Point of Impact (5 page)

Out beyond the church was the little graveyard, and
there among the Washingtons and the Lincolns and the Delanos of Polk County was one spindly marker for a man named Bo Stark. Bob just looked at it. The wind howled and roared through the trees, the moon was a raggedy-assed streetlamp, the music pumped and blasted, the black people were singing up a storm, beating the devil down.

Bo Stark was his own age, and the only white man in the cemetery because no other cemetery would have him. He’d come from a fine family and had known Bob all through high school. They’d gone to the same doctor, the same dentist, played on the same football team. But Bo’s people had money; he’d gone on to the university in Fayetteville and from there had joined the Army and spent a year as a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne, another fool for duty who’d believed in it all. And after that, nothing. Bo Stark had gone a man and come home a no-account. The war got inside him and never let him go. One bad thing turned to another; couldn’t hold a job, wouldn’t pay back loans, was searching for the death he’d only just missed in the Land of Bad Things. Two weeks after the war in the desert was over, after the mighty victory and the celebration, one Sunday night he’d finally killed a man in a bar with a knife in Little Rock and when the police found him in his daddy’s garage in Blue Eye, he’d blown a .45 through the roof of his mouth.

So Bob stood there as the wind brought cold memories from the cold ground out at him, and looked at the marker:
BO STARK
, it said, 1946–1991.
AIRBORNE ALL THE WAY
.

He came here when he was frightened, because in the radiance of the glowing church, standing over the body of the man who could have been and was almost him, he could see it in the stone:
BOB LEE SWAGGER
, 1946–1992
USMC SEMPER
F
IDELIS
.

Now he looked at it, and realized it was time to do that which could kill him fastest of all possible dangers: to go back. He wondered if he had the Pure-D stones for it.

He still thought of it as The World. It was the place where all things were, where women and liquor and pleasure and temptation commingled. Now he was back in it. He landed at Baltimore–Washington International Airport after a crazed flight that took him to St. Louis from Little Rock, then east. He was worried that his rifle, with the bright orange airline tag on the handle of the gun case, hadn’t made the trip; you always worried that some person in the airlines system would see the thing and snap it up.

But sure enough, the case came out of the luggage chute and moved along to him on the rubber belt so that he could pluck it up.

“Damn,” someone said, “hunting season’s long over, pardner.” It was early January, though surprisingly mild.

“Just a target rifle,” Bob said easily to the man, scooping up the case. He felt a little silly with the long, hard thing, so weirdly shaped among all the other luggage, and knowing that he himself looked so cowboylike to these Eastern people, in his best black Tony Lamas, a nice pair of Levi’s, a pointed-collar shirt with string tie and a black Stetson, all under a sheepskin coat, his best coat.

Getting the car turned out to be no problem at all as the reservation in his name was waiting and the girl at the counter was especially ingratiating. She thought he was some kind of cowboy hero; her eyes lit with joy at what he took to be his incredibleness and when he called her “ma’am,” she was doubly pleased.

He left the airport, found his way to the Baltimore Washington Parkway, from there to the Baltimore
Beltway, and then west out I–70, across Maryland. Even in the yellowed state of high, dead winter, he could see that it was a lovely place, rolling, not so savage as Arkansas. Soon he came to mountains, old, humped things, ridge after ridge of them. In three hours, beyond Cumberland, he found himself in Maryland’s wildest pastures in its farthest, westernmost regions, not wild like the Ouachitas but nevertheless free of the poison taint of the city and just barely tame enough to accommodate the most provisional sort of farming. It looked to be fine deer country, way out in Garrett County. He was searching for a town called Accident, and halfway between it and nowhere, just where they’d said it would be, he found the small Ramada Inn nestled under the mountains. He checked in, his reservations all made and an envelope waiting for him with a hearty welcoming letter and detailed instructions on how to reach the headquarters of Accutech at its shooting facility a few miles down the road. There was also his per diem, ten crisp twenty-dollar bills.

Bob went to his room and lay down on the bed and didn’t go out anymore that night. He just thought it all out, trying not to be bothered that he had been followed his whole long trip out from the airport by a very good surveillance team.

