Point of Impact

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Payne left before dawn, having booked a 10:30 A.M. flight from Richmond to Tucson by two. The whole thing struck him as pretty fucked up. Bob would probably be finished well before that time. What was the point? The woman was irrelevant by then. But he would not question Colonel Shreck.

As he drove off, the men of Panther Battalion were up and making ready for the day. Payne knew this part of the ritual, the preparation for battle. He’d done it himself perhaps a thousand times in the last twenty years. He could feel the tension in the soldiers and also their coarse energy and eagerness to get started. In the darkness, men cursed and jostled tightly, or laughed. Cigarettes glowed, a few men coughed, a few shivered.

But it secretly pleased him to be leaving. As no man ever had except the gook who got inside the wire with his rusted rifle and bayonet, Bob had scared him. He’d shot the fucker in the chest, seen the blood fly, watched him go down. And then he’d gotten up. He’d tracked them. He’d dusted two boys in the swamp. He was a major massacre waiting to happen. It frightened Payne, knowing that he was not capable of what Bob had done.

As the camp disappeared behind him, Payne discovered a sense of release. Let these tough kids go against Bob Lee Swagger. They’d get him, because they had no respect and did not know who he was or care what he had done. To them he was just another gringo. That was what it would take to finally get Bob Lee Swagger: stupidity and overwhelming firepower superiority.

But he knew Swagger would get more than a couple of them.

Bob awakened at around nine-thirty and showered slowly, taking his own sweet time. The men in the surveillance van kept the directional boom aimed on his room, and heard only the sounds of the shower, the easy noises of a man preparing to encounter a relatively benevolent world for the first time. There was no sense of urgency or despair, no track of fear.

He left the room at ten-fifteen, checked out of the motel, threw his bag into the trunk of the rental car, then moseyed into the Howard Johnson’s and had a nice breakfast. Two eggs, scrambled, three pieces of bacon, toast and jelly. He bought the Danville Courier, and read it at a leisurely pace. The directional boom, in the van discreetly parked two hundred yards away behind the Pizza Hut, stayed on him the whole time.

“Ma’am, could I have another cup of coffee?”

“Why, sure. Nice day.”

“Sure is.”

“Now let me think, did you take cream and sugar with that?”

“No, ma’am. Black is how I like it.”

It took him close to forty minutes to eat. Then he stepped out in the bright sun, a tall, powerful man in jeans and a denim workshirt with a corduroy sport jacket with pearl buttons, put on his sunglasses, and climbed in to be off.

“Bravo Six, this is Bravo Four, the package is on the way,” said the observation team leader into his radio. “The package is on the way.”

Sitting in the operations shack next to the Millersville Airport where four black-painted Huey helicopters waited, Shreck received the message grimly.

“General de Rujijo! Have your sergeants get the first four squads onloaded the slicks,” he said.

The Latino officer grinned, his white teeth glowing.

He turned, and barked in Spanish. Men began to deploy to their ships in seconds, heavily armed, faces blackened with paint, rifles at the high port, festooned in gaudy belts of ammunition for the heavy automatic weapons, black berets at a rakish tilt. With a shrieking whine, the choppers coughed to life and the rhythmic beating of their engines and the roar of the dust their rotors sucked from the earth became a part of the drama.

“It is a good day for a battle, I think,” said de Rujijo. “My men are very anxious. They will make me proud, I know. And now we have this thing finished.”

Shreck nodded, but said nothing. He looked at his watch.

It would take Bob about a half an hour to drive the last thirty miles to Skytop.

He picked up the phone and dialed Lon Scott.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Scott, he’s on his way. Half an hour.”

“All right.”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel fine. Are we set?”

“I guarantee it. The report says he’s expecting nothing except some old papers.”

“Good,” said Lon Scott. “I’m curious to meet him.”

