“Ooooo, brave words from the land of the walking dead.”
“All right, gentlemen,” said Howdy Duty, who had gotten himself appointed coordinator of the Swagger manhunt, “let’s close it down and watch. Go ahead, Hap.”
“Okay, guys,” said Hap, “this is raw, unedited TV tape, courtesy of our good friends, the assholes at CBS who make more money and do lots more damage than we do. You’ll notice the time sequence at the bottom right of the screen that’s blocked out for TV showings, but very helpful for our purposes. I’ve got it cued to thirty seconds before the first shot – assuming, and we’re still not sure, there was more than one shot.”
The television screen leapt to light and there was Flashlight, his good-looking, rather bland and characterless face knitted up in a slightly unconvincing mask of passion. It was a tight shot, only him and he was singing fulsome praise of this Latino who’d done so much to repair the damage between, as Flashlight put it, “our two great countries,” and had worked so tirelessly to effect “reconciliation, reconstruction, and recognition.”
And so, Flashlight concluded, what a great pleasure it is to award Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez the highest award we have in this country for civilian accomplishment, the Medal of Freedom.
The tape dropped back to a two-shot and the cleric, in modest black, with a beatific smile on his face, comes up to the podium on the president’s right to take the president’s hand and to genuflect to accept the silky garland with its little hunk of gold plating around his fat neck. He turns, giving his back to the audience, then bends as the president lifts to raise the thing over his -
“That’s it,” said Hap Fencl, as the image froze. “What we’re gonna hear a lot of once the conspiracy boys figure out how to make a bundle on this, is how come Bob doesn’t shoot when the president is talking and he’s got an easy frontal or brain shot. Why does he wait till he’s turned to his right and the Latin guy is moving into the line of fire? Answers, anybody?”
There was silence. But Nick knew.
“Hap?”
“Yes, Nick.”
“Ah, the reason is that a headshot is too far to risk from, what, five hundred yards out? Not because he can’t hit a head at that range, you can bet your ass he can. But because the head is the most animated part of the body and most of the body movement begins at the head; so the head is never really still and it moves so quickly because the neck muscles are so articulated and because the reaction time between impulse and action is nearly instantaneous. So the head’s a no-go, at least for a pro. But at the same time he’s worried about body armor so he can’t quite take a full frontal, center-of-mass shot. See, he’s waiting for Flashlight to turn slightly, to raise his arms, and he’s going for a raking shot into the sleeve vent of the body armor. He wants a translateral chest shot, putting it into him right in front of the armpit on about a forty-five-degree angle. The bullet will traverse left to right, expanding as it goes, and it ought to clear out all the chest structures. He’d be dead in a second, before he hit the ground. Was Flashlight wearing body armor?”
“Secret Service won’t say. That’s very good, Nick.”
“Too bad you’re a dead man,” somebody said anonymously in the dark.
There was some laughter and even Nick had to smile.
“Okay, let’s get to the good stuff,” said Hap. “Brain-shot time, boys and girls.”
On some twitch, the archbishop lurched up as if a back spasm suddenly struck him and Nick thought that he’d been hit or something; but no, it just seemed to be the random play of events in a very small compass that for whatever reason, instead of lowering his head to take the president’s garland he raised it and pushed his head into the kill zone where Swagger’s bullet hit it full force, back right rear quadrant.
The moment, frozen in the stillness of the videotape was staggering: ripeness is all, said Lear, though Nick had learned it from Joseph Heller in Catch-22 when Snowden died in the back of the plane, but here it was again, that message. Man was matter. Light him, he’ll burn. Sink him, he’ll drown. Shoot him in the head, his head will explode.
The head seemed to disappear in a sudden flame of motion, a smear across the lens as if the atoms were individually decomposing. In actuality, of course, it was a.308 caliber 200-grain bullet hitting at about fourteen hundred feet per second, breaching the cranial vault, opening like a steel tulip inside, veering crazily through the whorls and confusions of the august archbishop’s gray matter and blowing crazily out his left eye socket and in so doing spattering tissue into the horrified face of the president of the United States.
“He’s a complete rag doll the microsecond the bullet goes through him,” said Hap.
There was a moment of almost holy silence as the man’s death loomed in frozen grandeur on the screen.
“It’s a little tough to tell from this angle, Hap, but are we sure the president was the intended target? Jesus, that’s a dead center hit to me,” somebody said.
“Now I don’t want that kind of talk,” Howdy Duty said, asserting himself for the first time and quick to deal with the apostasy. “That’s exactly the kind of nonsense that got started during 1963 and haunts us to this day. Yes, absolutely the president was the target, you can see the way the head rose into the line of fire.”
But Nick just sat there staring at the moment of death, the brains like a breaking red wave emptying themselves in the face of the president who had not yet begun to react. He’d thought so much about shooting a person at long range – it had been his life once, before Myra, his vanity that he could do it, do it well, save lives, become a hero – and something now reached him that disturbed him.
He tried to fix on it, to sift it out of the data but -
“Nick? Nick? Hey, somebody poke Nick, he’s sleeping!”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry, what’s up, Hap?”
“Nick, you did some sniper time on SWAT, any way he’s not shooting at Flashlight?”
“Ahh – ” Nick paused.
“Well, Nick?” asked Howdy Duty.
“Can you get an angle reading from the point of impact and the wound channel and trace it back to a source and make sure it came from that house?”
“No. Just got the report from Washington. They ran it through their big ballistics mainframe program, and the best they can do is pinpoint a rough semicircle of about seven degrees. And there’s over nineteen buildings with windows opening onto the shooting site from there. We’ve been over each of them, though, and the only one that had blood and a rifle in it and an empty shell happened to be the one where Bob the Nailer walked on a nine-mil and took your Smith,” Hap said.
“Well, that’s it then,” said Nick, letting it slide, knowing he’d hoard his doubt at least a little longer, rather than risk Howdy Duty’s ire this early in it, and hanging on to his career by a pubic hair.
“Okay, let’s go on,” said Hap.
Impelled by the force of the bullet, the cleric now plunged forward and smashed into the president, and the two went down in a terrible heap.
“Archbishop Roberto Lopez crashes into Flashlight, after spraying him with tissue and blood, but by this time the bullet has exited and smashed into the wood of the podium slat,” Hap continued to narrate, “where it will be recovered by our ballistic technicians, too damn mutilated for a ballistics signature reading. Still, one bullet, two men down, elapsed time four one-hundreths of a second. It’s a hell of a piece of shooting.”
The drama continued to unfold, now in real time. In seconds, Secret Service men of Alpha Security Team, pulling Uzis from God knows where, are surrounding Flashlight so that no other bullet may reach him. Mere anarchy is loosed around the podium, but the Alpha guys stay very calm and completely purposeful.