Authors: Stephen Hunter
Well, maybe I’ll do some thinking too, thought Nick, consigning himself to be the only one to press against the mysteries of Annex B.
Dr. Dobbler licked his lips nervously, swallowed a time or two, and then knocked on the door.
“Yes?”
“Colonel Shreck?”
“Yes, come in, Doctor.”
Dobbler stepped into Shreck’s office, to find Payne and the colonel bent in conversation.
“What is it, Doctor?”
“Ah, I have a—a
plan.”
The colonel looked at Dobbler. Russell Isandhlwana used to look at him like that, more with pity than anything else. In some ways Russell and the colonel were the same man. They just took what they wanted. And
Dobbler knew that he desperately wanted to please them both.
“All right,” said Shreck, waiting for more.
“Bob is too sharp and suspicious to be taken as we had hoped. He’s always watching. We must beat him on his strength, which is patience. We must put something before him so subtly that not a man in a thousand would notice it. But we must put it there and let him sniff at it and go away, sniff again and go away, reconnoiter and re-reconnoiter, until he has at last satisfied himself that the way is clear. We must nurse him in slowly, never being greedy, draw him in with utmost care and discipline, being as ready as he is to disengage if conditions do not favor us. We must be more patient. Then and only then—”
Shreck was impatient.
“That’s wonderful. Now tell me how.”
“Yes sir,” said Dobbler. “All right. Here it is. Am I not certain that somewhere in the secret files of this organization there is access to a man who does the shooting? Really. There has to be a shooter. An excellent shooter. After all,
somebody
took that shot in New Orleans.”
Shreck thought about it, but didn’t commit himself. Then he said, “Go on.”
“This shooter, I guarantee you, would interest Bob. He would fascinate Bob. Bob is probably already theoretically aware of his existence and attempting to puzzle out a name for the man, and a location. And certainly Bob noted the rifle such a man used. After all, didn’t he use it in Maryland during the recruitment stage?”
“Yes.”
“My thought is that in the subtlest possible way, we put the shooter’s name before Bob.”
“And what way would that be?”
“There’s a publication called
The Shotgun News
that
comes out three times a month. Thousands of custom or rare rifles are advertised through classified ads in each issue, as well as other items—reloading stuff, parts, surplus clothes, ammunition … and books. This was a surprise to me. But it’s true. These men who love guns, somehow are driven to record and document their love. They’ve created a whole other literature, a parallel literature. And just as mainstream culture is riven by ideological differences between left and right, so is gun culture, though it isn’t really left and right so much as traditionalist and progressive. Anyway, a common thread is guerrilla publishing—self-publishing, if you will. I was fascinated to see a book on Japanese military rifles being sold for thirty-seven dollars through the mail! Imagine that. Someone so fascinated by Japanese rifles that he goes to the trouble to write a book—a catalog, more, I suspect—anyway, he goes to all that
trouble
and then there are actually people out there mad enough to send thirty-seven dollars through the mail for—”
“Get to the point, goddammit!”
“Yes, I’m sorry. Why not—a book? A self-published book on the history of that particular rifle Bob used in Maryland. Published by some obscure researcher-devotee in some small town. As advertised in a small item in
The Shotgun News
. Bob would see it. I guarantee you. And he would think, Hmmmmm. Here’s somebody who knows about this rifle and its background. Maybe in his researches, he came across a clue that will lead me to the next step. And so he would approach this obscure researcher-devotee. He will have to. And in that way we lure him to a remote place and—”
“A mountaintop,” Payne spoke up for the first time. “You want to drive him up a mountain, so there’s a point where he can’t get any further. Hit him with a lot of men.”
“Yes. Drive him up, then hit him with a lot of men. More men than he can handle.”
“So where we going get a lot of new boys?” said Payne.
“Let me work on that,” said Shreck.
They were sitting outside the cabin well after dark. It was as if Bob had flown off into the ether. Nick realized he’d never quite known the meaning of the word
concentration
before; there was no concentration like the concentration of the sniper. Nick was afraid almost to speak to him.
Bob sat by the fire, simply staring into it. The fire crackled and blazed, sending small flares out into the night, its light playing across his taut, lean face. His eyes were steady, lost in the middle distance.