“Don’t be curious, sir. Just help us kill him. When he comes in the door, you take your hand off the photocell; in two minutes we’ll have the first four squads, that’s twenty-four heavily armed men there. In ten minutes there’ll be more than 150 troopers ringing the hill. Don’t mess with him. Let him run clear.”

“Oh, I understand,” said Lon.

Headquarters had never been so deserted. Dobbler felt as if he were alone in the building. Nearly everyone else was so caught up in the drama they were either down there in North Carolina with Colonel Shreck and Panther Battalion or had gone home. Dobbler also had the odd sense that people were peeling off, slipping away to new lives. Rats deserting a ship, that sort of thing.

Dobbler was finished typing. He was afraid that in the excitement of finally getting Bob, his own contributions to the project would be overlooked. So he’d sat down and typed a long nine-page memo detailing, as modestly as possible, his own role in the Bob Lee Swagger episode. After all, it had been considerable – he had designed the mechanism by which Bob had been initially trapped, he had designed the mechanism by which Bob’s “second life” had been terminated, and he had found the woman to whom Bob turned.

He was doing so well here! It was wonderful! And now it was only a matter of waiting. He checked his watch, saw that it was mid-morning and knew even as he stood there that Bob had to be on his way into the trap.

He decided the report was too important to leave to RamDyne’s indifferent internal mail system. He walked through the deserted corridors and crossed into Shreck’s building. He tried his office door; it was locked. Damn!

“Dr. Dobbler?”

“What! Oh, you surprised me!”

It was one of the security guards.

“Uh, I have to leave this report in Colonel Shreck’s office. Do you have a master key?”

“Dr. Dobbler, he don’t like nobody in his office.”

“The colonel himself just called. He needs the report.”

Dobbler was amazed at his own assertiveness. He knew his confidence was growing but he hadn’t been this assertive since before the arrest. The man’s weak eyes blurred in confusion; he could not meet Dobbler’s authoritative glare. In seconds, the security man had yielded, opened the room, and allowed him in.

“I’ll wait out here till you leave,” the guard said.

“No, I’ll close up. I have to get some papers too.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man, in some confusion.

Dobbler went in. In a strange way, he didn’t dare turn on the light. He also felt strangely excited. He was violating Shreck’s space, albeit harmlessly, but the experience felt titillating.

But the room was as unimpressive as always. It seemed to have no personality whatsoever; the colonel kept his eccentricities, if he had any at all, under the tightest of discipline. There were no pictures on the walls, the desk was bare, there were no loose papers about. The place had the scrubbed, nearly antiseptic sense of the professional military to it; in the dim light, Dobbler could see the whorls the buffer left in the wax on the linoleum floor; those sweeping circles, catching and reflecting the light, were the only evidence of spontaneity in the place.

Dobbler set the report down on Shreck’s barren desk. The colonel could not miss it. It was time to leave, but he didn’t want the experience to end. He hadn’t felt this powerful in years. His eyes hooked on the old wall safe behind the colonel’s desk; he had a massive stab of curiosity and mischievousness. The safe was exactly the same as the one in his office, which he rarely bothered to lock. He wondered about the combination – could it be the same, too?

Looking around for just a second to make certain of his isolation, he walked to the safe, and spun the dial. He pulled. Nothing happened.

He laughed.

Of course not. How stupid.

He turned. And turned back, and gave the handle another tug.

It popped open.

The observation post was concealed on a hilltop a mile away from the entrance to Skytop. Young Eddie Nicoletta had drawn the duty because he’d been with Payne on the observation mission in Blue Eye and had eyeballed him through a scope. He was sitting in a hole about four feet deep and looking out a small viewer’s slot in some ersatz bushes just inside a ridge line. Before him was a Celestron 8, an eight-inch surveillance telescope, state of the art, forty-three pounds of Schmidt-Cassegrain optics that could be dialed up to 480×, which is where he had it now.

It was tiring peering through the aperture of the lens, which was seated at right angles to the tube itself, a huge fat wad of curved steel atop a squat tripod. Nickles’s head hurt and his neck ached.

