He tried to get up but Dad and Lamar stood over him.
“Russ, hit him
Lamar lifted the sickle. Its blade picked up a movielike highlight from the sun. He was Jason, Freddy Krueger, the guy in
“Sorry, boy,” he said, “but you shoulda listened to your daddy. Nut-cuttin’ time!”
Russ awoke in a cheesy hotel room in Oklahoma City, his mind filled with shards of glass, pieces of gravel and infinite regrets. Someone
“Russ, come on,” someone was yelling, “you’re late again, goddammit. It’s time to go.”
Oh. It was his
Russ got himself out of bed.
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Not if you have it displayed.”
“But it isn’t displayed.”
“My, my, if it didn’t just fall off the gun rack here.”
Bob pointed to the empty gun rack above the seat in his truck. Behind the seat, he had just slid the Mini-14 in its gun case, plus a paper bag with three loaded twenty-round magazines and the immense forty-rounder, a curved thing that looked like a flattened tin banana. “What cop is going to give me a hard time? This here’s Oklahoma.”
“Well, I’d never mess with your old man, so you’d best come up with a way to talk him out of it,” Bob said, sliding the .45 Commander in its holster behind the seat too, along with the extra magazines.
“I don’t know,” said Russ. “This is getting hairy.”
“It gets hairier. You drive.”
They climbed in. They were in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn, getting ready to call on General Jack Preece, of JFP Technology, Inc.
“What was that address again?” Russ asked.
Bob told him.
“I think it’s near the airport,” he said.
“Go to it, Junior.”
They drove in silence for a while. Then Russ said, “You’d better brief me on some stuff.”
“Why?”
“If you and I are supposed to be doing a book on sniping and it turns out I don’t know shit about it, this guy is going to kick us out on our butts and we get nothing.”
“So what do you want to know? ‘What’s it feel like?’ I used to get asked that a lot. ‘What’s it feel like?’”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Smart-ass punk kid.”
“All right. Why do you hate him?”
“Who, Preece?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t hate him. He’s a fine man.”
“You hate him. I can tell. Even behind the famous Swagger reserve, you hate him.”
“He was a fine officer. He ran a superior program. His people got hundreds, maybe thousands, of kills. They saved the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of American soldiers. He’s a fine man, a patriot, probably a father and a Republican. Why would you say I hate him?”
“You hate him.”
“Well … it’s just a thing. You wouldn’t understand it. I’d say it to another sniper and to no one else. What I said to you earlier, that’s what’s important. He’s a fine man, a great officer.”
“You have to tell me. I can’t get through this if you don’t.”
Bob paused. He wondered if he had the skills to articulate what lay at his heart. Or the energy. Damn this kid, with his smart-ass ways and his penchant for always coming up with a question that was pretty damned good.
“If you do write a book, you
“Yes sir.”
“I don’t want it said, Bob Lee Swagger, he had hard words for an American soldier who in good faith and out of duty and honor risked his life for his country. I won’t have that. That’s shit. That’s what’s killing the country.”
“I swear.”
“Then I tell you this now, and I will never hear of it again.”
“Yes sir.”
“It’s about killing.”
Russ said nothing.
“In war,” Bob said, “death comes in three forms. Usually, it comes from far off, delivered by men who never see the bodies they leave behind. That’s how we done most of our killing in Vietnam. The B-52s did the most, man, they’d turn that goddamn jungle into pulp and chew up everything for a square mile. And artillery. On the ground, the artillery does most of the killing. The king of battle, they call it. You may not like it, but that’s how it is.”
“Yes,” said Russ.
“Second is in hot blood. Firefight. You see forms moving, you fire. Some of them stop moving. You may never see them up close, you may never know if you got a hit or not. Or you may: you see the little fuck go down, you see the tracers cut him up, that sort of thing. What’s going on is really fighting. It’s you or him. You may not like it, but goddammit you do it, because if you don’t, you’re the one goes home in a bag.”
“Yes, I see.”
“The third and last form is cold-blooded killing. That’s what we do. We, being the snipers. We put a scope on a man from a half mile out and we pull a trigger and we watch him go still. Nothing pretty about it, but I would say it’s necessary. I
“That’s what you did.”
“I did. But still, distinctions can be made. Somehow distinctions
“Now, the army …”
He paused. Something in him recoiled at this; but he had to get it out.
“Different doctrine, developed first at this Project B
