Time to Hunt bls-1

by Stephen Hunter

  "God, does that sound like a plan to me," he said with a smile.

  "There's only one last little thing. Trig's mother.

  She was very helpful and she told me that if I ever learned anything about the way her son died, I should tell her. Tell her the truth. I still feel that obligation. So in a couple of months or so, when all this dies down, when we're back, I may take a bit of time and head back there to Baltimore."

  "Do you want us to come with you?"

  "Oh, it ain't worth it. I'll just fly in, rent a car, fly back.

  It'll be over quicker 'n' you can believe. No sense putting no trouble to it or taking Nikki away from her riding.

  Hell, I may drive instead of flying, save some money that way."

  He smiled. For just a second she thought there might be something in his eyes, some vagrant thought, some evidence of another idea, another agenda, but no, not a thing could be seen. They were depthless and gray and revealed nothing except the love he felt for her.

  Little by little, life for the Swagger family reassembled itself toward some model of normality. Even the big news of a spectacular murder in Russia failed to make much of a stir. Bob just watched a little of it on CNN, saw the burning Jeep Cherokee and the dead man in the back, and when the hysterical analysts came on to explain it all, he changed channels.

  Sally stayed until they moved back to Boise, and then Bob drove her to the airport.

  "Once again," she said at the gate, "the great Bob Lee Swagger triumphs. You killed your enemies, you got your wife and family back. Can't keep a good man down."

  "Sally, I got 'em all fooled but you, don't I? You see clean through me."

  "Bob, seriously. Pay attention to them this time. I know it's easy to say, but you have to let the past go.

  You're married, you have a wonderful, brave, strong wife and a beautiful little girl. That's your focus."

  "I know. It will be."

  "There's no more old business."

  "Is that a question or a statement?"

  "Both. If there's one little thing left, let it go. It doesn't matter. It can't matter."

  "There's nothing left," he said.

  "You are one ornery sumbitch," she said.

  "I swear, I don't know what that woman sees in you."

  "Well, I don't neither. But she's pretty smart, so maybe she knows something you and I don't."

  Sally smiled, and then turned to leave, good friend and soldier to the very end. She winked at him, as if to say, "You are hopeless."

  And he knew he was.

  When the cast came off a little later, and Julie was back among the supple, the family flew to St. John, in the U.S.

  Virgins for two glorious weeks. They rented a villa just outside Cruz Bay on the little island, and each morning took a taxi to the beautiful Trunk Bay beach, where they snorkeled and lay in the sand and watched the time pass ever so slowly as they turned browner and browner. They were a handsome family, the natural aristocrats of nature: the tall, grave man with gray eyes and abundant hair, and his wife, every bit as handsome, her hair a mesh of honey and brown, her cheekbones strong, her lips thin, her eyes powerful. She had been a cheerleader years ago, but she was if anything more beautiful now than ever. And the daughter, a total ball of fire, a complete kamikaze who always had to be called in, who pushed the snorkeling to its maximum, who begged her father to let her scuba or go water- or para-skiing.

  "You got plenty of time to break your neck when you're older," he told her.

  "Your old mommy and I can't keep up with such a thing. You have to give us a break.

  This is our vacation, too."

  "Oh, Daddy," she scolded, "you're such a chicken."

  And when she said that, he did an imitation of a chicken that was clearly based on a little real time in the barnyard, and they all laughed, first at how funny it was but second at the idea that a man of such reserve could at last find some way to let himself go, to be silly. An astonishment.

  At night, they went into town and ate at the restaurants there. Bob never had a drink, didn't seem to want one. It was idyllic, really too good. It reminded Julie just a bit of an R&R she'd had with Donny in Hawaii, just before .. .

  well, just before.

  And Bob seemed to relax totally too. She'd never seen him so calm, so at ease. The wariness that usually marked his passage in society--a feeling for terrain and threat, a tendency to mark escape routes, to look too carefully at strangers--disappeared. And he never had nightmares.

