A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  Richard heard the cheer of the crowd. He looked in his side mirror and was saddened to see that he had started no fires, though he’d knocked down some electric wires and they bled sparks in a few places, dangerous and beautiful and spectacular at once. Then suddenly one of them ignited something and the fire rose and leaped, at least on one half of Driver’s Row, and soon enough flames consumed a great many of the battered retail installations.

  Damn, that was good! Do it git better?

  “Richard, my poor Grumleys in the back. They ain’t got no seatbelt.”

  “Their heads are too hard for injury. You can’t hurt a Grumley by hitting him in the skull. But okay, let’s go.”

  He came next to a little bridge across a gully, initially cut off by traffic blocks set in the earth. But a less important Grumley job had been to wander down there during the race itself and pull them out. Richard rumbled across the bridge, pulled up an incline, and came again to flatness and temptation. Now the speedway was half a mile behind him, the mountain half a mile before him, and the structures on this side of the gully less substantial.

  “Go, Richard,” shouted the old man.

  This wouldn’t be as fun. It was all ticky-tack, tents and ramshackle lean-tos, all of it held together by aluminum and canvas and tape and twine, representing the lower end of the NASCAR money pyramid. Not corporate power but scavenging entrepreneurial nomadism.

  “Ho hum,” said Richard. “Don’t think nothing’ll burn or electrify, sorry to say.”

  “Richard, you don’t got to narrate everthing. This ain’t a damn movie.”

  “Oh, it is, old man. You’re Tommy Lee Jones, avuncular and charming, but now old and weary. I’m the mean Kevin Costner, not the sensitive Kevin, Caleb is Marky Mark, and maybe somewhere there’s a hero who’ll bring us down, but Clint retired and nobody took his place, so I don’t think so.”

  After these important comments, Richard finally consented to do his job, and roared through the lesser precincts of NASCAR with much less pizzaz, as if he’d grown bored, having the attention span of a gnat. It was just snap, crackle, and pop, as the flimsy structures were eaten alive by the power of the Cash in Transit truck, and no pile of hats or Chinese Confederate flags or funnel cakes or barbecued ribs and sausages could stand against the onrush. Beer exploded, tables of goods were splattered, tents billowed as their ropes were cut, signs fell, but it lacked the FX grandeur of the previous few minutes’ work. As spectacle, it had fallen. His esthetic sense somewhat blunted, he glumly soldiered on.

  But as tactical enterprise, the genius of the plan soon became evident. There simply was no way any four-wheeled vehicle could have followed them, because Richard left behind him so much more damage than had been there before, and whether or not planned, the dynamic of the crowd, ebbing this way and that, opening before him, then solidifying behind him, precluded penetration. Then too, of the few roads around NASCAR Village, all were impenetrable, because all were jammed with civilians headed out, not in. Many of those people had abandoned their cars upon seeing the panicked crowd and hearing stories of machine guns, armed guerrillas, terrorists, Klansmen, militia. So in the vast mess, only the armored truck had any maneuverability, purely on the strength of its ruthlessness. It could and would drive through anything, it could and had driven down anybody, it was without conscience, a Moby Dick on land, or a Godzilla or a Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms that regarded humanity as insects to be crushed. It was just diesel nihilism on four tires, driven by venality and psychopathology and the fury of sons who’d disappointed their fathers, and it was unstoppable.

  Richard drove on, he flattened, folks danced in delight, some throwing beer bottles at him, not so much to stop him but to participate in the wanton pleasure of the evening. Now and then a police bullet sounded a pitiful ping as it bounced off the heavy armor but failed to penetrate. At the far end, the anticlimax arrived with a whimper. Richard found a dirt road that led to a gated installation in the lee of the mountain, built up some nice speed and fragmented the cyclone gate with his Ford cyclone, and roared along the edge of the mountain, which presented itself to him as an incline swaddled in trees.

  “There ’tis,” shouted the old man, and indeed, up ahead, an archway in the trees revealed a dark portal, behind which lay the serpentine of a switchbacked track to the top, glistening with perpetual mud from a dozen mountain springs, its existence all but forgotten, a relic left over from logging days. “Here’s where you earn all that goddamn money we done paid you!”

