Point of Impact

CHAPTER SIX

The colonel had attitude, that was for certain.

Not a twitch of regret touched his tough face, not a shred of self-doubt. What he got from Bob – furious rectitude, and the concealed threat of violence – he paid back in spades.

“All right, Swagger,” he said. “You’ve seen through us. What do you expect, congratulations? You were supposed to. It’s time to put the cards on the table.”

“Why’d you do that to me? Why’d you set me up to take that shot on myself and poor Donny?”

“They say you don’t trophy-hunt anymore, Swagger. I wanted to let you know that there were still trophies worth hunting.”

They were now in a small, crummy conference room in the trailer that wore the Accutech sign near the three-hundred-yard range. The colonel glared at Bob; the others were some kind of bearded sissy Bob had seen at the range, and the suckass Hatcher. Weirdly, dominating the conference table on which it sat was a large Sony TV with VCR. Were they going to watch a show?

“What is your name, sir?” said Bob.

“It isn’t William Bruce,” said the colonel. “Though there is a Colonel William Bruce and he did win the Congressional and he was supervisor of the Arizona State Police. A fine man. I’m not a fine man. I’m a man who gets things done and I usually don’t have the time to be anything except an asshole, and this is one of those times.”

“I don’t like being lied to. You’d best come clean, or I’m on my way out of here.”

“You’ll sit there until I say so,” said the colonel, fixing those hard, level eyes on him, asserting the weight of rank.

It was a sense of command that he’d seen in some of the best officers, the men who pushed the hardest. It wasn’t inspirational, except by deflection; it was instead a gathering of will, a fury to win or die. It was a gift, too, and without it in battle an army was lost. But Bob had seen its ugliness too – that rigidity that could conceive of no other way but its own, that willingness to spend other men’s lives that came from holding one’s own cheaply but the mission dearly. This guy stunk of duty, and that’s what made him so fucking dangerous.

“We’re after a man,” the colonel said. “He’s a very special man, a very sly man. We think we’re going to get a shot at him. We’re after the Soviet sniper who has hit many great shots in his time, among them the fourteen-hundred-yard job that blew out your hip and the spine shot on Donny Fenn.”

It was amazing, Dr. Dobbler was thinking. His self-control was astonishing. No gasp, no double take, as if it didn’t matter. Swagger simply took it in, and went on, his concentration unmodified, his glare unblinking. No signs of excitation as were common to the species in moments of conflict. No rapid breathing, no facial coloration, no lip-licking, muscular tension. No excitation! No wonder he had been such an extraordinary soldier in battle.

Dobbler wondered how rare this was. Was it as rare, say, as the ability to hit a major league fastball, a gift given to about a hundred babies a year? Or was it extraordinarily rare, such as the ability to hit a major league fastball for an average of.350 or better, which arrives to a baby once in a generation or so? Dobbler knew he’d come across something rare and it gave him a thrill. It scared him, too.

Bob was leaning forward.

“You don’t give a shit about Donny Fenn. There’s only two of us left in the world that remember that young man. And you don’t give a shit about my bad pin.”

“You know what, Swagger? You’re right. I don’t give a shit about Donny Fenn. And I don’t care about your hip. But I care about this Russian. Because he’s back. He’s hunting again.”

Nick put fifty cents in and after a bit, somewhere inside the machine there was a shifting and a clunking, and after another bit, a can of diet Coke rolled down a chute and banged into the bin. He pulled it out, peeled the pop top back and took a long, bracing swig.

“Damn,” said Hap Fencl, “fifty cents. In our building the goddamn things cost seventy-five.”

But Nick didn’t respond.

“I can’t think why a guy would want to be next to a Coke machine,” he finally said. “Hell, two Coke machines, two Pepsi machines, an ice machine, and a machine that drops bags of stale peanuts.” He gestured to the little arsenal of vending equipment clustered in the alcove just outside room 58.

“Maybe the guy had a sweet tooth. Never wanted to be away from the machine.”

“No, it’s the last room you’d take, you got guys dropping quarters or rattling through the ice all night long. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Nick, he thought he was being followed maybe. So, he wants a room where there’s a lot of action outside in the hallways, figuring it might scare the hitters off. These guys, though – nothing would have scared them off.”

“Yeah, but – ”

“Hey, Nick, you’re not thinking straight. You’ve seen a dozen of these things, not quite so bloody. It’s a straight drug-trade wipeout, the Colombians or the Peruvians or whatever sending the word out that they are not to be disobeyed or nasty things happen. This guy got caught snitching; went underground; they caught him and whacked his butt good. Okay?”

Nick nodded. Still, it bothered him.

Why me, he thought. Why would this guy call me of all people on the day my wife dies.

