A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  “You good on the numbers?”

  “I can run ’em fast as anyone and have done a fair amount of it under incoming.”

  “Then you’re the hero here. You run the brainy stuff and diddle the scope and I’ll just pull the trigger.”

  Bob took a seat, wedged himself close to the bench, as Blondie placed his own M40A1, by which Bob knew him to be a fellow marine, and watched as the young man swiftly loaded and locked three 168s. Bob squinched behind the rifle, and it was all familiar. He settled in, feeling the tension in the trigger, finding his stockweld, sliding to the eyepiece, and seeing the world through the mil-dot-rich reticle of the Unertl 10X Marine Corps–issue scope, a unit overbuilt so powerfully you could use it to break down doors. He diddled with the focus ring, waiting for it to declare the world pristine and hard-edged at five to eight hundred yards, and when it did, he nodded to Blondie.

  “I’m gittin’ bored, me just standing here like a fella on a pier, watching ships,” said Anto, drawing laughter.

  “Almost ready, Sergeant Anto,” said Blondie, and then went all serious pro on them, first laser-ranging the three distant brightly colored dots in the thousand yards of green beyond them with his small Leica unit, then pulling out his Kestral 4000 weather station and noting the wind, humidity, and temperature. Then he ran the data through his Palm Pilot and came up with three solutions. He dialed the first into the scope of the rifle, clicking mostly elevation but some windage, for there was a drift of light wind that rustled undulations in the grass.

  He whispered to Bob, “Okay, you’re set up on the first target, which is 492 yards out, in a quarter value left to right wind. When you take that shot, I’m quickly turning you eighteen clicks up for the next one, which is at 622 yards, and then up fifteen for the last one, at 814 with a wind correction of five clicks. Are you ready?”

  “Good work, son,” said Bob. He was firing off a bench on sandbags while Grogan stood to do his offhand.

  “Sure you don’t care to sit, Colour Sergeant Anto?”

  “Nah, I’m fine this way. Some other fellow come up and pull the bandana when you’re ready.”

  Bob realized that Anto would pass the first target because he

  himself was already set up to that range and Anto would have no advantage. Instead he’d lase and shoot the second, then the third, while Blondie worked the clicks up for Bob’s second. He had a rogue impulse toward anarchistic victory: he’d shoot the second one first, taking away Anto’s advantage, then shoot the farthest, them come down to pick up the closest. That would be the way

  to win.

  But what would that prove? That he was smarter at a stupid game? That he was an asshole? That he couldn’t go with the agenda out of some petty vanity?

  Don’t do it, he told himself. Don’t be an asshole.

  “Someone start us off,” said Anto.

  Someone did.

  “Pull on one, ready now, three, two, o—”

  Bob was alone in the world of the scope. He was home, really; it was all familiar, the feel of the rifle, the smell of the cleaning fluid, the touch of hand to comb, cheek to fiberglass, finger to trigger, the rifle firm, the breathing stopped, the body nothing but steel except for the littlest tip of the trigger finger, and he saw the bright, tiny dot nesting at the confluence of the crosshairs and, as usual, some inner voice commanded his finger’s twitch and so deep was his concentration that he neither heard the shot nor felt the recoil, just watched the tiny blot of color leap.

  With his practiced hand, he got the bolt thrown and felt the vibrations of clickage as, hunched close, the young man called Blondie rocketed through his eighteen clicks. Bob put the hairs on the even smaller dot just in time to see it scoot into the air as Anto nailed it dead solid perfect.

  No need to cock then, but some impulse came to him from a trick bag of shooter’s savvy that just seemed to be there when you needed it, and he waved off Blondie and went for the shot on intuition, his gift for hold, knowing that Blondie couldn’t click fast enough. His mind was a blur of numbers. He reasoned that at 800 yards, each mil-dot below the crosshair represented an increment of 35 yards off the last zero at 622, which meant that the 92 yards further out to the third target represented about 2.7 mil-dots, and at a speed that has no place in time, he found the segment of line between second and third mil-dots that represented the 2.7 hold and involuntarily fired, just as did Grogan.

  The ball leaped up, then jagged hard right.

