The Third Bullet: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel

by Stephen Hunter

  “That’s not going to happen?”

  “Afraid not. It’s just me, an SAIC on the outs with D.C., and you, a contract undercover. I can finesse some backup and nurse you through the system with as little exposure as possible. I can’t fund you. I can’t make a major issue of you. If that happens, our wiggle room goes away, and already I’m getting odd looks from my second, who’s not sure what’s going on. What’s your next move?”

  “I have to make contact with Richard Monk again. One way or another, he’s a sure conduit to whoever’s pulling strings. I can play him and see what happens.”

  “The Swagger investigation method: shake the tree until hired killers come out. Hope you can kill them first. Then learn what they knew. Never fails. Loud, dangerous, but sure.”

  “I agree with you and my wife and daughter. I am too old for this shit. But I don’t seem to have another choice. Except maybe to go away and let old Hugh alone.”

  “You could never do that. Even if he tries to kill you again.”

  Richard was just sitting there. His usual breakfast—Egg McMuffin, hash browns, coffee, and OJ—and suddenly, there Jack Brophy was. He slid in next to Richard with a cup of coffee.

  “Hey, Richard,” he said. “Long time no see, friend.” He shook Richard’s hand, and Richard sort of choked, had to swallow, and said, “Jack, I’m glad you’re all right. The way you disappeared.”

  “Oh, that,” Bob said. “Family crisis. Had to take care of some unexpected issues.”

  “Jack,” Richard said, “there was a shooting. On the night you left, near the street where you disappeared. A man was killed. Trying to kill someone else, they say. Somehow I worried you were involved.”

  “Me?” said Swagger. “No sir, I’m a rabbit. I love the guns, but only when I’m shooting at some faraway fuzzy animal or on a nice, safe firing range.”

  Swagger laid some stuff on Richard about how he’d done some experimenting back in Idaho, and he was convinced that whoever shot JFK used what he called a “hybrid” of some sort, two calibers mulched together, but Richard couldn’t stay with it. He didn’t see how two bullets could fit in the same, er, bullet. Or two shells in the same bullet, or two cartridges in the same shell. Something like that.

  Then Swagger went off on the Dal-Tex Building.

  “Still on Dal-Tex?” Richard said. “The angles are right, but it was a huge public building full of people coming and going; it’s almost impossible to believe anybody could be brazen enough to get in and get out. Plus, the cops sealed it off within three minutes. You’d need to have a sniper going in the front door and out the front door, unseen, in the middle of a mob scene. I don’t see how it could be done.”

  “You used the right word. Brazen. I figure these boys were top-of-the-line pros, the kind of guys who don’t make mistakes and have nerves of steel.”

  “Mafia hit men!” Richard said. “That ground’s been trod over and over again, and nobody’s picked up anything but craziness.”

  “I didn’t say Mafia. Fact is, I don’t have no theory about who yet. I’m still working out the how. If I get the how, maybe I’ll find the who.”

  The gist of it turned out to be that Jack wanted Richard to help him find some old guys who remembered how Dal-Tex was in the old days. He had to build a case that getting in and out that day was feasible. He swore Richard to secrecy within the community. He declared himself the sole owner of valuable intellectual property.

  Richard said he’d look into the possibilities, but discreetly; because of the value of his intellectual property, Jack told Richard he was afraid of a claim jumper or someone beating him to the punch. He’d be the one to contact Richard in a couple of days. He told Richard, “If you don’t know where I’m staying and you’re captured and tortured, you can’t give me up.”

  Ha, ha. Not very funny, Richard thought, but being a nice guy, he laughed anyhow.

  “Okay,” said Nick, “initial contact made. Now we’ve rerun Richard Monk. I was able to slip that one through, and that guy Jeff Neal, the computer genius, I had him do the actual search. He’s the best, and if he can’t find anything, there’s nothing to be found. Or it’s been buried by super-pros. At a deep level, we can say once again we come up with nothing. It’s the same as it ever was. Brown graduate, twenty years U.S. Army CID, mostly in Europe. Good record.”

  “He retired as a major,” said Bob. “How can that be good? Any fuckups?”

