Time to Hunt

by Stephen Hunter

“Yes.”

  “The points are all well made,” Bonson said. “Well then, let’s throw it open for general discussion. Can someone tell me what possible meaning this has?”

  “Sir, I think I can explain the sequencing.”

  “Go ahead,” said Bonson.

  “In 1971, four people saw Pashin operating undercover in this country as this Fitzpatrick. That is, really interfaced with him in commission of his duties. Three were eliminated quickly. But they had no ID on the fourth, and as I recollect, according to official Marine Corps records, Mrs. Swagger’s first marriage to Donny Fenn was unrecorded.”

  “That’s right,” said Julie. “I received no benefits. It didn’t matter to me. I didn’t want anything to do with the Marine Corps. Although I ended up marrying it.”

  “But,” continued the analyst, “they have a bad picture of her, the one they got at the farm. They can’t ID it. It haunts them over the years. The decades pass. SovUn breaks up. Pashin is no longer GRU, he’s part of PAMYAT, the nationalist party. He begins his political career. He’s handsome, heroic, the brother of a martyred nationalist hero, has lots of mafia backing; he’s scaring the old-line commies, he’s within a few weeks of winning an election and control of twenty thousand nukes. Then, two months ago, a picture of Bob Lee Swagger appears in The National Star and subsequently in Time and Newsweek, who call him ‘America’s most violent man.’ If you recall: it was a picture snapped by a Star photographer of Bob coming out of church in Arizona, with his wife. Her picture appears in the national media. And it contains the information that Bob is married to his spotter’s widow. Donny’s widow, the woman who got away, who’s been haunting them all these years. The last survivor of that night on the farm. Suddenly, it becomes clear to PAMYAT and all the interests betting on Pashin that one witness from his undercover days still exists and can still put him on that farm. All right? So … from that point on, they have to take her out, and her husband’s gaudy past certainly provides a kind of pretext.”

  “That’s sequencing,” said Bonson. “Fine, good, it makes sense. It’s a theory that fits. But still … why?”

  “Ah, he was involved with a famous peace demonstrator in blowing up a building.”

  “So?”

  “Well…”

  Bonson argued savagely, trying to compel the young man to a next leap. “It’s widely known he had an intelligence background. It’s known in some circumstances that the peace movement had some East Bloc involvement. Actually, that might help his candidacy in today’s Russia. I don’t understand why the same security mandates would be operational twenty-seven years later. They were protecting assets then. What can they be protecting now? Ideas, anybody?”

  None of the senior people had any.

  “Well, then, we’re sort of stuck, aren’t we?” said Bonson. “It’s very interesting, but we still don’t—”

  “Should I explain it to you now, or do you want to yammer on a bit?” asked Bob.

  “You ain’t got it yet, Bonson,” said Bob. “You still bought into the cover story. You still look at the cover story and you don’t see the real story. And all your smart boys, too.”

  “Well, Sergeant,” said Bonson evenly, “then go ahead. You explain the real story.”

  “I will. You missed the big news. There was a bomb explosion at the University of Wisconsin 9 May 1971 all right. A kid named Trig Carter blew himself up protesting the war in Vietnam. Maybe most of you are too young to remember it, but I do. He gave his life to peace. He was a rich kid, could have had anything, but he gave his life up for his ideals. They even wrote books about him. He may have been brave, too. I don’t know.

  “But the one name you won’t find in that book or in any other books about the peace movement or the history of our country in 1971 is the name Ralph Goldstein. Anybody here recognize it?”

  There was silence in the room.

  “That’s the big story. Ralph Goldstein was the doctoral student who was killed that night in the University of Wisconsin Math Center. Jewish boy, twenty-seven, married, from Skokie, Illinois. Went to the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus, not a very impressive school compared to the fancy schools where Trig Carter went. He didn’t know nobody. He just did his work and tried to get his degree and do his research. Smart as a whip, but very obscure. Never went to no demonstrations, smoked no dope, got no free love, or nothing. I did something nobody has yet done: I went and talked to his son, now himself a very bright kid. I hope nobody don’t blow him up.”