He emptied the Coke can in one wet, sweet swig.

“Here he is, Mr. Swagger,” said the colonel. “The man who shot Donny Fenn. And who crippled you.”

Bob looked at the face that the colonel had brought to the television screen with the snap of a remote control. He tried to see some special thing there, something that said shooter, something that said sniper. What he saw was a lean hard face, a face that had no nonsense in it. The eyes were slotted and dark, like gun slits; the cheekbones were streamlined knobs; the hair a tight military sheen. There was a streak of the Orient in him in the slight flare of his cheekbones – he looked like a Mongol.

“Solaratov, T. We think that’s his name. But nobody knows what the T stands for.”

Bob just grunted, because he didn’t know what else was available.

“T. Solaratov, as photographed from quite a distance away by an agent code-named Flowerpot in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1988. Our last picture of him, and our best. He’s fifty-four years old, in peak condition. Runs twelve miles a day. He was in Afghanistan advising Spetsnaz units on sniper deployment. He’s an expert on sniper deployment; he’s hunted men all over the world. Whenever the Soviets needed a shot to be taken, he took it for them. How many men have you killed, Sergeant?”

Bob hated this question. It was nobody’s business; it didn’t matter.

“All right,” said the colonel, “you can be strong and silent. But the official records say eighty-seven and I’d bet you hit lots more. Lots.”

Bob knew what the figure was. He sometimes pretended he didn’t but he knew, exactly.

“We figure Comrade T. Solaratov has sent over three hundred fifty suckers on to a better world. Head shots, mostly, his trademark. No pussy center-of-body shit for this boy.”

Bob grunted. That was serious shooting.

Nick flashed his ID on the woman and in a few seconds, he was led in to see Mr. Hillary Dwight, vice president, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New Orleans, in charge of vending sales. Mr. Dwight was a florid man in a white tropical suit who perhaps drank so much pure Coke that it had affected his ample waistline. But he had a monk’s shrewd, devotional eyes and an office so neat it spoke of a tidy, precision-oriented mind.

“So what is it I can do for you, Mr. Memphis?” he asked. “I hope one of my drivers hasn’t gone and done something wrong. Those boys have access to all sorts of institutions and, frankly, the quality of personnel just isn’t quite what it once was.”

“No, sir,” said Nick. “No, it’s just a little mystery I’m trying to get a handle on. We have a fellow who got himself killed in a motel room out near the airport – ”

“Good heavens,” said Dwight.

“But before he got killed, he specifically asked for the room near the Coke machines. You have two Coke machines just outside and Pepsi-Cola has two. There was also a Handy-Candy Dispensing Machine for candy bars and nuts and the like. Now, what are the properties of a Coke machine that might make a man who suspects he’s being trailed by killers seek out their presence? Or am I barking up a wrong tree entirely?”

“Hmmm.” Dwight’s plump face knitted up densely with the process of thought.

“What was the motel?”

Nick told him.

He stood, spun to face a desktop computer terminal and tickety-ticked in some instructions. Nick watched as obediently, in electro-yellow, the program rose before him. The fat man studied it.

“Well now, Mr. Memphis, you see we’re in the process of replacing our Vendo-Dyne 1500 series with the more advanced Vendo-Dyne 1800. You’ve seen them. They talk to you. You can put dollar bills into them and get change. A very sophisticated piece of machinery. And powerful, too.”

Nick nodded, enjoying the arcana of Coke Culture. That was one of the many things about his job he liked so much: it took you into new worlds all the time.

“Ah, yes. Yes, we’d just serviced that place and, yes-siree, we’d replaced the fifteen hundreds with eighteen hundreds just last month. A great advantage is size. The eighteen hundreds hold two thousand cans while the fifteen hundreds only hold five hundred. Means we don’t have to service them nearly as much, and we can pass the savings on to the consumer.”

Nick remembered. Fifty cents a can.

“So what does that tell us?” he asked, remembering the glossy, blinding brilliance of the new Coke machine in the hallway.

“Well, sir, one of the properties of the eighteen hundred happens to be its field generation.”

Nick waited on the explanation.

“The eighteen hundred really encompasses a small computer chip and it needs power to run it. So it generates an electromagnetic field. We had two of them there? Well, they were putting out a blanket of electromagnetic pulse, that means.”

Nick shook his head, cursing his own stupidity.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

Mr. Dwight smiled, and then explained.

