Time to Hunt

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The black dogs were everywhere. They yipped at him at night, preventing him from sleeping; they haunted his dreams with their infernal racket; they made him wake early, crabby, bitter, spent.

Were they dreams from bad old times? Or were they just the generalized melancholy that attends a man who begins to understand he can never be what he was before he reached fifty, that his body and eyesight and gift of feel and stamina were on the decline? Or were they from some deep well of grief, once opened impossible to shut down?

Bob didn’t know. What he knew was that he awoke, as usual, with a headache. It was not yet dawn, but his wife, Julie, was already up, in the barn, saddling the horses. She clung to her habits even during his dark times. Ride early, work hard, never complain. What a woman! How he loved her! How he needed her! How he mistreated her!

He felt hungover, but it was a dream of post-alcoholic pain. He had not allowed liquor to touch his lips since 1985. He didn’t need it. He’d lost close to a decade and a half to the booze, he’d lost a marriage, a batch of friendships, half his memories, several jobs and opportunities; he’d lost it all to the booze.

No booze. He could do it. Each day was the first day of the rest of his life.

Lord, I need a drink, he thought today, as he thought every day. He wanted it so bad. Bourbon was his poison, smooth and crackling, all harsh smoke and glorious blur. In the bourbon, there was no pain, no remorse, no bad thoughts: only more bourbon.

The hip hurt. Inexplicably, after many years of near painlessness, it had begun to ache all over again. He had to see a doctor about it, and stop gobbling ibuprofen, but he could not, somehow, make himself do it.

“It hurts,” his wife would say. “I can tell. You don’t complain, but your face is white and you move slowly and you sigh too much. I can tell. You have to see somebody.”

He answered her as he answered everybody these days: a sour grimace, a furious stubbornness, then wintry retreat behind what she once called the wall of Bobness, that private place he went, even in the most public of circumstances, where nobody, not even his wife and the mother of his only child, was admitted.

He went and stood naked under a shower, and let its heat pound at him. But it did not purify him. He emerged in as much pain as he had entered. He opened the medicine cabinet, poured out three or four ibus and downed them without water. It was the hip. Its pain was dull, like a deep bone bruise, that throbbed, and lighted the fire of other pains in his knees and his head and his arms. He’d been hit in so many places over the years: his body was a lacework of scars that testified to close calls and not a little luck.

He pulled on ancient jeans and a plaid shirt, and a pair of good old Tony Lamas, his oldest friends. He went down to the kitchen, found the coffee hot and poured himself a cup. The TV was on.

Something happening in Russia. This new guy everybody was scared of, an old-fashioned nationalist, they said. Like the czars in the nineteenth century, he believed in Russia over everything. And if he got control, things would get wobbly, since they still had so many rockets and atomic warheads, and were only a few hours’ work from retargeting America’s cities. There was an election coming up in a couple of months; it had everybody worried. Even the name was scary. It was Passion. Actually, it was Pashin, Evgeny Pashin, brother of a fallen hero.

It made Bob’s headache worse. He thought Russia had fallen. We’d stood up to them, their economy had collapsed, they’d had their Vietnam in Afghanistan, and it had all fallen apart on them. Now they were back, in some new form. It didn’t seem fair.

Bob didn’t like Russians. A Russian had hit him in the hip all those years ago, and started this run of bad luck that, just recently he thought he’d beaten down, but then it had returned, ugly and remorseless.

Bob finished the coffee, threw on a barn jacket and an old beat-up Stetson and went out of the bright warm kitchen into the predawn cold, looking like an old cowboy who’d been to his last roundup. A grizzle of beard clung to his still sunken jaws and he felt woozy, a beat behind, his mind filled with cobwebs and other junk.

Just enough of the mountains were visible in the rising light. They stirred him still, but only just. They were so huge, caped in snow, remote, unknowing, vaster by far than the mountains he had grown up in back in Arkansas. They promised what he needed: solitude, beauty, freedom, a place for a man who went his own ways and only got himself into deep trouble when he got involved with other men.

He saw the barn, heard the snuffle and rasp of horses, and knew that Julie and Nikki were saddling up for their morning ride, a family ritual. He was late. His horse, Junior, would be saddled too, so that he could join them at the last second. It was not right: to earn the right to ride a horse, you should saddle it yourself. But Julie let him sleep for those rare moments when he seemed to do so calmly. She just didn’t know what nightmares lay inside his calm sleep.

He looked about for his other enemy. The landscape, high in the mountains but still a good mile from the snow, was barren. He saw only the meadows, where some cattle drifted and fed, miles of dense trees, and the rugged crinkles of the passes as they led to openings in the peaks that were the Sawtooths.

But no reporters. No agents. No TV cameras, Hollywood jockeys, slick talkers with smooth hair and suits that fitted like cream on milk. He hated them. They were the worst. They had exiled him from a life he had loved.

It began when Bob, at the insistence of a good young man who reminded him a bit of his wife’s first husband, Donny Fenn, had urged him to return to Arkansas to look into the matter of the death of Earl Swagger, his father, in 1955. Things got complicated and hairy fast; some people tried to stop him and he had to shoot back. No indictments were ever handed down as no physical evidence could be located and nobody in Polk County would talk to outsiders. But some rag had gotten wind of it, linked him to another set of events that took place a few years before that, and taken a picture of him and his wife, Julie, as they’d walked out of church back in Arizona some months later. He woke up the next Wednesday to discover that he was AMERICA’S DEADLIEST MAN and that he had STRUCK AGAIN. Wherever ex-Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger hangs his hat, men die, it pointed out, relating his presence to a roadside shootout that left ten men, all felons, dead, and the mysterious deaths of three men, including an ex-Army sniper, in the remote forest, and recalling that some years earlier he had briefly been a famous suspect in the shooting of a Salvadorian archbishop in New Orleans, until the government dropped the charges for reasons that were to this day unclear. Why, he had even married the widow of a Vietnam buddy, the paper reported.

Time and Newsweek picked it up and for a few weeks there, Bob had the worst kind of fame his country could offer: he was hounded by reporters and cameras wherever he went. It seemed many people thought he held the keys to a fortune, that he knew things, that he was glamorous, sexy, a natural-born killer, which, by some odd current loose in America, made him, in the argot, “hot.”

So here he was, on a ranch that was owned by his wife’s father’s estate as an investment property, living essentially on charity, without a penny to his name except for a piddling pension and no way of making one. The future was unsettled and dark; the peace and quiet and good living he had achieved seemed all gone. Where am I going to get the money? My pension ain’t enough, by a damn sight. Though it had never been expressed, he had become convinced that his wife secretly wished he’d do something with the one asset he owned, his “story,” which many people believed was worth millions.

He walked toward the barn, watching the sun just begin to smear the sky over the mountains. The black dogs came upon him and overpowered him halfway between the structures. That was his name for them: the sense that he was a worthless failure, that everything he touched turned to shit, that his presence hurt the two people he cared about the most, that everything he’d done had been a mistake, every decision wrong, and anybody who’d gone along with him had ended up dead.

The dogs came fast and hard. They got their teeth into him good, and in seconds, he was no longer in the barnyard under the mountains where a red sun was about to pull itself up and light the world with the hope of a new day, but in some other, dank, foul place, where his own failures seemed the most prominent landform, and the only mercy was bourbon.

“Well, Mister, nice of you to join us,” called Julie.

He looked at his wife, at her smile, which continued to dazzle him if even now there seemed a layer of fear behind it. He had seen her first on a cellophane-wrapped photograph that a young man had carried in his boonie cap in Vietnam, and maybe he had fallen in love with her in that second. Or maybe he fell in love with her the second the young man died and she was the only part of him still alive. Still, it took long years, many of them soaked in bourbon, before he’d finally met her and, by the odd twists that his life seemed always to take, ended up being the lucky jerk she took as her second husband. Yet now … was it falling apart on him?

“Daddy, Daddy,” yelled Nikki, eight, running to meet him. She grabbed his blue-jeaned leg.

“Howdy, honey, how’s my girl this morning?”

“Oh, Daddy, you know. We’re going to ride up to Widow’s Pass and watch the sun come across the valley.”

“We do that every morning. Maybe we ought to find a new place.”

“Honey,” said Julie. “She loves that view.”

“I’m only saying,” Bob said, “it might be nice to change. Forget it. It don’t mean a thing.”

He had more edge in his voice than he’d meant. Where had it come from? Julie shot him a hurt look at his harsh words, and he thought, Well, that’s fine, I deserve that, and he had himself in control, everything was fine, he was fine, it was—

“I do get tired of riding the same goddamn place every goddamn morning. You know, there are other places to ride.”

“All right, Bob,” she said.

“I mean, we can ride there, no problem. Is that where you want to ride, sweetie? If that’s where you want to ride, that’s fine.”

“I don’t care, Daddy.”

“Good. That’s where we’ll ride.”

Who was talking? He was talking. Why was he so mad? Where was this coming from? What was going on?

But then he had himself back and he was fine again and it would be—

“And why the hell is she riding English? You want her to be some fancy person? You want her to go to little shows where she wears some red jacket and helmet and jumps over fences and all the fags clap and the rich people come and drink champagne, and she learns her old man, who don’t talk so good and swears a mite, he ain’t up to them folks who ride English, he’s just an old farm boy from shit-apple Arkansas? Is that what you want?”

He was yelling. It had come on so fast, so ugly, it had just blown in, a squall of killing anger. Why was he so mad these days? It made him sick.

“Bob,” his wife, Julie, said with slow, fake sweetness, “I just want to widen her horizons. Open up some possibilities.”

“Daddy, I like English. It’s more leg than stirrup; it doesn’t hurt the horse.”

“Well, I don’t know nothing about English. I’m just a cop’s kid from Hick Town, Arkansas, and I didn’t go to no college, I went into the Marine Corps. Nobody ever gave me nothing. When I see her riding like that—”

He bellowed for a while, as Julie got smaller and smaller, and Nikki began to cry and his hip hurt and his head ached and finally Junior spooked.

“Oh, fuck it!” he said. “What the hell difference does it make?” and stormed back to the house.

He’d left the TV on, and sat before it, nursing his fury, angered by the terrible unfairness of it all. Why couldn’t he support his family? What could he have done different? What could he do?

After a bit, he turned and watched the two of them ride out through the fence and head up toward Widow’s Pass.

Good, that was fine. They could do that. He was better off alone. He knew where he wanted to go. He stood, raging with fury, and though it was early, turned and walked to the cellar door, went down into it. He’d meant to set up a shop here, where he could reload for next hunting season and work out some ideas he had for wildcat cartridges, new ways to get more pop out of some old standards. But somehow he’d never found the energy; he didn’t know how long they’d be here, he didn’t know if—

He went instead to the workbench, where a previous occupant had left a set of old, rusty tools and nails and such, and reached around to grab what was stashed there. It was a bottle, a pint of Jim Beam, subtly curved like a Claymore, with its black label and white printing.

The bottle had weight and solidarity to it — it felt serious, like a gun. He hefted it, went to the steps and sat down. The cellar smelled of damp and rot, for this was wet country, snowy in the winter and ripe for floods in the spring. He’d been so long in dry country, this all seemed new. Its smell was unpleasant: mildew, perpetual moisture.

He held the bottle in his hand, examined it carefully. Shifting it ever so slightly sent the cargo inside sloshing this way and that, like the sea at China Beach, where he’d gone on R&R one time or another, but he couldn’t say on which of his three tours.

His hand closed around the cap of the bottle, its seal still pristine. Just the slightest twist of his hand could open it, much less strength than that required to kill a man with a rifle, which he had done so many times.

He looked carefully at the thing. He waggled it just a bit, feeling the slosh of the fluid. Its brownness was clear and butterscotchy; it beckoned him onward.

Yes, do it. One sip, just to take the edge off, to make the bad pictures go away, blunt the worries about money and prying reporters and TV cameras, to retreat to some sacred, private land of blur and wobble and laughter, where only good times are remembered.

Drink to the lost. Drink to the boys. Drink to the dead boys of Vietnam, drink to poor Donny. Drink to what happened to Donny and how Donny haunted him, how he had married Donny’s wife and fathered Donny’s child and done what could be done to resurrect Donny, to keep Donny still on this earth.

Yes, drink to Donny, and all the boys killed before their time for Veet Nam to stop commu-nism.

Oh, how the bottle called him.

Fuck this, he thought.

I have a wife and a daughter and they are out on the range without me, and so I had best get to them. That is one thing left I can do.

He put the bottle back and climbed the stairs. His hip hurt, but what the fuck. He headed for the barn, his horse, and his wife and daughter.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

They rode up through the meadow, found the track through the pines and followed that, always trending upward. The air was cool, though not really cold, and the sun’s presence in the east, over the mountains, gave the prospect of warmth.

Julie nuzzled her coat closer, tried to cleanse her thoughts of trouble and put her anger at her husband and what had happened to their life behind her. Her daughter, the better rider, galloped ahead merrily, the ugliness of the scene in the barn seemingly forgotten. Nikki rode so well; she had a gift for it, a natural affinity for the horses, and was never happier than when she was out in the barn with the animals, tending them, feeding them, washing them.

But Nikki’s happiness was also somewhat illusory. As they neared the treeline and the ride across the high desert toward Widow’s Pass and the trip to overlook the far valley, she drifted back to her mother.

“Mommy,” she said, “is Daddy sick?”

“Yes, he is,” said Julie.

“Is he going to be all right?”

“Your father is as strong as ten horses and he has faced and beaten many enemies in his long and hard life. He’ll beat this one, too.”

“What is it, Mommy?” Nikki asked.

“It’s a terrible disease called post-traumatic stress disorder. It has to do with the war he was in. He was in heavy fighting and many of his very close friends were killed. He was strong enough to put that behind him and build us a very fine and happy life. But sometimes there are things that just can’t be kept away. It’s like a little black dog has escaped from the secret part of his brain and come out. It barks, it bites, it attacks. His old wounds are hurting, but also his memory keeps recalling things he thought it had forgotten. He has trouble sleeping. He is angry all the time and doesn’t know why. He loves you very, very much, though. No matter what happens and how he acts, he loves you very much.”

“I hope he’s all right.”

“He will be. He needs our help, though, and he needs the help of a doctor or something. He’ll understand that eventually and get some help, and then he’ll be better again. But you know what a stubborn man he is.”

The two rode on in silence.

“I don’t like it when he yells at you. It scares me.”

“He’s not really yelling at me, honey. He’s yelling at the men who killed his friends and the men who sent him over there to fight that war and then walked away from it. He’s yelling for all the poor boys who got killed and never came back to the lives they deserved and were forgotten.”

“He loves you, Mommy.”

“I know he does, honey. But sometimes that’s not enough.”

“He’ll be all right.”

“I believe he will be, too. He needs our help, but he needs mostly to help himself, get some medication, find a way to take advantage of his very special skills and knowledge.”

“I can ride Western. I don’t mind.”

“I know. It’s not about that, really. It’s about how mad he is at things he can’t stop. We just have to love him and hope that he sees how important it is to get some help.”

They were out of the trees. The high chaparral was desolate, rock strewn, clustered with primitive forms of vegetation. Ahead, in the shadow of the snowcaps, the cut in the earth between mountains that was called Widow’s Pass beckoned, and beyond it, after a course on a shelf of dirty rock and broken slope, a precipice from which could be seen as much beauty as has been put on earth. Julie loved it and so did Nikki. Bob loved it too. They rode here nearly every morning; it got the day off to a fine start.

“Oh, here we go, baby. Be careful.”

The track was tricky, and Julie was speaking more to herself than to her nimble daughter or to her daughter’s horse, the better athlete of the two animals.

She felt the tension come into her; this was delicate work and she wished her husband were here. How had they ended up like this?

Nikki laughed.

When the noise came, it didn’t shock or surprise the sniper. He had waited in the dawn for targets before. He knew it had to come, sooner or later, and it did. It didn’t fill him with doubt or regret or anything. It simply meant: time to work.

The noise was a peal of laughter, girlish and bright. It bounced off the stone walls of the canyon, from the shadow of a draw onto this high plain from close to a thousand yards off, whizzing through the thin air.

The sniper wiggled his fingers, finding the warmth in them. His concentration cranked up a notch or so. He pulled the rifle to him in a fluid motion, well practiced from hundreds of thousands of shots in practice or on missions.

Its stock rose naturally to his cheek as he pulled it in, and as one hand flew to the comb, the other set up beneath the forearm, taking the weight of his slightly lifted body, building a bone bridge to the stone below. He found the spot weld, the one placement of cheek to stock where the scope relief would be perfect and the circle of the scope would throw up its image as brightly as a movie screen. He cocked one knee halfway up toward his torso to build a muscular tension into his position, as he had been trained to do.

The child. The woman. The man.

“Hey, there!”

She turned at the voice to see her husband riding toward her and her heart soared.

But then it subsided: it was not Bob Lee Swagger but the neighboring rancher, an older widower named Dade Fellows, another tan, tall, leathery coot, on a chestnut roan he controlled exquisitely.

“Mr. Fellows!”

“Hello, Mrs. Swagger. How’re you this morning?”

“Well, we’re just fine.”

“Hello there, honey.”

“Hi, Dade,” said Nikki. Dade was an occasional hanger-on at the ranch, welcome for his knowledge of the area, his sure way with animals and guns.

“Y’all haven’t seen a dogie or two up this way? My fence is down and I’m a little short. They’re so stupid, they might have come this way.”

“No, it’s been completely quiet. We’re riding through the pass to see the sun come across the valley.”

“That is a sight, isn’t it?”

“Would you care to join us?”

“Well, ma’am, I’ve got a full day and I’d like to find my baby cows. But, hell, why not? I ain’t seen the sun rise in quite a while. I’m up too early.”

“You work too hard, Mr. Fellows. You should slow down.”

“If I slow down, I might notice how old I got,” he laughed, “and what a shock that would be! Okay, there, Nikki, you lead the way. I’ll follow your mother.

Nimble Nikki took her big chestnut along the climbing path, and it rose between the narrow canyon walls until they seemed to swallow her. Then she sunk into shadow where the pass was really deep. Julie was close behind, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw her daughter break clear, into the light. At the end of the enfilade was a shelf of land that ran along the mountainside for half a mile, gently trending upward, and then it reached a vantage point on the far valley.

Nikki laughed at the freedom she felt when she emerged, and in a second had freed her horse to find its own pace; it preferred speed and began to gallop. A fear rose in Julie’s heart; she could never catch the girl, nor stay up with her if she had to, and she felt the urge to call out, but suppressed it as pointless, for there was no stopping Nikki, a natural-born hero like her father. The eight-year-old galloped ahead, the horse’s bounding grace eating up the distance to the vantage point.

Julie then came into the light and saw that, safely, Nikki had slowed to a walk as she neared the precipice. She turned back and called, “Come on, Mr. Fellows! You’ll miss it.”

“I’m coming, ma’am,” he yelled back at her.

She cantered ahead, feeling the rise of the mountains on either side but also the freedom of the open space ahead of her. Its beauty lightened her burden and the mountains looked down solemn and dignified and implacable. She approached Nikki, even as she heard Fellows coming up behind her, driving his horse a bit harder.

“Look, Mommy!” Nikki cried, holding her horse tight between her strong thighs, leaning forward and pointing out.

Here, there was no downslope beyond the edge, just sheer drop, which afforded a vista of the valley beyond, the ridge of mountains beyond that as the sun crested them. The valley was green and undulating, thatched with pines, yet also open enough to show off, sparkling in the new sun, its creeks and streams. Across the way there was a falls, a spume of white feathery water that cascaded down a far cliff. Under the cloudless sky and in the pale power of the not yet fully risen sun, it had a kind of storybook quality to it that was, even if you’d seen it a hundred-odd times, breathtaking.

“Ain’t that something?” said Fellows. “That is the true West, the one they write about, yes, sir.”

Swagger had aged, as all men do, even as the sniper himself had aged. But he was still lean and watchful and there was a rifle in the scabbard under his saddle. He looked dangerous, like a special man who would never panic, who would react fast and shoot straight, which is exactly what he was. His eyes darted about under the hood of his cowboy hat. He rode like a gifted athlete, almost one with the animal, controlling it unconsciously with his thighs while his eyes scanned for signs of aggression.

He would not see the sniper. The sniper was too far out, the hide too carefully camouflaged, the spot chosen to put the sun in the victim’s eyes at this hour so that he’d see only dazzle and blur if he looked.

The crosshairs rode up to Swagger, and stayed with the man as he galloped along, finding the same rhythm in the cadences, finding the same up-down plunge of the animal. The shooter’s finger caressed the trigger, felt absorbed by its beckoning softness, but he did not fire. He knew the range perfectly: 742 meters.

Moving target, transversing laterally left to right, but also moving up and down through a vertical plane. By no means an impossible shot, and many a man in his circumstances would have taken it. But experience told the sniper to wait: a better shot would lie ahead, the best shot. With a man like Swagger, that’s the one you took.

Swagger joined his wife, and the two chatted, and what Swagger said made her smile. White teeth flashed. A little tiny human part in the sniper ached for the woman’s beauty and ease; he’d had prostitutes the world over, some quite expensive and beautiful, but this little moment of intimacy was something that had evaded him completely. That was all right. He had chosen to work in exile from humanity. Seven hundred thirty-one meters.

He cursed himself. That’s how shots were blown, that little fragment of lost concentration which took you out of the operation. He briefly snapped his eyes shut, absorbed the darkness and cleared his mind, then opened them again to what lay before him.

Swagger and his wife had reached the edge: 722 meters. Before them would run a valley, unfolding in the sunlight as the sun climbed even higher. But what this meant to the sniper is that at last his quarry had ceased to move. In the scope he saw a family portrait: man, woman and child, all at nearly the same level, because the child’s horse was so big it put her up with her parents. They chatted, the girl laughed, pointed at a bird or something, seethed with motion. The mother stared into the distance. The father, his eyes still seeming watchful, relaxed just the tiniest bit.

The crosshairs bisected the square chest.

He stroked the trigger and the gun jarred and as it came back in a fraction of a second, he saw the tall man’s chest explode as the Remington 7mm Magnum tore through it.

It was a moment of serene perfection, until she heard a sound that reminded her somehow of meat dropping on a linoleum floor — it had a flat, moist, dense reverberation to it, somehow — and at that same instant felt herself sprayed with warm jelly. She turned to see Dade’s gray face, his eyes lost and locked on nothingness as he fell backward off his horse. His chest had been somehow eviscerated, as with an ax, its organs exposed and spewing blood in torrents, his heart decompressing with a pulsing jet of deoxygenated, almost black liquid spurting in an arc over the precipice. He hit the ground, in a cloud of dust, landing with the solidity of a sack of potatoes falling off a truck as his horse panicked and bucked, hooves flailing in the air. As a nurse, from too many nights in a reservation ER, Julie was no stranger to blood or to what mysteries lay inside of bodies, but the transformation was so instantaneous that it shocked her, even as, from far off, the report of a rifle shot finally arrived.

The sound seemed to unlock her brain from the paralysis into which it had blundered. She knew in the next nanosecond that they were under fire, and in the nanosecond after that her daughter was in danger, and she found the will to turn and yell “Run!” as loud as possible, and yanked hard to the left on her reins, driving her horse into Nikki’s to butt it about.

My daughter, she thought. Don’t kill my daughter.

But like hers, Nikki’s reflexes were fast and sure, and the girl had already reached the same conclusion, reeled her horse to the left, and in another second, both horses were free of the ruckus caused by Dade’s plunging animal.

“Go!” shrieked Julie, kicking and lashing her horse with the reins. The animal churned ahead, its long legs bounding over the dirt toward the narrow enfilade of the pass. She was to the left of and a little behind Nikki, that is, between Nikki and the shooter, which is where she wanted to be.

The horses thundered along, careering madly for safety, and Julie was bent over the neck of hers like a jockey, but she could not keep up with Nikki’s, which, a stronger animal with a much lighter load, began to gun away and ahead, exposing the child.

“Nikki!” she screamed.

Then the world went. It twisted into fragments, the sky was somehow beneath her, dust rose like a gas, thick and blinding, and she felt herself floating, her heart gathering fear for the knowledge of what would come next. The horse screamed piteously and she slammed into the ground, her head filling with stars, her will scattering in confusion. But as she slid through the dust and the pain, feeling her skin rip and something in her body shatter, and the horse scampered away, she looked to see that Nikki had halted and was circling around toward her.

She rose, astounded that she could move through all the fire that was eating her skin, and had a moment when she noticed the blood pouring across her shirt. She staggered, went to one knee, but then rose again, and screamed at Nikki, “No! No! Run! Run!” waving her away desperately.

The girl pulled up, confused, the fear bright on her face.

“Run for Daddy!” Julie screamed, then turned herself and began to scramble for a ravine to the right, a copse of rough vegetation and tough little trees, hoping that the shooter would follow her and not the girl.

Nikki watched her mother run toward the edge of the shelf, then turned herself, lashed the horse, felt it churn into a gallop. The dust of the slashing hooves floated everywhere, clotting her breathing, and the tears on her face matted up with it, but she stayed low and whipped the horse and whipped it again, and though it neighed in pain, whipped it still a third time, gouging it with her English boots, and in seconds, the dark shadows of the enfilade covered her and she knew she was safe.

Then she heard a shot.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

He fired and the sight picture at the moment of ignition — the stout, heroic chest quadrisected perfectly by the crosshairs zeroed exactly for a range of seven hundred meters — told him instantly that he had hit. As the scope came back, he saw red from the falling body, just a fraction of a second’s worth, but square in the full chest, until it was lost in the dust.

Then he shifted to the woman but—

He was astonished by the swiftness with which the woman responded. His whole shooting scenario was based on her utter paralysis when her husband’s chest exploded. She would be stupefied and the next shot would be easy.

The woman reeled her horse about almost instantaneously and he was astounded at how much dust floated into the air. You cannot anticipate everything, and he had not anticipated the dust. He had no shot for almost a second, and then, faster than he could have begun to imagine, she and the child were racing hellbent and crazed toward the pass and safety.

He had a momentary flash of panic — never before had such a thing happened! — and took his eye from the scope to get an unimpeded visual on the fleeing woman. She was much farther away than he had figured; the angle was oblique, dust floated in the air. Impossible shot! Only seconds remained as she and the girl raced toward the pass.

He fought his terror, and instead let the rifle sit, and picked up his secret advantage in all this, a set of Leica binoculars with a laser range finder, since unknown distance shooting is almost pointless, and he put the glasses on her to see the readout as it shot back to him, straight and true. She was now 765 meters, now 770, racing away.

His mind did the computations as he figured the lead, all while setting the binocs down and reacquiring the rifle, flipping through a bolt throw with the shell ejecting cleanly to the right. A lifetime’s experience and a gift for numbers told him he had to shoot a good nine meters ahead of her — no, no, it would be nine if she were preceding at an exact ninety degrees, but she was on the oblique, more like forty-five or fifty degrees, so he compensated to seven meters. A mil-dot — that is, one of a series of dots etched into the crosshairs — in the scope, at this range, was about thirty inches, so when he went back to the rifle, he led her six mils and a mil high, that is, putting her just inside the edge of the solid part of the horizontal crosshair. Impossible shot! Incredible shot! Close to eight hundred meters on a fast-mover at the oblique away from him in heavy dust.

The rifle jolted in recoil and came back to reveal a ruckus of disturbance. He could see nothing. The horse was down, then up, bucking and kicking in fury, dust floating in the air.

He cycled the bolt again.

Where was she? The child was forgotten but that was not important.

He searched the dust, then put the rifle down and seized the binoculars, which would give him a much bigger field of vision.

Where was she? Had he hit her? Was she about? Was she dead? Was it over? He waited for centuries, and without oxygen. But now, there she was, hit — he could see the blood on her blue shirt — and stiff with the pain of the fall. But she had not gone into shock, was not surrendering and, like many who discover themselves in mortal circumstances for the first time, giving up to lie and wait for the final blow. Heroically she moved away from the horse and the dust to the edge.

Soft target. Giving herself up for the girl, who didn’t matter.

She was at the edge.

He put the binoculars squarely on her and had just a glimpse of her face, only the fleetest impression of her beauty. A melancholy closed upon him, but his heart was strong and hard and he put it away. He pressed a button to fire a spurt of smart laser at her and it bounced back and he looked to the readout and got a range of 795 meters, and knew he’d have to hold dead center of the first low vertical mil-dot.

He set the binocs down, went back to the rifle and saw her at the edge, just standing there, daring him to concentrate on her while the daughter vanished into the shadows of the pass. The woman’s foolish courage sickened him. Her dead husband’s insane courage sickened him.

Who were these people? What right did they have to such nobility of spirit? Why did they consider themselves so special? What gave them the right? He put the center of the first mil-dot below the horizontal crosshair on her.

The hatred flared as he pulled the trigger.

The rifle jolted. Time in flight was about a second, maybe a little less. As the 175 grains of 7mm Remington Magnum arched across the canyon, tracing an invisible parabola, unstoppable and tragic, he had the briefest second to study her. Composed, calm, on two feet, defiant even at the end, holding her wound. Then she disappeared as, presumably, the bullet struck her. She tumbled down and down, raising dust, until she vanished from sight.

He felt nothing.

He was done. It was over.

He sat back, amazed to discover the inside of his jacket soaked with sweat. He felt only emptiness, just like the last time he’d had this man in his scope — only the professional’s sense of another job being over.

He put the scope back on the man. Clearly he had been eliminated. The gravity of the wound, its immensity, its savagery, was apparent even from this distance. But he paused. So resilient, so powerful, such an antagonist. Why take the chance?

It felt unclean, as if he were dishonoring someone who might be as great as himself. But he again yielded to practicality: this wasn’t about honor among snipers but doing the job.

He threw the bolt, ejecting a shell, and put the crosshairs squarely on the underside of the chin, exposed to him by the man’s supine, splayed position. This would drive a bullet upward through the brain at eighteen-hundred feet per second. A four-inch target at 722 meters. Another great shot. He calmed himself, watched the crosshairs still, and felt the trigger break. The scope leaped, then leaped back; the body jerked and again there seemed to be a cloud, a vapor, of pinkish mist. He’d seen it before. The head shot, evacuating brains in a fog of droplets. The fog dissipated. There was nothing more to see or think.

He rose, threw the rifle over his shoulder. He gathered the equipment — the ten-pound sandbag was the heaviest — and recased the binoculars. He looked about for traces of himself and found plenty: scuffs in the dust, the three ejected shells, which he scooped up. He grabbed a piece of vegetation from the earth and used it to sweep the dust of his shooting position, rubbing back and forth until he was convinced no sign of his having been there existed. He threw the brush down into the canyon before him, and then set out walking, trying to stay on hard ground so as to leave no tracks.

He climbed higher into the mountains, expertly and without fear. He knew it would be hours at the least before any kind of police reaction to his operation could be commenced. His problem now would be the remote possibility of running into random hunters or hikers, and he had no wish to kill witnesses, unless he had to, which he would do without qualm.

He walked and climbed for several hours, finally passing over the crests and descending to rough ground. He hit his rendezvous spot by three and got out the small transmitter and sent his confirmation.

The helicopter arrived within an hour, flying low from the west. The evac was swift and professional.

He was done.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Bob rode up through the trees and across the barren, high desert to the mountains. He loped easily along, trying to calm himself, wondering if he could make it before the sun rose fully. The black dogs seemed to have gone back to their kennel. They kept no schedule, nothing set them off; they were just there some days and not some others. Who knew? Who could tell, who could predict?

He tried to think coherently about his future. Clearly he could not stay here much longer, because the weight of living off his in-laws was more than he could bear. It turned all things sour and made him hate himself. But he doubted he could get started in his profession, which was running a lay-up barn for horses, not until he sold his spread in Arizona and had the money to invest in an upgraded barn and other facilities. Plus, it would mean getting to meet the local vets, getting them to give him referrals. Maybe the place was already crowded with lay-up barns.

He could sell his “story.” Too bad old Sam Vincent wasn’t around to advise him, but Sam had come to a sorry end in that Arkansas matter which even now Bob had his doubts about starting up. It got a lot of people killed, for not much but the settling of forgotten scores. He had some shame left in him for that thing. Maybe scores weren’t worth it.

But if Sam wasn’t around, who could he trust? The answer was, nobody. He had an FBI agent friend in New Orleans and a young writer still struggling with a book, but not yet having had any success. Who could he approach? The jackals of the press? No, thank you, ma’am. They turned him off beaucoup.

No, the “story” thing wasn’t any solution to his problems, not without the advice of somebody he trusted. That left shooting. He knew his name was worth something in that world — some fools considered him a hero, even, like his father, a blasphemy he couldn’t begin to even express — and the idea of making that pay somehow sickened him. But if he could pick up work at a shooting school, where they taught self-defense skills to cops and military personnel, maybe that could bring in some money and some contacts. He thought he knew some people to call. Maybe that would work. At least he’d be among men who’d been in the real world and knew what it meant to both put out and receive fire. He tried to imagine such a life.

The sound was clear and distinct, though far off. No man knew it better than he.

Rifle shot. Through the pass. High-velocity round, lots of echo, a big-bore son of a bitch.

He tensed, feeling the alarm blast through him, and had a moment of panic as he worked out that it was possible the shot had come from exactly where Julie and Nikki ought to be. In the next split second he realized he didn’t have a rifle himself and he felt broken and useless.

Then he heard a second shot.

He kicked Junior and the horse bolted ahead. He raced across the high desert toward the approaching mountains, his mind filling with fear. Hunters, who happened to get a good shot at a ram or an antelope in the vicinity of his women? Random shooters, plinkers? But not up this high. Maybe there was some trick of the atmosphere, which made the sound of the shots travel from miles away, up through the canyons, and it only now reached him and was meaningless. He didn’t like the second shot. A stupid hunter could shoot at something wrong, but then he wouldn’t shoot again. If he shot again, he was trying to kill what he was shooting at.

There was a third shot.

He kicked the horse, bucking a little extra speed out of it.

Then he heard the fourth shot.

Christ!

Now he was really panicked. He reached the darkness of the pass but had a moment’s clarity and realized the last thing he should do would be to race out there, in case someone was shooting.

As he slowed the animal down to a walk, he saw Nikki’s horse, its saddle empty, come limping toward him.

A stab of pain and panic shot through his heart. My baby? What has happened to my baby? Oh, Christ, what has happened to my baby?

A prayer, not one of which had passed his lips in Vietnam, came to him, and he said it briefly but passionately.

Let my daughter be all right.

Let my wife be all right.

“Daddy?”

There she was, huddled in the shadows, crying.

He ran to her, snatched her up, feeling her warmth and the strength of her young body. He kissed her feverishly.

“Oh, God, baby, oh, thank God, you’re all right, oh, sweetie, what happened, where’s Mommy?”

He knew his wild-eyed fear and near loss of control were not helping the girl at all, and she sobbed and shuddered.

“Oh, baby,” he said, “oh, my sweet, sweet baby,” soothing her, trying to get both himself and her calmed down, back in some kind of operational zone.

“Honey? Honey, you have to tell me. Where’s Mommy? What happened?”

“I don’t know where Mommy is. She was behind me and then she wasn’t.”

“What happened?”

“We were looking at the sunrise across the valley. Mr. Dade was there. Suddenly he blew up. Mommy screamed, the horses bucked, and we turned and rode for safety. Mommy was — oh, Daddy, she was right behind me. Where’s Mommy, Daddy? Oh, Daddy, what happened to Mommy?”

“Okay, sweetie, you have to be brave now and get a hold of yourself. We are going to have to ride out of here soon. You have to settle down and be calm. I’m going to go look for Mommy.”

“No, Daddy, no, please don’t go, he’ll kill you too!”

“Honey, now, you be calm. I will take a look-see. You stay here in the shadows. When you feel up to it, gather your horse and get Junior’s reins. We will be riding like hell out of here very shortly. All right?”

His daughter nodded solemnly through her tears.

Bob turned, whipped off his hat, and slithered along the wall of the pass toward the light. As he neared it, he slowed … way … down. Fast movement would attract the eye, draw another shot if the bad boy was still scoping. Swagger thought he wouldn’t be. Swagger thought he’d hit his primary and his secondary and the girl couldn’t figure in anything, and so he was beating it to higher elevations or his pickup or whatever. Who knew? That had to be figured out later. The issue now was Julie.

He edged ever so slowly toward the light, at last setting himself so that he had a good vantage point. Some dust still hung in the air, but the sun was bright now. He could see poor Dade about one hundred-odd yards away, right at the edge. From Dade’s broken posture alone it was clear the old man was finished, but a monstrous head wound testified to no possibility of survival. Bad work. Expanding bullet, presumably fired in through the eye or something, a cranial vault explosion, gobbets of brain and blood flung everywhere.

He looked about for a sign of his wife, but there was none. He saw her horse over in the shade, calm now, chewing on some vegetation. He looked about for a hide in case she had gotten to one, but there were no rocks or bushes thick enough to conceal or protect her. That left the edge; he tried to recall what lay beyond the edge, and built an image of a rough slope littered with scrub vegetation and rocks, down a few hundred feet to a dense mess of pines where the creek ran through. Was that right, or was it some other place?

He thought to call, but held back.

The sniper hadn’t seen him yet.

There really wasn’t a decision to be made. He knew what had to be done.

He slipped back to where Nikki, who had now collected herself, stood with the two horses.

“Do you have any sense of where the shots came from, sweetie? Did you hear them at all?”

“I only remember the last one. As I was riding and had reached the pass. It came from behind.”

“Okay,” he said. If the shot came from “behind,” that probably meant he was shooting from across the canyon, on the ridgeline that ran anywhere from two hundred meters to one thousand meters away. That jibed with the position of Dade’s body, too. Whatever, it meant the shooter was cut off from where they were by the gap between the mountains and wouldn’t be able to reach them from here on out, unless he came after them. But he wouldn’t come after them. He’d fall back, get to safe ground, hit his escape route and be out of here.

“All right,” he said, “we are getting the hell out of here and beelining straight for home, where we’ll call the sheriff and get him and his boys in here.”

She looked at him, stricken.

“But, Mommy — she’s out there.”

“I know she is, honey. But I can’t get her now. If I go out there, he may shoot me, and then what have we got?”

He didn’t think he would be. He had worked it out to the next logical step: whoever had done the shooting, his target was not Dade Fellows but Bob Lee Swagger. Someone had reconned him, planned the shot, knew his tendencies and lay in wait from a safe hide a long way off. It was a sniper, Bob felt, another professional.

“She might be hurt. She might need help bad.”

“Listen to me, honey. When you are shot, if it’s a bad hit, you die right away, like poor Mr. Dade. If it ain’t hit you seriously, you can last for several hours. I saw it in Vietnam; the body is very tough and it’ll fight on its own for a long time, and you know how tough Mommy is! So there’s no real advantage to going to Mommy right now. We can’t risk that. She’s either already dead or she’s going to pull through. There’s nothing in between.”

“I— I want Mommy,” said Nikki. “Mommy’s hurt.”

“I want Mommy, too,” said Bob. “But sweetie, please trust me on this one. We can’t help Mommy by getting ourselves killed. He may still be there.”

“I’ll stay,” said Nikki.

“You’re such a brave girl. But you can’t stay. We have to get out of here, get the state cops and a medical team here fast. Do you understand, baby girl? That’s what’s best for Mommy, all right?”

His daughter shook her head; she was not convinced and nothing would ever convince her but Bob knew in his Marine heart that he had made the right decision — the tough one, but the right one.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

It had to happen sooner or later and he was glad it happened sooner. It had to be gotten out of the way.

“Mr. Swagger,” said Lieutenant Benteen, the chief investigator of the Idaho State Police, “would you mind stepping over here for a second, sir?”

Bob knew what was coming. As he stood on the escarpment, two and a half hours had passed since the shooting. His daughter was with a female state police detective and a nurse back at the house; here, an investigation team and coroner’s team worked the crime site, while below a team of sheriffs deputies struggled through the trees and underbrush for a sign of Julie Swagger. Across the gorge, detectives and deputies looked for evidence of the shooting site, ferried there by a state police helicopter that idled on that side of the gap.

“I figured you would be talking with me,” said Bob. “You go ahead. Let’s get it done with.”

“Yes, sir. You know, when a wife is killed it’s been my experience that ninety-eight percent of the time, the husband is somehow involved, if he didn’t do the thing himself. Seen a lot of that.”

“Sure, it figures.”

“So I have to ask you to account for your whereabouts at the time of the shooting.”

“I was on the other side of the pass, riding up to join my wife and daughter. We usually go out for an early morning ride. Today we had words, and I let the girls go alone. Then I got mad at myself for letting my damn ego seem so important, so I went after them. I heard four shots and rode like hell, to find my baby girl in the shadows of the pass. I looked out and saw poor Dade. I decided the best thing was to get Nikki back to the house, where I called you all and you know the rest.”

“Did it occur to you to look for your wife?”

“It did, but I had no medical supplies and I didn’t know if the shooter was around, so I thought it best to get the girl out of here and call in the sheriff and a medical team.”

“You are, sir, I believe, a marksman of some note.”

“I am a shooter, yes. I was a Marine sniper many years ago. I won the big shoot they hold in the east back in 1970. The Wimbledon Cup, they call it. Not for tennis, for long-range shooting. Also, I have been in some scrapes over the years. But, sir, can I point a thing out?”

“Go ahead, Mr. Swagger.”

“I think you’ll find them shots came from the other side of the gap. That’s what my daughter said, and that’s what the indication of Dade’s body said. Now, there ain’t no way I could have fired those shots from over there and gotten to my daughter over here in a very few seconds. There’s a huge drop-off, then some rough country to negotiate. I was with my daughter within thirty seconds of the last shot. You can also see the tracks of my horse up here from the ranch house, and no tracks that in any way connect me with what went on over there. And finally, you have surely figured out by now that poor Dade is gone because whoever pulled the trigger thought he was hitting me.”

“Duly noted, Mr. Swagger. But I will have to look into this further, to let you know. I will be asking questions. I have no choice.”

“You go ahead. Do I need a lawyer?”

“I will notify you if you are considered a suspect, sir. That’s how we do it out here.”

“Thank you.”

“But you were a shooter who used a rifle with a scope? And if I don’t miss my best guess, this was a pretty piece of shooting with just such a rig.”

“Possibly. I don’t know yet.”

“This couldn’t be some sniper thing? Some other sniper? Maybe someone getting even with you for something in your past?”

“I don’t know, sir. I have no idea at all.”

The lieutenant’s radio crackled and he picked it up.

“Benteen here, over.”

“Lieutenant, I think we found it. Got a couple of shells and some tracks, a coffee thermos and some messed-up ground. You care to come and look?”

“I’ll hop right over, Walt, thanks.” He turned to Bob. “They think they found the shooting position. Care to look at it, Mr. Swagger? Maybe you can tell me a thing or two about this sort of work.”

“I would like to see it, yes, sir. There’s no word on my wife?”

“Not yet. They’ll call as soon as they know.”

“Then let’s go.”

Of course the chopper was a Huey; it was always a Huey and Bob had the briefest of flashbacks as the odor of aviation fuel and grease floated to his nose. The bird rose gracefully, stirring up some dust, and hopped the canyon to the ridgeline on the other side and set its cargo down.

Bob and the lieutenant jumped out and the bird evacuated. A hundred yards away and up, a state policeman signaled and the two men followed a rough track up to the position. There, the younger cop stood over a little patch of bare ground. Something glittered and Bob could see two brass shells in the dust. There were some other marks and scuffs, and a Kmart thermos.

“This appears to be the spot,” said the young officer.

“Maybe we’ll get prints off the thermos,” Benteen said.

Bob bent and looked at the marks in the earth.

