It was November, cold and wet in west Arkansas, a miserable dawn following on a miserable night. Sleet whistled through the pines and collected on the humps of stone that jutted out of the earth; low overhead, angry clouds hurtled by. Now and then the wind would rush through the canyons between the trees and blow the sleet like gunsmoke. It was the day before hunting season.
Bob Lee Swagger had placed himself just off the last climb that led up to Hard Bargain Valley, that flat splurge of tabletop high in the Ouachitas, and he sat in perfect silence and perfect stillness against an old pine, the rifle across his knees. This was Bob’s first gift: the gift of stillness. He acquired it naturally, without instruction, from some inner pool where stress never reached. Back in ’Nam he was something of a legend for the nearly animallike way he could will his body reactions down, stiller than death.
The cold had fought through his wool leggings and up and under his down vest and begun to climb up his spine, like a sly little mouse. He gritted his teeth, fighting the urge to let them chatter. Now and then his hip throbbed from a wound from long ago. He instructed his brain to ignore the phantom ache. He was beyond will. He was in some other place.
He was earning Tim.
You see, he’d tell you, if you were one of the two or three men in the world he talked to – old Sam Vincent, say, the ex-Polk County prosecutor, or maybe Doc LeMieux, the dentist, or Vernon Tell, the sheriff – you can’t just shoot an animal. Shooting’s the easy part. Any city dick can sit in a stand, drink hot coffee and wait till some doe goes prancing by, close enough to touch, and then put out the muzzle of his Wal-Mart rifle and squeeze-jerk the trigger and blow a quart of her guts out and find her three counties away, bled out, her eyes still somehow beaming dumb pain.
You earned your shot, Bob would tell you, by letting whatever was happening to the animal happen to you and for however long. Fair was fair, after all.
Through the pines and the saplings, he could see the clearing 150 yards ahead, a little below, coming gradually into what small, low light there’d be that day. A trail ran through it, and at dawn and again at twilight he knew the animals would filter through, one by one, a buck and his harem. Last night, Bob had seen twelve, three bucks, one a nice fat eight-pointer even, and their ladies.
But he’d come for Tim. Old Tim, scarred and beat up, with many an adventure behind him. Tim would be alone, too: Tim didn’t have a harem, and didn’t need one anymore. One year Tim had had a prong of antler shot off by some lucky city dick from Little Rock and looked out of balance for a whole season. Tim had limped another whole year because Sam Vincent, not as spry as once he’d been, had held sloppy and put a.45-70 softpoint – too much gun, but Sam loved that old Winchester – into his haunches, and only bled him bad enough to kill any normal buck.
Tim was tough, Bob knew, and that was the kindest word he had for anybody, living or dead.
Bob was in his seventeenth hour of sitting. He had sat all night in the cold; and when, about four, sleet had started, he still sat. He was so cold and wet he was hardly alive, and now and again a picture of another time would come up before his eyes but always, he’d shake it out, keeping himself set on what lay ahead 150 yards.
Come on, you old bastard, he was thinking. I’m earning you.
Then he saw something. But it was only a doe and her fawn and in their lazy, confident, stupid animal way they came down the trail from the hill and began to move on down to graze in the lower forest, where some lucky city fool would certainly kill them.
Bob just sat there, next to his tree.
Dr. Dobbler swallowed, trying to read the mystery in Colonel Shreck’s eyes. But as always, Shreck sat there with a fierce scowl masking his blunt features, radiating power and impatience and somehow scaring everybody in the room. Shreck was scary. He was the scariest man Dobbler had ever known, scarier even than Russell Isandhlwana, the dope dealer who had raped Dobbler in the showers of Norfolk State Penitentiary in Massachusetts and made the doctor his punk for a very, very long three months.
It was late. Outside the rain drummed on the tin roof of the Quonset. A stench of rusting metal, old leather, dust, unwashed socks and stale beer hung in the room; it was a prison smell, though this wasn’t a prison, but the field headquarters of an outfit calling itself RamDyne Security on several hundred obscure acres of untillable central Virginia.
The planners sat in front of the darkened room; the brutish Jack Payne, the second scariest man in the world, sat across the table; and that was all, such a tiny team for the immense and melancholy task that lay ahead of them.
