A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  Because Cold Water, for its acquisition of capital, its possible destiny as a railhead, its array of vices and pleasures, had also attracted scum, crude and violent men, for whom civilization meant only one thing: banquet.

  Texas Red was one of them.

  Wild gun boy, fine dancer, quick to shoot, quickest from the leather, holder of grudges, kisser of gals, he was the whirlwind. His reputation was made in blood and lead. He shed the former, he dealt in the latter. He was the devil to the good citizens of Cold Water, who had formed a posse to take him down. He faced fifteen men.

  The first five were to be engaged by rifle, through the window of the hotel. His .44-40 1892, loaded, would be lying at a table to the right of the window. He’d seize it, throw the lever closed, and fire. Then, having put them down, he would set down the rifle and move fast to the window of the saloon, where seven more waited. Seven meant of course he’d have to use both his handguns, the down-loaded .44-40s from Colt, one at his hip, one on his other hip in the reversed and tilted holster. Done with that, he’d move to the next window in the hotel, to see where four more fellows awaited just down the street, and by that time, his smokepoles empty, he’d go to shotgun and slide two 12-gauge red boys into the loading gate of his supremely polished and finished Model 97 Winchester—by way of the Harbin Industrial Fabrication Plant No. 6, Hwang Province, China—and quickly pump and shoot and pump and shoot. Then a reload from the leather bandolier he wore across his red placket front, and two more blasts of justice, and he’d be finished with the first stage of this year’s Cold Water Cowboy Action Shoot. After that, until late tomorrow afternoon, eleven more stages would determine if Texas Red was indeed the best gun in the Senior Cowboy Black Powder Duelist category, and if all his work was worth it. He just had to be finished—to win!—in time to be airborne by six for his eight o’clock in Seattle.

  Now, finally, it had begun.

  He reached the loading area, and when the shooter ahead had finished and cleared, and the targets had reset, he was approached by the lead range officer.

  “Load ’em up, Red.”

  “Yes sir,” said Red. He walked to the lever gun, slipped ten .44-40s into the chute on the ’92 receiver, leaving the lever down to show empty chamber, and laid the rifle where designated. He returned, drew each Colt, threaded five robin’s-egg-heavy cartridges—“cah-ti-ges” the Duke had called them as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers—into each chamber as accessed by the popped-open loading gate of Sam’s marvelous, intricate machine, an orchestration of lines and symmetries and streamlines and densities like no other. One in, he spun the cylinder past the next, then sliding in four more, then cocking under control to rotate the cylinder one last time, then closing the gate and restoring the masterpiece to its leather. That ritual was to assure that no live cartridge nested under the firing pin’s pressure, a design weakness in the old gun so grave nobody noticed it for over 110 years. Then, finally, he took his shotgun from his guncart, its pump racked backward to expose empty chamber and empty magazine as well as all the spring-driven, leverage-turned ingenuity of its interior, and moved to set it on the table next to the far window.

  He readied himself at the starting line, shivering a little, pianoing his fingers to get them loose and ready, tensing and relaxing his upper-body muscles. He put his earplugs in, then his hands came to his waist and he put on his grimace-tight gunman’s face.

  “Shooter ready?” came the question, muffled by the ear protection.

  He nodded.

  He heard the three-beat timer ticking down, ding, ding, and dong, and on dong—more precisely on the d- so that he was halfway to the first station by the -ong—he raced forward, seized the ’92 in a liquid, practiced choreography, slid it to shoulder, keeping muzzle level and downrange even as he was closing the lever, and fired the first shot as the sight came into focus over the blurred image of the bad guy, in this case a black metal plate, and the trigger came back and the gun shuddered gently as it sent its hunk of lead on its way at a little over six hundred feet per second.

  The trick here was not to wait for the clang of the hit and the sight of the plate toppling on its hinge but to be already into the leverwork and already moving the gun by that time, and he fired again and again and again and againagainagain, only aware at the unfocused edge of the drama of the ejected shell casings flipping through the air but most attuned to the great spurt of white, a billow at each report that rivaled the clouds above. And when the last plate fell, he left the action open, set the rifle down, and moved his ass fast to the next window.

