A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  The Reverend needed men. So he sent only two gunners to the crestline to search for the ranger on the motorcycle, figuring the two could handle it easily enough. That left three to unload and hoist, and one on the roof to stack the bales in a neat pile for easy tossing into the wide-open chopper door. If that goddamned Richard were here, it would help, but the boy had disappeared.

  The Grumley inside tossed the bags out to a Grumley beside the truck’s open rear door, and he in turn—husky Caleb, bloody nose and all—heaved it up to the Grumley atop the truck. When all the bags were out, all the Grumleys would climb up top and toss the bags into the chopper hovering above. It seemed to be going pretty well, given that the rotors of the helicopter were tossing up hell and gone, when someone wandered up groggily, holding his ear.

  “Pap,” he yelled, “he goddamn hit me three times and the last one bounced off the vest and tore off my ear.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Pap.

  “Pap, I’se hurt bad. Git me out of here. That boy can shoot a lick.”

  The Reverend made a decision.

  “Caleb, you no nevermind that, you git over there, you boys too, you put this fella down.”

  So the whole goddamned team quit their loading and ran to the edge of the hill.

  Pap waited as the guns blazed, the helicopter hovered, and nothing seemed to be happening except time was passing. What was taking so long?

  “I’m getting worried hanging here,” said the helicopter pilot through the phone. “They git heavy guns up here, they can bring this thing down in a second. You said wouldn’t be no shooting.”

  “Some damn hero trying to win a medal,” Pap said. “Hold her just a second.”

  He looked about. Richard would sure have been a help around now. But no Richard.

  Suddenly the boys was back. They’d dumped their mags, filled the woods with slugs, tore shit out of it no human man could live through, and left Caleb to hold the fort.

  So it was Pap himself who climbed up top the truck from the hood, and started lifting and tossing the bales into the chopper. Hard to believe, each chunk of weight was about a quarter mil in swag, untraceable, immediately spendable, investable, hell, a feller could have himself a great weekend in Vegas with just one of ’em. And goddamn, he was getting two, the boys one each and—

  He found superhuman strength in the power of his greed and tossed them aboard. The pilot helped by walking the chopper down the length of the truck so the distance wasn’t far, and the thirty-five bags went aboard fast. Then each scrambled in, all helping to get the wounded man aboard.

  “Where’s Caleb?”

  “Sir, he ain’t coming, don’t believe. We seen him go down just a second ago. We ought to—”

  But the old man didn’t need to be told. He twisted from the news, looked through the entryway from cargo hatch to cockpit where a pilot looked back at him, and gave the thumbs up.

  Too bad for Caleb, but that were the Grumley way, and even though the bird was no rocket, they all felt some kind of low g-force as she zoomed skyward, straight up into the black, with four Grumleys and eight mill small unrecorded aboard.

  Whooooeeeee, Pap felt himself gush as the bird climbed and began its outbound jaunt, running low, hard and without lights.

  Nothing could stop them now.

  Bob hadn’t even made it out of the trees as the bird—it was a Blackhawk, no less—took off for the moon or other parts ethereal. It climbed high until it was damned near invisible, and it was out of range in seconds. He didn’t have a shot.

  Shit, he thought.

  Then he cursed himself for chucking away the phone as he now saw he might have been able to get a call through, somehow have gotten word to somebody that…but he saw that was impossible. Nah. The airwaves were still a mess, nobody knew anything, no—

  Mark 2:11. “Arise from your pallet and go to your house.”

  Mk.211, Model O, Raufoss armor-penetrating incendiary.

  It was time to let Jesus speak for himself.

  Swagger ran to the fallen man, who lay in a fetal position, his head bent and crushed by a 6.8 Remington. But that wasn’t the point. The point was cradled in dead hands. Bob picked up the goddamned Barrett rifle, all thirty pounds of it, and ran back with it to the armored truck. He set up over the hood, after performing a quick check with the bolt to make certain a shell lay in the chamber and seeing that it did, he found a good supported position, the heavy thing on its bipod legs. He drew it to his shoulder, aware from Japan that he’d find speed in no speed, he’d find attainment in no attainment, he’d find it all in smooth, and in smooth he ticked them off: spotweld, check, trigger finger, check, breathing discipline, check, bones locked, check, mind numbed to stillness, going, going, going on toward nothing.

