Point of Impact

CHAPTER THREE

Bob made his inquiries discreetly. From Bill Dodge’s Exxon station on Route 270, he called an old NCO buddy who was a master sergeant going for his thirty, now working Personnel in the Pentagon, and put certain questions before him. The next day, the friend replied with a telegram.

DEAR COOT, it said, YOUR PAL COL. BRUCE IS THE REAL MCCOY. HE LED AN APC ATTACK ON A BUNKER POSITION, WAS HIT TWICE, AND PULLED HIS MEN OUT OF THE BURNING THING HIMSELF. THEY SAY HE DID BECOME A COP IN ARIZONA. SEMPER FI, BUD.

That learned, Bob stopped in at Sara Vincent’s travel agency – Sara was Sam Vincent’s divorced daughter, and a woman so plain she’d even scare Mike – and bought his tickets, made arrangements with Sam to check his property once or twice a day, and feed the dog, and tried to get himself ready for the world again.

He was all right, too, until the last night. He knew he had to get up early for the drive to Little Rock and just when he’d thought he had everything checked out and was ready for the sack, it came over him. That’s the way it came: fast, without preparation, without announcement. It just came and there it was.

It was a bad one. He hadn’t had it so bad since the president declared the little war in the desert a victory, and America went on a bender and everybody was happy except himself and maybe another million boys who wondered why nobody put up ribbons for them twenty years ago, when it might have mattered.

Now you hold it on down, he told himself, aching for a glass of smooth brown whiskey to flatten himself out, knowing that if he had one many more would follow.

But there was no whiskey, nothing to blunt what happened in his mind. The memories hit him hard. He remembered the VC he shot who turned out to be an eight-year-old boy with a hoe – it had looked like an AK through the 9× at eight hundred meters in the bad light of sunset. He remembered the smell of burned villages after the Search and Destroys, and the crying of the women and the way the goddamned kids just looked at you during his first tour. He remembered the bellytime, moving through the high grass, avoiding the crest lines, as the ants crawled over you and the snakes slithered by and you just lay there, waiting, for days sometimes, until someone passed into the kill zone eight hundred meters out and you could put them down. He remembered the way they fell when hit, instant rag doll, the toppling surrender, the small cloud of dust it raised. So many of them. The “confirmed” kills were only the ones with a spotter there, to write it in the log and make a report.

But mostly he remembered the sudden shock as his hip went numb and he collapsed and slid down the earthen dam of the perimeter. He looked down and saw the smashed flesh, the pulsing red. Remembering, he put his hand on the wound, and it throbbed some. Then he remembered Donny scrambling down.

“No!” he yelled, “get your young ass back,” and the bullet came from so long away it arrived a full second before its own sound. It drilled Donny in the chest and tunneled to his spine. He was dead before he collapsed against Bob and lay across him that long morning.

“Hell of a shot, Bob,” the major said later. “We made it over a thousand yards. Who knew they could shoot that good? Who knew they had a man that good?”

You could never forget stuff like that, not really. But he learned somehow not to let it rag him most of the time; he could ride it out in the mountains or in the solitude.

Bob sat at what had passed for a kitchen table. His rebuilt hip ached a bit, all that plastic instead of cartilage. He could feel what he called his own personal night passing over him. Of course the time of day had nothing to do with it. What he called his own personal night was about the feeling of being nothing, of having no worth, of having spent himself in a war nobody cared about, and having given up everything that was important and good. In other days, this was what got Bob off on his drinking, and drunk, he turned mean as shit.

But now he didn’t drink, and instead he threw on a coat and went out into the harsh Arkansas night and walked the mile or so downhill. Inside Aurora Baptist, some kind of service was going on. He heard the black people singing something loud and crazy. What are they so goddamned happy for inside that shaky little white clapboard building anyhow?

Out beyond the church was the little graveyard, and there among the Washingtons and the Lincolns and the Delanos of Polk County was one spindly marker for a man named Bo Stark. Bob just looked at it. The wind howled and roared through the trees, the moon was a raggedy-assed streetlamp, the music pumped and blasted, the black people were singing up a storm, beating the devil down.

