But he knew it was time to dump the bike when the tracers came floating his way. Whoever these boys were, they weren’t well schooled. They fired too early, counting on the display of neon death floating parabola-like through the trees (and rupturing wood where it struck) to drive him back. He might have been a different fellow, but Bob had taken tracer before, even fired batches of it, so panic was not what he felt, even as random bullets began to kick up stingers and puffs of mud near him.
He cranked hard, put the bike over, feeling it bite against the mud as it plowed furrows. Before it was even still, he’d scrambled off, found cover in the trees, and begun his assault. He had no targets yet, but still his finger flew to the EOTech gizmo atop his DPMS rifle, and pressed the button that was protected against accidental tripping by a plastic sheet across it. He nudged it, felt it give, brought the gun to his shoulder and saw, to his surprise, a bright orange circle on the 2x2 screen. You didn’t need training, so simple was the concept; you put the circle on what it was you wanted, you pushed the trigger, and you ventilated. He slithered upward, safety off, finger indexed along the top of the guard, and forty yards out saw two men hunched over weapons on a crestline, peering hard for target.
“I think we put him down, Pap,” came a cry. Bob put the orange circle on the center of mass, and fired three times. This damn gun was no poodle-shooter; it bucked, more by far than a.223, but not so much that it was beyond control. With superb trigger control and a stout shooting position, Bob knew he scored all three and he watched the unfortunate recipient jerk when struck, then fall to the left. Bob came over, wasn’t quite fast enough on the pivot, and by the time he got around, the second guy was down under cover. Gunflashes gave away his position, and so did the tracer burst which vectored like splashes of liquid weight toward Bob, bending as it arched toward him and tore into trees and ground. And suddenly other boys were on the line and the hill was alive with the sound of death. The guns buzzsawed hellaciously and ripped, and the world turned all nasty and full of frags and flying debris and the spritz of near-supersonic wood chips. Bob squirmed back, aware that they were shooting toward sound rather than actually acquiring a target.
He waited a bit, moved a little more but delicately, put his rifle up and waited patiently. Soon enough a scout popped up to see if he could see a thing, and just as quickly Bob put one into him, center mass again, the gun beating into his shoulder with its upward torque, the muzzle flash bleaching detail from his night vision, illuminating a spent 6.8 shell as it flew to the right. Another one down, but another cycle of mega-blasting came abanging as the rest of the boys dumped their mags at him.
He waited them out. Would they have the guts to flank? Would they put people off on his right and his left, triangulate and take him out? He bet not. They weren’t trying to hold the hill for but a few more minutes, and nobody wanted to miss the big bus out.
And indeed, here came the bus; it floated out of blackness, its rotor kicking up a cyclone, huge and messy, blowing clouds of dust everywhere. He couldn’t get a good shot at it, however, and when it had settled in, it was hidden behind the angle of the incline and he could only hear it, see its column of rising disturbance. Then another posse of tracer came his way, lighting up his world and almost hitting him. One came closer than any round since fifteen years earlier, and he had a moment of fear. Even he, the great Bob the Nailer, victor in a hundred gunfights against impossible odds, felt the terror of the near miss, and he slunk back, happy just to be alive.
The phone rang.
Odd time for a phone call. But it rang, some chipper computery tune calculated to alert and annoy, the sound fortunately buried from his antagonists by the roar of the chopper. Astounded that he would do such an amazingly stupid thing, he obeyed the human rule that no matter what, phone calls take precedence over all reality. Maybe it was FBI, or maybe Nick had given the number to local authority.
“Swagger,” he said into it after plucking it from inside his vest and slipping it open.
“Mr. Swagger, it’s Charlie Wingate,” said the voice.
