Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

He came erect with a jerk, self-loathing forgotten. A travel itinerary! Ten stops in five states in six days, starting two weeks from today. One site leaped out at him from all the towns and cities and rural areas listed. Years ago, unwinding between overseas jobs, he’d gone on a hiking trip near that spot.

Leaving Terry home to mind baby. Memory wrenched an unexpected sob from him. After Terry’s death, he had gone to the site of the hit-and-run on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. Terry was crossing with the green light when a Mercury Cougar knocked her catty-corner across the intersection and smashed her against the second-story window of an office building sixty feet away.

They caught up with the hit-and-run driver a week later. He lost his license for a year. Corwin took a vow to stalk him and take him from his wife as the man had taken Terry from him.

That same night the nightmare started. The THUD of impact, he was running hard across the intersection to catch Terry before she hit the sidewalk. He was too late. As he knelt beside her broken body, she floated to her feet and began to glide away.

He ran after her, calling her name, pursuing her through the hot, devastated landscapes of his mercenary assignments, dead bodies strewn about. She paused to look back at him with great sadness, then disappeared into a grove of mortar-shredded palm trees and was gone. That was when he awoke. Every time.

The nightmare continued during two more years of mercenary jobs before he finally understood what Terry was telling him: No more killing. No more dealing out death in hot countries. No more thoughts of killing the man who had killed her.

He deeded their house to Nisa, went into the north woods to become a trapper and a hunter of animals, not men. The nightmare stopped. The years went by. Then he was shot himself, his attacker’s slugs taking him down, ripping his flesh, leaving him half-crippled, distorted of mind and emotion. He couldn’t hunt even animals any more. His life was over.

But Nisa began driving up to visit him at Whitby Hernild’s little clinic in Portage. As he healed, she invited him down to St. Paul for Christmas. When he tried to find out who had shot him, and why, she had helped him look...

Back to the site of Wallberg’s speech. It would work. He would make it work. Energized, he limped across the little cabin to get his fleece-lined jacket from its peg on the wall beside the fireplace. He went to the wardrobe he had built to hold his clothes and meager possessions, and got out his gun case.

The rifle, the scope, the ammo that he would use on that day. There was so much newer, better sniper hardware now. The M-40A3 rifle, and the newest night scope, the AN/PVS-10. But it wasn’t the hardware that counted: it was the software, the wiring inside the brain and body that made the great sniper.

From now until he left for the Bitterroot Wilderness Area, all of his practice shots would be made at a thousand yards out, out beyond any imaginable security perimeter, out where even now only a few shooters could go. If he really existed, was the dangerous tracking beast of his dreams one of them? Anyway, no way could he divine where and when Hal Corwin would strike.

Corwin took his rifle out into the cold northern spring day. A vivid flash of memory: going deer-hunting for the first time with his dad so many years before. The thud of hunters’ shots, thirteen of them, and his father saying, there’ll be blood on the snow tonight...

The president and all of the president’s men were going to western Montana. Waiting there for them, rifle in hand, would be Halden Corwin. There’d be blood on the snow that night, too.

Brendan Thorne sauntered across the opulent Mayflower lobby, a man at loose ends. Jock Number One yawned, folded his newspaper while standing up from his lobby chair. Outside the revolving door to Connecticut Avenue, Thorne set off toward the Georgetown Dock, knowing the invisible net surrounded him.

He strolled through the gathering dusk to the three-story, glass-clad restaurant. No awning-covered drinks kiosk at street level for him tonight, no beer in a plastic glass. He chose a table on the second outside level, set for dinner.

Hornrims from the library and the lady hiker with the thighs — tonight demurely covered by a mid-calf dress — took a nearby table to chat animatedly about their non-existent jobs at Georgetown University. When the waitress brought water and a menu, he spoke loudly enough for the Feebs to overhear.

‘I’d like a glass of the house chardonnay and an appetiser of fried clams to start. And a slice of lemon in my water.’

She wrote on her pad. ‘Very good, sir.’

She detoured by the Feebs’ table to leave menus. Thorne watched the brightly-lit parkway traffic on the Virginia side of the Potomac. As she returned with his wine, he saw the white tour boat line up to begin its transverse under Key Bridge.

‘Your clams will be right up, sir.’ She had a Georgia accent and mahogany skin and an elaborate corn-row hairdo.

‘Thank you. And, oh, miss, where are the rest rooms?’

‘Inside, sir, on the third floor.’

He slipped two twenties under his water glass where the two Feebs couldn’t see them, then went up the stairs to the sparkling ornate indoor restaurant. Neither stood to follow him. Past the stairs, through the kitchen to the narrow garbage-pail-lined alley behind, through the deserted not-yet completed galleria behind the bowl-shaped mall enclosing the massive fountain.

Tourists were still disembarking from the tour boat to the dock beyond the little park beyond the mall. Thorne stepped aboard four minutes after leaving his table at the restaurant.

Inside the enclosed cabin were a dozen rows of unoccupied benches and a steep narrow stairway leading up to the bridge. Aft, between the doors to the rear observation deck, an acned teenager in the tall paper hat was pouring hot fresh corn from the popper. The aroma filled the cabin.

Thorne chose a bench well forward where he could see the stubby gangplank. No more riders came aboard after him. The pilot climbed the stairs to the bridge. He was not over twenty years old, with a great shock of unruly blond hair.

They cast off to slide away from the dock, then turned down river toward Alexandria. A canned commentary pointed out the sights on either side of the river, but in the dark, little could be seen except moving headlights on the flanking parkways.

A mother and her ten-year-old son chose the bench ahead of Thorne’s. The boy got up on his knees to shoot through the window glass with a palmsize video camera, then sat down and pushed buttons to review his footage.

Two teenage girls sat down on the far side of the cabin, giggling and gossiping. Four more teens joined them. All wore leather jackets and jeans. One girl held up her hand and made baby-bird-opening-its-beak gestures with it. A boy bought popcorn, and shoved a handful of it into her mouth while the others laughed. They all were speaking Russian. Only in D.C.

The tour boat slid into its berth at the Cameron and Union Street Dock in Old Town Alexandria at seven-thirty. A Dixieland band was playing with large enthusiasm and small talent in front of the Torpedo Factory, left over from World War II and converted into an Art Center. The smell of broiling steaks from a fancy restaurant on the dock made Thorne’s mouth water. He hadn’t gotten to eat his fried clams.

Way up at the very far end of King Street glittered the George Washington Masonic Memorial. Thorne walked up toward it past Market Square and the Apothecary Museum. There were cobbles underfoot, and the old houses and office buildings of weathered and painted brick were lovingly cared for.

The foot traffic was mostly local folks out for an evening stroll. He stopped to pet a black and white springer spaniel.