Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  So he wanted a very clean gun, untraceable, he wanted a semiauto capacity, he wanted accuracy.

  There was only one choice, really.

  It was outmoded weapons technology, to be sure, but it had the great attraction of stepping out of the long tradition of black operations. He owned it more as a curiosity than as an item for sale. Who would buy something so antiquated? The Agency had evidently used it in Nam as part of SOG’s Operation PHOENIX, the infrastructure eradication program that targeted high-profile V.C. suspects for assassination by special killer teams. Then it had gone God knew where, done God knew what for a number of years: if weapons could talk, then this one had the experience of a best-selling book in its sleek contours. Certainly, it had seen much action in South and Central America, perhaps even in Africa and Europe as well.

  Preece had bought it sub rosa from one of his own sniper cadre, a man with much experience. One look into that man’s lightless, hunter’s eyes and at that flat dead face told the general that further inquiries were pointless. The man was facing his third divorce, needed to raise cash; he sold it to the general for $4,000, no questions asked, no papers given, nothing recorded. It was the weapon that never was, unless it was firing at you.

  The piece was an M-16, firing the little 5.56mm round, but at its muzzle it boasted an old long, thin Sionics suppressor, the HEL-H4A model, and, by special mount, it wore the last operational American military infrared weapon sight, the AN/PAS-4. This was no ambient night sight, and still less a Magnavox thermal sniperscope, but it was miles better than the old carbine sniperscopes. For one thing, its battery pack had been miniaturized. Specs described it as “a battery-operated sight and aiming device consisting of an infrared light source, an infrared sensitive image forming telescope (4.5×) with integral miniaturized high-voltage power supply and a light source power supply (a belt-mounted 6 VDC rechargeable nickel cadmium battery).” The telescope assembly was thirteen inches long; the telescope and light source were approximately fourteen inches long; the entire sight assembly weighed about twelve pounds. It looked like a scope with a searchlight mounted atop it, awkward and crude but surprisingly easy to manipulate.

  It had but one disadvantage: that light source. That is, it was active infrared, as opposed to the Magnavox’s passive mode: it had to project a beam of infrared light from the light source to the target area for the sensitized telescope to pick up. In a technologically sophisticated combat environment such a system was inherently dangerous because for sure the enemy would have an infrared spotting scope through which his light beam would be a vivid indication of his locale, and countersniper measures would be undertaken with massive firepower. Thus it was better in the undeveloped portions of the world, Central America, Africa, West Arkansas.

  He picked the weapon up, ran a quick battery check. Everything was fine. He snapped the charger back and released it, felt the weapon cock with a satisfying clack. The trigger pull was a dry, light snap, like a glass rod breaking. He set the weapon down and went at last to the ammo locker within the vault and selected six boxes of Ball M-193 5.56mm, confident that the night belonged to him.

  34

  The funeral was in the late morning but they couldn’t make it, because the Baltimore-Dallas flight and the hop via American Eagle to Fort Smith didn’t get them back until about noon. But there was a wake to be held at Sam’s old house at four, and, driving hard down the parkway, they knew they’d make it by at least four-thirty.

  Russ drove; Bob was even more sealed off than usual. The sniper’s stillness: part of the legend. His bitterness, his repressed anger, his sense of isolation—all a part of the same package. But behind those calm, dark eyes, Russ knew there was something going on.

  “So what are you thinking?” Russ finally asked.

  “That we just wasted a good solid day and that I’m out thirteen hundred bucks in tickets.”

  “I’ll pay you—”

  “It ain’t that, I don’t want your money. It was just waste. We are heading in a wrong direction.”

  “No sir,” said Russ. “I honestly believe that there has to be a connection between the death of that child and the death of your father.”

  “You bonehead,” said Bob cruelly, not even looking at him. “That’s impossible. My father was killed the same day that girl was found. There’s no way they could have set what they set up that fast. It was a four- or five-day operation, Frenchy working at his goddamned craziest. And second: there was no way anybody could have predicted that my daddy would find that body that day or any day. That was pure goddamn luck or whatever. Her mama came to him, and he went a-looking. Suppose he hadn’t have found that body? He’d still be dead by 11.00 P.M. That body could have laid for weeks yet before someone came across it, and by that time it could have been so decomposed that it would take still more weeks before they got around to identifying it. No, what happened to that girl is a crime, and if poor Reggie Fuller died on its account, that is a pity and a sorrow, but it don’t mean shit to us.”

