The Third Bullet (9 page)

“At twelve minutes after midnight on Tuesday, November 5, 1968, the Russians launched.”

“Wow,” said Swagger. “Richard, this is getting a little weird, isn’t it?”

“Jack, you promised not to interrupt.”

“It’s a good thing I’m not a drinking man anymore, or you’d have me all bourboned up by now. I’d be fighting sailors, talking to young women, and calling my kids.”

“My whistle is dry. I need another beer.”

“After destroying the world, I’ll bet. Waiter!” He hailed the kid. “Get my father here another Tecate and refill my Diet, will you?”

“Sure. You guys want to see the dessert menu?”

“Hey, ice cream and nuclear firestorms turning me to ash, that’s a great idea,” Bob said.

Richard laughed. “Oh, it gets better.”

The beer came, and Richard rewarded himself for destroying the Western Hemisphere with a swallow, while Swagger drained his own half a Diet Coke in tribute to the burning cities and civilians slaughtered in their beds by the millions.

“Okay, Richard,” he said. “I guess I’m manned up enough to get on through this.”

“You only think you can’t handle the truth,” said Richard. He took a breath and began again.

“Who can blame them? It probably wasn’t even a decision made in the Kremlin. I’m sure it was some junior lieutenant general in some command bunker outside of Vladivostok. By the iron logic of his national philosophy and the Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction,
he did the right thing. Once the ‘mutually’ is taken out of the equation, the sane thing to do is fire.

“In thirty minutes of sustained SS-9 warfighting, over a hundred million Americans perished. All command and control bunkers were hit, SAC-NORAD was turned to radioactive glass, but there was no point in wasting megatonnage on the silos because they’d been disconnected from the computer grid and the local commanders, the first lieutenants in the holes with the two keys, didn’t have the flexibility to launch without command authority. Fail-safe, you know. Those weapons were redirected at smaller cities, so even the Dubuques and the Cedar Rapids and the Lawtons were fried on the thermonuclear griddle. So the Russians won World War III quite handily.

“Unfortunately, they didn’t do so well in World War IV, which started the next day. Assuming the Brits would sit it out, they assumed wrong, and the RAF went in low and hard and turned Eastern Europe into a funeral pyre. For its efforts, the RAF’s airfields were awarded secondary strikes from intermediate-range SS-7s, and since the airfields were attached to the island of Great Britain, another twenty or so million went up in flames.

“The Russians also thought they had the American carriers zeroed, but it turned out their subs were the ones on the zero. The American destroyers hunted and killed them like fish in barrels, and the carrier planes took out the Russian surface fleet with first-generation air-to-ship missiles, allowing the carrier medium bombers and attack planes to get close enough to roar up the soft underbelly of Redland at low level and deliver tactical nukes on all Red Army groups, tank concentrations, and any unfortunate cities in the neighborhood. Finally, one Boomer-class nuke missile sub that had been at sea and missed the fire that time got itself back into the game and launched without command. Sixteen Poseidons. A hundred and sixty megatons, COD. Returns not accepted. By the end of the first day of World War IV, the Russians had lost close to two hundred million people and their military structure had been utterly cremated.

“Then it looked like the Chinese, the Africans, and the South Americans would inherit the earth. Ha ha, joke’s on them. A little thing called nuclear winter set in. One of those unintended consequences people are always talking about. I hate it when that happens. A blanket of radioactive debris filled the sky—I mean
everywhere
—and, robbed of sun, agriculture wilted and died where it grew. The temperature dropped forty degrees mean. The seas became oceans of poison. Marine life went the way of the dodo. Mutations, new plagues, new parasites, actual vampire attacks, all these microscopic nasties that had heretofore yielded to the killing power of soap and water flourished and multiplied and grew, killing yet more millions. The flu, black plague, cholera, you name it, ancient diseases not seen in eons came trotting out for their pound of flesh. Ovaries shriveled, and among the few million survivors, the birth rate fell precipitously. We were going down. We were dying faster than we were replacing, and nothing could change that demographic trend. By 2014, there was almost nothing left.

