Authors: Stephen Hunter
“Okay, so go on,” said Hap.
“Here’s a second thing. He asks for, no he
demands
, a room next to all the Coke machines. Very weird, you have to admit. Now why would he do this? I mean really, Coke machines?”
“Maybe he liked Coke, Nick,” somebody said.
When the laughter died, Nick said, “The Agency says he’s not one of theirs? But let me tell you something
very interesting. Not two weeks ago, this Agency which doesn’t exist, it puts out a routine what’s called Technology Memo for field usage, about the useful properties just discovered in vending machines that would especially help a guy on the run in an industrialized city. I went over to the Coke company a couple of days ago. Coke machines, especially the new, powerful ones, guess what? They put out a low-frequency electromagnetic force field. Enough to screw up a TV, radio, a small appliance. Or a parabolic mike for acoustical penetration.”
He looked at them, let it sink in.
“He knew he was being hunted by pros. Pros who’d have the latest audio stuff. The Agency had just told him how to beat it. Don’t you see?”
“Nick, I—” started Hap.
“But it gets even
more
interesting. Know why? See, they had very good stuff. Not crap stuff, like we have, but state-of-the-art eavesdropping gear. So he thought he had them beat, but they had him beat. And that’s how they got in.”
“What’s the eavesdropping have to—”
“Only way they could get in without a struggle or leaving pick marks on the lock or any physical evidence of entry is with the magic two words. The magic two words were ‘Nick Memphis.’ Eduardo Lanzman or Lachine or whatever he calls himself, he calls the office, asks for Nick Memphis, leaves a message. Ten minutes later knock comes at door, somebody says, ‘Nick Memphis.’ Eduardo opens, they’re on him very fast, and they whack him. Fair enough? So how’d they get my name?”
The guys looked at him silently. Mike Farthing lit a cigarette. Hap was making like a couch potato. Mickey Sontag, another bruiser but a young one, scratched his nose.
“They couldn’t run a tap, they didn’t have time. How’d they get my name?”
“Okay, what’re you saying?”
“They
had
to have a parabolic mike. They acoustically penetrated his motel room. It wasn’t hard-sealed, of course. But they could beam through the electronic interference of the Goke machines and hear what he was saying. Okay? It’s the only adequate explanation of the event.”
They were looking at him.
“And the significance of that—if their equipment is that good, then it’s one of those jobs that costs out at about two hundred thousand dollars. We’re talking an expensive piece of equipment.
We
don’t even have one, you guys know. If we want one, we have to petition Washington, make the case that our bust is that important, and they send it over from Miami or down from St. Louis, in a van with two technicians, that is, if we can get the highest approval. So what’s a piece of the space age like that doing being deployed in some low-ranking drug hit? I’m telling you guys, the signature all over this one is that it involves some big-time heavy hitters, some intelligence people maybe, or at the least some very, very big drug operators.”
Hap considered.
“Nick, it’s thin. You don’t have any hard evidence, you have nothing to take to court. You only have your interpretation. And the word of some guy from Coke.”
“Hap, just give me a week or two, it’s the silly season, and if now and then it runs thin I’ll drift over to Robbery Detail or shag paper for Bunco-Fraud or run stakeouts here on narc so these guys can take a day off now and then.”
“What’s your angle?”
“I want to ride the mike thing. Who makes these things, how are they dispersed, who owns them? How
would people get hold of them? We can justify it by saying that it’s a possible stolen government equipment thing, if you get any heat on it. But just let me attack it through that angle, and in a week or so, I’ll let you know what I’ve come up with.”
“Ahh,” said Hap, “it’s not making me happy, Nick, I have to answer to Washington and you know what pricks they can be. Tell you what, you do me a favor, I’ll do you a favor, and we’ll see how we shake down end of the week.”
“Name it.”
“Well, your favorite Mickey Mouse outfit, our old pals in the Secret Service are—”
A chorus of groans. Secret Service personnel were arrogant, reputedly the best shots in federal service, very showy, very touchy, and always hard to deal with because they put their agenda up front of everything.