Meanwhile, in his solitude, Nick tried to zero on Annex B. How do you get at something deep in the FBI files, especially when you have been suspended by the Bureau and your only source into its computer system has been compromised. But he was convinced that if he could just find some orderly, logical methodology, it could be done. Perhaps some computer hacker could penetrate, some damned high school kid. They were getting into things all the time. Or maybe if he went to someone like Hap Fencl, laid all this out in a nice orderly fashion, maybe Hap would bypass the dreaded Howard D. Utey and go to even higher-ups and that way … but even as he was conjuring the bubble of this fantasy, it burst on him. Hap wasn’t as bad as Howard, but he was Howard in a way: old Bureau, inflexibly wedded to the ways of the bureaucracy, however individually decent completely unable to get his mind to consider violating its mandates. You couldn’t go to Hap
unless
you had Annex B already.
Nick snorted suddenly. That used to be me. Now
look at me: camping in the woods, locked in a private war against a shadowy spook agency that was half official, half not. Annex B: that’s where the answers lay. He was sure of that. Annex B would give him the answer.
Somewhere in the dark an animal skittered and howled. The fire had burned low, and across from it, Bob still sat hunkered and remote, lost in his own head.
He wished he had Myra to talk to. She’d have an idea or at least be willing to hear him out. He missed her. Goddamn, he missed her a lot.
“Memphis?”
He looked over. Bob was staring at him harshly.
“Huh? Yeah?”
“Memphis, you willing to do some hard work? I mean hard, dirty, boring crap work? The kind nobody likes to do anymore? Can you give me a week of it, twelve, eighteen hours a day?”
Nick gulped. That was his specialty, his only talent. To lean against something not with great brainpower but with sheer dogged will, until he or it broke apart.
“Yeah, sure.”
Then Nick saw something he’d never seen, not at all, not in all their hours together, not in the aftermath of the swamp shooting, not in the long talks on RamDyne and the world they lived in.
In the firelight, Bob the Nailer smiled.
“Then I got him,” he said, his war eyes totally focused. “He’s mine. The boy who pulled the trigger. I own his ass.”
The martyred president sat in marble wisdom on his throne, surrounded by Doric pillars and the rubbery thumps of two hundred pairs of athletic shoes on the floor. Shouts and screams bounced off the cavernous arch of the dome. An eighth-grade class was visiting the Lincoln Memorial.
Any semblance of order had long since broken down, and there had never been a semblance of respect. The youngsters tore about.
“Barbarians,” said Hugh Meachum from around the stem of his pipe, amid a haze of smoke. “They have no sense of decorum at all, do they?”
The old man was miffed. Shreck said nothing.
“There should be a way to surgically remove and store children’s tongues as soon as they learn to speak,” said Hugh. “Then, when they’ve graduated from college and distinguished themselves in the workplace, they could file a petition to have their tongues reattached.”
“I don’t think that’s feasible, Mr. Meachum,” said Shreck.
“Dammit, Colonel, don’t humor me. I hate it when I am being humored. Now. You called this meeting. I take it the news is not good. People won’t be pleased, Colonel. I’m telling you frankly, they won’t be pleased. Now what is it?”
A teacher sped by, harassed and exhausted, in pursuit of a knot of seething kids.
“An end we thought was tied off,” said Shreck. “It just untied itself.”
“Meaning?” said Hugh, taking another deep draw from his pipe. The aroma of gin hung over him.
“Meaning that Bob Lee Swagger is not dead. He’s very much alive. And he’s hunting us. That means he’s hunting all of us.”
Hugh shook his head, reached into his pocket and came out with a flask.
“Drink, Colonel?”
“No, sir.”
Hugh took a quick tot. It seemed to do him some good.
“All right. You must find him and kill him. Surely you understand that?”
“We’ve got a plan. It’s clever, it looks promising.”
“Yes, yes.”
“But I have two problems.”
“Only two?”
“One is easy. The other …”
He let it trail off.
“All right. Number One?”
“Number One is manpower. I don’t want to take any chances. I want a lot of men; he can kill twenty or fifty and I want fifty more there to take him down. I can’t recruit anew; there isn’t enough time.”
