I, Sniper: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel Read online

  “I see, I see,” said Bill. “Then possibly here’s a way we could go. Could we leak something to, say, NBC News or the Times? I happen to know a young guy at the Times who could be very helpful. And that paper almost speaks with the authority of the state, and an early peek at the findings of the investigation would do a lot to calm this grotesque speculation.”

  “Well,” said Nick, knowing it to be a bad idea. You couldn’t trust those guys anymore, and some hotshot egoist reporter with a desperate need to advance his own career could completely mess things up.

  “I appreciate Tom’s interest,” said the director, “but I don’t think we’ve got anything comprehensive to leak yet. I’d be very happy to keep you gentleman, and Mr. Constable, in the loop, and when we have something near an end product, we’ll get back in touch and then maybe we can work something out. In the meantime, Nick, consider yourself officially interfered with by the Seventh Floor and pressurized to bring it to a boil faster, because there are so many interested parties. It’s wrong, it’s unfair, it sucks, but it’s Washington.”

  Everybody laughed at the director’s skillful jest, which nevertheless carried the weight of authority behind the humor.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to walk Nick back to the task force real estate; it was good of you to drop by and express your concerns.”

  Everybody rose, shook, palavered inconsequentially for a bit, and then the director herded Nick back to the hallway and shoved him down it toward the elevators.

  “Sorry, but Constable has juice with the administration, and when he leans, I have to pretend to give a little.”

  “Yes sir,” said Nick.

  “For some reason, they want this thing moved ahead. I know you’re working your ass off, but it’s so much better for all of us if you can release sooner rather than later and if you can slip something to the Times.”

  “As soon as I can, sir, believe me, I’ll—”

  “Just let me ask you, what’s the hang-up? Do you need more people? Is it a manpower issue or a technology thing? Whatever support you need, I’ll give it to you one hundred fifty percent. I want this thing over too.”

  “Yes sir. No, it’s not really manpower, it’s—”

  He paused.

  “ ‘Memo to Special Agents: Never pause thoughtfully in the presence of the director. Thoughtful doesn’t get you to the Seventh Floor, only results do.’ ”

  “Yes sir. It’s this, then. I’ll lay it out. Not a major issue, I think, but it is something I’ve—we’ve—never encountered before. It’s weird; it’s got us somewhat baffled.”

  “An anomaly?”

  “A huge anomaly. I’ve never seen an anomaly this big.”

  “What is it?”

  “Here’s the anomaly: there are no anomalies.”

  The director grunted.

  “This is real life,” Nick said, “there’s always an anomaly, some little random fact that doesn’t make sense or seems stuck in there and is connected to nothing. Someone gets somewhere too fast or not out of breath; someone’s looking out a window and sees something and misinterprets it; a fingerprint from seven years ago turns up on a scene and screws up everybody. That’s the universe we work in: squalid, messy, human, full of the unexplained or the untidy. The unusual is to be expected; it’s even banal. But in this case, nothing. It all fits. There’s nothing left over, nothing unexplained. Everything is perfect, from the ballistics to the forensics to the arterial spray patterns to the fiber samples to the fingerprints to the paper trail to the witness accounts to the time line to the coroner’s report to the DNA testing. It’s not messy enough. It’s too neat and it makes me very nervous.”

  “But you can’t put your finger on any one thing, is that it?”

  “Exactly. We go over it and over it and we’re stymied. Every day we get something new and it always fits just right, like a puzzle.”

  “Well, let me just caution you that you don’t want to get too overwhelmed by what is, after all, well and truly nothing. I mean the prime craziness of the conspiracy gooney birds is the notion that the less the evidence, the more proof the authorities saw of conspiracy. Less was never less, it was always more. The absence of evidence was seen as more significant than evidence itself.”

  “Good point,” Nick conceded. “Still, there’s a thing I want to do. Let me run it by you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “A wild card.”

  “Hmm,” said the director.

  “Meaning somebody from outside our culture, not in our boxes, with our prejudices, who would look at it with a fresh eye.”

  “A neutral observer.”