  “Think there’s a man in America who could get a rig this heavy up a road this steep and sharp? Well there ain’t but one, and he took the Pike’s Peak hill climb three times running and some other uphills as well, and has done the trick on bikes and go-carts and destructo jalopies and tractors and big-daddy trucks and hell, even a kiddie cart or two.”

  “You’d best have it, boy.”

  “Hang on, Grandpappy. The elevator is reading Up.”

  He plunged ahead.

  A lesser man would have wept. Not Caleb. His shattered nose blossomed blood, and he felt like a piece of popped corn in a corn popper, floating this way and that, a hard trick with a thirty-pound rifle in his hands.

  “Goddamn him, that sumbitch, gonna whip his ass!” screamed another flying Grumley, immediately before hitting the goddamned wall or sharp shelf or any of the dozens of hard surfaces inside the box.

  “The fucking little prick, he doin’ this ’cause he thinks he’s special, it’s his little trick on us poor dumb Grumleys.”

  “He thinks we ain’t human!”

  It was, in other words, no fun in the box. The five boys each were made clumsy by submachine guns, their body armor, their spare magazines, the darkness, the claustrophobia. It was like a submarine undergoing a depth-charge raid by the Japanese. They were tossed this way, then that, without visibility. On top of that, shrapnel, in the form of thirty-pound bales of bills in tamper-evident plastic bags flew around the interior like really heavy pillows. They fucking hurt when they hit you, and they could hit you at any time from any angle. Then there was a lunch box or two, maybe a few cans of Diet Coke, and who knew what else afly in the dark atmosphere of the steel box and though the shocks supporting it were thick and strong, they did little to protect against the vicissitudes of crumple and crunch that Richard produced as he wreaked vengeance on NASCAR for the crime of being NASCAR. Back here, a hero was needed, a man of strength.

  But these were Grumleys, greed-driven and sensation hungry, the brains scientifically bred out of them, so they had no hero. No calm voice took over and soothed, not even Caleb’s, as that unhappy warrior simply sat as still as possible, clutching the huge Barrett .50, trying to breathe through blood, while dreaming of driving the Barrett’s butt into Richard’s strange, disguised head and watching it shatter. The rest got through the ordeal of the ride on the strength of their considerable sheer meanness, their similar hunger to pulp Richard when the day was done, and dreams of swag and whores and drugs and other cool Grumley things.

  It was dialogue. It was not oration, still less a lecture, and least of all some kind of pontification. No, it was chat, conversation, attention to nuance, cooperation, and teamwork. This is how you climb a hill that doesn’t want to be climbed in a big vehicle that doesn’t want to climb it. Richard listened and talked with the components of the adventure. He felt the traction in each tire, not a chorus, but the voice of each as the expression of a personality; he felt the play between torque and transmission even in the crude containment of the automatic gear shift as these two dynamisms bartered their way through the complex transaction. He felt the tremble of vibes from the shocks, the subtler orchestration of announcements from the enhanced diesel as the Xzillaraider had blown out the parameters of the performance package, and the diesel fuel burned hot and long and fierce, turning its own chambers a molten red, threatening to go volcanic at any second. On top of that, through the imperfect vision cones of the illuminating headlights, Richard
read the curves, finding the ideal line in each, read the texture of the mud in the road, divining where its gelid smoothness contained strength and where only watery treachery. He sensed which logs could be crushed, which knocked aside and which, still strong, had to be avoided. It was a complex negotiation, and he was right that few men in the world could have done it, and few would have wanted to.

  It seemed to take forever, and Richard at a certain point felt his muscles locked against the wheel as if the wheel was the enemy and the addition of his human strength could make a difference. He cued himself to relax, and felt the iron melt from his neck. Though bathed in sweat, he felt at last a kind of relaxation, because it occurred to him that that which he feared most—a sucking pool of mud that would engulf him to above the hubcaps—would not befoul him.