  Not once did he awake screaming, drenched in cold sweat, or with the shakes, or with that hurt, hunted look that sometimes came into his eyes. His scars almost seemed to disappear as he grew tanner and tanner, but they were always there, the puckers of piebald flesh that could only be bullet wounds: so many of them. One of the Virgin Islanders stared at them once, then turned to say something to one of his colleagues, in that musical, impenetrable English of theirs, so fast and full of strange rhythms, but Julie heard the word "bombom mon," which she took to mean "boom-boom man," which she in turn took to be "gunman."

  But Bob appeared not to notice. He was almost friendly, his natural reserve blurred into something far more open and pleasant to the world. She'd never quite seen him like this.

  There was only one night when she awoke and realized he wasn't in bed with her. She rose, walked through the dark living room, until she found him on the deck, under a tropic night, sitting quietly. Before them was a slope of trees, a hill and then the sea, a serene sheet of glass throwing off tints of moonlight. He sat with utter stillness, staring at a book, as if it had some secret meaning to it.

  "What is that?" she asked.

  "This? Oh, it's called Birds of North America by Roger Prentiss Fuller."

  She came over and saw that he was gazing at a section on eagles.

  "What are you thinking about?" she asked.

  "Oh, nothing. This book has some pretty pictures. Kid who painted them really knew his birds."

  "Bob, it's so unlike you."

  "I was just curious, that's all."

  "Eagles?"

  "Eagles," he said.

  They returned to Arizona and with the money, Bob was able to upgrade the barn, hire two Mexican assistants, buy a new pickup and reintroduce himself to the Pima County horsey set. In just a little bit of time, they had patients-seven, eight, then ten horses in various states of healing, all ministered to with tender care. His lay-up barn became a thriving concern after a while, mostly on the basis of his own sweat, but also because people trusted him.

  Nikki went back to school but she rode every day, English style, and would start showing on the circuit's junior level the next spring, her coach insisted. Julie resumed working three days a week at the Navajo reservation clinic, helping the strong young braves mend after fights or drinking bouts, helping the rickety children, doing a surprising amount of good in a small compass.

  No reporters ever showed, no German TV crews set up in the barnyard, no young men came by to request interviews for their books, no gun show entrepreneurs offered him money to stand at a booth and sell autographs, no writers from the survivalist press wanted to write admiring profiles. He and the war he represented seemed once again to have disappeared. No part of it remained, its wounds healed or at least scarred over.

  One night, Bob sat down and wrote a letter to Trig Carter's mother. He told her he was planning a trip east some time in weeks to come and, as he said, he'd like to stop by and share with her what he had learned about the death of her son.

  She wrote back immediately, pleased to hear from him. She suggested a time, and he called her and said that was fine, that's when she should look for him.

  He loaded his new pickup with gear and began the long trip back. He drove up to Tucson, to the veterans cemetery there, and walked the ranks of stones, white in the desert sun, until at last he came to: Donny M. Fenn Lance Corporal

  USMC.

  Nothing set it apart. There were dozens of other stones from tha
t and other wars, the last years always signifying some violent eddy in American history: 1968, 1952, 1944, 1918. A wind whistled out of the mountains.

  The day was so bright it hurt his eyes. He had no flowers, nothing to offer the square of dry earth and the stone tablet.

  He'd been in so many other cemeteries, this one felt no different at all. He had nothing to say, for so much had been said. He just soaked up the loss of Donny: Donny jumping over the berm, the vibration as the bullet went through him, lifting the dust from his chest, Donny falling, his eyes going blank and sightless, his hand grasping Bob's arm, the blood in his mouth and foaming obscenely down his nose.

  After a while--he had no idea how long--he left, got back in the truck and settled in for a long pull across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and on to the East.