“—hold the cheers, girls—anyway, they’re sending a security detail down because, in, um, three weeks, Flashlight is coming. Yep, the man himself. Anyway, Washington wants us to cooperate up the kazoo with Secret Service and the bad part is the people on Pennsylvania Avenue are sending a heavy hitter down to run the liaison because yours truly doesn’t quite carry enough weight. But we have to provide support. So I need a gofer to run errands for this big guy and keep him out of the office’s hair and make my life easier. So here’s the deal, Nick, you fill this guy’s coffee cup for him and kiss his butt just where he likes it to be kissed, and dovetail with the assholes from Secret Service, and I’ll cut you some slack to run this investigation.”
It was a deal Nick couldn’t say no to, and so he said yes, happily, but the happiness only lasted a second.
“Yeah, now I got you, buddy. Guess who the Washington shot is?”
Nick had a presentiment of tragedy.
“No.”
“Sorry. Yeah. Guy’s a comer, what can I say. It’s Howdy Duty.”
Howdy Duty was the nickname of Howard D. Utey, special assistant to the Director, former head of counterespionage, staff director of counterterror, former assistant director of organized crime, one of the hardest-charging law enforcement executives in the Bureau and a man much loathed and feared by all who knew him.
But especially Nick, for in 1986, Howard D. Utey, Howdy Duty, on his way up fast, had been supervisor of the Tulsa office. Howdy Duty had been on the other end of the mike when Nick took his shot.
Howdy Duty was Base, howling in his ear as he blew out the spine of the only woman he’d ever love.
Bob made a fast check from outside; if they’d been in, they’d been damned careful and very professional; he could find no trace of entry, no tracks or disturbances in the dust, no sign even of scuffing where they might have wiped out tracks. Most important, the dog Mike was slightly mangier for wear, but not dead, and Bob knew that if anyone had tried to enter the trailer compound, Mike would kill or die himself. Sam Vincent had kept the beast fed while Bob was gone, and Mike, part sloppy beagle and part God-knew-what from deep in the Ouachitas, was on him when he unlocked the cyclone gate, tongue wet and gloppy, eyes warm yet mournful. Mike was another solitary creature, a great pal who could seem to make no other
friends and simply gave himself wholly to Bob’s service.
Bob rubbed him and made him sing for joy, then got him some food as he opened his various padlocks—the trailer first, immaculate and pristine as he had left it, the gun vault, all guns gleaming in their patina of oil (he quickly replaced the Remington 700 while doing this), and finally the shop out back, where the problematic Winchester 70, damn its stubborn soul, still sat disassembled.
He looked at it, felt a yearning to lose himself once more in its intricacies and try to get at its secrets. Why was it now betraying him? Had it grown bored with loyalty and not enough attention? Had it a weak character, was it not a piece to be trusted when things turned dark and hairy? Or was it just tired, being fifty years or so old, an ancient piece of steel that had lost some inner fortitude?
But as he stared at it, he knew he could not give himself to it, no matter the ache involved. He had something to do now, something he wanted so bad it hurt him in places where he didn’t think it would hurt ever again or that he even had.
He remembered himself lying with Donny’s heavy stillness atop him, Donny’s warm blood flooding over him, mingling with his own as the flies came and feasted on the stuff and from just inside the embankment the major was yelling, “Don’t you move, Bob, goddammit, we got a fire mission coming in, we’ll smoke his fucking ass.” He remembered remembering while he lay there the time in the An Loc Donny had stood out in the motherfucking green open with his M-14 calmly shooting at gooks and drawing lots and lots of fire as poor Bob, busted from cover downslope like a covey of quail, scrambled up to the safety of the crest amid a sleet of destruction, his 700 flapping stupidly in
the breeze, the jungle floor erupting from the misses around him until he finally made it to the top and the two of them fell behind the crest, laughing like maniacs, just spared death, high and nuts on danger, so in love with the great fun of their profession and the sense of the edge that made all pleasures so infinitely tasty.
“Oh, Christ, Bob, you shoulda seen the look on your damn face coming up that hill, damn, I near to bust a gut.”
“You dumb sonovabitch kid, why didn’t you get your ass down, no sense both our asses getting wasted.”
“Fuck, Bob, it’d been worth it to die to see you lookin’ so scared,” and he dissolved in laughter.
