Howdy Duty was Base, howling in his ear as he blew out the spine of the only woman he’d ever love.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bob made a fast check from outside; if they’d been in, they’d been damned careful and very professional; he could find no trace of entry, no tracks or disturbances in the dust, no sign even of scuffing where they might have wiped out tracks. Most important, the dog Mike was slightly mangier for wear, but not dead, and Bob knew that if anyone had tried to enter the trailer compound, Mike would kill or die himself. Sam Vincent had kept the beast fed while Bob was gone, and Mike, part sloppy beagle and part God-knew-what from deep in the Ouachitas, was on him when he unlocked the cyclone gate, tongue wet and gloppy, eyes warm yet mournful. Mike was another solitary creature, a great pal who could seem to make no other friends and simply gave himself wholly to Bob’s service.
Bob rubbed him and made him sing for joy, then got him some food as he opened his various padlocks – the trailer first, immaculate and pristine as he had left it, the gun vault, all guns gleaming in their patina of oil (he quickly replaced the Remington 700 while doing this), and finally the shop out back, where the problematic Winchester 70, damn its stubborn soul, still sat disassembled.
He looked at it, felt a yearning to lose himself once more in its intricacies and try to get at its secrets. Why was it now betraying him? Had it grown bored with loyalty and not enough attention? Had it a weak character, was it not a piece to be trusted when things turned dark and hairy? Or was it just tired, being fifty years or so old, an ancient piece of steel that had lost some inner fortitude?
But as he stared at it, he knew he could not give himself to it, no matter the ache involved. He had something to do now, something he wanted so bad it hurt him in places where he didn’t think it would hurt ever again or that he even had.
He remembered himself lying with Donny’s heavy stillness atop him, Donny’s warm blood flooding over him, mingling with his own as the flies came and feasted on the stuff and from just inside the embankment the major was yelling, “Don’t you move, Bob, goddammit, we got a fire mission coming in, we’ll smoke his fucking ass.” He remembered remembering while he lay there the time in the An Loc Donny had stood out in the motherfucking green open with his M-14 calmly shooting at gooks and drawing lots and lots of fire as poor Bob, busted from cover downslope like a covey of quail, scrambled up to the safety of the crest amid a sleet of destruction, his 700 flapping stupidly in the breeze, the jungle floor erupting from the misses around him until he finally made it to the top and the two of them fell behind the crest, laughing like maniacs, just spared death, high and nuts on danger, so in love with the great fun of their profession and the sense of the edge that made all pleasures so infinitely tasty.
“Oh, Christ, Bob, you shoulda seen the look on your damn face coming up that hill, damn, I near to bust a gut.”
“You dumb sonovabitch kid, why didn’t you get your ass down, no sense both our asses getting wasted.”
“Fuck, Bob, it’d been worth it to die to see you lookin’ so scared,” and he dissolved in laughter.
He remembered his old dream: he and Donny and Donny’s beautiful young wife Julie, a few dogs, some good old Arkansas whiskey for cold nights, all of them somehow living together in the Ouachitas, away from civilization, with their rifles, hunting every day, drinking every night. It was a stupid dream, he now realized, stupid as they come, because there was no way the world would permit such a thing; but he’d been young and dumb when he’d thought it up.
And he remembered when the major came in and saw him, his leg slung above him in plaster, the whole left side of his body immobilized.
“Didn’t know they had someone who was that good,” the major had said. “It was a hell of a shot.”
Oh, yes it was. It was a hell of a shot.
So now he thought he’d tremble or cry. The dog’s warm tongue came slopping across his open hand, jarring him back from there to here. He shook his head a bit to stir the memories and make them flee, and was aware how rocky he suddenly felt.
Then he got hold of himself, felt his remade self fly back inside his body; he was all right. He was Bob again, who never talked but to three or four men in Blue Eye, Sam and Doc LeMieux, Sheriff Tell, the late Bo Stark when he was sober, and who shot at least a hundred rounds a day, rain or shine, and had given himself up entirely to the rifles so that he could live out his life and feel nothing at all.
He was all right, he had work to do, it was fine, now he was ready.
Bob worked it out, on decaf coffee and TV dinners, his own way. That is, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two hours at it, nailed at the kitchen table under a dim wash of bulb or a gray wash of thin January sunlight, with only the morning walk with Mike and the few hours’ sleep to break up the journey. He did it slowly, carefully, never speeding up, never slowing down, looking through the maps and plans, drawing diagrams, taking measurements off his calculator, studying the architectural renderings of the buildings, making notes to himself.
He was a jungle shooter of course, an outdoorsman. But it seemed to him nevertheless that a city was a different kind of jungle, so that the same lessons would apply. A shooter would need the same requirements, the same perfect harmony of elements before taking a shot. And by this knowledge, he steered himself.
A shooter would need, first off, a clean theater of fire. By that Bob meant more than just a lane of fire. He’d need a line to the target, of course, but equally important he’d not want a formation of buildings either to the east or the west, to funnel the prevailing winds and generate unpredictable shears of energy that could take the fragile trajectory of the shot and make a pretzel of it. He’d want the sun behind him when he shot to kill the possibility that his scope would pick up a beam of light from the sun in front of it and toss it somewhere someone was looking – and the Secret Service would certainly be looking.
And then there was range. The Secret Service Worry Zone, tragically nonexistent in 1963, would almost certainly be a half mile out by this time – that’s 880 yards where no windows could be open, where there’d be cops on every rooftop, circling helicopters, security checkpoints. The Russian would be at least a thousand yards out, maybe more like twelve hundred. He’d need a place to shoot from three-quarters of a mile away. And it would have to be a secure place, too, with an easy, unobservable entrance and exit, with access to an escape route. And it would have to be high for visibility to the target, but not too high. Shooting downward on an angle always played tricks on bullet trajectory too, particularly at extended ranges, but there was a cutoff point beyond which the trajectory became too irrational and was uncontrollable. Bob figured Solaratov would be at least three stories high, but could not be any more than five.
And the temperature was important too. A heavily humid climate could affect bullet trajectory too, but a frigid one would be even chancier, the near-to-zero weather making the gun’s action stiff and awkward and subtly transforming the vibratory patterns of the wood of the stock and the metal of the barrel to say nothing of the fiber of the man behind the trigger. Bob had heard a hundred stories of good men taking that most important shot at a twelve-point buck on a frozen winter day and watching in horror as the bullet puffed harmlessly against the bluff ten yards away, and the beast took flight, leaving the hunter to face a bitter winter. He didn’t think the Russian would shoot in any kind of cold weather, or in a particularly damp climate – too many ifs, too many maybes. If you’re going to do it right, you do it where the earth itself is your ally, where the climate and the land and the sun and the sky are your friends.
He looked for a shot to take place where it was between fifty and seventy degrees out, on an overcast day, but a coastal city, where the wind was tempered by offshore fronts, and didn’t howl in off a frozen midwestern plain or a frozen lake.
Then there was the question of noise. No matter what weapon Solaratov chose this time, he could not use a silencer that would only work with a subsonic round; he’d have to be at velocities of over two thousand feet per second with a weight of at least 150 grains and more likely 200 to have a chance of making a twelve-hundred-yard head or torso kill. They’d have to build him some sort of nearly soundproof room or chamber, a shooting bunker with
