Next he went to the filing cabinets for the county land plats and sifted through them. Again, luck or whatever was with him: the plats offered a much more detailed examination of the terrain and he found the area and looked at a map of the place. He found County Route 70, a straight line running perpendicular and east from 271, past Iron Fork Lake. It plunged deeper and deeper into map blankness like an arrow, a road that went nowhere except to the very limits of the known world. Civilization hadn’t reached that far into the dark woods, evidently; not even any sewers appeared to have been laid. But that wasn’t important; instead he looked at the words along the road marking local place-names. Way, way back—maybe twenty miles in—he came across a “Posey Hollow,” in what had to be the shadow of Iron Fork Mountain. The map there was blank except for the ominous word Forest. A squiggle denoted a rough road snaking inward toward nothingness.
As best as he could, he copied the directions down, drawing up a facsimile. Then he headed back outside, feeling good. He’d found him. That fast, that simple.
* * *
They drove the 271 until they reached the dirt road that was County 70, where a sign pointed toward Iron Fork Lake.
“There, there!” he shouted.
But Bob did not turn down it.
“Keep your voice down,” he said.
He threw a U-turn when a gap in the traffic permitted and headed back to the closest town, which was called Acorn, where a slatternly convenience store sat in isolation behind some gas pumps across from a one-horse strip of dying retail outlets and a trailer post office. Bob pulled into the convenience lot.
“I need a Coke,” he said, “come on.”
They went in, and Bob took a plastic bottle of the soft drink from the glass case, got one for Russ, then went up to the counter, where a black woman watched them sullenly. He threw something at her that caused Russ to bumble into a movie-scale double take. A smile! A beaming, radiant, howdy-there smile.
She smiled back.
“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “I got some friends supposed to come through from Little Rock to look at some hunting camp property. Damn, I may be lost. You seen any groups of strangers, city-looking boys, very careful types? Truth is, we’re all Little Rock cops. You know that cop look: way the eyes is always traveling, way one guy is sort of hanging back, taking it all in, the way they don’t talk loud and keep to themselves. You see my friends in here in, say, the last few days?”
“Mister, in hunting season you see boys like that all the time. I ain’t seen a soul in months I don’t know his mama and his papa and his brothers.”
“No four-wheel-drive vehicles? Sunglasses, expensive boots, clothes look real new?”
“You ain’t looking for no cops.”
“No, I ain’t, truth is. I am worried about these damn boys and would be grateful if you’d think about it a second.”
“No sir, I ain’t seen nothing like that.”
“Okay, good work. Thanks.” He left a five on the counter.
They walked back to the truck.
“Man, you are careful,” said Russ.
“I am alive,” Bob said, “and I goddamn well intend to stay that way.”
They drove back along 271 to the dirt road, turned down it and began to pick their way along. Periodically, Bob would stop, get out and examine the dirt road for tracks. There were no fresh ones. They passed a lake far off to the right, flat pewter water against the green bulk of a mountain.
They drove and drove. The forest swallowed them, the canopy trees interlocking to block out the sun and the blue sky, as if they plunged through a green tunnel toward blackness. Every mile or so, Bob would pull over, get out, let the dust settle, check the road for tracks, listen intently. His persistence and his patience Russ found really deeply annoying.
Come on, he was thinking.
They crept past deserted farms, timbered or burned-out patches of field, the occasional meadow, but soon enough the forest grew denser, black oak and hickory and winged elm, a curtain of hardwood shot through with an undergrowth of bristly saw brier and yucca.
Finally, they came to a ragged track off to the right.
“That’s it,” said Russ. “If the cabin is here, it’s back there.”
But Bob continued on for at least a mile, then pulled off the road, sliding the car as deep in the woods as he could. “It would be easier to walk down the road,” Russ said.
“It ain’t about being easier. It’s about being safer.”
He got out, waited again for the dust to settle.
“Bob, I—”
“Shhh,” Bob cautioned. “Use your ears. Shut your eyes and listen.”
Russ heard nothing. Bob concentrated for a good five minutes, waiting to discover if the far-off hum of a following car would announce itself. But nothing came. The world was quiet except for the occasional squawk of a bird and the quiet hiss of the wind in the trees.
“Okay,” Bob said, looking at the crude map Russ had drawn from the land plat. “You’re sure this is accurate?”
“It’s almost a tracing,” Russ said.
“Looks to me like the road trends back to the southeast. That would put the cabin a mile and a half in. We ought to be overland from it about a mile.”
Bob shot an azimuth on a small compass he pulled out of his jeans, grabbed a pair of binoculars, and they set off into the woods. The forest absorbed them. It was dense and green, the light overhead filtering through the canopy, more like a jungle than Russ’s idea of a forest.
Every so often Bob would shoot another compass angle, then veer crazily in an odd direction. It was soon enough gibberish to Russ; they seemed just to be wandering through the heavy woods in the heat, the bugs biting, the birds singing. He was hopelessly lost.
“You know where we’re going?”
“Yep.”
“You can get us out of here?”
“Yep.”
“We must have come miles.”
