A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  “And the fact that he owns a gun store is coincidental? I don’t buy coincidences that big.”

  Bob stopped. “Yeah, this is where it comes apart: the bullet or Bible issue. And she called me first, and I don’t know jerk about Bibles. But the fact that he claims she didn’t go there, and we know that’s a lie…She drives home, and that guy, who’s later killed, somehow gets to the driver, and he’s sent after her. Now he had to be close. So he was clearly at the prayer camp run by old man Grumley. We have his tracks as he raced down 421 to catch up to her.”

  “That sounds right. Okay, we don’t have Mark 2:11, but what do we have? Here’s what I’m getting. It seems to me what they’re planning isn’t a conspiracy, a murder, a scheme, a plot. That doesn’t sound Grumley. It’s more of a caper, a one-time thing, some kind of raid or operation. Maybe a robbery. That’s the urgency. That’s why everything has to happen fast, ’cause they’re up against a tight deadline, and what happens happens soon. They have to go at a certain moment, not before, not after. And that information has to be protected. It’s so fragile that even the suspicion of something going on would screw things up. Their plan must depend on total surprise, and even minimum-security upgrades would defeat it. That’s why they go after Nikki. Even if she knows nothing, she might make phone calls or ask questions, and someone else might figure something was up and those upgrades would be made and their plans would be screwed.”

  Bob thought, Yeah he’s pretty smart. That’s good for government work.

  “Could it be a code, a signal? Let’s Google it again. Maybe we missed something.”

  But they came up with nothing except the endless and seemingly fruitless biblical references.

  “Let me call this kid Charlie. He’s real smart, maybe he’s come up with something.”

  Bob called Charlie; the boy was apologetic, self-doubting and disappointed because he hadn’t come up with anything.

  “I even ran it by a guy I know who specializes in codes. He looked at it for numerology, misplaced letters, anagrams, displacements, upside down writing, backwards writing, and he came up zilch.”

  “Okay, Charlie. Thanks.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t do better for you, Mr. Swagger.”

  “Well, you actually cross out a lot of possibilities, son. So that’s of some help. It ain’t a code, it ain’t nothing from the Bible or the numbers or letters in the Bible. That cuts it way down.”

  “I won’t charge you.”

  “Charlie, how many times do I have to say this: Charge me!”

  Bob disconnected.

  “Nothing. And if you’re right, if they have some kind of caper going on against a deadline, here we sit with nothing to show for it, no progress made. Could it have to do with the race? The big race?” He looked at his watch. “Hell, eight-thirty. It’s started. Could it be a rob…”

  But he let it trail off.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” said Nick. “How could they rob something in the middle of the biggest traffic jam in Tennessee this year? How could they get in, get out? I suppose they could go on foot, but how much could each man carry? I just don’t see any reasonable methodology here. Those roads are going to be like parking lots for hours. Nobody’s going anywhere.”

  “I am at the end of the road.”

  “Man, I’m about to say, call it a day. Maybe tomorrow I can run it by the analysts back in D.C. and get some genius to look into it and see what we don’t. I do need a drink, a real one. But let’s ask: What do we know the most about?”

  “The answer is Nikki. I know Nikki. I know how her mind works and what a stubborn little cuss she can be.”

  “So let’s think along with her. Take us through her thoughts on that last night. You know she’s called you.”

  “She calls me…but I’m not answering. She gets a burr under her saddle, she’s got to get it out. She calls me, I ain’t there. What does she do? Call someone else? Who else would she call? She’s been to a gun store, she had a Bible she got from the Reverend, she can’t find no satisfaction, she calls me, I’m not there, who else does she call? It’s early evening, most places are closed down. Who does she call? The newspaper? Could she have called the newspaper?”

  “But you said she didn’t.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe she didn’t call anyone. Maybe she just up and left for home and the driver caught her and—”

  “No. Gal wouldn’t give up. That’s not how she was taught. She’d want to do something positive, achieve a sense of progress. So somehow she’d continue to search. So, who’s open that late? Who never closes? Who has information on anything on tap even if you’re in the woods in rural Tennessee in the dark?”

