He had them he had them he had them. He was in the blind spot, he found the angle, he veered for the fatal smash—
Where you gonna run to, all on that day?
A curiosity. Unprecedentedly, before he struck, the van disappeared. No, it didn’t disappear, it braked hard but well, instantly jettisoning its speed, and in a nanosecond was out of the kill zone as he oversped. But as it disappeared, it also revealed. That revelation was another vehicle, just ahead, so close to the first that it had been hidden by the height of the van. In another nanosecond Brother Richard discovered that it was a Dodge Charger like his own, only glistening black, the V8 6.7 liter Hemi, 425 horses raring to go.
In that second, too, he recognized the profile of its driver. It was his brother, Matt, the NASCAR hero, whom he’d always adored but whom he also hated, for Matt had the life that he, Johnny, so wanted.
Matt nodded.
The Sinnerman knew what would happen next.
Matt slid inside him, came left hard, hit him just beyond the rear quarter panel, and he felt the traction going as the car floated left. Before he could stop himself, he overcorrected, and the car launched at 140 miles per.
Where you gonna run to, all on that day?
You’re not going to run anywhere. There was no place to run.
He was floating, his tires lost contact with the surface of the earth, the moon was bleeding, the sea was boiling, the car was rolling, all on this day.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This one began the second I saw the Speedway at night, loaded with fans, frenzy, and happiness. I thought: What they need is a good gunfight! I recommend a trip to Bristol whether it’s a racing weekend or not, for that view of the hugeness of the structure in the greenness of the valley is shocking and somehow awesome. It stands for man’s monumental imagination and his ability to impose his will on nature. On the other hand, if those aren’t your values, you’d better stay away. Anyhow, I was down there visiting my daughter, Amy, who, like Nikki, is a reporter for the Bristol Herald Courier, and she’s just as gallant and intrepid as Nikki, even if I’m a far cry from Bob Lee Swagger. Without giving it a thought, I had bumbled into the most fantastic American spectacle I’d ever seen and knew I had to do something with it.
The confluence of daughter and setting suggested a plot, though it took a while to get it all straightened out. In the early going, the story was going to revolve around an attempt to fix a race and would have required penetrating NASCAR culture to a far greater extent. Ten minutes into a race convinced me that “fixing” was impossible, so I diverted to something more gun-centric and fireworks-intensive. Had a hell of a good time doing it, too.
Thanks to the usual suspects and some newcomers as well. Thanks to Amy for inspiring it, thanks to NASCAR for being so much fun to write about, thanks to the millions who attend NASCAR events, for their good humor, enthusiasm, charisma, and consumption of beer in epic quantities. Thanks to Gary Goldberg, who became a sort of majordomo of the book, and figured out, among so many things, how much $8 million in small bills would weigh. Thanks to John Bainbridge for proofreading, to Lenne Miller, Jay Carr, Frank Starr, Mike Hill, and Jeff Weber for good counsel and morale. Thanks to Jean, as usual, for going along on my mad flights with a good spirit. Thanks to Folk Village, and XM-15 for playing “Sinnerman” at the precise moment I was trying to get a handle on the driver. Thanks to Ylan Q. Mui at The Washington Post for her help with Bob’s Vietnamese. Thanks to the professionals: my agent, Esther Newberg, my publisher, David Rosenthal, and my editor, Colin Fox.
Thanks to Kimber, DPMS, and Black Hills for inspiring all the hardware. Thanks to Dodge for the Charger, a piece of work and a half. Most of all, thanks to you for entertaining my efforts.
I, SNIPER
ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER
Night of Thunder
The 47th Samurai
American Gunfight (with John Bainbridge, Jr.)
Now Playing at the Valencia: Pulitzer Prize Essays on the Movies
Havana
Pale Horse Coming
Hot Springs
Time to Hunt
Black Light
Dirty White Boys
Point of Impact
Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem
Target
The Day Before Midnight
The Spanish Gambit (Tapestry of Spain)
The Second Saladin
The Master Sniper
SIMON & SCHUSTER
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hunter, Stephen.
I, sniper : a Bob Lee Swagger novel / Stephen Hunter.
p. cm.
1. Swagger, Bob Lee (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Vietnam War,
1961–1975—Veterans—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction.
4. Marines—Fiction. 5. Snipers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3558.U494I3 2009
813'.54—dc22
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6515-4
eISBN: 978-1-4165-6616-8
This book is dedicated to the American writers who have provided me with so much education, illumination, insight, enjoyment, and delight over the past twenty-five very good years, with apologies to the many I’ve left out:
Michael Bane, Massad Ayoob, Jan C. Libourel, Rick Hacker,
David M. Fortier, Chuck Taylor, Peter G. Kokalis, Wiley Clapp,
Don Cates, Sam Fadala, Patrick Sweeney, Craig Boddington,
Barrett Tillman, Duane Thomas, Layne Simpson, Garry James,
Walt Rausch, John Feamster, John L. Plaster, Frank James,
Roy Huntington, Charles Cutshaw, Gary Paul Johnston,
Mike Venturino, John Barsness, LeRoy Thompson, Dan Shea,
Frank Iannamico, Jacob Gottfried, Dave Anderson, John Taffin,
Holt Bodinson, Gene Gangarosa, Rick Jamison, Wayne Van Zoll,
Terry Wieland, Clint Smith,
and
the late Chuck Karwan and the late Robert T. Shimek.
