Authors: Stephen Hunter
“You should know,
Colonel
Shreck, that for us it did not go perfectly.”
“Oh?” said Shreck.
“But not to worry.”
“Oh my,” said Hugh Meachum. He took another sip of wine.
“A traitor. Yes. A traitor.”
Shreck nodded, waiting, thinking, oh shit, what now?
“Who learned of our arrangement. And fled.”
“Messy,” said Hugh Meachum. “Very messy. Certain people will not be pleased.”
“Not to worry,” the general repeated.
“And why not, sir?” asked Shreck.
“The traitor was betrayed himself. He was hiding in Panama. When he finally thought it was safe, he flew to New Orleans. To the FBI. But we were waiting. Do you remember the wonderful electronic surveillance vehicle your organization provided to our intelligence service?”
“Affirmative,” said Shreck.
“With this, we tracked him. We made certain it was our Eduardo, and we eliminated him in a manner that communicates to all who know of such matters our seriousness of intentions.”
Shreck nodded.
“And now I drink,” said the general, “to my brave
compadres
and to the glorious future of our two nations.”
“Hear, hear,” said Hugh Meachum.
Fuck you, thought Shreck.
The next morning, waiting for the helicopter that would take him to the airport for the jet back to the United States, Shreck stood in the meadow before the great house and looked at the sea. It was a gray day, windy and moist, with a chill in the air surprising for the tropics. The chill made him think of the mornings in Korea, when he’d been just a kid, and all the times he’d sworn in Korea that no matter what happened to him, he’d never be cold again in the morning.
But he felt cold.
“
Colonel
, you are all right?”
It was General de Rujijo, now in his camouflages with his black beret. The high-polish Colt automatic hung in a shoulder holster under his left arm.
“I am fine, sir,” said Shreck.
“You look under the weather,
Colonel.”
“No sir. Not at all.”
“Good. I have a little present for you. From my very own archives.”
He snapped his finger and an aide brought over a briefcase. The general reached inside and pulled out a black plastic box that Shreck recognized as a videotape cassette.
“I record all my battalion’s operations,” said the general. “For training purposes. This is a copy of the action on the Sampul River. You should find it educational, how well our troops mastered their lessons.”
Shreck had an impulse to smash the man’s skull in. But he smiled grimly and took it from him.
“I have many more,” said the general. “You may have that one.”
“Yes sir. Thank you, sir.”
The general smiled with courtly dignity, saluted and when Shreck returned the salute, he turned and walked away.
Shreck looked at his watch; the chopper was late, nothing ever happened on time in this goddamned country.
“Colonel, you seem especially morose today.”
Of course it was old Hugh, who was never quite as drunk as he seemed, even if, at eleven
A.M
., he had a gin and tonic in his hand and a pinkish hue to his face.
“That asshole just presented me with a tape of the Sampul River job. I guess the point he’s trying to make is that we’re all in this together, like it or not. If he goes down, the tape reaches somebody important and we all go down.”
“The general is a practical man.”
“It makes me sick that a motherfucker like de Rujijo thinks he’s got us. He reminds me of some of those shit-ass gook generals in their fucking jumpsuits who made it out in seventy-five with a couple of hundred million bucks in the sack.”
“Raymond, I’ve always appreciated your tact. You never say what you think, do you?”
“I don’t get paid to think, Mr. Meachum. I didn’t go to Yale, like you did. We both know that.”
“Of course not. Well, the general. The general has his uses. He’s a dreadful man, a war criminal most certainly. A great importer of
la cocaína
. But he and he alone was not responsible for what happened with the Panther Battalion troops on the Sampul River. We made that mess, too. You, Colonel, too. You were there. Those were your trainers in the field. And, if we are to be responsible adults, we must clean it up.”
That didn’t really satisfy Shreck of course: it was too easy.
“We did what we did,” he said, “in perfect awareness of the consequences and the risks—and the costs. We did it because we believed in the long run it would save far more lives than it took.”