Bo Stark was his own age, and the only white man in the cemetery because no other cemetery would have him. He’d come from a fine family and had known Bob all through high school. They’d gone to the same doctor, the same dentist, played on the same football team. But Bo’s people had money; he’d gone on to the university in Fayetteville and from there had joined the Army and spent a year as a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne, another fool for duty who’d believed in it all. And after that, nothing. Bo Stark had gone a man and come home a no-account. The war got inside him and never let him go. One bad thing turned to another; couldn’t hold a job, wouldn’t pay back loans, was searching for the death he’d only just missed in the Land of Bad Things. Two weeks after the war in the desert was over, after the mighty victory and the celebration, one Sunday night he’d finally killed a man in a bar with a knife in Little Rock and when the police found him in his daddy’s garage in Blue Eye, he’d blown a.45 through the roof of his mouth.

So Bob stood there as the wind brought cold memories from the cold ground out at him, and looked at the marker: BO STARK, it said, 1946-1991. AIRBORNE ALL THE WAY.

He came here when he was frightened, because in the radiance of the glowing church, standing over the body of the man who could have been and was almost him, he could see it in the stone: BOB LEE SWAGGER, 1946-1992 USMC SEMPER FIDELIS.

Now he looked at it, and realized it was time to do that which could kill him fastest of all possible dangers: to go back. He wondered if he had the Pure-D stones for it.

He still thought of it as The World. It was the place where all things were, where women and liquor and pleasure and temptation commingled. Now he was back in it. He landed at Baltimore-Washington International Airport after a crazed flight that took him to St. Louis from Little Rock, then east. He was worried that his rifle, with the bright orange airline tag on the handle of the gun case, hadn’t made the trip; you always worried that some person in the airlines system would see the thing and snap it up.

But sure enough, the case came out of the luggage chute and moved along to him on the rubber belt so that he could pluck it up.

“Damn,” someone said, “hunting season’s long over, pardner.” It was early January, though surprisingly mild.

“Just a target rifle,” Bob said easily to the man, scooping up the case. He felt a little silly with the long, hard thing, so weirdly shaped among all the other luggage, and knowing that he himself looked so cowboylike to these Eastern people, in his best black Tony Lamas, a nice pair of Levi’s, a pointed-collar shirt with string tie and a black Stetson, all under a sheepskin coat, his best coat.

Getting the car turned out to be no problem at all as the reservation in his name was waiting and the girl at the counter was especially ingratiating. She thought he was some kind of cowboy hero; her eyes lit with joy at what he took to be his incredibleness and when he called her “ma’am,” she was doubly pleased.

He left the airport, found his way to the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, from there to the Baltimore Beltway, and then west out I-70, across Maryland. Even in the yellowed state of high, dead winter, he could see that it was a lovely place, rolling, not so savage as Arkansas. Soon he came to mountains, old, humped things, ridge after ridge of them. In three hours, beyond Cumberland, he found himself in Maryland’s wildest pastures in its farthest, westernmost regions, not wild like the Ouachitas but nevertheless free of the poison taint of the city and just barely tame enough to accommodate the most provisional sort of farming. It looked to be fine deer country, way out in Garrett County. He was searching for a town called Accident, and halfway between it and nowhere, just where they’d said it would be, he found the small Ramada Inn nestled under the mountains. He checked in, his reservations all made and an envelope waiting for him with a hearty welcoming letter and detailed instructions on how to reach the headquarters of Accutech at its shooting facility a few miles down the road. There was also his per diem, ten crisp twenty-dollar bills.

Bob went to his room and lay down on the bed and didn’t go out anymore that night. He just thought it all out, trying not to be bothered that he had been followed his whole long trip out from the airport by a very good surveillance team.

Like everything associated with RamDyne, the trailer was small and seedy and cheap. The outfit never did anything first-class and seemed only to have cretins of the prison guard mentality working for it, like the horrid Jack Payne. And now it was jammed with men Dobbler was supposedly briefing.

The doctor sighed, looking at the dull faces in his audience.

“Er, could I have your attention please?”

He couldn’t. They paid him no attention at all. He was irrelevant to them.