  This was the killer. The subtlety of cowboy action was that it wasn’t an athletic contest of speed of foot and dexterity, but of course it was, and that it wasn’t a fast-draw contest, but of course it was. You had to calibrate effort versus grace, for to seem to hurry could be called “against the spirit,” a ten-second time penalty; at the same time if you loafed, you lost.

  Red had it today; the gods had been kind, and in his last practice, he had suddenly felt the gun rock solid all the way through the string. He’d hit plate after plate yesterday, watched them prang and fall, and felt oddly accomplished. All that practice. He’d done it. He’d mastered the goddamned thing. He was a gunfighter.

  He came to the window, turned, drew, and in the same fluidity the gun was in his hand, thumbing back as it rode up, and he saw the sights against the black blur, and axiomatically the gun discharged, and again he thumbed a new cartridge home, rotating up from the next-in-line position in the cylinder, perfectly sustained and perfectly timed by Sam’s engineering genius all those frosty years ago, and each time the gun popped, and he was moving it and thumbing back the hammer and restoring the grip just as Clell had taught him before the just-hit plate fell. Five and he was done with gun number one, holstered smooth as butter. He rotated to the left for the next snatch and brought that beauty in line, cocking as he got it there. Five soft pops, five spurts of glorious white fume; they stood for America, for liberty, for the West, for patriotism, for old movies and TV, for growing old with grace and still winning every goddamn thing. He was done, slipped number two back into its leather den, and was halfway to shotgunland before the last plate fell.

  This was pretty easy for Red because in another life, as a southern billionaire playboy, pheasant and dove hunts with $14,000 Perazzis had been a Sunday necessity in the fall, if the Falcons weren’t playing at home, and he had no problem with the four inserts, the four pumps, and the four shots, each of which delivered a handful of spattering birdshot to the larger, heavier plates, and down they went ker-plunk.

  “Good shooting, Red,” said the range officer, reading off the time—29.2—to the scorekeeper, adding, “all targets down, no penalties.”

  Red sat back, smelling the gunsmoke, watching the white gas drift and seethe until a light breeze took it and it dissipated.

  Soon enough Clell would be there to tell him how well he’d done, urge him to stay cool and collected—no rush, no sweat, no nerves, no expectations, just there, in the zone—and a nice round of applause rose to congratulate his efforts, some of it from people who surely recognized him and were sucking up as if he’d give a clapper a mil just for kicks, but much of it genuine, from those who didn’t know.

  But he knew it best of all: Texas Red has it.

  49

  Anto slowly revved the ATV, then slipped into gear and took it down the gentle slope of the valley toward the center. He had a black-comic thought of accidentally running over the heads of his own sniper team as he progressed, and had to fight a grin in case Swagger, from his own hide, was eyeballing him.

  He switched back, left then right, eating up the distance, came in out of the high grass onto shorter, where ugly prairie things—they looked like turds but were some kind of cancerous vegetation—littered the ground, along with the odd low scrub of bush, the scraggily but unspectacular cacti, stones, smallish boulders, what have you. He was a man who’d spent many days in action and had taken more fire than ev
en the many professional soldiers of his culture, with the scars to prove it, and he wore that time in hell well. In fact it was not even hell to him, as it is to most men. The truth is, high-level professionals like Anto and his mates from 22 SAS and most commandos in the forces and Seals and various foreign alphabet-soup high-contact teams don’t fear battle at all; they relish it. To them it’s an exhilaration like a drug high, and they truly savor the act of taking life, at close range or by rifle through optics; it’s like scoring baskets or goals in the sports-driven youths that most had.

  So Anto was far from scared, far from choked with dread, far from concerned with his own death, which, through many wounds and much recovery time, had nevertheless only seemed like a final joke. He was pure alpha, the war dog in its most distilled form. Oh, this one would be so damned much fun!

