He slipped a cocked and locked Series ’70 Colt .45 out of a drawer and slid it into the back pocket of his jeans, then threw on a jacket and his Razorback baseball hat and stepped out. The sun was a thin wash. Around him, the blue Ouachitas rose bleakly, bled dry of color by the coming of cold weather, and Bob turned the corner to see two men lounging next to what had to be a rented car just beyond the gate, while Mike yowled at them as if he’d kill them if they came closer.
They wore raincoats over suits. But they were soldiers of a sort. Maybe not now, but they’d been soldiers, that was clear. They were carved from the same tough tree, one square and blocky, Bob’s own age, but a head and a half lower to the ground, with huge hands and a weight lifter’s body; he had a sheen of crewcut hair, and every square inch of him said NCO.
The other was the officer: taller, but husky too, well-proportioned, with a square face and short but not crewcut hair. He had the look of at least nine of Bob’s eleven battalion commanders down through the years, men Bob didn’t love but respected, because they put mission first and last and always accomplished it.
“Go on, shuddup,” Bob said to Mike, giving him a kick. The dog slunk off to the door. But Bob didn’t open his locked fence. He put his hand under his jacket and set it on the haft of the .45, because it’s always better to have your gun in your hand than in your pants if it comes to kick-ass time.
“Y’all want something?” he said, squinting up his face.
“You’re Mr. Bob Lee Swagger?” said the officer.
“I am, sir.” Bob spit a glob of phlegm into the dust.
“You’re a hard man to get ahold of, Mr. Swagger. We’ve sent you five registered letters. You won’t even sign for them and open them. You don’t have a telephone.”
Bob recalled the damn letters. He’d thought they were from Susan, his ex-wife, wanting more money. Or from one of those nutty war groups that wanted to pay him just to come stand around at some motel and tell stories.
“This is private property,” he said. “You’re not welcome here. You go on back to where you came from and let me be.”
“Mr. Swagger,” said the officer, “we’re here with a business proposition that could mean a lot of money to you.”
“I don’t need any money,” Bob said. “I have plenty of money.”
“I was hoping you’d do me the favor of listening to me, that’s all. Take five minutes of your time, and then if you’re not interested in what I have to say, and what I’m proposing, I’m out of here.”
The smaller of the two men had not said anything. He was just eyeing Bob and he stunk of aggression. His big hands were in his pockets and Bob didn’t like the way there was a suggestion of bulk under the right arm of his raincoat.
Bob turned back to the officer.
“Why should I do you any sort of favor, sir? I don’t even know you.”
“Possibly this will establish my bona fides.”
With that the older man slipped a jewelry case out of his pocket, and flipped it over the fence. It landed at Bob’s feet in the mud.
“It’s authentic,” said the man. “I won it, all right. In 1966, near Dak To, just off Highway One. I was a major in the Twenty-fourth Mech Infantry. A very busy day.”
Bob picked the case up, and popped the lid to discover a Congressional Medal of Honor.
He swallowed just a bit. His own daddy had won one on the Iwo and at least a dozen officers had told him he’d earned one when he and Donny Fenn dusted that main forces battalion in the An Loc, but that it was a shame he’d never get it, as the politics of the moment were such that a sniper couldn’t get the big medal. It didn’t bother Bob. He’d never wanted a medal. He just didn’t like the idea that the killing he’d done was somehow wrong and couldn’t be recognized.
“All right,” said Bob, trying to put that shame out of his mind. “Out of respect for what you did for your country, I’ll hear your piece. Just keep it short.”
He unlocked the gate.
Inside the trailer, the two men took off their coats to reveal business suits. It now looked as if the smaller man had some sort of sawed-off pump gun under his arm; but he just sat back, a dullness coming over his face. Bob thought of him as some sort of attack hound; when Bob hadn’t been sure whether or not he’d let them in, he was all tense and full of fury, ready to strike. Now that they were inside, the little guy went limp.