“We’ve walked about three, yeah. By beeline, we’ve come less than one, however. In the jungle you don’t go nowheres in a straight line, ’less you want to be taken down.”
Russ thought: he’s been here before. He’s taken men down before.
Look at him, he thought. A force of nature. Bob slid so easily and silently through the trees, his boots never slipped, he never stumbled or grunted, just maneuvered with the easy grace of the man who’d done it before. His face was blank, his eyes working the edges of the horizon, the demeanor utterly calm and concentrated. Leatherstocking. Natty Bumpo. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett. Damned John Wayne, like his father, whom everybody always said looked like John Wayne. Soon the sweat showed on his blue denim shirt but Bob paid it no mind; he just kept on trucking, the grip of that .45 sticking out of his jeans above the kidney.
In time, they came to a creek, cool and dark, and swiftly flowing. Russ scrambled over the rocks and got a mouthful of the water, which tasted faintly metallic.
“You make too much noise that way,” Bob said. “Cup it up to your lips and sip it. You never was a marine, right?”
“Not hardly,” said Russ.
“Okay, let’s go. It ain’t far.”
They cut across a path which ran between two low hills and appeared to lead to a clearing in the dim, overgrown trees ahead, but Bob never did things the easy way. Instead, halfway through that little draw, Bob took them off the path, through some heavy growth, and then broke onto the barer high ground under a maze of pines. Ahead, Russ could see the light of vista and openness. But Bob dropped to a low crawl and slithered ahead, coming at last to the edge and setting himself up behind a tree. Russ, feeling utterly like an imposter, did the same.
Two hundred yards below in a hollow by the stream sat the cabin. It was built of logs, low and primitive, with a woodpile, an outhouse, a feed trough for the pigs who scurried in a pen. A beat-up Chevy stood near it, rusted out, one fender gone to primer. Yet it had nothing of rustic Dogpatch, your quaint rural hamlet to it: inst
ead it looked mean and squalid and impoverished.
“No phone lines,” Bob said. “No goddamned TV aerial. No electric wires.”
“Question,” said Russ. “If he’s just out of prison, how come the place looks so lived in?”
“He had a brother named Lum,” said Bob. “The brother had a son, who also lives here. It’s the son’s work you’re seeing, not old Jed’s.”
“Okay,” said Russ. “So let’s go see if he’ll talk to us.”
“No way,” said Bob. “You stay here. You eyeball the place. You got another hour. Then the sun’s too low to the west and it’ll reflect off the lenses. You got a watch?”
“Yes.”
“It’s two forty-five. You eyeball it till three forty-five. What are you looking for?”
“Uh, anything that’s out of the ordinary.”
“How do you look?”
“Uh—” Completely new question. Russ flubbed around.
“Hard,” he finally said.
“No, dummy. Divide it into quadrants. Thirty seconds a quadrant. Blink to black between, then move on. Follow the same pattern for ten minutes, then reverse it or change it around. Take frequent breaks and study the woods around. Use lens discipline. Never let them rise above the midpoint, you might throw a reflection. You’re not looking for men and guns, because you won’t see them and there’s no point. You’re looking for regular outlines. Nothing in nature is regular. If you see a straight line in the woods, you know something’s off. Got it? One hour. Then put the glasses down and just go to regular vision.”
“Where’ll you be?”
“I’m going to circle around and see if I cut any tracks in the woods. I want to know if parties of men have moved through here to that damned place. If it’s empty, and you haven’t seen anything, then we’ll go down.”
“Okay,” said Russ. “We’re not going to get out of here until after dark.”
“Don’t you worry about that, Donnie. You just eyeball the place.”
With that, he slid back and in seconds—the sniper’s gift—had disappeared.
Who the hell is Donnie? Russ wondered.
37
Jack Preece was working on budgetary projections for 1998, one of his most favorite things.
He loved the steady march of the numbers across the page, the semblance of order they brought to chaos, the inflow and outflow as his fortunes advanced. It answered some deeply felt need he had.
Battalion 316, Honduras Army
Salvadoran Treasury Police
Detroit SWAT
Baltimore County Quick Response
FBI Hostage Rescue
Atomic Energy Commission Security Teams
Library of Congress SWAT
Navy SEAL Team Six
It was amazing, really. Nobody had ever looked at it this way, but sniping was a growth industry. The explosion in terrorism in the seventies, its ugly reappearance in the nineties, the profusion of heavily armed drug cartels with paramilitary capacity, the specter of armed right-wing militias, the increasing liberal call for “sophisticated” (i.e., surgical or low-lethality) police operations, all added up to one thing: the precision rifleman and the gear and culture to equip and train him were a skyrocket for the nineties and the century beyond the millennium. He was surprised, come to think of it, that the Wall Street Journal hadn’t done a story yet.