“All right, Swagger, here’s what we’ve been able to turn up on the guy. T. Solaratov, according to an Israeli team that went after the fucker and almost nailed him when he was instructing Fatah in sniper techniques in the camps of the Bekka Valley in the mid-seventies – our best source of information on him, I might add, and a damned shame for all of us that as close as they got, they weren’t able, quite, to get their man. When he was eighteen, in the Soviet Naval Marines, his shooting abilities were first discovered and cultivated. In the years 1954 to 1959, he absolutely ruled the Eastern Bloc shooting matches. He was an extraordinary target marksman. We believe he got his first kills, however, in Hungary, in 1956; both Nicholas Humml and Pavel Upranye,-Hungarian nationalists arguing for further resistance to the Soviet troops, were dispatched from long distance by Moisen-Nagant bullets at rallies. No trace was ever found of their killer.

“By 1960 – after certain exploits in the Congo – he had obtained a commission and been selected out of the Soviet Naval Marines for an even higher elite, the Spetsnaz, the Soviet special forces. He more or less retired from competitive target shooting in 1962. Then, he disappeared, except for the occasional sightings and some other rumored guest appearances.

“And in 1972, when a gunnery sergeant named Bob Lee Swagger bounced Number Three Battalion of the Fifth People’s Shock Infantry in the An Loc Valley, killing thirty-six men over a heroic two-day encounter and thus saving the lives of twelve Green Berets and a hundred indig troops on an eavesdropping mission up near the Cambo border, the NVC freak and send to Moscow for a pro. So Comrade Solaratov arrives. He’s searching for one guy. You. It takes him a week to infiltrate in, but he can’t get closer than fourteen hundred yards. He studies you, living and pissing and shitting in that little hole, for a week. Then when everything’s perfect, he takes the shot you took today. Oh, but fourteen hundred yards is a long way.”

“He didn’t get the drop right,” said Bob.

“That’s right. So he takes you low, in the hip. But that gives him the range. And when Donny comes over, he hits it. Center chest. Then he’s history. Solaratov’s a big hero! He gets the fifty-thousand-piaster reward on your head, and two days later he’s in Moscow, having strawberry blintz and getting laid.”

Bob looked at the shooter’s face on the television screen. Yeah he’d heard the rumors. Guys came back said a white guy had nailed him.

The colonel continued.

“We have him next in Angola in the seventies, we’ve got him in Nicaragua instructing Sandinista shooters, we’ve got him in and out of the Middle East, as I told you, where the Israelis laid on a napalm strike just for him, and missed him by less than an hour. He’s very big in the Middle East. Does a lot of work for some nasty boys over there. We’ve got him in Afghanistan for a long long time. He ran a unit of Spetsnaz snipers there, they dropped their targets in the hundreds. Make you and Donny look like Sunday school teachers.”

Bob’s hand went to his hip, to quell a little flare of pain down there.

Nick called a guy he knew in DEA who had a brother who worked for Defense Mapping in Washington but who had at one time worked for a certain outfit quartered in Langley, Virginia. It was a complicated exchange, involving a lot of billing and cooing, and finally begging on Nick’s part, but finally the brother said that, yes, he knew some people in the outfit still and he could make a certain, highly unofficial call to an old buddy and ask Nick’s one question. He would only ask the one. He would ask no others and he would deny till the day he died that he ever knew or heard of a Nick Memphis. He would call Nick back…well, he’d call Nick back when he was good and ready to.

“Why would a Russian be back in this country hunting somebody?” Bob said.

“I said he was a Russian,” said the man. “I didn’t say he was hunting for the Russians. Solaratov was ousted, unceremoniously retired, when the Red Army downsized last year, after the Soviet Union broke up. Pissed him off. He felt discarded. He felt bitter. Know anything about an old war-horse who feels discarded, Sergeant Swagger?”

Bob just stared at the prick.

“He was spotted in July. Guess where?”

“I don’t like games, mister.”

“It would have been your first and only guess. Downtown Baghdad, in the presence of a General Khalil al-Wazir, who is head of Al Mukharabat, the Iraqi secret police. Now, Sergeant, into the present. Let me tell you about Rainbow. Do you know what Rainbow is?”

“I don’t know what Rainbow is,” said Bob, wanting the man to be done with it.

“Hardly anybody does. It’s a satellite, exceedingly sophisticated, stealth impregnated, that sits in very high orbit above the Middle East, seeing all that it can see and sending the pictures back to us. Very helpful the past few years. The Iraqis and the Syrians and the Libyans suspect it’s there, but they can’t verify it because they can’t pick it up on their cheap Eastern Bloc radar. But they’re careful. When they do their secret things, they do them at night, when Rainbow isn’t nearly so effective. But strange things do happen. Who would play lotteries if they didn’t? Now look at this.”

He snapped the picture control and brought up a series of photos. They appeared to show, one after another, a hazy series of markings on the earth as seen from high up.

