Savant

5

Fort Worth, Texas

To the little boy who peers down into the heart of the immense cathedral, it is as if he views a sea. A sea of humanity. Into this sea it has begun to rain rich, full, vibrating organ notes, notes that fall slanting through the stained-glass sunlight that pierces the body of crucified Christ, washing over the sea with throbbing music, drenching it in a flood of spine-tingling sounds. "Know the fear of God!" the voice intones.

Seven lamp stands, he sees. One like a son of man, clothed in a long robe and with a golden girdle around his breast. "His feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters; in his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth issued a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength."

The apparition of the Deity speaks. "Behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades." The child trembles with dread. A pervasive sense of fear shakes his body as he is pulled to his feet and propelled forward, down through the vibrating sea of faces.

"Bobby Price." The man speaks to him from the pulpit in a voice of concentrated thunder. "Bobby."

Pressure on his arm. His hand caught in a hard clenched fist that pulls him along, drags him down the center aisle toward the mouth of the river of sound. He has never known such terror.

"Bobby!" he says again. Motes of dust sparkle like dying stars in the angled rays, wheels of blinding color lance his eyes from dying Christ imprisoned in stained panels high above. "Do you renounce Satan?"

The Price mansion reeked of old money, serious money, which in the Metroplex generally meant cattle or oil. The Price fortune had been built on black gold: petrodollars, and lots of them. Two petroleum tycoons' heirs merged, via marriage, into one—the Tinnon/Price consortium.

John R. Price and the illustrious Olivia Tinnon of Dallas, Curacao, and Barbados, leveraged their way into one another's lives. It was a loveless marriage from the beginning, a union that pregnant Olivia described to a sister on her wedding day as being "just like the oil bidness. John is light, sweet, crude and dirty."

Bobby Price seldom saw his preposterously rich jet-set petroheir-and-heiress parents. Pampered and spoiled by nannies, given everything, he was simply one of those sick aberrations for which there appears to be no scientific explanation.

But the little child would long remember standing naked on the front-hall stairs, where two women teased him, promising him he would never be a complete man. He would often recall the bitterness of his tears as he stood beneath the dark oil portraits of stern ancestors, listening to the taunts of the maid and the nanny who had found him nude on the stairway.

Later, he would also fix on the moment when the nanny had caught him trying to peer up her skirt, and had opened large, fleshy legs to reveal the frightening black cavern hidden in her bush, telling the boy he'd fall in that hole and nobody would ever find him.

Funny how little it sometimes takes to change a child into what will someday become a twisted sociopathic menace.

Women speak of their biological clock. Bobby Price had one, too. On the surface he seemed to be a perfectly normal child, but if you placed your head to his heart and listened carefully, you could hear the little boy ticking.

From the first time he took one of his father's hunting rifles into his small hands, it was love at first sight. Where children from more prosaic backgrounds grew up with Red Ryder BB carbines, Bobby was given an expensive "varmint" toy, one that fired the genuine article—.22-caliber long rifle ammo.

Bobby took to the weapon like a duck takes to the wet stuff, and—unsupervised and indulged—he began to kill. "Shitbirds," he called them. Within a few weeks the "shitbird" population in the Price section of suburban Fort Worth had dwindled alarmingly.

Bobby Price had found his calling. He loved to kill. Loved… to kill. It became his philosophy, his raison d'être, his religion. His obsession with weapons had begun in earnest.

When Bobby was fourteen he had grown bored with slaying birds and animals. Already the veteran of two wild-boar hunts and innumerable big-game hunting excursions, Bobby became fascinated with the prospect of taking down some two-footed trophies. He started scoping traffic and snap-shooting an empty Weatherby-Magnum at the passing cars.

One day it was just too much for him. A farmer came chugging along in an old beat-up pickup truck, and he could no more have stopped himself than the man in the moon. He snapped a .357 round into the empty chamber, snicked that oiled bolt into lock 'n' load, and squeezed one off. That time he ended up in an asylum. Daddy saw to that. Daddy and Daddy's legal talent.

When he came back out—still in "deep therapy," of course, he went to work for some people there in Texas, who thought "Shooter" Price was just what the doctor ordered. Not long after that he was arrested as a prime suspect in a mob-style execution, and again Daddy's lawyers went to work. It was a bit tougher this time. Bobby was seventeen. A lot of people thought Bobby should get the electric chair. But then a lot of people suddenly came into a whole bunch of money, and changed their minds.

The deal was this: Bobby could walk, but only on one condition. The kid had to join the U.S. Army. There was a nasty little war going on in Vietnam. One outfit in particular liked the cut of Shooter Price's jib. They all agreed—this li'l ol' boy from Texas was nothin' but a flat-out born killer.

Quang Tri Province, Republic of Vietnam

The Sixties found Bobby Price in I Corps Tactical Zone, killing for peace. Diem and Kennedy were but two of the better-known casualties of that time. SAUCOG, a mysterious and clandestine intelligence group, in league with the Clandestine Services unit of a monolithic "fact-gathering" agency, had found several mutant personalities, some of whom had been institutionalized at the time.

