The waiting was at last over. He pushed up the NV goggles, and took up the Leica range finder. He put the ranging dot on her and pressed the button, sending an invisible spurt of laser out to bounce off her and back, trailing its logo of data. Five hundred fifty-seven, it said in the display superimposed on the right of the image.
Five hundred fifty-seven meters. He thought for a second, computing drift and drop, and then lifted the rifle to place the mil-dot beneath the crosshairs on her. It felt obscene to target a child like this, but he had to familiarize himself with the sensations.
The dot blotted out her heroic little chest. His muscles, though stiff, remained hard, and he locked the rifle under a bridge of bone to the earth, and held the dot there with the professional shooter’s discipline. No wobble, no tremble, nothing to betray fear or doubt. His finger touched the trigger. Were he to will it, four and a half pounds of pressure and she would leave the earth forever.
He put the rifle down, glad that he still had energy.
Clearly now, it was just a matter of time.
He knew something was wrong immediately.
Instead of curling his body into a cannonball, he flailed, feeling panic and fear. He had never fallen before, and the sense of no control completely stunned him. It was no question of courage, just his limbic system; he was suddenly unmanned by the sense of utter helplessness. The wind hammered at him like fists; his body planed and fluttered and he tried to bring his ankles up to his wrists but he could get nothing to work against the power of the air rushing up at him at hundreds of miles an hour.
He screamed but there was no sound, because he screamed into an oxygen mask. But it was a scream, nevertheless, mad and ripped from his lungs like a physical thing, like an animal. He heard it rattling around in his helmet.
He had never screamed before in a hundred or a thousand fights. He had never screamed at Parris Island or any of the places where he’d had to kill or die. He had never screamed on the nights before action, in contemplation of what might happen on the next day, and he never screamed the day after, in contemplation of the horrors that he had seen or caused or had just missed him. He’d never screamed in grief or rage.
He screamed.
The scream was pure fury boiling out of his soul, unstoppable but lost in the hugeness of the air pressure.
He fell through darkness, feeling lost and powerless and, above all, vulnerable.
Don’t let me die, he thought, all commitment to mission, all dedication to justice, all sense of fatherhood gone. He fell screaming in complete treason to everything he thought he believed in, his arms clawing at the air, his legs pumping, the sense of weightlessness almost rendering him useless.
Don’t let me die, he thought, feeling tears on his face under the Plexiglas of the helmet, gasping for breath. Please don’t let—
The parachute shuddered open with a bang; he could simply sense it mutating strangely on his back, and the next split second, he was slammed into something that felt like a wall but was only air as the chute filled and grabbed him from doom. He could see nothing in the blackness, but he knew the ground was close and then, far before it should have happened, he whacked into it and felt his head fill with stars and concussion and confusion, as his body went hard against the ground. He staggered to his feet, trying to find the release lever for the chute in case it filled with air and pulled him away. He could not; it puffed and began to drag him, and the Plexiglas before him splintered; his face began to sting and bleed. His arm was numb. The equipment bag banged over the rocks as he slid along and seemed to rack his leg a couple of extra inches. He clawed at the harness, and then it popped open and the harness somehow rid itself of him, as if he were unwanted baggage, and deposited him in the snow as it went its merry way.
Oh, Christ, he thought, blinking, feeling pain everywhere. He looked around and saw nothing at all recognizable. He struggled to pop off his helmet, and felt just a second’s worth of air until the air turned frozen. He pulled a white watch cap from his pocket and yanked a snow mask down from its folds. He pulled the equipment bag over, opened it and got the parka and the leggings on. The warmth comforted him. Then he yanked out the night-vision goggles, fiddled for the switch and looked around.
Oh, Christ, he thought.
Nothing was as it seemed. He was on a slope, not a flat; there was no ranch house ahead because in the most obvious possible way there was no ahead.
There was only down, barren and remote.
He was way up.