He remembered his old dream: he and Donny and Donny’s beautiful young wife Julie, a few dogs, some good old Arkansas whiskey for cold nights, all of them somehow living together in the Ouachitas, away from civilization, with their rifles, hunting every day, drinking every night. It was a stupid dream, he now realized, stupid as they come, because there was no way the world would permit such a thing; but he’d been young and dumb when he’d thought it up.
And he remembered when the major came in and saw him, his leg slung above him in plaster, the whole left side of his body immobilized.
“Didn’t know they had someone who was that good,” the major had said. “It was a hell of a shot.”
Oh, yes it was. It was a hell of a shot.
I want him!
Bob thought. Oh Jesus I want him. But it was a year before his body was well enough to hold a rifle again, and by that time he’d heard the rumors: white guy. Specialist. Someone brought in for just one job. But by that time, too, his war was over.
So now he thought he’d tremble or cry. The dog’s warm tongue came slopping across his open hand, jarring him back from there to here. He shook his head a
bit to stir the memories and make them flee, and was aware how rocky he suddenly felt.
Oh you Russian, how I want you for what you took from me!
Then he got hold of himself, felt his remade self fly back inside his body; he was all right. He was Bob again, who never talked but to three or four men in Blue Eye, Sam and Doc LeMieux, Sheriff Tell, the late Bo Stark when he was sober, and who shot at least a hundred rounds a day, rain or shine, and had given himself up entirely to the rifles so that he could live out his life and feel nothing at all.
He was all right, he had work to do, it was fine, now he was ready.
Bob worked it out, on decaf coffee and TV dinners, his own way. That is, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two hours at it, nailed at the kitchen table under a dim wash of bulb or a gray wash of thin January sunlight, with only the morning walk with Mike and the few hours’ sleep to break up the journey. He did it slowly, carefully, never speeding up, never slowing down, looking through the maps and plans, drawing diagrams, taking measurements off his calculator, studying the architectural renderings of the buildings, making notes to himself.
He was a jungle shooter of course, an outdoorsman. But it seemed to him nevertheless that a city was a different kind of jungle, so that the same lessons would apply. A shooter would need the same requirements, the same perfect harmony of elements before taking a shot. And by this knowledge, he steered himself.
A shooter would need, first off, a clean theater of fire. By that Bob meant more than just a lane of fire. He’d need a line to the target, of course, but equally important he’d not want a formation of buildings either to the east or the west, to funnel the prevailing winds and generate
unpredictable shears of energy that could take the fragile trajectory of the shot and make a pretzel of it. He’d want the sun behind him when he shot to kill the possibility that his scope would pick up a beam of light from the sun in front of it and toss it somewhere someone was looking—and the Secret Service would certainly be looking.
And then there was range. The Secret Service Worry Zone, tragically nonexistent in 1963, would almost certainly be a half mile out by this time—that’s 880 yards where no windows could be open, where there’d be cops on every rooftop, circling helicopters, security checkpoints. The Russian would be at least a thousand yards out, maybe more like twelve hundred. He’d need a place to shoot from three-quarters of a mile away. And it would have to be a secure place, too, with an easy, unobservable entrance and exit, with access to an escape route. And it would have to be high for visibility to the target, but not too high. Shooting downward on an angle always played tricks on bullet trajectory too, particularly at extended ranges, but there was a cutoff point beyond which the trajectory became too irrational and was uncontrollable. Bob figured Solaratov would be at least three stories high, but could not be any more than five.
And the temperature was important too. A heavily humid climate could affect bullet trajectory too, but a frigid one would be even chancier, the near-to-zero weather making the gun’s action stiff and awkward and subtly transforming the vibratory patterns of the wood of the stock and the metal of the barrel to say nothing of the fiber of the man behind the trigger. Bob had heard a hundred stories of good men taking that most important shot at a twelve-point buck on a frozen winter day and watching in horror as the bullet puffed harmlessly against the bluff ten yards away, and the beast took
flight, leaving the hunter to face a bitter winter. He didn’t think the Russian would shoot in any kind of cold weather, or in a particularly damp climate—too many ifs, too many maybes. If you’re going to do it right, you do it where the earth itself is your ally, where the climate and the land and the sun and the sky are your friends.