Point of Impact

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Dr. Dobbler’s fingers were black with newsprint. He sat alone in his office late at night, turning the pages, concentrating. He was surrounded by piles of magazines, some slick and gaudy, some amazingly primitive. But he had, after much investigation, settled on this document as his road map to Bob Lee Swagger.

It was cheaply printed, on newsprint, and its ink soaked into his fingertips. The words were often semiliterate, almost always utilitarian, the type packed together inelegantly, without reference to any modern theory of layout, as if the men responsible were just trying to crush as much information in as possible, the pictures often murky and sometimes indecipherable. It could have come from a different universe.

Dobbler turned one of the flimsy pages, feeling as if he were sinking deeper and deeper into strangeness.

Tokarev Military TU-90. Free Ammo. $119 each.

Banger’s Distribution, America’s Best Colt Distributor, Offers You the Colt Gold Cup Ten – $669.99 each/2 or more $649.99 ea.

Subscribe Now to Machine Gun News – Special Introductory Price.

Paragon Makes It Easy to Buy Ammo.

Maryland/Howard County Weapons Fair, November 10-11.

The Gun Cellar – Prices Are Lower in the Cellar.

Machine Gun Conversion Videos.

And on and on it went, for 195 pages. The publication was called The Shotgun News, though shotguns were only a small part of the news. If it shot or related to shooting or documented shooting, you could find it in The Shotgun News, the urtext of the subculture.

Dobbler was fascinated. Guns everywhere, of every shape and form and description, for every taste and wallet. They could be so cheap and so expensive, so demure and so awesome, so ridiculous and so sublime.

He wondered about the men who worshiped them with such ardency, whose lives were bounded by their complexities or liberated by their possibilities.

What was there to see in all this?

Well, passion for order for one thing. So much of gun culture was about parts, units, systems, things fitting together. There were whole institutions that existed merely to sell parts of obsolete weapons. So there was a puzzle aspect to it, a sense of bringing order to chaos.

Power? The damned things were so absolute in their meaning that yes, there had to be the lure of power. But beauty also. Some of them, he was stunned to discover, were strangely beautiful. He especially liked one called a Luger and another called a New Frontier single action.

And freedom, or at least the illusion of it, by the narrowest of definitions. To Dobbler, freedom was essentially intellectual, but he supposed that to someone in a more primal world, it was physical – freedom of movement, freedom from harassment, freedom from being messed around with. Outdoor freedom. And a man who holds a gun in his hand must feel it passionately. No government can rule you absolutely. Yours is always the last option.

And masculinity. Nothing soft and feminine about guns: they were too direct, too brutal. The phallic business so provocative to Freudians didn’t seem to him to be very helpful; if these guns were penises, their purchasers were too self-oblivious to know or care.

And then again: data. To him a gun was just a gun, but to some of these people it was obviously an endless font of information – a history, a set of specifications, an involvement with a company, usually a corporate entity, a connection to certain traditions, a whole hierarchy of meanings that yielded yet more meanings and had to be deciphered like some runic code. To shoot wasn’t enough: there was something almost Borgesian about the labyrinths the damned things conjured in the imagination.

The clock ticked away and the pages fled by and after a bit, he ceased looking at the display ads from the gun wholesale places, but instead, fascinated, looked to smaller fry: the columns and columns of classifieds, where more oblique needs were addressed. It was like The New York Review of Books personal ads, only for guns and their affiliated phenomena, not sex.

REMINTON 25, Rifle in mint. cond, 25-20, 99% original blue, mint bore, wood perfict, SN 26827, 100% unaltered, these little pumps are a joy, only $895

Pre-64, M70 220 SWIFT, Super grade, 98% overall, nice dark wood, factory jeweled bolt body and extractor, exc. bore, $1,595.

LUGER list and price guide, 200 + quality collectors Lugers and accessories for sale on each bi-monthly list. Send $1 for sample or $5 for year subscription.

MILITARY RIFLES OF JAPAN, 1989 Third Edition, $37. Postpaid! SASE for discriptive flyers. At your dealer or Fred Honeycutt, 6731 Pilgrim Way, Palm Frond Village, FLA 33411.

DISCOUNT GUN BOOKS: ALL SHIPPED FREE. Great New Book, Winchester, An American Legend, Wilson, $58.50. Colt Encyclopedia II, Cochran, $58.50. Discount Gun Books, P.O. Box 762, Nescopeck, PA 18635.

