Point of Impact (3 page)

“You can see, of course, his ready fund of resentment, his sense of isolation. All these things make him vulnerable and malleable,” said the doctor. “He’s the man we’ve been taught to hate. He’s the solitary American gun nut.”

Bob knew, as the gun jolted into his shoulder and the sight picture disappeared in a blur of recoil, that the perfect shot he’d been building toward all these hours was his. It was as if the image at the second when the lockwork of the Remington bolt had delivered striker to primer were engraved in his mind and he had fractions of a second to analyze at a speed that has no place in real time; yes, the rifle was held true; yes, the scope, zeroed onto two hundred yards with a group size of less than two inches, was placed exactly where he wanted it; yes, the trigger pull was smooth, unhurried; yes, he was surprised when it broke; yes, his position was solid and no, no last second twitch, no flicker of doubt or lack of self-belief, had betrayed him.

Yes, he’d hit.

The animal, stricken, bucked ferociously in its sudden
shroud of red mist. Its great antlered head spasmed back as its front legs collapsed under it and it crashed to the ground.

Without unshouldering, Bob flicked the bolt, tossing a piece of spent brass, ramming home a new .308, and reacquired the target. But he saw immediately that no follow-up was necessary. He snapped the safety on, lowered the rifle and watched Tim thrash, his bull neck beating against the sleet and dust. The animal could not accept that it had been hit or that its legs no longer functioned or that numbness was spreading through it.

Go on, fight it, boy, thought Bob. The more you fight it, the faster it gets you.

At last the man stood. His legs ached and he suddenly noticed how cold it was. He flexed his fingers to make certain they still worked. His hand flew to the ache in his hip, then denied it. He shivered; under the down vest, he was bathed in sweat. Numbly, he went over and retrieved the shell casing he’d just ejected.

After shooting, Bob felt nothing. He felt even more nothing than he did in shooting. He looked at the animal in the undergrowth a hundred-odd yards away. No sense of triumph filled him, no elation.

Yeah, well, I can still shoot a little, he thought. Not so old as I thought.

Creakily, he walked down the hill to the clearing and over to the fallen stag. The sleet pelted him, stinging his face. The whole world seemed gray and wet. He squinted, shivered, drew the parka tighter about himself.

The animal wheezed. Its head still beat against the ground. Its eye was opened desperately and it craned back to see Bob. He thought he could see fear glinting
out of that great black eyeball, fear and rage and betrayal, all the huge things that something that’s just been shot feels.

The animal’s tongue hung from its half-opened mouth as the deeper paralysis overcame all its systems. The buck was a brute all right, and its legs were as scarred as a football player’s knees. Bob could see a pucker of dead tissue high on the flank where Sam Vincent’s sloppy .45-70 had flashed through years earlier. But the horns, though now slightly asymmetrical, were beautiful. Tim wore an enormous rack, twelve points of staghorn, in a convoluted density of random growth, like a crown of thorns atop the narrow beauty of his head. He was all trophy, maybe a record for the Boone and Crockett book.

His flanks still heaved, showing the struts of his ribs. His living warmth and its musty, dense animal smell rose through the plunging sleet. You could almost warm your fingers off of him. His left back leg kicked ineffectually, as even now he fought it. Bob looked at the bullet strike. He could see the impact just where he’d willed it to be and just where the Remington had sent it to go: a crimson stain above the shoulder, immediately above the spine.

Figure I hit you just about dead perfect, partner, Bob thought.

Tim snorted piteously, thrashing again. It irked Bob that he thrashed and splattered the mud up on his tawny hide, spotting it. The animal could not take its eye off Bob as Bob bent and stroked it.

Bob touched the throat, then pulled out his knife, an old Randall Survivor, murderously sharp.

Be over in a second, partner, he thought, bending toward Tim.

“Wait a minute,” said Payne.

Dobbler swallowed. In the dark Payne looked over at him with a pathological glare. Everybody was afraid of Payne except Shreck.

“Colonel, I been around a lot of guys like that in the service, and so have you,” he said to Shreck. “Proud to say, I served with them in my twenty-two years in the Special Forces. Now, when it’s killing time, there ain’t no better boy than your white country Southerner. Those boys can shoot, and they got stones the size of cars. But they got an attitude problem, too. They got this thing about their honor. Cross one of them boys, and they make it their business to even the score, and I ain’t shitting you. I’ve seen it happen in service too fuckin’ many times to talk about it.”

“Go on, Payne,” said the colonel.

“They’re true men, and when they get something in their heads, they won’t let go of it. I saw enough of it in Vietnam. I’m just telling you, cross this man and I’m guaranfuckingteeing you the worst kind of trouble.”

“I think,” said the doctor in a loud voice, “that Mr. Payne has made an excellent point. It would not do at all to underestimate Bob Lee Swagger. And he is especially right when he notes Bob’s ‘honor.’ But surely you can also see that it’s his honor that makes him so potentially valuable to us. He is in fact quite a bit like the precision rifle with which he earned his nickname—extremely dangerous if used sloppily, yet absolutely perfect if used well. He, after all, knows more about what we are interested in than nearly any man alive. He is simply the best sniper in the Western world.”

He shot a glance at the silent figure of Shreck, and received in reply only more stony silence.

“But there is a problem. Bob the Nailer, as perfect as he seems, does present one terrible, terrible problem. He has a deep flaw.”

Bob leaned over Tim, gripping the Randall in his left hand.