How far he’d fallen and how fast! Once the youngest member of the Harvard Medical School psychiatric faculty and the sole proprietor of one of the most flourishing private practices in the Cambridge-Greater Boston area, he’d had the life he’d dreamed of and worked for so furiously. One day, however, when he was tired and his resources nearly depleted, on a last appointment, he’d let his discipline slip. He’d touched a woman. Why had he done it? He didn’t know. In the nanosecond before he did it, it hadn’t even been in his mind. But he did it. He’d touched her and when she looked at him he realized that she wanted him to touch her more, the sexual savagery that spilled out stunned him. He made love to her right there in the office. It was the start of his out-of-control phase, abetted by a severe amphetamine habit. He seduced nine patients. Inevitably one had gone to the police; the charge was rape. The squalor played itself out over six melancholy months, climaxing in his acceptance of a plea-bargained second-degree assault conviction, which delivered him, courtesy of a feminist judge, to the ungentle ministrations of Russell Isandhlwana. The symmetry was perfect, even awesome – justice at its finest: Dobbler had fucked nine neurotic women in his office; in prison he was fucked by an immense man, who called him his dickhole.

And now, he was Raymond Shreck’s dickhole. Not sexually, of course, but even Dobbler found a certain black humor in the irony: he’d gone from the ignominy of the prison to somehow secure a position in subservience to a man with the same (though somewhat modulated) sense of physical power and ruthlessness as Russell Isandhlwana, a man whom, like Russell, he totally feared but whom he needed for protection and strength.

“Earth to Planet, Doctor!” It was the horrid Payne.

“What?”

“Hey, get with the program. You lost it there, man.”

Ah! He’d lost his place again, wasn’t sure what question he was answering. It was the last briefing before the subject showed up.

Oh, yes, he was holding forth on Bob’s unique capacity for utter near-death stillness, explaining to Payne’s perplexed listeners why it was that Bob, though in his room from five-thirty P.M. on the previous evening, had simply ceased to exist for their listening devices. He was trying to get them to see how important this was, for it got to the very nature of Swagger’s uniqueness.

“Ah – yes, he has an ability to shut down and let the world go about its business while he’s frozen; and then when he’s become a part of the environment, then and only then, will he strike. But like any skill, it’s a skill that simply has to be practiced. He was practicing nothingness.”

Somebody yawned.

Somebody farted.

Somebody laughed.

“All right,” said Shreck, vigorously, climbing up front and by sheer body heat exiling the doctor to the wings. “Thanks, Dobbler. Now, listen up, I want eyes front, Payne, get your people to pay some attention for once. It’s very close to the most sensitive part of this operation, the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”

Shreck’s dark eyes seemed to beam with strange force.

“Let me tell you who you’re dealing with, so there’s no misunderstanding. This guy is mule-proud Southern, as stubborn as they come. He doesn’t want to be pushed and he won’t stand to be insulted. He’s also still got some gung-ho Marine in him. He’ll be a fucking ramrod; you try and bend him and he may kick your ass. So the way we play him is slow and steady. You don’t push; you don’t order. You just smile and go along. Any questions?”

Shreck’s sudden dramatic appearance had its desired effect: it silenced the troops.

They were fools.

“Sir?”

Someone had leaned in.

“Yeah,” said Shreck.

“Sir, it’s 0730 hours. Surveillance called; subject just left the motel. He’s on his way.”

“Okay,” said Shreck, “I hope you were listening to the doctor, because if anybody screws up I’ll have his ass. Now let’s get cracking, people. First day on a new job.”

If nothing else, it had a comforting feeling. It was, after all, a rifle range, one of those peeling, flaking, sagging, yet grand places where men have always gathered to plunk themselves down before a piece of paper with a black circle imprinted on it and discover the secrets of their own rifles and their own selves. Bob had spent a lifetime, it sometimes seemed, in such a place, and always the talk was good and the feeling among the shooters easy and generous.

He stood on a concrete apron, before a series of T-shaped shooting benches, green, always green, on every shooting range in America they were green. Bob could see the place had been built sometime in the thirties, the private preserve of some hunting and shooting club or other, and he knew that under the sagging roof that shielded the apron and the benches there’d been many tales told of deer that had gotten away and of loads good and loads bad, and rifles worth as much as a good woman and rifles worth as little as a dog with the clap.