“There was only one solution. The remaining high-IQs agreed on it. With fewer than a hundred thousand people left on the planet, there was only one choice. In one of the most moving spectacles in human history, the world’s remaining top scientists, engineers, physicians, soldiers, and thinkers gathered; it was like the Manhattan Project, a colossal undertaking underwritten by all surviving power structures, backed by all humanity, a concentrated species effort the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Australopithecus crushed his first gazelle with a femur on the African savannah, with one goal; to find a way to use the power of science to save humanity.

“They had to send a man back in time.”

“I think I saw that movie,” said Bob. “I think it was called
Terminator.
”

“Hmm, never heard of it,” said Richard, taking a finishing draft on his Tecate, then raising his hand for another one. “Now that you mention it, I
might
have seen it a time or fifteen.”

“I think I was with you until the time-travel jazz came up. I dig
holes in the ground, long, straight holes. In other words, I live in and fight dirt. Dirt is about as elemental as you can get, Richard, especially when six miles of it are between you and what you’re trying to dig up. So for me, time travel is a nonstarter. I just can’t wrap my mind around it. I have to get off the boat right here.”

“Jack, trust me on this—time travel, by the laws of physics, is theoretically justifiable. I’ll spare you the math, but the secret is the position of the body in space. You see, if you sent a man back a hundred years from here, from this nice restaurant and among all these attractive young people, and he stepped into the here of a century ago, he would instantly die, because he’d be in outer space. Hello, no air, 5,000 degrees below zero, and pieces of shit flying along at light speed because there’s nothing to slow them down. That’s because the earth, the solar system, the whole shebang, nothing is where it was. It’s all moving and moving fast. You have to first devise the mother of all computers to calculate exactly where
here
was a hundred years ago, and by particle beam transmission, that’s where you send him. So when he gets there, there is a there to be gotten to.”

“I’m getting a headache,” said Bob.

“We’re almost done,” promised Richard. He took another long draft and resumed. “He wasn’t a special man. But he had to be a hundred percent certain. After rigorous psychological testing, he was found, winnowed from the thousands who’d sworn they could do the deed. But in 2015 everyone knew the temptation to stay in the past would have been overwhelming. The past was so much better than the ever-diminishing present. They had to have a man with the integrity to destroy himself on faith for a world he’d never see, for children he’d never know, who’d not only die but, more tragically, perish from memory, a man who not only wouldn’t exist but never would have existed.

“They found him. Maybe he was someone like you, Jack, tough and smart, salty, been around, walked with a limp, always with the watchful eyes, always slightly tense, as if he’s ready to dodge a flying
drill bit. That would be the guy. A hero, like Jack, with a limp from a wound he never talks about.

“They sent him back. He entered the past at twelve-twenty-nine p.m. CST on November 22, 1963. They sent him to the southwest corner of the Texas Book Depository, just beyond the Hertz sign. He had a minute or so to set up, and he’d been trained well. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t hesitate, doubt, fear, regret. Very capable, a Jack Brophy if ever there was one. Good with tools, even or especially guns. He had a rifle, nothing special, nothing complicated, and a nice midrange scope, and several rounds of ammunition. All of these were chance survivors of the nuclear wars, located at great cost and effort by our descendants in the year 2015.

“The hero on the roof put his well-zeroed scope on the head of the vital, attractive young man known as John F. Kennedy and saw the president take Lee Harvey Oswald’s second round and flinch but not fall, watched his hands involuntarily rise to his throat in the nerve behavior known as the Thorburn position, counted to five, and squeezed the trigger. He drove a bullet into JFK’s skull.

“In that moment, he disappeared. The rifle disappeared. All traces of the bullet disappeared. As it performed its killing duty, it ceased to exist. All evidence of the second rifle ceased to exist. And that’s why nobody will ever ‘solve’ the case. A confused but still idiotic Lee Harvey Oswald was left to go
Huh?
, panic, and begin his crazed last run. Who cares what happened to him. What’s important is that in the moment of JFK’s death, the next hundred years ceased to exist, or ceased to have existed. JFK was dead; he wasn’t wounded, he didn’t recover, his brain had been turned to vapor, he didn’t pull the troops out of Vietnam, he didn’t beg the Russians for mutual concessions, he didn’t unilaterally stand down from the brink, thus pushing us over the brink. There was no nuclear holocaust, no deaths in the billions, no nuclear winter, no collapsing ecosystem, no vanished agriculture, no poison seas, no demographic suicide, no second Manhattan Project; we got, as a planet and a species, something unknown—a second chance.

