“Okay, STAT, let’s move this man to the chopper and get him to Trauma. I’m staying on him to monitor vital signs.”
“I’m riding too,” said Nick, and he turned to Bob and said, “Baby, you were gone, you were in negative heartbeat, but we got you back, don’t ask me how.”
“I saw my dad, Nick,” said Bob.
“And you will again,” said Nick, “but I hope not for a long time.”
A Note on Method
Readers should be assured that I’ve made a good-faith effort to play fair by the data established in The Warren Commission Report, Case Closed by Gerald Posner, and Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi. Lee Harvey Oswald is always where those volumes say he was, and he always does what they say he did. All “conspiratorial business” takes place in times uncovered by any of the foregoing works. In my effort to construct a legitimate alternate narrative to the WC, I alter no known facts in order to make my argument tighter. I do reserve the novelist’s right to reinterpret motive and reason.
For a demonstration of my method, take as an example the shooting from the Book Depository and Oswald’s last run. I accept as factual the following: that he took three shots, that he cocked a last live cartridge into his chamber, that he walked across the ninety feet of the sixth floor, rifle in hand, that he hid the rifle at the head of the stairway down, that he escaped north up Elm and took a bus south down Elm, then a cab to his roominghouse on North Beckley in Oak Cliff, where he secured his revolver. Fifteen minutes later and a mile distant, he shot Officer Tippit, including a coup de grâce to the head. He was arrested in the Texas Theatre fifteen or so minutes after that. The Warren Commission, Posner, and Bugliosi agree on that.
To that historical record, I added motives and reasonable conjectures – that he planned to shoot when Kennedy was just below the sixth-floor window but somehow botched the opportunity; that he hurried all three shots at a diminishing target (exacerbating exponentially the likelihood of a miss on his last shot); that he was driven by a more pungent fear of his betrayers than he was of law enforcement, which drove him to an extremely foolhardy trip through the assassination zone to recover his .38; that he administered the final brain shot to Officer Tippit out of rage at his betrayal.
I should also add that all the firearms and reloading data in the book have been tested by myself and colleagues; it is possible to fire a Carcano bullet from the .264 Winchester Magnum case in a Model 70, with great velocity and accuracy. (NOTE: Firing a jacketed .267 Carcano bullet throught a .264 bore is not a recommended reloading practice, and the fact that we were able to do it without incident does not mean you will.) There are some tweaks I purposely left out to keep non-gun culture people from slipping into a coma, but in general, it is easily accomplished as I have described it.
I should add that I have deliberately avoided conspiracy books and have stayed out of assassination-community culture in hopes of not inadvertently picking up somebody else’s intellectual property. If I have accidentally absorbed something by osmosis or random white noise, I do apologize. I mean to steal no one’s bread.
I should also add that I made no inquiries into the state of the Abercrombie & Fitch firearms records and my account of their location and disposition is entirely fictitious.
Acknowledgments
Any book has a multitude of starting points. This one began on November 22, 1963, in the lunch hall of New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Illinois, where I got the news. I followed the events of the next three days with the concentration of any teenager whose world has just been rocked. And I followed the subsequent developments over time. It was the kind of thing that never went away.
I basically paused at each of the stations of the cross of assassination theory over the following forty-nine years. I believed the Warren Commission, then I believed Mark Lane and his compatriots (I never believed the secret surgery at Andrews Air Force Base, however; did anyone?), then I believed Posner and Bugliosi.
In my mind, it was pretty much settled history until John Carroll, the great editor of The Baltimore Sun, knowing I knew a thing or two about guns, asked me to cover Howard Donahue and the book Mortal Error, written about his theories, by Bonar Menninger. I met Howard, a Baltimorean through and through, I respected Howard, I liked Howard (who didn’t?); however, like Swagger, I found his explanation of the third bullet convincing but thought he went off into the wild blue yonder by ascribing it to a Secret Service agent with an AR-15 in a following car. It was hard to believe such a thing could happen in front of two thousand witnesses and nobody would see it.
Later in the process, Howard invited me to lunch. By that time he’d been pretty well fried in the press and was looking for a new method to illustrate his idea; he asked me to write a novel expressing his theory. I politely declined. I guess my subconscious, however, took up the challenge, and in a way, this is the book that Howard wanted me to write. To do it, I had to come up with my own theory about the second-rifle/third-bullet mystery.
Somewhere in all this – I can’t remember the exact chronology – I wrote a book called Point of Impact. It was inspired by the old Sun reporter Ralph Reppert’s earlier account of Howard’s theory in the Sun magazine. Howard had been one of the shooters in the tower at the H. P. White Ballistic lab in Maryland who took and hit the Oswald shots for CBS News’s re-creation. That was what started Howard on his odyssey.
I picked up on the idea of a marksman in a tower solving a shooting problem against a time clock and later realizing from the angles and the speed that he’d just reenacted the JFK assassination. I had to come up with a shooter, and so, with the help of Carlos Hathcock, I invented Bob Lee Swagger.
The idea was that the actual assassins were using Swagger in another hit, casting him in the role of Lee Harvey Oswald, to their infinite regret. As I progressed, I lost faith in my ability to bring it off, and I lost faith in conspiracy theories (I think Case Closed came out around then), so I ultimately kept Swagger but ditched JFK. At one point, I went through the manuscript and got rid of all the JFK references. Alas, I am by nature sloppy, so I missed many, and those accidental survivors later became the joinery between Point of Impact and this book. That’s how Hugh Meachum and Lon Scott came into it.
The most recent starting point was February 2011. I was writing a book called Soft Target and sitting around with my good pal Gary Goldberg in the living room. Somehow, the JFK assassination came up, and I performed my assassin-from-the-future routine, just as Richard does, and then I did riffs on the context of the Mannlicher-Carcano, the angles versus the proximity issue and several other subjects that I reuse in this book. We had a good old time, and I think there was hooch involved.
I said to Gary, “You know, maybe I ought to have Bob Lee Swagger solve the JFK conspiracy,” and we got a hearty laugh out of that one, and one second later, I thought, You know what? That’s a damn good idea. I ought to get Bob Lee Swagger to solve the JFK assassination.
The day after I finished Soft Target, I began The Third Bullet. It was a great ride, believe me. One of the best ever. Let me thank all those who pitched in.