Setting the shotgun down momentarily, he plucked a roll of black electrician’s tape from his pocket. With swift and sure motions, he unstripped the end of the tape, planted it squarely in the middle of her forehead, and began to run loops of the tape around her skull, drawing them tight.

She whimpered as the greasy stuff was yanked tight about her head, cutting against her eyes so that the vision was destroyed, between her lips so that her voice was stifled and across her nose so that the breathing was impaired and around her hair, where its adhesive quickly matted to her skull, but he said, “There, there, it’s nothing, baby, it’s nothing.”

Having constructed a snare of tape, he then brought the little shotgun up and began to unspool yet more tape, wrapping it crudely about the barrel and fore end of the piece, entwining the woman’s head and the gun in the same seven-yard-long constriction, until both were joined. Then he cut the tape.

He reached down with his left hand and engaged the pistol grip of the weapon, inserting his finger in the trigger guard. He felt the tension in the trigger.

“Colonel Shreck?”

Shreck took the spool and continued the ritual of the binding, until Payne’s hand was almost one with the shotgun’s pistol grip and trigger in a solid, gummy nest of tape. Shreck bent and jacked the shotgun’s bolt, and both men felt the shiver as the bolt slid back, lofted a shell into the chamber, then plunged forward to lock the shell in.

“You know what to do?”

“Yes, sir,” said Payne. In case of trouble, he was to blow the woman’s head off; then swing the short-barreled weapon and blow away whoever stood against them. At the same time, he was untouchable: no bullet could penetrate his vest and a head shot would produce either by spasm or by the weight of his fall the blast that would destroy the woman. Nobody was going to play hero with Payne booby-trapped to the woman like this.

It wasn’t going well. These Arkansas types were closemouthed, clannish and not terribly interested in helping.

Still, the reports that reached the headquarters of Task Force Swagger, now in the basement of the Sheriff’s Office, were persistent, if vague. Two hunters off on a preseason scouting hike had watched through binoculars as a stocky man had laid and moored coils of rope to a ridge deep in the Ouachitas. They didn’t move any closer because through the glass the guy had looked as tough as a commando. And no, they probably couldn’t find the place again anyway.

“Maybe just some other hunter,” said Hap. “Laying in ropes to get up that ridge in the dark on the first day of the hunting season.”

“Ummm,” was all that Howdy Duty would commit himself too.

Then someone swore he’d seen a lean blond man talking to Sam Vincent, the lawyer who had sued the magazine on Bob’s behalf. He was Bob’s oldest friend, demi-daddy and hunting buddy of years gone by. The man could have been Bob the Nailer, and the talk took place on a high road miles off a main highway that the observer, a postman, had just happened to breeze by.

But Sam Vincent was a wily, tough old bird and he knew the law as well as any man alive.

“Now, sir,” the old lizard had said to Utey, leaning forward and fixing him with what was known as the “chair-eye” (for Sam, as a state prosecutor in the fifties and sixties had sent thirteen men to the electric chair), “you know a damned sight better than I do that I cain’t be compelled to cooperate unless I want to, and no subpoena and no threat of government harassment’s going to change that. I’m too old to scare and too stubborn to budge. If I seen Bob Lee Swagger and ain’t told you, I’ve committed a federal felony. So essentially” – and here his shrewd old eyes knitted up – “you’re asking me to testify agin’ myself. Against the Constitution, young feller. And against Arkansas state law, Code D-547.1, see Conyers v. Mercantile Trust. You got that?”

Howard got it indeed, but assigned a tail on Sam. No such luck; within the hour an injunction arrived from the Third District Court of Arkansas, the Hon. Justice Buford M. Roubelieux presiding, requiring the government to show cause for assigning surveillance upon a distinguished eighty-one-year-old citizen like Sam Vincent and issuing, until such compliance could be met (the next available court date was July 1998), a cease and desist order, under penalty of law.

That had been the low point.

There hadn’t been any high points.

Until today, just now, when the phone rang.

Hap answered it, spoke for two minutes, then said, “I’ll call you right back.”

Howard looked up; two of the other men watched as Hap shot over to Howard. They gathered round.

“Maybe this is nothing, I don’t know,” said Hap. “But I just got a call from a guy in the National Forest Service. Says three hunters, at three different times this morning, saw military flares being shot into the air deep in the Ouachitas.”

“Somebody in trouble?” asked an agent.

“More like a signal,” somebody else said.

“But no fires started,” said Hap. “The service ordered up a couple of flybys out of their spotter planes, but there were no fires. And the flares seem to be coming from different locations, spread over about a twenty-mile-square area.”

Howard concentrated on this. Who would use flares in daylight? Who would even see a flare in daylight, unless they were looking for it? It had to be a kind of signal.

“Did they get a location?” he asked.

“Well, they’ve had several, but the Forest Service guy says his people plotted it out on a big map they’ve got, and the direction is largely trending north by northwest.”

“Okay,” said Howard. “Toward what? Toward anything?”

“There’s a big flat, nearly inaccessible valley way up there they call Hard Bargain Valley,” said Hap. “It’s way the hell off the mainstream. The Forest Service says hardly any hunters go up there because the deer much prefer the lower forest land. It’s flat and barren and almost a mile across.”

Howard thought.

Hard Bargain Valley?

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s saddle up. Full SWAT gear. Call the field. I want the chopper to pick us up in ten minutes. Hap, call the Forest Service back and tell them we need a guide to get us to Hard Bargain Valley.”

“There,” said Payne, seeing them first.

The two figures had emerged from the trees across the wide valley.

Shreck looked at them through his binoculars but they were too far off for details. Their faces were green, like commandos.

He snorted.

“He thinks he’s going to a war,” he said to Payne.

Payne stood up, and gingerly drew the woman up off her haunches.

“Now, honey,” he said. “You walk real slow. Don’t you trip or stumble, or you’ll be history.”

She moaned, then made a noise through the tape.

“Shut up, Mrs. Fenn,” said Shreck. “Damn, she’s come out of it. You should give her another injection.”

“I can’t,” said Payne. “Not taped up like this.”

“Look, lady,” said Shreck, “I want you to know this is the end, you’ve only got another few minutes. We make the swap, and off you go with your boyfriend. That’s a security arrangement; the gun isn’t even loaded.”

Under the bonds of the tape, her eyes tightened in terror.

He ignored her and signaled to Payne to get her moving. Haltingly, the three of them began to walk across the wide field. It had turned into a lovely, sunny fall day, about fifty-five, crisp and clean. Around them, like waves, were the ragged ridges and crests of the Ouachitas, now brilliantly ablaze in color.

The sniper’s breath came in soft spurts. He was trying to keep himself calm for what lay ahead. It was time to shut down. It was time to get into the zone.

He felt his body complying. He had known it would; he trusted it. He watched his target, exactly where it was supposed to be, in the most obvious place. It wasn’t even an ant, but a speck, the dot over an i. He’d never hit at this range before but he wasn’t scared. This was a shot he’d owed himself for a long time; it was time to get it right.