  “Jesus Christ,” said the old man, “I think you done it, boy. I think we going to make it.”

  The truck broke from gnarled, mythic wood into a kind of grassy meadow and it suddenly occurred to Richard that there was no more hill to climb.

  He brought the truck to a stop. He opened the door and almost fell out, limp with exhaustion, spent and wasted and hungry for vacation. He sucked coolish air, felt coolish air against his brow. He looked, saw stars, pinwheels of ancient energy, dancing light years off. Jesus, what a fucking thing.

  “We here, boy, we done it,” sang the old guy. From behind came an outpouring of Grumleys as the boys liberated themselves and had a moment of pure bliss. They were on top of the world. Ma, we’re on top of the world. From hating Richard, they flew to loving him. Richard had never been so admired in his life. He felt like a rock star as hard Grumley hands pounded him on the back.

  “Okay, boys, you git that dough on the roof,” yelled the old man, and then turned to speak on the cell, “Tom, get that bird in and get us the hell out of here. Time to go home.”

  As behind him, the Grumleys set about to move the money bales to the roof of the truck so that they could be tossed into the hovering chopper, Richard moseyed off a few yards and came to a vantage on what he had done.

  He looked down from a thousand feet on the vast structure of the speedway and the NASCAR civilization that had spread forth and put roots down upon the plains.

  He saw wreckage. He saw fire. He saw a thousand emergency service vehicles spitting out goobers of red light. He saw smoke, drifting this way and that in the wind, he saw the crushed, the broken, the smashed, the atomized. He saw pain, disbelief, destruction, disaster. He saw the beast wounded. He felt in himself an insane pride in the ruination. Sure you could have detonated a bomb like some A-rab boy-fucker, or opened up with a Glock like a sad, sick Korean kid, or any of another dozen methods of high-octane take-down, but to drive through it, to smash and grind and pulp and express the ultimate contempt in traction and horsepower—say, that was pretty fucking cool. It was so Sinnerman. He felt a sense of profound fulfillment.

  Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

  But then he heard it. They all heard it. The sound of a motorcycle as it churned up the same hill they’d just mounted.

  “It’s the goddamned Lone Ranger,” somebody said.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Bob hit the hill hard on his Kawasaki. The bike slid upward, attacking, sliding right and left, inclining on the sudden hairpins, spitting mud, churning dirt, sliding this way and that as it fought for traction. Up he went, feeling between his legs the throb of the pistons beating as he rode the line between second and third, foot alive to the quickness of the necessary shifting. He smelled gas as it was eaten in 350-cc gulps.

  But he knew it was time to dump the bike when the tracers came floating his way. Whoever these boys were, they weren’t well schooled. They fired too early, counting on the display of neon death floating parabola-like through the trees (and rupturing wood where it struck) to drive him back. He might have been a different fellow, but Bob had taken tracer before, even fired batches of it, so panic was not what he felt, even as random bullets began to kick up stingers and puffs of mud near him.

  He cranked hard, put the bike over, feeling it bite against the mud as it plowed furrows. Before it was even still, he’d scrambled off, found cover in the trees, and begun his assault. He had no targets yet, but still his finger flew to the EOTech gizmo atop his DPMS rifle, and pressed the button that was protected against accidental tripping by a plastic sheet across it. He nudged it, felt it give, brought the gun to his shoulder and saw, to his surprise, a bright orange circle on the 2x2 screen. You didn’t need training, so simple was the concept; you put the circle on what it was you wanted, you pushed the trigger, and you ventilated. He slithered upward, safety off, finger indexed along the top of the guard, and forty yards out saw two men hunched over weapons on a crestline, peering hard for target.

  “I think we put him down, Pap,” came a cry. Bob put the orange circle on the center of mass, and fired three times. This damn gun was no poodle-shooter; it bucked, more by far than a .223, but not so much that it was beyond control. With superb trigger control and a stout shooting position, Bob knew he scored all three and he watched the unfortunate recipient jerk when struck, then fall to the left. Bob came over, wasn’t quite fast enough on the pivot, and by the time he got around, the second guy was down under cover. Gunflashes gave away his position, and so did the tracer burst which vectored like splashes of liquid weight toward Bob, bending as it arched toward him and tore into trees and ground. And suddenly other boys were on the line and the hill was alive with the sound of death. The guns buzzsawed hellaciously and ripped, and the world turned all nasty and full of frags and flying debris and the spritz of near-supersonic wood chips. Bob squirmed back, aware that they were shooting toward sound rather than actually acquiring a target.

