Point of Impact

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

When he wasn’t shooting, Lon was studying.

He began with rote memory; he divided the map into one foot squares and attempted to commit each to the files deep in his brain. He worked everything out, slowly, one step at a time, with plodding thoroughness. He sat there in the field headquarters hut in Virginia in his wheelchair and just stared and stared at the miniaturized plastic mountain range spread out on the table before him, rocking back and forth on the fulcrum of his belly.

After memorizing the material so perfectly that he could see it in his dreams, he began to look for firing lines. He needed a certain distance, height, a good vantage point, the light behind him, no cross breezes, plenty of camouflage. One by one, he tested sites against his cluster of requirements, finding and discarding possibilities.

When he worked, no emotion showed on his face. It was a wintry Yankee face, iron as New England, the face of a man who knew death because he was himself mostly corpse.

Finally, days into the study, he beckoned to Colonel Shreck.

“Here,” he said. “I found it.”

His finger touched a valley deep in the vastness of the Ouachitas, far, far from the town of Blue Eye.

Shreck bent to read the inscription where the blunt finger marked it.

HARD BARGAIN VALLEY, it said.

Dobbler was astounded at how banal Bob found him. He had presumed, with no small amount of vanity, that Bob would find him fascinating, would ply him with questions, would in some way admire him.

Using Bob as others had used him, Dobbler had unburdened himself in one epic purge, like a mega-couch-session, letting it all pour out, his sins, his fears, his weaknesses, his guilts. He even blubbered as he confessed, while secretly admiring his own performance.

But Bob had just looked at him all squinty-eyed.

“What do you want?” Dobbler demanded when he was done. “Tell me, and I’ll give it to you.”

Bob regarded him without much interest.

“Don’t you trust me?” Dobbler wanted to know.

“It doesn’t matter a lot.”

“Why don’t you ask me more questions?”

“You’ve talked enough. You’ve talked too much.”

“Don’t you want to know how Shreck’s mind works? About the relationship between him and Payne? Don’t you want – ”

“Can you tell me how to kill him?”

“Uh – no.”

“Then you don’t know a thing that interests me.”

“But there’s so much more – ”

“You think what you told me is so important. But it doesn’t matter a spoon of grease to me, unless it can give me an advantage in a week or so. Meanwhile, you save it for Memphis; he’ll listen to you. I just want you to stay here and don’t wander off, you hear? You’re just another problem I have to solve.”

That was the beginning. Then Bob went out with his rifle for several hours, leaving Dobbler cabin-bound. Bob didn’t have to tell him that to wander off was to die in these remote regions.

In the cabin, Dobbler was always cold. He shivered from dawn till dusk, threw wood on the fire – “If you don’t stop using up that goddamn wood, I’m going to make you chop it your own damn self,” Bob had said testily – and sat there, sinking into misery, unmoved by the showy blaze of autumn that was exploding like napalm bursts all around. He hated the filth of it also, the lack of a toilet and toilet paper, the same socks and underwear day in and day out. He hated his own smell and wondered why he just got dirtier and Bob somehow seemed always immaculate.

Then one night, late, the door burst open.

Dobbler bolted up in sheer terror, sure they’d been discovered by one of the colonel’s raiding parties. But it was a large, angry young man with a thatch of blond hair and a rumpled business suit who seemed to be wearing four guns under his coat. This would be Memphis, the doctor surmised, and indeed it was. He smiled, anticipating someone more in his world than Bob.

“Who’s this sorry sack of shit?” Nick wanted to know.

“Says he’s one of Shreck’s men. He’s come over to our side because he didn’t realize these boys were Nazis. He has a tape over there with the massacre on it.”

“Who the hell are you, mister? Are you working for Shreck?”

“My name is David Dobbler. I’m a graduate of Brandeis University and Harvard Medical School. I’m a practicing psychiatrist – although some years ago the board removed my certification.”

“He was the smart boy who looked at me like a bug on a pin back in Maryland, Pork.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“As I told Mr. Swagger, I recently discovered that the acts of RamDyne were not, as I had been informed, in the national interest but rather the adventurings of a rogue unit. Naturally, I felt – ”

“That’s all shit, mister,” said Memphis, who had the policeman’s gift for locating weaknesses swiftly and exploiting them greedily. “You must have found something out that you thought Shreck would kill you over. And he probably would.”

“Yes, he would. I have – evidence. Of a massacre.”

“Evidence,” snorted Nick. “The world is full of evidence.”

“Visual evidence. On tape.”

Bob pointed to the cassette, which lay haphazardly on the mantel.

“He says they filmed it.”

