Rebound

by Ian Barclay

  “Why does the customer need a hair trigger if this rifle has no kick?” he asked Charley.

  “I suppose he wants to be doubly sure.” Woodgate answered. “For him I think it’s just a toy. The only person he’ll ever shoot will be himself, and that will be accidentally. I’ve done some nice work for him before—and so far as I know, he’s a collector and not a dealer.”

  Like all Kalashnikov rip-offs, this rifle was gas-operated and used a simple, two-lug rotating bolt to accomplish the locking function. The basic design was simple, and stripping involved only lifting the top cover and taking out the gas piston, bolt carrier, and bolt assembly. There were no springs or small parts to fall out and be lost.

  Dartley raised the gun to his shoulder and sighted through the eyepiece. The scope used the illuminated-dot sighting method, consisting of an illuminated dot reticle and a single horizontal line. The illuminated dot was tops in poor light or even in full darkness where only an outline could assist in target acquisition. The unit had a magnification power of 4 and a 40 mm objective lens.

  Dartley noted that the magazine release could be worked by either hand and that the trigger guard was large enough to easily admit a gloved finger. Those were the kind of fine points he admired in a gun design.

  “What was wrong with the original Valmet trigger?” he asked Charley.

  “Nothing. It broke at five to six pounds, with very little creep or grit. It had the standard military take-up.”

  A trigger’s military take-up meant that it would move maybe a quarter of an inch before. its mechanism began to operate, and after that it operated quickly. This provided a safety margin so that things brushing lightly against the trigger would not set it off while the soldier was on maneuvers or otherwise occupied.

  Woodgate had installed a double-set trigger, which consisted of two triggers, the first to cock the mechanism and the second to fire the shot. He pulled the enabling trigger and barely touched the front trigger, but this was enough to set it off. He tried again, and this time the front trigger went off by itself. Both men laughed. It was because of the dangers of such sensitivity that commercial arms were never sold with hair triggers. When the mechanism was cocked, a large, heavy spring was caught and held back by a very small lever resting on a notch cut in the metal about two-thousandths of an inch wide. A breath of air could release it.

  “When you’ve finished with that,” Charley said, “I have a reboring job done on a Springfield Ml-A that needs to be sighted for a variance of less than half an inch in a five-shot group at two hundred yards. That will give you some outdoor work.”

  Charley was doing his best, Dartley could see that. Yet he could not help feeling mildly irritated at his uncle for these makework efforts. Had he become such a monster that even Charley grew nervous having him lurking around with nothing to do?

  Shirley Carter had heard all about the beaches in her husband’s letters months before she and the children had arrived. Coming from Tennessee, which had some lakes and three big rivers but nothing anyone could call a mighty stretch of water, she had never expected that one day she would be seeing the sun set over the South China Sea—or any other sea, for that matter. Her husband was from Murfreesboro, and she had first met him there while he was home visiting his parents. He had the rank of ensign then and had come out to see her parents in the nearby town of Barfield. Three months later he came back to marry her, and everyone joked her for marrying a Navy man without ever having seen the sea.

  They had been happy in Charleston, South Carolina, where both the children were born and where he reached the rank of lieutenant. She had some things to say about the lack of privacy involved in being married to a career serviceman—everyone knew how much money he made according to his rank, and everyone had a comment on how they spent it. Apart from that, she had no complaints until word came that he was being transferred to the 7th Fleet, in the Philippines, with a promotion to lieutenant commander promised in the near future. He went. She and the kids followed four months later.

  Now she was looking out over the ocean at the sun going down in layers of orange, ocher, mauve, even apple-green and other colors she had no name for, as her husband swam and the kids played at the water’s edge. She tried to relax and believe that everything would work out just fine.

  She had been in the Philippines for two weeks now, and her husband had not changed toward her—as she feared he might while they were apart—and they had a nice house, the kids had a playground, and there were plenty of other American children. There were stores, and she had met some other Navy families she liked. It was only that this was her first time outside America and it frightened her. Her husband loved it here. The kids loved it. Only she had any misgivings, and she tried to hide them from the others. Even now she could not just lay back, relax, and enjoy the gorgeous sunset over the calm sea. She sat on the sand, smoking the third-to-last Salem from the pack she had bought that morning, tense and watchful.

  On a four-day leave her husband had taken them on a trip away from the beaches of Subic Bay, thronged with Americans, up the coast of Zambales province. Here the beaches were empty, the resorts were small and quiet, the coast beautiful and unspoiled. It was paradise—even more beautiful than photographs she had seen of such places. She was learning to swim and had been doing quite well until she had heard stories about sharks. Now she found that she had developed a terrible fear, every time she was in the sea, that she would be bitten from beneath—that one of her breasts or part of a thigh would be sheared off by the rows of razor-sharp teeth in the mouth of one of those swimming beasts.