A plan had been devised for inserting "killer robots," as one unfortunate memorandum phrase had described the action personnel, into situations involving highly sensitive operations: assassinations, over-the-fence jobs, torture and terrorism; no act was to be beyond the purview of this special unit. In a war where our allies were often our enemies, a sanitized hit squad was worth its weight in gold.

The mandate appeared to be presidential, and the combined forces unit had drawn on both military and civilian resources. It was a mixed bag of horror stories.

In a secure Quonset hootch within the perimeter of the spook complex near the Quang Tri airstrip, admittance to which required special clearance, an old man and the kid—known to his colleagues as Shooter Price—talked about a unique weapon system, The old man did most of the talking.

"The .50-caflber sniper weapon is nothing new. As you know there have been isolated kills made with the so-called Ma Deuce—the M-2—and the Hotchkiss .50 is performing admirably as you can attest." He turned and removed what appeared to be a large map cover. Bobby Price saw a cutaway schematic of a firing device.

"Ray guns—electrical guns more properly—fall into three groups: rail, coil, and polarizer. That's a rail Those are capacitor banks." He pointed. "You understand what a capacitor is?" Shooter nodded, but the old man ignored him. "Umm. No matter. You couldn't move this, much less carry it. You need conducting rails for the projectile to ride, and this is where you shoot your current, which creates a magnetic field. It travels along here, and BANG! Fires your weapon. Not practical. Too big. Wears out quickly." The old man turned to another cutaway in color.

"In a conventional firing device you need three things to operate: a furnace, a projectile, and a pipe. You burn something or create heat, expanding gases blow your projectile out your pipe. BANG! How fast the projectile comes out—that's your bullet velocity.

"The coil is good, see, because it isn't limited by the same laws that govern velocities in conventional furnaces. We go now from one mile a second to two miles, three, maybe four miles a second! We call that hypervelocity.

"Energy waves travel through here." He pointed to the drawing of the coil gun. "And the force of the magnetic field propels the projectile at hypervelocities of such speeds you can penetrate anything.

"You ever heard how a hurricane drives pieces of straw through boards?"

"Yes, sir." Price hadn't but he wanted to show he was paying attention.

"Same deal." The man shook his head and long gray hairs misbehaved. "Hypervelocity. It makes the projectile penetrate the target according to a different set of physical laws.

"In theory, if your bullet was dense enough, you could put a coil gun on a satellite, send it in orbit around the earth, and you could fire a projectile that would penetrate the globe and come out the other side of the planet! In theory, that is. If it didn't burn up on the way—and so on…" The old man trailed off, mesmerized by his own ideas.

"This is the polarizer. Magnetic field. Super velocity. More durable than a rail gun. Smaller than a coil gun. Only problem is the energy eats the bullet. It gets the furnace so hot—so to speak—that when it pushes the projectile out the pipe the projectile itself disintegrates because the air becomes the target." He'd completely lost Shooter.

"So here was where a light bulb lit over my head. Look at the projectile the light bulb said to me, not the delivery method. Put something that makes its own little furnace out there on the tip of the bullet, see? When the hyperspeeds heat up the projectile, BANG!—the combustible material fires! Now you got your furnace here, and here—burning up the air on the way to the target. Excelsior!" The old man gestured wildly in the air, looking like a mad scientist in a comic book.

"SHARP-HEX! Stands for Super-Hardened Armor-penetrating Projectile—High EXplosive. Tungsten-carbide kinetic energy penetrator with an incendiary detonator on the tip." He showed a large-scale cutaway of two cartridges. "APEX! Anti-Personnel Projectile. EXtended Range. This one'll go through anything. This one not only explodes what it strikes, it destroys itself in the process. Amazing projectiles," he said with undisguised pride.

"Only problem is in the delivery system." He turned to his final schematic. "It's like the old story about the electric car. They cost a cent and a half per ten thousand miles. The only trouble is the extension cord costs fifty thousand dollars. Same deal. The furnace and the pipe cost the U.S. government a quarter of a million dollars. Only one field model has been produced. Nothing else like it exists anywhere on earth. The U.S. M-3000 .50-caliber single-shot, hypervelocity, extended-range, flashless, Silent Anti-Vehicle/ANti-Terrorist Weapon System. SAVANT for short. The death ray!"

At a location known officially as Fire Support Base King, a sprawling hilltop jump-off point just south of "the Zone," SAUCOG's sniper, Bobby Price, was given his first secret mission in which the SAVANT weapon system would be utilized.

A spike team of mercenaries and other headhunters drawn from the Combined Forces Special Unit, both civilian and military personnel, was to be aborted. Post-Diem liaisons had caused both the team's operations and its goals to be a political liability.

