A Bob Lee Swagger eBook Boxed Set: I, Sniper, Night of Thunder, 47th Samurai

by Stephen Hunter

  Vern sat next to the little girl on the sofa, his big hand draped protectively about her. Gently he’d been caressing her arm for about and hour, whispering softly into her ear.

  “Well, sir, Mr. Holy Water, I will do my job, same as you, and earn my money, same as you.”

  He went back to the phone.

  “Sir, I—”

  “Vern, I heard discord. I told y’all I didn’t want no discord. Discord is what makes things fall apart, that I know true and straight.”

  “Sir, Ernie and I are fine. We just ran into some unexpected situation is all. As for that old man, he ain’t peeked out a bit. Ernie kept a good watch on him, yes he did. There’s no move or nothing.”

  “Okay, we are about to let hell out of the jar here. The race’ll be over in a little bit—they’re up to lap four eighty or so now—and they’ll let the traffic build a bit, and then they go and we jump. Like I said before, that’s when you go up, you bash in the door, you hit him with both barrels, a lot of shooting, it don’t matter, no po-lice getting there for six hours with the mess we making here. Then you git gone but good. I’ll call you later so’s you can pick up your swag.”

  “That is a good plan, sir.”

  “Boys,” said the Reverend, “I just want you to know, you’re doing Grumley work tonight, but more important, you are serving the Lord.”

  “Sir, He has rewarded me. I have met the gal of my dreams here tonight, yes sir!”

  THIRTY-ONE

  It was The History of Sniping and Sharpshooting by Major John L. Plaster, a sniper expert and former SOG war dog in Vietnam, who Bob actually knew.

  “Sniping,” said Nick. “So she was trying to find something about snipers.”

  “She couldn’t have found a gun. Nobody loses a gun. She’d found, I don’t know, a piece of equipment, a gillie hat, a range book, or maybe some shell-related thing. The shell itself, the box, a piece of carton, a manifest, a bill of lading, something with a shell designation on it. But it had to be something unusual. The girl is my daughter. She’d been around cartridges her whole life. She knew the difference between a .308 and a .30-06 and between a shell, a cartridge, and a bullet.”

  “And it had to be arcane then, if she didn’t know it right away and sought someone with more information—the guy in the gun store, you, finally the book.”

  “Let’s try Mark 2:11,” Bob said.

  He went to the index. Damn! No Mark 2:11. But he was so close now, he could feel the answer almost as a palpable presence, floating just out of focus in the corner of the room.

  “Damn,” said Nick. “I was so sure it—”

  “Wait,” said Bob, “I think technically they abbreviate ’em. And we never saw the word ‘Mark’ written in her own hand. Don’t know if it really was a Mark or some kind of abbreviation. I think the military uses ‘M-k period’ as its abbreviation, left over from the old days. But I don’t see—”

  “Go back to the index.”

  Bob found the designation “Mk.211, 622.”

  Bob turned to page 622 and immediately saw a photo of a group of long, big, mean-looking cartridges, missiles really, their sleek brass hulls propped upright as they rested on a rim, while at the top, a bullet like a warhead promised speed, precision, and destruction. The conical, streamlined-to-death-point thing itself was sometimes black, sometimes blue, sometimes red, sometimes tipped in these colors, all a part of the complex system of military enumeration, by which armies on the prowl in far dusty places could keep their logistical requirements coherent.

  And there, finally, it was: Mk.211 Model O Raufoss, with green-over-white painted tip.

  They read. The Mk.211 Raufoss is a dedicated armor-piercing .50 caliber round, meant to penetrate light steel, of Norwegian manufacture (NAMMO being the name of the firm) and design, in play in specialized roles in the American war effort in the Middle East. It consists of a tungsten core buried in the center of the 650-grain bronze bullet and was designed so that the bullet itself, traveling at over twenty-five hundred feet per second and delivering four thousand foot pounds of energy at impact, would bore through the armor of the vehicle. A nanosecond later a small charge would explode, thus releasing the tungsten rod within, which being heavier and harder, would fly into the crew compartment, shatter and fragmentize, quickly wounding, disabling, or simply slaughtering the human beings and any delicate electronic equipment inside.

