It bucked in his hand: its muzzle flash ignited the column of vapor behind him as he dropped it. He felt the whooosh whooosh as the darkness ruptured with a blade of light so fierce and radiant that it bleached the colors from the forest and the field even as it briefly exposed them. Starburst, nova, supernova, the universe ending in fire. as the darkness ruptured with a blade of light so fierce and radiant that it bleached the colors from the forest and the field even as it briefly exposed them. Starburst, nova, supernova, the universe ending in fire.

The heat rolled across him and he felt his back pucker and blister as he fell forward.

Across the clearing, like a dog's eyes caught in the full light, two lenses captured the radiation from the fireball and reflected it back at him. They were stacked circles: the lens of a light-amplifying scope and the lens of an IF search-light. But still they were the eyes of a beast.

Bob fired over his sights, not through them, aiming out of instinct, following the illuminated trajectory of his first round. The tracer flicked fast and a little low, kicking up some dirt. In a nanosecond he corrected, fired again, the tracer skipping across the distance so fast, a whipsong of illumination, and it went to the eyes and struck between them.

Fire for effect, he thought. That's in the book of counter-sniper operations: locate, then overwhelm with superior firepower.

He jacked ten fast rounds into the eyes, the tracers snaking over the clearing and plunging into the position across the way, a sleet of light. He threw darts of light, bolts of light, missiles of light, as he burned through the rest of the magazine, a controlled burst, three shots a second, walking the rounds across the position where the now vanished eyes had proclaimed themselves. The tracers struck and sunk, or they bounced crazily away, like flecks of an exploding star.

He looked and all about him, fires burned.

But he was done.

Jesus H. Christ.

Peck drew back, astounded at what he saw before him.

A column of flame, like the detonation of a bomb, gushed upward through the trees.

Then in a second, someone was shooting tracers. They dashed across the field fast, low and ugly, snapping remorselessly at the base of a tree on the far side.

He had a terrible suspicion that Jack Preece was on the receiving end of the fireworks.

His night vision was shattered, but enough of it came back in time to see a dark shape rush from the tower of flames, cross the clearing and close on the far position and bend to probe a body.

It was enough.

Peck knew he was overmatched.

Time to get the hell out of there.

Bob found Preece in his ghillie suit, looking like a sofa that had exploded. He lay on his belly, and Bob almost put a shot into him, but held up. The body was still, the fingers relaxed.

Fuck you if you can't take a joke, he thought.

He turned the body over. In the illumination of the fires flaring across the clearing, he saw that the man had taken at least four or five shots in the head and upper torso. Blood everywhere, the face smashed and broken.

Bob flipped the body aside; Preece was the ultimate step-on. Bob knelt to examine the weapon and saw quickly that it too was destroyed. A bullet had smashed the scope and another had shattered the lens of the infrared searchlight.

Now it occurred to him he was illuminated in the fire-light. Maybe there was someone else around.

He felt no triumph or power but only the emptiness of survival.

He moved out.

42.

Now what?

It was first light and the sun had begun to filter through the black trees, turning them gray and then green.

Russ stirred painfully. His limbs were numb from the water that had washed over them all night. He tried not to look at Jed Posey, whose skull had been evacuated and now seemed like a queerly semi-deflated balloon.

He had no idea what was happening. Sometime last night, the sky had lit up for a second or so, as something huge and hot burned fast; there'd been gunfire too: a batch of rounds tapping out, almost fast as a machine gun, he thought.

But since then, silence.

He remembered his instructions. Wait until dawn. The sniper's rifle is worthless in the light as well as awkward and heavy, so you'll be safe. Then strike out due west, moving quickly. Six or seven hours away is the road, U.S. 71. Get into town, call the cops, tell everything to everybody.

And what about Bob?

No sign of Bob.

Possibly Bob was doing all that shooting, possibly not. Russ couldn't imagine a world without a Bob in it. It somehow seemed impossible.

He pulled himself out of the creek and climbed up the bank. He searched for the compass in his pocket, found it, held it level and let it orient itself. Then he shot an azimuth due west, picked a landmark at its end and started out for it.

The woods, in the increasing light, were quiet, green and oddly lovely. Something about the freshness of the morning dew, the sense of a long and bloody night past and having somehow survived it. Wouldn't this make a terrific book?

He wondered if he had the strength to write it. Maybe not now, but after a few weeks' rest. He had an image: he'd take that job on the Fort Smith paper, get a little place and work hard in his off hours on the book. Maybe he could go up to Nashville, to Vanderbilt, and see Sam's granddaughter Jeannie, who- Something crushed into Russ, knocking him flat. He thought it was Bob, rescuing him, but the iron strength applied against him, pushing his face into the loam, and the sudden spasm of pain as a knee drove into his kidneys told him no.

