Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “I’ll tell you when I’m ready. The next thing was the grocery store job. Forget why. Don’t worry about why. Just look at the job: too clever. The right grocery store, the right time of day, very professional. Jimmy was a small-potatoes car thief. How’d he figure on that so quickly?”

  Russ said nothing.

  “Then the getaway. Even you got that one. How’d they get sixty miles south, through all them roadblocks? You could write it off to luck, I suppose, unless you looked at it carefully. They had a lot of other luck that day too. How’d they get so damned lucky? On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a thing to load that car in a semi and haul it down here. You’d sail through. Trucks sail through all the time.”

  Russ said nothing.

  “The .38 Super. It’s a pro’s gun, a criminal’s gun. It’s a man-killer. Bank boys love them, mob hitters, that kind of thing. Seems very goddamned odd the best man-shooter in the world just happens to show up in Jimmy Pye’s hands the day he gits out of jail.”

  Russ nodded.

  “Then the shooting site,” Bob said. “I’m a professional shooter. I kill people for a living, or at least I did. And if I’m setting up a shot, that’s how I’d do it. You have to be high, because the corn gets in the way of a level shot. He’s in the trees, maybe a hundred yards away, in a stand. His job is to watch. The setup is to have Jimmy Pye kill my father with the .38 Super. But whoever’s pulling the strings, he has to worry if Jimmy’s quite the man for the job. And Jimmy wasn’t. So there has to be another guy there, just in case. Shooting slightly downhill at a sitting target on a windless night. It was an easy shot,” said Bob.

  “It was at night. It was at night!!” shouted Russ. “Could he see in the dark?”

  “Yes, he could,” said Bob. “That’s why he was using the carbine and not a ballistically better weapon. Remember the rattlesnake?”

  “The snake?” Why did this strike a note of familiarity with Russ? Who had spoken of snakes? But then, yes, he remembered. The old man had mentioned somebody named Mac Jimson shooting a snake on the road. He said he’d never seen anything like it.

  “Snakes are cold-blooded night hunters, but they have some advantages,” Bob explained. “They’re sensitive to heat. That’s how they hunt. They’re sensitive to infrared radiation, in other words.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Infrared,” Bob said. “Black light.”

  Russ swallowed. Infrared? Black light?

  “Infra is light below the visible spectrum, the light of heat. It has certain military applications. If you radiate heat, you radiate light in that wavelength and you have an electronic device that can amplify it, you can see in the dark. Or you can put out a beam in that wavelength and you can see it in such a device. Ours was called the M-3 sniperscope, pretty much state-of-the-art in 1955. It was a scope and an infrared spotlight mounted on a carbine. Worked best on clear, dark nights. He puts out a beam. He watches my daddy in that beam. My daddy never knows a thing. One shot. Only the snake knew. It felt the heat; it has pit organs in its skin, heat receptors, and when the light came onto it, it stirred, rattled. Then it did what a hunter would do. It went toward the source of the infrared. That’s why it crossed the road, no matter all the cops. It was hunting the sniper.”

  “But you can’t know,” said Russ. “It’s all abstract theory. There’s no real proof.”

  “Yes, there is,” said Bob. “The bullet hole in my father’s chest. It was .311 of an inch, which is the diameter, with impact beveling, that an M-l carbine bullet would make. Jimmy had a .38 Super. Its diameter would be a little more than .357. Bub had a .44 Special, which hadn’t been fired. My father was killed in the dead of night by a .30 carbine bullet.”

  “Jesus,” said Russ.

  “You see the whole thing was about killing my father. I don’t know why. My father must have known something, but there’s nothing in his behavior that last week to suggest anything unusual was going on. But these guys maneuvered very cleverly. Stop and think: They investigated Earl and found his weakness, his soft heart for a white trashy punk named Jimmy Pye. They got to Jimmy in jail, made him some kind of offer so good he had to take it and sell out everything he had. They set up a grocery store job guaranteed to make Jimmy famous, even to the little bit about him stopping for a hamburger! They moved him downstate; he got in contact with Daddy to surrender. They had access to a state-of-the-art piece of hardware and a military shooter who knew what the hell he was doing, just in case. Thorough, professional, very well thought out, all contingencies covered. All to kill one little state trooper sergeant in rural Arkansas in a way that would appear to be open-and-shut. Put the body in the grave, say the prayers and walk away from it.”