The only unusual thing about this place, a mile or so off the main road by a series of convoluted gravel tracks, was a trailer off to one side, which while not new looked as if it had just been dumped there. Before it stood the sign of the sponsors of this day’s labors, Accutech.

He could see the targets across the faintly sloping yellow meadow beyond the line of benches, a black dot at a hundred yards, a black period at two hundred and a black pinprick at three hundred.

“Coffee, Mr. Swagger?” asked the colonel, still in his raincoat. Next to him was the morose little noncom who always looked ready for a fight. Everybody else was a gofer, except one pear-shaped city boy with a goatee who looked like he had a finger up his ass.

“No thanks,” he said. “It jitters the nerves.”

“Decaf?”

“Decaf’s fine,” he said, and Colonel Shreck nodded to a man who quickly poured Bob a paper cupful from a thermos.

It was surprisingly temperate, around sixty, and a gentle breeze pressed over the range; above a pale-lemon sun stood in a pale-lemon sky. It was the false spring, a phony of a day, too sweet to be trusted this month.

“All set, then?” asked the colonel.

“I suppose,” Bob said.

“Do you want to recheck your zero before we start the testing rounds?”

“Yes sir.”

“All right, gentlemen, let’s move away. Eyes and ears on.”

Bob uncased his rifle, lodged it on a sandbag rampart and slid the bolt back. He cracked open a box of the Lake City Match rounds, threaded five, one after the other with a brass clicking, into the magazine, pushed home and locked the bolt which flew forward and rotated shut with the gliding ease of a vault door closing on ball bearings and grease. He pulled his Ray-Ban aviators on, hooking them behind the ears, and slid his earmuffs down across the top of his head, clamping his ears off from the world. He felt the roar of blood rushing in his brain.

Bob slid up to the rifle and found his bench shooter’s position, his boots flat upon the cement apron of the range as if making the magic construction of stability up through his body that would translate to the rock-hard hold of the rifle itself.

He pulled the rifle up, and in, chunking it against his shoulder, placing his hand upon the comb tuned so just the faintest smudge of fingertip caressed the lightened trigger, adjusting a bunny-ear bag underneath the butt-heel. His other arm ran flat along the shooting bench, under the rifle which itself had been sunk just right into the sandbags.

Bob found his spot-weld, and closed his left eye. The image was a bit out of focus, so he diddled with the ring to bring it back to clarity and for his effort was rewarded with the black image of perfect circumference, quartered precisely by the stadia of the scope, ten times the size it had been, now as big as a half-dollar at point-blank range.

He exhaled half a breath, held what he had, and with that wished the end of his finger to contract but a bit and was rewarded with the thrill of recoil, the blur as the rifle ticked off a round. As he was throwing the bolt, he heard a spotter.

“X-ring. Damn, right in the middle, perfect, a perfect shot.”

Bob fired four more times into the same hole.

“I guess I’m zeroed,” he said.

A man called Hatcher briefed him on the test.

“Mr. Swagger, one of my associates will load your rifle with five rounds. You’ll not know if you’re shooting your own handloads, the Federal Premium, the Lake City Match or our own Accutech Sniper Grade ammunition. You’ll fire four groups of five rounds each at a hundred yards, four at two hundred yards and four at three hundred yards. Then we’ll compute the groupings and see how the ammunition stacks up. Then, this afternoon, we’d like to run a similar series of tests, but from offhand or improvised positions, with a stress factor added in. I think you’ll find it quite interesting.”

“You’re paying the bills. Let’s get shooting,” Bob said.

Bob shot with extraordinary concentration. What separated him from other shooters was his utter consistency, his sameness. He was a human Ransom rest, like the mechanical gizmo they use to test pistols, coming each time to the same strained yet perfectly built position, cement to bone to wood, bone to rifle, fingertip to trigger. Each time, the same: his cheek just so against the fiberglass of the stock, the same pull of rifle into shoulder, the same cant to his hand on the grip, the same angle and looseness of his off-hand, the same distance between eye and scope, the same half-breath held, the same three heartbeats in suspended animation, the same infinitesimal backwards slide of trigger as the slack came out, the same crispness like a grass rod snapping as the trigger broke, the same soundless detonation and blur as the rifle shivered under the ignition of its round.

“X-ring, little high, maybe a third of an inch high at two o’clock.”

