He turned to a computer terminal and punched in a command. The computer answered immediately.
“Superb shooting,” said the general. “Exactly as expected. You X’d the bull’s-eye on the first two cleanly, you broke a line on the third and you X’d the fourth again. Four kills. Elapsed time, 3.2 seconds. Recorded noise, ah, under one hundred decibels, about the sound intensity of someone firing a BB gun.”
The general reached over and hit a switch and the thermal scope died; Bob set the rifle, which looked oddly distended with the huge gunmetal-gray tube atop it, on the sandbags; he looked downrange at his targets and at the end of the tunnel, saw flattened metal silhouettes, clearly on some kind of uneven conveyer belt that gave them the lurching movement of human beings on patrol.
“How do you heat them?” said Bob.
“Essentially, you were shooting at a common household appliance. You just got four toasters. Or, rather, their heating elements. Congratulations.”
“There’s no infrared-light source on this piece,” Bob said.
“No sir,” said the general. “We’re beyond that. We’re beyond even ambient light, the Starlight scopes. That’s passive infrared; no infrared beam and it doesn’t need illumination. The problem with the ambient-light pieces was that they didn’t work in total darkness, they didn’t work in smoke, fog or rain, they didn’t work in daylight, even. They were limited. The Magnavox collects all the infrared energy from the target scene by a single-element silicon aspheric lens. The emerging convergent beam is horizontally scanned by an oscillating mirror and then focused on a vertical linear array of sixty-four lead solenide detector elements which traduce the IR energy into electrical signals. Each detector’s output is fed to a high-gain pre-amplifier. The signals from the sixty-four pre-amplifiers are then multiplexed to a single composite video signal. The composite video signal is then amplified and applied to a miniature cathode-ray tube that is viewed through the monocular eyepiece. It’s MTV for snipers.”
“Pretty goddamned slick,” Bob said. The box did in fact look like a television set, a long rectangular 6×6 tube with the huge round eye up front for a screen, leading back to the eyepiece.
“Well, we’ve come a ways. The Germans used to shoot at concentration camp prisoners. That’s how they tested their first-generation Vampir sight. We shoot at decommissioned toasters.”
“Can the boy try it?”
“No, that’s all right,” said Russ.
“You sure, son?” asked the general.
“It’s fine,” said Russ.
The general turned back to Bob. “It’s not just that the thermal sniperscope is the highest refinement in the night-vision electronics. But what we sell is a whole system. We wholesale from Magnavox, we mount it to the rifle, we manufacture our own suppressor, we pack it into a kit, and we provide trainers and a constant technical hot line and emergency system. That’s not an M-16.”
“It felt heavier than one.”
“It’s a Knight-Stoner SR-25 in .308, shooting a subsonic load. And our JFP MAW-7 suppressor. Unbelievably silent, accurate, lethal, isn’t it? Muzzle blast is caused by high-pressure gases suddenly escaping from the end of the barrel as the bullet exits. Reducing the pressure results in less sound generated. We reduce the pressure by increasing the volume for gas expansion, reducing the gas temperature, delaying gas exit by trapping and turbulence. Damn, it’s a good unit!”
“Yes, it is,” said Bob.
“Nothing like your old 700 Remington?”
“I’d hate to be matched with my old rifle against a fellow with that outfit.”
“You wouldn’t have a chance. The night belongs to the man who can see through it. Imagine the kills you could have gotten in combat with this outfit.”
Bob rose; the demonstration was over.
“Come on back,” said the general. “We’ll talk in my office.”
Jack Preece was a stocky man, with the short neck that was common to many championship shooters; he was handsome and rather slick, with a mane of silver hair and a smooth way about him. He radiated confidence and charm; his skin was tan and his teeth, capped, were white and perfect.
He led them back from the firing range through workshops where the system—the Knight rifle, the night-vision device, the sound suppressor—was being assembled into kit form, a single plastic case, after assembly, zeroing and disassembly, for shipment at no doubt a pretty penny to the elite marksmanship units of the world—Delta, various special forces units, SEAL Team Six, a Ranger battalion, the FBI’s HRT, various big-city SWAT units.