On a small screen, four faces had been projected, now glowing in the dark. Each represented a hundred other possibilities; these men had been discovered by Research, investigated at length by Plans, watched by the pros from Operations, and then winnowed to this sullen quartet. It was Dobbler’s job to break them down psychologically for Colonel Raymond Shreck’s final decision.
Each of the final four had a flaw, of course. Dr. Dobbler pointed these out. He was, after all, still a psychiatrist, if now uncertified. Flaws were his profession.
“Too narcissistic,” he said of one. “He spends too much on his hair. Never trust a man in a seventy-five-dollar haircut. He expects to be treated special. We need somebody who is special but has never been treated special.”
As for Number 2, “Too smart. Brilliant, tactically brilliant. But always playing the games. Always thinking ahead. Never at rest.”
Of the third, “Wonderfully stupid. But slow. Exactly what we need so far as certain qualities are required, and experienced in the technical area. Obedient as a dog. But slow. Too slow, too literal, too eager to please. Too rigid.”
“I hear you flirting again, Dobbler,” said Colonel Shreck, brutally. “Just give us the information, without the charm.”
Dobbler winced.
“Well,” he finally said, “that leaves us with only one.”
Jack Payne hated Dobbler. The softy Dobbler, with his big head, scraggly beard and long sensitive fingers, was everything pussy in the world. He had tits. He was almost a woman. He tried to turn everything into show.
Jack Payne was a dour, nasty-looking little man, tattooed and remote, with blank, tiny eyes in his meaty face. He was enormously strong, with a pain threshold that was off the charts. His specialty was getting things done, no matter what. He touched the cut-down Remington 1100 in its custom under-shoulder rig beneath his left arm. In the long tube under the barrel there were six double-ought 12-gauge shells. In each shell were nine.32 caliber pellets. He could fire fifty-four bullets in less than three seconds. Got lots of stuff done with that.
“The details are impressive,” Dobbler was saying. “He killed eighty-seven men. That is, eighty-seven men stalked and taken under the most ferocious conditions. I think we’d all have to agree that’s impressive.”
There was a pause.
“I killed eighty-seven men in an afternoon,” Jack said.
Jack had been stuck in a long siege at an A-team camp in the southern highlands, and in the last days the gooks had thrown human wave attacks at them.
“But all at once. With an M- 60,” said Colonel Shreck. “I was there too. Go ahead, Dobbler.”
Dobbler was trembling, Jack could see. He still trembled when the colonel addressed him directly sometimes. Jack almost laughed. He smelled fear on the psychiatrist. He loved the odor of other men’s fear.
But Dobbler pressed ahead. “This is none other than Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, USMC, retired, of Blue Eye, Arkansas. They called him ‘Bob the Nailer.’ He was the United States Marine Corps’s second leading individual killer in Vietnam. Gentlemen, I give you the great American sniper.”
Bob loved their magic. When he had hunted men, there was no magic. Men were stupid. They farted and yakked and gave themselves away miles before they moved into the killing zone.
But the deer, particularly the old Ouachita stags, appeared like ghosts, simply exploding out of brushy nothingness, as if they were superior visitors from another planet. And they were superior, in their way, Bob knew: their senses so razor keen, everything focused on the next two minutes. That was their secret. They didn’t think about the last two minutes, which had ceased entirely to exist in the second after they were experienced, had evaporated entirely. They only thought about the next two minutes. No past, no real future. There was only now.
And so when Tim materialized with the force of a sharp memory out of the thin Arkansas pines, stunning Bob with his beauty, he did not quite surprise him.
Bob had learned years back in hard places that surprise was dangerous. It made you jerk awkwardly upon the first moment of encounter, and you gave away your edge.
So Bob’s initial reaction to Tim was nothing that his body showed.
He was downwind, so no odors would reach Tim’s keen nostrils, though Bob of course had washed yesterday with odorless soap; he’d air-dried his clothes; he’d washed his mouth out with peroxide so no tang of toothpaste could hang in the forest air.
The animal’s head twitched and turned, and unerringly turned to Bob.
You can’t see me, Bob thought. I know how you operate. You can see motion, you’re a smart boy at picking out a flick of motion, scampering off to safety; but you can’t see pattern. Here I sit, and you’re looking right at me and you can’t see me.