  “Actually, someone inclined to disbelieve our explanation. Someone who’d fight us. Someone with an instinct for our weaknesses. Someone who’s very good on guns, particularly the dynamics of shooting, because he’s won a batch of fights with big iron. Someone whose life experience inclines him to revere the marine sniper and who would never make an axiomatic assumption about a marine sniper’s guilt. His mind doesn’t work that way. Then, he was himself a marine sni—”

  “Swagger.”

  “Yes.”

  “Christ, Nick, no doubt he’s quite the operator, but can he be controlled? I mean, we spun his adventures in Bristol to our advantage, no doubt about it, but he was just that far from being out of control. Nick, suppose that fifty he fired at that helicopter had missed and hit a busful of orphan piano prodigies on their way to prayer camp.”

  “I’d be a crossing guard in Mississippi,” said Nick.

  “And I’d be your supervisor, making twenty-five cents more an hour. Nick—”

  “He’s smart,” Nick said. “Almost nobody knows more about this stuff than he does. And he’s honest. He’ll call it as he reads it, no bullshit, no PC, no spin. He’s straight nineteenth-century lawman in that regard.”

  “Matt Dillon!” said the director. “Here we go again. You ride him hard, you control him heavy, you have three more days. We need that report sooner, if not faster than sooner.”

  8

  He beheld the thing itself. It was Carl’s “teaching rifle,” a patiently constructed replica of the Remington M40A1 .308 USMC sniper rifle of the nineties. Carl, of course, had done his great shooting in Vietnam with one of the old marine special services target rifles, a heavy-barreled Model 70 in .30-06, and a two-foot-long Unertl 8x scope. But that system was hopelessly outmoded, and as a “teacher” at sniper schools and an adviser to police SWAT teams and a gun show celeb, he’d had to acquire something more up-to-date, and thus in 1997 had purchased 5965321.

  It seemed that 5965321 was Swagger’s fate, no matter how he tried to avoid it. Nick had pushed all the right buttons: responsibility to the Corps, responsibility to the sniper program and to sniper culture, the one-in-a-million shot this was a game some assholes were running that only he, Swagger, could see into, the old cowboy thing about setting things right in the world. Against such arguments, “I’m old, I’m tired, I’m used up, I need a nap, my leg hurts” didn’t cut much. So here he was with Carl’s rifle, in the city he hated above all others, surrounded by people of whom he trusted only one.

  The rifle: Carl had gotten 5965321 through the PX system at Camp Lejeune, a system which as a retiree he was still allowed to use, writing a check (also recovered) for $345.89, as opposed to a civilian retail of about $700, a very good deal. The agents had found the bill of sale in his papers, and Bob looked at it now: a Remington police rifle, in the model PPS, with a heavy 24-inch barrel and a tuned action. Carl bought it, Carl used it, Carl knew it, Carl loved it, no doubt about that.

  Carl also, as sophisticated shooters will, improved it. He’d bought a McMillan Hunter stock, in the sand-and-spinach camo pattern that was state of the art in the nineties, before all this desert digital came in. Either he or a marine armorer buddy had bedded the action to the stock and hung a 1903 leather Springfield sling on it. He bought a Leupold 3.5–10x tactical scope with mil-dots in the reticle fo
r ranging, a good alternative to the Marine Unertl 10xs not commonly available on the open market. He mounted the scope in Badger Ordnance tactical rings on a Badger Picatinny rail bolted and red Loctited to the action. He’d changed out the Remington trigger for a Jewell that gave 5965321 a five-ounce pull without creep or overtravel. He’d fired nothing but match 168-grainers in it and had shot out the original barrel and replaced it with two Hart barrels, keeping a detailed log of each shot fired. A few years ago, realizing that his clients would mostly be law enforcement and that many would be shooting suppressed systems, he’d gone through the ATF/Treasury Department rigamarole to legally purchase an otherwise illegal Class III device, i.e., a suppressor from SureFire, the tac light, laser, and suppressor giant, and had paid the SureFire armorers to machine threads to his new Krieger barrel on which to screw the noise-dampening steel tube. When the trigger was pulled, the gun didn’t go bang, it went ulch or groff or something like that, a lot less loud but more importantly dissipated to other points on the horizon and thus a lot less identifiable as a firearm report. The SureFire armorers were so good that they could mount the can, as suppressors are called, without affecting the accuracy of the weapon, and FBI shooters had already proved the efficacy of the construction: they’d gotten consistent minute-of-angle groups, averaging .675 at a hundred yards, 1.866 at two hundred, and 2.84 at three hundred yards, the scope well zeroed at the hundred-yard marker.

