Dobbler cleared his throat.

Eyes Only: xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Washington, D.C.

Re: Panther Bn. training operations, Ocalupo, Salvador.

General de Rujijo agrees that punitive measures must be taken against the peasant population but finds that his soldiers, drawn from the same population, are reluctant on the scale we have conceptualized. My training cadre has isolated two platoons of Panther Battalion and we seem to be making real progress in bringing them to the proper level of willingness. Will be moving onto Sampul River district in June and commencing counterinsurgency ops that area. Anticipate sanitation program to commence that date.

Signed,

Raymond F. Shreck

There was a moment of silence.

“You see,” said Nick, “some genius in an office somewhere wants to get the guerrillas to the peace talks. But there’s no pressure on them. Nothing’s happening. They’ve made some kind of deal with the rural population. So he dreams up this idea: send in some crack troops, line up the peasants and blow ’em away. It was a massacre ordered up out of a catalogue. Atrocity, one each, OD, Summer Issue, Number 5554442. Murder-R-Us. The point being to scare the peasants so fucking bad they’ll never help the guerrillas again. The guerrillas have to come in and make powwow. And here’s the worst part: it worked. He’s probably even proud of himself. He did the hard thing. He made the world a better place, and it only cost two hundred or so women and kids. That’s RamDyne, isn’t it, Doctor? I mean, that’s classic RamDyne.”

“The hard thing,” said Dobbler. “Yes, they could have done that. Yes, that’s what the tape shows.”

“Anyway,” said Nick, “with the tape and Annex B, Shreck’s dead. The whole fucking program is blown out of the water. And anybody who sailed on the ship – that includes the Bureau’s Lancer Committee, who bought the National Interest bullshit hook, line and sinker – goes down with her. Down to the bottom.”

Bob just nodded grimly.

“There’s only one problem,” said Nick. “This file was sent to the general prior to the operation against the archbishop. It was meant to keep him from going hog-wild. And boy, the stink it’s going to make when it gets out. Man, it’ll make Watergate and Iran-Contra look like tea parties. But maybe it’ll get you off the hook. And maybe it won’t.”

Bob was done with the action. He took an aerosol can of Gun Scrubber and began to blow compressed-air-driven solvent into the trigger mechanism with a sharp, wet hiss.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Bob.

“Here’s the plan,” said Shreck. “Very simple. It’s how we bring Bob into Scott’s kill zone. Scott says he can deliver the one-shot kill at ranges no man, not even Bob, can guarantee. He’ll take it at between fifteen hundred and seventeen hundred yards. A mile, perhaps. He’s operating at the very edge of the envelope, where not even Bob has been before. And that’s our advantage. This is how we do it.”

Payne leaned forward to listen.

“Scott goes in independently about a day in advance of our arrival. He’ll never hit Blue Eye, so nobody will see him or even know he’s there, and no one will believe that a man with his infirmity could penetrate so deep in the wilderness. He’ll go in by ’chute, a HALO job, high altitude, low opening, the night before, landing in Hard Bargain Valley. Nicoletta goes in with him and we’ll drop an ATV. Nicoletta will be his legs and get him up to the ridge and dig him a spider hole.

“Meanwhile, our end of the operation takes the form of a barter. We have the girl. Bob has the cassette. The woman will mean more to him than the cassette to us. We make contact with him, just as he said, in Blue Eye. We’ll offer him the woman for the cassette.”

Payne wanted the woman, too.

“We’ll offer him the woman and a fresh start,” the colonel continued. “We’ll tell him that we can set it up so that he’s no longer a marked man. He can have his life back, he can have the woman. He’ll seem to accept, but of course it’ll be a lie. He’ll make the exchange, then count on his skills to double around and kill us from afar. But he can’t do it until the woman is safe. That’s the key. We have to preempt him.”

“How do we set up a swap?” Payne asked.

“We tell him that we’re worried about his ability to pick us off at long range. We can’t give him that opportunity. We tell him that at 1000 hours on November third, we’ll fire a flare in the sky, a red flare. He makes a compass fix on it and has one hour to make it to the site. When he’s there, he finds a flare pistol. He fires an answering flare so we know he’s in position. We fire another answering flare. Again he has an hour to reach the spot. Again he finds a flare, and lets us know he’s arrived. In that way we bounce him through the mountains. He never has time to get set up because he’s got to stay on the move to get to the site so that he can fire the pistol so that we fire our flare pistol. We maneuver him into Hard Bargain Valley. He should be exhausted and desperate. In the middle of the valley we wait for him. He’ll feel safe there, because the closest shooting range is well over fifteen hundred yards, and he knows nobody can hit at that range. He can’t hit at that range. Plus, how could we get poor old crippled Lon in to even attempt such a thing? At one hundred yards distance, he sends over Memphis with the cassette, we send over you with the woman. When I see the cassette is all right, I simply press a button on my watch that emits a high pitch of noise that Lon’s radio can pick up. Hearing the signal, Lon takes Bob down from fifteen hundred yards; you and I shoot Memphis. It’s over.”

“The woman?”

“Payne, that’s a stupid question.”

“Yeah,” said Payne.

Nick looked at him for just a moment; the way he processed information somehow got fouled up and then he realized that indeed Bob had said what Bob had said.

“It doesn’t matter?” he exploded. “Are you kidding? It does matter. You’re innocent! This whole thing has been about your innocence! Not because it’s you but because that’s how the system works: the innocent go free, the guilty go to jail. That’s America. That’s what’s at stake – ”

Bob put down the cleaning implements.

“Pork, this here thing isn’t about getting me off a hook. It’s about something else. I got a woman who did me good who is now Payne’s playtoy. I got a dog that stuck by me when no one else would and ended up in the ground. I got a country that thinks anybody who fought in Vietnam is some kind of crazy sniper who shoots at the president and any man who owns a gun is a crazy man. Those are debts that have to be paid first off. And then there’s the goddamn tape and that letter. I don’t want that goddamn thing playing on the TV like a movie, and all those reporters getting rich and writing books off that letter for years to come. No, sir, not by me, not if I have breath to stop it.”

“You have to let the cards fall where they – ”

“The cards fall where I put them. And here’s where I put them. Plain and simple, we’re going to zip the bag on those boys, and save that woman and then I’ll deal with the other thing. Agree with me or get out of here. Julie first, Shreck and Payne second, and nothing third. Got that?”

Nick looked at Bob sitting there, stolid as a rock. He felt like Geraldo Rivera interviewing Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok at the same time. There was no bend in Bob’s furious rectitude, his nutty conviction that he would do what he had to do.

“Jesus, you are a stubborn bastard, Bob,” he said. “Your only way out is with this letter and the tape and – ”

“Play it my way or don’t play it. That’s all. Got that? If I don’t believe you’re on my program, I’ll ship you out of here. You can go back to New Orleans and that little girl and let me take care of the men’s work.”