  “Jeff got his records. Fabulous fitness reports all the way through, even reading between the lines. The problem is that after 9/11, all the military intel branches clogged up with careerists who saw it as a fast way up the ladder. By the very fact that was what they did, they made it a slow way up the ladder. Plus, Monk was in Europe, a specialist there, and nobody wanted to move him to Baghdad. He’s on record as making many transfer requests. But he was too good to let go. So they fucked him for his excellence.”

  Bob snorted. “Sounds like typical service shit.”

  “He stayed in Germany while the connected career boys got to the sandbox and soaked up all the promotions. He was never going to make lieutenant colonel, so he took the out-at-twenty and went to Washington and eventually connected up with that lefty foundation that pays him well and sent him to run their show in Dallas. We can find nothing untoward about him except the Japanese porn collection and the Bangkok vacations.”

  “Man,” said Swagger, “the way this is going, I may head out to Bangkok too.”

  This is the hard part. I knew I’d have to get to it sometime. I suppose it might as well be now. Pardon, a shot of vod. Sometimes I call it Vod the Impaler. Yes, impale me, Vod, impale me!

  Ah, that’s better. Poor Lon. He is the tragic figure in what happens. It was a shame to watch it happen, it was worse to have made it happen. He was given so much and it was taken so cruelly; he soldiered on heroically, without ill will, doing the best he could. Then I used him and turned him into an official monster. The years passed and he never betrayed me, he never quit on me, he never resented me, he never violated his pledge. He just had to be alone for a while. He was an honorable man, so I used him again, and this time I got him killed. At least he died as he never believed he would or could, with a rifle in his hands, in the intense rapture of a manhunt.

  In any event, and for the record: Lon Scott was my cousin on my mother’s side, his mother being my mother’s sister, the family Dunn, old money, maybe older than mine. She married a man who was far richer than she; Jack Scott, Texas oilman, Connecticut gentleman farmer, big-game hunter, champion rifleman, aviator extraordinary, war hero (fifty missions in a B-24, including the nightmare that was Ploieşti), and the father who paralyzed his own son.

  Lon was born to be a hero, and he genuinely achieved that status young. At fourteen, he shot and killed a wounded lion as it charged him, his father, and a professional hunter in what was then called British East Africa. His reflexes were the fastest, and when the beast came out of the high grass at fifteen yards, Lon stepped in front of the older men, took the charge, and put two .470 Nitro Express solids into it as it leaped, and when it hit him and knocked him down, the animal was already dead. As for Lon’s character, that was a story he never told or wrote (he was a fine writer; see his classic Hunting Africa in the Fifties, which I believe has been reprinted recently); it survives only because others told it of him so frequently. It made the later tragedy even more tragic.

  Lon was born to wealth and rifles. The former he used modestly, never bragging, never splurging, always generous to family and causes. The latter became his life. I suppose he got it from his father, but there is a genius gene for the firearm that does not respect class or race or economic circumstances, it simply descends and enlightens once every generation or so. I suppose the great gunfighters of the West had it, possibly a few thirties desperadoes (Clyde Barrow, for one, possibly Pretty Boy Floyd), and a few great lawmen. The great snipers have it, a few of the great hunters. Lon had it.

  From the time he
laid eyes on a rifle, that was his life. In those days—this would be the early thirties—there was no opprobrium attached to such a fixation, and in his circle, it was celebrated and encouraged. His father gave him his first .22 before he was five years old, and by the time he was ten, his skill with the firearm had made him a legend. He spent summers on the Texas ranch, where he became a damned good cowboy, I’m told; by the time he was eighteen and left for Yale, he’d filled a bunkhouse with horned treasures as well as the lion and three rhinos, two Cape buffalo, and a dozen or so antelope species from his adventure in East Africa. That being a randy part of the world, I’m sure his nobility, grace, and courage earned substantial reward between silk sheets during the many evenings in Happy Valley where all the exiled Brit nabobs and their grumpy but beautiful women gathered to smoke, drink, and fornicate in abundance.

