“You are smart,” said Bonson. “You just weren’t quick enough, were you?”
“Who are you?” repeated Bob.
“You’d never believe this, but I’m history. I’m the future. I’m mankind. I’m hope. I’m the messiah of what must be.”
He smiled again, a pure pilgrim of his own craziness.
“Not even Solaratov believed that shit,” said Bob.
“All right, I’ll tell you,” said Bonson. “And then I’ll kill you. This is a great privilege for you.”
“Who are you?”
“You’d know the original family name, or you could dig it up. It’s in some books. My parents were working-class Americans and fervent members of the American Communist Party. In 1938, the year I was born, they were asked to drop out and go underground for the committee. Of course they agreed. It was the greatest honor they’d ever been paid. So they renounced the party, turned on all their friends and spent the next fifteen years working as couriers, cut-outs, bag men for the atom bomb spies. They serviced the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, the whole brilliant thing we ran in this country. They were heroes. My father was a great man. He was greater than your father, Swagger. He was greater, braver, stronger, tougher, more resilient than your father. He was the best and my mother was a saint.”
Bonson’s eyes shown with tears as he recalled the beauty of his mother.
“You know the rest. NSA decrypts finally gave them away. My father hung himself in a holding tank on Rikers Island. My mother got me out, and then poisoned herself as the agents were coming up the stairs to arrest her. They were heroes of the Soviet Union! They gave it all to the revolution. Someone in the network got me out of the country, and by the following Tuesday I was in Moscow. I was fourteen years old and totally American, a Yankees and Giants fan, with an IQ of 160 and an absolute commitment to bringing down the system that murdered my parents. I was trained for six years. When I reinfiltrated I was already a major in the KGB. I’m now a three-star general. I have more decorations than you’ll ever dream about. I am a hero of the Soviet Union.”
“You’re a psychopath. And there ain’t no Soviet Union,” said Bob.
“Too bad you won’t be around to see how wrong you are.”
The two ancient enemies faced each other in silence.
Finally Bonson said, “All right. That’s enough. Kill him.”
The team raised their pistols. The suppressed 9mm bores looked at Bob. There was complete silence.
“Any last words?” asked Bonson. “Any message for the family?”
“Last words?” said Bob. “Yeah, three of ‘em: front toward enemy.”
He turned his hand over to show them what it held and Bonson realized in an instant why he had been speaking so loudly. Because he was wearing earplugs. He held the M57 electrical firing device, the green plastic clapper with a wire running down to the painting, behind which stood on its silly little set of tripods an M18A1 anti-personnel mine, better known as a Claymore. One or two, the faster, may have tried to fire, but Bob’s reflexes were faster still as he triggered the demolition.
The one and a half pounds of plastic explosive encased in the mine detonated instantly, and a nanosecond later the seven hundred ball bearings, a blizzard of steel, arrived upon them at close to four thousand feet per second. The mine did what the mine was supposed to do: it took them out.
It literally dissolved them: their upper bodies were fragmented in one instant of maximum, total butchery. They exploded as if they’d swallowed grenades and become part of the atmosphere.
As for Bob, he saw none of this. The pillar, as planned, saved his life by blocking the force of the concussion. The earplugs saved his eardrums. But a pound and a half of plastic explosive is no small thing. He felt himself pulled out of his body, and his soul went sailing through the air until it struck something hard, and his mind filled with a bright fog, an incandescent emptiness. He blacked out for a minute or two.
No police arrived. The waterfront is a place of odd noises from unspecified localities: freighters’ horns, the rumble of trucks, backfires and an almost total night-emptiness of human life. The sound of the blast was just another unexplained aural phenomenon in a city full of unexplained aural phenomenon.
When Bob pulled himself out of his fog, he tasted blood. He smelled it too. The blood he tasted was his own: his nose bled and both his ears rang like firebells, despite the plugs. He felt pain. He thought he’d broken his arm, but he hadn’t, although he’d bruised it deeply. He picked himself up, saw flashbulbs prance through the air as his short-circuited optic nerves sputtered ineffectively. He blinked, staggered, sat, pulled himself up, blinked again and then beheld the horror.