  He could feel their eyes on him. He cracked a little smile. All the pointy heads, listening to him.

  “But Ralph Goldstein had published a paper in Duke Higher Mathematics Quarterly, which he called ‘Certain Higher Algorhythmic Functions of Topographical Form Reading in Orbital Applications.’ Don’t mean a thing to me. But guess what? We now got about 350 satellites in orbit watching the world because Ralph Goldstein figured out the math of it. He was only a grad student, and he himself didn’t even know it, but he’d been picked to join the staff at the Satellite Committee at the Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Lab in Maryland, where they did all the high-power number crunching that made the satellite program possible. Okay, so what his death meant practically was it took us three extra years to get terrain-recognition birds in the air. If it matters, that’s three years where the Sovs upgraded their own satellite program, and closed a gap in the Cold War. That’s three more years that kept them in the race. Which one of you geniuses or experts can tell me which part of Soviet staff was responsible for strategic warfare?”

  “GRU,” came the reply.

  “That’s right. And what was Pashin?”

  “GRU.”

  “That’s right. So guess what? His job wasn’t to stop the war in Vietnam. He didn’t give a shit about the war in Vietnam, or about Trig Carter or about nothing. It was to kill a little Jewish guy in an office in Madison, Wisconsin, who was just about to put the Americans way ahead in the Cold War. Kill him in such a way that no one would ever, in a hundred years, think it had to do with the Russians. Kill him in such a way that no one would even think about his death but only about the death of the man who killed him. To make him an extra in his own murder. That was Pashin’s mission: it was straight GRU wet work, a murder job. Trig Carter and the peace movement were just part of the props.”

  He could hear them breathing heavily in the room, but no one spoke.

  “And don’t you see the cynicism in it, the goddamned motherfucking brilliance? They knew this country so goddamn well. They just knew that when any of you Ivy League heroes looked at that data, you couldn’t see past Trig, because, no matter which side he was on, he was one of you. That would be the tragedy, and the fog it would release in your little pea fucking brains would keep you from ever figuring it out. It takes an outsider, someone who ain’t been to no college and doesn’t think the word Harvard or Yale means shit in this world. It takes guttertrash rednecks who you all pay to do the dirty work with the rifles so you can sit in your clubs and make ironic little jokes. Or plan your little wars that the Swaggers and the Fenns and the Goldsteins have to go fight.”

  The silence lasted for a long moment.

  Then finally, Bonson spoke: “Class anger aside, does this make any sense to you Skull and Bones boys?”

  It took a while, but finally someone said, almost laconically, “Yeah, it makes perfect sense. It even explains why it’s happening now. It puts them in a desperate situation. They—that’s PAMYAT, the old GRU security bunch hiding behind nationalism and financed by mob money—have to keep this information quiet. They couldn’t take a chance that just as he’s closing in on the presidency, their man is revealed as a murderer of American nationals on American soil. That would make it impossible for him to work with any American president or with big American corporations. That information has to be buried at all costs. Their lives, their futures, their party depend on it. They had to eliminate the last witness, particularly as Pashin’s fame is getting
bigger and bigger.”

  “Sir,” said someone else, “I think we could game out some very interesting tactical deployment for this information. We might have a hand ourselves in determining who their next president is.”

  “Okay,” said Bonson, “you game it out. But I want it going in one direction. I want to kill this motherfucker.”

  PART IV

  BACK TO THE WORLD

  The Present

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  The snow didn’t last. It melted on the third day after it had fallen, causing floods in the lowlands, closing roads, wrecking bridges, creating mud slides. But on Upper Cedar Creek it was a serene day, with blue skies, eastern zephyrs and creeks full of sparkling water. The pines shed their cloak of snow; the grass began to emerge, green and lush, and seemingly undamaged by the ordeal.

