Point of Impact

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Millions of people saw it within minutes. But Nick Memphis did not see it for three days, and then only by accident.

He was at hub center of the Swagger manhunt in FBI headquarters, going through leads, keeping his head down in the seething atmosphere of the place now so totally locked into finding the sniper that it seemed unable to pay attention to some smaller details…such as himself. But he knew Mother Bureau would get around to it. He knew the inevitable could not be avoided, and that he was riding in a bubble of illusion. The ax would fall. On him. Soon.

But for now he’d lost himself in the minutiae of the reports, and the sightings that now extended over seven states. Bob was everywhere. Bob was in Alaska. Bob was in California. Bob was really Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother. Bob had held up a gas station in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Bob was a dance instructor in New Haven, Connecticut. He had what appeared to be an amusing sighting in Everett Springs, Georgia, where an ex-Marine, who said he knew Bob in the war, swore he’d run into him on a back trail in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Nick was trying to figure out how the hell Bob could have gotten from New Orleans with two nine-millimeters pumped into him to Everett Springs, Georgia, in the damn Blue Ridges.

But from the investigators, not much at all had surfaced. The car had simply vanished. No snitch had any word at all, and the pressure was on but good. Helicopters cruised the highways and a hundred agents had been flown in to handle the pursuit, on which considerable professional pride rested. But a thousand roadblocks and a hundred thousand photos had yielded nothing at all.

Where had the damned guy gone?

Suddenly, Hap Fencl was leaning in.

“Hey, Nick, we finally got the CBS version, you wanna look?”

“Ahhh – ” Nick paused. Something weird in him ticked off. No, he didn’t really want to see it, even if, by chance, the CBS cameraman had been best situated to record impact and collapse and poststrike scramble, and even if the pricks at CBS had been snooty about playing ball with the poor old Feebs, who were only in charge of tracking down the motherfucker on the trigger, and even though NBC and CBS and the three New Orleans affiliates who’d had tape on the ultimate moment had shipped it right over, that is, after airing it. Despite all that, Nick was reluctant. His whole misfortune was tied up in it: the terribleness of his own missed shot now somehow replicated by the strange pattern in the life and times of his hero. And a certain secret part of Nick couldn’t yet believe that the Great Bob the Nailer, the champ of Vietnam and eighty-seven or so odd man-on-man encounters in the boonies, the man who never missed, had, somehow, some way…missed.

Bob the Nailer might have been a lot of terrible things but he was a great shot. He never missed, that’s what Nick thought, along with Bob’s wife and two or three others.

“Come on, pal, you might as well see what all the shouting’s about. The shouting’s gonna be in your ear sooner or later, old buddy.”

Hap said this with a malicious grin, not quite meaning to be cruel but rather to be bluff and hearty and masculine and to undercut the tension, because everybody knew Nick was a gone goose. So Nick could hardly turn down the invite.

He walked into a dark room a few minutes later, to a batch of catcalls and hoots – everybody had been working so hard, three eighteen-hour days in a row that Nick-baiting was a treat for them all.

“Hey, hero, where you been hiding?”

“Nicky, whyn’t ya shoot the motherfuck when you had the chance, I haven’t been able to touch my wife in three days and I am getting very very horny, old boy.”

“Nicky, don’t let these dicks turn you around, you done good, except for letting him get away, that little minor detail.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said in answer to his jolly tormentors, “just wanted to see if you clowns were as good as you say you are. Three days and you guys haven’t found your nuts yet.”

“Ooooo, brave words from the land of the walking dead.”

“All right, gentlemen,” said Howdy Duty, who had gotten himself appointed coordinator of the Swagger manhunt, “let’s close it down and watch. Go ahead, Hap.”

“Okay, guys,” said Hap, “this is raw, unedited TV tape, courtesy of our good friends, the assholes at CBS who make more money and do lots more damage than we do. You’ll notice the time sequence at the bottom right of the screen that’s blocked out for TV showings, but very helpful for our purposes. I’ve got it cued to thirty seconds before the first shot – assuming, and we’re still not sure, there was more than one shot.”