The blood he smelled was theirs, and much of it, atomized, still floated in waves in the air, lit by flickering lights. There had been six of them: now there were three legs left standing, though no two belonged to any one of the men. What remained of Ward Bonson, deputy director of the CIA for counter-intelligence, Wall Street lawyer, three-star general in the KGB and a hero of the Soviet Union, was applied to the punctured metal of the wall behind him, mixed completely with the remains of the men who’d served him so ably over the long years. No one would have the heart—or the stomach—to separate them. It was a pure hose job.
Small fires burned everywhere in the smoky space. The sketches had been scattered about. Slowly, Bob gathered them up, then went to the largest of the fires.
He knelt, and one by one fed them into the hungry fire. It gobbled them, and he watched them seized, then curl to delicacy as they were blackened and devoured, then transfigure again into crispy ash, which fragmented and floated away in the hot current.
In the way his mind worked, he thought he saw the souls of those three lost boys, his friend Donny and Donny’s friend Trig and Trig’s victim, Ralph, somehow released to rise and float free, DEROS at last.
He picked up the fingerprinted M57 and dropped it into his pocket for later disposal, his last physical connection to the fate of Bonson and his team. Then he rose and walked out, turning for one last glimpse at the slaughterhouse he had created and the end of all complications of his violent life.
He thought: Sierra-Bravo-Four. Last transmission. Out.
He walked into the night air, sucked in its freshness, headed to his truck and, though he ached and bled, knew it would be best to start the long drive west. It was time to rotate back to the world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to begin by making certain readers understand that the foregoing in no way advances a claim for his own heroism, which is, of course, nonexistent. He was not a Marine sniper nor even a Marine; he never went to Vietnam but served as the least efficient ceremonial soldier in the 1st Battalion (Reinf.), Third Infantry, in Washington, DC, 1969–1970. His own war story: he was present at the occupation of the Treasury Building. It was very boring. And once he cut his lip on some barb wire at Camp A.P. Hill in Virginia.
Readers will also recognize that I’ve seized events from Vietnam, fictionalized them and reinserted them in a bogus time frame for my own dramatic purposes. That includes inventing an extra year of Marine ground combat. Most Marine units left RSVN in 1971; I was stuck with 1972 because I chose that year without doing a lick of research when I was writing Point of Impact, the first of the Bob Lee Swagger books, many years back. In earlier books, I also set the action near An Loc, which turns out to be close to Saigon, and nowhere near I Corps, where the Marines served. So in a belated attempt at the illusion of accuracy, I’ve deemphasized An Loc and moved the location of Bob and Donny’s fight in the rain up to I Corps, near the Special Forces camp at Kham Duc.
I’ve also simplified the complicated events in Washington over the first four days of May 1971 into a single night, put the massacre of Firebase Mary Ann—my Dodge City—in a different year and ascribed it to a different service, and invented my own ’Nam jargon under the license of telling stories, not writing history. In fact, one of the few things recounted
in this book that actually happened was the great catch that Donny remembered making against Gilman High School. It was made against Gilman, a prep school not in Arizona but Baltimore, by my son Jake Hunter, in Boys’ Latin’s victory over Gilman in 1995.
I should add that I’ve made a good-faith effort to reconcile events of this book with events previously referred to in Point of Impact and Black Light. Alas, far too many times events were irreconcilable, so you’ll simply have to trust my assertion that in other books things happened that way, but in this book they happen this way.
But where I’ve made up much, I’ve also talked with many people who had firsthand knowledge of the kind of events I describe. They’re all good men and deserve no blame for my inaccuracies or the ends to which I’ve put information that they earned the hard way.
