Point of Impact

by Stephen Hunter

  The rifle, for example, was quickly tracked by serial number to the Naval Post Exchange system, where it was identified as having been purchased in 1975 by an officer in the Marine Marksmanship Unit for presentation as a retirement present to Bob Lee Swagger, Gny. Sgt., USMG. Bob’s signature upon a receipt was uncovered. It followed quickly that the new barrel, a Hart stainless steel model, had been installed by a custom gunsmith in Little Rock named Don Frank; Frank had the serial number in his records, and verified that the job had been done in 1982 for Bob Lee Swagger.

  With that information in hand by eight P.M., agents from the Little Rock office of the FBI obtained a search warrant and journeyed out to Blue Eye, cut through the padlocks at his property and examined his trailer and the contents of his life with a great deal of care.

  There, they found even more incriminating evidence—maps, drawings, sketches and notes of the four cities in which the president of the United States was scheduled to speak in the months of February and March, with diagrams of the speaking sites. The notes were particularly damning: “Wind, how much wind?” Bob had written. “What time best to shoot?” Bob had wondered. “What range? Go for a long shot, or just try and get up close?” And, “.308? .50? What about some sort of .308–.50?” They also found ticket stubs and hotel receipts indicating that he’d traveled to all four cities, and other teams of agents quickly verified his presence in each. And finally, they found a Barr & Stroud rangefinder, for calibrating the exact distances between shooter and target, an invaluable aid for any sniper.

  They also found thirty-two rifles in his gun vault and seventeen handguns, and an empty space where the Remington 700 had rested before he removed it for his trip to New Orleans, and over ten thousand rounds of ammunition.

  And they found one other sad thing, much remarked upon in the press for many weeks: lying in a shallow grave, the body of Bob’s dog Mike, his brain blown out with a 12-gauge shotgun, because, as the senior agent in charge told NBC news, “He knew he probably wasn’t coming back and there was no one to take care of Mike, who was probably the only creature Bob loved in this world.”

  On the issue of the dog, there was one demurral, from Bob’s friend the old ex-prosecutor and war hero Sam Vincent, who never for a second believed Bob had taken the shot, and who had once helped Bob sue Mercenary magazine.

  “I’ll tell you this,” he said to the newsmen who had tracked him down. “Whoever done this thing to Bob did a good job. He framed him, he took his reputation from him, he made him an outlaw and the most hated man in America or the world. And he’s got you boys putting your lies about him in your magazines and newspapers and on the TV. Well, I tell you, he done a good job, but he made one mistake. He killed Bob’s dog. Well, around these parts, we consider our dogs family. And that makes it personal.”

  This quaint bit of Arkansas lore made the evening news, but nobody paid it much attention because nobody wanted to get into the bitter old man’s delusions.

  Other witnesses were located to discuss the phenomenon that had become Bob Lee Swagger. His father’s legendary heroism was hauled out of the files, and his father’s death on U.S. 67 the night of July 23, 1955, as a sergeant in the Arkansas State Police and one of Arkansas’s seven Medal of Honor winners from the Second World War. A number of old Arkansas salts who knew both men made television news appearances.

  “Hard to b’lieve a son of Earl Swagger’s could end up like this,” they said to a man. “He was one of the bravest, fairest, most decent men to ever walk the face o’ the earth. We-all thought Bob was a true-blue type too, but you can’t never tell how a boy’s gonna turn out.”

  A few ex-Marine snipers who’d served with Bob were located; only one would go on television and say “interesting” things—and only with the proviso that his face not be shown. He was now an automobile salesman.

  “Bob was just a great shot but he had the coldness,” the man said, “the coldness of heart that makes a killer. Of all of us, and there were over fifty men rotated in and out of that platoon over the three years it was operational, he was certainly the best. But as far as I know, we all went back to civilian lives convinced we’d served our country as well as we could. And most of us readjusted.”

  The man went on to detail his own psychic difficulties with living with his own evil, his own fascination with violence. He’d been in and out of programs, he said, had a long history of alcoholism and only just lately had gotten his life together again. Later, when it was determined he was a fraud, the story ran only on Entertainment Tonight.