The other man, however, did not. Leaning across the small table in the neat little living room of the trailer, he stared, his bright, dark eyes boring into Bob.
“Here, Mr. Swagger. This will help.”
He pushed a business card across at Bob, who read:
COLONEL WILLIAM A. BRUCE U.S.A. (RET.)
PRESIDENT–CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER
ACCUTECH INDUSTRIES, INC.
It gave an address somewhere in Maryland, and in smaller type it listed the firm’s specialties:
LAW ENFORCEMENT TECHNOLOGY
LAW ENFORCEMENT AMMUNITION
TRAINING SEMINARS AND FIREARMS
CONSULTATION
“Okay,” said Bob, “so, Colonel, what’s on your mind?”
“Mr. Swagger, after I retired in 1975, I spent the next sixteen years as the supervisor of the Arizona State Police. I retired from that post last year, and now I’ve started this little business, which means to bring progressive equipment and philosophy to American law enforcement.”
“Is that why your boy is wearing a pump gun under his arm?”
The expression on the smaller one’s face didn’t change; but at the word boy his face seemed to lose just a shred of color, as if the man inside were baking in an oven.
“My associate is also my bodyguard, Mr. Swagger. Like anybody who’s spent a career in law enforcement, I have some enemies. Mr. Payne is duly licensed by the state of Maryland to carry concealed and he’s been authorized by the state of Arkansas to the same courtesy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“At any rate, this is why I’m here—the newest addition to my product line.”
He pushed a yellow box the size of two cigarette packs across the table at Bob.
ACCUTECH SNIPER GRADE, it said in bright red letters.
Under that it said, Law Enforcement Use Only.
Bob saw that it was .308, 150-grain hollowtip. He cracked the box, slid the ammo out to discover it displayed headstamp up in a Styrofoam tray. Twenty perfect double circles peeped up at him, rim-edge and primer, looking like eggs or eyes. He plucked a cartridge from the tray, heavy brass, gleaming brightly, the copper-sheathed cone climaxing in the precise circle of the crater at the tip. It looked like any other .308 except for the bright band of glossier brass at the neck of the cartridge.
“None of the big American ammo companies can touch this stuff,” said the colonel. “Not even the expensive grade lines, the Winchester Supreme, the Federal Premium, the Remington Extended Range. I guarantee Minute of Angle in a proper rifle.”
“Neck turned,” Bob said, his finger touching the bright band. “How can you mass-produce a neck-turned round? That’s a handloader’s job. I don’t see how it can be done.”
“Lasers.”
“Hmm,” said Bob. “Okay, I know some outfits these days use lasers as sighting devices. But y’all use them in the loading?”
“That’s right,” said the colonel, leaning forward. “Industrial lasers are the coming thing in precision manufacturing. Now, they’re used in the manufacture of electronic components, missile guidance systems, hightech materials. My brainstorm was to try them on ammunition. They can be coded into a computerized program so that you get extraordinary repeatability. You know what the secret of a quality round is. Precision. So all the things that a handloader can do on a very small scale, we can do on a larger scale with brilliant perfection: we buy our brass from Remington in hundred-thousand case quantities; our lasers score the neck of the case both inside and out so that it has the exact diameter all the way around and each case has the exact diameter o
f every other case. Exactly. Precisely. Then, we can deburr the flash hole, and seat each primer the identical depth. We can manage it with laser-guided machining. In other words, we can code the machines to follow laser tracks as specified by a computer program. We can get the kind of careful quality thousands of rounds by thousands of rounds that you can get round by round on your Lee or RCBS or Wilson or whatever dies it is you use.”
Bob looked down at the round in his hand.
“I’ve gotten some pretty damned fine .308 groups over the years.”
“But you’ve had to work to get them, is that right?” said the colonel.
“Yes sir, that’s right.”
“That’s it, in a box. It’s a natural for the police market, which is considerable. Later, maybe we’ll expand to the civilian if we can establish a law enforcement reputation.”
“So what is it you want from me?”