Bob let the beast’s gaze wash over him, then felt it slide away. This was the part he liked the best, the exciting fragility of it all, the flimsiness of the connections that brought buck and man together through the medium of the rifle, but only for a few seconds, and knowing that in a minute, if the buck held, if the wind held, if his nerve held, if his luck held, he’d have Tim in his cross hairs.
He lifted the rifle.
It was a Remington 700 bolt action, lovingly purchased by the Marine Marksmanship Team and presented to him as a retirement gift when he’d been invalided out of the Corps in 1975. It had a heavy varmint barrel which almost neutralized vibration when he fired, though Bob had since replaced the original barrel with a stainless steel one from Hart, which he’d then finished with Teflon so the whole piece had the appearance of old pewter. The barrel, action and even the screws were bedded in Devcon aluminum into a black fiberglass and Kevlar stock. The screws were torqued through aluminum pilars, tightened to sixty pounds. The rifle was purely ugly. It was a.308 Winchester, and one of Bob’s own handloads now rested in the chamber.
Bob slid the rifle up in a smooth and practiced motion, economical from long years of repetition. Under slightly less adverse conditions he would have elected the prone, the stablest shooting position, but since he knew he’d have to be still for so long he had been afraid the contact with the cold ground would chill his body numb. Instead, he drew the rifle up to his shoulder, notching his elbows inside his splayed knees, canting his shoulders, locking his arms under the rifle’s ten pounds so that it was supported off bone, not muscle; he was building a bone bridge, running from the piece itself to the ground, anchoring it so that no whimsy of muscle fiber, no throb of heart or twitch of pulse, could deflect him at the last moment.
Bob’s eye slid behind the scope, a Leupold 10×. The bold optics of the magnification, snatching every bit of light from the air, threw up Tim’s head and shoulders ten times the size of life. Again the animal turned toward him, though this time he was projected against the intersection of the cross hairs.
With a thumb, Bob snicked off the safety and settled in to shoot.
I’ve earned you, you son of a bitch, he thought. And by God I own your ass. You are mine.
His heart seemed to thump a bit. Now he was trying to slip into that calm pool of near-nothingness where the little patch on the tip of his finger just took over as if on auto-pilot, reading the play of the cross hairs, matching their rhythm, anticipating their direction.
Okay, Bob thought, as he made the minute corrections and the cross hairs settled on Tim’s spine as he nimbly licked ice-glazed shoots from a tree, okay now I own you.
On the screen, the four faces vanished; and then Bob’s young face suddenly appeared.
“He’s twenty-six, on his third tour of Vietnam,” said Dr. Dobbler. “It’s June tenth, 1972. He’s just officially killed his thirty-ninth and fortieth men, though unofficially the total is far higher.”
The slide showed a raw young face, lean and sullen. The eyes were slits, the skin tight, the mouth a hyphen; there was something somehow Southern in the bone structure. He looked mean, too, and very competent, without a lick of humor, with no patience for outsiders, with a willingness to fight anyone who pushed him too far. A boonie hat was pressed back on his head, revealing a thatch of crewcut. He wore rumpled utilities with globe and anchor inscribed on the pocket, and trapped proudly in the joint of his left arm so that it lay along the length of his forearm and was cupped in his hand at the trigger guard and comb was a black, heavy-barreled rifle with a long telescopic sight.
Dobbler looked at the boy on the screen: it was the same expressionless face you saw on the white-trash tough guys, the human tattoo museums and born-to-kill bikers and assault-with-intent pros who did their time in the joint as easily as a vacation, whereas he himself had nearly died from it. That was the first shock of a cultured man: that in such savagery, some people not only survived but actually thrived.
The doctor continued.
“Please note, it’s not Robert Lee Swagger; his father named him Bob Lee – he gets quite angry when people call him Robert. And he likes to be called ‘Bob,’ not Bob Lee. He’s very proud of his father, although he must only vaguely remember him. Earl Swagger won the Congressional Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima in World War Two and was an Arkansas state trooper, killed in the line of duty in 1955, when Bob was nine. The boy’s mother returned from Little Rock to the family farm outside Blue Eye, in Polk County, in western Arkansas, where she and her mother and Bob managed a threadbare existence.
