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  The thing that had saved him before saved him now, nudging him awake in the darkness of a spike-team hootch. It prickled his skin as he waited, vexing him, prodding him to his huge bare feet. It would protect him from his own side.

  Silently, like a great fat cat, he began to ease his way out into the night, loaded with duffel, weapon, 15EEEEE boots, surprisingly graceful and sure-footed, a dangerous dancing bear. Outside he froze. Waited. Listened.

  The thing that warned him on a level he could never totally identify pushed him in the direction of the perimeter. It would not be as tricky to get out as it would be to get in, but damned near. He knew where the mines and traps were, where the guard posts were, the location of the listening post out beyond the edge of the distant trees, but it would require all his skills to make it out through the tanglefoot, concertina, razor wire, and assorted protective fencing, out beyond the danger of "friendly fire."

  The immense human-shaped mass tiptoed through the tulips, glided, slid, crawled, rolled, picked his way through the wire, moving as if directed by an inner gyro, his mental compass taking him deeper into the shadow of Firebase King's perimeter.

  Trees. Foliage dripping from recent downpours. He moved through the treeline, away from Firebase King and the fate that his presentience foretold, stopping again at the far side of the woods to watch and listen to the sounds of the night around him, slowing his vital sips, forcing himself into a state of bioelectrical calm, patient as the most efficient animal predator, tuned to the darkness that surrounded him.

  From the edge of the trees, he saw a patch of open paddy that he would have to cross, an extremely perilous place, but beyond that there was a wash of sand, then a steep slope covered in tall sawgrass. The slope led to the river, swollen with monsoon-season rains, a brown swift-moving snake that could take him out of harm's path.

  They hoped to kill him. To kill all of them. He let a bit of his rage creep back, inflaming his calm, giving him an edge of anger. When his killer instinct was all the way up again he let the shadows swallow him up, and he willed himself across the paddy, willing himself into a state not unlike invisibility, a feral, invulnerable, massive component of the Asian night.

  Within minutes he was gone. A quarter ton of killer had disappeared. Vanished from sight. All that remained was a whisper in the sawgrass.

  It was a hell of a place for tanks, the tank commander thought, standing in the hatch of "Tracks from Hell," perched on the treeline's edge. Pogues back at Battalion Headquarters were fucking terrain morons, and he'd said it a hundred times to anyone who'd listen. He watched the grunts settle in with guns up. The tanks were security for the squad, and for the sniper down in the gun pit.

  The radio crackled before he heard the skinships. With these people—the outfit he worked for—you didn't ask too many questions. They said two unmarked Hueys were gonna get lit up, you lit 'em, up. Arty from FSB King, tanks, and a couple of fire teams? Shit. Those old boys were history.

  "In position," he said, keying a handset.

  "Hellstorm, we copy." An anonymous voice crackled in his ear. He signaled, and inside the steel monster beneath him compensating idler wheels whirred, final drive sprockets revolved, gloved hands on steering control assemblies touched transmission and throttle, and the powerful turbine moved "Tracks from Hell" forward, past the edge of the treeline.

  The youngster at the gunner's station watched the primary sight. Computer-operated laser rangefinders and thermal imaging systems locked on to their targets.

  The tank commander, his thumbs caressing the butterfly triggers of his M-2, patted the big .50, and climbed back down out of the turret, pulling the hatch shut. Inside the monster it stunk of mo-gas farts, hot oil, and heavy-duty payback.

  The two targets hovered expectantly in the hidden sights of several tons of friendly fire.

  It was a hell of a place for tanks, that was all he could think of.

  Down in the gun pit, Shooter Price, a pair of North Sonic IIs keeping only a part of the machine noise out of his ears, laid the crosshairs of a Laco 4OX sniperscope on the lead bird and his trigger finger exerted three and a quarter pounds of pressure. SAVANT spat death.

  A covert op had become a herd of rogue elephants—a liability…. Now it was terminated.

  But not quite.

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  6

  Fort Worth, Texas

  Nanny is behind the wheel. She will not ride in the chauffeur-driven limo, not to a place of worship. It is not seemly. She would be embarrassed if her girlfriends would see her and the little boy get out of the rich folk's ostentatious car. And she loathes the filthy-minded chauffeur as well.