He struggled pointlessly, as the larger, stronger man dominated him toward submission. Another knee thundered into his kidneys and sent a rocket of terrible pain up his body. He couldn't see: he felt something hard and cold against the flesh under his ear, and he then heard a voice: "You move, you fucking whelp, and I'll kill you right here."

It was Duane Peck.

Something snapped around his wrist and then around his other wrist.

He was handcuffed.

"Come on, baby boy," said the deputy, pulling him up. Peck looked crazed, splotched with sweat, his hair a damp mess, his eyes wild with madness. "We're going to meet your pal."

[image]

Bob crawled from the brush at first light. He thought hard about his own next move and saw that attempting to intercept Russ in the forest was pointless. Instead, he decided to move back to the car, escape the immediate area and set up somewhere on Route 71 where Russ would probably emerge around noon. Then they could go get a good hot meal and return to base camp and figure out a next move, whatever a next move might be.

He looked at his watch. It was about 6:30 A.M A.M.

He had one subsidiary stop: to head back to the far side of the clearing, where he had to recover the Mini-14, a rifle that was traceable to him and whose spent shells would match the spent shells found on the roadside of the Taliblue Trail. That might lead to more explaining than he cared to do.

Warily, he looked around and in the gray but increasing light, could see nothing. There was no noise, except the occasional peeping of an awakening bird. A low mist clung to the ground, all the better.

He crawled from cover, reached back to check his .45 and then began to move low and zigzagging through the forest. Did he want to recheck the body?

No, he decided not to. If there was another man in the forest, one thing such a boy might do is set up there. He determined that there was no incriminating evidence at the body, nothing to connect him once he got rid of the Mini-14. The rifle was the important thing.

He approached from the southeast, slithered up to a fallen log and examined what lay before him. He could see no signs of human activity: only an undulating, wild clearing a hundred yards by a few hundred yards, crazed with knee-high grass and speckled with flowers. At the oblique, a scorched, blackened tree stood, where he had detonated the fireball. Lucky the forest was damp and the flames didn't spread. Very lucky. It was something he hadn't thought of in the craziness of the moment last night.

It's better to be lucky than good, he thought.

Carefully, he maneuvered around the perimeter of the clearing until at last he had returned to the site of last night's action. A few small fires still smoldered and he kicked them out. He stood in the core of the fireball: a blackened cylinder seemed to have been cut in the trees, but it would grow out quickly.

He went to the tree behind which he'd hid, and saw the rifle lying a few feet out in the high grass. He went quickly to it and lifted it. While he was out there, he collected spent shells and seemed stuck at nineteen, but then, remembering the sense of being pronged in the face by a shell ejecting straight back (it happens), he slid backwards and found the twentieth shell far from where the others had landed and, near it, the single .45 casing that had lit the fire. Shit, he'd forgotten that one. He stuck it in his jeans pocket. Then he remembered he'd fired twice more, to attract attention, back in the trees a bit. He moved back and had a little trouble at first, but then a glint of brass announced itself and he picked up one and, nearby, the other.

Shells at car, he thought: three of them. Pick them up too.

He took a quick look back. Across the way, he could make out very little of where Jack Preece lay. It occurred to him to bury the body, but he didn't have a shovel, he didn't feel like getting Preece's blood and DNA all over himself, and some forest animal would come along and dig it up, anyhow. If Preece was found, Preece would be found, and someone could have a field day coming up with a conspiracy theory as to how he got there and what he was up to. Some Johnnie would probably write another goddamned useless book on it.

He was set.

It was time to go.

He stood and began to move and then he heard something. Not sure what it was-a shout, a call, a squawk, something natural, something human?-he slid back, pulling out the .45, thumb rising to the safety, as the empty Mini-14 was now useless.

What the-?

He waited and it came again.

Yes, it was a human call, blurred and almost recognizable, from somewhere off to the left.

His eyes scanned the terrain.

He caught a flash of motion across the way, in the trees, and watched as it tumbled into focus, the awkward form of a man walking clumsily. He saw it was Russ, tumbling forward but yanked back, then pushed forward again. Bob made out the second man behind him, controlling him. It was Peck, of course.

Peck screamed again.

"Sniper! Come on and fight me, sniper, goddamn you." Come on and fight me, sniper, goddamn you."

Duane Peck saw his future in a second when the boy stumbled toward him. He would take the boy and through the boy take the sniper. In that way he would endear himself to Red Bama and the Bama organization and enjoy a life of respect, wealth, property and importance, everything he yearned for.

