Point of Impact

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Nick said he’d do it.

Bob was stern. “No funny business. No heroics. You play hero, you kill us all. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, I understand. I can handle this.”

“I know you can. I’m just telling you. Whatever they say, you agree. You listen hard, and you agree.”

Nick climbed into the pickup and drove down the mountain in the dark. It was a wet, shaggy predawn and tendrils of fog clung to the hollows and valleys. For Nick, it was like driving through some half-remembered land from his childhood, as if dragons lurked in the tall pines and the deep caves.

Many switchbacks and crossovers later, he came to flatland, farmland and a highway, passed the burned church, and then drove on in to the town of Blue Eye itself, which even in the rain looked festive. The sun was up as he arrived. THE BUCKS ARE STOPPED HERE, the sign still said, fluttering over the town square. Bright shiny pickups and Rec-Vs lined the street, rifles visible hanging in the racks in their back windows. Everywhere Nick could see men proud in their blaze-orange camouflage. Tomorrow was the first day of deer season.

Nick parked and pushed his way through the crowd, which seemed to have been drawn to some epic pan-cake feed put on by the Kiwanis or Jaycees. The boys were talking rifles and loads, hunting techniques, telling stories of giant animals who’d soaked up bullet after bullet and then walked away. There was a common anticipation and a sporting crowd’s fever in the air. All agreed that, what with a moist and succulent summer, the Arkansas whitetails were everywhere. It would be, everybody said, a great year for a venison harvest.

But Nick, melancholy as always with the approach of action, ignored all this, went to the square, and sat himself down on a bench near a statue of some ancient Confederate hee-row in pigeon-shit-green copper. There he slumped, a glowering figure in jeans and a rough workman’s coat, his Beretta in a speed holster upside down under his left arm, not three inches from where his right hand just happened to fall.

He sat and he sat, and in time – he had no sense of it at all – a man came and sat with him. It was very smoothly done, but then everything these birds did they did smoothly. They were professionals.

“Memphis?”

“Yes.”

“Good. There,” said the man. “Can you see her?”

“No,” said Nick.

“See, the Plymouth Voyager van. The back door is open. She’s sitting there. Can you see her?”

He could. She was a lean middle-aged woman, handsome and composed, dressed in a sweater and jeans, and with a grave look on her face. There was something stiff in the way she sat.

Sitting next to her was Payne. He remembered Payne from the swamp, and the jaunty, relishing way he had interrogated Nick and got him ready to die. And he remembered Payne from Annex B: Payne, of the Sampul River.

“Yeah, I see them.”

“Do you want to talk to her?”

“No.”

“You have the cassette?”

“The cassette, you bet. But we’ve got more than that. I also managed to dig Annex B up.”

“Oh,” said Shreck.

“There’s enough to send you and Payne to the electric chair three times. Man, they’ll deep-fat fry you to a crisp.”

Shreck laughed.

“Not this time, sonny. Now you know how this has to happen. We need that cassette. Swagger thinks the woman is important. And we both know Bob has a stubborn, romantic streak, don’t we?”

Nick turned. He looked at Raymond F. Shreck for the first time. He wasn’t disappointed. He thought of the word tough and imagined it carried out to some science fiction degree. Short-haired, steady and strong, the colonel looked like a.45 hardball round in flesh. He was all blunt force, hard eyes, sitting ramrod straight, not a tremor or a line of doubt anywhere about him.

“You know if it were up to me, and I was still with the Bureau, I’d bust your ass so fast you’d leave your teeth in the street.”

Shreck smiled.

“Sonny, people have been trying to kill me for nearly forty years. They’re all dead and buried and I’m still here. So don’t try to scare me. It’s a little late in the day for that.”

He was wearing a Trebark camouflage suit and a blaze-orange baseball cap that said in gold sans serif across the front, AMERICAN HUNTER AND DAMN PROUD OF IT. His eyes met and held Nick’s as forcefully as an assault, and it was Nick who finally looked away.

“Tell Swagger if he crosses me, I kill the woman. Kill her dead. Cut her throat, watch her die, walk away. I’ve got tons of money and a thousand new identities I can slip into. I’m home free at any second if I want to be.”

“But you want that cassette. And those documents.”

“Frankly, I don’t really give a shit about the documents. But the cassette does have my face on it; it’s the only absolute record of my appearance. Life could be difficult if it got out. But the people I work for will be excited about the documents. So bring them too, or I kill the woman. Now this is how we play it.”

Nick listened intently as the colonel laid out the plan.

At the conclusion, Shreck handed over a map, a geodesic survey of the high Ouachitas, with the start point laid out, and a 40mm brass flare pistol.

“We don’t want the Nailer nailing us. We have to see him moving so we know he isn’t setting up somewhere above us to take us down from eight hundred yards.”

“Maybe you’ll have a guy to nail him,” Nick said.

“No way. We can’t nail him because he may not have the cassette and Annex B with him. He’s got insurance, I’ve got insurance. Mutual deterrence. It kept the world alive for fifty years. I’ll set it up so the final exchange is in the wide-open spaces, way beyond any rifle range.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And when the exchange is made, we walk away. It’s over. We’re out of business, but so is he. He has his woman and his freedom. The Feds think he’s dead. He can have his whole life back if he lets it lie. He’s had a hell of a war, but the war is over now. It’s time for him to go someplace in Montana, where beaucoup deer and antelope roam, and just shoot and fuck all day long.”

Toward late afternoon of that same day, a banal van left a motel and drove to a civilian hangar at a small airport twenty miles south of Little Rock. It contained three men: one of them was Eddie Nickles and another was a dour figure with the head and shoulders of a Greek god and a broken body, who sat alone with his rifle in a wheelchair in the back. He spoke to no one. It made Eddie Nickles nervous.

If Bob scared him, this guy scared him too, especially in that he wasn’t even whole. He had the aura of death to him, that was for sure; he was like a butcher or an embalmer.