  Russ still believed that there was some connection.

  “It had to. What else could possibly have been going on in Polk County in 1955 that would have been worth setting up that elaborate conspiracy? Frenchy Short wouldn’t just do something for—”

  “That is right as rain,” said Bob. “So here’s what I think. I think my father was on some kind of investigative team or something the state police were running. Maybe it had to do with what was going on at Camp Chaffee. And somehow he found something out. And had to be stopped.”

  “That sounds like a crummy movie,” said Russ.

  “I know it does, and I don’t even go to movies,” said Bob grumpily.

  “Well, maybe—”

  “Slow down,” said Bob, “and don’t turn around fast.”

  A moment or two ticked by.

  Bob slid his .45 out of the inside-the-belt holster which Russ hadn’t even seen him put on.

  “What the hell—”

  “Easy, easy,” said Bob.

  Russ became aware of a van, blue, riding in the dead man’s slot just where his mirrors couldn’t track it.

  The van suddenly accelerated and began to pull even.

  “Don’t look” said Bob, “and if I say go, you hit the brake hard, you understand?”

  Russ swallowed, tasting pennies. They were back.

  But the van kept passing them and Russ could no longer obey; his head sneaked sideways, where he saw, in the backseat, a very pretty little girl who stared intently at him. She stuck out her tongue.

  “Shit,” said Russ. “You had me scared.”

  “Maybe I am losing it,” said Bob, sliding the pistol back behind his jacket. “I didn’t see that boy pull up; he was in the slot. I got to be paying more goddamned attention.”

  “So what do we do next?” asked Russ.

  “You’re the Princeton boy. You tell me.”

  “Well,” said Russ, and then he realized … he didn’t know either.

  The complexity that had been Sam Vincent was on full display in the odd mob that congregated at his house to mourn his passing, or possibly to celebrate it, or at least to get drunk at his expense. African Americans from the west side of the tracks, aristocrats from Little Rock, cronies from the thousands of hunting trips he’d taken, old boys who’d guided him, farmers who’d traded with him, politicians, police officers, children, bitter secretaries, opposing lawyers, corrections officers, even a few men that Sam had sent away. Each had a Sam story to tell, but the one that was making the rounds when Bob and Russ finally arrived and found parking—the street was thronged with cars, everything from Mercedes to forty-year-old pickups—had to do with the ultimate disposition of Sam’s estate, itself quite large from a lifetime of extremely shrewd investing and trading. He’d been wisely sidestepping the estate tax by dispensing his wealth in $10,000-per-year chunks for a number of years to his children and even to his sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, divorced or not, second marriage or not, no questi
ons asked, on the principle that anyone who’d had to put up with him in the family deserved a nice little present. He’d also already established trust funds for each grandchild worth $200,000 but only payable to educational institutions in the form of checks for tuition, food or housing. He left each of his fired or resigned secretaries $10,000 except for the one who’d become a drunk: she got $15,000. That left an untidy sum in the estate of $19,450.

  “God, Dad,” said Dr. John Vincent, Scotch on his breath (the bar was well stocked) and amazement in his voice, “he left $9,725 to the NRA’s ILA fund and $9,725 to Handgun Control, Inc. I can see him cackling when he thought that one up!”

  “He was a good man,” said Bob, who seemed in the crowd of revelers the only one who was morose and still grieving.

  “Oh, he was a mean old bastard,” said the doctor, the eldest son, the one who’d borne the brunt of his father’s rages and praises. “Smart as a whip, mean as a rooster. He whaled the tar out of us when we were growing up. But by God each of us turned out. Two doctors, a lawyer, a travel agent, an investment counselor and an impressionist painter.”

  “Who’s the painter?” Bob asked.

  “Jamie.”

