Point of Impact (24 page)

“I know, Howard. I screwed up.”

“It looked so bad in the newspapers. And it looks bad inside the Bureau, too. We’re supposed to be able to handle situations like that.”

“I don’t know what to say, Howard. It was a desperate situation. Maybe I—I just don’t know, Howard.”

“Nick, you were in a desperate situation in 1986 in Tulsa and you mismanaged that, too.”

Nick was silent. Then, finally, he said, “Howard, I just want to be an FBI agent. That’s all I ever wanted.”

“Well, Nick … the director has left this call to me.”

Nick hated the fact that he was begging. But he tried to imagine a life without the one thing that mattered as much as his wife, which was the Bureau. He had to live a life without Myra now; but he couldn’t imagine one without the Bureau.

“Please don’t fire me, Howard. I know I haven’t been sharp lately. But I just lost my wife a few months ago … it just hasn’t been an easy time.”

“Nick, we need bodies on this thing. I’m going to suspend you without pay for a week, but it won’t go into effect for three months. Then I’m afraid it’ll have to.”

Nick nodded. It meant that within a month afterwards he’d be rotated back to the sticks and he’d never get out. It had taken him years to get to New Orleans. But it also meant, however provisionally, he’d be able to stay.

“I suppose I’ll be transferred then.”

“Nick, you know how it works. And I’m going to have to put a letter in your file. Like the other one.”

“Yes.”

“Nick, I don’t want to.”

“Okay, Howard.”

“I’m trying to cut you as much slack as I can.”

“Sure, I appreciate it,” Nick said.

Sure, I appreciate it!
You prick, if you’d have kept your fucking trap shut six years ago, I’d have nailed that fuck right between the eyes and I’d be where you’re sitting and you’d be on your way back to Tulsa.

“You’re still in the Bureau, Nick.”

“I appreciate that, Howard.”

“But, Nick, no more mistakes. Do you understand. There can’t be another slipup.”

“There won’t be, Howard. I promise.”

When Bob crawled from the water just before dawn on the day after the shooting, his head seethed with rage and flashing pictures and hallucinations. His body was numb as the log under which it had floated and slightly swollen and soft from the long immersion; he smelled of diesel oil from the barge scum that coated the surface of the river below New Orleans. He reckoned he’d drifted fifty or so miles; around him were scrub pines, an infinity of them, and boggy marshes, a maze of them, and dense, interlocking cypress trees. Small things scurried and then went silent; far off, a bird made a strange and mournful sound, a screech of pain; then it went silent too.

You’re going to die
, he thought.

There was nothing here but the sameness of jungle, its merciless face. And there’d be men in it too, soon enough, hunting him.

You’re back where you started, only you’re older and weaker
.

He stumbled a few feet, went to his knees. When was the last time he’d eaten? Must have been yesterday, breakfast. He’d been shot twice, used his last drop of adrenaline in getting out of there, and floated in the sullen river for eighteen horrible hours, slung upside down under the goddamn log, only his nostrils flaring above the water.

So there it was: eat or die.

Didn’t matter if the wound was infected or not; if he didn’t eat he’d wear down fast, and the jungle would feed off him in a matter of hours.

Been in tougher fixes, yes I have, I do believe
.

But he hadn’t. There was no chopper waiting to airevac him if he could just make the LZ. There was nothing but this jungle and outside it a whole world set to do him in.

It must have been a bit after dawn. The air was very crisp and clean and smelled fresh as baby breath. The sun was still weak. It was feeding time, he knew it soon enough.

Then Bob happened to feel something hard against his leg, and realized the hardness had been there all night. He slid the pistol from his jeans pocket. It was a big stainless Smith & Wesson .45 automatic, their new Model 4506. No. No, by God, it wasn’t, it was that fancy new 10mm the FBI had started using. He wondered about the round. He’d trust his life to a .45, having fired a hundred thousand .45 cartridges in his time through a variety of Colts. But this new thing, a 10-mil? He didn’t know.

Man without a gun has got no chance, Bob thought. Man has a gun, he has a chance
.