The Celestron 8 was trained on the road running into the place called Skytop, and a bit of the ribbon of macadam of the two-lane highway that ran by it. Now and then a truck or a car would materialize out of the wobbling, foreshortened perspective, seem to assemble itself out of pure bolts of light, and purr through his range of focus. Jesus, a mile away and you could see faces! It was said you could read a newspaper at a hundred yards with one of these things and Nickles believed it.

But every once in a while, he just had to look up to keep from losing his mind. What he saw then was the half-mile dirt road up to the house itself, though he couldn’t see much of the rambling, one-story building beneath the trees. It was enough to tell that it was good-sized, the house of a man who was well off or better. Behind it was a swimming pool, some cement walkways to what appeared to be a shooting range (why cement? Nickles wondered) and beyond that, dominating the property, what they called Bone Hill.

Bone Hill was heavily forested about halfway up its three hundred feet or so of bulk, but then it gave way, as it steepened, to coarse grass and scrawny trees. Its top was bare except for the grass and a few stones strewn about.

That’s where he’ll go, Eddie Nickles told himself. When the first chopper arrives and the greasers with their combat gear come crashing out, that’s where he’ll go. He’ll go up. He’ll run up, and he’ll run and run and pretty soon there’ll be no place to go.

Nickles got to see it all happen. That pleased him.

“Bravo Four! Bravo Four, you there, goddammit?”

It was Shreck.

“Ah, sorry, Colonel. Yeah, I’m here, nothing much going on.”

“Keep your goddamn eyes open, Nicoletta. He ought to be here any minute now.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nickles.

He put his eye back to the eyepiece, and watched as a Coca-Cola truck lumbered down the road out of the bright nothingness. Then the road was quiet. Minutes passed.

He saw the roof first, emerging over a crest, just a flash. Then it was clear, heading down the road, just as they said, the red Chevy they’d been driving last night, with a single looming, steady silhouette cut off behind the glare of the windshield.

His tension growing, Nickles watched as the face assembled itself from flecks of light as the car moved into the focus zone, a pair of hard-set eyes, a taut jawline, a sense of steadiness.

At a mile away, Bob the Nailer still scared him.

“He’s here,” Nickles shrieked into the hands-free mike, forgetting all radio procedure. “Bob the Nailer’s here.”

Bob stopped at the turnoff to Skytop and got out of his car. He took a look around. What he saw was miles and miles of lush North Carolina landscape, rolling hills, a few rills of hard rock, a universe of green. It had been a hot, dry fall and although it was October, the leaves hadn’t begun to turn yet.

He took a deep breath as he looked around and his trained eyes probed and saw nothing. The sky was an intense blue, untainted with cloud. The sun was high. It seemed as if the day had stalled somehow, calm and guileless.

Bob took another deep breath, climbed back into his car and went down the road between a double line of swaying poplars to the house. He pulled up on the gravel patch that awaited visitors.

He went up the stairs and knocked on the door.

“It’s open,” came a call from deep inside. “Come on in, Agent Memphis.”

“Thanks,” said Bob, walking into the wide hall, and into a sunny beauty of a room lined on one wall with floor-to-ceiling books. The open sliding glass door at the rear gave way to a small jewel of a swimming pool – he could smell the chlorination in the air – and beyond he saw the slope of a large green hunk of hill.

“Mr. Albright?” he called.

What he heard next was an electric purring. Then a man in a motorized chair emerged.

“My name isn’t Memphis,” said Bob.

“I don’t believe it is. I believe it’s Bob Lee Swagger.”

Bob’s eyes beheld the man calmly. He saw the powerful shoulders, the long arms, and the deformed body, soft and twisted and mulched and locked in its chair; and the legs, spindly and bizarre.

“And I believe you’d be Lon Scott.”

“Yes, I am.”

Bob’s hand slipped back into his jeans; without hurry he had the.45 out, thumb snicking off the oversize safety. It was now cocked and unlocked, two pounds of trigger pressure away from the shot that would be the end of Lon Scott. But Scott was still, evidently unarmed.

