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

by Stephen Hunter

  “You did the right thing,” Texas Red said, clicking the cell closed.

  He had a moment of disbelief, of stunned nothingness. His

  first cogent thought: where the fuck is Bill Fedders? He’s supposed to be wired into that system. I’m supposed to know in advance when—

  But quickly enough he saw the pointlessness of that line of inquiry. He realized a decision had just been made for him; he had to instantly accept its reality and deal with it first and fastest. There was but one answer: he had to get clear of the country, now. Nothing else mattered. From Costa Rica, he could sort things out, but the deal now was to avoid custody—the circus, the humiliation—and to see what they knew and didn’t.

  “Okay,” he said to his number one bodyguard, who had by this time bullied his way forward, violating the rules, and stood waiting near him, “we’ve got to get out of here. Call the plane, tell them we’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Thanks, Susan, you’re the best,” he said to his loyal secretary and daily sex servant.

  He started to walk off the event stage.

  “Shooter, you cannot leave without showing empty, you cannot leave, I will DQ you if you do not immediately return to the loading area and make your weapons safe.”

  Tom turned.

  “Fuck you,” he said, and walked off.

  “DQ! DQ! Shooter is DQed!” shouted the range officer but made no step forward as the three beefy guards closed in behind Texas Red and the crowd parted in the thrust of the armed man and his armed bodyguards as they headed down the main street of the town of Cold Water, through the corridor of stunned competitors and fans.

  And then a tall gunman stepped into the empty street ahead of him, raising one hand.

  “A cowboy!” said Nick. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “It’s the Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot, Cold Water, Colorado. I saw something on CNN about it this morning and realized I’d heard the Irishmen talk about the boss being off playing cowboy. So being Sherlock Holmes, I put one and one together and came up with Cold Water. It was only a hundred miles from where we was. I had my pal Chuck drive me hell-for-leather over here, but since it was a gun crowd and I wanted to fit in, we stopped off. Chuck’s an ex-lawman; he could buy a gun without no wait. We picked up a nice used Colt in a pawnshop. At a gas station I bought a hat, and when I got here, I picked up a holster and some black powder forty-fours. I wanted to see this guy face to face.”

  “You haven’t called him out or something insane like that?”

  “Of course not. I only look stupid. I just wanted to see him. He don’t know nothing about me.”

  “Boy, was that ever the right decision. I am one lucky little federal flunky today. Just a second.”

  Bob waited as he assumed Nick was shouting orders to his

  people to get the information to the closest field office to Cold Water, Colorado, and get a SWAT team gunned up and on the way by helicopter.

  Nick came back, sounding breathless.

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ve gotten Denver. They’re on the way. They were on the runway because of an earlier alert. I’m told it’ll be less than half an hour. Just stand by and—”

  “Oh, shit,” said Bob. “Something’s going on. He’s up there to shoot but all of a sudden his gal comes over, hands him a phone. He talks real urgent into it. Now he’s breaking away, his mob of boys. They’re getting out of town, Nick. He’s going to his plane.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Nick. “How many?”

  “It’s him, three bodyguards, heavy guys. I don’t see no guns but I’m guessing they’re carrying.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Nick.

  “I can stop them,” said Bob.

  “Oh, God,” said Nick, as if envisioning details of a terrible shootout in a huge crowded area, dozens dead, the whole thing a complete fuck-up, his career, just saved, trashed beyond redemption.

  But then he thought, I rode this far with the gunman. Might as well go all the way.

  “Okay,” he said, “use your best judgment. If you think following them is the way to go, then—”

  “You better give me some kind of verbal authorization to shoot damn quick, ’cause they’s a hundred feet away and coming toward me.”

  He heard Nick whisper to others, “Witness this and record it,” then he said loudly, “Do it. Take him down.”

  It took a second for the situation to dawn on the crowd, but then they all seemed to get it at once. Two gunslingers facing each other in a western town under a blaze of sun, shooting for blood. They backed off—not away, but off, cordoning themselves along the streets of Cold Water, witnesses to that which had not been seen for real in a century. Nobody was going to get them to look away.