The television screen leapt to light and there was Flashlight, his good-looking, rather bland and characterless face knitted up in a slightly unconvincing mask of passion. It was a tight shot, only him and he was singing fulsome praise of this Latino who’d done so much to repair the damage between, as Flashlight put it, “our two great countries,” and had worked so tirelessly to effect “reconciliation, reconstruction, and recognition.”

And so, Flashlight concluded, what a great pleasure it is to award Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez the highest award we have in this country for civilian accomplishment, the Medal of Freedom.

The tape dropped back to a two-shot and the cleric, in modest black, with a beatific smile on his face, comes up to the podium on the president’s right to take the president’s hand and to genuflect to accept the silky garland with its little hunk of gold plating around his fat neck. He turns, giving his back to the audience, then bends as the president lifts to raise the thing over his -

“That’s it,” said Hap Fencl, as the image froze. “What we’re gonna hear a lot of once the conspiracy boys figure out how to make a bundle on this, is how come Bob doesn’t shoot when the president is talking and he’s got an easy frontal or brain shot. Why does he wait till he’s turned to his right and the Latin guy is moving into the line of fire? Answers, anybody?”

There was silence. But Nick knew.

“Hap?”

“Yes, Nick.”

“Ah, the reason is that a headshot is too far to risk from, what, five hundred yards out? Not because he can’t hit a head at that range, you can bet your ass he can. But because the head is the most animated part of the body and most of the body movement begins at the head; so the head is never really still and it moves so quickly because the neck muscles are so articulated and because the reaction time between impulse and action is nearly instantaneous. So the head’s a no-go, at least for a pro. But at the same time he’s worried about body armor so he can’t quite take a full frontal, center-of-mass shot. See, he’s waiting for Flashlight to turn slightly, to raise his arms, and he’s going for a raking shot into the sleeve vent of the body armor. He wants a translateral chest shot, putting it into him right in front of the armpit on about a forty-five-degree angle. The bullet will traverse left to right, expanding as it goes, and it ought to clear out all the chest structures. He’d be dead in a second, before he hit the ground. Was Flashlight wearing body armor?”

“Secret Service won’t say. That’s very good, Nick.”

“Too bad you’re a dead man,” somebody said anonymously in the dark.

There was some laughter and even Nick had to smile.

“Okay, let’s get to the good stuff,” said Hap. “Brain-shot time, boys and girls.”

On some twitch, the archbishop lurched up as if a back spasm suddenly struck him and Nick thought that he’d been hit or something; but no, it just seemed to be the random play of events in a very small compass that for whatever reason, instead of lowering his head to take the president’s garland he raised it and pushed his head into the kill zone where Swagger’s bullet hit it full force, back right rear quadrant.

The moment, frozen in the stillness of the videotape was staggering: ripeness is all, said Lear, though Nick had learned it from Joseph Heller in Catch-22 when Snowden died in the back of the plane, but here it was again, that message. Man was matter. Light him, he’ll burn. Sink him, he’ll drown. Shoot him in the head, his head will explode.

The head seemed to disappear in a sudden flame of motion, a smear across the lens as if the atoms were individually decomposing. In actuality, of course, it was a.308 caliber 200-grain bullet hitting at about fourteen hundred feet per second, breaching the cranial vault, opening like a steel tulip inside, veering crazily through the whorls and confusions of the august archbishop’s gray matter and blowing crazily out his left eye socket and in so doing spattering tissue into the horrified face of the president of the United States.

“He’s a complete rag doll the microsecond the bullet goes through him,” said Hap.

There was a moment of almost holy silence as the man’s death loomed in frozen grandeur on the screen.

“It’s a little tough to tell from this angle, Hap, but are we sure the president was the intended target? Jesus, that’s a dead center hit to me,” somebody said.