  By now the excitement was over. Bonson had departed with a handshake the previous morning, after ensuring that a quickly convened Custer County grand jury found no culpability in the death by misadventure of one Frank Vborny, of Cleveland, Ohio, as the fake identification documents read in the dead sniper’s pocket. Ballistics confirmed that indeed Mr. Vborny had shot and killed two innocent people in the Custer County Idaho Bell substation in Mackay; obviously a berserker, he next attacked a house that was luckily rented out by a gun owner, who was able to defend himself. The gun owner’s name was never published but that was all right, and in Idaho most people took satisfaction from the moral purity of the episode and its subtle endorsement of the great old Second Amendment, a lesson most Westerners felt had been forgotten in the East.

  Up in the mountains, the state police had pulled out, the helicopters and all the young men and women had gone back to wherever it was they came from, and there was little sign that they’d been there.

  Bob and Julie had a check, in the odd sum of $146,589.07, and had no idea how that exact figure had been selected. It was from the Department of the Treasury, and the invoice banally read, “Consultancy,” with the proper dates listed and his Social Security number.

  The last of the security team left, the rifle and recovered Beretta were returned, the foam case with its cargo marked officially as “operational loss,” and Sally had taken Nikki for a walk down to the mailbox on Route 93, when he at last had an opportunity to talk to his wife.

  “Well, howdy,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said. Doctors had examined her after her ordeal; she was in fine shape, her collarbone knitting properly. She seemed much stronger now, and was able to get about better. Sally would soon be leaving.

  “Well, I have some things to say. Care to have a listen?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know we have some money now. I’d like to git on back to Arizona and restart the business. Joe Lopez says they seem to miss me down there. It was a good business and a good life.”

  “It was a good life.”

  “I went a little crazy there. I put everybody through a lot. I wasn’t very grown-up about my troubles. That’s all in the past now. And what I learned was how important my family was. I want my family back. That’s the only thing I want. No more adventures, no more screwing around. That’s all finished.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It had nothing to do with you. It was all about me. How could I blame you for anything? You saved all—”

  “Now, now,” he said. “No need for that. I thought all this out. I just want the old life back. I want you to be my wife, I want my baby girl to be fine, I want to work with the horses and take care of y’all. That’s the best life there is, the only life I’ve ever wanted. I get these bad moods. Or I used to; I hope I’m over that. If I had some ghosts, they ain’t walking out of the cemetery no more. So … well, what do you say? Will you let me come back?”

  “I already called the lawyer. He recalled the separation request.”

  “That’s great.”

  “It’ll be good,” she said. “I think we should use some of that money and go on a nice vacation. We should close up the house here, the house outside of Boise, but then go to some warm island for two weeks. Then we can go back to Arizona. R&R.”

  “God, does that sound like a plan to me,” he said with a smile. “There’s only one last little thing. Trig’s mother. She was very helpful and she told me that if I ever learned anything about the way her son died, I should tell her. Tell her the truth. I still feel that obligation. So in a couple of months or so, when all this dies down, when we’re back, I may take a bit of time and head back there to Baltimore.”

  “Do you want us to come with you?”

  “Oh, it ain’t worth it. I’ll just fly in, rent a car, fly back. It’ll be over quicker ‘n’ you can believe. No sense putting no trouble to it or taking Nikki away from her riding. Hell, I may drive instead of flying, save some money that way.”

  He smiled. For just a second she thought there might be something in his eyes, some vagrant thought, some evidence of another idea, another agenda; but no, not a thing could be seen. They were depthless and gray and revealed nothing except the love he felt for her.

  Little by little, life for the Swagger family reassembled itself toward some model of normality. Even the big news of a spectacular murder in Russia failed to make much of a stir. Bob just watched a little of it on CNN, saw the burning Jeep Cherokee and the dead man in the back, and when the hysterical analysts came on to explain it all, he changed channels.

