Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

After a while — he had no idea how long — he left, got back in the truck and settled in for a long pull across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and on to the East.

The last part of the trip took him to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, where once again he bunked with an old friend who had become the Command Sergeant Major of the United States Marine Corps. As a few months before, he fell in with cronies, both still on active duty or recently retired, men of his own generation and stamp, leathery, sinewy men who bore the career imprint of the Corps. There were a few loud nights at the CSM’s house in the suburbs, the whole thing slightly more celebrative.

It was the next day that he called Mrs. Carter and told her he’d be up the next night. She said she couldn’t wait.

He hung up and waited on the line for the telltale click of a wiretap. He didn’t hear it, but he knew that meant nothing: there were other methods of penetration.

Now, he thought, only this last thing.

Bob drove carefully through the far reaches of Baltimore County, at sunset. It was as he remembered, the beautiful houses of the rich and propertied, of old families, of the original owners of America — people who rode English. At last he turned down a lane and drove under the overhanging elms until he found Trig’s ancestral home.

He pulled in, once again momentarily humbled by the immensity of the place, its suggestion of stability and propriety and what endured in the world. At last he got out, adjusted his tie and went to the door.

It was September now, turning coolish at night here in the East. The leaves hadn’t yet begun to redden but there was nevertheless a definite edge in the air. Things would change soon: that was the message.

He knocked; the old black butler answered, as before.

He was led through the same halls of antiques, paintings of patriots, exotic plants, dense Oriental rugs, damask curtains, lighting fixtures configured to represent the flicker of candles. Since it was darker, there wasn’t quite the sense of the threadbare that had been so evident his first time out here.

The old man led him into the study, where the woman waited. She stood erect as the mast of a ship — the family had owned shipping once, of course, as well as railroads, oil, coal and more. She was still stern, still rigid, still had that iron-gray uplift to her hair. She was demurely dressed in a conservative suit, and he could see, even more now, that at one time she must have been a great beauty. Now an air of tragic futility attended her. Or maybe it was his imagination. But she’d lost a son and a husband to a war that the husband said was worth fighting and the son said wasn’t. It had broken her family apart, as it had broken apart so many families. No family was immune, that was the lesson: not even this one, so protected by its wealth and property.

“Well, Sergeant Swagger, you look as if you’ve become a movie star.”

“I’ve been working outdoors, ma’am.”

“No, I don’t mean the tan. I have sources still, I believe I told you. There’s some news afoot about your heroics in Idaho, how you disconnected some terrible conspiracy. I’m sure I don’t understand it, but the information has even reached the society of doddering State Department widows.”

“They say we were able to get some good work done, yes, ma’am.”

“Are you congenitally modest, Sergeant? For a man so powerful, you are so unassuming you seem hardly to be there at all.”

“I’m just a polite Southern boy, ma’am.”

“Please sit down. I won’t offer you a drink, since I know you no longer drink. A club soda, a cup of coffee or tea, a soft drink, something like that?”

“No, ma’am, I’m fine.”

They sat across from each other, in the study. One of Trig’s birds observed them; it was a blue mallard.

“Well, then, I know you came here to tell me something. I suppose I’m ready to hear it. Will I need a drink, Sergeant Swagger? A great shot of vodka, perhaps?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t believe so.”

“Well, then, go ahead.”

“Ma’am, I have satisfied myself on this one issue: I don’t believe no way your son would have killed another human being and I don’t believe he killed himself. I think he was duped by a professional Soviet agent — rather, Soviet in those days. Your son was sort of charmed into—”

“What a quaint euphemism. But I have to tell you I’m aware of my son’s homosexual leanings. You believe it was a homosexual thing?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. That’s not my department. I only know the result, that somehow he was snookered into assisting in what was represented as an act of symbolic violence as a way of reenergizing the peace movement. But the Russian operator, he didn’t give a tinker’s dam about the peace movement. He was only interested in your boy’s fame and reputation as a masking device for the mission’s real target, Ralph Goldstein, who was working on satellite topography-reading technologies and seemed on the verge of a breakthrough the Russians felt would put them way behind in the Cold War.”

“It was only about murder, in the end. And some other boy was the target?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So my poor Trig wasn’t even the star of his own murder?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, he’d been the star of so many other things, I don’t suppose it matters.”

“My guess is, he had begun to have doubts; perhaps he even tried to back out, or go to the FBI or something. Possibly there’s some record of his doubts in his missing sketches. But it appears I won’t never see them. He was killed, probably with a judo chop to the back of the neck. That was their specialty in those days. In fact, everybody who saw this agent was killed, at some effort, including another peace demonstrator named Peter Farris, a Marine named Donny Fenn, and later attempts were made on my wife, who had seen the agent with Trig. She was married to Donny Fenn at the time. I believe Ralph Goldstein was killed in the same way. Their bodies were put in the building and it was detonated. It goes down into the books as a violent fool and a math geek. But the books are always wrong. It was something entirely different; kids used by older, smarter, far more ruthless men, then thrown away for a momentary strategic advantage. It was a war, but the cold one, not the hot one.”

“The one we won.”

“I suppose we did.”

“What happened to the Russian?”

“Well, our intelligence people found out a way to turn the information against him. I don’t know much about it, but he’s dead. They had it on CNN. You could see the burned bodies in the back of the Jeep.”

“That nasty boy?”

“That one.”

“And the man who was trying to kill you?”

“Well, he wasn’t trying to kill me. He was trying to kill my wife. He was stopped,” Bob said. “And he ain’t never coming back.”

“Were you responsible?”

Bob just nodded.

“Do you know what you are? Sergeant, you’re a sacred killer. All societies need them. All civilizations need them. It is to the eternal shame and the current damnation of this country that it refuses anymore to acknowledge them and thinks it can get by without respecting them. So let an old bat speak a truth: you are the necessary man. Without you it all goes away.”

Bob said nothing. Speculation on his place in the nature of things was not his style.

The old lady sensed this, and asked for an accounting of the politics of the affair, the details of history. He gave it, succinctly enough.

“Odd, isn’t it? As you’ve explained it, after it’s all counted up and all the accounts are settled, the one party to it all that could be said to benefit is the old Russian communist apparatus. It’s kept them from going under another few years. And who can tell what that’ll mean? The cruel irony of history, I suppose.”