Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

Dobbler set the report down on Shreck’s barren desk. The colonel could not miss it. It was time to leave, but he didn’t want the experience to end. He hadn’t felt this powerful in years. His eyes hooked on the old wall safe behind the colonel’s desk; he had a massive stab of curiosity and mischievousness. The safe was exactly the same as the one in his office, which he rarely bothered to lock. He wondered about the combination – could it be the same, too?

Looking around for just a second to make certain of his isolation, he walked to the safe, and spun the dial. He pulled. Nothing happened.

He laughed.

Of course not. How stupid.

He turned. And turned back, and gave the handle another tug.

It popped open.

The observation post was concealed on a hilltop a mile away from the entrance to Skytop. Young Eddie Nicoletta had drawn the duty because he’d been with Payne on the observation mission in Blue Eye and had eyeballed him through a scope. He was sitting in a hole about four feet deep and looking out a small viewer’s slot in some ersatz bushes just inside a ridge line. Before him was a Celestron 8, an eight-inch surveillance telescope, state of the art, forty-three pounds of Schmidt-Cassegrain optics that could be dialed up to 480×, which is where he had it now.

It was tiring peering through the aperture of the lens, which was seated at right angles to the tube itself, a huge fat wad of curved steel atop a squat tripod. Nickles’s head hurt and his neck ached.

The Celestron 8 was trained on the road running into the place called Skytop, and a bit of the ribbon of macadam of the two-lane highway that ran by it. Now and then a truck or a car would materialize out of the wobbling, foreshortened perspective, seem to assemble itself out of pure bolts of light, and purr through his range of focus. Jesus, a mile away and you could see faces ! It was said you could read a newspaper at a hundred yards with one of these things and Nickles believed it.

But every once in a while, he just had to look up to keep from losing his mind. What he saw then was the half-mile dirt road up to the house itself, though he couldn’t see much of the rambling, one-story building beneath the trees. It was enough to tell that it was good-sized, the house of a man who was well off or better. Behind it was a swimming pool, some cement walkways to what appeared to be a shooting range (why cement? Nickles wondered) and beyond that, dominating the property, what they called Bone Hill.

Bone Hill was heavily forested about halfway up its three hundred feet or so of bulk, but then it gave way, as it steepened, to coarse grass and scrawny trees. Its top was bare except for the grass and a few stones strewn about.

That’s where he’ll go, Eddie Nickles told himself. When the first chopper arrives and the greasers with their combat gear come crashing out, that’s where he’ll go. He’ll go up. He’ll run up, and he’ll run and run and pretty soon there’ll be no place to go.

Nickles got to see it all happen. That pleased him.

“Bravo Four! Bravo Four, you there, goddammit?”

It was Shreck.

“Ah, sorry, Colonel. Yeah, I’m here, nothing much going on.”

“Keep your goddamn eyes open, Nicoletta. He ought to be here any minute now.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nickles.

He put his eye back to the eyepiece, and watched as a Coca-Cola truck lumbered down the road out of the bright nothingness. Then the road was quiet. Minutes passed.

He saw the roof first, emerging over a crest, just a flash. Then it was clear, heading down the road, just as they said, the red Chevy they’d been driving last night, with a single looming, steady silhouette cut off behind the glare of the windshield.

His tension growing, Nickles watched as the face assembled itself from flecks of light as the car moved into the focus zone, a pair of hard-set eyes, a taut jawline, a sense of steadiness.

At a mile away, Bob the Nailer still scared him.

“He’s here,” Nickles shrieked into the hands-free mike, forgetting all radio procedure. “Bob the Nailer’s here.”

Bob stopped at the turnoff to Skytop and got out of his car. He took a look around. What he saw was miles and miles of lush North Carolina landscape, rolling hills, a few rills of hard rock, a universe of green. It had been a hot, dry fall and although it was October, the leaves hadn’t begun to turn yet.

He took a deep breath as he looked around and his trained eyes probed and saw nothing. The sky was an intense blue, untainted with cloud. The sun was high. It seemed as if the day had stalled somehow, calm and guileless.

Bob took another deep breath, climbed back into his car and went down the road between a double line of swaying poplars to the house. He pulled up on the gravel patch that awaited visitors.

He went up the stairs and knocked on the door.

“It’s open,” came a call from deep inside. “Come on in, Agent Memphis.”

“Thanks,” said Bob, walking into the wide hall, and into a sunny beauty of a room lined on one wall with floor-to-ceiling books. The open sliding glass door at the rear gave way to a small jewel of a swimming pool – he could smell the chlorination in the air – and beyond he saw the slope of a large green hunk of hill.

“Mr. Albright?” he called.

What he heard next was an electric purring. Then a man in a motorized chair emerged.

“My name isn’t Memphis,” said Bob.

“I don’t believe it is. I believe it’s Bob Lee Swagger.”

Bob’s eyes beheld the man calmly. He saw the powerful shoulders, the long arms, and the deformed body, soft and twisted and mulched and locked in its chair; and the legs, spindly and bizarre.

“And I believe you’d be Lon Scott.”

“Yes, I am.”

Bob’s hand slipped back into his jeans; without hurry he had the.45 out, thumb snicking off the oversize safety. It was now cocked and unlocked, two pounds of trigger pressure away from the shot that would be the end of Lon Scott. But Scott was still, evidently unarmed.

“You won’t shoot me. No matter what we’ve done to you, I still don’t believe you’re the kind of man who could shoot a cripple in a chair.”

“Cripple? For a cripple, that was a right smart shot you hit in New Orleans, mister. You dropped that bishop at fifteen hundred yards.”

“It was fourteen fifty-one. I rebarreled the Black King to.318 and saboted one of the rounds you pumped into the bank in Maryland behind 59 grains of IMR-4895.”

Bob raised the pistol and put the front sight on the middle of Lon Scott’s swollen belly. He wondered if he shot whether pus would come out. It was like aiming at a tumor or a larva or something. He took about a half a pound out of the trigger.

But Scott didn’t scare. It was as if he really didn’t give a fuck if Bob pulled the trigger or not.

“It’s over. When I saw your face, I took my hand off the chair here and uncovered a photoelectric cell. That sent a signal. Even as we talk they’re on their way. Lots of them. Pulling that trigger doesn’t mean a thing. You want to take me hostage? Go ahead. They’ll shoot right through me into you.”

Bob put the pistol down.

He heard the roar of the helicopters. Outside, leaves began to shake under the pulsing of the rotors and vibrations filled the air as the birds swooped in to offload the first squads of killers. It reminded him of the ’Nam; the swift arrival of the choppers, the deployment of the men, the merciless closing in upon the prey. It was the classic air-assault tactic.

“Bob,” said Lon Scott, over the noise, “they’ll be here in seconds and once those Latino cowboys show up with their assault rifles, there’s no stopping them. Let me save you. Let me give you a new life. We’re the same man.”