“Bob is, in many ways, a child of the embarrassing Second Amendment, and he fits the profile of other great American gun heroes – both Alvin York and Audie Murphy come to mind. He grew up orphaned early, in a border state, on a hardscrabble farm, where his hunting was not only natural and expected but necessary. He quickly became a proficient hunter with a single-shot.22 rifle, and graduated, in his teens, to a lever-action deer gun and finally a Winchester in.30 caliber. He was, from the very first time his father allowed him to shoot, an exceedingly gifted rifleman.
“In 1964, having graduated from high school where he got – this is perhaps not as amazing as it seems – excellent grades, Bob turned down a college scholarship and instead joined the United States Marines, just in time for the Vietnam War.
“He did a tour in 1966 as an infantry lance corporal and was wounded twice; he did one in 1968, during Tet, as a recon patrol leader, doing a lot of dangerous work up near the DMZ. In 1971, at Camp Perry, Ohio, Bob Lee was the national thousand-yard center-fire rifle champion. It got him noticed. He returned to Vietnam in late 1971 to the Scout-Sniper platoon, Headquarters Company, Twenty-sixth Regiment, First Marine Division, operating outside Da Nang.”
He clicked a button.
The screen displayed a business card with a neat block of print under the silhouette of a telescopic rifle.
It said,
WE DEAL IN LEAD, FRIEND.
– SCOUT-SNIPER PLATOON,
HEADQUARTERS COMPANY,
FIRST MARINES.
“The line was stolen from Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven. It was his platoon’s calling card, part of the First Marine Psywar operations in its region, left in prominent places in the area where Bob and his men were operating, usually in the left hand of corpses dropped by a single bullet in the chest. Scout-Sniper of the First was the most proficient unit of professional killers this country had ever sponsored, at least on an individual basis. In the six years it operated, it is said to have killed over one thousand seven hundred fifty enemy soldiers. Itself, it only counted forty-six men in its ranks over those years. A sergeant named Carl Hitchcock, with ninety-three confirmed kills, was highest; Bob, five years later, was second, with his eighty-seven; but there were several other snipers in the sixties and more than a dozen in the fifties.
“As for Bob, I’ll only sketch the high points. He evidently did a few jobs for the CIA’s Operation Phoenix, liquidating hardcore infrastructure people, Vietcong tax collectors and regional chieftains and the like. So he is not unfamiliar with the operations of professional intelligence agencies. But his more common targets were rank-and-file North Vietnamese regulars operating in the area. They even had a huge reward out for Bob, over fifty thousand piasters. But most astonishingly, he and his best friend and spotter, a lance corporal named Donny Fenn, once ambushed a North Vietnamese battalion which was rushing toward an isolated Special Forces camp. The weather was bad, and the jungle was triple canopy, so air support or evacuation was impossible. It was out of range of artillery. A thousand men, heading toward twelve on a hilltop. But Bob and his spotter were the only other friendly forces in the area. They tracked the North Vietnamese, and began taking out officers one at a time over a forty-eight-hour stretch in the An Loc Valley. The battalion never reached the Green Berets, and Swagger and his spotter made it out three days later. He killed over thirty men in that two-day adventure.”
Even Payne, who tried never to be impressed, had to suck in some air.
“Cocksucker can shoot a little,” he said.
The projector clicked.
A man swaddled in bandages lay in a hospital bed, leg locked in traction, face bleak, eyes hugely hollow.
“Bob Lee Swagger’s war came to an end on eleven December 1972. He was sliding over a crest line on his way out when he was hit in the hip by a rifle bullet fired from over a thousand yards. His friend and spotter Donny Fenn slid down the embankment to get him. The next bullet hit Donny in the chest, blew through to his spine. Bob lay out there all morning with his dead friend in his arms, until they could call in artillery on the suspected sniper position. It ended his war and it ended his career in the Marine Corps. He was invalided out of the service in 1975, after three years’ painful rehabilitation. It ended his competitive shooting, too. Competitive shooting is an extremely formalized sport, involving positions of great physical discomfort, while wrapped tightly in leather shooting garments for maximum body control. With his hip wired together, Bob was never able to achieve those formal positions with the same degree of intensity.