  His real passion was for thousand-yard shooting. He won his first Wimbledon cup in ’50, had an off year, then won again in ’52 and ’53. It is an extraordinarily demanding discipline that brings all the shooter’s skills into play, not only his stamina to hold his position for great lengths of time but his ability to dope the wind and reload ammunition skillfully to get the maximum accuracy for the range, the rifle, and the conditions. He was, at the time, an honors graduate of Yale and unspeakably handsome. It was thought in some circles that he would follow the path of another great shooter, the national prewar skeet champion Robert Stack, and eventually move into movies. His grace with a gun in hand—then a necessity in the American movie industry—spoke well of his chances, and his high IQ, which made flash memorization a trifle (as in scripts), and his intense empathy, which marked him as a charismatic young man, all suggested such an outcome. He was better-looking than Rock Hudson, not a homo, smart as a tack, and could hit a running target offhand at a hundred yards ninety-nine times out of a hundred. He was already famous by ’55 and was just waiting for the next big thing to happen to him.

  On October 11, 1955, when Lon was thirty, his father shot him in the spine.

  He fell to the ground and never walked again.

  Characteristically, Lon never made much of it. It happened, that’s all, let’s get on with it. Of course, the thousand-yard shooting was out, most of the hunting was out, so he devoted himself to the newer sport of benchrest and its application in the fields, varmint hunting, and he spent most of the summer at his place in Wyoming, killing vermin at distances up to a thousand yards off a bench and experimenting with the best ways to get this done. He learned a lot, and it could be said that at one time, he knew more about long-distance shooting than any man on earth. He remained on good terms with his father. The official story: it was an accident. A Model 70 in .30-06, a prime hunting weapon, was dropped and it went off, though the safety was on. Nothing could be done except get Lon to the emergency room fast, which was what his father and other shooters on the line did; Lon’s life was saved, but his mobility from the waist down was not. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

  No one ever said a thing. What could be said? The act had no meaning except for the tragic randomness of the universe, its cruel whimsy. What’s the line: Whom the gods destroy, they first make interesting? Possibly I made that one up. Or possibly it’s Vod speaking. But in outline, anti-Oedipal dynamics are visible. The father, so long thought a great man, sees his usurpation in his young son. He loves the boy, but a serpent of ego whispers into his subconscious: He will replace you. He will steal your memory. You have given him everything, he will take everything. you are soon to become a supernumerary. Thus the gun falls from the hands, thus the safety is perhaps not forcibly off but wedged gently into that no-man’s-land between on and off, thus by freak mischance or the weird imposition of evil will on a falling object, the muzzle is lined up for one tenth of a second on Lon’s lower spine, and the rifle discharges.

  He was lucky, I suppose. It was S4. No quad, no respiratory problems, no iron lung, no electric wheelchair or writing with a paintbrush by mouth. Muscular and athletic, he adapted well. He could drive, he could prepare food, his mind was intact, he could dress, drink, laugh, read, watch, work at his bench. S4, so much more mercy than C2. Still . . .

  What is his subconscious making of all this? Perhaps he has felt the hate under the love, perhaps he has heard a whispered resentment in all the lavish praise, perhaps he knows his father a little better than the father knows himself. He suppresses. He conceals his feelings. As I’ve said, he gets on with it. Who knows what snakes have been released into his mind, what need to strike and kill fathers universally or fathers symbolically or sons who, like him, were created by their fathers and then surpassed them. No one knows any of that, least of all I, but it may explain why, at some level, Lon was okay with the monstrosities I pitched him and kept the faith to the very end. In fact: he died of the faith.

  In late October 1963, none of this could be imagined. I told myself I had a question for Lon that needed answering, perhaps denying to myself the inevitability of the course I had set up. I did know that I couldn’t be affiliated by record in phone contact from house or office, and I was aware that nobody knew whom that devious busybody James Jesus Angleton was or was not wiretapping. My solution to this was to drive downtown on a Saturday afternoon wearing suit and tie, park around Fifteenth at N, walk up N, and stride boldly into the office building at 1515 upon whose facade the words “The Washington Post” were emblazoned in some sort of ancient Gothic typeface. In those days, newspapers were wide open to the public, especially if the public looked as Official Person as I did, in dark tie, dark suit, white shirt, horn rims, and natty little Princeton haircut, as it was called. I strode in, nodded at the ever-sleepy Negro guard, and took the elevator to the fifth floor, where the newsroom was sited.

