Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

Bob was breathing heavily. His face looked crazy with fury, his eyes shrunk to hard, glaring kernels. He was blinking a bit strangely. His face was smeared with greasy smudges from all the gunsmoke he’d breathed, and his hands and shirt were almost black. He kept blinking crazily.

“Jesus,” said Nick again. “Let ’em go. They’re running. They’re broken. What’s it prove?”

“He ain’t broken,” said Bob, gesturing savagely to a hill a mile away. “There’s a goddamn spotter over there, Donny. Seen the flash of his lens. He’s been glassing us all along. You know your ballistic tables?”

“No.”

“Well, a goddamn.308 drops about eighteen feet at a thousand yards. Wind’s about five miles an hour. I’m gonna hold eighteen feet high and a mite to the left for the wind drift.”

He dropped to prone, found his spot-weld and his shooting position. Then he cranked off five shots in four seconds, flicking the bolt and ejecting a shell each time.

“That ought to fix him. Now come on, Donny.”

Nick gaped at him.

“Huh? Are you all right?”

“Come on, Donny. I want to see what we bagged. I have to find out what they did with my woman.”

“Bob, my name is – ”

“Come on, boy. We’ve done enough for today. Time to get out of the zone.”

And with that the sniper headed off the mountain, his rifle in his blistered hands, to the copse a mile away where they’d stashed Bob’s truck two days earlier.

Nick went running after.

Eddie Nickles thought he’d bleed to death. His Celestron 8 was shattered, a bullet having drilled it through its wide lens and rattled through its insides. It was nothing but a tube full of broken shards.

He himself had been hit twice, once high in the head – a glancing shot, without penetration, he thought – and in the leg, a ricochet as he cowered shitting and weeping in the split second after he saw the tall man through the scope suddenly spin to zero on him.

He knew he’d never get out. He’d be gone before help arrived. There simply wasn’t much help left. He’d watched Bob shoot, the motherfucker, and shoot and shoot. He knew what that meant.

“Hey, asshole.”

He looked up to see the man himself. He was attended by a Beach Boy with a crew cut.

“You killed me,” he blurted.

“I doubt that, sonny. From the looks, you’ll recover, that is if you’ve half a heart.”

“Don’t shoot me. I just sat here and watched.”

“Was Payne here?”

“No. No, they sent Payne somewhere. They sent him to get your girl.”

“God damm it,” Bob said.

“They’ll do her, Swagger. These guys, they’ll do anybody. This guy Shreck, runs the outfit, he can do stuff like that.”

Bob seemed to think this over.

“Was Shreck here?”

“Yes.”

“If he isn’t dead, and I don’t think he is, you tell him to leave the woman alone. If he wants me, I’ll tell him where he can find me. But he’s to leave the woman alone, or so help me Christ what’s gone before will seem like Sunday school.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Good. You tell him to look for me in the Ouachitas, because that’s where I’m going. If he’s man enough to come alone, that’s where he’ll find me.”

“He won’t come alone.”

“I know it. But you tell him anyways. Tell him to bring the woman and Payne. Tell him to come Sunday morning, nine A.M., the town square, Blue Eye, two weeks from now. That’s the first Sunday in November. We’ll set it up.”

Then he was gone.

The call came at seven-thirty that evening.

“Go on,” said Payne. “Get it.”

She picked up the phone and listened.

“Are you Payne?” she asked.

He took the phone.

“Payne?”

“Yes.”

“It’s bad. We didn’t get him. He led us in.”

Payne listened numbly to the details.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “In two hours. No sweat.”

He put the phone down.

“Your unlucky day, honey,” he said, watching her face. “My orders were to kill you if they got Swagger. I was just going to walk away and say I did. But they didn’t get him. He got them. Your boyfriend killed forty-four men today, honey. And that means you and I got bad trouble.”

Payne had to laugh. Swagger wasn’t good, he was beyond good. He was so fucking good it was scary. He could hear the fear in Shreck’s voice. Forty-four men dead, including nine of his best guys who’d climbed aboard a chopper in an attempt to get some firepower on Bob from a new angle, and had been rewarded with a flaming death. Then, dozens wounded, Panther Battalion spread all over North Carolina, all kinds of cops hanging around, drawn by the smoke from the burning chopper, the whole thing a complete fuckup.

“Let’s go.”

“Where are we going?”

“East. Your boyfriend’s gonna wanna meet you. We need you for that. You got a job to do for us.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I cap you here. You want that? You just drive with me in the desert. Chopper picks us up, ferries us to an airfield, where a private jet has us in a few hours. No sweat.”

“I’m the bait, that’s it? You think you’ll get Bob because you have me, is that it?”

“Lady, I don’t think the stuff up. I just follow orders.”

“Bob will eat you alive. Bob will chew you up and spit you out. You’re dead, you know that?”

Payne laughed. The bitch had some edge.

“There’s lots of blood between him and me, honey. Lots of it, and more to come. But I got one thing he wants, and that makes me a god to him.”

She looked at him.

“I got you, bitch.”

Deputy Director Howard D. Utey of the FBI was known far and wide in his own organization and several others in the federal security sector as the man who “got” Bob Lee Swagger.

This reputation had not done his career any harm; in fact, his recent promotion to the DD level and the fine corner office he now occupied on the fifth floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., was largely a result of the successful manhunt. Moreover, the image of the burning church, ingrained in the national subconscious, was a lesson to those who would trifle with the security of the president of the United States, a lesson provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and not the Secret Service, which had provided no lessons.

Everywhere he looked, all was serenity. He had nurtured contacts carefully over the course of his career, worked diligently, extracted maximum performance from those beneath him, formed relationships with powerful men, shed himself quickly of those who couldn’t perform and, most important, knew the difference, instantly, between those who could and those who couldn’t. He was careful to have men under him who were not quite as bright as he, and he particularly understood the dangers of talent, which was that while it was capable of producing spectacular results, it was just as apt to go off by itself to nurse obscure grudges or lick psychic wounds after gross expenditures of energy. Talent wasn’t consistent or loyal or pliant enough to be trusted; Howard deeply hated talent, and made certain that none of the men who worked for him ever had any talent. He’d driven seven talented men out of the Bureau and only one had stood against him, the idiot Nick Memphis, once so bright and brimming with enthusiasms, carefully betrayed at each step of the way, and yet stubborn in his refusal to leave the Bureau.

But now he had Nick at last. It was the hearing. Suspended agents are given two months off without pay and then are asked to present themselves at a certain time and place to defend their records. Most understand that their careers are over, and quietly turn in resignations, in exchange for good recommendations. Some fight the inevitable at the hearing, but Howard had always prevailed.