“Guy fuckin’ scares the shit out of me,” Nickles said to his companion, one of the morose survivors of Panther Battalion’s assault on Bone Hill, another lad who’d lost his sand.

At the hangar, they pulled up next to a DC-3, glistening silver. ARKANSAS CENTRAL AIRLINES it said in green art deco print under the windows. A double cargo door had been opened two thirds down the fuselage toward the tail.

Nickles got out, went over and conferred briefly with the pilot. Then he leaned into the open cargo bay and saw the ATV, a three-wheeled Honda with soft fat studded tires for gobbling up the rough land and steep inclines of the wilderness; it had been staked to a board with heavy yellow rope; a bulky pack that he knew was a cargo parachute was lashed to it.

“Everything okay, chief?” he called to the cargo master still checking the rigging.

“Thumbs up, Bud,” said the man.

Nickles went back to the van.

“Sir, I’m going to load you now,” he said.

“Don’t touch me. Get the ramp down and stand aside.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nickles pulled the ramp out of the van. He stepped back and watched as the man leaned over and took the blocks out from under his wheelchair tires. Then he forcefully rocketed himself to the edge, shot down the ramp and headed to the plane.

The man wore a black baseball cap and had smeared his face with black and green paint. He wore black boots and a black and green camouflage tunic. The rifle, encased in a plastic sheath against the damp weather, lay in his lap; he had a Browning Hi-Power pistol in a black shoulder holster.

“Okay,” Nickles yelled up to the cargo master. “We need the winch now.”

The crewman swung out the device and with an electric purr, the wire descended from its pulley, bearing a hook.

“I have this harness for you, sir,” said Nickles.

The man looked at him and Nickles recognized with a stab the fury and humiliation in him; to be that helpless among all these robust men! But, uncomplainingly, the man slipped it on and cinched it tight. His jaw trim, his eyes set, he adjusted himself to the indignity of being loaded aboard the plane like a haunch of beef.

Lon was free. He fell in darkness feeling the wind pounding at him. For just a second he was a boy again, stalking the hills of Connecticut twenty miles west of New Haven with his father. The sun was a bronze smear; the earth leaped toward him.

Then with a thud, his chute opened, rustling in the wind like a sail. He remembered sailing when he was a boy on the Sound. His father had taught him to sail. Those had been wonderful times.

Hard Bargain Valley hit him with a bang. He lay in the grass. He struggled with the harness, and the chute fell away. He sat upright. He could see the ATV a few hundred feet away, its chute plump in the breeze that coursed along the valley floor. But no sign of Nickles.

He looked at his watch. It was almost five. And suppose Nickles had killed himself in the jump; his parachute hadn’t opened, he’d hit the ground at eight hundred feet per second?

Lon laughed. After all the planning he’d gone through in his life, wouldn’t that be a final joke?

He looked around, alone on the floor of the valley. To the east he saw the ridge, sweeping and grass covered; to the west a line of trees as the elevation fell away toward the forest below. He saw other mountains, too. It was completely quiet except for the popping and snapping of the chute on the ATV.

“Sir?”

He turned; Nickles was approaching him from the south, with the rifle in a sling over his arm.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“My chute opened early and I carried about a half mile away.”

Lon realized the boy had panicked, not trusting the altimeter device rigged to blow the chute out at six hundred feet, and had pulled the emergency ripcord. But it didn’t matter now.

“Okay. Get the ATV rigged, collect the chutes and let’s get the hell up the ridge.”

“Yes, sir.”

Payne woke Julie Fenn early in the back of the van, around four, yet when they drove through the dark town, the streets were crawling with men.

On the first day of deer season, the animals would be stupidest and least wary, and the hunters were moving into the woods to be in position by sunup for that first shot.

“You just keep your mouth shut,” Payne told her. “You got another day. Then it’s all over for you and you get to go home.”

But he was lying. She’d seen the other man’s face. She knew that doomed her. There was something secretly savage in his eyes; he could look at her and talk to her and plan to kill her all at once.

But she had difficulty concentrating these days. She wasn’t sure what the drug was: she guessed it to be something in the Amobarbital-B range, a powerful barbiturate that had the additional effect of eroding the will. They’d been gradually increasing the dosages, too, until on some days she couldn’t remember who she was or why this was happening. Always so tired, all she longed for was to go back to sleep and wake up back in Arizona. Very occasionally, she wished she had something to fight them with. But they had taken her only weapons.

They sat her in the seat behind them and drove the van up high mountain ridges, down dusty roads, passing hordes of other four-wheel-drive vehicles, watching as men clambered out in the glare of the headlamps, snorting plumes of hot breath in the night air, their rifles glinting and jingling as they headed out for their stands.

And after a while, the hunters thinned, and then ceased altogether. They drove on endlessly. She looked up dreamily, her head resting on the cool pane of the window: the stars above were bright like pinwheels of fire, the air brisk and magical. She could lose herself in them totally; she felt herself drifting through them and only the sudden sharp bounce of the tire on a rut in the road jerked her back to the present.

With effort, she fought her way toward a consideration of her circumstances. She wanted to kill them; she wanted to see them die, smashed into the earth. But it hurt to hold that thought in the front of her mind for very long; she felt the idea break loose from her brain and begin to drift away until it could no longer be grasped or recognized.

But just as it seemed to disappear forever, she had one last instant of clarity: I hope you’re there, Bob, she thought. I hope you make them pay.

“We’re here,” said Payne. “This is as close as we can get by vehicle to the first checkpoint. It’s about two miles and we’ve got a few hours yet. No sweat.”

“No sweat,” said Shreck. “Now let’s suit up.”

The two men got out of the van and Payne slid the cargo door open. Inside the woman sat passively while Payne bent to the floor, where two Kevlar Second-Chance ballistic vests lay. He retrieved one and handed it to the colonel.

“Thanks,” said Shreck.