  He waited a bit, moved a little more but delicately, put his rifle up and waited patiently. Soon enough a scout popped up to see if he could see a thing, and just as quickly Bob put one into him, center mass again, the gun beating into his shoulder with its upward torque, the muzzle flash bleaching detail from his night vision, illuminating a spent 6.8 shell as it flew to the right. Another one down, but another cycle of mega-blasting came abanging as the rest of the boys dumped their mags at him.

  He waited them out. Would they have the guts to flank? Would they put people off on his right and his left, triangulate and take him out? He bet not. They weren’t trying to hold the hill for but a few more minutes, and nobody wanted to miss the big bus out.

  And indeed, here came the bus; it floated out of blackness, its rotor kicking up a cyclone, huge and messy, blowing clouds of dust everywhere. He couldn’t get a good shot at it, however, and when it had settled in, it was hidden behind the angle of the incline and he could only hear it, see its column of rising disturbance. Then another posse of tracer came his way, lighting up his world and almost hitting him. One came closer than any round since fifteen years earlier, and he had a moment of fear. Even he, the great Bob the Nailer, victor in a hundred gunfights against impossible odds, felt the terror of the near miss, and he slunk back, happy just to be alive.

  The phone rang.

  Odd time for a phone call. But it rang, some chipper computery tune calculated to alert and annoy, the sound fortunately buried from his antagonists by the roar of the chopper. Astounded that he would do such an amazingly stupid thing, he obeyed the human rule that no matter what, phone calls take precedence over all reality. Maybe it was FBI, or maybe Nick had given the number to local authority.

  “Swagger,” he said into it after plucking it from inside his vest and slipping it open.

  “Mr. Swagger, it’s Charlie Wingate,” said the voice.

  “Charlie? Well—”

  “I think I figured Mark 2:11 out. It took a thousand hits on the Net but it’s actually ‘Mark,’ as in military or industrial model designation, capital M, small k, period, then just two-eleven, no colon, and it refers to a .50 caliber armor-piercing munition that—”

  At that moment the tree trunk be
hind which Bob had slithered exploded. It atomized as something weighing 650 grains with a secondary explosive and a tungsten core, traveling at twenty-five hundred feet per second, hit it at zero angle, detonated, and sent a shockwave through it that all but liquefied the wood structure itself. It toppled, but could not find room among the other trees to actually hit ground, and lay suspended at an angle.

  “Thanks, Charlie,” said Bob, “I’ll get back to you.” He flipped the phone away, slithered even farther down the hill. Good old Charlie. Better late than never.

  Two more .50 Raufosses arrived, but the gunner had no target. This time, not hitting wood, he did not get his secondary detonation, but only plowed into the dirt, kicking up a huge, dusty geyser of earth and leaves, each blast a bit farther from Bob, the thrust of the recoil taking him away from his target with each shot. Bob rolled to the side, came up in a good kneeling position, put the red circle on his target and, guessing that he was body-armored, shot him in the head.

  Now, he thought, get to the top, get some rounds into that bird, cripple it, then fall back and live happily ever after. Let the real FBI take over.

  Each thirty-pound, twenty-by twenty-four-inch, plastic tamper-evident bag contained approximately twelve thousand bills, as baled carefully in the counting room at Bristol Speedway headquarters. The distribution of bills was predictable, even immutable: 10 per cent of them were ones, 15 per cent fives, 25 per cent of them tens, 40 per cent of them twenties, 5 per cent of them fifties and 5 per cent of them one hundreds. Each bag contained about $226,000 and all thirty-five of them—roughly $8 million in small, unrecorded bills—weighed a thousand fifty pounds.