Authors: Stephen Hunter
Benchresting was the R & D lab of all shooting; if you were at all serious about the game, you had to bank your time at the loading bench and the shooting bench; all other things stemmed from it. If his boy learned his stuff anywhere, he learned it in benchresting. The magazine, he learned, had begun as the newsletter of the first American benchrest shooter’s club, which started up in the early fifties in upstate New York, following on the work of men like Warren Page, Harvey Donaldson and P. O. Ackley in the twenties and thirties. They were loaded with tabular matter, with long and dreary accounts of shooting matches of years ago, obscure names of great shooters and obsolete calibers like the .222½ and the 7 × 61 Sharpe and Hart.
He bought them all and that night he began to read them. When he’d read them all, he found more, and read them too. He haunted the secondhand shops, looking for old copies. When he found them, he read them, looking for something but what it was, he couldn’t say.
I’ll find you, you old bastard, he thought, for he assumed his quarry was old. Only old men could shoot like that, for it’s a dying skill, not practiced by the young much; there was only one younger man who could have made that shot, but he was an illusion. Bob
tried to put it out of his mind, because it spoiled things for him.
It’s not T. Solaratov, he said to himself. It’s not. It can’t be.
In the evenings they made love. They made love for hours. Sometimes he felt like a piston that just kept on going.
And finally, several times, after he’d fallen through the last of his floors and lay there as if every atom in his body was at rest, he felt himself yielding to the fatigue. He couldn’t move a thing.
“God,” she said. “You must have saved up all that time at Walden Pond.”
He snorted.
“I seem to be doing okay.”
“I’ll say,” she said.
They lay there, breathing their way back to earth.
The terror of her was that she carried in her the seed of possibility. In her, he saw an alternate life. It occurred to him that he didn’t have to live in solitude, hating the world, and that he didn’t have to give himself to his rifles, like some kind of mad Jesuit. Didn’t have to live in a little trailer off in the misty mountains, and face each visitor with mistrust.
The world was full of things that could be. He had a flash of them together somewhere, just enjoying each other, no complications. Somehow it had to do with water; he saw them at a beach, maybe Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, or maybe outside Biloxi or Galveston or some such; anyway, sand, water, sun, and nothing else in the world.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked. “You almost had a smile on your face. What was it?”
He knew if he told her he was lost. There would be no turning back from the softness. He lay there and the
temptation to give in rose and rose in him. He wanted to let it swallow him up. He could feel himself disappearing in the wanting.
“Something from the Marines.”
“That’s a lie,” she said.
“Sure. I was thinking how much I like this. It’s a life I could love. But I have to tell you square-up: maybe it was a mistake. Maybe it costs me too much or gives me too much to hold on to, I have to be able to let go of things. It’s like I’m bargaining; I have to be able to walk away from the deal at any time, elsewise I can never win. I have to be willing to die at any time, or I can’t ever win. Any man in a war will tell you that; you must be willing to give up your life at any chance. If you’re thinking about what’s at home, you lose your edge.”
She looked at him with those gray, calm eyes.
“I was right. I knew. Give me a taste. Then pull away. Go off on your crusade.” She almost laughed. “I wish I could hate you, Bob. You are a true and deep son of a bitch. But hating you would be like hating the weather. No point to it at all.”
“I’m sorry. There was never a better time. It was the best. It was special. Another time or two and I’d never leave.”
“No. That’s a lie. You’d leave. I know your type. You always leave.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’d leave. I have to.”
She found this one a laugh.
“You
are
a bastard.”
Bob nodded. Not much passed on his grave face.
“When?”
“I think it has to be tomorrow.”
“So soon?”
“Yeah. It’s time. I’ve got some ideas. I’ve got something of a plan, even.”
“I just never thought it would be so soon.”
“The sooner I leave, the sooner I come back.”
“You’re lying again, Bob. You’re not coming back. You’ll be dead in a week.”
“More than likely,” he said. “It’s a shaky plan. But it’s the only one I could come up with. But first, I’ve got a couple of things to do.”
“And what’re they?” she said, trying to show no pain.
