Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

My great friends and enthusiastic readers Lenne P. Miller, Bill Smart, Jay Carr, Jeff Weber, and Mike Hill were extremely supportive and enthusiastic. My editor at Simon & Schuster, Sarah Knight, was terrific and helped me reorganize the material into a more accessible form.

Barrett Tillman, the distinguished aviation and naval historian, was also an early reader and enthusiastic supporter. My good friend John Bainbridge returned to proofreading duties and, as usual, caught fifteen things I never would have.

Dave Emary, the brilliant technician at Hornady (he devised the 6.5 Creedmore) discussed Mannlicher-Carcano ballistics with me and revealed that he had come to a similar conclusion regarding the third bullet. He loaded a dummy .264 Win Mag/Carcano hybrid for me and sent it on with some other sample bullets doctored as we agreed the conspirators would have done them. I was introduced to Dave by Mark Keefe IV, the editor of American Rifleman .

My gun buddy Roger Troup also helped; it was under his auspices that we reloaded some .264 Win Mag/Carcano cartridges for real and tried them out in one of two pre-’64 Model 70s in that caliber I had bought for this project, by which we learned that not only was it feasible but the load produced excellent accuracy and velocity.

Through Roger, I met Bill Vanderpool, retired FBI Special Agent and firearms instructor. He patiently met with me and had many good ideas and contacts.

Dan Shea, the entrepreneur behind Small Arms Review and Long Mountain Outfitters of Henderson, Nevada, gave me counsel on suppressors circa 1963 and light machine guns circa 2012. I’m indebted to his wisdom and experience.

Also, Jeff Clemmer, of LWRC, the superb AR builder in Cambridge, Maryland, took me through the plant and coached me on the intricacies of the M-6s Blues 1-4 used in their unfortunate matchup with Swagger. I told him his guys were going to lose, but after all, they were up against Bob the Nailer! He was okay with that.

In Dallas, Scott W. Ehley, of International Capital, LLC, current owners of Dal-Tex, guided me through the building and answered my questions about its past. He was a very good guy to my enterprise, about which he knew nothing and which he took entirely on trust.

Dr. David Fowler, the chief medical examiner of Maryland and a good friend, gave me time and patience as he vetted my velocity-explosive theory of November 22, 1963. In the sci-fi tale that Richard tells Bob via Hugh’s instructions, the time travel/location in space is a last gift from my late and wonderful friend Bob Lopez. Vaya con Dios, amigo .

And, of course, my wife, Jean Marbella. I have no doubt she would go out to Idaho and sit in a diner for a month to persuade Bob Lee Swagger to investigate my death, exactly as her doppelgänger does in this book. More to the point, she put up with my nutty enthusiasm, my purchase of four Mannlicher-Carcanos (it took that many to get one that would shoot!), my distraction, and my babbling on the subject of each new idea, and she made the coffee that got me going every single day, which may be why there’s so much coffee in this book. She did all this while pursuing her own extraordinary career at the Sun .

Of course, no blame for errors should attach to any of these fine people; I and I alone am responsible.