Like everything associated with RamDyne, the trailer was small and seedy and cheap. The outfit never did anything first-class and seemed only to have cretins of the prison guard mentality working for it, like the horrid Jack Payne. And now it was jammed with men Dobbler was supposedly briefing.

The doctor sighed, looking at the dull faces in his audience.

“Er, could I have your attention please?”

He couldn’t. They paid him no attention at all. He was irrelevant to them.

How far he’d fallen and how fast! Once the youngest member of the Harvard Medical School psychiatric faculty and the sole proprietor of one of the most flourishing private practices in the Cambridge-Greater Boston area, he’d had the life he’d dreamed of and worked for so furiously. One day, however, when he was tired and his resources nearly depleted, on a last appointment, he’d let his discipline slip. He’d touched a woman. Why had he done it? He didn’t know. In the nanosecond before he did it, it hadn’t even been in his mind. But he did it. He’d touched her and when she looked at him he realized that she wanted him to touch her more, the sexual savagery that spilled out stunned him. He made love to her right there in the office. It was the start of his out-of-control phase, abetted by a severe amphetamine habit. He seduced nine patients. Inevitably one had gone to the police; the charge was rape. The squalor played itself out over six melancholy months, climaxing in his acceptance of a plea-bargained second-degree assault conviction, which delivered him, courtesy of a feminist judge, to the ungentle ministrations of Russell Isandhlwana. The symmetry was perfect, even awesome—justice at its finest: Dobbler had fucked nine neurotic women in his office; in prison he was fucked by an immense man, who called him his dickhole.

And now, he was Raymond Shreck’s dickhole. Not sexually, of course, but even Dobbler found a certain black humor in the irony: he’d gone from the ignominy of the prison to somehow secure a position in subservience to a man with the same (though somewhat modulated) sense of physical power and ruthlessness as Russell Isandhlwana, a man whom, like Russell, he totally
feared but whom he needed for protection and strength.

“Earth to Planet, Doctor!” It was the horrid Payne.

“What?”

“Hey, get with the program. You lost it there, man.”

Ah! He’d lost his place again, wasn’t sure what question he was answering. It was the last briefing before the subject showed up.

Oh, yes, he was holding forth on Bob’s unique capacity for utter near-death stillness, explaining to Payne’s perplexed listeners why it was that Bob, though in his room from five-thirty
P.M
. on the previous evening, had simply ceased to exist for their listening devices. He was trying to get them to see how
important
this was, for it got to the very nature of Swagger’s uniqueness.

“Ah—yes, he has an ability to shut down and let the world go about its business while he’s frozen; and then when he’s become a part of the environment, then and only then, will he strike. But like any skill, it’s a skill that simply has to be practiced. He was practicing nothingness.”

Somebody yawned.

Somebody farted.

Somebody laughed.

“All right,” said Shreck, vigorously, climbing up front and by sheer body heat exiling the doctor to the wings. “Thanks, Dobbler. Now, listen up, I want eyes front, Payne, get your people to pay some attention for once. It’s very close to the most sensitive part of this operation, the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours.”

Shreck’s dark eyes seemed to beam with strange force.

“Let me tell you who you’re dealing with, so there’s no misunderstanding. This guy is mule-proud Southern, as stubborn as they come. He doesn’t want to be pushed and he won’t stand to be insulted. He’s also still
got some gung-ho Marine in him. He’ll be a fucking ramrod; you try and bend him and he may kick your ass. So the way we play him is slow and steady. You don’t push; you don’t order. You just smile and go along. Any questions?”

Shreck’s sudden dramatic appearance had its desired effect: it silenced the troops.

They were fools.

“Sir?”

Someone had leaned in.

“Yeah,” said Shreck.

“Sir, it’s 0730 hours. Surveillance called; subject just left the motel. He’s on his way.”

“Okay,” said Shreck, “I hope you were listening to the doctor, because if anybody screws up I’ll have his ass. Now let’s get cracking, people. First day on a new job.”