“Now I don’t want that kind of talk,” Howdy Duty said, asserting himself for the first time and quick to deal with the apostasy. “That’s exactly the kind of nonsense that got started during 1963 and haunts us to this day. Yes, absolutely the president was the target, you can see the way the head rose into the line of fire.”

But Nick just sat there staring at the moment of death, the brains like a breaking red wave emptying themselves in the face of the president who had not yet begun to react. He’d thought so much about shooting a person at long range – it had been his life once, before Myra, his vanity that he could do it, do it well, save lives, become a hero – and something now reached him that disturbed him.

He tried to fix on it, to sift it out of the data but -

“Nick? Nick? Hey, somebody poke Nick, he’s sleeping!”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, what’s up, Hap?”

“Nick, you did some sniper time on SWAT, any way he’s not shooting at Flashlight?”

“Ahh – ” Nick paused.

“Well, Nick?” asked Howdy Duty.

“Can you get an angle reading from the point of impact and the wound channel and trace it back to a source and make sure it came from that house?”

“No. Just got the report from Washington. They ran it through their big ballistics mainframe program, and the best they can do is pinpoint a rough semicircle of about seven degrees. And there’s over nineteen buildings with windows opening onto the shooting site from there. We’ve been over each of them, though, and the only one that had blood and a rifle in it and an empty shell happened to be the one where Bob the Nailer walked on a nine-mil and took your Smith,” Hap said.

“Well, that’s it then,” said Nick, letting it slide, knowing he’d hoard his doubt at least a little longer, rather than risk Howdy Duty’s ire this early in it, and hanging on to his career by a pubic hair.

“Okay, let’s go on,” said Hap.

Impelled by the force of the bullet, the cleric now plunged forward and smashed into the president, and the two went down in a terrible heap.

“Archbishop Roberto Lopez crashes into Flashlight, after spraying him with tissue and blood, but by this time the bullet has exited and smashed into the wood of the podium slat,” Hap continued to narrate, “where it will be recovered by our ballistic technicians, too damn mutilated for a ballistics signature reading. Still, one bullet, two men down, elapsed time four one-hundreths of a second. It’s a hell of a piece of shooting.”

The drama continued to unfold, now in real time. In seconds, Secret Service men of Alpha Security Team, pulling Uzis from God knows where, are surrounding Flashlight so that no other bullet may reach him. Mere anarchy is loosed around the podium, but the Alpha guys stay very calm and completely purposeful.

“Hey, these Alpha guys know how to operate,” said Hap.

“Too bad they’re such pricks,” came a jokester’s voice.

The drama then seemed to devolve into pulsating patterns of light and color. Evidently, a Secret Service Alpha guy pushed all the cameramen back and for just a moment the world went all to blur. When it came back, a small knot of men is gathered around Flashlight who is supine, but trying to struggle to his feet. Archbishop Roberto Lopez is almost in his lap, that head with its queerly deflated look, as if it were a balloon and not a skull. The Secret Service guys are dancing around; then a medic comes atop the podium, and they bend to let him in. A few seconds later the world dissolves; this time it’s under the torrents of air that the standby medical chopper radiates as it settles with lazy urgency out of the sky. The camera shifts to it as paramedics and stretcher teams race over to Flashlight and the Alpha team. Screams, shouts, confusion. It reminded Nick of a pickup game of basketball, all frenzy and nonsense.

And then he had it, what was weird about the shooting.

“Could we go back to the hit?” he asked.

“What are you, a ghoul?”

“Come on, Hap, let me see the hit.”

There was some grumbling but Hap rewound the tape, then punched PLAY, and the drama reinvented itself up there on the screen, the lurch of the old man, the sudden, stunning, boltlike arrival of the bullet, the sleet of bone and tissue, and Nick was thinking about his own shooting.