  Russ said, “And it’s still going on. The exchanged headstones. Duane Peck.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He nodded.

  “Only the snake knew,” repeated Bob. “It was hunting the sniper. Now I am.”

  It came down to a telephone. There was no telephone at Bob’s trailer so after he and Russ ate and changed and Bob locked the Ruger and its ammunition in the Tuf-Box bolted across the back of his truck, they got in and headed not into town but to the Days Inn, where Bob rented a room—for its phone and its privacy.

  Jorge, leading a convoy of hitters, got to Bob’s trailer forty minutes after they left. The truck was not in sight.

  “Goddamn,” he said.

  He went back to the men in his unit. He left one man in the trees across from the trailer with a pair of binoculars and a phone; he assigned the remaining vehicles to begin to patrol on preselected routes in Blue Eye and greater Polk County, in search of the truck, a green Dodge, one unpainted fender, Arizona plates SCH 2332. The instructions were simple. They weren’t to make contact or even follow. Instead, they were to phone in; Jorge himself, with telephone consultations with the boss, would try and determine where Bob was headed. The idea was to set the ambush well in advance and spring it with the whole team, in the coordinated way they had agreed upon.

  Unawares, Bob started his hunt with a call to the Pentagon, Department of the Army, Archives Division, Sergeant Major Norman Jenks.

  “Jenks.”

  “Say, Norman.”

  “Bob Lee, you old coot! What the hell, you still kicking around?”

  “I seem to be.”

  The old sergeant, who’d first met on Bob’s second tour when he led recons up near Cambodia while assigned to SOG and Jenks had been S-2 staff, chatted for a bit in the profane language of retired senior NCOs. But eventually Bob got to it.

  “Need a favor.”

  “Name it, Coot. If I can do it, I’ll do it. I’m too old for them to do anything to me now.”

  “And too top-heavy,” sergeantspeak for having won too many combat decorations.

  “Yeah, well,” said Jenks. “Go ahead, pard. Shoot.”

  “You remember you guys had a gadget called a goddamned Set No. 1/M3 20,000 Volt?”

  “That piece of shit? My first tour the ARVNs were using ’em. They were old then, and they was supposed to be fungus-proofed but whoever said they was never saw the fungus in Nam. That shit’d eat you for lunch!”

  “Yeah, it was old by the sixties.”

  “It was really World War II vintage. Based on some piece of German gear an OSS team brought back after the war, as I recall.”

  “Well, anyway, I’m looking at the year 1955. Suppose a fellow had a need to use a night-vision setup in 1955 and he was in West Arkansas. How’d he get a hold of one? Where’d they be? Were they issued widely to troops? Would they have been, say, up at Campbell with the 101st Airborne? Would they have been at Bragg with the 82nd? Or maybe they were up at that ballistics development lab in Rhode Island? I’m just trying to get a feel for how common they was and how close to West Arkansas. And who was their expert? Who advocated them? Who trained on them and knew them? My feeling is, you couldn’t become proficient without training.”

  “You couldn’t. It was like l
ooking into an aquarium. The gooks never did figure it out. Anyhow, when do you need this by?”

  “If it came yesterday, I’d be late.”

  “Damn, Bob, what the hell this all about?”

  “It’s a deal I’m working on with a writer.”

  “Oh, a book! It’ll be a best-seller, I can guarantee you. You gonna tell him about An Loc?”

  “I might.”

  “Okay, I got a light schedule today and a newbie spec 4 just assigned; I’ll get this boy right on it. Number?”

  Bob gave him the number.

  “You hang tight. I’ll see what we can dig up.”

  He hung up.

  “Now what?” said Russ.

  Bob opened his wallet and peeled out $300.

