Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

Actual was the code word; it meant somebody was shooting at or had shot the president.

“Medics, vector in those medics, get these people out of here!”

“Medevac, this is Alpha Four, we need you ASAP, the man is down and hit, oh, Christ, oh, Jesus, get him fast, there’s some other people up here hit, oh, Christ!”

“Off the air, Alpha Four, your medevac is vectored in, are you still under fire?”

“Negative, Alpha Six, I think it was two, maybe three shots, I don’t, oh, God, there’s blood all over – ”

“This is Base Six, all units are cleared to fire if you have targets, this means you, countersnipers.”

“Where’s that fuckin’ medevac, we have blood everywhere, guys are down.”

Nick listened in horrified fascination.

“Do we have an isolation on the shot?”

“It was a long one, Phil, a sniper, I think it came from someplace out there beyond Rampart, in those fuckin’ houses, maybe that tall one.”

“SWAT people, let’s get going.”

“Negative that, this is Base, goddammit, we’ve got to get that chopper in and get the Man out of here.”

But me, Nick thought. I have to move. I have to move . He was out of the car, hating himself for the five seconds or so he’d lost.

Without willing it, the Smith came up into his hand from the pancake. His big thumb snaked out and pushed the safety up and off.

He ran toward the sound of the shot, which was on the left, the big house at 415 St. Ann.

Payne dragged him into another room. He felt the blood on his chest, warm like urine, so much of it. It felt like the last time.

In the blaze of light, as his head lolled and his limbs went limp, he could see a shooting bench, rigged together of cement blocks and weathered pieces of wood, and on it, there lay a rifle, slightly atilt on a brace of sandbags, a heavy-barreled Remington 700 with a Leupold 10× Ultra scope.

The New Orleans cop was talking urgently into his radio unit.

“Base Six, this is Victor Seven-twenty, I have shot suspect white male with rifle at five-one-four Saint Ann, please send assistance, I say again, Base Six, this is Victor Seven-twenty, I have shot suspect in the attic of five-one-four Saint Ann, please send assistance.”

Then Bob looked at the rifle.

It was his rifle.

“I have wounded suspect,” said Timmons. “Get people here fast. Get me ambulance, get me paramedics, get ’ em here ASAP!”

“Okay, dump him,” said the colonel, stepping out of the shadows as Bob slid off into stillness, “and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Bob sat there, feeling again what he had felt on the ridge line when the bullet tore through his hip: shock, hatred, pain, but mostly rage at his own stupidity.

It was winding down on him. His breathing came with the slow, rough transit of a train that had run off its tracks and now rumbled over the cobblestones. His systems were shutting down, the wave of hydrostatic shock that had blown through him with the bullet’s passage upsetting all the little gyros in his organs. He felt the blood in his lungs; there was no pain quite yet but only the queer sensation of loss, of blur, of things slipping away.

Then something cracked in him.

No you aren’t going let it happen

You been shot before

You can fight through it

You be a Marine

He took a deep breath, and in the rage and pride he found what would pass for energy and without exactly willing it, he stood up, again surprised that there was no pain at all, and with a strange, determined gait began to move toward the door.

“Jesus, he’s fuckin’ up !” he heard the cop’s anguished cry, and another shot rang out, hitting him high in the left shoulder, glancing off the bone – a heavy impact and a red sear of pain – but then he was out the door and there were only two steps to go toward a window and he launched himself, felt the window shattering, and amid a rain of glass he fell through bright sunlight toward God knew what.

Nick was looking around in a spasm of confusion. He’d entered the courtyard of the large brick house because he’d heard the cop over his earpiece claiming that he had hit a suspect. But that was a block away, at 514; he was at 415. He heard a helicopter’s roar as it whirled and darted; he heard sirens rising.

But he stood in the sunlight wondering if he should go back to the street to check the address. He thought maybe he was in the wrong area. It was a maze to him; the building scruffy and dilapidated, lots of other houses close by. Jesus, any one of them could have been the location of the call-in.

He froze, wondering what the hell to do, where to go, what he should be doing, who was in command. The gun grew heavy in his hand. He felt idiotically melodramatic, and at the same time wished he were wearing sunglasses, because the sun was so bright.

Then, immediately above him, he heard what sounded like the breaking of a hundred ice cubes and he looked up into the radiant sun. Amid a sleet of glass, a man had launched himself crazily from a fourth-story window and Nick watched him fall with a sickening acceleration toward the ground, except that fifteen feet into it, he landed with another stupefying, dust-rising whack on the slanted roof of a bay window, rolled akimbo down it, and fell again, this time by some miracle of grace and agility gaining enough control over his body so that he landed on his feet, more or less on the wooden stairway which ran up the side of the house. He lurched down the steps.

Nick stared at him dumbfounded.

The guy looked like death itself, a lean-boned, blond-headed man with squirrely-slit eyes and a deep tan. He was in blue jeans, boots and a blue workshirt. There was blood on him everywhere, and as he tried to stand, he fell back, then got his feet under him and lurched up.

Nick threw out the 10mm and screamed, “Don’t move, don’t move, FBI, goddammit, don’t move!”

The man went to his knees as fatigue and blood loss overwhelmed him and his head pitched forward; he seemed almost to collapse and Nick raced forward, yanking his cuffs from the compartment on his belt, got behind him, and got one cuff on a limb with his one free hand, holding the Smith 10 in his other, even as he smelled blood and sweat and felt the man shiver and groan.

“Fucked me,” the man kept saying, “fucked me so bad, fucked me, fucked me, fucked me.” The voice was cracker-South, a twang drawn over a banjo string.

Holding the cuffed hand up and tight, Nick slid the 1076 back into his pancake, and reached for the other wrist to bring it up to the cuffs.

For just an instant Nick knew he had him, and then the whole thing turned shaky as the man, with a force that stunned Nick, drove up and under him, and Nick felt his center of balance going, reached back for his Smith, but by that time had somehow lost leverage as well as balance as the man beneath him turned into nothing but snake.

The world splintered as Nick, judo-flipped expertly, hit the ground, his breath driven from him. He tried to right himself, but what he saw instead was the man above him, filling the entire horizon of his vision, but now coiled like a cavalry trooper with a saber, except there was no saber but only an elbow, which exploded into Nick’s cheekbone.

In the next second, amid the roar in his head and the shock, he felt a hand groping on him and as he tried feebly to prevent it through the throbbing that had overwhelmed his face, he felt the pistol being slid from his holster.

“No, God!” he shouted, grabbed the hand, but even then failed.

Now the man stood above him, the pistol leveled at his head, its bore a ravenous black mouth that would in an instant spit flame and that would be all.