Stephen Hunter - The Third Bullet

“I do. But what should I do if I’m caught?”

“You won’t be caught.”

“I know, but plans can backfire. It could happen.”

“Then be patient. Say nothing. We will get you out somehow. Possibly a prisoner trade, possibly a breakout, I don’t know. We always get our people back, that’s our reputation. If it goes sour and you keep the faith, we’ll spring you, and you’ll spend your life in Havana as a valued citizen who sacrificed for the Revolution. We’ll even work out a way for Marina and Junie and the new child to come to you.”

“I knew I could count on you, Comrade,” he said.

“Okay, now go. I will get you the plan, you will memorize it. You have the ammunition; do you have the rifle?”

“It’s with Marina in Fort Worth. She doesn’t know I still have it. I can get it anytime.”

“Excellent. Leave it there for the time being; concentrate on concentrating. In all likelihood, you will do this thing, get away with it, and in months to come, possibly we will find other wet tasks for you to do. You will help the Revolution. This is what you want, correct?”

“I will show you.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out an envelope that he had been careful not to fold. He pulled a photograph out of it. “See,” he said, “this is who I really am.”

I pulled to the side of the road and turned on the light in the car. The photo later became world-famous when it appeared on the cover of Life magazine and a thousand crazed conspiracy books. You’ve seen it. Alek in black, holding his rifle across his body, his pistol tucked into his belt, and in his other hand copies of the Daily Worker and the Trotskyist International – he had no idea that these two organs, like the parties they represented, were in blood opposition to each other – staring forthrightly at the camera lens in poor Marina’s hand, wearing that eternal smirk of the sucker who thinks he’s figured the game as the game is figuring him. I could see that it was a kind of romantic image of the red guerrilla that animated his deepest fantasies, like something out of the 1910s, an assassin, a bomber with a bowling-ball explosive and a long, sparkling fuse, a Gavrilo Princip, a figure out of Conrad. I felt sorry for a man who could be so deluded even as I said, “Yes, Alek. That is it. That’s the spirit we need!”

I spent the next few days holed up, working on The Plan. I went back to the operational zone a couple of times, I took public transportation to and from, I walked the distances, I charted the police activity, I noted the mileages to the police stations, I had margaritas at the Patio so I could determine whether Alek’s movement on the roof or my shooter in the car where I would place him would be particularly visible. I even climbed up on the roof in old blue jeans and boat shoes, Yale poof playing Jedburgh commando! I got a good look at Alek’s shooting position and tried to imagine his actions.

I knew certain things. First, that the immediate result of the shot would be a frozen moment of fear followed by absolute chaos. As I saw it, my shooter would have the general zeroed and be well prepared for Alek’s shot. If Alek missed, he would fire a silenced shot (I took on faith that Lon would solve all problems), finishing the issue. But witnesses would remember it differently; some would say there came a shot and the general’s head exploded, and others would say there was a shot and the general’s head exploded a full second later. What if Alek missed and the bullet was recovered? That would be dicey, yes, but it would be so confusing to everybody that no one would get it. There would be – assuming Lon had worked it out – no record of a second bullet existing. Since the Patio was brick, the building behind it stone, there was a good chance that a miss by Alek would shatter on a hard surface. In any event, the worst-case scenario seemed to amount to confusion, conflicting theories, an eternal mystery, a suspicion that there was more to know – but nothing substantial leading to our plot, except a theoretically captured Alek’s crazed insistence that the reds had made him do it.

The difficult part wasn’t the plan itself but reducing it to easily remembered components. I tried to find a mnemonic device that would help Alek’s pea brain retain the information. I came up with APPLE: approach, position, patience, liquidation, escape. I knew that “liquidation” was weak, but I had to get a known word out of the puzzle. Since it was a word associated in the popular imagination with old NKVD practices and employed frequently by the patron saint of agents, Ian Fleming, in his Bond books (which Alek had read devotedly), it was okay but not optimal. I thought that authorities would consider it the kind of hokey nonsense a fantasist like Alek would come up with.

Each letter had further information associated with it. APPROACH had a set of numbers, 830 15-33-15, which meant 8:30 bus no. 15 to Thirty-third Street, fifteen-minute walk down Thirty-third to target area.

And so forth and so on, very secret agent-like. I thought Alek would enjoy the primitive spycraft, and if I got his imagination fired up, maybe he’d apply himself.

I sent him a postcard, knowing in those days of postal efficiency, it would be delivered the next day. It simply said, “Texas Theatre, 8 p.m. show.” That was the movie house a mile or so from his roominghouse, where, ironically, he would be arrested on November 22.

That night he showed up. The movie was absurd, something about teenagers on a beach, and I could not stand it. I’d noted him when he came in. I went, sat next to him for a second, and dropped the plan (in an envelope) in his hands.

I whispered, “Take it home, commit it to memory, and copy it in your own hand. Do not destroy it. It must be returned to me when next I make contact. Every night study it until you know it by heart. Run through it one night and be sure you can make all the connections. I will be back in contact in ten days or so, the week of the eighteenth. Our target date is November twenty-fifth, that Monday night.”

Then I left. You must remember, in those days there were no easily accessible copying machines. Xerox had yet to take over the world, there was no fax, and the only “copiers” were extremely expensive photocopiers of the sort that produced negative imagery, to which Alek, in his reduced circumstances, would be unlikely to have access. I knew that making a copy of it was beyond him.

I left him in the Texas Theatre, while silly California girls did the frug and the monkey on-screen, and disappeared into the night. I had become an expert on Dallas transportation, so I walked a few blocks west and caught a bus downtown. The next day I flew back to Boston and then back to D.C. My next mission was to see what Lon had come up with.

It took most of the day to get back from Dallas. I had to pay cash for the flight to Boston, take a cab to Cambridge, sneak upstairs, come down and check out of the hotel, take another cab back to Logan, then the flight to National. The only problem was the checkout, where the clerk said, “Was everything all right, sir? We noticed you didn’t seem to sleep in the bed.”

I said, “Yes, it was fine. Look, if anyone should ever ask, it’ll be my wife’s private detectives. So take this ” – I winked and handed him two twenties, after having considered the whole flight back to Boston how much to pay, twenty being too little and apt to annoy him and fifty being too generous and apt to prove memorable – “and remember to forget that I never mussed the sheets.”

“Yes sir,” he said with a smile. “And I bet the housekeeping reports disappear too!” In those days, all us “wolves” hung together; manhood was a national adultery culture, possibly under the influence of Playboy magazine, which made such activities hep, like jazz and hi-fi. I never once cheated on Peggy, but many was the time I used the pretense of such a thing to help me out of a tight one.