Authors: Stephen Hunter
“Fed beef. These two FBI agents. They—”
“Hey, I didn’t do a damned thing, I—”
“That’s okay, pal,” said Nick, in his calming voice. “This isn’t about you. It’s about the cab.”
“That buggy is bad luck. Somebody shot Roni Ovitz through the neck and before that a guy named Tim Ryan was fuckin’ killed and—”
But Nick wasn’t listening.
Okay
, he thought.
You’re in the backseat of the cab. You know you’ve been made. You’ve just got a few seconds. What do you do? The trunk? How can you get to the trunk? You can’t get to the trunk
.
Under the front seat? No. The driver would see you, and whatever you stashed, he’d dig it out a few seconds later
.
Nick said “Excuse me” to Sally, then went and climbed into the automobile, a 1987 Ford Fairlane. He sat there, his eyes closed, smelling the odor of the old and sodden upholstery, the stench of a hundred thousand other, unremarkable passengers, the tang of gasoline and oil, and, he supposed, one other coppery whiff in the air, the whiff of fear. Roni Ovitz’s fear. Tim Ryan’s fear. And, for surely by the time they reached the motel, Lanzman knew he was quite probably doomed, Lanzman’s fear.
Oh, you were a cool one, Nick thought. You held together to the very end. Whatever it was that motivated you—patriotism, faith, machismo—whatever it was, it was strong and beautiful stuff. Oh, you were a man, my friend. An
hombre
. Oh, yes you were.
His fingers had of their own accord fallen to the seat where, blindly, they probed and pushed at the juncture between cushion and back. There was a gap there, when the yielding cushioning was peeled back; you could slide a document through.
Nick got out of the car, turned, leaned in and pushed his hand through. He gave a mighty tug and yanked, and the seat lurched forward on hinges. Underneath it lay a tapestry of Western civilization and its contents: candy wrappers, cigarette packs, combs, pens, quarters
and tokens, two playing cards, a business card and a rolled wad of some kind of heavy paper.
“Nick,” said Sally at his shoulder, pointing. “Is that it?”
Nick picked it up.
He unrolled it carefully. He saw immediately that it was on some sort of light-sensitive paper that made it impervious to photocopying. And even as he unscrolled it, he thought he watched the type dilute in clarity; an hour in the sun and this baby was history. No one could duplicate it, except maybe the geniuses at the Bureau’s legendary Forensic Documents Division.
The cover letter was written in Spanish, addressed to somebody named General Esteban Garcia de Rujijo of the Fourth Battalion (Air-Ranger), First Brigade, First Division (“Acatad”), Salvadoran Army. It was signed by a Hugh Meachum, no affiliation given. It said, as best as Nick’s clumsy Spanish could understand, that the mission as outlined orally in their last meeting was being undertaken by the extremely efficient organization with which the writer was certain the general was familiar, and that it was to everybody’s best interest that the business be completed as quickly as possible. The writer also took the liberty of enclosing some background material—highly sensitive! most secret!—so that the general could rest assured the very best professional people were handling the job, and that therefore he was not to make any attempts himself, as that would completely undermine the cause in whose service they all labored so diligently.
Nick lifted the cover letter to examine the document itself.
It was Annex B.
When he wasn’t shooting, Lon was studying.
He began with rote memory; he divided the map into one foot squares and attempted to commit each to the files deep in his brain. He worked everything out, slowly, one step at a time, with plodding thoroughness. He sat there in the field headquarters hut in Virginia in his wheelchair and just stared and stared at the miniaturized plastic mountain range spread out on the table before him, rocking back and forth on the fulcrum of his belly.
After memorizing the material so perfectly that he could see it in his dreams, he began to look for firing lines. He needed a certain distance, height, a good vantage point, the light behind him, no cross breezes, plenty of camouflage. One by one, he
tested sites against his cluster of requirements, finding and discarding possibilities.
When he worked, no emotion showed on his face. It was a wintry Yankee face, iron as New England, the face of a man who knew death because he was himself mostly corpse.
Finally, days into the study, he beckoned to Colonel Shreck.
“Here,” he said. “I found it.”
His finger touched a valley deep in the vastness of the Ouachitas, far, far from the town of Blue Eye.
