by Tom Clancy
Things got real quiet in the saloon.
“You give me my hat now, motherfucker, or I will shoot you!”
Lyons, still holding the hat in his left hand, jammed his right hand into his pocket, where, Jay knew, he had the borrowed knife.
He said, “You cockeyed son of a bitch, I’m gon’ make you kill me!”
There was a general stampede for the door as most of the two dozen patrons decided at that moment they had pressing business elsewhere. Men did pull guns in that part of town frequently and they did go off. That Christmas Day, there would be at least four or five other shootings in bars, poolrooms, and whorehouses within a couple of miles. Some of the shooters weren’t very good at it, and innocent bystanders had been known to collect bullets more than once. Bad enough to be killed for something you did; worse to be killed by a stray bullet by accident. Dead, either way.
Stack took three steps backward and pointed the gun at Billy. Jay stayed where he was.
Stack shot Billy. Just the one time, in the abdomen. The noise was very loud in the saloon, and the gray smoke that belched to join that of the tobacco had that unmistakable gunpowder stink.
Billy Lyons fell back against the bar, lurched to one side, still clutching Stack’s Stetson.
Nobody said anything. The few patrons and bartenders still there stood frozen. Nobody wanted to move and become a target.
Billy sagged against the bar, and dropped the hat. Stack stepped up to him. “I told you. You give me back my hat!” And with that, he bent down, retrieved the Stetson, and put it on.
Lyons slid lower. “You done killed me,” he said.
“You took my hat. It’s on you.”
With that, Stack put his gun away and walked out.
Strolled out, in no hurry at all.
Billy, Jay knew, would linger on for a time. They would take him to the infirmary, and later to a hospital, where he would pass away at about four in the morning. Not a testament to his intelligence. What kind of man refuses to give a swiped hat back to its owner when staring down the barrel of a gun?
Well, the kind soon to be a dead man . . .
Stack, Jay knew, went to one of his houses—he had a couple—reloaded his .44 and stuck it in a drawer and, apparently unconcerned, went to bed. That was where the local police found both Stack and his gun at about three A.M., an hour or so before Billy Lyons died.
That was the true story of how Stagger Lee shot Billy.
No gambling late, Lyons didn’t win all Stack’s money, and while Lyons did have three children by a local woman, he wasn’t married to her or anybody else, so most of the versions of the songs that came later got it wrong. It was in St. Louis, not Memphis, nor Chicago, nor New Orleans. And how Stack Lee Shelton became any kind of hero after that was a puzzle to Jay. Cold-blooded murder over a hat didn’t seem like the stuff of heroic legend to Jay.
Stack Lee was tried twice for the crime. The first trial ended in a hung jury, with Stack’s white lawyer arguing self-defense, due to the knife in Billy Lyons’s pocket. But the lawyer, an alcoholic, died shortly thereafter following a drinking binge, and Stack’s next attorney apparently wasn’t as good as his first. The second trial, he was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years. After a brief parole, he was incarcerated again, and died in the Missouri State Prison Hospital, on March 11, 1912, of tuberculosis.
One of the most accurate of the songs that came from the Missouri riverboat roustabouts around the end of the nineteenth century had a final verse that Jay liked:If you evah in St. Louis
And you goes to the Curtis Club
Well, every step you walk in
You walk in Billy Lyons’s blood
Talkin’ ’bout a dead man
Kilt by mean ole Stagolee . . .
Jay watched the bartenders and bystanders haul Billy Lyons out of the club. What had he learned here? Well, not as much as he’d hoped, but at least it had been interesting. And maybe if he ever got tired of working for Net Force, he could go into the entertainment biz. He could tell and show a pretty good story. There was always a market for scenario-builders of his caliber.
Shoot, maybe even Hollywood . . .
18
Fort Thomas Braverman
Winslow, Kentucky
It had been going so well, Carruth thought. Done and on the way out, and then, out of nowhere, that X-factor appeared, and royally screwed it all up. Some guy with insomnia or having to walk out a cramp or sneak a smoke, whatever, and all of a sudden he’s yelling and lights are coming on. . . .