  “Whoa!”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Damn!”

  Grogan’s shot, dead-on, had knocked the ball upwards as it deflated, but Bob’s, arriving a nanosecond later and off-center, had banged it hard to the right, and it squirted off and bled its atmosphere out in the grass, signifying death.

  “Well shot, Bob the Nailer,” cried Grogan. “Damn, sir, that’s shooting!”

  Applause arose, and Bob was shamed at the vanity of his wanting to win, but at the same time pleased he’d done all right and impressed all the young guys who’d done it for real much more recently than he had, and would be Out There again soon, beyond the point of the spear.

  Grogan was all lit up.

  “Lord God, many’s the time I’ve done my little trick, yes sir, and no one has ever come even half so close. You was what, a hundredth of a second behind me, and here I am with all the techno gizmos and you just shot on pure instinct. What a shot, what a bloody damned shot.”

  For just a second there, it seemed like the point of the whole exercise was to congratulate the old lion on his near-win in a game that proved nothing. But Anto was the leader in this development; he led the celebration.

  “Tell me, Mr. Nailer, how you done it. I never could, not in a thousand years, no matter the rifle.”

  “He waved me off,” Blondie was saying to anyone who would listen, not that anyone was. “Jesus Christ, can you believe that?”

  “When the Marine Corps went to mil-dots in the late seventies with the Unertl, it was something I had to know. Don’t know why. So I learned mil-dots, just beat it all into my head. It’s no good as a system, really, too much dependent on figuring, and so you’ve got to be a mathematician as much as a shooter and a stalker. I just learned it by rote memorization and practice, don’t know why. It kept me off the booze a whole year, I suppose, and maybe the mil-dots saved me from my own black dogs. Anyhow, when Blondie told me the range of the targets, I figured the difference between the two and realized what the subtend value was for the dots at that range. So I was able to come to the point of aim faster using the dots cold off the middle-range zero than I could have with Blondie adjusting the elevation knob. It was 2.7 mil-dots down from the 622-yard zero, so that’s where I held and shot.”

  “There’s a professional for all you younger fellows, and I hope in the land of the scorpions you’ve got as much sense.”

  “But I was shooting known distance, where you wasn’t. So it don’t really come to much ’cept my vanity. Seems like we lost the point here: the point is, that goddamn thing works like a charm, and I am a believer. Now I will sit back and just watch while you teach these young guys how to use it. They will need that, where they’re going. They will send many bad boys to wherever them kind of people go when they’re sent, and on account of that a lot of good boys will be coming home. If iSniper can up the count on homecomings, then by God, I am a true believer in iSniper and its, whatever you call it, that 911 thing.”

  14

  Sally was working on some big case with a team from Treasury involving fraud in the financial meltdown, so she wasn’t around much, which meant that Nick found himself with more spare time to kill than he ever expected. Task Force Sniper was nowhere, just going over more leads, tracking down some of the wilder ideas, all of it more or less make-work, waiting for Nick’s decision to release the report and release the task force’s assets, and he was holding out to see if Swagger came up with something truly interesting. Meanwhile, the reps from the three local departmen
ts had all been sent home with nothing to do.

  Nick decided, late that night, to have a nice dinner, since he hadn’t eaten real food since this thing had begun. He left the ominous Hoover Building, stepping around the line of cement revetments arranged to keep the mad terrorist car bombers at bay, and dawdled aimlessly around Southeast DC, looking for a spot to eat.

  It was getting glamorous around here. In the nineties and early in the following decade, Southeast had been a dump, a crappy zone of once-prosperous retail and apartment buildings gone shabby with neglect, a little too far from the federal triangle to attract the lunchtimers who drove more central city food culture, unserviced by movie houses, bookstores, boutiques, that sort of thing. Then it changed when the Verizon Center opened, a new big cathedral to the religions known as NBA and NHL; with it, restaurants opened, a big multiplex of theaters, a busy and hustling main street of sorts, Seventh Street, and all kinds of snazzy little places. It seemed to fill up overnight with that disturbing tribe of unrecognizable barbarians called “the young,” and as Nick moseyed through the streets, he was astounded by their numbers, their energy, their clothes, their heat, their hubbub, their urge to fill the world with their own centrality. It gave him a headache. Ugh, how’d he get so old, over forty, with a big house in Fairfax he hardly ever saw and a wife who had turned out to be such a hotshot he hardly ever saw her either.