  The last part of the trip took him to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, where once again he bunked with an old friend who had become the Command Sergeant Major of the United States Marine Corps. As a few months before, he fell in with cronies, both still on active duty or recently retired, men of his own generation and stamp, leathery, sinewy men who bore the career imprint of the Corps. There were a few loud nights at the CSM's house in the suburbs, the whole thing slightly more celebrative.

  It was the next day that he called Mrs. Carter and told her he'd be up the next night. She said she couldn't wait.

  He hung up and waited on the line for the telltale click of a wiretap. He didn't hear it, but he knew that meant nothing: there were other methods of penetration.

  Now, he thought, only this last thing.

  CHAPTER fifty-one.

  Bob drove carefully through the far reaches of Baltimore County, at sunset. It was as he remembered, the beautiful houses of the rich and propertied, of old families, of the original owners of America--people who rode English. At last he turned down a lane and drove under the overhanging elms until he found Trig's ancestral home.

  He pulled in, once again momentarily humbled by the immensity of the place, its suggestion of stability and propriety and what endured in the world. At last he got out, adjusted his tie and went to the door.

  It was September now, turning coolish at night here in the East. The leaves hadn't yet begun to redden but there was nevertheless a definite edge in the air. Things would change soon: that was the message.

  He knocked, the old black butler answered, as before.

  He was led through the same halls of antiques, paintings of patriots, exotic plants, dense Oriental rugs, damask curtains, lighting fixtures configured to represent the flicker of candles. Since it was darker, there wasn't quite the sense of the threadbare that had been so evident his first time out here.

  The old man led him into the study, where the woman waited. She stood erect as the mast of a ship--the family had owned shipping once, of course, as well as railroads, oil, coal and more. She was still stern, still rigid, still had that iron-gray uplift to her hair. She was demurely dressed in a conservative suit, and he could see, even more now, that at one time she must have been a great beauty. Now an air of tragic futility attended her. Or maybe it was his imagination. But she'd lost a son and a husband to a war that the husband said was worth fighting and the son said wasn't. It had broken her family apart, as it had broken apart so many families. No family was immune, that was the lesson: not even this one, so protected by its wealth and property.

  "Well, Sergeant Swagger, you look as if you've become a movie star."

  "I've been working outdoors, ma'am."

  "No, I don't mean the tan. I have sources still, I believe I told you. There's some news afoot about your heroics in Idaho, how you disconnected some terrible conspiracy. I'm sure I don't understand it, but the information has even reached the society of doddering State Department widows."

  "They say we were able to get some good work done, yes, ma'am."

  "Are you congenitally modest. Sergeant? For a man so powerful, you are so unassuming you seem hardly to be there at all."

  "Fm just a polite Southern boy, ma'am."

  "Please sit down. I won't offer you a drink, since I know you no longer drink. A club soda, a cup of coffee or tea, a soft drink, something like that?"

  "No, ma'am, I'm fine."

  They sat across from each other, in the study. One of Trig's birds observed them, it was a blue mallard.

  "Well, then, I know you came here to tell me something.

  I suppose I'm ready to hear it. Will I need a drink, Sergeant Swagger? A great shot of vodka, perhaps?"

  "No, ma'am, I don't believe so."

  "Well, then, go ahead."

  "Ma'am, I have satisfied myself on this one issue: I don't believe no way your son would have killed another human being and I don't believe he killed himself. I think he was duped by a professional Soviet agent--rather, Soviet in those days. Your son was sort of charmed into--" "What a quaint euphemism. But I have to tell you I'm aware of my son's homosexual leanings. You believe it was a homosexual thing?"

  "I don't know, ma'am. That's not my department. I only know the result, that somehow he was snookered into assisting in what was represented as an act of symbolic violence as a way of re energizing the peace movement.

  But the Russian operator, he didn't give a tinker's dam about the peace movement. He was only interested in your boy's fame and reputation as a masking device for the mission's real target, Ralph Goldstein, who was working on satellite topography-reading technologies and seemed on the verge of a breakthrough the Russians felt would put them way behind in the Cold War."