With a thumb as big as a brick, he pawed the magazine release. The mag fell out and he saw the agent had it loaded brimful with hollowpoints, like little brass Easter eggs down there. He sneaked a look to see if the man had the chamber stoked, and the gleam of brass from the seated cartridge answered him. Would they stand up under a soaking? Only one way to find out. He slid the magazine back, felt it lock and with a same brick thumb got the hammer back and locked.

He sat back, wishing he had more strength to find a position, or a trail, some place to hunt from, a good place to shoot from, a brace, anything. He had none of it. Only the gun. Overhead, the sun filtered through the dense tree cover, thin, not yet eight he reckoned. The shadows were blurry. Or was it his eyes going? Was he sliding off into nothingness, bled out like a deer shot quickly and not well.

He was hallucinating again. Strange, at this time he thought of Donny Fenn and all the scary moments in the boonies, and how at the real crazy-ass seconds, Donny’d begin to laugh a little, a hysterical giggle.

Donny, boy, you’d be laughing today if you could see old’ Bob and what’s become of him, sitting on his wet ass in some bog waiting on death or a creature
.

But Bob couldn’t laugh. He tried to settle back. Seemed like there was a dim memory of sitting in the rain a while back a whole night through, waiting on Tim, the whitetail buck with the twelve-point spread. That was a long wet wait, wasn’t it? Oh, that was a hunt! He remembered the way Tim came blasting out of the foliage, like a ghost or a miracle, and how the rifle came up to him and he fired and knew how well he’d fired. That was a night, wasn’t it? Hit Tim above the spine with a bullet cast from epoxy; must have weighed
less than 25 grains, atomized when it hit the flank but the shock knocked the sense out of Tim for a good five minutes.

He remembered sawing the antlers off.

Nobody going to kill you to hang your head on a wall, he thought.

Go on, boy. Git
.

He remembered the creature leaping away when it came out of its coma, full of juice, crackly with life.

He laughed crazily.

They sure tried to hang my head on a wall
.

Then Bob looked up and there it was. Late, it was drinking late. Maybe so deep here in the swamp there were no men and so there was no fear. Bob didn’t know. He just heard the rustle of twigs snapping, saw a flash of color.

It was some sort of ugly spotted pig. Bob watched it emerge from the dapples of the trees maybe seventy-five yards out. It was ugly as an outhouse on a hot day, and yet when Bob saw it he almost cried for the second time in his life, the first being when he was alone at nine and had gone off onto the hill after Major Benson had come to tell them his daddy was dead out near Fort Smith.

But Bob didn’t cry. He made ready to shoot.

The damned gun was new; suddenly it felt different than his old Colt automatic, as if it were fighting him. Squeezing his left hand around the right, printing down on his right thumbnail with his left, his elbows locked between his pressing knees as he sat in a modified isosceles, fighting the tremors of exhaustion that nuzzled through his wrists and tried to betray him in their treacherous way.

Front sight. Front sight. Front sight.

That was it. That was the key, the rock upon which the church was built. You had to see the front sight with
a pistol, and let the target be a kind of hazy blur in the far distance. Otherwise, nothing good happened at all.

Front sight, front sight, front sight.

In the notch of the rear sight, a frame, he saw the huge red wall of the front. There was only front, rock steady, big as Gibraltar or Mars, Bob bending into it with every last thing, and the pig a kind of soupy blur, its details lost in the distance, just a splotch of movement against the stability of the greenery.

He hoped that damn cop had zeroed it well. He hoped the water hadn’t deadened the primers or ruined the powder in the case.

Bob was so poured into the shot he didn’t hear the noise at all or feel the recoil, as the big pistol whacked back. What he saw was the pig speared through the spine by the lead, which, entering its tough hide, ruptured; it hit and broke the spine.

The animal squealed as death closed it down, then a spasm of fury rocketed through it. It tried to climb to its now stunted and shaky legs but, having a broken spine, was unable to direct the last part of its body to obey. Then, with a last quiver, it went quiet.

Bob got himself up. Still woozy, still soaked, he felt death in his own limbs, stalking through his body, hunting him. But he walked onward, dazed, kept sane only by the smell of the burned powder that his nose picked up in the riotous odors of the swamp, a familiar thing onto which he could lock. He wobbled to the pig, then collapsed as he reached it.

