His shoulder pressed against the Bronco’s door as Danny Pastor took Vito around a hard, left-bending curve. A long, strange life, it had been that all right. From the beginning, it seemed, promised to the field of battle. Way back in another time, he might have been something else, a sailor on one of Cook’s voyages or a mountain man in the high evergreens.
Mountain men… from the Park Slope area of Brooklyn, you could see Manhattan across the East Paver, and on foggy days the towers resembled mountains; that’s how he’d imagined it when he was young. He’d sat in the bay window of his parents’ fourth-floor walk-up, three floors above an Italian restaurant taking up the whole bottom floor, and had thought about mountain men. He’d read about them in a library book and after that wanting to be one and having the freedom to go where the wind took you and coming back only when you felt like it. No buses, no subways, no school, none of that.
The day he’d left Park Slope for good was low hung and dark, foggy a little, and the towers had looked like mountains again. He’d stood there looking at them across the East River getting ice along its edges, thinking it might be the last time he’d see those mountains, probably for sure the last he’d see of them from this window. He was going to Minnesota, and he wasn’t certain if there were mountains out there or not, didn’t think so. Lakes, though, that’s what his mother said. She’d told him that a week before, exactly a month to the day after his father had pulled out, leaving Clayton and her alone.
When Clayton had asked, “Why’d Dad leave us?” his mother replied, “Elmer just felt closed in, I guess.” She’d been all weepy and slumped over when she’d said it.
Clayton was the youngest of five children, the other four gone and paying their way, and his parents had been old by parent standards when he’d come along, unexpected and unwelcome.
“We didn’t plan on Clayton,” his mother had said once to a friend of hers and not aware Clayton could hear them talking. “There were things we wanted to do, and they didn’t include another child. My God, four are enough to raise in this world.”
“Land sakes, yes.” The other woman had nodded in fast agreement, sweeping her hand as if she were brushing away unwanted children. “I should think so. We stopped after three. Nobody needs a caboose these days.”
His mother had sat him down and told him what was for sure and what had to be done. “Clayton, I’ve found a job at Landowski’s Cleaners over on Fourteenth, but I can’t make enough to take care of us both, Your grandparents out in Ely say it’s all right if you come and live with them for a while. It’s real nice there, lots of lakes and woods, You’ll be happier out of the city. I’ll find a smaller place I can afford and send along a little money if I can.”
Clayton Price had looked at his mother, blue eyes running toward gray looking straight at her. His father was gone, his mother was sending him away… . “We didn’t plan on Clayton… . There were things we wanted to do.” He’d understood, in a way. She already looked old at fifty-two, as old as his grandparents looked in the photograph on the bureau in her room, and they looked older than Jim Bowie’s grave.
Clayton may have understood… kind of, why his parents hadn’t wanted him, how he’d screwed up their plans. He may have understood… kind of, but he’d been only ten and a caboose at that, and Ely, Minnesota, had seemed forever out there someplace.
Margaret Price and her unexpected youngest son had ridden the train to Manhattan. There she’d put Clayton on a bus headed west. November 29, 1952, that’s when it was, and snowing heavy by late afternoon. Margaret Price always remembered afterward how hard it had been snowing when Clayton got into the Greyhound. Army had defeated Navy 7—0 earlier in the day, Ike was going to be the new president, the French Union forces in Vietnam were doing pretty well and looking as if they’d stopped the march of communism right in its tracks.
The bus had rolled out of the Port Authority Terminal and Margaret Price was waving to Clayton on that day and not able to see him very well behind the steamed-up windows. Clayton Price had eight dollars in his pocket, and Ely, Minnesota, had looked like a long way down the road. He’d wondered again for about the millionth time why his father left when and how he did, just pulling out that way, and that was something nobody ever knew.
“The bus drivers’ll help you, Clayton, and your grand-folks’ll meet you in Duluth.” His mother had said those words somewhere around twenty times that one afternoon before the Greyhound closed its big door with a sigh and headed for a far place.
Clayton had wiped at the steamy window beside him, making circular motions with his mitten on the glass, trying to see his mother one more time. She’d stood there and was hard to see in all the smoke from a lot of buses and on the other side of a window that was dirty on the outside and which Clayton couldn’t get perfectly free of steam on the inside no matter how hard and fast he’d wiped it. People were already carrying Christmas packages, hurrying through the weather and passing in front of and behind Margaret Price in her black cloth coat and faded orange scarf. Big wheels turning and Margaret Price running then alongside the bus on the wet street with her purse hanging over her left arm and flopping out there all the while she ran. And Clayton reading her lips with which she was saying, “I love you,” but he didn’t believe it then and didn’t later on and never would after that day.
When he’d finished boot camp at Parris Island in 1960, both Margaret and Elmer Price had come down for the ceremonies. He hadn’t invited them, but his grandmother had written Margaret and said Clayton had joined the marines partly because his teeth needed a lot of fixing and the government said they’d fix his teeth if he joined up. His parents had gotten back together a year after he’d left Park Slope but never said anything about him coming back there and sending instead some money to Ely each month to help out with his board.
