Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Were all these men shooters?” Russ asked.

“No, not really. Ben Farrell was a very good shot. Not exceptional, but excellent.”

“Who did the shooting? Was it a team?”

“Oh, there was only one shooter,” said the general, exhaling a long flume of smoke like a dragon’s breath. “Me.”

After they had gone, the general sat very still for a time. His cigar burned out and he didn’t touch it. He didn’t call his girlfriend or his daughter or his divorced wife or his lawyer or any of the men on his board of directors or his head engineer or any of the old boys in his sniper cadre.

Finally, he got up, opened the cabinet behind his desk, took out a bottle of Wild Turkey and poured himself a tall glass. He sat, looking at it for a time, and then reached for it, noting, as he drew it to his lips, that his hands were still shaking.

S ome dang days a fella couldn’t win. Duane, going on just a few hours’ sleep after having spent all day yesterday bouncing around Polk County on the tail of old Sam, plus answering a few unavoidable police calls, was bushed; but he was up and at it early this morning, on his ordered sweep across all the commercial establishments he could find along the Etheridge Parkway corridor.

Yet he struck pay dirt early enough.

Goddamn, he thought, when the Indian day-clerk woman at the Days Inn at Parkway Exit 7 said yes, an older man and a younger man had checked into a room yesterday at around ten. Was there anything wrong?

Duane puffed and acted like some sort of important investigator, and pretty much bullied the poor woman—she was foreign, with some kind of fucking dot on her head, so what difference did it make?—into giving up the whole story. They’d checked in at ten, the boy disappeared for most of the afternoon, the man made long-distance phone calls all day and they’d left about six in a truck loaded with sleeping bags and, technically, still had a contract on the room, at least until checkout time, noon.

She remembered, because usually they don’t rent rooms before one, but the tall man had insisted.

Duane asked to see the phone records, though he didn’t have a subpoena. Fortunately, the woman was too stupid to know or too indifferent to care. In his notebook, he wrote down the numbers in his big silly handwriting, like a child’s.

He thanked her, helped himself to a free cup of coffee and by ten was on the phone.

He gave his report to the answering machine, including the numbers, then sat back waiting for praise. It didn’t come.

The phone rang.

“Peck, where are you now?”

“Well, sir, uh, I’m in the parking lot of the Days Inn.”

“Git back down to Blue Eye. You stay with the old man today, you understand? You let me know what he’s up to.”

That was it: no nice going, nicely done, good job, just get back on the job.

Damn, you couldn’t please some folks.

Red Bama had experts everywhere; that was one of the pleasures of being Red Bama. So he called one, a communications specialist formerly of Southwestern Bell who handled telephone problems for him, and inside half an hour had a make on the phone calls Bob had made.

One was to the Pentagon, the office of Army Historical Archives. The other was to a firm in Oklahoma, called JFP Technology. It took another couple of calls to get to the product line and meanings of JFP Technology.

When he did, he whistled.

Fucking Swagger was smart . He was inside this deal already, and getting closer and closer to secrets so carefully and professionally buried over forty years ago. This was a powerful antagonist, the best that had come against Red in many a year.

Next, Red made a call to a lawyer he knew in Oklahoma City, a good man who was, as they say, in the life. The lawyer, for a not unsubstantial fee, was quickly able to hire a licensed private detective, and on a crash basis the detective set up a surveillance at JFP after establishing, in the parking lot, the presence of a green Dodge pickup with an odd unpainted fender license number Arizona SCH 2332.

The lawyer reported back to Red, who took a bit of a moment to appreciate what he’d brought off— I found you, you tricky bastard! and then issued further, and very specific, orders.

“I want one thing and one thing only. Just the time they leave that office as determined from an observation site as far away as possible. I do not want , and let me say that again because I love the sound of my own damn voice, I do not want any tail jobs or moving surveillance. Nobody’s to follow. This boy is too tricky,” he told the lawyer. “I don’t know what kind of men you got in Oklahoma City—”

“Good men, Mr. Bama.”

“Yeah, well, not that good. This boy is very, very smart and he has instincts for aggression you would not believe. I guarantee you: he will see any kind of tail you put on and if he does, every damn thing upcoming will fall apart. Is that understood?”

“Yes sir,” said the lawyer.

“The time is very important. Meanwhile, I will think this thing through,” said Bama, “and if I need your services I’ll call you back. I will expect you to be available.”

“Mr. Bama, you’ve never talked to a more available man.”

“They do grow ’em good in Oklahoma City, then,” Bama said.

He put down the phone in his little office, took another sip of rancid bar coffee and then felt something very strange upon his face.

By God, it was a smile.

He was happy . He was as happy as he’d been in, say, years. Other than the success of his children, nothing filled him with more delight than a good challenge. And, oh boy, was this Bob Lee Swagger proving out.

He tried to apply his purest intelligence to the problem.

The key was what time they left that visit to JFP. If they left soon, they could easily make it back to Blue Eye before dark, which was not good, because he didn’t think he could manipulate his elements and set up what he had in mind fast enough. And everything had to be in place . If they came back later, it would be a night drive. He didn’t like that at all. He did not want to set up an after-dark hit. Too tricky on the open road. In the city was a different matter, but on the open highway, in the country, at night with a tricky bastard like Bob Lee Swagger, it got real iffy and if the thing fell apart, who knew when he’d get another chance?

So: hope they spend another night in Okie City and come back in the morning. That gets them into the area around midafternoon, which would give him plenty of time.

So: assume they’ll come back to Blue Eye from Oklahoma City tomorrow. Next question: which route would they take? Any normal man would do the normal thing, the dogleg: take U.S. 40 like a shot over to Fort Smith, then veer south on the parkway that Hollis had named for his daddy down to Blue Eye. Or maybe, out of sentimentality, Bob would pass up on the new road and choose the slower, more awkward Route 71; his father had died on that road, maybe he would too. But he doubted Bob would feel that sentimental. Bob’s nature was essentially practical; sentiment was for late at night, when the day was done.

Red wished he knew how they’d got there in the first place; Swagger wasn’t the kind of man to come the same way twice. He pored over the map, wishing he had something more expressive, more revealing. He wanted data, information, numbers, facts, he wanted to drown himself in them.

He saw quickly enough that there were really only two other routes into Blue Eye. Both were more or less direct east-west roads, though much smaller than the Fort Smith route. Both involved dropping down from U.S. 40 to McAlester, then heading east on a two-lane blacktop to Talihina. Shortly thereafter, they diverged: One, Oklahoma 1, followed the crest of the Ouachitas from Talihina fifty-seven miles into Arkansas, where it turned into Arkansas 88. It would be a high road, a couple of thousand feet up, with plenty of visibility. It was called, combining the names of the towns on either of its ends, the Taliblue Trail, and the state had designated it as a beautiful road, with mountain vistas on either side. He had driven it himself in a Porsche he once owned and had a goddamned great old time.