  The last time he’d fired through a scope was months ago, and what was this scope, what was its zero, who set it up? Well, the bad boys didn’t set it up, because they used it close in, and the shooting they’d done was from the hip, at distances of twenty feet or less, as witness the beefy guy who’d tried to hipshoot him. They’d left it alone, most likely, fearing it a little. What was the origin of the gun? Was it a privately owned weapon, used by some rich gun guy for hitting targets a mile out? No way, too beat up for that, not well enough cared for. Had to be from the same source as the restricted Raufoss ammo, that is, from some Justice Department/Defense Department equipment program, meaning it was a military gun, maybe refurbed by Barrett after use in the sand, declared surplus and turned over to law enforcement cheap for use in the war against drugs and somehow coming all the way to Mountain City. Bob tried to feel its last real shooter and came up with a man like himself, a marine NCO, hard and salty and given to the mastery of the technology, his imagination enflamed by the possibility of doing bad guys a mile away and saving the lives of young marines who’d otherwise have to close and do it at muzzle-blast range.

  He’s a mile out, he thought, and whoever set this up, he fired at a mile, that was his pride, his power. He knew with certainty: The scope is zeroed at a mile.

  Bob settled behind the reticle, indexed on his approximation of the angle at which the bird had headed, and there it was, illuminated in the light of the speedway its occupants had just looted, the bird in blur, three-quarter profile, bisected in the milliradian-designated crosshairs, and it all came together in the kind of stroke only someone who’d done the deed under pressure a thousand or a million times on training fields and in bad places where they shot back could make happen—smooth and beyond attainment or speed or ambition.

  He didn’t even feel the recoil in the nanosecond the bird crossed the crosshairs of the scope, though it may have been ferocious, even as he gave with it, rolled backward, and let the gun resettle for a second shot. He didn’t see the blinding muzzle flash as the huge missile with its tungsten core flew onward at well past the speed of sound, he didn’t feel the noise, which was immense, he didn’t sense the disturbance all those hot, roiling gases unleashed.

  He looked again when the show was complete, but he couldn’t find the bird. Where had it gone, what was it—

  He saw it sliding out of the sky. He watched through the magnification of the scope and caught the thing in its downward gyre. It wasn’t smoking or burning, but its internal rhythms were psychotic and the fuselage rotated wildly, whipping ever faster, until it was just barely flying, and at the last the pilot, whoever he was, got some control, and the thing hit with a smash against the empty seating of the speedway, its tail boom shearing off and going for a tumble, smoke rising now from a dozen different areas. Then Bob saw men spilling crazily out of it, even one, from this distance, in blue.

  Then a glare spotlighted him.

  He looked up to see another bird just a few feet up. He felt himself pinned, silhouetted in the harsh light. He raised his hands, holding Nick’s badge up for all to see.

  The bird got even lower, and in its own light he now saw KFOXTV written on its boom.

  He climbed up to the ro
of of the truck and the chopper came even lower. He got a foot on the runner, launched forward, and eager hands pulled him in.

  He was aboard next to a guy with a fancy haircut and a guy with a camera, both so excited they looked about to pee. But he wedged past them, knowing all too well the interior of the Huey, and leaned into the cockpit.

  The pilot handed him a set of earphones, which he slipped on, finding a throat mic at the ready.

  “I’m with the FBI,” he said, gesturing with the badge.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Listen, can you run this baby south to 421, then follow 421 all the way over Iron Mountain out to Mountain City?”

  “Sure can.”

  “When we get there, I’ll talk you in the rest of the way. You drop me where I say, and then you make tracks.”

  “Read you, Special Agent.”

  “Then let’s rock and roll the fuck out of here.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The boss waited. Radio reports were incoherent, inclusive, communicating only chaos and conflicting intelligence. Choppers down, but Caleb had to bring a chopper down. How many? One? Two, three? Hard to say. In the end, it was pointless to listen, and so the boss turned off the unit.

