Bob sat back. His head ached, he felt dizzy, his heart beat wildly.
He thought of another man who might have done this.
He'd buried the name and the memory so far it didn't usually intrude, though sometimes, in the night, it would come from nowhere, or even in the daylight it would flash back upon him, that which he had tried to forget.
But he had to find out. There had to be a sign. Somehow, some way, the shooter would have left something that only another shooter could read.
Oh, you bastard. Come on, you bastard. Show me yourself. Let me see your face, this once.
He forced himself to concentrate on the hard scrabble dirt before him. He felt a raindrop, cold and absolute, against his face. Then another. The wind rose, howling.
Junior, made restive, whinnied uncomfortably. The rain was moments away. He looked and he could see it, a gray blur hurtling down from the mountains. It would come and destroy. The sniper had planned for it. He was brilliant, well schooled in stratagems.
But who was he?
Bob leaned forward, he saw only dust. Then, no, no, yes, yes, he leaned forward even farther, and up front, where the dust had clearly been swept clean, he saw very small particulate residue. Tiny beads of it, tiny grains.
White sand. White sand from a sandbag, because a great shooter will go off the bag, prone.
The rain began to slash. He pulled his jacket tight. If the sandbag was here--it had to be, to index the rifle to the killing zone--then the legs were splayed this way. He bent to where they'd have been, hoping for the indent of a knee, anything to leave a human mark of some sort. But it was all scratched out, and gone, and now the rain would take it forever.
The rain was cold and bitter. It was like the rain of Kham Due. It would come and wipe anything away.
But then he went down farther, and amid the small and meaningless dunes, he at last found what he had yearned for. It was about two inches of a sharp cut in the dust, with notches for the thread holding sole to boot.
Yes. It was an imprint of the shooter's boot, the edge of the sole, the tiny strands of thread, the smoothness of the contour of the boot itself, all perfectly preserved in the dust. The shooter had splayed his foot sideways, to give him just the hint of muscular tension that would tighten his muscles up through his body. It was an adduct or muscle, Adductor magnus. That was the core of the system, as isolated by a coach who'd gotten so far into it he'd worked out the precise muscles involved.
That was Russian. A shooting position developed by the coach A. Lozgachev prior to the fifty-two Olympics, where the Eastern Bloc shooters simply ran the field. In sixty, someone else had been coached by A. Lozgachev and his system of the magic Adductor magnus to win the gold in prone rifle.
T. Solaratov, the Sniper.
CHAPTER thirty-two.
It was late at night. Outside, the wind still howled, and the rain still fell. It was going to be a three-day blow.
The man was alone in a house that was not his own, halfway up a mountain in a state he hardly knew at all. His daughter was in town, close to her injured mother, in the care of a hired nurse until an FBI agent's wife would arrive.
In the house, there was no sound. A fire burned in the fireplace, but it was not crackly or inviting. It was merely a fire and one that hadn't been tended in a while.
The man sat in the living room, in somebody else's chair, staring at something he had placed on the table before him. Everything in the room was somebody else's, at fifty-two, he owned nothing, really, some property in Arizona that was now fallow, some property in Arkansas that was all but abandoned. He had a pension and his wife's family had some money, but it wasn't much to show for fifty-two years.
In fact, what he had to show for those fifty-two years was one thing, and it was before him on the table.
It was a quart bottle of bourbon: Jim Beam, white label, the very best. He had not tasted whiskey in many years. He knew that if he ever did, it might kill him: he could wash away on it so easily, because in its stupefying numbness there was some kind of relief from the things that he could not make go away in any other way.
Well, sir, he thought, tonight we drink the whiskey.
He had bought it in 1982 in Beaufort, South Carolina, just outside Parris Island. He had no idea why he was there: it seemed some drunken journey back to his roots, the basic training installation of the United States Marine Corps, as if nothing existed before or after. It was the end of an epic, seven-week drunk, the second week of which his first wife had fled for good. Not many memories of the time or place could be recalled, but he did remember staggering into a liquor store and putting down his ten spot getting the change and the bottle and going out, in the heat, to his car, where what remained of his belongings were dumped.
