Point of Impact (47 page)

It popped open.

The observation post was concealed on a hilltop a mile away from the entrance to Skytop. Young Eddie Nicoletta had drawn the duty because he’d been with Payne on the observation mission in Blue Eye and had eyeballed him through a scope. He was sitting in a hole about four feet deep and looking out a small viewer’s slot in some ersatz bushes just inside a ridge line. Before him was a Celestron 8, an eight-inch surveillance telescope, state of the art, forty-three pounds of Schmidt-Cassegrain optics that could be dialed up to 480x, which is where he had it now.

It was tiring peering through the aperture of the lens, which was seated at right angles to the tube itself, a huge fat wad of curved steel atop a squat tripod. Nickles’s head hurt and his neck ached.

The Celestron 8 was trained on the road running into
the place called Skytop, and a bit of the ribbon of macadam of the two-lane highway that ran by it. Now and then a truck or a car would materialize out of the wobbling, foreshortened perspective, seem to assemble itself out of pure bolts of light, and purr through his range of focus. Jesus, a mile away and you could see
faces
! It was said you could read a newspaper at a hundred yards with one of these things and Nickles believed it.

But every once in a while, he just had to look up to keep from losing his mind. What he saw then was the half-mile dirt road up to the house itself, though he couldn’t see much of the rambling, one-story building beneath the trees. It was enough to tell that it was good-sized, the house of a man who was well off or better. Behind it was a swimming pool, some cement walkways to what appeared to be a shooting range (why cement? Nickles wondered) and beyond that, dominating the property, what they called Bone Hill.

Bone Hill was heavily forested about halfway up its three hundred feet or so of bulk, but then it gave way, as it steepened, to coarse grass and scrawny trees. Its top was bare except for the grass and a few stones strewn about.

That’s where he’ll go, Eddie Nickles told himself. When the first chopper arrives and the greasers with their combat gear come crashing out, that’s where he’ll go. He’ll go up. He’ll run up, and he’ll run and run and pretty soon there’ll be no place to go.

Nickles got to see it all happen. That pleased him.

“Bravo Four! Bravo Four, you there, goddammit?”

It was Shreck.

“Ah, sorry, Colonel. Yeah, I’m here, nothing much going on.”

“Keep your goddamn eyes open, Nicoletta. He ought to be here any minute now.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nickles.

He put his eye back to the eyepiece, and watched as a Coca-Cola truck lumbered down the road out of the bright nothingness. Then the road was quiet. Minutes passed.

He saw the roof first, emerging over a crest, just a flash. Then it was clear, heading down the road, just as they said, the red Chevy they’d been driving last night, with a single looming, steady silhouette cut off behind the glare of the windshield.

His tension growing, Nickles watched as the face assembled itself from flecks of light as the car moved into the focus zone, a pair of hard-set eyes, a taut jawline, a sense of steadiness.

At a mile away, Bob the Nailer still scared him.

“He’s here,” Nickles shrieked into the hands-free mike, forgetting all radio procedure. “Bob the Nailer’s here.”

Bob stopped at the turnoff to Skytop and got out of his car. He took a look around. What he saw was miles and miles of lush North Carolina landscape, rolling hills, a few rills of hard rock, a universe of green. It had been a hot, dry fall and although it was October, the leaves hadn’t begun to turn yet.

He took a deep breath as he looked around and his trained eyes probed and saw nothing. The sky was an intense blue, untainted with cloud. The sun was high. It seemed as if the day had stalled somehow, calm and guileless.

Bob took another deep breath, climbed back into his car and went down the road between a double line of swaying poplars to the house. He pulled up on the gravel patch that awaited visitors.

He went up the stairs and knocked on the door.

“It’s open,” came a call from deep inside. “Come on in, Agent Memphis.”