They slipped their coats off and pulled the heavy vests on, securing the snaps.

“Heavy as shit,” said Payne.

“But it’ll stop goddamn near anything, including a.308 rifle bullet,” said Shreck. He fastened the last snap and said, “Get the woman.”

Payne stepped back inside. Julie sat there limply, a vacant look on that beautiful face.

“Come on, sweetie. Time to play with the big boys.”

Pulling her by the arm, he was again amazed at how light she seemed. And compliant now, after the spirit she’d shown in Arizona. She seemed to be in another gravity or something; you could launch her in a direction, and she’d sail on out in that direction until she was stopped or bumped into something. God, if Bob the Nailer knew what Shreck had done to her. But Bob wouldn’t be knowing anything after a few hours.

“Okay,” he said. “All set.”

“Fine,” said Shreck. Shreck had his rifle out; it was a bland little Marlin lever gun with a scope. He had on his baseball cap and an expensive camouflage outfit and he looked for all the world like a prosperous hunter, in case they should run into forest rangers or park service personnel, though that was highly unlikely. They didn’t like to come into the forest on the first day of deer season unless they had to.

Shreck led. Though the vests were heavy and the ground was rough and they were climbing, it wasn’t hard and they pushed the woman along when she dragged behind. Eventually, the sky turned orange and the sun rose. It looked to be a clear day, with one of those high, piercing skies, sweet blue, the wind brisk and moist and pure.

First day of deer season, thought Payne. A good day for killing.

A shot rang out far away, a crisp rolling echo. Somebody had drawn blood. It was a good omen.

“All right,” said Bob. “Last chance for questions? Any questions? We did it all a hundred times yesterday. You forget it all yet?”

Dobbler and Memphis looked at him. Nick was grave, stiff, but determined; Bob saw that Marine look, that Donny Fenn look, that said, Hey, I don’t want to be here, but I don’t see anyone else. He’d be all right.

Dobbler was something else. He was on the edge of panic. Bob could see him lick his lips, stroke his chin, his eyes shifting nervously. This was all new to him. He was cherry. Would he hang tough or bug out? Bob didn’t know and he didn’t like the gamble. But he had to play with the cards he had.

“Dr. Dobbler?”

“No.”

“Memphis?”

“This is so chancy. I still – ”

“That it is. You have a better idea?”

“You should be on the rifle. Not – ”

“Don’t you worry, Nick.”

“Bob, you know what I did the last time.”

“I know what you’ll do this time.”

“The whole thing turns on my – ”

“You’re the man who found Annex B. You’re a goddamned FBI agent, one of the best. You can do it.”

“You’re the war hero, not me.”

“No such thing as a hero. You forget heroes, Nick. This is about doing the job and coming home. You do your job and you come home, I swear it.”

“But you – ”

“Don’t you worry about me. None of your business about me. I got what I signed up for. Okay?”

“Okay,” Nick said sullenly.

The doctor tried to say something, but the words caught in his throat.

“Hey, Doc,” said Bob, “in three tours in Vietnam, I’ve been in some scrapes. It’s okay to be scared shitless.”

Dobbler cracked a wretched smile.

“If Russell Isandhlwana could see me now!” he finally said.

“I don’t know who he is, but he’d crap in his pants, that I guarantee you,” said Bob.

He winked, actually happy, and they set off.

“Okay,” said Shreck. “1000 hours. Set, Payne?”

“Let’s do it, sir.”

“It’s going to be a long day. Fire the first flare.”

Payne lifted the flare pistol, pulled the trigger, felt the crispest pop, and watched as a red arc of intense light soared overhead, caught on its own parachute, then began to drift flutteringly to earth. In twenty seconds it was out; in thirty seconds it was down.

They walked to the little silk chute and the blackened, sulfurous husk of the burned-out illumination round.

“Leave a round there,” said Shreck. “A green one.”

Payne threw a brass flare round into the furls of the parachute.

“Now, we move to our next position. They’ve got a long hard climb to make this one, and we don’t have very far at all. In fact we should be able to watch them come.”

They pushed the woman along, and walked the crest of the ridge. It was easy moving, because the ground was clear and stony and the air bright. They covered a mile in fifteen minutes, then plunged downhill for a swift half mile. There, nestling in a grove, was a canoe that Payne had planted days ago. He righted it, plunged it into a stream, and the three climbed in. Propelled by Payne’s powerful strokes, they made three miles in the remaining time. Then, hiding the canoe, they came to another ridge. Payne bent into the underbrush, pulled out a lank rope, and yanked it tight so that it coiled and slithered under his tension, like an awakening snake. It extended halfway up the ridge to where it had been pinioned into the stone. At that point, Payne had dangled another rope from still higher on the ridge.

“All right, Mrs. Fenn. You just pull yourself up as you climb. You’ll find it’s much, much easier than climbing unsupported.”

At each stage, Payne coiled the rope and hid it.

When they reached the crest, none of them were even breathing hard.

“The telescope,” said Shreck. “They’ll be on the ridge soon enough.”

Payne pulled a case out of his pack and unlimbered a Redfield Regal VI spotting scope with a 20×-60× zoom lens, mounted it to its tripod and bent to its angled eyepiece, jacked the magnification up to maximum, and found a clear view of the ridge across the way.

“All set, Colonel Shreck.”

“Well, they’re late. This early in the game and they’re late. They’re losing it.”

“They had a long pull. They had four miles, over two ridge lines, with a stream to ford. They’d only just now be making it.”

Finally, with three minutes gone over the hour deadline, the green flare rose and floated down.

“All right, fire quickly. Don’t give them any time to rest.”

Payne fired a blue flare into the air and in the last moment of its arc, he saw a figure come straggling over the surface to take a fast compass reading.

Just barely made it, bubba, he thought.

A few minutes later three figures were visible on the crest line two miles away. Magnified sixty times, they were still ants, but recognizable ants.

