I, Sniper

“He’s now in your area?”

“He retired down here in Jacksonville, like a lot of old marines do. It’s right outside Lejeune. He had a little house here. He liked to garden. His wife died a year or two back. But his health hasn’t been too good lately.”

“How do you know him?”

“He had a consulting business where he’d drop by and do some informal training days for police departments on their shooting programs. He helped our boys and was an exceptional coach. He made everyone shoot better and, more important, think better. He’d put a lot into snipercraft. He even had a license plate that read SNIPR- 1.”

He spelled it out for the young woman.

“And something’s going on with him?”

“Well, it gets dicey here. This is why I’m reluctant to share. But yeah, something. Something. Don’t know what. Carl’s not the sort of man who talks a lot about how he feels. He prides himself on not feeling a thing. But I could tell. His voice was dead on the phone. He canceled his visits. Just something and it depressed the hell out of him. Classical. Maybe just old age, the realization there were a lot more leaves on the ground than on the tree. It hits different people different ways. I don’t know.”

“So when was the last time you saw Carl Hitchcock?”

“A month ago. I’m just talking a feeling. Seemed lonely, I suppose.”

“Was he infirm?”

“He wasn’t able to play basketball, no, but for a gent close to seventy, he was spry enough. Walked with a limp, had pain from some burns, that sort of thing, but he got around all right.”

“Do you have an address?”

“Well, let me look it up for you. Would you want me to-”

“No sir,” said the young woman, who knew that a local gumshoe suddenly asking questions might be just what the doctor didn’t order. “I’m going to run this by my superiors and we will be back in touch soonest.”

“Ma’am, I hear that all the time when I work with feds, and ‘soonest’ is shorthand for ‘neverest.’ ”

“I apologize for that, sir, but I do mean ‘soonest’ this time.”

The young woman, excited, raced in to see the legendary Nick, who waved her into a chair while he finished a call.

And the young woman heard him say, “You spell that H-I-T-C-H-C-O-C-K, just like the director?”

Source number two was the police department of Hendrix, Arizona, whose chief Nick had just been on the phone with. The chief had said the following:

“This old gal sat in our lobby for six hours and I will say she got the runaround. But finally a detective came by to take her complaint and it turned out that her sister was a former beauty queen named Mavis O’Neill Hitchcock, of Jacksonville, North Carolina, which is a town just outside the big marine base at Camp Lejeune. Mavis died, but her husband was a combat-injured retiree named Carl Hitchcock, who had been famous for a while as the marines’ number one sniper in Vietnam. It was a good marriage. Both were old dogs, both had been around the block, and Mavis’s first husband, Howard, had also been a marine sergeant, and he and Carl had been friends. Anyhow, for a long time Carl was a kind of a god to the marines and to lots of law-enforcement officers and the like. It was a life he liked very much and he enjoyed talking to the young snipers and so forth. But about the time Mavis took sick, something went sour. Belly-up. Don’t know what. Now, the sister went out to Jacksonville as Mavis’s condition worsened, and she could tell that something wasn’t right with Carl. ‘Carl, what’s wrong?’ Carl wouldn’t say a word. Wasn’t a talking type; all the lonely time he spent in Vietnam probably cured him of a need to talk. He tells her he was the champion. But now it turns out he wasn’t the champion. There was another fellow, a few years earlier, killed more bad guys. ‘Why would you let a thing like that upset you?’ ‘I feel like I’ve been living a lie,’ Carl said. Anyhow, Mavis dies, Carl is all broken up, and the sister has to go back to Hendrix and her own life, but she tries to keep in touch. Several times she calls, he’s too drunk to talk. Sometimes he himself calls, drunk. One day he breaks a hip and that takes a hell of a lot out of him. Then he just stopped answering the phone. Now this, and she wonders, could Carl… It’s not like Carl… Carl was such a good, brave man, such a wonderful marine… but could Carl?”

“All right,” Nick told them at the meeting he convened in about thirty seconds, “I don’t want to commit to Carl Hitchcock, but we have to get more. I’ve been on the phone with the federal attorney for North Carolina and he’s putting together a search warrant. I want our best team on this. Ron Fields will run the show, and Ron, you know what I expect. This is a tough situation, you don’t want to brown off the locals with overzealous supervision, the marines are going to be very interested because he’s very much a symbol of their branch, one of their heroes, but I’ve also got Joan Flanders’s ex-husband T. T. Constable calling the director and demanding action, sometimes twice a day. Ron, you’re up for this?”

“I am.”

“Take the young woman here with you. She did good. What was your name, young lady?”

“Jean Chandler.”

“Take Special Agent Chandler, Ron. Run her hard, treat her unfairly, call her by her last name, overwork her, don’t let her call her husband-”

“No husband,” Chandler said, blankly.