His head had been shaved close for the ceremonies, and he’d received a special award for marksmanship. A younger Clayton Price had been able to hit a jackrabbit on the run in heavy brush by the time he left Ely, could do it with a .22-long rifle bullet. He hadn’t cared much for shooting at stationary targets the way they had in boot camp, and it wasn’t hard measured up against what you had to do in the woods, particularly for Clayton Price. Some people can draw faces or make pool balls dance to any tune they want right from the start; others can think through mathematics and paint in watercolors. Clayton Price could handle guns and eventually outshot twenty-six hundred other marksmen at the National High-Power Rifle Championship at Camp Perry, Ohio. He did that later on in the early sixties, did it shooting at a target a thousand yards out where the bulls-eye looked like a pinhead down his scope.
His parents had come up to him after the ceremony and all full of pride and saying how fine he looked in his uniform. Clayton hadn’t smiled, not even a flicker of one, and he hadn’t been trying to hold it back or anything, it just hadn’t been there for these people from another time, from a different planet or another world, was how he thought of them back then and still did ever after in the times out in front of him. But the marines in addition to fixing his teeth had taught him something about being a gentleman, so he’d shaken hands with both of them and hadn’t done any more than just that all the while his mother was standing on her tiptoes and kissing his cheek and having her picture taken with him. Said then he had to go, even though he hadn’t gone anywhere except back to the barracks, where he’d cried a little over seeing those people from another world again and knowing then he’d never go near them, not one more time in his life. Also knowing the best way to go from there on out was not to count on anyone ever again or even to care for anyone again or let anyone care for you.
And a few years later, dawn and warm rain falling on leaves and grass, mist above the rice paddies. Twelve hours in the “hide” with gnats around your face and ants crawling in your ears and under your clothes… leeches hanging on to you… mosquitoes biting and you can’t swat them away, no movement allowed. Becoming part of the landscape. Estimatin
g windage by the feel of it on your face and the bend of grass five hundred yards out, watching heat waves to get a sense of how the bullet will ride. Living for a week on nothing but water and basic C-rations—peanut butter, jelly, cheese, and crackers. Four more killing days to Christmas, as a major had said before the chopper took off last night.
Lying there, concentrating, looking for a movement of brown or green in a wall of brown and green. Scanning the natural lines of drift where people tend to walk or rest. Mornings and evenings are best. Charlie’s just waking up or tired and careless after a day’s work.
The beat of your heart against the earth, the smell of solvent residue coming off your rifle bolt, a flat-shooting Remington 700 with a Redfield nine-power scope.
“There he is,” your spotter whispers. “The hamburger in the door, epaulets and clean uniform, binoculars. NVA colonel.”
Officers: Always look for the clean uniform, the binoculars, the one with a radio man close by. Dumb bastard’s standing in the door of a hut, yawning.
Check your body position and scope picture.
“I make it eight five zero yards,” you whisper.
“Eight fifty, eight seventy-five,” your spotter whispers back.
It all seems kind of… kind of dreamlike. “four teacher, White Feather, calls it his “bubble,” going into a place of concentration and focus so clear that it becomes a universe of its own where nothing and no one can intrude.
Check again: the bend of grass, the heat waves.
Wait for the flattest part of your breathing cycle.
Control the trigger pull, the follow-through.
The recoil against your shoulder, and on the other side of the valley, a man jolts back into the darkness of a hut.
Your spotter gives you a thumbs-up, and the two of you begin a reverse crawl down your escape route.
The world of Clayton Price.
A strange world, and a long, strange life, aloneness mostly, loneliness sometimes. Never a woman for any amount of time. Nothing like the one riding close behind him, the one he could smell in the compressed space of a Bronco called Vito when they slowed and the breeze no longer blew away the pleasant mix of perfume and sweat coming off her. He straightened in his seat and glanced back. Luz María was looking at him.
In the Learjet hammering southwest, different smells. The distinct, unalloyed scents of coffee and gun oil. Walter McGrane glanced up when he heard the soft click of a rifle bolt. One of the men across from him was examining the sniper rifle. He watched the man work the bolt, checking over the tool of graceful agony that could have been a candidate for an award in contemporary design, curving metal and angular parts machined to a level of precision usually reserved for fine watches. The man, machined to precision like the rifle and known to him only as Weatherford, ran a soft cloth along the barrel as if he were touching a woman.
The rifle, forty-four inches long and weighing a little over fourteen pounds with its scope, was chambered for a match-grade 7.62,173-grain bullet. One second after being fired, the bullet would hit the center of a man s chest at a thousand yards, over a half mile away, every time, in the hands of a skilled marksman, and the men across from Walter McGrane were skilled. Sometime in the next few days, if things went well and the Mexican government stayed out of their way, the reticles on the sniper’s scope would lie across the chest of Clayton Price, who would never hear the sound that killed him.