Every town, every city, every state, every agency, every country, needed the trained rifleman with the world-class equipment. Life was becoming psychotic. Rationality had broken down. Crushed and shattered by disappointment, political, domestic or economic, many men turned to violence. The workplace berserker, the family hostage taker, the organized criminal gang, the drug security goon squad, all heavily armed. Who would stop them? Not the patrol officer or the security dork, not enough training, not enough guts. No, it would be some replication of himself: a man with the coolness, the experience, essentially the will, to lie there in the dark and when the whole thing was going down, to do his duty. Trigger slack out, breathing controlled, absolute confidence in weapons system, not a hitch or a doubt or a twitch anywhere: the trigger goes back. A hundred yards away a small piece of metal driven at supersonic speeds enters the cranial vault, expands like a fist opening to hand, then spurts out the rear in a fog of pink mist. It’s over.
He, Jack Preece, had seen this earlier than anyone and was now prepared to ride the wave to a better, a safer tomorrow.
“General?”
It was Peck, long-boned and pale-eyed and trashy as death itself, in his deputy’s uniform, his gold badge shiny and bright.
“General,” he said, “it’s time. Signal just come through.”
“Give me a sitrep, please.”
“Huh?”
“Report on the situation, you idiot.”
“Oh. Yes sir. They’re there, they must be coming in. The old man got a good visual, else he wouldn’t have sent it.”
“Then let’s saddle up.”
Preece was already wearing his ghillie suit, a ghastly jumpsuit apparition painstakingly festooned with thousands of strips of camouflage cloth threaded through thousands of loops, giving him indoors the appearance of a great shaggy green dog that walked on two legs and had just stepped out of the swamp. But in the natural environment, it conferred an instant shapeless invisibility. He rose, feeling the swish of the strips, and quickly went to the bathroom. Before him on the sink were four wide paint sticks, black, brown, olive drab, jungle green. He hated the masks some of the boys wore: too hot, and limited peripheral vision. He worked quickly in applying the combat makeup, diagonal streaks an inch wide. The darkness of the jungle ate up the pink of his face like a lion swallowing a pie: it was gone, that pink, bland, square, handsome mug behind which he faced the world and hid his inner nature. A warrior gazed back, ancient and fearsome, his white eyes preternatural against the jungle tapestry that muted his flesh.
He grabbed his boonie hat—the original, worn in Nam for the two years he commanded Tigercat—and raced outside, pausing only to pick up the cocked and locked Browning Hi-Power that slid into a shoulder holster under the ghillie. Duane Peck had a four-wheeled ATV fired up and a long plastic case which packed the weapons system tied across the handlebars.
Jack Preece climbed aboard and with a spurt of the throttle Peck gunned ahead. They had not used the vehicle at all in previous recons of the area but had plotted a path through the trees that would in ten minutes bring Jack Preece within a half mile of one of the hills that overlooked the creek and the path. The little vehicle ate up the distance, though Peck kept the speed moderate so there was no wailing engine.
They reached the destination and Preece dismounted, took the case and opened it. The M-16 with its gigantic eye atop its gigantic tube mounted to the receiver was a black shadow in the decaying light. The suppressor protruded from the gun muzzle like an elegant snout, a sleek cylinder fully a foot long. The metal was all Teflon-coated, lusterless and somehow dead to the touch. He bent, quickly attached the miniature battery pack to his belt, lifted the rifle and locked in a twenty-round banana clip with only nineteen cartridges, always a sound precaution when working with magazine-fed weapons. With a snap, he pulled back and released the charging plunger, loading and cocking the weapon, and thumbed the safety to On. He threw the support harness around his shoulder, rose and lifted it: less than eighteen pounds total, quite easily done.
“Get out of here now, Peck. You meet me at the staging area at midnight; if I’m not there, check each hour.”
“Yes sir,” said Peck.
The general turned and headed up the slope, hearing the low buzz of the engine as Peck’s ATV lurched off and slowly faded away.
He walked for ten minutes and saw before him a broad, flat, needle-carpeted forest floor, broken by the vertical maze of the trees, lit at one edge by the setting sun on the other side of the clearing. He moved through it fluidly, advancing twenty or thirty feet at a time, then melting into the earth, and listening i
ntently. He reached the edge and, placing himself beside a pine tree with the lowest possible profile, peered downward. He could see figures behind the window, speaking animatedly. It was hard to make out. Binoculars would bring them out, but the sun was just low enough to present the possibility of a reflection. Instead, he brought the rifle up and with a snap of his thumb first to light and then to scope, went to infrared.
The cabin, two hundred yards away, was a bit out of range for the reach of the searchlight, so he didn’t get great illumination. The lack of total dark also eroded illumination. But he got enough: in the murky green light, he could see three figures. They seemed animated. Details were lost; one appeared to be tall and thin and could match up easily with the Bob Lee Swagger who had visited him two weeks ago. Another was the boy.
Do them, he thought.
Right now, why wait? Do them, be done with it. He could put nineteen rounds through the window in less than two seconds, and the .223, though not a powerfully heavy and accurate long-range round, was a true speed merchant and still offered more than 2,500 feet per second of velocity at that range. They’d be dead before they hit the ground.
But Jack was professional. You go by the plan, which you’ve rehearsed painstakingly. When you improvised, the law of unforeseen accident always took its toll.
He snapped the beam and the scope off and withdrew, snaking along the ground until he was lost in the trees. He stood then, and traced his way back along the ridgeline, making no noise, raising no dust. By the time he got to the hide, it was nearly full dark.
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