“That Knight rifle gives us an enormous advantage over even the M-21s. We can get minute-of-angle accuracy out of a semiauto; we can get second or third shots without breaking the shooter’s spot-weld with a bolt gun’s accuracy. Bob, the days of the bolt gun are over. By the decade’s end, all the world’s elite sniper teams will be shooting semiauto.”
“I think I’ll keep mine awhile,” said Bob, and the general laughed.
He ushered them into his office, a small paneled warren, one wall of which was filled with marksmanship trophies from a hundred forgotten high-power rifle championships the world over, as well as photographs of men with rifles standing or kneeling around a trophy, each with a fancy target rifle in his hands. Bob glimpsed and read a shooting history etched on brass plates: Interzonal U.S. Army Champion, 1977; Panama Games, Standing Rifle, 1979; NRA High Master; Alabama High Power, Sitting Champion, 1978; and on and on.
“No Wimbledon Cup up there,” said the general. “My best year, you took it. Nineteen seventy-one.”
“Sir, if I’d have known you had a gap in your trophy case, I’d have dropped a shot or two!”
The general laughed. “It’s all shit, of course. But I have customers in here all the time. It impresses them. Now, what’s on your mind, gentlemen?” He lit a cigar and leaned back in his chair comfortably, as if looking forward to a good time.
“Sir,” said Russ, “I’ve been hired to coauthor Bob Lee Swagger’s story for the Presidio Press in San Francisco. We wanted to at least touch on the wider shape of the story: that is, American sniping in Vietnam as programs and how they affected the war. There’s not a lot of data on the army’s, yet I understand the army snipers got much higher kill rates than the marines.”
“It had nothing to do with the quality of men,” said the general with an executive’s practiced smoothness. “At the senior noncommissioned officer level, the American services all have extremely talented and motivated individuals. The marines have stayed wedded to marksmanship as the core of their service; that’s fine, as history has proven out time and again. The army has been charged with staying at the cutting edge of ground combat technology. That was my job. That’s where Tigercat came from. We started in the early fifties trying to develop a technology that would give the night to the American sniper.”
“The M-3 sniperscope,” prompted Bob.
“A piece of junk,” said the general, expelling a large curling cumulus of smoke. “Bulky, clumsy, awkward, with a distressing propensity toward showing the vegetation more clearly than the enemy. So heavy it could only be mounted on a light rifle like the puny carbine. But … a start.”
“Yes sir,” said Bob. “No doubt, if we’d have had your gear in the Nam, we could have kicked ass big-time.”
The general wasn’t really listening.
“Do you know what the difference between the marine and the army sniper programs was? I mean, speaking frankly. I love the spirit of the marines, but our kills were so much higher. Do you know why?”
Russ inwardly blanched. He knew this was the last thing Swagger would want to hear from this grinning, self-promoting baboon.
“No sir,” said Bob evenly.
“The marines somehow couldn’t commit at the conceptual level to the idea of technology. At some fundamental level, they believed still in the romantic notion of individual heroism. They somehow refused to enter the modern age. You marine snipers were like World W
ar I pilots or cowboy gunslingers, going off on your own to do battle with the enemy and taking him out one-on-one. We believed in team spirit, sophisticated technology and body counts. Our body counts were so much higher. We saw through to the heart of it: it was about killing the enemy, not dueling him. And our sniper teams moved in and left nothing but step-ons. When we put a V.C. down, we didn’t count it until the next morning we could put our boot on his chest. We called them step-ons.”
“Yes sir,” said Bob chastely, nothing showing on his bland face. “I sure wish I’d had a chance to work the jungle with that kind of equipment.”
His piece said, the general returned to the technical and the arcane.