“See that,” he said, pointing to two circular indentations in the dust right at the edge of the patch. “Those are marks of a Harris bipod. The rifle rested on a Harris bipod.”

“Yeah,” said the cop.

Bob turned and looked back across the gulf to where Dade’s body still rested under a coroner’s sheet. He gauged the distance to be close to two hundred meters dead on, maybe a little downward elevation but nothing challenging.

“A hard shot, Mr. Swagger?”

“No, I would say not,” he said. “Any half-practiced fool could make that shot prone off the bipod with a zeroed rifle.”

“So you would look at this and not necessarily conclude that it’s a professional sniper’s work.”

“No. In the war we did most of our shooting at four hundred to eight hundred meters, on moving targets. This is much simpler: the distance is close, his angle to the target was dead on, the target was still. Then he misses the other two shots he takes at my wife, or at least he didn’t hit her squarely. Then he comes back and hits the old man in the head as he lays dead in the dirt. No, as I look at this, I can’t say I see anything that speaks of a trained man to me. It could have been some random psycho, someone who had a rifle and the itch to see something die and suddenly he sees this chance and his darker self gets a hold of him.”

“It’s been known to happen.”

“Yes, it has.”

“Still, it would be a mighty big coincidence, wouldn’t it? That such a monster just happens to nail your wife? I mean, given who and what you were?”

“As you say, such things have been known to happen. Let’s take a look at the shell.”

“Can’t pick it up till we photo it,” said the younger man.

“He’s right. That’s procedure.” “Okay, you mind if I squat down and get a look at the head stamp?”

“Go ahead.”

Bob bent down, brought his eyes close to the shell’s rear end.

“What is it?” asked Benteen.

“Seven-millimeter Remington Mag.”

“Is that a good bullet?”

“Yes, sir, it is. Very flat shooting, very powerful. They use them mainly in hunting over long distances. Rams, ’lopes, elk, the like. Lot of ’em in these parts.”

“A hunter’s round, then. Not a professional sniper’s round.”

“It is a hunter’s round: I’ve heard the Secret Service snipers use it, but nobody else.”

He stood, looked back across the gap. Bipod marks, circular, where the bipod sat in the dust, supporting the rifle. Two 7mm Remington Mag shells. Range less than two hundred meters, a good, easy shot. Nearly anyone could have made it with a reasonable outfit. Now what was bothering him?

He didn’t know.

But there was some oddness here, too subtle for his conscious mind to track. Maybe his unconscious brain, the smarter part of him, would figure it out.

He shook his head, to himself, mainly.

What is wrong with this picture?

“I wonder why there’s only two shells,” said Benteen, “if he fired four times. That would be two missing.”

“Only one,” said Bob. “He may not have ejected the last shell. As for the third shell, maybe it caught on his clothes or something, or he kicked it when he got up. Or it was right by him and he picked it up. That’s not surprising. The shells are light; they get moved about easily. You can never find all your shells. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to that.”

Was that it?

“Good point,” said the elderly officer.

But then the radio crackled again. Old Benteen picked it off his belt, listened to the stew of syllables, then turned to Bob.

“They found your wife.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

She would live. She lay encased in bandages. The broken ribs, five of them, were difficult; time alone would heal them. The shattered collarbone, where a bullet had driven through, missing arteries and blood-bearing organs by bare millimeters, would heal with more difficulty, and orthopedic surgery lay ahead. The abraded skin from her long roll down the mountainside, the dislocated hip, the contusions, bruises, muscle aches and pains, all would heal eventually.

So now she lay heavily sedated and immobile in the intensive care unit of the Boise General Hospital, linked to an EKG whose solid beeping testified to the sturdiness of her heart despite all the fractures and the pain. Her daughter sat on her bed, flowers filled the room, two Boise cops guarded the door, the doctor’s prognostication was optimistic and her husband was there for her.

“What happened?” she finally said.

“Do you remember?”

“Not much. The police have talked to me. Poor Mr. Fellows.”

“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I am very sorry about that.”

“Who did this?”

“The police seem to think it was some random psycho in the hills. Maybe a militia boy, full of foolish ideas, or someone who just couldn’t handle the temptation of the rifle.”

“Have they caught anybody?”

“No. And there were no distinguishable prints on a cheap thermos they recovered. They really don’t have much. A couple of shells, some scuffs in the dust.”

She looked off. Nikki was coloring steadily, a big Disney book. The scent of flowers and disinfectant filled the room.

“I hate seeing you here,” Bob said. “You don’t belong here.”

“But I am here,” she said.

“I’ve asked Sally Memphis to come up and stay with you. She’s a couple of months pregnant but she was eager to help. I called Dade Fellows’s daughter, and she said her father has a ranching property over in Custer County, remote and safe in a valley. When you get better, I want Sally to move you up there. I want you and Nikki protected.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nikki, honey, why don’t you go get a Coke?”

“Daddy, I don’t want a Coke. I just had a Coke.”

“Well, sweetie, why don’t you get another Coke. Or get Daddy a Coke, all right?”

Nikki knew when she was being kicked out. She got up reluctantly, kissed her mother and left the room.

“I haven’t told the cops,” he said, “because they wouldn’t get it and they couldn’t do anything about it. But I don’t think this is a wandering Johnny with a rifle. I think we got us a big-time serious professional killer and I think I’m the boy he’s after.”

“Why on earth?”

“There could be many reasons. As you know, I have been in some scrapes. I don’t know which of ’em would produce this. But what that means is until I get this figured out, I believe you are in more danger around me than less. And I need freedom. I need to get about, to look at things, to get some items sorted out. This guy’s got a game going on me; but now I have the advantage because for a few days more he won’t know he missed me. I have to operate fast and learn what I can in the opening.”

“Bob, you should talk to the FBI if you don’t think these Idaho people are sophisticated enough.”

“I don’t have anything they’d recognize yet. I have to develop some evidence. I’d just get myself locked in the loony bin.”

“Oh, Lord,” she said. “This is going to be one of your things, isn’t it?”

There was a long moment of quiet. He let the anger in him rise, then top off, then fall; then he began to hurt a little.

“What do you mean, ‘things’?”

“Oh, you have these crusades. You go off and you get involved in some ruckus. You don’t talk about it but you come back spent and happy. You get to be alive again and do what you do the best. You get to be a sniper again. The war never ended for you. You never wanted it to end. You loved it too deeply. You loved it more than you ever loved any of us, I see that now.”

“Julie, honey, you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re on painkillers. I want you to be comfortable. I’m just going to look into some things for a while.”

She shook her head sadly.

“I can’t have it. Now it’s come to my daughter. The war. It killed my first husband and now it’s come into my life and you want to go off and fight it all over again, and my daughter, who is eight, had to see a man die. Do you have any idea how traumatizing that is? No child should have to see that. Ever.”

“I agree, but what we have is what we have and it has to be dealt with. It can’t be ignored. It won’t go away.”

He could see that she was crying.

“Get some help,” she finally said. “Call Nick; he’s with the FBI. Call some Marine general; he’ll have connections. Call one of those writers who’s always wanting to do a book with you. Get some help. Take some money from my family’s account and hire some private guards. Don’t be Bob the Nailer anymore. Be Bob the husband and Bob the father, Bob the man at home. I can’t stand that this is in our life again. I thought it was over, but it’s never over.”

“Sweetie, I didn’t invent this. It’s not something I thought up. Please, you’re upset, you had a terrible experience, you’re in what we call post-traumatic stress syndrome, where it keeps flashing before your eyes and you’re angry all the time. I’ve been there. Time is going to heal you up, your mind as well as your body.”

She said nothing. She looked at Bob, but wasn’t seeing him any longer.

“But I have to deal with this. Okay? Just let me deal with this.”

“Oh, Bob—”

She started to cry again.

“I can’t lose you, too. I can’t lose both you and Donny to the same war. I can’t. I can’t bear it.”

“I just have to look into this. I’ll be careful. I know this stuff; I can work a lot faster alone and you’ll be safer without me there at all. Okay?”

She shook her head disconsolately.

“You have to answer me a question or two, please. All right?”

After a bit, she nodded.

“You went over this with the cops, only they won’t let me see the report. But they don’t have a clue. He’s already got them outfoxed. Now, I’m assuming no two shots followed upon each other closely. Is that right?”

She paused again, thinking, and then at last yielded.

“Yes.”

“There must have been at least two seconds between shots?”

“It felt like less than that.”

“But if he hits Dade in the chest, then he hits you in the collarbone, and you’re forty, fifty yards away, it took him some time to track and fire. So it had to be at least two, maybe three seconds.”

“You won’t put Nikki through this?”

“No. Now — he hits you moving. I’m guessing you were really galloping, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a pretty good shot.”

He sat back, his respect slightly increased. An oblique fast-mover, at two hundred yards.

“Why does he hit you in the collarbone and not in the full body?”

“It’s my right collarbone, not my left one,” she said. “That means he was aiming at my back, dead center. What I remember is the horse seemed to stumble forward just a bit, and the next second it was like somebody hit me in the shoulder with a baseball bat. The second after that I was down; there was dust everywhere. Nikki came back to me. Somehow I got up. I was afraid he’d shoot at her, so I yelled at her. Then I ran away from her so that he’d shoot me instead.”

“It still makes no sense. If he’s two hundred yards out, then the time in flight is so minimal he hits the sight picture he sees, and he don’t shoot if he don’t see the right sight picture. You’re sure the horse stumbled?”

“I felt it. Then, whack, and I was down, there was dust everywhere, the horse was crying.”

“Okay. Next, I heard four shots fired. One into Dade, the knock-down shot, the third shot, then the fourth into Dade’s head.”

“Thank God I never saw that.”

“But there was a third shot?”

“I think so. But I went off the edge.”

“You jumped off the edge? You weren’t knocked down?”

“I jumped.”

“God. Great move. Right move, great move, smart move. Guts move. Guts move. That gets you a medal in the Marine Corps.”

“It was all I could think to do.”

“So he did take a third shot. He was shooting at you. Man, I cannot figure why he is missing. Why is he missing? You jump, but at two hundred meters or less, with a seven-millimeter Remington Mag, what he sees is what he gets. He can’t miss from that range. Maybe he’s not so good.”

“Maybe he’s not.”

“Maybe the cops are right. It’s some psycho.”

“Maybe it is. But that would cheat you out of your crusade, wouldn’t it? So it can’t be a psycho. It’s got to be a master sniper.”

He let her hostility pass.

“Another thing I can’t figure is how come he’s shooting at you at all? You’d think once he did me, it’s over. That’s it. Time to—”

But then something came into his mind.

“No. No, I see. He has to hit you, because he knows exactly how quickly you could get back to the ranch and a phone and that’s cutting it too close. Nikki’s not a problem, she’s probably not together enough to think of that. But he has to do you to give himself the right amount of time to make his getaway. He’s figured out the angles. I can see how his mind works. Very methodical, very savvy.”

“Maybe you’re dreaming all this up.”

“Maybe I am.”

“But you want the man-to-man thing. I can tell. You against him, just like Vietnam. Just like all the other places. God, I hate that war. It killed Donny, it stole your mind. It was so evil.”

But then Nikki came back with a Coke for her dad and a nurse came in with pills and their time alone was finished.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The wind howled; it was cloudy today, and maybe rain would fall. Bob’s horse, Junior, nickered nervously at the possibility, stamped, then put his head down to some mountain vegetation and began to chew.

Bob stood at the shooter’s site. It was a flat nest of dust across an arroyo, not more than two hundred meters from where Dade had been shot and maybe 280 from where Julie fell. If he had had a range finder, he would have known the range for sure, but those things — laser-driven these days, much more compact than the Barr and Stroud he’d once owned — cost a fortune, and only wealthy hunters and elite SWAT or sniper teams had them. It didn’t matter; the range was fairly easy to estimate from here because the body sizes were easy to read. If you know the power of your scope, as presumably this boy would, you could pretty much gauge the distance from how much of the body you got into your lens. That worked out to about three hundred yards, and then it was a different matter altogether: you entered a different universe when the distances were way out.

Why did you miss her? he wondered. She’s running away, she’s on the horse, the angle is tough; the only answer is, you’re a crappy shot. You’re a moron. You’re some asshole who’s read too many books and dreamed of the kick you get looking through the scope when the gun fires, and you see something go slack. So you do the old man, then you swing onto the racing woman, her horse bounding up and down, and it’s too much shot for you. You misread the angle, you misread the distance, you just ain’t the boy for the job.

Okay. You fire, you bring her down. There’s dust, and then she emerges from the dust, running toward the edge. She wants you to shoot her, so you concentrate on her, not the girl. You’ve really got plenty of time. There’s no rush, there’s no up-down plunge as there would be on a horse; it’s really a pretty elementary shot.

But you miss again, this time totally.

No, you ain’t the boy you think you are.

That added up. That made sense. Some asshole who thought too much about guns and had no other life, no family, no sane connection to the world. It was the sickening part of the Second Amendment computation, but there you had it: some people just could not say no to the godlike power of the gun.

But how come there ain’t no tracks?

Apparent contradiction: he’s not good enough to make the shot, but he is good enough to get out cold without any stupid mistakes, like the print of his boot in the dust, which would at least narrow it down a bit. Yet he leaves two shells and a thermos. Yet all three are clean of prints. How could that be? Is he a professional or not? Or is he just a lucky amateur?

Bob looked at the bipod marks, still immaculate in the dust, undisturbed by the process of making plaster casts of them. They would last until the rain, and then be gone forever. They told him nothing; bipod, big deal. You could buy the Harris bipod in any gun store in America. Varmint shooters used them and so did police snipers. Some men used them when they took their rifles to the range for zeroing or load development, but not usually: because the bipod fit by an attachment to the screw hole in which the front swing swivel was set. That meant the screw could work lose under a long bench session and that it could change the point of impact much more readily than a good sandbag. Some hunters used them, but it was a rarity, because you almost never got a prone position in the field, so the extra weight was not worth it. Some men used them because they thought they looked cool. Would that be our guy?

He stared at imprints of the legs, trying to divine a meaning from their two, neat square images. No meaning arrived. Nothing.

But contemplating the bipod got him going in another direction: What’s he see? Bob wondered. What’s he see from up here?

So he went to the prone and took up a position indexed to the marks in the dust. From there he had a good, straight-on view of Dade’s position, yes; and the shot — with the stable rifle, the sun behind you, the wind calm as it was at that point in the day — it was just a matter of concentrating on the crosshairs, trusting the rig, squeezing the trigger and presto, instant kill. You threw the bolt, and no more than a few seconds later you had the woman.

He now saw how truly heroic Julie had been. Nine-hundred-ninety-nine out of a thousand inexperienced people just freeze on the spot. Sniper cocks, pivots a degree or so, and he has a second kill. But bless her brilliant soul, she reacted on the dime when Dade went down, and off she went with Nikki. He had to track her.

Bob had a thought here. What happens if the point where she was hit wasn’t within pivot range of this spot? What happens if there’s some impediment? But there wasn’t. It was an easy crank, an arc of about forty degrees, nothing in the way, you just track her, lead her a bit and pull the trigger.

Why did he miss?

Bob thought he had it.

He probably didn’t keep the rifle moving as he pulled the trigger. That’s why he hits her behind the line of her spine, he’s centered on her, but he stops when he fires, and the bullet, arriving a tenth of a second later, drills her trailing collarbone.

That made a sort of sense, though usually when you were tracking a bird or a clay with a shotgun and you stopped the gun, you missed the whole sucker, not just hit behind on it. Maybe the birds moved faster. On the other hand, the range was a lot farther than any wing or clay shooting. On the third hand, the velocity of the rifle bullet was much faster.

There were so many goddamned variables.

He sat back.

Used to be pretty goddamned good at this stuff, he thought. Used to have a real talent for understanding the dynamics of a two- or three-second interval when the guns were in play.

None of this made any goddamned sense, not really, and he had no way of figuring it out and his head ached and it was about to rain and destroy the physical evidence forever and Junior nickered again, bored.

Okay, he thought, rising, troubled, facing the fact that he had not really made any progress. He turned to go back to the horse and his empty house and his unopened bottle of Jim Beam and—

Then he saw the footprint.

Yeah, the cops missed a footprint, that’s likely.

He looked more closely and saw in a second that it was his own footprint, a Tony Lama boot, size 11, the one he was wearing, yes, it was his goddamned own. A little hard to ID because he’d turned and sort of stretched it out and—

That was it.

There it was.

He turned back, quickly, and stared at the bipod imprints.

If he has to pivot the bipod, the bipod marks would be distorted. They’d be rounded from the fast, forceful pivot as he followed her, and one would inscribe an arc through the dust. But these bipod marks were squared off, perfectly.

Bob looked at them closely.

Yes: round, perfect, the mark of the bipod resting in the dust until the rain came and washed it away.

He saw it now: this was a classic phony hide. This hide was built to suggest the possibility that a screwball did the shooting. But our boy didn’t shoot from here. He shot from somewhere else, a lot farther out.

Bob looked at the sky. It looked like rain.

He rode the ridgeline for what seemed like hours, the wind increasing, the clouds screaming in from the west, taking the mountains away. It felt like fog, damp to the skin. Up here, the weather could change just like that. It could kill you just like that.

But death wasn’t on his mind. Rather, his own depression was. The chances of finding the real hide were remote, if traces remained at all. When the rain came, they would be gone forever. Again he thought: nicely thought out. Not only does the phony hide send the investigation off in the wrong direction, it also prevents anyone from seeing the real hide until it is obliterated by the changing weather. So if he does miss something, the weather takes it out.

Bob was beginning to feel the other’s mind. Extremely thorough. A man who thinks of everything, will have rehearsed it in his mind a hundred times, has been through this time and time again. He knows how to do it, knows the arcane logic of the process. It isn’t just pure autistic shooting skill, it’s also a sense of tactical craft, a sense of the numbers that underlie everything and the confidence to crunch them fast under great pressure, then rely on the crunching and make it happen in the real world. Also: stamina, courage, the guts of a burglar, the patience of a great hunter.

He knew we came this way. But some mornings we did not. He may have had to wait. He was calm and confident and able to flatten his brain out, and wait for the exact morning. That was the hardest skill, the skill that so few men really had. But you have it, don’t you, brother?

A sprinkle of rain fell against his face. It would start pounding soon and the evidence would be gone forever.

Why didn’t I think this through yesterday? I’d have had him, or some part of him. But now, no, it would be gone. He’s won again.

He searched for hides, looking down from the trail into the rough rocks beneath. Every so often there’d be a spot flat enough to conceal a prone man, but upon investigation, each spot was empty of sign. And as he rode, of course, he got farther out. And from not everywhere on the ridge was the shelf of land visible where both Dade and Julie could be hit in the same sweep.

So on he went, feeling the dampness rise and his sense of futility rise with it. He must have missed it, he thought, or it’s already gone. Damn, he was a long way out. He was a long way out. He was getting beyond the probable into the realm of the merely possible. Yet still no sign, and Junior drifted along the ridge, over the small trail, tense at the coming rain, Bob himself chilled to the bone and close to giving up.

He couldn’t be out this far!

He rode on even farther. No sign yet. He stopped, turned back. The target zone was miniature. It was far distant. It was—

Bob dismounted, let Junior cook in his own nervousness. He’d thought he’d seen a little point under the edge of the ridge, nothing much, just a possibility. He eased down, peeking this way and that, convinced that, no, he was too far out, he had to go back and look for something he had missed.

But then he saw something just the slightest bit odd. It was a tuft of dried brush, caught halfway down the ridge. Wind damage? But no other tufts lay about. What had dislodged it? Probably some freak accident of nature … but on the other hand, a man wiping away marks of his presence in the dust, he might just have used a piece of brush to do it, then tossed the brush down into the gap. But it caught, and as it dried out over the two days, it turned brown enough so a man looking for the tiniest of anomalies might notice it.

Bob figured the wind always ran north to northwest through this little channel in the mountains. If the wind carried it, it would have come off the cliff just a bit farther back. He turned and began to pick his way back in that direction and had already missed it when, looking back to orient himself to the tuft of bush, he noticed a crevice and, peering into it, he looked down to see just the tiniest, coffin-sized flatness in the earth, where a man could lie unobserved and have a good view of the target zone.

He eased down, oriented himself to where Dade had died and Julie fell. He was careful not to disturb the earth, in case any scuff marks remained, but he could see none. At last he turned to get his best and first look at the killing zone from the shooting site.

Jesus Christ!

He was eight hundred, maybe a thousand meters out.

The killing zone was a tiny shelf far off at the oblique.

There were no features by which he could get an accurate distance-by-size estimation, and even on horseback, the targets would have been tiny. The scope wouldn’t have blown them up too much, either: too big a scope would have amplified the wobble effect until a sight picture was simply unobtainable and, worse, it would have had too small a breadth of vision at this range. If he lost contact with his targets, he might never have gotten them back in time. He had to be shooting a 10X, nothing bigger than a 12X, but probably a 10.

That’s some shooting. That’s beyond good; that’s in some other sphere. Careful, precise, deliberate, mathematical long-range shooting is very good shooting. Knowing instinctively how far to lead a moving target in the crux of the fraction of the second you’ve got, knowing it automatically, subconsciously … that is great shooting. Man, that is so far out there, it’s almost beyond belief. He knew of one man who could hit that shot, but he was dead, a bullet having exploded his head in the Ouachitas. There might be two or three others but—

He now saw too why the shooter had missed the kill on Julie.

He didn’t make a mistake: he had the shot perfectly. He was just betrayed by the physics of the issue, the bullet’s time in flight. When he fired, he had her dead to rights. But it takes a second for the bullet to travel that long arc, to float down on her; and there’s plenty of time, even in that limited period, for her to alter her body movement or direction enough to cause the miss. That’s why Dade is at least an easier shot. He’s not moving, to say nothing of at the oblique, on horseback galloping away as Julie was.

Bob sat back. His head ached; he felt dizzy; his heart beat wildly.

He thought of another man who might have done this. He’d buried the name and the memory so far it didn’t usually intrude, though sometimes, in the night, it would come from nowhere, or even in the daylight it would flash back upon him, that which he had tried to forget.

But he had to find out. There had to be a sign. Somehow, some way, the shooter would have left something that only another shooter could read.

Oh, you bastard. Come on, you bastard. Show me yourself. Let me see your face, this once.

He forced himself to concentrate on the hardscrabble dirt before him. He felt a raindrop, cold and absolute, against his face. Then another. The wind rose, howling. Junior, made restive, whinnied uncomfortably. The rain was moments away. He looked and he could see it, a gray blur hurtling down from the mountains. It would come and destroy. The sniper had planned for it. He was brilliant, well schooled in stratagems.

But who was he?

Bob leaned forward; he saw only dust. Then, no, no, yes, yes, he leaned forward even farther, and up front, where the dust had clearly been swept clean, he saw very small particulate residue. Tiny beads of it, tiny grains. White sand. White sand from a sandbag, because a great shooter will go off the bag, prone.

The rain began to slash. He pulled his jacket tight. If the sandbag was here — it had to be, to index the rifle to the killing zone — then the legs were splayed this way. He bent to where they’d have been, hoping for the indent of a knee, anything to leave a human mark of some sort. But it was all scratched out, and gone, and now the rain would take it forever.

The rain was cold and bitter. It was like the rain of Kham Duc. It would come and wipe anything away.

But then he went down farther, and amid the small and meaningless dunes, he at last found what he had yearned for. It was about two inches of a sharp cut in the dust, with notches for the thread holding sole to boot. Yes. It was an imprint of the shooter’s boot, the edge of the sole, the tiny strands of thread, the smoothness of the contour of the boot itself, all perfectly preserved in the dust. The shooter had splayed his foot sideways, to give him just the hint of muscular tension that would tighten his muscles up through his body. It was an adductor muscle, Adductor magnus. That was the core of the system, as isolated by a coach who’d gotten so far into it he’d worked out the precise muscles involved.

That was Russian. A shooting position developed by the coach A. Lozgachev prior to the fifty-two Olympics, where the Eastern Bloc shooters simply ran the field. In sixty, someone else had been coached by A. Lozgachev and his system of the magic Adductor magnus to win the gold in prone rifle.

T. Solaratov, the Sniper.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

It was late at night. Outside, the wind still howled, and the rain still fell. It was going to be a three-day blow. The man was alone in a house that was not his own, halfway up a mountain in a state he hardly knew at all. His daughter was in town, close to her injured mother, in the care of a hired nurse until an FBI agent’s wife would arrive.

In the house, there was no sound. A fire burned in the fireplace, but it was not crackly or inviting. It was merely a fire and one that hadn’t been tended in a while.

The man sat in the living room, in somebody else’s chair, staring at something he had placed on the table before him. Everything in the room was somebody else’s; at fifty-two, he owned nothing, really; some property in Arizona that was now fallow, some property in Arkansas that was all but abandoned. He had a pension and his wife’s family had some money, but it wasn’t much to show for fifty-two years.

In fact, what he had to show for those fifty-two years was one thing, and it was before him on the table.

It was a quart bottle of bourbon: Jim Beam, white label, the very best. He had not tasted whiskey in many years. He knew that if he ever did, it might kill him: he could wash away on it so easily, because in its stupefying numbness there was some kind of relief from the things that he could not make go away in any other way.

Well, sir, he thought, tonight we drink the whiskey.

He had bought it in 1982 in Beaufort, South Carolina, just outside Parris Island. He had no idea why he was there: it seemed some drunken journey back to his roots, the basic training installation of the United States Marine Corps, as if nothing existed before or after. It was the end of an epic, seven-week drunk, the second week of which his first wife had fled for good. Not many memories of the time or place could be recalled, but he did remember staggering into a liquor store and putting down his ten-spot, getting the change and the bottle and going out, in the heat, to his car, where what remained of his belongings were dumped.

He sat there in the parking lot, hearing the cicadas sing and getting set to crack the seal and drown out his headache, his shakes, his flashbacks, his anger in a smooth brown tide. But that day, for some reason, he thought to himself: maybe I could wait just a bit before I open it up. Just a bit. See how far I can get.

He had gotten over twelve years out of it.

Well, yes, sir, tonight is the night I open it up.

Bob cracked the seal on the bottle. It fought him for just a second, then yielded with a dry snap, slid open with the feeling of cheap metal gliding on glass. He unscrewed the cap, put it on the table, then poured a couple of fingers’ worth into a glass. It settled, brown and stable, not creamy at all but thin, like water. He stared at it as if in staring at it he could recognize some meaning. But he saw the futility, and after a bit raised it to his lips.

The smell hit him first, like the sound of a lost brother calling his name, something he knew so well but had missed so long. It was infinitely familiar and beckoning, and it overpowered, for that was the way of whiskey: it took everything and made everything whiskey. That was its brilliance and its damnation too.

The sip exploded on his tongue, hot with smooth fire, raspy with pouring smoke, with the totality that made him wince. His eyes burned, his nose filled, he blinked and felt it in his mouth, sloshing around his teeth. Even at this last moment it was not too late, but he swallowed it, and it burned its way down, like a swig of napalm, unpleasant as it descended, and then it hit and its first wave detonated, and there was fire everywhere.

He remembered. He forced himself to.

Last mission. Donny was DEROS. He should have been outprocessing. No, the little bastard, he couldn’t let anything alone. He had to be so perfect. He had to be the perfect Marine. He had to go along.

Why did you let him?

Did you hate him? Was there something in you that wanted to see him get hit? Was it Julie? Was it that you hated him so fiercely because he was going back to Julie and you knew you’d never have her if he made it?

Donny hadn’t made it. Bob did have Julie. He was married to her, though it took some doing. So in a terrible sense he had gotten exactly what he desired. He had benefited. Hadn’t seemed so at the time, but the one Johnny who came out of the fracas with more than he went into it was he, himself, Gy.Sgt. Bob Lee Swagger, USMC (Ret.).

Don’t think, he warned himself. Don’t interpret; list. List it all. Dredge it up. He had to concentrate only on the exactness of the event, the hard questions, the knowable, the palpable, the feelable.

What time was it?

0-dark-30, 0530, 06 May 72. Duty NCO nudges me awake, but I am already conscious and I have heard him come.

“Sarge?”

“Yeah, fine.”

I rise before the sun. I decide not to wake Donny yet; let him sleep. He’s DEROS tomorrow, on his way back to the world. I check my equipment. The M40 is clean, having been examined carefully the night before both by myself and the armorer. Eighty rounds of M118 7.62mm NATO Match ammunition have been wiped and packed into pouches on an 872 harness. I slip into my shoulder holster for my .380; over that I pull on my cammies, I lace and tighten my boots. I darken my face with the colors of the jungle. I find my boonie cap. I slip into the 782 gear, with the ammunition, the canteens, the .45, all checked last night. I take the rifle, which hangs by its sling, off the nail in the bunker wall, slide five M118s into it, closing the bolt to drive the top one into the chamber. I pull back to put on safe, just behind the bolt handle. I’m ready to go to the office.

It’s going to be a hot one. The rainy season is finally over, and the heat has come out of the east, settling like a mean old lady on us poor grunts. But it’s not hot yet. I stop by the mess tent, where somebody’s already got coffee going, and though I don’t like the caffeine to jimmy my nerves, it’s been so quiet of late I don’t see any harm in having a cup.

A PFC pours it for me into a big khaki USMC mug, and I feel the great smell, then take a long, hard hot pull on it. Damn, that tastes good. That’s what a man needs in the morning.

Sitting in his living room, the fire burning away, Bob took another sip on the whiskey. It, too, burned on the way down, then seemed to whack him between the eyes, knock him to blur and gone. He felt the tears come.

06 May 1972. 0550.

I head to the S-2 bunker and duck in. Lieutenant Brophy is already up. He’s a good man, and knows just when to be present and when not to be. He’s here this morning, freshly shaved, in starched utilities. There seems to be some sort of ceremonial thing going on.

“Morning, Sergeant.”

“Morning, sir.”

“Overnight your orders came through on the promotion. I’m here to tell you you’re officially a gunnery sergeant in the United States Marine Corps. Congratulations, Swagger.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ve done a hell of a job. And I know you’ll be bang-up beaucoup number one at Aberdeen.”

“Looking forward to it, sir.”

Maybe the lieutenant feels the weight of history. Maybe he knows this is Bob the Nailer’s last go-round. Three tours in the ’Nam with an extension for the last one, to give him nineteen straight months in country. He wants to observe it properly and that satisfies me. In some way, Brophy gets it, and that’s good.

We go over the job. We work the maps. It’s an easy one. I’ll go straight out the north side, over the berm and out to the treeline. Then we work our way north toward Hoi An, through heavy bush and across a paddy dike. We go maybe four klicks to a hill that stands 840 meters high and is therefore called Hill 840. We’ll go up it, set up observation and keep a good Marine Corps eyeball on Ban Son Road and the Thu Bon River. I’m done killing: it’s straight scout work. I’m here for firebase security, nothing else. Along those lines, we plan to look for sign of large-body troop movements, to indicate enemy presence, on the way out and the way back.

The lieutenant himself types up the operational order and enters it in the logbook. I sign the order. It’s official now.

I tell the clerk to go get Fenn. It’s 0620. We’re running a little late, because I’ve let Fenn sleep. Why did I do this? Well, it seemed kind. I didn’t want to break his balls on the last day. He really isn’t needed until we leave the perimeter, as the mission has been well discussed and briefed the night before; he knows the specs better than I do.

He shows up ten minutes later, the sleep still in his eyes, but his face made-up green, like mine. Someone gets him some coffee. The lieutenant asks him how he’s doing. He says he’s fine, he just wants to get it over with and head back to the world.

“You don’t have to go, Fenn,” I say.

“I’m going,” he says.

Why? Why does he have to go? What is driving him? I never understood it then; I don’t understand it now. There was no reason, not one that ever made no sense to me. It was the last, the tiniest, the least significant of all the things we did in the ’Nam. It was the one we could have skipped and oh, what a different world we’d live in now if we had.

Bob threw down another choker of bourbon. Hot fire. Napalm splashes, the whack between the eyes. The brown glory of it.

“Check your weapons,” I tell Fenn, “and then do commo.”

Donny makes certain the M14 is charged, safety on. He takes out his .45, drops the mag, sees that the chamber is empty. That’s the way I’ve told him to carry it. Then he checks out the PRC-77, which of course reads loud and clear since the receiving station is about four feet away. But we do it by the numbers, just like always.

“You all set, Fenn?” I ask.

“Gung ho, Semper Fi and all that good shit,” says Donny, at last strapping the radio on, getting it set just right, then picks up the weapon, just as I pick mine up.

We leave the bunker. The light is beginning to seep over the horizon; it’s still cool and characteristically calm. The air smells sweet.

But then I say, “I don’t want to go out the north. Just in case. I want to break our pattern. We go out the east this time, just like we did before. We ain’t never repeated ourself; anybody tracking us couldn’t anticipate that.”

Why did I say that? What feeling did I have? I did have a feeling. I know I had one. Why didn’t I listen to it? You’ve got to pay attention, because those little things, they’re some part of you you don’t know nothing about, trying to reach you with information.

But now there was no reaching back all these years; he had made a snap decision because it felt so right, and it was so wrong. Bob finished the glass with a last hot swig, then quickly poured another one, two fingers, neat, as on so many lost nights over so many lost years. He held it before his eyes as the blur hit him, and almost laughed. He didn’t feel so bad now. It was easy. You could just dig it out that simply, and it was there, before him, as if recorded on videotape or as if, after all these years, the memory somehow wanted to come out at last.

“He’s gone, he’s dead, you got him,” says Brophy, meaning, The white sniper is gone, there’s nobody out there, don’t worry about it. He should have been dead, too. We cooked his ass in 20mm and 7.62. The Night Hag sprayed him with lead. The flamethrower teams barbecued him to melted fat and bone ash. Who could live through that? We recovered his rifle. It was a great coup, waiting to be studied back at Aberdeen by none other than yours truly.

But — why did we believe he was dead? We didn’t find no body, we only found the rifle. But how could he have survived all that fire, and the follow-up with the flamethrowers and then the sweep with grunts? No one could have survived that. Then again, this was a terrifically efficient professional. He didn’t panic, he’d been under a lot of fire, he’d taken lots of people down. He kept his cool, he had great stamina.

“Yeah, well,” I tell the lieutenant.

We reach the eastern parapet wall. A sentry comes over from the guard post down the way.

“All clear?” I ask.

“Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain’t nothing out there.”

But how would he know? The night vision is only good for a few hundred yards. The night vision tells you nothing. It simply means there’s nobody up close, like a sapper platoon. Why didn’t I realize that?

He took another dark, long swallow. It was as if something hit him upside the head with a two-by-four, and his consciousness slipped a little; he felt his bourbon-powered mellowness battling the melancholy of his memory as it presented itself to him after all these years.

I slip my head over the sandbags, look out into the defoliated zone, which is lightening in the rising sun. I can’t see much. The sun is directly in my eyes. I can only see flatness, a slight undulation in the terrain, low vegetation, blackened stumps from the defoliant. No details, just a landscape of emptiness.

“Okay,” I say. “Last day: time to hunt.” I always say this. Why do I think it’s so cool? It’s stupid, really.

I set my rifle on the sandbag berm, pull myself over, gather the rifle and roll off.

I land, and there’s a moment there where everything is fine, and then there’s a moment when it isn’t. I’ve done this hundreds of times before over the past nineteen months, and this feels just like all those times. Then time stops. Then it starts again and when I try to account for the missing second, it seems a lot has happened. I’ve been punched backwards, come to rest against the berm itself. For some reason my right leg is up around my ears. I can make no sense of this until I look down and see my hip, pulped, smashed, pulsing my own blood like a broken faucet. Somewhere in here I hear the crack of the rifle shot, which arrives just a bit after I’m hit.

It makes no sense at all and I panic. Then I think: motherfuck, I’m going to die. This fills even my hard heart with terror. I don’t want to die. That’s all I’m thinking: I don’t want to die.

There’s blood everywhere, and I put my fingers on my wound to stanch it, but the blood squirts out between them. It’s like trying to carry dry sand; it slips away. I can see bone, shattered. I feel the wet. Again an odd second where there is no pain and then the pain is so heavy I think I’ll die from it alone. I’m thinking of nothing but myself now: there’s no one in the world but me. A single word forms in my head, and it’s morphine.

Bob looked into the amber bourbon, so still, so calm. The wind rushed outside, cold and harsh. He heard himself screaming, “I’m hit!” from across the years, and saw himself, hip smashed, blood pouring out. And he knew what happened next.

He took a swallow. It landed hard. He was quite drunk. The world wobbled and twisted, fell out of and back into focus a dozen times. He was crying now. He hadn’t cried then but he was crying now.

“No!” he screamed, but it was too late, for the boy had leaped over the berm too, to cover his sergeant, to inject morphine, to drag the wounded man to cover.

Donny lands and at that precise moment he is hit. The bullet excites such vibration from him as it crashes through that the dust seems to snap off his chest. There’s no geyser, no spurt, nothing; he just goes down, dead weight, his pupils slipping up into his head. From far off comes the crack of that rifle. Is there something familiar in it? Why does it now seem so familiar?

The sound of it played in his ears: crisp, echoless, far away, but clear. Familiar? Why familiar? Rifles and loads all have their signature, but this one, what was it? What about it? What information did it convey? What message did it carry?

“Donny!” I cry, as if my cry can bring him back, but he’s so gone there’s no reaching him. He collapses into the dust a foot or so from me with the crash of the uncaring, and how I do it I don’t know, but I somehow squirm to him and hold him close.

“Donny!” I scream, shaking him as if to drive the bullet out, but his eyes are glassy and unfocused, and blood is coming out of his mouth and nose. It’s also coming out of his chest, pouring out. No one ever gets how much blood there is: there’s lots of it, and it comes out like water, thin and sloppy and soaking.

His eyelids flutter but he’s not seeing anything. There’s a little sound in his throat, and somehow I have him in my arms and now I’m screaming, “Corpsman! Corpsman!”

I hear machine gun fire. Someone has jumped to the berm with an M60 and is throwing out suppressive fire, arcs and arcs of tracers that skip out across the field, lifting the dirt where they hit. A 57mm recoil-less rifle fires, big booming flash, that blows a mushroom cloud into the landscape to no particular point, and more and more men come to the berm, as if repulsing a human-wave attack.

Meanwhile, Brophy has jumped, and he’s on both of us, and there are three or four more grunts, pressing against us, firing out into the emptiness. Brophy hits me with morphine, then hits me again.

“Donny!” I scream, but as the morphine whacks me out, I feel his fingers loosening from my wrist, and I know that he is dead.

Bob hit the bottle again, this time dispensing with the glass. The fluid coursed down. His mind was now almost thoroughly wasted. He couldn’t remember Donny anymore. Donny was gone, Donny was lost, Donny was history, Donny was a name on a long black wall. Were there even any photos of him? He tried to recall Donny but his mind wouldn’t let him.

Gray face. Unfocused eyes staring at eternity. The sound of machine gun fire. The taste of dust and sand. Blood everywhere. Brophy jacking the morphine in. Its warmth and spreading, easing numbness. I won’t let go of Donny. I must hold him still. They’re trying to pull me away, over the berm. The blackness of the morphine taking me out.

I sleep.

I sleep.

Days pass, I’m lost in morphine.

I’m finally awakened by a corpsman. He’s shaving me. That is, my pubic region.

“Huh?” I say, so groggy I can hardly breathe. I feel inflated, creamy with grease, bound by weight.

“Surgery, Gunny,” he says. “You’re going to be operated on now.”

“Where am I?” I ask.

“The Philippines. Onstock Naval Hospital, Orthopedic Surgery Ward. They’ll fix you up good. You been out for a week.”

“Am I going to die?”

“Hell, no. You’ll be back in the Major Leagues next season.”

He shaves me. The light is gray. I can’t remember much, but somewhere underneath it there’s pain. Donny? Donny’s gone. Dodge City? What happened to Dodge City? Brophy, Feamster, the grunts. That little place out there all by itself.

“Dodge?”

“Dodge?” he asks. “You ain’t heard?”

“No,” I say, “I been out.”

“Sure. Bad news. The dinks jumped it a few days after you got hit. Sappers got in with grenades. Killed thirty guys, wounded sixty-five more.”

“Oh, fuck.”

He shaves me expertly, a man who knows what he’s doing.

“Brophy?” I say.

“I don’t know. They got a lot of officers; they hit the command bunkers. I know they got the CO and a bunch of grunts. Poor guys. Probably the last Marines to die in the Land of Bad Things. They say there’ll be a big investigation. Careers ended, a colonel, maybe even a general will go down. You’re lucky you got out, Gunny.”

Loss. Endless loss. Nothing good came out of it. No happy endings. We went, we lost, we died, we came home to — to what?

I feel old and tired. Used up. Throw me out. Kill me. I don’t want to live. I want to die and be with my people.

“Corpsman?” I grab his arm.

“Yeah?”

“Kill me. Hit me with morphine. Finish me. Everything you got. Please.”

“Can’t do it, Gunny. You’re a goddamned hero. You’ve got everything to live for. You’re going to get the Navy Cross. You’ll be the Command Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps.”

“I hurt so bad.”

“Okay, Gunny. I’m done. Let me give you some Mike. Only a little, though, to make the pain go away.”

He hits me with it. I go under and the next time I awake, I’m in full traction in San Diego, where I’ll spend a year alone, which will be followed by a year in a body cast, also alone.

But now the morphine hits and thank God, once again, I go under.

The light awakened him, then noise. The door cracked open and Sally Memphis walked in.

“Thought I’d find you here.”

“Oh, Christ, what time is it?”

“Mister, it’s eleven-thirty in the morning and you ought to be with your wife and daughter, not out here getting drunk.”

Bob’s head ached and his mouth felt dry. He could smell himself, not pleasant. He was still in yesterday’s clothes and the room had the stench of unwashed man to it.

Sally bustled around, opening window shades. Outside, the sun glared; the three-day blow had lasted only one and then was gone. Idaho sky, pure diamond blue, blasted through the windows, lit by sun. Bob blinked, hoping the pain would go away but it wouldn’t.

“She was operated on at seven A.M. for her collarbone. You should have been there. Then you were supposed to pick me up at the airport at nine-thirty. Remember?”

Sally, who had just graduated from law school, was the wife of one of Bob’s few friends, a special agent in the FBI named Nick Memphis who now ran the Bureau’s New Orleans office. She was about thirty-five and had acquired, over the years, a puritan aspect to her, unforgiving and unshaded. She was going to start as an assistant prosecutor in the New Orleans district attorney’s office that fall; but she’d come here out of her and her husband’s love of Bob.

“I had a bad night.”

“I’ll say.”

“It ain’t what it appears,” he said feebly.

“You fell off the wagon but good, that’s what it appears.”

“I had to do some work last night. I needed the booze to get where I had to go.”

“You are a stubborn man, Bob Swagger. I pity your beautiful wife, who has to live with your flintiness. That woman is a saint. You never are wrong, are you?”

“I am wrong all the time, as a matter of fact. Just don’t happen to be wrong on this one. Here, lookey here.”

He picked up the uncapped bottle of Jim Beam, three-quarters gone, and walked out on the front porch. His hip ached a little. Sally followed. He poured the stuff into the ground.

“There,” he said. “No drunk could do that. It’s gone, it’s finished, it won’t never touch these lips again.”

“So why did you get so drunk? Do you know I called you? You were hopeless on the phone.”

“Nope. Sorry, don’t remember that.”

“Why the booze?”

“I had to remember something that happened to me long ago. I drunk for years to forget it. Then when I got sober finally, I found I disremembered it. So I had to hunt it out again.”

“So what did you learn on your magical mystery tour?”