  “I want you to take the truck and head up one exit on the Etheridge Parkway. That’s the Y City exit. I seem to recall a camping store up there. You go up there and buy two sleeping bags, a Coleman lantern, some Coleman fuel, some changes of underwear, toothbrushes, the works. Remember the fuel, the damn lantern don’t work without it! We’re not going back to my trailer for a spell.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s good to change your base of operations every once in a while. We been at the trailer a week. We’ll move somewhere else for a couple of days or so.”

  “But I had a sleeping bag. At the trailer. I had underwear. I had—”

  “Now, don’t get yourself lathered up. Man, you start to squeal like a pup every goddamned time. We’ll leave that stuff there. If anybody like a Mr. Duane Peck takes a look, he’ll see it and figure we’re due back at any time. Got it?”

  “You are paranoid,” said Russ.

  “Para-what?”

  “Never mind.”

  Russ left. Bob lay back and rested. He gave Russ time to drive off, then left the room and went down the hall to the pay phone and called his wife collect.

  “Well, hello.”

  “Well, howdy, stranger,” said Julie. “Thought you’d married a movie star and headed for California.” “Not this boy. No sir. Ah—”

  “Ah—I know that tone. You’re about to tell me something I don’t want to hear.”

  “Sweetie, it’s nothing. It just is going to take a bit longer than I thought. Maybe another week or two.”

  “Are you having a good time?”

  “It’s been interesting. I went to his grave. I had a moment with him. We been going through records. It’s very educational. Saw Sam. That sort of thing.”

  “How is he?”

  “Old. Older. I don’t know, he goes a little strange now and then. I’m worried about him.”

  “We’re all older.”

  “How’s my baby girl?”

  “She’s fine. Misses her daddy.”

  “I’ll be home as soon as possible.”

  “You’re not in any trouble, are you?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  “You love trouble. That’s your problem.”

  Bob bought a Coke and the Little Rock paper and went back to the room. About two o’clock the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Down-filled or polyester?”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you want down-filled or just simple polyester? For the sleeping bags? Maybe it’s too warm for the down-filled. Incidentally, I had to go all the way to Booneville. That camp store was closed.”

  “Polyester is fine. And a cooler. Fair enough?”

  “Gotcha.”

  He hung up to more silence in the room and the minutes ticked by. At last the phone rang. It was about 3:30. “Hello.”

  “Bob?”

  It was Sergeant Major Jenks.

  “Yes sir.”

  “All right, I got some info for you. You guessed right pretty much about the M-3s. At no one time did the army have on its TO&E more than two thousand of those units. They was damned expensive, they was hard to operate and they was delicate, so distribution was mainly to elite units; they never handed ’em out to the troops at the company or platoon level. Hell, you couldn’t even buy one at the PX! Dispersion was mainly to special forces units in Europe, to the big airborne divisions at brigade or regimental S-2 level, to 4th Army in Washington State and the 3rd Mountain Division up in Alaska. The heaviest profusion of them was to 9th and 23rd Infantry on the DMZ at the 38th parallel in Korea. Another complement went to the Jungle Warfare School in Panama. Just what you’d expect.”

  Damn, Bob thought.

  “Okay, fine, Norman, I—”

  “Wait a sec, ain’t done yet. Don’t this beat all? According to our records, three such units were transshipped from the Panama Zone, the Jungle Warfare School, to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, in late June of 1954.”

  Bob waited a second.

  “What for?”

  “Well, one of the problems with the goddamned things was simple: no doctrine. They were not effectively used in Korea because nobody had thought much about the best methods of deployment and there was thought about junking the things altogether. Then a brilliant young first lieutenant wrote a paper on night-vision tactical doctrine which he submitted to the Infantry Journal, where it got published and he got noticed. So he finds himself TDY Camp Chaffee, where he’s put in charge of what they’re calling the Experimental Night Tactical Development Program, code-named BLACK LIGHT, where they run a lot of night-fire operations trying to figure out the best way to deploy the thing, while also working with ways to refine it. They got some R&D types, they got some intel boys, maybe even some Agency boys in it.”

