I, Sniper

46

Swagger awoke from dark sleep that felt drugged, shook his head to drive out memories too grotesque to be recorded, wished hard for a cup of coffee. He didn’t feel refreshed or enlivened a bit; he wanted to go back to unconsciousness and escape his reality: in a dirty-smelling nook in the rocks, heaped with the crap he’d brought along, faced with a mission he felt too old for. Have to get my combat mind back, he told himself: have to!

He crawled out of his sleeping bag, crawled up the incline to the mouth of the cave, and went to his Leicas for a good five-minute examination of landscape. It looked fine-a drift of low hills and sparse forestry, a glimpse of green-yellow valley floors, a haze of far-off peaks. At one point he thought he saw a line that seemed a little too straight for anything in nature, and he put down the binoculars to take up the rifle. Through the Leupold Mark IV’s 10X, he studied hard and realized it was a length of birch trunk 240 yards out.

He glanced at his watch, saw that it was nearly 5 p.m., meaning it was 8 p.m. in the East and he was already behind schedule.

He ate three protein bars because he’d need the energy for the long night ahead, and stuffed a couple in his cargo pants pocket. Then he crawled to the mouth of the cave, checked again, crawled out, and pulled out his cell and punched in a number.

Come on, goddamn it, work, goddamn you, and in a bit he heard ringing.

“Where the hell are you?” said Nick Memphis.

“Never you mind,” said Swagger. “Are you back, are you out of the woods, are you the boss?”

“I’m back. Long story. Forget me. You said to Starling, ‘Jump time,’ and then you went incommunicado for three long days. What the hell is happening? What the hell are you doing? What is your situation? What are your plans?”

“Here’s what’s important. I have to get you something. No point describing it. Hmm, don’t see no FedEx offices around this neighborhood, so tomorrow I’ll find a way to get it sent FedEx; tomorrow being Saturday, I’ll pay for Sunday delivery. I want you ready for it, expecting it, set up to receive it, protect it, and understand it.”

“Where’s the nearest big city?”

“Lord, it ain’t that near, probably Missoula.”

“Too far? Give me a town then. I’ll have a team there tomorrow.”

“Place called Indian Rapids, Montana, downstate and east a bit from Missoula.”

“I’ll fly a team in. Bring it to the Indian Rapids airfield or airport. Anytime after noon. Go to the American Eagle desk, tell ’em it’s for Mr. Memphis. An agent will take it from you.”

“And take me too, no doubt. Well, I don’t think it’ll matter none by tomorrow. Tomorrow’s going to be a very damned interesting day, Special Agent Nick, that I guaran-fucking-tee you.”

He broke the connection, put the phone away, then reached in and pulled out the radio unit he’d taken from the charger in security headquarters. It was a Motorola CP 185 VHF two-way, set to MAINT DIRECT. He turned the unit on, then snapped a selector switch to VOX, which automatically voice-activated transmission on the preset frequency.

“Mr. Potatohead. Calling Mr. Potatohead.”

“Is it you, Swagger?”

“It’s me, Potatohead.”

“Tricky bastard, yis screwed all me plans,” came the voice, clear against some marginal static. “We needed them machines to get into Indian Rapids before the bank closed at noon, so’s I could access an operational account with more cash than a scoundrel like yis ever seen. Now it’s all buggered.”

“Then rob it tonight, I don’t care. If I don’t see a ton of cash tomorrow, you get nothing but a bullet between the eyes. The film goes to the feds. Your boss goes to prison. Then I bring some friends in, boys who know a thing or two, and we hunt down the other three O’Flanagans and take heads. I don’t have an Irishman over my mantel yet.”

“Him with the big talking. What’s the game, Sniper? You’ve got a game.”

“Tomorrow you’re up at oh-five-hundred. Oh, and you’re naked. Buck-ass, jaybird nude. That’s so you don’t have a shiv or a.45 slickered away in some dark place.”

“For God’s sake, what about me dignity, man?”

“Not my department. You get aboard an ATV, also stripped, except for that big bag of money, and you set out on the Water Hole Road, and you make tracks to the hole. At the hole, you take High Ridge Trace and you make tracks down it. I’m guessing you’ll hit Big Bend Creek at oh-six-thirty just as the light’s beginning to come across the valley. I’ll call you on this radio, this frequency, so you better have a headphone set. Then you can guess the drill. I’m going to give you GPS headings and bounce you up hills and down valleys and over streams. Sometimes I’ll be watching, sometimes I won’t, but you’ll never know. You move straight and fast to where I tell you. You’re alone, you’re unarmed, you’re naked. When I satisfy myself that your goddamn boys aren’t following you and that you aren’t in communication with them, I’ll take you to me, someplace wide open where nobody gets close. I take the dough. I give you the first half or so of the film. I leave you naked, I take your radio and your ATV and I’m gone. Again, when I’m satisfied I’m not being followed and your boys aren’t around, I’ll call them and give them the coordinates of your spot and they come get you. The first part of the deal is over.”

“You’re a bastard, Swagger. Do you know who you’re dealing with?”