“Indeed we did. That, after all, is the sort of calculus they pay us for, isn’t it? But that same principle extends to this last operation, which you implemented so well in New Orleans. It costs us two men—an intellectual bishop with a surprisingly intractable moralistic streak, and a beat-up war hero who’s a complete gun nut. If we don’t use those men, and somehow the archbishop’s will prevails and it comes out about Panther Battalion, and who did what and why, then the left and the right in this bloody little country will never
ever
get together. There will be no treaty; the fighting will go on, the thousands will continue to die—”
“Come on, Mr. Meachum, that’s not what worries you. What worries you is that the lefties might win here, even as communism is crumbling or has crumbled all over the world, and we’ve kicked ass bigtime in the Persian Gulf. That’s what sticks in your craw.”
The old man smiled one of his mischievous Meachum smiles, then faded behind a mask of remoteness.
“Well, Raymond, believe what you will and for whatever reason you wish. But agree with me on this one sound operating principle. That this man Swagger must be found and destroyed.”
“We’ll get him.”
“Speaking of which, I had an idea. The Electrotek 5400. State of the art, is it not?”
“You know it is.”
“It seems a shame to let it sit up in New Orleans until the general figures out how to get it back through customs. It occurs to me how very useful it might be to you in your quest.”
“Jesus,” said the colonel.
“Yes, I thought you’d be pleased. You see, Raymond, even though you don’t think so, we do take care of our own. We always have. We always will. And I’d destroy that tape if I were you.”
“I will,” said Shreck, looking at the goddamned thing in his hand.
He drove through brightness. There was brightness everywhere. The sun was a blaze, a flare; the white sand picked it up and threw it back. He drove squint-eyed because he had no sunglasses. He drove straight on because he did not want to stop to rent a room, knowing his face was the most famous in America. He lived on candy bars and Twinkies and Cokes from desolate gas station vending machines and thanked God he had had a couple of hundred bucks in his wallet. He drove through the pain and the anger; he just committed himself to driving and he drove.
Now it was hot. He was in desert. The spindly cacti that played across the low rills looked as if they could kill him; in some religious part of his
brain they looked like crucifixes, though of course he was not a Catholic but some sort of Baptist back when his daddy had been alive. Ahead, the road was a straight, shimmering band in the heat; mirage rose off it in the light and dust devils swirled across it. Onward he drove.
He held right at seventy, just five miles over the speed limit. He was in his third stolen car, a 1986 Mercury Bobcat, but always before he stole a car he switched its plates with another vehicle’s. That was an old trick he’d heard about on Parris Island, from some tough young black kid, probably now long dead in Vietnam.
It was strange: from the long, wet haul across the swamp, hoarding cartridges, hunting to live, taking only the surest of shots; then, when he was down to his last, he came across something like civilization. He threw the gun away and nabbed a car; and then a long eighteen-hour driving stretch that brought him to desert. Ten hours in Texas. New Mexico was shorter. He was now in Arizona. Texas was long past, though it had been a long, long, stretch in Texas. He knew he was almost there. And what was
there
? Maybe nothing. Maybe this was it. But there was no other choice. He’d thought it out. No, no other place to go that would not get him caught because they’d be looking for him everywhere. But here there was a chance.
He came over a rise. A little town in the desert, a spread of buildings, with bright tin roofs glowing in the sun, lay just ahead. There’d be some kind of law here too, but he didn’t care. Far off, he could see the purple crests of mountains, but for now just this spread of buildings in the desert. He slowed.
The town came up fast.
AJO, ARIZ
., the sign said,
POP
. 7,567.
He drove through, shielding his eyes against the dazzie.
Bank, strip mall, convenience store, two gas stations, one main drag, what looked to be some tract houses where a lot of water had produced what passed for green, a McDonald’s, a Burger King, another gas station, Ajo Elementary School, and then, yes, finally, Sunbelt Trailer Park.
Bob pulled in. Drove all this way for such a scruffy little place, huh? Maybe a hundred trailers, maybe a hundred palm trees, it all looked the same to him.
