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

by Stephen Hunter

  “Sure, why not,” said Bob. “I got nothing better to do. It’ll be my kind of fun.” Bob threw the chain around his neck so that the badge hung in the center of his chest, signifying, for the first time since 1975, his official righteousness.

  He rose, walked through the gathered crowd. He walked across the parking lot to his car, but next to it, came across the curious scene of a Vietnamese family standing in a semicircle around the gunman who had fallen against the bumper of his red Cadillac. One of them was a pretty young girl in a Hannah Montana T-shirt.

  “You yelled the warning?” he asked.

  “Yes. They were in our apartment all day, scaring my family to death. Horrible men. Monsters,”

  “Can on co em. Co that gan da va su can dam cua co da cuu sinh mang chung toi,” he said.

  She smiled.

  He walked to his car, popped the trunk. He withdrew the DPMS 6.8 rifle, and inserted a magazine with twenty-eight rounds. He looped its sling, held by a single cinch, diagonally across his body so that the gun was down across his front with enough play to allow him to get it either to shoulder or a prone position. He looked at the monitor atop it, that EOtech thing that looked like a ’50s space-cadet toy, figured out which of several buttons turned it on, so that if he had to do it in the dark, he’d know which one to use.

  He threw on the vest Julie had provided, in which he’d inserted, in dedicated mag pouches, the other nine magazines, all full with ammo.

  Slamming the trunk, he walked back to the stairwell where Nikki’s bike rested under a tarp. He ripped the canvas free and climbed aboard the Kawasaki 350. Shit, the pain in his hip from Kondo Isami’s last cut flared hard and red, but he tried not to notice it. He turned the key to electrify the bike. It took three or four kicks to gin the thing to life, but he saw that he had plenty of fuel. He heeled up the stand, lurched ahead, kicked it into gear, pulled into the lot, evaded the gawkers, and took off into the night, running hard, disappearing quickly.

  Nick, his leg throbbing but feeling no pain, watched him go.

  Lone gunman, he thought, remembering Lawrence’s words defining the American spirit: “hard, stoic, isolate, and a killer.” But on the Night of Thunder, so necessary.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The muzzle flash of the Barrett 107 was extraordinary, a ball of fire that bleached the details from the night, so bright that it set bulbs popping in eyes for minutes. Caleb, who was holding it under his shoulder like a gangster’s tommy gun, felt the heavy surge of the recoil as the weapon rocked massively against his muscle, almost knocking him from his feet, while at the same moment fierce blowback from the point of impact lashed against his face. Without glasses, he’d have burned out his eyes. The muzzle blast, expanding radially at light speed, ripped up a cyclone of dust from the earth beneath; it seemed a tornado had briefly touched down, filling the air with substance.

  The 650-grain bullet hit the steel door two inches below the window frame, blowing a half-inch-size gaper and leaving a smear of burnt steel peeling away from the actual crater. It took both driver and assistant driver down, spewing a foam of blood on the far window inside the cab, after the tungsten core, liberated from the center of the bullet by the secondary detonation, flew onward at several thousand miles per hour and ripped them apart.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Caleb, himself awestruck and even a little nonplused by the carnage he had unleashed.

  “The rear, the rear,” screamed the old man.

  Caleb lumbered around behind the truck with the heavy weapon in his hands, locked under his shoulder, as the Grumleys fanned out to surround the vehicle, while at the same time gesturing with their submachine guns to frozen passengers in the jammed cars to abandon ship and run like hell.

  “G’wan, git the hell out of here, git them kids out of here, there’s going to be a lot of goddamned shooting.”

  Caleb closed his eyes, fired one more time, point blank, into the rear of the truck from dead six o’clock. He even remembered to crouch and hoist the weight to orient the gun at a slight upward angle so that the tungsten rod it flung wouldn’t continue forward, exit the end of the armored box, shred the dash, and end up chewing the bejesus out of the engine. That would have been a mess.