“You won’t shoot me. No matter what we’ve done to you, I still don’t believe you’re the kind of man who could shoot a cripple in a chair.”

“Cripple? For a cripple, that was a right smart shot you hit in New Orleans, mister. You dropped that bishop at fifteen hundred yards.”

“It was fourteen fifty-one. I rebarreled the Black King to.318 and saboted one of the rounds you pumped into the bank in Maryland behind 59 grains of IMR-4895.”

Bob raised the pistol and put the front sight on the middle of Lon Scott’s swollen belly. He wondered if he shot whether pus would come out. It was like aiming at a tumor or a larva or something. He took about a half a pound out of the trigger.

But Scott didn’t scare. It was as if he really didn’t give a fuck if Bob pulled the trigger or not.

“It’s over. When I saw your face, I took my hand off the chair here and uncovered a photoelectric cell. That sent a signal. Even as we talk they’re on their way. Lots of them. Pulling that trigger doesn’t mean a thing. You want to take me hostage? Go ahead. They’ll shoot right through me into you.”

Bob put the pistol down.

He heard the roar of the helicopters. Outside, leaves began to shake under the pulsing of the rotors and vibrations filled the air as the birds swooped in to offload the first squads of killers. It reminded him of the ’Nam; the swift arrival of the choppers, the deployment of the men, the merciless closing in upon the prey. It was the classic air-assault tactic.

“Bob,” said Lon Scott, over the noise, “they’ll be here in seconds and once those Latino cowboys show up with their assault rifles, there’s no stopping them. Let me save you. Let me give you a new life. We’re the same man.”

Bob flicked the safety back on the Colt, slid it back into his jeans, then smiled.

“Don’t kid yourself, wormboy. I’m a soldier. You’re only a murderer. And because of what you’ve done, every man who ever loved a rifle is a suspect in his own house. I know who you are. And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Then he turned and raced out the door.

Dobbler looked inside the safe. Its contents were prosaic. He saw a handgun, some kind of automatic. There was a wad of bills, and a passport and driver’s license, both fake. The colonel had made plans for a fast getaway, prudent enough preparation for a man in his line of work.

And that was it. No family jewels, no dark secrets, nothing remotely incriminating. Dobbler was somewhat disappointed. He’d expected a bit more. He replaced the passport and the license, and felt his fingers bump against something. He withdrew it. It was only a black plastic videotape cassette, unmarked.

Dobbler stood in the darkened office. He could hear each tick and sigh in the building, but no human activity. He stared at the cassette, tempted, a bit afraid. He looked over and yes, the big Sony TV was still at the table on one side of the room, a VCR underneath it on the shelf.

He walked over and inserted the cassette.

His finger trembled as he pushed PLAY.

Bob dashed through the open door to the pool and saw three of them. They had just come around the side of the house at a hell-bent pace, safeties off, fingers cupping and tensing their Galil triggers. They saw him.

They were fast. The rifles came up…Bob fired three Silvertips in what seemed a burst but was really three aimed shots unleashed in three tenths of a second, the gun flicking from recoil to sight picture to recoil to sight picture at a speed too quick to measure. He killed two instantly with center-chest hits, dead before their knees gave and they toppled; the third, hit in the throat, began to bleed out spectacularly all over the cement. Then Bob, hardly having paused to fire, cleared the deck of the pool, fell into the deep underbrush and began to thrash his way toward the hill.

When he reached the incline, he paused just long enough to shuck his jacket, hit a fast combat reload on the Colt. He climbed through loblolly and stunted pines, clawing his way over ground cover and tufts of dried grass. The trees were not tall here, and now and then he’d run a dangerous trek over open ground. Behind him, he could hear the choppers ferrying in more troops. This was a big operation. They were throwing everything at him. Now and then a shot would come arching toward him, and one hit close by, lofting a cloud of dust and fragments. He winced but kept climbing.

