“Negative, but thanks and noted. No, my team will apprehend. It’s a small room, I don’t want a lot of people in there rushing and crowding. Three’s enough. Body armor, helmet, backup shotguns but primary personnel—that is, myself and Agents Fields and Chandler—will go in with handguns behind flashbangs. Okay? My call, that’s how I’m calling it.”
He went ahead with further tactical details: all SWAT teams cocked and locked at the holding point, the helicopters in orbit a mile out, roadblocks in place, medical teams on standby—everything was checked off until there was nothing more to do except the thing itself.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They scampered through the darkness, hit the hotel office, where a squad of cops waited breathlessly. They nodded, did a last checkoff, and slid down the hallway, passing cop sentries every few feet. The approach to Carl’s room, however, was clear, and they slid to it.
Nick looked at his watch, saw that it was 5 a.m.
He nodded to his two colleagues. Ron Fields slipped by him. He had a Mossberg entry gun, a short-barreled pump-action shotgun with a breaching round in the chamber. Next to him young Chandler, her Glock holstered gunfighter style in a low rig strapped to her thigh under her body armor, had a flashbang in each fist. With the thumb of each hand, she pulled the pins, holding the levers down. Fields squirmed to the doorknob, braced the muzzle of the short-barrel against it, made a visual check with each teammate, pushed the safety off, and made a last visual check with Nick.
Nick nodded.
Fields took a deep breath and fired.
The breaching round detonated in the narrow space of the hallway, splintering the door at the knob. Fields gave it a kick, and it flew open brokenly, and then he stood aside as Chandler tossed in each distraction grenade. In three seconds, the two detonated with a stunning double thunderclap, filling the universe with painful vibration and a flash of illumination so powerful it cut like a knife, disorienting anyone looking into it instead of, like the raiders, away from it.
Nick went through the door hard, his Glock in a steady two-hand grip, trigger finger indexed above the trigger guard, a SureFire light mounted on rails beneath the barrel burning a hole in the smoky turmoil conjured by the flashbangs. His beam showed nothing, and he advanced quickly, screaming, “FBI, hands up, FBI, hands up, FBI, hands up!”
But there was nobody there with hands to raise. Penetrated by Nick’s, then Fields’s, then Chandler’s beams, the darkness yielded no image of a man struggling to come awake and grope for a gun. The room was empty, the bed unmessed, nothing strewn about to signify human occupation, just the sterile neatness of an undisturbed motel room. The three rotated quickly to the bathroom, kicking the ajar door fully open and again revealing nothing. The shower curtain wasn’t even drawn, so there was no concealment behind it. Other cops arrived, forming up in the hallway; outside, shadows moved, where SWAT teamers from stations beyond the motel got close and laid their muzzles on a window to prevent any escape. But no target emerged.
The lights came on, revealing what was now nothing more than a room of overexcited policemen with guns drawn.
One last door remained. It was to the closet, just this side of the bathroom, and a cluster of guns zeroed it. Someone dipped in, pulled it open.
The many weapons-mounted lights captured the still Carl. He was in his underwear, a plaid pair of shorts and an OD T-shirt. His legs were stretched out, pale and glowing, the dark hair on them standing up bristling in the merciless lights. He held his rifle, which Nick numbly noted was the inevitable Remington 700 with a heavy barrel; his hand lay relaxed upon his thigh, where it had fallen from its awkward stretch to reach the trigger. In fact, because of the extra length of the barrel with the eight inches of steel suppressor affixed, he’d had to push the trigger with a straightened-out hanger. The hanger had fallen to the floor. The weapon ran up the length of his body to his mouth, almost as if cradled, a loving thing till the end, but at the mouth, the muzzle of its suppressor had nested, though in recoil it appeared to have knocked a few teeth out. He’d fired his last shot through the roof of his mouth in the closed closet, and the bullet had tunneled upward through his brain, plowed through the roof of the closet and perhaps lodged itself in the motel structure, where it could be recovered. Carl’s eyes were closed and his brains and blood painted the upper third of the closet, more abstract art for the clinically inclined. In all the circling light beams, the blood itself, red-orange, seemed to dance or pulsate, as if it still welled from the crater that had been the top of the man’s skull.
