Point Of Impact

pissing and shitting in that little hole, for a week. Then when everything’s perfect, he takes the shot you took today. Oh, but fourteen hundred yards is a long way.”

“He didn’t get the drop right,” said Bob.

“That’s right. So he takes you low, in the hip. But that gives him the range. And when Donny comes over, he hits it. Center chest. Then he’s history. Solaratov’s a big hero! He gets the fifty-thousand-piaster reward on your head, and two days later he’s in Moscow, having strawberry blintz and getting laid.”

Bob looked at the shooter’s face on the television screen. Yeah he’d heard the rumors. Guys came back said a white guy had nailed him.

The colonel continued.

“We have him next in Angola in the seventies, we’ve got him in Nicaragua instructing Sandinista shooters, we’ve got him in and out of the Middle East, as I told you, where the Israelis laid on a napalm strike just for him, and missed him by less than an hour. He’s very big in the Middle East. Does a lot of work for some nasty boys over there. We’ve got him in Afghanistan for a long long time. He ran a unit of Spetsnaz snipers there, they dropped their targets in the hundreds. Make you and Donny look like Sunday school teachers.”

Bob’s hand went to his hip, to quell a little flare of pain down there.

Nick called a guy he knew in DEA who had a brother who worked for Defense Mapping in Washington but who had at one time worked for a certain outfit quartered in Langley, Virginia. It was a complicated exchange, involving a lot of billing and cooing, and finally begging on Nick’s part, but finally the brother said that, yes, he knew some people in the outfit still and he could make a certain, highly unofficial call to an old buddy and ask Nick’s one question. He would only ask the one. He would ask no others and he would deny till the day he died that he ever knew or heard of a Nick Memphis. He would call Nick back…well, he’d call Nick back when he was good and ready to.

“Why would a Russian be back in this country hunting somebody?” Bob said.

“I said he was a Russian,” said the man. “I didn’t say he was hunting for the Russians. Solaratov was ousted, unceremoniously retired, when the Red Army downsized last year, after the Soviet Union broke up. Pissed him off. He felt discarded. He felt bitter. Know anything about an old war-horse who feels discarded, Sergeant Swagger?”

Bob just stared at the prick.

“He was spotted in July. Guess where?”

“I don’t like games, mister.”

“It would have been your first and only guess. Downtown Baghdad, in the presence of a General Khalil al-Wazir, who is head of Al Mukharabat, the Iraqi secret police. Now, Sergeant, into the present. Let me tell you about Rainbow. Do you know what Rainbow is?”

“I don’t know what Rainbow is,” said Bob, wanting the man to be done with it.

“Hardly anybody does. It’s a satellite, exceedingly sophisticated, stealth impregnated, that sits in very high orbit above the Middle East, seeing all that it can see and sending the pictures back to us. Very helpful the past few years. The Iraqis and the Syrians and the Libyans suspect it’s there, but they can’t verify it because they can’t pick it up on their cheap Eastern Bloc radar. But they’re careful. When they do their secret things, they do them at night, when Rainbow isn’t nearly so effective. But strange things do happen. Who would play lotteries if they didn’t? Now look at this.”

He snapped the picture control and brought up a series of photos. They appeared to show, one after another, a hazy series of markings on the earth as seen from high up.

“That’s Rainbow working over central Iraq about two hundred miles above Baghdad, near a military installation at Ad Dujayi late one night a few weeks ago, trying to get a line on our old friends, the Medina Division of the Republican Guard. And what do you see? You see almost nothing. And then…a miracle.”

He clicked again.

The photo was dramatically clearer. What Bob saw was towers, very like the one he had perched in that morning, overlooking networks of roads or amphitheaters at varying distances, the geometry of each setting subtly different from its brothers.

“Lightning. Nature’s flashbulb, something nobody could predict; it lit the ground at the instant that Rainbow was snapping away. And yet the clouds weren’t sufficient to blot out our view of this rather elaborate arrangement.

“But what’s really interesting about this setup is they take it down every day. It must take hundreds of men. And just to keep our satellites from getting the snapshot we’ve just seen. Look, here’s what the daylight reveals.”

He clicked again; what Bob saw was simply a random pattern of roads across a desolate plain.

“Now can you solve the puzzle, Swagger. These photos. Solaratov in Iraq. Do you see it yet, Swagger?”

“Sure,” said Bob. “They’re prepping a shot. Those are buildings and streets. He’ll have handled the range and angle solutions already. It’ll be familiar to him.”

“We should have come to you in the beginning. It took a young man in the Agency, a photo analyst, weeks to come up with the same answer, and those are lost weeks. But he finally had the bright idea of coding the grids of buildings to streets by angle with the help of a computer and having the computer run a check on those same streets and angles. Swagger, it’s the Inner Harbor from the U.S.F. &G. Building in Baltimore, it’s the back porch of the White House from a roof at the Justice Department – the Justice Department! – and it’s Downing and Huguenot streets in North Cincinnati, and finally it’s North Rampart and St. Ann in New Orleans.”

“All right,” said Bob. “So it is.”

“Sergeant, those places have one thing in common. They are all sites of speeches to be given over the next several weeks by the president of the United States.”

Dobbler watched the two of them. They were both children of the superego. They had nothing in them that would ever tell them to stop, hold back, wait, consider. They were both forceful men, without ideological underpinnings, who approached the world simply as a set of problems to be solved.

He remembered when the colonel had found him working in a mill clinic in Rafferty, Massachusetts, prescribing aspirin and bandages to the children of mill workers.

The colonel had simply walked in, so vivid a presence that no nurse would hold him back, laid down the Boston Globe front page that carried the news of Dobbler’s sentence the year before across three columns, and said, “If you can keep your dick in your pants, I can get you some really interesting work. Lots of money. Fun, travel, adventure. Some of it’s even legal.”

“W-what do I have to do?”

“Supervise recruitment. Analyze prospects from a psychological-psychiatric perspective. Tell me which of ’em will jump when I say boo.”

“Nobody can do that.”

“No, but you ought to come closest. Or would you rather stay here and hand out bandages for the rest of your life?”

“It’s part of my arrangement with the cour – ”

“Not anymore.”

The colonel laid a parole board exemption before him.

“Are you with the government?” asked Dr. Dobbler.

“You might say that,” said the colonel.

Bob let the silence hang in the air until it seemed to crack.

“They’re still trying to win that war,” said the man. “They think they can win it with one shot. And Solaratov’s the hired gun.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Swagger, you’ve done something damn few men have done. You’ve stalked and hunted men, hundreds of them. You are one of the world’s two or three best. Maybe an Israeli or two, maybe an SAS man somewhere, this