He sat there in the parking lot, hearing the cicadas sing and getting set to crack the seal and drown out his headache, his shakes, his flashbacks, his anger in a smooth brown tide. But that day, for some reason, he thought to himself: maybe I could wait just a bit before I open it up.
Just a bit. See how far I can get.
He had gotten over twelve years out of it.
Well, yes, sir, tonight is the night I open it up.
Bob cracked the seal on the bottle. It fought him for just a second, then yielded with a dry snap, slid open with the feeling of cheap metal gliding on glass. He unscrewed the cap, put it on the table, then poured a couple of fingers' worth into a glass. It settled, brown and stable, not creamy at all but thin, like water. He stared at it as if in staring at it he could recognize some meaning. But he saw the futility, and after a bit raised it to his lips.
The smell hit him first, like the sound of a lost brother calling his name, something he knew so well but had missed so long. It was infinitely familiar and beckoning, and it overpowered, for that was the way of whiskey: it took everything and made everything whiskey. That was its brilliance and its damnation too.
The sip exploded on his tongue, hot with smooth fire, raspy with pouring smoke, with the totality that made him wince. His eyes burned, his nose filled, he blinked and felt it in his mouth, sloshing around his teeth. Even at this last moment it was not too late, but he swallowed it, and it burned its way down, like a swig of napalm, unpleasant as it descended, and then it hit and its first wave detonated, and there was fire everywhere.
He remembered. He forced himself to.
Last mission. Donny was DEROS. He should have been out processing No, the little bastard, he couldn't let anything alone. He had to be so perfect. He had to be the perfect Marine. He had to go along.
Why did you let him?
Did you hate him? Was there something in you that wanted to see him get hit? Was it Julie? Was it that you hated him so fiercely because he was going back to Julie and you knew you'd never have her if he made it?
Donny hadn't made it. Bob did have Julie. He was married to her, though it took some doing. So in a terrible sense he had gotten exactly what he desired. He had benefited.
Hadn't seemed so at the time, but the one Johnny who came out of the fracas with more than he went into it was he, himself, Gy.Sgt. Bob Lee Swagger, USMC (Ret.).
Don't think, he warned himself. Don't interpret, list.
List it all. Dredge it up. He had to concentrate only on the exactness of the event, the hard questions, the knowable, the palpable, the feel able
What time was it?
O-dark-30, 0530, 06 May 72. Duty NCO nudges me awake, but I am already conscious and I have heard him come.
"Sarge?"
"Yeah, fine."
I rise before the sun. I decide not to wake Donny yet, let him sleep. He's DEROS tomorrow, on his way back to the world. I check my equipment. The M40 is clean, having been examined carefully the night before both by myself and the armorer. Eighty rounds of M118 7.62mm NATO Match ammunition have been wiped and packed into pouches on an 872 harness. I slip into my shoulder holster for my .380, over that I pull on my cammies, I lace and tighten my boots. I darken my
face with the colors of the jungle. I find my boonie cap. I slip into the 782 gear, with the ammunition, the canteens, the .45, all checked last night. I take the rifle, which hangs by its sling, off the nail in the bunker wall, slide five M118s into it, closing the bolt to drive the top one into the chamber. I pull back to put on safe, just behind the bolt handle. I'm ready to go to the office.
It's going to be a hot one. The rainy season is finally over, and the heat has come out of the east, settling like a mean old lady on us poor grunts. But it's not hot yet. I stop by the mess tent, where somebody's already got coffee going, and though I don't like the caffeine to jimmy my nerves, it's been so quiet of late I don't see any harm in having a cup.
A PFC pours it for me into a big khaki USMC mug, and I feel the great smell, then take a long, hard hot pull on it. Damn, that tastes good. That's what a man needs in the morning.