Carruth had shut him up, but the cure—a round from his BMF revolver—was worse than the disease. He hadn’t thought, he had just pulled the piece and cooked, almost instinctively.
The gun was like a bomb going off, and anybody who was a light sleeper certainly sat up in bed when he heard that honker’s roar.
Now, as their truck careened around an S-curve two miles away from the base, a Hummer full of MPs chasing it, Carruth realized they were in deep trouble. Oh, they might outrun the MPs, but there was such a thing as radio, and when the Army got its act together, they would start calling for help. Yeah, they wanted to take care of their own business, but if Carruth and his men got away, their heads were gonna roll, and that was more important.
A roadblock of state cops sure wasn’t going to be helpful to Carruth’s situation.
Lying in the back of the truck, Stark wheezed around the M-16 round that was probably lodged in one of his lungs. Dexter had slapped a pressure patch on the hole to stop the bubbling, and hit Stark with a syringe of morphine to ease his pain, but his chances weren’t good. Being bumped and thumped around in the back of a truck rolling at eighty down the highway wasn’t helping the wounded man any.
To Hill, Carruth said, “Break one out.”
He was talking about the toys they had just swiped, four M-47 wire-guided, semiautomatic missile launchers, with rockets. Called the Dragon, the M-47, aka the FGM-77, was a portable antivehicle weapon from McDonnell-Douglas consisting of a launcher, missile, and wire-guidance system. Pretty much obsolete and on the books as surplus, having been replaced by the FGM-148 wireless Javelin, there were still a bunch of them in military armories and they still worked just fine. The Dragon was simple to use: Set the crosshairs on the target and squeeze the trigger. As long as you kept the sight steady, that’s where the rocket would hit. Good for twelve, fifteen hundred meters, and able to pierce 400 mm of armor, it was a great tank-buster.
“We can’t shoot it in here, Boss,” Hill said. “The backwash will scour the inside of the truck down to the metal and roast us all.”
True. The old system didn’t have a low-gee, soft-launch motor and wasn’t IR-guided like the newer Javelins, which were fire-and-forget. You could reload one of those instantly from inside a house or truck, you didn’t have to wait and use the guidance wire. “I know that. Get it ready. Drop a couple grenades to back ’em off some and next time we round a curve, we’ll slow it down enough for me to bail out.”
“That’s crazy,” Hill said.
“Better than spending the rest of your life in Leavenworth—or winding up on a slab.”
Hill nodded. He pulled an M-61 fragger, olive green with the yellow stripe up top, yanked the pin, waited a second, and underhanded it out through the rear. The grenade was an antipersonnel weapon, it wasn’t designed to stop vehicles, but it would make a big noise and flash and maybe pepper the chaser with a bit of shrapnel. Slow them down a hair.
The grenade bounced on the road—Carruth saw the spark where it hit the pavement—and shortly thereafter blew up.
The headlights of the Hummer dipped as they hit the brakes.
Stateside Hummers weren’t armored well, if at all. A grenade could punch holes in the sucker and maybe kill a rider. They would know that better than anybody.
“Curve coming up, Boss. We have a couple hundred meters.”
“Slow it down once you are around it. Find me a soft spot!”
Carruth gra
bbed the Dragon. The package weighed twenty, twenty-two kilos or so. He hoped he wouldn’t drop it, or have it fall apart when he hit the ground.
Hoped he wouldn’t fall apart, either.
Hill threw another grenade, this one timed to go off in the air.
The truck slowed. Carruth bailed, hit the ground next to the road, tumbled, rolled, came up, fell again, the wind knocked out of him. Man!
The truck sped up.
Carruth crabbed further away from the road, then dropped prone.
The headlights of the Hummer swept around the curve. The vehicle roared past. A soldier leaned out of the passenger window, aiming his M-16 at the truck ahead of them.
