Point of Impact (20 page)

“Goddamn, where are they, get ’em in there. He’s going to—”

“All elements, move in, Ginger Dragon, go, go, go,” he heard Payne on the radio.

Where were they? There should be a chopper overhead, FBI SWAT guys in black rappelling down it, men moving in from all the hidden parts of the universe, men with guns and purpose, moving swiftly to stop—

“Where are they?”

Bob saw the spurt of flame as Solaratov fired.

“Bob?”

He turned and Payne shot him in the chest from a range of six feet.

Nick yawned and—

He heard the sound of a shot.

It froze him. The universe seemed to halt and his heart turned to stone.

Then the radio exploded.

“My God, Flashlight is down!
”

He sat up; swallowed again.

The shot came from close by.

“We are under fire on the podium, Flashlight is hit and down, my God!”

“Alpha Actual, Alpha Actual, all units, Alpha Actual.”

Actual was the code word; it meant somebody was shooting at or had shot the president.

“Medics, vector in those medics, get these people out of here!”

“Medevac, this is Alpha Four, we need you ASAP, the man is down and hit, oh, Christ, oh, Jesus, get him fast, there’s some other people up here hit, oh, Christ!”

“Off the air, Alpha Four, your medevac is vectored in, are you still under fire?”

“Negative, Alpha Six, I think it was two, maybe three shots, I don’t, oh, God, there’s blood all over—”

“This is Base Six, all units are cleared to fire if you have targets, this means you, countersnipers.”

“Where’s that fuckin’ medevac, we have blood everywhere, guys are down.”

Nick listened in horrified fascination.

“Do we have an isolation on the shot?”

“It was a long one, Phil, a sniper, I think it came from someplace out there beyond Rampart, in those fuckin’ houses, maybe that tall one.”

“SWAT people, let’s get going.”

“Negative that, this is Base, goddammit, we’ve got to get that chopper in and get the Man out of here.”

But me, Nick thought. I have to move.
I have to move
. He was out of the car, hating himself for the five seconds or so he’d lost.

Without willing it, the Smith came up into his hand from the pancake. His big thumb snaked out and pushed the safety up and off.

He ran toward the sound of the shot, which was on the left, the big house at 415 St. Ann.

Payne dragged him into another room. He felt the blood on his chest, warm like urine, so much of it. It felt like the last time.

In the blaze of light, as his head lolled and his limbs went limp, he could see a shooting bench, rigged together of cement blocks and weathered pieces of wood, and on it, there lay a rifle, slightly atilt on a brace of sandbags, a heavy-barreled Remington 700 with a Leupold 10x Ultra scope.

The New Orleans cop was talking urgently into his radio unit.

“Base Six, this is Victor Seven-twenty, I have shot suspect white male with rifle at five-one-four Saint Ann, please send assistance, I say again, Base Six, this is Victor Seven-twenty, I have shot suspect in the attic of five-one-four Saint Ann, please send assistance.”

Then Bob looked at the rifle.

It was his rifle.

“I have wounded suspect,” said Timmons. “Get people here fast. Get me ambulance, get me paramedics, get ’em here ASAP!”

“Okay, dump him,” said the colonel, stepping out of the shadows as Bob slid off into stillness, “and let’s get the hell out of here.”

Bob sat there, feeling again what he had felt on the ridge line when the bullet tore through his hip: shock, hatred, pain, but mostly rage at his own stupidity.

It was winding down on him. His breathing came with the slow, rough transit of a train that had run off its tracks and now rumbled over the cobblestones. His systems were shutting down, the wave of hydrostatic shock that had blown through him with the bullet’s passage upsetting all the little gyros in his organs. He felt the blood in his lungs; there was no pain quite yet but only the queer sensation of loss, of blur, of things slipping away.

Then something cracked in him.

No you aren’t going let it happen

You been shot before

You can fight through it

You be a Marine

He took a deep breath, and in the rage and pride he found what would pass for energy and without exactly willing it, he stood up, again surprised that there was no pain at all, and with a strange, determined gait began to move toward the door.