  “I thought he was a lawyer.”

  “He was, for ten years. Then he finally screwed up his courage and did what he wanted, not Dad. I think Dad respected him for it.”

  “He was a stubborn bastard,” Bob said.

  “Jesus. And tough. You know in twenty-two years at home, I only saw him cry once. He didn’t even cry when Mom died. He only cried when your father was killed. I remember he sat downstairs all by himself when he got back. Must have been well toward dawn. He sat down there and had a drink. I was awakened by a sound I’d never heard. I snuck downstairs. He was sitting in that old rocker there”—John pointed through the crowd to a threadbare old chair that had stood in the same spot for fifty years—“and rocked back and forth and sobbed like a baby. He loved your father. He thought Earl Swagger was the most perfect man ever put on earth: hero, father, police officer, incorruptible symbol of everything that was right and strong about America.”

  “I keep telling people: my father was only a man.”

  “Well, my dad didn’t think so. Bob, I have to ask: what’s going on? I keep hearing things.”

  “About old crazy Bob Lee digging up some Confederate?”

  “Yes. That. And suddenly you’re here and there’s a terrible gunfight over in Oklahoma and ten men are killed. Never happened before you came back. Nothing connects you to it, but people still remember you went hunting a few years back, and two boys came out of the woods in body bags. Old Dad saved your butt in a federal court.”

  “Nobody went into a body bag around me that didn’t deserve to. It’s just some old business. About my father.”

  “Did it involve mine?”

  “I asked him to do some legal work for me. That’s all.”

  “That’s it?”

  “My young friend over there. He come to me because he wanted to write a book about my daddy. No one remembers Earl Swagger, except maybe your father and old Miss Connie. He’s dead, she will be soon. It seemed to me to be worthwhile. Better’n writing a book about me.”

  “Okay. You should know, people are asking. You walk alone, but you cast a long shadow, my friend. Now come with me, I have something for you.”

  They walked through the crowd, which in effect was a walk through the fragments of Bob’s past. He saw Sara Vincent, Sam’s eldest daughter, who had married twice and divorced twice; she was now the town’s travel agent, prosperous and lonely. She alone of the Vincent kids did not have Sam’s magnetism, though she’d once conceived an awful crush on Bob, and even now threw an awkward, hot-eyed glance at him. But she alone made eye contact; for the others, he knew, he was an embarrassment.

  I killed men. I am the sniper. I am apart.

  It was the crushing sense of exile that the killer feels, which sometimes makes him more of a killer. Everyone knew from the publicity three years back: Bob Lee Swagger, not just a drunken marine vet alone on his mountain, but a sniper, an executioner, a man-hunter, the man who reached out and touched eighty-seven somebodies. In Arizona, nobody really cared because that’s who he was from the start, but here it had the effect of a scandal. They connected him with a past and wondered: Why him? What sets him apart? What does the sniper know that other men don’t? What’s it like to send a piece of lead and copper through somebody’s head and blow his brains out? The pink mist effect: turn a man to colored rain. What’s it feel like?

  There was a girl once named Barb Sempler: he’d been on a date with her in high school but she thought he was too wild, a country boy. Wasn’t her father a lawyer or something? Now she was oddly inflated, having picked up the forty pounds, her once beautiful features spread across the wide face. A boy over there, now fat and bald and well dressed, had once blocked him blindside on a football field and laughed about it until Bob had jumped him and the coach had pulled him off. He’d grown up to sell insurance, Bob to kill men. Strange. That woman. He thought her name was Cindy—ah, what, Tilford, that was it—and he’d gotten backseat tit off her one night in 1961. So long ago. Tit seemed like paradise. She was now slim and hard, where she’d been fat and dumpy. A divorcee, therapy, lots of aerobics. She smiled, scaring him. He yearned for his wife. He yearned to feel whole and connected again: father, family man, lay-up barn owner. Julie, YKN4, horses: he missed them, but also what they represented, which was the normal way, not the sniper’s way. But they parted, to let him pass, to let him stand alone.

  I am the sniper. I stand alone.

