by Larry Hoy
A Bullet for the Shooter
Hit World Book Two
By
Larry Hoy & William Alan Webb
PUBLISHED BY: Hit World Press
Copyright © 2021 Larry Hoy & William Alan Webb
All Rights Reserved
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License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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To all the brave men and women who fought the real war after 9-11.
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Cover Design by Shezaad Sudar
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William Alan Webb - Author Foreword
A Bullet for the Shooter began life as the novelette Shoot First, Larry Hoy’s maiden entry in the then-nascent Hit World Universe. I found the character of Luther Sweetwater compelling from the very start and performed more of an editing role on that story than actual co-writer. Over the course of adapting “Shoot First” into this novel that changed, mainly because I had more experience in the longer format.
Larry’s and my writing styles are quite different and yet oddly compatible. In my view, he is more from the Stephen King school of writing, using small details to build tension ending in something shocking and horrific, while I am heavily influenced by writers with a more spare style, like Roger Zelazny, where details and descriptions are limited in favor of narrative pacing. I would like to think that A Bullet for the Shooter is the best of both, but there is no question that the structure of this book is all Larry’s, which is another way of saying that it has structure. After the frantic chaos of The Trashman, that may come as a relief to those who read that book.
The Hit World Universe is a challenge for me personally, because it can incorporate any and all of the bizarre ideas that constantly flow through my mind. That isn’t necessarily the good thing it might seem, as those ideas sometimes transcend my capabilities to turn them into coherent prose. In writing A Bullet for the Shooter, therefore, the grounding of Larry’s story structure relieved that pressure. This book is all the better for it.
William Alan Webb
Eads, TN
5 November 2020
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Larry Hoy - Author Foreword
I met Bill Webb at a writers’ support group in Memphis when he had just returned from a book signing at Fort Knox. I was kind of dumbfounded that someone could make a living in this business. Over the next year Bill was my mentor as I signed up for his writing classes and followed him around various conventions. Over time, I learned what made him successful: Bill has a disciplined work ethic, and he has never met a stranger.
Now, I’m not a complete beginner. I’ve published a fistful of short stories earning enough money that I could order a meal in any restaurant as long as it comes wrapped in paper and the main ingredient is grease. Then, one evening as I was crawling through Amazon, I saw that Bill had released a short story, Kill Me When You Can. I devoured it and thought, “Hell, I can do that!” So, I reached out to Bill and asked if he’d open up his universe to me.
We tag-teamed “Shoot First,” and I made plans to build out the universe through short stories. But then Bill met Chris Kennedy and they told me to forget the shorts—it was time to turn this into a novel! That’s where my idea for Luther Sweetwater came from.
Like Luther, I had plans. I sorta knew where I was going, but I was in deep over my head. In truth, Luther is my hero. He’s not someone who can do everything, and he has to work for every step he takes. He has problems. Okay, he has a lot of problems. Just like things don’t come easy for Sweetwater, writing this book didn’t come easy for me. But oh, what a trip it was. Thank you for coming along.
Larry Hoy
Memphis, TN
7 November 2020
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Contents
The Hit World Universe
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Cast of Characters
About William Alan Webb
About Larry Hoy
Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy
Excerpt from Book One of the Singularity War
Excerpt from Devil Calls the Tune
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The Hit World Universe
September 11, 2001, was the blackest day in American history. A dozen hijacked airliners wiped out most of the American government and brought America to its knees. The population screamed for blood, but the government was in chaos. The senior surviving member in the line of succession was a junior Senator from Oregon who nobody had heard of outside his native state.
The Chinese, Iranians, and Russians all eyed the United States to see if the time had come for military action against American interests worldwide. The new president had only just been appointed and didn’t have the political capital—or will—to risk World War Three. Indeed, he was on record as publicly blaming America for worsening relations with the Muslim world prior to the attacks. He called for restraint and refused to commit the U.S. military to go after those identified as responsible. “We brought this on ourselves,” he said in a nationwide broadcast.
But Americans were having none of it, not even the constituency that had elected him. The wealthiest of the wealthy went to work behind the scenes, committing tens of billions of dollars to show America’s enemies what happened when you dared attack us. The terrorists jeered and vowed more attacks, trying to provoke a response.
It worked.
The answer was the formation of a lavishly funded group of mercenaries hired by those wealthy private citizens. The mercenaries sped to the Middle East set on bloody revenge. The president threatened to arrest everyone concerned, but America’s law enforcement agencies sided with the mercs, and he never pushed it beyond threats.