“Terrible things,” Dobbler said. “Women, children, in the water. The machine guns, the laughing soldiers, the commanders. The Americans.”

“You have this Shreck? On tape?” Nick said, astounded.

“Yes. And little Jack Payne as well. Giving the orders, guiding a Salvadoran general. It’s all – ”

Nick turned to Bob.

“Jesus, just maybe that would do it. It would certainly suggest a motive for killing the archbishop, and with a motive we could get the investigation reopened and other things might come out.”

Bob thought on this for a second.

Then he said, “Hear him out. See what he’s got. I’m getting out of here for a time. You two geniuses of education jawing away like piglets in the slop could give me a serious pain in the eyes.”

It took time but Nick and Dobbler, fierce adversaries at first, soon enough found their common ground. Bob himself disappeared with his rifle and as the two of them were talking there came the far-off sound of shots. When he returned, he regarded them without enthusiasm. Nick rose and came at him.

“Now what have you got cooked up, Memphis?” Bob asked.

“It’s all here,” Nick finally said. “With what he’s got and what I’ve got, we can put them away. We can clear you.”

But Bob just went to the cabinet where he stored his cleaning rod and equipment, and began the laborious, greasy job of scrubbing down the bore of the rifle.

In his remoteness, it wasn’t so much that he offered a counterargument, but that he communicated his displeasure by his stoicism and the hard look on his face. Nick pressed on, bringing a trophy out for all to see.

“Annex B. This is it.” He lifted the green bag of documents he’d found under the cab seat in New Orleans. “It turns out that Annex B is simply the Bureau abstract of the Agency file on its contract outfit, RamDyne, except that all the names and dates and pertinent memoranda are included. The facts are what we knew from the Bureau file itself. It was started in 1962, right after Bay of Pigs. Who started it? My bet is that it was founded by somebody who was formerly with CIA who was actively involved in planning the invasion, but who got the ax when the invasion failed. Does that add up?”

Dobbler said, “Yes. Bay of Pigs was weakness, failure, lack of nerve. They hated weakness.”

“Of course,” said Nick.

“Neurotically. And I can see how to them the Bay of Pigs was the beginning of American weakness – of committing to something, then changing your mind, beginning to equivocate, beginning to undercut, and finally dooming your operation to failure by your own doubts. RamDyne was about following through. About seeing the course.”

“The name even comes from Bay of Pigs,” said Nick. “RamDyne, large R, large D: it has no meaning except R and D, which a guy I used to know said computed out in Army lingo, sixty-two-style, to Romeo Dog, which was the call sign for the Second Battalion of Twenty-twenty-six Brigade at Red Beach, the force that got cut off, chopped up and captured. So calling it RamDyne, maybe that’s somebody’s way of commemorating the past and setting course for the future. That sound right to you, doc?”

“They were zealots,” Dobbler said. “They were true believers. They had a sense of building from the ruins, like Hitler, I suppose. It guided them. To God knows what.”

Bob just sat there, listening to the pitch, running the rod, with its bright crown of bronze bristle and its dank lubrication of Shooter’s Choice, through the bore guide and up and down the rifle barrel.

“Bob, we can put them away. In a jail. There can be a happy ending. There can be justice.”

“He’s right, Mr. Swagger. Terrible wrongs were done. But the world can be restored to order. And some of us in this room – there’s a provisional salvation for us, too. You can be at peace.”

Bob looked at them harshly.

“It’s just words,” he said. “In Vietnam we had a saying. ‘Don’t mean a thing.’ That’s what this is. It don’t mean a thing.”

He put the rod down, removed the Delrin bore guide from the action, and began to scrub at the insides of the chamber and the receiver with a blackened toothbrush, giving the weapon his full attention.

“It’s all here!” Nick exploded. “Or most of it. I don’t quite know what mission first got them together in the early sixties. That’s lost to history. And the early stuff is mundane, when they worked for the Agency as a cover organization for shipping illegal cargos to various hot spots in the world. It gets interesting in sixty-nine when this nutcase Shreck was recruited after the Army sacked him, with the mission of building an operational and training arm. He seems to have created a kind of Green-Beret-for-Hire unit. These boys saw some action, no shit. Africa in the early seventies. Lots of time in the Mideast in the late seventies and eighties, and, lately, lots of time in Central America. Whenever some tin-pot country had a job that needed doing but not the capacity, RamDyne could field an operations nasty-ass team. But never so nasty as with Panther Battalion on the Sampul River last year. They talk about that much, Doctor?”