  It was a formidable piece of weaponry, easily capable of killing each of the targets that had been fired at during Carl’s last mad week, and given his expertise in the art, the kills were clearly within his capabilities; moreover, the suppressor disguised the origin of the shots and guaranteed his getaway. Ballistics matched, casings matched, fingerprints matched; all the shots were makeable by a man with Carl’s extensive training and field experience, and all the movements seemed within his capacity even as a sixty-eight-year-old man.

  The rifle, slightly out of balance because of the eight-inch suppressor, lay on a long table set up in the Major Case working room on the third floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington DC. It was part of the melancholy accretion of data by which the agents and technicians had proved that Carl and Carl alone had been responsible for the four murders in the seven-day time line of his killing spree. Their arguments and their evidence were contained in the draft known as “the report,” meant to be issued through PIO as soon as possible, in tandem with the case being officially closed by the Bureau, and the police agencies involved would certainly, even eagerly, follow suit. And that would be that. Swagger had read the report many times, and even though rough and unfinished, it was an extremely convincing document.

  In Carl’s home, address given, agents had located a “mission room” in which detailed accounts of the lives of nine “famous” antiwar activists from the late sixties and early seventies, among them “Hanoi Joan” Flanders, Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly, and, a much lesser presence admittedly, Mitch Greene. Moreover, the number ninety-seven, representing the number of kills it would take for Carl to take over as “number one marine sniper” from the war, was scrawled in thirty-nine separate localities in the room, on scraps of paper, on the wall, though again admittedly, it was difficult to get a convincing handwriting interpretation based only on two numerals.

  That number spoke to motive, perhaps seemingly irrational to many but certainly arguable in the context of advancing physical decline, signs of dementia or depression, alcohol problems, loneliness, and isolation.

  The means were equally convincing. A paper trail documented the former marine’s travels in his last week, from his purchase of the blue Ford van for $16,900 from Woody’s Fords on the outskirts of Jacksonville to Bank of America Visa card records for fill-ups, which traced an odyssey that ran from Jacksonville to Long Island to Chicago to Cleveland to finally near Ann Arbor. Motel bills told the same story.

  There was the van itself, smeared with Carl’s fingerprints and DNA traces, as well as dirt samples essentially linkable to two of the three shooting sites, clearly brought into the cab by Carl’s boots. Witnesses corroborated it all, more or less. Yeah, that’s the guy, yeah, old guy, kind of thorny, looked like that guy. The witnesses were the least impressive, of course, because they were people in the hospitality industry who saw hundreds of faces a day, but they basically agreed that yes, that’s the guy.

  He was there. He’d done it. Face it, Bob said to himself.

  The motive? Well, who knew about that? It seemed to make sense in the way killers’ motives made sense in the movies. Yeah, sure, he learned he wasn’t number one no more and the freakin’ redneck hillbilly cracked and went wacko/psycho. It didn’t sound like any marine NCO Bob had ever known, because those gentlemen—himself included—tended to be the kind that stuffed it way inside and let it sit there. Even at the worst of times, with lead flying in and hitting everywhere, everything, everybody, tossing up stinging clouds of jet-spray debris, their faces remained, on long discipline, phlegmatic and almost uninterested. It wasn’t that they were fearless, it’s that they were responsible, and they had boys under them on the verge of panic and flight, and that dull, unimpressed face was their greatest weapon. It was cultivated, a sergeant mug—flat, smooth, unworried, kind of irritated maybe, but hardly really noticing all the shit in the air.