  He got to the creek where advised, eased down the throttle to an idle, came out of gear, and slipped into neutral. He let the motor run on general principle. Although unlikely, a mechanized getaway would be a lot more efficient than a barefoot one, running uphill nude for nine hundred yards among prickers and buffalo shit.

  As instructed, he scissors-stepped off the vehicle, moving ten feet away. At that spot, he assumed the position, faced east, hands up, legs spread. Now where was that bad boy Swagger? Would he come over the hill on an ATV and take his time, letting Anto bake even redder in the sun as he trekked down for the exchange? Raymond knew: don’t shoot until he’s still, and he and I have had a chat. That was the sign. Then take him, because of course Anto wanted to watch him die from as close as possible, possibly even having a word or two with the mortally stricken man.

  Jimmy had gone to binoculars, so much easier to manipulate than the tripod-mounted spotter’s scope, if somewhat less steady. He fixed on Anto as he came down the hill, watched him course this way and that, detected no nervousness. And what happened if Swagger simply killed Anto, shot him dead on the spot? Then he, Jimmy, would find the sniper’s hide and give the site to Raymond and talk Raymond into the shot, and Raymond, steady as an ingot, would put the man down.

  Then they’d bring their fallen Michael Collins back and give him a burial Irish style that he’d deserve. There’d be drinking and keening and piping, with the banshees howlin’ of a great man’s death on the glens and in the bogs. But it would be all right: that was Anto, giving himself up for the team and the mission, without even a thought to the sadness of it all.

  “Would you see anything?” asked Ray, stuck in the smaller field of vision of the iSniper911 atop the AI.

  “I do not,” said Jimmy, “only fat Anto’s fat arse scrunched up on the bike’s seat. Not a pretty vision, I’m telling yis.”

  “No man should have to look on Anto’s great ass, sure,” said Raymond, and Jimmy couldn’t tell if it was Raymond’s first joke or if he meant that with his customary earnestness.

  Anto arrived at his designated location, stilled his machine, and slid off. He moved to the side in odd steps, keeping his hands high. From the site of the boys, he was on a slight oblique.

  Raymond, as practiced on the iSniper as any of them, shot the distance and reported it to be 297 yards in 0-5 wind, a downward angle of 13 degrees over the yardage, not enough to require any correction. The device then told him three down, .5 to left, and so he went back to the scope, traced three lines down the axis of the center of the reticle from the larger reticle, adjusted the rifle ever so slightly until the fat, slightly angled, red-dappled shape that was Anto’s naked back rested exactly in the space between the third hashmark of the vertical axis of the crosshair and the first small + to its left, and there he rested. He could kill Anto easy enough, but that wasn’t the point then, was it?

  Jimmy ran the binoculars over the known world fast enough to make time, slow enough to see what he was looking at. He was just on the edge of blur. It should be happening soon enough now.

  Suddenly he saw Anto jump, not as if hit, but startled. All of Anto’s muscles became tense, even his buttocks, clenching in the drama, and he turned, stopped as if commanded, and began to speak.

  “What the fuck,” said Jimmy, shifting his binocs after concluding from the evidence that somehow the sniper was close to but behind Anto. “Raymond, Raymond, look at where the bastard is!”

  Ginger didn’t jump when Anto appeared at the edge of his vision; nor did he twitch, tighten, or kick. He was professional. He just let the scene unfold. He saw Anto arrive at the creek, not thirty yards away.

  So it begins, it does, he thought.