“I didn’t learn nothing yet.”

“But you will,” she said.

“I know where to look for an answer,” he finally said.

“And where would that be?”

“There’s only one place.” She paused.

“Oh, I’ll bet this one is rich,” she said. “It just gets better and better.”

“Yep,” he said. “I don’t never want to disappoint you, Sally. This one is really rich.”

“Where is it?”

“Where a Russian put it. Where he hid it twenty-five years ago. But it’s there, and by God, I’ll dig it out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s in my hip. The bullet that crippled me. It’s still there. I’m going to have it cut out.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

It was dark and the doctor was still working. Bob found him out back of the Jennings place, down the road from the Holloways, where he’d had to help a cow through a difficult birth. Now he was with a horse called Rufus whom the Jennings girl, Amy, loved, although Rufus was getting on in years. But the doctor assured her that Rufus was fine; he would just be getting up slower these days. He was an old man, and should be treated with the respect of the elderly. Like that old man over there, the doctor said, pointing to Bob.

“Mr. Swagger,” said Amy. “I’d heard you’d left these parts.”

“I did,” he said. “But I came back to see my good friend Dr. Lopez.”

“Amy, honey, I’ll send over a vitamin supplement I want you to add to Rufus’s oats every morning. I bet that’ll help him.”

“Thank you, Dr. Lopez.”

“It’s all right, honey. You run up to the house now. I think Mr. Swagger wants a private chat.”

“ ’Bye, Mr. Swagger.”

“Good-bye, sweetie,” said Bob, as the girl skipped back to the house.

“Thought those reporters chased you out of this place for good,” the doctor said.

“Well, I did too. The bastards are still looking for me.”

“Where’d you go to cover?”

“A ranch up in Idaho, twenty-five miles out of Boise. Just temporarily, waiting for all this to blow over.”

“I knew you were something big in the war. I never knew you were a hero.”

“My father was a hero. I was just a sergeant. I did a job, that’s all.”

“Well, you ran a great lay-up barn. I wish you’d come back into the area, Bob. There’s no first-class outfit this side of Tucson.”

“Maybe I will.”

“But you didn’t come all this way to talk about horses,” said Dr. Lopez.

“No, Doc, I didn’t. In fact, I flew down this afternoon. Took the two-ten American from Boise to Tucson, rented a car, and here I am.”

Bob explained what he wanted. The doctor was incredulous.

“I can’t just do that. Give me a reason.”

“I am plumb tired of setting off airport alarms. I want to get on an airplane without a scene.”

“That’s not good enough. I have an oath, as well as a complex set of legal regulations, Bob. And let me point out one other thing. You are not an animal.”

“Well,” said Bob, “actually I am. I am a Homo sapien. But I know you are the best vet in these parts and you have operated on many animals, and most of ’em are still with us today. I remember you nursed Billy Hancock’s paint through two knee operations, and that old boy’s still roaming the range.”

“That was a good horse. It was a pleasure to save that animal.”

“You never even charged him.”

“I charged him plenty. I just never collected. Every few months, Billy sends me ten or fifteen dollars. It should be paid up by the next century.”

“Well, I am a good horse, too. And I have this here problem and that’s why I come to you. If I go to VA, it could take months for the paperwork to clear. If I go to a private MD, I got a passel of questions I have to answer and a big operating room to tie up and weeks to recover, whether I need it or not. I need this thing now. Tonight.”

“Tonight!”

“I need you to go in on local, dig it out, and sew me up.”

“Bob, we are talking about serious, invasive work. It would take any normal man a month to recover, under intensive medical care. You won’t be whole again for a long time.”

“Doc, I been hit before. You know that. I still come back fast. It’s a matter of time. I can’t tell you why, but I’m under the gun on time. I have to find something out so I can go to the FBI. I need a piece of evidence. I need your help.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“I know you did a tour over there. It’s a thing guys like us have in common. We ought to help each other when we can.”

“No one else will, that’s for sure,” said Dr. Lopez.

“You was a combat medic and you probably saw more gunshot wounds and worked on more than any ten MDs. You know what you’re doing.”

“I saw enough of it over there.”

“It’s a nasty thing to fire a bullet into a man,” said Bob. “I was never the same, and now that I am getting old, I feel my back firing up because of the damage it did to my structure. And the VA don’t recognize pain. They just tell you to live with it, and cut your disability ten percent every year. So on I go, and on all of us go with junk in us or limbs missing or whatever.”

“That war was a very bad idea. Nothing good ever came out of it.”

“I copy you there. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have no other choice. I need that bullet.”

“You are a fool if you think what I can offer you is as safe as modern hospital medicine.”

“You dig the bullet out and put in the stitches. If you don’t do it, I’ll have to do it myself and that won’t be pretty.”

“I believe you would, Bob. Well, they say you are one tough son of a bitch. You better be, because you’re going to need every bit of tough to get through the next few days.”

Bob lay on his back, looking at the large mirror above him. The ugliness of the entrance wound was visible; he hated to look at it. The bullet had hit him almost dead on at a slight downward angle, plowed through skin and the tissue of his sheathing gluteus medius muscle, then shattered the platelike flange of the hip bone, deflecting off to plunge down the inside of his leg, ripping out muscle as it went. The bullet hole was unfilled: it was that alone and nothing else — a channel, a void, an emptiness in his hip that plunged inward, surrounded by an ugly pucker of ruined flesh.

“No false hip?” said Dr. Lopez, feeling at it, examining it carefully.

“No, sir,” said Bob. “They patched it up with bone grafts from my other shin and screws. On cold days, them screws can light up, let me tell you.”

“Did it break a leg, too?”

“No, sir, it just tore up tissue traveling down the leg.”

The doctor probed Bob’s inner thigh, where a long dead patch described the careening bullet’s terrible passage through flesh. Bob looked up, away, feeling the acute humiliation of it. The doctor’s operating theater was immaculately clean, though out of scale to human bodies, as its most usual patients were horses with leg or eye problems. Except for the two of them, it was deserted.

“Well, you’re lucky,” Dr. Lopez said. “I was afraid it still might be hung up in the mechanics of the hip. If that had happened, you were out of luck. I couldn’t take it out without permanently crippling you.”

“I am lucky,” said Bob.

“Yeah,” the doctor said, “I can feel it here, nested in the thigh, down close to the knee. I know what happened. They had to screw your hip together with transplants; the deep, muscular wound of the bullet didn’t matter to them. They didn’t even bother to look for it. They just sewed it up. They were trying to keep you alive and ambulatory, not make sure you could get through airport metal detectors.”

“You can get it?”

“Bob, this is going to hurt like hell. I have to cut through an inch of muscle, get down close to the femur. I can feel it in there. You will bleed like a dog on the roadway. I will sew you up, but you will need a good long rest. This isn’t a small thing. It isn’t a huge thing, but you ought to spend at least a couple of weeks off your feet.”

“You cut it out tonight. I’ll sleep here and be gone in the morning. You give me a good pain shot and that will be that.”

“You are a hard case,” said the doctor.

“My wife says the same.”

“Your wife and I bet anyone that ever met you. All right, you sit back. I’m going to wash you up, then shave you. Then I’ll go scrub, and we’ll give you a painkiller and we’ll do what’s gotta be done.”

Bob watched with a numb leg and an odd feeling of dislocation. The doctor had put an inflatable tourniquet around the upper leg to cut down on blood loss. There he’d wrapped his leg in a sterile Ace bandage, and now he cut through it, a horizontal incision with a scalpel an inch deep and three inches long into the lower inside of his right thigh. Bob felt nothing. The blood jetted out in a spurt, as if an artery had been snipped, but it hadn’t, and as the initial jet was soaked up by the bandage, the new blood crept back to seep out of the ugly gash.

He’d seen so much blood, but the blood he remembered was Donny’s blood. Because the bullet had shattered his heart and lungs, it had gotten into his throat fast and he’d gagged it out. There was so much, it overcame his pipes and found new tunnels out of which to surge: i, came from his nose and mouth, as if he’d been punched in the face. Donny’s face was ruined, taken from them all by the black-red delta as it fanned from the center of his face down to his chin.

The doctor tweaked and squeezed the incision, opening it as one would a coin purse; then he took a long probe and inserted it into the wound and began to press and feel.

“Is it there?”

“I don’t have it — yeah, yeah, there it is, I ticked against it. It seems to be encapsulated in some scar-type tissue. I’d guess that’s standard for an old bullet.”

He removed the probe, now sticky with blood, gleaming in the bright light of the operating theater, and set it down. Picking up a new scalpel, he cut more deeply; more blood flowed.

“I’m going to have to irrigate,” he said through his mask. “I can’t see much; all that damn blood.”

“They will do that on you, won’t they?” said Bob.

Lopez merely grunted, squirted a blast of water into the wound, so that it bubbled.

It was so strange: Swagger could feel the water as pressure, not unpleasant, even a little ticklish; he could feel the probe, could almost feel as the pincers tugged at the bullet. The sensations were precise, the doctor tugging at the thing, which was evidently quite disfigured and jammed into some tissue and wouldn’t just pop out as a new bullet would. Bob felt all these details of the operation. He saw the opening in his leg, saw the blood, saw the doctor’s gloved fingers begin to glow with blood, and the blood begin to spot his surgeon’s gown and smock.

But he felt nothing; it could have been happening to someone else. It was unrelated to him.

At last, with a tiny tug, Lopez pulled the bloody pincers out of the wound and held the trophy up for Bob to see: the bullet was crusted in gristle, white and fatty, and the doctor cut it free with his scalpel. It had mangled when it had met his bone, its meplat collapsing into its body, so that it was deformed into a little flattened splat, like a mushroom, oddly askew atop the column of what remained. But it hadn’t broken into pieces; it was all there, an ugly little twist of gilding metal sheathing lead, and its original aerodynamic sleekness, its missileness, was still evident in the twisted version. He could see striations running down it, where the rifle’s grooves had gripped it as it spun through the barrel so long ago on its journey toward him.

“Can you weigh it?”

“Yeah, right, I’ll weigh it and then I’ll wax it, and then I’ll gift-wrap it while you quietly bleed to death. Just hold your horses, Bob.”

He dropped the bullet into a little porcelain tray, where it tinkled like a penny thrown into a blind man’s cup, then went back to Bob.

“Please weigh it,” said Bob.

“You ought to be committed,” the doctor said. He irrigated the wound again, poured in disinfectant and inserted a little sterile plastic tube, for drainage. Then he quickly and expertly sewed it up with coarse surgical thread. After finishing, he restitched with a finer thread. Then he bandaged the wound, wrapped an inflatable splint around it and blew hard until the splint held the leg stiff, nearly immobile. Then he loosened the Velcro on the tourniquet and tossed it aside.

“Pain?”

“Nothing,” said Bob.

“You’re lying. I felt you begin to tense five minutes ago.”

“Okay, it hurts a bit, yeah.”

Actually, it now hurt like hell. But he didn’t want another shot or anything that would drug him, flatten him, keep him woozy. He had other stuff to do.

“Okay,” said the doctor. “Tomorrow I’ll rebandage it and remove the tube. But it’ll relieve the pressure tonight. Now—”

“Please. I have to know. Weigh it. I have to know.”

Dr. Lopez rolled his eyes, took the porcelain cup to a table where a medical scale was sitting, and fiddled and twisted.

“All right,” said the doctor.

“Go on,” said Bob.

“It’s 167.8 grains.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m very sure.”

“Christ!”

“What’s wrong?”

“This thing just got so twisted it don’t make no sense at all.”

He slept dreamlessly for the first time in weeks in one of Doc Lopez’s spare bedrooms; the pain woke him early, and the unbearable stiffness in the leg. The doctor redressed the wound, then replaced the inflatable splint.

“No major damage. You ought to be able to get around a little bit.”

He had some crutches lying around, and advised Bob to seek professional medical help as soon as possible. Bob could not walk or bathe, but he insisted on going to the airport, on the power of ibuprofen and will alone. White-faced and oily with sweat, he was pushed to the ten-fifteen plane in a wheelchair by a stewardess, and used the crutches to get aboard. He got to enter the plane early; it was like being important.

No one was seated next to him, as the flight was only half full. The plane took off, stabilized and eventually coffee was brought. He took four more ibus, washed them down with the coffee, then at last took out his grisly little treasure in its plasticine envelope.

Well, now, ain’t you a problem, brother, he thought, examining the little chunk of metal, mushroomed into the agony of impact, frozen forever in the configuration of the explosion it had caused against his hip bone.

One hundred sixty-eight grains.

Big problem. The only 168-grain bullet in the world in 1972 was American — the Sierra 168-grain MatchKing, the supreme .30-caliber target round then and, pretty much, now. He was expecting a 150-grain Soviet bullet, for the 7.62mm × 54, as fired in either a Dragunov or the old Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle.

No. This boy was working with an American handload, as the 168-grainers weren’t used on manufactured bullets until the services adopted the M852 in the early nineties. Nor was it the 173-grain match American bullet, loaded equally into the M72 .30-06 round or the M118 7.62 NATO round.

No. American handload, tailored, planned, its last wrinkle worked out. A serious professional shooter, at the extended ranges of his craft. That meant this was a total effort, even to somehow obtaining American components in RSVN to get the absolute maximum out of the system. Why?

He tried to think it out.

T. Solaratov has lost his Dragunov. The field-expedient choice would then be an American sniper rifle, presumably available in some degree within the NVA supply system; after all, half their stuff was captured.

Bob bet it was an M1-D, the sniper version of the old Ml Garand rifle that the GIs won World War II with.

The more he thought about it, the more sense it made, up to a point. Yes, that would explain the almost subconscious familiarity of the sound signature. In his time, he’d fired thousands of rounds with an M-1. It had been his first Marine rifle, a solid, chunky, robust, brilliantly engineered piece of work that would never let you down.

This is my rifle, this is my gun.

This is killing, this is for fun.

Every recruit had marched in his underwear around the squad bay some indeterminate number of hours, a ton of unloaded Ml on his shoulder, Parris Island’s sucking bogs out beyond the wire, his dick in his left hand, that primitive rhyme sounding in his ears under the guidance of a drill instructor who seemed like a God, only crueler and tougher and smarter.

Yeah, he thought, he uses a Garand rifle with a scope, he works out the load with the best possible components, he takes me down, he’s the hero.

Looking at the striations imprinted in the copper sheathing of the bullet by its explosive passage up the barrel that day, he guessed closer examination by experts would prove them to be the mark of a rifling system that held to ten twists per inch, not twelve, for that would prove the bullet was fired from a match grade Ml and not an M14. He saw the logic in that, too. It made sense to choose a .30-06 over a .308 because downrange the .30-06, with its longer cartridge case and higher powder capacity, would deliver more energy, particularly beyond a thousand yards. It really was a long-range cartridge, as so many deer had found out over the years; the .308 was a mere wannabe.

But here’s where he hit the wall.

If in fact he decided to go with the .30-06 cartridge, then why the hell wouldn’t he have used a Model 70T, a bolt gun? That was the Marine sniper rifle of the first five years of the war. There had to be plenty of those still around; hell, even Donny had come up with one of them in that one shot at Solaratov they’d had.

Why would the Russian use the less accurate, considerably more problematic semiauto instead of one of the most classic sniper rifles in the world? Carl Hitchcock, the great Marine sniper of 1967, with his ninety-two kills, he’d used a 70T, with a sportsman’s stock and an 8X Unertl externally adjusted scope. That would be the rifle to use. What the hell was this Russian bird up to?

Could it be: no Model 70s available?

Well, he could check out combat losses through friends in the Pentagon, but it seemed impossible that the Russian wouldn’t be able to pick up a Model 70. He could probably have gotten one of Bob’s own Model 700 Remingtons if he’d wanted it.

What was there about the M1 that made it mandatory for the Russian’s selection?

It was indeed a very accurate rifle. Maybe he’d wanted the semiauto capacity to bracket the target, to put three or four shots into the area fast, in hopes that one would hit.

Nah. Not at that range. Each shot had to be precise.

The problem with the Garand as a sniper rifle was it was at its best with national match iron sights. It ruled in service rifle competition in which telescopic sights were not permissible. But the weapon became difficult when a scope was added, because its straight-down topside en bloc loading and straight-up ejection made it impossible to mount the scope over the axis of the bore. Instead, through a complicated system never really satisfactory, the Ml had worn a parallel scope, one mounted a little to the left of the action. That meant at a given range, the scope was intersecting the target but it was not on the same axis as the bore, which made rapid computation very difficult, particularly when the target was not exactly zeroed, or moved, or some such.

Yet he chose this rifle.

What the hell was going on?

Bob mulled, trying to make sense of it all.

He had the feeling of missing something. There was a thing he could not see. He could not even conceive of it.

What am I missing?

What in me prevents me from seeing it?

I can’t even conceive it.

“Sir?”

“Oh, yes?” he said, looking up at the flight attendant.

“You’ll have to put up your lap tray and straighten your seat back. We’re about to land at Boise.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, wasn’t paying any attention.”

She smiled professionally, and he glimpsed out the windows to see the Sawtooths, the down-homey little Boise skyline, and the airfield, named after a famous ace who’d died young in war.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Bob drove to the hospital straight from the airport. During a brief gap in the power of the ibuprofen, his incision began to knit in truly exquisite pain. He knew bruising would start by tomorrow and the thing would be agonizing for weeks — but he didn’t want to stop.

He drove through the quiet, bright streets of Boise, as unpretentious a town as existed anywhere, and finally reached the hospital where the crutches got him in, the ibuprofen got him beyond the agony again and an elevator got him to his wife’s room, outside of which his daughter and Sally Memphis waited.

“Oh, hi!”

“Daddy!”

“Sweetie, how are you?” he said, gathering up his daughter and giving her a big hug. “Oh, it’s great to see my gal! Are you okay? You doin’ what Sally says?”

“I’m fine, Dad. What’s wrong with you?”

“Sweetie, nothing. Just a little cut on my leg, that’s all,” he said, as Sally shot him a disbelieving look.

He chatted with his daughter for a bit and with Sally, whose response to him was cool. It seemed that Julie was sleeping now, but there hadn’t been any real complications from the surgery. They thought she’d get out sometime soon and Sally had made arrangements to go to the small ranch in Custer County as Bob had planned. She agreed with him that it was a safe security arrangement, at least until the situation clarified.

Finally, Julie awakened and Bob went in to his wife.

Her torso was in a full-body cast that supported the arm on the side where the collarbone had been shattered. His poor girl! She looked so wan and colorless and somehow shrunken in the cast.

“Oh, sweetie,” he said, rushing to her.

She smiled but not with a lot of force or enthusiasm and asked how he was and he didn’t bother to answer her, but instead went on about her, caught up on her medical situation, checked on the security arrangements, finally told her he thought he was on to something.

“I could tell; you’re all lit up.”

“It’s a long story. There’s something I can’t figure out, and I need help.”

“Bob, how can I help you? I don’t know anything. I’ve told you everything I know.”

“No, no, I don’t mean about it. I mean about me.”

“Now you’ve lost me.”

“Honey, I got this thing I have to figure out. It doesn’t make no sense to me. So either it’s wrong, or I am wrong. If it’s wrong, there’s nothing I can do about it. If it’s me that’s wrong, then I can figure it out.”

“Oh, Lord. I get shot and it’s all about you.”

He let the cut simmer, not responding.

Finally he said, “I’m very sorry you got hit. I’m very happy you survived. You should concentrate on how lucky you were to make it through, not how unlucky you were. You handled yourself well, you took control, you were a hero. You got your life, you got your daughter, you got your husband. It ain’t no time to be angry.”

She said nothing.

“It ain’t about me. It’s about us. I have to figure this thing out.”

“Can’t you let the police, the FBI do it? They’re all over the place. That’s their job. Your job is to be here with your family.”

“I have a man hunting me. The more around you I am, the more danger you’re in. Don’t you see that?”

“So you’ll be off again. I knew it. You weren’t there when I got shot, you weren’t there when I lay in that gulch for three hours, you weren’t there when I was operated on, you weren’t there when I came out of the operation, you haven’t been taking care of your daughter, you’re evidently not going with us to the mountains, I hear you’ve been drinking, you’ve obviously been in some kind of fight or something, because of the terrible way you’re limping and the way your face is completely sheet-white, and all you want to do is go off again. And … somehow, you’re happy.”

“I wasn’t in a fight. I had a bullet cut out of my leg, that’s all. It’s nothing. I’m sorry,” he said. “This is the best way, I think.”

“I don’t know how much of this I can take.”

“I just want this to be over.”

“Then stay here. Stay here, with us.”

“I can’t. That puts you in danger. He’ll know soon enough, if not yet, that I wasn’t the man he hit. So he’ll come back. I have to be able to move, to operate, to think, to defend myself. Not only that, if he comes after me again, and you’re there again, do you think I can defend you? Nobody can defend you. Let him come after me. That’s what he was trained to do. Maybe I can get him, maybe not, but I sure as shit ain’t going to let him go after you.”

“Bob,” she said. “Bob, I called a lawyer.”

“What?”

“I said, I called a lawyer.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I think we ought to separate.”

Certain moments, you just feel your chest turning to ice. It just freezes solid on you. You have trouble breathing. You swallow, there’s no air, then there’s no saliva in your mouth. Your ears hammer, your head aches, blood rushes through your veins, pumping crazily. You’re that close to losing it. It had never happened to him when the shit was flying in the air and people were dying all around him, but it happened now.

“Why?” he finally said.

“Bob, we can’t live like this. It’s one thing to say we love each other, we have a family, we take care of each other. It’s another when you go off every so often and I hear rumors that people are dead and you won’t talk about it. It’s another when you’re so angry all the time you won’t talk or touch me or support me and you snap at me all the time. I can just make so many excuses to our daughter. But then the next thing, the worst thing, the war comes into our house and I’m shot with a bullet and my daughter sees a man die before her very eyes. And then you go off again. I love you, Lord, I love you, but I cannot have my daughter going through that again.”

“I’m— I’m very sorry, Julie. I didn’t see how hard this was on you.”

“It’s not just the violence. It’s that you somehow love it so. It’s that it’s always in you. I can see it in your eyes, the way you’re always searching the terrain, the way you’re never quite relaxed, the way there’s always a loaded gun close at hand, the way you drive me out. You’re not a sniper anymore; that was years ago. But you’re still over there. I can’t compete with the war in Vietnam; you love her more than us.”

Bob breathed heavily.

“Please, don’t do this to me. I can’t lose you and Nikki. I don’t have anything else. You’re all I value in this world.”

“Not true. You value yourself and what you became. Secretly, you’re so happy to be Bob the Nailer, different from all men, better than all men, loved and respected or at least feared by all men. It’s like a drug addiction. I feel that in you, and the angrier you get and the older you get, the worse it becomes.”

He could think of nothing to say.

“Please don’t do this to me.”

“We should be apart.”

“Please. I can’t lose you. I can’t lose my daughter. I’ll do what you want. I’ll go with you to the mountains. I can change. I can become the man you want. You watch me! I can do it. Please.”

“Bob, I’ve made up my mind. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. You need space, I need space. The shooting business just makes it more important. I have to get away from you and get my own life, and get away from the war.”

“It’s not the war.”

“It is the war. It cost me the boy I loved and now it’s cost me the man I loved. It cannot take my daughter. I’ve thought all this through. I’m filing for separation. After I recover, I’m returning to Pima County and my family. We can work out financial details. It doesn’t have to be bad or ugly. You can always see Nikki, any time, unless you’re off at war or in the middle of a gunfight. But I just can’t have this. I’m sorry it didn’t work out any better, but there you have it.”

“I’ll go. Just promise me you’ll think it over. Don’t do anything stupid or sudden. I’ll take care of this business—”

“Don’t you see? I can’t have you taking care of this business and getting yourself killed. I can’t lose someone else. It almost killed me the first time. You think you had it hard in your traction and your VA hospital? Well, I never came back. There isn’t a day I don’t wake up and not remember what it felt like when the doorbell rang and it was Donny’s brother, and he looked like hell and I knew what was happening. It took me ten, maybe twenty years to get over that and I only just barely did.”

He felt utterly defeated. He could think of nothing to say.

“I’ll go now,” he said. “You need to rest. I’ll say good-bye to Nikki. I’ll check on you, stay in contact. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You be careful.”

“We’ll be all right.”

“When this is all over, you’ll see. I’ll fix it. I can do that. I can fix myself, change myself. I know it.”

“Bob—”

“I know I can.”

He bent and kissed her.

“Bob—”

“What?”

“You wanted to ask me what was wrong with you. Why you couldn’t figure something out?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll tell you why. It’s because of the great male failing of your age. Vanity. You’re publicly modest but privately insanely proud. You think everything is about you, and that blinds you to what is going on in the world. That’s your weakness. You have to attack your problem without ego and vanity. Approach it objectively. Put yourself out of it.”

“I—”

“It’s the truth. I’ve never told you that, but it’s the truth. Your anger, your violence, your bravery; it’s all part of the same thing. Your pride. Pride goeth before the fall. You cannot survive unless you see through your pride. All right?”

“All right,” he said, and turned to leave.

Here I am, right back where I started from, he thought.

The room was shabby, a motel on the outskirts of Boise, not a chain but one of those older, forties places on a road that had long since been surpassed by other, brighter highways.

I am slipping, he thought. I am losing everything.

The room smelled of dust and mildew. Every surface was slightly warped wood, the bathroom was only nominally clean, the lightbulbs were low-wattage and pale.

I drank a lot of bourbon in rooms like this, he thought.

He was here on more or less sound principles. The first was that by this time, whoever had been trying to kill him surely realized he had missed and was back on the hunt again. Therefore the ranch house, with its clothes, its life, was out. He knew that place and to go there was to get yourself killed, this time for real, with no poor old Dade Fellows to stop the bullet.

So, after doubling back and crossing his own tracks a dozen times, and setting up look-sees for followers and finally satisfying himself nobody was onto him yet, he was here. Paid cash, too. No more credit cards, because whoever this bird was working for, he might have a way of tracking credit cards. No more phone calls except from public phones.

What he needed now was a gun and cash, like any man on the run. The cash he knew he could get. He had $16,000 left from a libel case the late Sam Vincent had won for him years ago, and he’d moved it from a cache in Arkansas to a cache here in Idaho. If he was clear again tomorrow, he would get it.

A gun was another problem. He felt naked without one, and the gun laws here in Idaho weren’t troubling yet, but there was still that goddamn seven-day wait by national law. He could head back to his property, where his .45 Commander was stored away, but did he really want to carry it on a daily basis? Suppose he had to take an airline or wandered into a bank with a metal detector? Sometimes it was more trouble than it was worth. Besides, how could he shoot it out against a sniper with a 7mm Remington Magnum with a .45? If the white sniper found him, it was over, that was all.

Bob sat back, turning the TV on by remote, discovering to his surprise that it worked. The news came on.

Bob paid no attention. It was just white noise.

His head ached. He held a bottle in his hands, between his legs as he lay on the bed, on a thin chintz bedspread. Jim Beam, $9.95 at the Boise Lik-r-mart, recently purchased. There were water spots on the ceiling; the room stank of ancient woe, of raped girlfriends and beaten wives and hustled salesmen. Cobwebs fogged the corners; the toilet had a slightly unwholesome odor to it, like heads he’d pissed in the world over.

I am losing it, he thought.

He tried to press his brain against the riddle again.

He felt if he could get that, he would have something.

Why, all those years ago, did Soloratov use an Ml rifle, a much less accurate semiauto? It appeared to be one of those mysteries that had no solution. Or, even worse, the answer was mundane, stupid, boring: he couldn’t get a bolt gun, so he settled for the most accurate American rifle available, an M1D Sniper. Yes, that made perfect sense but…

…but if he could get an M1D, he could get a Model 70T or a Remington 700!

It don’t make no goddamn sense!

It doesn’t have to make sense, he told himself. Not everything does. Some things just can’t be explained; they happen in a certain way because that’s the way of the world.

Bob looked at the bottle again, his fingers stole to the cap and the plastic seal that kept the amber fluid and its multiple mercies from his lips, and yearned to crack it and drink. But he didn’t.

Won’t never touch my lips again, he remembered telling someone.

Liar. Lying bastard. Talking big, not living up to it.

He tried to lose himself in what was on the tube. The news, some talking head from Russia. Oh, yeah, it sounded familiar. Big elections coming up, everybody all scared because some joker who represented the old ways was in the lead and would carry the day, and the Cold War would start up all over again. The guy was this Evgeny Pashin, handsome big guy, powerful presence. Bob looked at him.

Thought we won that war, he said to himself.

Thought that was one we did okay in, and now here’s this guy and he’s going to take over and restore Russia and all the missiles go back into the silos and it’s the same old crock of shit.

Man, there was no good news anywhere, was there?

He was feeling powerfully maudlin. He yearned for his old life: his wife, his lay-up barn, the sick animals he was so good at caring for, his perfect baby daughter, enough money. Man, had it knocked.

It all was taken away from him.

He turned the TV off and the room was quiet. But only for a moment. A couple of units down, somebody was yelling at somebody. Somewhere outside, a kid was crying. Other TVs vibrated through the walls. Traffic hummed along. Looking out the window he saw the buzz of neon, blurry and mashed together, from fast food joints and bars and liquor stores across the way.

Man, I hate to be alone anymore, he thought.

That’s why Solaratov will get me. He likes being alone. I lived alone for years, I fought alone. But I lost whatever edge I had.

I want my family. I want my daughter.

The lyrics of some old rock and roll song sounded in his ears, moist, rich, poignant.

Black is black, he heard the music, I want my baby back.

Yeah, well, you ain’t going to get her back. You’re just going to sit here until that fucking Russian hunts you down and blows you away.

Ceiling, discolored. Cobwebs, mildew, the sound of other people’s grief over the traffic and me stuck by myself with no goddamn way in hell to figure out what I got to figure out.

You think everything is about you and that blinds you to the world, his wife had told him.

Yeah, as if she would know. She really never did get him, he thought bitterly.

His hand involuntarily cranked on the bottle top and he heard it crack as the seal broke. He opened the bottle, looked down into the open muzzle. He knew a form of doom lay behind that muzzle. It was like looking down the barrel of a loaded rifle, the incredible temptation it had to some weak and deranged people, because to look down it was to look straight into death’s own eye. So it was with the bottle for an ex-drunk. Look into it, take what it has to offer and you are gone. You are history.

He yearned for the strength to throw it out but knew he didn’t have it. He raised the bottle to his lips, wise with the knowledge that he was about to die, and brought the bottle—

You think everything is about you.

Bob stopped. He considered something so fundamental he’d not seen it before, but suddenly it seemed as big as a mountain: his assumption that Solaratov came to Vietnam to kill him and had returned to Idaho to kill him.

But suppose it wasn’t about him?

What could it be about, then?

He tried to think.

The sniper had a semiauto.

He could fire twice, fast.

He had to take them both to make sure of hitting one.

But suppose I wasn’t the one he had to hit.

Well, who else was there?

Only Donny.

Could it be about … Donny?

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

He awoke early, without a hangover, because he had not been drunk. He looked at his watch and saw that it was eight here, which meant it was eleven in the East.

He picked up the phone, then called Henderson Hall, United States Marine Corps Headquarters, Arlington, Virginia. He asked to be connected to the Command Sergeant Major of the Corps, got an office and a young buck sergeant, and eventually got through to the great man himself, with whom he’d served a tour in Vietnam in sixty-five and run into a few odd, friendly times over the years.

“Bob Lee, you son of a bitch.”

“Howdy, Vern. They ain’t kicked you out yet?”

“Tried many a time. It’s them pictures I got of a general and his goat.”

“Those’ll git a man a long way.”

“In Washington, they’ll git you all the way.”

The two old sergeants laughed.

“So anyhow, Bob Lee, what you got cooking? You ain’t written a book yet?”

“Not yet. Maybe one of these years. Look, I need a favor. You’re the only man that could do it.”

“So? Name it.”

“I’m flying to DC this afternoon. I need to look at some paperwork. It would be the service jacket of my spotter, a kid that got killed in May 1972.”

“What was his name?”

“Fenn, Donny. Lance corporal, formerly corporal. I have to see what happened to him over his career.”

“What for? What’re you looking for?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I got something to check out involving him. What it is, I don’t know. It’s come up, though.”

“Didn’t you end up marrying his widow?”

“I did, yeah. A terrific lady. We’re sort of on the outs now.”

“Well, I hope you get it straightened out. This may take me a day or so. Or maybe not. I can probably get it, if not from here, from our archives, out in Virginia.”

“Real fine, Sergeant Major. I appreciate it much.”

“You call me when you get in.”

“I will.”

Bob hung up, hesitated, thought about the booze he did not drink and then dialed the Boise General Hospital and eventually was connected to his wife’s room.

“Hi,” he said. “It’s me. How are you? Did I wake you?”

“No, no. I’m fine. Sally took Nikki to school. There’s nobody around. How are you?”

“Oh, fine. I wish you’d reconsider.”

“I can’t.”

He was silent for a while.

“All right,” he finally said, “just think about it.”

“All right.”

“Now I have something else to ask.”

“What?”

“I need your help. This last little thing. Just a question or two. Something you would know that I don’t.”

“What?”

“It’s about Donny.”

“Oh, God, Bob.”

“I think this may have something to do with Donny. I’m not sure, it’s just a possibility. I have to check it out.”

“Please. You know how I hate to go back there. I’m over that now. It took a long time.”

“It’s a nothing question. A Marine question, that’s all.”

“Bob.”

“Please.”

She sighed and said nothing.

“Why was he sent to Vietnam? He had less than thirteen months to serve. But he had just lost his rating. He was a full corporal and he showed up in ’Nam just a lance corporal. So he had to be sent there for punitive reasons. They did that in those days.”

“It was punitive.”

“I thought it was. But that doesn’t sound like Donny.”

“I only caught bits and pieces of it. I was only there at the end. It was some crisis. They wanted him to spy on some other Marines who they thought were slipping information to the peace marchers. There was this big screwup at a demonstration, a girl got killed, it was a mess. He was ordered to spy on these other boys and he got to know them, but in the end, he wouldn’t. He refused. They told him they’d ship him to Vietnam, and he said, Go ahead, ship me to Vietnam. So they did. Then he met you, became a hero and got killed on his last day. You didn’t know that?”

“I knew there was something. I just didn’t know what.”

“Is that a help?”

“Yes, it is. Do you know who sent him?”

“No. Or if I did, I forgot. It was so long ago.”

“Okay. I’m going back to DC.”

“What? Bob—”

“I’ll only be gone a few days. I’m flying out there. I’ve got to find out what happened to Donny. You listen to Sally; you be careful. I’ll call you in a few days.”

“Oh, Bob—”

“I’ve got some money, some cash. Don’t worry.”

“Don’t get in trouble.”

“I’m not getting in any trouble. I promise. I’ll call you soon.”

There it was: WES PAC.

He remembered the first time he had seen it, that magic, frightening phrase, when the orders came through for that first tour in 1965: WES PAC. Western Pacific, which was Marine for Vietnam. He remembered sitting outside the company office at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and thinking, Oh, brother, I am in the shit.

“That’s it,” said the sergeant major’s aide.

“That’s it,” said Bob.

He sat in the anteroom in Henderson Hall, with the tall, thin young man with hair so short it hardly existed and movements so crisp they seemed freshly dry-cleaned.

“We got it this morning from Naval Records Storage Facility, Annandale. Sergeant Major used lots of smoke. He served with the CO’s chief petty officer on the old Iowa City.”

“You’ll tell him I appreciate it.”

“Yes, sir. I’m sniper-rated, by the way. Great school, out at Quantico. They still talk about you. Understand you fought a hell of a fight at Kham Duc.”

“Long time ago, son. I can hardly remember it.”

“I heard of it a hundred times,” said the young sergeant. “I won’t ever forget it.”

“Well, son, that’s kind of you.”

“I’ll be in my office next door. You let me know if you need anything else.”

“Thank you, son.”

The jacket was thick, all that remained of FENN, DONNY J.’s almost, but not quite four years in the Marine Corps. It was full of various orders, records of his first tour in the Nam with a line unit, his Bronze Star citation, his Silver Star nomination for Kham Duc, travel vouchers, shot records, medical reports, evaluations going back to Parris Island in the far-off land of 1968 when he enlisted, GCT results, the paper trail any military career, good, bad or indifferent, inevitably accumulates over the passage of time. There was even a copy of the Death in Battle report, filled out by the long-dead Captain Feamster, who only survived Donny a few weeks until the sappers took out Dodge City. But this one sheet, now faded and fragile, was the one that mattered; this was the one that sent him to the Nam.

HEADQUARTERS, USMC, 1C-MLT: 111

1320.1

15 MAY 1971

SPECIAL ORDER: TRANSFER

NUMBER 1640-71

REF: (A) CMC LTR DFB1/1 13 MAY 70

(B) MCO 1050.8F

1. IN ACCORDANCE WITH REFERENCE (A), EFFECTIVE 22 AUGUST 70, THE PERSONNEL LISTED ON THE REVERSE HEREOF ARE TRANSFERRED FROM THIS COMMAND TO WES PAC (III MAF) FOR DUTIES SPECIFIED BY CO WES PAC (III MAF).

2. PRIOR TO TRANSFER, THE COMMANDING OFFICER WILL ASSIGN AS PRIMARY THE MOS SHOWN FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE AUTHORITY CONTAINED IN EXISTING REGULATIONS.

3. TRAVEL VIA GOVERNMENT PROCURED TRANSPORTATION IS DIRECTED FOR ALL TRAVEL PERFORMED BETWEEN THIS COMMAND AND WES PAC (III MAF) IN ACCORDANCE WITH PARAGRAPH 4100, JOINT TRAVEL REGULATIONS.

4. EACH INDIVIDUAL LISTED ON THE REVERSE HEREOF IS DIRECTED TO REPORT TO THE DISBURSING OFFICER WITHIN THREE WORKING DAYS AFTER COMPLETION OF TRAVEL INVOLVED IN THE EXECUTION OF THESE ORDERS FOR AN AUDIT OF REFUNDS.

It was signed OF Peatross, Major General, U.S. Marine Corps, Commanding, and below that bore the simple designation DIST: ‘N’ (and WNY, TEMPO C, RM 4598).

Bob had received just such a document three times, and three times he’d come back from it, at least breathing. Not Donny: it got him a name inscription on a long black wall with bunches of other boys who’d much rather have been working in factories or playing golf than inscribed on a long black wall.

Bob turned it over, not to find the usual computerized list of lucky names but only one: FENN, DONNY, J., L/CPL 264 38 85 037 36 68 01 0311, COMPANY B, MARINE BARRACKS WASHINGTON DC MOS 0311.

The rest of the copy was junk, citations of applicable regulations, travel information, a list of required items all neatly checked off (SRB, HEALTH RECORD, DENTAL RECORD, ORIG ORDERS, ID CARD and so on), and the last, melancholy list of destinations on the travel sub-voucher, from Norton AFB in California to Kadena AFB on Okinawa to Camp Hansen on Okinawa and on to Camp Schwab before final deployment to WES PAC (III MAF), meaning Western Pacific, III Marine Amphibious Force. Donny’s own penmanship, known so well to Bob from their months together, seemed to scream of familiarity as he looked at it.

Now what? he thought. What’s this supposed to mean?

He tried to remember his own documents and scanned this one for deviations. But his memory had faded over the years and nothing seemed at all different or strange. It was just orders to the Land of Bad Things; thousands and thousands of Marines had gotten them between 1965 and 1972.

There seemed to be nothing: no taint of scandal, no hint of punitive action, nothing at all. In Donny’s evals, particularly those filed in his company at the Marine Barracks, there were no indications of difficulty. In fact, those recordings were uniformly brilliant in content, suggesting an exemplary young man. A SSGT Ray Case had observed, as late as March 1971, “Cpl. Fenn shows outstanding professional dedication to his duties and is well-respected by personnel both above and below him in the ranks. He performs his duties with thoroughness, enthusiasm and great enterprise. It is hoped that the Corporal will consider making the Marine Corps a career; he is outstanding officer material.”

Bob knew the secret language of these things: where praise is the standard vocabulary, Case’s belief in Donny clearly went beyond that into the eloquent.

Even Donny’s loss of rating order, which demoted him from corporal to lance corporal, dated 12 May 71, was empty of information. It carried no meaning whatsoever: it simply stated the fact that a reduction in rank had occurred. It was signed by his commanding officer, M. C. Dogwood, Captain, USMC.

No Article 15s, no Captain’s Masts, nothing in the record suggesting any disciplinary problems.

Whatever had happened to him, it had left no records at all.

He stood up and went to the door of the sergeant major’s aide.

“Is there a personnel specialist around? I’d like to run something by him.”

“I can get Mr. Ross. He worked personnel for six years before coming to headquarters.”

“That’d be great.”

In time the warrant officer arrived, and he too knew of Bob and treated him like a movie star. But he scanned the documents and could find nothing at all unusual except—

“Now this is strange, Gunny.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Can’t say I ever saw it before.”

“And what is that, Mr. Ross?”

“Well, sir, on this last order, the one that sent Fenn to Vietnam. See here” — he pointed — “it says ‘DIST: “N.”’ That means, distribution to normal sources, i.e. the duty jacket, the new duty station, Pentagon personnel, MDW personnel and so forth, the usual grinding wheels of our great bureaucracy in action.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But what I see here is odd. In parentheses ‘(and WNY TEMPO C, RM 4598).’”

“What would that mean?”

“Well, I’d guess Washington Naval Yard, Temporary Building C, Room 4598.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know. I was twelve in 1971.”

“Any idea how I could find out?”

“Well, the only sure way is to go to the Pentagon, get an authorization, and try and dig up a Washington Naval Personnel logbook or phone book or at least an MDW phone book from the year 1971. They might have one over there. Then you’d just have to go through it entry by entry — it would take hours — until you came across that designation.”

“Oh, brother,” said Bob.

The next night, Bob drove his rented car out to a pleasant suburban house in the suburbs of America and there had dinner with his old pal the Command Sergeant Major of the United States Marine Corps, his wife and three of his four sons.

The sergeant major grilled steaks out on the patio while the two younger boys swam in the pool and the sergeant major’s wife, Marge, threw together a salad, some South Carolina recipe for baked beans and stewed tomatoes. She was an old campaigner herself and Bob had met her twice before, at a reception after he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for Kham Duc-1976, four years after the incident itself, a year after he finally left the physical therapy program and the year he decided he could no longer cut it as a Marine — and the next year, when he did retire.

“How’s Suzy?” she asked, and Bob remembered that she and his first wife had had something of an acquaintanceship; at that point, he’d been higher in rank than the man who was hosting him.

“Oh, we don’t talk too much. You heard, I went through some bad times, had a drinking problem. She left me, and was smart to do it. She’s married to a Cadillac dealer now. I hope she’s happy.”

“I actually ran into her last year,” Marge said. “She seemed fine. She asked after you. You’ve had an adventurous few years.”

“I seem to have a knack for trouble.”

“Bob, you won’t get Vern’s career in any trouble? He retires this year after thirty-five years. I’d hate to see anything happen.”

“No, ma’am. I’ll be leaving very shortly. My time here is done, I think.”

They had a nice dinner and Bob tried to hide the melancholy that seeped into him; here was the life he would have had if he hadn’t gotten hit, if Donny hadn’t gotten killed, if it all hadn’t gone so sour on him. He yearned now for a drink, a soothing blur of bourbon to blunt the edge he felt, and he recalled a dozen times on active duty when he and this man or a man just like this man had spent the night recalling sergeants and officers and squids and ships and battles the world over, and enjoying immensely their lives in the place where they’d been born hard-wired to spend it, the United States Marine Corps.

