Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

Nick was dead; he accepted his own death, felt it swell in him, but then was astounded to look past the gun to the man’s looming and anguished face, as if he were looking up at a man hung out to die, his face mottled with suffering and despair, and yet in the gray eyes something terrible and abiding.

Compassion, Nick thought, but he could not believe it even as he recognized it.

Then the man was gone, scuttling off in a half-run, leaking blood.

Nick stood to give chase but a bullet whistled by his ear, fired from above, and smacked up a cloud of dust at the fleeing man’s feet. Two more came, two more misses and then the man was out the gate and in Nick’s car.

Oh, Christ, he thought, because in his urgency he knew he’d left the key in it.

The car started, revved and was gone.

“Goddamn, goddamn, missed him, shit, hit the fuck twice, dammit.”

Nick turned to see a fat and sweaty New Orleans cop racing toward him down the steps and yelling, Beretta waving about in a fat hand.

“I’m FBI! Call it in,” Nick yelled, noting the man’s radio unit.

“Ah, Base Six, where the hell are you, this is Victor Seven-twenty, I have hit the suspect twice, but goddamn, he’s still running, and he jumped some guy and got his car. What’s the number, bubba?”

Ah! Nick didn’t know. He’d checked it out of the interagency motor pool that morning.

“It’s a goddamn Ford, beige, don’t know the number. A Taurus, I think. They’d have the number at the pool. But it’s got a radio in it, he’ll be listening. Who are you?”

“Timmons, Traffic Division. Seen something up on the fourth floor moving up near the goddamned roof line. Called in that chopper, but they didn’t see nothing. Went in, heard the goddamn shot, and bounced the guy. He made a jump at me and damn if I didn’t put a Silvertip right through his chest and knock him down. And two minutes later the guy is up and running. Took another shot, hit him in the shoulder, and then he’s out the fuckin’ window. Took three more shots after he decked you, but missed.”

Nick just shook his head. He tried to figure it out, but one thing he knew for certain, and that was he was in big trouble. Getting your piece taken from you by a presidential assassin who’d already soaked up two bullets was a definite bad career move.

“Man, I’m screwed,” he said in a little burst of self-pity.

“Shit, no sweat,” said the cop. “I seen ’em hit like that before. You may not get ’em with a one-shot stop but they bleed out in ten minutes. He’s a dead guy right now. They’ll find him half a mile away, piled up against a dipsy dumpster in an alley.”

“No,” said Nick, knowing that the fates would not be so kind to him. “Not that guy.”

He turned.

“Get on that thing and put out an all points bulletin. Bob Lee Swagger. Of Blue Eye, Arkansas, and the United States Marine Corps.”

“You know him?” the cop said.

“Yeah,” said Nick, suddenly feeling all sorts of pain begin to fire away all over his body, but the physical pain wasn’t so much as the anguish for the terrible days ahead. “Yeah. I know him.”

Bob drove through waves of hallucination, skidding left-and right-hand turns, watching alleys fly by, terrified most of all of the bird. He knew if a bird had him, he was dead and gone, because a bird could stay with him.

But no bird came. In a second, over the car’s police radio, he learned why.

“Base Six, that medevac all set with Flashlight and other wounded aboard, let’s clear the air so we can ASAP to Shock Trauma.”

“Roger, Shock Trauma, I want all birds to go to ground level while we get the man to the hospital. Any word, Alpha?”

“Lots of blood, that’s all I can tell you, Base Six, and we got paramedics working hard. You let us worry, he’s in our hands now.”

Then other messages broke in and the whole thing degenerated into a cascade of possibilities, of rumors, of men yelling for attention and assistance. He heard a couple of references to “five-one-four Saint Ann” and the fleeing suspect, but that baffled him; he’d been in 415; 514 was a block away, on the other side of the street. Where did they get that number? What was going on? Then he had it. Sure, that’s how well planned it was. Timmons gives the wrong address, as if he’s flustered. The whole outfit goes to the wrong house a block away. That gives Payne and the colonel the time to slip away.

He drove onward, down deserted streets, and now a new problem began to eat at him. His head kept trying to float back to Vietnam. He fought with it, feeling very much two men, a weak one who wanted to return and a strong one who would not let him. He’d been hit in Vietnam too, and once you’ve been hit, it always feels the same. He slid for a second, unrooted in time, the dead past floating up big as a movie in front of him. There was an enormous amount of pain that day, and the pain he now felt brought that back. But this wasn’t anything like it. The pain of the hip had been absolute.

This pain was stunning and pointed but he knew he could beat it. He’d had worse pain than this, plenty of times. This was nothing. He snorted, trying to get out of the ’Nam, and made himself concentrate on old Jack Payne and the happy glint in his pig eyes as he pulled the trigger.

He felt himself slipping into numbness and stupidity. He hated himself for that moment of utter strangeness when he’d been shot.

Gun-simple fool. He’d been easy for them because he wanted Solaratov so bad, that was it. That was the best trick, how they played on what he wanted. These Agency fucks had somehow found out about him and Donny and how they got nailed by a Nailer coming over the crest, and they used it on him like a club, used his most private thing. Agency hoods, working on something big and dark and complicated, meant to turn on his stupidity and his vulnerability and his need.

Now, I got to stop the blood or I die. He looked about him. On the seat was a bag that said Dunkin’ Donuts. He reached in, pulled out a wad of waxy paper. He tightened it into a ball and stuffed it into the entrance wound, the one that was bleeding so badly.

There. Wasn’t much, but it was what he had.

He knew exactly where he was going, if he could only stay smart enough to get there.

He’d studied it, after all. There was only one escape route. Now, he had only one problem and that was the fact that he was dying.

Or was he? Shouldn’t he be dead by now? The first bullet had gone right through him, for some crazy reason, and he suspected that it was a ball round, overpenetrative, it had missed major body structures, taken out no arteries, whatever. As for the shoulder hit, that part of his body had gone to numbness, but there wasn’t much blood and he had a sense, maybe illusory, it didn’t matter, that no bone had been broken. So on he drove, by this time calmed down and no longer roaring. But he had to dump the car, that was the thing. The car was death.

He drove toward water.

In water there was safety.

“Attention all, units, we have a definite confirm, we have Government Interagency motorpool car, a beige eighty-eight Ford Taurus, plate number Sierra Doggie one-five-niner-Lima, that’s Sierra Doggie one-five-niner-Lima. Suspect is armed and dangerous, a white male, about forty, wounded but considered dangerous, and an early ID for the name Robert Lee Swagger, I say again, all units, he’s armed and dangerous, approach with caution.”

Oh, shit, he thought.

But Bob had seen the water.

He rolled off the road, raising a cloud of dust behind him, slewing through weeds and mulch. Suddenly it was before him, the vast band of blue-black Mississippi, a sinewy, bending thing. He had no real idea of what he was doing because of blood loss. And of course the rage which was making him insane. He had no sense of making a decision. The car just surged ahead and he felt a sense of liberation, of release, similar in fact to the one he’d felt as he blew through the window, and then suddenly there were bubbles and blackness all around him, pulling at him. In the pocket of the cab, the water line rose as the car sank. He rose with it, until his head struck the ceiling. He felt the torrent blasting through the car’s open windows as he sank, and he knew he’d die now, trapped beneath the surface.