  He double-checked his weapon under the camo tarpaulin, ran his thumb up to the safety to see it was indeed swung all the way around to full-auto, then broke contact with the grip to crawl his fingers up the receiver to test the cocking handle, pulling it back toward the butt to find it loose, which signified the weapon was cocked fully with a round in the chamber. He slid his hand up higher on the receiver to the face of the Eotech holographic sight, a clever tactical enhancement that looked like a small TV set mounted in a smooth plastic streamline bolted tight on the receiver’s Picatinny rail. Activated—Ginger did that, pushing a button first for power-up, then pushing it a dozen more times to elevate the brightness—it beamed a holographic circle on its screen of glass, a powerful icon glowing red against the clear, so perfect for close-quarter battle because you didn’t even have to look for it, it was just there to your eye, and you put it on target and squeezed and sent a fleet of 5.56s off to do the job right and proper. Now he was ready and sure that what might happen to need his assistance in settling would be occurring soon enough, and he said a brief prayer to Jesus to grant him the favor of putting a mag into the Yank, to pay him back for the fooking cracked skull he took and the embarrassment of being the fella to let the team down.

  That done, he screwed up his focus, his concentration, his war persona, and watched as poor naked Anto just stood there, his bollocks all loose, his shoulders red, waiting for whatever.

  Surely soon the American would appear, coming on down the far hill, approaching for the exchange, and it would all—

  What the—?

  Jaysus, will you look at that?

  Who’d have guessed? Not a man among them.

  The earth moved.

  It did, it did. Twenty yards behind naked Anto, a smallish knot of brush and grass quivered and gave and transmogrified itself as beneath it rose, like a prehistoric beast coming out of a millennium or more’s sleep, a shape that soon enough took on the damned image of a man in ghillie, black pistol in hand, face a green-black-brown silent killer’s mask. He rose to both legs and extended the pistol toward Anto, as if to shoot.

  Ginger had a moment of panic: should he rise himself now and fire the killing burst? But before he could commit, it appeared that the enemy sniper was not about to fire. He too, it appeared, wanted a little chat.

  Anto seemed to wait forever and almost put his arms down out of sheer fatigue, ready to throw them up again at any sign of the approach, but then he heard a voice from too close to be real but real indeed say, “All right, Potatohead, you stay frozen,” and felt himself jump in surprise.

  What in God’s name?

  He turned halfway and saw in his peripheral the man himself, or rather a man disguised as planet, all fronds and frills and floppy hat, as ghillied up to perfection as any sniper could be, a Sig pistol in his grip, the camo smock falling away. He wasn’t a mile away, he wasn’t a half, a quarter, a hundred yards, a hundred feet. He was right there, almost in spit’s distance.

  “Move another inch, Irishman, you’re dead as shit.”

  Anto froze. The fellow was there, unseen by Jimmy and Raymond and even close-in Ginger. He’d been there all along. He had to have gotten there ahead of them. He’d planted himself in the earth and outwaited the stillest, best men in the business!

  Anto’s mind hurried then to another ramification; who’d been on the radio, who’d been guiding him in?

  “Is it Ginger?” asked Raymond.

  “No,
no, get on the damned gun, man, put the bastard down. It’s him, it’s him, can’t you goddamn see how dif his camo is from ours? Do it, do it now.”

  Raymond didn’t panic, professional that he was, but reacquainted the rifle butt with his shoulder, settled microscopically, tried to quell a heart rush, took a breath or so. Then he reshot the iSniper911 laser ranger to initiate the target acquisition sequence, committed to screen, and saw that it was 281 yards off, and the angle had risen to 16 degrees, still too little for a cosine correction, and the new shooting determination was still three down, but now without the .5 left adjustment, so he found stock-weld, acquired reticle, acquired new target—large man in grassy ghillie suit—tracked downward on the central vertical axis of the reticle to the same third hashmark but this time didn’t need to make the same .5 to left, let the rifle settle, let his breathing settle, and began to take slack out of the trigger.

  “How much did you get, Anto?” asked Bob mildly.

  “’Tis over two hundred thousand for the sniper’s pleasure,” said Anto with a merry, comic lilt to his voice. “Oh, sure yis be having some wicked pleasures on that swag. It’s yours, Sniper. Want me to bring her to ye, or will yis grab it yourself?” him thinking, now, prang the boyo, finish him with Mr. .308, blow lungs and heart out, Raymond, don’t let your old sarge here down.

  “Won’t that be fun?” said Bob.

  “It’s good craic you’ll be having with that—”