Authors: Stephen Hunter
Business of some sort, Nick thought. He’d heard that Swagger hadn’t been able to stay in the Marines because of his injuries. Probably today he was some kind of traveling salesman or something, or an Arkansas
farmer into the big city for the hell of it, a wild few days or something, take some pictures like any tourist, and go on back to the South Forty.
But it occurred to Nick to ask a more fundamental question. Why was the guy on the Suspects List at all? Who put him there? What gets you there?
He ran Swagger through the FBI computer and learned he had no record, at least no felonies listed anywhere. He checked him against the National Crime Index and again came up with nothing. Calling the Department of the Navy, he learned that Bob had retired at the rank of gunnery sergeant with physical disability pay after twelve years active service and close to three years in the hospital undergoing joint reconstruction and extensive physical therapy and had no blemishes on his record. He checked with the Veterans Administration and found out that Bob had never sought or received any kind of psychological testing, or counseling or anything like that. There seemed to be nothing on him at all. Now why the hell had he ended up on this list? And who was tracking him enough to note that he was here in New Orleans?
He called Herm Sloane.
“Hey, Herm—”
“Nick, we’re really pressed for time up here? What is it?”
“I just have one question. These Charlies, where do you get them? How does a guy get on the Charlie list?”
“Well, the Alphas are usually developed from intelligence, usually from the Bureau investigations of dangerous groups, from other Justice Department or DEA sources and our own intelligence unit; um, the Betas are usually guys with minor criminal records, guys who’ve made lots of public threats, who have an authority complex and tend to attract attention; and your Charlies are
letter writers. We keep all the threatening letters the president gets, or threatening-seeming letters. Why?”
“Oh, there’s a Charlie here that surprised me.”
“Listen, call Tom Marbella at Treasury in DC. He collates the letter files; he’ll let you know what’s what.”
Some minutes later, Nick managed to track down Marbella and Marbella said he’d check it out, let him know, and some time after that—it was the next day, actually—Marbella called back.
“Okay, I’ve got the file up on my computer terminal now. Your boy seems to think he should have won the Congressional Medal of Honor,” said Marbella.
“Hmm,” said Nick, a noise he made when he wanted to indicate he was on the phone still, but that he had no attitude or information to convey.
“Three weeks ago, he writes a letter to the president, explaining that the Marine Corps screwed him out of the Congressional Medal of Honor that was his by rights, just like his dad’s, and that he now wanted his medal, and would the president please send it on?”
“And that gets him on a Secret Service list?”
“Hey, after sixty-three,
anything
gets you on a Secret Service list, friend. We take no chances. We win no friends, but we take no chances.”
“Is there anything threatening in the letter?”
“Uh, well, our staff psychiatrist says so. It’s not an explicit threat so much as a tone. Listen to this. ‘Sir, I only request that the nation give me that which is my due, as I served my country well in the jungles. It’s quite important to me that I get this medal [exclamation point]. It is mine [exclamation point]. I earned it [exclamation point]. There’s no two ways about it, sir, that medal is mine [exclamation point].’ ”
Nick shook his head. Like so many others, the great Bob the Nailer, the warrior champion of Vietnam, the master sniper, had yielded to vanity too. It was no
longer enough merely to have done the impossible on a routine basis and to know that you and you alone were of the elect. No, in his surrender, Bob, like so many others, wanted celebrity, attention, validation. More. More for me. I want more and I want it now. It’s my turn.
That’s what Nick ran into all the time on the streets. Somehow in America it had stopped being about us or we or the team or the family; it was this me-thing that turned people crazy. They expected so much. They thought they were so important. Everybody was an only child.
But it seemed so un-Bob-like somehow.
“It sounds pretty harmless to me,” Nick said.
“It’s the exclamation points. Four of ’em. Our reading is that exclamation points indicate a tendency toward violence. Not an inclination, but a
tendency
, a capacity to let go. That’s the theory at any rate, though the truth is, we’ve found that letter writers almost never go to guns. They just don’t. For most of them, writing the letter is the thing that satisfies them, they sit back and everything is nice. Still, this guy is supposedly a hell of a shot, or was at one time. He used four exclamation points. And we do have it on record that he did go to New Orleans—”
“Yeah, I’ve confirmed that—”
“And so we put him on the Charlie list. Check him out, see if he deserves an upgrade to Beta—”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“I know the Charlie list is shit, Memphis. Nobody likes to do the Charlie list. Usually the guys just out of training end up doing Charlies. You sound, um, a little old for Charlies.”