Walter McGrane didn’t like going after one of their own. He didn’t much like any of this anymore. But so be it and so it lay. He was a field man by his own preference, and he’d been ordered to do it by the Pure Intelligence office boys, the suits, the idiot theoreticians, “espiocrats,” as le Carre or somebody had called them. Those who’d never used a dead drop in Bucharest, had never worn goggles in the blowing dust of Algeria while a jeep climbed rocky outcrops, had never done a goddamned thing except go to school. Had no idea what the field was like, the calm and concentration on the face of a man such as Broadleaf when you were putting him out in some bloody middle-of-nowhere to do a job. On paper, everything looked good. In the dust and smoke out where it all happened, there was always the human factor, the Clayton Prices going off the path and screwing up the neat calculations and impeccable logic.
By their own choices, the shadowmen marched in a narrow path of rules and instruction, and any deviation meant things would come to an end for them. Everyone knew that and accepted it; some walked off the path anyway for reasons they alone might understand but probably couldn’t articulate, Years from now, or even tomorrow, the men across from Walter McGrane might go off the path without warning from their actions or words. Fortunately, most of them did not and retired to obscure places where they planted gardens and lived with their images of blood and brains and work carried out for reasons they’d never been told.
All of them, the scout-snipers, were handpicked. The best were farm boys or other bush-smart kids who spent their growing years in the out-of-doors, where they developed fieldcraft skills and a sharp sense of how nature operates, acquired a sense of belonging to the wild. North country trappers, West Texas deer stalkers, Arkansas squirrel hunters. Excellent noncorrected vision, slow heartbeat. Great physical condition, mental discipline, attention to detail, and, most of all, that thing called patience.
Over the years, Walter McGrane had worked with Centipede and Broadleaf, never with Tortoise. But he’d heard about him, had read the dossier.
PRICE, CLAYTON LEE
… as with other scout-snipers, Gunnery Sgt. Price has strong mental stability and patience to the extreme. To quote from one study on hired killers, which applies to Sgt. Price, though not necessarily to all snipers: “They are surprisingly ordinary people without spectacular failings… (though) this kind of personality has difficulty forming lasting emotional relationships to people. The pendulum swings of emotion associated with some psychoses are absent. (They) are rational in a negative and perverse Dostoyevskian sense and thoughtfully aware of their motives and the consequences of their acts. Feeling neither joy nor sadness and indifferent to death, they are unable to relate to others. (He) accurately perceives reality but is limited in his capacity to respond to it emotionally. To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton: He is not someone who has lost his reason, rather he is someone who has lost everything but his reason.…”
And there was something one of Price’s commanders from Vietnam had said that stuck in Walter McGrane’s mind, made him shiver down inside when he thought of it: “I knew Clayton Price from ’Nam and later on in Africa when I was doing some freelance work. Man, he was scary. I always was glad he was on our side in those days, though I’m not sure whose side he might be on now. Being up against Clayton Price is like shooting pool with Pool itself; give him the break and he’ll run the table on you. Afterward, he’ll read the morning paper and never look back.”
Only four or five of the old ones were left now. But within the Covert Operations Unit, where Walter McGrane drew his pay, they were legends of a sort, discussed over coffee and after-dinner drinks at good restaurants.
“Christ, can you believe this: Morelock once hit a VC at twenty-five hundred yards with a fifty-caliber machine gun converted into a sniper weapon. Shot him right off a goddamned bicycle.”
“I know Morelock holds the all-time kill record from ’Nam. Who’s second?”
“Tortoise—Price—I think. If I recall correctly, he had eighty-two confirmed, something over two hundred more classified as ’probables.’ “
The stories went on, the legends endured, about White Feather and Centipede and Tortoise and the rest. They were the colorful ones. White Feather had become an instructor at Quantico; the rest, those who weren’t dead or retired, were still out there someplace, lying in wait until called upon by whatever or whoever required their services. And McGrane knew their credo, their simple and overriding criterion for success: one shot, one kill. In Vietnam, the average number of rounds expended per kill by ordinary soldiers was in the range
of two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand. The snipers had averaged 1.3 per kill. At three for two, Price had fallen below the standard in Puerto Vallarta.
In his associations with the shadowmen, Walter McGrane had always been surprised at how ordinary they seemed, no spectacular failings that one might notice right off. But he’d read the psychological evaluations: “The subjects all possess great courage, a high tolerance for discomfort and for being alone for extended periods of time. However, they share a common trait of being unable to form lasting emotional relationships with other people. Though they perceive reality much more directly, quickly, and accurately than most, they are limited in their capacities to respond to it emotionally For example, the exhaustive studies by Ingram and Marks have disclosed a remarkable lack of hate directed at the enemy. On the contrary, the so-called shadowmen seem to have only respect for the enemy and no thought of killing for revenge. According to Ingram and Marks, that latter characteristic is partly a tactic for completing the mission, partly a matter of survival. Maintaining an emotional distance from the quarry focuses concentration and prevents the man from making foolish mistakes based on personal reasons, which would render him both ineffective and vulnerable.”
Walter McGrane looked out the window at black night roaring by. “Personal reasons”… Therein lay the fault and the flaw of what had once been a perfect killing machine. Clayton Price had made that mistake, reducing his emotional distance from a target. Had taken that distance down to zero, in fact, and got too close, even though he’d been warned years ago to forget his one personal vendetta.