Swagger got back to the hotel with a headache, as if he’d been drinking. In a sense, he had been: Richard’s science fiction story, with time travel and all that goofy bullshit. What the hell was that about? It had a meaning, somehow, but he couldn’t see it.
He almost wished he had a drink, and as usual, the temptation to go to the bar, to have the one that would become two and then three and so on was still there, like a pilot light, something that never went out.
He had to think of something else. He had to put something between himself and his appetites and the craziness that swirled in his head. He pulled on clothes and boots, took the elevator down, and walked the twelve blocks in darkness and coolness and emptiness to Dealey in a haste that belied the pain in his hip and the gracelessness of his walk.
He wanted to look at it again, see it in the dark, as form without detail, as shape. That nightmare site of so many crazies: the grassy knoll.
Without features, the small hill to the west of the plaza seemed utterly nondescript. He walked to it, climbed it, and watched the cars peel down Elm. He imagined himself as that legendary French gangster, the favorite candidate from one of the first theories, who somehow had lingered. A Corsican, the story went, like someone out of an old Hollywood movie, so degraded that he could kill the world’s most beautiful and dazzling man. There he was with his M1 carbine, leaning forward at 12:30 p.m. that day, putting the front sight blade on the president’s head and squeezing the trigger.
But–
No, it was wrong. The French killer couldn’t have aimed at the president. The president was moving at an uncertain speed. His killer would have to aim ahead of him. He’d have to hold, what, six inches to the front to make that brain shot. It was called shooting on the deflection, and it took talent and practice. Some people never got it.
Most people assume that the Frenchman on the knoll had the easier shot because he was closer. In their minds, close equals easy, far equals difficult. Oswald was 263 feet away, the Frenchman 75. Clearly, these people hadn’t done any wing shooting, or taken any shots at running game or men.
Swagger estimated that the theoretical Frenchman would have been on a ninety-degree angle to the vehicle, which itself was beginning to accelerate at an uneven speed. In order to place one shot – and he would be limited to one shot in order to preserve the false-flag operation – he would have had to shoot on the deflection. In skeet and trap and sporting clays, this is the hardest shot, called a “crosser,” because it demands the biggest lead. It is mastered by shooting it over and over again to develop a feel for the necessary lead given the speed of the target. The Frenchman would have had to find the target, keep the rifle moving, pull ahead of the target a certain (unknown) distance, and then pull the trigger without disturbing the sight picture as he kept the rifle moving. Swagger knew that was hard enough with a shotgun, which blasts a pattern of shot covering a fairly wide area, but almost impossible except for the top professionals with a rifle, an instrument that puts a single bullet into a single spot. The odds on making that shot the first time out are extremely remote. No, they are not impossible, but it seemed unwise for a professional team to base its plan on one man hitting a near-impossible shot first time, cold bore, unless it had at its disposal some sort of shooting genius, and such men are rare and difficult to find.
As for Oswald, or whoever was back there in the building, whichever one it was, his situation was completely different. His shot, in wing-shooting terminology, was an outgoer. It’s pretty easy. The target presents very little angle. The limo wasn’t exactly at zero degrees angle to him, but as it moved down Elm Street and as he oriented himself in the window to track it, it was under five degrees. From his point of view, even through that poor-quality scope, it was trending right to left slowly, possibly even undetectably to him. Its main quality was that it was diminishing in size as it traveled farther in distance. Neither of these conditions required that he shoot on the deflection, demanding that skillful computation of lead. He could hold point-blank on the target, concentrate on his squeeze, and get his shot off. If the rifle was accurate and the sight aimed dead zero, then the shot was technically no harder than a benchrest shot at a rifle range. The difference in distances – 75 feet versus 263 feet – was hardly meaningful. To Bob’s sniper’s brain, the shot from behind and above was far easier than a shot from 90 degrees at a vehicle accelerating at an unknown rate.
Swagger thought: Hmm, that’s kind of interesting. The shot
CHAPTER 5
Shower, dress, coffee, paper. The same khaki suit, still baggy. The same red tie. He noticed neither tie nor suit and headed out. Dal-Tex was eight blocks or so away, the same walk as last night’s jaunt to Dealey, and he thought it would do his hip some good to walk it.
He made them easily enough. Two of them. One on foot, one trailing in a car, which looked to be an ’09 Chevy. The car hopscotched, and the man on foot would change duties with the driver. One guy was black, in a black suit with no necktie, a porkpie hat, and shades. The other was dour and plump, in plaid sport coat and slacks, no tie, no hat, no glasses, sun or otherwise. They were not amateurs.
Bob walked down Main, swallowed by the glass-and-steel canyons that had not been there fifty years ago. As last night, he followed Kennedy’s route, pungently aware that the style of modern air-conditioning climate control largely banished the open window from large building construction. No open windows in the sheets of tinted glass that rose forty stories.
It was all different for Kennedy. The buildings then were squatter, stouter things, constructed mostly in the twenties and thirties, lots of ornamentation and showy work, arches and cupolas and the other flourishes that cheap skilled labor could routinely produce in brick or stone. And windows. The close-in canyons of Main must have pushed JFK past fifty thousand open windows, and a shooter could have lurked in any of them. It was outside the limits then. Kennedy himself joked about it and drew smiles because it was such a fantastic possibility. He was just about out of windows too; beyond the depository, it was wide-open space all the way to the Trade Mart and the speech he never gave. The fifty-thousand-and-first window had a gunman behind it. End of story.
As had Kennedy, Swagger reached Main’s jog at Dealey, and instead of turning left to follow Main, he turned right down Houston. A block brought him to the corner where he’d met Nick, where Houston crossed Elm and the two brick piles stood side by side, the Book Depository and Dal-Tex, almost twins: square girder and mortar palaces.
He looked hard at Dal-Tex. A biggish office building, seven stories tall, redbrick, flat roof, fairly elaborate with arches built into the brick, recessing the windows, thick stone slabs edging the roof, big windows that opened from the bottom up. He could see where new oranger brick had replaced a couple of chunks at the joinery of the Elm- Main corner, to sustain a new brand for the unit. That corner also sported the building’s sole retail unit, the Sixth- Floor Museum souvenir shop and coffee gallery, though it was unclear if it was officially connected with the museum in TBD across the street, or if they had claimed the name as a marketing ploy. He noted that a fire escape, which in 1963 ran the height of the building on Houston Street, was gone.
Swagger’s vision drifted leftward, across the gulf of Houston Street, and settled again on LHO’s sniper’s nest, at the sixth-floor corner window. From where Swagger stood at the corner of the two streets, the window seemed immense. It couldn’t have been seventy-five feet away, and the downward angle wouldn’t affect the trajectory because the range was so close. You point at the white shirt through that junky scope and pull the trigger and cannot miss; no bad trigger pull could jerk the gun far enough to make a difference, no wind deflection could push the bullet from its destiny, nothing could interfere with its flight into flesh.
He stood on the corner, again imagining the slow pivot of the big car as the driver wheeled it through the 120 degrees of the turn. It would have been all but stationary except for the slow pivot. And up there, behind Window 50,001, was the gunman.
Again: why didn’t he shoot then? Wide-open target, straight angle into the high chest, Connally too far forward to interfere, Jackie to the right and out of the way, the shot
What was going on with LHO up there in his nest?
Another mystery, unknowable, unsolvable, that had died with Jack Ruby’s .38 Special into Lee Harvey.