It was somewhere in here, lost amid the lists of old guns, new books and reloading components and magazines for pistols that hadn’t been manufactured since World War I that something began to tick in his mind.

They hid deep in the timber, after disappearing down many remote lumber roads. It was a small, one-room hunting cabin, built years ago, a rustic place of logs and wooden roof. Bob swiftly shot three squirrels with a Mini-14, then set about to skin them for the stewpot.

“Is there anything I should be doing?” asked Nick.

“Just don’t get in the way,” said Bob.

“Now I think we should – ”

“Memphis, don’t explain anything to me. All right?”

Nick, fuming and pissed at himself and at Bob, had never known anybody so used to silence and so uninterested in conversation, so hidden behind an impassive face. But it wasn’t the impassivity of relaxation – that was a complete illusion, Nick now saw, like some kind of mask to keep the world away while its owner shrewdly calculated moves two jumps down the line.

“Where are we?” asked Nick.

“Ouachitas,” said Bob. “Nobody’s going to find us here, unless we want them to.”

“Ah,” said Nick. “Um, what are your thoughts on what we do next?”

Bob just went on skinning the squirrels.

“I haven’t figured yet.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” said Nick.

“Uh-oh,” said Bob.

“I still think the damned key is Annex B. Now, where is Annex B? Well, it’s got to be in Washington. In fact, everything’s in Washington. I think that’s where we ought to go. We can do some nosing around, maybe get a line on it. Then…”

He had nothing to say after the then.

“Now, don’t you think they might figure that out?” Bob asked.

“Well…” said Nick.

“One thing I know. In a war, you don’t go where they expect you. That earns you a body bag.”

“Well, then…what?”

“We lay up here a few more days, till the buzz dies down. We both need sleep; I’ll kill a deer tomorrow so we’ll eat good. Then I’ll figure something.”

“Look, I have to tell you as a professional criminal investigator of twelve years’ experience, we just aren’t – ”

“Young Mr. Pork Memphis, I am not a fancy government man. I only studied at the University of Vietnam. I don’t know anything about investigating anything. But I do know the key to this damn thing is a rare rifle that has been used at least once in mortal circumstances. And I know its owner is one of the best shots in America and one of the great ballistic technicians, as well as having spent almost forty years in a wheelchair. And I have a funny feeling that he works for this RamDyne. That’s the only card I got, so it’s the card I’m going to play. Now let me think on it. Go for a walk or something. But don’t get lost. I don’t have time to go looking for you.”

Well, maybe I’ll do some thinking too, thought Nick, consigning himself to be the only one to press against the mysteries of Annex B.

Dr. Dobbler licked his lips nervously, swallowed a time or two, and then knocked on the door.

“Yes?”

“Colonel Shreck?”

“Yes, come in, Doctor.”

Dobbler stepped into Shreck’s office, to find Payne and the colonel bent in conversation.

“What is it, Doctor?”

“Ah, I have a – a plan.”

The colonel looked at Dobbler. Russell Isandhlwana used to look at him like that, more with pity than anything else. In some ways Russell and the colonel were the same man. They just took what they wanted. And Dobbler knew that he desperately wanted to please them both.

“All right,” said Shreck, waiting for more.

“Bob is too sharp and suspicious to be taken as we had hoped. He’s always watching. We must beat him on his strength, which is patience. We must put something before him so subtly that not a man in a thousand would notice it. But we must put it there and let him sniff at it and go away, sniff again and go away, reconnoiter and re-reconnoiter, until he has at last satisfied himself that the way is clear. We must nurse him in slowly, never being greedy, draw him in with utmost care and discipline, being as ready as he is to disengage if conditions do not favor us. We must be more patient. Then and only then – ”

Shreck was impatient.

“That’s wonderful. Now tell me how.”

“Yes sir,” said Dobbler. “All right. Here it is. Am I not certain that somewhere in the secret files of this organization there is access to a man who does the shooting? Really. There has to be a shooter. An excellent shooter. After all, somebody took that shot in New Orleans.”

Shreck thought about it, but didn’t commit himself. Then he said, “Go on.”

“This shooter, I guarantee you, would interest Bob. He would fascinate Bob. Bob is probably already theoretically aware of his existence and attempting to puzzle out a name for the man, and a location. And certainly Bob noted the rifle such a man used. After all, didn’t he use it in Maryland during the recruitment stage?”

“Yes.”

“My thought is that in the subtlest possible way, we put the shooter’s name before Bob.”

“And what way would that be?”

