out. From the shooting, and then the explosion of the helicopter, he read the course of battle. He understood now that Bob had been a step ahead of Dobbler and had somehow found Lon Scott on his own. He’d let them think they were luring him in when he was luring them in. He tricked them into the killing ground where the odds were to his advantage: high ground, protected shooting, and a world of skittish, leaderless targets before him.
The shooting was dying down now.
On the other side of the summit, Nick watched them move out of the trees. They were a good three hundred yards out. Without a scope on the Mini-14, that was quite a shot for a.223. But if he had to defend an entire horizon against an infantry company with a single semiautomatic rifle, he knew that he’d do better to hit them early than to let them get too close where they could carry the crest in a single rush. He could hear Bob still firing on the other side. Now it was his turn.
He was also in the classic prone, aiming through a tuft of ragged bushes that he had artlessly pulled and thrown together into something like a shooting blind. He was breathing hard but he felt surprisingly calm. He could still hear Bob laying down fire but he had no idea what was going on over there.
Carefully, he drew the rifle to him, found what he took to be a spot-weld, let his bones hold the weight of the piece, and squinted through the peep sight until it no longer existed. He saw only the body of the leader, behind the wedge of the front sight. He hoped he’d hit something this time.
Front sight, front sight, he told himself, ordering his pupil to contract until it was as clear as a dollar bill and behind it, the target was a blur. Why this worked he didn’t know, but it was the essence of shooting.
He willed the trigger to break and somehow it did.
The gun bucked; the sight picture was gone, an empty shell popped away. And when he returned again to see what could be seen, what could be seen was nothing.
“Goddammit, gimme that gun, you missed again, you jerk,” Bob yelled in his ear, and yanked the Mini-14 from Nick’s grasp. He threw it to his shoulder and cracked off the rest of the magazine, all twenty-nine shots. The shells popcorned from the breech, a bright cascade of sunlit brass. Below them, on the far side of the trees, they could see the survivors of Panther Battalion running raggedly for the far crest line.
“They’re way out of range for that gun,” said Nick.
“Oh, yeah? Well, not for this one.”
He retrieved his Remington, threw the bolt, and rammed it home.
Bob was breathing heavily. His face looked crazy with fury, his eyes shrunk to hard, glaring kernels. He was blinking a bit strangely. His face was smeared with greasy smudges from all the gunsmoke he’d breathed, and his hands and shirt were almost black. He kept blinking crazily.
“Jesus,” said Nick again. “Let ’em go. They’re running. They’re broken. What’s it prove?”
“He ain’t broken,” said Bob, gesturing savagely to a hill a mile away. “There’s a goddamn spotter over there, Donny. Seen the flash of his lens. He’s been glassing us all along. You know your ballistic tables?”
“No.”
“Well, a goddamn.308 drops about eighteen feet at a thousand yards. Wind’s about five miles an hour. I’m gonna hold eighteen feet high and a mite to the left for the wind drift.”
He dropped to prone, found his spot-weld and his shooting position. Then he cranked off five shots in four seconds, flicking the bolt and ejecting a shell each time.
“That ought to fix him. Now come on, Donny.”
Nick gaped at him.
“Huh? Are you all right?”
“Come on, Donny. I want to see what we bagged. I have to find out what they did with my woman.”
“Bob, my name is – ”
“Come on, boy. We’ve done enough for today. Time to get out of the zone.”
And with that the sniper headed off the mountain, his rifle in his blistered hands, to the copse a mile away where they’d stashed Bob’s truck two days earlier.
Nick went running after.
Eddie Nickles thought he’d bleed to death. His Celestron 8 was shattered, a bullet having drilled it through its wide lens and rattled through its insides. It was nothing but a tube full of broken shards.
He himself had been hit twice, once high in the head – a glancing shot, without penetration, he thought – and in the leg, a ricochet as he cowered shitting and weeping in the split second after he saw the tall man through the scope suddenly spin to zero on him.
He knew he’d never get out. He’d be gone before help arrived. There simply wasn’t much help left. He’d watched Bob shoot, the motherfucker, and shoot and shoot. He knew what that meant.
“Hey, asshole.”
He looked up to see the man himself. He was attended by a Beach Boy with a crew cut.
“You killed me,” he blurted.
“I doubt that, sonny. From the looks, you’ll recover, that is if you’ve half a heart.”
“Don’t shoot me. I just sat here and watched.”
“Was Payne here?”
“No. No, they sent Payne somewhere. They sent him to get your girl.”
“God
“They’ll do her, Swagger. These guys, they’ll do anybody. This guy Shreck, runs the outfit, he can do stuff like that.”
Bob seemed to think this over.
“Was Shreck here?”
“Yes.”
“If he isn’t dead, and I don’t think he is, you tell him to leave the woman alone. If he wants me, I’ll tell him where he can find me. But he’s to leave the woman alone, or so help me Christ what’s gone before will seem like Sunday school.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Good. You tell him to look for me in the Ouachitas, because that’s where I’m going. If he’s man enough to come alone, that’s where he’ll find me.”
“He won’t come alone.”
“I know it. But you tell him anyways. Tell him to bring the woman and Payne. Tell him to come Sunday morning, nine A.M., the town square, Blue Eye, two weeks from now. That’s the first Sunday in November. We’ll set it up.”
Then he was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The call came at seven-thirty that evening.
“Go on,” said Payne. “Get it.”
She picked up the phone and listened.
“Are you Payne?” she asked.
He took the phone.
“Payne?”
“Yes.”
“It’s bad. We didn’t get him. He led us in.”
Payne listened numbly to the details.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “In two hours. No sweat.”
He put the phone down.
“Your unlucky day, honey,” he said, watching her face. “My orders were to kill you if they got Swagger. I was just going to walk away and say I did. But they didn’t get him. He got them. Your boyfriend killed forty-four men