“I’ve got to dig up my cache in the mountains where I’ve got thirty thousand dollars and some guns stashed, so I can pay my own way and defend myself. And then,” he said, “I’ve got to bury my dog.”
Shreck never walked through doors; he exploded through them like a grenade, blowing them nearly off their hinges as he blasted through, bent forward, his gait rock-steady and determined.
Dobbler looked up at the noise, and Shreck was already on him, having crossed the ten feet from threshold to desk front in about a half a second and no more than two paces.
“Colonel Shreck, I—”
Feeling rousted as if by a bull on a snap inspection, Dobbler made a clumsy attempt to rise but the stern man motioned him down impatiently.
“I’m running late, Dobbler. I just got in.”
“My God, Colonel, are you all right?”
“Tired. Exhausted.”
“Jet lag? You really should take your shoes off, and walk barefoot on the carpet and—”
“Doctor, I’d asked you to consider Swagger’s disappearance. Can you summarize your thoughts for me?”
“Of course, of course,” said Dobbler, nonplussed; Shreck had never crashed into his office before; almost always, he served at Shreck’s summons.
Dobbler began to babble through his discovery of the strange florist’s bill in Little Rock, his initial dead end when he learned that the florist kept no records, and his latest initiative, which was to ask one of the technonerds in Research to run a computer search through the memory of the FTD databank if he could get into the system, in hopes of locating that elusive destination to which Bob had dispatched his flowers. But halfway through he realized that Shreck wasn’t focusing.
“That’s very promising. But I want some feeling of what’s going on in his head. What’s he going to do?”
“Oh,” said Dobbler, somewhat taken aback at being denied the compliment he expected. “Well, Payne says the FBI has now moved its base of operations to Arkansas. His home area. They believe he’ll head there.”
“What do you think?”
“Oh, he will,” said Dobbler vaguely.
“Why do you believe that?”
“Because he has to do what we expect, and still beat us.” Dobbler smiled. “That’s really what’s going on now. Bob’s vanity. His desire not merely to survive but to triumph. To punish us for our delusion of superiority. He must now prove to us who is the alpha-male.”
Shreck nodded, intently.
“Suppose the FBI takes him alive. What will he be able to tell them?”
“Ah, I doubt he will be taken alive. He’s in a very
volatile state. The pressures on him are incredible. He—”
“But if he is?”
“If he is—it may make him insane. They won’t believe him, of course, the trap is too tight, too well constructed. It may actually destroy his mind. I don’t know if he can function under those circumstances.”
Shreck followed this carefully. Then he said, “All right, good. That’s very helpful.”
“Why, thank you, Colonel Shreck,” said Dobbler, pleased.
“It’s good to have a Harvard man on the staff, Dr. Dobbler. Because I can count on you for consistency. You are full of shit. Always. Completely. That’s a gift, Dobbler.”
Dobbler was stunned.
“I—”
“You stupid asshole, don’t you know a thing about how men’s minds work? Or Swagger’s kind of man? Don’t you see the fucking joke in this? You see, we planned his death, but maybe we gave him his life. We have engaged him. He is back among the living, and he’s got himself a war to fight, and all his skills and talents may be fully deployed. That’s the terrible thing, the longer this goes on, the more he enjoys it, the stronger he gets. And he’ll love it. He should pay us for it. We’re giving him more fun than he’s had since the war.”
It was morning of the last day. She got up at four and made breakfast so that it was ready when he awoke at five. But he wanted to make love—so soon, after last night, and what she had thought would be the last time—so the breakfast waited. It tasted wonderful when they got to it.
Then he showered and she dressed his wounds.
“Jesus, but aren’t you a stud-puppy?” she said. “I’ve never seen multiple trauma gunshot recovery so fast.”
The arm wound was the ugliest, a raw welt at the outside of his left bicep about three inches above the elbow. But it was just bruised and burned meat that would eventually heal without complication.
The entrance and the exit wounds to the chest had resolved themselves into quarter-sized scabs that would ultimately pucker into scar tissue.
“It doesn’t hurt?”
“I can handle it.”
“I just bet you can.”