If nothing else, it had a comforting feeling. It was, after all, a rifle range, one of those peeling, flaking, sagging, yet grand places where men have always gathered to plunk themselves down before a piece of paper with a black circle imprinted on it and discover the secrets of their own rifles and their own selves. Bob had spent a lifetime, it sometimes seemed, in such a place, and always the talk was good and the feeling among the shooters easy and generous.

He stood on a concrete apron, before a series of T-shaped shooting benches, green, always green, on every shooting range in America they were green. Bob could see the place had been built sometime in the thirties, the private preserve of some hunting and shooting club or other, and he knew that under the sagging roof that shielded the apron and the benches there’d been many tales told of deer that had gotten away and of loads good and loads bad, and rifles worth as much as a
good woman and rifles worth as little as a dog with the clap.

The only unusual thing about this place, a mile or so off the main road by a series of convoluted gravel tracks, was a trailer off to one side, which while not new looked as if it had just been dumped there. Before it stood the sign of the sponsors of this day’s labors, Accutech.

He could see the targets across the faintly sloping yellow meadow beyond the line of benches, a black dot at a hundred yards, a black period at two hundred and a black pinprick at three hundred.

“Coffee, Mr. Swagger?” asked the colonel, still in his raincoat. Next to him was the morose little noncom who always looked ready for a fight. Everybody else was a gofer, except one pear-shaped city boy with a goatee who looked like he had a finger up his ass.

“No thanks,” he said. “It jitters the nerves.”

“Decaf?”

“Decaf’s fine,” he said, and Colonel Shreck nodded to a man who quickly poured Bob a paper cupful from a thermos.

It was surprisingly temperate, around sixty, and a gentle breeze pressed over the range; above a pale-lemon sun stood in a pale-lemon sky. It was the false spring, a phony of a day, too sweet to be trusted this month.

“All set, then?” asked the colonel.

“I suppose,” Bob said.

“Do you want to recheck your zero before we start the testing rounds?”

“Yes sir.”

“All right, gentlemen, let’s move away. Eyes and ears on.”

Bob uncased his rifle, lodged it on a sandbag rampart and slid the bolt back. He cracked open a box of the Lake City Match rounds, threaded five, one after the
other with a brass clicking, into the magazine, pushed home and locked the bolt which flew forward and rotated shut with the gliding ease of a vault door closing on ball bearings and grease. He pulled his Ray-Ban aviators on, hooking them behind the ears, and slid his earmuffs down across the top of his head, clamping his ears off from the world. He felt the roar of blood rushing in his brain.

Bob slid up to the rifle and found his bench shooter’s position, his boots flat upon the cement apron of the range as if making the magic construction of stability up through his body that would translate to the rock-hard hold of the rifle itself.

He pulled the rifle up, and in, chunking it against his shoulder, placing his hand upon the comb tuned so just the faintest smudge of fingertip caressed the lightened trigger, adjusting a bunny-ear bag underneath the butt-heel. His other arm ran flat along the shooting bench, under the rifle which itself had been sunk just right into the sandbags.

Bob found his spot-weld, and closed his left eye. The image was a bit out of focus, so he diddled with the ring to bring it back to clarity and for his effort was rewarded with the black image of perfect circumference, quartered precisely by the stadia of the scope, ten times the size it had been, now as big as a half-dollar at pointblank range.

He exhaled half a breath, held what he had, and with that wished the end of his finger to contract but a bit and was rewarded with the thrill of recoil, the blur as the rifle ticked off a round. As he was throwing the bolt, he heard a spotter.

“X-ring. Damn, right in the middle, perfect, a perfect shot.”

Bob fired four more times into the same hole.

“I guess I’m zeroed,” he said.

A man called Hatcher briefed him on the test.

“Mr. Swagger, one of my associates will load your rifle with five rounds. You’ll not know if you’re shooting your own handloads, the Federal Premium, the Lake City Match or our own Accutech Sniper Grade ammunition. You’ll fire four groups of five rounds each at a hundred yards, four at two hundred yards and four at three hundred yards. Then we’ll compute the groupings and see how the ammunition stacks up. Then, this afternoon, we’d like to run a similar series of tests, but from offhand or improvised positions, with a stress factor added in. I think you’ll find it quite interesting.”

“You’re paying the bills. Let’s get shooting,” Bob said.