And it became immediately obvious what the difficulty was.

It must have been Bob out front. He looked as if he could go for another ten years.

Too bad they don’t make a two-mile rifle, motherfucker, Payne thought. I’d have a snipe at you myself.

The middle one would be the younger guy, Memphis. He remembered Memphis. Memphis wore an FBI raid jacket, and its initials almost yielded their individual meanings before collapsing back into blaze-yellow blur. Memphis’s face was lost behind a mask of camouflage paint but his body language looked stolid and determined.

The problem was the third one.

Jesus, it was Dobbler. Face painted like a commando or not, he was still recognizable by his pansy body and that prissy lack of strength in his flapping limbs.

“It’s Dobbler!” Payne yelled. “Colonel Shreck, for Christ’s sakes, they brought Dobbler along and he don’t look happy.”

Dobbler had gone to his knees and his mouth was open – Payne imagined he could hear the ruckus even two miles away.

“I can see he’s yelling. Jesus, I can just hear him: ‘I can’t make it, I can’t go on, why did I ever do this,’ that kind of candy-ass shit.”

“Let me see,” said Shreck.

Payne moved to let Shreck at the scope.

“Swagger, you fool,” said Shreck, with a contemptuous snort as he watched. “You should have shot him.”

Eventually, they saw the other two get the abject figure to his feet.

“I wonder how long he’ll last,” said Shreck.

Payne would shoot Dobbler, just as he knew Shreck would. If you ain’t up to the field, you die. That was all. That was the rule. He himself had shot a captain once who’d fucked up so bad in an A-camp fight and was weeping piteously in the bunker. He’d bet Shreck had done it too.

But not Bob. Bob was a secret pussy. He didn’t have what Shreck had and what Payne had: he couldn’t do the final thing. He couldn’t get it done. That’s why now, at the end, when it came down to balls and nothing else, he’d lose.

Dobbler finally gave up around one o’clock. It was surprising that he lasted that long. They saw it happen, having extended their lead and now sited themselves on another ridge for a checkup.

“Look, Colonel Shreck, look!”

Shreck bent to the scope and saw what Payne had seen: a mile and a half away, Dobbler had quit. He lay in the high grass, clearly begging for mercy. Memphis appeared to be the angry one. They saw him try and pick Dobbler up but Dobbler simply collapsed. Dobbler would not rise.

And giving up had its dire implications. Who would come back for him? Shreck knew these two wouldn’t; in two hours they’d be under the gun of Lon Scott. Dobbler would perish in these mountains, though he couldn’t know this now. He’d wander, winding down further each day. Maybe he’d be lucky and run into a party of hunters, but they were so deep in the fastness of the Ouachitas now, that prospect seemed unlikely.

“If he stays, he’s dead,” said Shreck.

“And if he goes, he’s dead,” said Payne.

Bob appeared to have disengaged. He stood away from them, unmoving, as Memphis did all the screaming. Finally, Shreck could just barely make out through the scope that he was saying something; then he turned and walked away. Shreck watched Memphis bend quickly to Dobbler, the yellow letters of his FBI raid jacket flashing as he opened it to peel his own canteen from his belt, and hand it to the man. Then he turned to run after Bob.

Shreck, Payne and the woman had achieved Hard Bargain Valley from the southwest, coming across a screen of trees and over a little creek. They were more than an hour ahead of Swagger and Memphis, though in the hours since dumping poor Dr. Dobbler, the two pursuers had closed the gap considerably.

It had not been an easy approach, for no roads lead to the valley and it must be earned by several hours of desperately difficult hiking over rills and hills and gulches, up stony mountainsides, through dense trees.

And then a splurge of yellow openness. A mile wide at its most open, it is one of the largest, flattest geological phenomena in all of Arkansas, a virtual tabletop in the middle of the mountains.

At one side is the ridge that could be said to overlook it, although it’s not high, and it doesn’t afford much in the way of observation. On the other side is just a forest, which leads downhill eventually to a valley and then to another mountain. Not even the deer will roam on the flatness of Hard Bargain Valley, because they are creatures of the forest, and feel vulnerable in the open. So it is predominantly the kingdom of the crows, who wheel overhead on the breeze like bad omens.

“I want us to be on that side,” said Shreck. “We’ll have the meet in the dead center, fifteen hundred yards from the nearest shootable elevation.”

“Where is he?” asked Payne. Snipers made Payne a little nervous. Even snipers on his own side.

“Oh, he’s up there. You can count on it,” Shreck said tersely.

Lon’s mood had darkened. He sat alone in his spider hole, fifteen hundred yards from the flat yellow center of Hard Bargain Valley on its western rim. He suddenly felt cursed.

It had begun as a lovely day. But a few hours ago, a huge red buck had pranced down the ridge in front of him. He remembered the deer hunts of his boyhood, before his father shot him. It filled him with a kind of joy. On impulse he brought the rifle to bear on the buck. The animal was about 250 paces out, gigantic in the magnification of the Unertl 36×. Lon put his cross hairs on the creature and felt a thrill as he played with the notion of making the creature’s beauty his own by extinguishing it forever.

The animal, a bearded old geezer with two stubs where his antlers had been sheared off in some freak accident, paused as the scope settled upon him. It turned its magnificent head and fixed two bold, calm eyes upon Lon. It appeared not to fear him at all; worse, it had no respect for him. This enraged him in some strange way. He felt his finger take three ounces of slack out of the six-ounce trigger, until the animal lived only on the stretch of the thinnest of hairs. The buck stared at him insolently, as if daring him to go ahead and shoot. He knew this was impossible: the animal could not have seen him. But haughtily, nevertheless, the old creature cast its evil eye on him, until he became aware of the pressure in his trigger finger and the beads of sweat in his hairline. He slackened off the trigger.

The animal spluttered, threw his beautiful red-hazed old head in the sunlight, then trotted away with an aristocratic saunter as if to snub him, and make him feel unworthy.