“That’s where we are now, Jack, fifty years into the second post–November 22, 1963, reality. Vietnam. Watergate. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bush One, Clinton, 9/11, Bush Two, the war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, it’s been one mess after another, Jack, but we haven’t blown ourselves up, and billions of us still drink the water and breath the air. So maybe that lone gunman did us some good after all.”

“Well,” said Bob, “you promised me a theory, and that’s a hell of a theory.”

“See, most theories assume that had JFK survived, the consequences would have been positive. There’s no way to make that argument. Just as likely, by that goddamned law of unexpected consequences, they could have been negative, tragic, even catastrophic. We can never know.”

“Richard, you are either brilliant or insane, I don’t know which.”

“I’ll bet you’re not surprised to learn I’ve heard that line a few times before. Now chew on that one overnight, and tomorrow at eleven, show up at the lobby of Dal-Tex, and Dave Arons will take you through the building.”

Swagger got back to the hotel with a headache, as if he’d been drinking. In a sense, he had been: Richard’s science fiction story, with time travel and all that goofy bullshit. What the hell was that about? It had a meaning, somehow, but he couldn’t see it.

He almost wished he had a drink, and as usual, the temptation to go to the bar, to have the one that would become two and then three and so on was still there, like a pilot light, something that never went out.

He had to think of something else. He had to put something between himself and his appetites and the craziness that swirled in his head. He pulled on clothes and boots, took the elevator down, and walked the twelve blocks in darkness and coolness and emptiness to
Dealey in a haste that belied the pain in his hip and the gracelessness of his walk.

He wanted to look at it again, see it in the dark, as form without detail, as shape. That nightmare site of so many crazies: the grassy knoll.

Without features, the small hill to the west of the plaza seemed utterly nondescript. He walked to it, climbed it, and watched the cars peel down Elm. He imagined himself as that legendary French gangster, the favorite candidate from one of the first theories, who somehow had lingered. A Corsican, the story went, like someone out of an old Hollywood movie, so degraded that he could kill the world’s most beautiful and dazzling man. There he was with his M1 carbine, leaning forward at 12:30 p.m. that day, putting the front sight blade on the president’s head and squeezing the trigger.

But—

No, it was wrong. The French killer couldn’t have aimed at the president. The president was moving at an uncertain speed. His killer would have to aim ahead of him. He’d have to hold, what, six inches to the front to make that brain shot. It was called shooting on the deflection, and it took talent and practice. Some people never got it.

Most people assume that the Frenchman on the knoll had the easier shot because he was closer. In their minds, close equals easy, far equals difficult. Oswald was 263 feet away, the Frenchman 75. Clearly, these people hadn’t done any wing shooting, or taken any shots at running game or men.

Swagger estimated that the theoretical Frenchman would have been on a ninety-degree angle to the vehicle, which itself was beginning to accelerate at an uneven speed. In order to place one shot—and he would be limited to one shot in order to preserve the false-flag operation—he would have had to shoot on the deflection. In skeet and trap and sporting clays, this is the hardest shot, called a “crosser,” because it demands the biggest lead. It is mastered by shooting it over and over again to develop a feel for the necessary lead given the speed
of the target. The Frenchman would have had to find the target, keep the rifle moving, pull ahead of the target a certain (unknown) distance, and then pull the trigger without disturbing the sight picture as he kept the rifle moving. Swagger knew that was hard enough with a shotgun, which blasts a pattern of shot covering a fairly wide area, but almost impossible except for the top professionals with a rifle, an instrument that puts a single bullet into a single spot. The odds on making that shot the first time out are extremely remote. No, they are not impossible, but it seemed unwise for a professional team to base its plan on one man hitting a near-impossible shot first time, cold bore, unless it had at its disposal some sort of shooting genius, and such men are rare and difficult to find.