“Jesus, he’s fuckin’
up
!” he heard the cop’s anguished cry, and another shot rang out, hitting him high in the left shoulder, glancing off the bone—a heavy impact and a red sear of pain—but then he was out the door and there were only two steps to go toward a window and he launched himself, felt the window shattering, and amid a rain of glass he fell through bright sunlight toward God knew what.

Nick was looking around in a spasm of confusion. He’d entered the courtyard of the large brick house because he’d heard the cop over his earpiece claiming that he had hit a suspect. But that was a block away, at 514; he was at 415. He heard a helicopter’s roar as it whirled and darted; he heard sirens rising.

But he stood in the sunlight wondering if he should go back to the street to check the address. He thought maybe he was in the wrong area. It was a maze to him; the building scruffy and dilapidated, lots of other houses close by. Jesus, any one of them could have been the location of the call-in.

He froze, wondering what the hell to do, where to go, what he should be doing, who was in command. The gun grew heavy in his hand. He felt idiotically melodramatic, and at the same time wished he were wearing sunglasses, because the sun was so bright.

Then, immediately above him, he heard what sounded like the breaking of a hundred ice cubes and he looked up into the radiant sun. Amid a sleet of glass, a man had launched himself crazily from a fourth-story window and Nick watched him fall with a sickening acceleration toward the ground, except that fifteen feet into it, he landed with another stupefying, dust-rising whack on the slanted roof of a bay window, rolled akimbo down it, and fell again, this time by some miracle of grace and agility gaining enough control over his body so that he landed on his feet, more or less on the wooden stairway which ran up the side of the house. He lurched down the steps.

Nick stared at him dumbfounded.

The guy looked like death itself, a lean-boned, blond-headed man with squirrely-slit eyes and a deep tan. He was in blue jeans, boots and a blue workshirt. There was blood on him everywhere, and as he tried to stand, he fell back, then got his feet under him and lurched up.

Nick threw out the 10mm and screamed, “Don’t move, don’t move, FBI, goddammit, don’t move!”

The man went to his knees as fatigue and blood loss overwhelmed him and his head pitched forward; he seemed almost to collapse and Nick raced forward, yanking his cuffs from the compartment on his belt, got behind him, and got one cuff on a limb with his one free hand, holding the Smith 10 in his other, even as he smelled blood and sweat and felt the man shiver and groan.

“Fucked me,” the man kept saying, “fucked me so bad, fucked me, fucked me, fucked me.” The voice was cracker-South, a twang drawn over a banjo string.

Holding the cuffed hand up and tight, Nick slid the 1076 back into his pancake, and reached for the other wrist to bring it up to the cuffs.

For just an instant Nick knew he had him, and then the whole thing turned shaky as the man, with a force that stunned Nick, drove up and under him, and Nick felt his center of balance going, reached back for his Smith, but by that time had somehow lost leverage as well as balance as the man beneath him turned into nothing but snake.

The world splintered as Nick, judo-flipped expertly, hit the ground, his breath driven from him. He tried to right himself, but what he saw instead was the man above him, filling the entire horizon of his vision, but now coiled like a cavalry trooper with a saber, except there was no saber but only an elbow, which exploded into Nick’s cheekbone.

In the next second, amid the roar in his head and the shock, he felt a hand groping on him and as he tried feebly to prevent it through the throbbing that had overwhelmed his face, he felt the pistol being slid from his holster.

“No, God!” he shouted, grabbed the hand, but even then failed.

Now the man stood above him, the pistol leveled at his head, its bore a ravenous black mouth that would in an instant spit flame and that would be all.

Nick was dead; he accepted his own death, felt it swell in him, but then was astounded to look past the gun to the man’s looming and anguished face, as if he were looking up at a man hung out to die, his face mottled with suffering and despair, and yet in the gray eyes something terrible and abiding.

Compassion, Nick thought, but he could not believe it even as he recognized it.

Then the man was gone, scuttling off in a half-run, leaking blood.