  She couldn’t tell her husband about this new fear that had come over her, he was already explaining to her how irrational all her other fears were. When she had mentioned the possibility of a shark attack to him, he had his usual set of statistics ready and told her that she was a certain number of times—she could not remember how many—more likely to be hit by a car while crossing the street than she was to be bitten by a shark while swimming here. She had made a joke of it by saying that judging from the way Filipinos drove, those odds were not so high.

  He would never understand why she no longer stayed in the water for more than a few minutes; her fear became too powerful for her to control. Now she watched him swimming fearlessly in the orange stain the setting sun made across the calm water. Her two children played ankle-deep in the wavelets breaking on shore. She had only two cigarettes left to last her until they got back to where they were staying.

  As she watched and worried, she saw what she dreaded happen right before her eyes. Her husband cried in pain out on the water. He thrust his arms in the air and struggled, yelled again, sank for a moment, and came to the surface again. She leapt to her feet but was nearly powerless to move after that from shock and anguish. At any moment she expected to see the black triangular fin of the beast attacking her husband. Instead she saw a round black object, smaller than a basketball, poke out of the water between her husband, still struggling and shouting, and her two small children at the water’s edge, looking out to sea at their father.

  The round object moved closer to her children. She did not know what it was until it rose out of the water and she saw that it was a frogman’s head. The man’s wet suit glistened black, and he carried a spear gun in one hand. He raised the glass visor from his face and looked at the two children. Then he waded through the water toward them, changing the spear gun from his right hand to his left. As he neared the little girl he pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt.

  She did not know if he had seen her, or if he had, whether he had dismissed her as a lone, helpless mother on the beach. But this Tennessee woman had once saved her younger sister from a rattler with a single shot from a .22 rifle. Against what she thought was a shark, she could do nothing. Against a man attacking her children, she could be as fierce as a mother bear. She bent down and fetched her husband’s Colt .45 pistol from where he had concealed it in his folded shirt next to the blanket. She
snapped the safety and levered a shell into the chamber, glad now that she had taken pistol lessons from her husband back in South Carolina. She fired four shots at the frogman, and each of the four bullets smacked through the wet suit and ripped through the man’s innards. Knife in hand, he fell facedown in knee-deep water, still several feet from her daughter.

  The children ran weeping to meet their mother, who stumbled across the sand to meet them, still clutching the smoking pistol. They clung to her legs and wanted to know where their father was.

  She looked out to sea, now a gold-copper color in the blinding sunset. He had disappeared.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Richard Dartley’s real name was Richard John Woodgate. His father, Charley’s brother, was “something in the State Department” and did a lot of traveling. When he was twelve, his mother told him they had adopted him, that he wasn’t really their child.

  “So I am not really Richard Woodgate at all,” he said to her, trying to hold back his tears. “I’m really someone else.”

  She tried to assure him that he was as much a son to them as any son of their own flesh and blood could be, but from that day on he was always convinced, somewhere in his mind, that this was all a pretense and that he was really someone else. His adoptive parents did not know the names of his natural parents—all the records had been sealed by the adoption agency. It was not until he was twenty-two that he found out, through illegal access to court records, that his birth name was Paul Savage and that he was the illegitimate offspring of teenagers, members of two important Washington law families.

  He grew up in a fine old house in Chevy Chase, went to church, finished high school, and went to Vietnam. He hadn’t been good at anything in particular; he was just a regular, ordinary kid who didn’t know his ass from his elbow. The first man he killed was a Cong stalking him through elephant grass. Dartley heard him come, waited, his hands trembling on his M16, and emptied a clip of sixteen rounds into his face. The bullets tore away the man’s entire face, from the chin up, yet he stood there staring at the young American who had just shot him, though he had no eyes left and only chopped hamburger for a face. It must have been twenty seconds before he fell. If he had taken any longer about it, Dartley would have been the one to hit the ground first, passed out from horror.

  That was the beginning. One time Dartley was separated from his platoon when they went in to find missing Americans from a downed chopper. On the ground they came under North Vietnamese Army fire and had to scatter to avoid being overrun. Dartley was working his way back to their drop point when he came across an American who was wounded in the right shoulder and had been staked to the ground and skinned. The man was still alive and begged Dartley to kill him. Dartley had no radio. He could not carry this hideous peeled-raw body without causing him unbearable agony. He had no painkillers to give him. Except a bullet. That’s what the soldier begged him for. Dartley put his M16 next to his forehead and told him good-bye. The man thanked him. Dartley squeezed the trigger.

  The end came in Saigon. He had fallen in love with a Viet beauty and planned to take her with him somehow when he left. When she tried to kill him, he realized that all the time she had been working for the Viet Cong. In a crazed fury he crushed her skull with the heel of his combat boot. He was nuts for a long time after that.

  Back in the States, he didn’t do much of anything. Nothing worked for him. A woman, a job, a bottle of whiskey—they were good for a day or two, and then he would move on.

  On September 11, 1976, his adoptive father was shot in the forehead by an AK-47 bullet outside the American Embassy in Buenos Aires. Only hours beforehand, an ex-CIA agent, disillusioned with the agency, had made public a list of CIA operatives in the field. Dartley’s father was high on the list. In an oration at his funeral the vice-president referred to him as a “courageous warrior,” and the State Department told the newspapers that he was a “security adviser.” He was only one of several men on that list to die, all within hours of each other.

