“It’s almost a tracing,” Russ said.
“Looks to me like the road trends back to the southeast. That would put the cabin a mile and a half in. We ought to be overland from it about a mile.”
Bob shot an azimuth on a small compass he pulled out of his jeans, grabbed a pair of binoculars, and they set off into the woods. The forest absorbed them. It was dense and green, the light overhead filtering through the canopy, more like a jungle than Russ’s idea of a forest.
Every so often Bob would shoot another compass angle, then veer crazily in an odd direction. It was soon enough gibberish to Russ; they seemed just to be wandering through the heavy woods in the heat, the bugs biting, the birds singing. He was hopelessly lost.
“You know where we’re going?”
“Yep.”
“You can get us out of here?”
“Yep.”
“We must have come miles.”
“We’ve walked about three, yeah. By beeline, we’ve come less than one, however. In the jungle you don’t go nowheres in a straight line, ’less you want to be taken down.”
Russ thought: he’s been here before. He’s taken men down before.
Look at him, he thought. A force of nature. Bob slid so easily and silently through the trees, his boots never slipped, he never stumbled or grunted, just maneuvered with the easy grace of the man who’d done it before. His face was blank, his eyes working the edges of the horizon, the demeanor utterly calm and concentrated. Leatherstocking. Natty Bumpo. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett. Damned John Wayne, like his father, whom everybody always said looked like John Wayne. Soon the sweat showed on his blue denim shirt but Bob paid it no mind; he just kept on trucking, the grip of that .45 sticking out of his jeans above the kidney.
In time, they came to a creek, cool and dark, and swiftly flowing. Russ scrambled over the rocks and got a mouthful of the water, which tasted faintly metallic.
“You make too much noise that way,” Bob said. “Cup it up to your lips and sip it. You never was a marine, right?”
“Not hardly,” said Russ.
“Okay, let’s go. It ain’t far.”
They cut across a path which ran between two low hills and appeared to lead to a clearing in the dim, overgrown trees ahead, but Bob never did things the easy way. Instead, halfway through that little draw, Bob took them off the path, through some heavy growth, and then broke onto the barer high ground under a maze of pines. Ahead, Russ could see the light of vista and openness. But Bob dropped to a low crawl and slithered ahead, coming at last to the edge and setting himself up behind a tree. Russ, feeling utterly like an imposter, did the same.
Two hundred yards below in a hollow by the stream sat the cabin. It was built of logs, low and primitive, with a woodpile, an outhouse, a feed trough for the pigs who scurried in a pen. A beat-up Chevy stood near it, rusted out, one fender gone to primer. Yet it had nothing of rustic Dogpatch, your quaint rural hamlet to it: instead it looked mean and squalid and impoverished.
“No phone lines,” Bob said. “No goddamned TV aerial. No electric wires.”
“Question,” said Russ. “If he’s just out of prison, how come the place looks so lived in?”
“He had a brother named Lum,” said Bob. “The brother had a son, who also lives here. It’s the son’s work you’re seeing, not old Jed’s.”
“Okay,” said Russ. “So let’s go see if he’ll talk to us.”
“No way,” said Bob. “You stay here. You eyeball the place. You got another hour. Then the sun’s too low to the west and it’ll reflect off the lenses. You got a watch?”
“Yes.”
“It’s two forty-five. You eyeball it till three forty-five. What are you looking for?”
“Uh, anything that’s out of the ordinary.”
“How do you look?”
“Uh—” Completely new question. Russ flubbed around.
“Hard,” he finally said.
“No, dummy. Divide it into quadrants. Thirty seconds a quadrant. Blink to black between, then move on. Follow the same pattern for ten minutes, then reverse it or change it around. Take frequent breaks and study the woods around. Use lens discipline. Never let them rise above the midpoint, you might throw a reflection. You’re not looking for men and guns, because you won’t see them and there’s no point. You’re looking for regular outlines. Nothing in nature is regular. If you see a straight line in the woods, you know something’s off. Got it? One hour. Then put the glasses down and just go to regular vision.”
“Where’ll you be?”
“I’m going to circle around and see if I cut any tracks in the woods. I want to know if parties of men have moved through here to that damned place. If it’s empty, and you haven’t seen anything, then we’ll go down.”
“Okay,” said Russ. “We’re not going to get out of here until after dark.”
“Don’t you worry about that, Donnie. You just eyeball the place.”
With that, he slid back and in seconds—the sniper’s gift—had disappeared.
Who the hell is Donnie? Russ wondered.
37
ack Preece was working on budgetary projections for 1998, one of his most favorite things.
He loved the steady march of the numbers across the page, the semblance of order they brought to chaos, the inflow and outflow as his fortunes advanced. It answered some deeply felt need he had.
Battalion 316, Honduras Army
Salvadoran Treasury Police
Detroit SWAT
Baltimore County Quick Response
FBI Hostage Rescue
Atomic Energy Commission Security Teams
Library of Congress SWAT
Navy SEAL Team Six
It was amazing, really. Nobody had ever looked at it this way, but sniping was a growth industry. The explosion in terrorism in the seventies, its ugly reappearance in the nineties, the profusion of heavily armed drug cartels with paramilitary capacity, the specter of armed right-wing militias, the increasing liberal call for “sophisticated” (i.e., surgical or low-lethality) police operations, all added up to one thing: the precision rifleman and the gear and culture to equip and train him were a skyrocket for the nineties and the century beyond the millennium. He was surprised, come to think of it, that the Wall Street Journal hadn’t done a story yet.
Every town, every city, every state, every agency, every country, needed the trained rifleman with the world-class equipment. Life was becoming psychotic. Rationality had broken down. Crushed and shattered by disappointment, political, domestic or economic, many men turned to violence. The workplace berserker, the family hostage taker, the organized criminal gang, the drug security goon squad, all heavily armed. Who would stop them? Not the patrol officer or the security dork, not enough training, not enough guts. No, it would be some replication of himself: a man with the coolness, the experience, essentially the will, to lie there in the dark and when the whole thing was going down, to do his duty. Trigger slack out, breathing controlled, absolute confidence in weapons system, not a hitch or a doubt or a twitch anywhere: the trigger goes back. A hundred yards away a small piece of metal driven at supersonic speeds enters the cranial vault, expands like a fist opening to hand, then spurts out the rear in a fog of pink mist. It’s over.
He, Jack Preece, had seen this earlier than anyone and was now prepared to ride the wave to a better, a safer tomorrow.
“General?”
It was Peck, long-boned and pale-eyed and trashy as death itself, in his deputy’s uniform, his gold badge shiny and bright.
“General,” he said, “it’s time. Signal just come through.”
“Give me a sitrep, please.”
“Huh?”
“Report on the situation, you idiot.”