“He must have done it right away,” said Chandler. “There’s rigor in the limbs, so he’s been gone a long time. Maybe right after he checked in.”
“He knew it was all over,” said Ron. “He had no place to run. Besides, he completed his mission, he got to ninety-seven. He’s the champ again.”
6
As in Vietnam, the rains came. It was the season. They fell almost horizontally, sopping everything, turning the earth to gruel, squeezing mud up and over shoes. It was a penetrating rain, and nobody got away from it or didn’t feel its chill.
Swagger stood apart from the others and watched the box that contained what remained of Carl Hitchcock go into the ground. He hadn’t known Carl, as Carl had finished his sniper’s tour before Bob started his; afterwards, in the melancholy aftermath of a lost war, things turned and stayed strange for the longest time, and the two never came upon each other, though they cut trail often enough.
Then, the odd thing: in slow, steady increments, Carl got big. Being number one, at anything, still mattered in this country, and a book came along, some articles, and soon enough Carl was adding to his pension by standing still for autographs at gun shows and being beloved as the avuncular “Gunny,” a pop-cult stereotype with a background in real bloodletting that made certain no one ever laughed in his face and, stamping him a member of the killer elite or a knight of a round table, depending on your politics, would only permit other snipers or shooters in his presence; those who had not shot for blood felt quietly driven out and shunned.
Then, another thing, wholly unpredictable: what might be called “tactical culture.” Because of Carl or in spite of him or completely apart from him—who knew? but for some reason—a fascination with the designated life takers, the sanctioned force appliers, took root. The new man was the sniper, the commando, the CQB professional, the pistol jockey, the long-range hitter. Magazines like Soldier of Fortune and SWAT and Combat Handguns came alive, and serious men consumed reams and reams of paper debating such issues as “9mm v. .45 ACP” or “Instinct Shooting: Lifesaver or Fool’s Folly?” The fascination took hold of a certain demographic, some professional, some dreamers, but all obsessed with a kind of ideal warrior in an ideal gunfight. The core of the culture was equipment fetish, and soon enough boutique providers were turning out dedicated sniper rifles, pouches, straps, gizmos of all shapes and purposes, whole lines of tactical clothing, headgear, watches (always black), boots, vests, holsters with elaborately engineered snaps for security on the one hand and quickness of draw on the other. Carl was somehow the professor emeritus of this world, its guru, its revered elder. And it fed him, as he rode sniper chic to a nice enough income with his seminars for law enforcement marksmen, which he put on all over the country. He became at the same time a kind of sniper social worker and spent more than one night talking to someone who’d blown a shot or frozen at the ultimate moment. He counted again. He loved it. Who could blame him? Human nature being what it was, it was more fun to spend a retirement beloved than ignored.
But it had come to this: a civilian graveyard on the outskirts of Jacksonville, North Carolina, a wet fall day, a few disconsolate loners standing about in what appeared to be a crowd but was not, really, as no one pressed close; it was just a group of individuals standing in an almost-crowd. Some generic holy fellow read from the book but added nothing other than God’s pro forma respect for the dead. No one from the United States Marine
Corps attended.
How could they? Carl was deranged marine sniper, Carl was combat-shocked vet, Carl was crazed gunman, Carl was disappointed, depressed soldier, in the words of a prominent newspaper in New York that thought it was all right to call marines soldiers. So the Corps sent no one officially, despite all that Carl had given the Corps. That seemed wrong to Bob, but what did he know of such things and the way they turned out.
Again, like a Faulknerian blood curse, an original sin of violence and oppression, the hideous adventure that was this country’s misguided path in Vietnam in the late 1960s reaches out to claim yet more lives. Let it be written, that the tragic marine sniper Carl Hitchcock, once a hero and now an alleged murderer, is the last casualty of that war and that it can kill no more. Let us hope we are at last safe from it.