  On the third day, the ballistics report was issued by the FBI. It began with the bad news that the bullet—which had mushroomed considerably as it plowed through bone and brain, then veered free and struck something hard, perhaps a nail in the podium—was unreadable as to its rifling marks. However, preliminary results of tests on the bullet’s metallic structure via a neutron activation analysis revealed that it matched perfectly with traces of copper residue found inside the Hart stainless steel barrel on Bob’s Remington action. Two partial fingerprints were lifted from inside the weapon’s barrel channel; from Marine Corps records, they were quickly verified as Bob’s. The empty shell found on the floor had indeed been fired in the chamber of the Remington; all its marks corresponded exactly to the markings of the chamber. The shell itself probably came from an order of brass—.308 Winchester Match Nickel Plated, Lot No. 32B 0424, manufactured by the Federal Cartridge Company, Anoka, Minnesota—which Bob had purchased, mail order, from Bob Pease Accuracy in New Braunfels, Texas. The matching shells, some loaded, some yet untouched, were found in his workshop.

  And last, there was the letter. Poignant, desperate, awkward and naive, it swiftly became the most famous letter in American culture: Bob telling the president he wants the Congressional Medal of Honor because he’s earned it. It was the letter that got him on the Secret Service’s Charlie list, and had not an idiotic FBI agent blown the assignment, it was the letter that might have saved a man’s life. But there it was, the crucial issue of motive.

  In all this, there was not one public doubt raised about the guilt of Gunnery Sergeant (Ret.) Bob Lee Swagger, of Blue Eye, Arkansas, in the matter of death by gunshot in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 1. That was finally uttered, for the first time, on the fourth day, when a reporter from WKNU-TV finally tracked down Mrs. Susan Swagger Preece, of Highland Junction, North Carolina, who had once been married to Bob Lee Swagger and was now the wife of a hardware store owner.

  She was a bitter little woman, her face almost completely concealed under a headscarf and sunglasses. The reporter caught her rushing from her husband’s Cadillac toward his lawyer’s office.

  No, she had no idea where Bob was, and doubted very much, if he was alive, if he’d try to make contact with her. That was all over, she said, and life was too short to be involved with Bob Swagger more than one time.

  But she had a last thought.

  “I’ll say this, though,” she said, turning for just a second, “if Bob Lee Swagger took it in his mind to fire a bullet at the president of the United States, then the president of the United States would be a dead man, and not no Salvadoran archbishop. You’re telling me Bob Swagger aimed at a man and missed and killed another man? Bob Lee Swagger never missed nothing he aimed at his whole life and that’s the Pure-D truth.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Millions of people saw it within minutes. But Nick Memphis did not see it for three days, and then only by accident.

  He was at hub center of the Swagger manhunt in FBI headquarters, going through leads, keeping his head down in the seething atmosphere of the place now so totally locked into finding the sniper that it seemed unable to pay attention to some smaller details … such as himself. But he knew Mother Bureau would get around to it. He knew the inevitable could not be avoided, and that he was riding in a bubble of illusion. The ax would fall. On him. Soon.

  But for now he’d lost himself in the minutiae of the reports, and the sightin
gs that now extended over seven states. Bob was everywhere. Bob was in Alaska. Bob was in California. Bob was really Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother. Bob had held up a gas station in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Bob was a dance instructor in New Haven, Connecticut. He had what appeared to be an amusing sighting in Everett Springs, Georgia, where an ex-Marine, who said he knew Bob in the war, swore he’d run into him on a back trail in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Nick was trying to figure out how the hell Bob could have gotten from New Orleans with two nine-millimeters pumped into him to Everett Springs, Georgia, in the damn Blue Ridges.

  But from the investigators, not much at all had surfaced. The car had simply vanished. No snitch had any word at all, and the pressure was on but good. Helicopters cruised the highways and a hundred agents had been flown in to handle the pursuit, on which considerable professional pride rested. But a thousand roadblocks and a hundred thousand photos had yielded nothing at all.

  Where had the damned guy gone?