  “Kill him,” said Texas Red to his bodyguard.

  “Sir,” said the man, “I am a bonded employee of Graywolf Security, and I am not empowered to open fire unless fired upon. I cannot engage unknown civilians, particularly in a crowded area. I have no idea who this guy is.”

  “Who are you?” yelled Red.

  He saw the man start to answer, but someone else from the crowd yelled, “He’s an Arizona Ranger,” for some odd reason.

  A moment of silence creaked by, then the bodyguard said, “Possible law enforcement agent. Cannot engage. Graywolf rules.” He stepped away from Texas Red and led his colleagues to the sidelines. They wanted to watch too. That left Clell Rush.

  “Don’t do this, Red,” Clell said quietly. “He’s got a big iron on his hip.”

  Red looked, recognized from the top view exactly what he himself was carrying, only his Colt wore the gunfighter’s 4¾ inch barrel, while the Arizona Ranger’s iron was indeed big; it was the 7½ inch model, which gave him a lot of metal to clear from leather.

  In an instant, something ticked off in Red, or was he back to being Tom? Whatever, something flashed vaingloriously before his eyes. He imagined himself killing this “Arizona Ranger” in a fair gunfight—who, after all, could stay up with him?—then making the getaway. He knew that by the twisted currents loose in

  American culture, such an act would make him not merely famous but legendary. It would take away the onus of the murders he’d committed or ordered, all of which could be called cowardly.

  Facing and slaying an enemy old-style, in the oldest of Old West styles, as captured on a thousand cell phone videos, would make him perversely admired. He was a bastard, but he was a brave bastard, they’d say.

  “I warn you,” he called to the Ranger, “these guns are loaded.”

  His adversary cracked a dry smile.

  “Mine too,” he said. “Never saw no use for an unloaded gun.”

  It was quiet. How could it not be? Of all the audiences in the world, this was the one that appreciated the ceremony of the gunfight more than any other and had worshipped its warriors like the old gods. And all were in the garb, some slightly theatricalized, of the 1880s, so as a tableau, it looked as if it belonged captured in the sepia of the best photo Matthew Brady ever took or in Remington’s or Russell’s brushstrokes. Everyone understood the dynamism, the thunder, the flash and pain that was about to be released for real.

  The two men began the slow walk toward each other, by now oblivious to crowd and setting. Their boots sloughed dust; their neckerchiefs were tight. One wore red and one wore blue. Texas Red slipped out of the stylish black leather vest he was wearing, in case its tightness proved an impediment. He set his white hat lower on his eyes, to shade the sun.

  The stranger wore jeans and a denim shirt; he was a rhapsody in worn blue. His handkerchief was black; his hat was crushed and bent, and you’d have thought it was one of those ridiculous Richard Petty imitation hats that gas stations sold, but of course a man so elegant and brave would never wear such a thing. His gun was in a Galco Texas Ranger rig, heavily figured with floral motifs, on an equally figured belt, which also supported a row of twenty more robin’s-egg-big .44 cartridges. But al
l present, having seen Red shoot, thought this handsome stranger was about to meet his death.

  There was forty feet between them when they came to make their play. No words, no smiles, just dead-faced gunfighter’s harshly focused concentration, eyes slitted, mouths tight and grim, no visible breathing, no visible emotion, and as if on silent agreement they went to leather.

  Red was fast and loose and strong, and the truckload of adrenaline in his bloodstream turned his gunhand into a blur as it flew to grip, thumb to hammer, driven by an ideal unspooling in his mind, as if from the myth-pure western that no man had made, the one where the hands flash and the guns jackhammer a bolt of flame and a blast of smoke and it’s the other man who’s spavined to the ground, oozing blood and sorrow. That did not happen.

  The Ranger’s hand abandoned time and physics as it seemed to pass into invisibility, and in the next nanosecond, when it returned to the known universe, it had somehow already oriented the old revolver, cocked it, busted cap with spurt of muzzle flame and white cannonade of rocketing gas, and launched a fat .44 on its track across space.