“X-ring, within an inch.”

“X-ring, inside an inch.”

There were no flyers, no glitches, no mistakes. Bob found the groove and stayed there, throughout the long morning, hardly moving or breathing or wasting a second or a motion. It pleased him queerly that the rifle was taken from him empty, then brought back loaded, that regularly someone ran to record and change the targets.

He lost count. It was like the ’Nam. You just shot and watched the bullet go where you sent it, with the tiniest of deviations. It became almost abstract, completely impersonal; you didn’t brood on it, merely broke it down into small rituals, small repetitions. And on and on the score mounted, so that nobody could stay with him and he got closer and closer to Carl Hitchcock’s legendary figure of ninety-three.

“X-ring.”

“X-ring.”

“X-ring.”

When he was done, had shot all four five-shot strings at all three ranges, he put the rifle down, while technicians ran out to secure the targets and calculate the group sizes.

Of course Bob had made the loads early on, by the slight difference in the kicks. He knew his own rounds right off, and was just a bit slower in marking the difference between the Federal and the Lake City loads, but in time he could tell; that left by process of elimination only the Accutech Sniper Grade ammunition. It shot a mite high, he felt, and he had the impression of the shots clustering just over the X-ring, carrying a bit. Lots of ooomph though, a hot round, very consistent.

“Mr. Swagger, would you like to see your results?” asked Hatcher.

“Yes, I would,” said Bob.

He went over to a bench where the results were being tabulated, by two men with a set of dial calipers.

“Okay,” said Hatcher, “I think you’ll be pleased. I’ve marked each target according to the distance and the ammunition you fired. At a hundred yards, you fired Federal Premium, Accutech, Lake City Match M852’s and your own handload, in that order. Here are the targets.”

Bob looked at the mutilated X-rings, the small spatters of perforations dead center where the bullet holes had cloverleafed.

“The group size, as we make it, is as follows. Federal,.832 inches, Accutech.344 inches, Lake City Match.709 inches and your handload.321 inches.”

Bob examined them; yes, the Accutech stuff was about as good as his own handloads, and quite a bit better than the two best factory loadings. He nodded.

“Let’s see how she holds out a bit,” he said.

“Okay, at two hundred you drop the four and a half inches the ballistics table says you’ll drop but you’ll see the group sizes remain under a minute of angle, though the Federal begins to push it.”

Again, Bob saw the neat clusters of punctures; this time, however, cloverleafs were rarer, almost a function of coincidence. Each group was between one and a half and two inches in diameter, and each about two inches off the X-ring, as the bullet had dropped. The Federal, surprisingly, yielded the sloppiest grouping with the holes spread out at almost two inches exactly; again, Bob’s handloads held truest, at.967 inches, center of outer hole to center of outer hole, less than half a minute of angle, but the Accutech lot was pressing him closely, with a.981-inch rating, also less than half a minute of angle, and Bob felt he might have done better because he sensed his own round immediately and relaxed, having the confidence in its ability to perform.

“And now, our pièce de résistance,” said Hatcher. “Mike, the three-hundred-yard targets, please. Mr. Swagger, I think you’re going to see why we call our ammunition ‘Sniper Grade.’ You, above all others, should grasp the significance.”

He handed the four targets out.

When Bob was impressed, that respect took the form of a low, involuntary whistle. He whistled.

At three hundred yards, cloverleafs were a thing of fantasy. At three hundred yards, the groups fell between nine and eleven inches from the X-ring, at six o’clock, outside of the black. The groups opened up and the Federal revealed its fraudulence: it had exploded beyond minute of angle to a full 4.5 inches.

Bob shook his head with an evil snort, deeply disappointed. The group looked like the random pokings of a child.

The Lake City did a bit better, but not much; it was just at the minute of angle limit, the group playing across three inches, though in truth one of them might have been a flyer, because if you subtracted it the group fell to 2.5 inches.

And Bob saw that the Accutech stuff had beaten him. His own group still had the illusion of a circle, the punctures clustered within 1.386 inches; he was sub-minute of angle still, but the damned Accutech was 1.212 inches, with one three-shot triangle within.352 inches!

“Damn,” he said.