“Mr. Swagger, I’m looking for a professional shooter to fly around the country and put on shooting demonstrations for police departments that are upgrading their SWAT capabilities. But I need a man with a reputation. A man who’s been in hard places, kept his head, and come back alive.”
“Why don’t you get Carl Hitchcock? He’s famous. They wrote a damn book about him and made up a poster. He’s number one.”
“Carl is making too much money on the personal appearance circuit. They pay him two thousand dollars just to appear at a gun show for one day, did you know that?”
“Carl always was a lucky boy.”
“We have a facility in Garrett County, Maryland, where we’re doing our testing. What we’d like to do is fly you up there for a weekend at our expense, of course. You bring your favorite rifle, your favorite handloads. Okay? Then you can go out on the range with some of our shooters and engineers, fire our rounds and your rounds side by side. We think if you do that, you’ll see how our rounds group consistently with your own. That’s all we ask. Your forbearance. Give us a chance to let you believe. If you believe, all else will follow.”
Bob had no real need or urge to leave his mountain. The fact was, except for getting his hair cut, picking up magazines and his government check at the post office once a month and a chat or two with old Sam Vincent and now and then having a routine checkup on his health or his teeth, he hadn’t been down in five years.
“It would be a great job,” said the colonel. “I’d fly you around the country and you’d be with men who’d respect you. You know, the world has changed since Vietnam. They say the Vietnam syndrome is dead. We had a war that we won, big time, and now everybody who was in the military can be a hero again. You’d get exactly what you didn’t get the first time. You’d get respect and love and appreciation.”
Bob made a sour look. He’d believe it when he saw it. But he knew he couldn’t stay up here forever. He looked at the rifle cartridge. He was curious. Goddamned thing looked like it would shoot the tits off a mother flea, but there was only proof in the shooting, not in the looking. But he heard it singing to him in a strange way. Poked. He was poked in the head. Hadn’t been poked in the head since he’d given up the drinking.
“When?”
“When’s convenient?”
“Can’t leave now. Got a rifle gone barn sour on me. Say, next weekend?”
“Well, all right. Whatever. You have a credit card?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You go ahead and charge your tickets. Keep all the receipts and we’ll expense it out. Or, you could sign a contract now and we could write you an advance check and—”
“No thanks on the contract.”
“I didn’t think so. And do you want to be picked up at the Baltimore airport or rent your own car?”
“I’d take the car, thank you.”
“It’s done.”
“Then that’s all there is to it,” said Bob. “Now I have to feed my damn dog.”
CHAPTER THREE
Bob made his inquiries discreetly. From Bill Dodge’s Exxon station on Route 270, he called an old NCO buddy who was a master sergeant going for his thirty, now working Personnel in the Pentagon, and put certain questions before him. The next day, the friend replied with a telegram.
DEAR COOT, it said, YOUR PAL COL. BRUCE IS THE REAL MCCOY. HE LED AN APC ATTACK ON A BUNKER POSITION, WAS HIT TWICE, AND PULLED HIS MEN OUT OF THE BURNING THING HIMSELF. THEY SAY HE DID BECOME A COP IN ARIZONA. SEMPER FI, BUD.
That learned, Bob stopped in at Sara Vincent’s travel agency—Sara was Sam Vincent’s divorced daughter, and a woman so plain she’d even scare Mike—and bought his tickets, made arrangements with Sam to check his property once or twice a day, and feed the dog, and tried to get himself ready for the world again.
He was all right, too, until the last night. He knew he had to get up early for the drive to Little Rock and just when he’d thought he had everything checked out and was ready for the sack, it came over him. That’s the way it came: fast, without preparation, without announcement. It just came and there it was.
It was a bad one. He hadn’t had it so bad since the president declared the little war in the desert a victory, and America went on a bender and everybody was happy except himself and maybe another million boys who wondered why nobody put up ribbons for them twenty years ago, when it might have mattered.
Now you hold it on down, he told himself, aching for a glass of smooth brown whiskey to flatten himself out, knowing that if he had one many more would follow.
