The Third Bullet

his scope squarely on the president’s chest, and at the moment of minimum movement and maximum proximity, pulled the trigger to discover that the rifle would not fire.

Had he put the safety on his loaded weapon and, in the heat of the moment, forgotten to remove it? The safety on a Mannlicher-Carcano is a devilishly small thing, poorly designed and not for battle usage. It’s a button located under the bolt plunger at the rear of the receiver. To manipulate it, you’ve got to break your hold, look at the fucking thing, and carefully guide it out of one condition and into the other. The idiot whom the other boys called Ozzie Rabbit snapped dry, panicked, went through the process, then went back into the shooting position, aware that he was already behind the action curve. His first shot may have been premature, as he was hunting for a target through the trees and stacking the trigger for the final pull, and the M-C trigger, unlike most of the age, is surprisingly light.

The rifle fires. He knows it’s a clear miss and now the clock is ticking on his effort and his old friend failure is nipping at his heels again. He rushes through cocking the weapon, reacquires the position, and is amazed to see the car emerge from the trees into plain view with almost no reaction from occupants, security, or crowd. He throws the crosshairs onto the president – this is his most likely shot to hit the brain, as the president is much less than two hundred feet away; the angle is beneficial to Oswald, producing little lateral movement and only slight diminishment, probably not even noticeable through the cheap glass of the inferior optical device; and he’s on much firmer ground regarding the trigger pull, knowing exactly how much slack to take out to get the trigger to stack up at the point of firing and when to exert that last ounce of pressure to fire.

And he misses again.

Of course, that’s the famous magic bullet, and not only does he not miss, he puts a bullet through two men. It’s not God’s point of view that matters, however, but Oswald’s point of view. The president does not react spastically to the bullet strike; rather, he makes a little jerk, which, being lost in the blur of the recoiling scope, Oswald may not see. By the time he gets the rifle cocked and is back to the target, he sees – nothing. That is, the president doesn’t collapse, tip, tilt, implode, pitch forward, splay his arms. Instead, he begins a slow, subtle forward lean, and his hands go toward his throat, but not with any wounded-animal instinct or speed. Oswald cannot see any indication of a hit and must think, You idiot! Another fuckup! And he must think, What the hell is wrong with this scope? I was right on, and I missed. Is it all fucked up? Where do I hold to make the shot?

Given that psychological reality, Swagger found it mind-blowing that Oswald recovered enough to reacquire the target after running the rough action a second time, and though the target was smaller, his psychological condition possibly more scattered, his doubts about his system more intense, his fear of failure even more concentrated, he managed the perfect brain shot.

What the fuck? How did this schmuck go from two strikes to a home run? How did he recover so fast and pull it off? You can look for years at his record for any hint of such a moment and be bewildered. There is nothing but utter failure; random mediocrity is his best accomplishment.

Swagger sat back, astounded that he was sweating and that he’d been transported to a faraway place and time. Now he was back in a sordid room smelling of piss and puke, sleeping on a dirty mattress, man on the run all the way.

Yet the dreamscape of Lee Harvey Oswald killing a president would not abandon his head. In another second, it took over his brain and Swagger was back among the boxes, smelling the burnt powder, standing next to the little prick who brought such shame on all of us who call ourselves shooters. The question, eternal and lingering: what the fuck?

Was it simple sniper’s luck that he hit that last shot? It could have been. The wild shot can hit as accidentally as it misses. The bullet doesn’t know where it’s going, what’s on the other end. It just goes where the physics tell it to go, and that can be into a brain or a curb, whatever.

Swagger understood that this idea sucked: nobody wants the key moment of the late twentieth century turning on nothing more than a nobody loser’s one stroke of luck. But maybe that was what happened.

Luck or whatever, Oswald has just shot the president in the head. Freeze the moment, which is the most interesting moment in the entire event. He has just seen his bullet detonate the president’s head into a geyser of brain matter and blood. Even if he lost specifics of the image in the recoil, when he comes back on target out of the recoil stroke, he sees chaos, panic, and hysteria in the back of the car. And what does he do?

He cocks the rifle again.

Excuse me, but what the fuck?

Why?

Does he mean to shoot again? Is it pure reflex? It wasn’t learned in the Marine Corps, where his M-1 automatically reloaded itself. What is his motive? Most good hunters have trained themselves to cock again for a fast follow-up, but by no means is this ass-clown an experienced hunter, and there’s no indication that he’s hunted in five years. Or does he need a motive at the time? Maybe it can’t be explained; it just is, it happened because it happened, and to look for motive is to see him as rational when he was an irrational man at an irrational moment.

Still, it seemed to Swagger, aware of the sniper’s instincts after the kill, in that situation, his task done, Oswald now knows that his chances at escape can be measured in mere seconds. It seems far more likely that instead of cocking the rifle, he abandons it, exits the nest, and beelines toward the only stairway, which is over ninety feet away diagonally across the empty space of the sixth floor.

He doesn’t do this.

Instead, he carries the rifle with him, loaded and unlocked, across the floor those ninety-odd feet. Suppose he meets a colleague? Suppose someone sees him from a building across the street, the Dal-Tex Building or the Dallas County Records building, both of which have floors and windows that look directly onto his area? At that point he is acting more like a marine on combat patrol, fearing ambush, than he is a fleeing assassin.

He reaches the stairway directly in the floor at the other corner of the building, and realizing he can’t reenter the world with rifle in hand, he shoves it between two boxes there at the stairs, where it will be found, fully loaded, shell in chamber, an hour or so later.

Why does he cock the rifle after killing the president? Why does he carry it with him as he proceeds across the floor? These issues seemed to bother nobody. They bothered Swagger.

- - - -

Finally, enough time passed so that Stronksi felt safe enough to set a night; he met Swagger again, this time in the back of a van, to arrange the debrief and pass over the money.

“You swear,” said Stronski, “that after I have this thing for you, we will proceed directly to embassy, I will watch you enter, and can then finally relax, knowing I served you as you required and lived up to all promises.”

“Absolutely.”

“Now tell me where to meet.”

“No.”

“Swagger, you are such a bastard. Such a stubborn son of bitch. You don’t trust me?”

“What choice have I got? But let’s take elementary precautions. Though troublesome in the long run, they will cut down on the yips, and we can concentrate on our work.”

“You talk like general. All the time soothing, reasonable, and probably right. Goddamn you, man, you are a hard friend to have.”

“I’m just a country boy scared of city slickers, that’s all.”

“I don’t know what ‘slicker’ is, but I get the meaning. So when we settle on place?”

“I will call you on a cell that morning after you are out of the Lubyanka. I will give you a street. You will drive down it. At a set time, I will call you with a turn to make. I will guide you by me in this way and make sure nobody follows. I may do that two or three times. When I am certain you are alone, I will give you the destination, my choice, and you will be dropped. We will chat, then head by another cab to the embassy. Is that acceptable?”

“You have a cunning Russian mind. No rush to do anything.”

“It’s how I earned a glorious retirement in the basement of a bicycle shop where I watch the plaster slowly fall from the ceiling.”

“It is not very interesting, I am sure, but still, I am sure it is more interesting than death.”

“It is.”

Swagger gave him the envelope: ten thousand dollars in rubles.