“Thanks,” said Bob, walking into the wide hall, and into a sunny beauty of a room lined on one wall with floor-to-ceiling books. The open sliding glass door at the rear gave way to a small jewel of a swimming pool—he could smell the chlorination in the air—and beyond he saw the slope of a large green hunk of hill.

“Mr. Albright?” he called.

What he heard next was an electric purring. Then a man in a motorized chair emerged.

“My name isn’t Memphis,” said Bob.

“I don’t believe it is. I believe it’s Bob Lee Swagger.”

Bob’s eyes beheld the man calmly. He saw the powerful shoulders, the long arms, and the deformed body, soft and twisted and mulched and locked in its chair; and the legs, spindly and bizarre.

“And I believe you’d be Lon Scott.”

“Yes, I am.”

Bob’s hand slipped back into his jeans; without hurry he had the .45 out, thumb snicking off the oversize safety. It was now cocked and unlocked, two pounds of trigger pressure away from the shot that would be the end of Lon Scott. But Scott was still, evidently unarmed.

“You won’t shoot me. No matter what we’ve done to you, I still don’t believe you’re the kind of man who could shoot a cripple in a chair.”

“Cripple? For a cripple, that was a right smart shot you hit in New Orleans, mister. You dropped that bishop at fifteen hundred yards.”

“It was fourteen fifty-one. I rebarreled the Black King to .318 and saboted one of the rounds you pumped into the bank in Maryland behind 59 grains of IMR-4895.”

Bob raised the pistol and put the front sight on the middle of Lon Scott’s swollen belly. He wondered if he
shot whether pus would come out. It was like aiming at a tumor or a larva or something. He took about a half a pound out of the trigger.

But Scott didn’t scare. It was as if he really didn’t give a fuck if Bob pulled the trigger or not.

“It’s over. When I saw your face, I took my hand off the chair here and uncovered a photoelectric cell. That sent a signal. Even as we talk they’re on their way. Lots of them. Pulling that trigger doesn’t mean a thing. You want to take me hostage? Go ahead. They’ll shoot right through me into you.”

Bob put the pistol down.

He heard the roar of the helicopters. Outside, leaves began to shake under the pulsing of the rotors and vibrations filled the air as the birds swooped in to offload the first squads of killers. It reminded him of the ’Nam; the swift arrival of the choppers, the deployment of the men, the merciless closing in upon the prey. It was the classic air-assault tactic.

“Bob,” said Lon Scott, over the noise, “they’ll be here in seconds and once those Latino cowboys show up with their assault rifles, there’s no stopping them. Let me save you. Let me give you a new life. We’re the same man.”

Bob flicked the safety back on the Colt, slid it back into his jeans, then smiled.

“Don’t kid yourself, wormboy. I’m a soldier. You’re only a murderer. And because of what you’ve done, every man who ever loved a rifle is a suspect in his own house. I know who you are. And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Then he turned and raced out the door.

Dobbler looked inside the safe. Its contents were prosaic. He saw a handgun, some kind of automatic. There was a wad of bills, and a passport and driver’s license,
both fake. The colonel had made plans for a fast getaway, prudent enough preparation for a man in his line of work.

And that was it. No family jewels, no dark secrets, nothing remotely incriminating. Dobbler was somewhat disappointed. He’d expected a bit more. He replaced the passport and the license, and felt his fingers bump against something. He withdrew it. It was only a black plastic videotape cassette, unmarked.

Dobbler stood in the darkened office. He could hear each tick and sigh in the building, but no human activity. He stared at the cassette, tempted, a bit afraid. He looked over and yes, the big Sony TV was still at the table on one side of the room, a VCR underneath it on the shelf.

He walked over and inserted the cassette.

His finger trembled as he pushed
PLAY
.

Bob dashed through the open door to the pool and saw three of them. They had just come around the side of the house at a hell-bent pace, safeties off, fingers cupping and tensing their Galil triggers. They saw him.