“The M-3 was a great advance over the M-2 system of World War II, yet in Korea the troops hated it and the army itself didn’t really understand or follow up. It was my idea to run the thing through a night-battle wringer and try to develop doctrine. Fortunately, somebody read my idea in Infantry Journal and I was given a chance to practice what I’d preached. We called the project BLACK LIGHT and ran it out of Camp Chaffee, where we tried to devise some data for night operations with vision devices. We were stuck with the goddamned M-3s. But at least we were able to show the R&D boys what was necessary in a night-combat environment. No one really knew until that time. They’d just copied the German hardware.”
“Tell us about BLACK LIGHT.”
The general launched into a long and somewhat self-serving account of the project, and it soon developed that the problem with him wouldn’t be getting him to talk but getting him to shut up. His chatter soon evolved into performance, soliloquy, ultimately a one-man show, punctuated by theatrical blasts of smoke. He looked like the god of war, Mars himself, sitting there under his reasonable gray hair as the clouds swirled and he gave pronouncement. Much of his presentation seemed to turn on obscure issues, like trying to find the right number of men that stayed within command parameters and yet were adequate to provide security for the shooter. Months were spent determining if six or eight or ten were better, and the ultimate choice was four, given that the sniper himself could do double duty in a firefight with a greasegun. Night command vocabulary was tested; night map reading was examined and night navigation; radio techniques were explored. The shooting was a relatively late part in it.
“About ’55 we got to the shooting.”
“What did you use for targets? The Germans used people, you said.”
“On the record? On the record, heat-generating targets were not mandatory, because we were only beginning to understand the principle of ambient light, that is, passive night vision. We used the M-3’s active infrared, that is, an infrared searchlight. We could have shot at anything. But there was a ballistic component to the project which mandated load testing on living organisms. Off the record, we shot sheep and goats. Cattle would have been preferable because their respiratory system most resembles humans, but I had no stomach for trying to bring down a steer with a bullet that at its best generated muzzle energies somewhere between a .38 Special and a light .357 Magnum.”
On and on it went, through the construction of the units, problems with the clamps that secured them, difficulty with the webbing that supported, and so forth and so on. Russ thought he’d doze.
“I’m just curious,” said Bob finally, and Russ knew that he’d played out the whole long hand, nursed the man’s vanities and ego, gotten through the bullshit lecture on “individual heroism vs. team spirit and body count” to get to this point at last, “what sort of administrative control could there have been on the units themselves? Was it standard infantry arms-room administration; was it more stringent? Who actually controlled the units? The actual M-3s?”
“Technically, I did, though the true administration of the project fell in the hands of my first sergeant, whose name was Ben Farrell. Very good NCO. Killed outside Da Nang in ’64.”
“Who controlled the arms-room keys?”
“Well … what does this have to do with anything?”
There was an awkward moment.
Then Russ said, “The truth is, we think there’s a movie potential for this book. And the reason I wanted to talk about night vision was that I had an idea for a funny scene. Young soldiers break into the armory and steal some night-vision devices. They use them to spy on a WAC encampment, some girls with nice tits. Tits and ass. That’s the kind of wacky stuff the movies love.”
“Oh, Lord,” said the general. “Why don’t you just make it up? What do you need my help for?”
“Sergeant Swagger insisted that everything be at least based in reality.”
“Well, I can assure you nobody used our hardware to spy on WACs and if you knew anything about the WACs of the fifties, you wouldn’t want to spy on them either.”
“We could make it nurses,” said Russ. “Would that be better?”
The general made a face of disgust. “Hollywood,” he said. “No, it’s impossible. There were only two arms-room keys. Three, I assume the base commander had one but he paid us no mind. We had our shop, our barracks space and use of three range facilities and various field assault courses. The only two keys were controlled by First Sergeant Farrell and myself and he was a Prussian in the discipline department. No one used those weapons without our permission or knowledge. Which means no one used them, period.”
Bob veered away from the point.
“Did you find the units equally effective?”
“No,” said the general, relaxing somewhat, and expelling a long whoosh of dark smoke, and went on to explain the difference in the units, the difference in the lots of ammunition, the difference in the three carbines themselves.