“-boyfriend, who’s probably a linebacker for the Redskins, and see if she comes up smiling. Maybe she’s a keeper, maybe not. We’ll see.”

Chandler smiled; Nick was famous for his needling, joshing style with the younger people.

Nick said, “You make sure-I know you know this, but they pay me to point out the obvious-you make sure the legal paperwork is perfect before you move; you don’t ransack; you show utmost respect to this old duffer if he’s around; you document everything, okay? Is this understood?”

“Yes, Nick.”

“And you understand this one other thing: if, God forbid, he’s the boy and if it gets dicey, you back off quick and look contrite. I know you’re a gunfighter yourself, but you cannot engage Carl Hitchcock. Under no circumstances are you to engage Carl Hitchcock. If you want to see a lot of people dead in a hurry, you corner a former marine sniper with a rifle and a bagful of ammo with no way out, and I guarantee you, you’ll have body bags all the way out to the trees and back in the first two minutes. And the survivors will never get a promotion.”

They laughed, nervously.

“And you keep me in the loop and everybody else out of the loop. Everything goes through me, because I get paid to be the asshole. You let me be the asshole. If you do that, I’ll fight to death for you. If you don’t, I’ll dump you and hang a do-not-promote-this-fool toe tag on your career. I will not be asked questions by the press I don’t know the answer to. Okay, go, go, go. What, you’re not out of here yet?”

3

The house was a one-story brick job under palms and pines in a leafy neighborhood full mostly of young marine noncom families. Jacksonville, it turned out, was one of those parasite towns that grew up on the outskirts of a large military installation, this time Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, the home of and training site for II Marine Expeditionary Force, the Second Marine Division, the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th Marine Expeditionary Units as well as the USMC infantry and engineering schools. The town was full of small retail for young marines-dry cleaners, tailors, shoe repair places, fast food-and of course a seamier array of afterduty amusements, mostly beer and strippers, as well as a bus station, a train station, and a surprisingly well developed taxi system, which ferried the boys and girls to and from duty and recreation if they were not advanced enough in their careers to afford autos.

Ron Fields and Jean Chandler met early that afternoon with the federal prosecutor for Shelby County, a USMC JAG staff rep, the local police chief, and a captain in the North Carolina State Police. Fields had a lot of explaining to do.

“I’m really a nice guy,” Ron said, “and people love me. But I’m going to big-foot it now to save time and let you decide how wonderful I am six months from now. Sorry if I come on like a jerk, but that’s the way it has to be. Jack,” he said to the prosecutor, sliding into first-name familiarity, “I’m going to fax your office’s legal work to DC for vetting by guys who went to Harvard. I don’t think they’re smarter, I just have to be sure.”

“Of course,” said Jack, “I only went to UNC, what do I know?”

“We have forensics and evidence recovery teams and SWAT people on standby. But we cannot approach this by kicking in doors. We go gentle. Slow and gentle. I want you, Major Connough,”-the Marine Corps JAG rep-“to witness and sign off on all my decisions, and you tell me any time I act with disrespect; I don’t want the Marine Corps mad at me.”

“The Marine Corps is already mad. This guy is an institution. He’s a god, a hero. If it turns out-well, it won’t. Everyone who knows Carl Hitchcock says it won’t.”

Ron didn’t like the sound of that. It was already out. That’s the thing with these service cultures, he thought. They’re hardwired for commo and something can’t happen here without everyone knowing it in five seconds.

“I hope he’s clean too. Makes my job easier. Okay, no police presence up front. I want it gathered at the school two blocks away; your SWAT people, your traffic control, your medical standby, your press liaison, whatever. How fast can you assemble?”

“We can have people in place by four p.m.”

“Good, I’m hoping to get a yes from DC and that you can get to a nice friendly judge by then, all right?”

“We can work that time frame. The warrant’s already at Judge O’Brian’s. He’ll sign. He always has before.”

“Good move, Chief, that saves some time. Now at three, Chief, I want your people to begin a discreet evac of the neighborhood. Friendly cop style, ma’am, we’re making a potentially dangerous arrest, and we’d like you to quietly gather your kids up and head over to the school, that kind of thing. These are marine people, they’ll follow orders.”

“Is that necessary?” asked the marine JAG rep. “Carl’s nearly seventy. He’s not going to go to guns.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Major Connough. But I can’t take the risk. We cannot have civilian casualties. Furthermore, every public safety professional who has the potential of going in line of sight to the house will wear, I say again, will wear body armor.”

“Won’t stop a.308,” said the marine.

“No, but it could deflect and we’ve found that the armor increases efficiency and confidence as well as survivability in critical incidents.”