Point Of Impact

“I guarantee it. The report says he’s expecting nothing except some old papers.”

“Good,” said Lon Scott. “I’m curious to meet him.”

“Don’t be curious, sir. Just help us kill him. When he comes in the door, you take your hand off the photocell; in two minutes we’ll have the first four squads, that’s twenty-four heavily armed men there. In ten minutes there’ll be more than 150 troopers ringing the hill. Don’t mess with him. Let him run clear.”

“Oh, I understand,” said Lon.

Headquarters had never been so deserted. Dobbler felt as if he were alone in the building. Nearly everyone else was so caught up in the drama they were either down there in North Carolina with Colonel Shreck and Panther Battalion or had gone home. Dobbler also had the odd sense that people were peeling off, slipping away to new lives. Rats deserting a ship, that sort of thing.

Dobbler was finished typing. He was afraid that in the excitement of finally getting Bob, his own contributions to the project would be overlooked. So he’d sat down and typed a long nine-page memo detailing, as modestly as possible, his own role in the Bob Lee Swagger episode. After all, it had been considerable – he had designed the mechanism by which Bob had been initially trapped, he had designed the mechanism by which Bob’s “second life” had been terminated, and he had found the woman to whom Bob turned.

He was doing so well here! It was wonderful! And now it was only a matter of waiting. He checked his watch, saw that it was mid-morning and knew even as he stood there that Bob had to be on his way into the trap.

He decided the report was too important to leave to RamDyne’s indifferent internal mail system. He walked through the deserted corridors and crossed into Shreck’s building. He tried his office door; it was locked. Damn!

“Dr. Dobbler?”

“What! Oh, you surprised me!”

It was one of the security guards.

“Uh, I have to leave this report in Colonel Shreck’s office. Do you have a master key?”

“Dr. Dobbler, he don’t like nobody in his office.”

“The colonel himself just called. He needs the report.”

Dobbler was amazed at his own assertiveness. He knew his confidence was growing but he hadn’t been this assertive since before the arrest. The man’s weak eyes blurred in confusion; he could not meet Dobbler’s authoritative glare. In seconds, the security man had yielded, opened the room, and allowed him in.

“I’ll wait out here till you leave,” the guard said.

“No, I’ll close up. I have to get some papers too.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man, in some confusion.

Dobbler went in. In a strange way, he didn’t dare turn on the light. He also felt strangely excited. He was violating Shreck’s space, albeit harmlessly, but the experience felt titillating.

But the room was as unimpressive as always. It seemed to have no personality whatsoever; the colonel kept his eccentricities, if he had any at all, under the tightest of discipline. There were no pictures on the walls, the desk was bare, there were no loose papers about. The place had the scrubbed, nearly antiseptic sense of the professional military to it; in the dim light, Dobbler could see the whorls the buffer left in the wax on the linoleum floor; those sweeping circles, catching and reflecting the light, were the only evidence of spontaneity in the place.

Dobbler set the report down on Shreck’s barren desk. The colonel could not miss it. It was time to leave, but he didn’t want the experience to end. He hadn’t felt this powerful in years. His eyes hooked on the old wall safe behind the colonel’s desk; he had a massive stab of curiosity and mischievousness. The safe was exactly the same as the one in his office, which he rarely bothered to lock. He wondered about the combination – could it be the same, too?

Looking around for just a second to make certain of his isolation, he walked to the safe, and spun the dial. He pulled. Nothing happened.

He laughed.

Of course not. How stupid.

He turned. And turned back, and gave the handle another tug.

It popped open.

The observation post was concealed on a hilltop a mile away from the entrance to Skytop. Young Eddie Nicoletta had drawn the duty because he’d been with Payne on the observation mission in Blue Eye and had eyeballed him through a scope. He was sitting in a hole about four feet deep and looking out a small viewer’s slot in some ersatz bushes just inside a ridge line. Before him was a Celestron 8, an eight-inch surveillance telescope, state of the art, forty-three pounds of Schmidt-Cassegrain optics that could be dialed up to 480?, which is where he had it now.

It was tiring peering through the aperture of the lens, which was seated at right angles to the tube itself, a huge fat wad of curved steel atop a squat tripod. Nickles’s head hurt and his neck ached.

The Celestron 8 was trained on the road running into the place called Skytop, and a bit of the ribbon of macadam of the two-lane highway that ran by it. Now and then a truck or a car would materialize out of the wobbling, foreshortened perspective, seem to assemble itself out of pure bolts of light, and purr through his range of focus. Jesus, a mile away and you could see faces! It was said you could read a newspaper at a hundred yards with one of these things and Nickles believed it.

But every once in a while, he just had to look up to keep from losing his mind. What he saw then was the half-mile dirt road up to the house itself, though he couldn’t see much of the rambling, one-story building beneath the trees. It was enough to tell that it was good-sized, the house of a man who was well off or better. Behind it was a swimming pool, some cement walkways to what appeared to be a shooting range (why cement? Nickles wondered) and beyond that, dominating the property, what they called Bone Hill.

Bone Hill was heavily forested about halfway up its three hundred feet or so of bulk, but then it gave way, as it steepened, to coarse grass and scrawny trees. Its top was bare except for the grass and a few stones strewn about.

That’s where he’ll go, Eddie Nickles told himself. When the first chopper arrives and the greasers with their combat gear come crashing out, that’s where he’ll go. He’ll go up. He’ll run up, and he’ll run and run and pretty soon there’ll be no place to go.

Nickles got to see it all happen. That pleased him.

“Bravo Four! Bravo Four, you there, goddammit?”

It was Shreck.

“Ah, sorry, Colonel. Yeah, I’m here, nothing much going on.”

“Keep your goddamn eyes open, Nicoletta. He ought to be here any minute now.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nickles.

He put his eye back to the eyepiece, and watched as a Coca-Cola truck lumbered down the road out of the bright nothingness. Then the road was quiet. Minutes passed.

He saw the roof first, emerging over a crest, just a flash. Then it was clear, heading down the road, just as they said, the red Chevy they’d been driving last night, with a single looming, steady silhouette cut off behind the glare of the windshield.

His tension growing, Nickles watched as the face assembled itself from flecks of light as the car moved into the focus zone, a pair of hard-set eyes, a taut jawline, a sense of steadiness.

At a mile away, Bob the Nailer still scared him.

“He’s here,” Nickles shrieked into the hands-free mike, forgetting all radio procedure. “Bob the Nailer’s here.”

Bob stopped at the turnoff to Skytop and got out of his car. He took a look around. What he saw was miles and miles of lush North Carolina landscape, rolling hills, a few rills of hard rock, a universe of green. It had been a hot, dry fall and although it was October, the leaves hadn’t begun to turn yet.

He took a deep breath as he looked around and his trained eyes probed and saw nothing. The sky was an intense blue, untainted with cloud. The sun was high. It seemed as if the day had stalled somehow, calm and