It went on like that, Russ pretending to keep notes, Bob prodding with gentle questions, up to and including the general’s astonishingly successful stewardship of the Tiger-cat Sniper School, the record number of kills racked up once the mounting problems for the Starlight on the M-21 were solved, and so on.
Late in the afternoon, Bob circled in for another pass.
“Could we just get back to BLACK LIGHT one more time, sir?” he asked.
“Certainly, Sergeant,” said the general.
“We agreed, the young man and I, that this book would be better if there were some personalities in it. So I’m thinking: there at Chaffee in ’54 ’55: any outstanding personalities involved? How big a team was it? Who were they?”
“The usual. Good men. Toward the end, representatives from Varo Inc. and Polan Industries, who ultimately got the initial Starlight scope contracts. Some civilians TDY from Army Warfare Vision at Fort Devens. You know, I have a picture. Is that interesting to you?”
“Yes, sir. Like to see it.”
“It’s over here, on the wall.”
He led them to the wall and pointed the picture out. Like the others it was a mixed group of civilians and soldiers standing and kneeling; Preece himself, much thinner but somehow rawer, crouched in the front row, holding the carbine with the huge optical device mounted. He wore army-green fatigues with his name on a white name tag and one of those goofy turret caps that were issue in the fifties. The men around him were doughy, unimpressive, unmemorable: they looked like NASA flight controllers, faintly ridiculous in the casual clothes of the era, mostly short-sleeved white shirts with slacks and lumpy oxfords.
“I should have had them write their names down,” the general said with a laugh. “I only recognize a few. That’s Ben Farrell. That’s Bob Eadings, of Polan.”
“Who’s that one?” asked Bob, pointing to a kneeling figure at the edge of the photograph, a young man with a certain pugnacious set to his square, blocky head, who looked strong beneath his clothes and had a set of fiercely burning eyes.
“That guy,” said Preece. “Lord, I remember him. He was from Motorola, I think. He was only on the project for two weeks but it happened to be the two weeks we took the picture. I cannot for the life of me remember the name.”
“Were all these men shooters?” Russ asked.
“No, not really. Ben Farrell was a very good shot. Not exceptional, but excellent.”
“Who did the shooting? Was it a team?”
“Oh, there was only one shooter,” said the general, exhaling a long flume of smoke like a dragon’s breath. “Me.”
After they had gone, the general sat very still for a time. His cigar burned out and he didn’t touch it. He didn’t call his girlfriend or his daughter or his divorced wife or his lawyer or any of the men on his board of directors or his head engineer or any of the old boys in his sniper cadre.
Finally, he got up, opened the cabinet behind his desk, took out a bottle of Wild Turkey and poured himself a tall glass. He sat, looking at it for a time, and then reached for it, noting, as he drew it to his lips, that his hands were still shaking.
24
Some dang days a fella couldn’t win. Duane, going on just a few hours’ sleep after having spent all day yesterday bouncing around Polk County on the tail of old Sam, plus answering a few unavoidable police calls, was bushed; but he was up and at it early this morning, on his ordered sweep across all the commercial establishments he could find along the Etheridge Parkway corridor.
Yet he struck pay dirt early enough.
Goddamn, he thought, when the Indian day-clerk woman at the Days Inn at Parkway Exit 7 said yes, an older man and a younger man had checked into a room yesterday at around ten. Was there anything wrong?
Duane puffed and acted like some sort of important investigator, and pretty much bullied the poor woman—she was foreign, with some kind of fucking dot on her head, so what difference did it make?—into giving up the whole story. They’d checked in at ten, the boy disappeared for most of the afternoon, the man made long-distance phone calls all day and they’d left about six in a truck loaded with sleeping bags and, technically, still had a contract on the room, at least until checkout time, noon.
She remembered, because usually they don’t rent rooms before one, but the tall man had insisted.
Duane asked to see the phone records, though he didn’t have a subpoena. Fortunately, the woman was too stupid to know or too indifferent to care. In his notebook, he wrote down the numbers in his big silly handwriting, like a child’s.
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