Sitting in his living room, the fire burning away, Bob took another sip on the whiskey. It, too, burned on the way down, then seemed to whack him between the eyes, knock him to blur and gone. He felt the tears come.
06 May 1972. 0550.
I head to the S-2 bunker and duck in. Lieutenant Brophy is already up. He's a good man, and knows just when to be present and when not to be. He's here this morning, freshly shaved, in starched utilities. There seems to be some sort of ceremonial thing going on.
"Morning, Sergeant."
"Morning, sir."
"Overnight your orders came through on the promotion.
I'm here to tell you you're officially a gunnery sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. Congratulations, Swagger."
"Thank you, sir."
"You've done a hell of a job. And I know you'll be bang-up beaucoup number one at Aberdeen."
"Looking forward to it, sir."
Maybe the lieutenant feels the weight of history.
Maybe he knows this is Bob the Nailer's last go-round.
Three tours in the "Nam with an extension for the last one, to give him nineteen straight months in country. He wants to observe it properly and that satisfies me. In some way, Brophy gets it, and that's good.
We go over the job. We work the maps. It's an easy one. I'll go straight out the north side, over the berm and out to the treeline. Then we work our way north toward Hoi An, through heavy bush and across a paddy dike. We go maybe four klicks to a hill that stands 840 meters high and is therefore called Hill 840. We'll go up it, set up observation and keep a good Marine Corps eyeball on Ban Son Road and the Thu Bon River. I'm done killing: it's straight scout work. I'm here for firebase security, nothing else. Along those lines, we plan to look for sign of large-body troop movements, to indicate enemy presence, on the way out and the way back.
The lieutenant himself types up the operational order and enters it in the logbook. I sign the order. It's official now.
I tell the clerk to go get Fenn. It's 0620. We're running a little late, because I've let Fenn sleep. Why did I do this?
Well, it seemed kind. I didn't want to break his balls on the last day. He really isn't needed until we leave the perimeter, as the mission has been well discussed and briefed the night before, he knows the specs better than I do.
He shows up ten minutes later, the sleep still in his eyes, but his face made-up green, like mine. Someone gets him some coffee. The lieutenant asks him how he's doing.
He says he's fine, he just wants to get it over with and head back to the world.
"You don't have to go, Fenn," I say.
"I'm going," he says.
Why? Why does he have to go? What is driving him? I never understood it then, I don't understand it now.
There was no reason, not one that ever made no sense to me. It was the last, the tiniest, the least significant of all the things we did in the "Nam. It was the one we could have skipped and oh, what a different world we'd live in now if we had.
Bob threw down another choker of bourbon. Hot fire.
Napalm splashes, the whack between the eyes. The brown glory of it.
"Check your weapons," I tell Fenn, "and then do commo."
Donny makes certain the M14 is charged, safety on.
He takes out his .45, drops the mag, sees that the chamber is empty. That's the way I've told him to carry it. Then he checks out the PRC-77, which of course reads loud and clear since the receiving station is about four feet away.
But we do it by the numbers, just like always.
"You all set, Fenn?" I ask.
"Gung ho, Semper Fi and all that good shit," says Donny, at last strapping the radio on, getting it set just right, then picks up the weapon, just as I pick mine up.
We leave the bunker. The light is beginning to seep over the horizon, it's still cool and characteristically calm.
The air smells sweet.
But then I say, "I don't want to go out the north. Just in case. I want to break our pattern. We go out the east this time, just like we did before. We ain't never repeated ourself, anybody tracking us couldn't anticipate that."
Why did I say that? What feeling did I have? I did have a feeling. I know I had one. Why didn't I listen to it?
You've got to pay attention, because those little things, they're some part of you you don't know nothing about, trying to reach you with information.
But now there was no reaching back all these years, he had made a snap decision because it felt so right, and it was so wrong. Bob finished the glass with a last hot swig, then quickly poured another one, two fingers, neat, as on so many lost nights over so many lost years. He held it before his eyes as the blur hit him, and almost laughed.