“That’s shooting,” someone said. “That’s fine shooting. Most men can’t see at three hundred yards, even with a 24×.”

“No,” said Bob, awed. “That’s ammo. That’s fine ammo.”

It was fine ammo. Only fifty to sixty men in the world could handload ammo that fine, Frank Barnes maybe, a couple of the sublime technicians at Speer or Hornady or Sierra, a few wildcatters of a dying breed, old gnarled men who’d lived with guns in machine shops their whole lives. A few world-class benchrest shooters who agged in the 1’s. A few Delta or FBI SWAT armorers. Whoever put this stuff together knew what he was doing. Bob had an image in his head of some old man who’d done it a million times, working the brass down to the finest, smallest perfection. It took more than patience; it took a kind of genius. He felt him. He felt him on the range: the presence of an old shooter who knew what he was doing.

Bob knew then. He’d suspected before but now he knew. They were playing him, guiding him; they weren’t what they said. Then who were they?

Bob smiled.

“Now what, colonel?”

“Well, let’s eat; then, this afternoon, we’d like to take you to another range, where you’ll be gunning for targets at even farther ranges…beyond five hundred yards. Out as far as a thousand.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Bob.

“Then, tomorrow morning, Mr. Swagger, I’m going to give you some real fun!”

That night, Bob turned down an invitation from the Accutech crew for a nice feed at a restaurant in Thayersville, and instead took his rented car and simply drove alone until he found an unpretentious place farther out, away from the built-up areas, a country place where he could sit by himself and not be paid any mind.

They didn’t follow him. They now kept their distance, thinking sure they had him.

And maybe they did. He was damned curious where all this was headed. He knew in a general sense, of course, what it had to be. It had to be about killing.

His reputation had preceded him. People in certain zones knew of him. Occasionally something weird would come his way – a nibble, a veiled hint, just the slightest indication that some really nice money could be his if he’d only meet so-and-so in St. Louis or Memphis or Texarkana and listen to a certain proposal. These offers came from strange sources, over the years. Certainly, some were from what he took to be organized crime interests. Others came from what had to be intelligence sources – Bob, after all, had done two jobs against civilian targets in the ’Nam, when ordered to in writing by higher headquarters. Still other approaches were simply well-off men with pathological inclinations who wished to use him, in some way, to solve a business problem, to right a wrong, to avenge an infidelity.

No, Bob always explained. It was against the law.

Go away, please.

Most of them did. Though occasionally, one didn’t: there was one breed of hater it took special effort to drive away – those who knew that the country was entirely theirs, and that all good things would flow if others were removed. Of course what they meant, usually, was the black people. Bob had served with too many fine black NCOs in the ’Nam to listen to this kind of shit, and though he had more or less given up on violence, he had broken the nose of a fellow from some outfit calling itself the White Order. The man had said through blood and anger they’d put Bob on The List too, and Bob had grabbed the man and thrust the blunt muzzle of his Colt Government Model down his throat and explained simply, “Mister, if you can’t do your own killing, you don’t scare me worth a drink of spit!” The man had pissed in his pants and disappeared off Bob’s mountain but fast.

But now – these others, this damn Colonel Bruce with his medal and his little bird dog Payne. Rich enough to buy this whole spread, bring him way out here, have someone make up these excellent cartridges. Who were they? Who was worth killing to go to this much trouble?

Agency.

He could smell it all over them. This was how the Agency worked, at odd angles, never quite out in the open, bringing you halfway in so that by the time you figured out what was what it took more effort to get out than to stay.

So? He sat and considered, perplexed, aching for a taste of liquor, a cold splash of beer against his throat, to soften up his mind so that he could think better. But he knew one drink and he was lost, so he fought his way through stone-cold sober.

Agency wants me hunting again.

But who?

Bob thought and thought on it in the little restaurant, his head and hip aching, and got nowhere and only after many hours did he notice the place was about to close, and the waitress was making hungry eyes at him. He’d have no part of that, no thank you. No women, no liquor, never again. Only rifles and duty.

But what was duty?

Who was worth hunting?

Who had loaded the Accutech ammo?

Bob got in his car and drove back; he slept dreamlessly, still setting course by a single star: nothing is worth killing.

He’d tell them tomorrow after hearing them out. He would not kill again.