“God, Colonel, you can’t expect us to provide you with men. Good heavens, the risk is—”
“No, no. I have men. They’re just not here. I need approval at a high level to fly a Hercules in from down south, and land without Customs interference. That can be arranged, can’t it? Surely your associates can prevail on something so minor. They’ll fly in, do the job, and fly out. They’ll be in-country for no more than a week, I swear. No one will see them.”
Hugh considered.
“I suppose it could be arranged. And who are you bringing in, Colonel Shreck?”
“I need good, hard men, men who’ve been in battle, Mr. Meachum. The only place I can get men of that quality fast enough and in sufficient quantity is from El Salvador.”
Hugh looked at him.
“That’s right,” said Shreck. “I’m bringing in the counterinsurgency company from Panther Battalion, the one we trained. It’s their mess we’re still cleaning up. Let them go up the mountain after Bob Lee Swagger.”
“God,” said Meachum. “All right. I suppose it can be
arranged. You’ll get me the details at the right time. And what’s Number Two?”
Shreck paused, swallowed. This was the one he didn’t like. He knew he sailed into dangerous waters here.
“Go on, go on,” said Hugh, impatiently.
“My people never saw him,” said Shreck. “We have no idea who he is or what he did. We only know that he can shoot better than any man on this earth. And we know he isn’t mobile, because he had to work from Bob’s report and couldn’t handle it himself. And we had the sense that he was once famous, in a way, or at least public. So there has to be history there. And we examined his rifle. We know that it was used to win championships.”
Hugh’s eyes flashed over at Shreck.
“Among other things it was used for,” he said. “The security was important, indeed crucial. There are things you don’t need to know. I told you I would handle that part of it. That it didn’t involve you or your people. Didn’t I? Now what on earth can this be about, Colonel?”
“Our plan needs bait. This Swagger is a difficult antagonist, but he has weaknesses. He had a weakness for a Soviet sniper he thought shot and killed his best friend. My staff psychiatrist, Dobbler, put that together; and it worked, Mr. Meachum. It got us Swagger on a platter. But we couldn’t keep him there.”
“Obviously.”
“Now Dobbler thinks that Swagger will have somehow
sensed
the other shooter. And will find him as provocative as he found the Russian. I want to put him before Swagger. It needn’t be complicated, but it must be authentic. I want a sense of him, I want his cooperation.”
“As bait?”
“Yes. Well, not physically. But we’ll need name, history, background, accomplishments, that sort of—”
“Well, for your information, he and I go way back. We went to school together, in fact. His life has been … remarkable. Colonel, his identity is the one secret I hold most precious.”
“If we don’t get Swagger, he’ll blow us away, Mr. Meachum.”
Hugh considered.
“I’ll have to ask him,” he said. “I couldn’t think of doing it without his agreement.”
They pulled up outside the house. It was a quiet twilight in Syracuse, New York. Nick wore a suit, a white shirt, a tie, all recently purchased from Bob’s cache of nearly thirty thousand dollars that he wore in a moneybelt. Bob had bought a suit and tie, too—he looked almost civilized.
Nick turned and faced the house, and took a swallow.
“Oh, my,” Nick suddenly said. “We are finally here.”
This was the hardest thing, and it had placed a large ball of ice in his stomach.
Bob just chewed on a toothpick, looked ahead through the windshield of the rented Buick.
“Got to do it, Memphis.”
Nick exhaled four or six lungsful of air, just kept blowing the stuff off as the melancholy crept through him.
“I cross this line, I may never get back.”
“You don’t cross this line, they may kill you on the wrong side of it.”
“Doesn’t help much,” said Nick. “Not the way I was raised.”
The line was the felony line. It had haunted him since Bob had laid the plan before him; but it was the only way.
“This is it?”
“Yeah, ’fraid so. No other way to get what we want and get it fast. Look at it this way. These bad boys from this RamDyne outfit probably going to blow you out of your socks in a day or two anyway, what difference does it make then?”
Bob smiled at him again.
“Okay,” said Nick. He knew that so far in his adventures he’d done nothing illegal, though he’d stretched the elasticity of the law considerably. This was different. He was about to represent himself as a Federal agent, when he no longer was one. It violated Federal Code 28–02.4, and it carried three to five, though if he ever went over on it, he knew he’d be out in six months maximum, unless somebody was really mad at him. But he also knew he’d never work his side of the street again.