“But you can’t know,” said Russ. “It’s all abstract theory. There’s no real proof.”
“Yes, there is,” said Bob. “The bullet hole in my father’s chest. It was .311 of an inch, which is the diameter, with impact beveling, that an M-l carbine bullet would make. Jimmy had a .38 Super. Its diameter would be a little more than .357. Bub had a .44 Special, which hadn’t been fired. My father was killed in the dead of night by a .30 carbine bullet.”
“Jesus,” said Russ.
“You see the whole thing was about killing my father. I don’t know why. My father must have known something, but there’s nothing in his behavior that last week to suggest anything unusual was going on. But these guys maneuvered very cleverly. Stop and think: They investigated Earl and found his weakness, his soft heart for a white trashy punk named Jimmy Pye. They got to Jimmy in jail, made him some kind of offer so good he had to take it and sell out everything he had. They set up a grocery store job guaranteed to make Jimmy famous, even to the little bit about him stopping for a hamburger! They moved him downstate; he got in contact with Daddy to surrender. They had access to a state-of-the-art piece of hardware and a military shooter who knew what the hell he was doing, just in case. Thorough, professional, very well thought out, all contingencies covered. All to kill one little state trooper sergeant in rural Arkansas in a way that would appear to be open-and-shut. Put the body in the grave, say the prayers and walk away from it.”
Russ said, “And it’s still going on. The exchanged headstones. Duane Peck.”
“Yes, it is.”
He nodded.
“Only the snake knew,” repeated Bob. “It was hunting the sniper. Now I am.”
It came down to a telephone. There was no telephone at Bob’s trailer so after he and Russ ate and changed and Bob locked the Ruger and its ammunition in the Tuf-Box bolted across the back of his truck, they got in and headed not into town but to the Days Inn, where Bob rented a room—for its phone and its privacy.
Jorge, leading a convoy of hitters, got to Bob’s trailer forty minutes after they left. The truck was not in sight.
“Goddamn,” he said.
He went back to the men in his unit. He left one man in the trees across from the trailer with a pair of binoculars and a phone; he assigned the remaining vehicles to begin to patrol on preselected routes in Blue Eye and greater Polk County, in search of the truck, a green Dodge, one unpainted fender, Arizona plates SCH 2332. The instructions were simple. They weren’t to make contact or even follow. Instead, they were to phone in; Jorge himself, with telephone consultations with the boss, would try and determine where Bob was headed. The idea was to set the ambush well in advance and spring it with the whole team, in the coordinated way they had agreed upon.
Unawares, Bob started his hunt with a call to the Pentagon, Department of the Army, Archives Division, Sergeant Major Norman Jenks.
“Jenks.”
“Say, Norman.”
“Bob Lee, you old coot! What the hell, you still kicking around?”
“I seem to be.”
The old sergeant, who’d first met on Bob’s second tour when he led recons up near Cambodia while assigned to SOG and Jenks had been S-2 staff, chatted for a bit in the profane language of retired senior NCOs. But eventually Bob got to it.
“Need a favor.”
“Name it, Coot. If I can do it, I’ll do it. I’m too old for them to do anything to me now.”
“And too top-heavy,” sergeantspeak for having won too many combat decorations.
“Yeah, well,” said Jenks. “Go ahead, pard. Shoot.”
“You remember you guys had a gadget called a goddamned Set No. 1/M3 20,000 Volt?”
“That piece of shit? My first tour the ARVNs were using ’em. They were old then, and they was supposed to be fungus-proofed but whoever said they was never saw the fungus in Nam. That shit’d eat you for lunch!”
“Yeah, it was old by the sixties.”
“It was really World War II vintage. Based on some piece of German gear an OSS team brought back after the war, as I recall.”
“Well, anyway, I’m looking at the year 1955. Suppose a fellow had a need to use a night-vision setup in 1955 and he was in West Arkansas. How’d he get a hold of one? Where’d they be? Were they issued widely to troops? Would they have been, say, up at Campbell with the 101st Airborne? Would they have been at Bragg with the 82nd? Or maybe they were up at that ballistics development lab in Rhode Island? I’m just trying to get a feel for how common they was and how close to West Arkansas. And who was their expert? Who advocated them? Who trained on them and knew them? My feeling is, you couldn’t become proficient without training.”
“You couldn’t. It was like looking into an aquarium. The gooks never did figure it out. Anyhow, when do you need this by?”
“If it came yesterday, I’d be late.”
“Damn, Bob, what the hell this all about?”
“It’s a deal I’m working on with a writer.”
“Oh, a book! It’ll be a best-seller, I can guarantee you. You gonna tell him about An Loc?”
“I might.”
“Okay, I got a light schedule today and a newbie spec 4 just assigned; I’ll get this boy right on it. Number?”
Bob gave him the number.
“You hang tight. I’ll see what we can dig up.”
He hung up.
“Now what?” said Russ.
Bob opened his wallet and peeled out $300.