“You could say, I suppose, that Bob Lee Swagger gave everything to his country, and in return, it took everything from him. His heroism was of a sort that makes many Americans uneasy. He wasn’t an inspiring leader, he didn’t save lives, he didn’t rise in the chain of command. He was simply and explicitly an extraordinary killer. Almost certainly for that reason, he never got the medals and the acclaim he deserved.
“What followed, one can almost predict. He was married, but the marriage fell apart. A career in real estate sales outside Camp Lejeune collapsed, he tried to go back to school but lost interest. He was into and out of alcoholism clinics in the mid to late seventies. In the eighties, he seems to have come to some sort of provisional peace with himself, and with his country, if only by withdrawing. And one can only imagine what the excessive patriotic hubris of the Persian Gulf victory has done to increase his isolation and his bitterness. He lives in a trailer, alone, in the Ouachita Mountains, a few miles outside of Blue Eye, subsisting on his Marine disability pay and what’s left of the thirty thousand dollars his pal, an old country lawyer named Sam Vincent, won for him in a lawsuit against Mercenary magazine in 1986. Alone, that is, except for his guns, of which he has dozens. And which he shoots every day, as if they are his only friends.
“You can see, of course, his ready fund of resentment, his sense of isolation. All these things make him vulnerable and malleable,” said the doctor. “He’s the man we’ve been taught to hate. He’s the solitary American gun nut.”
Bob knew, as the gun jolted into his shoulder and the sight picture disappeared in a blur of recoil, that the perfect shot he’d been building toward all these hours was his. It was as if the image at the second when the lockwork of the Remington bolt had delivered striker to primer were engraved in his mind and he had fractions of a second to analyze at a speed that has no place in real time; yes, the rifle was held true; yes, the scope, zeroed onto two hundred yards with a group size of less than two inches, was placed exactly where he wanted it; yes, the trigger pull was smooth, unhurried; yes, he was surprised when it broke; yes, his position was solid and no, no last second twitch, no flicker of doubt or lack of self-belief, had betrayed him.
Yes, he’d hit.
The animal, stricken, bucked ferociously in its sudden shroud of red mist. Its great antlered head spasmed back as its front legs collapsed under it and it crashed to the ground.
Without unshouldering, Bob flicked the bolt, tossing a piece of spent brass, ramming home a new.308, and reacquired the target. But he saw immediately that no follow-up was necessary. He snapped the safety on, lowered the rifle and watched Tim thrash, his bull neck beating against the sleet and dust. The animal could not accept that it had been hit or that its legs no longer functioned or that numbness was spreading through it.
Go on, fight it, boy, thought Bob. The more you fight it, the faster it gets you.
At last the man stood. His legs ached and he suddenly noticed how cold it was. He flexed his fingers to make certain they still worked. His hand flew to the ache in his hip, then denied it. He shivered; under the down vest, he was bathed in sweat. Numbly, he went over and retrieved the shell casing he’d just ejected.
After shooting, Bob felt nothing. He felt even more nothing than he did in shooting. He looked at the animal in the undergrowth a hundred-odd yards away. No sense of triumph filled him, no elation.
Yeah, well, I can still shoot a little, he thought. Not so old as I thought.
Creakily, he walked down the hill to the clearing and over to the fallen stag. The sleet pelted him, stinging his face. The whole world seemed gray and wet. He squinted, shivered, drew the parka tighter about himself.
The animal wheezed. Its head still beat against the ground. Its eye was opened desperately and it craned back to see Bob. He thought he could see fear glinting out of that great black eyeball, fear and rage and betrayal, all the huge things that something that’s just been shot feels.
The animal’s tongue hung from its half-opened mouth as the deeper paralysis overcame all its systems. The buck was a brute all right, and its legs were as scarred as a football player’s knees. Bob could see a pucker of dead tissue high on the flank where Sam Vincent’s sloppy.45-70 had flashed through years earlier. But the horns, though now slightly asymmetrical, were beautiful. Tim wore an enormous rack, twelve points of staghorn, in a convoluted density of random growth, like a crown of thorns atop the narrow beauty of his head. He was all trophy, maybe a record for the Boone and Crockett book.