  He drew his overcoat a little tighter, as deep fall, threatening winter, had come to the East. He took his ID card on its chain off and stuffed it in his pocket, as he didn’t want to be ID’d as a bureaucratic geek out on a late-night prowl. He felt the Glock .40 against his hip, well back in a Safariland holster, and the counterweight of two mags with twelve apiece on his other hip; he bought his coats a little big so that the gun wouldn’t print, even if it meant he had to have the sleeves taken up.

  Fish. He decided it would be a fish night, because he was a long way from a reputable steak joint, the nearest, Morton’s, being over on Connecticut at K. It was a cab ride away. Nearby there was a place called Oceanaire he’d always heard good things about; he’d hit that, have a nice dinner, walk back to the Hoover underground, and be home in Fairfax by midnight.

  He got to Oceanaire, which was on L, and liked what he saw: it seemed to have a kind of forties look to it, and it made him think of movies about G-men, where everyone wore a tough fedora with a tilt to the brim and a trench coat and carried a Colt Dick Special. Oh, and smoked, they all smoked, and he remembered the movie that had set him off on this path in life, which he’d seen on television in the seventies lying on his belly at fourteen in his parents’ split-level, gray in the light of the tube; it was called The Street with No Name and told the story of a heroic G-man named Gene Cordell who had infiltrated some mob in the tacky slumtown of “Center City,” and it ended in a blazing shootout, with tommy guns spitting flashes and spurts of spent gas and long columns of tumbling brass into the night air, while slugs chewed the shit out of a guy named Shivvy, sparing Cordell’s life at the last moment. Cordell was played by—what was that guy’s name? Some guy who never made it big, but boy, he’d seemed big in that movie. Steve Jackson? Jack Smith? Bill Stevenson, some name like that, some—Mark Stevens, that was it, and for that movie at least, no matter what happened before or after, Mark Stevens was so cool, so smart, so tough, so brave, so everything a kid could want to be, that’s when Nick knew he had to be a G-man or his life would come to nothing.

  Nostalgic for the good old days of G-manning he’d only experienced in the movies, no matter twenty-odd years of service as a special agent, Nick slipped in, saw the place was half full, caught the maître d’s attention, and was taken to a nice out-of-the-way table. He sat, turned down a drink, listened to the specials, chose grilled rockfish with mashed potatoes after a salad, oil and vinegar, and began to work on a little plate of on-the-house munchies in sour cream the waiter had brought before he’d taken the order.

  Meanwhile big-band music filled the air, and Nick waited for the announcement that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, but it never came. Instead, a bottle of champagne did.

  “I didn’t order that,” he said to Chad, the waiter.

  “I know, sir, but a fellow at that table sent it over. It’s the very best. Not cheap.”

  Nick looked across the room and saw that man Bill Fedders, waving pleasantly at him.

  Nick smiled back, then turned to the waiter.

  “Take this back, thank Mr. Fedders for me, if you don’t mind, but tell him I’m on duty. I’m an FBI special agent and I’m carrying a firearm, so it’s against regulations for me to drink tonight. He’ll understand.”

  “Yes sir,” said the waiter, and sped off. But if Nick thought that would be the end of it, he was sadly mistaken. He had the salad, the rock, nicely done, and was enjoying a cup of decaf when a shadow crossed the table, and he knew who it was.

  “Nick, hi. Bill Fedders—”

  “Sure, Bill, I remember, in the director’s office a couple of weeks ago. You’re working for Constable, right?”

  “I am indeed. Doing the boss’s dirty work, as usual. Sorry you couldn’t take the champagne. It’s a really light one, very good with fish. But I understand. Something happens, you have to pop a bad guy, and the fizz-juice comes up and it’s a lot of trouble.”

  “Even I admit the chances of me popping a bad guy tonight are pretty remote, but if you get into a way of living, it’s tough to get out of it. Thanks for the offer. I’m not a prude. It just wouldn’t have been a good idea.”