  Again, the fireball blinded any who happened to observe the discharge from within a hundred yards, though most civilians had abandoned their cars and were running en masse in the opposite direction. Again, the muzzle blast unleashed a cyclone of atmospheric disturbance. Again, the recoil was formidable, even if slightly dissipated by the give in Caleb’s arms and body as he elasticized backward from the blow. This time, for some reason, the noise was present in force and Caleb, even with ear plugs in, felt his eardrums cave under pressure of the blast.

  A crater ruptured the upper half of the rear door.

  A Grumley leaned close and yelled into the hole, almost as if there were a chance in hell anyone inside could hear, “You boys best open up or he’ll fire six more in there.”

  There was a moment, then the door unlatched. Two uniformed men, with darkened faces from the blast, their own blood streaming from ear and nose, someone else’s splattered randomly about them, eyes unseeing for the brightness, staggered out, fightless and dazed. Instantly the Grumleys were on them, disarmed them, and shoved them to one side of the road, where they collapsed and crawled to a gully to try and forget the horror of what they had just seen—the third member of their crew, who’d evidently taken a full injection of flying tungsten frontally, vaporizing the upper half of his body. His legs and lower torso lay on the floor, like the remains of a scarecrow blown down and scattered by a strong wind; the plastic bags of baled cash stacked on racks now wore a bright dappling of his viscera.

  “Damn thang means business,” a Grumley said.

  “Go, go, boys, git going, no goddamned lollygagging,” shouted the old man, a kind of cheerleader, amazingly animated and liberated by the violence. “Watch for them coppers.”

  A Grumley took up a position at each of the four compass points around the truck. The idea was to try and locate approaching police through the lines of cars, and engage them far away, because with their handguns the cops couldn’t bring effective fire from that range. Meanwhile, other Grumleys set about their business. One dragged the second half of poor Officer Unlucky out of the truck, and dumped him. Another flew to the bags and began to pull out the ones containing change, which he dragged out and dumped. No need for extra weight on the upcoming hill.

  Now it was Richard’s turn.

  “Tire guys, go, go, get it done,” he shouted, and as they had so often practiced, a Grumley team of three hit the rear axle of the vehicle, got the heavy power-jack underneath, and with swift, focused strength jerked the thing atilt. Meanwhile, from roadside, two heavy tires with off-road treads meant to bite and tear at the earth in maximum, tractor-pull traction, trundled out, driven by Grumley power to the site of the armored truck, and the changing commenced.

  Richard raced to the engine with his trick bag, not looking at the cab, not wanting to see what remained of the crew; he’d let Grumley minions clear that mess out. A Grumley struggled against the locked hood, then fired a blast of tracer into it. The bullets tore and bounced and in seconds had reduced the metal to tatters so that the hood could be lifted and hoisted high.

  Richard set to work, as flashlights beamed onto the chugging complexities of the engine. He waited till a Grumley turned it off, and it went still. It was exactly as he expected, a Cat 7-stroke diesel, producing around 250 horsepower, which is why the big truck would always move sluggishly, underpowered for the extra weight of the armor. Quickly, he plunged into the nest of wires, found the MAP sensor, disconnected it, and reconnected the Xzillaraider wire harness. Plug and play was the principle. As the Grumleys held the flashlights, his fingers flew to the right wires, cut them, and quickly and expertly clipped in the new wires. He grounded the assembly, this time taking the time to unscrew the negative terminal, carefully wrap the grounding wire again
st the plug, then rescrew the cable terminal, making sure everything was nice, tidy, and tight. He paid no attention to what was going on around him, and so maximized was his concentration that he missed the crash of a helicopter brought down by Caleb. Then he leapt back to the rear of the engine compartment, pulled a knife, and cut through the rubber grommet and stuffed the wire harness through into the cab.

  Ugh. Now the unpleasantness. When he got to the F-750’s cab, however, the bodies were gone and some Grumley with a thoughtful touch had thrown a wad of NASCAR Tshirts on the blood and flesh matter that the Mk.211 had blown loose from the drivers. It wasn’t so bad; no hearts or lungs or heads lay about, it only looked like several gallons of raspberry sorbet had melted.