  The boss checked the time. After midnight. Here, so far away, the night was calm, the sky full of radiance, the temperature at last bearable, and a sliver of gibbous moon let low gleam smear the southern hemisphere. When the hell would it be here? Why wouldn’t the hands on the watch move more quickly? Why was breath so hard, neck so stiff, mouth so dry?

  Suddenly, there it was. The boss felt immense relief. It felt so good. They were here. It was done.

  The black bird, running low over the mountain crest, finding this unlit field behind the prayer camp without a problem. He was such a good pilot and now he could be taken care of too.

  The boss lit a flare, the only signal necessary.

  It’s done. They said it couldn’t be done. But I did it. Now I’m free and clear and rich and untouchable. I’m a legend. They’ll wonder for a hundred years what became of me, what I did with all that money. They’ll tell of the boss who beat the game.

  The helicopter set down, pitching up a whirl of wind and dust and leaves, blowing and bending the grass away from its roar. But Grumleys didn’t jump out. That old man in his blue suit didn’t leap out, dancing as was his way when gleeful, and there were no Grumleys shouting and pounding and strutting as was expected, everybody hungry for their share of the swag, neatly pre-cut into bales of cash, one for each boy, two for the old man, and the rest for the boss, as planned. Then the boss would jump aboard the chopper, and it would continue its run in the dark, low and unfollowable, another hundred miles to an obscure rural field where an SUV waited along with some phony passports. They’d be in Mexico in a day.

  But no, none of that happened.

  No Grumleys got off.

  Just one old man: Bob Lee Swagger.

  “Howdy, Detective Thelma,” Bob said. “Nice to see you.”

  “Swagger,” she said. “Goddamn you.”

  “I do annoy people.”

  She saw the badge.

  “You were FBI undercover all the time?”

  “No, ma’am. I am Nikki Swagger’s father, pure and simple. But I have a great friend in the Bureau and we linked up. Now I’m working for him. But I’m still working for Nikki.”

  “It wasn’t personal.”

  “It never is.”

  The two faced each other in the flicker of the flare as the helicopter skipped away into a high orbit.

  “No way that hayseed gun store gets hold of imported Norwegian Raufoss armor-piercing rounds without someone running a request on police stationery through Justice under the sheriff’s signature, the sort of thing someone running an anti–meth lab program might have, right, Thelma? But who runs the department? That matinee-idol sheriff? He’s so dumb he doesn’t know how many feet he’s got. They’ll figure that out down there soon enough. I already did.”

  “Swagger, don’t make me do this. I see I have to run hard now, and I can’t waste time here with you.”

  “There ain’t no rush, Detective Thelma. I don’t think you’re going nowhere. Hmm, let’s see, what else? Oh, yeah, sure, I’m betting the superlab is in the coal yard next to the sheriff’s office, under the stink of all that coal where nobody can sniff it out, most of all that sheriff. Boy, you made some monkey out of him. But that’s why you got to go, isn’t it, Thelma? OSHA’s closing down the yard and y’all are moving the department. You can’t run the lab if they’re closing down the whole zone. You’ve run meth in Johnson for three years now. You fed the sheriff the intel, let the sheriff take out the competition, and you manufactured the stuff by the bagful right under his nose, slipstreamed behind him, kept the cost of meth the same. That network of snitches you’re so proud of; those are your dealers. That poor boy Cubby Bartlett you shot was a dealer and he was so cranked he didn’t have any idea what was going on. You grabbed the gun because when you showed up at his place that afternoon and pumped him full of ice, you found his piece, unloaded it. So you had to grab it to justify your prints all over it. The upshot is, you used the profit to set up this operation, to turn an awkward million you shouldn’t have had into eight unmarked free and clear. Hell, the pieces were already in place for you; the helicopter, its pilot being your banged-up gone-to-hell brother. And I know you got him the job. The Barrett rifle already in the inventory, the inside dope on the cash movement, the inside dope on how tied in knots law enforcement was. All you had to do was get the sheriff to sign off on the Raufoss. Then off you go, laughing all the way. What you got on old Alton to leverage him like that? Something pretty, I imagine.”

  “Damn you, Swagger, how’d you get so smart? He likes boys. He come chickenhawking up here, and I heard and set up a sting and got video on him. In his circles, that’s ruination. So he does this job, and we’re quits.”