  They looked at each other.

  “She had a laptop, right?” said Nick. “Wireless, right? She went to the Internet. She tried to Google Mark 2:11 and came up with what we came up with—ten thousand explanations of how Jesus cured the cripple and sent him home, and she couldn’t make any sense of it. Who does she call next?”

  They looked at nothing and then they looked at each other again.

  They looked at the package that Bob had just dumped on the floor. It said AMAZON.

  “She buys a book!”

  THIRTY

  Vern’s cell rang.

  “Yes sir.”

  “What’s the word, Vern?”

  “Ernie, what’s the word?”

  “Ain’t no word, goddamnit, Vern, and you’d know that if you done your job. Don’t know how you can take money for tonight, just sittin’ there hammerin’ on that poor little girl and her family.”

  Vern sat next to the little girl on the sofa, his big hand draped protectively about her. Gently he’d been caressing her arm for about and hour, whispering softly into her ear.

  “Well, sir, Mr. Holy Water, I will do my job, same as you, and earn my money, same as you.”

  He went back to the phone.

  “Sir, I—”

  “Vern, I heard discord. I told y’all I didn’t want no discord. Discord is what makes things fall apart, that I know true and straight.”

  “Sir, Ernie and I are fine. We just ran into some unexpected situation is all. As for that old man, he ain’t peeked out a bit. Ernie kept a good watch on him, yes he did. There’s no move or nothing.”

  “Okay, we are about to let hell out of the jar here. The race’ll be over in a little bit—they’re up to lap four eighty or so now—and they’ll let the traffic build a bit, and then they go and we jump. Like I said before, that’s when you go up, you bash in the door, you hit him with both barrels, a lot of shooting, it don’t matter, no po-lice getting there for six hours with the mess we making here. Then you git gone but good. I’ll call you later so’s you can pick up your swag.”

  “That is a good plan, sir.”

  “Boys,” said the Reverend, “I just want you to know, you’re doing Grumley work tonight, but more important, you are serving the Lord.”

  “Sir, He has rewarded me. I have met the gal of my dreams here tonight, yes sir!”

  THIRTY-ONE

  It was The History of Sniping and Sharpshooting by Major John L. Plaster, a sniper expert and former SOG war dog in Vietnam, who Bob actually knew.

  “Sniping,” said Nick. “So she was trying to find something about snipers.”

  “She couldn’t have found a gun. Nobody loses a gun. She’d found, I don’t know, a piece of equipment, a gillie hat, a range book, or maybe some shell-related thing. The shell itself, the box, a piece of carton, a manifest, a bill of lading, something with a shell designation on it. But it had to be something unusual. The girl is my daughter. She’d been around cartridges her whole life. She knew the difference between a .308 and a .30-06 and between a shell, a cartridge, and a bullet.”

  “And it had to be arcane then, if she didn’t know it right away and sought someone with more information—the guy in the gun store, you, finally the book.”

  “Let’s try Mark 2:11,” Bob sa
id.

  He went to the index. Damn! No Mark 2:11. But he was so close now, he could feel the answer almost as a palpable presence, floating just out of focus in the corner of the room.

  “Damn,” said Nick. “I was so sure it—”

  “Wait,” said Bob, “I think technically they abbreviate ’em. And we never saw the word ‘Mark’ written in her own hand. Don’t know if it really was a Mark or some kind of abbreviation. I think the military uses ‘M-k period’ as its abbreviation, left over from the old days. But I don’t see—”

  “Go back to the index.”

  Bob found the designation “Mk.211, 622.”

  Bob turned to page 622 and immediately saw a photo of a group of long, big, mean-looking cartridges, missiles really, their sleek brass hulls propped upright as they rested on a rim, while at the top, a bullet like a warhead promised speed, precision, and destruction. The conical, streamlined-to-death-point thing itself was sometimes black, sometimes blue, sometimes red, sometimes tipped in these colors, all a part of the complex system of military enumeration, by which armies on the prowl in far dusty places could keep their logistical requirements coherent.

  And there, finally, it was: Mk.211 Model O Raufoss, with green-over-white painted tip.