Yet he was strangely agitated.

Be still, he told himself. It’s nothing. But he could not get it out of his mind.

The hours had passed. Now, moodily, he scanned the far ridge of trees in search of human motion. He had glanced at his watch for the thousandth time; it was well past three and time for the action to begin.

Ah! There! There!

He made them through the spotting scope as they came out of the trees and began their slow trek across the open space to the far side. Though at this range it was impossible to make out details or faces, he could read them from their body types. The tall one was Shreck; the stumpy one, hunched and dangerous, was the little soldier Payne. And third was the woman, the tethered bait.

He watched them walk across the field, and set up below him; now their faces were distinct, but they could not see him. Then, suddenly, commotion: the two men both stood and looked and pointed.

Yes, there is was, just as Colonel Shreck had promised, though a bit late: a yellow flare, barely distinguishable in the bright sunlight, floating down behind the ridge line.

He saw Payne fire an answering flare, letting the pursuers know their next move, and upon what field the game would be played.

Lon flexed his fingers and tried to will his body to alertness as he slid in behind the rifle once again.

He touched the radio receiver that would receive the bolt of sound that meant Shreck was green-lighting the shot. He touched, as if to draw on their magic, the.300 H & H Magnums laid out before him, tapering brass tubes close to four inches long, glinting, their heavy, cratered noses stolid and somehow faintly greasy.

Now it was merely a matter of waiting.

The buck was forgotten at last; he thought only of the hellacious long shot he had to make, that no man had a right to make, that he knew he could make. He’d made them before.

“All right, Payne,” said Shreck as they languished on the far side of Hard Bargain Valley. “This is the easy part. Get her ready.”

“Yes, sir,” said Payne.

He turned to Julie.

“Okay, honey,” he said. “Just this one last little thing.”

She looked at him with drug-dumb eyes. There wasn’t a flicker of will or resistance in their glassy depthlessness. A stupid half-smile played across her mouth.

Payne shucked his pack and reached into it. There he removed his cut-down Remington 1100 semiautomatic shotgun. It held six 12-gauge shells in double-ought buckshot, each of which contained nine.32 caliber pellets. It was possibly the most devastating close-quarters weapon ever devised. In less than two seconds it could blow out fifty-four man-killing balls of lead with an effective range of fifteen yards.

He walked around behind the woman.

“You just relax now,” he said. “This is nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

She looked as if she’d never worried about anything in her life.

Setting the shotgun down momentarily, he plucked a roll of black electrician’s tape from his pocket. With swift and sure motions, he unstripped the end of the tape, planted it squarely in the middle of her forehead, and began to run loops of the tape around her skull, drawing them tight.

She whimpered as the greasy stuff was yanked tight about her head, cutting against her eyes so that the vision was destroyed, between her lips so that her voice was stifled and across her nose so that the breathing was impaired and around her hair, where its adhesive quickly matted to her skull, but he said, “There, there, it’s nothing, baby, it’s nothing.”

Having constructed a snare of tape, he then brought the little shotgun up and began to unspool yet more tape, wrapping it crudely about the barrel and fore end of the piece, entwining the woman’s head and the gun in the same seven-yard-long constriction, until both were joined. Then he cut the tape.

He reached down with his left hand and engaged the pistol grip of the weapon, inserting his finger in the trigger guard. He felt the tension in the trigger.

“Colonel Shreck?”

Shreck took the spool and continued the ritual of the binding, until Payne’s hand was almost one with the shotgun’s pistol grip and trigger in a solid, gummy nest of tape. Shreck bent and jacked the shotgun’s bolt, and both men felt the shiver as the bolt slid back, lofted a shell into the chamber, then plunged forward to lock the shell in.

“You know what to do?”

“Yes, sir,” said Payne. In case of trouble, he was to blow the woman’s head off; then swing the short-barreled weapon and blow away whoever stood against them. At the same time, he was untouchable: no bullet could penetrate his vest and a head shot would produce either by spasm or by the weight of his fall the blast that would destroy the woman. Nobody was going to play hero with Payne booby-trapped to the woman like this.

It wasn’t going well. These Arkansas types were closemouthed, clannish and not terribly interested in helping.

Still, the reports that reached the headquarters of Task Force Swagger, now in the basement of the Sheriff’s Office, were persistent, if vague. Two hunters off on a preseason scouting hike had watched through binoculars as a stocky man had laid and moored coils of rope to a ridge deep in the Ouachitas. They didn’t move any closer because through the glass the guy had looked as tough as a commando. And no, they probably couldn’t find the place again anyway.

“Maybe just some other hunter,” said Hap. “Laying in ropes to get up that ridge in the dark on the first day of the hunting season.”

“Ummm,” was all that Howdy Duty would commit himself too.

Then someone swore he’d seen a lean blond man talking to Sam Vincent, the lawyer who had sued the magazine on Bob’s behalf. He was Bob’s oldest friend, demi-daddy and hunting buddy of years gone by. The man could have been Bob the Nailer, and the talk took place on a high road miles off a main highway that the observer, a postman, had just happened to breeze by.

But Sam Vincent was a wily, tough old bird and he knew the law as well as any man alive.

“Now, sir,” the old lizard had said to Utey, leaning forward and fixing him with what was known as the “chair-eye” (for Sam, as a state prosecutor in the fifties and sixties had sent thirteen men to the electric chair), “you know a damned sight better than I do that I cain’t be compelled to cooperate unless I want to, and no subpoena and no threat of government harassment’s going to change that. I’m too old to scare and too stubborn to budge. If I seen Bob Lee Swagger and ain’t told you, I’ve committed a federal felony. So essentially” – and here his shrewd old eyes knitted up – “you’re asking me to testify agin’ myself. Against the Constitution, young feller. And against Arkansas state law, Code D-547.1, see Conyers v. Mercantile Trust. You got that?”