  “You are a bad girl, Thelma. But we ain’t quite at the end. You knew Grumley before. You got some strange connection to Grumley. Grumley don’t trust no outsiders. They’d just roll over you. What is it, Thelma. Who are you?”

  “Born Grumley. Maybe Pap’s, maybe someone else’s. Grumley blood. They got rid of me. Too smart. Raised in an orphanage. But I backtracked and found ’em. Pap could never bring himself to shed Grumley blood. End of talk. Time to go. Swagger, you are way overmatched. You have seen me draw. You know how fast I am, and how I don’t never miss. I have to leave now. If you try to stop me I will kill you. Who do you think you are?”

  “Who do I think I am? You never got it, did you? Y’all thought I was some old coot from out West, no match for Grumley killers and armed robbers and crooked-as-hell detectives. I am Bob Lee Swagger, Gunnery Sergeant, USMC, eighty-seven kills, third-ranking marine sniper in Vietnam. I have shot it out with Salvadorian hunter-killer units and Marisol Cubano hitmen and a Russian sniper sent halfway around the world. I even won a sword fight or two in my time. They all had one thing in common. They thought they were hunting me, and I was hunting them. Faced many, all are sucking grass from the bitter, root end. Here’re your choices: You can come easy or you can come dead.”

  Thelma drew.

  She was way fast, she was so smooth, her hand flew in a blur to the Para-Ord in the speed holster, it came up like a sword stroke, invisible in its raw speed.

  Bob hit her twice in the chest before she even got the safety off.

  She spun, hurt so bad, and the heavy gun fell from her hand, the two CorBon .38 Supers enabling the ritual of drainage that would take her life from her as they opened up like sharp steel roses. She gasped for air, finding little, and turned to look at the old man with the pistol in his hand, just as the flare died.

  “By the way,” he said, “I was also Area 7 USPSA champ five years running. Nobody ever called me slow.”

  PART III

  LAST LAP

  THIRTY-NINE

  It took some sorting out, and the politics were en
ormously complicated. But the final law enforcement debriefing on the incident of August 23, 2009, Bristol, Tennessee, managed to get through its business in less than six hours. All participants—the FBI, the Tri-cities Law Enforcement Task Force representing the municipalities of Sullivan County, the Tennessee Highway Patrol, and the appropriate federal, state, city, and county prosecutor’s offices—remained cordial and tempers were more or less controlled throughout.

  It helped that though the Grumley mob had fired over 750 rounds of ammunition—this was the number of cartridge casings picked up by the FBI Evidence Recovery Team on site at the Bristol Speedway the day after the incident—no civilians were killed, though eleven were wounded, one critically. It helped that Bristol police officers caught the main perpetrators—actually had them signed, sealed, and delivered when the hijacked Johnson County Sheriff’s Department’s helicopter crashed conveniently into the speedway itself—without difficulty. It helped that law enforcement casualties were quite low too: a Bristol traffic officer was seriously wounded by 9mm fire as he approached the site of the takedown, a state police helicopter pilot was badly burned when his aircraft was shot down by Caleb Grumley early in the firefight, and his copilot broke an ankle pulling him out of the downed machine in the seconds before the fire erupted. The real tragedy was the three employees of Cash Transit Service of Tennessee killed outright. It seemed to bother no one that three perpetrators—Caleb, another Grumley gunman on the hilltop, and a corrupt Johnson County law enforcement officer—were killed by FBI agents. Two other Grumley gunmen were killed earlier in the evening by another FBI team.

  If anyone could be said to have won the engagement and emerged in extremely positive light, it was the Bureau, with its intrepid penetration of the conspiracy, its rapid response and deployment, and its heroic SWAT actions during the incident itself. Task force director Nicholas Memphis, wounded in the first shooting relating to the events of that evening, was singled out for special praise and would almost certainly win another decoration. The undercover agent he supervised was never identified to law enforcement personnel—the Bureau is notoriously reluctant to share operational details, even with other agencies—though many believed the tall, anonymous older gentleman who accompanied the Bureau contingent to the meeting might have been that fellow himself.