At one point, he paused for a quick recon. They were searching for him with binoculars but he knew they would wait until they had all the men there, could ring the damned thing, before they’d move up the hill in coordinated maneuver. That’s how he’d do it, at any rate, and he knew these cowboys were pros. He looked and thought he could see movement, the troops assembling into their squads under the cover of the trees. The house was visible below and Lon Scott in his electric wheelchair was talking to somebody in jungle fatigues by the pool. They were pointing up the hill. Bob could not make out the other man’s face. But he guessed he knew who it was.

He turned. The hill was steep here and he was almost out of cover. Then there was a last hundred feet up the bare ground to the summit. He slid the Colt back into the holster. The summit was a bare knob standing out against that blue, pure sky. Sweat raced down his face into his eyes; he blinked.

Now he had to move. This was the worst part, the open part. Would they have snipers? Would they have a guy with a good rifle, a steady hand, who could down a running man at six hundred feet? Time to find out.

Bob touched the green grass and took a deep breath and began the last pull over the bare ground to the hilltop, thinking, Lots of men have died on hilltops.

“There he goes,” said Lon, whose eyesight, like Bob’s, was still extraordinary.

Shreck picked him up in the next second, a man running desperately up the scruffy hilltop. He brought the binoculars to bear and through their magnifying lenses saw a tall angular figure racing agilely up the last few feet to the top of the hill.

“I could have hit him,” said Lon.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Shreck. “He’s finished now. It’s all over now.”

A few shots rang out from lower down the hill as various Panther Battalion troopers, having a view of Bob, threw their rifles to their shoulders and squeezed off rounds. The bullets struck near him and at one point they thought they saw him falter, but he regathered his strength and launched himself over the edge, out of sight.

“General de Rujijo!” Shreck barked.

De Rujijo, who had been standing next to his RTO and two junior officers, came over smartly.

“What’s your situation?”

“Colonel, we have all one hundred twenty men on the ground now. I’m only waiting for a confirmation from my second platoon, on the other side of the objective, that they are in position. Then I’ll move my assault troops up in two elements, and in a few minutes I’ll bring enfilading fire to bear, move my final assault team up, and bring you this man’s head.”

“I just want his corpse,” said Shreck.

He turned back to Scott.

“We’ve got his ass now.”

“I wonder what he’s thinking about,” said Scott. “It would be very interesting to know what such a man thinks about at such a moment.”

Shreck said, “I was once on a hill waiting to die. You don’t think about much. You think about how you wish you could get another day, that’s all. But this son of a bitch is probably thinking about how many of us he can take out before we nail him. Well, I have one last thing for him to think about.”

General de Rujijo was suddenly waving at him.

“Colonel Shreck, the ring is complete. Shall we move out?”

“One second,” said Shreck. He turned to Scott. “I want to send this bastard to hell knowing all the bad news.”

“Colonel Shreck,” said Scott. “You shouldn’t let it get personal. Hugh wouldn’t want it to become personal.”

“Fuck Hugh,” said Shreck, “it’s always personal.”

He raised the bullhorn.

Bob lay atop the hill. He was extremely winded. Below, about four hundred yards or so, he could see the house, Scott in his chair and some officers and several junior officers standing around the pool. Men moved through the trees below.

Suddenly, there came a voice vibrating through the air.

“Bob Lee Swagger. Bob Lee Swagger. You know who I am. Swagger, I wanted you to know before I send the troops up to get you that we found your woman in Ajo, Arizona.”

Shit, Bob thought.

“I sent Payne. Payne will kill her. She may be already dead.”

Swagger sat back from the rocks.

He heard whistles as the troops began to move out.

Payne had no trouble at all. It went so easily, the flight to Tucson, the rental car, the hour or so drive to Ajo. He found the trailer without difficulty. He parked, and went up to the door and knocked.

When she answered he said, “Nurse Fenn?”

