Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

Well, he thought, that won’t happen to me. God knows what will, but that won’t.

And suddenly he was out of things to do.

He looked down at his meager cardboard box of belongings. Then he looked around for a friend, a colleague, someone to embrace or to give him a look or to signify that he was still loved, or, hell, that he was still alive . But everywhere in the office the other agents seemed preoccupied. A kind of hush had fallen over them.

Yeah, sure, I get it, he thought.

He went to find Doris Drabney, sitting stiffly at her desk.

“Yes, yes, you’ve got, let’s see, you’ve got to sign this and this and…oh, yes, this .”

Numbly he signed the forms. One had to do with his Government Credit Union account, one had to do with his GEICO insurance policy, which would cease to be in effect thirty days from today, and one required a formal acknowledgment that he was being placed on indefinite leave without pay pending a meeting of the review board in re his case blah blah blah.

“Is that it?”

“That’s it. You’ll be notified of the hearing.”

I’m history, he thought.

“And your last paycheck is being held until you return the pistol.”

“ What? ”

“Nick, that Smith & Wesson Model 1076 you lost during the incident of the speech. That was government property. Remember, you filed a lost-line-of-duty item report. And it was turned down? I sent the response to you in Arkansas. You’re being billed for the pistol. It’s four hundred fifty-five dollars.”

He just looked at her.

It’s probably an ingot mulched in with Bob Swagger’s bones, he thought. Or somewhere in a soggy swamp, or in some ocean somewhere, wherever Bob had been before he died.

He turned to leave.

“Oh, and you’re supposed to see Sally Ellion in Records, too.”

Ach! Sally! She was a slight, pretty, very Southern girl with what people all called “personality”; she’d had a hundred boyfriends in her time, and was always dumping one for another and then the new one. He’d always liked her somehow, even if she scared him a little bit. What on earth could she want now?

“What for?”

“I haven’t the slightest.”

So, it came down to this last thing. He went to find the young woman, who of course was on break, and had to wait for half an hour feeling stupid and preposterous until she came back from the cafeteria. At last she hove into sight, beaming pep, with a small roll in her shoulders as she walked. She’d probably had a date every night in her life, Nick thought; her Saturday nights were one long festival. She probably dated quarterbacks and shortstops. Looking at her, he sank a bit deeper into his depression.

“Hi, uh, Sally, uh, someone said – ”

“Nick, hi! Did I keep you waiting? Gosh, I’m sorry. Those fingerprint techs; they just wouldn’t let me get out of the cafeteria.”

Great. He’d been hung up here like a fish on a line, Howard’s newest trophy, for the office to admire, while those lazy clowns were trying to make time with Sal.

“Well, anyway,” she went on. “I have this thing for you. It just came in today. Where have you been? I called out to Arkansas yesterday and they said you’d gone, but you didn’t check in last night.”

“Uh, I sort of awarded myself a night off. You know, a little R and R, for a job well done.”

“Shhhhh,” she said. “Don’t say that out loud. Someone might hear you and not realize you were joking.”

“I’m beyond hurt at this point. Anyway, what’s up, I really have to – ”

“Well, it’s only partially official. I wanted to say something to you. I just wanted to tell you how much I admired what you did with your wife. How you stuck with her. I think that’s neat. Not many men would have done such a thing.”

“Oh,” said Nick, taken aback. “Oh, well, it seemed like the kind of thing you sort of had to do, that’s all. You know, I don’t like to quit on things. I like to stick with them. That’s all. Stubborn. Stupid, but stubborn, just like a mule.”

She laughed.

“Well,” she said, “that’s neat. Not many like that. Lots of people just quit on you.”

“Ummm,” Nick grunted, having run into a conversational brick wall and splatted against it. “Yeah. Ummm.”

“ Anyhow ,” she said, after a minute when it became obvious first of all that she wanted him to say something like, “Gee, why don’t we go out for lunch or a drink sometime?” and second of all that he didn’t begin to possess the vocabulary for such a thing, “ anyhow , I thought you might want to know, it came.”

Her eyes were bright and sweet. She was so pretty. It angered him that she should be so pretty on the last day of his career and she was just prattling on about things he didn’t understand.

Nick blinked.

“Huh?”

“You know. Don’t you remember the last time I talked to you?”

He couldn’t begin to put it together again in his head.

“You wanted that file from Washington, but they wouldn’t send it because you weren’t cleared.”

He remembered asking her about it in the hallway at some point or other.

“Yeah?”

“Well, I put you in for the clearance.”

“ You put me in?” he asked, incredulously. “But that needs a supervisor’s signature and, uh, I mean – ”

“Oh, Mr. Utey signed it. He wasn’t sure what it was, and anyway he was so busy I don’t think he cared and you were his right-hand man and everything.”

It suddenly occurred to him with a stupendous flash that Sally Ellion was so busy being the office’s favorite girl that she hadn’t caught on quite yet to the fact that he’d gotten the sack.

She smiled again.

“And you got it. The clearance.”

“Uh huh,” he said, not quite sure where this was going.

“And so they just authorized a printout. I just got it from the printing room.”

She handed him a thick sheaf of computer-printed paper.

It was marked TOP SECRET/SENIOR SUPERVISORY PERSONNEL ONLY.

Nick looked at it.

It was the RamDyne file.

Shreck, alone in his office now, was surprised how little elation he felt. It reminded him of the way it was when he came off a hill in Korea in 1953, when he was seventeen years old. Not relief, not guilt, just simple numbness. He knew it was classic postcombat stress syndrome; depletion, emotional and physical, and as you recharged you went into a kind of torpid state.

But it had only happened to him that one time in Korea, because he was so new to it. In all his other operations, as they wound into the triumph or bitterness but always survival, he’d felt incredibly lightened, charged, made whole again. This fucker Swagger had really gotten under his skin; a tough guy, a dangerous guy, just the sort of guy who could bring it all down.

When the phone call finally came, it was something of an anticlimax. Dobbler had managed to meet the Bureau contact without difficulty and was handed the actual forensic lab report, complete with X rays. From then on, Dobbler just babbled to Shreck, couldn’t control himself, spoke too plainly, dithered and yammered too much. But the gist got through. The X rays checked. Everything was fine. Bob was dead. It was over.

Shreck felt some lightening of feeling, but not much. He was not a man of many pleasures; only duty and mission were pleasures. But this really was his finest triumph. He thought maybe he’d go shoot sporting clays this weekend. Maybe he’d buy a new car. But mainly he wanted to -

The secure phone rang.

He looked at it for a long second, before picking it up.

“Shreck.”