  It was hardly a tenth full, as a skeleton crew watched teletype machines or took dictation from far-flung correspondents on the rare breaking-news stories. I sat down at Marty Daniels’s desk, aware that I looked a little like Marty, who covered the Defense Department for the Post, and rifled through the pink stack of messages that had accumulated. I hoped Marty called Mo back, and I hoped he avoided the angry fellow at the West German embassy, and I hoped that Susan didn’t call to cancel lunch or anything more interesting, and then, lazily, I picked up the phone. As a senior correspondent, Marty enjoyed direct access to long-distance, and I quickly dialed Lon’s number.

  I got Monica, she put me through to Lon in the shop, and I said hello.

  “Hugh, how’s my favorite secret agent? Have you caught Dr. No yet?”

  “The slimy bastard changed lairs on us again. He found a new volcano. And how’s my favorite cripple?”

  “You know, Hugh,” said Lon amiably, “I thought I felt a sexual impulse below my waist the other day, but it turned out to be a house falling on my knee.”

  We both laughed. I had followed his steps to Choate and Yale. He was five years older, and I’d gone down to New Haven my senior year to watch him on the football field, where I took great pleasure in the way he left the Harvard Bambis smashed and bloody in his wake. That was his strength deployed in righteous fury!

  “Seriously, how are you doing, Lon?”

  “I’m fine except for the ulcers on the leg. They don’t hurt, but they’re a little annoying. I’ve got a piece due for the Rifleman at the end of the week, and I’m going to a conference on combat-oriented pistol matches next month that looks to be interesting. You?”

  “Just spying away like a busy little beaver,” I said. “Spy, spy, spy, all day long!”

  Soon enough, our jocularity out of the way, I progressed to issues. “Lon, something has come up on the job, and I thought I’d run it by you.”

  “Good Lord, Hugh, I’d think if anybody’d have experts on this sort of thing, it would be you fellows.”

  “I’m sure we do, but it’s the weekend, nobody spies on weekends. Plus, it will take three days to go through and three days to come back via channels. You probably know more than they do, anyway.”<
br />
  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I’ve come across a reference to”—I pretended to withdraw it from memory—“something called an ‘Eye-tie Mannlicher-Carcano six-five.’ Now, I am a professional intelligence officer, so I have been able to determine that ‘Eye-tie’ probably means ‘Italian.’”

  “Excellent, Hugh. I feel we are well protected.”

  “Indeed. But the rest, other than the fact that it’s from the firearms world, is gibberish.”

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t know too much about it. It could refer to the rifle or the cartridge, depending on context. Or both. Anyhow, the rifle was the Italian service rifle beginning in 1891 and running through the late fifties. It was probably the worst service rifle of its generation, less effective in every respect than the German Mauser, the British Lee-Enfield, our own Springfield, even the French Lebel. But they kept making ’em in various iterations, including a short cavalry or ski troop version.”

  “I see,” I said. “How would an American get one?”

  “Very classified. Buy a stamp. That’s the secret. When the Italians joined NATO, they converted to our arms—you know, the garand, the .30-caliber machine gun, the carbine, the .45 automatic—so they sold off a billion or so of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifles in various formats as surplus, and a great many of them came into this country, where they are being sold as downmarket hunting rifles by mail-order gun houses. I see ads for them all over the place. These guys put a cheesy Jap scope on them and sell them as deer rifles for the workingman who can’t afford a Winchester Model 70.”

  “So it’s no sniper rifle?”

  “It’s basically a piece of junk. Barely accurate, shoddily made, ugly as sin, with a cranky bolt throw. It shows that the Italians never took war seriously, particularly when you compare it to a brilliant piece of engineering like a Mauser. Now, the cartridge it shoots is more interesting and probably deserved a better rifle than the Mannlicher. It’s a mediumbore, flat shooting round, meant for battle at more or less longer ranges. The bullet is heavy for its size, with a thick copper coating to hold it together on those rare occasions when Italian marksmanship prevails. It’s a viable round for just about any thin-skinned game animal up to and including a whitetail. I’d use it on a man before I’d use it on a bear.”