“That’s Rainbow working over central Iraq about two hundred miles above Baghdad, near a military installation at Ad Dujayi late one night a few weeks ago, trying to get a line on our old friends, the Medina Division of the Republican Guard. And what do you see? You see almost nothing. And then…a miracle.”

He clicked again.

The photo was dramatically clearer. What Bob saw was towers, very like the one he had perched in that morning, overlooking networks of roads or amphitheaters at varying distances, the geometry of each setting subtly different from its brothers.

“Lightning. Nature’s flashbulb, something nobody could predict; it lit the ground at the instant that Rainbow was snapping away. And yet the clouds weren’t sufficient to blot out our view of this rather elaborate arrangement.

“But what’s really interesting about this setup is they take it down every day. It must take hundreds of men. And just to keep our satellites from getting the snapshot we’ve just seen. Look, here’s what the daylight reveals.”

He clicked again; what Bob saw was simply a random pattern of roads across a desolate plain.

“Now can you solve the puzzle, Swagger. These photos. Solaratov in Iraq. Do you see it yet, Swagger?”

“Sure,” said Bob. “They’re prepping a shot. Those are buildings and streets. He’ll have handled the range and angle solutions already. It’ll be familiar to him.”

“We should have come to you in the beginning. It took a young man in the Agency, a photo analyst, weeks to come up with the same answer, and those are lost weeks. But he finally had the bright idea of coding the grids of buildings to streets by angle with the help of a computer and having the computer run a check on those same streets and angles. Swagger, it’s the Inner Harbor from the U.S.F. &G. Building in Baltimore, it’s the back porch of the White House from a roof at the Justice Department – the Justice Department! – and it’s Downing and Huguenot streets in North Cincinnati, and finally it’s North Rampart and St. Ann in New Orleans.”

“All right,” said Bob. “So it is.”

“Sergeant, those places have one thing in common. They are all sites of speeches to be given over the next several weeks by the president of the United States.”

Dobbler watched the two of them. They were both children of the superego. They had nothing in them that would ever tell them to stop, hold back, wait, consider. They were both forceful men, without ideological underpinnings, who approached the world simply as a set of problems to be solved.

He remembered when the colonel had found him working in a mill clinic in Rafferty, Massachusetts, prescribing aspirin and bandages to the children of mill workers.

The colonel had simply walked in, so vivid a presence that no nurse would hold him back, laid down the Boston Globe front page that carried the news of Dobbler’s sentence the year before across three columns, and said, “If you can keep your dick in your pants, I can get you some really interesting work. Lots of money. Fun, travel, adventure. Some of it’s even legal.”

“W-what do I have to do?”

“Supervise recruitment. Analyze prospects from a psychological-psychiatric perspective. Tell me which of ’em will jump when I say boo.”

“Nobody can do that.”

“No, but you ought to come closest. Or would you rather stay here and hand out bandages for the rest of your life?”

“It’s part of my arrangement with the cour – ”

“Not anymore.”

The colonel laid a parole board exemption before him.

“Are you with the government?” asked Dr. Dobbler.

“You might say that,” said the colonel.

Bob let the silence hang in the air until it seemed to crack.

“They’re still trying to win that war,” said the man. “They think they can win it with one shot. And Solaratov’s the hired gun.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Swagger, you’ve done something damn few men have done. You’ve stalked and hunted men, hundreds of them. You are one of the world’s two or three best. Maybe an Israeli or two, maybe an SAS man somewhere, this Solaratov, Carl Hitchcock, but nobody else in the world is in your class. We need a man who’ll attack our problem for us the way a sniper would. We want to know how he’d put an operation together, where he’d shoot from, what sort of ordnance he’d use. We want you to brief our security people, who’ll find ways of making sure the information is inserted into the federal security mainstream and acted upon. Because we want to catch this piece of terrorist shit and turn him and empty out all his little secrets and use him as a club against his masters in Baghdad. We’ll smart-bomb them back to dust and cinders.”

Bob said nothing for a time. He was thinking things through and still he didn’t like all this, didn’t like the fact that these boys still had Agency on them like a smell. He wasn’t sure if he trusted them enough to have a cup of coffee with. But then he knew he didn’t really have a lot of choice. It was all set up, set up years ago.

He remembered the numbness and collapse as he went down and the way Donny scrambled down after him, his whole life ahead of him, and the way the light vanished instantly from Donny’s eyes as the bullet bit through to his spine. He finally turned to the colonel.

He said, “Put me on the rifle, Colonel. And I’ll body-bag this sly old boy for you.”

For the first time in many years, Bob the Nailer smiled, feeling just a bit reborn.

Aroused, Dobbler wrote.