But there was no whiskey, nothing to blunt what happened in his mind. The memories hit him hard. He remembered the VC he shot who turned out to be an eight-year-old boy with a hoe—it had looked like an AK through the 9× at eight hundred meters in the bad light of sunset. He remembered the smell of burned villages after the Search and Destroys, and the crying of the women and the way the goddamned kids just looked at you during his first tour. He remembered the bellytime, moving through the high grass, avoiding the crest lines, as the ants crawled over you and the snakes slithered by and you just lay there, waiting, for days sometimes, until someone passed into the kill zone eight hundred meters out and you could put them down. He remembered the way they fell when hit, instant rag doll, the toppling surrender, the small cloud of dust it raised. So many of them. The “confirmed” kills were only the ones with a spotter there, to write it in the log and make a report.
But mostly he remembered the sudden shock as his hip went numb and he collapsed and slid down the earthen dam of the perimeter. He looked down and saw the smashed flesh, the pulsing red. Remembering, he put his hand on the wound, and it throbbed some. Then he remembered Donny scrambling down.
“No!” he yelled, “get your young ass back,” and the bullet came from so long away it arrived a full second before its own sound. It drilled Donny in the chest and tunneled to his spine. He was dead before he collapsed against Bob and lay across him that long morning.
“Hell of a shot, Bob,” the major said later. “We made it over a thousand yards. Who knew they could shoot that good? Who knew they-had a man that good?”
You could never forget stuff like that, not really. But he learned somehow not to let it rag him most of the time; he could ride it out in the mountains or in the solitude.
Bob sat at what had passed for a kitchen table. His rebuilt hip ached a bit, all that plastic instead of cartilage. He could feel what he called his own personal night passing over him. Of course the time of day had nothing to do with it. What he called his own personal night was about the feeling of being nothing, of having no worth, of having spent himself in a war nobody cared about, and having given up everything that was important and good. In other days, this was what got Bob off on his drinking, and drunk, he turned mean as shit.
But now he didn’t drink, and instead he threw on a coat and went out into the harsh Arkansas night and walked the mile or so downhill. Inside Aurora Baptist, some kind of service was going on. He heard the black people singing something loud and crazy. What are they so goddamned happy for ins
ide that shaky little white clapboard building anyhow?
Out beyond the church was the little graveyard, and there among the Washingtons and the Lincolns and the Delanos of Polk County was one spindly marker for a man named Bo Stark. Bob just looked at it. The wind howled and roared through the trees, the moon was a raggedy-assed streetlamp, the music pumped and blasted, the black people were singing up a storm, beating the devil down.
Bo Stark was his own age, and the only white man in the cemetery because no other cemetery would have him. He’d come from a fine family and had known Bob all through high school. They’d gone to the same doctor, the same dentist, played on the same football team. But Bo’s people had money; he’d gone on to the university in Fayetteville and from there had joined the Army and spent a year as a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne, another fool for duty who’d believed in it all. And after that, nothing. Bo Stark had gone a man and come home a no-account. The war got inside him and never let him go. One bad thing turned to another; couldn’t hold a job, wouldn’t pay back loans, was searching for the death he’d only just missed in the Land of Bad Things. Two weeks after the war in the desert was over, after the mighty victory and the celebration, one Sunday night he’d finally killed a man in a bar with a knife in Little Rock and when the police found him in his daddy’s garage in Blue Eye, he’d blown a .45 through the roof of his mouth.
So Bob stood there as the wind brought cold memories from the cold ground out at him, and looked at the marker: BO STARK, it said, 1946–1991. AIRBORNE ALL THE WAY.
He came here when he was frightened, because in the radiance of the glowing church, standing over the body of the man who could have been and was almost him, he could see it in the stone: BOB LEE SWAGGER, 1946–1992 USMC SEMPER FIDELIS.
Now he looked at it, and realized it was time to do that which could kill him fastest of all possible dangers: to go back. He wondered if he had the Pure-D stones for it.
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