It weighed about forty pounds. It was about three feet long. It smelled of manure and offal. Its snout was curiously delicate, as if designed by an angel; its lashes, fleecy at the closed slots of its eyes, were also delicate, like a child’s.

The bullet hole was an ugly blister over the shoulder, but there wasn’t a lot of blood seepage. It hadn’t come
out, unlike the bullet Payne had put into him, which is why he had lived and the pig had not. Served Payne right for using something tiny like a nine. Payne had broken the one true moral law of hunting: use enough gun.

Some day, I’ll use enough gun on you, Payne.

Swiftly he got out his Case XX, still secure in the watch pocket of his Levi’s, thanking God for a good Case knife that would hold an edge all down the many years and thanking God also for his own stubborn ways that made a small knife as much a part of daily dressing as boots and socks.

Turning the dead animal so that its soft belly was finally exposed, he had a moment of crisis. Felt as if he’d fallen out of his own body there for a second. A wave of hallucination crashed over him. He forgot everything. But then it came back and he found himself with the knife and the dead animal and he butchered it swiftly.

Bob wanted the liver, which he found, a treasure amid the gore, and ripped it out, feeling it hot because it was so soaked in oxygenated blood.

The liver was richest in nutrition and tastiest this side of a fire. Bob tore off a bite, stunned at the intensity of the flavor and the sense of richness; it made him dizzy it was so powerful. He ate some more, chewing ravenously, amazed at how hungry he was; how desperately he needed it. He ate and ate until the liver was gone.

I am alive, he thought.

Then he heard the roar of a chopper, and dropped. A Huey sped low above the riverbank, blowing the trees left and right as it hurtled along.

They’re looking for me, he thought, with a wave of regret at the complications of his life. Then he picked up the carcass, slung it over his back and headed deeper into the swamp.

Dobbler always found Shreck’s occasional absences frightening. The customers here at RamDyne were tough guys, like cops or soldiers, or if not tough, they were distant, techno-nerd types, and both groups looked upon the large, soft psychiatrist with an attitude characteristic of their professions: either contempt or indifference, depending. So the doctor tended to sit in his grubby little office when Shreck wasn’t around to act as his sponsor in this strange world.

The RamDyne offices—offices wasn’t exactly the right word—were located amid the cargo terminals and warehouses of Dulles International Airport, just south of Washington, D.C. They were a shabby warren of jerry-built light-industrial units sequestered
behind double Cyclones that wore double spirals of razor wire, guarded viciously by armed men. The sign next to the guardhouse at the sole entrance said only
BROWN EXPORTS
, without corporate logo or escutcheon. It had a prosaic, unexceptional quality to it, and the guard who always looked fiercely at Dobbler, as if he never recognized him after a full year on the payroll, went with the outfit’s bunker mentality.

Dobbler’s office was a dingy closet unbecoming an assistant professor at a junior college in Idaho; with concrete floors and surplus wardroom furniture, it looked like the office of a doomed teacher who never would get tenure and would live forever on the hook of his department chairman’s whim. Everything in it was junk, from the sagging bookcase to the desk scratched with strange initials to the ancient safe for confidential documents. It even had bars at the window, an irony not lost on Dobbler. The fluorescent light was imperfectly calibrated, and threw shadows no matter how you sited yourself in it, that is, when it wasn’t flickering wanly.

But it wasn’t as if Dr. Dobbler had the worst office; Colonel Shreck’s, in another building, was equally crummy; it was just a bit bigger, with a moth-eaten sofa near a window that yielded a vista of cargo planes taking off or landing. It didn’t even have a bigger safe, but exactly the same beat-up model as Dobbler’s. The doctor often wondered if it had the same combination!

Dobbler now sat in his office, trying to focus on the problem before him. He found the silence ominous, as if a spell had been cast by the freakish escape of Bob Lee Swagger. And that, in fact, was the problem Dobbler now faced.

The last words from Shreck had been simple.

“Doctor, go back over the documents. Tell me where this asshole went.”

Dobbler answered tentatively, as he always did.

“Y-you don’t think he’s dead?”

“Of course not. Now, I’ve got to go out of town for a few days,” said Shreck. “Try and let me have a report when I get back. I have the utmost confidence in you.”