Preece knew he’d be hitting two targets, Swagger first and then that kid. The bolt gun was a highly accurate system, as Swagger himself had proven in Vietnam and hundreds of SWAT and Delta or FBI HRU engagements had since proven; it was the quintessential exemplar of the professional’s code: One Shot, One Kill. But it was not the system of choice for engaging multiple targets. There was that damned bolt throw after the shot, an inch up, three inches back, three inches forward, an inch down. Peter Paul Mauser had cooked it up back in 1892; it was a hundred years old. A good, trained rifleman could do it under a second and there was a time when Preece was as fast as anyone in the world. This was not that time. He didn’t want to be throwing a bolt then looking for target number two; the whole thing fell apart if one of the targets made it out.
So he wanted a very clean gun, untraceable, he wanted a semiauto capacity, he wanted accuracy.
There was only one choice, really.
It was outmoded weapons technology, to be sure, but it had the great attraction of stepping out of the long tradition of black operations. He owned it more as a curiosity than as an item for sale. Who would buy something so antiquated? The Agency had evidently used it in Nam as part of SOG’s Operation P, the infrastructure eradication program that targeted high-profile V.C. suspects for assassination by special killer teams. Then it had gone God knew where, done God knew what for a number of years: if weapons could talk, then this one had the experience of a best-selling book in its sleek contours. Certainly, it had seen much action in South and Central America, perhaps even in Africa and Europe as well.
Preece had bought it sub rosa from one of his own sniper cadre, a man with much experience. One look into that man’s lightless, hunter’s eyes and at that flat dead face told the general that further inquiries were pointless. The man was facing his third divorce, needed to raise cash; he sold it to the general for $4,000, no questions asked, no papers given, nothing recorded. It was the weapon that never was, unless it was firing at you.
The piece was an M-16, firing the little 5.56mm round, but at its muzzle it boasted an old long, thin Sionics suppressor, the HEL-H4A model, and, by special mount, it wore the last operational American military infrared weapon sight, the AN/PAS-4. This was no ambient night sight, and still less a Magnavox thermal sniperscope, but it was miles better than the old carbine sniperscopes. For one thing, its battery pack had been miniaturized. Specs described it as “a battery-operated sight and aiming device consisting of an infrared light source, an infrared sensitive image forming telescope (4.5×) with integral miniaturized high-voltage power supply and a light source power supply (a belt-mounted 6 VDC rechargeable nickel cadmium battery).” The telescope assembly was thirteen inches long; the telescope and light source were approximately fourteen inches long; the entire sight assembly weighed about twelve pounds. It looked like a scope with a searchlight mounted atop it, awkward and crude but surprisingly easy to manipulate.
It had but one disadvantage: that light source. That is, it was active infrared, as opposed to the Magnavox’s passive mode: it had to project a beam of infrared light from the light source to the target area for the sensitized telescope to pick up. In a technologically sophisticated combat environment such a system was inherently dangerous because for sure the enemy would have an infrared spotting scope through which his light beam would be a vivid indication of his locale, and countersniper measures would be undertaken with massive firepower. Thus it was better in the undeveloped portions of the world, Central America, Africa, West Arkansas.
He picked the weapon up, ran a quick battery check. Everything was fine. He snapped the charger back and released it, felt the weapon cock with a satisfying clack. The trigger pull was a dry, light snap, like a glass rod breaking. He set the weapon down and went at last to the ammo locker within the vault and selected six boxes of Ball M-193 5.56mm, confident that the night belonged to him.
34
he funeral was in the late morning but they couldn’t make it, because the Baltimore-Dallas flight and the hop via American Eagle to Fort Smith didn’t get them back until about noon. But there was a wake to be held at Sam’s old house at four, and, driving hard down the parkway, they knew they’d make it by at least four-thirty.
Russ drove; Bob was even more sealed off than usual. The sniper’s stillness: part of the legend. His bitterness, his repressed anger, his sense of isolation—all a part of the same package. But behind those calm, dark eyes, Russ knew there was something going on.
“So what are you thinking?” Russ finally asked.
“That we just wasted a good solid day and that I’m out thirteen hundred bucks in tickets.”
“I’ll pay you—”
“It ain’t that, I don’t want your money. It was just waste. We are heading in a wrong direction.”
“No sir,” said Russ. “I honestly believe that there has to be a connection between the death of that child and the death of your father.”
“You bonehead,” said Bob cruelly, not even looking at him. “That’s impossible. My father was killed the same day that girl was found. There’s no way they could have set what they set up that fast. It was a four- or five-day operation, Frenchy working at his goddamned craziest. And second: there was no way anybody could have predicted that my daddy would find that body that day or any day. That was pure goddamn luck or whatever. Her mama came to him, and he went a-looking. Suppose he hadn’t have found that body? He’d still be dead by 11.00 . That body could have laid for weeks yet before someone came across it, and by that time it could have been so decomposed that it would take still more weeks before they got around to identifying it. No, what happened to that girl is a crime, and if poor Reggie Fuller died on its account, that is a pity and a sorrow, but it don’t mean shit to us.”
Russ still believed that there was some connection.
“It had to. What else could possibly have been going on in Polk County in 1955 that would have been worth setting up that elaborate conspiracy? Frenchy Short wouldn’t just do something for—”
“That is right as rain,” said Bob. “So here’s what I think. I think my father was on some kind of investigative team or something the state police were running. Maybe it had to do with what was going on at Camp Chaffee. And somehow he found something out. And had to be stopped.”
“That sounds like a crummy movie,” said Russ.
“I know it does, and I don’t even go to movies,” said Bob grumpily.
“Well, maybe—”
“Slow down,” said Bob, “and don’t turn around fast.”
A moment or two ticked by.
Bob slid his .45 out of the inside-the-belt holster which Russ hadn’t even seen him put on.
“What the hell—”
“Easy, easy,” said Bob.
Russ became aware of a van, blue, riding in the dead man’s slot just where his mirrors couldn’t track it.