Carruth sat up, lit the electronics, lined the crosshairs of the sight on the rear of the Hummer. It was a hundred yards away. Too close, he didn’t want to be eating shrapnel. . . .
Two hundred yards . . . two-fifty . . .
He squeezed off the round. There was a big whoosh! as the rocket’s exhaust blew out behind him. The rocket sped away. Top speed was only a couple hundred meters per second, and it would take a little while to get there, keep the sights on the target, keep them lined up. . . .
The rocket hit the back of the Hummer. The rocket and the Hummer went up together, a terrible flash, and the noise washed over him a second later. . . .
It seemed like a long time before the truck came back to collect him, but it couldn’t have been more than a minute or two. They drove past the burning remains of the Hummer, and the soldiers who had manned it.
“Sorry,” Carruth said as they went by.
“Stark’s dead,” somebody said.
Carruth nodded. “We’ll have to ditch the truck, fast. Get to the exchange point.”
The exchange point was behind an old gas station; there were two pickup trucks waiting. They piled out of the bigger truck, loaded the Dragons into them, covered them with tarps.
Carruth siphoned a couple gallons of gas out of the big truck’s tank and soaked Stark’s body and the inside of the vehicle pretty good. He climbed into one of the pickups, leaned out, and lit a flare. As they drove past the big truck he tossed the flare. There was no ID in the vehicle, nothing to tie Stark to them, and by the time anybody got there, he’d be a crispy critter.
“Go!”
The two smaller trucks peeled out.
The big truck erupted into an orange fireball as the gasoline caught.
“Adios, amigo,” Carruth said. He saluted the outside rearview mirror. At least they gave Stark a Viking funeral, sort of.
The light from the burning truck was visible for a long way behind them as they drove off.
It was a night to burn stuff up, for sure.
Lewis wasn’t gonna be happy about this.
The Pentagon
Washington, D.C.
This time, General Hadden had Thorn come to his office. And he wasn’t a man to beat around the bush.
“I’m not happy with your unit’s progress on this, Thorn. Last night, somebody stole four surplus rocket launchers from one of my bases and killed some of my soldiers—we lost six men when they cooked a vehicle full of MPs!”
“I’m sorry. We’ve got the best people in the world working on it as fast as they can go. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
“So you say, but I’m not seeing results and I’ve got a body count!”
“With all due respect, sir, we’re not making burgers and fries here. Sometimes you don’t get it your way. We’re dealing with a bad guy who is clever and who doesn’t want to get caught. Our people are on his trail, they are making progress, that’s how it works.”
Hadden said, “There is always something that can make things go faster—the trick is to figure out what. Maybe your computer geeks need some more motivation. Some . . . direct supervision. From what I’m able to tell, you give them something and turn them loose—you aren’t there keeping their noses to the grindstone.”
Thorn shook his head. “Sir, I came to this job by way of the computer industry. I worked with ‘computer geeks’ all the time. Hell, sir, I was one myself. They deal well with time pressure, most of them, but standing over them and micromanaging their actions is worse than trying to herd cats. The best players here are like artists; you lean on them, they will stop what they are doing and cross their arms. This isn’t paint-by-numbers.”
“I’m not talking about a guy with a bullwhip, Thorn, I’m talking about maybe giving you an . . . assistant. An efficiency expert, office manager, somebody who might be able to make things run a little smoother.”
Thorn laughed.
“I’m not used to people laughing at my ideas, son.”
“You aren’t used to dealing with this kind of civilian, General. You can’t fool my people into thinking I’m still running things if you send some hard-ass in to whip them into shape. They are smart enough to know I wouldn’t hire somebody like that. If one shows up, they’ll know who sent him, and they will know why. Any of our top operatives could quit this afternoon and have a better job lined up by supper time—more money, more perks, no direct supervision at all, and they could work from home if they wanted. You might be able to draft them and keep them, but without their fullest cooperation, you won’t ever get what you want from them.”