  He got to work, linking the harness of wires to the Xzillaraider module. He quickly wired the unit to the fuse box, then slid behind the wheel, paying no attention to the three gunshots that ricocheted weirdly off the three-inch glass, leaving a smear, nor to the fact that the whole scene appeared to be lit by an orange glow, as the crashed helicopter blazed brightly in the middle of NASCAR Village. Under normal circumstances, who would not stare at an aviation disaster such as that one? But these weren’t normal circumstances, and Richard was much more fascinated by the blink sequence on the module. Yep, as he turned the key, the lights went through their positions and ended up in the red of high power.

  He turned to see the Reverend, a Peacemaker in his hand and a cowboy hat on his head, and Brother Richard said, “When the tires are finished, old man, we are good to go.”

  While Richard worked, the old man had been commanding Grumley defenses. His gunners peered three-sixty, looking for targets, and when a poor police officer approached on foot, illuminated by his traffic safety jacket, a Grumley put a burst of 9mm tracer into him. The tracers were a wonderful idea: they made manifest the strength and invincibility of the Pap Grumley firepower.

  Pap watched as a sleek streak of 9-mils raced down the corridor between abandoned cars, struck the poor officer, who had not even drawn his pistol, and flattened him. Those that missed their targets spanged off the cars on either side, pitched skyward into the night air. Hootchie mama, it was the Fourth of July! It was Jubilee! It was hell come to earth, fire, brimstone, the whole goddamned Armageddon thing.

  “Good shooting,” he yelled, “that’ll keep their damned heads down.”

  Then someone poked him in the ribs and he looked down and saw a black hole in the lapel of his powder blue Wah Ming Chow custom suit. Fortunately the armored vest underneath stopped the bullet, but it meant some cop had fired from nearby up on the hill to the right.

  “Over there,” he commanded, and two Grumleys put out a blaze of noon light in the form of a half-mag apiece. If they got the cop or not, nobody could say, but the bullets sure chewed the hell out of an SUV in line to get out of a parking lot. Fortunately for all concerned, it had been long abandoned and so if anyone died, it would only have been a copper.

  The sound of shots rang out everywhere as Grumleys on the perimeter either saw or thought they saw policemen slithering closer, and answered with long, probing bursts of tracer. Now and then something caught fire, including the rear of a Winnebago, a souvenir stand whose supply of T’s and ball caps went up in flames, a propane heater for a barbecue stand. These small disasters added yet more hellish illumination to flicker across the already incredible scene, part monster movie (the citizens flee the beast), part war movie (the noise, the tracers, the screams of the wounded), and part NASCAR documentary (the tire crew operates at top speed, well choreographed and rehearsed) as the Grumley tire team, having gotten one of the off-road tires rigged, switched sides of the F-750, and went hard to work on the other.

  But then a new source of illumination shocked all the Grumleys with its relentless quality. It was a harsh beam of light from a state police helicopter thirty feet up and fifty yards out, catching everything in high, remorseless relief.

  “Drop your firearms,” came the amplified order, “you are covered, drop your firearms and—”

  “Caleb, take ’er down,” yelled the old man.

  “Pap, you sure?”

  “It’s copper, boy, they about to fire.”

  “Got it.”

  Caleb set up the Barrett on the hood of an abandoned car next to the F-750. He shouldered the weapon for the first time, drew it tight to him, and put his eye to the scope—he had no idea, but it happened to be a superb Schmidt & Bender 4x16 Tactical model—and in a second, as he adjusted his eye to the focal length, saw the black shape of the helicopter behind the blazing radiance of the light which was quadrisected by the cross hairs of the scope. He fired. The gun kicked so hard it broke his nose.

  “Ow, fuck,” he screamed, thinking, Wouldn’t want to do that again, goddammit.

  He put a 650-grain Mk.211 into the helicopter, right through the engine nacelle, and the bird climbed upward abruptly as the pilot realized he was under heavy fire. But then all his linkages went, and from aircraft the thing alchemized into sheer weight, beyond the influence of anything except gravity, and it simply fell from the air, straight down into NASCAR Village, nose forward. There it hit, its rotors chawing up a circle of dust from every bite. It seemed to die like an animal for a few seconds, still and broken, and then it exploded, an incredibly bright, oily, napalmesque four-thousand-degree burn. It lit the scene like day, exposing the fleeing masses, the fallen and trampled, the occasional crouching police officer popping away ineffectively with a handgun from two hundred yards out. Then the glare dulled and subsided, and all detail was lost.