  They read. The Mk.211 Raufoss is a dedicated armor-piercing .50 caliber round, meant to penetrate light steel, of Norwegian manufacture (NAMMO being the name of the firm) and design, in play in specialized roles in the American war effort in the Middle East. It consists of a tungsten core buried in the center of the 650-grain bronze bullet and was designed so that the bullet itself, traveling at over twenty-five hundred feet per second and delivering four thousand foot pounds of energy at impact, would bore through the armor of the vehicle. A nanosecond later a small charge would explode, thus releasing the tungsten rod within, which being heavier and harder, would fly into the crew compartment, shatter and fragmentize, quickly wounding, disabling, or simply slaughtering the human beings and any delicate electronic equipment inside.

  “It’s for light armored vehicles,” said Bob. “Not a tank, but an armored personnel carrier, a Humvee, a car, a radar screen, an aerial, a mobile command center. Or maybe a bunker or barricade, a helicopter, a plane on the ground, a wiring junction, a stoplight, a camera or infrared scope, any number of military applications which are classified ‘soft targets,’ anything short of the real, big mechanized stuff. I’m betting they do a lot of damage wherever they’re deployed.”

  “The .50 caliber. That’s the big one?” Nick wanted to know.

  “They call the original gun the Queen of Battle. Ma Deuce, from the heavy machine gun designation which is M-2. You rule the battlefield with it in certain situations, say on a hill way out in bad-guy land. We used a lot of ’em in ’Nam. We loved ’em. But this here’s the newest wrinkle. It ain’t for a machine gun. See this Mk.211 shit’s for a rifle built by an outfit called Barrett, a big son of a bitch, just barely man-portable. Six feet long, forty pounds or so, off a bipod. Looks like an M16 on hormones for Arnold Schwarzenegger. You couldn’t carry it in a holster to rob a store. But placed with a trained operator, you could use it to snipe at over a mile to take out trucks and lightly armored defensive positions, you could rain havoc and brimstone on your target zone with pinpoint accuracy. You could take down people, low-flying planes, missiles on their launch pads, radio and radar installations, anything. You could use it on the president with that ammo. It ain’t the gun, it’s the ammo. It’s strictly military-only, banned from civilian use, and I don’t think even the NRA cares about that. It’s for blowing up stuff, for multiplying the killing force, for bringing down planes or choppers, That ammo’ll go through anything and cut the shit out of what’s on the other side.”

  “So that’s what she found,” said Nick. “Some evidence of a .50 caliber rifle with deadly, military-only ammunition in criminal hands, presumably being readied for some kind of kick-ass caper. And that’s why they wanted to kill her, and when you found out, they had to try and kill you. But what would the caper be? Can you guess? And when is it going down?”

  “Could it be a kill?” said Bob. “That’s what you could do with this. The president, I don’t know, the governor, some big guy, he’s in a box watching the race. They’re on the mountaintop which just barely might give you a vantage point on the speedway or somehow they’ve gotten into the speedway itself, though with a gun that big, I don’t know how. Maybe he can zero the big guy’s box, put ten Mk.211s into it, kill everybody in two seconds, I’m guessing. Or it could take out an armored limousine. Turn it to Swiss cheese.”

  “The president isn’t there. The governor of Tennessee is, but…the governor of Tennessee? I suppose. I just—” Nick ran out of words. “Somehow, it doesn’t seem Grumley. It’s not their style.”

  “No, no, this is good, consider it,” said Bob. “They’re hired by some mob who knows their one value isn’t sophistication but silence. That’s what they’re selling. So maybe the governor is organizing some new anti–organized crime task force, got ’em all scared. They contract the hit to the Grumleys who bring it off with their usual crudeness and violence but also a refusal to snitch ’em out if caught.”

  “The tires, Bob. You were the one that discovered the tires. Were you wrong on that? How would that fit in?”

  “Ahhh—” Bob thought, clinging to his thesis. “Yeah, yeah, they could count on their being an SUV there in the crowd, but not with off-road tires. Yeah, after the hit, which takes maybe two seconds, they chase a family out of its Bronco, speed-change the tires, and take off cross country, maybe to the top of that hill. A chopper picks ’em up. It sounds pretty good to me, partner.”