“Charlie? Well-”
“I think I figured Mark 2:11 out. It took a thousand hits on the Net but it’s actually ‘Mark,’ as in military or industrial model designation, capital M, small k, period, then just two-eleven, no colon, and it refers to a.50 caliber armor-piercing munition that-”
At that moment the tree trunk behind which Bob had slithered exploded. It atomized as something weighing 650 grains with a secondary explosive and a tungsten core, traveling at twenty-five hundred feet per second, hit it at zero angle, detonated, and sent a shockwave through it that all but liquefied the wood structure itself. It toppled, but could not find room among the other trees to actually hit ground, and lay suspended at an angle.
“Thanks, Charlie,” said Bob, “I’ll get back to you.” He flipped the phone away, slithered even farther down the hill. Good old Charlie. Better late than never.
Two more.50 Raufosses arrived, but the gunner had no target. This time, not hitting wood, he did not get his secondary detonation, but only plowed into the dirt, kicking up a huge, dusty geyser of earth and leaves, each blast a bit farther from Bob, the thrust of the recoil taking him away from his target with each shot. Bob rolled to the side, came up in a good kneeling position, put the red circle on his target and, guessing that he was body-armored, shot him in the head.
Now, he thought, get to the top, get some rounds into that bird, cripple it, then fall back and live happily ever after. Let the real FBI take over.
Each thirty-pound, twenty-by twenty-four-inch, plastic tamper-evident bag contained approximately twelve thousand bills, as baled carefully in the counting room at Bristol Speedway headquarters. The distribution of bills was predictable, even immutable: 10 per cent of them were ones, 15 per cent fives, 25 per cent of them tens, 40 per cent of them twenties, 5 per cent of them fifties and 5 per cent of them one hundreds. Each bag contained about $226,000 and all thirty-five of them-roughly $8 million in small, unrecorded bills-weighed a thousand fifty pounds.
The Reverend needed men. So he sent only two gunners to the crestline to search for the ranger on the motorcycle, figuring the two could handle it easily enough. That left three to unload and hoist, and one on the roof to stack the bales in a neat pile for easy tossing into the wide-open chopper door. If that goddamned Richard were here, it would help, but the boy had disappeared.
The Grumley inside tossed the bags out to a Grumley beside the truck’s open rear door, and he in turn-husky Caleb, bloody nose and all-heaved it up to the Grumley atop the truck. When all the bags were out, all the Grumleys would climb up top and toss the bags into the chopper hovering above. It seemed to be going pretty well, given that the rotors of the helicopter were tossing up hell and gone, when someone wandered up groggily, holding his ear.
“Pap,” he yelled, “he goddamn hit me three times and the last one bounced off the vest and tore off my ear.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Pap.
“Pap, I’se hurt bad. Git me out of here. That boy can shoot a lick.”
The Reverend made a decision.
“Caleb, you no nevermind that, you git over there, you boys too, you put this fella down.”
So the whole goddamned team quit their loading and ran to the edge of the hill.
Pap waited as the guns blazed, the helicopter hovered, and nothing seemed to be happening except time was passing. What was taking so long?
“I’m getting worried hanging here,” said the helicopter pilot through the phone. “They git heavy guns up here, they can bring this thing down in a second. You said wouldn’t be no shooting.”
“Some damn hero trying to win a medal,” Pap said. “Hold her just a second.”
He looked about. Richard would sure have been a help around now. But no Richard.
Suddenly the boys was back. They’d dumped their mags, filled the woods with slugs, tore shit out of it no human man could live through, and left Caleb to hold the fort.
So it was Pap himself who climbed up top the truck from the hood, and started lifting and tossing the bales into the chopper. Hard to believe, each chunk of weight was about a quarter mil in swag, untraceable, immediately spendable, investable, hell, a feller could have himself a great weekend in Vegas with just one of ’em. And goddamn, he was getting two, the boys one each and-
He found superhuman strength in the power of his greed and tossed them aboard. The pilot helped by walking the chopper down the length of the truck so the distance wasn’t far, and the thirty-five bags went aboard fast. Then each scrambled in, all helping to get the wounded man aboard.