“I want you to take the truck and head up one exit on the Etheridge Parkway. That’s the Y City exit. I seem to recall a camping store up there. You go up there and buy two sleeping bags, a Coleman lantern, some Coleman fuel, some changes of underwear, toothbrushes, the works. Remember the fuel, the damn lantern don’t work without it! We’re not going back to my trailer for a spell.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s good to change your base of operations every once in a while. We been at the trailer a week. We’ll move somewhere else for a couple of days or so.”
“But I had a sleeping bag. At the trailer. I had underwear. I had—”
“Now, don’t get yourself lathered up. Man, you start to squeal like a pup every goddamned time. We’ll leave that stuff there. If anybody like a Mr. Duane Peck takes a look, he’ll see it and figure we’re due back at any time. Got it?”
“You are paranoid,” said Russ.
“Para-what?”
“Never mind.”
Russ left. Bob lay back and rested. He gave Russ time to drive off, then left the room and went down the hall to the pay phone and called his wife collect.
“Well, hello.”
“Well, howdy, stranger,” said Julie. “Thought you’d married a movie star and headed for California.” “Not this boy. No sir. Ah—”
“Ah—I know that tone. You’re about to tell me something I don’t want to hear.”
“Sweetie, it’s nothing. It just is going to take a bit longer than I thought. Maybe another week or two.”
“Are you having a good time?”
“It’s been interesting. I went to his grave. I had a moment with him. We been going through records. It’s very educational. Saw Sam. That sort of thing.”
“How is he?”
“Old. Older. I don’t know, he goes a little strange now and then. I’m worried about him.”
“We’re all older.”
“How’s my baby girl?”
“She’s fine. Misses her daddy.”
“I’ll be home as soon as possible.”
“You’re not in any trouble, are you?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“You love trouble. That’s your problem.”
Bob bought a Coke and the Little Rock paper and went back to the room. About two o’clock the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Down-filled or polyester?”
“Huh?”
“Do you want down-filled or just simple polyester?
For the sleeping bags? Maybe it’s too warm for the down-filled. Incidentally, I had to go all the way to Booneville. That camp store was closed.”
“Polyester is fine. And a cooler. Fair enough?”
“Gotcha.”
He hung up to more silence in the room and the minutes ticked by. At last the phone rang. It was about 3:30. “Hello.”
“Bob?”
It was Sergeant Major Jenks.
“Yes sir.”
“All right, I got some info for you. You guessed right pretty much about the M-3s. At no one time did the army have on its TO&E more than two thousand of those units. They was damned expensive, they was hard to operate and they was delicate, so distribution was mainly to elite units; they never handed ’em out to the troops at the company or platoon level. Hell, you couldn’t even buy one at the PX! Dispersion was mainly to special forces units in Europe, to the big airborne divisions at brigade or regimental S-2 level, to 4th Army in Washington State and the 3rd Mountain Division up in Alaska. The heaviest profusion of them was to 9th and 23rd Infantry on the DMZ at the 38th parallel in Korea. Another complement went to the Jungle Warfare School in Panama. Just what you’d expect.”
Damn, Bob thought.
“Okay, fine, Norman, I—”
“Wait a sec, ain’t done yet. Don’t this beat all? According to our records, three such units were transshipped from the Panama Zone, the Jungle Warfare School, to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, in late June of 1954.”
Bob waited a second.
“What for?”
“Well, one of the problems with the goddamned things was simple: no doctrine. They were not effectively used in Korea because nobody had thought much about the best methods of deployment and there was thought about junking the things altogether. Then a brilliant young first lieutenant wrote a paper on night-vision tactical doctrine which he submitted to the Infantry Journal, where it got published and he got noticed. So he finds himself TDY Camp Chaffee, where he’s put in charge of what they’re calling the Experimental Night Tactical Development Program, code-named BLACK LIGHT, where they run a lot of night-fire operations trying to figure out the best way to deploy the thing, while also working with ways to refine it. They got some R&D types, they got some intel boys, maybe even some Agency boys in it.”
“It sounds like a black operation. The technology would be useful for a hell of lot more people than company commanders with perimeters to defend.”
“You got that right.”
“Give me a name, Norman.”
“I thought you’d ask for one,” said Jenks. “And I got a hell of a name for you. Preece.”
“Preece!” said Bob.
“Yep. That’s where the whole army night-Sniping program began. With BLACK LIGHT and First Lieutenant, later Major and now Brigadier General James F. Preece, retired. Jack Preece.”
Bob nodded. The name took him way back.
“Tigercat.”
“Tigercat. That’s the one and same guy.”
“You got an address for the general?”
“I went to the computer for you, Bob. You never heard this from me, which is why I am calling from a pay phone in Arlington.”
“Fair enough.”
“He’s now CEO and director of research for an outfit called JFP Technology, Inc., in Oklahoma City.”
“What’s JFP Technology?”
“One of those small unmarked buildings that’s really skunkworks for nasty toys. Their specialty is sound suppressors and night-vision equipment for the world’s armies and SWAT teams. Our Delta guys use their stuff and so do the SEALs. That’s what Tigercat gets you in the civilian world.”
Norman gave him the number.
