An Act of Treason

the Boatman. Always paddling to the surface in his nightmares, coming to cackle and offer grim predictions about looming and unavoidable catastrophes, the Boatman tried to plant doubts in his mind and remind him that at heart, Kyle Swanson was a cold killer who steadily supplied fresh souls to hell. Being drunk and high usually opened the mental door for the Boatman to drop by. Being clean and sober again, Kyle had not seen the son of a bitch for a long time and did not miss him at all. Good riddance. Still, he had been reduced to drinking bottled water from France.

He closed his eyes and stretched his neck as the freshening breeze from the coming storm whipped around him. The hazy sunlight finally blinked out while crooked bolts of lightning cracked the sky and thunder bowled over the water. The first raindrops came dancing across the deck, and still Kyle sat alone, balancing the bottle on his knee and watching and listening and pondering Jeff’s question. Am I really ready? Will I jeopardize this mission and the lives of others before it all even starts? Can I pull the trigger on a tango at four hundred or use a silenced pistol or even the Gerber knife up close and personal? Am I ready?

“I am disappointed that you entertain doubts.” A shaky voice seemed to rise up to him from the water, where a small craft rode at rest, unmoving in the troubled sea. “I have allowed you enough time off. Get back to work.” A little snicker of a giggle trailed on the wind. A tall figure was at a stern oar, the winds not touching the bloodstained black rags that drooped from the skeletal bones. The Boatman was back, his personal omen of deaths yet to come.

“I was hoping never to see you again,” Kyle replied into the night storm. “Shit. I’m not even asleep and I can see you out there.”

“Look at you! Living a good life on a fancy yacht, and goodness me, developing nonlethal weapons! How can such a thing help me fill my boat?”

“What? You think I work for you? Boatman, you are a raggedy-ass creation of my own mind, sailing around in my brain. You are nothing.”

The sardonic, hateful laugh came again. “Wrong. I am everything. I am your today, and I am your tomorrow, the sum of all of your parts. You know when they place the gold coins on your eyes at death, you will be all mine, sitting in this little boat with me ferrying you to the unknown. And that is the one thing, the one place, that you fear: the unknown.”

“Go away. You’re boring.”

The Boatman leaned on his oar, and the little boat shifted position, nose into the waves now, taking the motion of the water. “You will notice that the boat is currently empty of souls. You should have filled it with the corpses of those pirates, and you know it. Excalibur was calling for you to shoot, and you let them live.”

Swanson was on his feet, at the railing, staring out at something no one else could have seen. “That was the mission. We accomplished what we intended to do. Everything does not have to end in a bloodbath.”

The single crackle of laughter was lost in a boom of thunder that vibrated the big yacht but sounded like a derisive shout from the heavens. “Yes, it does. For you, it must end in blood, and it will not stop until you take your seat in my boat. Enough.” There was a flash of face, nothing but white bone and a grinning jaw of sharklike sawteeth. “I just stopped by to welcome you back to our private world. Go hunting now. Bring me fresh souls.”

Kyle loosed a primal shout of anger from his gut, grabbed the green bottle, and threw it as far as he could. It splashed into the water far short of the disappearing boat, which blinked out in the big waves as the noise of the storm swallowed the final burst of laughter. He did not care if he was being environmentally unfriendly and perhaps bonking a whale on the head. Fuckin’ Boatman. Kyle would do the job with Jim Hall, and that was that. He still had questions, yes, but there was only one way to find the answers.

7

SWANSON RETURNED TO HIS cabin, took a quick shower, and slid into the neat bed. He grabbed a Robert B. Parker Western novel to read until he was drowsy enough to sleep, but his mind refused to return to the Old West and its sturdy gunfighters. He kept thinking about the gunfighters of today, and how he had become one. Instead of being a sheriff calling out bad guys to duel in streets outside of saloons, Swanson preferred never to let his quarry get anywhere near him, and also to never know the end was imminent. A well-placed shot from a hide that was hundreds of meters away did the job just fine, and the sniper would then slip away to do the same thing on some other day. Swanson saw no point in standing toe-to-toe and having a quick- draw contest. Too much was uncertain. If he wanted a man dead, he would kill him, which was, after all, the point of the whole thing. It would be good to be working with Jim, someone he had known for many years and whom he trusted without question.

He put the book aside and clicked off the light, feeling the Vagabond sweeping through the water and letting it rock him like a baby in a seagoing cradle. If he had ever had a real mentor in the Marine Corps, it was Jim Hall, who spotted something special in Kyle when he was just a pup in training and had groomed him for bigger things.

Soon, sleep came, and with it a remembrance from seventeen years ago, at the sprawling Marine base at Camp Pendleton in California, when Kyle had been young and talented, but with an attitude problem that was driving Jim Hall nuts.

* * *

LANCE CORPORAL SWANSON SLITHERED through the dirty drainage pipe beneath the wide road. He knew he was going out of bounds, and didn’t care. To him, the popular motto of the Marine sniper, “One shot, one kill,” was just public relations bullshit. Out here, he steered by a much truer compass, the much more relevant axiom of “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying; if you are caught cheating, then you ain’t trying hard enough.”

That was what he was doing right now, cheating, but he was not going to be caught. Swanson had been busting tens, maximum scores in the stalking trials, since he began the phase. Nobody could see the invisible man until he wanted them to, and the instructors were getting pissed at how his success was feeding his already cocky attitude. The youngster was an absolute loner, and he was scoring the max while simultaneously throwing the lesson plan on the trash heap.

* * *

“SEE ANYTHING?” GUNNERY SERGEANT Jim Hall, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the training, had three Marines scanning the scrubby field with powerful binos and spotting scopes. Out in the stalking course were a couple of walkers, who were merely tools for the day’s exercise. Since they wandered around a specifically outlined course, they could easily spot any irregularities up close, but they were not allowed to give the spotters help, advice, or information. The spotters had to find something unusual, then guide the walkers onto the students. The walkers just went to where they were told to go. If there was a sniper at that spot, then the student failed.

“Nothing,” said one of the spotters.

“Nope.”

“Not yet.”

Stalking was the hardest phase of the Scout Sniper School and was responsible for a large percentage of the dropouts. That damned boot Swanson was making a mockery of the difficult training. Hall decided to put an end to that.

There were a total of ten stalk sites on the vast military reservation, and this morning, on a thousand-yard course with clearly defined boundaries on each side, he had paired Swanson with a student who was really on the