Authors: Stephen Hunter
“Tommy’s a piece of shit.”
“Nicky, I always liked you.”
“You piece of shit!” Nick yelled.
“Oh, Nick’s a tough boy, ain’t he,” said the heavyset, smaller man. Nick could see a tapestry of blue ink embossed on his thick arms.
He remembered the RamDyne file.
Payne-0
.
“You’re Payne, right? The Green Beret. You were at the massacre on the Sampul River. Man, you must be real proud of yourself, you piece of shit.”
“Oh, Nick, Nick, Nick. That was a wonderful job of work. We killed two hundred communists that day, so that fat assholes like you could rest in your fat little country, not a thought in their heads.” He laughed an awful laugh. “Nick, that’s what we do. You know, that’s our job.”
“Payne-O, you oughtn’t to tell him—”
“Oh, we can trust Nick with all our secrets, can’t we, Nick? Nick’s one of the good scouts, right?”
“Fuck you, Payne,” said Nick, liberated by the drunken freedom of the drug still in his system. “You let me out of these cuffs, man, I’ll tear your fucking heart out. Your specialty is machine-gunning kids. I read the file. Let me tell you, motherfucker, I’d like to match you against an FBI SWAT team instead of women and kids in a river. We’d teach you something you didn’t know about rock and roll, motherfucker.” Nick was really screaming.
Payne laughed. Tommy laughed.
Nick looked beyond him and saw the darkness and the stillness of the Louisiana bayou. God knew where they were. Miles and miles beyond civilization. There was no help or mercy. He saw his own car parked just outside. He knew what that meant. It meant they would kill him in some way made to approximate a suicide and the car had to be there to explain how he’d gotten out there.
“Now, Nick, this can go hard or it can go easy. What’s it going to be?”
“Either way it’s fucking curtains for me, sucker.”
“Not necessarily,” said Tommy. “When we make you see how we’re operating in National Security, you may even want to join us. We do what has to be done. You better be fucking glad somebody in this fucking country is. We’re like the fucking Roman centurions, man. We keep the barbarians away. Isn’t that right, Payne-O?”
“He’s got that right.”
“Shitasses like you always say you’re doing something for the country. You’re the barbarians, motherfucker.”
Then Nick spat in Payne’s face.
Something awesome and rhinolike flared in Payne; even in the darkness Nick could sense the surge of naked
rage. At that second Payne wanted to rip his eyes out. But he regained his professional control, and wiped the phlegm off his forehead.
“Payne-O,” said one of the other guys, “he ain’t gonna volunteer any info.”
Payne’s eyes narrowed.
“Yeah, shit, you’re right. That stretches it out. But it’s fastest up front. So shoot him up.”
Nick felt his jacket sleeve being shoved up.
“Oh, Nick, have we got a tongue loosener for you.”
He felt the prick of a needle, its long slide into his vein, and the odd largeness as whatever was injected into him filled his veins.
“Okay, Nick, just relax, let it happen,” Tommy said.
Nick tried to fight it.
“It’s very sophisticated stuff. Phenobarbital-B, an advanced compound, state of the art for CIA interrogations. Go ahead, fight it. The more you fight, the more you talk.”
Nick felt nothing. Then he felt everything. Lights were going on, then going off. He felt his will shredding. He felt it going away. In his weakness and terror, he yearned only to please.
“Now Nick,” came the voice from very far away, “Nick, Nick, Nick. Tell us a story. Got the tape going, Pony?”
“It’s on.”
“Nick, how’d you first hear of RamDyne?”
Nick tried to find a way to resist, but the point of it seemed quite ridiculous. Why not give them what they wanted? Everybody did.
“I—I—”
“That’s right. Go on.”
“I was on surveillance with the Secret Service prior to Flashlight’s visit. Um. One of their agents mentioned that RamDyne exported the big surveillance rigs to
Central American governments and I’d been looking for some way …”
And with that he was gone. He talked and talked and talked. He couldn’t shut up. It just came out of him. It was like a purging. All the information he’d stored, all his doubts about Bob Lee Swagger’s guilt, all his fears, his terror, worst of all, of his own inadequacy, it all came out of him. He talked for days, for years. In the end, he wore them out. He beat them by talking.
It was dawn. The crickets had shut up, even, he out-talked the crickets. Outside, the sun was rising, turning the day pale and green. Outside, Nick could see, everything was green. It was a wild driven craze of green, a dangerous green. They were near a river or a swamp; there were trees everywhere. The road was a dirt track. He was tired. He was so tired. Now all he wanted to do was rest.