“Look, I do what my boss says, that’s all.”
“We appreciate it. Glad to have the Bureau’s help.”
“How did you know he was in New Orleans?”
“Huh?”
“You said, ‘And he
was
in New Orleans.’ How did you know that?”
“Uh,” said Marbella, “it says so. Right here in his file.”
“But where did that information come from? I mean, a snitch, another agency, a cop shop, the Pentagon, the VA?”
“Hey, it doesn’t say. You know, this stuff comes in from all over, some of it pretty raw. What’s the big deal?”
“Is somebody
watching
Swagger?”
“Shit, man. I’m the last guy to know. And it doesn’t say a thing here. It’s just raw data, Memphis. Some of it’s accurate, some of it isn’t. It’s up to you to check it out, okay, bud?”
“Yeah, sure. Hey, thanks a lot,” Nick said. He hung up.
What should I do? I should do
something
.
He called Directory Information for the state of Arkansas, learned quickly that Bob Lee Swagger had no listed or unlisted phone number. He called the Arkansas State Police, and found that Bob Lee Swagger was not under investigation or indictment of any sort, but from that he learned Bob’s address, which was simply Rural Route 270, Blue Eye. Finally, he called Vernon Tell, who was the sheriff of Polk County, Arkansas, and after giving the FBI identification code, quickly got to the sheriff himself.
“Bob Lee? Bob Lee just lives up the mountain by himself. That’s all.”
“Any problems with him?”
“No, sir. Not the most sociable fellow in the world, no, sir. Bob Lee keeps to himself and don’t like people picking at him. But he’s a good man. He done his country proud in the war, and his daddy done his country
proud and Earl’s daddy Lucas was actually the sheriff back in the twenties. They’re all old Polk County folks, and wouldn’t hurt nobody didn’t hurt them first.”
But it bothered Nick that Bob lived alone, away from society, with a lot of guns. The profile of the loner gunman had proved out too many times to be coincidental.
“Any drinking or substance abuse problems?”
“Mr. Memphis, believe me, it would be a lie if I didn’t tell you some years back, Bob Lee had a problem with the bottle and had some wild times. He’s always in pain, you know, because of the way he was hurt in the war. But I believe Bob Lee has found himself in some way. All he wants from life is freedom and to be left alone.”
“What about medals? Has he ever said anything about medals? Are medals important to him?”
“To Bob Lee? Let me tell you something, son—were you in the war or anything?”
“No sir, I wasn’t.”
“Well, son, the only people that are interested in medals are the ones that are fixing to run for office some day. I went from one side of Burma to the other with General Merrill’s Marauders in 1943 and 1944, and the only man I ever saw who wanted a medal or cared about a medal later became the only governor of Colorado to be impeached. No, son, Bob Lee Swagger don’t give two damns and a jar of cold piss about medals. I’ve been out to his place a time or so and you’d be hard pressed to find an indication anywhere that this man was one of the bravest heroes our country ever produced.”
Somehow, that pleased Nick.
And that night, when Herm dropped by, he said, “Nick, you got any Charlies to butt on up to Beta or Alpha classification?”
Nick answered, “Yes,” and he had three names, men
who seemed dangerous but whom he had not been able to turn up.
Bob Lee Swagger was not on the list.
At last he was out of the office. Sitting in a swamp, as a matter of fact, but at least, indisputably, out of the office.
He sat in the back of a Secret Service van, with Herm Sloane and his partner Jeff Till as Till, the expert, fumbled and cursed at a control console. The van was all dressed up with electronic gear.
“Not a goddamn thing,” said Till.
“Are you sure it’s reading?” said Sloane.
“I’m not sure of a goddamn thing,” said Till, a little neurotically. “All the lights are red, we’re on the right directional beam, but believe me, I am getting absolutely nothing but hum and static. It’s making me crazy.”
Nick let the two chums take turns cursing the equipment that flickered wanly in front of them.