He didn't feel so bad now. It was easy. You could just dig it out that simply, and it was there, before him, as if recorded on videotape or as if, after all these years, the memory somehow wanted to come out at last.
"He's gone, he's dead, you got him," says Brophy, meaning, The white sniper is gone, there's nobody out there, don't worry about it. He should have been dead, too. We cooked his ass in
20mm and 7.62. The Night Hag sprayed him with lead. The flamethrower teams barbecued him to melted fat and bone ash. Who could live through that? We recovered his rifle. It was a great coup, waiting to be studied back at Aberdeen by none other than yours truly.
But--why did we believe he was dead? We didn't find no body, we only found the rifle. But how could he have survived all that fire, and the follow-up with the flamethrowers and then the sweep with grunts? No one could have survived that. Then again, this was a terrifically efficient professional. He didn't panic, he'd been under a lot of fire, he'd taken lots of people down. He kept his cool, he had great stamina.
"Yeah, well," I tell the lieutenant.
We reach the eastern parapet wall. A sentry comes over from the guard post down the way.
"All clear?" I ask.
"Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain't nothing out there."
But how would he know? The night vision is only good for a few hundred yards. The night vision tells you nothing.
It simply means there's nobody up close, like a sapper platoon. Why didn't I realize that?
He took another dark, long swallow. It was as if something hit him upside the head with a two-by-four, and his consciousness slipped a little, he felt his bourbon-powered mellowness battling the melancholy of his memory as it presented itself to him after all these years.
I slip my head over the sandbags, look out into the defoliated zone, which is lightening in the rising sun. I can't see much. The sun is directly in my eyes. I can only see flatness, a slight undulation in the terrain, low vegetation, blackened stumps from the defoliant. No details, just a landscape of emptiness.
"Okay," I say.
"Last day: time to hunt." I always say this. Why do I think it's so cool? It's stupid, really.
I set my rifle on the sandbag berm, pull myself over, gather the rifle and roll off.
I land, and there's a moment there where everything is fine, and then there's a momen
t when it isn't. I've done this hundreds of times before over the past nineteen months, and this feels just like all those times. Then time stops. Then it starts again and when I try to account for the missing second, it seems a lot has happened. I've been punched backwards, come to rest against the berm itself.
For some reason my right leg is up around my ears. I can make no sense of this until I look down and see my hip, pulped, smashed, pulsing my own blood like a broken faucet.
Somewhere in here I hear the crack of the rifle shot, which arrives just a bit after I'm hit.
It makes no sense at all and I panic. Then I think: mother fuck I'm going to die. This fills even my hard heart with terror. I don't want to die. That's all I'm thinking: I don't want to die.
There's blood everywhere, and I put my fingers on my wound to stanch it, but the blood squirts out between them. It's like trying to carry dry sand, it slips away. I can see bone, shattered. I feel the wet. Again an odd second where there is no pain and then the pain is so heavy I think I'll die from it alone. I'm thinking of nothing but myself now: there's no one in the world but me. A single word forms in my head, and it's morphine.
Bob looked into the amber bourbon, so still, so calm.
The wind rushed outside, cold and harsh. He heard himself screaming, "I'm hit!" from across the years, and saw himself, hip smashed, blood pouring out. And he knew what happened next.
He took a swallow. It landed hard. He was quite drunk. The world wobbled and twisted, fell out of and back into focus a dozen times. He was crying now. He hadn't cried then but he was crying now.
"No!" he screamed, but it was too late, for the boy had leaped over the berm too, to cover his sergeant, to inject morphine, to drag the wounded man to cover.
Donny lands and at that precise moment he is hit. The bullet excites such vibration from him as it crashes through that the dust seems to snap off his chest. There's no geyser, no spurt, nothing, he just goes down, dead weight, his pupils slipping up into his head. From far off comes the crack of that rifle. Is there something familiar in it? Why does it now seem so familiar?
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