Savant

Women speak of their biological clock. Bobby Price had one, too. On the surface he seemed to be a perfectly normal child, but if you placed your head to his heart and listened carefully, you could hear the little boy ticking.

From the first time he took one of his father's hunting rifles into his small hands, it was love at first sight. Where children from more prosaic backgrounds grew up with Red Ryder BB carbines, Bobby was given an expensive 'varmint' toy, one that fired the genuine article—.22-caliber long rifle ammo.

Bobby took to the weapon like a duck takes to the wet stuff, and—unsupervised and indulged—he began to kill. 'Shitbirds,' he called them. Within a few weeks the 'shitbird' population in the Price section of suburban Fort Worth had dwindled alarmingly.

Bobby Price had found his calling. He loved to kill. Loved… to kill. It became his philosophy, his raison d'etre, his religion. His obsession with weapons had begun in earnest.

When Bobby was fourteen he had grown bored with slaying birds and animals. Already the veteran of two wild-boar hunts and innumerable big-game hunting excursions, Bobby became fascinated with the prospect of taking down some two-footed trophies. He started scoping traffic and snap-shooting an empty Weatherby-Magnum at the passing cars.

One day it was just too much for him. A farmer came chugging along in an old beat-up pickup truck, and he could no more have stopped himself than the man in the moon. He snapped a .357 round into the empty chamber, snicked that oiled bolt into lock 'n' load, and squeezed one off. That time he ended up in an asylum. Daddy saw to that. Daddy and Daddy's legal talent.

When he came back out—still in 'deep therapy,' of course, he went to work for some people there in Texas, who thought 'Shooter' Price was just what the doctor ordered. Not long after that he was arrested as a prime suspect in a mob-style execution, and again Daddy's lawyers went to work. It was a bit tougher this time. Bobby was seventeen. A lot of people thought Bobby should get the electric chair. But then a lot of people suddenly came into a whole bunch of money, and changed their minds.

The deal was this: Bobby could walk, but only on one condition. The kid had to join the U.S. Army. There was a nasty little war going on in Vietnam. One outfit in particular liked the cut of Shooter Price's jib. They all agreed— this li'l ol' boy from Texas was nothin' but a flat-out born killer.

Quang Tri Province, Republic of Vietnam

The Sixties found Bobby Price in I Corps Tactical Zone, killing for peace. Diem and Kennedy were but two of the better-known casualties of that time. SAUCOG, a mysterious and clandestine intelligence group, in league with the Clandestine Services unit of a monolithic 'fact-gathering' agency, had found several mutant personalities, some of whom had been institutionalized at the time.

A plan had been devised for inserting 'killer robots,' as one unfortunate memorandum phrase had described the action personnel, into situations involving highly sensitive operations: assassinations, over-the-fence jobs, torture and terrorism; no act was to be beyond the purview of this special unit. In a war where our allies were often our enemies, a sanitized hit squad was worth its weight in gold.

The mandate appeared to be presidential, and the combined forces unit had drawn on both military and civilian resources. It was a mixed bag of horror stories.

In a secure Quonset hootch within the perimeter of the spook complex near the Quang Tri airstrip, admittance to which required special clearance, an old man and the kid—known to his colleagues as Shooter Price —talked about a unique weapon system, The old man did most of the talking.

'The .50-caflber sniper weapon is nothing new. As you know there have been isolated kills made with the so-called Ma Deuce—the M-2—and the Hotchkiss .50 is performing admirably as you can attest.' He turned and removed what appeared to be a large map cover. Bobby Price saw a cutaway schematic of a firing device.

'Ray guns—electrical guns more properly—fall into three groups: rail, coil, and polarizer. That's a rail Those are capacitor banks.' He pointed. 'You understand what a capacitor is?' Shooter nodded, but the old man ignored him. 'Umm. No matter. You couldn't move this, much less carry it. You need conducting rails for the projectile to ride, and this is where you shoot your current, which creates a magnetic field. It travels along here, and BANG! Fires your weapon. Not practical. Too big. Wears out quickly.' The old man turned to another cutaway in color.

'In a conventional firing device you need three things to operate: a furnace, a projectile, and a pipe. You burn something or create heat, expanding gases blow your projectile out your pipe. BANG! How fast the projectile comes out—that's your bullet velocity.

'The coil is good, see, because it isn't limited by the same laws that govern velocities in conventional furnaces. We go now from one mile a second to two miles, three, maybe four miles a second! We call that hypervelocity.

'Energy waves travel through here.' He pointed to the drawing of the coil gun. 'And the force of the magnetic field propels the projectile at hypervelocities of such speeds you can penetrate anything.

'You ever heard how a hurricane drives pieces of straw through boards?'

'Yes, sir.' Price hadn't but he wanted to show he was paying attention.

'Same deal.' The man shook his head and long gray hairs misbehaved. 'Hypervelocity. It makes the projectile penetrate the target according to a different set of physical laws.

'In theory, if your bullet was dense enough, you could put a coil gun on a satellite, send it in orbit around the earth, and you could fire a projectile that would penetrate the globe and come out the other side of the planet! In theory, that is. If it didn't burn up on the way—and so on…' The old man trailed off, mesmerized by his own ideas.

'This is the polarizer. Magnetic field. Super velocity. More durable than a rail gun. Smaller than a coil gun. Only problem is the energy eats the bullet. It gets the furnace so hot—so to speak—that when it pushes the projectile out the pipe the projectile itself disintegrates because the air becomes the target.' He'd completely lost Shooter.

'So here was where a light bulb lit over my head. Look at the projectile the light bulb said to me, not the delivery method. Put something that makes its own little furnace out there on the tip of the bullet, see? When the hyperspeeds heat up the projectile, BANG!—the combustible material fires! Now you got your furnace here, and here—burning up the air on the way to the target. Excelsior!' The old man gestured wildly in the air, looking like a mad scientist in a comic book.

'SHARP-HEX! Stands for Super-Hardened Armor-penetrating Projectile—High EXplosive. Tungsten-carbide kinetic energy penetrator with an incendiary detonator on the tip.' He showed a large-scale cutaway of two cartridges. 'APEX! Anti- Personnel Projectile. EXtended Range. This one'll go through anything. This one not only explodes what it strikes, it destroys itself in the process. Amazing projectiles,' he said with undisguised pride.

'Only problem is in the delivery system.' He turned to his final schematic. 'It's like the old story about the electric car. They cost a cent and a half per ten thousand miles. The only trouble is the extension cord costs fifty thousand dollars. Same deal. The furnace and the pipe cost the U.S. government a quarter of a million dollars. Only one field model has been produced. Nothing else like it exists anywhere on earth. The U.S. M-3000 .50-caliber single-shot, hypervelocity, extended-range, flashless, Silent Anti- Vehicle/ANti-Terrorist Weapon System. SAVANT for short. The death ray!'

At a location known officially as Fire Support Base King, a sprawling hilltop jump-off point just south of 'the Zone,' SAUCOG's sniper, Bobby Price, was given his first secret mission in which the SAVANT weapon system would be utilized.

A spike team of mercenaries and other headhunters drawn from the Combined Forces Special Unit, both civilian and military personnel, was to be aborted. Post-Diem liaisons had caused both the team's operations and its goals to be a political liability.