Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the International Hunt for His Assassin

18 TARGET PRACTICE AT SHILOH

AFTER BUYING THE rifle and scope in Birmingham, Eric Galt returned to his Atlanta rooming house, taking care to keep his new acquisition hidden from other tenants and his landlord. He spent much of his time reading the Atlanta Constitution, which gave extensive coverage to King's troubles in Memphis and reported, on April 1, his vow to return in a few days for a peaceful demonstration down Beale Street.

Suddenly Galt knew where he needed to be. King's frenetic pace, combined with the constant, improvisational changes to his schedule, had made him nearly impossible to track; the peripatetic minister had scarcely been home in Atlanta during the time Galt had been living at the rooming house. But on this occasion the papers had neatly forecast the precise location of King's next appearance--on historic Beale in downtown Memphis--and conveniently gave Galt several days to plan ahead.

"You must have a goal²⁸³ to shoot for, and a straight course to follow," Dr. Maltz had urged in Psycho-Cybernetics. "Do the thing and you will have the power."

A straight course was exactly what Galt had now; one could detect in his patterns a sudden sense of focus. He began to accelerate his movements, to concentrate his formerly fevered and desultory thoughts, to make clear and cogent preparations. He paid another week's rent at his Atlanta rooming house. He bought a map designated "Georgia-Alabama," another of the entire United States, from which he planned his route to Tennessee. On April 1, at about 10:00 a.m., he dropped off a bundle of dirty clothes²⁸⁴ at the Piedmont Laundry around the corner at 1168 Peachtree Street--giving fastidious instructions to the counter clerk about items he wanted dry-cleaned, including a black-checked suit coat. As always, he said he wanted his regular laundry folded, with no starch. The laundry's desk clerk, Mrs. Annie Estelle Peters, wrote his name on the ticket in perfect Palmer penmanship cursive--"Galt, Eric."

On April 2, Galt threw a few belongings together and placed his Gamemaster rifle, still awkwardly nestled inside its Browning box, in the trunk of his car. He tossed some toiletries and clothes in a cheap, Japanese-made leatherette zippered bag, as well as his Remington-Peters ammo, his camera equipment, and, the better to monitor King's movements, his Channel Master transistor radio. Galt left most of his other belongings--including his Zenith television--in his room. Fearing a break-in, he decided to hide his snub-nosed .38 revolver²⁸⁵ in the flophouse's basement.

It was a warm spring morning, and the sun shone at his back as Galt drove the Mustang west out of Atlanta, toward Memphis. As the road spooled into the Georgia piney woods, he was alone with his thoughts and the hypnotic thrum of the V-8 engine. He hurtled over country roads, past Indian mounds and termite-chewed barns and rutted ditches of rust-red soil. Spring had arrived in earnest. Buds appeared on the deciduous trees, and the warming earth swelled with bright new blooms--jasmine, wild cherry, forsythia. It was the time of year when newly hatched bugs snapped from the greening thickets and splattered on windshields, and the skies swarmed with great black clouds of starlings.

Galt cut a jagged crease across the kudzu-strangled Southland, across countryside that Nathan Bedford Forrest and his marauders had prowled during the Civil War. Keeping to the Lee Highway--Highway 72--he shot past Huntsville and Madison and Muscle Shoals, past Tuscumbia and Cherokee and Iuka. Galt angled ever closer to the Tennessee state line, at one point passing not far from Pulaski, birthplace of the KKK. Along the way, he discovered that one of his tires had a slow leak, and he pulled over to change it.

As he drew nearer to Memphis, he must have regretted that he hadn't had an opportunity to test-fire his new rifle. Outside the old Confederate rail crossroads of Corinth, Mississippi, just a few crow miles from the Tennessee border and not far from the battlefield of Shiloh, Galt pulled off the road and found a secluded place.²⁸⁶

The bloodbath at Shiloh had begun 106 years earlier to the week, on an early April day much like this one. Lasting a mere two days, the engagement ended with twenty-four thousand dead and wounded--more than all the American casualties of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican War combined. This battle, fought in the vicinity of a small country church, affirmed everyone's worst fears, North and South--that madness would prevail, that the War Between the States would descend into a protracted horror of staggering loss.

The writer Ambrose Bierce, who fought here as a young man, described the woods around Shiloh as a "smoking jungle"²⁸⁷ so deep and dark that "I should not have been surprised to see sleek leopards." Now, behind a scrim of similar woods just south of the battlefield, Galt cut the engine and opened the trunk. Studying the Gamemaster in the filtered light, he familiarized himself with its components, with the contour of its walnut stock, with the heft of its butt and the feel of its pump-action mechanism. The moving parts of the gun worked seemingly without friction, thanks to a proprietary burnishing process the Remington company called "vibra-honing."

Galt was loath to draw attention to himself--a farmer, a Civil War buff, or even a Mississippi state trooper could be within earshot--but he knew he had to test the Gamemaster's accuracy. He needed to make sure the Redfield scope was properly aligned and showing no idiosyncrasies. He wanted to acquaint himself with the rifle's powerful kick, and examine the trajectory to see for himself how much the bullet dropped over long distances.

Galt leveled the Remington and trained his scope on a target off in the hazy woods. Then he curled his finger around the trigger.

Deer hunting season had ended months earlier, so any knowledgeable sportsman who happened to be passing through that drowsy stretch of the Magnolia State might have been surprised to hear, in the first week of April, the ragged concussions of a high-powered hunting rifle as a succession of .30-06 shells whined through the trees.