He was lost in the mountains.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Julie was dreaming. In the dream she and Bob and Donny were at a picnic somewhere in the green mountains by a lake. It felt very real, but was still clearly a dream. Everybody was so happy, much happier than they’d ever been in their conscious lives. Bob and Donny were drinking beer and laughing. Her father was there, too, and Bob’s father, Earl, who’d been killed way back in 1955, and she was cooking hamburgers on a grill and all the men were drinking beer and laughing and tossing a ball around and flirting with Nikki.
Maybe it wasn’t a dream. Maybe it had begun as a dream, something spun out of her subconscious, but now she was aware that she was controlling it, and somehow trying to keep it alive, to make it last longer as she hung in a gray zone just between wakefulness and sleep. Peter was there too. Earnest, decent, dedicated Peter Farris, who’d loved her so, his ardency poignant. He looked strange because Bob and Donny were so Marine-straight with their short, neat hair and Peter was the complete hippie, with a splotchy purple tie-dyed T-shirt, a headband, his hair a mess, a sad little Jesus beard. Peter’s feelings got very hurt because he felt so powerless next to the two stronger men, and that somehow made him more poignant. He loved her so! Donny apologized, because it wasn’t in him to hurt anybody’s feelings. Bob was just watching them, Mr. Southern Cracker Alpha Male, amused by their silly youthfulness, and his dad and her dad were having a good laugh, though what a state trooper and a heart surgeon, one dead in 1955, the other in 1983, would have had to talk about was anybody’s guess.
And there was someone else.
He was by himself, a graceful young man, also amused by the manhood convention here on the shores of the Gitche Gumee or wherever it was, and it took her a while to figure out who he was, and then at last she knew it was Trig.
She’d seen him twice, no, three times. She’d seen him that night when Peter had dragged her to that party in Georgetown and he lived in that funny little place with all the bird paintings, and she’d seen him when he’d driven Donny out in the red Triumph to find her at West Potomac Park just before the last big May Day demonstration, and she saw him again, three nights later, at the farm in Germantown, where he and that Irishman were loading bags of fertilizer into the truck.
Trig: another of the lost boys of the Vietnam War. All of them were linked in some terrible chain, forever changed, forever mutilated. Nobody ever came back from that one. No one got home free. Donny, dead on DEROS. Peter, smashed, somehow, and found with a broken spine months later. Trig, blown to pieces in Madison, Wisconsin. And Bob, the only survivor but maybe the most hurting of them all, with his black-dog moods and his lost years and his self-hatred and his need to test himself against gunfire again and again and again, as if to finally earn the death he yearned for so intently and join his friends. Death or DEROS: which would come to Bob Lee Swagger first?
“Mommy?” her daughter asked her.
“Oh, honey,” she said, but it was not in the dream, it was here in the dark, warm bedroom.
Julie blinked and came out of it. No, it wasn’t a dream. It couldn’t have been a dream. It was too real to be a dream.
“Mommy, please, I want to go ride the sled.”
“Oh, Lord, honey, it’s—”
“Please, Mommy.”
She turned and looked at the clock. It was close to seven. Outside, just the faintest hint of light pressed through the margins of the shade.
“Oh, baby,” she said, “it’s
so early. The snow’s going to be around for a long, long time.”
The deep ache in her body was there and the awkwardness conferred by the arm cast. She hadn’t taken a painkiller since last night, halfway through Singin’ in the Rain when her baby girl had fallen asleep on her lap.
“Please, Mommy. I’ll go get Aunt Sally.”
“Don’t you dare wake Aunt Sally. God bless her, she’s earned her escape from the Swaggers and all their problems. I’ll get up, baby. Just give me a moment or two.”
“Yes, Mommy. I’ll go get dressed.”
The child ran out.
So early, thought Julie. So damned early.
He tried the GPS receiver. Nothing happened. Eventually it lit up but the LCD produced a rattle of red digitized gibberish. Evidently it had banged too hard when the bag hit the ground and was out of whack. He turned on the radio, and heard through his earphones, “Bob One, Bob One, where are you, we have lost contact; goddammit, Swagger, where are you?”