Tim snorted one more time.

Bob spun the gnarled haft of the weapon in his hand, bringing the serrated upper teeth to bear. With the saw blade, he hacked at the base of the left antler, not in the veiny, velvety knob but an inch or two higher, where the horn was stone dead. In a second the teeth cut into and through the horn and Bob yanked as a half of the heavy crown fell into his hand. He tossed it away into the undergrowth, bent, and just as forcefully sawed the second antler off.

Then he backed off to avoid getting trampled.

The beast lurched halfway to its feet.

Bob gave it a hard swat on the rump.

“Go on, boy. Git! Git! Git outta here, you old sonovabitch!”

Tim bucked up, snorted once, shook his unchained head with a shiver of the purest delight and, his nostrils spurting a double plume of rancid, smoky breath, he seemed to gather even more strength and bounded off crazily, bending aside saplings and flinging shards of ice as he plunged into the forest.

In a second he was gone.

I own you, you sonovabitch, Bob thought, watching as the stag disappeared.

He turned and started the long trek home.

“His flaw,” said the doctor, “is that he will not kill anymore. He still hunts. He goes to great lengths and puts himself through extraordinary ordeals to fire at trophy animals. But he hits them with his own extremely light bullets machined of Delrin plastic at a hundred yards’ range. If he hits the creatures right and he always does—he aims for the shoulder above the spine—he can literally
stun them off their feet for five or six minutes. There’s a small compartment of red aluminum dust for weight in each bullet, and as the bullet smashes against the flank of the beast, it smears the animal with a red stain, which the rain quickly washes off. Extraordinary. Then he saws their antlers off. So that no hunter will shoot them for a trophy. He hates trophy hunting. After all, he’s
been
a trophy.”

Colonel Shreck spoke.

“All right, then. It’s Swagger. But we’ll have to find a trophy this asshole will hunt,” he said.

It was funny how a rifle will sometimes go sour on you. Bob’s fine old pre-’64 Winchester Model 70 in .270 had been a minute-of-angle gun for five years, shooting within an inch at a hundred yards, or two at two hundred or three at three, holding ever true to that abstraction of rifle accuracy. But it had suddenly opened up. On today’s target, the bullet punctures formed a raggedy constellation over three times an inch.

Yet, baffled as he was, a certain part of Bob was tickled. It was so damned
interesting
. It was one more thing to find out about, another trip deep into the maze that kept him, or so he believed, sane.

Take this damn 70. He could spend a week on it. He’d take it apart, down to its finest screw and
spring, and go over each tiny bit of it, looking for burrs in the metal, for pieces of grit in the works, for signs of wear or fatigue. He’d steam clean the trigger mechanism. With his fingers, he’d probe every square centimeter of the stock, feeling for knots, splinters, warps, anything that could lay just the softest finger of pressure against the barrel to nudge the rifle out of true.

And when that was done, if it didn’t shoot right, he’d just do it again.

His tiny shop was out back of the trailer, a shed of corrugated tin, dark and oily. Off to one side stood a reloading bench, with a single-stage Rock Chucker for his rifle loads and a Dillon for his .45’s, and stacked along the wall, neatly and fastidiously, were his many dies. The back wall had filing cabinets for his notebooks and his targets, and bins for used brass that he’d yet to reload. The smell of Shooter’s Choice bore solvent hung in the air like a vapor. A single light illuminated the darkness, and if he wasn’t shooting or sleeping he was reading
Guns & Ammo
or
Shooting Times
or
The American Rifleman
or
Accuracy Shooting
or
The Shotgun News
or
Rifle
.

But on this afternoon as he contemplated the delinquent Model 70, he heard his dog Mike barking. Mike, a furious old half-beagle with a mangy coat and yellow eyes, prowled the fence Bob had built around his trailer; in exchange for table scraps and a daily romp through the hills, he’d chase any human thing away, except for the two or three that Bob allowed to call on him. But this day, Mike just kept howling for the longest damn time, and Bob knew that whoever had come by wasn’t about to leave.

He slipped a cocked and locked Series ’70 Colt .45 out of a drawer and slid it into the back pocket of his jeans, then threw on a jacket and his Razorback baseball hat and stepped out. The sun was a thin wash. Around
him, the blue Ouachitas rose bleakly, bled dry of color by the coming of cold weather, and Bob turned the corner to see two men lounging next to what had to be a rented car just beyond the gate, while Mike yowled at them as if he’d kill them if they came closer.

They wore raincoats over suits. But they were soldiers of a sort. Maybe not now, but they’d been soldiers, that was clear. They were carved from the same tough tree, one square and blocky, Bob’s own age, but a head and a half lower to the ground, with huge hands and a weight lifter’s body; he had a sheen of crewcut hair, and every square inch of him said NCO.

The other was the officer: taller, but husky too, well-proportioned, with a square face and short but not crewcut hair. He had the look of at least nine of Bob’s eleven battalion commanders down through the years, men Bob didn’t love but respected, because they put mission first and last and always accomplished it.

“Go on, shuddup,” Bob said to Mike, giving him a kick. The dog slunk off to the door. But Bob didn’t open his locked fence. He put his hand under his jacket and set it on the haft of the .45, because it’s always better to have your gun in your hand than in your pants if it comes to kick-ass time.

“Y’all want something?” he said, squinting up his face.

“You’re Mr. Bob Lee Swagger?” said the officer.

“I am, sir.” Bob spit a glob of phlegm into the dust.