But that was gone now. Face it, he thought. It’s gone, it’s finished, it’s over.

That night they went to a baseball game, Legion Ball, where the youngest boy, a scholarship athlete at the University of Virginia, got three hits while giving up only two as pitcher over the game’s seven innings. Again: a wonderful America, the best America — the suburbs on a spring evening, the weather warm, the night hazy, baseball, family and beer.

“Do you miss your wife?” asked the sergeant major’s wife.

“I do, a lot. I miss my daughter.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Oh,” said Bob, “she’s a rider. She’s a great horsewoman. Her mother has her riding English in case she decides to come east for college.”

And off he went, for twenty uncontrollable minutes, missing his daughter and his wife and the whole thing even more. Black is black, he thought, I want my baby back.

The game was over and in triumph everybody went back to the sergeant major’s house. Beer was opened, though Bob had Coke; some other senior NCOs came over and Bob knew a few, and all had heard of him. It was a good time; cigars came out, the men moved outside, the night was lovely and unthreatening. Then finally a young man showed up, trim, about thirty, with hard eyes and a crew cut, in slacks and a polo shirt. Bob understood that he was the sergeant major’s oldest boy, a major at Quantico, in the training command, back recently from a rough year in Bosnia and before that an even nastier one in the desert.

Bob was introduced and they chatted and once again he encountered a young man who loved him. What good did it do if his own family didn’t? But it was nice, all the same, and eventually the talk turned to his own day. He’d spent it in the DOD library in the Pentagon, where the sergeant major’s pass had got him admitted, going painfully through old phone books, trying to find out what this office was.

“Any luck?” asked the sergeant major.

“Yeah, finally. Room 4598 in Tempo C in the Washington Navy Yard, it was the location of an office of the Naval Investigative Service.”

“Those squid bastards,” said the Command Sergeant Major.

“At least now I’ve got a name to go on,” Bob said. “The CO was some lieutenant commander named Bonson. W. S. Bonson. I wonder what became of him.”

“Bonson?” said the gunny’s son. “Ward Bonson?”

“I guess,” said Bob.

“Well,” said the young officer, “he shouldn’t be too hard to find. I served a tour with the Defense Intelligence Agency in ninety-one. He was in and out of that shop.”

“You knew him?”

“I was just a staff officer,” he said. “He wouldn’t notice or remember me.”

“Who is he?” asked Bob.

“He’s now the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

He watched through binoculars as the car, a black Ford sedan, arrived at 6:30 A.M. and picked up the occupant of 1455 Briarwood, Reston, Virginia. Bob followed at a distance. The lone passenger sat in the back, reading the morning papers as the car wound its way through the nearly empty streets. It progressed toward the Beltway, then followed that road north, toward Maryland; at the George Washington Parkway it surged off, westward, until it reached Langley, and then took that otherwise unremarkable exit. Bob languished back, then broke contact as the car disappeared down the unmarked road that led to the large installation that was unnamed from the road but which he knew to be the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Instead, he drove back to Reston and relocated the house. He parked on the next court over — it was in a prosperous unit of connected townhouses — and slid low into the seat. It took almost two hours before he figured the pattern. There were two security vehicles, one a black Chevy Nova and the other a Ford Econoline van. Each had two men in them, and one or the other showed up every forty minutes, pausing on the street in front of the house and on the street in back. At that point, one of the men walked around back, bent in the weeds and checked something, presumably some sort of trembler switch that indicated if any kind of entry had been made.

Bob marked the address and drove to the nearest convenience store. There, he called the fire department and reported a fire in the house two down on the court. By the time he got back, three trucks had arrived, men were stomping in bushes, two cop cars with flashing light bars had set up perimeter security — it was a carnival. When the black Nova arrived, an agent got out, showed credentials, conferred with the police and firemen, then went to Bonson’s door, unlocked it and went in to check the house and secure it. He went around back to reset the trembler switch.

Bob went, found a place for lunch, then came back and parked a court down the line. He checked his watch to make certain neither of the patrol vehicles was expected, then walked back to Bonson’s house, where he knocked on the door. No answer came and, after a bit, he used his credit card to pop the door and slipped inside.

An alarm immediately began to whine. He knew he had sixty seconds to defuse it. The sound of the device enabled Bob to find it in ten seconds, which left fifty. Without giving it a lot of thought, Bob pressed 1-4-7 and nothing happened. The alarm still shrilled. He then hit 1-3-7-9 and the alarm ceased. How had he known? Not that difficult: most people don’t bother with learning numbers; they learn patterns that can easily be found in the dark, or when they are tired or drunk, and 1-4-7, the left-hand side of the nine-unit keypad, is the simplest and the most obvious; 1-3-7-9, the four corners, is the second most obvious. He waited a bit, then slipped out the back and found the trembler switch attached to an electric junction outside the house. It blinked red to indicate entry. With his Case knife, he popped the red plastic cone off the bulb, unscrewed the bulb, then squeezed and compressed the red cone to get it back on. Covering his tracks in the loam, he reentered the house. Soon enough the CIA security team rechecked the house on their rounds, but when the agent got out to check the trembler indicator, he did not get close enough to note the jimmied bulb. He was tired. He’d been through a lot. He returned to the truck.

Like his codes, Bonson’s home was plain. The furniture was spare but luxurious, mostly Scandinavian and leather, but it was not the home of a man whose pleasures included pleasure. It was banal, expensive, almost featureless. One room was a designated office, with a computer terminal, awards and photos on the wall that could have been of any business executive except that they showed a furiously intense individual who could not broadcast ease for a camera but always seemed angry or at least focused. He was usually pictured among other such men, some of them famous in Washington circles. His house was clean, almost spotless. A University of New Hampshire bachelor’s and a Yale law degree hung on the wall. Nothing indicated the presence of hobbies except, possibly, a slightly fussy fondness for gourmet cooking and wines in the kitchen. But it was the house of a man consumed by mission, by his role in life, by the game he played and dominated. No wife, no children, no relatives, no objects of sentimentality or nostalgia; seemingly no past and no future; instead, simplicity, efficiency, a one-pointed existence.

Bob poked about. There were no secrets to be had, nothing that could not be abandoned. The closet was full of blue suits, white shirts and red striped ties. The shoes were all black, Brooks Brothers, five eyelets. He appeared to have no casual wear, no blue jeans, no baseball caps or sunglasses or fishing rods, no guns, no porno collections, no fondness for show tunes or electric trains or comic books. There were huge numbers of books — contemporary politics, history, political science, but no fiction or poetry. There was no meaningful art in the home, nothing soiled, nothing that spoke of uncertainty, irrationality or passion.

Bob sat and waited. The hours clicked by, then the day itself. It turned to night. It got later. Finally, at 11:30 p.m., the door opened and the lights came on. Bob heard a man hanging up his raincoat, closing the closet. He walked into the living room, took off his suit coat, loosened a tie and unbuttoned his collar. He had his mail; which included some bills and the new issue of Foreign Policy. He turned on a CD stereo player, and light classical oozed out of the speakers. He mixed himself a drink, went to the big chair and sat down. Then he saw Bob.

“W-who are you? What is this?”

“You’re Bonson, right?”

“Who the hell are you!” Bonson said, rising.

Bob rose more pugnaciously, pushed him back into the chair, hard, asserting physical authority and the willingness to do much harm fast and well. Bonson’s eyes flashed fearfully on him, and read him for what he was: a determined, focused man well-versed in violence. He recognized instantly that he was overmatched. He got quiet quickly.

Bob saw a trim fifty-seven-year-old man of medium height with thinning hair slicked back and shrewd eyes. The suit pants and shirt he wore fit him perfectly and everything about him seemed unexceptional except for the glitter in his eyes, which suggested he was thinking rapidly.

“The false alarm; yeah, I should have figured. Do you want money?”

“Do I look like a thief?”

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“You and I have business.”

“Are you an agent? Is this something over a vetting or an internal security report or a career difficulty? There are channels and procedures. You cannot do yourself any good at all with this kind of behavior. It is no longer tolerated. The days of the cowboys are over. If you have a professional problem, it must be dealt with professionally.”

“I don’t work for your outfit. At least not for thirty years or so.”

“Who are you?” Bonson said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously as he tried to click back to his file on thirty years ago.

“Swagger. Marine Corps. I done some work for y’all up near Cambodia, sixty-seven.”

“I was in college in 1967.”

“I ain’t here about 1967. I’m here about 1971. By that time, you was a squid lieutenant commander, in NIS. Your specialty was finding bad boy Marines and having them shipped to the ’Nam if they didn’t do what you said. I asked some questions. I know what you did.”

“That was a long time ago. I have nothing to apologize for. I did what was necessary.”

“One of those boys was named Donny Fenn. You had him shipped from Eighth and I to ’Nam, even though he was under his thirteen. He served with me. He died with me on the day before DEROS.”

“Jesus Christ — Swagger! The sniper. Oh, now I get it. Oh, Christ, you’re here for some absurd revenge thing? I sent Fenn to ’Nam, he got killed, it’s my fault? That is probably how your mind works! What about the North Vietnamese; don’t they have something to do with it? Oh, please. Don’t make me laugh. Another cowboy! You guys just don’t get it, do you?”

“This ain’t about me.”

“What do you want?”

“I have to know what happened back then. What happened to Donny. What was that thing all about? What did he know?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think the Russians tried to kill him. I think it was him they were targeting, not me.”

“Ridiculous.”

“There was no Russian involvement?” “That’s classified. High top-secret. You have no need to know.”

“I’ll decide what’s ridiculous. I’ll decide what I need to know. You talk, Bonson, or this’ll be a long evening for you.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Bonson.

“Finish your drink and talk.”

Bonson took a swallow.

“How did you find me?”

“I shook your Social Security number out of your service records. With a Social Security number you can find anybody.”

“All right. You could have made an appointment. I’m in the book.”

“I prefer to talk on my terms, not yours.”

Bonson rose, poured himself another bourbon.

“Drink, Sergeant?”

“Not for me.”

“Fair enough.”

He sat down.

“All right, there was Russian involvement. Tertiary, but definite. But Fenn could not have known a thing. He knew nothing that would make him valuable enough for the Russians to target. I went over that case, over and over it. Believe me, he could not have known a thing.”

“Tell me the fucking story. I’ll decide what it means.”

“All right, Swagger, I’ll tell you. But understand I am only doing so under what appears to be threat of physical duress, because you have threatened me. Second, I prefer to tape this conversation and the terms under which it took place. Is that fair?”

“It’s already being taped, Bonson. I saw your setup.”

“You don’t miss much. You’d make a good field man, I can tell.”

“Get to the fucking story.”

“Fenn. Big handsome kid, good Marine, from Utah, was it?”

“Arizona.”

“Yes, Arizona. Too bad he got hit, but a lot of people got hit over there.”

“Tell me about it,” said Bob.

Bonson took a drink of his bourbon, sat back, almost relaxing. A little smile came across his face.

“Fenn was nothing. We were after someone much bigger. If Fenn had played his part, we might have gotten him, too. But Fenn was a hero. I never counted on that. It didn’t seem there were any heroes left at that time. It seemed it was a time where every man looked after his own ass. But not Fenn. God, he was a stubborn bastard! He really ripped me a new asshole. I could have had him up on charges for insubordination! He might have spent the next ten years in Portsmouth instead of — well, instead.”

Bob leaned forward.

“You don’t say nothing about Donny. I won’t listen to any lip on Donny.”

“Oh, I see. We can’t tell the truth, we just worship the dead. You won’t learn anything that way, Sergeant.”

“Go on, goddammit. You are pissing me off.”

“Fenn. Yes, I used Fenn.”

“How?”

“We had a bad apple named Crowe. Crowe, we knew, had contacts within the peace movement, through a young man named Trig Carter, a kind of Mick Jagger type, very popular, connected, highly thought of.”

The name sounded familiar.

“Trig was bisexual. He had sex with boys. Not always, not frequently, but occasionally, late at night, after drinks or drugs. The FBI had a good workup on him. I needed someone who fit the pattern. He liked the strong, farmboy type, the football hero, blond, Western. That’s why I picked Fenn.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“It worked, too. Fenn started hanging out with Crowe and in a few nights, Carter had glommed onto him. He was an artist, by the way, Carter.”

Bob remembered a far-off moment when Donny showed him a drawing of himself and Julie on heavy paper. It was just after they got Solaratov, or so they thought. But maybe not. It all ran together. But he remembered how the picture thrummed with life. There was some lust in it, as Bonson suggested. It was so long ago.

“Carter had a very brilliant mind, one of those fancy, well-born boys who sees through everything,” Bonson continued. “But he was just another run-of-the-mill amateur revolutionary, if I recall, until 1970 and 1971, when he burned out on the protests and took a year in England. Oxford. That’s where we think it happened. Why not? Classical spy-hunting ground.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We believed that the peace movement had been penetrated by Soviet Intelligence. We had a code intercept that suggested they were active at Oxford. We even knew he was an Irishman. Except he wasn’t an Irishman. He only played one on TV.”

He smiled at his little joke.

“We think this guy was sent to Oxford to recruit Trig Carter. Not recruit; it wasn’t done that crudely. No, it would have been subtler. Whoever he was, he was straight Soviet professional, one of their very best. Smart, tough, funny, a natural gift for languages, the nerves of a burglar. He was the Lawrence of Arabia of the Soviet Union. Man, he would have been a prize! Oh, Lord, he would have been a prize!”

“You never got him?”

“No. No, he got away. We never got a name on him or anything. We don’t know what his objective was. We don’t know what the operation was all about. It was my call; I fucked up. We had him somewhere in the DC area. But we never quite got him. Fenn was supposed to give us Crowe, who’d give us Carter, who’d give us the Russian. Classic domino theory! A Soviet agent working the peace movement beat! God, what a thing that would have been! That would have been the goddamed white buffalo.”

“How did he get away?”

“We lost time with Fenn; the case against Crowe wouldn’t stand. We lost a day, we never nabbed Trig. We almost had him at a farm in Germantown, but by the time we found it, there was nobody there. We missed him at his mother’s outside Baltimore; she wouldn’t tell us a thing. He was gone, disappeared. The next thing—”

“Trig was killed. I remember Donny mentioning it. He was killed in a bomb blast.”

“Under the math lab at the University of Wisconsin. Yes, he was. And we never found hide nor hair of anybody else. Whoever he was, he got away clean.”

“If he existed.”

“I still believe he existed.”

“What a waste!”

“Yes, and some poor graduate student working late on algorhythms got wasted too. Two dead.”

“Three dead. Donny.”

“Donny. I didn’t send him to ’Nam to die, Swagger. I sent him to ’Nam because it was my duty. We were fighting a clever, subtle, brilliant enemy. We had to enforce discipline in our troops. You were an NCO; you know the responsibility. My war was much subtler, much harder, much more stressful.”

“You don’t look like you done so bad.”

“Well, it ruined my Navy career. I was passed over. I read the writing on the wall, went to law school. I was a corporate lawyer on my way to a partnership and high six figures. But the agency took an interest in me and decided it had to have me, and so in 1979, I took an offer. I haven’t looked back since. I’m still fighting the war, Swagger. I’ve lost a few more Donny Fenns along the way, but that’s the price you pay. You’re out of it, I’m still in it.”

“All right, Bonson.”

“What is this all about?”

“We always heard the man who made the shot on me — on us — was a Russian.”

“So? They had advisers over there in all the branches. Nothing remarkable.”

“It was said this guy flew in special. Your own people were involved, because they wanted the rifle he had, an SVD Dragunov. We didn’t have one until then.”

“I suppose. That’s not my area. I can check records. What does this have to do with today?”

“Okay, so four days ago, someone makes a great shot on an old cowboy in Idaho. Blows him so far out of the saddle hardly nothing left. Seven hundred-odd meters, crosswind. He wings a woman with him.”

“So?”

“So,” Bob said, “the woman was my wife. The old man should have been me. Luckily, it wasn’t. But … he was trying for me. I examined the shooting site. I don’t know much, but I know shooting, and I’ll tell you this Johnny was world-class and he employed Soviet shooting doctrine, which I recognize. Maybe it’s not, but it sure seems like the same guy is on my track now as was on it then.”

Bonson listened carefully, his eyes narrowing.

“What do you make of this?” he said.

“Donny knew something. Or they thought he did. Same difference. So they have to take him out. They think the war will do it, but he’s a good Marine and it looks like he’s going to come out all right. So they have to take him. They send in this special man, mount this special operation—”

“Weren’t you some kind of hero? Weren’t you especially targeted?”

“I can only think what I done in Kham Duc alerted them to Donny’s whereabouts. It made good cover, too. The Russians wouldn’t care a shit about how many NVA some hillbilly dusted in a war that was already won. We always thought they requested the sniper; no, now I think the Russians insisted on the sniper.”

“Hmmm,” said Bonson. “That’s very interesting.”

“Then a little while ago, I got famous.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I thought you might.”

“Go on.”

“I get famous and they get to worrying. Whatever it was he knew, maybe he would have told me. So … they have to get me. It’s that simple.”

“Hmmm,” said Bonson again. His face seemed to reassemble itself into a different configuration. His eyes narrowed and focused on something far away as behind them, his mind whirred through possibilities. Then he looked back to Swagger.

“And you don’t know what it is?”

“No idea. Nothing.”

“Hmmmmm,” said Bonson again.

“But what I don’t get — there is no more Soviet Union. There is no more KGB. They’re gone, they’re finished. So what the fuck does it matter now? I mean, the regime that tried to kill me and did kill Donny, it’s gone.”

Bonson nodded.

“Well,” he finally said, “the truth is, we really don’t know what’s going on in Russia. But don’t think the old Soviet KGB apparatus has just gone away. It’s still there, calling itself Russian now instead of Soviet, and still representing a state with twenty-thousand nuclear weapons and the delivery systems to blow the world to hell and gone. What is going on is a political tussle over who makes the decisions — the old-line Soviets, the secret communists? Or a new nationalist party, called PAMYAT, run by a guy named Evgeny Pashin. There’s an election coming, by the way.”

“So I heard.”

“That election will have a lot to do with whose Russia it will be in the next twenty-five years and what happens to those twenty-thousand nukes — and to us. It’s very complicated, rather dangerous, and it’s not at all improbable that there’s some kind of Russian interest in this business you’ve spoken of.”

Bob’s eyes narrowed as he considered this.

“You’re thinking. I can tell. What do you intend to do? That is, if I don’t swear out charges for breaking and entering?”

“You won’t,” said Bob. “Well, to find out what happened to Donny, I guess I have to find out what happened to Trig. I guess I’ll follow that trail. I have to solve this if i have any chance of nailing this guy who’s hunting me. If i keep moving, keep him away from my family, it may work out.”

“This is very interesting to me, Swagger. I want to follow up on this. I can get you people. A team. Backup shooters, security people. The best.”

“No. I work alone. I’m the sniper.”

“Look, Swagger, I’m going to give you a phone number. If you get in trouble, if you learn something, if you get in a jam with the law, if anything happens, you call that phone and the person will say ‘Duty Officer’ and you say, ah, think up a code word.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four. You say ‘Sierra-Bravo-Four’ and you will get my attention immediately and you will be stunned at what I can do for you and how fast. All right?”

“Fair enough.”

“Swagger, it’s too bad about Fenn. The game can be rough.”

Bob didn’t say anything.

“Now go on, get out of here.”

“I should beat the shit out of you for what you did to Donny. He was too good to use that way.”

“I did my job. I was a professional. That’s all there is to it. And if you ever do strike me, I will use the full authority of the law to punish you. You don’t have the right to go around hitting people. But if you do, Swagger, remember: not the face. Never the face. I have meetings.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Bob wondered what it would be like to be born in a house like this one. It was not really in Baltimore, but north of Baltimore, out in what they called the Valley, good horse country, full of rolling hills, well packed with lush green vegetation, and marked with fine old houses that spoke not merely of wealth but of generations of wealth.

But no houses as fine as this house. It was at the end of a road, which was at the end of another road, which was at the end of still another road. It had a dark roof and many complexities, and was red brick swaddled in vine, with all the trim white, freshly painted. Beyond it lay acres of rolling paradise, mostly apple orchards; but the house itself, tall and dignified and a century old, could have been another form of paradise. The oak trees surrounding it threw down a network of shadows. A cul-de-sac announced a final destination outside it, and off to the right were formal gardens, now somewhat overgrown.

Bob parked the rented Chevy, adjusted the knot on his tie and walked to the door. He knocked. After a while the door opened and a black face, ancient as slavery, peeked out.

“Yes, sir?”

“Sir, I am here to talk to Mrs. Carter. I spoke to her on the phone. She invited me out.”

“Mr. Stagger?”

“Swagger.”

“Yes, come in.”

He stepped into the last century, hushed, now thread bare. It smelled of mildew and old tapestries, a museum without a sign in front of it or a guidebook. He was escorted through silent corridors and empty rooms with elegant, dusty furniture and under the haunted gaze of illustrious predecessors until he reached the sunroom, where the old lady sat in a wicker chair, looking out fiercely on her estate. Beyond, from this vantage, the windows displayed a view of a formal garden and a long, sloping path down through the apple trees.

“Mrs. Carter, ma’am?”

The old woman looked up and gave him a quick, bright once-over, then gestured him to the wicker sofa. She was about seventy, her skin very dark with too much Florida tan, her eyes very penetrating. Her hair was a ducktail of iron gray. She wore slacks and a sweater and had a drink in her hand.

“Mr. Swagger. Now, you wish to talk about my son. I have invited you here. Your explanation of why you wanted this discussion was frankly rather vaporous. But you sounded determined. Do you care about my son?”

“Well, ma’am, yes, I do. About what happened to him.”

“Are you a writer, Mr. Swagger? He has been mentioned in several dreadful books and even got a whole chapter in one of them. Awful stuff. I hope you are not a writer.”

“No, ma’am, I’m not. I have read those books.”

“You look like a police officer. Are you a police officer or a private detective? Is this some paternity suit? Some snotty twenty-five-year-old now says Trig was his father and he wants the bucks? Well, let me tell you, those bucks aren’t going to anybody except the American Heart Association, Mr. Swagger, so you can forget that idea right now.”

“No, ma’am. I’m not here about money.”

“You’re a soldier, then. I can see it in your bearing.”

“I was a Marine for many years, yes, ma’am. We would never say soldier. We were Marines.”

“My husband — Trig’s father — fought with Merrill in Burma. The Marauders, they called them. It was very rigorous. His health broke; he saw and did terrible things. It was very unpleasant.”

“Wars are unpleasant things, ma’am.”

“Yes, I know. I take it you fought in the one my only son gave up his idiotic life to end?”

“Yes, ma’am, I was there.”

“Were you in the actual fighting?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Were you a hero?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I’m sure you’re merely being modest. So why are you here, if you’re not writing a book?”

“Your son’s death is somehow tied up with something that hasn’t yet been answered. It’s also tied up, I think, with the death of that young man I mentioned earlier, another Marine. I just have a glimmer of it; I don’t get it yet. I was hoping you could tell me what you knew, that maybe in that way there could be some understanding.”

“You said on the phone you didn’t think my son killed himself. You think he was murdered.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t yet know.”

“Do you have any evidence?”

“Circumstantial. There seems to be some level of intelligence involvement in this situation. He may have seen something or someone. But it seems clear to me that there were spooks involved.”

“So my son wasn’t a moron who blew himself up for nothing except the piety of the left and the sniggering contempt of the right?”

“That would be my theory, yes, ma’am.”

“What would be more of your theory? Where is this heading?”

“Possibly he was used as a dupe. Possibly he was murdered, his body left in the ruins to make it look like it was a protest thing. His body would make that almost certain.”

She looked hard at him.

“You’re not a crank, are you? You look sensible, but you’re not some awful man with a radio show or a news-letter or a conspiracy theory?”

“No, ma’am.”

“And if you do come to understand this, what would you do with that understanding?”

“Use it to stay alive. A man is trying to kill me. I think he’s also a spook. If I’m to stop him, I have to figure out why he’s after me.”

“It sounds very dangerous and romantic.”

“It’s a pretty crappy way to live.”

“Well, if you went into most houses in America and laid out that story, you’d be dismissed in a second. But my husband spent twenty-eight years in the diplomatic corps, and I knew spooks, Mr. Swagger. They were malicious little people who were capable of anything to advance their own ends. Theirs, ours, anyone’s. So I know what spooks do. And if the spooks of the world killed my son, then the world should know that.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Bob.

“Michael,” she called, “tell Amanda Mr. Swagger is staying for lunch. I will show him around the house and then afterwards he and I will have a long talk. If anybody comes looking to kill him, please tell the gentleman we are not to be disturbed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the butler.

“It is exactly as it was,” she said, “on that last day.”

He looked around. The studio had been built out back, in what had once been servants’ quarters. The house was small, but its walls had been ripped out, leaving one huge raw room with red brick walls, a gigantic window that looked down across the orchards. It still smelled of oil paint and turpentine. Dirty brushes stood in old paint cans on a bench; the floor was spotted with paint drops and dust. Three or four canvases lay against the wall, evidently finished; one more was still on the easel.

“The FBI went through this, I guess?” Bob asked.

“They did, rather offhandedly. I mean, after all, he was dead by that time.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Come look at this one. It’s his last. It’s very interesting.”

She took Bob to a painting clamped rigidly on an easel.

“Rather trite,” she said. “Yet I suppose it was the correct project for him to express his anxieties.”

It was, unbelievably, a bald eagle, with the classic white head, brown, majestic body stout with power, anchored to a tree limb by clenching talons. Bob looked at it, trying to see what was so different, so alive, so painful. Then he had it: this wasn’t a symbol at all, but a bird, a living creature. It had obviously just survived some ordeal, and the gleam in its eyes wasn’t the predator’s gleam, the winner’s smug beam of superiority, but the survivor’s dazed, traumatic shock. It was called the thousand-yard-stare in the Corps, the look that stole into the eyes after the last frontal had been repulsed with bayonets and entrenching tools. Bob saw that the talons which gripped this tree branch were dark with blood and that the bird’s feathers, low on its stout body, were spotted with blood. He bent closer, looked more carefully. It was amazing how subtly Trig got all the components: the slight sense of the blood spots being heavier, moist against the fluff of the other feathers.

He looked at the bird’s single visible eye: it seemed haunted by horrors unforgotten, its iris an incredibly detailed mix of smaller color pigments that were different in color yet formed a whole, a living whole. Bob could sense the muscles twitching under its netting of feathers, and the breath coming heavily to it after much exertion.

“That boy was in one hell of a fight,” he said.

“Yes, he was.”

“Did he work from models? It ain’t like no eagle I ever saw. You’d have to be out in the wild and just seen the bird after it got out of a mix-up to get that look.”

“Or, possibly, see it in a man’s face, and project it onto a bird’s. But he’d been out West. He’d been all over, doing his paintings. He’d been all over the world, to Harvard, in a war, in every major peace demonstration, on committees, and the illustrator of a best-selling book by the time he was twenty-five.”

“Is he using the eagle as his country?”

“I don’t know. Possibly. I suspect that such a bird would be Jess alive, more rigid. This bird is too alive to be symbolic. Maybe it’s his own revulsion for bloodshed he’s displaying. I don’t see much heroic about that bird; I see a shaken survivor. But I don’t think you can know too much from it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Bob.

“For some reason, he had to finish this painting. Or finish the bird. He showed up late, in a pickup truck. He was dirty and sweaty. I asked him what he was doing? He said, ‘Mother, don’t worry, I can handle it.’ I asked him what he was doing here. He said he had to finish the bird.

“Then he came out here and he painted for seven straight hours. I had seen the preliminary sketches. It was different, conventional. Good, but nothing inspired. On that last night, this is the one place he had to go, the one thing he had to do.”

“Can you tell me about him? Was he different after he got back from England? What was going on with him, ma’am?”

“Did something happen to him? Is that what you’re asking?”

“Yes, ma’am. The intelligence officer I spoke to about all this said that the security services monitoring him believed he’d changed in England.”

“They kept a watch on all the bad boys, didn’t they?”

“They sure tried.”

They walked outside, where a few more rustic pieces of furniture languished. She sat.

“He was burnt out by seventy. He’d been marching since sixty-five. I think like all the young people then, it was more of a party than a crusade. Sex, drugs, all that. What young people do. What we would have done in the forties if we hadn’t had a war to win. But by seventy, I had never seen him so low. All the marching, the jail sentences, the times he was beaten up, the people he’d seen used up: it seemed to do no good. There was still a war, boys were still getting killed, they were still using napalm. He was traveling, also painting; he had a place in Washington, he was everywhere. He spent four months in jail in 1968 and was indicted two more times. He was very heroic, in his way, and if you believed in his cause. But it wore him out. And there was the problem with Jack. That is, his father, who was forced by circumstance and perhaps inclination to accept the government’s view of the war. His father was still in the State Department and was, I suppose, actively engaged in planning some aspect of the war. Jack and Trig had been so close once, but by the end of the sixties they weren’t even talking. He once said to me, ‘I never thought that decent, kind man who raised me would turn out to be evil by every value I hold dear, but that’s what has happened.’ Rather a cruel judgment, I thought, for Jack had always loved and supported Trig, and I think he felt Trig’s alienation more painfully than anyone. I do know that Trig’s death ultimately killed Jack, too. He died three years later. He never really recovered. He was a casualty of that war, too, I suppose. It was such a cruel war, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am. You were telling me about 1970. Trig goes to England.”

“Yes, I was, wasn’t I? ‘I need to get out of here,’ he said. ‘I have to get away from it.’ He took a year at the Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford. Do you know Oxford, Mr. Swagger?”

“No, ma’am,” said Bob.

“He really was a wonderful artist. I think it had more to do with his decision just to get out, though, than with any particular artistic need.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, somehow, for some reason, it worked. He came back more excited, more dedicated, more passionate and more compassionate than I’d seen him since 1965. This was the early winter of 1971. He had evidently made some personal discoveries of a profound nature over there. He met some kind of mentor. I believe the name was Fitzpatrick, some charismatic Irishman. The two of them were going to end the war, somehow. It was so uncharacteristic of Trig, who was so cautious, so Harvard. But whatever this Fitzpatrick had sold him on, it somehow transfigured Trig. He came back obsessed with ending the war, but also obsessed with pacifism. He had never formally been a pacifist before, though he was never an aggressive or a brutal young man. But now he formally believed in pacifism. I felt he was on the verge of something, possibly something great, possibly something tragic. I felt he was capable of dousing himself with gasoline on the Pentagon steps and setting himself aflame. He was dangerously close to martyrdom. We were very worried.”

“Yet he was planning something else. He obviously was planning the bombing.”

“Mr. Swagger, let me tell you what has haunted me all these years. My son was incapable of taking a human life. He simply would not do it. How he ended up dynamiting a building with a man inside it is beyond my capacity to understand. I understand that it was meant to be a ‘symbolic act of defiance,’ against property and not against flesh. Yet another man was killed. Ralph Goldstein, a young mathematics teaching assistant, a name largely lost to history, I’m afraid. You see it in none of the books about my son’s martyrdom, but I got a wretched note from his wife, and so I know it. I know it by heart. He was another wonderful young man, I’m sorry to report. But Trig would not have killed anyone, not even by accident. The accounts that portray him as a naive idiot are simply wrong. Trig was an extremely capable young man. He would not have blown himself up and he would not have blown up the building without checking the building. He was very thorough, very Harvard in that way. He was competent, completely competent, not one of those dreamy idiots.”

Bob nodded.

“Fitzpatrick,” he said, then over again. “Fitzpatrick. There’s not a record, a photo of Fitzpatrick, anything solid.”

“No … not even in the sketchbook.”

“I see,” said Bob.

It took several seconds before he made the next connection.

“Which sketchbook?” he asked.

“Why, Trig was an artist, Mr. Swagger. He had a sketchbook with him always. It was a kind of visual diary. He kept one everywhere. He kept one at Oxford. He kept one here, during his last days. I still have it.”

Bob nodded.

“Has anybody seen it?”

“No.”

“Mrs. Carter, could—”

“Of course,” the old lady said. “I’ve been waiting all these years for someone to look at it.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The thing was dirty. Thick and motheaten, it had the softness of old parchment, but also of filth: the lead of pencil and the dust of charcoal lay thick on every page. To touch it was to come away with stained fingertips. That gave it an air of tremendous intimacy: the last will and testament or, worse, a reliquary of Saint Trig the Martyr. Bob felt somehow blasphemed as he peered into it, pausing to mark the dates on the upper right hand of the cover: “Oxford, 1970 — T. C. Carter III.”

But it had this other thing. It was familiar. Why was it familiar? He looked at the creamy stock and realized that it was in this book Trig had drawn his picture of Donny and Julie, then ripped it out to give to Donny. Bob had seen it in Vietnam. The strange sense of a ghost chilled him.

He turned the first pages. Birds. The boy had drawn birds originally. The first several pages were lovely, lively with English sparrows, rooks, small, undistinguished flyers, nothing with plumage or glory to it. But you could tell he had the gift. He could make a single spidery line sing, he could capture the blur of flight or the patience of a tiny, instinct-driven brain sedate in its fragile skull as the creature merely perched, conceiving no yesterday or tomorrow. He caught the ordinariness of birds quite extraordinarily.

But soon his horizons expanded, as if he were awaking from a long sleep. He began to notice things. The drawings became extremely casual little blots of density where out of nothing Trig would suddenly decide to record “View from the loo,” and do an exquisite little picture of the alley out back of his digs, the dilapidated brickiness of it, the far, lofty towers of the university in the distance; or, “Mr. Jenson, seen in a pub,” and Mr. Jenson would throb to life, with veins and carbuncles and a hairy forest in his nose. Or: “Thames, at the point, the boathouses,” and there it would be, the broad river, green in suggestion, the smaller river branching off, the incredible greenness of it all, the willows weeping into the water, the high, bright English sun suffusing the whole scene, although it was a miniature in black pencil, dashed off in a second. Still, Bob could feel it, taste it, whatever, even if he didn’t quite know what it was.

Trig was losing himself in the legendary beauty of Oxford in the spring. Who could blame him? He drew lanes, parks, buildings that looked like old castles, pubs, rivers, English fields, as if he were tasting the world for the first time.

But then it all went away. The vacation was over. At first Bob squinted. He could not understand as he turned to the new page; the images had a near abstraction to them, but then they gradually emerged from the fury of the passion-smeared charcoal. It was the girl, the child, reduced to shape, running out of the flames of her village, which had just been splashed in American fire. Bob remembered seeing it: the war’s most famous, most searing image, the child naked and exposed to the fierce world, her face a mask of shock and numbness yet achingly alive. She was shamelessly naked, but modesty meant nothing, for one could see the cottage-cheesey streaks where the napalm had burned her, as it had incinerated her family behind her. Even a man whose life has been saved by napalm had a sickening response to that image: Why? he wondered now, all the years later. Why? She was just a child. We didn’t fight it right, that was our goddamn problem.

He put the book down, looked off into the long darkness. The black dogs were outside now, ready to pounce. He needed a drink. His head hurt. His throat was dry. Around him, in the empty studio, the birds danced and perched. The eagle fixed him with its panicked glare.

When will this shit be over? he wondered and went back to the sketchbook.

Trig too had had some kind of powerful emotional reaction. He’d given himself over to flesh. The next few pages were husky boys, working-class studs, their muscles taut, their butts prominent, their fingers naturally curled inward by the density of their forearms. There was even one drawing of a large, uncircumsized penis.

Bob felt humiliated, intrusive, awkward. He couldn’t concentrate on the drawings and rushed forward, skipping several pages. At last the season of sex was over; the images changed to something more noble. Trig seemed stricken with admiration for a certain heroic figure, a lone man sculling on the river. He drew him obsessively for a period of weeks: an older man, Herculean in his passions, his muscles agleam but in a nonsexual way, just an older athlete, a charisma merchant.

Was this Fitzpatrick, or some other lost love? Who would know, who could tell? There wasn’t even a portrait of the face by which the man could be recognized. But the pictures had somehow lost their originality, become standard. The hero had arrived, from a Western, or out of the Knights of the Round Table, or something. Bob could feel the force of Trig’s belief in this man.

The drawings went on, as the weeks passed, and as Trig’s excitement mounted. He was actually happy now, happier than he’d been. The explosion became a new motif in his doodling; it took him but a few tries, and suddenly he got quite good at capturing the violence, the sheer liberation of anarchistic energy a blast unleashed, and its beauty, the way the clouds unfurled from the detonation’s center like the opening of a flower. But that was all: there was no horror in his work, no fear that any man who’s been around an explosion feels. It was all theory and beauty to Trig.

The final drawing was of a shiny new TR-6.

Bob closed the book and held it up to the light and saw a kind of gap running along the spine of the book suggesting that something was missing. He reopened it and looked carefully and saw that, very carefully, the last few pages had been sliced out.

He left the studio and walked back to the big house, where the old lady nursed a scotch in the study.

“Would you care for a drink, Mr. Swagger?”

“A soda. Nothing else.”

“Oh, I see.”

She poured him the soda.

“Well, Sergeant Swagger. What do you think?”

“He was a wonderful artist,” Bob said. “Can’t ask for more, can you?”

“No, you can’t. I made a mistake just then, didn’t I?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I called you sergeant. You never told me your rank.”

“No, ma’am.”

“I still know a fool or two in State. After you called me, I called a man. Just before you arrived, he called back. You were a hero. You were a great warrior. You were everything that my son could never understand.”

“I did my job, somehow.”

“No, you did more than your job. I heard about it. You stopped a battalion. One man. They say it may never have been done in history, what you did. Amazing.”

“There was another Marine there. Everybody forgets that. I couldn’t have done it without him. It was his fight as much as mine.”

“Still, it was your aggressiveness, your bravery, your willingness to kill, to take on the mantel of the killer for your country. Is it difficult to live with?”

“I killed a boy that day with a knife. Now and then I think of that with sorrow.”

“I’m so sorry. Your heroism aside, nothing good came of that war, did it?”

“My heroism included, nothing good came of that war.”

“So tell me; why did my son die? You of all men might know.”

“I’m no expert in these matters. It ain’t my department. But it looks to me like he was picked up by a pro. Someone who knew his weaknesses, had studied him, who knew of his troubles with his father and played on them. He’s in the drawings as a heroic rower. I can feel Trig’s love for him. He may be this Fitzpatrick. Trig was different, you said. When he came back?”

“Yes. Excited, committed, energetic. Troubled.”

“He had to finish that painting?”

“Yes. Is there a message in the painting?”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand it either.”

“But you think he was innocent of murder? That would be so important to me.”

“Innocent of first-degree murder, yes, I do. The death of that man may have been unintended. If so, it would have been second-degree murder, or some form of manslaughter. I won’t lie to you. He may be guilty of that.”

“I appreciate the honesty. Trig will have to face his own consequences. But at least someone believes he wasn’t a murderer and an idiot.”

“I don’t know what was really going on yet. I can’t figure what it was about, why it happened, what the point was. It seemed to have no point, not then, not now, and what’s happening to me would then have no point. Maybe I’m completely wrong about all this and am just off on a wild goose chase, because I’m under a lot of pressure. But tell me … are you aware that the last few pages in the sketchbook are missing? The American pages?” “No. I had no idea.”

“Do you have any idea where they might be?”

“No.”

“Is it possible they’re here?”

“You’re free to look. But if they were here, I think I would have found them.”

“Possibly. Did he have a place, a favorite spot around here?”

“He loved to bird-watch at a spot in Harford County. Out near Havre de Grace, overlooking the Susquehanna. I could show you on a map. For some reason that was a spot especially alive with birds, even the occasional Baltimore oriole.”

“Could you show me on the map?”

“Yes. Do you think the pages are there?”

“I think I’d better look, that’s all I know.”

Bob drove through the failing light across Baltimore County, then north up 1-95 until he passed into Harford County and turned off on a road that led him to Havre de Grace, a little town on the great river that eventually formed the Chesapeake Bay.

He didn’t know what he was looking for, but there was always a chance. If Trig ripped those sketches out, he probably wanted to destroy them. But there was just a shred of the other possibility: that he learned something that scared him, that he saw something he didn’t understand, that he had begun to see through Robert Fitzpatrick. He was frightened, he didn’t know what to do. He came here to paint; because of some passionate psychological, stress-induced oddness or other, he had to finish the painting of a bird. He did, then he decided to remove the late sketches and hide them. He could have hid them anywhere, sure — but his mind worked a certain way, it was organized, pure, concise, it dealt frontally with problems and came up with frontal solutions. So: hide the sketches. Hide them in a place away from the house, for surely investigators will come to the house. Hide them where I will never forget and where someone tracking me sympathetically could find them. Yes, my “spot.” My place. Where I go to relax, to chill, to cool down, to watch the birds gliding in and out across the flat, silent water. It made a species of sense: he could have driven to this upcoming spot, wrapped the sketches in plastic or screwed them into a jar, hid them somehow, buried them, planted them under a rock, in a cave.

Trig, after all, had traveled the wilderness on his birding quests. He’d been to South America, to Africa, all across the remote parts of the United States, its deserts, its mountains. So he knew field craft; he was adroit in the out-of-doors, not some helpless idiot. His mother even said so: he was competent, he got things done, he handled them.

So what am I looking for?

A mark, a possible triangulation of marks, something. Bob tried to think it through, and reminded himself that such a sign, if it had been cut into the bark of a tree, say, would have been distorted horizontally in twenty-odd years’ growth. It would be wide, not high, as trees grow from the top.

He drove for a time along the river’s edge. It was a huge flat pan of water here, though back beyond the town the land rose to form bluffs and he could see huge bridges spanning them. A train crossed one, an orange bullet headed toward New York. Beyond that was a superhighway.

At last he came to the site Trig’s mother had designated on the map, and he knew immediately he would have no luck. He saw not geese and ducks but golden arches, and where a glade by the river had once been, uniquely attractive to birds the region over, now a McDonald’s stood. A clown waved at him from behind the bright bands of glass that marked the restaurant. He was hungry, he parked, walked around a few minutes, and realized it was hopeless. That site was forever gone, and whatever secrets it may or may not have concealed, they had been plowed under in the process of making the world safe for beef.

He went in, had a couple of burgers and an order of fries and a Coke, then went back to his car to begin the long drive to his motel room near the airport, during which time he hoped to settle the puzzlement of his next move.

It was here that he noticed the same black Pathfinder that had preceded him up 1-95. But it peeled off, to be replaced by a Chevy Nova, teal and rusty, and then, three exits down, when it disappeared, by a FedEx truck.

He was being followed, full-press, by a damned good team.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Bonson financed the operation out of a black fund he and three other senior executives had access to, because he didn’t want it going through regular departmental vetting procedures, not until he knew where it was leading and what it might uncover. He operated this way frequently; it was always better to begin low-profile and let the thing develop slowly, undistored by the pressures of expectation.

He picked his team with great care too, drawing on a tempo manpower pool of extremely experienced people who were kept on retainer for just such ad hoc, high-deniability missions. He ended up with three ex-FBI agents, two former state policemen, a former Baltimore policewoman and a surprisingly good surveillance expert cashiered by the Internal Revenue Service.

“Okay,” he told them in the safe house in Rosslyn, Virginia, the agency maintained as a staging area for emergency ops, “don’t kid yourself. This guy is very, very experienced. He has been in gunfights and battles his whole life. He operated as a recon team leader for SOG for a long year up near and inside Cambodia in sixty-seven. He was an immensely heroic sniper who may be the only man in history to have stopped a battalion by himself, in seventy-two. If you look at the dossier I’ve distributed, you see that he’s been involved in dust-ups ever since then: some business in New Orleans in ninety-two and then, two years ago, he spent some time in his hometown in Arkansas and the state death-by-shooting rate skyrocketed. This is a very, very salty, competent individual. He is strictly at the top of the pyramid.