  Her voice is loud in his ear as she sings the doxology in the pew at church.

  "Praise God from whom all blessings flow…" The words, without true meaning, run together inside his head.

  They drive past Sunday lawns manicured by workers of dark skin pigmentation and she turns the radio sermon on. A preacher from some distant station in West Texas is pleading for money. Bobby gazes out the window at the lush streets lined with weeping willows, magnolias, frangipania, bougainvillea, yuccas, and their more exotic cousins, The yards are landscaped here and lawn jockeys still wait at curbside. The homes have names. Entrance archways proclaim this is Fandangle and Fandango, Twin Forks and Twin Pines, Cedars and Big Oak, Rocking R and X-IT, San Sebastian and San Ciello, Chisholm and Lazy L. The men are named Clint, Bubba, Billy Bob Ray, and Billy Ray Bob.

  The neighbors here may be faceless strangers who own an immense Arabian horse stud ranch.

  Dappled sunlight filters down through three-hundred year-old oak, and mighty Dutch elms that arbor the clean streets as they wait to die of Dutch elm disease, and catches in the turrets of the catty-cornered mansions.

  "Hal-lay-lool-ya!" Nanny says to the radio, enthusiastically, startling the boy.

  The men are real men here, and they swill down the Pearl and the Lone Star to chase their Dick'l 'n' branch wattah. There are no beauty salons in evidence. These rich suburbs are unsullied by either mine, mill, factory, plant, or other industrial blight. This is serious old-time money.

  Bobby Price has his childhood memories. He was almost seventeen when he and his father's lawyers decided he'd best opt for military service.

  He remembered Beaumont, the Panhandle, Big Bush, Baghdad on the Bayou, Waco, San Antone (where you could still shoot a black panther with it declawed in the cage, and call it sport), Lubbock, the Cowboys, White Rock Lake, South Oak Cliff, TCU, SMU, the Metroplex, River Crest Country Club, where a girl once reached up the leg of his swimming trunks to see what was "hidin' in that ol' hair." She had told him something he would file away forever:

  "Lord, Bobby, they ain't but two things he didn't give you and both of 'em was a dick."

  He recalled the doctor who had written "…it will not be possible for him to achieve penetration." He would prove that good medical man wrong a hundred times. He would do some damned flat hog wild penetrating before he was done. (In 1966 he was driving a blood-red 'Vette with dual glass packs—as phallic a ride as there was back then—the sort of kid who'd never be street legal, and he was afraid of nothing.)

  "Olivia," he called his mother. She was distant and beautifully cool, and the wrinkles had fallen from her face and neck to gather on hands encrusted with platinum and rocks from Harry Winston and Van Cleef and Tiff's. "Ma'am" was the intimate form of address permitted her only child.

  The dining room was a long expanse of table with the tallest throne chairs at either end. Heavy, carved, ecumenical TexMex and El Grecoesque murals, tapestries, and ancestral oils mixed among the open beams, adobe moderne, and the showpiece wall of leaded glass. Here, in these rich Texas suburbs, the "cathedral" ceiling started.

  In the dining room, Bobby Price sat in solitary silence, hypnotized by the images in the colored glass, hearing the man ask him the question from the pulpit again and again:

  "Bobby…have you renounced Satan?"<
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  Kansas City

  Bobby Price a.k.a. "Shooter" woke up, as he sometimes did, instantly and fully awake. The first thing that he did was eyeball DeMon, the detection monitor, which confirmed for him visually that all was well. Big Petey was status quo.

  The beeper and the sensor alarm would have had him on his feet had it been otherwise, but he liked the reassuring visual confirmation. He wore his monitor the way some folks wear their wedding bands—everywhere.

  He hit the cold floor and did twenty slow push-ups. Then five the hard way, one handed, his weight balanced on the fingertips of his right hand. It killed him to do those and he let himself drop to the filthy carpet for a moment, remaining in a prone nose dive for as long as he could stand it, letting the foul odor of the carpet cleaner, room deodorizer, booze spills, and the residue from a carload of tobacco ashes force him to recoil away from the floor.

