Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

“Fine.”

The surveillance was extremely soft, men without radios who had been instructed to stare at nothing, to make no eye contact, but just to hope that what they’d been sent to see would arrive. They were established at various roads into the area, at coffee shops, across from shopping malls, at restaurants.

And it did happen, late that night. A rented red Chevy pulled into the parking area outside the Danville Sheraton, and from the darkness on the roof of the Big Boy across the street a RamDyne spotter watched as a tall lanky man got out, stretched in the bright pool of the fluorescent light, then went into the motel office. He came out in a bit and moved the car. Then he and another man, husky and blond, walked up the outside stairs leading to the second-floor balcony that ran the full length of the building and into two adjacent rooms. The spotter watched as they came back out to the car, and was able to follow its passage a quarter of a mile to the Pizza Hut; then he called headquarters.

Within ten minutes, the Electrotek 5400 surveillance van pulled up discreetly across the street.

“You want me to try and get a tap into their rooms?” asked Eddie Nickles.

“Nah,” said Payne, not quite believing it was happening. “Nah, we don’t even know if it’s them.”

But it was. The Chevy pulled up and parked, and Payne watched as Bob Lee Swagger, big as life, got out of the car two hundred yards away. He’d recognize that lanky walk anywhere, with its faint hitch in one leg from the wound so long ago; he’d studied it for weeks, and dreamed about it for months.

Jesus, if he had a rifle with a good night scope. With infrared, he could do Bob right here as he ambled with his buddy toward the stairway up to the second-floor balcony, place the dot in the center of the back and squeeze. Blow his spine out. It would be over in the space of time it took the bullet to eat up the yardage.

But the only thing he had was his Remington sawed-off in the custom rig running down his left side, under his fatigue jacket.

“It’s him?” asked Eddie Nicoletta.

“Yes, goddammit,” Payne said sharply.

“Shit, man, they look like they don’t suspect a thing. Man, we could do it, Payne-O, you, me, the guys. Hit him hard and fast. Kick in the fuckin’ door, you let fly with your double-ought, I empty a clip, then it’s over, man. We’re fuckin’ home free, plus we’re heroes.”

“You think he don’t sleep with a piece cocked and locked? One tenth of a second after you’re through that door, you’re dead. The guy’s a fuckin’ champ, and you know it. Now shut up and let me think.”

He turned to the Electrotek technician.

“Can you put the directional microphone beam on their room?”

“No problem,” said the man. “If there’s not a lot of white noise in the air, we’ll get ’em big as day.”

Suddenly, the door to the young one’s room opened and he went running down the balcony and began banging excitedly on Swagger’s door.

“Fuckin’ guy’s excited, Payne-O.”

“Hurry up,” Payne said to the technician.

Swinging the long foam-covered boom, the technician sighted in, twisted knobs.

“Bring it up,” said Payne. “And get the tapes going.”

Two voices began to crystallize over the babble as the man worked his digitized control panel.

“ – more promising, really. I’m telling you.”

Yes, it was Memphis, emerging out of the background noise.

“I don’t know.”

Swagger now. The voice was bell-clear, its drawly Arkansas rhythms stretching it out.

“Look, listen to me on this just once, okay?”

Bob was silent.

“She said she’d brief me on the organization of the computerized files and the code word structure. That’s a start, at least. It’s better than chasing this wild-goose hope that there’s some information buried in diaries thirty years old.”

“Memphis, I don’t like going in without a backup gun around.”

“Listen to me, Bob, please, just this once. If we can get Annex B it gives us names. Not names like ‘Payne’ and ‘Shreck.’ Those are the up-front guys. Annex B gives us the real powers – the people who don’t carry the guns but figure it all out and give the orders. Names . Addresses. It’s the only way we’ll take these guys down. Otherwise we lose. Bob, I have to go to her and try and get her working with us again.”

There was something that sounded like a transmission breakup but then it came to Payne that Swagger was sighing.

“I hate going into any place blind,” he finally said.

“It’s an old man who wrote a book about a shooter who died in the fifties. You don’t need backup. What you need is a little patience. You’re going to have to sit there all afternoon and read those diaries. Maybe you’ll come up with something, maybe you won’t. But that was your idea, not mine. Meanwhile, I’ll get down to New Orleans, and meet with her and we’ll have some idea of what we’re up against. Then…then we can go to the Bureau. With the evidence, we can get indictments. We can bring them down, we can save our own lives. We can bring it off.”

But Bob just repeated, “Hate to go into any place blind, no backup.”

“He’s a cautious bastard, isn’t he,” said Nickles. “Scary son of a bitch.”

“That’s why he don’t make mistakes,” said Payne.

“I called,” Nick was saying. “I can get a cab to drive me to the Richmond airport. I can get an eight A.M. flight to New Orleans and get there by ten.”

The conversation trailed off.

Finally, Bob said, “Shit. Meet me back here at noon day after tomorrow. And be careful, dammit. Be careful. You won’t have any backup either.”

“I’m just going to New Orleans,” said Memphis, radiant with delight, sounding like a man in love.

“Christ,” said Eddie Nickles. “Do we follow him?”

Payne studied on it. Then he said, “We ain’t got enough guys. We can always nail this fucking weenie kid. No. Swagger’s the one. We’ll stick with Swagger and nail him tomorrow.”

Dobbler was alone in his office. It was late, past eleven, and he thought maybe he’d try to scrunch up on the sofa instead of going home. Then, tomorrow…

Well, tomorrow would take care of tomorrow. Bob would go up the mountain. Panther Battalion would go up the mountain.

But Dobbler knew he was too excited to sleep. His mind was abuzz with possibility. He looked at his watch again. Only seven minutes had passed since. Time was crawling.

He decided to work. He sat at his desk, looked at the Bob Swagger folders before him, one for RELATIONSHIPS and another for SOUTHERN HERITAGE and another for PARENTS and still another on SHOOTING. Yet he could not bring himself to open them. What was there to be learned at this late date?

Then he looked at his in-basket. Funny, he hadn’t noticed it before, a brown interoffice envelope. What could it possibly mean? He hated interoffice mail; it always equaled trouble. He had an impulse to throw the thing in the wastebasket.

Sighing, he opened it anyway. It was a good thing he did.

In the command tent by the deserted airfield seven miles from Lon Scott’s place, Shreck was almost asleep when the call came. It took him a while to quite understand what Dobbler was raving about. But then it came through.

“Yes. They tried for weeks and weeks to get into the FTD computer network and finally they did! Anyway, they ran a program to dredge out all the FTD shipments – ”

“What are you talking about, Dobbler?”

“Flowers. Flowers! Bob has sent flowers to someone once a year for ten years. Anyway, a guy in Computer Services, they got into the FTD system at last. We thought it was a dead end, but he kept trying, he got into the system, he managed to break the code for the Little Rock florists, he called out all their orders, he broke it down by dates, and every December eleventh for the past ten years, a shipment has gone to a woman in Ajo, Arizona. Roses.”