“So let me repeat: your job is to monitor him, to report his activities, to tap into his discoveries, but that is all. I want this understood. This is not an apprehension; it’s no kind of wet work. Is that clear?”

The team nodded, but there were questions.

“Commander, do you want his lines tapped?”

Bonson hesitated. That would be helpful. But it was illegal without a court order and you never knew how these things would end up playing out. His career was his most important possession.

“No. Nothing illegal. This isn’t the old days.”

“We might be able to make a nice acoustic penetration on him in the old lady’s place.”

“If you can get that, fine. If not, that’s okay, too.”

“If he burns us, do we disengage?”

“No, you go to backups. That’s why I want six cars, not the usual four. You stay in radio contact. I’ll be monitoring in the control van. Each hour I’m going to broadcast a frequency change, to cut down on the possibility of him countermonitoring us.”

The team understood immediately how unusual this was. Under normal circumstances, no executive at Bonson’s level would serve as case officer on an operation. It was like a brigadier general taking over a platoon.

“Are we armed?”

“No, you are not armed. If you should unexpectedly encounter him, if he should make you and turn you out, you go into immediate deniability. You deny everything; you all have fake IDs. If you have to, you go to jail without compromising operational security. I do not want him knowing he’s being watched.”

Notes were taken, procedures written down. Bonson discussed call signs, probable routes he’d take to the old woman’s house north of Baltimore, that sort of thing. But then—

“One last thing: this man claims he is also being hunted by a former Russian sniper. I tend to believe him, though his record would incline him toward paranoia. But we have to take the sniper as a real, not an imaginary threat. So let’s assume that sniper has no idea where he is and thinks he’s still in Idaho. But he’s an enormously resourceful man. If the Russian is farther ahead of the game than I have even begun to suspect, and you encounter him, you fall back and contact me immediately and, if no other option exists, you may have to move aggressively. You may have to risk your lives to save Swagger, in that eventuality.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Swagger knows something. Or he has the power to figure it out. He’s a key, somehow, to something very deep and troubling. He cannot be lost. He still has work to do for his country. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s still got a mission.”

“Commander, could you tell us what this is about?”

“The past. Old men’s dreams, young men’s deaths. The spy that never was but is again. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re on a mole hunt. We’re after the one that got away.”

In Boise, Solaratov’s first move was to call the hospital, asking to speak to Mrs. Swagger. Mrs. Swagger had checked out of the hospital two days earlier. Where had she gone and in whose care had she been left? The hospital operator wasn’t permitted to release such information. What was her doctor’s name? Again, no answer.

Late that afternoon, Solaratov parked his rented car in a national park that provided access to the Sawtooth National Forest, and, outfitted as any hiker, began the seventeen-mile trek along the ridgeline that ultimately left national property and deposited him nine hundred yards above Swagger’s ranch house. He set up a good spotting position, well hidden from casual hikers, of whom there were likely to be none, and equally invisible from the meadows and pastures that stretched beneath him. He settled in to wait.

He waited two full days. The house was absolutely empty. Even the livestock had been sent elsewhere. In the middle of the second night, he came down off the ridge and penetrated, using a lock pick to spring the locks. Then, making certain the shades were drawn, he explored the house using a powerful flashlight for six hours, a thorough, professional examination as he sought some clue as to where the Swagger family had gone to cover. But on the first pass, the house yielded nothing. The Swaggers had vanished.

The home was orderly, jammed with books on the subject of war, very clean. The little girl’s room was the messiest, but only by a small margin. The living room was messy too, but it was a superficial mess, a one-day job, not the accrual of weeks of untidiness, and he could see where someone had spent a long night on the sofa. He found an empty bottle of bourbon in the garbage under the sink.

One ordinary hunting rifle, a Model 70 in .308, more a useful tool in this part of the country. A lightly customized .45 Colt Commander. No precision rifles. Swagger had seemed to leave that behind him. There was a study, where someone had done a lot of reading, but that was about all. He looked for family account books or financial files, in hopes that such would yield another possibility, but again, he found nothing.

It appeared to be hopeless. He was wondering what to do next. He went outdoors, carefully locking the door behind him, and went over to the garbage cans by the side of the house, still in the cart by which they would be hauled to the road twice a week. He opened one can and found it empty, but the second produced a last green plastic bag, knotted with yellow plastic ribbon at the top; it hadn’t been picked up or even set out. Perhaps the garbage contract had been cancelled when the family decamped.

He took the bag to the barn, sliced it open with his Spyderco, and went through the materials very carefully. Not much: old yogurt cups, the bones of steaks and chops and chickens eaten carefully, used paper towels, tin cans, an ice cream package, very sticky, coffee grounds, the usual detritus. But then: something crinkled, a yellow Post-It tab. Very carefully he unrolled it and saw what it revealed.

“Sally M.,” it said. “American 1435, 9:40 A.M.”

CHAPTER FORTY

Bob took his time driving back from the McDonald’s, letting his baby-sitters enjoy their presumed advantage over him. He went back to his motel room just outside the airport, called Mrs. Carter and told her that he hadn’t found anything at the site but that he had some other ideas to pursue and he would certainly keep her informed.

He went out, got some dinner and caught a movie at a suburban mall, a stupid thing about commandos who fired and never missed and who took fire and never got hit, just to eat up the time. When he got out of the film it was 2300, which meant in London it was 0600 tomorrow. That was fine. Instead of returning immediately to his car, he walked around the strip mall until he found a pay phone, well aware that at least two cars of watchers were in the lot, eyeballing him.

Using his phone card, he placed an overseas call to the American embassy in London, getting a night-shift receptionist; he asked to be transferred to the embassy Marine guard detachment, was passed on to the duty NCO and asked for the NCOIC, Master Sergeant Mallory, who should be up and about, and in a few seconds Mallory came to the line.

“Mallory, sir.”

“Jack, you remember your old platoon sarge, Bob Lee Swagger?”

“Jesus Christ, Bob Lee Swagger, you son of a bitch! I ain’t spoke to you in thirty years, since I medevaced out of the ’Nam. How the hell are you, Gunny? You done some great things in your third tour.”

“Well, I am okay, still kicking around on a pension, no bad problems.”

“Now what in hell is this all about? You bringing a missus to London and want a place to stay? I got an apartment and you can camp there all you want.”

“No, Jack, it ain’t that. It’s an S-2 thing.”

“You name it and it’s yours.”

“It’s not a big thing, a little favor.”

“Fire when ready, Gunny.”

“Now, I’m thinking that with your embassy security responsibilities, you have probably made contact with folks in the British security apparatus.”

“I deal with Scotland Yard and the two MI’s all the goddamn time. We got two officers over here, but, shit, you know officers.”

“Do I ever. So, anyhow, you got a good NCO-type in Six or Five you know?”

“Jim Bryant, used to be a color sergeant in SAS. He now handles embassy coordination in security for MI-6. I meet with him all the goddamn time, especially when we have people coming in that present security problems.”

“Good, counted on that. Now, here’s the thing. In 1970, a guy named Fitzpatrick operated in Great Britain, but I think he was a Russian agent, or a Russian-hired agent. I don’t know who the hell he was or what he did or what became of him, but it would be goddamned helpful for me to find out. Could you run that by your pal and see what shakes out? Their intel people would have the shit on him if anybody did.”

“Gunny, what’s this all about?”

“Old business. Very old business that’s come around and is biting me in the ass.”

“Okay, I’ll give it a run. If it’s in there and it ain’t real top-secret or whatever, Jim Bryant can nose it out for me. I’ll get back to you soonest. What’s your time frame?”

“Well, I’m about to sack out now. It’s getting close to midnight over here.”

“I’ll give Jim a call and get to him as soon as possible. You got a number?”

“Let me call you. What’s a good time?”

“Call me at 1800 hours my time. That would be, what, 1100 yours?”

“That’s it.”

“Get me direct at 04-331-22-09. Right to my office; don’t go through the embassy switchboard.”

“Good man.”

“You got me on that chopper, Gunny. Wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t. I owe you this one.”

“Now we’re even, Jack.”

“Out here.”

“Out,” said Bob.

He went back to his car and drove to the motel. His room had been expertly tossed and everything replaced neatly, including the cap on his toothpaste tube. But they’d been here, he could tell. They were watching him.

He undressed, showered and turned the lights out. It would be more comfortable in here than out there.

He went to breakfast at a Denny’s the next morning, went for a little walk, watching the campers struggle to stay unseen, and precisely at 1100, put his long-distance call through to London.

“Mallory here.”

“Jack.”

“Howdy, Gunny.”

“Any luck?”

“Well, yes and no.”

“Shoot.”

“This Fitzpatrick is more rumor or innuendo than actual operator. The Brits know he operated here around that time, but that info came late, from decoded radio intercepts after he’d gone on to his next duty station, wherever the hell that was. But there was no way of covering him through their regular ways of watching, which means he didn’t operate out of an embassy or a known cell.”

“Is that strange?”

“As in, very strange.”

“Ummmm,” said Bob.

“So they have no photos. Nobody knows what he looks like. Nobody really knows who he was, whether he was a recruited Irishman or a native-born Russian citizen. They do say that when the Russians go abroad, they tend more than not to impersonate Irishmen, because there’s a correspondence between the accents. In other words, a Russian can’t play an Englishman in England or an American in America, but they’ve got a good record of playing an Irishman in England or America. The Russian phonetic ah sound is very similar in tongue placement to the ae of the classic Irish accent.”

“So they think he’s Russian?”

“Ah, they can’t say for sure. That seems to be the best possible interpretation. The file has been dead for nearly fifteen years. Poor Jim had to drive all the way out to a records depository to even find the goddamn thing.”

“I see.”

“They only have some radio transmissions and some defector debriefings.”

“What would they be?”

“Ah, a guy came over in seventy-eight and then another came over in eighty-one, both low-level KGB operatives, in political trouble, afraid they were going to get an all-expenses-paid TDY to the gulags. They gave up everything they had: a funny thing, you know, the Russians are all worried about confusing issues so they ‘register’ work names, code names, the like; they got so many agencies, they want to make sure nobody uses the name and things get all fouled up. The work name ‘Robert Fitzpatrick’ was one item in the registry that both these guys gave up. But here’s the odd part.”

“Okay.”

“According to these guys, to both of ’em, he wasn’t in the First Directorate. That’s the KGB section that specializes in foreign operations, recruitments, penetrations, that sort of thing.”

“The straight-up spies.”

“Yeah, you know, hiring informants, getting pictures, running networks, working out of embassies, that sort of thing. The usual KGB deal.”

“So what was he?”

“According to these clerks, the work name ‘Robert Fitzpatrick’ was the property of GRU.”

“And what was that?”

“GRU is Russian military intelligence.”

“Hmmm,” said Bob again, unsure what this information could possibly mean. “He was army?” he finally asked.

“Well, yes and no. I asked Jim too. It seems GRU was uniquely tasked with penetration of strategic targets. That is, missiles, nuke delivery systems, satellite shit, that whole shebang. All the big atomic spies, like the Rosenbergs, like Klaus Fuchs, all them guys — they were GRU. This guy Fitzpatrick would be interested — I mean, if he existed, if he was Russian, if this, if that — he’d be doing something that was global, not local. He’d be trying to get inside our missile complexes, bomb plants, research facilities, the satellite program, anti-missile research.”

“Shit,” said Bob, seeing the thing just twist out of his control. “Man, I don’t know crap about that and I’m much too old to learn.”

“Plus you got your other problem; the Soviet Union broke up, all these guys went who-knows-where. Some are still working for Russian GRU, some are working for KGB or other competing organizations with different agendas, some for the Russian mafia, some for all these little republics. If it was hard to understand then, it don’t make no sense now.”

“Yeah. Anything else?”

“Gunny, that’s it. It ain’t much. A possible name, a suggestion of possible affiliation. Man, that’s all they got.”

“Christ,” said Bob. He searched his memory for anything that he had learned about Trig that touched on any issue of strategic warfare, but came up blank. It was all Vietnam, the war, that sort of thing.

“Sorry I wasn’t any help.”

“Jack, you were great. I’m much obliged.”

“Talk to you.”

“Out here.”

“Out.”

Bob put the phone down, more confused than ever. He felt everything was now hopelessly twisted out of his slender ability to grasp it. The “strategic” business had him buffaloed. Where the hell did that come from? What did it mean?

He called Trig’s mother and got her right away.

“Have you learned anything, Sergeant Swagger?”

“Well, maybe. It turns out the fellow’s name is Robert Fitzpatrick. The rower.”

“Yes. The Irishman.”

“Yeah, him. The British think he was a Russian agent, but not the sort that would be interested in the peace movement or anything like that. They think his mission would have been nuclear warfare, missiles, that sort of thing. Is there anything in Trig’s life that would touch on that?”

“Good heavens, no. I mean, I assume the conventional peace movement wisdom on strategic warfare was simply ‘Let’s ban the bomb and everything will be peachy,’ but it wasn’t an issue, not at all. They were fighting to stop the war that was going on, the war they saw on television, the war that threatened them.”

“Your husband was in the State Department. Did he have any connection with any of this?”

“Not at all. He was in the counselor service. We served in a number of embassies abroad representing American interests but never had a thing to do with the missiles or that sort of thing. He finished up his career managing an economic research project.”

“A brother, a sister?”

“My brother is the famous Yale ornithologist; two of Jack’s are dead, one a doctor, the other a lawyer in New York; the third, a survivor, manages the family money; my sister is three times divorced and lives in New York, spending money and trying to look younger.”

“All right.”

“You’ll get it. Eventually, Sergeant Swagger, you’ll figure it out.”

“I think I’m out of my league this time, ma’am. I will keep working on it, though.”

“Good luck.” “Thanks.”

He hung up, stumped. He opened the phone book, found a commercial shooting range called On Target over near the airport. There, he rented a stock .45 and spent an hour shooting holes in a target at twenty-five yards while his campers cooled their heels outside in the parking lot.

When he emerged, the food choices weren’t great: Popeyes Fried Chicken, a Pizza Hut, a Subway and, down the road a bit, a Hardee’s. He decided on Subway, and was walking toward it when he realized what it had to be and where he had to go next.

Bonson was flagged down after the 3 P.M. meeting by his secretary, who said there was an urgent call from Team Cowboy. He took it in his office.

“He burned us.”

“Shit.”

“He knew we were there all along.”

“Where did he go?”

“He slipped us so easily it was pathetic. Went into a Subway bathroom, never came out.”

“Subway, where, in DC or Baltimore?”

“No, the sandwich shop. On Route 175 near Fort Meade. Went in, never came out. We waited and finally checked it out. He was long gone. His rental car was still there in the parking lot, but he was long gone.”

“Shit,” said Bonson.

Where has the cowboy gone? What does he know?

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Solaratov knew the one sound rule that held true the world over: to catch a professional, hire a professional.

This meant that in his time he had worked with criminals of all stripe and shape, including mujahideen skyjackers, Parisian strong-arm men, Angolese poachers and Russian mafioso. But never a seventeen-year-old boy, with dreadlocks, a baseball cap backward on his head and a pair of trousers so baggy they could contain three or four editions of his thin, wiry body. He wore a T-shirt that said: JUST DO IT.

They met in an alley in the dockside section of New Orleans. And why New Orleans? Because the origin of “Sally M’s” flight on the Post-It slip was that city.

The boy sashayed toward him with an abundance of style in his bopping walk that was astounding: he pulsed with rhythm and attitude, contrapuntal and primary, his eyes blank behind a pair of mirror-finish glasses.

“Yo, man, you got the change?”

“Yes,” said Solaratov. “You can do this?”

“Like fly, Jack,” said the boy, taking the envelope, which contained $10,000. “You come this way, my man.”

They walked down sweltering alleys, where the garbage, uncollected, stank. They passed sleeping men wrapped around bottles and now and then other crews of tough-looking youths dressed almost identically to Solaratov’s host, but with this young gangster in command, nobody assaulted them. Then they turned into a backyard and made their way into a decrepit slum dwelling, went up dark, urine-soaked stairs and reached a door. It was locked; the boy’s quick hands flew to his pockets and came out with a key. The lock was sprung; Solaratov followed him into a decrepit room, then through another door to an inner office where possibly a million dollars’ worth of computer equipment blinked and hummed.

“Yo, Jimmy,” said another boy who was watching a bank of TV monitors that commanded all approaches to the computer room. He had a shorty CAR-15 with a thirty-round mag and a suppressor.

“Yo,” responded Jimmy, and the sentry moved aside, making room for the master.

Jimmy seated himself at a keyboard.

“Okay,” he said. “M. You said M, from New Orleans, receiving phone calls from Idaho, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Cool. Now what we do, see, we got to get into the phone company’s billing computer. All that takes is a code.”

“I have no code.”

“Not a problem. Not a problem,” said Jimmy. He called up a directory, and learned the code.

“How do you know?”

“My peoples regularly be going Dumpster diving, man. We hit the Dumpsters behind the phone company three times a week. A week don’t go by we don’t git their code memos. Yeah, here it is, a simple dial-in.”

The computer produced the mechanized tones of dialing, then announced LINKED and produced what Solaratov took to be the index of its billing system, with a blinking cursor requesting an order.

“This is the FAC,” said the boy, “Southern Bell’s facilities computer. Gitting into this one is easy. No problem. Kiddie shit.”

He asked the computer to search for calls received in the greater New Orleans area from Idaho’s 208 area code, and the machine obediently rifled its files and presented a list of several hundred possibilities over the past week.

“Memphis,” said Solaratov. “Our information says the husband once had a friendship with a New Orleans-area federal agent named Memphis. My guess is ‘Sally M.’ is this agent’s wife, come up to Idaho to take care of the woman. She would call home from wherever she’s hiding. That is my thinking. She—”

“Don’t tell me too much, man. Don’t want to know too much. Just want to find you your buddy. Okay, Memphis.”

“Memphis,” said Solaratov, but by that time the boy had it up. A Nicholas C. Memphis, 2132 Terry Drive, Metarie, Louisiana, telephone 504-555-2389.

“Now we cooking,” said the boy. “I’ll just ask Mr. FACS to locate and—”

He did so; a new set of numbers popped onto the screen.

“—there’s your billing address and service records. Now let’s see.”

He looked.

“Yes, yes, yes. Your friend Mr. Memphis, he got calls from outside Boise beginning late afternoon May fourth—”

Solaratov knew this as the date of the shooting.

“Three, four calls from—”

“That number is not important. That is the ranch house number.”

“Hey, man, I done told you, I don’t want to know nothing.”

“Go on, go on.”

“Then nothing, then the last three days, one call a night from 208-555-5430.”

“Can you locate the source of that call?”

“Well, let’s see, we can git the F-1, which is the primary distribution point and that turns out to be…”

He typed and waited.

“That turns out to be the Bell Substation at Custer County, in central Idaho, near a town called Mackay.”

“Mackay,” said Solaratov. “Custer County. Central Idaho. Is there an address?”

“No, but there’s an F-2: 459912.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the secondary distribution point. The pole.”

“The pole?”

“Yeah, the pole nearest wherever they are. That be the pole that the phone wire is directly wired to. It can’t be more than one hundred feet away from the house, probably closer than that. They got all the poles labeled, man. That’s how Ma Bell do it.”

“Can I get an address on that?”

“Not here. I don’t have access to their computer from here. What you got to do is go to that little phone substation and break in somehow. You got to get into their computer or their files and get an address for F-2 459912. That’ll put you there, no problem.”

“I can’t do computers. You come with me. You do it. Much money.”

“Yeah, me in Idaho, with the dreads and the ’tude. That’d be rich. Man, them whiteboy five-Os arrest me for how I be looking. No, man: you got to do it yourself. You want that address, you break in. It ain’t no big deal. You may even get it out of the Dumpster. But you break in, you check the files, you find the F-2 listings. You might even find a map with the F-2s designated, you dig? Ain’t no big thing, brother. I ain’t shitting you.”

“You could call, no? Bluff them into giving you information?”

“Here, no sweat. In any big city in America, no sweat. You can social engineer the shit out of these boys. But out there: they hear a brother in a place where there ain’t no brothers, I think you got problems. I don’t want to risk blowing your caper, man. What I’m telling you, it’s the best way, it really is. You’ll see; you be chilling in no time.”

Solaratov nodded grimly.

“You can do it, man. It ain’t a problem.”

“No problem,” Solaratov said.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

In the graduate degree ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 132 men and women were awarded their Ph.D’s in assorted academic and scientific specialties. But only one received the Ball Prize as the Institute Scholar, for only one was the ranking member of the class.

He was a tall young man, prematurely bald, of surprising gravity and focus. He took his degree — “Certain Theories of Solar Generation As Applied to Celestial Navigation” was his dissertation — in quantum physics from the dean and was asked to speak some words, and when he assumed the podium, his remarks were short.

“I want to thank you,” he said, “for the chance you have given me. I have been a scholarship student since my undergraduate years and even before that. I came from a poor family; my mother worked hard, but there was never enough. But institutions such as this one — and Yale University and Harvard University and Madison High School — were kind to me and doors were opened. Without your generosity I could not be here and I am honored by that, and by your faith in me. I only wish my parents could be here to share this moment. They were good people, both of them. Thank you very much.”

He stepped down to polite applause and went back to his place in line as the ceremony — interminable to an uninvested outsider — went on hour after hour. It was a hot day and cloudless in Boston. The Charles River was smooth as blackened, ancient ivory; a thin veil of clouds filtered the sun, but did nothing to help the heat. The Orioles were in town, to play the Red Sox in a four-game series; the president had just announced a new attempt to curb welfare growth; the international news was grave — the Russian election had the pundits worried, with everybody’s favorite bad guy leading by a seemingly unassailable margin — and the stock market was up four points. None of this meant anything to the tall man in the khaki suit who sat in the last row of the graduation ceremony.

He waited impassively as the minutes churned by until at last the crowd broke up and families rejoined, old friends embraced, the whole litany of human joy was re-enacted. He walked through the milling people toward the podium and at last he spotted his quarry, the young man who was the Ball Prize winner.

He watched him; the young man accepted the attentions he had earned somewhat passively and seemed not to respond to them with a great deal of enthusiasm. He accepted the embraces of colleagues and professors and administrators, but after a while — surprisingly quickly, as a matter of fact — he was alone. He took off his cap and hung his gown over his-arm to reveal a nondescript, almost shabby suit, and began to leave. He had, in fact, the look of a loner, the boy who’s ever so rarely at the center but prefers to blur through the margins of any situation, is uncomfortable with eye contact or attempts at intimacy, and will lose himself readily enough in the arcane, be it quantum physics, Dungeons & Dragons or sniper warfare. It was a quality of melancholy. Bob intercepted him.

“Say there,” he said, “just wanted to tell you that was a damned nice little talk you gave there.”

The boy was not so mature that he didn’t appreciate a compliment, so an unguarded smile crossed his face.

“Thanks,” he said.

“What’s next for you?”

“Oh, the prize thing is an automatic year at Oxford as a research fellow. I leave for England tomorrow. Very exciting. They have a good department, lots of provocative people. I’m looking forward to it. Say — excuse me, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Swagger,” Bob said.

“Oh, well, it’s nice to talk to you, Mr. Swagger. I’ve, uh, got to be going now. Thanks again, I—”

“Actually, it’s not just coincidence, me running into you. It took some digging to find you.”

The young man’s eyes narrowed with hostility.

“I don’t give interviews if this is some press thing. I have nothing to say.”

“Well, see, the funny thing is, I ain’t here about you. I’m here about your dad.”

The boy nodded, swallowed involuntarily.

“My father’s been dead since 1971.”

“I know that,” said Bob.

“What is this? Are you a cop or anything?”

“Not at all.”

“A writer? Listen, I’m sorry, the last two times I gave interviews to writers, they didn’t even use the stuff, so why should I waste my—”

“No, I ain’t a writer. Fact is, I pretty much hate writers. They always get it wrong. I never encountered a profession that got more wrong than being a writer. Anyhow, I’m just a former Marine. And your dad’s death is mixed up in some business that just won’t go away.”

“More on the great Trig Carter, eh? The great Trig Carter, hero of the left, who sacrificed his life to stop the war in Vietnam? Everybody remembers him. There’ll probably be a movie one of these days. This fucking country, how can they worship a prick like him? He was a killer. He blew my father to little pieces, and crushed him under a hundred tons of rubble. And nobody gives a fuck. They think Trig is the big hero, the victim, the martyr, because he came from a long line of Protestant swine and sold out to anybody that would have him.”

But then his bitterness vanished.

“Look, this isn’t doing any good. I never knew my father;

I was less than a year old when he was killed. What difference does it make?”

“Well,” said Swagger, “maybe it still makes a little. See, I was struck by the same thing as I looked into this. There ain’t nothing about your father nowhere. Excuse my grammar, I never had a fancy education.”

“Overrated, believe me.”

“I do believe you on that one. Anyhow, he’s the mystery man in this affair. Nobody wants to know, nobody’s interested.”

“Why is this of interest to you? Who cares?”

“I care. Maybe your father wasn’t the poor guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, like everybody says. Maybe he was more important than people think. That’s a possibility I’m looking at. And maybe the folks who pulled the strings are still around. And maybe I’m interested in looking into this and maybe I’m the only man who cares about your dad—”

“My mother was a saint, by the way. She taught, tutored, worked like hell to give me the chances I had. She died my freshman year at Harvard.”

“I’m very sorry. You were a lucky young man, though, who had parents who cared and sacrificed.”

“Yes, I was. So you think — you have some conspiracy theory about my father? Do you have a radio show or something?”

“No, sir. I’m not in this for the money. I’m just a Marine trying to get some old business straightened out. Believe it or not, it connects with the death of still another member of that generation, a boy who died in Vietnam. That was another great loss for his family and our country.”

“Who are you?”

“I was with that boy when he died. May seventh, 1972. He bled out in my arms. This is something I been working on a long time.”

“Urn,” said the boy.

“Look, I know you’re busy. You must be. But I was hoping you’d have a cup of coffee with me. I’d like to talk about your dad. I want to know about him.”

“He was quite a guy,” the boy said. “Or so I hear.” He looked at his watch. “Hell, why not? I have nothing else to do.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Bonson was debriefing the team in the Rossyln safe house. It was not a happy time.

“I warned you he was good. You people were supposed to be the best. What the hell went on?”

“He was good. He was professional. He read us, burned us and turned us when it suited him,” came the answer. “Sometimes people are just too good and they can do that to you. That’s all.”

“All right, let’s go through it again, very carefully.”

For what seemed the tenth time, the team narrated their one day of adventures with Bob Lee Swagger, where he’d been, what they’d learned, how indifferent to them he seemed, how swiftly and effectively he had slipped them.

Bonson listened carefully.

“Usually there’s a moment,” one of the ex-FBI agents said, “when you can tell you’ve been burned. There was nothing like that this time. He just disappeared.”

“I figure he made it out back, cut through the neighborhood behind us and called a cab from another little shopping center about a mile away. Or maybe he went up to the roof and waited until nightfall and slipped away.”

“You didn’t see him interact with anybody?”

“Nobody.”

“He had no contacts?”

“He made those phone calls.”

“We did get that, sir.”

The agents had written down the numbers of the phone booths and through them tracked the destinations of the calls, which turned out to be the American embassy in London, first the general number, and the next day the office of the Marine NCOIC of the embassy guard.

“We could have inquiries made.”

“No, no, I know what he was asking about. He’s very smart, this guy. He looks like Clint Eastwood and talks like Gomer Pyle and yet he’s got a natural gift for this sort of thing. He’s very—”

It was at this time an earnest young man entered the room.

“Commander Bonson,” he said, “Sierra-Bravo-Four is on the phone.”

Bonson looked about himself, stunned, then took the phone and waited for the switchboard to route it to him.

“Bonson.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four here,” he heard Swagger’s voice.

“Where the hell are you?”

“You didn’t tell me about the baby-sitters.”

“It’s for your own good.”

“I work alone. I made that clear, Bonson.”

“We don’t do it that way anymore. You have to come in. You have to come under control. It’s the only way I can help you.”

“I need some questions answered.”

“Where are you? I can have you picked up in an hour.”

There was a pause.

“I’m outside, asshole.”

“What?”

“I said, I’m outside, with a cellular I picked up at the Kmart a few minutes ago.”

“How did—”

There was a clang as something hit the window.

“I just threw a rock at your window, asshole. Good thing it wasn’t an RPG; you wouldn’t last long in a war, asshole. I rented another car and followed the baby-sitters you had staking out my car back to your place. Now, let me in and let’s start talking.”

Swagger came in, past the team whom he had so adroitly outmanaged.

“All right, people, get out of here. I’ll talk to him.”

“Do you need security, Commander?” said an ex-state cop, correctly reading the anger in Bob’s body.

“No. He’ll see reason. He knows this isn’t a pissing contest between him and this team, right, Swagger?”

“You just answer my questions and we’ll see what’s what.”

The men and women he had vanquished slid out of the room and then Bonson took him into another one, neatly set up as an operational HQ with computer terminals and phone banks. A few technicians worked the consoles.

“Okay, everybody on break,” Bonson called.

They too left. Bob and Bonson sat down on a beat-up sofa.

“I got the name of your Russian.”

“All right,” said Bonson.

“His name was Robert Fitzpatrick; he was affiliated with GRU, according to the Brits. But they don’t have nothing on him, what he was up to.”

“Swagger, good. Damn, you are an operator. I’m impressed. So what did you do with this? Where did you go?”

“You’ll find out when I put it all together, which I ain’t done yet, but I have some ideas. What have y’all got on this guy? I need to find out who he was or is, what became of him, what this is all about. He had the Brits buffaloed. They only found out he was operating in their country after he was long gone.”

“Fitzpatrick,” said Bonson. “Fitzpatrick was a recruiter. That was his specialty. He was one of those seductive, smooth presences who just gulled people into doing what he wanted, and they never, ever knew he was persuading them. You see, that’s what’s interesting about him. I don’t think Trig was his only project. I think he may have recruited others, and whatever his business with Trig was, it wasn’t the main reason he came to the United States.”

“What was he doing?”

“He was recruiting a mole.”

“Man,” said Bob, “this shit is getting fucked up. Secret-agent crap, like some paperback novel. I do not want to be a part of this shit. My mind don’t work that way.”

“Nevertheless, that was his great gift, his special talent. We know a little more about him than the Brits — and the timing works out right.”

“What do you mean?”

“For the past twenty years, the Agency has been in a curious down cycle. It seems to have had an enormous fund of bad luck. Every once in a while we smoke somebody out. In the early eighties, there was a guy named Yost Ver Steeg. A little later there was Robert Howard. Early in the nineties, we finally caught onto Aldrich Ames. And we think, well, that’s it, we’re clean at last. But somehow it never quite pans out that way. It never does. We’re always a little behind, a little slow, a little off. They’re always a little ahead of us. Even after the breakup, they’ve stayed strangely ahead of us. I’m convinced he’s here. I can feel him. I can smell him. He’s someone you’d never believe, someone totally secure. He’s not in it for the money; he’s not so active he’s obvious. But he’s here, I know it, goddammit, and I will catch him. And I know this goddamn ‘Fitzpatrick’ recruited him in the year 1971 when he was in this country. And, goddammit, I just missed him that year. I was a couple of hours slow, because your pal Fenn wouldn’t roll over for me.”

“So what happened to Fitzpatrick?”

“Disappeared. Gone. We have no idea. He was never serviced out of an embassy, never had a cut-out, any of the classic ploys of the craft. We never cut into his phone network. He was entirely a singleton. We don’t know who serviced him. We don’t even know what he looks like. We never got a photo. But it is provocative that suddenly all this is active again. Why would that be? Your picture goes in the paper and suddenly they’re out to kill you?”

“But my picture has been in the paper before. It’s been on the cover of Time and Newsweek. They couldn’t miss that. So what’s different this time?”

“That’s a great question, Sergeant. I can’t answer it. I even have a team of analysts working on it back at Langley and so far they have come up with nothing. It makes no sense. And to make it more complicated, Fitzpatrick may not even be working for the Russians, or for the old Soviet communist regime, which is still there, believe me. He may be working against it now. It’s a tough call, I’ll tell you, but I guarantee it’s simple underneath. Mole. Penetration of the Agency. The notification of your existence, something coming active over there, your elimination to prevent — what? I don’t know.”

Something didn’t quite add up. There was some little thing here that didn’t connect.

“You look puzzled,” said Bonson.

“I can’t figure it out,” said Bob. “I’m getting a little alarm. Don’t know what it is. Something you said—”

Photograph.

“You don’t know what Fitzpatrick looks like?”

“No. No photos. That’s how good he was.”

What is wrong?

“Why aren’t there any photos?”

“We never got close enough. We were never there. We were always behind him. It took too long, I told you. I was trying to set up a—”

Photograph.

“There is a photograph.”

“I don’t—”

“The FBI has a photograph. The FBI was there.”

“We’re not on the same page. The FBI was where?”

“At the farm. The farm in Germantown in 1971. Trig had told Donny where it was. My wife went out there with Donny the night he was trying to decide whether or not to give up Crowe. He was looking for Trig for guidance. She saw Fitzpatrick. She said the FBI was there, and when she and Donny left, they got their picture. They were on the hill above the farm. They were about to bust Trig.”

“The FBI was not there. The FBI was back in Washington with Lieutenant Commander Bonson trying to figure out where the hell everybody had gone to.”

“There were agents there. They got a picture of Donny and Julie leaving the farm. She told me that less than a week ago.”

“It wasn’t the FBI.”

“Could it have been some other security agency, moving in on Trig, unaware of the—”

“No. It didn’t work that way. We were together.”

“Who was there?”

“Call your wife. Find out.”

He pushed the phone toward Bob, who took out the small piece of paper on which he had written the number of the ranch house in Custer County.

He dialed, listened as the phone rang. It was midafternoon out there.

After three rings, he heard, “Hello?”

“Sally?”

“Oh, the husband. The missing husband. Where the hell have you been? She is in great discomfort and you have not called in days.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve been involved in some stuff.”

“Bob, this is your family. Don’t you understand that?”

“I understand that. I’m just about to come home and spell you and everything will be happy. She did separate from me, you remember.”

“You still have responsibilities,” she said. “You are not on vacation.”

“I am trying to take care of things. How’s Nikki?”

“She’s fine. It’s snowing. They say there’s going to be a bad snowfall, one of those late spring things.”

“It’s June, for God’s sake.”

“They do things by their own rules in Idaho.”

“I guess so. Is Julie able to come to the phone? It’s important.”

“I’ll see if she’s awake.”

He waited and the minutes passed.

At last another extension clicked on, and his wife said, “Bob?”

“Yes. How are you?”

“I’m all right. I’m still in a cast, but at least I’m out of that awful traction.”

“Traction sucks.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Washington right now, working on this thing.”

“God, Bob. No wonder my lawyer couldn’t find you.”

“I’ll be home soon. I just have this thing to deal with.”

She was silent.

“I had to ask you something.”

“What?”

“You told me that when you and Donny left that farm, you were photographed, right? Some guys were in the hills, monitoring the situation, and they got a photo.”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Why would I make something like that up?”

“Well, you might have it mixed up with something else.”

“It was very straightforward. Donny knew where the farm was; we drove out there. We found Trig and some big blond guy he said was Irish. We left after Donny talked to Trig. We got to our car, got in, and this guy came out of nowhere and took our picture. That’s it.”

“Hmmm,” he said. He put the phone down. “She says yes, definitely, there was a picture taken.”

“What did the guy look like?”

Bob asked her.

“Guy in a suit. Heavy-set, blunt, I guess. I didn’t get a good look. It was dark, remember? Cops. FBI agents.”

“Just cops,” Bob said.

“Don’t you see,” said Bonson. “Some kind of Soviet security team. Covering for Fitzpatrick.”

Yes, Bob thought. That made sense.

“And that was everybody that was out there?” he asked.

“Well … Peter, Peter Farris.”

“Peter?” Bob asked. Peter? Something rang in his head from far away.

“I don’t know that he was there.”

“Who was Peter?” he asked, struggling to remember. He thought he could recall Donny mentioning a Peter somewhere some time or other and had a bad feeling.

“He was one of my friends in the movement. He thought he was in love with me. He may have followed us out there.”

“You don’t know?”

“He disappeared that night. His body was found several months later. I wrote Donny about it.”

“Okay,” said Bob, “I’ll call you as soon as I get back, and we can work this out however you want. You’re safe in all this snow?”

“We may be snowed in for a few days, it’s so isolated. But that’s okay; we have plenty of food and fuel. Sally’s here. It’s not a problem. I feel very safe.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Good-bye,” she said.

“That was a dead end,” he said, after hanging up.

Peter, he thought. Peter is dead. Peter disappeared that night. Yet something taunted him. He remembered other words, spoken directly to him: It’s not about you this time.

“Well, it’s another good bit of circumstantial that the Russians had committed to a major operation, and they were running high-level security on it.”

Then a thought just sort of fluttered through Bob’s mind.

“It is odd,” he noted, “that of all the people that went to that farm — Trig, a kid named Peter Farris, Donny — they’re all dead. In fact, they all died within a few months of that night.”

“Everybody except your wife.”

“Yeah. And—”

Except my wife, he thought.

Except my wife.

Bob stopped, caught up suddenly. Something snapped into perfect focus. It wasn’t there, then it was; there was no coming into being, no sense of emergence: it was just indisputably there, big as life.

“You know—” started Bonson.

“Shut up,” said Bob.

He was silent another second.

“I get it,” he said. “The picture, the timing, the target.”

“What are you talking about?”

“They killed everyone except Julie. They didn’t know who Julie was but they had a picture of her. The picture they got that night. But Donny never officially recorded his marriage with the Marine Corps. So there were no records of who she was. She was a mystery to them. Then, when my picture was on Time’s cover over that business in New Orleans, it didn’t matter, it meant nothing. I didn’t even know Julie yet. But two months ago, my picture runs again in Time. And the National Star, when I’m famous again for a weekend. It was snapped by a tabloid photographer as we were coming out of church, Julie and I. It’s not my picture they’re interested in, or even me. That story told how I had married the widow of my spotter in Vietnam.”

He turned to Bonson.

“It’s Julie. They’re trying to kill Julie. They have to kill everyone who was at that farm and saw Fitzpatrick with Trig loading that truck. This whole thing isn’t about killing me. It’s about killing Julie. He fired at what he thought was me first in the mountains because I was armed. He had to take the armed man first. But she was the target.”

Bonson nodded.

Bob picked up the phone, dialed quickly. But the line was out.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

The snow didn’t scare Solaratov. He had seen snow before. He had lived and hunted in snow. He had trekked the mountains of Afghanistan above the snowline with a SPETSNAZ team hunting for mujahideen leadership cadres. The snow was the sniper’s ally. It drove security forces under cover, it grounded air cover and, best of all, it covered tracks. The sniper loved snow.

It fell in huge, lofty feathers, a wet, lush snow from a dark mountain sky. It adhered and quickly covered the earth and drove most people to shelter. The weatherman said it would snow all night, a last blast of winter, unusual but not unheard of. Twelve, maybe twenty inches of it, endless and silent.

He drove through already thinning traffic and had no trouble finding the Idaho Bell outstation that had been the F-1 — primary distribution point — for the phone calls from remote rural Custer County to Nick Memphis’s New Orleans address. It was a low, bleak building, built to modern American standards without windows. The happy Bell sign stood outside; inside, it was dark, presumably working entirely by robotics. To one side stood a phalanx of transformers, fenced off and marked with fierce DANGER signs, which produced a nexus of wires that rose to poles to shunt the miracle of communication around Custer County. A small parking lot was empty. Out back, a cyclone fence sealed off what appeared to be a sort of motor pool, where six vans with IDAHO BELL emblazoned on them were parked next to what looked like a sheet-metal maintenance garage. But it was dark too. Even better, the building was far from downtown, such as “downtown” was, along a country road that would now not be much traveled.

Still, he did not dare park in the lot, for that lone car on a dark night could attract some attention. He drove several hundred yards into a small development of houses, where some cars were parked along the street, and pulled in, turning the engine off. He waited in darkness, as the snow fell silently on the hood of the car, soon veiling the windshield. He opened the door, got out, slipped it shut without a slam, for the noise would have seemed even louder in the quiet.

It was an easy walk, between two dark houses, across a field, and then next to the Cyclone fence. He looked for sign of an alarm or electrification or notice of a dog. There was none. Taking a pair of wire cutters from the pocket of his parka, he used the massive strength in his forearms to cut the cyclone and bend back an entrance to the wire. He slithered through. He slipped between vans, around the garage, and felt his way along the back of the phone building until he found a metal door. He looked about for signs of an alarm and, finding none, took from his pocket a leather envelope of lock picks. The lock was a simple but solid pin tumbler; he took the two tools he would need, the tension tool and the feeler pick, and set to work. He inserted the tension tool. It was a matter of delicate feel, the tension tool holding the pins down, the feeler tool locating them one by one along the shear line of the cylinder and pushing them back until he felt a slight thump, signifying that he’d gotten all the pins aligned. The cylinder turned; the door sprang open.

He stepped inside, pulled out a pair of glasses with a small, powerful flashlight mounted to them and began to explore the building.

It didn’t take long. He found a map on the wall in what appeared to be the bullpen for the Bell linemen and took it down. It seemed to be Custer County as broken down into phone zones. Indeed, as he searched it in the illumination of the flashlight, he quickly noted small circles denoted along the roads that were numbered in integer sequences similar to the one he’d uncovered in New Orleans. These would be the secondary distribution points for the calls, the F-2s.

He had a powerful impulse just to flee with the map, but it was stiff and large, and carrying it across the field back to the car would be very difficult. Instead, he began a patient search, zone by zone, of the chart, searching for the magic numbers 459912. Again, it took some time, but at last, along a mountain road high in the Lost River range, he found the pole; it stood in a valley near a rectangle that clearly denoted a ranch house. From the crush of elevation contours close by, he understood that it stood under the mountains, giving him a perfect angle for a killing shot. He carefully copied the map onto a sheet of paper, which he would later compare with the exhaustive maps he had already acquired as he set up his approach to the target area.

He had the map hung on the wall again when he heard sounds. He fought the urge to panic and slipped down the wall until he found a desk behind which he could hide. He switched off his light, and took a Glock 19 out of his shoulder holster under the heavy parka.

The lights came on at that moment, and he heard the sound of a man walking to a desk, sitting down and fiddling with papers, sighing with the approach of a night’s duty. The man picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Bobby? Yeah, I want the guys in. Grace is already on the way. The state cops told me they got downed lines near Sunbeam Dam and I want somebody to check the meadow there at Arco; those suckers always go down. I’ll start calling the A-line, you start calling the B’s. Yeah, I know, I’m pissed too. This late. Oh, well, buddy, you wanted to be in management, that means long nights and no overtime. But free coffee, Bobby.”

The man hung up.

Solaratov faced reality. In minutes the room would fill up with linemen come in to work the unexpected weather emergency. He was in a tenuous situation as it was, only undiscovered because the supervisor was so focused on his labors. When the others arrived, he would soon be discovered; even if he could hide, he’d be pinned for hours as the long night’s repair effort was coordinated and executed.

“Mrs. Bellamy? This is Walter Fish at work. Is Gene there? Yes, ma’am, we’re recalling the workforce; please wake him. That’s right, ma’am. Thanks very much.”

Walter Fish bent over his phones and was making another call when the shadow of Solaratov fell across him. He looked up; a bafflement fell across his features that transfigured almost instantaneously into a reflexive Western smile, and then became a mask of panic.