He spoke: “Bob Control, this is Bob One, do you copy?”
“Bob One, Bob One, we have lost contact. Bob One, where are you?”
“Do you copy, Bob Control, do you copy? I am sending, does anybody hear me?”
“Bob One, Bob One, please notify control, we have lost contact.”
Shit!
He ripped the thing off and threw it in the snow. The next thing to check was the rifle. He opened the case, gave it a once-over, saw that it seemed okay, but he doubted it. The same harsh impact that had screwed the electronics might have knocked the scope out of zero. There was no way to know except in the shooting. He couldn’t shoot now so there wasn’t a thing to do except hope that Unertl built the scope real nice and tight and that it would stand up where the other stuff didn’t.
He stood. Pain rocked him, and he had a flash where he thought he might lose it, faint, and die under the snow. They’d find him next year. It would be in all the newspapers.
Fuck me if I can’t take a joke, he thought.
He looked about. In one direction lay only an endless sea of snowy mountains. That couldn’t be the way, and by God, yes, beyond the mountains at the horizon was just the faintest smear of light, signifying the east.
He appeared to be on the highest one. He knew the overflight went on a northwest-southeast access, aiming to put him into the flats below the mountains and the ranch. If he had overshot his mark, the deviation was longitudinal, not latitudinal; that would put him on Mount McCaleb, theoretically on its northwest slope. Down below, say six thousand feet, that would be where the ranch was. He couldn’t see; the valley in that direction was lost in a strata of cloud, which closed it off like a lost world. He could see only peaks across a gap that he took to be a valley.
He slung the rifle over his shoulder, checked his compass and set off down the slope.
The land was barren, without vegetation, as if in some recent time a nuclear bomb had cleaned out all the life. The snow lay in undulating forms, sometimes thick and difficult, other times surprisingly light. Twice he tripped on rocks unseen under the smooth white crust.
Flakes still fell, stinging his eyes. But the fierce wind had died and no snow devils whirled up to defy him. He couldn’t even hear the wind. He went downhill at an angle, almost galloping, feeling the boots bite into the stuff, trying to find a rhythm, a balance between speed and care. He was breathing hard and inside his parka began to sweat. He came to a rock outcropping and detoured around it.
Occasionally, he’d stop, flip down the night-vision goggles, and see—nothing. Ahead and below, the clouds lingered like a solid wall, impenetrable. The goggles resolved the cloud mass as green, only partially distinct from the green of the snow up here, and amplified the light so much that distinctions could hardly be made, and no valley could yet be seen through them: only an infinity of green, cut now and then by a black scut of rock.
It occurred to him that he might have completely mis-figured. He could be anywhere, just heading foolishly down to some empty, remote valley where there would be no highway, no ranch, no Julie, no Sally, no Nikki. Just empty Western space, as Jeremiah Johnson had found it.
Then what?
Then nothing.
Then it’s over. He’d wander, maybe hunting a little. He’d live, certainly, but in three days or a week, under a growth of beard, he’d emerge to find a different world, without a wife, with a bitter, orphaned daughter, with everything he’d worked for gone, all his achievements gone. Solaratov gone back to Moscow for blintz and borscht, with a nice reward in his pocket.
Just go, he thought.
Just push it out, think it through and do it.
He looked over his shoulder and got more bad news: it was getting lighter.
He raced the day downhill.
A light came on. Upstairs.
Solaratov stirred.
He was not cold at all. He rolled over, cracking fingers and joints, fighting the general numbness that his body had picked up in its long stay on the ground.
A shawl of snow cracked on his back as he moved, splitting and falling from him. He’d picked up the last inch. That was all right, he knew. A man can actually last in snow much longer than a rifle can.
The rifle was more problematical. Lubrication can solidify in the cold, turn to gum, destroy the trigger pull, catch in the next cycle of the bolt. The gasses don’t burn as hot, so the bullet flies to a new point of impact, unpredictable. The scope stiffens somehow, comes out of zero. His breath could fog on it, obscuring his vision. Nothing works quite as well. There were a hundred reasons why a good shot could go bad.
