Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

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In the jungles of Vietnam, Bob Lee Swagger was known as ‘Bob the Nailer’ for his high-scoring target rate at killing. Today the master sniper lives in a trailer in the Arkansas mountains, and just wants to be left alone. But he knows too much… about killing. The mission is top secret. Dangerous, patriotic, and rigged from the start. One thing goes wrong: double-crossed Bob has come out alive. Now he is on the run. His only allies: an FBI agent in disgrace and a beautiful woman. His only hope: find the elusive mastermind who set him up. Multi-layered with non-stop action, this hot-shock torcher of a thriller is addictive, exciting and right on target. A high-tech, high-ride reading experience.

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But for now he’d lost himself in the minutiae of the reports, and the sightings that now extended over seven states. Bob was everywhere. Bob was in Alaska. Bob was in California. Bob was really Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother. Bob had held up a gas station in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Bob was a dance instructor in New Haven, Connecticut. He had what appeared to be an amusing sighting in Everett Springs, Georgia, where an ex-Marine, who said he knew Bob in the war, swore he’d run into him on a back trail in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and Nick was trying to figure out how the hell Bob could have gotten from New Orleans with two nine-millimeters pumped into him to Everett Springs, Georgia, in the damn Blue Ridges.

But from the investigators, not much at all had surfaced. The car had simply vanished. No snitch had any word at all, and the pressure was on but good. Helicopters cruised the highways and a hundred agents had been flown in to handle the pursuit, on which considerable professional pride rested. But a thousand roadblocks and a hundred thousand photos had yielded nothing at all.

Where had the damned guy gone?

Suddenly, Hap Fencl was leaning in.

“Hey, Nick, we finally got the CBS version, you wanna look?”

“Ahhh – ” Nick paused. Something weird in him ticked off. No, he didn’t really want to see it, even if, by chance, the CBS cameraman had been best situated to record impact and collapse and poststrike scramble, and even if the pricks at CBS had been snooty about playing ball with the poor old Feebs, who were only in charge of tracking down the motherfucker on the trigger, and even though NBC and CBS and the three New Orleans affiliates who’d had tape on the ultimate moment had shipped it right over, that is, after airing it. Despite all that, Nick was reluctant. His whole misfortune was tied up in it: the terribleness of his own missed shot now somehow replicated by the strange pattern in the life and times of his hero. And a certain secret part of Nick couldn’t yet believe that the Great Bob the Nailer, the champ of Vietnam and eighty-seven or so odd man-on-man encounters in the boonies, the man who never missed, had, somehow, some way… missed .

Bob the Nailer might have been a lot of terrible things but he was a great shot. He never missed, that’s what Nick thought, along with Bob’s wife and two or three others.

“Come on, pal, you might as well see what all the shouting’s about. The shouting’s gonna be in your ear sooner or later, old buddy.”

Hap said this with a malicious grin, not quite meaning to be cruel but rather to be bluff and hearty and masculine and to undercut the tension, because everybody knew Nick was a gone goose. So Nick could hardly turn down the invite.

He walked into a dark room a few minutes later, to a batch of catcalls and hoots – everybody had been working so hard, three eighteen-hour days in a row that Nick-baiting was a treat for them all.

“Hey, hero, where you been hiding?”

“Nicky, whyn’t ya shoot the motherfuck when you had the chance, I haven’t been able to touch my wife in three days and I am getting very very horny, old boy.”

“Nicky, don’t let these dicks turn you around, you done good, except for letting him get away, that little minor detail.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said in answer to his jolly tormentors, “just wanted to see if you clowns were as good as you say you are. Three days and you guys haven’t found your nuts yet.”

“Ooooo, brave words from the land of the walking dead.”

“All right, gentlemen,” said Howdy Duty, who had gotten himself appointed coordinator of the Swagger manhunt, “let’s close it down and watch. Go ahead, Hap.”

“Okay, guys,” said Hap, “this is raw, unedited TV tape, courtesy of our good friends, the assholes at CBS who make more money and do lots more damage than we do. You’ll notice the time sequence at the bottom right of the screen that’s blocked out for TV showings, but very helpful for our purposes. I’ve got it cued to thirty seconds before the first shot – assuming, and we’re still not sure, there was more than one shot.”

The television screen leapt to light and there was Flashlight, his good-looking, rather bland and characterless face knitted up in a slightly unconvincing mask of passion. It was a tight shot, only him and he was singing fulsome praise of this Latino who’d done so much to repair the damage between, as Flashlight put it, “our two great countries,” and had worked so tirelessly to effect “reconciliation, reconstruction, and recognition.”

And so, Flashlight concluded, what a great pleasure it is to award Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez the highest award we have in this country for civilian accomplishment, the Medal of Freedom.

The tape dropped back to a two-shot and the cleric, in modest black, with a beatific smile on his face, comes up to the podium on the president’s right to take the president’s hand and to genuflect to accept the silky garland with its little hunk of gold plating around his fat neck. He turns, giving his back to the audience, then bends as the president lifts to raise the thing over his -

“That’s it,” said Hap Fencl, as the image froze. “What we’re gonna hear a lot of once the conspiracy boys figure out how to make a bundle on this, is how come Bob doesn’t shoot when the president is talking and he’s got an easy frontal or brain shot. Why does he wait till he’s turned to his right and the Latin guy is moving into the line of fire? Answers, anybody?”

There was silence. But Nick knew.

“Hap?”

“Yes, Nick.”

“Ah, the reason is that a headshot is too far to risk from, what, five hundred yards out? Not because he can’t hit a head at that range, you can bet your ass he can. But because the head is the most animated part of the body and most of the body movement begins at the head; so the head is never really still and it moves so quickly because the neck muscles are so articulated and because the reaction time between impulse and action is nearly instantaneous. So the head’s a no-go, at least for a pro. But at the same time he’s worried about body armor so he can’t quite take a full frontal, center-of-mass shot. See, he’s waiting for Flashlight to turn slightly, to raise his arms, and he’s going for a raking shot into the sleeve vent of the body armor. He wants a translateral chest shot, putting it into him right in front of the armpit on about a forty-five-degree angle. The bullet will traverse left to right, expanding as it goes, and it ought to clear out all the chest structures. He’d be dead in a second, before he hit the ground. Was Flashlight wearing body armor?”

“Secret Service won’t say. That’s very good, Nick.”

“Too bad you’re a dead man,” somebody said anonymously in the dark.

There was some laughter and even Nick had to smile.

“Okay, let’s get to the good stuff,” said Hap. “Brain-shot time, boys and girls.”

On some twitch, the archbishop lurched up as if a back spasm suddenly struck him and Nick thought that he’d been hit or something; but no, it just seemed to be the random play of events in a very small compass that for whatever reason, instead of lowering his head to take the president’s garland he raised it and pushed his head into the kill zone where Swagger’s bullet hit it full force, back right rear quadrant.

The moment, frozen in the stillness of the videotape was staggering: ripeness is all, said Lear, though Nick had learned it from Joseph Heller in Catch-22 when Snowden died in the back of the plane, but here it was again, that message. Man was matter. Light him, he’ll burn. Sink him, he’ll drown. Shoot him in the head, his head will explode.

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