damned good. He’d been in The World, tested himself against it, and come back in one piece, not destroyed. The work was fascinating and what he’d found pleased him; he was eager to get on with the next bit.
He went to the icebox, found some chili frozen in a square like a brick, and set it to warming on the stove; then he showered quickly, changed into clean jeans and shirt and boots. Then he took Mike for a good four-mile walk. By the time he was back, the stuff was hot and red, as he liked it. He ate it quickly and economically, with large glasses of iced tea, only momentarily missing the beer that had once been his chief sensual pleasure with hot food.
Then, though tired, he felt nourished. He went over to a typewriter that had been in the family since his grandfather was sheriff of Polk County back in the twenties, and began very slowly and carefully to write.
Bob always surprised people with his literacy; they expected an ex-Marine gunnery sergeant from Arkansas to be a complete fool when it came to letters, not knowing, say, capitals from small letters, or what a paragraph was about, or the difference between a period and a colon or the meaning of that great puzzler, the apostrophe. But he knew all that; more, he knew he had a small, quiet gift for expressing himself clearly and it always pleased him to do so. And he did so now.
He wrote a twenty-two-page document explaining his analysis of the four shooting sites and his prediction of T. Solaratov’s preferences. He knew, of course, where he’d shoot from himself; it scared him a little, because he saw how easy it would be, how in spite of all the advances since 1963, how despite the extent to which everyone had entered the era of maximum paranoia and security, it was still nearly impossible to stop a man with a rifle and the will and the skill to use it.
It was not an eloquent document, but it was direct, after the military fashion.
It is my feeling that the subject will most likely attempt his shooting of the President on 1 March of this year at Louis Armstrong Park in New Orleans. He will be shooting a 750-grain copper-sheathed.50 caliber round from approximately 1,200 yards out. The bullet will be traveling, when it strikes the President, at over 1,500 feet per second, and that should, with the bullet weight, defeat any body armor the President is wearing. The time of the shooting will almost certainly be near the end of the President’s speech, which is scheduled to begin at 11:30 and last 45 minutes. There are three reasons for this. First, a shadow falls across the podium of the shooting site between 10:30 A.M. and 2:15 P.M. on that day (give or take a few minutes) and the President will be deepest into it at the end of his speech, which will mean that the glare from the contrast between the light and the dark will be at its minimum during the time of his exposure. This would not be a factor under normal ranges, but the extreme distance of the shot will make even the most incidental considerations important. Second, midday is by weather bureau records the calmest time of day; the prevailing winds tend to be at their gustiest during the morning hours. The Russian will almost certainly know this, if he’s studied carefully. In fact, of the four shooting sites, only New Orleans puts the President in the zone of exposure during the calmest part of the day, with Cincinnati a distant second. And finally, the New Orleans site offers at least three escape routes. If he shoots from the steeple of St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter, which is located 1,200 yards from the site of the speech, and he uses some kind of external (by that I mean nonballistic) noise suppression system, he can very easily retreat down the (closed) stairway, step into the crowds on the square and melt away. It is unlikely that discovery of the site would be made for several minutes, perhaps hours, because the site is so far from the bullet strike. From the church he could very quickly walk to the Mississippi, which is less than half a mile away, and flee by boat down into the bayou system, and it would be almost impossible to locate him in there. He could also depart down Decatur, a major thoroughfare unlikely to be burdened by heavy traffic at that time of day. Or finally, in desperate straits, he could be picked up by helicopter in the open space of Jackson Square, just in front of the Church.
Then Bob made his recommendations.
1) Secret Service should be informed at earliest possible date of the Soviet attempt and brought in on our side. But they have to be made to understand that the point of the operation is not only to safeguard the President’s life but to apprehend and interrogate the Soviet-Iraqi shooting team and its support units.
2) Radio networks should be authorized and interjurisdictional limits set, so that SS knows exactly its responsibilities and this agency knows what it can do too.
3) Monitoring of St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans should begin immediately; almost surely the shooting team will begin to modify and adapt it prior to 1 March. At the same time surveillance should be extremely discreet, so as not to scare away “the bird.” As enemy investigation of the site will almost certainly be thorough, it is further recommended that no direct observational devices or planted listening devices be employed. They would be onto those in a second. A very good way might be to observe from above – F4Js at 20,000 feet orbiting in circle – with infrared cameras for heat signatures, in the way the Air Force did in Vietnam when it was interdicting the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
4) An aerial search of greater New Orleans bayou and swamp area should be commenced immediately in order to locate the site of Russian preparation. In order to adjust to climatic conditions in late winter/ early spring, the shooting team will almost certainly hold several live fire run-throughs under circumstances as exact as possible so that Solaratov knows exactly what to expect as to load performance and so forth.
5) The President should of course be warned, but if he is as courageous as he proved to be in the war against Iraq, he will insist upon taking part in the exercise to lure the shooting team onward, rather than using a double or canceling the event. His earliest participation is necessary.
6) On day of event, counter sniper teams should be stationed concentrically from the President’s speaking position as indicated on map. These positions are located roughly 600 yards out and are oriented away from, rather than toward, the President. Each unit should be equipped with one Remington Model-40A1 rifle with Unertl 10? scope and carry duty load of M852 Match Accuracy Lake City Arsenal 7.62mm NATO cartridges, in order to engage the Soviet-Iraqi team in the event of actual shooting. (I would like to lead one of these units, and I prefer to locate myself at the starred site on the map on the day of the event; if necessary, and given the proper command authority, I can take out the Soviet – Iraqi team before any harm is done. I’ll shoot the shooter through center mass and the spotter – if there is one – in the left body quadrant; a quick reactive team can almost certainly get to him before he comes out of shock and begins self-destruction procedures. He should be an interesting intelligence source.)
7) Debriefing of captured Soviet and/or personnel should begin immediately so that we may act on their intelligence immediately; in Vietnam, interrogation information was sometimes squandered when we reacted too slowly.
He stopped typing.
That was it.
What else was there?
Well, of course there was one other thing and it was the thing that no man could plan for. Luck. One only prayed for it, and maybe it would be there and maybe it wouldn’t.
He looked at his watch. Time to sleep; tomorrow he’d send the report to the people he now believed represented the Central Intelligence Agency.
He stripped and crawled into bed. Mike bounded up too, for the big soft stupid dog liked to touch him ever so slightly through the covers in sleep.
But at four he awakened and went back and read the document over. It seemed good. He couldn’t sleep however. He knew it was absurd but he felt he was being watched or something. He sat back and tried to work out his feelings about his new employers.
He didn’t trust them. But they were all he had.
And then he thought: I need an edge. I need a way to keep these boys from turning on me if things go wrong. He tried to think of what that might be, but he couldn’t come up with a thing.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
