acoustic baffling and only the smallest aperture for sighting and shooting; but he himself would have to be back from the aperture, so that the muzzle blast would be absorbed by the acoustic baffling, with some sound leakage from the aperture, but not enough to get a real fix on, as the sound would be generalized and diffuse. So Bob thought of a rooftop structure, a disguised heating plant; and from that he calculated there’d have to be nothing jerry-built about it; they were working on it even now, a structure of some sophistication and complexity, easy to disassemble perhaps, but nevertheless convincingly stable.
They could use any thousand-yard rifle, from a.308 on up to a.50 caliber sniping rifle of the sort now said to be in the inventory of elite units. Surely the Russian would have access to a.50. That possibility blew the distance factor out close to seventeen hundred yards, and it opened up the circle of possibility even further.
Bob moaned, rare enough for him; the job seemed huge; his head ached. He looked and couldn’t tell if it was day or night, checked the jungle Seiko he’d worn since he’d bought it for twelve dollars in an Army PX in 1971 and saw that it was almost midnight. He sighed, and went back to work.
Location, time, distance, weapon. These were the points of his compass. As he studied the documents and tested a hundred shooting sites against them, he came up dry the first time through. He tried again, harder, sinking deeper into it. He tried to imagine the man, a shooter like himself, sunk in his sandbags, in a little dark room a mile out, watching through the scope as the president of the United States did this thing and that thing, and then his head blew off in a big red gout of tissue, a blizzard of bone and blood and brain. It would take weeks to find the room if he were firing from a mile out. They might never find it.
He worked it through, over and over and over, in slow, grinding degrees, sinking so far beneath the surface he wondered if there was a surface. Was there a solution? Could it be done? Where could he find everything. He -
He watched it appear, watched it organize itself before his very eyes, saw it all fit together.
He saw in that instant how it would happen, how it had to happen. He knew where.
It was the third day, late, well past midnight. All right, he thought. You motherfuckers think it’s 1972, fourteen hundred yards outside the Da Nang wire as Sniper Team Alpha slides over the berm.
It won’t be.
Because this time I’ll be waiting.
CHAPTER NINE
“Nicky, Nicky,” said Tommy Montoya, “oh, my boy, this is not like you.”
Montoya was Cuban, deep into spook life, who occasionally came across tips that he passed Memphis’s way as he did his jobs for various agencies of the federal government and perhaps for other customers as well. He was one of those edge-masters, a bit too clever for his own good, who’d some day be found in the Big Muddy or Lake Pontchartrain with a diesel crankcase wired to his ankle and a school of guppies living in a thoracic wound cavity. But until then, Tommy Montoya would lick the oyster dry and now he smiled, holding an opened bivalve in one fat hand, and his thick tongue darted out to nudge the gelid thing loose from its tray of shell, so that he could suck it down in one intense, sensuous moment.
Nick tried to avert his eyes. Christ, how could anyone eat one of those things? Nick was of the opinion that if it didn’t bleed when you cut it, you didn’t put it in your mouth. But the Cuban still had his uses. He knew things nobody else knew – the business, for example.
“Nicky,” he said again, “you know you go through channels. DEA’s got priority on those big eavesdropping rigs, you apply through – ”
“Come on, Tommy,” said Nick, in a hurry to get through Tommy’s coy games, because Howdy Duty was due in that afternoon and he wanted to be ready when the old Base got there, because if you got off on the wrong foot with Utey, you never got back to the right one, as Nick knew only too well.
So he was nervous and not handling this brilliantly. Besides, the bar on the riverfront was dark and seething with exotic men, and Nick, in a Stay-Prest blue poplin suit and a white shirt, felt as if he had FED stenciled between his hairline and his eyebrows in letters three inches tall and knew the long grip of his Smith 1076 was printing through the coat.
He plunged ahead, all illusion of finesse gone. “Say I needed one fast. I gotta circumvent the red tape. I got a big bust coming up but I’m afraid, say, there’s a leak, either in DEA or my own shop. I want ultrasophisticated listening technology and, just to make it worth somebody’s while, let’s say I liberated enough cash from a bad dealer to be able to pay the going tariff. So what’s my best move?”
“You ain’t wearing a wire, my friend? You’re not trying to bug a bugger or con a con man? You always seemed to me to be a pretty straight kind of guy.”
It was said of Tommy that he’d gone ashore with 2506 Brigade at the Bay of Pigs, and spent two years in Castro’s prisons – and that he had scars like star bursts on his back. He had that Latin thing –
“No, I’m clean, man, that’s all. I just have to figure out how some guys got some powerful listening equipment into play out by the airport a couple of days ago. Where they got some stuff and got it quick, to set up a hit.”
“That guy had his insides cut to ribbons?”
“Yeah, that guy.”
“Ooooooo, Nicky, that’s a strange one. You know, you always hear things. Always. You know, the players, the teams, when something like this goes down. Except now. Nicky, my friend, would you believe, I ain’t heard nothing. It’s strictly from out of town. It’s got nothing to do with us, I’ll tell you.”
“Maybe not. Still, it’s kinda personal. Come on, Tommy. I’m just playing up the equipment angle. I have a source who swears the guy was some kind of Salvadoran spook, and I’m also hearing Agency on him, but the Agency won’t play ball with me and his records are so suspiciously clean it makes me wonder how come a guy could lead a whole life without ever getting a parking ticket.”
Tommy made a sour face, then with his tongue liberated another oyster. How such a thick man could do such an obscene thing with such quick delicacy really amazed Nick.
“I’m trying to figure how the hell the guys got in to whack the john. They
“Well,” Tommy finally said, “what I think you want would be one of the Electrotek 5400 models. It’s a portable directional parabolic microphone, very state of the art, known for its capacity to penetrate even hardened rooms. We’re talking over a million the unit. Far as I know, only seven were built – four for DEA, two for the Agency, and one for a foreign client, very hush-hush.”
“What country?” asked Nick.
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to say, my friend. But they had themselves a nasty little war going on.”
“El Salvador! That’s it. Son of a bitch.”
He saw pattern before his eyes. It’s what he lived for: the magic connection between parts of a case.
He was thinking in great leaps: Electrotek
Tommy looked at him.
“Nick, you look like you just had a religious experience. The Virgin, did she talk to you?”