I overcompensated, he thought. I knew the bullet, traveling downward, would drop farther. That’s the effect of the angle. So I overcompensated, missed high, and hit Myra. Now this Swagger, he knows shooting like he knows his own two hands and the smell of his own sweat. He knows where the bullet will strike. That means the bullet drift is going to be vertical. He’ll hit high or low on a vertical range; if he’s shooting at the president’s armpit, if the bullet goes too high it hits the president in the neck or head; if it’s too low it goes into his ribs or hip.

But this shooting error was lateral. It was on the same damn level as the president’s armpit, for the man was kneeling…but it was a lateral error, an aiming error, which had nothing to do with the shot’s most difficult aspect, the play of the downward angle over the long eight hundred yards to the target. Could a gust of wind have just nudged it off target?

He remembered that March 1 had been an unusually calm day, with the wind under five miles per hour. It was possible but not probable.

It suddenly occurred to Nick that the shooting error made no sense at all. He would shoot over the president, he would shoot below the president; he would not miss to the right. Not this boy.

Nick swallowed. He’d arrived at a place he didn’t want to be: it could only be that Bob Lee Swagger was shooting for the archbishop all the way.

And then he realized what bad news this was for everybody: currently the only theory available to unify the events was that that mean-ass, sullen, pissed-off Dixie whiteboy Swagger was shooting the president. It made sense. It held together – but only if Swagger were shooting for Flashlight.

If Swagger wasn’t shooting for Flashlight…a dizzying realm of possibility opened up.

Nick had a weird moment here, as his whole life traveled its fucked-up way before him and he suddenly saw that he was about to diverge from the path.

Because he now knew Swagger was innocent, and that the reason he saw compassion in the sniper’s eyes as he stood above him with the big Smith was because the sniper was still, by his own lights, a moral man, an honorable man – a man who did not shoot the innocent and Nick, stupid and bumbling, had been of the innocent.

“Nick?”

It was Howdy Duty.

“Nick, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to see me sometime today. All right?”

Oh, shit, thought Nick.

The cow was not frightened of Colonel Shreck.

Her eyes were placid and dull, though huge. There was something tenderly stupid in them.

The cow chewed her cud, occasionally scuffed one hoof in the straw, or bent her great, gentle head down to seize another bunch of hay from her bale.

“Shoot her,” said Colonel Shreck.

Hatcher kneeled, squinted, then found what he was looking for. He raised a 9mm Beretta 92 and shot the cow in the chest, hitting her square in a painted spot.

Dobbler winced at the report, even through the high-decibel soundproof earmuffs; and he thought he’d be sick, though he’d been feeling woozy since the event. He forced himself to look back at the animal. He’d never seen anything die, much less anything so huge and warm-blooded.

But the cow didn’t seem interested in dying. She’d twitched just once when the bullet drove through her and a tiny track of blood opened up from the black pucker of the entrance wound. But her head came back up, she continued to chew and to gaze at her audience benevolently.

“Of course she has one great advantage,” said Hatcher, rising. “She has no conceptual ability. She cannot understand what has just happened to her. Swagger, of course, saw the gun, and knew what happened. Thus his collapse and initial response to shock. But physiologically, that’s it. That’s the shot on Bob. Same range, same ammunition, same angle, through the center chest.”

Dobbler studied the animal. The animal appeared to study him back until he bored her. Then she lowered her head for another thatch of hay. He thought he would puke. He struggled to keep his focus, but could feel the sweat running down his face.

Dobbler watched as Shreck stared at the creature. The colonel seemed bent in some furious, one-pointed crusade to absorb all the life from the animal, his dark eyes gobbling up her destruction with no remorse whatsoever, only great curiosity. She paid him no attention.

“She’s hit and the bullet has gone down through her thoracic cavity and exited the other side,” said Thatcher. “But it’s not stopping her. It’s not even irritating her. This happens all too frequently. You may recall the famous ‘Miami Shootout’ of May 1987, where a creep named Michael Platt was hit ten times, once through the lungs, mostly with Winchester 9mm hollow-tips and kept firing long enough to kill two and wound five FBI agents.”