He paused, maintaining eye contact with Hadden. Then he added, “And if you want to fire me, sir, that’s fine, too. I’ll have my desk cleared out this afternoon.”
“Nobody is firing you.” Thorn heard the unspoken “yet.”
“Fine. Then as long as my name is on the door, nobody is sending me an assistant I don’t want or need. My people will get this job done as soon as it is humanly possible. They won’t go any slower and they can’t go any faster—you standing on the sidelines yelling ‘Hurry, hurry!’ at guys running full out isn’t going to help.”
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was at the beck and call of a civilian, the President of the United States, but Thorn guessed he wasn’t used to hearing lip from anybody less than that. Thorn could see it didn’t set well.
“Sir, it’s like sifting a beach, looking for a particular grain of sand. Our guys will know it when they get to it, but they can’t just walk out into the dunes and pick that one grain up and say, ‘Aha!’ ”
Hadden didn’t say anything.
Thorn had dealt with people like him before—CEOs of major corporations tended to be control freaks; that was part of how they got to the top, by attending to all the details. And the United States military was as major as it got. Thorn said, “I understand you are the man in the hot seat, General, and that you are responsible for all kinds of things about which I don’t have a clue. But this is what we do. Once you set the dogs loose, you have to wait until they get the scent and run your game to ground.”
“I don’t like waiting.”
“No, sir, I understand, I don’t either. You don’t have to like it, but you need to understand it. This is how it is done.”
Hadden chewed on that for a moment. “All right. But you put a bug in your man’s ear and make damn sure he is making all due speed.”
“Yes, sir.”
But Thorn wouldn’t say anything to Jay. The general believed that a little bit of time pressure would help keep people on their toes; feeling as if somebody was looking over your shoulder. The general was wrong. With these people, at any rate, that would just make things worse.
As Thorn was leaving the Pentagon, walking to where his car and driver waited, he saw Marissa angling across the walk toward him.
“Why, hey, Tommy, fancy meeting you here.”
He didn’t think for a second that it was a coincidence. “Are you following me?”
“Of course. You didn’t think this was a coincidence, did you?”
He smiled. “Why?”
“Well, sometimes you are pretty dense, so you might have thought I just happened to be in the area—”
“No, Marissa. Why are you following me?”
“Just concerned a
bout you. Worried you might have been in there telling the Chairman of the JCOS to go play with himself.”
“Close. But he didn’t fire me and I didn’t quit.”
“That’s good. You’re learning patience, I like that. Truth is, I have something for you, in my capacity as CIA liaison to Net Force—for whatever that is worth these days.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“That break-in, the one where they got the M-47 Dragon launcher and rockets?”
“The one they used to wipe out the MPs chasing them?”
“Yeah, that one. Well, it turns out we got one of their guys. He was killed by an M-16 round. They tried to burn the body in the truck they used, but it was recovered, and an ID made; dental records confirmed it.”
“That’s great.”
“For you, maybe. Turns out he was one of ours—a CIA asset.”
“No shit?”
“Plenty of that, but, yeah. A contract man, not a direct employee. Name was Stark. Ex-military—he was a Ranger—then he got into mercenary work in Congo, eventually wound up knocking around in Iraq, working private security. Apparently the local station used him for gathering intel—he spoke some Arabic and a little Kurdish. We lost track of him a couple years back. According to his passport, he’s still in the Middle East.”
“If you found his body in the back of a truck in Kentucky, then I’m guessing maybe he was using a different passport,” Thorn said.
“Give the man a cigar. Anyway, I’m having the information couriered to your people—known associates, relatives, his old unit, like that. Maybe Gridley can find something that State missed.”
“I hope so. Those rocket launchers they stole—how easy would it be to take down a passenger jet with one?”
“Well, they are outdated, there are better ones now, but—as easy as pointing your finger and going ‘bang!’ If they can get within half a mile of a target like, say, the White House? They might be able to put a rocket through the President’s window.”