But they had him up.
“I just want to sleep,” he said.
“Nah. You want to go to the bathroom, right?” said Tommy.
“Nah, I wanna sleep.”
“Shit. Walk him around, okay.”
“You got it all, Payne-O?”
“Hey, can you think of anything I left out? This guy would sing the birdies out of the sky now.”
“Ah, let me see. Let me check the list.”
“It’s all checked off. It’s all on the list.”
“Okay, you know the drill. Tommy, he’s your buddy. You handle it. Pony, you stay with him. We’ll leave you here. You wait till he pisses. Meanwhile, I gotta get the tape back ASAP.”
“You got it, Payne-O.”
Still crushed by the drug, Nick could at least put it together. He had no will and he had no pride.
“What are you gonna do to me?” he asked.
“What do you think, fuck?” said Payne. “You crossed the line. You been a-messin’ where you shouldn’t a been a-messin’, and now the boots are gonna walk all over you. Someone’s still got to do the hard thing, you little shit. You didn’t have to find out about it. It was your choice. But now you’re the hard thing, kid.”
“National Security at Risk. Lancer Committee requests no further action be taken. Refer to Annex B,” Nick quoted, but the irony was lost on them.
The two of them got into the surveillance van and drove away. Nick watched as the van disappeared down the dirt road, leaving a skirt of dust in the empty air.
Nick looked around. It was quite a beautiful place, actually. Completely deserted, but a kind of river basin, where the swamp momentarily yielded to a broad yellow-green meadow. A few hundred yards away the trees were dense and the land looked soupy. Here, in the fragrant morning, the land was solid. His car was parked over there, and another one.
Nick turned. Tommy and the other guy were eyeing him balefully. He twisted on his cuffs; they would not give. He could run, but to where? There was no place to run to.
“This is all wrong,” he said. “I haven’t done anything.”
“It ain’t about doing things wrong. It’s about knowing too much. It’s how these things work, man. It’s how they always work,” said Tommy. “You want a Coke or a cup of coffee? We have a thermos, Nicky.”
“No.”
“Nicky, I hate to tell you, you ain’t no superman. You’re gonna have to piss sooner or later. It’s the nature of the beast.”
“What’s with the pissing?” he asked.
“You got too high a concentration of pheno-B in you.
You piss, it gets down to levels where it can’t be spotted. See, that’s why we got to wait. Sorry about it. Enjoy the morning. Just relax. It ain’t gonna be nothing.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Nicky, I seen a lot of guys check out. And my time will come soon enough. So let’s just get through it as quickly and easily as possible. Don’t cry or beg or nothing.”
“Fuck you, I’m not going to cry or beg.”
“Usually, they do,” said Pony. “Usually they do.”
Nick waited until his bladder betrayed him. It had to, finally. He fought it. But then Tommy said, “Hey, why put yourself through that? It ain’t gonna matter much, really. I mean, is it?”
So finally he said it. “Have to go. Undo my hands.”
“No can do, pard. You know that. Pony, undo his pants for him. Don’t touch him. Let it be natural.”
God, he hated them! It was the little touches of solicitousness, the softly remorseless way in which they did their job.
Pony, young and muscular and vaguely Latino, undid his pants. He was able to urinate himself dry, a last, long dying arc of life in the bright morning light in the blazing green of the swamp.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Fuck you. Get it fucking over with.”
They zipped and buttoned him up and led him down to the river. It lapped against the mud. A dragonfly flashed in the sun, big and prehistoric, like something liberated from a million or so years in amber. Nick was pushed to his knees.
He felt a belt being strapped around his waist. Then his left arm suddenly wore a new manacle, something attached to the belt. Jesus, they had
equipment
for this! That’s how thought out it was, how perfect. They had a drill. They’d done it a thousand times!
Something was thrust into his hand; his fingers recognized the familiar contours of his Colt Agent. He tried to pull the trigger but it wouldn’t budge; they had something wedged under it. He felt a binding of tape being wound about his knuckles, locking the small pistol in his grip.
“Hold his head back, Pony,” Tommy said. Pony grabbed Nick by his hair, and pulled his head back. It fucking hurt.
“You motherfucking pricks,” he screamed. “God, don’t do this to me, don’t do this to me. Tommy, Christ, please, I was your buddy.”