“There’s a publication called The Shotgun News that comes out three times a month. Thousands of custom or rare rifles are advertised through classified ads in each issue, as well as other items – reloading stuff, parts, surplus clothes, ammunition…and books. This was a surprise to me. But it’s true. These men who love guns, somehow are driven to record and document their love. They’ve created a whole other literature, a parallel literature. And just as mainstream culture is riven by ideological differences between left and right, so is gun culture, though it isn’t really left and right so much as traditionalist and progressive. Anyway, a common thread is guerrilla publishing – self-publishing, if you will. I was fascinated to see a book on Japanese military rifles being sold for thirty-seven dollars through the mail! Imagine that. Someone so fascinated by Japanese rifles that he goes to the trouble to write a book – a catalog, more, I suspect – anyway, he goes to all that trouble and then there are actually people out there mad enough to send thirty-seven dollars through the mail for – ”

“Get to the point, goddammit!”

“Yes, I’m sorry. Why not – a book? A self-published book on the history of that particular rifle Bob used in Maryland. Published by some obscure researcher-devotee in some small town. As advertised in a small item in The Shotgun News. Bob would see it. I guarantee you. And he would think, Hmmmmm. Here’s somebody who knows about this rifle and its background. Maybe in his researches, he came across a clue that will lead me to the next step. And so he would approach this obscure researcher-devotee. He will have to. And in that way we lure him to a remote place and – ”

“A mountaintop,” Payne spoke up for the first time. “You want to drive him up a mountain, so there’s a point where he can’t get any further. Hit him with a lot of men.”

“Yes. Drive him up, then hit him with a lot of men. More men than he can handle.”

“So where we going get a lot of new boys?” said Payne.

“Let me work on that,” said Shreck.

They were sitting outside the cabin well after dark. It was as if Bob had flown off into the ether. Nick realized he’d never quite known the meaning of the word concentration before; there was no concentration like the concentration of the sniper. Nick was afraid almost to speak to him.

Bob sat by the fire, simply staring into it. The fire crackled and blazed, sending small flares out into the night, its light playing across his taut, lean face. His eyes were steady, lost in the middle distance.

Meanwhile, in his solitude, Nick tried to zero on Annex B. How do you get at something deep in the FBI files, especially when you have been suspended by the Bureau and your only source into its computer system has been compromised. But he was convinced that if he could just find some orderly, logical methodology, it could be done. Perhaps some computer hacker could penetrate, some damned high school kid. They were getting into things all the time. Or maybe if he went to someone like Hap Fencl, laid all this out in a nice orderly fashion, maybe Hap would bypass the dreaded Howard D. Utey and go to even higher-ups and that way…but even as he was conjuring the bubble of this fantasy, it burst on him. Hap wasn’t as bad as Howard, but he was Howard in a way: old Bureau, inflexibly wedded to the ways of the bureaucracy, however individually decent completely unable to get his mind to consider violating its mandates. You couldn’t go to Hap unless you had Annex B already.

Nick snorted suddenly. That used to be me. Now look at me: camping in the woods, locked in a private war against a shadowy spook agency that was half official, half not. Annex B: that’s where the answers lay. He was sure of that. Annex B would give him the answer.

Somewhere in the dark an animal skittered and howled. The fire had burned low, and across from it, Bob still sat hunkered and remote, lost in his own head.

He wished he had Myra to talk to. She’d have an idea or at least be willing to hear him out. He missed her. Goddamn, he missed her a lot.

“Memphis?”

He looked over. Bob was staring at him harshly.

“Huh? Yeah?”

“Memphis, you willing to do some hard work? I mean hard, dirty, boring crap work? The kind nobody likes to do anymore? Can you give me a week of it, twelve, eighteen hours a day?”

Nick gulped. That was his specialty, his only talent. To lean against something not with great brainpower but with sheer dogged will, until he or it broke apart.

“Yeah, sure.”

Then Nick saw something he’d never seen, not at all, not in all their hours together, not in the aftermath of the swamp shooting, not in the long talks on RamDyne and the world they lived in.

In the firelight, Bob the Nailer smiled.

“Then I got him,” he said, his war eyes totally focused. “He’s mine. The boy who pulled the trigger. I own his ass.”

The martyred president sat in marble wisdom on his throne, surrounded by Doric pillars and the rubbery thumps of two hundred pairs of athletic shoes on the floor. Shouts and screams bounced off the cavernous arch of the dome. An eighth-grade class was visiting the Lincoln Memorial.

Any semblance of order had long since broken down, and there had never been a semblance of respect. The youngsters tore about.