But let the Vietnam War stand also as a warning to further enticements in far-off lands; there have been a few since. The temptation to solve with violence that which cannot be solved with diplomacy is powerful, yet always wrong. Victory or defeat make little difference in the end. War turns heroes into Carl Hitchcocks with kills 94, 95, 96 and 97 the civilians who were only trying to save him. They are victims, but Carl Hitchcock was the tragedy, constructed by a culture that seeks its answers in high-velocity bullets.
That was the New York Times editorial page.
Bob hadn’t read any others online; he didn’t have the heart to, and it was another of his resentments that Carl had somehow become the platform for the eastern asshole press, and he doubted there was a man in an eastern press editorial room who’d been in Vietnam at all, much less as a marine, and yet somehow they were the ones who felt entitled to sound the words and play the bugle.
He tried to shake it off.
Getting old, all beat and cut to hell.
He still walked with a limp from a bad cut picked up a few years back. His hair was gray, his face bleak, his body old and achy. He’d been shot at a lot, hit a few times, and one of his hips was cold steel, five degrees icier than the weather every single day, always a reminder of how things can go wrong. But all that said, it was true too that he had it made.
He was sort of rich. He owned seven lay-up barns throughout the West and drew a good percentage from each with not a lot of overhead; his wife ran them beautifully. He had pensions from the marines as well as disability pay, so there’d always be enough money. He lived in a beautiful house outside Boise that looked across meadows to mountains. He had a few good horses, a few good rifles, a few good handguns, and a damned comfortable rocking chair on the porch. He had an all-terrain vehicle and a Ford F-150 and a Kawasaki 350. But he was richest in daughters: his oldest had just moved up in her chosen profession to a big newspaper, which made him happy; his other daughter had just won the girls’ Idaho twelve-and-under pony slalom crown at the junior NCAA rodeo in Casper and was only seven. The kid was a true samurai on horseback. That was a day of happiness so pure he thought he’d die of it, but then this terrible week happened that left four people dead and Carl with his brains blown out and everybody and his brother saying terrible things about marine snipers.
In time, the reverend Mr. Minister was done and backed off. One by one, the men filed by, just to see the box close up, perhaps reflect on the boxes he had put men into or the boxes they had put men into or the boxes they had almost gone into themselves. No one said a word. It wasn’t a crowd that would throw a drunken wake and end up in the hoosegow with black eyes, broken teeth, and memories of a great bar fight. In many ways, they were all Carls and all Swaggers: scrawny men with lots of fast-twitch muscles, hair crew cut yet thick, thousand-yard stares, the dignity of the professional military or police, no sense of emotional excess anywhere, no moans or tears. They weren’t quite buying into the crazed marine narrative and felt an urge to pay solemn last respects to a guy who’d done his duty always to the end.
When it was finished, the minister came to Bob.
“Was that what you had in mind, Mr. Swagger?”
“It was fine, Reverend. What do I owe you?”
“Sir, I hate to put a figure on such a melancholy occasion. Whatever’s in your heart.”
It wasn’t in Swagger’s heart; it was in Swagger’s hand, a crumple of hundreds, three of them, and he discreetly passed them to the minister.
“I’ll go to the office now and pay the cemetery people,” he said.
“You’re a Christian soul, sir.”
“Not really,” said Swagger.
“You knew him . . . before.”
“Knew of him. Not in his league. Sorry it came to this.”
“We all are.”
Bob said his good-bye to the man and walked to the road, where the few cars were parked. He drove the rental quickly to the cemetery headquarters, went inside, and took care of business. It was a matter of $4,000, and he wrote the check quickly, without thinking about it.
“Very good, Mr. Swagger. I must say, decent of you. I don’t know what would have happened to the body otherwise. No survivors. The estate will be tied up for weeks, maybe months. It’s so sad. He deserved so much better. I just don’t know what—”
Swagger didn’t want to hear it. The mortuary director was unctuous, as they tend to be, and trying to say the right things, but Swagger tuned him out, smiled, and when he heard a break in the man’s patter, slipped away.