  Suddenly, Hap Fencl was leaning in.

  “Hey, Nick, we finally got the CBS version, you wanna look?”

  “Ahhh—” Nick paused. Something weird in him ticked off. No, he didn’t really want to see it, even if, by chance, the CBS cameraman had been best situated to record impact and collapse and poststrike scramble, and even if the pricks at CBS had been snooty about playing ball with the poor old Feebs, who were only in charge of tracking down the motherfucker on the trigger, and even though NBC and CBS and the three New Orleans affiliates who’d had tape on the ultimate moment had shipped it right over, that is, after airing it. Despite all that, Nick was reluctant. His whole misfortune was tied up in it: the terribleness of his own missed shot now somehow replicated by the strange pattern in the life and times of his hero. And a certain secret part of Nick couldn’t yet believe that the Great Bob the Nailer, the champ of Vietnam and eighty-seven or so odd man-on-man encounters in the boonies, the man who never missed, had, somehow, some way … missed.

  Bob the Nailer might have been a lot of terrible things but he was a great shot. He never missed, that’s what Nick thought, along with Bob’s wife and two or three others.

  “Come on, pal, you might as well see what all the shouting’s about. The shouting’s gonna be in your ear sooner or later, old buddy.”

  Hap said this with a malicious grin, not quite meaning to be cruel but rather to be bluff and hearty and masculine and to undercut the tension, because everybody knew Nick was a gone goose. So Nick could hardly turn down the invite.

  He walked into a dark room a few minutes later, to a batch of catcalls and hoots—everybody had been working so hard, three eighteen-hour days in a row that Nick-baiting was a treat for them all.

  “Hey, hero, where you been hiding?”

  “Nicky, whyn’t ya shoot the motherfuck when you had the chance, I haven’t been able to touch my wife in three days and I am getting very very horny, old boy.”

  “Nicky, don’t let these dicks turn you around, you done good, except for letting him get away, that little minor detail.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said in answer to his jolly tormentors, “just wanted to see if you clowns were as good as you say you are. Three days and you guys haven’t found your nuts yet.”

  “Ooooo, brave words from the land of the walking dead.”

  “All right, gentlemen,” said Howdy Duty, who had gotten himself appointed coordinator of the Swagger manhunt, “let’s close it down and watch. Go ahead, Hap.”

  “Okay, guys,” said Hap, “this is raw, unedited TV tape, courtesy of our good friends, the assholes at CBS who make more money and do lots more damage than we do. You’ll notice the time sequence at the bottom right of the screen that’s blocked out for TV showings, but very helpful for our purposes. I’ve got it cued to thirty seconds before the first shot—assuming, and we’re still not sure, there was more than one shot.”

  The television screen leapt to light and there was Flashlight, his good-looking, rather bland and characterless face knitted up in a slightly unconvincing mask of passion. It was a tight shot, only him and he was singing fulsome praise of this Latino who’d done so much to repair the damage between, as Flashlight put it, “our two great countries,” and had worked so tirelessly to effect “reconciliation, reconstruction, and recognition.”

  And so, Flashlight concluded, what a great pleasure it is to award Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez the highest award we have in this country for civilian accomplishment, the Medal of Freedom.

  The tape dropped back to a two-shot and the cleric, in modest black, with a beatific smile on his face, comes up to the podium on the president’s right to take the president’s hand and to genuflect to accept the silky garland with its little hunk of gold plating around his fat neck. He turns, giving his back to the audience, then bends as the president lifts to raise the thing over his—

  “That’s it,” said Hap Fencl, as the image froze. “What we’re gonna hear a lot of once the conspiracy boys figure out how to make a bundle on this, is how come Bob doesn’t shoot when the president is talking and he’s got an easy frontal or brain shot. Why does he wait till he’s turned to his right and the Latin guy is moving into the line of fire? Answers, anybody?”

  There was silence. But Nick knew.

  “Hap?”

  “Yes, Nick.”