“Nothing. They had perfect professional discipline. I didn’t know until I saw the tape. And the job on the bishop – they said he was a secret guerrilla and that he was working to sabotage the peace process. He had to be stopped so that peace could be achieved. He was an enemy of peace.”

Nick leaned toward Bob.

“This is the key part. Two hundred civilians, most of them women and kids, all wiped out. But it wasn’t a mistake. That’s the secret of the Sampul River. It’s what this thing has always been about. They did it on purpose.”

He had Bob’s attention now.

“Here’s the killer,” Nick said. “Here’s the only thing in Annex B that’s worth a damn. It’s what puts Shreck, Payne, and all the RamDyne yo-yos in the chamber when they drop the little pill.”

He handed it over to the doctor.

“It’s a note from Shreck to – name obliterated, notice how the big guys protect themselves – dated 2 May ’91, sent through U.S. diplomatic pouch from the embassy in El Salvador. Read it to us, Doctor.”

Dobbler cleared his throat.

Eyes Only: xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Washington, D.C.

Re: Panther Bn. training operations, Ocalupo, Salvador.

General de Rujijo agrees that punitive measures must be taken against the peasant population but finds that his soldiers, drawn from the same population, are reluctant on the scale we have conceptualized. My training cadre has isolated two platoons of Panther Battalion and we seem to be making real progress in bringing them to the proper level of willingness. Will be moving onto Sampul River district in June and commencing counterinsurgency ops that area. Anticipate sanitation program to commence that date.

Signed,

Raymond F. Shreck

There was a moment of silence.

“You see,” said Nick, “some genius in an office somewhere wants to get the guerrillas to the peace talks. But there’s no pressure on them. Nothing’s happening. They’ve made some kind of deal with the rural population. So he dreams up this idea: send in some crack troops, line up the peasants and blow ’em away. It was a massacre ordered up out of a catalogue. Atrocity, one each, OD, Summer Issue, Number 5554442. Murder-R-Us. The point being to scare the peasants so fucking bad they’ll never help the guerrillas again. The guerrillas have to come in and make powwow. And here’s the worst part: it worked. He’s probably even proud of himself. He did the hard thing. He made the world a better place, and it only cost two hundred or so women and kids. That’s RamDyne, isn’t it, Doctor? I mean, that’s classic RamDyne.”

“The hard thing,” said Dobbler. “Yes, they could have done that. Yes, that’s what the tape shows.”

“Anyway,” said Nick, “with the tape and Annex B, Shreck’s dead. The whole fucking program is blown out of the water. And anybody who sailed on the ship – that includes the Bureau’s Lancer Committee, who bought the National Interest bullshit hook, line and sinker – goes down with her. Down to the bottom.”

Bob just nodded grimly.

“There’s only one problem,” said Nick. “This file was sent to the general prior to the operation against the archbishop. It was meant to keep him from going hog-wild. And boy, the stink it’s going to make when it gets out. Man, it’ll make Watergate and Iran-Contra look like tea parties. But maybe it’ll get you off the hook. And maybe it won’t.”

Bob was done with the action. He took an aerosol can of Gun Scrubber and began to blow compressed-air-driven solvent into the trigger mechanism with a sharp, wet hiss.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Bob.

“Here’s the plan,” said Shreck. “Very simple. It’s how we bring Bob into Scott’s kill zone. Scott says he can deliver the one-shot kill at ranges no man, not even Bob, can guarantee. He’ll take it at between fifteen hundred and seventeen hundred yards. A mile, perhaps. He’s operating at the very edge of the envelope, where not even Bob has been before. And that’s our advantage. This is how we do it.”

Payne leaned forward to listen.

“Scott goes in independently about a day in advance of our arrival. He’ll never hit Blue Eye, so nobody will see him or even know he’s there, and no one will believe that a man with his infirmity could penetrate so deep in the wilderness. He’ll go in by ’chute, a HALO job, high altitude, low opening, the night before, landing in Hard Bargain Valley. Nicoletta goes in with him and we’ll drop an ATV. Nicoletta will be his legs and get him up to the ridge and dig him a spider hole.

“Meanwhile, our end of the operation takes the form of a barter. We have the girl. Bob has the cassette. The woman will mean more to him than the cassette to us. We make contact with him, just as he said, in Blue Eye. We’ll offer him the woman for the cassette.”

Payne wanted the woman, too.

“We’ll offer him the woman and a fresh start,” the colonel continued. “We’ll tell him that we can set it up so that he’s no longer a marked man. He can have his life back, he can have the woman. He’ll seem to accept, but of course it’ll be a lie. He’ll make the exchange, then count on his skills to double around and kill us from afar. But he can’t do it until the woman is safe. That’s the key. We have to preempt him.”