“Thanks, Norman,” said Bob, then hung up. He waited a second, letting his head clear. Tigercat was the code name for the 7th Division Sniper School in Vietnam, where the army ran its snipers through and taught them the doctrine. Of course there was a problem: army doctrine was different than marine doctrine. Not worse, not better, just different. And it worked, or at least the kills said it did. Army snipers ran up far higher numbers in Vietnam than marines did.
So was it an interservice thing? The fact that there was not a lot of love lost between sniper communities in the two services, either then or now? Maybe. Maybe not. Bob didn’t know. What he did know was that Preece’s Tigercat turned out a number of first-class shooters very quickly; and in no little time, the army snipers were putting bodies in bags all over Nam. Yet even the army was a little awkward about this triumph; its huge and efficient P.R. machine never made a thing of it, no books came out of it, none of its high scorers ever became known to the public as had he and Carl Hitchcock. It was … well, it was different.
The door opened and Russ walked in.
“You want me to unload the truck?”
“Just a minute,” said Bob. “Now you listen to me.” He dialed the number as Russ sat across from him. After a bit the phone was answered by a young woman.
“JFP Technology,” she said.
“Yes, hello, I’m calling for General Preece.”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Yes, my name is Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, USMC, retired. I was familiar with the general’s operations in Vietnam; he might be familiar with mine.”
The phone went dead for a bit and then, “Gunnery Sergeant Swagger?”
“Yes sir, it is.”
“By God, as I live and die, the real live Bob the Nailer. I never thought I’d have the pleasure. You did a hell of a job of work in country.”
“Thank you, sir. Just the job the Corps gave me.”
“You may not realize this, but do you remember when you won the Wimbledon Cup in ’71 after your second tour?”
“Yes sir, I do.”
“Well, I came in third!”
“My God!”
“Yes sir. You had it that day, Sergeant. Nothing threw you. Not the wind or the sun or the mirage. You shot through everything.”
“That’s our good Marine Corps training, sir!”
“Sergeant, you don’t ‘sir’ me, all right? I’m retired now. All that’s behind us. What’s on your mind?”
“Well, sir, I’ve signed up to do a damned book. ‘I was there,’ that sort of thing.”
“That’ll be a hell of a book. I can’t wait to read that one. The things I heard about the An Loc Valley.”
“Hell of a fight,” said Bob. “Anyhow: I’m working with a young writer and he’s got me convinced we ought to do what he calls context. You know, background, the big picture, how it all fits together. So I thought I’d have to describe the marine sniper program in those days. And he wanted to look at the whole damned thing. Army sniping too; give it the grand overview, he says. Well, sir, I thought you’d be the man to talk to.”
“Gunny, you know a lot of that is still classified. And the army never went public with its snipers in the way the Corps did. Too damn liberal in Washington, I suppose.”
“Yes sir.”
“Off the record?”
“Hell yes, maybe you could just point us in the right direction.”
“You in town?”
“I’m actually home in Arkansas. Eight hours away maybe. Could drive up tonight.”
“Get here tomorrow morning. Let me see. Hell, I have a meeting with Sales. Oh, fuck, I’ll shift it. Jean, call Sales, tell them we’ll have the meeting tomorrow afternoon!”
“That’s it,” said Bob. The general gave him an address.
“See you tomorrow.”
Bob hung up.
“Let’s go.”
“Now?”
“I ain’t getting any younger.”
Some nights it was good and other nights it was beyond good, into some kind of great. Tonight was great. When he was done and when she had given him the ritual compliments, he rolled over and went downstairs. The huge house on Cliff Drive was more or less quiet except for the shiftings of his sleeping children. The light snapped off and she went to sleep
. He poured himself a glass of Jim Beam, walked out on the patio and saw, far below, the winking runway lights of the airfield. He took a sip of the whiskey and enjoyed for just a second the illusion that everything was fine in his empire.
Then the beeper in his bathrobe pocket began to vibrate. Red checked the number and saw that it wasn’t goddamned Duane Peck at all but instead the number of Jorge de la Rivera’s phone. Quickly he dialed.
“So?”
“Sir, ain’t got nothing. Goddamn been up, down and around this place. Left a man at his trailer, just picked him up, ain’t seen nothing all day. Maybe they gone.”
Red thought a bit.
“You want us to book time in a hotel, sir?”
“No, no, that would look odd, ten men in three cars and a truck pulling into a Holiday Inn all at once. No, head back up here, get back to the farmhouse. What, by the parkway that’s only an hour.”
“Yes sir. We hunt again tomorrow?”
“Ah, let’s wait on that. Get ’em some good sleep. No fucking around. When we need ’em, we’ll need ’em fresh and fast.”
“Yes sir.”
Red waited a second, then called Duane Peck’s number.
“Hello? Who is …”
“Who do you think this is?”
“Yes sir.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m outside the old man’s house, just like you said. He did the craziest things today. I swear, this old man’s lost it. He—”
“Make a report after I’m off the phone. Listen, Duane, tomorrow, first thing, you go in uniform to every motel, every restaurant, every gas station, every camp store there around Blue Eye and you see if anyone’s seen Swagger and the boy. They’ve disappeared. We have to find them, fast.”
“Yes sir. Instead of the old man?”
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