“I thought the point of a hollowpoint bullet,” said Colonel Shreck, “was to open up and rip the shit out of the tissue and organs.”

“It didn’t open,” said Hatcher. “If it had, he’d have never made it to the car, much less dumped that FBI agent. We know because Payne’s report says he saw blood on the back of the shirt. It had to go through without opening up.”

“Why didn’t it open up?” Shreck asked.

Finally, Hatcher answered. “In our research, we’ve found that most of the stopping problems with 9mm Silvertip came with first-generation ammunition. They first started manufacturing it in the mid-seventies. The real bad stopping problems took place then; subsequently they changed the circumference of the cavity and the composition of the copper sheathing the lead, and since then the results have been much better, up to about seventy-three percent one-shot kills. But Timmons had to draw his ammo from police sources. Otherwise, there’d be reason to suspect some kind of frame-up. And we think the police issue was an older lot, purchased back in 1982. But we had to go with police issue, because if he used an unauthorized load it led to very dangerous ground. We simply trusted him – or Payne, who insisted on doing the actual shooting – to place a mortal round. If he’d hit the heart, it wouldn’t have mattered. If it had opened up and he missed the heart, it wouldn’t have mattered. Unfortunately he missed the heart and it didn’t open up.”

“Shit,” said Shreck. “And why did Payne miss the heart?”

“You’d have to ask Payne, Colonel Shreck.”

“I did.”

“Bear in mind, sir,” said Hatcher, “that in the expanse of the chest, the heart is a fairly difficult target. It’s much smaller and to the right of where people think it is. I talked with him about anatomy, but in the dark, and the crisis of the second, he…”

Hatcher let the sentence end.

“You’re a doctor, Dr. Dobbler. What’s the medical prognosis?”

Dobbler cleared his throat. He’d researched this.

“Swagger could die of blood loss or infection. But it’s possible that the bullet just rushed through doing minor tissue damage and left him largely intact. If he was smart enough to stanch the bleeding right away – and clearly he was, having been wounded before – he’ll heal up and if he doesn’t get infected, he’ll be good as new in two weeks.”

Shreck looked as if he were going to laugh.

“Now,” said Hatcher, “let me just show you, by contrast, a later 9mm.”

“Of course,” said Shreck.

“This is a Federal 147-grain Hydra-Shok, with a post in the center of the cavity, to help expansion. I think you should see some dramatic results.”

Suddenly, Dobbler was nauseous. He didn’t want to watch the man shoot the animal and then talk about the weight of the bullet and the angle of the wound and the size of the temporary stretch cavity. It seemed obscene to him: it was killing, after all, not to any ends, not to purpose or point, but just to satisfy some arcane curiosity.

Dobbler looked away. Outside, through the barn door, he could see the rolling Virginia hills.

“Just a second,” said Shreck. “Dr. Dobbler, would you mind paying attention?”

Dobbler smiled and turned his face to watch. The bullet was fired. She kicked, an amazing burst of energy from so stolid an animal. Then her heavy head twitched once. Subtly, her lines changed as she shuddered, and her knees went as the bullet, a ragged nova of hot metal, ruptured her heart, and she surrendered. The great head slid forward and lay atilt, eyes blankly open. She was still in a dark and spreading pool of blood.

Dobbler smiled weakly, afraid he’d lose face in front of Shreck, but thought for just a second he was all right. Then he vomited all over his clothes.

But Shreck did not even notice. Instead he watched the animal die, then turned to Hatcher and said, “Now at least I know what to tell them.”

“Ahhh,” said Howdy Duty, regretfully. He looked up at Nick over half-specs, his face haggard with fatigue. He’d been working like the rest of them, eighteen on and six off, and was beginning to wear a bit thin. But he would be polite, Nick knew.

“Come on, sit down, Nick.”

Nick sat down. The gray light of the office turned Howdy Duty’s skin the color of old parchment; his eyes were lost behind the crescent specs. He had a slightly distracted air.

“Oh, Nick, what are we going to do with you?”