Howard got it indeed, but assigned a tail on Sam. No such luck; within the hour an injunction arrived from the Third District Court of Arkansas, the Hon. Justice Buford M. Roubelieux presiding, requiring the government to show cause for assigning surveillance upon a distinguished eighty-one-year-old citizen like Sam Vincent and issuing, until such compliance could be met (the next available court date was July 1998), a cease and desist order, under penalty of law.

That had been the low point.

There hadn’t been any high points.

Until today, just now, when the phone rang.

Hap answered it, spoke for two minutes, then said, “I’ll call you right back.”

Howard looked up; two of the other men watched as Hap shot over to Howard. They gathered round.

“Maybe this is nothing, I don’t know,” said Hap. “But I just got a call from a guy in the National Forest Service. Says three hunters, at three different times this morning, saw military flares being shot into the air deep in the Ouachitas.”

“Somebody in trouble?” asked an agent.

“More like a signal,” somebody else said.

“But no fires started,” said Hap. “The service ordered up a couple of flybys out of their spotter planes, but there were no fires. And the flares seem to be coming from different locations, spread over about a twenty-mile-square area.”

Howard concentrated on this. Who would use flares in daylight? Who would even see a flare in daylight, unless they were looking for it? It had to be a kind of signal.

“Did they get a location?” he asked.

“Well, they’ve had several, but the Forest Service guy says his people plotted it out on a big map they’ve got, and the direction is largely trending north by northwest.”

“Okay,” said Howard. “Toward what? Toward anything?”

“There’s a big flat, nearly inaccessible valley way up there they call Hard Bargain Valley,” said Hap. “It’s way the hell off the mainstream. The Forest Service says hardly any hunters go up there because the deer much prefer the lower forest land. It’s flat and barren and almost a mile across.”

Howard thought.

Hard Bargain Valley?

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s saddle up. Full SWAT gear. Call the field. I want the chopper to pick us up in ten minutes. Hap, call the Forest Service back and tell them we need a guide to get us to Hard Bargain Valley.”

“There,” said Payne, seeing them first.

The two figures had emerged from the trees across the wide valley.

Shreck looked at them through his binoculars but they were too far off for details. Their faces were green, like commandos.

He snorted.

“He thinks he’s going to a war,” he said to Payne.

Payne stood up, and gingerly drew the woman up off her haunches.

“Now, honey,” he said. “You walk real slow. Don’t you trip or stumble, or you’ll be history.”

She moaned, then made a noise through the tape.

“Shut up, Mrs. Fenn,” said Shreck. “Damn, she’s come out of it. You should give her another injection.”

“I can’t,” said Payne. “Not taped up like this.”

“Look, lady,” said Shreck, “I want you to know this is the end, you’ve only got another few minutes. We make the swap, and off you go with your boyfriend. That’s a security arrangement; the gun isn’t even loaded.”

Under the bonds of the tape, her eyes tightened in terror.

He ignored her and signaled to Payne to get her moving. Haltingly, the three of them began to walk across the wide field. It had turned into a lovely, sunny fall day, about fifty-five, crisp and clean. Around them, like waves, were the ragged ridges and crests of the Ouachitas, now brilliantly ablaze in color.

The sniper’s breath came in soft spurts. He was trying to keep himself calm for what lay ahead. It was time to shut down. It was time to get into the zone.

He felt his body complying. He had known it would; he trusted it. He watched his target, exactly where it was supposed to be, in the most obvious place. It wasn’t even an ant, but a speck, the dot over an i. He’d never hit at this range before but he wasn’t scared. This was a shot he’d owed himself for a long time; it was time to get it right.

His eyes were dilating, his ears sealing off, his breathing going softer. He was sliding into tunnel vision, where the concentration was so intense that all other cues in the world dropped away and respiration bled to a hum.

He pulled the rifle to him. No time now to think of it: he could not allow himself to be aware of the instrument because he had to be beyond the instrument. His will was the instrument.

Now he slid behind the scope, finding the spot-weld, where cheek and gun joined while his fingers discovered their place by slow degree. That was the secret; to make everything the same. Simplify, simplify. To make of oneself nothingness; to slide into the great numbness beyond want and hope; to simply be.

He was beyond computation. He knew the range, he knew the angle, he knew the wind, he knew the bullet’s trajectory and velocity, he knew its drop and how it would leak energy as it sped along. He had accounted for all this and he now engaged his target through the bright circle of the scope.

Even magnified, the man was a small, a very small object, hardly recognizable as human. Just a squirming dot. He watched the tremble in the reticle as he willed himself through minute subverbal corrections, not thinking so much as feeling. It was very, very close now.

Don’t blow it, he ordered himself. Not this time!

Nick breathed out a little. Lon Scott was just where Bob had said he would be, beneath the crest line where the osage had been crushed by an all-terrain vehicle as it delivered him. He was in a spider hole, only his painted face and the rifle barrel visible.

At a hundred yards, Shreck put up his hands.

“No guns,” he shouted. “No guns or the woman is dead. You got that?”

Each of the two men raised his hands, pirouetted slowly to show that he wore no visible weapons, then let his hands stay high.

“You got the cassette and Annex B?”

Bob raised the knapsack he was carrying.

“Right here,” he yelled back.

“Okay. You bring the stuff. When I authenticate it, we’ll release the girl. You see how we’ve got her? You make a funny move, you look funny, you do anything stupid, you get unlucky and trip, anything, anything, my friends, and she’s fucked. Payne’ll do it, you know he will. Only chance she’s got is our rules.”

“You’re calling the shots,” Bob said. “Now just take it easy with that damned shotgun, Payne.”

Slowly and warily, the two men approached, hands held high and stiff.

At last Shreck faced Bob the Nailer, big as life, who stood but six feet away and he looked him in the eyes. He looked as calm as a pond on a summer day.

“Hello, Colonel,” came a familiar voice.