“How do we set up a swap?” Payne asked.

“We tell him that we’re worried about his ability to pick us off at long range. We can’t give him that opportunity. We tell him that at 1000 hours on November third, we’ll fire a flare in the sky, a red flare. He makes a compass fix on it and has one hour to make it to the site. When he’s there, he finds a flare pistol. He fires an answering flare so we know he’s in position. We fire another answering flare. Again he has an hour to reach the spot. Again he finds a flare, and lets us know he’s arrived. In that way we bounce him through the mountains. He never has time to get set up because he’s got to stay on the move to get to the site so that he can fire the pistol so that we fire our flare pistol. We maneuver him into Hard Bargain Valley. He should be exhausted and desperate. In the middle of the valley we wait for him. He’ll feel safe there, because the closest shooting range is well over fifteen hundred yards, and he knows nobody can hit at that range. He can’t hit at that range. Plus, how could we get poor old crippled Lon in to even attempt such a thing? At one hundred yards distance, he sends over Memphis with the cassette, we send over you with the woman. When I see the cassette is all right, I simply press a button on my watch that emits a high pitch of noise that Lon’s radio can pick up. Hearing the signal, Lon takes Bob down from fifteen hundred yards; you and I shoot Memphis. It’s over.”

“The woman?”

“Payne, that’s a stupid question.”

“Yeah,” said Payne.

Nick looked at him for just a moment; the way he processed information somehow got fouled up and then he realized that indeed Bob had said what Bob had said.

“It doesn’t matter?” he exploded. “Are you kidding? It does matter. You’re innocent! This whole thing has been about your innocence! Not because it’s you but because that’s how the system works: the innocent go free, the guilty go to jail. That’s America. That’s what’s at stake – ”

Bob put down the cleaning implements.

“Pork, this here thing isn’t about getting me off a hook. It’s about something else. I got a woman who did me good who is now Payne’s playtoy. I got a dog that stuck by me when no one else would and ended up in the ground. I got a country that thinks anybody who fought in Vietnam is some kind of crazy sniper who shoots at the president and any man who owns a gun is a crazy man. Those are debts that have to be paid first off. And then there’s the goddamn tape and that letter. I don’t want that goddamn thing playing on the TV like a movie, and all those reporters getting rich and writing books off that letter for years to come. No, sir, not by me, not if I have breath to stop it.”

“You have to let the cards fall where they – ”

“The cards fall where I put them. And here’s where I put them. Plain and simple, we’re going to zip the bag on those boys, and save that woman and then I’ll deal with the other thing. Agree with me or get out of here. Julie first, Shreck and Payne second, and nothing third. Got that?”

Nick looked at Bob sitting there, stolid as a rock. He felt like Geraldo Rivera interviewing Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok at the same time. There was no bend in Bob’s furious rectitude, his nutty conviction that he would do what he had to do.

“Jesus, you are a stubborn bastard, Bob,” he said. “Your only way out is with this letter and the tape and – ”

“Play it my way or don’t play it. That’s all. Got that? If I don’t believe you’re on my program, I’ll ship you out of here. You can go back to New Orleans and that little girl and let me take care of the men’s work.”

Nick didn’t have to think a second. He was in. Always had been. Had to see how it would finish. He’d given himself to this strange bird, and so he elected to stay the course, not that he had a real choice.

“Sure,” he finally said. “It’s fine. We’ll do it your way.”

“I haven’t told you everything,” said Dobbler. “And now I will.”

They both turned to look at him.

“What makes Shreck such a powerful antagonist. One of my duties at RamDyne was to interpret tests. He had once been tested, when he went to work there. The psychologist then was an idiot and didn’t understand. But the results are clear. Shreck is more than a sociopath, he’s one of those rare men who is simply not afraid to die. Who, in fact, wants to die. Payne is the same way. You see, that’s why they are so frightening. Most men care about life. In the end, most men always act out of self-preservation. But these two don’t care and won’t act that way. It’s a function of self-hatred so passionately held that it’s off the charts.”

Another pause. Then Bob said, “You know, doctor-man, you must come from some pretty soft places to find that so remarkable. You could be describing one half of the world’s professional soldiers and both halves of its professional criminals. Truth is, I used to be one of those boys. Didn’t give two hairs about surviving. Now I have something to live for. Now I’m scared to hell I’ll die. Will it cost me my edge?”

He almost smiled, one of the few times Nick had ever seen anything so gentle play across the strong, hard features of his face.

“Sure is going to be damned entertaining to find out, isn’t it?” Bob said.