Why, they couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance!
MAJOR GENERAL JOHN SEDGWICK,
COMMANDER, UNION VI CORPS, MOMENTS
BEFORE HIS DEATH BY RIFLE FIRE FROM
CONFEDERATE SHARPSHOOTERS,
SPOTSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA, MAY 9, 1864
1
The time has long passed in America when one can say of a sixty-eight-year-old woman that she is “still” beautiful, the snarky little modifier, all buzzy with irony, signifying some kind of miracle that one so elderly could be so attractive. Thus everyone agreed, without modification, that Joan Flanders was beautiful in the
absolute—fully beautiful, extremely beautiful, totally beautiful, but never “still” beautiful. Botox? Possibly. Other work? Only Joan and her doctors knew. The best in dental work, an aggressive workout regimen, the most gifted cosmeticians and hairdressers available to the select? That much certainly was true.
But even without the high-end maintenance, she would have been beautiful, with pale smooth skin, a lioness’s mane of thick reddish blond hair, piercing blue eyes set behind prominent cheekbones, a slender stalk of neck and a mere slip of body, unfettered by excess ounces, much less pounds. She was dressed in tweeds and white cashmere, expertly tailored, and wore immense sunglasses that looked as if flying saucers of prescription glass had landed on the planet of her face. She took tea with a great deal of grace and wit, with her Hollywood agent, a famous name but with a dull generic quality to him no one would recognize, and her gay personal assistant. The group sat on the patio of the Lemon Tree in downtown East Hampton, New York, on a bright fall day with just a brush of chill in the air as well as salt tang from the nearby Atlantic. There were two other stars on the patio, of the young, overmoussed generation, one female, one indeterminate, as well as a couple of agents with their best-selling writers, the wives of a couple of Fortune 500 CEOs, and least three mistresses of other Fortune 500 CEOs, as well as the odd tourist couple and discreet celeb watchers, enjoying an unusually rich harvest of faces.
Joan and Phil were discussing—the market recovery? Paramount’s new vice president of production? The lousy scripts that were being sent her after the failure of her comeback picture Sally Tells All? Ex-hubby Tom’s strange new obsession with the kiddie shoot-’em-ups of his past? It doesn’t matter. What matters is only that Joan was twice royalty: her father, Jack, had been one of the major stars bridging the pre- and postwar era and she had gotten his piercing eyes and bed-knob cheekbones. She was pure Hollywood blueblood, second generation. But as well, her second husband had been a prominent antiwar leader in the raging if far-off sixties, and her picture, aboard the gunner’s chair on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft battery, had made her instantly beloved and loathed by equal portions of her generation. That made her political royalty, a part of the hallowed crusade to end a futile war; or it made her a commie bitch traitor, but still royalty. The rest was detail, albeit interesting. She had won an Oscar. She had been married to the billionaire mogul T. T. Constable, in one of the most documented relationships in history. She had made one of her several fortunes as an exercise guru and still worked out three hours a day and was as fit as any thirty-five-year-old. All who saw her that day felt her charisma, her history, her beauty, her royal presence, including the tourists, the other stars, the wives and mistresses, and her executioner.
He spared her and America the disturbing phenomenon of a head shot. Instead, he fired from about 340 yards out and sent a 168-grain Sierra hollow point boat tail MatchKing on a slight downward angle at 2,300 feet per second to pierce her between her fourth and fifth ribs on the left-hand side, just outside the armpit; the missile flew unerringly through viscera without the slightest deviation and had only lost a few dozen pounds of energy when it hit her in the absolute center of the heart, exactly where all four chambers came together in a nexus of muscle. That organ was pulped in a fraction of a second. Death was instantaneous, a kind of mercy, one supposes, as Ms. Flanders quite literally could not have noticed her own extinction.
As in all cases of public violence, a moment of disbelief occurred when she toppled forward, accidentally broke her fall on the table for a second, but then torqued to the right and her body lost purchase and completed its journey with a graceless thud to the brick of the patio. Nearly everyone thought “She’s fainted,” because the rifle report was so far away and suppressed that no identifier with the information “gun” was associated with the star’s fall to earth. It took a second more for the exit wound to begin copious blood outflow, and that product spread in a dark sheen from her body, at which point the human fear of blood—quite natural, after all—asserted itself and screams and panic and running around and jumping up and down and diving for cover commenced.
It wasn’t long before the police arrived and set up crime scene operations, and not long at all after that when the first of what would become more than three hundred reporters and photographers arrived on scene and the whole two blocks of downtown East Hampton took on an aspect that resembled none of Joan Flanders’s twenty-eight films but vividly recalled those made by an Italian gentleman named Federico Fellini. In all that, no one noticed a blue Ford van pulling out of an alley 340 yards away to begin a trip to another destination and another date with history.