And the boy presented himself so easily, snot-nosed punk stumbling through the woods. Duane had subdued many prisoners in his time: the secret was leverage and meanness, one of which he obtained by surprise and the other of which he had always had, by genetics or environment. The boy captured, cuffed and pushed before him, he now had to determine how to handle Swagger. But it didn't take long to figure that out: the Glock had a hair trigger when you took the slack out of it; the muzzle held against the boy's head, the trigger gone back on itself as far as it could go, and he was invulnerable to any rifle shot, for a rifle shot would surely cause his finger to constrict and the boy would be dead too. That he knew about Swagger: he cared about the boy. He would not let the boy die.

He would draw Swagger to him, unarmed, and then simply shoot him. What could Swagger do? He could not risk losing the boy, that was his code, that was his weakness. It was the one thing that Duane knew better than his own name: attack through weakness. This was Swagger's; this gave him an advantage that neither the ten professional gunmen nor the night-vision-equipped marksman had. It was in fact the one advantage Duane Peck had always had and he knew it: he was willing to do the dirty work. He didn't have any illusions: he didn't mind the blood spatters and the screams. He could get through anything. He knew he could do it. He'd been spoiling for this chance his whole life.

He pushed Russ along savagely, not seeing him as human. He was full of rage and power, and felt at last he was coming into what was owed him for having put up with having so little for so long.

"Go on, you little fucker," he hissed, his mind foggy with anger. "You give me any shit and I will kill you right now."

"I-" the boy started, and Duane clubbed him hard with the gun, driving him to the earth, drawing a rivulet of blood down his neck and into his shirt.

He reached down and sank a hand into the boy's thick hair, pulling his head back hard while putting his boot between the boy's shoulder blades, as if to break him on a rack.

"Yeah, you give me lip, you little bastard, and you will be sorry as a sack of shit."

He pulled the boy up to his legs and shoved him ahead.

"You moron," the boy shouted back at him, "he knows you killed Sam. He's been looking forward to this. He'll kill you dead cold."

Duane's breath left him; that wasn't a good sign. He felt adrenaline flare through him, and the urge to dump the boy, shoot him in the head and run like hell spiraled through the deepest and most frightened part of his mind.

But, no, goddammit, maybe the old Duane Peck, not the new one. This was it: his chance. Grab it and make it happen. Be strong.

"Git going, you little bastard," he hissed.

In what seemed like not much time at all, they reached the clearing. Duane held Russ close and looked about it. He could see nothing. Was Bob there? He didn't see him.

He shoved the boy ahead. They moved through the grass into the clearing. Duane started hollering.

"Come fight me, Swagger! Come on, goddammit, or I will kill this boy right here. Come on, you gutless asshole, come and fight me!"

But nothing happened.

"See, he's chickenshit," he said to the boy. "You say he's a man, but he ain't. He likes to kill people from a long way off and scurry away like a little toad. But when it comes to man's work, by God, his little dick gets small and goes away."

He paused.

"Come and fight me, sniper," he screamed again.

And then he saw that he was going to get his wish.

Across the way, he watched as a man emerged, tall and strong, and walked toward him with the slow and steady pace of a gunfighter.

"You're fucked," said Russ.

Bob had the .45 Commander cocked and locked over his kidney, not in the inside-the-belt holster, but wedged lightly between his jeans and his shirt, too delicately situated for vigorous action. It was set just so for one reason: to draw. He could see Peck hardly at all as he approached. Only Russ, his arms jacked tight behind him, was visible. The boy's face was pale with fear and he looked as if he were in great pain. Now and then Peck peeked around for a glance, but quickly retreated behind his human shield.

With a good rifle, Bob could have possibly hit the brain shot, but he didn't have one. He just had the .45 and he didn't like Peck's damned Glock with its tricky, dangerous trigger, its black snout pressed at the boy's temple.

It seemed to take forever, that long, slow walk through the grass across the clearing. The sun was shining through the trees. The birds were singing. The grass ruffled in the breeze. It looked to be a glorious, radiant Arkansas summer day.

Get in close, he told himself. You get in close, then you get ten feet closer You get in close, then you get ten feet closer.

He kept moving.

Am I fast? he thought. he thought. We'll see if I'm still fast We'll see if I'm still fast.

"That's far enough," called Peck.

"What?" Bob said, taking another few steps.

"I said hold it!" hold it!" Peck bellowed, the gun coming off Russ's head and toward Bob. Peck bellowed, the gun coming off Russ's head and toward Bob.