  "It was only about murder, in the end. And some other boy was the target?"

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "So my poor Trig wasn't even the star of his own murder?"

  "No, ma'am."

  "Well, he'd been the star of so many other things, I don't suppose it matters."

  "My guess is, he had begun to have doubts, perhaps he even tried to back out, or go to the FBI or something.

  Possibly there's some record of his doubts in his missing sketches. But it appears I won't never see them. He was killed, probably with a judo chop to the back of the neck.

  That was their specialty in those days. In fact, everybody who saw this agent was killed, at some effort, including another peace demonstrator named Peter Fan is, a Marine named Donny Fenn, and later attempts were made on my wife, who had seen the agent with Trig. She was married to Donny Fenn at the time. I believe Ralph Goldstein was killed in the same way. Their bodies were put in the building and it was detonated. It goes down into the books as a violent fool and a math geek. But the books are always wrong. It was something entirely kids used by older, smarter, far more ruthless men, then thrown away for a momentary strategic advantage. It was a war, but the cold one, not the hot one."

  "The one we won."

  "I suppose we did."

  "What happened to the Russian?"

  "Well, our intelligence people found out a way to turn the information against him. I don't know much about it, but he's dead. They had it on CNN. You could see the burned bodies in the back of the Jeep."

  "That nasty boy?"

  "That one."

  "And the man who was trying to kill you?"

  "Well, he wasn't trying to kill me. He was trying to kill my wife. He was stopped," Bob said.

  "And he ain't never coming back."

  "Were you responsible?"

  Bob just nodded.

  "Do you know what you are? Sergeant, you're a sacred killer. All societies need them. All civilizations need them.

  It is to the eternal shame and the current damnation of this country that it refuses anymore to acknowledge them and thinks it can get by without respecting them. So let an old bat speak a truth: you are the necessary man. Without you it all goes away."

  Bob said nothing. Speculation on his place in the nature of things was not his style.

  The old lady sensed this, and asked for an accounting of the politics of the affair, the details of history. He gave it
, succinctly enough.

  "Odd, isn't it? As you've explained it, after it's all counted up and all the accounts are settled, the one party to it all that could be said to benefit is the old Russian communist apparatus. It's kept them from going under another few years. And who can tell what that'll mean?

  The cruel irony of history, I suppose."

  "I wouldn't know about that, ma'am. They were very happy, the intelligence people, that they were able to stop this fellow Pashin. He was their real target. My wife was his, but he was ours, and we got him first."

  "Well, anyway: you've provided a measure of serenity to my life. My son wasn't a fool, he was overmatched by professionals, who've been punished. Justice isn't much, but it helps the nights go easier."

  "Yes, ma'am. I agree."

  "Sometimes you don't even get that, so one must be very grateful for what one does get."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "Now ... I know you weren't working for me, you were never my employee. But the one power I still have in the world is to satisfy myself through my checkbook. I would very much enjoy getting it out now and writing a nice big, fat one."

  "Thank you," he said.

  "That's not necessary."

  "Are you sure?"

  "I am."

  "Soon there'll be college expenses."

  "Not for a while. We're doing fine."

  "Oh, I hope I haven't spoiled things by bringing up money."

  "No, ma'am."

  "Well, then--" "There is one thing, though."

  "Name it."

  "The painting."

  "The painting?"

  "The eagle after the fight. I don't know a thing about art and I don't know a thing about birds, but I'd be honored to have that. It has some meaning to me."

  "You felt your breast stir when you saw it?"

  "Well, something like that."

  "Then you shall have it. Come with me, Sergeant Swagger."

  She led him forthrightly out of the room, commanded the old butler to get a "torch"--a flashlight--and led Bob in the butler's uncertain illumination to the studio. Their breaths plumed in the frosty air. She opened the door, found a switch and the birds flashed to life, still and majestic.

  "These are worth quite a lot of money to connoisseurs of the macabre, I expect," she said.