  “It sounds like a black operation. The technology would be useful for a hell of lot more people than company commanders with perimeters to defend.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Give me a name, Norman.”

  “I thought you’d ask for one,” said Jenks. “And I got a hell of a name for you. Preece.”

  “Preece!” said Bob.

  “Yep. That’s where the whole army night-Sniping program began. With BLACK LIGHT and First Lieutenant, later Major and now Brigadier General James F. Preece, retired. Jack Preece.”

  Bob nodded. The name took him way back.

  “Tigercat.”

  “Tigercat. That’s the one and same guy.”

  “You got an address for the general?”

  “I went to the computer for you, Bob. You never heard this from me, which is why I am calling from a pay phone in Arlington.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “He’s now CEO and director of research for an outfit called JFP Technology, Inc., in Oklahoma City.”

  “What’s JFP Technology?”

  “One of those small unmarked buildings that’s really skunkworks for nasty toys. Their specialty is sound suppressors and night-vision equipment for the world’s armies and SWAT teams. Our Delta guys use their stuff and so do the SEALs. That’s what Tigercat gets you in the civilian world.”

  Norman gave him the number.

  “Thanks, Norman,” said Bob, then hung up. He waited a second, letting his head clear. Tigercat was the code name for the 7th Division Sniper School in Vietnam, where the army ran its snipers through and taught them the doctrine. Of course there was a problem: army doctrine was different than marine doctrine. Not worse, not better, just different. And it worked, or at least the kills said it did. Army snipers ran up far higher numbers in Vietnam than marines did.

  So was it an interservice thing? The fact that there was not a lot of love lost between sniper communities in the two services, either then or now? Maybe. Maybe not. Bob didn’t know. What he did know was that Preece’s Tigercat turned out a number of first-class shooters very quickly; and in no little time, the army snipers were putting bodies in bags all over Nam. Yet even the army was a little awkward about this triumph; its huge and efficient P.R. machine never made a thing of it, no books came out of it, none of its high scorers ever became known to the public as had he and Carl Hitchcock. It was … well, it was different.

  The door
opened and Russ walked in.

  “You want me to unload the truck?”

  “Just a minute,” said Bob. “Now you listen to me.” He dialed the number as Russ sat across from him. After a bit the phone was answered by a young woman.

  “JFP Technology,” she said.

  “Yes, hello, I’m calling for General Preece.”

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “Yes, my name is Gunnery Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, USMC, retired. I was familiar with the general’s operations in Vietnam; he might be familiar with mine.”

  The phone went dead for a bit and then, “Gunnery Sergeant Swagger?”

  “Yes sir, it is.”

  “By God, as I live and die, the real live Bob the Nailer. I never thought I’d have the pleasure. You did a hell of a job of work in country.”

  “Thank you, sir. Just the job the Corps gave me.”

  “You may not realize this, but do you remember when you won the Wimbledon Cup in ’71 after your second tour?”

  “Yes sir, I do.”

  “Well, I came in third!”

  “My God!”

  “Yes sir. You had it that day, Sergeant. Nothing threw you. Not the wind or the sun or the mirage. You shot through everything.”

  “That’s our good Marine Corps training, sir!”

  “Sergeant, you don’t ‘sir’ me, all right? I’m retired now. All that’s behind us. What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, sir, I’ve signed up to do a damned book. ‘I was there,’ that sort of thing.”

  “That’ll be a hell of a book. I can’t wait to read that one. The things I heard about the An Loc Valley.”

  “Hell of a fight,” said Bob. “Anyhow: I’m working with a young writer and he’s got me convinced we ought to do what he calls context. You know, background, the big picture, how it all fits together. So I thought I’d have to describe the marine sniper program in those days. And he wanted to look at the whole damned thing. Army sniping too; give it the grand overview, he says. Well, sir, I thought you’d be the man to talk to.”

  “Gunny, you know a lot of that is still classified. And the army never went public with its snipers in the way the Corps did. Too damn liberal in Washington, I suppose.”