His flanks still heaved, showing the struts of his ribs. His living warmth and its musty, dense animal smell rose through the plunging sleet. You could almost warm your fingers off of him. His left back leg kicked ineffectually, as even now he fought it. Bob looked at the bullet strike. He could see the impact just where he’d willed it to be and just where the Remington had sent it to go: a crimson stain above the shoulder, immediately above the spine.
Figure I hit you just about dead perfect, partner, Bob thought.
Tim snorted piteously, thrashing again. It irked Bob that he thrashed and splattered the mud up on his tawny hide, spotting it. The animal could not take its eye off Bob as Bob bent and stroked it.
Bob touched the throat, then pulled out his knife, an old Randall Survivor, murderously sharp.
Be over in a second, partner, he thought, bending toward Tim.
“Wait a minute,” said Payne.
Dobbler swallowed. In the dark Payne looked over at him with a pathological glare. Everybody was afraid of Payne except Shreck.
“Colonel, I been around a lot of guys like that in the service, and so have you,” he said to Shreck. “Proud to say, I served with them in my twenty-two years in the Special Forces. Now, when it’s killing time, there ain’t no better boy than your white country Southerner. Those boys can shoot, and they got stones the size of cars. But they got an attitude problem, too. They got this thing about their honor. Cross one of them boys, and they make it their business to even the score, and I ain’t shitting you. I’ve seen it happen in service too fuckin’ many times to talk about it.”
“Go on, Payne,” said the colonel.
“They’re true men, and when they get something in their heads, they won’t let go of it. I saw enough of it in Vietnam. I’m just telling you, cross this man and I’m guaranfuckingteeing you the worst kind of trouble.”
“I think,” said the doctor in a loud voice, “that Mr. Payne has made an excellent point. It would not do at all to underestimate Bob Lee Swagger. And he is especially right when he notes Bob’s ‘honor.’ But surely you can also see that it’s his honor that makes him so potentially valuable to us. He is in fact quite a bit like the precision rifle with which he earned his nickname – extremely dangerous if used sloppily, yet absolutely perfect if used well. He, after all, knows more about what we are interested in than nearly any man alive. He is simply the best sniper in the Western world.”
He shot a glance at the silent figure of Shreck, and received in reply only more stony silence.
“But there is a problem. Bob the Nailer, as perfect as he seems, does present one terrible, terrible problem. He has a deep flaw.”
Bob leaned over Tim, gripping the Randall in his left hand.
Tim snorted one more time.
Bob spun the gnarled haft of the weapon in his hand, bringing the serrated upper teeth to bear. With the saw blade, he hacked at the base of the left antler, not in the veiny, velvety knob but an inch or two higher, where the horn was stone dead. In a second the teeth cut into and through the horn and Bob yanked as a half of the heavy crown fell into his hand. He tossed it away into the undergrowth, bent, and just as forcefully sawed the second antler off.
Then he backed off to avoid getting trampled.
The beast lurched halfway to its feet.
Bob gave it a hard swat on the rump.
“Go on, boy. Git! Git! Git outta here, you old sonovabitch!”
Tim bucked up, snorted once, shook his unchained head with a shiver of the purest delight and, his nostrils spurting a double plume of rancid, smoky breath, he seemed to gather even more strength and bounded off crazily, bending aside saplings and flinging shards of ice as he plunged into the forest.
In a second he was gone.
I own you, you sonovabitch, Bob thought, watching as the stag disappeared.
He turned and started the long trek home.
“His flaw,” said the doctor, “is that he will not kill anymore. He still hunts. He goes to great lengths and puts himself through extraordinary ordeals to fire at trophy animals. But he hits them with his own extremely light bullets machined of Delrin plastic at a hundred yards’ range. If he hits the creatures right and he always does – he aims for the shoulder above the spine – he can literally stun them off their feet for five or six minutes. There’s a small compartment of red aluminum dust for weight in each bullet, and as the bullet smashes against the flank of the beast, it smears the animal with a red stain, which the rain quickly washes off. Extraordinary. Then he saws their antlers off. So that no hunter will shoot them for a trophy. He hates trophy hunting. After all, he’s been a trophy.”
Colonel Shreck spoke.
“All right, then. It’s Swagger. But we’ll have to find a trophy this asshole will hunt,” he said.