Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (6 page)

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.

Click, and click again—the sniper rifle. Walter McGrane looked at the man called Weatherford and the other muscled windbreaker
beside Weatherford. They were the new and improved versions of Clayton Price, routinely produced by special operations units
in various branches of the military. Better trained, disciplined, more reliable, it was said, unlike the shadowmen, who were
viewed by some as too individualistic, too eccentric, too likely to just take off and do things their own way. “Cowboys,”
they were sometimes called, the word accompanied always by a derisive shake of the head. Still, others in the COU, Walter
McGrane included, preferred the old way of working, using the shadowmen who left no paper trail of temporary assignments from
the military, a set of specialized arrows that could be drawn from a quiverful of options when the time arose. The few who
were left could be called on when the times got tough and the work got extremely dirty, “wet” in agency parlance, in Africa
or the Middle East or Guatemala… or Mexico. True, they weren’t as disciplined as their newer versions. And, true, they tended
to be eccentric. But they had their own strengths. Individualism and eccentricity always seemed to be the other side of the
creative mind.

The Lear’s engines shifted in pitch, and the co-pilot announced over the intercom they were beginning their descent into San
Antonio for refueling. Weatherford looked over at Walter McGrane and grinned. “Just who is it we’re after, this time? All
we were told was to gather up our gear and get over to Andrews.”

“Man named Clayton Price.”

“Don’t believe I’ve heard of him. That never matters, though, does it?”

“It might this time,” said Walter McGrane.

“Why’s that?”

“He’s one of us. Going up against Clayton Price is like shooting pool with Pool itself.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means after you finish making love to that rifle, you might want to glance at the notes I prepared for you.”

“Right, I’ll do that.”

“Yes,” Walter McGrane said, “be sure and do that. And remind me to tell you sometime about what he went through in Vietnam,
after his capture by the VC.”

“Bad?”

Walter McGrane looked Weatherford straight in the eyes and shook his head slowly back and forth, said nothing, and returned
to studying his maps.

T
wenty minutes after turning west off Route 200, Danny got lost in Zacualtan, feeling ugly and incompetent about it. Not much
of a town, but the streets all seemed to end in fields or at somebody’s front porch. He and Luz had driven this route once
before on a weekend outing, and she remembered something about the plaza. Turn there, maybe. Danny drove back through town,
made the turn, and three blocks later they were heading up the coast road, in open country again. The shooter was quiet, desert
boot tapping slowly on the dashboard.

This was backcountry rural, where anything might be wandering on or across the road. Animals, in particular, liked to lie
on the warm pavement when the night cool settled in and sometimes shared that space with drunks. Danny held the Bronco back,
which wasn’t hard since Vito complained and got out of sorts at anything exceeding fifty.

Around three
A.M.
, the pavement ended at a barricade of hundred-pound rocks painted white and marked with the words
“NO PASEO.”

Danny whacked the steering wheel. “Shit.”

Nothing about a detour, nothing in the way of directions. When they’d come this way a couple of years back, there was no problem,
pavement all the way. Rough, but passable then.

Luz rescued them for the second time in forty-five minutes. “Danny, bus going through village.”

“Where?”

“Down hill, over there.”

Danny looked down to his left and saw the lights of a bus moving at about three miles an hour, its headlights illuminating
trees and houses. He retreated down the hill and took the Bronco into the village, figuring the bus-driver knew something
they didn’t, something about a detour. Danny tried to guess where the bus had come through the narrow dirt streets winding
into one another. He made a left turn at what he thought was a road and ended up in a creek bed, where the headlights startled
roosting chickens and sleeping pigs. Finally he worked his way through the village, made the right choice at a Y intersection,
and got back up on the main road. After a mile of fine dust blowing into the Bronco and covering everything inside with a
kind of brownish red talcum powder, they passed two bulldozers sitting in the dark and hit hard surface again.

They were moving along the edge of a high cliff dropping off toward the Pacific and could see the lights of Santa Cruz, and
San Bias farther on, a long way to the north. Dawn coming up on the other side of the coastal mountains. Danny estimated they
were an hour out of San Bias and drove carefully around curve after curve, with jungle on both sides of them and trees arching
over the road, making a gray green tunnel through which the mad trio rolled at sunrise, all with their own oblique purposes.

Luz was curled up in the back, sleeping, almost out of sight in the jumble of water jugs, food, and other gear. The daughter
of Jesús and Esmeralda Santos could sleep anywhere at anytime in anything.

The shooter lit another Marlboro, stretched, yawned.

“What business you in, Mr. Schumann, if you don’t mind my asking?” Country-boy language, casual approach. Danny watched the
road for serious potholes but was aware the shooter was looking at him for several seconds before answering.

“Consulting, You could say I’m a freelance specialist in crisis management.” Suitably vague, but the hair on the back of Danny’s
neck lifted up. He got hold of himself and pushed it a little further.

“Any special area in which you work? Construction, oil, any of that?”

“All of it. If there’s a mess, I clean up the trash, get rid of the garbage. It’s a dirty world, lot of messy accounts out
there.”

Danny was about to ask him what messy accounts had to be settled in Puerto Vallarta, just to see how he’d answer, but the
shooter spoke first.

“How about you, Danny Pastor? What’s your game?” He talked quietly, and it was hard to hear him over the roar of the wind
from their passing. Danny had to lean toward him to catch all the words.

“Aw, I just hang around Puerto Vallarta. Saved up a little money a while back, and I’m living on that.”

don’t do anything, then? Just lie around Las Noches with the rest of the gringos? I stopped in there the other day. What a
pile of dog crap that was—all of them flopped in beach chairs, stomachs bulging, drinking beer and telling lies. Looked to
me like kind of a kamikaze lifestyle. Ever go there?”

A feeling kept coming back to Danny that what he was doing was the wrong thing to be doing, that he might be in over his head.
“C’mon, Pastor,” his brain was talking again, “hang together, he’s just fishing. You’re a smart guy, dominate him. You know
the big secret about him. He doesn’t know anything about you. Do the kind of work you’re capable of doing.”

“Yeah, I go to Las Noches sometimes.”

“I had you pegged for a writer, something like that.” The shooter let a few seconds go by, then added, “I always thought I’d
like to put some things down on paper, “fou ever do any writing?”

Christ, this guy was unbelievable. Danny’s confidence was lurching back in the direction of shaky. He’d started out thinking
about the matchup between a robot assassin— cocky and crude like the wiseguys, but dumber, he figured—and a crack reporter,
which shouldn’t have been any contest at all. Yet Danny kept getting the sense of the shooter being something more than an
eye and a gun.

Danny’s old skills were latent, but back there someplace. He kept telling himself that. Still, the booze and sun and loose
life in general had dulled him. He’d been aware of that happening but never noticed how far he’d dropped until that moment.
He was feeling rusty and rattled but kept talking to himself: Get tough, get smart, get on top of him.

So what if you’re a writer. That doesn’t mean anything as long as he doesn’t catch on to what you know.

“I did a little writing once. Nothing recently.”

“Got a case of… what do they call it?… writer’s block?”

“I never much liked that term. It’s a copout way of looking at things, like some invisible force has a fist around your mind
and is squeezing it.”