  Red had not cleared leather before the bullet fairly ripped, hit, mutilated, and exited. He went down hard, kicking up a puff of dust, which the wind took, just as it took the gunsmoke of the Ranger’s speedier Colt. Red curled as he fell, gun flying away in a twisted angle, the sound of the shot lost to all, so intent were all in the essence of the age-old drama.

  The moment was utter antique. Not a single thing spoke of later times that any man or woman or child could see. The white smoke and dust, teased to action by the relentless wind, seemed to lie over all for just a second, glazing and blurring all surfaces, suggesting again that this was ancient times.

  But then the applause broke out. Well, who could blame them? And the chants, “Ran-ger, Ran-ger, Ran-ger!”

  One might think, how terrible to cheer a mankilling, no matter the circumstances. However, it became instantly clear that Texas Red may have been fairly ripped by the bullet’s progress, but he was not dead by a long shot. Instead the Ranger had brought off that trope of fifties cowboy TV—shooting the gun out of the hand, as Gene and Roy and Hoppy had done countless times, so that the bad guys gripped their sore mitts and shook them as if experiencing something akin to bees in the bat.

  Red rolled, screaming for help, and it then became obvious what was different about this particular variation on the theme: the Ranger had not quite shot the gun out of his hand but had shot the hand out from his gun. The bullet had struck him in the wrist bone and deflected downward, knocking the gun this way and three fingers of his right hand that way. The mangled paw now spurted a crimson jet unseen in fifties tube time.

  The Ranger slipped his gun back into its holster and walked to the fallen man. Texas Red gripped his destroyed hand as if with finger pressure he could stop the blood flow, but as his eyes came up to his victor, he tried to slither backward, caught in a vise of fear. The man waited until at last eye contact was made.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Red said, squinting into a sun that turned his opponent to a black silhouette.

  “Oh yes you do. I am the sniper.”

  Then he turned and walked clear, hearing someone scream, “Get him a doctor,” but before that was accomplished, the whole nineteenth-century illusion was devastated by an updraft of dust, a sudden density of shadow that announced a helicopter was settling out of the sky, right there in Cold Water. It was the FBI apprehension team, and as the bird settled, its rotors beat up a mighty wind, filling the air with a hurricane of dust, driving folks this way and that. The Arizona Ranger seemed to disappear in the drifting grit just as mysteriously as he had arrived.

  56

  The Constable revelations rocked the nation, as might be imagined, and the story of the trials and the sentencing, the appeals, the retrials, and an account of the whole surrealistic Fellini movie that came in its wake—the television shows, the circus of sensational journalism, blogism, essayism, talking headism, and schadenfreudeism—is best left for elsewhere.

  For those involved, however, the trials and interviews and think pieces et al were really signifiers of nothing. It was just the assholes in the world catching up to what the people on the point of the spear had already done in their names. All that media crap wasn’t much for real endings. But there were real endings, possibly too many to choose from.

  One came after the first trial and halfway through the second, when in all the ruckus, Nick Memphis found Special Agent Ron Fields sitting in the Nyackett, Massachusetts, courthouse cafeteria, waiting to testify. He had not been able to catch the fellow alone since the day it all went down.

  “Hi ya,” he said, slipping in across from the big guy.

  “Hi, Nick,” Fields said. “You got my note. Thanks for the commendation. It looks like I will get the sniper program,” Fields said.

  “I hope so,” said Nick. “You deserve it.”

  “Ah, Nick,” said Fields with his sloppy grin, “I’m just a dumbbell gunfighter and gofer. I’m best suited for Quantico and teaching SWAT. That Starling, she’s the bright one. She’ll be a star.”

  “I bet you’re right on that one,” Nick said. “I wrote her up too.”

  “Great.”

  “But I’m glad you mentioned her. I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Sure, Nick. But don’t expect subtlety. I’m the grind-it-up type.”

  “You know what they’re saying?”

  “Hmm,” said Fields. “Well, I’ve heard some stuff.”