Solaratov shot him in the face, below the left eye, with a 147-grain Federal Hydra-Shock. The gun popped in his hand, cycled, spitting a shell across the room. Fish jerked backward as if in a different, a faster, time sequence. His brain tissue sprayed the wall behind him, and a small gouge of plaster blew out where the bullet exited the skull and plunked into the wall.

Solaratov turned and looked for the ejected shell; he spied it across the room, under a desk, and went quickly to pick it up. When he arose, he faced a woman in the doorway, with a thermos in one hand, still wrapped up babushkalike against the weather. Her features became unglued at the horror she saw and her eyes opened like quarters. Solaratov shot her in the chest but missed the heart. She staggered backward, spun and began to stagger down the hall, screaming, “No, no, no, no, no, no!”

He stepped into the hall, locked the Glock in both hands, acquired the nightlit front sight and shot her in the base of the spine. She went down, her hand reaching convulsively back to touch the wound itself. Why did they do that? They always did that. He walked to her; she still moved. He bent, put the muzzle to the back of her head and fired again. The muzzle flash ignited her hair. It blazed with an acrid, chemical stench, then extinguished itself, producing a vapor of smoke, and Solaratov realized she’d been wearing a wig of some artificial substance.

Now there was no time to pick up shells. He walked swiftly down the corridor, found the door and slipped out the back. Thank God it was still snowing heavily; in seconds, minutes at the most, his tracks would be gone.

He went across the field, the pistol still hot in his hand. He had no sense of shame or doubt or pain; he was the professional and he did what was necessary, (he hard thing always, and kept going. But it shook him nevertheless: the look on the poor man’s face in the second before the bullet blew through his cheekbone; and the woman who could only scream “No, no, no, no” as she rushed along the corridor.

It seemed to put a curse on his enterprise. He was not superstitious and he was too experienced by far to consider such nontechnical elements as having any meaning; still, it didn’t feel right.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Bonson had promised Bob that he could surprise him with how much he could do and how quickly, and now he made good on that statement.

He picked up the phone and dialed a certain number and said, very calmly, “Duty officer, this is Deputy Director Bonson, authenticating code Alpha-Actual-Two-Five-Nine, do you acknowledge?”

When the man on the other end did so, Bonson said, “I am hearby declaring a Code Blue Critical Incident. Please notify the Fifth Floor and set up a Domestic Crisis Team. I want two senior analysts — Wigler and Marbella. I want my senior analysts from Team Cowboy. I want some people from computer division. I want to lay on air ASAP; I’m at 2854 Arlington Avenue, in Rosslyn. We will make our way to the USA Today building for pickup. I’d like that in the next five minutes.”

He waited, got the reply he wanted.

“I also want an FBI HRT unit put on alert and ready to coordinate with our liaison ASAP. This may involve a shooting situation and I want the best guys. Do you copy?”

Getting his last acknowledgment, he hung up.

“Okay,” he said, turning to Bob, “we have to get a ride to the newspaper building, and the chopper will pick us up. We’ll be in Langley inside fifteen minutes and put our best people to work in twenty. I can have a security team on-site in four hours.”

“Not if it’s snowing,” said Bob.

“What?”

“She said it was snowing. That’s going to close the whole thing down.”

“Shit,” said Bonson.

“It won’t shut him down,” said Bob. “Not this boy. He’s been in the mountains. He hunted the mountains for years.”

“It may be premature to worry,” said Bonson.

“No, he’ll go as soon as he can. He won’t wait or goof around or take a break. He’s got a job to do. It’s the way his mind works. He’s very thorough, very committed, very gifted, very patient, but when he sees it, he’ll go for it instantly. He’s been hunting her as I’ve been hunting him. And he’s much closer.”

“Shit,” said Bonson again.

“Call them back and get them working the area. We’re going to need maps, weather, satellite tracking, maybe. It’s Custer County, about five miles outside of Mackay, Idaho, in the center of the state, in the Lost River Range. It’s north of Mackay, off Route Ninety-three, in the foothills of the Lost River, as I understand it.”

“That’s good,” said Bonson, and turned to make the call.

A half hour later they got the bad news.

“Sir,” said a staff assistant with the grave face of a junior officer carrying the news no one wanted to hear, “we got some real problems out there.”

“Go ahead,” said Bonson, trailing along in Bob’s wake into a room that could have been any meeting room in any office building in America but just happened to be in the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

“There’s a freak front moving in from Canada across central Idaho. The weather service people say it’ll dump sixteen, eighteen inches on the place. Nothing’s moving there; the roads will be closed until they can be plowed, and they can’t be plowed until morning. Nothing’s flying either. That area is totally sealed off. Nobody’s going anywhere.”

“Shit,” said Bonson. “Notify FBI. Tell them to stand down.”

“Yes, sir, but there’s more.”

“Go ahead.”

“We have been in contact with Idaho State Police authorities. Just to make things worse, there’s been a double homicide at the phone company. A supervisor and his secretary, coming on to run the snow emergency shift, were shot and killed. Whoever did it got completely away. Nothing was stolen, nothing taken. Maybe it was domestic, but they say it looked like a professional hit.”

“It’s him,” said Bob. “He’s there. He probably had to get the final location out of the phone company files or something. He got surprised by these two people and he did what he had to do.”

“Cold,” said Bonson. “Very cold.”

“I’ll tell you what we need real fast,” said Swagger. “We need an extremely good workup on the terrain there. Let’s figure out, given the time of the shootings, if he’d have a chance at making it on foot to a shooting position. Where would he dump his car, how far would he have to go, what kind of speed could an experienced mountain operator be expected to make? Then double that, and you’ll know what this guy is doing. What time will he make it there? Where would he likely set up? He’d want the sun behind him, that I know.”

“Get cracking,” said Bonson.

Nikki watched the snow.

“It’s pretty,” she said. “But I never knew it could snow in June.”

“That’s the mountains,” said Aunt Sally. “It snows when it wants to.”

“When we get back to Arizona,” said her mother from the sofa, “you’ll never see snow again, I promise.”

“I think I like snow,” said Nikki, “even if you can’t ride in it.”

She watched in the fading light as the world whitened. Outside, she could see a corral and beyond that the barn. There were no animals way up here, so there was nothing to worry about. The highway was about a half mile away, and it was her job to follow the long dirt road each day and check the solitary mailbox that stood where Upper Cedar Road, that high, lonely ribbon of dirt which connected them to Route 93, passed by.

But the mountains dominated what she could see. The house was in a high meadow, surrounded by them. Mount McCaleb was the closest, a huge brute of a mountain; it loomed above them, now unseen in the driving snow. Farther to the north was Leatherman Peak; farther to the south, Invisible Mountain. These were the peaks of the Lost River Range, dominated farther toward Challis by Mount Borah, the highest in Idaho. There was the sense of their presence, even though they were invisible. On an evening like this, it was much darker; you could feel them through your bones, dark and solid, just beyond the veil of the seen.

“Brrrr,” Nikki said. “It looks so cold out.”

“This snow’ll be gone by the end of the week,” Aunt Sally said. “That’s what they said on the radio. Unseasonable cold front from Canada, but it’ll be in the seventies by Monday. It’ll melt away. Maybe it’ll cause some flooding. It does feel like midwinter, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” said Nikki’s mommy, who was at least ambulatory now. Her left arm and collarbone were secured in a half-body cast, but the abrasions and cuts had healed enough so that she could move about. She wore a bathrobe over jeans. She looked thin, Nikki thought.

“You know what?” said Aunt Sally, who with her spunky personality and Southern accent had quickly become Nikki’s favorite person in the whole wide world, “I think it’s a soup night. Don’t you girls? I mean, snow, soup, what else goes together better? We’ll do up some nice Campbell’s tomato with crackers, and then we’ll settle down and watch a video. Not Born Free, though. I cannot sit through that again.”

“I love Born Free,” said Nikki.

“Nikki, honey, let’s let Aunt Sally pick the movie tonight. She’s a little tired of Born Free. So am I.”

“Welllllll…,” Nikki considered.

“What about Singin’ in the Rain?”

“That’s a good one.”

“What is it?” said Nikki.

“A musical. About these people who worked in old-time movies and how much fun they had. There’s a lot of great singing and dancing.”

“A man dances in the rain,” said Sally.

“Ew,” said Nikki. “Why would he do that? It’s stupid.”

Solaratov worked the maps by comparing his crude drawing with the U.S. Geologic Survey maps he had back in his motel room just north of Mackay. He tried to work quickly because he knew it would be a matter of time before the police began checking motels for strangers, and who knew if anybody had seen him come in half an hour after the murders? But at the same time, too much haste was no help at all. He tried to find the zone: that smooth place in his mind where his reflexes were at their best, his brain most efficient, his nerves calmest. He pushed his brain against the whirling topographic patterns of the map, located Route 93 and traced the path from his drawing to the map. He saw that the ranch house site was farther out 93, at the Mackay Reservoir. But there you turned right, drove across the flats and began to climb up FR 127, an “unimproved road,” by the map symbol, which mounted the Lost Rivers and penetrated them, following Upper Cedar Creek. There was a natural fold in the rise of the mountains as the road went deeper, and at the end of that stood the ranch, surrounded on three sides by Mount McCaleb, Massacre Mountain and Leatherman Peak. The mountains were represented on the map by dizzying twirls of elevation lines, and the denser they were the more sheer the rise. He saw that the fast way in would be along Route 93, but that would not work, for the road was now officially closed, barely passable, and probably being monitored by the police. Who else would be driving through such a storm on such a night except a murderer fleeing the scene of his crime?

But he was a mere few miles from the south slope of Mount McCaleb, and the way was well marked, as it followed Lower Cedar Creek. The creek, protected from drifting snow by the furrow it had cut in the earth, would not be frozen this quickly, but it might be low, and no snow would adhere to it. Therefore, it might be surprisingly easy walking, even in the dark. When he got to McCaleb, he’d climb about two thousand feet — the slope didn’t turn sheer for another five thousand feet — and could then just follow the ridge around and site himself above the ranch house. Again, the drifting snow could make it difficult, but he knew that on promontories, the snow doesn’t drift or collect; in fact, that way might be easy too. He calculated the trip would take about six or seven hours; plenty of time to set up, lase the range, and get to his soft target in the morning, when the sun was due to break through. Then he could fall back, continue around McCaleb toward Massacre Mountain deeper into the Lost River Range, call in his helicopter, and be in another state by noon, leaving nothing but an empty motel room and a truck rented under a pseudonym.

He picked up his cellular and called.

“Yes, hello,” came the answer.

“Yes, I’ve located the target,” he said, and gave them the position. “I am moving out tonight to set up.”

“Isn’t it snowing, old man?”

“That’s good. The snow doesn’t mean a thing to me. I’ve seen snow before.”

“All right. What then?”

“I’ll be completing the deal sometime tomorrow morning whenever the client becomes visible. The husband isn’t around. She’ll be the one whose arm is in the cast. I’ll execute cleanly, then fall back through the mountains about two miles and scale a foothill between McCaleb and Massacre. You have the map? You are following me?”

“Yes, we have it.”

“Your helicopter pilot can navigate to that point?”

“Of course. If the sun is out, he’ll have no problem.”

“I’ll call when the deal is closed. He’ll be flying from… ?”

“You don’t need to know, old man. He’s relocated close to your area. We’re in contact with him.”

“Yes, I’ll call when I reach the area of the pickup. When I see him, I’ll pop smoke. I have smoke. He can come in and take me out — and then it’s done.”

“And then it’s done, yes.”

The working party met at 2330 with the best available intelligence. It felt so familiar, like a battalion operations meeting: stern men with dim but focused personalities, a sense of hierarchy and urgency, the maps on the wall, too many Styrofoam cups of coffee on the table. It reminded Bob of a similar meeting twenty-six years earlier, where the CIA and Air Force and S-2 Brophy and CO Feamster had met with him and Donny as they mapped their plans to nail Solaratov then.

“All right,” said the map expert, “assuming he’s located somewhere in the greater Mackay area and the roads are closed and he’s going to go in overland, it’s actually well within an experienced man’s range, if he knows where he’s going, he has good harsh-weather gear and he’s determined.”

“What time?”

“Oh, he can make it well before light. If he finds an exposed ridge, he won’t have much snow accumulation, given a fair amount of wind. If he gets a tailwind, it could actually help him, though we don’t have the wind-tendency dope in yet. He’d almost certainly make it before light. He could set himself up without much difficulty. I don’t know where—”

“He’ll be to the east,” Swagger said. “He’ll want the sun behind him. He won’t want any chance of the light hitting his lens and reflecting down into the target area.”

“How soon can Idaho State Police or park rangers make it in?” asked Bonson, who was running this show with glaring ferocity. He was apparently something of a legend in these precincts, Bob could tell; all the others deferred to him and at the same time were subtly eager for his attention and his approval. Bob had seen it in staff briefings a thousand times.

“Probably not till midmorning. They can’t helicopter in; they can’t navigate with snow mobiles or tracked vehicles at night.”

“Can’t they walk in?” said Bonson. “I mean, if Solaratov can walk, why can’t they?”

“Well, sir,” said the analyst, “don’t forget they have a civil emergency on their hands. They’re going to have people stuck along highways in snowdrifts for fifty miles each way, they’re going to have accidents, frostbite, wires down, messed-up communications, hypothermia, the whole shebang of a public safety emergency. Sir, you could call the governor and get him to divert some people; that might work. But I don’t know how it would play in—”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Bob. “If he runs into cops or rangers, he’ll just kill them too and go on about his business. It’s not a problem for him. These guys have no idea what they’re up against. He can take them out, take out my wife, then escape and evade for weeks until pickup. That’s how good he is. That’s what his whole life has been about.”

“Sir, with all due respect,” said the young analyst, “I’d like to make a point which I’d be more comfortable making in private. But I have to make it here and now, so I hope Sergeant Swagger will understand that it’s not about personalities, it’s about responsibilities.”

“Go ahead,” said Swagger. “Speak freely. Say what has to be said.”

“Well, sir,” said the young analyst, “I have to think that it might be wise to concede the Russian his mission. We ought to be thinking about contingency plans for taking him down on the out route. He’s an incredible asset. The information he has! Our first priority ought to be to take him alive and absorb the casualties—”

“No!” boomed Bonson, like Odin throwing thunderbolts. “Sergeant Swagger’s wife is obviously in possession of valuable knowledge. You’d let that go? They think she’s important enough to run this high-risk, maximum-effort mission, and you’re going to let them get her? And you’re saying to Sergeant Swagger here, we’re just going to let your wife die? It’s more important that we get some information on old ops? We’ll just let him do his little thing, then we’ll pick him up in the afternoon?”

“Sir, I’m trying to be realistic. I’m sorry, Sergeant Swagger. I get paid to call them as I see them.”

“I understand,” said Bob. “It ain’t a problem.”

“How fast could we get FBI HRT in there, or Idaho State Police SWAT?” asked Bonson again.

“It’s a no-go for stopping the shot,” said the analyst. “It just can’t happen. We can’t get people in there fast enough. Man, this guy’s really caught some breaks!”

Bonson turned to him.

“I am not willing to concede him his mission. I absolutely am not. Will one of you bright young geniuses solve this problem? That also is what you’re paid for.”

“I’m just thinking out loud, but you could target the sniper’s likely location with cruise missiles,” someone said. “They’re very accurate. You’d have a pretty good chance of—”

“No, no,” someone else said, “the cruises are low-altitude slow-movers, with not a lot of wing to give them much maneuverability. They’d never get through the inclement weather. Plus, they have to read landforms to navigate and we don’t have time to program them. Finally, the nearest cruises are on a nuclear missile frigate in San Diego. There’s no mission sustainability in the time frame.”

“Could we smart bomb?”

“The infrared could see through the clouds, but the landforms in the mountains are so goddamned confusing that I don’t see how he could pinpoint the target area.”

“No, but that’s promising,” said Bonson. “All right, Wigler, I want you to run a feasibility study, and I mean instantaneously.”

Wigler nodded, grabbed his coffee and raced out.

It was quiet. Bob looked at his watch. Midnight. Solaratov was well on his way. Six, maybe seven hours till daylight out there. He’d take his shot, Julie would join Donny and Trig and Peter Farris, and whatever secret she had would be gone forever. Maybe they could take Solaratov alive. But that was an illusion too. He’d have an L-pill. He was a professional. There was no way to stop him or take him. He was going to win. Again.

Then Bob said, “There is one way.”

The banks of the creek shielded the shallow lick of water and Solaratov built a good rhythm as he plunged along, as if on a sidewalk that led to the mountains. He wore night-vision goggles, which lit the way for him as he walked through green-tinted whiteness, following the course of the creek bed as it wound along the flats. The wind howled; the snow cut down diagonally, gathering quickly or swirling.

But he felt good. He wore a Gore-Tex parka over a down vest, mountain boots, mountain pants, long underwear, a black wool knit cap. The boots, expensive American ones by Danner, were as comfortable as any he’d ever worn, much nicer than the old Soviet military issue. He had a canteen, a compass, forty rounds of hand-loaded ammunition, the 7mm Remington, the Leica range-finding binoculars, his night-vision goggles, and the Glock 19 in its shoulder holster with a reloaded fifteen-round magazine, and two other fifteen-rounders hanging under his other shoulder. He’d improvised a snow cape from the motel room sheets.

After two hours of steady pumping, he reached the place where the creek bed petered out as it went underground. Above him soared the lower heights of Mount McCaleb, barren and swept with snow and light vegetation. The mountains were too new, too arid to hold much life. He looked upward at the hardscrabble escarpment. Then he looked back across the flats into the center of the valley.

It was if the world had ended in snow. There was a foot of it everywhere and it had closed down everything. No lights, no sign of civilization or even human habitation stood against the whiteness of the landscape and its hugeness and emptiness, even in the green wash of the ambient light.

Solaratov had a brief moment of melancholy: this was the sniper’s life, was it not? This, always: loneliness, some mission that someone says is important, the worst weather elements, the presence of fear, the persistence of discomfort, the rush always of time.

He began to climb. The wind howled, the snow slashed. He climbed through the emptiness.

“I’ll bet this is good,” said Bonson.

“HALO,” said Bob.

“HALO?” asked Bonson.

“He’d never make it,” said the military analyst. “He’d have no idea what the winds would do. The terrain is impossible; the drop would probably kill him.”

“I didn’t say he,” said Bob. “I wouldn’t ask another man to do it. But I’d do it.”

“What the hell is HALO?” asked Bonson.

“High Altitude, Low Opening.”

“It’s an airborne insertion technique,” said the young man. “Highly trained airborne operators have tried it, with mixed success. You go out very high. You fall very far. It’s sort of like bungee jumping, without the bungee. You fall like hell, and in the last six hundred feet or so, the chute deploys. You land hard. The point is to fall through radar. You’re falling so fast you don’t make a parachute signature on radar. Most Third World radars can’t even pick up a falling man. But I’ve never heard of anyone doing it in the mountains in a blizzard at night. The winds will play havoc all the way down; you have no idea where the hell you’d wind up. You could be blown sideways into a face. SOG tried it in ’Nam. But it never worked there.”

“I was in SOG,” said Bob. “It didn’t work there because the problem was the linkup after the drop. We never could figure out how to reassemble the team. But here there ain’t a team. There’s only me.”

“Sergeant, there’s real low survivability on that one. I don’t think this dog hunts.”

“I’m airborne qualified,” said Bob. “I did the jump course at Benning in sixty-six, when I was back from my first tour.”

“That was thirty years ago,” someone pointed out.

“I’ve made twenty-five jumps. Now, you guys have terrific avionics for night navigation. You got terrific computers. You can pinpoint the drop location and you can get there easily enough by flying above the storm. You can plot a drop point where the odds of my landing in the appropriate area are very high. Right?”

The silence meant assent.

Then someone said, “Instead of a smart bomb, we send a smart guy.”

“Here’s the deal. You get me there, over the storm. I’ll fall through the blizzard. I can’t chute through it, but I can cannonball through it and my deviation won’t be that bad. I can open ’way low, to minimize wind drift, maybe as low as three hundred feet. If you liaise up an Air Force jet and a good crew, you can have me there in six hours. I can’t think of another way to get a countersniper on the ground in that circumstance. When I’m on the ground, you can triangulate me with a satellite and I can get an accurate position and I can move overland and get there in time.”

“Jesus,” said Bonson.

“You owe me, Bonson.”

“I suppose I do,” said Bonson.

“Sergeant Swagger, there’s not one man in a hundred who could survive that.”

“I been there before, sonny,” said Swagger.

“Get Air Force,” said Bonson. “Get this thing set up.”

Swagger had one more thing to say.

“I need a rifle. I need a good rifle.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Go down and shoot her, he thought.

Go down now, kick in the door, kill her and be out of here before the sun is up. It’s all over then. No risk, no difficulty.

But he could not.

He stood on a ridge, about five hundred yards from the ranch house, which was dark and hardly visible through the whirling snow. Its lights were out and it stood in the middle of a blank, drifted field of white. It was a classical old cowboy place from the Westerns Solaratov had seen in the Ukraine and Bengal and Smolensk and Budapest: two-storied, many-gabled, clapboarded, with a Victorian look to it. A wisp of smoke rose from the chimney, evidence of a dying fire.

He hunched, looked at his Brietling. It was 0550; the light would rise in another few minutes and it would probably be light enough to shoot by 0700, if the storm abated. But what would bring them out? Why wouldn’t they stay in there, cozy and warm, drinking cocoa and waiting for time to pass? What would bring them out?

The child would, the girl. She’d have to frolic in the snow. The two women would come onto the porch and watch her. If she was as bold and restless as he knew her to be — he’d seen her ride, after all — she’d be up early and she’d have the whole house up.

Yet still a voice spoke to him: go down now, kill the woman, escape deeper into the mountains and get out, go home.

But if he went down, he’d have to kill them all. There was no other way. He’d have to shoot the child and the other woman.

Do it, he thought.

You have killed so many, what difference does it make? Do it and be gone.

But he could not force himself to. That was not how his mind worked, that was not how he had worked in the past; that, somehow, would bring him unhappiness in the retirement that was so close and the escape from his life.

Do it, the smart part of himself said.

Nyet, he answered in Russian. I cannot. He was tselni, which is a very Russian term for a certain kind of personality. It is a personality that is bold and aggressive and fearless of pain or risk. But it is in some way one piece, or seamless: it has no other parts, no flexibility, no other textures. He was committed to a certain life and as stubborn in the mastering of it as a man could be; he could not change now. It was impossible.

I cannot do it, he thought.

Instead, as he moved along the ridge, he at last located the spot he wanted, where he could see onto the porch yet was still far enough to the east that the sun would be behind him, and would not pick up on his lens. He squatted, took off the Leica ranging binoculars and bounced a laser shot off the house to read the range. It was 560 meters. Using a 7mm Remington Magnum at a velocity of 3010 feet per second and a 175-grain Sierra Spitzer Boat-tail bullet developing muzzle energy of over two thousand foot-pounds would drop about forty-five inches at that range, a fantastic load-velocity combination, untouchable by any .308 in the world. But he knew that to compensate, he’d still have to hold high, that is, to aim not with the crosshair but the second mil-dot beneath it in the reticle. That would put him nearly dead on, though he might have to correct laterally for windage. But it was usually calm after a blizzard, the wind spent and gone. Remember, he cautioned himself: account for the downward angle in your hold.

He visualized, a helpful exercise for shooters. See the woman. See her standing there. See the second mil-dot covering her chest, how rock steady it is, how perfect is the range, how easy the shooting platform. Feel the trigger with the tip of your finger, but don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything. Your breathing has stopped, you’ve willed your body to near-death stillness, there’s no wind, you put your whole being into that mil-dot on the chest, you don’t even feel the rifle recoil.

The bullet will reach her before the sound of it. It’ll take her in the chest, a massive, totally destructive shot — still over eighteen hundred pounds of energy — that explodes her heart and lungs, breaks her spine, shorts out her central nervous system. She’ll feel nothing. The secrets locked into her brain will be locked there forever.

And that’s it. It’s so easy, then. You fall back, about four miles, and you call in the helicopter on the cellular. He’ll be on you in twenty minutes for evacuation. No police or civil authority will reach this place until midafternoon at the earliest, and you’ll be far gone by that time.

He slipped down behind a rock to take himself out of the gusting wind. He settled in to nurse himself through the coldness that lay ahead. But it would not be a problem, he knew. He had beaten that one a long time ago.

The dark of the plane was serene, cocoonlike. Swagger was geared up. He wore jump boots, some kind of super-tight jumpsuit and was struggling to get his chute straps tightened. He was quite calm. It was Bonson who was nervous.

“We’re getting close,” Bonson said. “Altitude is thirty-six thousand feet. The computers have pinpointed a dropping point that should put you down in the flat just northwest of the Mackay Reservoir, about a mile or so from the location of the house. If you carry farther you’ll go into the Lost River Mountains, see, here.”

He pointed to the map, which clearly showed the Thousand Springs Valley that ran northwest by southeast through central Idaho, cut by the Big Lost River between the Lost River range and the White Knob Mountains.

“The chute will deploy at five hundred feet and you should land softly enough. You’ll just have to make it across the flatlands under the cover of dark, get into the house, warn the targets, and if you have to, engage him.”

“If I get the shot, I’ll take it.”

“That’s fine. Our priority here is your wife. She’s the target of this mission, so thwarting him is what counts. As soon as it’s flyable, I’ve got a squad of air policemen heloing in from Mountain Home to set up a defensive perimeter, and park rangers and Idaho State Policemen ready to go into the mountains after this guy. If you get the shot, take it. But, man, if we could get him alive and her alive, we’d have—”

“Forget it,” Swagger said. “He’s a professional. He killed two people already. He won’t be taken alive. The rest of his life in a federal prison is no life for this guy. He’d take the L-pill, laughing at you as he checked out.”

“Maybe so,” said Bonson.

Swagger finished with the parachute; it seemed okay, with the preset altitude-sensitive deployment device.

That was the tricky part. The altitude sensor read altitude from a predetermined height above sea level so that it was set to pop the chute five hundred feet over the flatland; if he drifted into the mountains, the chute might not pop at all before he hit some gigantic vertical chunk of planet. The Air Force people had explained this to him, and told him that, more than anything, was why this was so foolhardy. The computers could read the wind tendencies, compute his weight, the math of his acceleration, add in the C-130’s airspeed and determine a spot where the trajectory would be right, navigate the bird to that spot and tell him when it was time to go. But the jump wouldn’t be in a computer, it would be in the real world, unpredictable and unknowable; a gust of tailwind, some tiny imperfection, and he’d be dead and what good would that do?

The plane was making about 320 miles an hour, after a government Lear jet had zoomed them from Andrews to Mountain Home in less than five hours, during which time he and Bonson had been on the radio with various experts trying to work out the details.

They landed at Mountain Home and were airborne again in ten minutes.

Bob checked his electronics and other gear, all secured in a jump bag that was tethered to his ankle. In it, a cold-weather arctic-pattern camouflaged Gore-Tex parka and leggings had been folded. He also had a new Motorola radio, MTX-810 Dual Mode portable, with microprocessor and digitized, a tenth the weight of the old PRC-77 and with three times the range, which would keep him in contact with a network; it was linked to his belt, and secured to his head by a throat mike, sound-sensitive, so all he had to do was talk and he was on the net. He also had a Magellan uplink device to read the Global Positioning System satellites, which orbited overhead broadcasting a mesh of ultra-accurate signals, similarly digitized and microprocessor-driven, which could enable him to chart his position in milliseconds if he should wander off track. He had night-vision gear, the latest things; M912A night-vision goggles from Litton with two 18mm Gen II Plus image-intensifier assemblies, which provided three times the system gain of the standard AN/PVS-5A.

He had a Beretta 92 in a shoulder holster under his left arm, a 9mm mouse gun shooting a lot (sixteen) of little cartridges not worth a damn, but nobody had .45s anymore, goddamn their souls.

And he had a rifle.

Taken from the Agency’s sterile weapons inventory, it appeared to be some Third World assassination kit of which the rifle was but one part. The rifle lay encased in a foam-lined aluminum case, the Remington M40A1, Marine-issue, in .308, with its fiberglass stock, its free-floated barrel, its Unertl 10X scope. It would shoot an inch at one hundred yards, no problem; and two boxes of Federal Premium 168-grain MatchKing boattailed hollowpoints.

He’d examined it closely and saw that the proprietary shooter had taped a legend to the butt stock.

“Zeroed at 100 Yards,” it said. And under that: “200 yards: 9 klicks up; 300 yards: 12 klicks up; 400 yards: 35 klicks up; 500 yards: 53 klicks up.”

“Okay,” said Bonson, leaning close, “let’s check commo.”

“Just a goddamn second,” said Bob, trying to guess the range he’d be shooting at.

What the fuck, he thought, and started clicking, fifty-three times.

“Come on, let’s check commo,” said Bonson again. Clearly the tools of the trade at this basic level did not much interest Bonson; they may even have frightened him. But there were other devices cut into the padded foam of the case; one was an SOG knife in a kydex sheath, a dark and deadly thing; another was leather-encased sap, just the thing for thumping sentries as you got to your hide; and still another, so discreet in its green canvas M7 bandoleer and therefore complete with firing device and wiring, was the M18A1 anti-personnel mine known as the Claymore, so familiar from Vietnam and just the thing for flank security on some kind of assassination mission outside Djakarta.

He had a moment when he wondered if he should have junked all this shit, but as it was all going into the parapack, and would be tethered to his leg, he decided not to worry about it. He locked the case up.

“Come on,” said Bonson for a third time, “let’s check commo.”

“We just checked commo.”

“Yeah, I’m nervous. You okay?”

“I’m fine, Commander.”

“Okay, I’m going to run up to the cockpit and check with the pilots.”

“Got you.”

He turned and walked up the big ship’s dark bay to the cabin, cracked a door and leaned in.

Back here it was dark, with a few red safety lamps lit, and the subtle roar of the big engines chewing through air on the other side of the fuselage. It felt very World War II, very we-jump-tonight, strangely melodramatic.

Here I am again, he thought.

Here I go. Face some other motherfucker with a rifle. Been here before.

But he did not feel lucky tonight. He felt scared, tense, rattled, keeping it hidden only because poor Bonson was so much more rattled.

He looked at the end of the bay, where the big ramp was cranked up. In a few minutes, it would yawn open into a platform and he would get a signal and he would step out, and gravity would take him. He’d fall for two minutes. Maybe the chute would work and maybe it wouldn’t. He wouldn’t know until it happened.

He tried to exile his feelings. If you get mad, you get excited, you get careless, you get dead. Don’t think about all that shit. You just do what has to be done, calmly, professionally, with a commitment to mission and survival. Don’t think about the other man. It’s what has to be done. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

He tried not to think of Julie or of the man who’d come across time and space to kill her for what she didn’t even know she knew. He tried not to think of his ancient enemy and all the things that had been taken from him by the man. He tried not to think of larger meanings, of the geopolitics of it all, of the systems opposed to each other, and himself and the other, as mere surrogates. He exiled all that.

“Sarge?”

He turned; it was a young air crewman, a tech sarge who looked about fifteen.

“Yeah?”

“You got your parachute on upside down.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Bob.

“You haven’t been to jump school, have you?”

“Saw a guy parachute in a movie once. Ain’t it the same thing?”

The kid smiled.

“Not quite. Here, let me help you.”

It took just a few seconds for the young NCO to have him geared up correctly.

Yeah, that made sense. It felt much better; now it fit right, it was okay.

“You need oxygen, too, you know. There’s no air to breathe this high.”

“Yeah, they told me.”

The kid had a helmet for him, a jet pilot thing with a plastic face shield, an oxygen mask and a small green tank. The tank was yet another weight on the belt over his jumpsuit, and the tube ran up to the helmet, which fit close around his skull and supported it in plastic webbing.

“I feel like a goddamned astronaut,” Swagger said.

It was nearly time. Bonson came back.

Behind them, with a shriek of frigid wind, the ramp door of the Hercules opened. It settled downward with an electrical grind, and outside the dark sky swirled by.

Bonson hooked himself up to a guy wire so he wouldn’t be sucked out. The tech sarge gave Bob a last go-round, pronounced him fit and wished him well. With the ramp down, there was no oxygen and so they were all on oxygen. He felt the gush of air into his lungs from the clammy rubber mask around his mouth, under the face plate. He tasted rubber.

Bob and Bonson edged down the walkway to the yawning rear of the aircraft. The wind rose, howled and buffeted them; the temperature dropped. Bob felt the straps of the chute, the weight of the jump bag tethered to his ankle, the warmth of the jump helmet. Outside he could see nothingness with a sense of commotion.

“You cool?” said Bonson over the radio.

Bob nodded. He was too old for this. He felt weighed down with the rifle, the optics gear, the boots, the helmet, the parachute, all of it too much, all of it pulling on him.

“You got it? You just cannonball when you go out. You fall, you fall, you fall, then the thing opens up automatically. You can stabilize with the risers on the left or the right of the chute. I don’t need to tell you. You’ve done it before.”

Again, Bob nodded, as Bonson went ahead nervously into his own microphone.

“No problem. You get there, you save the women, you’ll be all right. And we get Solaratov, no problem. We’ve got it all set up. As soon as the weather breaks, another team goes in; it’s all taken care of.”

Another nod.

“Okay, they’re saying thirty seconds now.”

“Let’s go.”

Bob moved slowly toward the gap in the rear of the plane. There was no sense of anything; just blackness beyond the ramp.

“Okay, get ready,” said Bonson.

Bob paused in the buffeting torrent of black air. He was scared.

“Go!” said Bonson, and Bob stepped forward and off, into nothingness.

Nikki awoke early, before first light. It was a habit she could not break, partially because of her own pulsating energies but also because she had for so long awakened then to feed the horses.

Today, there were no horses to feed, but there was a whole new world of snow to explore.

She threw a bathrobe on over her pajamas and stepped into her moccasins and went downstairs. The fire was sleepy, so she threw a log onto it, and amid a spray of sparks, it began to stir to life. Then she went to the doorway, cracked it open. A wintry blast howled through, and yes, it was still snowing, but not as hard. She got the door open and crept out on the porch, pulling her bathrobe tight.

The world was lost in snow. Its natural shapes were blurred and softened. It was everywhere; on the fences, drifting over them; in strange hills that had been bushes; mounded on the roof of the barn and on the woodpile. She had never seen so much snow in her life.

The children who had once lived here had a sled; she’d seen it in the barn. She knew where she’d go, too. Off to the left, not too far, there was a slope, not a steep one but just enough to get up some good momentum.

She looked through the darkness to the mountains of the east, invisible in the slanting, falling snow. But she could feel a change coming somehow. She couldn’t wait for daylight. She couldn’t wait!

Solaratov watched the child through his night-vision goggles, a far-off figure in a field of green in the bottom of the aquarium that was the world of electronically amplified ambient light. Excited by the temptations of snow, she’d come early and stood, outside on the porch, a little green blob. Then she reached down and cupped a clutch of snow into a neat little ball, and threw it out into the yard.

The waiting was at last over. He pushed up the NV goggles, and took up the Leica range finder. He put the ranging dot on her and pressed the button, sending an invisible spurt of laser out to bounce off her and back, trailing its logo of data. Five hundred fifty-seven, it said in the display superimposed on the right of the image.

Five hundred fifty-seven meters. He thought for a second, computing drift and drop, and then lifted the rifle to place the mil-dot beneath the crosshairs on her. It felt obscene to target a child like this, but he had to familiarize himself with the sensations.

The dot blotted out her heroic little chest. His muscles, though stiff, remained hard, and he locked the rifle under a bridge of bone to the earth, and held the dot there with the professional shooter’s discipline. No wobble, no tremble, nothing to betray fear or doubt. His finger touched the trigger. Were he to will it, four and a half pounds of pressure and she would leave the earth forever.

He put the rifle down, glad that he still had energy.

Clearly now, it was just a matter of time.

He knew something was wrong immediately.

Instead of curling his body into a cannonball, he flailed, feeling panic and fear. He had never fallen before, and the sense of no control completely stunned him. It was no question of courage, just his limbic system; he was suddenly unmanned by the sense of utter helplessness. The wind hammered at him like fists; his body planed and fluttered and he tried to bring his ankles up to his wrists but he could get nothing to work against the power of the air rushing up at him at hundreds of miles an hour.

He screamed but there was no sound, because he screamed into an oxygen mask. But it was a scream, nevertheless, mad and ripped from his lungs like a physical thing, like an animal. He heard it rattling around in his helmet.

He had never screamed before in a hundred or a thousand fights. He had never screamed at Parris Island or any of the places where he’d had to kill or die. He had never screamed on the nights before action, in contemplation of what might happen on the next day, and he never screamed the day after, in contemplation of the horrors that he had seen or caused or had just missed him. He’d never screamed in grief or rage.

He screamed.

The scream was pure fury boiling out of his soul, unstoppable but lost in the hugeness of the air pressure.

He fell through darkness, feeling lost and powerless and, above all, vulnerable.

Don’t let me die, he thought, all commitment to mission, all dedication to justice, all sense of fatherhood gone. He fell screaming in complete treason to everything he thought he believed in, his arms clawing at the air, his legs pumping, the sense of weightlessness almost rendering him useless.

Don’t let me die, he thought, feeling tears on his face under the Plexiglas of the helmet, gasping for breath. Please don’t let—

The parachute shuddered open with a bang; he could simply sense it mutating strangely on his back, and the next split second, he was slammed into something that felt like a wall but was only air as the chute filled and grabbed him from doom. He could see nothing in the blackness, but he knew the ground was close and then, far before it should have happened, he whacked into it and felt his head fill with stars and concussion and confusion, as his body went hard against the ground. He staggered to his feet, trying to find the release lever for the chute in case it filled with air and pulled him away. He could not; it puffed and began to drag him, and the Plexiglas before him splintered; his face began to sting and bleed. His arm was numb. The equipment bag banged over the rocks as he slid along and seemed to rack his leg a couple of extra inches. He clawed at the harness, and then it popped open and the harness somehow rid itself of him, as if he were unwanted baggage, and deposited him in the snow as it went its merry way.

Oh, Christ, he thought, blinking, feeling pain everywhere. He looked around and saw nothing at all recognizable. He struggled to pop off his helmet, and felt just a second’s worth of air until the air turned frozen. He pulled a white watch cap from his pocket and yanked a snow mask down from its folds. He pulled the equipment bag over, opened it and got the parka and the leggings on. The warmth comforted him. Then he yanked out the night-vision goggles, fiddled for the switch and looked around.

Oh, Christ, he thought.

Nothing was as it seemed. He was on a slope, not a flat; there was no ranch house ahead because in the most obvious possible way there was no ahead.

There was only down, barren and remote.

He was way up.

He was lost in the mountains.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Julie was dreaming. In the dream she and Bob and Donny were at a picnic somewhere in the green mountains by a lake. It felt very real, but was still clearly a dream. Everybody was so happy, much happier than they’d ever been in their conscious lives. Bob and Donny were drinking beer and laughing. Her father was there, too, and Bob’s father, Earl, who’d been killed way back in 1955, and she was cooking hamburgers on a grill and all the men were drinking beer and laughing and tossing a ball around and flirting with Nikki.

Maybe it wasn’t a dream. Maybe it had begun as a dream, something spun out of her subconscious, but now she was aware that she was controlling it, and somehow trying to keep it alive, to make it last longer as she hung in a gray zone just between wakefulness and sleep. Peter was there too. Earnest, decent, dedicated Peter Farris, who’d loved her so, his ardency poignant. He looked strange because Bob and Donny were so Marine-straight with their short, neat hair and Peter was the complete hippie, with a splotchy purple tie-dyed T-shirt, a headband, his hair a mess, a sad little Jesus beard. Peter’s feelings got very hurt because he felt so powerless next to the two stronger men, and that somehow made him more poignant. He loved her so! Donny apologized, because it wasn’t in him to hurt anybody’s feelings. Bob was just watching them, Mr. Southern Cracker Alpha Male, amused by their silly youthfulness, and his dad and her dad were having a good laugh, though what a state trooper and a heart surgeon, one dead in 1955, the other in 1983, would have had to talk about was anybody’s guess.

And there was someone else.

He was by himself, a graceful young man, also amused by the manhood convention here on the shores of the Gitche Gumee or wherever it was, and it took her a while to figure out who he was, and then at last she knew it was Trig.

She’d seen him twice, no, three times. She’d seen him that night when Peter had dragged her to that party in Georgetown and he lived in that funny little place with all the bird paintings, and she’d seen him when he’d driven Donny out in the red Triumph to find her at West Potomac Park just before the last big May Day demonstration, and she saw him again, three nights later, at the farm in Germantown, where he and that Irishman were loading bags of fertilizer into the truck.

Trig: another of the lost boys of the Vietnam War. All of them were linked in some terrible chain, forever changed, forever mutilated. Nobody ever came back from that one. No one got home free. Donny, dead on DEROS. Peter, smashed, somehow, and found with a broken spine months later. Trig, blown to pieces in Madison, Wisconsin. And Bob, the only survivor but maybe the most hurting of them all, with his black-dog moods and his lost years and his self-hatred and his need to test himself against gunfire again and again and again, as if to finally earn the death he yearned for so intently and join his friends. Death or DEROS: which would come to Bob Lee Swagger first?

“Mommy?” her daughter asked her.

“Oh, honey,” she said, but it was not in the dream, it was here in the dark, warm bedroom.

Julie blinked and came out of it. No, it wasn’t a dream. It couldn’t have been a dream. It was too real to be a dream.

“Mommy, please, I want to go ride the sled.”

“Oh, Lord, honey, it’s—”

“Please, Mommy.”

She turned and looked at the clock. It was close to seven. Outside, just the faintest hint of light pressed through the margins of the shade.

“Oh, baby,” she said, “it’s so early. The snow’s going to be around for a long, long time.”

The deep ache in her body was there and the awkwardness conferred by the arm cast. She hadn’t taken a painkiller since last night, halfway through Singin’ in the Rain when her baby girl had fallen asleep on her lap.

“Please, Mommy. I’ll go get Aunt Sally.”

“Don’t you dare wake Aunt Sally. God bless her, she’s earned her escape from the Swaggers and all their problems. I’ll get up, baby. Just give me a moment or two.”

“Yes, Mommy. I’ll go get dressed.”

The child ran out.

So early, thought Julie. So damned early.

He tried the GPS receiver. Nothing happened. Eventually it lit up but the LCD produced a rattle of red digitized gibberish. Evidently it had banged too hard when the bag hit the ground and was out of whack. He turned on the radio, and heard through his earphones, “Bob One, Bob One, where are you, we have lost contact; goddammit, Swagger, where are you?”

He spoke: “Bob Control, this is Bob One, do you copy?”

“Bob One, Bob One, we have lost contact. Bob One, where are you?”

“Do you copy, Bob Control, do you copy? I am sending, does anybody hear me?”

“Bob One, Bob One, please notify control, we have lost contact.”

Shit!

He ripped the thing off and threw it in the snow. The next thing to check was the rifle. He opened the case, gave it a once-over, saw that it seemed okay, but he doubted it. The same harsh impact that had screwed the electronics might have knocked the scope out of zero. There was no way to know except in the shooting. He couldn’t shoot now so there wasn’t a thing to do except hope that Unertl built the scope real nice and tight and that it would stand up where the other stuff didn’t.

He stood. Pain rocked him, and he had a flash where he thought he might lose it, faint, and die under the snow. They’d find him next year. It would be in all the newspapers.

Fuck me if I can’t take a joke, he thought.

He looked about. In one direction lay only an endless sea of snowy mountains. That couldn’t be the way, and by God, yes, beyond the mountains at the horizon was just the faintest smear of light, signifying the east.