Shreck looked to the other man, the young FBI agent. Only it wasn’t the young FBI agent, even though he wore a black FBI raid jacket and baseball cap and greenish paint on his face. It was Dr. Dobbler.

Shreck looked back to Bob, realized in a flash the game had changed. He pressed the button on a unit on his belt, sending a shriek of radio noise that would signal Scott to fire.

There came the sound, from far away, of a rifle shot.

The shrillness of the beep somewhat surprised Lon and he saw the cross hairs dance a tiny jig and come off Bob.

So soon? he thought.

He exhaled half a lungful of air and gently as a lover squeezed the reticle back onto Bob, center chest, and began to draw the slack from the trigger and-

Nick fired and in the split second the rifle jumped and the scope-picture blurred, he called it a hit. He looked back quickly in recovery. The bullet had struck Lon Scott in the head. It was the brain shot. Blood seemed to have been flung everywhere by the impact. Lon sagged back and slid into his spider hole. Only the rifle was left to show.

Nick, in his own spider hole in the vastness of Hard Bargain Valley, threw the bolt and tried to bring Bob’s Remington to bear on the party of five in the open. A sudden wave of weakness thundered over him.

Jesus, he thought, you just hit a thousand-yard shot!

He started to tremble.

The woman screamed, but Payne pulled her down, twisted her to brandish the shotgun, and didn’t panic.

Bob said to the colonel, “My boy just tagged your boy. You’re all alone.”

The colonel was calm. Maybe a half-smile played across his mouth. At some not so secret level he was a happy man.

“It doesn’t mean a thing, Swagger,” he said, thinking quickly. “Now let me tell you what’s going to happen. Nothing’s changed. Only thing we want now is out. We’re going on a nice slow walk out of here with the woman and with the cassette and the documents. You follow, she’s wasted. So don’t you try a goddamn thing. You put the gun down. You got that?”

“I’ll kill this fucking woman,” said Payne. “You know I will. I got the gun taped to her head. I swear, I’ll blow her away. Now you back off.”

Bob dropped the knapsack. Only his hand wasn’t empty. It held a Remington 1100 semiautomatic shotgun, cut down to pistol grip and sawed-off barrel.

Nick’s second mandate was Shreck. He disengaged the rifle from Lon’s spider hole and brought it to bear on the five figures five hundred yards to his left.

Goddamn!

He could only see the tops of heads. The action had come to play in one of the subtle folds in the earth that ran across the valley floor and his targets were beneath his line of vision.

Which one was Shreck?

He couldn’t tell.

Oh, Christ, Bob, he thought.

He looked around desperately, seeking a tree he could climb to get some elevation into the fold, but there was nothing. He put the rifle down, drew his Beretta, feeling helpless rage.

“Put the gun down,” said Payne. “I’ll blow her fuckin’ brains out.”

“He will, you know,” said the colonel.

So here we are, Bob thought. Come a long way for this party. Let’s see who’s got the stones for close work.

Bob leveled the short, mean semiautomatic shotgun at Payne. Payne could see the yawing bore peeping out from the forestock.

“He isn’t going to shoot,” said the colonel forcefully. “Payne, he’s bluffing, he doesn’t have a shot.”

“I’m not going to shoot,” said Bob. “Here’s the damn deal. I put the gun down, you cut the girl free. Everybody walks. Okay?”

Dobbler backed away nervously.

“Done,” said the colonel. “The smart move.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “I’m going to count to three, then I’m putting the gun down. Nobody get excited here.”

“Do it slow, Swagger,” said Payne.

“One,” said Bob, and then “Two,” and then he fired.

Payne was astounded that it happened like this, the crazy fucking fuck, the moron, he actually fired, and in the explosion he fired too, sending the woman to hell, fuck them all, fuck all who fucked with Jack Payne, soldier and killer of men.

And he felt the gun buck and knew the woman’s head was gone, except that it wasn’t, for she fell backwards somehow, screaming in terror but intact and he fired again, felt the impulse to squeeze run from his brain down through his arm to his finger, felt it squeeze, waited for the gun to go off.

Only then did he realize he was squeezing a phantom finger on a phantom hand.

Swagger had blown a charge of double-ought clean through his elbow from a range of two feet, literally severing it. The hand still grasped the shotgun bound in tape to her skull; it simply was no longer attached to him.

In horror, Payne held his stump high, and watched jets of bright blood pulse out into the clear fall air. In that second the incredible agony of it hit him.

“You fucker,” he screamed. “You fucker!”

Bob put the muzzle of the Remington against Payne’s stout little chest, and sent a deer slug through the Kevlar vest that tunneled to his spine. Payne disappeared as he collapsed.

In the same attenuated microsecond, Shreck broke through the shards of disbelief that clotted his actions and yanked the Marlin up to put a shot into Bob, but he was not quite fast enough. Bob, pivoting through a short arc to his new target, beat him by a clean tenth-second and double-tapped a pair of deer slugs through Shreck’s vest so swiftly the blasts seemed like a single sound. Their roar hit the mountains and rolled back across the valley and still vibrated in the air as the colonel’s legs went and he toppled backwards.

Shreck felt no pain. He lay on his back in the yellow grass. He thought of landing zones, frontals, good men dead in far places, K-rations and C-4, and that bitch duty whom he’d never once betrayed, always doing the hard thing.

Bob stood over him. Shreck blinked and felt his fingers turn to feathers. He had no legs, he had no body. He was very thirsty and confused. Then he realized: it had finally happened.

“I deal in lead, friend,” Bob said, and fired another deer slug into him. It blew out his heart.

In an instant, Bob ran to Julie.

“Okay, okay, honey, it’s all right,” he said to her, taking her in his hands. “Don’t move, don’t jerk, just be calm, we’re almost home free, Dobbler, Dobbler, goddammit, come here!”