He was walking to the car, thinking, Get to the airport by six, be back to Boise by ten, get to the house by midnight. Glad it didn’t run long. It’ll be—
“Say, wouldn’t you be the famed paid killer Bob Lee Swagger?”
The voice took him unawares because he’d been so deep into his own internals, he’d lost contact with the real world, always a bad mistake. Now what the hell was this? Some asshole?
He turned, faced another soaked man about his own age, swaddled in rain gear and melted boonie cap but with fewer lines and deeper tan, and something mischievous in his eyes, cluing Bob to the fact that the comment, in a tone of jest and needling, hadn’t been meant in hostility but as evidence of membership in the brotherhood of life takers.
“Who would you be?” Bob asked.
“Gunny, my name’s Chuck McKenzie. Lance corporal, retired. I was in the same line of work for a year plus a month.”
Swagger felt something pulse in his cold, dead heart and realized he was still a little alive.
“Chuck! Damn! Sure, Chuck. You’re the big Mr. Ninety-six, right?”
“That’s what they say. Myself, I never counted. Just figured if it had an AK-47, it was worth shooting.”
“Chuck, I’ll shake your hand gladly. You and me, brother, that’s us out there looking for AKs with targets attached. Glad you made it through your thirteen, glad you made it here.”
“You paid for this, right?”
“I guess so. Somebody had to, and I have a few bucks scraped up. That’s all.”
“Gunny, can we talk? Can I buy you a cup of coffee, a drink?”
Bob thought: there goes the flight plan.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s find a place. Coffee’s fine. I have a drinking problem just barely beat, and if I take a slug of bourbon, you won’t see me until the next monsoon.”
Chuck turned out to be something rare: the funny sniper. They sat in some imitation Starbucks in a suburb of a suburb, a nondescript warren full of interchangeable boys and girls, two old guys laughing and cackling, like the dry drunks they were, over topics so arcane no man but a sniper could have stayed with them or found it funny.
“It wasn’t the killing I minded,” Chuck said, “it was the paperwork. All them after-action reports. My trigger finger got cramps. I said, ‘Sir, you want me out shootin’, you gotta cut digit number one some slack, that old boy’s gittin’ all tuckered.’ I thought he’s going to say, ‘Corporal, put it on ice, like a pitcher. It’s too valuable to treat lightly. You, go on KP, but that finger, it’s got to be taken care of.’ Really, we wasn’t men, we’s trigger fingers that was unfortunately connected to m
en.
“What I liked,” he continued, “was the way some officers looked at you like you were Murder Inc. Mankiller, psycho nutcase, piece of dog turd on the shoe. That is, until they’s pinned down by a little guy in the bushes with a ninety-year-old Russian bolt gun, a three-buck scope, and a hunger to kill something big and white, with bars on its collars. Then you’re the man’s best friend! ‘Brother Chuck, so damn glad to see you. Chuck, Chuck, Chuckity-chuck, my closest compadre! Where you been, how’s the wife ’n’ kids, how’d you like a nice promotion, say, do you mind dusting that little feller in the bushes trying to put a squirt of lead up my ass?”
Bob laughed. It was pretty funny and oh so true.
“Ran into that a dozen times,” he said. “What was it? ‘Killer elite,’ something like that. We were more like dip-sucking redneck boneheads too dumb to know we were on the bull’s-eye ourselves, doing what they told us to do. Turned out they didn’t mean ‘Kill all those little bastards.’ What they meant was ‘Kill all those little bastards but don’t tell us about it, because we don’t want to have to think about it.’ ”
“Exactly.” Chuck laughed. “Gunny, that’s it. They didn’t want to think about it, but they didn’t care if we thought about it. Like the man said about whores, it ain’t the sex you’re paying them for, it’s the leaving after the sex. It wasn’t the killing they’s paying us for, it’s the remembering, so that they didn’t have to and could go home and enjoy Christmas with the kids and feel all clean and moral and heroic.”
“Well,” said Bob, “we made a lot of them feel heroic then. Still, with all the shit, we lived lives few men could imagine.”