He appeared to be on the highest one. He knew the overflight went on a northwest-southeast access, aiming to put him into the flats below the mountains and the ranch. If he had overshot his mark, the deviation was longitudinal, not latitudinal; that would put him on Mount McCaleb, theoretically on its northwest slope. Down below, say six thousand feet, that would be where the ranch was. He couldn’t see; the valley in that direction was lost in a strata of cloud, which closed it off like a lost world. He could see only peaks across a gap that he took to be a valley.

He slung the rifle over his shoulder, checked his compass and set off down the slope.

The land was barren, without vegetation, as if in some recent time a nuclear bomb had cleaned out all the life. The snow lay in undulating forms, sometimes thick and difficult, other times surprisingly light. Twice he tripped on rocks unseen under the smooth white crust.

Flakes still fell, stinging his eyes. But the fierce wind had died and no snow devils whirled up to defy him. He couldn’t even hear the wind. He went downhill at an angle, almost galloping, feeling the boots bite into the stuff, trying to find a rhythm, a balance between speed and care. He was breathing hard and inside his parka began to sweat. He came to a rock outcropping and detoured around it.

Occasionally, he’d stop, flip down the night-vision goggles, and see — nothing. Ahead and below, the clouds lingered like a solid wall, impenetrable. The goggles resolved the cloud mass as green, only partially distinct from the green of the snow up here, and amplified the light so much that distinctions could hardly be made, and no valley could yet be seen through them: only an infinity of green, cut now and then by a black scut of rock.

It occurred to him that he might have completely mis-figured. He could be anywhere, just heading foolishly down to some empty, remote valley where there would be no highway, no ranch, no Julie, no Sally, no Nikki. Just empty Western space, as Jeremiah Johnson had found it.

Then what?

Then nothing.

Then it’s over. He’d wander, maybe hunting a little. He’d live, certainly, but in three days or a week, under a growth of beard, he’d emerge to find a different world, without a wife, with a bitter, orphaned daughter, with everything he’d worked for gone, all his achievements gone. Solaratov gone back to Moscow for blintz and borscht, with a nice reward in his pocket.

Just go, he thought.

Just push it out, think it through and do it.

He looked over his shoulder and got more bad news: it was getting lighter.

He raced the day downhill.

A light came on. Upstairs.

Solaratov stirred.

He was not cold at all. He rolled over, cracking fingers and joints, fighting the general numbness that his body had picked up in its long stay on the ground.

A shawl of snow cracked on his back as he moved, splitting and falling from him. He’d picked up the last inch. That was all right, he knew. A man can actually last in snow much longer than a rifle can.

The rifle was more problematical. Lubrication can solidify in the cold, turn to gum, destroy the trigger pull, catch in the next cycle of the bolt. The gasses don’t burn as hot, so the bullet flies to a new point of impact, unpredictable. The scope stiffens somehow, comes out of zero. His breath could fog on it, obscuring his vision. Nothing works quite as well. There were a hundred reasons why a good shot could go bad.

He opened the Remington’s bolt, slid it backward. No impediment marked the smoothness of the glide: no, the oil had not gummed in any way.

He pushed it ever so slowly forward until it would go no farther, then pushed the bolt handle downward two inches, feeling the bolt lock in place.

Without assuming the position to shoot, he put his hand around the pistol grip of the rifle, threaded a finger through the trigger guard, felt the curvature of the trigger. His finger caressed it through the glove. Without consciously willing it, his trigger finger squeezed ever so slightly, feeling a dry twig of resistance for an instant, and then the trigger broke with the precision of a bone-china teacup handle snapping off. Perfect: four and a half pounds, not an ounce more, not an ounce less.

He pulled the rifle to him and examined the muzzle where the Browning Optimizing System was screwed to a precise setting to control barrel vibration. The setting was perfect and tight.

Next, he slipped his glove off, unzipped his parka, reached inside the many layers until he reached his shirt, where he’d stored twenty rounds in a plastic case. Close to his heart. Close to the warmest part of him. He opened the box and removed four. Then he carefully returned the box to the pocket, to preserve the warmer environment. He opened the bolt and slid the cartridges, one by one, into the magazine. This somehow always pleased him. It was the heart of the issue of the rifle: the careful fit of round to chamber, the slow orchestration of the bolt syncopating this union, then vouchsafing it with the final, camming lockdown that felt solid as a bank vault.

No safety. Never used safeties. Didn’t believe in them. If you used safeties, it meant you didn’t trust yourself. If you gave yourself up to the whim of mechanics, you begged trouble. You just kept your finger off the trigger until you were on target. That’s how it worked.

Solaratov blew on his hand, pulled the glove on, then shifted his vision downhill to the house.

In the slightly intensified light of the rising dawn, the house was more distinct. The upstairs light remained on, but now one downstairs had been added. Its orange glow suffused the night. Because of the angle he could see one of the windows but the others were shielded by the rake of the porch roof. Behind that visible window, now and then a figure moved. It would be the woman, would it not, preparing breakfast? Making coffee, scrambling eggs, pouring milk for cereal for the child.

But which woman? The FBI agent’s wife? Or the sniper’s wife? That’s why he couldn’t send a shot into the shadow and be gone. Suppose it was the wrong woman? He could not afford another failure and, worse, he would never, ever again come upon conditions so totally in his favor.

Do not rush, he told himself. Do not move until you are sure.

The light rose, eventually, though second by second one could detect no difference. Now the day had gone from black edging to pewter to pewter edging to gray. The clouds were still low, though no snow was falling; no sun today. It would be hours before anyone could helicopter in, hours beyond that before they could come overland, except by snowmobile, and what point was there to that? By that time he’d be far, far away from the scene of the crime.

Telephone!

Of course! That last detail, the one you forgot, the one that could get you killed.

He fires, kills the woman and retreats. But the other woman sees her dead in the snow, and quickly picks up the phone and calls the sheriffs office. Deputies nearby on snowmobiles are reached by radio. They could get here in minutes; they’d zoom up the slope and quickly find his tracks. They’d call in his location. Other deputies would be dispatched. He’d end up in some half-baked last stand in this godforsaken chunk of America, brought low by a hayseed with a deer rifle who was a part-time deputy sheriff or forest ranger.

His eyes went back to the house, explored it carefully until at last he found the junction of the phone wires where they left the pole that ran along the road and descended to the house. His eyes met an astonishment!

The line was already down! The snow had taken the line down!

Now there was an omen! It was as if the God he had been taught not to believe in had come to his aid, not merely by bringing in the storm to cover his tracks but by breaking the phone line! Was God a communist?

He smiled just the littlest bit.

He looked back. A sudden slash of orange light flicked across the snow, as the front door opened.

He watched as a little girl ran off the porch and dived into a pile of snow. He could hear her laughter all the way up here. There was no other sound.

Then, standing on the edge of the porch, he saw the woman.

He was in the soup now.

The cloud was everywhere, visibility sunk to nothing. He was in the cloud and felt its penetrating moisture. Wetness gathered on his parka, glazing the white arctic-warfare pattern. His eyelashes filled with dampness. It gleamed off the pewter-colored rifle barrel.

The night-vision goggles were worthless now: engaged, they simply produced green blankness.

Throw them, he thought. Dump them. Complete shit!

But instead he pushed them up on his head; what would happen if he came out of it and needed them to negotiate rocks or something?

Instead he groped onward, the rifle hanging on his shoulder, trying desperately to keep up speed. But now the ground was rockier and he couldn’t see far enough to choose the right paths through the descending gullies, the twisty snow-clogged passage between rocks, the increasing tufts of vegetation bent into nightmare forms by the thick, wet snow. His own breath blossomed before him, foamy and betraying.

He fell. The snow jammed into his throat, got down inside the parka. His leg hurt like hell. A shiver ran down his body.

Get up, goddammit!

He climbed back to his feet, remembering another dark day of fog and wet. That was so long ago; it seemed to have happened in some other lifetime. That day he’d been so electric, so animal, so tiger; his reflexes were alive, and in a secret way he now realized, he loved it all.

Now he felt old and slow. His limbs were working out of coordination. The cold and the wet fought him. His leg hurt, particularly his hip. A slow sting had begun inside his thigh and he realized that his impact had reopened the incision above his knee where Solaratov’s bullet had nestled all these years in its capsule of scar tissue.

The rage came again, a hot red tide, a frenzy of mutilating hatred.

God help me, he prayed.

God help the sniper.

He raced downward, coming across a clear spot, and thought for just a moment he might be out of it, but saw in the next second it was only an illusion.

Snow!

In the gray light of dawn the snow was like a giant mound of softness. She thought of ice cream, vanilla, in big white piles everywhere, thick enough to grab her body and support her when she threw herself into it. She tasted it and received only messages of coldness and texture, which in the next fraction of a second became cold water, amazingly.

She giggled in delight.

“Mommy! It’s fun!”

“Honey, don’t go far. I can’t get you yet. The sun will be up in a few minutes.”

“Wheeeeeeee! I want to sled.”

“No, baby, not yet. Wait till Aunt Sally is up. If you get hurt, I can’t reach you.”

She struggled through the snow, which reached her knees, not listening a bit. The sled was in the barn. She knew where, exactly. The barn was empty but the sled leaned against the wall, beyond the eight stalls, in a feeding pen. It was an old sled — she could see it exactly in her mind — with rusty red runners and a battered wooden flatbed. She should have gotten it last night when they said it would snow!

“Nikki!” her mother called.

Nikki turned back and saw her mother, standing on the edge of the porch, wrapped in a great parka over her immobilizing cast, her hand shielding her eyes from the snippets of snow the wind occasionally caught and flung.

“Nikki! Come back.”

Her mother stood there.

Is it her?

Goddammit, is it her?

The woman stood rooted to the front of the porch. Against his finger, the trigger was a tease.

The mil-dot had her centered perfectly, and no tremor came to his arm. His position was superb. Adductor magnus was firm, anchoring him to the earth. He was four pounds away from the end of the war. No cold, no fear, no tremor, no doubt, no hesitation.

But … is it her?

He had only seen her through his scope at 722 meters for one second: he couldn’t tell. She was wrapped in a coat, and one hand held it secured. Possibly that meant the other hand was immobilized in a cast; possibly it meant nothing. That’s how you wore a coat if you didn’t want to put it on and button it. Any person would wear it that way.

The woman ducked back. She was gone.

He exhaled.

“Wheeeeeeeeeeee!” came the far-off sound of the child.

“Wheeeeeeeeeeee!”

It was so far away, light, dry, just the smallest of things. Maybe a freak twist of wind blew it up to him or the kindness of God.

But there it was: my child.

He’d know it anywhere — the throaty timbre, the vitality, the heroism. Spirit. Goddamn, did that girl have some spunk. Got it from her granddad; now there was a man with spunk!

She was to the left somewhere, very far away. In that direction he could see nothing except rougher ground.

Fuck it, he thought.

He unslung the rifle and with a swift open-and-shut cocked it, jacking one of Federal’s primo .308s into the spout.

He ran. He ran. He ran.

He dashed through the rocks, building momentum, his legs fighting the splash of snow that each one’s energy unleashed. It ate at his heart and lungs, all the work, and his breath came in dry spurts, wrapped in a sheath of pain. Still, he pressed, he ran, and when he came out of the rocks, the slope dropped off closer to vertical and he had to slow up to keep from falling, almost leaping down through the snow, his momentum again building, right on the tippy edge of control.

Then suddenly he was out of it.

The day lightened as the cloud disappeared and before him stretched a valley filled with snow, like a vast bowl of off-color vanilla ice cream, still only gray in the rising illumination. He saw a house, telephone poles signaling a road, a corral with only the tips of the posts visible in the blanket of white, a barn itself laden with the stuff, all pretty as a greeting card — and his child.

She was a few yards in front of the porch, dancing.

“Wheeeeeeeeeee!” she screamed again, her voice powerful and ringing.

Bob saw that he was on a ridge to the far side of the horseshoe of elevation that surrounded the place on three sides.

He saw lights in the house, a warm slash of brilliance from an open door and, on the porch now, something else moved and came out.

He saw her, standing on the steps, a parka wrapped about her, his wife. Nikki threw a snowball at her and she ducked and there was just a moment when her coat fell open and slipped and he could see the cast on her left arm.

He turned and flopped to the ground, finding prone, building the position, trying to slow the pounding of his heart.

The sniper. Find the sniper.

It was her. She ducked, the coat came open, then she shuddered it back onto her shoulders. But her left arm was immobilized in plaster.

Yes. Now.

He squirmed, making minute corrections. He didn’t rush. What was the point of rushing?

There was nothing in the world except the woman standing there in her coat.

Five hundred fifty-seven meters.

Hold two dots below the reticle, that is, two dots high, to account for the bullet’s drop over the long flight and the subtle effects of gravity over the downward trajectory.

Concentrate.

It’s just another soft target, he thought, in a world full of soft targets.

He expelled a half breath, held the rest in his lungs. His body was a monument, Adductor magnus tight. The mil-dots didn’t move: they were on her like death itself. The rifle was a chastised lover, so still and obedient. His mind emptied. Only the trigger stood between himself and the end of the war. It was a four-and-a-half-pound trigger, and four pounds were already gone.

Bob scanned the ridge as it curved away from him, knowing his man would set up to the east to keep the sun to his back. The scope was 10X, which was big enough to give him a little width of vision. God, why didn’t he have binoculars? Binoculars would—

There he was.

Not him, not the man, but the rifle barrel, black against the white snow, sheltered near a boulder. The rifle was still, braced on one hand in a steady, perfect prone. In the lee of the rock, Bob knew Solaratov was making his last-second corrections, nursing his concentration to the highest point.

Long shot. Oh, such a long shot.

He steadied, prayed, for he knew the man was ready to fire.

It was close to a thousand meters. With a rifle he’d never zeroed, whose trigger was unknown to him.

But only a second remained, and his crosshairs found the rifle barrel, then rose above it based on his instinctive guesstimate of the range.

Is it right? Is this it?

Oh shit, he thought.

Time to hunt, he thought, and fired.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Bonson felt a huge blast of utter, scalding frustration shudder through him. Agh! Ugh! Umf! This is where your major strokes came from: some little fritz in the brain and, in the blink of an eye, you’re fried. His blood pressure felt dangerously high. He wished he had somebody to smack or kill. His muscles tightened into brick; redness flashed in his mind. His teeth ground against one another.

He spoke again into the microphone.

“Bob One, Bob One, this is Bob Control, come in, come in, goddammit, come in!”

“He isn’t there, sir,” said the tech sergeant, who was in the radio bay with him. “We’ve lost him.”

Or the fucking cowboy’s on his own, Bonson thought.

“Okay, switch me through to the larger net.”

The sergeant dialed the new frequency on the console of the radio.

“Ah, Hill, this is Bonson, are you there?”

“Yes, sir,” spoke his second in command from Mountain Home Air Force Base. “The whole team is in. We’re in good shape.”

“You’ve liaised with the state police?”

“Yes, sir. I have a Major Hendrikson on standby.”

“Okay, here’s the deal. We’ve lost contact with our asset. Tell this major to get state police helicopters in there as soon as possible. Sooner, if possible.”

“Yes, sir, but the word I’m getting is that nobody’s flying into those mountains until at least ten A.M. There’s still real bad weather. And these guys are spread pretty thin.”

“Shit.”

“I did talk to Air Force. We can get some low-level radars set up on three surrounding mountains by 1200, assuming they can move in by 1000, and we can get good position on any incoming helos. If this Russian plans to exit by helo, we’ll nab him.”

“This guy’s the best in the world at escape and evasion. He’s worked mountains before. Swagger knew that. If Swagger doesn’t get him, he’s gone. It’s that simple.”

The man on the other end was silent.

“Goddamn, I hate to be beat by him! I hate it,” said Bonson to nobody in particular. He ripped off his earphones and threw them against the fuselage of the plane; the plastic on one of them cracked and a piece spun off and landed at his feet. He stomped it into the floor, grunting mightily.

The sergeant happened to look away at precisely that moment, as the navigator came back to get some coffee from the thermos in the radio bay, and the two aviators locked eyes. The sergeant rolled his eyes, pointed his finger at his head and rotated it quickly, communicating in the universal language of human gesture a single idea: screwball.

The navigator nodded.

Julie knew at once it was a shot. The supersonic crack was sharp and trailed a wake of echo as it bounced off the sheltering hills.

“Nikki! Get in here! Now!” she screamed.

The little girl turned, paused in confusion, and then there was another one, like the snap of a whip, and Nikki ran toward her. Both recognized it from the time they’d been shot at so recently.

“Come on, come on!” yelled Julie, and she grabbed her daughter, pulled her into the house, locked the door.

She heard another shot, from a different location; an answering shot.

Men were trying to kill each other nearby.

“Get downstairs,” she said to her daughter. “Now! And don’t come up, no matter what, until you hear the police.”

The girl ran into the cellar. Julie grabbed a phone, and found at once there was no dial tone. It was dead.

She looked outside and could see nothing except the hugeness of the snow, now lightening as full dawn approached. She heard no more shots.

She ran upstairs, and found Sally groggily wandering down the hall.

“Did you—?”

“Someone’s shooting,” Julie yelled.

“Jesus,” Sally said. “Did you call the police?”

“The line’s down or dead or something.” “Who—?”

“I don’t know. There’s two of them. Come on, we have to get into the basement.”

The two women ran down the stairs, found the door into the cellar and descended into near darkness.

The cellar windows had been snowed in and only diffuse light showed through them. It was cold.

“Mommy,” said Nikki. “I’m scared.”

“I’m scared too,” said Julie.

“I wish Daddy was here.”

“I do too,” said Julie.

“Now, you get in the corner,” said Sally. “I’ll figure out some way to block the door, just in case. I’m sure it’s just hunters or something.”

“No,” said Julie. “They were shooting at each other. They’re not hunters. They’re snipers.”

“I wish Daddy were here,” said Nikki again.

Snow showered across Solaratov and his mind came out of its deep pool of concentration to recognize the familiar cloud of debris a high-velocity round delivers when it strikes, and the next split second the whipsong of the rifle crack reached him as it shattered the sound barrier.

Under fire.

The left.

The left.

Another detonation spewed snow into the sky.

Under fire.

He tore himself from the scope, looked to the left to see nothing, because of the shielding rock. But he knew from the sound that the man had to be on the rim of the ridge.

He looked back into the valley to just catch the little girl as she dipped under the porch roof, and in another split second heard the door slam.

Damn!

They were gone.

Who was shooting at him?

He realized now he was invisible to the shooter, else he’d be dead. The shooter could not see him behind his rock.

He knew too the man now had the rock zeroed, knowing full well that Solaratov would have to come around it to return fire.

He felt no fear. He felt no curiosity. He felt no disappointment, he felt no surprise. His mind did not work that way. Only: Problem? Process. And, solution!

Instead of rising to come around the rock, he backed, low as a lizard, through the snow, trusting that the man’s scope would be so powerful that its field of view would be narrow and that the whiteness of his camouflage would also shield him from recognition.

He squirmed backward as low in the snow as a man could be, sliding through the stuff as if he were some kind of arctic snake. He canted his head as he backed, and as he slid out from behind the rock, he saw his antagonist, a disturbance ever so slight along the line of the ridge that could only be a man hunched over a rifle, desperately looking for a target. He studied and was sure he saw it move or squirm or something.

What was the distance? He pivoted on the ground, finding a good angle to the target, splaying his legs, coming into that good, solid prone. Adductor magnus. In the scope, yes, a man, possibly. In white. Another sniper. Low on the ridge. He watched his crosshairs settle, telling himself not to hurry, not to rush, not to jerk. He couldn’t get a clear sight picture and he didn’t have time to shoot a laser at the target to get its distance. He pivoted slightly, found a bush coned in snow, which he took to be of three feet girth. By covering it in the scope with mil-dots and racking through the math — the black mass covered two dots; multiply the assumed one meter in height by one thousand and divide by two to get the approximation of a thousand yards: say, less than a thousand but more than nine hundred yards he held four dots high. With greater concentration and less art, he steadied himself, pivoted to find the disturbance that had to be the man but was not really clear, felt his finger on the trigger but did not think about it, and let it decide itself, as if it had a brain, what to do next, and then it fired.

A geyser of snow erupted seven feet to the right of Bob, followed by the whipcrack of sound. Windage. The Russian had the range but there was some crosswind and the 7mm hadn’t quite the weight to stand up to it. It had drifted ever so slightly. But how could Solaratov have read wind if he were shooting across the raw space of the valley? He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

But quickly he’d understand that, cock again and shoot.

Bob squirmed back, feeling himself sliding a little off the edge of the ridge, and in the next split second, another eruption blew a hole in the surface of the planet, a big spout of flung snow and rock frags. It hit exactly where he’d been but just barely was no longer.

Oh, this motherfucker is so good. This motherfucker won’t make another mistake.

Bob slid back farther.

No shots had gone toward the house. For a little while, at least, his wife was safe. He knew she’d have the sense to head to the cellar with Nikki and Sally and lock up and wait.

Meanwhile he had but one choice. That was to low-crawl along the ridge and hope that its tiny incline was enough to shield him from Solaratov’s vision. Solaratov would realize he couldn’t go up or down, he’d never go toward him; he could only fall back around the mountain until he disappeared around it, and could then get up and move to cover and set up an ambush. Solaratov would go up; elevation was power in this engagement. Whoever reigned on high, reigned, because he’d have the angle into a target where the other man would have nothing.

That was the plan: to get out of this area of dangerous vulnerability, move like hell when safe and find a good hide. Solaratov would have to come around the mountain to get him, but he’d come around high. Bob knew he’d get a good shot, maybe only one, but he knew he could make it.

He tried to calculate the differences between his .308 168-grain round and the Russian’s 7mm Remington Magnum. The Magnum flew four hundred feet per second faster with almost a thousand pounds more muzzle energy; it shot so much flatter. The Russian, if he were under five hundred yards, could hold just a bit over him and pull the trigger, not worrying about drop. So he’d have to stay at least five hundred yards ahead, because the slight drop, plus the windage, would be his best defense.

He turned back, squirmed to the lip of the ridge, but could see nothing except the quiet house far below and the ridgeline running around the base of the mountain.

But he was coming. The Russian was coming. The Russian was hunting him.

Solaratov studied the situation. He looked across the horseshoe through his Leica binoculars at the ridge where he’d spotted the other shooter and understood the man couldn’t go up or down, for both would expose him and he’d be dead in a second. He could only crawl desperately away, round the flank of the mountain, and try and set up in the mountain’s next cove, waiting for a shot.

He shot a laser over and the readout told him the range was about 987 meters. He calculated the drop to be about forty-two inches from his five hundred-yard zero, which was four dots high on the mil-dot reticle. Now that he’d solved the distance, he felt confident. But there was one other thing left to do.

He pulled the rifle down, and quickly unscrewed the BOSS nozzle, which controlled barrel vibrations. He reached inside his jacket and removed an AWC suppressor. It was a long black tube of anodized aluminum packed with “baffles,” sound-absorbent material, like steel wool, and washers called “wipes;” it would reduce the 460-dB level of the gas exploding out of his muzzle by trapping it and bleeding it off, down to under a hundred db’s, approximately the sound of a BB gun. From long distance, in the cone of the suppressor’s pattern, that sound would be not merely significantly quieter but also more diffuse. There’d be no signature to reveal his position. Anyone on the receiving end would hear only the crack of the bullet as it broke the sound barrier, but nothing from the rifle’s muzzle that could pinpoint a location. That meant he could shoot at his antagonist but his antagonist could not locate him by sound to shoot back. The downside: it changed his zero somewhat. How much? He’d have to reckon visually and make adjustments as he fired. He still felt that with the range finder, the suppressor gave him significant tactical advantage. He carefully screwed the suppressor tight to the muzzle.

He knew one other thing, because he had studied the topographical maps: that once his antagonist got around the mountain, he would be in for a surprise. The elevation was much steeper. There were no ridges as there were here fronting the valley. He’d have no place to hide. He’d be in the open.

Solaratov knew the wise move would be to scamper upward to gain further advantage of height. As he had the initiative at this point, he probably had a good four- or five-minute window of time where he could ascend, slide over one of the lesser hills of Mount McCaleb, and then shoot down upon his antagonist.

But he also knew that is exactly how the man’s mind would work; that’s how he’d figure it and he himself, once under shelter, would ascend quickly to try and prevent the Russian from gaining the height advantage.

But none of this mattered. The objective was the woman. The higher Solaratov got, the farther from the woman he got. It wasn’t about some man-on-man thing, some sniper duel, some engagement of vanity. That was his advantage. The other man — it had to be Swagger — meant nothing to him. Solaratov’s ego was uninvested; what had happened all those years back in Vietnam was totally disconnected from today, and that itself was a significant advantage.

Thus Solaratov made his plan: he would drop back a few yards behind the shield of an enfilade and then descend in freedom to the valley floor. He’d have a dangerous period of vulnerability as he went across the valley floor, but with his snow skills and his understanding of the other man’s fear, he knew the other man would be busy setting up a hide in the next fold for a man he thought would ascend to fight.

Instead, the Russian would work from the ground and shoot uphill. He’d find cover in a treeline or behind rocks, he’d scope the distance, and he’d put his silent shots onto the antagonist, precise and perfect.

Swagger would not even know where the shots came from. He’d hear nothing. He’d be driven back until he was out of cover, and then he’d die.

Then, thought Solaratov, I’ll backtrack, get into the house and do the women. Witnesses. I’ll have to kill them all.

Bob squirmed in a last desperate burst of energy and came around the mountain. There is no lower or more degrading mode of transportation than the low crawl, and he had crawled enough in his time. His elbows and knees ached from the endless banging against the rock. Snow had gotten into his mouth and down his neck. Now at last: some kind of safety.

He paused, breathing hard, feeling wet with sweat. At least Solaratov had not gotten above him to fire down on him as he crawled.

His mouth was dry, his body heaved for oxygen that he could not replenish fast enough. His heart hammered like a drum beaten by a madman. His focus rolled in and out. But with a surge of will, he settled down. He pulled himself up the mountain and peeked back over some rocks at the valley he’d left behind.

Nothing.

No sign of Solaratov. The house lay undisturbed far below, in a huge field of undisturbed snow. The rock along the ridgeline where the Russian had set up now appeared deserted.

Bob picked up the rifle and used its scope to scan the mountain above. If he were Solaratov, that’s what he would have done: climbed, worked around, always trying to get the elevation.

But he saw nothing; there was no snow in the air, no sign of disturbance. Putting the scope down, he tried to will himself into a kind of blankness, by which his subconscious, peripheral vision might note something his front-on, focused eyes might not, and send him a signal of warning. But he saw nothing; no movement registered on the slopes before him or the flatness beneath. He drew back.

Had Solaratov gone low, tried to get to the house and finish the job? Doubtful; he’d be exposed too long, and at any moment a shot could take him. He rethought it: yes, he has to come after me. His first priority is to eliminate the threat, because he is not on a kamikaze mission, he’s no zealot. He’s a professional. It only makes sense for him if he can escape; that means he’s got an escape route, a fallback route, everything.

He will come.

He will hunt me.

Bob looked up. The slope of the mountain increased until it disappeared into fog, which was really cloud. Solaratov would get up there, come down by some magic and shoot down upon him.

He backed around, looking for a place to set up a hide.

The news was not good.

The ridge on which he perched, like a shelf that traced the jagged contours of the mountain, gave out 250 yards ahead; or, rather, it ran into a ravine, where a gash had been cut in the mountain, a long, ragged scar left by some ancient natural cataclysm. Now it was full of vegetation and rocks, all pristine with snow. But beyond the gap, there was nothing. The mountain slope was smooth and bare, offering no protection at all.

He looked up. It was too steep to climb at this point, though maybe beyond the gap he could engineer some elevation.

He looked down into a sector of valley. The floor was covered with snow-humped trees and brush, all bent into extravagant postures and made smooth under the weight of their white burden. It was a sculpture garden, a winter wonderland, a theme park, beautiful and grotesque and delicate at once, the frail tracery of the lesser branches all bearing their inch of white stuff. It looked quite poetic from six hundred yards up, but if you got caught down there, you’d never be able to move out.

There was really no choice. He had to get to the gash and take up a position in the rocks. He’d get one good shot at Solaratov, who would probably work his way down from above. Solaratov would have the advantage of elevation, but he wouldn’t know where to look. He’d have to scout and he’d have to expose himself when he looked.

That’s when I get him, Bob thought, wishing he believed it.

Then he noticed: it had begun to snow. Flakes cascaded down again, fluting and canting in the wind, a screen of them, dense and unyielding.

Visibility closed in.

Bob didn’t like this a bit.

It was snowing. Solaratov, breathing hard, found a trail inside the scruffy vegetation that edged the mountain, where the overhanging leaves had cut down on snow accumulation. He almost ran, skirting the flat of the valley, staying off its exposure, staying away from the house for now. He knew that Bob could not see him from any elevation, through the snow-bearing branches. He probably wouldn’t even look in the right direction.

Solaratov came around a curve of the valley, edged to the treeline and went hunched behind a fallen log that was somehow suspended by its branches. The snow fell gently around him out of the gray light. There was no sound at all in the world.

He read the land, looking for natural hides where an experienced man would go to ground. It was not a difficult problem, for the mountainside was largely featureless there, with only sparse vegetation to distract the eye. In fact the whole little war between them had been distilled to its most nearly abstract: two men in white in a white, cold world in white mountains of extreme elevation, hunting each other, going for whatever little edge of experience and luck they could find. Whoever read the problem better would win: it had nothing to do with courage or, really, even marksmanship. It would come down to this one thing: who was the better practitioner of the sniper’s skills?

He could see a kind of gash in the mountainside ahead of him and realized that his quarry, coming around the edge, would have no choice but to seek refuge at its top.

He picked up his binoculars and scanned. He could see nothing but the rocks under their packing of snow. Visibility was not bad, though blurred by the falling snow.

He’s up there. He’s got to be.

He triggered a laser to the top of the gash, bounced it off a rock, and read the range in the readout: 654 meters. Known distance. Upward. He did the math quickly and knew where to hold, computing in the uphill angle. He’d shoot from the center of the third mil-dot; that would put him there, crudely but close enough. And he felt his nearness to the mountain would shield the bullet from the predations of the wind; it wouldn’t drift laterally.

He hunted patiently, looking for target indicators, for some implication that his prey was alive and hiding, and had not circled behind him. The rocks were everywhere, a kind of garden of stone humped in snow. He looked for disturbances in the snow, for sign of a man who’d crawled, upending the crust of white. But he could not see that for the angle.

What is his sign?

What is the sign?

Then he knew: the man’s breath. It will rise like fog, maybe just a vapor, but it will show. It has to show. He has to breathe.

It was the slightest thing. Was it really there, or an optical illusion? But no, there it was: a slight curl through the snow, the suggestion of atmospheric density. It could be a man’s breath leaking out as he huddled motionlessly in the rocks, awaiting his prey as he scanned upward.

Yes, my friend. There you are, he thought, slowly picking out the pattern of the arctic warfare camouflage, snow dappled with a little dead brown vegetation.

The man was on his belly, nestled behind rocks, in a little collection of them at the very top of the gash. He lay with the sniper’s professional patience, totally engaged, totally calm. Solaratov could not see the rifle, but he saw the man.

There you are, he thought. There you are.

He again fired a laser at him: exactly 658 meters. He had the target.

He fixed markers in his mind’s eye — a stand of snow-laden pines — put the binoculars down, raised the rifle and went to the scope. Of course it was not nearly so powerful as the binocs, and its field of vision was much smaller. But he found the pines, tracked down, waited, and yes, found the little trail of vapor that marked his prey.

He settled in, looking for the target. He could see just a half an inch of camouflaged parka above the rock, probably the upper surface of the prone back. He settled on this target, centering it on the third dot.

Should I fire?

I may not quite have enough of him visible to drive into the blood-bearing inner organs. I might just wound him.

My zero might be way off.

But then: so what? I have a suppressor.

He will not know where I am shooting from.

He will have to move as I bring him under fire.

He won’t know if I’m above him or below him.

He’ll have to move; I can chase him across the ravine. He’ll run out of rocks. I’ll have him.

He exhaled his breath, commanded his senses, felt the slow tick and twitch of his body as he made minute corrections, waited until the total rightness of it all fell across him.

The trigger broke, and with its odd, tiny sound, the rifle fired.

Bob lay quietly in the rocks. Above him a screen of snowy pines shielded him somewhat but left him with a good view of the direction he’d come. With the most discipline his body could invent, he scanned three zones: the first was the ridge, right where it came around the mountain; the next was a crop of rocks perhaps sixty meters above that; and the next was a notch in the mountain, perhaps two hundred meters up, that swam into and out of visibility as the cloud permitted. Solaratov would appear at one of those places as he came high around the mountain, with the idea of shooting downward.

Methodically he moved his eyes between them, the first, the second, the third, waiting.

Well, I did it, he tried to tell himself. I got him away from my wife. In a little while they’ll be here. He’ll come, I’ll get my shot, it’ll be over then.

But he did not feel particularly good about it all. There was no sense of anything except unfinished business and that now, all these years later, it was his time.

I die today, came the message, insistent and powerful.

This is the day I die.

He’d finally run up against a man who was smarter, a better shot, had more guts. Couldn’t be many in the world, but by God, this was one.

The snow was falling more heavily now. It pirouetted downward from the low gray sky, and as he looked back to the house, still barely visible, he could hardly see it. It looked like it would snow for hours. That was not good. The longer it snowed, the longer it would take for help to arrive. He was on his own. He, and his ancient enemy.

Where is he?

It was making him nuts.

Where is—

A tremendous pain came across his back, as though someone had stood over him and whacked him, hard, with a fireplace poker.

Bob curled in the pain and knew instantly that he’d been hit. But no shock poured through him and took him out of his brain as it had when he’d been hit before. Instead a powerful spasm of fury kicked through him, and he knew in a second that he wasn’t hit seriously.

He drew his legs up and at that moment the odd BEOWWWWWW! of a bullet singing off a rock exploded just to his right, an inch above his skull.

He’s got me, he thought, listening as the crack of the bullet snapping the sound barrier arrived.

But where was the muzzle blast?

There was no muzzle blast.

Suppressor, he thought. The motherfucker has a suppressor.

The sniper could be anywhere. Bob lay behind his rack of stones, waiting. No other shot came. Clearly he was completely zeroed but not quite visible enough for a good body or head shot.

Bob was almost paralyzed. No place to run, zeroed, completely outfoxed. Completely faked out.

He tried to run through the possibilities. Clearly Solaratov was not at one of the three places that Bob had determined. He’d gotten around somehow, and Bob believed him to be below, given the one shot that had ricocheted off the stone that shielded his head. The round had struck from downslope. If Solaratov were above him, it would be all over. The Russian had outthought him by descending into the valley and was now shooting upward. Bob tried to remember what was down there, and recalled a little patch of snow-packed forest. Somewhere the sniper was down there, but without a sound signature to locate him, he was effectively invisible.

Do something.

Sure: but what?

Move, crawl.

He has you.

If you move he kills you.

Checkmate. No moves possible. Caught in the rocks, trapped.

Then he realized that the Russian was but a few hundred yards from the house where the undefended women hid. After he killed Bob, it would take him five minutes to finish the job. Since it would be close-range work, he could leave no witnesses.

It was almost over now.

The Russian could see the man cowering behind the rocks and could sense his fear and rage and the closing in of his possibilities.

He filled with confidence. He had not fired twice but three times. The first shot landed about four feet above his target. That was the new zero. Swagger had not even noticed it. Quickly he dialed in the correction, fired again. He hit him! The next shot barely missed him. But he knew: he had him!

It occurred to him to move ever so slightly, find a better shooting position and try and drive the killing shot home. But he had such an advantage now, why worry about it? Why move, not be able to shoot, just when the man is so helpless, has already been hit, is presumably leaking blood and in great pain.

The rifle rested on the tree trunk; he was comfortable behind it, sure that he was invisible from the ridge. The reticle was steady; he knew the range. It was merely a matter of time, of so little time.

What can he do?

He can do nothing.

Bob tried to clear the rattle from his head.

In the field, what would I do?

Call in artillery.

Call in smoke.

No artillery.

No smoke.

Throw a grenade.

No grenade.

Fire the Claymore.

No Claymore. The Claymore was in the case three thousand feet up the mountain. He wished he had it now.

Call in a chopper.

No chopper.

Call in tactical air.

No tactical air.

But a word caught somewhere in his mind.

Smoke.

No smoke.

It would not go away.

Smoke.

You move under smoke. Under smoke he cannot see you.

There is no smoke.

Why would the word not leave his head? Why would it not go away? Smoke.

What is smoke: gaseous chemicals producing a blur of atmospheric disturbance.

There is no smoke.

Smoke.

There is no—

But there was snow.

Snow, agitated, could hang in the air like smoke. Plenty of snow. Snow all around.

He turned to his right to face a wall of snow. Above him, on a precipice, more snow. The snow that had fallen silently through the night and even now glided down from the heavens.

Solaratov loves snow. He knows snow.

But Bob saw now that above him, several hundred pounds of the stuff rested on the branches of a pine, which had turned it into some kind of upside-down vanilla cone. In fact, several of the trees were above him. The snow fell and caught on them in the gray mountain light. He could almost feel them groaning, yearning for some kind of freedom.

He reached out with his rifle barrel but could touch none of it.

But then the plan formed in his mind.

He edged to his side, making certain to keep his body profile low behind the rocks, so that Solaratov would not get the last shot free. His right hand crept across the parka, unzipped it, and he reached inside and removed the Beretta.

He steeled himself.

It was instinct shooting, unaimed fire, but his reflexes at this arcane pistol skill had always been quite good. He threaded his other wrist through the sling of the Remington M40, to secure it for his move.

He thumbed back the hammer. He looked at each of his targets.

He took a deep breath.

So do it, he thought.

So do it!

Something was happening.

A series of dry popping cracks reached Solaratov’s ears, far away, but definitely coming off the mountain.

What?

He looked hard through the scope, not daring to take it from the trapped man. He thought he saw a flash, the flight of something small through the air, a disturbance in the snow, and quickly came up with the idea of an automatic pistol, but what was he doing, trying to signal men in the area? Who could be in the area?

But in the next second his question was answered. He was shooting into the snow-laden pines above him, striking their trunks and driving the impact vibrations out their limbs, shooting fast so that the vibrations accumulated in their effect, and almost astonishingly, the snow loads of four pines yielded and slid down the mountain toward the supine man, where they hit and exploded into a fine blast of powder, a sheet of density that momentarily took his sight picture away from him.

Where is he?

He put the scope down because he could never find the man in the narrow width of vision, and saw him, rolling down the mountain a good fifty feet from the commotion he’d stirred.

Solaratov brought the rifle up fast, but couldn’t find the man, he was moving so quickly. At last he located him and saw that he had gotten a full fifty meters down the hill.

He picked up the good moving sight picture, fired quickly, remembering to lead on the moving target, but the bullet impacted behind the target, kicking up a huge geyser of snow.

Of course! The range had changed subtly; he was still holding for 654 meters, and the range was probably down to six hundred or so.

By the time he figured this out, the man had come to rest in the rocks below, and was now much better situated behind them, having picked up some maneuverability and the position to shoot back.

Goddamn him! he thought.

With a thud he caught on something, taking his breath away. He had come to rest in a new nest of rocks fifty meters downslope. The snow still hung in the air, and in his desperate fall-run, it had gotten into his parka and down his neck. But in the complete uncoordination of the moment, he made certain he was behind cover. He breathed hard. He hurt everywhere, but felt warmth pouring down the side of his face, and reached up to touch blood.

Had he been hit?

No: the fucking night-vision goggles, totally worthless but forgotten in the crisis, had slipped down his head crookedly, and one strap cut a wicked gash in his ear. The cut stung. He grabbed the things and had an impulse to toss them away. What was the point now?

But maybe Solaratov wasn’t sure where he was now, nestled behind a slightly wider screen of rocks. He looked and saw he had a little more room to move from rock to rock.

Maybe he could even get a shot off.

But at what?

And then he saw that the slope dropped off intensely and, worse, the rocks had run out.

This is it, he thought.

This is as far as I go.

What did I get out of it?

Nothing.

His ear stung.

“They’ve moved,” Sally said. “Now they’re behind the house. You can hear the shots are over there.”

“Are we going to be all right?” asked Nikki.

“Yes, baby,” Julie said, holding her daughter close.

The three were in the cellar of the house, and Sally had spent the past few minutes jamming old chairs, trunks and boxes against the door at the head of the steps, just in case someone came looking for them with bad intentions.

The cellar smelled of mold and faded material, and spring floods that had soaked everything some years back. It was dirty and dark, only meager light coming through snow-covered windows.

There was one other door, to the outside, one of those slanted wood things that led down three steps to them. Sally had piled up more impediments to that passageway, but there was no way of really locking the doors. They could only forestall things.

“I wish we had a gun,” said Nikki.

“I wish we did too,” said Sally.

“I wish Daddy was here,” said Nikki.

Bob had a rare moment of visual freedom, a long, clean look into the stunted snow-covered trees at the base of the mountain. But he could see nothing, no movement, no hint of disturbance.

Then a bullet sang off the rock an inch beyond his face, kicking a puff of granite spray into his eye. He fell back, stifling a yell, and felt the telltale numbness that indicated some kind of trauma. But only for a second; then it lit into raw, harsh but meaningless pain, and he winced, driving more pain into the eye.

Goddamn him!

Solaratov had seen just the faintest portion of head exposed and he was on it that fast, putting a bullet an inch shy of the target. An inch at six hundred-odd meters. Could that son of a bitch shoot or what?

Swagger felt his eye puff, his lid flare, and he closed it, sensing the throb of pain. He touched the wounded sector of his face: blood, lots of it, from the stone spray, but nothing quite serious. He blinked, opened the eye, and saw hazily out of it. Not blind. Trapped but not blind, not yet.

The guy was so good.

No ranging shots; he got the range right every single time, had Bob pinned and eyeballed.

No goddamn ranging shots.

Solaratov had an odd gift, a perfect gift for estimating distance. It made the package complete. Some men had it, some didn’t. Some could learn it with experience, some couldn’t. It was in fact the weakest part of Swagger’s own game, his ability to estimate range. It had cost him a few shots over the years because he lacked the natural inclination to read distances while possessing in spades all the shooter’s other natural gifts.

Donny had a gift for it; Donny could look and tell you automatically. But Bob was so lame at it, he’d once spent a fortune on an old Barr & Stroud naval gunfire range finder, a complex, ancient optical instrument that with its many lenses and calibration gizmos could eventually work the farthest unknown distance into a recognizable quantity.

“Some day they’ll make ’em real small,” he remembered telling Donny at one lost moment or other.

“Then you won’t need a go-fer like me,” Donny had said with a laugh, “and I can sit the next war out.”

“Yes, you can,” Bob had said. “One war is enough.”

An idea flirted with him. From where? From Donny? Well, from somewhere over the long years. But it wasn’t solid yet: he just felt it beyond the screen of his consciousness, unformed, like a little bit of as-yet-unrecognizable melody.

This guy is so good. How can he be so good?

Donny had the answer. Donny wanted to tell him. Donny knew up in heaven or wherever he was, and Donny yearned somehow to tell him.

Tell me! he demanded.

But Donny was silent.

And down below Solaratov waited, scoping the rocks, waiting for just a bit of a sliver of a body part to show so he could nail it, and then get on with business.

He is so good.

He made great shots.

He hit Dade Fellows dead on, he hit Julie riding at an oblique angle flat out at over eight hundred meters, he was just the—

That scene replayed in his mind.