He tried to get her to lie still, terrified that a sudden motion might somehow trip the trigger. She was blinded by the tape and making mewling noises, but now he got his arms around her, squeezing her tight, just to hold her steady against his own strength.

“Now, just relax, baby girl, please, just relax.”

He reached into his boot and drew out his razor-sharp Randall Survivor. Looking at the knotted strands of black tape he was at first unsure where to cut, afraid that if he cut too savagely, the vibration on some unseen strand of the stuff might fire the gun. Very carefully, he began to slice through the strands around her face until he’d freed it and peeled the strands away. One by one they broke, but the gun did not budge.

“Okay, okay, we’re almost there, nothing’s going to happen to you, we’re almost home free.”

Gently he rotated her trembling head and inserted the blade in a knot of tape right under the muzzle and began to saw. The edge devoured the tape, one by one popping the individual links. But the gun remained jammed against her and seemed a living thing, a snake almost, with its fangs sunk crazily into her skull. He didn’t want to touch it; he could see that the safety was off and that the weight of Payne’s dead finger still lay across the trigger.

He sliced another strand of tape and the gun seemed to loosen and slide. The breath came so hard to him he thought he’d pass out and someone seemed to be pounding a kettledrum against his ears. Then another strand went, and the gun dropped and Bob had the thing, free and clear.

He looked at it. Soaked in blood, one of Payne’s tattoos remained visible. AIRBORNE ALL THE WAY, it said. You got that right, son, he thought and heaved the goddamn thing as far as he could. It landed in the grass fifty feet away, and did not go off.

“Oh, Jesus,” she was saying as he pulled the tape from her face.

“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re fine, we made it.” He hugged her, held her very tight.

Dobbler was crouching beside them. He lifted one of her eyelids, looked into her pupil, read her pulse.

“What did they give you?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, you’re stable. Bob, give her your coat. The danger is shock. If we keep her warm, there should be no problem.”

She lay back, clutching the coat.

“It’s all over. We’re home free, I swear to you. Nobody can hurt you now or ever again.”

He set her down on the grass, where she settled in, though she did not want to let go of his hand. But he had some other business still.

He drew the doctor away from her until they confronted the bodies in the grass. Dobbler stopped and stared.

“G-god,” said Dobbler. “I can’t believe we – ”

Bob silenced him.

Four feet apart, Payne and the colonel lay in the yellow grass. The colonel’s eyes were open, Payne’s were closed. Payne’s grotesque stump still gushed a magenta delta into the yellow grass. The vests, however, constricted the blood from the chest wounds in both men; only the burned puckers where the slugs had blasted through signified the cause of their deaths.

“Look at them,” Dobbler said, half in shock. “I can’t believe – ”

“They’re men. Shoot ’em, they die, that’s all,” said Bob. “Listen here, we don’t have much time. I’ve thought this out carefully.” He reached into his shirt and pulled something out. Dobbler saw that it was a money belt.

“There’s seven thousand dollars in here. It’s all I have left from my magazine money. You take it.”

“I – ”

“Now just listen. I want you out of here and gone before that damned boy shows up with his badge and remembers what he does for a living. You see that white pine at the far end of the valley?”

He pointed to the tree.

Dobbler nodded.

“At the tree, you’ll find a creek bed. You follow it about seven miles, mostly downhill, to a river. You can follow the river either way, it doesn’t matter. If you walk hard you’ll come out of the forest around three tomorrow on U.S. Route two-seventy. Flag down the Greyhound that makes the four P.M. run to Oklahoma City. Take the money. Disappear. Start a new life.”

Dobbler looked at him in shock.

“But – You need a witness. You need someone to testify. You – ”

“Don’t you worry about me, Doc. You did your part. It doesn’t matter what came before. You go on that stand and you’ll be in a mess that’ll destroy you forever. I know. I’ve been there. Take your freedom and go.”

“But – ”

“But nothing,” said Bob. “Now get out of here before that damned kid shows up.” He pushed the doctor along and then watched as the man, confused at first, but then with more spirit in his step, made a beeline for the white tree. Soon, he had disappeared.

Bob returned to Julie. She lay quietly in the grass, breathing softly.

He knelt. Her hand came up and touched his. He bent and kissed her on the lips.

“We’re going to have plenty of time together,” he whispered. “I guarantee it. Now I have just one little thing to do.”

He went to the knapsack, still lying in the grass.

He opened it and removed the green plastic bag that held Annex B and the cover letter. He ripped it open, took out the paper. He couldn’t wait for the sun. He pulled out a Zippo lighter that said USMC and beneath that SEMPER FI, a souvenir of the days when he smoked. He ignited it, held the bright, small flame against the corner of one of the pages, watched the flame begin to spread. In seconds, Annex B was engulfed. He held it until he could hold it no longer, then tossed it. It burned to ash.

“Stop it! Stop it!”

It was Nick, yelling at him from two hundred yards away. He began to race toward him. “What are you doing? Jesus Christ!”

But Bob now grabbed the video cassette. He placed it on the ground and drove his boot into it, smashing the plastic. He pulled the tape out into a loose jumble, leaned over and lit it. It went like a flash and was gone in seconds.

“Jesus fucking A, what are you doing?”

Nick stood over him, dark with anger.

“That’s evidence! That’s the goddamn evidence that can get you off the goddamn hook! What the fuck are you doing?”

“You know what I’m doing,” Bob said.

“Bob, I – ”

“Now you shut up, boy, and you listen. It’s over. These boys are in the goddamn body bags now and what they did is going in there with them. And that’s where it’ll stay. There’s nothing left to tell elsewise now.”

“You’ll go to – ”

“Nick, you saved my ass with that shot. We’re even up now, and you have to be your own man and make your own decisions. You’re free of me, do you get it?”

Nick looked at him, openmouthed.

Then they heard the helicopter and turned to see a Huey hurtling low over the far end of the valley.

Oh, Christ, thought Nick. It’s Howdy Duty time.