Ed DeCarlo, retired Army CSGT, and Alvin Guyton, retired Gy. Sgt., USMC, both good buddies from On Target Shooting Range, where I spend vast amounts of time and money, shared Vietnam memories and data with me. Ed was a radio operator and briefed me on the intricacies of the PRC-77 and map reading; Alvin, a recon Marine, lent me tons of reference material and even loaned me copies of his orders to Vietnam on which to base my version of Donny’s, and tried to make me feel Marine culture well enough to imagine it. Two of the usual suspects, Weyman Swagger and John Feamster, offered their usual supplies of endless labor, commentary and suggestion, each reading the manuscript with a great deal of precision. Lenne Miller, another Vietnam vet and an old college friend, was equally generous with time and observation. My brother Tim Hunter sent me a terrific letter of constructive criticism. Jeff Weber not only lent me his name for one of the characters but also read the manuscript and offered good advice. Bob Lopez came up with a crucial idea at a crucial moment. J. D. Considine, the pop-music critic of The Baltimore Sun, my old paper, drew up a compilation tape of 1971 hits, to whose accompaniment this book was written. Mike Hill was very helpful. Bill Phillips, an ex-Marine officer, Vietnam vet and author of The Night of Silver Stars, read the manuscript carefully and helped me sort out Army jargon and replace it with Marine, but if I’ve called it a latrine somewhere instead of a head, it’s my fault, not Bill’s. Tim Carpenter, of Bushnell’s, explained the subtleties of infrared ranging devices to me. Dave Lauck, of D&L Sports in Gillette, Wyoming, and author of The Tactical Marksman, ran his fine professional eye over the manuscript, to my great benefit. Kathy Lally and Will England, the Sun’s Moscow correspondents, gave me tips and data on that city for a chapter that was ultimately cut. Warrant Officer Joe Boyer of the Marine Barracks took me on a prowl through that installation and patiently answered my questions. Jean Marbella, of my old paper and my new life, was her usual fabulous self and listened to me prattle on about titles and narrative issues late into the night. John Pancake, arts editor of my new paper, The Washington Post, just smiled every time I told him I was leaving early to work on the book. David Von Drehle, editor of the Post’s Style section, was equally generous in letting me disappear when I deemed it necessary. Steve Proctor, of the Sun, had instituted a similar policy in my many years there, and he too should be recognized and thanked.
Former Green Beret Don Pugsley wrote to me at great length about communications procedures from A camps. Charles H. “Hap” Hazard, a Sun artist and former Army intelligence enlisted man, translated a lot of stuff into Vietnamese for me, very helpfully. Dr. Jim Fisher introduced me to Dr. Charlie Partjens, an orthopedic surgeon, who discussed the physical realities of an old bullet with me. Bill Ochs, former Army sergeant, discussed something of far more intensity: the trauma of his own hip wound, acquired in action in RSVN. I really appreciate his willingness to let a stranger invade his privacy like that.
I should also thank authors who have come before me. Peter R. Senich, the Thucydides of sniper warfare, came out with The One-Shot War, a history of Marine sniper operations in Vietnam, just as I was beginning. Then Michael Lee Lanning and Dan Cragg published Inside the VC and the NVA, which was very helpful for tough little Huu Co, senior colonel. Of course I’ve drawn from Charles Henderson’s Marine Sniper, and Joseph T. Ward’s Dear Mom: A Sniper’s Vietnam, as well as the standard history texts. I never spoke to any Marine snipers, however, because I needed to be free to envision Bob Lee Swagger as I wanted him to be, warts and all.
Last, in the professional realm, I must thank my brilliant, wonderful agent Esther Newberg of ICM and my great editor, Bill Thomas, of Doubleday. And something finally for the book’s dedicatee, John Burke, who was the great Carlos Hathcock’s spotter in Vietnam, and didn’t make it to DEROS. I never knew him but his story so moved me that I had to find a way to cast it into a book, and he became my Donny Fenn. So in a way this whole thing—this book and the three that proceeded it—all came from his sacrifice. Thanks, Marine.
STEPHEN HUNTER spent two years in the United States Army and since 1971 has been on the staff of the Baltimore Sun, where he is now the film critic. He is the author of nine other novels, including Dirty White Boys, Point of Impact, The Master Sniper, and Tapestry of Spies, and the nonfiction book Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem. He is the father of two children and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Published by
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Copyright © 1998 by Stephen Hunter
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