Stephen Hunter - Black Light

So it turned out freedom meant little to him; a chance to strike at the goddamned skunk-ass Swaggers was enough to get him happily through his old age.

His role was easily within his grasp. He was told that sometime in the next week or so, Bob Lee Swagger would come to him in the forest. Don’t ask how or why, he just will; trust us. Your role, Jed, is twofold. First, simply step on a rigged floorboard that will send a radio signal. The second, keep him there until after dark or at least until twilight. You have no other responsibilities. In the daylight, Bob Lee is a formidable man. In the night, he is just another target.

Jed knew he could do this. Cackling evilly through his toothless gums, he thought he had a trick or two up his sleeve that would keep them boys busy for a time.

The sniper was the second part of Red’s plan. Now located on a farm just on the other side of 70 in the charge of Duane Peck, Jack Preece had spent the past few days in night-fire exercises and Duane reported that at ranges out to two hundred yards he was extremely deadly. He regularly patrolled, both by day and by night, the terrain on which the engagement was slated; terrain familiarity, after all, was the sniper’s best ally. When he was alerted that Swagger had arrived at Jed Posey’s, he would move swiftly over the familiar ground to intercept. The access in and out of the draw in which the ratty old Posey cabin sat was through a narrow enfilade where a creek cut between two hills. Under combat discipline, of course, Swagger would never take such an obvious path; but he wouldn’t be thinking in such terms, but merely be obsessed by the mystery he was trying to unravel. Plus, it would be dark, and going up or around the hills would be dangerous and time-consuming.

Preece set up his hide about 150 yards out, oblique to the left, with a good clear field of shooting, an arc of more than forty degrees. The M-16 didn’t have much recoil. They’d come along into the cone of infrared light, bright as day, and he’d drill the man first, the boy second, one 55-grain ball round to each chest, velocity a little under 3,000 feet per second, delivering about 800 foot-pounds of energy. The man would be dead before the boy knew a shot had been fired; the boy would be dead before the man had begun to fall.

As this was explained to Red, he thought of it as an incoming simo in sporting clays, two birds coming right at you. You panic the first or second time, but you learn quickly enough to simply pull through the last bird to the first, shooting as the barrel covers up the bird. It’s a shot that’s quite easy to master but demands aggressiveness and confidence more than talent.

It was beautiful. It turned on Bob’s predictability. He would learn that Jed Posey was free, for Red had seen to it that the black woman herself was told. He would think on it. He would investigate, and satisfy himself that it was not a trap. He would sniff, paw, hesitate, think, but in the end, because he believed, he would go forward. He had to. It was his nature to push on, heroic to the end, destroyed by his very heroism.

Only this last bothered Red a bit: the man, like his father, was a true hero, bold, smart, violent and aggressive. Such men were harder and harder to find; possibly Bob was the last one left in America, outside a few Army Rangers or Green Berets. Red respected heroism but he was not sentimental about it. If it came at him, it must be destroyed and what was accomplished must be preserved. It was that simple.

The phone rang.

“Bama.”

“Mr. Bama?”

It was a Bama lieutenant who was officially on the books as a security consultant to Redline Trucking, but actually served as Red’s troubleshooter in all aspects of communications that his enterprises demanded.

“Yeah, go ahead, Will.”

“Sir, you know we broke down the calls from the motel out to the army archives and that JFP Technology place for you?”

“Yes, I do, Will. That was fine work.”

“Well, sir, I got to thinking that if this boy is smart as we think he is, he wouldn’t use a traceable phone for a private call.”

“Uh-huh,” said Red.

“He’d use a pay phone. So I dropped by that hotel yesterday and I took down the numbers of all the pay phones in the lobby.”

“Yes,” said Red, wondering where this was going.

“Then I designed a software program for the phone company mainframe—you know, I can still get into their system.”

“Yes.”

“And it turned out on one of them phones, there was a collect call to Ajo, Arizona.”

“Hmmmm,” said Red.

“So anyway, I backchecked the number to find the address. You said he was from Arizona. Well, sir, that’s our boy’s home. He’s got a wife and a daughter there. You know, sir, I know how important this is to you. But you could now use that to strike at him. The wife, the little girl.”

Red nodded. “Excellent,” he said. “You are one smart boy, Will. I am grateful and you will be rewarded.”

“Thank you, sir. You want me to alert the boys?”

“I’ll do that,” said Red. “Don’t you worry.”

He hung up.

It was appealing: he could strike at the family. Now he really had him.

But it was a no-brainer.

He thought of his own little squirmers and the warm and safe place he’d made for them. No, we don’t do families. It isn’t about families. We leave the families out of it. The families aren’t on the board.

He wasn’t an idealist but—he just didn’t do families. It was his only rule.

B ob was still grim and freaky with paranoia. He radiated hostility and sat, hunched and tense, always silent, communicating in grunts. He didn’t want to return to the trailer or get a set of motel rooms or anything to make them easy to find. They sat in the flicker of a Coleman lamp deep in the Ouachitas, the silence even more forbidding than usual.

“What’s eating you?” Russ finally said. “You’re pissed. I can tell. Something’s going on.”

Bob, typically, said nothing. He looked like Achilles again, and Russ thought how the severe planes of his face would fit so appropriately under the bronze of a fierce Greek helmet, scarred from much action outside the walls of Troy.

“You learned something,” Russ said again.

Bob breathed out a wisp of vapor, like liquid anger, possibly enough to allow him to live another moment or two before the demons inside chewed him to pieces. He had an ulcer of anger like a gigantic leach sucking fluid from his soul.

“I ran into a neighbor lady,” he finally said. “I couldn’t get rid of her. And then she said, ‘I wonder where that wonderful deputy is? I’m surprised he isn’t here.’ Seems our boy Duane Peck done been hanging out in Sam’s neighborhood. She saw his car parked there two, three days running and later saw Sam driving ’cross town, Duane right behind. We gonna have us a chat with Duane real soon.”

“You, ought to reconsider that,” said Russ.

“What for?” Bob demanded, flashing a Bronze Age glare at Russ.

“If you call him out and kill him, you’re a murderer. What does that prove?”

“It proves that Duane Peck is dead.”

“But it doesn’t get the man or men who killed your father, for whom we both believe Duane works. You have to wait until Duane moves against you. Then you do him and it’s righteous; nobody cares, you go home to YKN4 and Julie. Put your anger aside until it’s time.”

Bob stared out into the darkness. His eyes narrowed into something pale and bitter and Russ knew he was looking at the pure soul of a killer. It was the first time he’d ever recognized how much anger smoldered in Bob and what terrible things the man was capable of.