Outside, there was nothing but bayou and hanging cypress and the swish and rustle of swamp water and small, mean creatures squishing through the mud. Somewhere three hundred yards ahead—at least in theory—there was a farmhouse that doubled as the headquarters of the White Beacon of Racial Purity, a rabidly antiblack group said to be floating around the fringes of the New Orleans loonies culture. These were fat-bellied white guys with tattoos and Ruger Mini-14’s, their favorite piece, far to the right of the Klan, good old, mean old boys who’d dropped out of the Klan because it was too dang
soft
. That is, if they existed. Nick was privately of the opinion that it was a policeman’s fantasy, or rather an easy out; any inconvenient crime could be blamed on the White Beacon, and thereby consigned to the unsolved files without much in the way of an
investment in time or energy. He had once spent a week trying to get a fix on them, concluding that there was nothing but vapors of hate and rumors feeding on rumors.
But, on a tip that Sloane had gotten from a detective in the New Orleans Gang Intelligence Division, he and his partner and, as local representative, the reluctant Nick Memphis had come out well past midnight in the Service’s electronic monitoring vehicle in order to penetrate the farmhouse—no warrant was necessary if the penetration was done via parabolic microphone—and see what the White Beacon boys were up to, if there were White Beacon boys and if this was the farmhouse where they were meeting. Nick knew at least three sly old Gajun detectives who’d drink themselves goofy in merry recollection of having sent three Northern federal whiteboys out into the swamps for a night, listening to the cicadas. But he said nothing.
“It can’t be a goddamn overlapping signature,” said Till. “It’s just junk equipment. It isn’t even digital, for Christ’s sake.”
“Maybe the beam isn’t getting through the trees,” said Sloane.
“Maybe it’s the goddamn junk equipment,” said Till again.
But Nick felt as if he was in the space cruiser
Enterprise
, it was so high-tech.
“What’s wrong with the equipment?” he asked. “Man, if we have a big bust, we have to requisition our EV from Miami.”
“We been trying to get an upgrade for years,” said Till. “This piece of shit always goes into a zone two weeks before the Man does. But it was built in the sixties and it’s so far from being state of the art, it can’t even pick up HBO! It’s a piece of shit!”
“You need an Electrotek 5400,” Nick said innocently.
“Jesus, yeah!” said Till. “Sure, but I don’t have a million bucks lying around to spend on listening in on people. Hell, all I’m trying to do is protect the life of the president of the United States, that’s all. How’d you ever hear of an Electrotek? That goddamn thing’s top secret.”
“Guy told me. Said there were seven in the world.”
“No, they built five or six more. Yeah, wouldn’t it be sweet if we had one. Man, we wouldn’t have to go to this fucking swamp. We could go to the parking lot and tune in.”
“It’s the Agency and DEA that have them, right?”
“And certain overseas clients with very high and tight connections.”
“I heard some guys got them in Salvador.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. No death squad would be complete without them. Meanwhile, guys like us who are trying to work for a living, we get a piece of sixties shit like this. Man, I think I’m getting Country Joe and the Fish on these earphones.”
Nick shut up for a while then, as Till jimmied and dicked with the equipment.
“I got something,” he finally said.
“Tape rolling?”
“Tape rolling fine. Ah, let me see if I can amplify it and bring it out …”
Nick heard a babble of voices chattering over the loudspeakers:
“You know, dem boys, dey be, you know, um, dey be hawmping in de woods fer ole gata, lemme tell you, um, dey be hawmping da swamps, shooooo-eee, boy, wif dem, like lights, you know, you know what I’m saying,
lights
, like, and when dem boys git in reals close,
wham, wham!
, you know—”
“I hate to tell you,” Nick said, “but I don’t think
those are the Beacons. Not unless they started an equal opportunity program.”
“Shit,” said Sloane.
“Man, what are they talking about?” said Till in wonderment.
“Gator hunting, I think. These old backwoods blacks, they go out late at night and attract gators with light, then bop ’em over the head with ax handles. Highly illegal, but they eat the meat and sell the skins and teeth. Poaching. It’s poaching. You guys want to bust ’em for conspiracy to poach? It’s three to five and it’s federal.”