Nick didn’t know what to say. He’d always suspected that he didn’t prosper in the Bureau because he’d never been much at coming up with charming answers to rhetorical questions agents in charge tended to ask at awkward moments. So, as usual, Nick said nothing; he just parked his considerable bulk into the chair, breathing hard.

“Nick, tell me about the Charlie thing to begin with. The Secret Service is making all kinds of trouble. You know what an asshole that Mueller can be.”

“Well,” said Nick, swallowing as he began, “maybe I did screw up. But Jesus, Howard, there were over sixty names on the Charlie list, and they were way down in importance. The Secret Service guys themselves said that; they won’t admit it, but they made it seem like it was strictly business as usual. But I worked it real hard, Howard. What’s his name, Sloane, he told me himself I’d done a good job. I located most of them or accounted for them; I recommended three be moved up to Beta classification, and they didn’t like that one bit, because it meant they had to do more work.”

“But you did miss Bob Lee Swagger?”

“Not really. I picked him out, and made inquiries. I called Sheriff Tell in Polk County to find out if he’d had any recent troubles. He’d been sitting pretty, off by himself. They say the pattern with these guys is they begin to destabilize in the days before they make a hit. There was no sign of that. He didn’t fit any pattern and his sheriff vouched for him. Also, the only reason he was on the list was for that letter and the only reason the letter got him there was because it had four exclamation points. Four exclamation points! It seemed like a safe call to me. I can’t say I’d make it any different way now.”

“All right, Nick. I suppose you performed adequately. We can’t expect distinction twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Nick, I think I can save you from Secret Service, because they want some Bureau blood to let them off the hook. It was really their operation, and they got beaten.”

“They sure did.”

“But, I’ve talked to the director and we feel our position is strong. They could complain that we didn’t do a good job on the Charlies and we could complain that they were so poorly managed they couldn’t deal with the Charlies themselves. Mexican standoff, and I think they’ll back down. Now, Nick, I have to say, that arrest; it was badly bungled.”

“I know, Howard. I screwed up.”

“It looked so bad in the newspapers. And it looks bad inside the Bureau, too. We’re supposed to be able to handle situations like that.”

“I don’t know what to say, Howard. It was a desperate situation. Maybe I – I just don’t know, Howard.”

“Nick, you were in a desperate situation in 1986 in Tulsa and you mismanaged that, too.”

Nick was silent. Then, finally, he said, “Howard, I just want to be an FBI agent. That’s all I ever wanted.”

“Well, Nick…the director has left this call to me.”

Nick hated the fact that he was begging. But he tried to imagine a life without the one thing that mattered as much as his wife, which was the Bureau. He had to live a life without Myra now; but he couldn’t imagine one without the Bureau.

“Please don’t fire me, Howard. I know I haven’t been sharp lately. But I just lost my wife a few months ago…it just hasn’t been an easy time.”

“Nick, we need bodies on this thing. I’m going to suspend you without pay for a week, but it won’t go into effect for three months. Then I’m afraid it’ll have to.”

Nick nodded. It meant that within a month afterwards he’d be rotated back to the sticks and he’d never get out. It had taken him years to get to New Orleans. But it also meant, however provisionally, he’d be able to stay.

“I suppose I’ll be transferred then.”

“Nick, you know how it works. And I’m going to have to put a letter in your file. Like the other one.”

“Yes.”

“Nick, I don’t want to.”

“Okay, Howard.”

“I’m trying to cut you as much slack as I can.”

“Sure, I appreciate it,” Nick said.

Sure, I appreciate it! You prick, if you’d have kept your fucking trap shut six years ago, I’d have nailed that fuck right between the eyes and I’d be where you’re sitting and you’d be on your way back to Tulsa.

“You’re still in the Bureau, Nick.”

“I appreciate that, Howard.”

“But, Nick, no more mistakes. Do you understand. There can’t be another slipup.”

“There won’t be, Howard. I promise.”