What was odd about it, he now saw, was how featureless it had been. A ridge on a mountain, with a wall of rock behind it, very little vegetation. It had been almost plain, almost abstract.

So?

So how did he range it?

There were no guidelines, no visual data, no known objects visible to make a range estimate, only the woman on the horse getting smaller as she got farther away on the oblique.

How did he know where to hold, when her range changed so radically after the first shot?

He must be a genius. He must just have the gift, the ability to somehow, by the freakish mechanics of the brain, to just know. Donny had that. Maybe it’s not so rare.

But then he knew. Or rather Donny told him, reaching across the years.

“You idiot,” Donny whispered hoarsely in his ear, “don’t you see it yet? Why he’s so good? It’s so obvious.”

Bob knew then why the man had shot at him as he fell but missed. The range had changed; he estimated the lead and got it slightly wrong and just missed. But once his target was still, he knew exactly the range. And that’s how he could hit Julie. He knew exactly. He solved the distance equation, and knew how far she was and where to hold to take her down.

He has a range finder, Bob thought. The son of a bitch has a range finder.

Solaratov looked at his watch. It was just past 0700. The light was now gray approaching white, a kind of sealed-off pewter kind of weather. The snow was falling harder and a little breeze had kicked up, tossing and twisting the flakes, pummeling as they rotated down. The wind got under the crack of his hood, where his flesh was sweaty, and cut him like a scythe. A little chill ran up his spine.

How long can I wait? he wondered.

Nobody was flying in for yet another few hours, but maybe they could get in with snowmobiles or plow the highway and get in that way.

A sudden, uncharacteristic uneasiness settled over him.

He made a list:

1.) Kill the sniper.

2.) Kill the woman.

3.) Kill the witnesses.

4.) Escape into the mountains.

5.) Contact the helo.

6.) Rendezvous.

An hour’s worth of work, he thought, possibly two.

He kept on the scope, the rifle cocked, his finger riding the curve of the trigger, his mind clear, his concentration intense.

How long can I stay at this level?

When do I have to blink, look away, yawn, piss, think of warmth, food, a woman?

He pivoted on the fulcrum of the log, running the scope along the ridge of rocks, looking for target indicators. More breath? A shadow out of place? Some disturbed snow? A regular line? A trace of movement? It would happen, it had to, for Swagger wouldn’t be content to wait. His nature would compel action and then compel doom.

He can’t see me.

He doesn’t know where I am.

It’s just a matter of time.

He tried to figure out a range finder. How do the goddamn things work? His old Barr & Stroud was mechanical, like a surveyor’s piece of equipment, with gears and lenses. That’s why it was so heavy. It was a combination binocular and adding machine: completely impractical.

But no modern shooter would have such a device: too old, too heavy, too delicate.

Laser. It has to work off a laser. It has to shoot a laser to an object, measure the time and make a sure, swift calculation off of that.

Lasers were everywhere. They used them to guide bombs, aim guns, operate on the eye, remove tattoos, imitate fireworks. But what kind of laser was this one?

Off the visible spectrum, since it projected no beam, no red dot.

Ultraviolet?

Infrared?

How could it be brought into the visible spectrum?

It’s a kind of light. How do I see it?

One idea: light being heat, if he could get Solaratov to project it through an ice mist, its heat would burn tracks in the snow. Then he could shoot back down the tracks and…

But that was absurd. Besides involving setting up some complex linkage of actions, any one of which could catch him a 7mm Magnum through the lungs, he didn’t even know if it would work.

Idea two: get Solaratov to shoot the laser through a piece of ice. It would bend, and send back some faulty reading. He would over- or undercompensate, miss and…

Insane. Unworkable.

Think! Think, Goddammit. How do I see it?

And then it occurred to him.

Would I see it on night vision? Would I see it in my goggles? Would they register it?

He picked them up where they lay, half in, half out of the snow, slid the harness over his skull, pulled the goggles down and snapped them on. They yielded a green dense landscape, as if the world had ended in water. The seas had risen. Green was everywhere. Nothing else was clear.

How can I get him to lase me again? He knew. He had to move one more time, change the range.

Solaratov would go to his laser range finder.

If it works, it’ll be like a neon sign in the green, saying I AM THE SNIPER.

Now something was happening.

He saw puffs of breath rising above a certain accumulation of boulders, signifying some kind of physical exertion. He watched and one of the rocks seemed somehow to tremble.

Is he moving the rock?

Why would he move the rock?

But in the same second, as he steadied himself, as the rock wobbled truly erratically, seemed to pause, and then tumbled ever so majestically forward, pulling a score of smaller rocks with it, uncurling a shroud of snow as it fell, he knew.

He’s trying to bury me, Solaratov thought.

He’s trying to start an avalanche, to send tons of snow down the mountain and bury me.

But it wasn’t going to work. Avalanche snow, Solaratov knew, was old snow, its structure eroded by melt, its moisture mostly evaporated, so that it was dry and treacherous, a network of unsafe stresses and fault lines. Then and only then could a single fracture cut out its underpinnings and send it crashing down. This avalanche would never go anywhere. The snow was too wet and new; it might fly a bit, but it wouldn’t build. It would peter out a few hundred yards down.

On top of that, clearly the man didn’t even know where he was. Even now, as the rocks and their screen of snow tumbled abortively down the hill, not picking up energy but losing it, they were on no course toward himself, but more or less to the right about one hundred yards. The falling snow simply could not reach him.

He almost chuckled at the futility of it, remembering that his quarry was a jungle fighter, not a man of the mountains.

The rocks tumbled, trailing snow, but down the slope where the angle flattened, they lost their energy and rolled to a halt.

Solaratov watched them tumble, then brought the rifle back to bear on the original line of rocks. As he was shifting it upward, he thought he made out a white shape sloshing desperately through the snow.

He rose above it, came back, could not quite find it and then did track it quickly, but never quite got the fraction of line between third and fourth mil-dots precisely on it.

He saw that Swagger had moved, literally floundering his way downhill to this new position. So? He was a few dozen meters closer? Now he had less maneuverability. What possible difference did it make? He had made his last mistake.

The game, Solaratov thought, is almost over.

He put down his rifle, picked up the binoculars and prepared to shoot a laser, just to verify the distance to the new position.

Bob came to the halted rocks and hit them with a whack, but couldn’t stop to acknowledge the pain. Instead he pulled himself up, put his head and shoulders over the top, flicked the night-vision goggles down as he snapped them on and peered desperately into the void. He knew he was violating every rule in U.S. Marine Corps Sniping FMFM1-3B, which tells snipers never, ever to look over an obstacle, for that makes you too obvious to counterfire; no, you drop to your haunches and look around it. But he didn’t have the time.

There was no definition in the green murk, no shape, no depth, nothing but flat, vaguely phosphorescent green. He scanned, registered this nothingness, but was too intense to feel much in the way of despair, even if he knew he was hung out over the lip of the rock and that Solaratov could take him in an instant.

He waited. A second, then another, finally a third yanked by like trains slowed by the sludgy blood his heart pumped.

Nothing.

Maybe the laser wasn’t visible in the spectrum of the goggles. Who knew of such stuff? Maybe the laser ranging device was part of some advanced scope he knew nothing about, and it would announce itself, but be followed in another nanosecond by close to 1,500 foot-pounds of Remington 7mm Magnum arriving to erase him from the earth.

Maybe he’s not there. Maybe he’s moved, he’s working his way up another slope, he’s flanked me, and now he’s just taking his time.

Two more seconds dribbled by, each encapsulating a lifetime, until Bob knew he could wait no longer, and as he began to duck back into a world of zero possibility, here it came, at last.

The yellow streak was like a crack in the wall of the universe. It pinged right at him from nothingness and lasted but an instant, but there it was, a straight line as the shooter below measured the distance to the shooter above.

Bob locked the source of the brief beam into his muscle memory and his sense of time and space. He could not move a muscle, an atom; he could not disturb the rigidity of his body, for it all depended on holding that invisible point before himself in the infinity of his mind as he brought the rifle up in one smooth, whipping motion and in to his shoulder and did not move his head to find the scope but moved the scope to that precise lock of his vision.

The scope flew before him and he saw nothing, even as his hands locked around the pistol grip and his finger found the curve of the trigger, caressed its delicacy, felt and loved its tension and sought to be one with it. He felt no tension, not now: here was the rest of his life; here was everything.

And as he flung away the goggles with a toss of his head, here was his ancient enemy. Bob saw the sniper, swaddled behind a horizontal trunk, his shape barely recognizable in the swirl of pewter-to-white dappling of the snow and his arctic warfare camouflaging, only the line of the rifle rising as it came toward Bob, hard and regular.

So many years, he thought, as he closed his focus down until he saw only the harsh cruciform of the reticle, made a slight correction to shoot lower to compensate for the downward angle, and then, without willing it as the reticle became such a statement of clarity it seemed to fill the whole universe, the trigger went and he fired.

You never hear the one that gets you.

Solaratov was on his target, racing through the excitement of knowing that at long last he had him, but he hesitated for just a second to compute the new range. And then he realized that the man above was aimed — incredibly — at him.

He felt no pain, only shock.

He seemed to be in the center of an explosion. Then time stopped, he was briefly removed from the universe, and when he was reinserted into it, he was not an armed man with a rifle boring in on a target but a supine man in the cold snow, amid a splatter of blood. His own breath spurted out raggedly, white cloud and red spray sending broken signals upward.

Someone was drunkenly playing a broken accordion or a damaged pipe organ nearby. The music had no melody, was only a whine with a slight edge or buzz to it. Sucking chest wound. Left side, left lung gone, blood pouring out both exit and entrance wounds. Blood everywhere.

Internal damage total. Death near. Death coming. Death at last, his old friend, come to pick him up.

He blinked, disbelieving, and wondered at the alchemy by which such a result could have been engineered.

His life flashed and fled, dissolved in a blur, went away and came back.

He thought: I’m gone.

He wondered if he had the strength to gather the rifle, find a position and wait for the man until he bled to death, but the man would not be foolish.

He thought next of how the mission had redefined itself.

To kill the man who had killed him meant nothing. There was no escape. The only option left was: failure or success.

He pulled himself up, saw the house five hundred yards away through the snowy trees and felt he could make it. He could make it, for the shooter would now lay low, unsure as to whether or not the sniper was dead.

He could make it to the house, get in, and with that little Glock pistol finish the job that had killed him.

That would be his legacy in the world: he finished the last job. He did it. He was successful.

Finding the strength somewhere, amazed at how clear it all seemed, he headed off, bleeding, in a winter wonderland.

Swagger lay close to the rock for a minute or so, recalling the sight picture: the reticle, swollen in the intensity of his focus so that it was big and bold as a fist, held low on the covering tree because you hold low when shooting downward, so that the bullet would hit center chest, a nice big target. But it’s tricky: the rifle was zeroed for five hundred yards, according to his shooter’s instructions, but maybe the man who zeroed it held it slightly differently than he did; maybe there was a twig, a branch slightly unresolved in the 10X power of the scope. Maybe there was a wind he didn’t feel, a sierra blowing around the contour of the mountain.

But the sight picture was as perfect as it could be. It was held where it should be held, and if he had to call the shot, he’d call it a hit.

He edged around the right, squinting out. He tried to find the shooting site of his enemy, but it was much harder to see from this angle. Instead, he scanned back and forth in what he determined was the proper sector, and saw nothing, no movement, no anything. He finally found the fallen tree he was convinced had supported his enemy, but there was no sign of him, there was no sign of disturbance in the snow. A spot, a little farther back, could have been blood, but it was impossible to tell. It could also have been a black stone, a broken limb.

He lowered the rifle, slipped down the nightscope lenses and watched in the murk for a while. It stayed green, uncut by the flick of a laser.

Did I hit him?

Is he dead?

How much time should I give him?

A dozen scenarios instantly occurred to him. Maybe Solaratov had moved to a fallback position. Maybe he had moved laterally. Maybe he was even advancing on him. He might even be headed now toward the house, certain he had Bob trapped.

That last seemed the most logical. After all, the job was to hit the woman, not Swagger. Swagger’s death had no real meaning; Julie’s had all the meaning.

And if he were seen, he’d kill witnesses too.

Bob took a deep breath.

Then he pushed himself up, scuttled down a few yards, turned angles obliquely, dodged, jumped, found cover. He tried to make himself difficult to hit, knowing he could not make himself impossible to hit.

But no shot came.

From his new cover his angle was lower, so his view of the valley was less distinct. He could only see a bit of the flatland through the snowy trees, and could see nothing moving on it, approaching the house. But his target would be camouflaged, moving at angles, dropping, easily evading him.

His heart was beating rapidly. There was no breath left in his lungs. The planet seemed scorched dry of oxygen.

He pulled himself out and moved at the assault again.

He fell twice in the snow and almost blacked out the second time. And when he looked up, the house seemed no closer.

His mind raced; it would not stay where he put it. He thought of sight pictures, of men going limp against reticles, of long stalks in mountains and jungles and cities. He had hunted in them all and been victorious in them all.

He thought of the crawl with the sandbag, the long, slow crawl outside the American fort and the earlier moment when they had him, and then the large black plane, like a vulture, hung in the air for just a split second before its guns pulverized the universe.

He thought of the times he’d been hit: over the years, it amounted to no less than twenty-two wounds, though two were blade wounds, one inflicted by an Angolan, one by a mujahideen woman. He thought of thirst, fear, hunger, discomfort. He thought of rifles. He thought of the past and the future, which was running out quickly.

He rose the last time, and stumbled through the snow, which fought him. It was not cold. The snow still fell, harder now, in swirls and pinwheels, dancing in the wind, the heavy damp flakes of Eastern European cities.

Where am I?

What has happened?

Why has it happened?

But then he was at the house.

All was silent.

He bent to the storm cellar door, pulled hard, even as he reached inside his coat and drew out the Glock pistol.

A nail seemed to hold him back. He felt the door want to yield but hang up. He pulled harder, finding strength somewhere in the backwash of his mind, and with a crack, the nail gave and he pulled the door open. It revealed three cement steps down into a dark entrance that looked jammed with clutter.

He slid by the door and stepped down into the darkness, aware only marginally that he had made it. He felt clear-eyed, suddenly, recommitted to his purpose, certain of what he must do.

He kicked his way through the impediments: a saw-horse, a bicycle, bed springs, boxes of old newspapers, and as he got through he felt the door slam shut behind him, sealing him off in the darkness. He took another step, kicking things aside, looking and waiting for his vision to clear. He smelled moisture, mildew, rot, old leather and paper, decaying material, ancient wood.

Then he could see them.

They were over against the far wall, huddled under the steps, two women and a girl clutching each other, crying.

Swagger made it into the treeline. This is where he needed a pistol, a short, handy, fast-firing weapon with a lot of firepower. But the Beretta was somewhere up the mountain, buried under a ton of snow.

He carried the rifle like a submachine gun in the low assault position, poking through the woods as he closed from the flank on the sniper’s hide.

He paused, waiting, listening. There was no sound, no sense of life at all in the haunted place. Branches and bushes distended by heavy, moist, fresh snow stood out in extravagant shapes like a display of modern art. Through the gray, the snow fell, swirling.

Bob’s breath rose above him, then parted. He advanced slowly. If the sniper was here, he was well hidden, completely disciplined.

He could see the fallen tree, and then made out the disturbance in the snow where the man had supported himself while shooting upward.

Bob slid as silently as he could on the oblique through the heavy trees, trying to shake no snow loose, and at last came to the site, paused a second, then stepped behind the cover to put his rifle muzzle on the man. But nobody was there. He heard only his own harsh breath heaving in the cold.

The blood told the story.

Solaratov had been hit bad. His rifle lay in the snow; the ranging binoculars were there too. A raspberry sherbet marked where he’d bled most profusely, driven to the ground by the impact of the .308.

Got him! Bob thought, but the moment of exultation never fully developed, for in the next seconds he read the tracks and the blood trail and saw that the man, seriously wounded but nothing like dead, had moved back through the trees toward the house.

At that moment he heard a bang, which could have been a shot, but it wasn’t. He turned and saw through the trees the house and a little puff of flung snow. That helped identify the sound. It had been the sound of a heavy cellar door closing, and when it had slammed shut, it had vibrated free a cloud of snow.

He’s in there with my family, Bob thought.

He had a rooted moment of terror. It felt like ice sliding down through his body, smooth and unbearably cold, numbing all the organs it brushed as it rushed through him.

But some part of his brain refused to panic, and he saw what he must do.

He raced to pick up the 7mm Remington Magnum, for the three hundred extra feet of velocity and the five hundred extra pounds of energy and, throwing aside his parka, ran, ran like a fool on fire or in love, not toward the house, which was too far, but for a good, straight-in angle on the door.

They heard the door creak as someone tried to pull on it.

“Oh, God,” said Sally.

“Over here,” instructed Julie.

She grabbed her daughter, and with the younger woman they fled to the back of the cellar, but only as far as the brick wall. There was no escape, for the stairwell up was jammed with junk to keep the same man out.

They fell back and cowered when the door cracked open, then was yanked wide, filling the dark space with light, destroying their adjusted vision.

He lumbered wheezily down the steps, kicking the junk aside like an enraged, drunken father home late from a night with the boys, come home to beat his wife. It stirred something deep in Julie, a memory of dread long buried, never examined. The cellar door slammed behind him, and he kicked more stuff aside until he came into the center of the room.

He blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust, but he was everything they could possibly fear: a muscular gray savage dressed in white, except that a profuse smear of blood had irrigated a raggedy delta from a source on his chest, leaking down to his trousers and his boots.

He had a gray, blunt face, a crew cut and wintry little eyes. He smiled madly, and blood showed on his teeth. He coughed, and it erupted from his mouth. He seemed barely conscious, seemed almost to fall, but he stopped, caught himself and looked at them fiercely. He was insane with pain, his eyes lit weirdly, his whole body trembling.

The gun muzzle played across them all.

She stepped out.

The killer laughed for some strange reason, and another spurt of blood came from his mouth down to splash on his chest. His lungs were full of blood. He was drowning in it. Why wouldn’t he fall?

He lifted the pistol until it pointed into her face.

Julie heard her baby crying, heard the intake of Sally’s breath and thought of her husband and the man she’d loved before, the only two men she could ever love. She closed her eyes.

But he did not fire.

She opened them.

He had fallen halfway, but then he pulled himself up, and thrust the gun at her, his eyes filling with mad determination.

Bob ran until he had a good angle into the door.

He’ll stop. He has to wait for his eyes to adjust.

He saw it. The man would step into the darkness and pause as his eyes adjusted. He’d be there, just beyond the door, for the length of time it took his pupils to adjust. With Solaratov, that interval would be a second or so.

He dropped to one knee, braced the rifle on his leg, found the good shooting position. It was five hundred yards if it was an inch, but that had to be the zero on the rifle, for Solaratov had come so close to him so often.

Without thinking, he wrapped the sling tight about his left, supporting arm as he slipped into a good Marine Corps position, feeling a bite of pain from the opened wound, but leaning through it. He took three breaths, building up his oxygen, and looked for his natural point of aim as something in him screamed Faster! Faster! and another part cooed Slower, slower. He laid the crosshairs dead-center on the door, just a patch of gray wood smeared with snow, and prayed for the extra oomph of the 7mm to do its thing.

He had one moment of clarity, and at the subliminal level willed all he knew of shooting into the effort: the relaxation of the finger, trained over the hard years; the discipline of the respiratory cycle, and the rhythm of deeper and shallower exhalation; the cooperation of rods and cones in the back wall of the eye, the orchestration of pupil, eye and lens, and the overall guidance and wisdom of the retina; but most of all, that deep, willed plunge into stillness, where the world is gray and almost gone, yet at the same time sharp and clear.

Nothing matters, the man coached himself when things mattered most.

And then it was gone as the rifle fired, kicked against him, blowing the sight picture to nothing but blur, and when he came back on target he saw a mushroom of snow mist floating from the vibes where the bullet had blasted through the wood.

The pistol settled down; she saw the hugeness of its bore just feet away from her and then felt—

Splatter in her face, a sense of mist or fog suddenly filling the air, a meaty vapor.

Mixed into this sensation was a sound which was that of wood splitting.

In it too was a grunt, almost involuntary, as if lungs gurgled, somehow human.

She found herself wet with droplets that proved to be warm and heavy: blood.

The sniper transfigured before her. What had been the upper quadrant of his face had somehow been pulped, ripped open, revealing a terrible wound of splintered bone and spurting blood. One eye looked dead as a nickle; the other was gone in the mess. Even as these details were fixing themselves in her memory, he fell sideways with a thump, his head banging on the cement floor, exposing the ragged entry wound in the corresponding rear quadrant of the skull, where the bones now seemed broken and frail.

A single light beam came through the cellar door where the bullet had passed.

She looked down, saw the stumpy little man fallen like a white angel into a red pool, as his satiny blood spread ever wider from his ruined face.

She turned to her daughter and her friend, who regarded her with mouths agape, and horror, more than relief, registering in both their eyes.

Then she spoke with perfect deliberation:

“Daddy’s home.”

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

He had not fired a second time because he had no more ammunition. But in another second, the cellar door had been flung open and he recognized Sally, leaping to signal him that it was over.

By the time Bob got to the house, three Air Force Hueys and a state police helicopter had landed and more were on their way. Then another Air Force job, a big Blackhawk, arrived and disgorged still more staff. It almost looked like an advanced firebase when the war was at its hottest, the way the choppers kept ferrying people in.

He got the news immediately: everybody was all right, though medics were attending them. The sniper was dead.

His own wounds were tended: an emergency technician resewed, with anesthetic, the gash in his thigh that had opened up under the pressure of all the moving and jumping, and then picked stone and bullet fragments out of his face and eye for half an hour, before disinfecting, then covering the raw cuts with gauze. Nothing appeared to have hit the eye proper; more shooter’s luck.

There was little to be done about the back wound. It had penetrated his camouflage and grazed the flesh of his back, scoring both burn and bruise. But other than disinfectant, only time and painkillers would make it go away.

A cop wanted to take a statement, but Bonson pulled rank and declared the ranch a federal crime site, until corroborating FBI agents could chopper in within the hour from Boise. In the cellar, a state police crime team worked the body of the dead sniper, hit twice, once through the left lung, once in the back of the head.

“Great shooting,” said a cop. “You want to take a look at your handiwork?”

But Swagger had no desire to see the fallen man. What good would it do? He felt nothing except that he’d seen enough corpses.

“I’d rather see my daughter and my wife,” he said.

“Well, your wife is being treated by our medical people. We’ve got to debrief her as soon as possible. Mrs. Memphis is with Nikki.”

“Can I go?”

“They’re in the kitchen.”

He walked through a strange house full of strangers. People talked on radios, and computers had been set up. A squad of uninteresting young people hung about, talking shop, clearly agitated at the prospect of a big treat. He remembered when Agency people were all ex-FBI men, beefy cop types, who carried Swedish Ks and liked to talk about “pegging gooks.” These boys and girls looked like they belonged in prep school, but they sure made themselves at home, with the instant insouciance of the young.

He walked through them, and they parted, and he could feel their wonder. What would they make of him: his kind of war was so far from their kind it probably made no sense.

He found Sally in the kitchen, and next to her, there was his baby girl. These were the moments worth living for. Now he knew why he bothered to survive Vietnam.

“Hi, baby!”

“Oh, Daddy,” she said, her eyes widening with deep pleasure. He felt a warmth in his heart so intense he might melt. His child. Through it all, after it all, his own: flesh, blood, brains. She flew to him and he absorbed her tininess, felt her vitality as he picked her up and hugged her passionately.

“Oh, you sweet thing!” he sang. “You are the sweetest thing there is.”

“Oh, Daddy. They say you shot the bad man!”

He laughed.

“You never mind that. How are you? How’s Mommy?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. It was scary. He came into the basement with a gun.”

“Well, he won’t bother you no nevermore, all right?”

She clung to him. Sally fixed him with her usual gimlet eye.

“Bob Swagger,” she said, “you are a mean and ornery piece of work, and you aren’t much of a husband or a father, but by God, you do have a gift for the heroic.”

“I can see you’re still my biggest fan, Sally,” he said. “Well, anyhow, thanks for hanging around.”

“It sure was interesting. How are you?”

“My back hurts,” he said. “So does my leg and my eye. I am plenty hungry. And there’re too goddamned many young people out there. I hate young people. How is she?”

“She’s fine. We’re all fine. Nobody was hurt. But only just barely. Another tenth of a second and he would have pulled that trigger.”

“Well, to hell with him if he can’t take a joke.”

“I’ll leave you two alone.”

“See if you can get one of these Harvard kids to fix some coffee.”

“They probably don’t do coffee, and there isn’t a Starbucks around, but I’ll see what I can manage.”

And so he sat with his baby daughter in the kitchen and caught up on the news and told her about the superficiality of his wounds and made a promise he hoped he’d now be able to keep: to return with her and her mother to Arizona, and resume the good life they had together.

In half an hour a young man came to him. “Mr. Swagger?”

“Yes?”

“We’re going to have to debrief your wife now. She’s asked that you be present.”

“All right.”

“She’s very insistent. She won’t talk unless you’re there.”

“Sure, she’s spooked.”

“This way, sir.”

Sally came back to take care of Nikki.

“Sweetie,” he said to his daughter, “I’m going to go with these people to talk to Mommy. You stay here with Aunt Sally.”

“Daddy!”

She gave him a last hug, and he now saw how deeply she’d been traumatized. The war had come to her: she’d seen what few Americans ever saw anymore — combat death, the power of the bullet on flesh.

“Sweetie, I’ll be back. Then this’ll be over. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

They took him upstairs. The Agency team had set up in a bedroom, pushing aside the bed and dresser and installing a sofa from the living room and a group of chairs. Cleverly, they weren’t arranged before the sofa, as if to seat an audience, but rather in a semicircle, as if in a group counseling session. Tape-recording equipment had been installed, and computer terminals.

The room was crowded and hushed, but finally, he saw her. He walked through the milling analysts and agents, and found her, sitting alone on the sofa. She looked composed now, though her arm was still locked in its cast. She’d insisted on dressing and wore some jeans and a sweatshirt and her boots. She had a can of Diet Coke.

“Well, hello there,” he said.

“Well, hello yourself,” she said with a smile.

“You’re okay, they say.”

“Well, it’s a little bothersome when a Russian comes into your house and points a gun at you and then your husband blows half his head away. I’m damn lucky to have a husband who could do such a thing.”

“Oh, I’m such a big hero. Sweetie, I just pulled a trigger.”

“Oh, baby.”

He held her tight and it was fine: his wife; he’d slept next to her for years now, the same strong, tough beautiful woman, about as good as they made them. Her smell was achingly familiar. Strawberries, she smelled of strawberries always. He first saw her in a picture wrapped in cellophane that came from a young Marine’s boonie hat. The rain was falling. There was a war. He fell in love with her then and never came close to falling out in all the years since.

“Where did you come from?” she said. “How did you get here so fast?”

“They didn’t tell you? Damn idiot me, I got me a new hobby. I parachuted through the storm. Pretty exciting.”

“Oh, Bob.”

“I never been so scared in my life. If I’d had clean underwear, I’d have pissed in the ones I was wearing. Only, I didn’t have no clean underwear.”

“Oh, Bob—”

“We’ll talk about all that stuff. That’s up ahead.”

“What in hell is this all about?” she finally asked. “He came for me? That’s what these people say.”

“Yeah. It has to do with something that happened a long time ago. I have it half figured. These geniuses think they know all the answers, or they can figure them. You up to this?”

“Yes. I just want it over.”

“Then we’ll get it all straightened out, I swear to you.”

“I know.”

“Bonson?”

Bonson came over.

“She’s ready.”

“That’s terrific, Mrs. Swagger. We’ll try and make this as easy as possible. Are you comfortable? Do you want anything? Another Coke?”

“No, I’m fine. I want my husband here, that’s all.”

“That’s fine.”

“Okay, people,” Bonson said in a louder voice, “we’re all set. The debriefing can begin.”

He turned back to her.

“I have two lead analysts who’ll run this. They’re both psychologists. Just relax, take your time. You’re under no pressure of any sort. This is not adversarial and it has no legal standing. It’s not an interrogation. In fact, we’ll probably share things with you that you are not security-cleared to hear. But that’s all right. We want this to be easy for you, and for you not to sense reluctance or authority or power or discretion on our part. If you can, try and think of us as your friends, not your government.”

“Should I salute?” she said.

Bonson laughed.

“No. Nor will we be playing the national anthem or waving any flags. It’s just a chat between friends. Now, let us set up things for you, so you have some idea of a context in which this inquiry is taking place, and why your information is so vital.”

“Sure.”

It began. The crowd settled, the kids obediently found chairs, and Julie sat relaxed on the couch. There were no harsh lights. One of the questioners cleared his throat, and began to speak.

“Mrs. Swagger, for reasons as yet unclear to us, factions within Russia have sent an extremely competent professional assassin to this country to kill you. That’s extraordinarily venturesome, even for them. You probably wonder why, and so do we. So in the past seventy-two hours, we’ve been poring through old records, trying to find something that you might know that would make your death important to someone over there. May I begin by assuming you have no idea?”

“Nothing. I’ve never talked knowingly to a Russian in my life.”

“Yes, ma’am. But we’ve put this into a larger pattern. It seems that three other people in your circle in the year 1971 were also killed under circumstances that suggest possible Soviet or Russian involvement. One is your first husband—”

Julie gasped involuntarily.

“This may be painful,” Bonson said.

Bob touched her shoulder.

“It’s all right,” she said.

The young man continued, “Your husband, Donny Fenn, killed in the Republic of South Vietnam 6 May 1972. Another was a young man who was active with you in the peace movement, named Peter Farris, discovered dead with a broken neck, 6 October 1971, dead for several months at the time. And the third was another peace demonstrator of some renown, named Thomas Charles ‘Trig’ Carter III, killed in a bomb blast at the University of Wisconsin 9 May 1971.”

“I knew Peter. He was so harmless. I only met Trig once … twice, actually.”

“Hmmmm. Can you think of a specific circumstance that united the four of you? Marine, peace demonstrators, 1971?”

“We were all involved in one of the last big demonstrations, May Day of that year. The three of us as demonstrators, Donny as a Marine.”

“Julie,” said Bonson, “we’re thinking less of an ideological unification here and more of a specific, geographic one. A time, a place, not an idea. And a private place, too.”

“The farm,” she finally said.

There was no sound.

Finally, Bonson prompted her.

“The farm,” he said.

“Donny was distraught over an assignment he’d been asked to do.”

Bob looked at Bonson and saw nothing, just the face of a smooth, professional actor in the role of concerned intelligence executive. No flicker of emotion, grief, doubt, regrets: nothing. Bonson didn’t even blink, and Julie, remembering nothing of him and his role in what had happened, went on.

“He believed this Trig, of whom he thought so highly, might have some idea what he should do with his ethical dilemma. We went to Trig’s house in DC but he wasn’t there. Donny remembered that he was going out to a farm near Germantown. I think Peter may have followed us. Peter thought he was in love with me.”

“What did you see on that farm?” asked the young analyst.

She laughed.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. What can have been so important about it?”

“We’d like to know.”

“There was a man. An Irishman named Fitzpatrick. He and Trig were loading fertilizer into a van. It was very late at night.”

“How clearly did you see him?”

“Very. I was just out of the light, maybe fifteen, twenty-five feet away. I don’t think he ever saw me. Donny, for some reason, wanted me to stay back. So he and Trig and this Fitzpatrick talked for a few minutes. Then Fitzpatrick left. Then Donny and Trig talked some more and finally hugged. Then we left. There was some kind of agent in the hills. He got our picture — Donny’s and mine — as we drove away. Donny’s mostly. I was ducking. And that’s it.”

“That’s it.”

“Do you remember Fitzpatrick?”

“I suppose.”

“Do you think you’d be able to describe—”

“No,” said Bonson. “Go straight to the pictures.”

“Mrs. Swagger, we’d like to have you look at some pictures. They’re pictures of a variety of politicians, espionage agents, lawyers, scientists, military, mostly in the old Eastern Bloc, but some are genuinely Irish, some English, some French. They’re all in their forties or fifties, so you’ll have to imagine them as they’d have been in 1971.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Just take your time.”

One of the kids walked across the room and handed her a sheaf of photographs. She flipped through them slowly, stopping now and then to sip on her Coke can.

“Could I have another Coke?” she asked at one time.

Somebody raced out.

Bob watched as the gray, firm faces slid by, men possibly his own age or older, most of them dynamic in appearance, with square, ruddy faces, lots of hair, the unmistakable imprint of success.

They were hunting for a mole, he realized. They thought that somehow — was this Bonson’s madness? — this Fitzpatrick had implanted someone in the fabric of the West, prosperous and powerful, but that his heart still belonged to the East, or what remained of it. If they could solve the mystery of Fitzpatrick, they could solve the mystery of the mole.

Bob felt an odd twist of bitterness. That war, the cold one, it really had nothing to do with the little hot dirty one that had consumed so many men he had known and so wantonly destroyed his generation. Who’ll stop the rain? It wasn’t even about the rain.

“No,” she said. “He’s not here, I’m sorry.”

“Okay, let’s go to the citizens.”

Another file of photos was provided.

“Take your time,” said one of the debriefers. “Remember, he’ll be heavier, balder, he may have facial hair, he—”

“Mel, I think Julie understands that,” said Bonson.

Julie was quiet. She flipped through the pictures, now and then pausing. But another pile disappeared without a moment of recognition. Another pile was brought, this time designated “security nationals.”

She had a possible, but paused, and then it too went to the discards, though into a separate category of “almosts.”

But then, finally, there were no more pictures.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

The disappointment in the room was palpable.

“Okay,” Bonson finally said. “Let’s knock off for a while. Julie, why don’t you take a break? Maybe a walk, stretch your legs. We’ll have to do it the hard way.”

“What does that mean?” she asked. “Drugs? Torture?”

“No, we’ll get you together with a forensic artist. He’ll draft a drawing from your instructions. We’ll get our computers to run a much wider comparison on a much wider database. Mel, be sure to get the ‘almosts’ too. Have Mr. Jefferson factor those in too. That’ll get us another bunch of candidates. We’ve got food. Would you care for some lunch or a nap or something?”

“I’m fine. I think I’d like to check on my daughter.”

She and Bob walked downstairs and found Nikki — asleep. She was stretched across Sally’s lap, snoozing gently, pinning Sally with her fragile weight.

“I can’t even get up,” said Sally.

“I’ll take her.”

“No, that’s okay. These child geniuses got the cable running. The remote even works now. It didn’t. See.”

She held up the little device and punched a few buttons and the picture flicked across the channels: Lifetime, CNN, Idaho Public TV, HBO, the Discovery Channel, ESPN, CNN Headline N—

“My God,” said Julie. “Oh, my God.”

“What?” Bob said, and from around the house, others looked in, came to check.

“That’s him,” said Julie. “My God, yes, fatter now, healthier; yes, that’s him. That’s Fitzpatrick!” She was pointing at the television, where a powerful, dynamic man was giving an impromptu news conference in a European city.

“Jesus,” said one of the kids, “that’s Evgeny Pashin, the next president of Russia.”

The second meeting was smaller, more informal. It was after lunch, prepared in an Air Force mess tent set up outside the house.

Surprisingly good, nourishing food, too. More to the point, someone had come up with a nice batch of Disney videos for Nikki, that is, when she got back from a sledding diversion with three state troopers.

Now, Julie and Bob sat upstairs with a much smaller contingent, the inner circle, as it were.

“Julie,” said Bonson, “we’re going to discuss the meaning of this right here, before you and your husband. That’s because I want you on the inside now, not on the outside. I’m drawing the two of you in. You’re not civilians. I want you to feel like you’re part of the team. You will, in fact, both be paid as agency consultants; we pay well, you’ll see.”

“Fine,” she said. “We could use the money.”

“Now, I’m not even going to ask you if you’re sure. I know you’re sure. But I have to say: this guy has been on TV a lot lately. Can you explain why it’s only now that you recognize him?”

“Mr. Bonson, have you ever been a mother?”

There was some laughter.

“No,” he admitted.

“Have you ever been the wife to a somewhat melancholy yet incredibly heroic man, particularly as he’s feeling his life has been taken from him by some unnecessary publicity and we had to move from one location to another?”

“No, no, I haven’t,” said Bonson.

“Well, I was both, simultaneously. Does that suggest to you why I wasn’t watching much TV?” “Yes, it does.”

“Now, today, you take me back. You force me to think about faces. I pick several faces that are somewhat similar in structure to his. I’m working on re-creating that face in my own mind. Do you see?”

“Yes.”

“The points are all well made,” Bonson said. “Well then, let’s throw it open for general discussion. Can someone tell me what possible meaning this has?”

“Sir, I think I can explain the sequencing.”

“Go ahead,” said Bonson.

“In 1971, four people saw Pashin operating undercover in this country as this Fitzpatrick. That is, really interfaced with him in commission of his duties. Three were eliminated quickly. But they had no ID on the fourth, and as I recollect, according to official Marine Corps records, Mrs. Swagger’s first marriage to Donny Fenn was unrecorded.”

“That’s right,” said Julie. “I received no benefits. It didn’t matter to me. I didn’t want anything to do with the Marine Corps. Although I ended up marrying it.”

“But,” continued the analyst, “they have a bad picture of her, the one they got at the farm. They can’t ID it. It haunts them over the years. The decades pass. SovUn breaks up. Pashin is no longer GRU, he’s part of PAMYAT, the nationalist party. He begins his political career. He’s handsome, heroic, the brother of a martyred nationalist hero, has lots of mafia backing; he’s scaring the old-line commies, he’s within a few weeks of winning an election and control of twenty thousand nukes. Then, two months ago, a picture of Bob Lee Swagger appears in The National Star and subsequently in Time and Newsweek, who call him ‘America’s most violent man.’ If you recall: it was a picture snapped by a Star photographer of Bob coming out of church in Arizona, with his wife. Her picture appears in the national media. And it contains the information that Bob is married to his spotter’s widow. Donny’s widow, the woman who got away, who’s been haunting them all these years. The last survivor of that night on the farm. Suddenly, it becomes clear to PAMYAT and all the interests betting on Pashin that one witness from his undercover days still exists and can still put him on that farm. All right? So … from that point on, they have to take her out, and her husband’s gaudy past certainly provides a kind of pretext.”

“That’s sequencing,” said Bonson. “Fine, good, it makes sense. It’s a theory that fits. But still … why?”

“Ah, he was involved with a famous peace demonstrator in blowing up a building.”

“So?”

“Well…”

Bonson argued savagely, trying to compel the young man to a next leap. “It’s widely known he had an intelligence background. It’s known in some circumstances that the peace movement had some East Bloc involvement. Actually, that might help his candidacy in today’s Russia. I don’t understand why the same security mandates would be operational twenty-seven years later. They were protecting assets then. What can they be protecting now? Ideas, anybody?”

None of the senior people had any.

“Well, then, we’re sort of stuck, aren’t we?” said Bonson. “It’s very interesting, but we still don’t—”

“Should I explain it to you now, or do you want to yammer on a bit?” asked Bob.

“You ain’t got it yet, Bonson,” said Bob. “You still bought into the cover story. You still look at the cover story and you don’t see the real story. And all your smart boys, too.”

“Well, Sergeant,” said Bonson evenly, “then go ahead. You explain the real story.”

“I will. You missed the big news. There was a bomb explosion at the University of Wisconsin 9 May 1971 all right. A kid named Trig Carter blew himself up protesting the war in Vietnam. Maybe most of you are too young to remember it, but I do. He gave his life to peace. He was a rich kid, could have had anything, but he gave his life up for his ideals. They even wrote books about him. He may have been brave, too. I don’t know.

“But the one name you won’t find in that book or in any other books about the peace movement or the history of our country in 1971 is the name Ralph Goldstein. Anybody here recognize it?”

There was silence in the room.

“That’s the big story. Ralph Goldstein was the doctoral student who was killed that night in the University of Wisconsin Math Center. Jewish boy, twenty-seven, married, from Skokie, Illinois. Went to the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus, not a very impressive school compared to the fancy schools where Trig Carter went. He didn’t know nobody. He just did his work and tried to get his degree and do his research. Smart as a whip, but very obscure. Never went to no demonstrations, smoked no dope, got no free love, or nothing. I did something nobody has yet done: I went and talked to his son, now himself a very bright kid. I hope nobody don’t blow him up.”

He could feel their eyes on him. He cracked a little smile. All the pointy heads, listening to him.

“But Ralph Goldstein had published a paper in Duke Higher Mathematics Quarterly, which he called ‘Certain Higher Algorhythmic Functions of Topographical Form Reading in Orbital Applications.’ Don’t mean a thing to me. But guess what? We now got about 350 satellites in orbit watching the world because Ralph Goldstein figured out the math of it. He was only a grad student, and he himself didn’t even know it, but he’d been picked to join the staff at the Satellite Committee at the Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Lab in Maryland, where they did all the high-power number crunching that made the satellite program possible. Okay, so what his death meant practically was it took us three extra years to get terrain-recognition birds in the air. If it matters, that’s three years where the Sovs upgraded their own satellite program, and closed a gap in the Cold War. That’s three more years that kept them in the race. Which one of you geniuses or experts can tell me which part of Soviet staff was responsible for strategic warfare?”

“GRU,” came the reply.

“That’s right. And what was Pashin?”

“GRU.”

“That’s right. So guess what? His job wasn’t to stop the war in Vietnam. He didn’t give a shit about the war in Vietnam, or about Trig Carter or about nothing. It was to kill a little Jewish guy in an office in Madison, Wisconsin, who was just about to put the Americans way ahead in the Cold War. Kill him in such a way that no one would ever, in a hundred years, think it had to do with the Russians. Kill him in such a way that no one would even think about his death but only about the death of the man who killed him. To make him an extra in his own murder. That was Pashin’s mission: it was straight GRU wet work, a murder job. Trig Carter and the peace movement were just part of the props.”

He could hear them breathing heavily in the room, but no one spoke.

“And don’t you see the cynicism in it, the goddamned motherfucking brilliance? They knew this country so goddamn well. They just knew that when any of you Ivy League heroes looked at that data, you couldn’t see past Trig, because, no matter which side he was on, he was one of you. That would be the tragedy, and the fog it would release in your little pea fucking brains would keep you from ever figuring it out. It takes an outsider, someone who ain’t been to no college and doesn’t think the word Harvard or Yale means shit in this world. It takes guttertrash rednecks who you all pay to do the dirty work with the rifles so you can sit in your clubs and make ironic little jokes. Or plan your little wars that the Swaggers and the Fenns and the Goldsteins have to go fight.”

The silence lasted for a long moment.

Then finally, Bonson spoke: “Class anger aside, does this make any sense to you Skull and Bones boys?”

It took a while, but finally someone said, almost laconically, “Yeah, it makes perfect sense. It even explains why it’s happening now. It puts them in a desperate situation. They — that’s PAMYAT, the old GRU security bunch hiding behind nationalism and financed by mob money — have to keep this information quiet. They couldn’t take a chance that just as he’s closing in on the presidency, their man is revealed as a murderer of American nationals on American soil. That would make it impossible for him to work with any American president or with big American corporations. That information has to be buried at all costs. Their lives, their futures, their party depend on it. They had to eliminate the last witness, particularly as Pashin’s fame is getting bigger and bigger.”

“Sir,” said someone else, “I think we could game out some very interesting tactical deployment for this information. We might have a hand ourselves in determining who their next president is.”

“Okay,” said Bonson, “you game it out. But I want it going in one direction. I want to kill this motherfucker.”