Point Of Impact

inflexibly wedded to the ways of the bureaucracy, however individually decent completely unable to get his mind to consider violating its mandates. You couldn’t go to Hap unless you had Annex B already.

Nick snorted suddenly. That used to be me. Now look at me: camping in the woods, locked in a private war against a shadowy spook agency that was half official, half not. Annex B: that’s where the answers lay. He was sure of that. Annex B would give him the answer.

Somewhere in the dark an animal skittered and howled. The fire had burned low, and across from it, Bob still sat hunkered and remote, lost in his own head.

He wished he had Myra to talk to. She’d have an idea or at least be willing to hear him out. He missed her. Goddamn, he missed her a lot.

“Memphis?”

He looked over. Bob was staring at him harshly.

“Huh? Yeah?”

“Memphis, you willing to do some hard work? I mean hard, dirty, boring crap work? The kind nobody likes to do anymore? Can you give me a week of it, twelve, eighteen hours a day?”

Nick gulped. That was his specialty, his only talent. To lean against something not with great brainpower but with sheer dogged will, until he or it broke apart.

“Yeah, sure.”

Then Nick saw something he’d never seen, not at all, not in all their hours together, not in the aftermath of the swamp shooting, not in the long talks on RamDyne and the world they lived in.

In the firelight, Bob the Nailer smiled.

“Then I got him,” he said, his war eyes totally focused. “He’s mine. The boy who pulled the trigger. I own his ass.”

The martyred president sat in marble wisdom on his throne, surrounded by Doric pillars and the rubbery thumps of two hundred pairs of athletic shoes on the floor. Shouts and screams bounced off the cavernous arch of the dome. An eighth-grade class was visiting the Lincoln Memorial.

Any semblance of order had long since broken down, and there had never been a semblance of respect. The youngsters tore about.

“Barbarians,” said Hugh Meachum from around the stem of his pipe, amid a haze of smoke. “They have no sense of decorum at all, do they?”

The old man was miffed. Shreck said nothing.

“There should be a way to surgically remove and store children’s tongues as soon as they learn to speak,” said Hugh. “Then, when they’ve graduated from college and distinguished themselves in the workplace, they could file a petition to have their tongues reattached.”

“I don’t think that’s feasible, Mr. Meachum,” said Shreck.

“Dammit, Colonel, don’t humor me. I hate it when I am being humored. Now. You called this meeting. I take it the news is not good. People won’t be pleased, Colonel. I’m telling you frankly, they won’t be pleased. Now what is it?”

A teacher sped by, harassed and exhausted, in pursuit of a knot of seething kids.

“An end we thought was tied off,” said Shreck. “It just untied itself.”

“Meaning?” said Hugh, taking another deep draw from his pipe. The aroma of gin hung over him.

“Meaning that Bob Lee Swagger is not dead. He’s very much alive. And he’s hunting us. That means he’s hunting all of us.”

Hugh shook his head, reached into his pocket and came out with a flask.

“Drink, Colonel?”

“No, sir.”

Hugh took a quick tot. It seemed to do him some good.

“All right. You must find him and kill him. Surely you understand that?”

“We’ve got a plan. It’s clever, it looks promising.”

“Yes, yes.”

“But I have two problems.”

“Only two?”

“One is easy. The other…”

He let it trail off.

“All right. Number One?”

“Number One is manpower. I don’t want to take any chances. I want a lot of men; he can kill twenty or fifty and I want fifty more there to take him down. I can’t recruit anew; there isn’t enough time.”

“God, Colonel, you can’t expect us to provide you with men. Good heavens, the risk is – ”

“No, no. I have men. They’re just not here. I need approval at a high level to fly a Hercules in from down south, and land without Customs interference. That can be arranged, can’t it? Surely your associates can prevail on something so minor. They’ll fly in, do the job, and fly out. They’ll be in-country for no more than a week, I swear. No one will see them.”

Hugh considered.

“I suppose it could be arranged. And who are you bringing in, Colonel Shreck?”

“I need good, hard men, men who’ve been in battle, Mr. Meachum. The only place I can get men of that quality fast enough and in sufficient quantity is from El Salvador.”

Hugh looked at him.

“That’s right,” said Shreck. “I’m bringing in the counterinsurgency company from Panther Battalion, the one we trained. It’s their mess we’re still cleaning up. Let them go up the mountain after Bob Lee Swagger.”

“God,” said Meachum. “All right. I suppose it can be arranged. You’ll get me the details at the right time. And what’s Number Two?”

Shreck paused, swallowed. This was the one he didn’t like. He knew he sailed into dangerous waters here.

“Go on, go on,” said Hugh, impatiently.

“My people never saw him,” said Shreck. “We have no idea who he is or what he did. We only know that he can shoot better than any man on this earth. And we know he isn’t mobile, because he had to work from Bob’s report and couldn’t handle it himself. And we had the sense that he was once famous, in a way, or at least public. So there has to be history there. And we examined his rifle. We know that it was used to win championships.”

Hugh’s eyes flashed over at Shreck.

“Among other things it was used for,” he said. “The security was important, indeed crucial. There are things you don’t need to know. I told you I would handle that part of it. That it didn’t involve you or your people. Didn’t I? Now what on earth can this be about, Colonel?”

“Our plan needs bait. This Swagger is a difficult antagonist, but he has weaknesses. He had a weakness for a Soviet sniper he thought shot and killed his best friend. My staff psychiatrist, Dobbler, put that together; and it worked, Mr. Meachum. It got us Swagger on a platter. But we couldn’t keep him there.”

“Obviously.”

“Now Dobbler thinks that Swagger will have somehow sensed the other shooter. And will find him as provocative as he found the Russian. I want to put him before Swagger. It needn’t be complicated, but it must be authentic. I want a sense of him, I want his cooperation.”

“As bait?”

“Yes. Well, not physically. But we’ll need name, history, background, accomplishments, that sort of – ”

“Well, for your information, he and I go way back. We went to school together, in fact. His life has been… remarkable. Colonel, his identity is the one secret I hold most precious.”

“If we don’t get Swagger, he’ll blow us away, Mr. Meachum.”

Hugh considered.

“I’ll have to ask him,” he said. “I couldn’t think of doing it without his agreement.”