The world supply of ammunition, four hundred rounds of SHARP-HEX and APEX cartridges, was now in the care of the sniper. He had run only eleven practice rounds through the weapon before he reached a feeling of confidence that the mission could be easily accomplished.

Bobby Price and SAVANT waited in a forward gun pit, not far from the landing zone where the team's two choppers would be arriving. Behind him a squad of snake eaters and two tank crews sighted their weapons from a protective treeline.

But not all of the members of the spike team were aboard the unmarked skinships. One man was missing.

In deep sleep, the missing man had envisioned the stalk of a wounded enemy. The hunt took him down into the core of a dark fragment of a time when he'd tracked one of the little people, following a blood trail that led to a clearing where the blood drops suddenly stopped. Where had the wounded man gone? In his dream, a thought occurred. What if one took a bottle of blood and made a trail, smallest drops last, coming out from an ambush site, a man backtracking in his own footprints leaving a trail of sprinkled blood drops?

As the thought crossed his mindscreen, the man jerked awake from the folds of his imagining, a sniper's sights lingering on the back of his head.

The thing that had saved him before saved him now, nudging him awake in the darkness of a spike-team hootch. It prickled his skin as he waited, vexing him, prodding him to his huge bare feet. It would protect him from his own side.

Silently, like a great fat cat, he began to ease his way out into the night, loaded with duffel, weapon, 15EEEEE boots, surprisingly graceful and sure-footed, a dangerous dancing bear. Outside he froze. Waited. Listened.

The thing that warned him on a level he could never totally identify pushed him in the direction of the perimeter. It would not be as tricky to get out as it would be to get in, but damned near. He knew where the mines and traps were, where the guard posts were, the location of the listening post out beyond the edge of the distant trees, but it would require all his skills to make it out through the tanglefoot, concertina, razor wire, and assorted protective fencing, out beyond the danger of "friendly fire."

The immense human-shaped mass tiptoed through the tulips, glided, slid, crawled, rolled, picked his way through the wire, moving as if directed by an inner gyro, his mental compass taking him deeper into the shadow of Firebase King's perimeter.

Trees. Foliage dripping from recent downpours. He moved through the treeline, away from Firebase King and the fate that his presentience foretold, stopping again at the far side of the woods to watch and listen to the sounds of the night around him, slowing his vital sips, forcing himself into a state of bioelectrical calm, patient as the most efficient animal predator, tuned to the darkness that surrounded him.

From the edge of the trees, he saw a patch of open paddy that he would have to cross, an extremely perilous place, but beyond that there was a wash of sand, then a steep slope covered in tall sawgrass. The slope led to the river, swollen with monsoon-season rains, a brown swift-moving snake that could take him out of harm's path.

They hoped to kill him. To kill all of them. He let a bit of his rage creep back, inflaming his calm, giving him an edge of anger. When his killer instinct was all the way up again he let the shadows swallow him up, and he willed himself across the paddy, willing himself into a state not unlike invisibility, a feral, invulnerable, massive component of the Asian night.

Within minutes he was gone. A quarter ton of killer had disappeared. Vanished from sight. All that remained was a whisper in the sawgrass.

It was a hell of a place for tanks, the tank commander thought, standing in the hatch of "Tracks from Hell," perched on the treeline's edge. Pogues back at Battalion Headquarters were fucking terrain morons, and he'd said it a hundred times to anyone who'd listen. He watched the grunts settle in with guns up. The tanks were security for the squad, and for the sniper down in the gun pit.

The radio crackled before he heard the skinships. With these people—the outfit he worked for—you didn't ask too many questions. They said two unmarked Hueys were gonna get lit up, you lit 'em, up. Arty from FSB King, tanks, and a couple of fire teams? Shit. Those old boys were history.

"In position," he said, keying a handset.

"Hellstorm, we copy." An anonymous voice crackled in his ear. He signaled, and inside the steel monster beneath him compensating idler wheels whirred, final drive sprockets revolved, gloved hands on steering control assemblies touched transmission and throttle, and the powerful turbine moved "Tracks from Hell" forward, past the edge of the treeline.

The youngster at the gunner's station watched the primary sight. Computer-operated laser rangefinders and thermal imaging systems locked on to their targets.

The tank commander, his thumbs caressing the butterfly triggers of his M-2, patted the big .50, and climbed back down out of the turret, pulling the hatch shut. Inside the monster it stunk of mo-gas farts, hot oil, and heavy-duty payback.

The two targets hovered expectantly in the hidden sights of several tons of friendly fire.

It was a hell of a place for tanks, that was all he could think of.

Down in the gun pit, Shooter Price, a pair of North Sonic IIs keeping only a part of the machine noise out of his ears, laid the crosshairs of a Laco 4OX sniperscope on the lead bird and his trigger finger exerted three and a quarter pounds of pressure. SAVANT spat death.

A covert op had become a herd of rogue elephants—a liability…. Now it was terminated.

But not quite.

| Go to Table of Contents |