Shreck bent to read the inscription where the blunt finger marked it.
HARD BARGAIN VALLEY
, it Said.
Dobbler was astounded at how banal Bob found him. He had presumed, with no small amount of vanity, that Bob would find him fascinating, would ply him with questions, would in some way admire him.
Using Bob as others had used him, Dobbler had unburdened himself in one epic purge, like a mega-couch-session, letting it all pour out, his sins, his fears, his weaknesses, his guilts. He even blubbered as he confessed, while secretly admiring his own performance.
But Bob had just looked at him all squinty-eyed.
“What do you want?” Dobbler demanded when he was done. “Tell me, and I’ll give it to you.”
Bob regarded him without much interest.
“Don’t you trust me?” Dobbler wanted to know.
“It doesn’t matter a lot.”
“Why don’t you ask me more questions?”
“You’ve talked enough. You’ve talked too much.”
“Don’t you want to know how Shreck’s mind works? About the relationship between him and Payne? Don’t you want—”
“Can you tell me how to kill him?”
“Uh—no.”
“Then you don’t know a thing that interests me.”
“But there’s so much more—”
“You think what you told me is so important. But it doesn’t matter a spoon of grease to me, unless it can give me an advantage in a week or so. Meanwhile, you save it for Memphis; he’ll listen to you. I just want you to stay here and don’t wander off, you hear? You’re just another problem I have to solve.”
That was the beginning. Then Bob went out with his rifle for several hours, leaving Dobbler cabin-bound. Bob didn’t have to tell him that to wander off was to die in these remote regions.
In the cabin, Dobbler was always cold. He shivered from dawn till dusk, threw wood on the fire—“If you don’t stop using up that goddamn wood, I’m going to make you chop it your own damn self,” Bob had said testily—and sat there, sinking into misery, unmoved by the showy blaze of autumn that was exploding like napalm bursts all around. He hated the filth of it also, the lack of a toilet and toilet paper, the same socks and underwear day in and day out. He hated his own smell and wondered why he just got dirtier and Bob somehow seemed always immaculate.
Then one night, late, the door burst open.
Dobbler bolted up in sheer terror, sure they’d been discovered by one of the colonel’s raiding parties. But it was a large, angry young man with a thatch of blond hair and a rumpled business suit who seemed to be wearing four guns under his coat. This would be Memphis, the doctor surmised, and indeed it was. He smiled, anticipating someone more in his world than Bob.
“Who’s this sorry sack of shit?” Nick wanted to know.
“Says he’s one of Shreck’s men. He’s come over to
our side because he didn’t realize these boys were Nazis. He has a tape over there with the massacre on it.”
“Who the hell are you, mister? Are you working for Shreck?”
“My name is David Dobbler. I’m a graduate of Brandeis University and Harvard Medical School. I’m a practicing psychiatrist—although some years ago the board removed my certification.”
“He was the smart boy who looked at me like a bug on a pin back in Maryland, Pork.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“As I told Mr. Swagger, I recently discovered that the acts of RamDyne were not, as I had been informed, in the national interest but rather the adventurings of a rogue unit. Naturally, I felt—”
“That’s all shit, mister,” said Memphis, who had the policeman’s gift for locating weaknesses swiftly and exploiting them greedily. “You must have found something out that you thought Shreck would kill you over. And he probably would.”
“Yes, he would. I have—evidence. Of a massacre.”
“Evidence,” snorted Nick. “The world is full of evidence.”
“Visual evidence. On tape.”
Bob pointed to the cassette, which lay haphazardly on the mantel.
“He says they filmed it.”
“Terrible things,” Dobbler said. “Women, children, in the water. The machine guns, the laughing soldiers, the commanders. The Americans.”
“You have this Shreck? On
tape
?” Nick said, astounded.
“Yes. And little Jack Payne as well. Giving the orders, guiding a Salvadoran general. It’s all—”
Nick turned to Bob.
“Jesus, just maybe that would do it. It would certainly
suggest a motive for killing the archbishop, and with a motive we could get the investigation reopened and other things might come out.”
Bob thought on this for a second.
Then he said, “Hear him out. See what he’s got. I’m getting out of here for a time. You two geniuses of education jawing away like piglets in the slop could give me a serious pain in the eyes.”