Bob had let his beard stay. He was a tall, sunburned man with a thick shock of blond-brown hair and a powerful chest. His eyes were hard and small; his mouth was a jot of concentration. He was a man in blue; she’d gone into a Gap store in a mall in Tucson and bought, with cash, three pairs of blue jeans and three pairs of black jeans, waist 34, length 33, and ten blue denim work shirts, and had washed them all. She’d also gotten a pair of brown Nocona boots, size 11, double A width, and two dozen pair of white socks at the Pick-and-Save. It was all loaded in a duffel bag in the back of his stolen car.
“Bob …”
Bob took a last swig of coffee.
“You know, you could just
stay
here. In time, we’d move. We could always be a jump ahead of them.”
A small smile came over his taut features.
“Sure. But I won’t. You know, if I could walk in right now and say to them, hey, you’ve got the wrong boy, and they take a look at some things they’ve missed, and say, ‘Damn, Swagger, you’re right,’ I still wouldn’t do it. Because that just means I’m off the hook and that’s not enough. I got some idea what it’s like to live with debts
to pay and no way to pay them. Well, this time, I do mean to pay them, in full.”
He turned, looking at her obliquely, and she saw an odd and powerful light in his eyes. She saw, too, that he was no longer the man he’d been a month ago, that desperate, bloody, half-crazy fugitive who’d arrived on her doorstep.
She didn’t know this man. This was the Bob that Donny had loved, so focused you felt his power even now, sitting in the bedroom as he buttoned up his shirt. Now he scared her a little.
“Julie, you listen here. When I’m gone, I want you to scrub down every surface in this house with ammonia, because it’s the only thing that will take off fingerprint oils. Throw out all your dishes and glasses and silverware. Now, you know what you have to do?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Run through it again. Tell me.”
“In five days, I drive four hours in any direction to any pay phone I can find. Then I call long distance to—uh, the number is three-three-one, four-five-two, six-seven-eight-three and I do my Lurleen accent—low, trashy, the kind of girl Elvis used to pick up in Tupelo bars before the Ed Sullivan show—”
He smiled.
“Then I ask for Memphis. Agent Memphis.”
“Yes.”
“They’ll test you. They’ll ask you what the dog’s name was, and it wasn’t Pat like they put in the papers, it was Mike. I wasn’t hit once, like they said, but twice. You’ll have to tell them that.”
“I know all that. Then I tell him what you told me.”
“Yes.”
“Then I hang up and drive away.”
“How long on the phone?”
“No more than two minutes.”
“Don’t forget to stop and have lots of change for the phone. You should have at least ten dollars in quarters.”
“All right.”
“Then you drive back here. I can’t begin to think there’s a chance in hell they’d ever track you. You don’t know about me, you never heard about me, I don’t exist. Nobody will know.”
“And then the fun part,” she said bitterly, “you get killed. The FBI kills you in some little Arkansas road-house.”
“Maybe. But I have a few cards up my sleeve.”
“Oh, Bob.”
The sun was coming over the eastern rim of the desert now, and it bled through the sky. For just a moment the room itself seemed soaked in blood—blood everywhere, red and glinting and wet and black. But blood most of all in the narrow eyes of Bob Lee Swagger.
She shuddered, and tried to think of other things.
“Nick!”
It was Howard, and he didn’t sound pleased.
“Uh, yes, Howard?”
“Would you come in here, please?”
“Sure.”
Nick left the bull pen and headed into the little office out of which Howard was running the operation.
“Nick—”
Howard did not ask him to sit down, not a good sign.
“Nick, just what
is
it you’ve been doing?”
“Ah, well, you know, mainly monitoring the reports on Bob’s movements as they’re routed here from Washington, and coordinating with the local officers and keeping contact with our surveillance teams sited in the area, and monitoring the readiness of our quick-react teams, you know, Howard, trying to stay alert and keep our readiness high and—”
“I’ve just had a very irate call from Ben Prine in D.C. The head of Cointelpro.”
“Yes.”
“He says a request originated from this office concerning access to Bureau files on a private security firm called RamDyne over my authorization. I didn’t authorize
anything
. Do you know about this?”
Nick wasn’t an adept liar. A tide of phlegm rose in his throat and he was stunned at his own sudden loss of confidence and clarity of thought.