Impeachment loomed.
The money to finance the mercs was funneled through a dummy corporation called LifeEnders, Inc. They attracted the best black ops people America had, plus select others from friendly nations, with many either on detached duty from the U.S. armed forces, arranged by loyal officers who defied the chain of command, or they left the service altogether. The billionaires who supported them spared no expense to supply them with the best
equipment available. They even lured some top-flight freelancers out of the shadows and into the fight. As always, money talked.
Within months, most of the men responsible for the 9/11 attacks were being executed on live American pay-per-view television, along with officials from the countries who supported them. Outraged protests from enemy states, and America’s own president, fell on the deaf ears of the American public. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff clarified that American military capabilities were at full strength and on high alert, but the president ordered them to stand down. Officially, the military obeyed. Privately, they defied their commander in chief, and let America’s enemies know it. Rather than risk nuclear war and worldwide Armageddon, foreign countries backed down.
But Americans didn’t want to limp along with a rump government that was wildly unpopular and had proved unequal to the emergency. As the federal bureaucracy struggled to restore itself and fill critical positions, the population demanded power be turned over to private corporations wherever possible. These new Corpses, a derogatory name for the corporations, replaced the bureaucracy with results.
With impeachment likely to succeed in deposing the president, and as a presidential recall petition passed 90 million signatures, America held a special election on September 11, 2003. Though challenged by the traditional parties, the Supreme Court deemed such a vote legal. Both parties nominated the usual candidates saying all the usual things, but the mood in America remained angry and combative, and through the summer a populist movement grew to draft Charlton Heston for president. The two political parties laughed off his efforts, but they misjudged the mood of the country. The actor won in a landslide write-in campaign, and with him, both houses of Congress swung toward revenge- and security-minded independent candidates. When the actor took office in January 2004, he had the strongest mandate of any president in American history.
LifeEnders, Inc. grew out of the mercenary group that struck back in the Middle East. The corporation found and eliminated threats to America, worldwide, with the speed and technique of a scalpel. When terrorist organizations were discovered within America, LifeEnders, Inc. found and eliminated them. Terrorists couldn’t hide from their reach, and there was no appeal on their judgment.
As time went by, LEI, as LifeEnders, Inc. came to be known, also tried to end murder within America’s borders; killers were met with swift Old Testament justice. But that didn’t work. First, there were too many murders, and second, the regular police angrily opposed such intrusions into their areas of responsibility. So the government passed all the legislation and—more to the point—set all the corresponding fees and tax rates to finance private, legal assassinations under the quasi-governmental LEI. Non-contracted killings remained murder, with all the usual punishments, but contracted murder through LEI was the law of the land.
The street name for this new reality was Hit World.
Chapter 1
Downtown Dallas, TX
Luther Sweetwater built his shooting nest on a table by the window, seven stories above the busiest street in downtown Dallas. It was far enough back that it couldn’t be seen from the outside, even from the hotel across the street, but close enough that he could get a clean shot at anything on the road below. The rifle, a custom-built, LEI-supplied version of the Finnish SAKO TRG 42, chambered for a .338 Lapua Magnum round, stood ready on its stand.
His handler was a stern British woman named Ms. Witherbot, no first name offered. She’d told Sweetwater to hit the target while he was on his way to work, thereby doing him a favor, it being a Monday and all; Sweetwater was saving him from of a week of work. Probationary Shooter Sweetwater yuck-yucked appropriately, even though Witherbot’s tone didn’t sound like she was joking at all. Truth was, Sweetwater wasn’t sure she could make a joke, but he needed some kind of mental defense mechanism. Maybe she knew that.
The dispassion of killing someone strictly for money was hard for Sweetwater, and while he’d asked repeatedly, they wouldn’t tell him why he had to kill the guy. If there was a good reason, if the target was a pedophile or rapist, justification wouldn’t have been an issue, but LifeEnders didn’t explain things to trainees, they just issued assignments.
Sweetwater was in perfect position to take the shot when everything went to shit.
He laid his head across the stock of the SAKO and slipped his cheek into a fitted groove along the top. It was as if they had made the stock just for him, which they had. Test firing it at the range, he’d put ten rounds into a two-inch circle at 1,800 meters. The rifle was perfect, his aim was precise, and he was ready to hunt…but not necessarily to kill a human being for money.
