'Okay, so four days ago, someone makes a great shot on an old cowboy in Idaho. Blows him so far out of the saddle hardly nothing left. Seven hundred-odd meters, crosswind. He wings a woman with him.'
'So?'
'So,' Bob said, 'the woman was my wife. The old man should have been me. Luckily, it wasn't. But ... he was trying for me. I examined the shooting site. I don't know much, but I know shooting, and I'll tell you this Johnny was world-class and he employed Soviet shooting doctrine, which I recognize. Maybe it's not, but it sure seems like the same guy is on my track now as was on it then.'
Bonson listened carefully, his eyes narrowing.
'What do you make of this?' he said.
'Donny knew something. Or they thought he did.
Same difference. So they have to take him out. They think the war will do it, but he's a good Marine and it looks like he's going to come out all right. So they have to take him.
They send in this special man, mount this special operation--'
'Weren't you some kind of hero? Weren't you especially targeted?'
'I can only think what I done in Kham Due alerted them to Donny's whereabouts. It made good cover, too.
The Russians wouldn't care a shit about how many NVA some hillbilly dusted in a war that was already won. We always thought they requested the sniper, no, now I think the Russians insisted on the sniper.'
'Hmmm,' said Bonson.
'That's very interesting.'
'Then a little while ago, I got famous.'
'Yes, I know.'
'I thought you might.'
'Go on.'
'I get famous and they get to worrying. Whatever it was he knew, maybe he would have told me. So ... they have to get me. It's that simple.'
'Hmmm,' said Bonson again. His face seemed to reassemble itself into a different configuration. His eyes narrowed and focused on something far away as behind them, his mind whirred through possibilities. Then he looked back to Swagger.
'And you don't know what it is?'
'No idea. Nothing.'
'Hmmmmm,' said Bonson again.
'But what I don't get--there is no more Soviet Union.
There is no more KGB. They're gone, they're finished. So what the fuck does it matter now? I mean, the regime that tried to kill me and did kill Donny, it's gone.'
Bonson nodded.
'Well,' he finally said, 'the truth is, we really don't know what's going on in Russia. But don't think the old Soviet KGB apparatus has just gone away. It's still there, calling itself Russian now instead of Soviet, and still representing a state with twenty-thousand nuclear weapons and the delivery systems to blow the world to hell and gone. What is going on is a political tussle over who makes the decisions--the old-line Soviets, the secret communists?
Or a new nationalist party, called PAMYAT, run by a guy named Evgeny Pashin. There's an election coming, by the way.'
'So I heard.'
'That election will have a lot to do with whose Russia it will be in the next twenty-five years and what happens to those twenty-thousand nukes--and to us. It's very complicated, rather dangerous, and it's not at all improbable that there's some kind of Russian interest in this business you've spoken of.'
Bob's eyes narrowed as he considered this.
'You're thinking. I can tell. What do you intend to do?
That is, if I don't swear out charges for breaking and entering?'
'You won't,' said Bob.
'Well, to find out what happened to Donny, I guess I have to find out what happened to Trig. I guess I'll follow that trail. I have to solve this if I have any chance of nailing this guy who's hunting me. If I keep moving, keep him away from my family, it may work out.'
'This is very interesting to me, Swagger. I want to follow up on this. I can get you people. A team. Backup, shooters, security people. The best.'
'No. I work alone. I'm the sniper.'
'Look, Swagger, I'm going to give you a phone number.
If you get in trouble, if you learn something, if you get in a jam with the law, if anything happens, you call that phone and the person will say 'Duty Officer' and you say, ah, think up a code word.'
'Sierra-Bravo-Four.'