They were fast. The rifles came up … Bob fired three Silvertips in what seemed a burst but was really three aimed shots unleashed in three tenths of a second, the gun flicking from recoil to sight picture to recoil to sight picture at a speed too quick to measure. He killed two instantly with center-chest hits, dead before their knees gave and they toppled; the third, hit in the throat, began to bleed out spectacularly all over the cement. Then Bob, hardly having paused to fire, cleared the deck of the pool, fell into the deep underbrush and began to thrash his way toward the hill.

When he reached the incline, he paused just long enough to shuck his jacket, hit a fast combat reload on the Colt. He climbed through loblolly and stunted
pines, clawing his way over ground cover and tufts of dried grass. The trees were not tall here, and now and then he’d run a dangerous trek over open ground. Behind him, he could hear the choppers ferrying in more troops. This was a big operation. They were throwing everything at him. Now and then a shot would come arching toward him, and one hit close by, lofting a cloud of dust and fragments. He winced but kept climbing.

At one point, he paused for a quick recon. They were searching for him with binoculars but he knew they would wait until they had all the men there, could ring the damned thing, before they’d move up the hill in coordinated maneuver. That’s how he’d do it, at any rate, and he knew these cowboys were pros. He looked and thought he could see movement, the troops assembling into their squads under the cover of the trees. The house was visible below and Lon Scott in his electric wheelchair was talking to somebody in jungle fatigues by the pool. They were pointing up the hill. Bob could not make out the other man’s face. But he guessed he knew who it was.

He turned. The hill was steep here and he was almost out of cover. Then there was a last hundred feet up the bare ground to the summit. He slid the Colt back into the holster. The summit was a bare knob standing out against that blue, pure sky. Sweat raced down his face into his eyes; he blinked.

Now he had to move. This was the worst part, the open part. Would they have snipers? Would they have a guy with a good rifle, a steady hand, who could down a running man at six hundred feet? Time to find out.

Bob touched the green grass and took a deep breath and began the last pull over the bare ground to the hilltop, thinking, Lots of men have died on hilltops.

“There he goes,” said Lon, whose eyesight, like Bob’s, was still extraordinary.

Shreck picked him up in the next second, a man running desperately up the scruffy hilltop. He brought the binoculars to bear and through their magnifying lenses saw a tall angular figure racing agilely up the last few feet to the top of the hill.

“I could have hit him,” said Lon.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Shreck. “He’s finished now. It’s all over now.”

A few shots rang out from lower down the hill as various Panther Battalion troopers, having a view of Bob, threw their rifles to their shoulders and squeezed off rounds. The bullets struck near him and at one point they thought they saw him falter, but he regathered his strength and launched himself over the edge, out of sight.

“General de Rujijo!” Shreck barked.

De Rujijo, who had been standing next to his RTO and two junior officers, came over smartly.

“What’s your situation?”

“Colonel
, we have all one hundred twenty men on the ground now. I’m only waiting for a confirmation from my second platoon, on the other side of the objective, that they are in position. Then I’ll move my assault troops up in two elements, and in a few minutes I’ll bring enfilading fire to bear, move my final assault team up, and bring you this man’s head.”

“I just want his corpse,” said Shreck.

He turned back to Scott.

“We’ve got his ass now.”

“I wonder what he’s thinking about,” said Scott. “It would be very interesting to know what such a man thinks about at such a moment.”

Shreck said, “I was once on a hill waiting to die. You don’t think about much. You think about how you wish
you could get another day, that’s all. But this son of a bitch is probably thinking about how many of us he can take out before we nail him. Well, I have one last thing for him to think about.”

General de Rujijo was suddenly waving at him.

“Colonel
Shreck, the ring is complete. Shall we move out?”

“One second,” said Shreck. He turned to Scott. “I want to send this bastard to hell knowing all the bad news.”

“Colonel Shreck,” said Scott. “You shouldn’t let it get personal. Hugh wouldn’t want it to become personal.”

“Fuck Hugh,” said Shreck, “it’s always personal.”