He moved the scope up and down the lanes of traffic, using the magnification to inspect cars as they inched along Main Street. The sweet fragrance of top-shelf gun oil filled his nostrils. Not the cheap stuff used in the Marine Corps, but the good stuff, M-Pro 9. One refined drop and the action was smooth as glass.
The lens of the scope went black as a Cadillac came into view. Adjusting the sight to the rear bumper, Sweetwater found the telltale Texas plate that read BIG CASH. The target was in sight. He felt the veins at his temples pulse.
“Time to make your bones, Two-Bit,” he whispered. Sweetwater hated the nickname that he’d been stuck with in the Corps, but like pilots and their call signs, you didn’t get to pick what everybody else called you. Two-Bit is what his fellow snipers had called him, and Two-Bit he became. Now it was his call sign, or would be, if he ever got his badge and license to kill.
Sweetwater touched his left thumb to the tip of his middle finger. Sensors in the gloves triggered a call to his spotter, who he hadn’t been introduced to.
“PS4213, request confirmation.”
“Hold.” That inhuman single word reply, fed through an electronic scrambler that disguised all voice characteristics, held the key to his future. A bead of sweat ran down his temple, and a rookie might have wiped it away, but years of intense sniper training kicked in and he ignored it. The Caddie sat locked in the bumper-to-bumper Dallas morning traffic, so he had time.
A click in the earphone alerted him that someone else had plugged into the call. Then the unmistakable voice of the British Bitch, Ms. Witherbot, said “wait” in a tone which held more rigid authority than Sweetwater believed a single word could hold. She apparently had added another line to the call, because it only took two rings before a strange man’s voice answered.
“Cooper, here.”
“Mr. Cooper,” said a computer voice that came on the line, “we are pleased to announce that open enrollment into the Forest Green Health Care Program has been extended.” There followed another click as Mr. Cooper hung up.
Witherbot’s voice returned. “Please wait as we triangulate the location.” Sweetwater knew she was talking to the spotter, not to him, or not just to him. For purposes of the evaluation, he was like a tool undergoing a performance test.
He tried not to lose concentration as he waited for the signal to shoot but couldn’t help trying to guess if Witherbot’s accent was really British, or maybe Australian. He had never been good at guessing accents.
“Fucking telemarketers,” he growled, forgetting the radio link was open.
“Is that a serious remark?”
“Uh, yeah, sorry about that.” He ground his teeth; first day on the job, and he was already showing his ass. “I’d hate for the last thing I’d heard on this Earth to be a telemarketer.”
“What are you talking about, PS4213? That was us. We need the target to give us a voiceprint for confirmation, and a health care questionnaire works well as a ruse. It’s a necessary precaution.”
“Oh.”
He shut up and watched as the Cadillac crept a few more feet through traffic. Most snipers were hyper-focused while waiting for the kill shot, but Sweetwater’s mind didn’t work that way. Then the brake lights on the car flashed and the driver’s door opened.
“Spotter,” he said. “The target is getting o
ut. Am I good to shoot?”
“Hold, I do not clear you to execute the contract.”
“How about you hurry those computers of yours? This is a perfect setup.”
The driver got out and opened up the car’s back door. A dark-haired man emerged, wearing a light beige suit. He only got one step away from the vehicle when a woman’s hand appeared in the open door, holding out a black briefcase. The man turned back to the door and the crossed reticules of the scope met on the target’s forehead, just above the bridge of the nose. Sweetwater recognized him from the briefing the day before.
“Spotter, I’ve got visual confirmation on Robert Cooper.”
“Negative, Probationary Shooter,” came the immediate reply, “hold your position. The trace has confirmed your target is in Toronto, Canada.”
“The hell he is. I can see his face, he’s right down there.”
“I said ‘hold’ Shooter, you are negative for taking the shot.”
The target took his briefcase and walked along the sidewalk. The rifle’s reticules were now centered on the back of his head. It was an easy shot.
“Damn it, what’s going on?”
“We have re-run the tracing program. Your target is tracking from Toronto.”
“Well, your computers are wrong. I’m telling you that’s the guy; he’s right there.”
Witherbot broke back in. “If you are so certain, PS4213, then you have the option to verify the target’s identity using alternate methods.”
“How the hell do I do that?” Sweetwater knew he didn’t sound professional, but she was pissing him off. They had a perfect setup that was quickly going to shit. What was that old saying? All plans fall apart at first contact with the enemy? “I don’t want to lose this shot. Spotter, give me the go, and we have money in the bank.”
