to New Orleans and get there by ten.”
The conversation trailed off.
Finally, Bob said, “Shit. Meet me back here at noon day after tomorrow. And be careful, dammit. Be careful. You won’t have any backup either.”
“I’m just going to New Orleans,” said Memphis, radiant with delight, sounding like a man in love.
“Christ,” said Eddie Nickles. “Do we follow him?”
Payne studied on it. Then he said, “We ain’t got enough guys. We can always nail this fucking weenie kid. No. Swagger’s the one. We’ll stick with Swagger and nail him tomorrow.”
Dobbler was alone in his office. It was late, past eleven, and he thought maybe he’d try to scrunch up on the sofa instead of going home. Then, tomorrow…
Well, tomorrow would take care of tomorrow. Bob would go up the mountain. Panther Battalion would go up the mountain.
But Dobbler knew he was too excited to sleep. His mind was abuzz with possibility. He looked at his watch again. Only seven minutes had passed since. Time was crawling.
He decided to work. He sat at his desk, looked at the Bob Swagger folders before him, one for RELATIONSHIPS and another for SOUTHERN HERITAGE and another for PARENTS and still another on SHOOTING. Yet he could not bring himself to open them. What was there to be learned at this late date?
Then he looked at his in-basket. Funny, he hadn’t noticed it before, a brown interoffice envelope. What could it possibly mean? He hated interoffice mail; it always equaled trouble. He had an impulse to throw the thing in the wastebasket.
Sighing, he opened it anyway. It was a good thing he did.
In the command tent by the deserted airfield seven miles from Lon Scott’s place, Shreck was almost asleep when the call came. It took him a while to quite understand what Dobbler was raving about. But then it came through.
“Yes. They tried for weeks and weeks to get into the FTD computer network and finally they did! Anyway, they ran a program to dredge out all the FTD shipments – ”
“What are you talking about, Dobbler?”
“Flowers. Flowers! Bob has sent flowers to someone once a year for ten years. Anyway, a guy in Computer Services, they got into the FTD system at last. We thought it was a dead end, but he kept trying, he got into the system, he managed to break the code for the Little Rock florists, he called out all their orders, he broke it down by dates, and every December eleventh for the past ten years, a shipment has gone to a woman in Ajo, Arizona. Roses.”
“I – ”
“Colonel Shreck, there
“Ajo, Arizona?” Shreck repeated, thinking. Finally he said, “Good work, Dobbler.”
Then he called an aide. “Go get Payne,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Payne left before dawn, having booked a 10:30 A.M. flight from Richmond to Tucson by two. The whole thing struck him as pretty fucked up. Bob would probably be finished well before that time. What was the point? The woman was irrelevant by then. But he would not question Colonel Shreck.
As he drove off, the men of Panther Battalion were up and making ready for the day. Payne knew this part of the ritual, the preparation for battle. He’d done it himself perhaps a thousand times in the last twenty years. He could feel the tension in the soldiers and also their coarse energy and eagerness to get started. In the darkness, men cursed and jostled tightly, or laughed. Cigarettes glowed, a few men coughed, a few shivered.
But it secretly pleased him to be leaving. As no man ever had except the gook who got inside the wire with his rusted rifle and bayonet, Bob had scared him. He’d shot the fucker in the chest, seen the blood fly, watched him go down. And then he’d gotten up. He’d tracked them. He’d dusted two boys in the swamp. He was a major massacre waiting to happen. It frightened Payne, knowing that he was not capable of what Bob had done.
As the camp disappeared behind him, Payne discovered a sense of release. Let these tough kids go against Bob Lee Swagger. They’d get him, because they had no respect and did not know who he was or care what he had done. To them he was just another gringo. That was what it would take to finally get Bob Lee Swagger: stupidity and overwhelming firepower superiority.
But he knew Swagger would get more than a couple of them.
Bob awakened at around nine-thirty and showered slowly, taking his own sweet time. The men in the surveillance van kept the directional boom aimed on his room, and heard only the sounds of the shower, the easy noises of a man preparing to encounter a relatively benevolent world for the first time. There was no sense of urgency or despair, no track of fear.
He left the room at ten-fifteen, checked out of the motel, threw his bag into the trunk of the rental car, then moseyed into the Howard Johnson’s and had a nice breakfast. Two eggs, scrambled, three pieces of bacon, toast and jelly. He bought the Danville
“Ma’am, could I have another cup of coffee?”
“Why, sure. Nice day.”
“Sure is.”
“Now let me think, did you take cream and sugar with that?”
“No, ma’am. Black is how I like it.”
It took him close to forty minutes to eat. Then he stepped out in the bright sun, a tall, powerful man in jeans and a denim workshirt with a corduroy sport jacket with pearl buttons, put on his sunglasses, and climbed in to be off.
“Bravo Six, this is Bravo Four, the package is on the way,” said the observation team leader into his radio. “The package is on the way.”
Sitting in the operations shack next to the Millersville Airport where four black-painted Huey helicopters waited, Shreck received the message grimly.
“General de Rujijo! Have your sergeants get the first four squads onloaded the slicks,” he said.
The Latino officer grinned, his white teeth glowing.
He turned, and barked in Spanish. Men began to deploy to their ships in seconds, heavily armed, faces blackened with paint, rifles at the high port, festooned in gaudy belts of ammunition for the heavy automatic weapons, black berets at a rakish tilt. With a shrieking whine, the choppers coughed to life and the rhythmic beating of their engines and the roar of the dust their rotors sucked from the earth became a part of the drama.
“It is a good day for a battle, I think,” said de Rujijo. “My men are very anxious. They will make me proud, I know. And now we have this thing finished.”
Shreck nodded, but said nothing. He looked at his watch.
It would take Bob about a half an hour to drive the last thirty miles to Skytop.
He picked up the phone and dialed Lon Scott.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Scott, he’s on his way. Half an hour.”
“All right.”
“How do you feel?”
“I feel fine. Are we set?”