  “It’s for light armored vehicles,” said Bob. “Not a tank, but an armored personnel carrier, a Humvee, a car, a radar screen, an aerial, a mobile command center. Or maybe a bunker or barricade, a helicopter, a plane on the ground, a wiring junction, a stoplight, a camera or infrared scope, any number of military applications which are classified ‘soft targets,’ anything short of the real, big mechanized stuff. I’m betting they do a lot of damage wherever they’re deployed.”

  “The .50 caliber. That’s the big one?” Nick wanted to know.

  “They call the original gun the Queen of Battle. Ma Deuce, from the heavy machine gun designation which is M-2. You rule the battlefield with it in certain situations, say on a hill way out in bad-guy land. We used a lot of ’em in ’Nam. We loved ’em. But this here’s the newest wrinkle. It ain’t for a machine gun. See this Mk.211 shit’s for a rifle built by an outfit called Barrett, a big son of a bitch, just barely man-portable. Six feet long, forty pounds or so, off a bipod. Looks like an M16 on hormones for Arnold Schwarzenegger. You couldn’t carry it in a holster to rob a store. But placed with a trained operator, you could use it to snipe at over a mile to take out trucks and lightly armored defensive positions, you could rain havoc and brimstone on your target zone with pinpoint accuracy. You could take down people, low-flying planes, missiles on their launch pads, radio and radar installations, anything. You could use it on the president with that ammo. It ain’t the gun, it’s the ammo. It’s strictly military-only, banned from civilian use, and I don’t think even the NRA cares about that. It’s for blowing up stuff, for multiplying the killing force, for bringing down planes or choppers, That ammo’ll go through anything and cut the shit out of what’s on the other side.”

  “So that’s what she found,” said Nick. “Some evidence of a .50 caliber rifle with deadly, military-only ammunition in criminal hands, presumably being readied for some kind of kickass caper. And that’s why they wanted to kill her, and when you found out, they had to try and kill you. But what would the caper be? Can you guess? And when is it going down?”

  “Could it be a kill?” said Bob. “That’s what you could do with this. The president, I don’t know, the governor, some big guy, he’s in a box watching the race. They’re on the mountaintop which just barely might give you a vantage point on the speedway or somehow they’ve gotten into the speedway itself, though with a gun that big, I don’t know how. Maybe he can zero the big guy’s box, put ten Mk.211s into it, kill everybody in two seconds, I’m guessing. Or it could take out an armored limousine. Turn it to Swiss cheese.”

  “The president isn’t there. The governor of Tennessee is, but…the governor of Tennessee? I suppose. I just—” Nick ran out of words. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem Grumley. It’s not their style.”

  “No, no, this is good, consider it,” said Bob. “They’re hired by some mob who knows their one value isn’t sophistication but silence. That’s what they’re selling. So maybe the governor is organizing some new anti–organized crime task force, got ’em all scared. They contract the hit to the Grumleys who bring it off with their usual crudeness and violence but also a refusal to snitch ’em out if caught.”

  “The tires, Bob. You were the one that discovered the tires. Were you wrong on that? How would that fit in?”

  “Ahhh—” Bob thought, clinging to his thesis. “Yeah, yeah, they could count on their being an SUV there in the crowd, but not with off-road tires. Yeah, after the hit, which takes maybe two seconds, they chase a family out of its Bronco, speed-change the tires, and take off cross country, maybe to the top of that hil
l. A chopper picks ’em up. It sounds pretty good to me, partner.”

  “But maybe you have biases. You’re a sniper. Everything to you looks like a sniper job.”

  “From ten feet with a .50 Mk.211, it ain’t much like sniping. It’s like blowing stuff up real good.”

  “Okay, I think we have to alert this command structure somehow. They’ve got to get people into the area, put a hold on all VIP transit, and maybe—I still don’t like it. It just doesn’t seem Grumley. Does it seem Grumley to you?”

  “Until today, I didn’t know a Grumley from a dandelion.”

  “Could they shoot up the race? From up above, fire the ten shells into the lead three cars as they move through the pack on a turn? You’d get a massive crash, cars all over the place, the race would be a catastrophe, they’d stop it, cancel it, something.”

  Bob saw through that.

  “And if someone laid money against the one-in-a-million shot there’d be no winner to the Sharpie 500—well, that person would win a fortune. But he’d get a visit from the Vegas mob enforcer to make sure his win was on the up-and-up, and since it wouldn’t be, he’d get a swim in Lake Tahoe with a pair of cement socks.”

  “And it doesn’t seem to need a driver, a speed-tire change, or any of the other stuff. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense,” Nick said.