  Would a man with a face like that crack the way this theory held, and then—here was the strange part—fragment into two beings, one still stoic and capable of intelligence gathering and analysis, complex escape planning, and execution in the form of great shooting followed by fallback through an unfamiliar area, without a single slipup, and the other clear-out crazy as a burning duck in a tornado? It didn’t sit with any theory of human behavior Bob had ever seen or heard of, and he’d been around a bit. He’d heard of great warriors who suddenly were torn down by black dogs of depression—hell, he’d been one of those, in another lifetime, a solitary, furious loser off in the woods by himself, with nothing but mean for any and all—but those guys usually just ate the .45 one night. They had too much respect for what guns can do to go serial killer on anybody. They might end up lonely, bitter drunks, wife beaters, terrible fathers, serial adulterers, bar fighters, but it wasn’t in the mind to go out and kill. Still, evidently some docs somewhere said it was possible. It was a symptom of post-combat stress syndrome, or whatever they were calling it these days. These guys in white coats were much smarter than him, so maybe they knew something. They said that it worked as a motive, and so the reality was, it worked as a motive. That would not go away. Carl got what little glory RVN bestowed, rode it hard, saw it turn to nothing, and he cracked. So be it.

  So Bob set aside motive and turned at last to his most dreaded and melancholy task, feeling no progress had been made and none was on the horizon.

  This was the actual product of the killer’s enterprise: four corpses. Bob had seen corpses his whole life and had donated more than could be counted to the cause of universal extinction for meaningless reasons. He knew what bullets did to flesh and bone. He himself had been hit at least seven times and had in his hip a stainless steel ball joint to keep his old thighbone functional where a .30 caliber had torn through and shredded everything it hit. He knew what grotesqueness the collision of supersonic bits of copper-covered lead and human matter was likely to produce, and there’d been little grotesqueness of that sort he hadn’t seen.

  Nevertheless he was pleased to ease into his virtual trip to the morgue via the first of the victims, the movie star, who alone had been shot in the body. The crime scene photos were of little use; they simply displayed a woman handsomely dressed, petite, lithe, lying facedown on the bricks in a sleepy, relaxed, yet dignified position: her knees were together, and nothing untoward could be glimpsed (and police photographers were notoriously inclined to denude the body of any vestige of dignity by going for the looker-upper to panty). A pool of blood lay beneath her, and one expensive shoe had dislodged itself from her foot. She had pretty painted
toenails, and nothing that he could see suggested that she was older than he was by a few years: taut legs, thin wrists, a thin neck. She looked a toned thirty-five. A little sherbet stain marked the entrance wound, but most of the gore was from another angle, and when he turned to that photo, he saw nothing but a delta of black liquid soaking her clothes. A hand at the end of a splayed arm hung limp; blood ran down it, inside her sleeve, and it slid down her curled fingers and deposited itself in little splotches on the bricks beneath.

  The morgue shots showed even less, really. A neat puncture of an entrance wound, an exit wound (now cleaned) about the size of a fist, traversing her from left front to opposite rear right, that is to say, breast to shoulder blade. Alas, between them had lain her heart, and it had been neatly exploded by the velocity; a separate photo showed the shredded organ, and he shuddered, thinking of the millions who’d loved and hated this woman, who’d been moved by her art or sickened by her politics, who’d worked out with her on her exercise tapes or loved her famous father and brother, who’d followed her in the gossips or on the tube. What would they say of this pulverized piece of meat that stood for her soul?

  He put down the case of Joan Flanders and turned to the far more devastating photos and diagrams of Jack Strong and Mitzi Reilly. He tried to be professional, objective, distanced, but couldn’t quite bring that off, as indeed what he saw was an atrocity.

  The integrity of the head, after all, is the surest of biological assumptions. The head is a vault, a treasure chest, a reliquary, the container of all our sacraments, of all that makes us human. When you blow it up, the sight disturbs anyone.

  It disturbed Bob. Jack Strong’s face was gone. It simply wasn’t there. The bullet had tilted sideways—its entry was small enough, a little bitty thirty-caliber hole hard to find under Jack’s thick hair—as it coursed through and churned up stuff and had built up enormous energy in just nanoseconds so that like a typhoon of brain matter, it literally exploded, tearing out everything that had been the upper left quarter of his face. What remained was an immense crater of red curd, squashed bean, broken potato chip, and vomited banana, sustained in a bowl of shattered skull; stared at long enough, the image fuzzed and became a volcano photo-reconned from above.