At last Shreck faced Bob the Nailer, big as life, who stood but six feet away and he looked him in the eyes. He looked as calm as a pond on a summer day.
“Hello, Colonel,” came a familiar voice.
Shreck looked to the other man, the young FBI agent. Only it wasn’t the young FBI agent, even though he wore a black FBI raid jacket and baseball cap and greenish paint on his face. It was Dr. Dobbler.
Shreck looked back to Bob, realized in a flash the game had changed. He pressed the button on a unit on his belt, sending a shriek of radio noise that would signal Scott to fire.
There came the sound, from far away, of a rifle shot.
The shrillness of the beep somewhat surprised Lon and he saw the cross hairs dance a tiny jig and come off Bob.
He exhaled half a lungful of air and gently as a lover squeezed the reticle back onto Bob, center chest, and began to draw the slack from the trigger and-
Nick fired and in the split second the rifle jumped and the scope-picture blurred, he called it a hit. He looked back quickly in recovery. The bullet had struck Lon Scott in the head. It was the brain shot. Blood seemed to have been flung everywhere by the impact. Lon sagged back and slid into his spider hole. Only the rifle was left to show.
Nick, in his own spider hole in the vastness of Hard Bargain Valley, threw the bolt and tried to bring Bob’s Remington to bear on the party of five in the open. A sudden wave of weakness thundered over him.
He started to tremble.
The woman screamed, but Payne pulled her down, twisted her to brandish the shotgun, and didn’t panic.
Bob said to the colonel, “My boy just tagged your boy. You’re all alone.”
The colonel was calm. Maybe a half-smile played across his mouth. At some not so secret level he was a happy man.
“It doesn’t mean a thing, Swagger,” he said, thinking quickly. “Now let me tell you what’s going to happen. Nothing’s changed. Only thing we want now is out. We’re going on a nice slow walk out of here with the woman and with the cassette and the documents. You follow, she’s wasted. So don’t you try a goddamn thing. You put the gun down. You got that?”
“I’ll kill this fucking woman,” said Payne. “You know I will. I got the gun taped to her head. I swear, I’ll blow her away. Now you back off.”
Bob dropped the knapsack. Only his hand wasn’t empty. It held a Remington 1100 semiautomatic shotgun, cut down to pistol grip and sawed-off barrel.
Nick’s second mandate was Shreck. He disengaged the rifle from Lon’s spider hole and brought it to bear on the five figures five hundred yards to his left.
He could only see the tops of heads. The action had come to play in one of the subtle folds in the earth that ran across the valley floor and his targets were beneath his line of vision.
Which one was Shreck?
He couldn’t tell.
Oh, Christ, Bob, he thought.
He looked around desperately, seeking a tree he could climb to get some elevation into the fold, but there was nothing. He put the rifle down, drew his Beretta, feeling helpless rage.
“Put the gun down,” said Payne. “I’ll blow her fuckin’ brains out.”
“He will, you know,” said the colonel.
Bob leveled the short, mean semiautomatic shotgun at Payne. Payne could see the yawing bore peeping out from the forestock.
“He isn’t going to shoot,” said the colonel forcefully. “Payne, he’s bluffing, he doesn’t have a shot.”
“I’m not going to shoot,” said Bob. “Here’s the damn deal. I put the gun down, you cut the girl free. Everybody walks. Okay?”
Dobbler backed away nervously.
“Done,” said the colonel. “The smart move.”
“Okay,” said Bob. “I’m going to count to three, then I’m putting the gun down. Nobody get excited here.”
“Do it slow, Swagger,” said Payne.
“One,” said Bob, and then “Two,” and then he fired.
Payne was astounded that it happened like this, the crazy fucking fuck, the moron, he actually fired, and in the explosion he fired too, sending the woman to hell, fuck them all, fuck all who fucked with Jack Payne, soldier and killer of men.
And he felt the gun buck and knew the woman’s head was gone, except that it wasn’t, for she fell backwards somehow, screaming in terror but intact and he fired again, felt the impulse to squeeze run from his brain down through his arm to his finger, felt it squeeze, waited for the gun to go off.
Only then did he realize he was squeezing a phantom finger on a phantom hand.
Swagger had blown a charge of double-ought clean through his elbow from a range of two feet, literally severing it. The hand still grasped the shotgun bound in tape to her skull; it simply was no longer attached to him.
In horror, Payne held his stump high, and watched jets of bright blood pulse out into the clear fall air. In that second the incredible agony of it hit him.
“You fucker,” he screamed. “
Bob put the muzzle of the Remington against Payne’s stout little chest, and sent a deer slug through the Kevlar vest that tunneled to his spine. Payne disappeared as he collapsed.
In the same attenuated microsecond, Shreck broke through the shards of disbelief that clotted his actions and yanked the Marlin up to put a shot into Bob, but he was not quite fast enough. Bob, pivoting through a short arc to his new target, beat him by a clean tenth-second and double-tapped a pair of deer slugs through Shreck’s vest so swiftly the blasts seemed like a single sound. Their roar hit the mountains and rolled back across the valley and still vibrated in the air as the colonel’s legs went and he toppled backwards.
Shreck felt no pain. He lay on his back in the yellow grass. He thought of landing zones, frontals, good men dead in far places, K-rations and C-4, and that bitch duty whom he’d never once betrayed, always doing the hard thing.
Bob stood over him. Shreck blinked and felt his fingers turn to feathers. He had no legs, he had no body. He was very thirsty and confused. Then he realized: it had finally happened.
“I deal in lead, friend,” Bob said, and fired another deer slug into him. It blew out his heart.
In an instant, Bob ran to Julie.
“Okay, okay, honey, it’s all right,” he said to her, taking her in his hands. “Don’t move, don’t jerk, just be calm, we’re almost home free, Dobbler,
He tried to get her to lie still, terrified that a sudden motion might somehow trip the trigger. She was blinded by the tape and making mewling noises, but now he got his arms around her, squeezing her tight, just to hold her steady against his own strength.
“Now, just relax, baby girl, please, just relax.”
He reached into his boot and drew out his razor-sharp Randall Survivor. Looking at the knotted strands of black tape he was at first unsure where to cut, afraid that if he cut too savagely, the vibration on some unseen strand of the stuff might fire the gun. Very carefully, he began to slice through the strands around her face until he’d freed it