  “But maybe you have biases. You’re a sniper. Everything to you looks like a sniper job.”

  “From ten feet with a .50 Mk.211, it ain’t much like sniping. It’s like blowing stuff up real good.”

  “Okay, I think we have to alert this command structure somehow. They’ve got to get people into the area, put a hold on all VIP transit, and maybe—I still don’t like it. It just doesn’t seem Grumley. Does it seem Grumley to you?”

  “Until today, I didn’t know a Grumley from a dandelion.”

  “Could they shoot up the race? From up above, fire the ten shells into the lead three cars as they move through the pack on a turn? You’d get a massive crash, cars all over the place, the race would be a catastrophe, they’d stop it, cancel it, something.”

  Bob saw through that.

  “And if someone laid money against the one-in-a-million shot there’d be no winner to the Sharpie 500—well, that person would win a fortune. But he’d get a visit from the Vegas mob enforcer to make sure his win was on the up-and-up, and since it wouldn’t be, he’d get a swim in Lake Tahoe with a pair of cement socks.”

  “And it doesn’t seem to need a driver, a speed-tire change, or any of the other stuff. It just doesn’t seem to make any sense,” Nick said.

  “And just to make it more ridiculous, the race is almost over. It’s near eleven. They start at eight and do the five hundred laps in about three hours. Man, I am so buffaloed. Come on, Nick, you’re supposed to be smart. Figure it out.”

  “I’m tired, I’m old. I feel older than you look.”

  “Okay, go back to basics. What do we know, absolutely.”

  “We know, absolutely, they have acquired a .50 caliber rifle and a supply of armor-piercing incendiary rounds of a sort the government categorizes as ‘antimatériel.’”

  “So,” said Bob, “let’s pursue this particular line. What is matériel?”

  “Okay, I’d answer like this: light armor. Limousines, sure. Or, given this environment, power lines, TV trucks, light safes, radio installations, I don’t know, McDonald’s signs, news helicopters, race cars, race car trailers, propane barbecue tanks. It could be any of those. I’m afraid we’re stuck with—”

  “Just make the call. You don’t have to designate a target. You just have to flood the zone with law enforcem
ent and security and—”

  “What zone?”

  “I guess the race zone.”

  “Yeah, but, hello, it’s full of three hundred thousand happy campers. Too bad there’s not a nice armored car in the middle of this, chock full of cash. Now that would make some sense. Okay, I’ll make the call and—”

  It lay there in the room for a while. Each man considered what Nick had just blurted out. Yes, armored car. Seemingly impregnable, full of cash, stuck in traffic, yet easily taken down by such a tool as an Mk.211.

  “What you just said,” said Bob, “now that makes some sense.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” But he had to fight it. “Why would there be an armored car in the middle of all this? It doesn’t track, it’s a bad idea, a red herring, it—”

  Nick took out his cell, punched a number. “I’ll call a state police captain I’ve worked with. He might know something,” he said.

  When he got through, Bob heard him say, “Hey, Mike. It’s Memphis, sorry for the late call. You’ve been watching the race? Cool, is it over yet? No, I could call back, it’s almost over, but let me just lay something on you. I’m here in Bristol myself. Sorry but it’s important.”

  He said to Bob, “Now he’s turning the TV down. Ah, okay, Mike, we have intelligence that some very bad actors are on scene here with a piece of ugly work called an Mk.211 Raufoss antimatériel round. And a .50 caliber rifle to fire the stuff. They could use it to do all sorts of things but the more we think about it, this group seems criminal, not political, and we’re trying to figure out if there’s a target they could unzip with it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m thinking how ideally suited the ordnance would be against some sort of armored car. Is there an armored car in play here that you would know anything—”

  He listened as far-off Mike told him all about it.

  Then he said, “All right, can you patch through to your command center? I’m going to try to reach them from my end. I’ll try and get a Bureau SWAT team deployed from Knoxville by chopper, and then we’ll move on site fast as we can. Ten-four.”