  Bobby was on his feet, breathing deeply. He went over and hit his weights, doing a few slow, s-l-o-w serious reps with the special fifty-eight-pound job. Arm curls that made those powerful bikes and trikes pump. As always he tried to do one with the left arm and couldn't get the chrome off the floor. He breathed some more, did a few squats, then went into the doorway of the bathroom for isos.

  Bobby put everything he had into the isometrics, breaking a sweat as he pushed against the immovable forces, doing the iso groups the same way he did everything else, with total dedication and concentration.

  He finished. Showered quickly, warm water then ice cold, surveying the clean, lean, mean Shooter Price in the door mirror. He didn't like himself nude, so 'he toweled off, pulling on a pair of royal blue briefs that hid the useless appendage that had controlled so much of his life.

  In the mirror, he examined himself again. The reflection was that of a trim, muscular, extremely good-looking man in his mid-thirties, which wasn't bad for forty-one. Well-developed upper torso, arms, and legs. A self-confident face that could be described as "handsome," and few would challenge the adjective. Five feet six inches. Well, he would be, as soon as he dressed. He wore shoes with high Cuban heels. Short? Okay. But perfectly shaped. The 159 pounds distributed properly over his frame. And with the briefs on, he couldn't see the tiny sleeping bird that mocked him from its hairy nest, the superfluous and recalcitrant hunk of meat that was a source of great puzzlement to all.

  Chisel-featured, flaxen-haired, brilliant, fastidiously well-groomed, he was and always had been tremendously attractive to women. And like so many persons who appear to have been wound too tightly, his energy force gave off a strong animal magnetism. So both his physical appearance and the coiled-spring ambience of Bobby's inner conflicts produced the expected dynamics. A long succession of beautiful and sexy women had been left unfulfilled and puzzled by the inexplicable impotence of Shooter Price.

  Completing his morning ritual, he dressed in elegant Neimann's doeskin slacks, a sandy tan cashmere sweater, and four-hundred-dollar handmade Italian loafers, then filled his pockets and stepped out into the sunlight, pulling the motel door closed and locking it.

  He unlocked the gleaming bone-colored M-30 and slid into the cold seat, kicking on the engine. He touched a button watching the windows disappear, as power augers released the top. It was too humid, he decided, and he raised the top back up, pulling out of the motel parking lot, the three-liter V-6 growling out into the stream of late-morning traffic.

  Big Petey was a dead white blip on the OMNI, which was on Locator/Focus-lock, Automatic, and Monitor B. The OMNI paged his beeper if Big Petey, his private name for P.T.—primary target—went into motion beyond a proscribed radius of his current location.

  Bobby Price flipped open his gold-trimmed alligator-hide notebook to the last entry: P.T. had been out of action since 0140. He clicked his slim gold pen and jotted down the time.

  Big Petey, Shooter Price's special assignment, was none other than Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski.

  For three days Petey hadn't moved and Price was getting antsy. "Get a life," he told himself, staring into the face of the OMEGASTAR. Inside his head, he had this big boy down pat and cold. One of his tricks to keep fresh and sharp over long, boring plants, which was the jargon for what the TV shows and films call "stakeouts," was to continually recite the tech manuals, running the nomenclature and specs through his mind like worry beads; his private sniper's litany:

  "OMEGASTAR provides the SAVANT operator with a complete menu of sensors and monitors, tactical communications linkages, auto-paging, and EW Countermeasures, all housed within a single device to assure successful tracking and targeting. "It stared back at him: its two bright eyes as much living optics to Price as a person's; the blue DeMon and green Loclok eyes—meters—around the nose of the Mobile Tracker Paging Unit. Freq dial. Power indicator, a complex bank of tuners. All the colored lights of the intrusion detectors, channel lights, and heat detectors glowed orange, yellow, and red like the string of lights on a Christmas tree.

  "User/Operator-friendly, the complete four-in-one console, housed in transit case with all fitted accessories, weighs less than twenty-five pounds. The Auto-Lock locator for the movement detector, when synced to the portable pager and sensing units, eliminates the need for hands-on operation of the tracker, as well as the need for "around-the-clock" eyeball surveillance presence." Bet your sweet taters it did.