  They reached the stairs, again the crowd parted magically, and they went down into the basement where Sam had had his office. John walked to the closet, opened it, took something off the shelf.

  “I had to clean out Dad’s office,” he said. “Here, I think this stuff belongs to you. It was locked in the safe.”

  He held out a cardboard box: in it were his father’s old notebook, with its brown blasphemy of blood, that old tablet of half-issued tickets.

  “And this too,” said John, holding out a sheet of yellow legal paper. “Dad had inscribed some notes. He seemed to be working on a case. Maybe it’ll help you.”

  Russ was talking to an extremely pretty girl who seemed to know all about him, or at least to be very interested in him. It was slowly dawning on him that in this odd world he was a minor celebrity: the sidekick of the famous, mysterious, dangerous and—yes—sexy Bob Lee Swagger. He felt a little like Mick Jagger’s gofer.

  “So Princeton,” the girl was saying, “why’d you drop out?”

  “Oh, my mother and my father separated. I knew it would be hard on my mother, so I didn’t want to be twelve hundred miles away. I spent the last year in Oklahoma City, working on the Daily Oklahoman. That, plus the fact I didn’t really like the East. I spent my life trying to get out of Oklahoma because I was too good for Oklahoma. Then I got to the Ivy League and the people seemed to be so, you know, little. They were fundamentally bigots. They viewed the world through such a perverted prism. Everyone outside was a redneck Nazi, anyone who owned a gun or was in the NRA or voted Republican was subhuman at worst and an amusing ignoramus at best. I just couldn’t stand it. They didn’t know anything. I somehow ended up working for a year on the Oklahoman, where I discovered that I fit in … nowhere.”

  “Oh, go on. I’m sure you’ll find a fit. You’re very bright.”

  “I was very bright. In Oklahoma, I was so smart. Then I got to New Jersey and I was just another toad on a rock.”

  She smiled.

  “Aren’t you some sort of writer?”

  “The unpublished sort. Very glamorous.”

  “Are you going to write a book about Bob the Nailer?”

  “No. Bob has secrets so deep ten years of therapy followed by ten years of torture couldn’t get them all out. He’s spent his life trying to live up to his father’s ideal. And, unlike the rest of us, I’d say he ma
de it. He wouldn’t say he had, but I would. Anyhow, the book is reputedly about the dad. Earl Swagger was an extremely heroic man, killed in a shoot-out with white-trash scum, after winning the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima. I had the idea of doing a long narrative on his last day, how it summoned up a whole slew of American pathologies. But all I’ve done is run around and get coffee.”

  “It sounds interesting. I like the idea of a symbolic episode: you learn so much about the macrocosm by evoking the microcosm.”

  “Wow,” he said. “You must be an English major.”

  “I’m a junior at Vanderbilt.”

  “That’s a good school.”

  “Thank you. I’m writing my senior thesis on Raymond Carrrrrr,” Russ not quite catching the last name.

  Raymond? Writer? Begins with C, has r’s? Russ panicked. Had she said Carver? He’d never read any Carver. But maybe she’d said Chandler. That was much better. He hadn’t read any Chandler either, but at least he could bluff his way through.

  “The L.A. private-eye guy? Lots of neon, that sort of stuff.”

  “Yes, but so much more,” she said, and Russ sighed with relief. “He could really tell a story. Maybe it’s a southern thing, but I love it when you can just sink into a book’s language. Will your book be like that?”

  “Yes,” said Russ, thinking I hope.

  “How far are you?”

  “Well, we’re really still researching. Listen, I’m sort of mixed up. Who are you?”

  “Oh,” she laughed. “One of the grandchildren. You knew Grandpappy?”

  Now he got it.

  “At the end, I went with Bob to see him. He was a crusty old boy, I’ll say that. He told me a thing or two.”

  “Crusty as they come. The original male tyrant king. But somehow, a necessary man,” she said. “And sweet. Underneath. He was getting vague, though.”

  “We noticed. But there was something heroic in the way he fought it. He was an Arkansas Lear,” Russ said, really pleased with the Lear remark, though he’d never gotten around to reading it either.