Nick stood to give chase but a bullet whistled by his ear, fired from above, and smacked up a cloud of dust at
the fleeing man’s feet. Two more came, two more misses and then the man was out the gate and in Nick’s car.

Oh, Christ, he thought, because in his urgency he knew he’d left the key in it.

The car started, revved and was gone.

“Goddamn, goddamn, missed him, shit, hit the fuck twice, dammit.”

Nick turned to see a fat and sweaty New Orleans cop racing toward him down the steps and yelling, Beretta waving about in a fat hand.

“I’m FBI! Call it in,” Nick yelled, noting the man’s radio unit.

“Ah, Base Six, where the hell are you, this is Victor Seven-twenty, I have hit the suspect twice, but goddamn, he’s still running, and he jumped some guy and got his car. What’s the number, bubba?”

Ah! Nick didn’t know. He’d checked it out of the interagency motor pool that morning.

“It’s a goddamn Ford, beige, don’t know the number. A Taurus, I think. They’d have the number at the pool. But it’s got a radio in it, he’ll be listening. Who are you?”

“Timmons, Traffic Division. Seen something up on the fourth floor moving up near the goddamned roof line. Called in that chopper, but they didn’t see nothing. Went in, heard the goddamn shot, and bounced the guy. He made a jump at me and damn if I didn’t put a Silvertip right through his chest and knock him down. And two minutes later the guy is up and running. Took another shot, hit him in the shoulder, and then he’s out the fuckin’ window. Took three more shots after he decked you, but missed.”

Nick just shook his head. He tried to figure it out, but one thing he knew for certain, and that was he was in big trouble. Getting your piece taken from you by a
presidential assassin who’d already soaked up two bullets was a definite bad career move.

“Man, I’m screwed,” he said in a little burst of self-pity.

“Shit, no sweat,” said the cop. “I seen ’em hit like that before. You may not get ’em with a one-shot stop but they bleed out in ten minutes. He’s a dead guy right now. They’ll find him half a mile away, piled up against a dipsy dumpster in an alley.”

“No,” said Nick, knowing that the fates would not be so kind to him. “Not that guy.”

He turned.

“Get on that thing and put out an all points bulletin. Bob Lee Swagger. Of Blue Eye, Arkansas, and the United States Marine Corps.”

“You
know
him?” the cop said.

“Yeah,” said Nick, suddenly feeling all sorts of pain begin to fire away all over his body, but the physical pain wasn’t so much as the anguish for the terrible days ahead. “Yeah. I know him.”

Bob drove through waves of hallucination, skidding left- and right-hand turns, watching alleys fly by, terrified most of all of the bird. He knew if a bird had him, he was dead and gone, because a bird could stay with him.

But no bird came. In a second, over the car’s police radio, he learned why.

“Base Six, that medevac all set with Flashlight and other wounded aboard, let’s clear the air so we can ASAP to Shock Trauma.”

“Roger, Shock Trauma, I want all birds to go to ground level while we get the man to the hospital. Any word, Alpha?”

“Lots of blood, that’s all I can tell you, Base Six, and we got paramedics working hard. You let us worry, he’s in our hands now.”

Then other messages broke in and the whole thing degenerated into a cascade of possibilities, of rumors, of men yelling for attention and assistance. He heard a couple of references to “five-one-four Saint Ann” and the fleeing suspect, but that baffled him; he’d been in 415; 514 was a block away, on the other side of the street. Where did they get that number? What was going on? Then he had it. Sure, that’s how well planned it was. Timmons gives the wrong address, as if he’s flustered. The whole outfit goes to the wrong house a block away. That gives Payne and the colonel the time to slip away.

He drove onward, down deserted streets, and now a new problem began to eat at him. His head kept trying to float back to Vietnam. He fought with it, feeling very much two men, a weak one who wanted to return and a strong one who would not let him. He’d been hit in Vietnam too, and once you’ve been hit, it always feels the same. He slid for a second, unrooted in time, the dead past floating up big as a movie in front of him. There was an enormous amount of pain that day, and the pain he now felt brought that back. But this wasn’t anything like it. The pain of the hip had been absolute.