  “That’ll keep them boys far away,” yelled the old man.

  “I’d like to git me another, Pap,” said Caleb.

  “You just wait on it, son, goddamn, them other birds is far away.” And it was true, for a mile out, a number of choppers had settled into orbit.

  “Tires done,” yelled a Grumley.

  “Richard, we are set to rock out of here.”

  “Okay,” yelled Richard from the cab. “Git the boys aboard, all that want to come.”

  “Time to go, fellas.”

  With that, the Grumleys descended upon the F-750. That is, the armed Grumleys. The tire boys had been well prepped and knew there wasn’t enough room aboard for all of them. Instead, they moseyed to the edge of the cone of light, and there, in darkness, peeled off armored vests, put on new baseball hats, and melted off into the trees. There were a few Grumley cars hidden in outlying spots to which they’d have no trouble proceeding, and would rendezvous later for their split of the swag. But now it was left to Richard and the shooters to get the load out of there.

  Richard, in neutral, rode the pedal as his gunmen jumped aboard. Pap climbed into the other seat.

  “Four minutes,” he said, looking at his watch. “By God, we are ahead of schedule, don’t think we’ve taken a wound, much less a kill, and nothing left to do but to drive on out of here, Richard. Let them boys shoot at us all they want, ain’t going do no damage.”

  Richard shifted from neutral, gunned ahead, battered the car in front away until he had maneuver room. He turned the truck, found an angle between two abandoned cars pinning him on his right, and smashed between them. They fought the strength of his vehicle. The clang of vibrations loosened everyone’s dentures, the metal screamed, but the cars yielded to the pumped-up CIT vehicle. Freed, he turned left, rode the shoulder for fifty feet, then turned right down an access road toward the speedway. This road took him to a bridge over a gully, and he pulled across it. Before him, pristine but not quite deserted, lay the heart of the kingdom, the confluence of courage for sale, engineering genius, soap opera, family feud, grudge, redemption, and failure, along with hats and shirts and signed portraits, the trailers turned to shops, the industrial pavilions, the souvenir and bric-a-brac outlets, the beer joints, and the cash machines that were NASCAR Village. It was the only thing between them and the mountain a mile away.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Swagger had no trouble at f
irst, and raced through the streets of Bristol, skewing and fishtailing around curves, zipping in and out of the traffic, as most people were off the streets or, if in their cars, intent on the racing news that had turned into robbery news. But the traffic began to thicken as he got through downtown and headed out the Volunteer Parkway toward the speedway and the civic disaster that engulfed it.

  Signs of the disaster were everywhere as he buzzed at eighty down the road; it seemed that signal lights pulsed from every direction, and the traffic soon began to coalesce into something dense and motionless. He diverted to the shoulder but found that congested with fleeing citizens. He veered back onto the roadway and found the lane between jammed cars also impenetrable because of the panicked crowd.

  He pulled up, looking for an alternate route from the mess of fleeing civilians and abandoned cars that solidified the parkway before him, when a cop on foot materialized from nowhere and started screaming, “Buddy, get that goddamn thing out of here, do you know what’s—”

  But then Bob offered him the magic talisman of the FBI badge, and the man’s eyes slid quickly to the assault rifle Bob wore crosswise down the front of his body, and his eyes bugged.

  “You got an update?” Bob said.

  “Well, it’s a real bad ten-fifty-two, lots of shots fired, officers down all over the place. They got some kind of cannon or—”

  “Can you get through to command on that thing?” He indicated the radio unit pinned to the man’s lapel.

  “It’s a mess, I can try.”

  “Okay, tell them FBI recommends they get their SWAT units to the mountain overlooking the speedway. They’re going to try to take that truck up there and go out by helicopter.”

  “What truck?”

  “It’s an armored-car job. They want to take all the baled cash to Mexico or wherever and anybody who gets in their way gets shot up. Now make the call.”

  “Sir, we can’t move nobody in there now. It’s a mess, with thousands of civilians in the immediate and we can’t get through ’em.”