  “And just to make it more ridiculous, the race is almost over. It’s near eleven. They start at eight and do the five hundred laps in about three hours. Man, I am so buffaloed. Come on, Nick, you’re supposed to be smart. Figure it out.”

  “I’m tired, I’m old. I feel older than you look.”

  “Okay, go back to basics. What do we know, absolutely.”

  “We know, absolutely, they have acquired a .50 caliber rifle and a supply of armor-piercing incendiary rounds of a sort the government categorizes as ‘antimatériel.’”

  “So,” said Bob, “let’s pursue this particular line. What is matériel?”

  “Okay, I’d answer like this: light armor. Limousines, sure. Or, given this environment, power lines, TV trucks, light safes, radio installations, I don’t know, McDonald’s signs, news helicopters, race cars, race car trailers, propane barbecue tanks. It could be any of those. I’m afraid we’re stuck with—”

  “Just make the call. You don’t have to designate a target. You just have to flood the zone with law enforcement and security and—”

  “What zone?”

  “I guess the race zone.”

  “Yeah, but, hello, it’s full of three hundred thousand happy campers. Too bad there’s not a nice armored car in the middle of this, chock full of cash. Now that would make some sense. Okay, I’ll make the call and—”

  It lay there in the room for a while. Each man considered what Nick had just blurted out. Yes, armored car. Seemingly impregnable, full of cash, stuck in traffic, yet easily taken down by such a tool as an Mk.211.

  “What you just said,” said Bob, “now that makes some sense.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” But he had to fight it. “Why would there be an armored car in the middle of all this? It doesn’t track, it’s a bad idea, a red herring, it—”

  Nick took out his cell, punched a number. “I’ll call a state police captain I’ve worked with. He might know something,” he said.

  When he got through, Bob heard him say, “Hey, Mike. It’s Memphis, sorry for the late call. You’ve been watching the race? Cool, is it over yet? No, I could call back, it’s almost over, but let me just lay something on you. I’m here in Bristol myself. Sorry but it’s important.”

  He said to Bob, “Now he’s turning the TV down. Ah, okay, Mike, we have intelligence that some very bad actors are on scene here with a piece of ugly work called an Mk.211 Raufoss antimatériel round. And a .50 caliber rifle to fire the stuff. They could use it to do all sorts of things but the more we think about it, this group seems criminal, not political, and we’re trying to figure out if there’s a target they could unzip with it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m thinking how ideally suited the ordnance would be against some sort of armored car. Is there an armored car in play here that you would know anything—”

  He listened as far-off Mike told him all about it.

  Then he said, “All right, can you patch through to your command center? I’m going to try to reach them from my end. I’ll try and get a Bureau SWAT team deployed from Knoxville by chopper, and then we’ll move on site fast as we can. Ten-four.”

  “Well?” said Bob.

  “Come on,” said Nick, “we don’t have time. I’ll explain on the run.”

  Bob threw on a light khaki sports coat to cover the gun in Kydex and mags arrayed in clip holders along his backside.

  “It’s the concession money,” said Nick. “All of it, cash, small bills, a week’s worth of souvenirs and baseball hats, plus tickets for tonight, hot dog money, beer money, all the money from that NASCAR Village operation. He says it’s a six to eight million take. Now I should say, if you rob a bank and get two million, you’ve really only stolen $200,000 because you’ve got to move it to an overseas cartel, they’ve got to launder it and get it back to the U.S., and they’ll only pay out one on ten. That’s universal—except for this. Eight million small bills—maybe eight hundred to a thousand pounds of deadweight—is eight million. No one for ten. Straight one-for-one. You can start spending immediately, no one can track it.”

  “It’s in an armored car?” asked Bob.

  “More like a truck. They gather it up during the race and haul it to speedway headquarters. But there’s no vault there. So they bale it up and load it aboard that armored car. When the race is over, that vehicle, with a driver and three or four guards, moves out into the traffic and begins the long crawl to Bristol where it’s vaulted at one of the big downtown banks. The traffic jam, that’s supposedly the security. No one would hit an armored car in a traffic jam, because there’s no way out. But I’m guessing they’ve figured some way—”

  It was suddenly clear to Bob.