He opened the Remington’s bolt, slid it backward. No impediment marked the smoothness of the glide: no, the oil had not gummed in any way.
He pushed it ever so slowly forward until it would go no farther, then pushed the bolt handle downward two inches, feeling the bolt lock in place.
Without assuming the position to shoot, he put his hand around the pistol grip of the rifle, threaded a finger through the trigger guard, felt the curvature of the trigger. His finger caressed it through the glove. Without consciously willing it, his trigger finger squeezed ever so slightly, feeling a dry twig of resistance for an instant, and then the trigger broke with the precision of a bone-china teacup handle snapping off. Perfect: four and a half pounds, not an ounce more, not an ounce less.
He pulled the rifle to him and examined the muzzle where the Browning Optimizing System was screwed to a precise setting to control barrel vibration. The setting was perfect and tight.
Next, he slipped his glove off, unzipped his parka, reached inside the many layers until he reached his shirt, where he’d stored twenty rounds in a plastic case. Close to his heart. Close to the warmest part of him. He opened the box and removed four. Then he carefully returned the box to the pocket, to preserve the warmer environment. He opened the bolt and slid the cartridges, one by one, into the magazine. This somehow always pleased him. It was the heart of the issue of the rifle: the careful fit of round to chamber, the slow orchestration of the bolt syncopating this union, then vouchsafing it with the final, camming lockdown that felt solid as a bank vault.
No safety. Never used safeties. Didn’t believe in them. If you used safeties, it meant you didn’t trust yourself. If you gave yourself up to the whim of mechanics, you begged trouble. You just kept your finger off the trigger until you were on target. That’s how it worked.
Solaratov blew on his hand, pulled the glove on, then shifted his vision downhill to the house.
In the slightly intensified light of the rising dawn, the house was more distinct. The upstairs light remained on, but now one downstairs had been added. Its orange glow suffused the night. Because of the angle he could see one of the windows but the others were shielded by the rake of the porch roof. Behind that visible window, now and then a figure moved. It would be the woman, would it not, preparing breakfast? Making coffee, scrambling eggs, pouring milk for cereal for the child.
But which wom
an? The FBI agent’s wife? Or the sniper’s wife? That’s why he couldn’t send a shot into the shadow and be gone. Suppose it was the wrong woman? He could not afford another failure and, worse, he would never, ever again come upon conditions so totally in his favor.
Do not rush, he told himself. Do not move until you are sure.
The light rose, eventually, though second by second one could detect no difference. Now the day had gone from black edging to pewter to pewter edging to gray. The clouds were still low, though no snow was falling; no sun today. It would be hours before anyone could helicopter in, hours beyond that before they could come overland, except by snowmobile, and what point was there to that? By that time he’d be far, far away from the scene of the crime.
Telephone!
Of course! That last detail, the one you forgot, the one that could get you killed.
He fires, kills the woman and retreats. But the other woman sees her dead in the snow, and quickly picks up the phone and calls the sheriffs office. Deputies nearby on snowmobiles are reached by radio. They could get here in minutes; they’d zoom up the slope and quickly find his tracks. They’d call in his location. Other deputies would be dispatched. He’d end up in some half-baked last stand in this godforsaken chunk of America, brought low by a hayseed with a deer rifle who was a part-time deputy sheriff or forest ranger.
His eyes went back to the house, explored it carefully until at last he found the junction of the phone wires where they left the pole that ran along the road and descended to the house. His eyes met an astonishment!
The line was already down! The snow had taken the line down!
Now there was an omen! It was as if the God he had been taught not to believe in had come to his aid, not merely by bringing in the storm to cover his tracks but by breaking the phone line! Was God a communist?
He smiled just the littlest bit.
He looked back. A sudden slash of orange light flicked across the snow, as the front door opened.
He watched as a little girl ran off the porch and dived into a pile of snow. He could hear her laughter all the way up here. There was no other sound.