The shooter did not spare his audience the theatrics of gore for his next two victims. He went for the head, hit it perfectly, and blew each one all over the insides of the Volvo in which they were just beginning their daily commute. The range this time was shorter, 230 yards, but the ordnance was identical and the accuracy just as superb. He hit the first target one inch below the crown of the skull, dead center. There had been no deviation through the rear window glass of the heavy Swedish car. Unlike in the Flanders hit, there was no immediate hubbub. Jack Strong merely slumped forward until his shattered skull hit the steering wheel and rested. His wife, Mitzi Reilly, pivoted her head at the ruckus, had a second’s worth of abject horror—police found urine in her panties, a fact not publicized, thankfully—before the second bullet hit her above and a little forward of the left ear. In both cases the hollow point target bullet blossomed in its puncture of skull bone and spun sideways, whimsically, as it plowed through brain matter, then exited in a horrendous gusher of blood, gray stuff, and bone frags, above an eye in one case, below the other eye in the other, cracking the face bone like a pie plate.
The car, which was in gear and running, then eased forward under the pressure of Jack’s dead foot and hit the wall of the garage, where its progress halted. No one heard the gunshots, and indeed, the sound of gunshots in that part of Chicago was not remarkable to begin with. Jack and Mitzi lay like that for over an hour until a FedEx truck came down the alley seeking a shortcut through Hyde Park. The driver had trouble getting by, noticed the exhaust tendrils still curling from the pipe, and got out to inquire of the drivers what was going on. He discovered the carnage, called 911, and within minutes the Fellini movie starring Chicago police, FBI, and media had commenced on this site too.
It would be said that Jack and Mitzi went out together as they had lived, fought, and loved together. They were famous, not as much as Joan Flanders, but in their own world stars as well. Both tracked their pedigrees back to the decade of madness against which Joan Flanders had stood out. But it had been so long ago.
Jack, high-born (né Golden) of Jewish factory owners, well educated, passionate, handsome, had grown up in the radical tradition in Hyde Park, taken his act to Harvard, then Columbia, had been a founder of Students for Social Reform, and for a good six years was the face of the movement. At a certain point he despaired of peaceful demonstration as a means of affecting policy, much less lowering body count, and in 1971 went underground, with guns and bombs.
It was there that he met the already famous Mitzi Reilly, working-class Boston Irish, fiery of temperament and demeanor, intellectually brilliant, who had already been photographed on the sites of several bombings and two bank robberies. Redheaded with green eyes and pale, freckly skin, she was the fey Irish lass turned radical underground guerrilla woman-warrior, beloved by media and loathed by blue-collar Americans. She reveled in her status, and when Jack came aboard—it was a matter of minutes before they were in the sack together, and the fireworks there were legendary!—the team really took off, both in fame and in importance. They quickly became the number one most wanted desperadoes on J. Edgar’s famous list, and somehow, through sympathetic journalists, continued to give interviews, stand still for pictures—both had great hair, thick, luxuriant, and strong, artistic faces; they burned holes in film—and operate.
Their b
iggest hit was the bombing of the Pentagon. Actually, it was a three-pound bag of black powder going boom off a primitive clock fuse in a waste can that created more smoke than damage, but it was symbolic, worth more than a thousand bombs detonated at lesser targets. It closed down a concourse for a couple of hours, more because of the insane press coverage than for any actual threat to people or operations, but it made them stars of an even bigger magnitude.
Their career began to turn when they were building a bigger bomb for a bigger target, but this time the boom came in the bedroom, not the Capitol, and both fled, leaving behind a good sister who’d managed to blow herself up. They were hunted and running low on money, and a violent bank robbery may or may not have followed—the FBI said yes, it was them; the Nyackett, Massachusetts, police were split—that left two security guards dead, shot down from behind by a tail gunner. It was a bad career move, whoever did it, because the dead men had children and were nothing but working stiffs, not pigs or oppressors or goons, just two guys, one Irish, one Polish, trying to get by, with large families depending on their three jobs, and the hypocrisy of a movement dedicated to the people that shot down two of the people was not lost on the public. Jack and Mitzi were never formally tied to this event, because the bank surveillance film, recovered by the police, was stolen from a processing lab and never recovered. Otherwise, it was said, they’d be up on capital murder charges and have a one-way to the big chair with all the wires attached, as Massachusetts dispatched its bad ones in those days.
A few years passed; times changed; the war ended, or at least the American part of it. Jack and Mitzi hired a wired lawyer who brokered a deal, and then it came out that in its efforts to apprehend them, the police and federal agencies had broken nearly as many laws as the famous couple had. In the end, rather than expose their own excesses to the public, the various authorities agreed to let it all slip. They were “guilty as hell, free as a bird,” as Jack had proclaimed on the event, and able to rejoin society.