It took time but Nick and Dobbler, fierce adversaries at first, soon enough found their common ground. Bob himself disappeared with his rifle and as the two of them were talking there came the far-off sound of shots. When he returned, he regarded them without enthusiasm. Nick rose and came at him.
“Now what have you got cooked up, Memphis?” Bob asked.
“It’s all here,” Nick finally said. “With what he’s got and what I’ve got, we can put them away. We can clear you.”
But Bob just went to the cabinet where he stored his cleaning rod and equipment, and began the laborious, greasy job of scrubbing down the bore of the rifle.
In his remoteness, it wasn’t so much that he offered a counterargument, but that he communicated his displeasure by his stoicism and the hard look on his face. Nick pressed on, bringing a trophy out for all to see.
“Annex B. This is it.” He lifted the green bag of documents he’d found under the cab seat in New Orleans. “It turns out that Annex B is simply the Bureau abstract of the Agency file on its contract outfit, RamDyne, except that all the names and dates and pertinent memoranda are included. The facts are what we knew from the Bureau file itself. It was started in 1962, right after Bay of Pigs. Who started it? My bet is that it was founded by somebody who was formerly with CIA
who was actively involved in planning the invasion, but who got the ax when the invasion failed. Does that add up?”
Dobbler said, “Yes. Bay of Pigs was weakness, failure, lack of nerve. They hated weakness.”
“Of course,” said Nick.
“Neurotically. And I can see how to them the Bay of Pigs was the beginning of American weakness—of committing to something, then changing your mind, beginning to equivocate, beginning to undercut, and finally dooming your operation to failure by your own doubts. RamDyne was about following through. About seeing the course.”
“The name even comes from Bay of Pigs,” said Nick.
“RamDyne
, large
R
, large
D:
it has no meaning except
R
and
D
, which a guy I used to know said computed out in Army lingo, sixty-two-style, to Romeo Dog, which was the call sign for the Second Battalion of Twenty-twenty-six Brigade at Red Beach, the force that got cut off, chopped up and captured. So calling it RamDyne, maybe that’s somebody’s way of commemorating the past and setting course for the future. That sound right to you, doc?”
“They were zealots,” Dobbler said. “They were true believers. They had a sense of building from the ruins, like Hitler, I suppose. It guided them. To God knows what.”
Bob just sat there, listening to the pitch, running the rod, with its bright crown of bronze bristle and its dank lubrication of Shooter’s Choice, through the bore guide and up and down the rifle barrel.
“Bob, we can put them away. In a jail. There can be a happy ending. There can be justice.”
“He’s right, Mr. Swagger. Terrible wrongs were done. But the world can be restored to order. And some of us
in this room—there’s a provisional salvation for us, too. You can be at peace.”
Bob looked at them harshly.
“It’s just words,” he said. “In Vietnam we had a saying. ‘Don’t mean a thing.’ That’s what this is. It don’t mean a thing.”
He put the rod down, removed the Delrin bore guide from the action, and began to scrub at the insides of the chamber and the receiver with a blackened toothbrush, giving the weapon his full attention.
“It’s all here!” Nick exploded. “Or most of it. I don’t quite know what mission first got them together in the early sixties. That’s lost to history. And the early stuff is mundane, when they worked for the Agency as a cover organization for shipping illegal cargos to various hot spots in the world. It gets interesting in sixty-nine when this nutcase Shreck was recruited after the Army sacked him, with the mission of building an operational and training arm. He seems to have created a kind of Green-Beret-for-Hire unit. These boys saw some action, no shit. Africa in the early seventies. Lots of time in the Mideast in the late seventies and eighties, and, lately, lots of time in Central America. Whenever some tin-pot country had a job that needed doing but not the capacity, RamDyne could field an operations nasty-ass team. But never so nasty as with Panther Battalion on the Sampul River last year. They talk about that much, Doctor?”
“Nothing. They had perfect professional discipline. I didn’t know until I saw the tape. And the job on the bishop—they said he was a secret guerrilla and that he was working to sabotage the peace process. He had to be stopped so that peace could be achieved. He was an enemy of peace.”
Nick leaned toward Bob.