  The master on/off switches were shielded in individual hazard covers, red rubberized hoods that protected each toggle from being thrown accidentally. The mouth of the tracker system's face was a perpetually open O of glowing green, a white blip visible in the center of the OMNI's bull's-eye. There were jacks for the various commo-links that could act as message channels to the Newton Secure Sig-System, and a scrambled landline plugged into the tracker's ear.

  "OMEGASTAR Mobile Tracker is manufactured by Signatech Electronics, Inc., of Davenport, Iowa, and is available in Sea Blue, Sandstone, or cream finish. Unit accessories include Mini-pager, Beeper, Light shields, Mesh net, Ghillie cover, and Cammo-fittings in Snow White, Sand, Woodland Green, Light Brown, O.D., Black, and other optional combinations, as well as the Executive Attache Transit Case into which the entire unit is housed. "

  Bobby Price was Dr. Norman's ace in the hole. Bobby and SAVANT, the silent and astonishingly deadly .50 sniper weapon, with the tracker continually monitoring Daniel Bunkowski's implant signal, made it possible to let Chaingang roam and kill.

  It mattered little to Price that he was an instrumental part of what was—arguably—one of the most malevolent programs ever initiated by the military or intelligence community in the name of science and/or national security. What mattered was the work. To Shooter the work was everything.

  The decades since Vietnam had been long, boring ones for him. There had been moments of excitement—yes—with long, slow dry spells in between.

  He'd remained with the parent company for the whole time, taking contracts during the Seventies and Eighties, but basically just sitting on his butt most of the time. He had filled his life with expensive toys, cars, babes, hobbies, books, theater, films—and travel.

  He'd lived on Ibetha before the hustlers moved in; St. Tropez before the tourists came; Barbados before the rowdies found it; Puerto Vallarta before the hippies arrived; Cancun before it became a spring-break shithole.

  To many persons, Bobby Price's life would seem idyllic. But without work—the work—he was a lifeless shell inside. The operational challenge of the stalk infused him with energy and purpose. He would have paid them, truth be known, to retain his position as SAUCOG's senior sniper.

  The weapon system had been his baby for a quarter of a century, and in all that time the R and D guys had been unable to come up with anything that could touch it. She was still the queen of long-range killers, and would probably reign so as long as she remained operative. A second model had been contemplated, but prices had gone through the ceiling, To build her a twin for the Persian Gulf War, for example, would have cost five million dollars. She was a uni
que piece.

  Would SAVANT ever rust or break or fall apart with age? No. Not with Price's tender, loving care and normal maintenance. She was made to function for many more years. What of the remaining hundred-and-some special rounds? Would the old ammunition begin to malfunction with time? Nobody knew for sure, and the inventor of the system itself was long dead.

  In the Eighties, the company had ordered a small run of SHARP-HEX and APEX ammo manufactured-just in case. And Shooter's stash had been upgraded with two cases of new Red Rock Match Grade (Silent/Extended Range) .50 sniper rounds, hand-delivered by the arsenal's courier, But Shooter, a professional worrier, never fully trusted the new stuff and continued to use the old rounds without incident. So far there hadn't been a cough in the carload.

  It had been interesting to watch Chaingang in action during the first phase of this operation, which had taken place in a small Missouri farm town. Price had been kept busy, driving the country blacktops and gravel roads parallel to the primary target's movements, as he wound along his river routes or made his way across farmland. Petey had been a busy boy.

  It was funny about the relationship between a sniper and his target. When you were hunting it was one thing, you took the target down at the first opportunity of a sure shot. When you conducted surveillance, it was a test of one's professionalism. You watched the same P.T. through that Laco 40X, or across the open blade sight, over and over, and pretty soon your trigger finger got very itchy.

  That's why Shooter never watched Petey too long through the weapon. He'd follow him on the tracker, stay close enough to take a shot should the order ever be issued, and be pleased to "blow him up real good," but until that time he was a big, fat golden goose. Also there was a bonding, albeit one-way, that had gone on over the years. In an odd, ironic way it was almost as if Shooter viewed Chaingang as an old pal.