile across.”
Howard thought.
Hard Bargain Valley?
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s saddle up. Full SWAT gear. Call the field. I want the chopper to pick us up in ten minutes. Hap, call the Forest Service back and tell them we need a guide to get us to Hard Bargain Valley.”
“There,” said Payne, seeing them first.
The two figures had emerged from the trees across the wide valley.
Shreck looked at them through his binoculars but they were too far off for details. Their faces were green, like commandos.
He snorted.
“He thinks he’s going to a war,” he said to Payne.
Payne stood up, and gingerly drew the woman up off her haunches.
“Now, honey,” he said. “You walk real slow. Don’t you trip or stumble, or you’ll be history.”
She moaned, then made a noise through the tape.
“Shut up, Mrs. Fenn,” said Shreck. “Damn, she’s come out of it. You should give her another injection.”
“I can’t,” said Payne. “Not taped up like this.”
“Look, lady,” said Shreck, “I want you to know this is the end, you’ve only got another few minutes. We make the swap, and off you go with your boyfriend. That’s a security arrangement; the gun isn’t even loaded.”
Under the bonds of the tape, her eyes tightened in terror.
He ignored her and signaled to Payne to get her moving. Haltingly, the three of them began to walk across the wide field. It had turned into a lovely, sunny fall day, about fifty-five, crisp and clean. Around them, like waves, were the ragged ridges and crests of the Ouachitas, now brilliantly ablaze in color.
The sniper’s breath came in soft spurts. He was trying to keep himself calm for what lay ahead. It was time to shut down. It was time to get into the zone.
He felt his body complying. He had known it would; he trusted it. He watched his target, exactly where it was supposed to be, in the most obvious place. It wasn’t even an ant, but a speck, the dot over an i. He’d never hit at this range before but he wasn’t scared. This was a shot he’d owed himself for a long time; it was time to get it right.
His eyes were dilating, his ears sealing off, his breathing going softer. He was sliding into tunnel vision, where the concentration was so intense that all other cues in the world dropped away and respiration bled to a hum.
He pulled the rifle to him. No time now to think of it: he could not allow himself to be aware of the instrument because he had to be beyond the instrument. His will was the instrument.
Now he slid behind the scope, finding the spot-weld, where cheek and gun joined while his fingers discovered their place by slow degree. That was the secret; to make everything the same. Simplify, simplify. To make of oneself nothingness; to slide into the great numbness beyond want and hope; to simply be.
He was beyond computation. He knew the range, he knew the angle, he knew the wind, he knew the bullet’s trajectory and velocity, he knew its drop and how it would leak energy as it sped along. He had accounted for all this and he now engaged his target through the bright circle of the scope.
Even magnified, the man was a small, a very small object, hardly recognizable as human. Just a squirming dot. He watched the tremble in the reticle as he willed himself through minute subverbal corrections, not thinking so much as feeling. It was very, very close now.
Don’t blow it, he ordered himself. Not this time!
Nick breathed out a little. Lon Scott was just where Bob had said he would be, beneath the crest line where the osage had been crushed by an all-terrain vehicle as it delivered him. H
e was in a spider hole, only his painted face and the rifle barrel visible.
At a hundred yards, Shreck put up his hands.
“No guns,” he shouted. “No guns or the woman is dead. You got that?”
Each of the two men raised his hands, pirouetted slowly to show that he wore no visible weapons, then let his hands stay high.
“You got the cassette and Annex B?”
Bob raised the knapsack he was carrying.
“Right here,” he yelled back.
“Okay. You bring the stuff. When I authenticate it, we’ll release the girl. You see how we’ve got her? You make a funny move, you look funny, you do anything stupid, you get unlucky and trip, anything, anything, my friends, and she’s fucked. Payne’ll do it, you know he will. Only chance she’s got is our rules.”
“You’re calling the shots,” Bob said. “Now just take it easy with that damned shotgun, Payne.”
Slowly and warily, the two men approached, hands held high and stiff.
At last Shreck faced Bob the Nailer, big as life, who stood but six feet away and he looked him in the eyes. He looked as calm as a pond on a summer day.
“Hello, Colonel,” came a familiar voice.
Shreck looked to the other man, the young FBI agent. Only it wasn’t the young FBI agent, even though he wore a black FBI raid jacket and baseball cap and greenish paint on his face. It was Dr. Dobbler.
Shreck looked back to Bob, realized in a flash the game had changed. He pressed the button on a unit on his belt, sending a shriek of radio noise that would signal Scott to fire.
There came the sound, from far away, of a rifle shot.
The shrillness of the beep somewhat surprised Lon and he saw the cross hairs dance a tiny jig and come off Bob.
So soon? he thought.
He exhaled half a lungful of air and gently as a lover squeezed the reticle back onto Bob, center chest, and began to draw the slack from the trigger and—
Nick fired and in the split second the rifle jumped and the scope-picture blurred, he called it a hit. He looked back quickly in recovery. The bullet had struck Lon Scott in the head. It was the brain shot. Blood seemed to have been flung everywhere by the impact. Lon sagged back and slid into his spider hole. Only the rifle was left to show.