He almost lost it right here at the end. Some pain fired up behind his eyes and his whole body felt itchy or patchy, as if he’d come down with a terrible skin disease. The entry wound hurt something terrible; a low throbbing against his nipple where the bullet had driven through him.
Am I going to make it? he wondered.
He drove up and down the little streets of trailers and saw people out of cartoons, fat Americans in shorts, women with their hair in curlers, lots of sullen, rude little children.
I must look a sight, he thought.
But nobody noticed; they were all sunk into their own dramas.
Then he saw her name on the mailbox, followed by R.N., her profession.
He knew the address from memory. All the letters had been returned unopened, placed in a slightly larger envelope. The flowers, every December, around the fourteenth. She probably just threw them out; she never sent a note of thanks. Yet she had never moved. She had not changed her name or made any attempt to become who she wasn’t. She just wouldn’t let him in. He was the rotten past and it carried too much hurt.
Bob looked at her place: the trailer was shabby but well tended, with trim little window boxes, with flowers in them. That was a woman’s gentle way. The trailer
was brown, edged in white trim, plastic. Neat, very neat.
And suppose she was not home? But the car was there, what had to be her car. And the name was hers, just as he knew it would be. Suppose there was a man there? Why not? She was a woman, didn’t there have to be a man?
But he didn’t think there would be.
He turned off the engine, and managed to lurch to the door. He knocked.
He’d never seen the woman before, only her picture. But when she opened the door he recognized her instantly. He’d always wondered what she looked like in the flesh, all those times off in Indian Country, looking at that picture. She had been a young beauty then and now she was a not-so-young beauty, but she was a beauty.
The face was a little too tough, some wrinkles, but not too many; the eyes, behind reading glasses, were gray, and miles beyond any kind of surprise. The hair was blond, but just blond. The lanky tall woman before him looked at him with eyes that stayed flat as the desert horizon.
She wore jeans and some kind of a pullover shirt and no makeup and had her hair pulled back in a short ponytail. She held a book in her hand with a bright cover, some kind of novel.
“Yes?” she said, and he saw a little shock cross her face.
He had no idea what to say. Hadn’t talked to women for years.
“Sorry,” he said, “sorry to bother you, ma’am, and sorry to look so bad. My name’s Swagger. Bob Lee. I knew your husband in the Marines. A finer young man there never was.”
“You,” she said. And then again, “You.” A sudden
grimace as she bit off the word. He saw her tracking the details; his scrubby face, matted with dirt; his filthy shirt with the blood stain now faded almost rose-colored; the eyes bloodshot, the rank smell of a man beyond hygiene. She probably saw his absolute defenselessness, too. He knew he was simply throwing himself at her. He felt himself begin to wobble.
“My God, you look awful.”
“Well, I got the whole damn government after me for something I never did. I’ve been driving for twenty-four straight hours. I came to you because—”
She looked at him some more, as if to say, Boy, this had better be good.
“… because he said that he told you all about me in those letters. Well, that was the best I ever was, and if you believed what your husband said to you when he was in the middle of a war, maybe you’ll believe me now, when I tell you that what they’re saying about me isn’t the truth, and that I need help in the worst possible way. Now that’s my piece. You can let me in or you can call the police. One way or the other, at this point I’m not sure I could tell the difference.”
She just stared at him.
“Will you help me, Mrs. Fenn? I haven’t got another place to go, or I’d be there.”
She eyed him up and down.
Finally she said, “You.” She paused. “I knew you’d come. When I heard about it, I knew you’d come.”
He went in and she led him to her bed, and threw back the cover and the sheets.
He collapsed.
“I’ll move the car around back,” she said and that was the last thing he remembered as he slid under.
Bob dreamed of Payne. He dreamed of that instant when he’d seen Solaratov fire and Payne had said his
name and he’d turned and the gun muzzle exploded, the bright flame lighting the room, the noise enormous and the sensation of being kicked as the bullet drove through him. He dreamed of his knees buckling and the terrible rage he felt at his own impotence as he hit the floor.
It played over and over in his head: the flash of the shot, the fall, the sense of loss as he hit. He had the sensation of screaming.