  “As I understand the story, it goes something like this. There’s this young special agent who’s pissed at the hosing her boss is getting in the press. And guess what, the fiancé of this young agent happens to work for a certain outfit located in Langley, V-A. He’s in photo intelligence. Anyhow, when this agent’s boss is in trouble and everyone’s calling him a crook, she and boyfriend come to the rescue. Boyfriend uses agency tech to dummy up a photo; this is, of course, after both put their heads together and figure out what a certain great newspaper knows nothing about. But first, they snitch a document out of an unguarded file, retype it on their own processor and replace it. Then they pass a reporter a document typed on the same word processor, and for a while, it looks as if the reporter has got a real scoop on his hands. Well, I’m telling the story all wrong, out of sequence, but you can figure it out, I’ll bet. The famous newspaper goes to press with its picture and gets slaughtered. Just gets massacred. Pretty damn funny, if you ask me. And the campaign the newspaper was running curls up and dies, and old Nick goes back to work, same as it ever was, and we even end up putting a bad guy away and who knows what might have happened if the guy in charge didn’t have this naive faith in some outlier named Bob Lee Swagger. Boy, would we be in a different world, I’ll tell you.”

  “I’ve heard that story, yeah,” said Fields. “As I said, she’s a smart one. And that reputation should help her in her career. People look at her and say, don’t mess with Starling. It’s a ticket up.”

  “It is. And try as I might, I can’t see that a crime has been committed. I mean other than misuse of government resources, but that’s not my bailiwick. If someone chooses to play a prank on a newspaper, what crime has been committed?”

  “I can’t think of one either, Nick.”

  “So, I’m going to let that drop. That’s my decision. But I look at Fields and I think, I’ll run it by him, just get his take on it; he’s a salty old dog.”

  “The salty old dog says, sometimes it’s best to let things drop.”

  Nick smiled.

  “Then it’s dropped. She’ll be a star. You get Sniper SWAT at Quantico. Maybe I get assistant director.”

  “If there’s any justice—”

  “And the important thing is the bad guys go down or away. Let’s not forget that.”

  “Never forget that. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.”

  “Cool,” said Nick, rising. “Okay, that’s a big help. I’ll let you concentrate
on your testimony now. I’ve got to get back to DC and—Oh,” he said, “one other thing.”

  “Sure, Nick.”

  “How do you suppose she got it down?”

  Fields smiled but his eyes showed bafflement.

  “What’re you—”

  “You know, my picture. The fake photo used info from a real picture. It was hanging on my glory wall. Sally and I in Hawaii on vacation, about four years ago. They needed a real photo so their computers could transfer and manipulate the information. That’s why it seemed familiar.”

  “Gee, I hadn’t thought of that,” said Fields. “I mean, I guess she just wandered into your office one day and slipped it off the wall.”

  “I suppose,” said Nick. “But she’s only five-two. She can’t reach any higher than six feet, much less manipulate something. That photo was in the top row, close to seven feet off the ground. And my office has a glass wall. So she’d have to do it in plain sight of the office, and she’d have to move a chair over to get up to it, and she’d have to have another photo to hang in its place, and all that would take time and anyone would notice it.”

  “I guess she did it after hours.”

  “But she’s only an SA. Special agents aren’t allowed in after hours unless they’re with an assistant special agent in charge; of course an ASAIC can come in anytime.”

  “Huh,” said Fields. “Interesting. So you’re saying—”

  “I’m not saying anything. The facts are saying that if someone took down that pic and replaced it with something else, it was done after hours, meaning by an ASAIC or higher, six-two or taller. Know anybody like that? Oh, and he’d have to be familiar with that wall.”

  “Maybe she—”

  “Maybe. But I did some checking. It’s interesting, yeah, her fiancé’s a CIA guy and might have had access to that lab. But did you know there’s a guy on Taskforce Sniper who partnered up early with a guy named Jerry Lally? Five years, a few gunfights, that sort of thing. And of course Jerry took a leave of absence, went back to school, got a master’s in chem and a PhD in physics and came back to work science for us. He’s now head of our photo interp. And let’s not forget that although CIA has the best photo lab in Washington, we have the second-best photo lab in Washington. Really, not one floor and a hundred feet from our office. And whoever did this little thing, he really knew our building forward and back, much better, I’m guessing, than a new special agent. No, this guy’d be an old salty dog.”