“Yeah, a naked Irishman hoping a grizzly doesn’t decide he’s lunch. Sometime in the future, when I’m feeling secure and have thought out the angles, I’ll make contact again. This time there’ll be an exchange not of cash but of account numbers. When mine’s full up, I’ll turn over the last of the film to the naked Irishman. You’ll never see or hear of me again unless you come after me, and if you do, I go after the big guy, and since you know how good I am, you’ll sell him on the proposition that if he wants his legacy clear and to live out his years in peace, he stays the hell away from me. Have you got that?”

“I have.”

“And no one else goes out either. I’ll be watching the house tonight, and if I hear motors on those ATVs as you send the boys out, I’ll sneak down and cut your throat and head into town. They’ll have a long wait tomorrow, and when they get back, they can watch the FBI arrest the boss on the TV.”

“They’s not going nowhere. Where would they go?”

“Tomorrow, oh-five-hundred. Tonight you better hope I don’t have nightmares of you guys holding me down while the water crushed my lungs, because I might decide to take it personally and put a bullet in the potatohead.” He clicked off.

The call finished, Bob knew he had to check kit while it was still light. Though it was probably an unnecessary precaution, he didn’t want to be throwing flashlight beams into the darkness.

Weapons: He wore Denny Washington’s Sig 229 in a Mitch Rosen horizontal leather holster under his left shoulder. It was loaded with twelve.40 Corbon +P hollow points, and he had two more twelve-round mags hanging vertically under his right shoulder, to balance the weight of the automatic on the other side of the harness. That gave him thirty-six; if he needed more, he should have had an M4 along.

The rifle was a stainless steel Remington 700 Sendero with a gray-green camo McMillan stock, more hunting rig than dedicated sniper, but accurate as hell way out there with its 7mm Remington Ultra Magnum 150-grain cartridges loading Swift Scirocco polycarbonate-tipped bullets, of which he had four boxes of twenty. The only tactical flourish was the Leupold Mark IV 4-15X scope with the old mil-dot range-finding system built into its reticle, secured in heavy Badger Ordnance tactical rings and bases. The barrel, which he had taped black to mute the dull silver gleam, was fluted, which theoretically meant it cooled faster and empirically made it lighter, and it wore a Blackhawk black canvas cheek pad lashed to the stock to provide the higher stockweld necessary from the prone.

He had an SOG black steel Bowie with seven inches of razor-sharp death taped to the ankle of his right 5.11 assault boot. He had a Colt.380 Pocket Automatic 1908 in his right cargo pocket, with eight Corbon 95-grainers aboard.

Wish I had an M4. Wish I had that Swedish K. Wish I had the best weapon of all, which is two thousand marines.

Food and drink: He had a hydro-pack on his back, a water bladder slung flat against his spine and sustained by shoulder straps, with a tube that curled around his neck, so he could hydrate anytime he needed to without the excess motion of unlimbering, then unscrewing a canteen, then reversing the motion. He also had a Depends on, for obvious reasons. He had six energy bars. He had insect repellent, lip balm, alcohol swabs, and a trauma kit strapped to his lower left calf, with scissors, bandages, a couple of packs of clotting agents, disinfectant, and morphine Syrettes.

Communications: He had the radio unit from the ranch, freshly empowered with new batteries. He had his Nokia folder, freshly charged.

Camouflage: He had his best ghillie, a cumbersome exoskin made largely of heavy gauze secured to a one-piece reinforced tactical unit and woven cleverly with six-by-one-inch strips of cloth in the green-brown-gray dispersal pattern of the natural world in autumn, an abstraction so dazzlingly authentic that it all but disappeared when inserted into nature and further camouflaged by its wearer’s willingness to endure the ordeal of complete stillness. He had a boonie hat, soft and floppy-brimmed, itself multihued but more importantly also woven with tufts of the nature-toned material. He had three sticks of face paint-green, tan, brown-that would fold the whiteness of his face into the blur of natural color. The only odd color visible would be the lenses of his Maui Jim prescription shades, tear-shaped, brown, sprayed with lacquer to counteract their tendency to reflect the light. All in all, he looked like a bush.

He geared up. An observer, though of course there was none, might have thought of a samurai preparing for a duel at a temple against a hated enemy, or a knight strapping on the armor for a joust to the death with the forces of darkness. Swagger, no romantic, thought of none of this, only the careful placement of gear, the protection of the film reel inside a nesting of bubble wrap inside a thickness of duct tape, in his left cargo pocket, the buttons well closed and checked; he thought of the ordeal of the night and the different ordeal of the day. He put on his war face, smearing alternating abstractions of the green, tan, and brown face paint this way and that, until all his pink flesh was hidden and only the absolutism of war camouflage showed. He thought of the long shot, of the short, quick encounter, all of it shooting for blood. He thought of his plan and how many ways it could fall apart and leave him alone surrounded by enemies; he thought of his age, which was way beyond the limit for this kind of mission; he thought of the soreness in his joints, particularly in his right hip from both a bullet and a sword cut, and six or so operations; he thought of his wife and two daughters and how he missed them; and finally he thought of Carl Hitchcock, head shot open, his legacy tarnished into crazed marine sniper, and all other thoughts, memories, dreams, hopes, and fears disappeared. Now the advantage was his. No more recon, no more recovery, no more negotiation. It was straight killing time, at last.

It was time to hunt.