  His death knocked Richard Dartley out of his stupor. He came to realize that his father had been, in his way, a defender of his country. And like the Viet vets, no one had a good word for CIA agents. Everyone was always willing to believe the worst and dismiss anything that sounded positive.

  Dartley grew up in a hurry. He began to see that someone had to do the work while the majority took it easy and complained. The ones who got things done could expect little recognition for it. That’s what politicians were for, to take the credit. He moved to a studio apartment above a store on K Street in Georgetown, stopped drinking and smoking, watched what he ate, and worked out every day along the C&O Canal. He gradually became fit again, and as his body grew healthy his mind calmed. He didn’t try to fool himself that his mind was normal again—like he had been in high school—but now, when he put things together, he was coming up with halfway logical conclusions.

  He decided he would join the CIA and pick up where his assassinated father had left off. His Uncle Charley supported him and arranged the interview. But once they saw his Army file, the CIA wanted no part of him. When he wouldn’t be put off easily, they told him straight. The CIA trains nice guys to be killers, not crazies to be nice guys. Go away.

  None of the other government intelligence agencies would touch him, either. He had been working on and off for Charley, and they got on well. Dartley had by now figured out Charley’s game, and he asked him to find work for him as a professional hit man. Dartley had some offers to go as a mercenary to Central America and Africa, but he reckoned he had done enough blind following of other people’s orders. This time, since it was his life on the line, he wanted to be in control.

  Charley hemmed and hawed for a while, clearly hoping that his nephew would change his mind. When he did not, Charley started to give him some advice. He would have to change his name. This was when he became Richard Dartley. It so happened that Charley Woodgate was asked every now and then, when delivering a weapon, if he knew of a good hit man. He had made recommendations in the past. Now he offered to do the same for his nephew. Charley was fully aware that many people would not regard this as a valid way to help out a relative, but those people did not have relatives like Richard Dartley. His nephew was already a cold-blooded killer and would earn his living as one, no matter what Charley had to say. Charley had the contacts. The most he could do was to try to guide Richard.

  It was agreed between the two men from the very beginning that Richard would only go after evil men with sufficient power to escape conventional means of justice. He would take no assignments that involved liquidating relatively innocent individuals as a result of business or private quarrels. For someone to become a potential victim of Richard Dartley, he had to be an unscrupulous asshole who had done some major bad things and hurt a lot of people. Dartley wouldn’t go after a thief or a con man. He was after bigger game.

  For a starting-out hit man with no rep to seek only the biggest targets was not the quickest way to get jobs. Powerful people are nearly always taken out by other powerful people, and they want the man they hire to do the job to be an experienced pro, not a gifted amateur or, worse still, some kind of psycho. Dartley did not find work for a full year. Then he got a job only because another hit man let down the client at the last minute. Dartley took the assignment at a few hours notice and did a clean job. This was enough to give him professional status overnight. Word of mouth brought him other jobs, and his successes over the next few years built his reputation as one of the top assassins in the world.

  Dartley was aware that he had grown increasingly cold-blooded, wealthy, and calculating. His only defense was that he had never yet deliberately sought to kill a man who had a right to go on living.

  “Mr. Dartley never meets with his clients,” the gray-haired man with the bushy gray mustache and pale puffy cheeks told the men sitting around the table. “My name is Paul Savage, and I handle all Mr. Dartley’s arrangements. He has empowered me to acce
pt or turn down assignments in his absence, so you can be assured, gentlemen, that my word will be final.”

  The four men in business suits looked curiously at the gray-haired man, whose hair and mustache were clearly false under the fluorescent lighting of the room. He seemed to have theatrical makeup on his face as well. No doubt this disguise would fool people outdoors who would not glance twice at an elderly citizen, but not here, where he was the focus of all attention.

  The man who called himself Paul Savage sat next to Charley Woodgate. Three of the businessmen were Filipino, the fourth an American. They continued to stare at the man with the false mustache who had just told them his decision would be final.

  One Filipino remarked humorously, “I hope Mr. Dartley’s skills at his end of the business are better than yours as a disguise artist, Mr. Savage.”

  “This makeup is not meant to fool you into thinking I’m an old man. Its sole function is to prevent you from recognizing me again or describing me to someone else. I think you’ll find it fulfills this function very well.”

  These words came in a cold, detached voice that put an end to humorous remarks.

  “I’m sure we can rely on Mr. Woodgate’s recommendation,” the Filipino said by way of restoring peace. “I’ll get right to the point. We know you refuse to become involved in politics or big business, which are one and the same thing in the Philippines. Our involvement is from that angle, but yours need not be. All that need concern you is that a whole series of U.S. servicemen in the Philippines are being killed. We know who the killer is. And we want you to get him.”

  Dartley nodded his gray head. “There are some obvious questions that come to mind.”