  “I see it. No, they don’t take the swag. They blow open the car, kill or incapacitate the crew. It takes ten seconds with an Mk.211. They set up perimeter security to deal with the cops who will have to fight the tide of panicked fans in the thousands to even get there. This team changes tires fast. Why? Because they ain’t driving down no road. The roads are jammed. They go off-road, they just mounted some kind of powerful off-road, heavy-tread tire. They go off-road, they grind through the most open area, which is that NASCAR Village, they just smash through it, nothing could stand up to the power of that truck. Maybe they’ve amped the engine somehow, to get a lot more power for a few minutes before the engine seizes or catches fire. That’s something the driver could do; he could figure it out.”

  “Yeah, but where does that get ’em?”

  “It gets ’em to the mountain. The hill, whatever. Up they go, and for that ride they’d need the best driver in the world, someone who’d won hill-climbs and truck demo derbies, the whole nine yards. They crank up that hill five minutes and fifty dead citizens and cops after they first hit the car. Up top, that’s the only safe place for that chopper pickup I came up with earlier. The chopper comes down the mountain range, way out of reach or even sight of any police firepower on scene, it picks them and the dough up, and they’re gone in seconds. They run through the dark low without lights, and nobody will follow them, because a) they can’t see ’em, and b) even if they could, they’re afraid of that .50 caliber, which will easily take a chopper down.”

  Nick took up the narrative. “They chopper out of the area, land, split the swag, and they’re gone by dawn. We won’t even find where they’ll land.”

  Bob made his choice at that moment. He knew where they’d land. But he had business there too.

  “I have to move,” said Nick. “I’m going to try and get a chopper in here and get out there. You don’t have to—”

  “Oh, yes I do. You need guns. I’ve got one.”

  THI
RTY-TWO

  The race was over. It was a jim-dandy. Junior won, just beating Carl by shedding him in a pile of the lapped but persistent tail-enders on the last half of number five hundred, when Junior went low, slipped through a gap between Food City and Bass Pro Shop, buzzed dangerously around the blue-green Dewalt reading the apex of the curve—which he knew better than his girlfriend’s inner thighs and which he dreamed of more often—and hit the last straight in FedEx’s wake, slingshotting off the suck, and hitting the checker maybe six feet ahead of Carl’s Office Depot. Carl got caught behind Cheerios—damn him!—then caught a gap and some sling action of his own, but just couldn’t overcome Junior. If it had been a five hundred-lap-plus-thirty-foot race he’d have done it. Okay, so? It’s only one race.

  The boys were all cheering, all up and down Volunteer Parkway outside the gigantic speedway structure, where the rug merchants all waited for a last shot at the johns and their families. Less sincerely, the Grumleys lurked, waiting for their big moment.

  “Where’d USMC 44 finish?” asked Brother Richard.

  “They haven’t read off the order yet—wait, here it is—” and Caleb listened hard to his little radio in the darkness. Then he said, “Fourth, he finished fourth.”

  “Cool,” said Brother Richard.

  A half-mile off, the speedway was still a source of immense noise, even with the engines finally turned off as the hot and smoky cars were rolled to their garages. It was the roar of the tribe. It was immense, the NASCAR animal in full throat, and above the stadium one could see the illumination not merely of the lights that made night racing possible but the thousands upon thousands of flashbulbs pricking off to record the moment when the young Dale the junior took his trophy.

  “Okay, boys,” said the old man, “time to git ’er ready. Say a prayer for fortune if you’re with me, if you are a secret non-believer, that’s okay, ’cause I will say a prayer for you and as I am close to Him, he will look out for you.”

  The boys began to prepare. Caleb quietly slipped under the table, pulled two large plastic bins out and withdrew into the dark space made by the tent above and the revetment of water bottles behind. There, in privacy, he removed two large constructions of metal, the upper and the lower of a Barrett .50 caliber M107. Expertly, he fitted the two together, finding the machined parts connected in the perfect joinery of the well-engineered. Pins secured the two units into one solid mechanism. Completed, made whole, it looked like a standard M4 assault rifle after six years in the gym, the familiar lines where they should be, but the whole thing amplified and extended, thickened, lengthened, densified, packed with strength and weight. Another Grumley—he couldn’t see who in the darkness—handed him a heavy magazine with ten Raufoss armor penetrators locked in and held tense under extreme spring tension. He himself slid the heavy thing into the magazine well, heard it click solidly as it found its place. He drew the bolt back, his great strength helping, let it slip forward, moving one of the quarter-pound, 650-grain, tungsten-cored big guys into the chamber, and locked it.