“No, Nicky. You was just a fed, man. I can’t cut you no slack. I got my job to do, man.”
Nick heard a click behind him, and the first set of cuffs came away, freeing his right arm; but immediately it was ridden into submission by the full force and thrust of Tommy Montoya at his right.
“Okay, Nicky, don’t fight me. Over in a second.”
“Please don’t do this,” Nick begged.
“Okay, Nicky, up we go.”
The man forced Nick’s arm upward in an arc, curving the hand toward Nick’s temple. His own hand was his enemy. Nick fought with all the strength he had, but the two men stood over him in postures that put the complete physics of leverage on their side. He saw his hand rise toward his head, guided by both muscular arms of his murderer. It was clear how it had to go; the arm would rise until the muzzle touched his temple; then Tommy would pull whatever he’d wedged behind the trigger—a RamDyne improvised suicide replication plug, part Number 4332 from the RamDyne Catalog, available to your friendly secret police force, no doubt—and crush Nick’s trigger finger. The gun would blow Nick’s brains out. He’d be found in the weeds by the river, his hand locked around his own pistol, his own car
close at hand. There’d be no other physical evidence. They’d thought of everything. It was so fucking professional!
Nick strained against his own hand.
“Oh, Jesus, oh, Christ, don’t do this.”
“Just—ah, almost, there, don’t fight it, goddammit,
don’t
fight it!” And the gun rose and rose until at last Nick felt it touch the fragile shell of his temple. It felt like somebody pressing a penny against him. Through his strained peripheral vision he could see Tommy laboriously working on the gun, getting his own gloved finger half into the trigger guard, making ready to pull the plug.
“Watch yourself, Pony,” Tommy said, warning his partner to steer clear of spatter, “I’ve almost got it, ah—”
Tommy Montoya’s head exploded.
The sound of the report reached them.
Across the river a cloud of angry white birds rose as one in clattering agitation, rudely bumped from their perches by the rifle shot.
Nick, freed of half his constraint, turned to the other man, Pony, who stood still stupefied, not getting it.
But Nick got it.
“You’re dead, motherfucker,” he said, and at that precise instant the second bullet found Pony center chest, blowing through his heart. He pirouetted to the ground, the destroyed heart spurting blood as he fell.
The birds cawed and seethed in the air. The wind rose and whistled.
Nick sat back. His arm ached. He wanted to throw away the pistol, but couldn’t, because it was taped to his hand. He figured the key would be somewhere on these two clowns.
He looked around and saw a man wading across the river. He was tall and rangy and tan, beardless now, in
blue jeans and a tired blue denim shirt. He wore a baseball cap that said
RAZORBACKS
on it. He had harsh, gray, squirrel-shooter’s eyes, unmirthful, focused, unafraid. His mouth was grim. He was quite tall.
He carried a fat-barreled Remington 700 rifle with about a yard of scope atop it. He carried it like a man who knew a little something about rifles.
He walked up to Nick.
“Mornin,’ Pork,” said Bob the Nailer.
Nick looked at him with love-filled, moronic eyes.
“You’re some sorry sight, sonny,” said Bob. “Chained and trussed like a coon in a bag after a hunt. Those boys were about to have your patty-cake butt for breakfast.” Nick watched him go over to each of the bodies, and search them for keys and papers.
He plucked two keys out of the late Tommy Montoya’s pocket and came back over to take the cuffs off Nick.
“Goddamn,” he said in disgust, “these boys even had a rig for phony suicide.”
He stripped the tape from Nick’s fist. Nick kept looking at him stupidly while he freed the little
Colt Agent. It fell to the earth. Swagger bent and picked it up.
“You’re not going to shoot me with this little bitty gun, are you, Pork? I couldn’t be sure the last time.”
Dumbly, Nick shook his head.
“Here. Don’t lose it. Now come on, boy, we’ve got to get these two pieces of human shit into the water, and more or less sanitize this area. You don’t want the Louisiana State Police on your ass, do you? I sure don’t, no sir. I’ve seen enough damn police to last me a century.”
With that, he laid his rifle down on the hood of Nick’s car and bent to one of the two bodies. As he bent, Nick saw that he had a Colt .45 automatic wedged cocked and locked into his jeans in a high hip-carry holster. The pistol was a custom job, with low mount sights and neoprene combat grips. It was the sort of pistol a man who has thought a lot about pistols might carry, as were the three spare magazines in Sparks mag holders on the other high hip.