  Sally stayed until they moved back to Boise, and then Bob drove her to the airport.

  “Once again,” she said at the gate, “the great Bob Lee Swagger triumphs. You killed your enemies, you got your wife and family back. Can’t keep a good man down.”

  “Sally, I got ’em all fooled but you, don’t I? You see clean through me.”

  “Bob, seriously. Pay attention to them this time. I know it’s easy to say, but you have to let the past go. You’re married, you have a wonderful, brave, strong wife and a beautiful little girl. That’s your focus.”

  “I know. It will be.”

  “There’s no more old business.”

  “Is that a question or a statement?”

  “Both. If there’s one little thing left, let it go. It doesn’t matter. It can’t matter.”

  “There’s nothing left,” he said.

  “You are one ornery sumbitch,” she said. “I swear, I don’t know what that woman sees in you.”

  “Well, I don’t neither. But she’s pretty smart, so maybe she knows something you and I don’t.”

  Sally smiled, and then turned to leave, good friend and soldier to the very end. She winked at him, as if to say, “You are hopeless.”

  And he knew he was.

  When the cast came off a little later, and Julie was back among the supple, the family flew to St. John, in the U.S. Virgins for two glorious weeks. They rented a villa just outside Cruz Bay on the little island, and each morning took a taxi to the beautiful Trunk Bay beach, where they snorkeled and lay in the sand and watched the time pass ever so slowly as they turned browner and browner. They were a handsome family, the natural aristocrats of nature: the tall, grave man with gray eyes and abundant hair, and his wife, every bit as handsome, her hair a mesh of honey and brown, her cheekbones strong, her lips thin, her eyes powerful. She had been a cheerleader years ago, but she was if anything more beautiful now than ever. And the daughter, a total ball of fire, a complete kamikaze who always had to be called in, who pushed the snorkeling to its maximum, who begged her father to let her scuba or go water- or para-skiing.

  “You got plenty of time to break your neck when you’re older,” he told her. “Your old mommy and I can’t keep up with such a thing. You have to give us a break. This is our vacation, too.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” she scolded, “you’re such a chicken.”

  And when she said that, he did an imitation of a chicken that was clearly based on a little real time in the barnyard, and they all laughed, first at how funny it was but second at the idea that a man of such re
serve could at last find some way to let himself go, to be silly. An astonishment.

  At night, they went into town and ate at the restaurants there. Bob never had a drink, didn’t seem to want one. It was idyllic, really too good. It reminded Julie just a bit of an R&R she’d had with Donny in Hawaii, just before … well, just before.

  And Bob seemed to relax totally too. She’d never seen him so calm, so at ease. The wariness that usually marked his passage in society—a feeling for terrain and threat, a tendency to mark escape routes, to look too carefully at strangers—disappeared. And he never had nightmares. Not once did he awake screaming, drenched in cold sweat, or with the shakes, or with that hurt, hunted look that sometimes came into his eyes. His scars almost seemed to disappear as he grew tanner and tanner, but they were always there, the puckers of piebald flesh that could only be bullet wounds: so many of them. One of the Virgin Islanders stared at them once, then turned to say something to one of his colleagues, in that musical, impenetrable English of theirs, so fast and full of strange rhythms, but Julie heard the word “bombom mon,” which she took to mean “boom-boom man,” which she in turn took to be “gunman.”

  But Bob appeared not to notice. He was almost friendly, his natural reserve blurred into something far more open and pleasant to the world. She’d never quite seen him like this.

  There was only one night when she awoke and realized he wasn’t in bed with her. She rose, walked through the dark living room, until she found him on the deck, under a tropic night, sitting quietly. Before them was a slope of trees, a hill and then the sea, a serene sheet of glass throwing off tints of moonlight. He sat with utter stillness, staring at a book, as if it had some secret meaning to it.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “This? Oh, it’s called Birds of North America by Roger Prentiss Fuller.”

  She came over and saw that he was gazing at a section on eagles.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.