“Barbarians,” said Hugh Meachum from around the stem of his pipe, amid a haze of smoke. “They have no sense of decorum at all, do they?”

The old man was miffed. Shreck said nothing.

“There should be a way to surgically remove and store children’s tongues as soon as they learn to speak,” said Hugh. “Then, when they’ve graduated from college and distinguished themselves in the workplace, they could file a petition to have their tongues reattached.”

“I don’t think that’s feasible, Mr. Meachum,” said Shreck.

“Dammit, Colonel, don’t humor me. I hate it when I am being humored. Now. You called this meeting. I take it the news is not good. People won’t be pleased, Colonel. I’m telling you frankly, they won’t be pleased. Now what is it?”

A teacher sped by, harassed and exhausted, in pursuit of a knot of seething kids.

“An end we thought was tied off,” said Shreck. “It just untied itself.”

“Meaning?” said Hugh, taking another deep draw from his pipe. The aroma of gin hung over him.

“Meaning that Bob Lee Swagger is not dead. He’s very much alive. And he’s hunting us. That means he’s hunting all of us.”

Hugh shook his head, reached into his pocket and came out with a flask.

“Drink, Colonel?”

“No, sir.”

Hugh took a quick tot. It seemed to do him some good.

“All right. You must find him and kill him. Surely you understand that?”

“We’ve got a plan. It’s clever, it looks promising.”

“Yes, yes.”

“But I have two problems.”

“Only two?”

“One is easy. The other…”

He let it trail off.

“All right. Number One?”

“Number One is manpower. I don’t want to take any chances. I want a lot of men; he can kill twenty or fifty and I want fifty more there to take him down. I can’t recruit anew; there isn’t enough time.”

“God, Colonel, you can’t expect us to provide you with men. Good heavens, the risk is – ”

“No, no. I have men. They’re just not here. I need approval at a high level to fly a Hercules in from down south, and land without Customs interference. That can be arranged, can’t it? Surely your associates can prevail on something so minor. They’ll fly in, do the job, and fly out. They’ll be in-country for no more than a week, I swear. No one will see them.”

Hugh considered.

“I suppose it could be arranged. And who are you bringing in, Colonel Shreck?”

“I need good, hard men, men who’ve been in battle, Mr. Meachum. The only place I can get men of that quality fast enough and in sufficient quantity is from El Salvador.”

Hugh looked at him.

“That’s right,” said Shreck. “I’m bringing in the counterinsurgency company from Panther Battalion, the one we trained. It’s their mess we’re still cleaning up. Let them go up the mountain after Bob Lee Swagger.”

“God,” said Meachum. “All right. I suppose it can be arranged. You’ll get me the details at the right time. And what’s Number Two?”

Shreck paused, swallowed. This was the one he didn’t like. He knew he sailed into dangerous waters here.

“Go on, go on,” said Hugh, impatiently.

“My people never saw him,” said Shreck. “We have no idea who he is or what he did. We only know that he can shoot better than any man on this earth. And we know he isn’t mobile, because he had to work from Bob’s report and couldn’t handle it himself. And we had the sense that he was once famous, in a way, or at least public. So there has to be history there. And we examined his rifle. We know that it was used to win championships.”

Hugh’s eyes flashed over at Shreck.

“Among other things it was used for,” he said. “The security was important, indeed crucial. There are things you don’t need to know. I told you I would handle that part of it. That it didn’t involve you or your people. Didn’t I? Now what on earth can this be about, Colonel?”

“Our plan needs bait. This Swagger is a difficult antagonist, but he has weaknesses. He had a weakness for a Soviet sniper he thought shot and killed his best friend. My staff psychiatrist, Dobbler, put that together; and it worked, Mr. Meachum. It got us Swagger on a platter. But we couldn’t keep him there.”

“Obviously.”

“Now Dobbler thinks that Swagger will have somehow sensed the other shooter. And will find him as provocative as he found the Russian. I want to put him before Swagger. It needn’t be complicated, but it must be authentic. I want a sense of him, I want his cooperation.”

“As bait?”

“Yes. Well, not physically. But we’ll need name, history, background, accomplishments, that sort of – ”

“Well, for your information, he and I go way back. We went to school together, in fact. His life has been…remarkable. Colonel, his identity is the one secret I hold most precious.”

“If we don’t get Swagger, he’ll blow us away, Mr. Meachum.”

Hugh considered.

“I’ll have to ask him,” he said. “I couldn’t think of doing it without his agreement.”