  “Got it. Nick, do you mind if I join you for a sec?” Fedders had a smooth way of ingratiating himself, that professional Washington player’s sense of entitlement to attention everywhere, welcome assumed. He was a radiantly handsome man, wearing the power attorney’s immaculately fitted blue pinstripe, with a glisten in his gray-black hair and the fresh look of just having stepped out of the barber’s chair.

  “Mr. Fedders—”

  “Bill.”

  “Bill, it’s probably not a good idea. I do official business at the office, in the open, where everybody can see and hear. If you want to schedule an appointment, we’ll certainly do our best to accommodate you. Or if—”

  “It’s not really official, Nick. Not really.”

  “Well, sure then, but bear in mind I have a walk back to my car and a long drive back to Fairfax tonight. And I want to be in early tomorrow. I always try to be the first guy in the office. It goes with all that big money they pay me.”

  Fedders smiled, eyes sparkling, as he eased into the empty chair. He put a half-full glass of scotch down before him.

  “Nick, it’s my job, you know. I have to ask around, I have to find things out, I have to know how things work. That’s what Tom pays me for. I guess I’m sort of his ‘special agent.’ ”

  “Sure.”

  “So I hear things. I hear, for example, the investigation has suddenly gone off on another route.”

  “We’re trying to be diligent, that’s all.”

  “Sure, sure. I hear that too. I hear from people, ‘That Nick Memphis, sure to be an assistant director before the year’s out, just gone from triumph to triumph.’ I understand that thing in Bristol was hairy.”

  “I caught a piece of lead, but I’m okay except for the funny walk.”

  “Well, a hero. Very good guy. And that’s what I hear, that’s the summary judgment on Nick Memphis, FBI. ‘Very good guy.’ ‘The best.’ ‘One of the incorruptibles,’ ‘really a comer,’ ‘going places.’ ”

  “Bill, going places isn’t the point. I’ve had a wonderful career and I’m happy at the small contributions I’ve made. That’s enough. If I make it to the next floor, won’t that be swell. If I don’t, that’s the way the cards fall. My ambition doesn’t include myself. I want to make sure we get it right; that’s my ambition.”

  “Well said. You’re a noble man in a town full of assholes, professional and amateur. Okay, Nick, but let me just be square with you. This guy Tom
Constable is your classic big foot and he’s not afraid to hurt people who get in his way. I try to get him to exercise some constraint, but these made-it-themselves celebrity billionaires are tough cookies when it comes to getting their own way. I’m just here to say, if there’s no point in antagonizing him, don’t do it. He can and will bring hurt, and I’ve seen it. Nick, I’d hate to see a guy good as you get buried under the big guy’s big foot over nothing. He wants the investigation closed; he wants his ex-wife’s name out of the papers; he wants the whole thing to go away. I’m only telling you this out of respect for your accomplishments.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Nick. “You’re doing me a favor. See, I thought you were threatening an FBI agent.”

  “Nick—”

  “Mr. Fedders, I’d like this conversation to end now, before you get in trouble. Yeah, you have to serve the big man, and yeah, I have to tread softly around the big man, we both know how it works in this bad old town. Okay, you’ve made your point. Power talks, bullshit walks, welcome to the City on the Hill.”

  “Nick, be pissed if you want, but think of it from another angle. This guy could really help you. I mean why do the assholes like me make it big and the good boys like you never quite do? It’s because us assholes aren’t afraid to suck up to a big foot, flatter him endlessly, do his dirty little jobs, and get the big payoff. You could say that’s the life I chose, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But a good guy like you, if you do this one little favor for the big man, you have no idea how it can help a career. It could get a good guy like you to the Seventh Floor, and think of the good you could do there, and the pride you’d take in it. You’d be ahead of your wife too, and I know that’s got to play into it”—so Fedders had actually looked into Sally’s thriving career at Justice and knew that she was fast-track to the upper floors—“and think how good that would feel. Nick, that’s all I have, thanks for listening, you have my card, and if you ever, and I mean ever, need a favor in this town, call me.”