  “Ah, the reason is that a headshot is too far to risk from, what, five hundred yards out? Not because he can’t hit a head at that range, you can bet your ass he can. But because the head is the most animated part of the body and most of the body movement begins at the head; so the head is never really still and it moves so quickly because the neck muscles are so articulated and because the reaction time between impulse and action is nearly instantaneous. So the head’s a no-go, at least for a pro. But at the same time he’s worried about body armor so he can’t quite take a full frontal, center-of-mass shot. See, he’s waiting for Flashlight to turn slightly, to raise his arms, and he’s going for a raking shot into the sleeve vent of the body armor. He wants a translateral chest shot, putting it into him right in front of the armpit on about a forty-five-degree angle. The bullet will traverse left to right, expanding as it goes, and it ought to clear out all the chest structures. He’d be dead in a second, before he hit the ground. Was Flashlight wearing body armor?”

  “Secret Service won’t say. That’s very good, Nick.”

  “Too bad you’re a dead man,” somebody said anonymously in the dark.

  There was some laughter and even Nick had to smile.

  “Okay, let’s get to the good stuff,” said Hap. “Brain-shot time, boys and girls.”

  On some twitch, the archbishop lurched up as if a back spasm suddenly struck him and Nick thought that he’d been hit or something; but no, it just seemed to be the random play of events in a very small compass that for whatever reason, instead of lowering his head to take the president’s garland he raised it and pushed his head into the kill zone where Swagger’s bullet hit it full force, back right rear quadrant.

  The moment, frozen in the stillness of the videotape was staggering: ripeness is all, said Lear, though Nick had learned it from Joseph Heller in Catch-22 when Snowden died in the back of the plane, but here it was again, that message. Man was matter. Light him, he’ll burn. Sink him, he’ll drown. Shoot him in the head, his head will explode.

  The head seemed to disappear in a sudden flame of motion, a smear across the lens as if the atoms were individually decomposing. In actuality, of course, it was a .308 caliber 200-grain bullet hitting at about fourteen hundred feet per second, breaching the cranial vault, opening like a steel tulip inside, veering crazily through the whorls and confusions of the august archbishop’s gray matter and blowing crazily out his left eye socket and in so doing spattering tissue into the horrified face of the president of the United States.

  “He’s a complete rag doll the microsecond the bullet goes through him,” said Hap.

  There was a moment of almost holy silence as the man�
�s death loomed in frozen grandeur on the screen.

  “It’s a little tough to tell from this angle, Hap, but are we sure the president was the intended target? Jesus, that’s a dead center hit to me,” somebody said.

  “Now I don’t want that kind of talk,” Howdy Duty said, asserting himself for the first time and quick to deal with the apostasy. “That’s exactly the kind of nonsense that got started during 1963 and haunts us to this day. Yes, absolutely the president was the target, you can see the way the head rose into the line of fire.”

  But Nick just sat there staring at the moment of death, the brains like a breaking red wave emptying themselves in the face of the president who had not yet begun to react. He’d thought so much about shooting a person at long range—it had been his life once, before Myra, his vanity that he could do it, do it well, save lives, become a hero—and something now reached him that disturbed him.

  He tried to fix on it, to sift it out of the data but—

  “Nick? Nick? Hey, somebody poke Nick, he’s sleeping!”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry, what’s up, Hap?”

  “Nick, you did some sniper time on SWAT, any way he’s not shooting at Flashlight?”

  “Ahh—” Nick paused.

  “Well, Nick?” asked Howdy Duty.

  “Can you get an angle reading from the point of impact and the wound channel and trace it back to a source and make sure it came from that house?”

  “No. Just got the report from Washington. They ran it through their big ballistics mainframe program, and the best they can do is pinpoint a rough semicircle of about seven degrees. And there’s over nineteen buildings with windows opening onto the shooting site from there. We’ve been over each of them, though, and the only one that had blood and a rifle in it and an empty shell happened to be the one where Bob the Nailer walked on a nine-mil and took your Smith,” Hap said.

  “Well, that’s it then,” said Nick, letting it slide, knowing he’d hoard his doubt at least a little longer, rather than risk Howdy Duty’s ire this early in it, and hanging on to his career by a pubic hair.