“Yes?” She was the kind of woman that Payne had never had. He’d had whores all the world over, listless women with shriveled tits, or young and stupid and poor and desperate. Having sex with them was nothing. It was like doing yourself and in time Payne lost interest in either, unless he was drunk.

This one was classy, somehow. It enraged him that Bob had once had such a fine woman and he’d had nothing like her.

“Aren’t you the one who was with him?” he asked.

“I’m not sure I – ”

“You know, him. Bob Lee Swagger. Tried to kill the president in New Orleans.”

Her face lost its color; she was not a liar.

“I – Are you with the police?”

“No such fuckin’ luck, lady,” he said, and pulled out the Remington cut-down as he stepped inside. Standing, he felt his force overpower her. He advanced, driving her to the wall, and stood against her, squashing her, the huge 12-gauge muzzle against the flesh of her cheek.

“What is – ”

“Just shut up and listen. Your goddamned boyfriend is alive, in case you don’t know, but now he’s dead, I mean really dead. Now you just sit down and cool it, or goddammit, I’ll kill you myself. Just shut your mouth and do what I tell you.”

“I don’t – ”

“Shut up. Now, we’re gonna hang tight for a time. Don’t you try nothing. Believe me, I ain’t like any guy you ever met, and if I have to, I will shoot you in the head and walk away from it without looking back.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Swagger can’t help you now,” he said. “Some boys got him on a fuckin’ hilltop and they ain’t got no mercy in their hearts.”

She looked him in the eyes. Then she said, “He’s been on hilltops before, you fool. Don’t you understand it yet? He loves hilltops. It’s where he belongs.”

The images were grainy, hard to make out. Soldiers, burning huts, people running every which way, all of it caught in the jumpy, ill-framed haste of the inexperienced cameraman.

Dobbler swallowed.

Then he saw Colonel Shreck and Jack Payne and a third man, a Latino officer, in a black beret with mirror sunglasses. All wore exotic camouflage uniforms and were heavily armed.

They were conferring over a map.

Dobbler hit FAST FORWARD.

The images hurtled by at warp-speed, made ridiculous, like vaudeville. The soldiers were burning the huts and it looked like the pictures he’d seen taken in the Ukraine in 1943, where the SS men had burned the villages as they retreated. But it was so different, because these soldiers were young and strong and having so much fun.

As the tape rushed along, the troops left the village and seemed to head down a slope. The camera panned and he could see what had drawn them. The village people had escaped to the water. They stood in the torrent of the river, but were blocked at both ends by small knots of soldiers with machine guns. They stood, shivering in the water. He could see that they were mostly women and children.

Dobbler watched as the hard young men walked to the water’s edge. His finger went off FAST FORWARD.

In real time, he saw Shreck and the powerful Latino officer in discussion.

He heard Shreck say, “Tell them to get it over with. Then let’s chopper the fuck out of here. No rapes. Just finish the job and let’s evac the hell out of here, General.”

The general gave an order and the camera shifted back to the water.

“No,” Dobbler screamed in the office, “no!”

But it did no good.

The machine gun bullets from Los Gatos Negros tore into the people in the water, kicking up foam and blood, knocking them down.

“No,” Dobbler repeated over and over, “no, no, no.”

Bob heard a voice.

“I didn’t think you were going to make it up that damn hill, old man,” Nick Memphis said.

Bob swiveled on his belly and saw him slithering toward him.

“Pork, I have a spry step or two left in these old bones,” said Swagger. “Now where’s my – ”

Memphis, in his black FBI SWAT uniform with the Mini-14 slung over his back, pushed a long canvas satchel over at Bob. Swagger unzipped it, reached in, then with a flick of the wrist sent the guncase scuttling through the dust as he unsheathed the Remington 700V with its Leupold 12× scope.

His finger snicked off the safety as he drew the rifle to him, knowing it contained five M852 7.62mm match cartridges, each sporting a 168-grain Sierra boattailed hollowpoint.

“Time to hunt,” he said.