The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter
That was in fact the shot he tried to take. Consider that when he arrived on the sixth floor that morning, he had his choice of windows. There were six. Why did he chose the left-hand corner? Because it gave him direct access to the turning automobile immediately beneath him. It was the right choice. If planning a shot farther down Elm Street, he surely would have chosen the right-hand window: it was the building’s width closer and, in terms of the curve in Elm Street, gave him less deflection to the target. It seemed that even Oswald, fired up on a wave of egomania and sense of destiny as he was, doubted his ability to make a deflection shot at close to three hundred feet, which was what his choice of the left-hand window ultimately committed him to doing. It was difficult to believe he could hit that shot if he didn’t think it was within his powers and had planned to avoid it.
Knock knock.
Hello, who’s there?
An insight.
Swagger realized the little creep in the nest had tried to take the closer, easier shot, and his failure to bring it off—consistent with his goof-up’s personality and his tendency to fall apart at big moments—was what determined the outcome of the next eight to ten seconds. Oswald prepped for that shot, put his scope squarely on the president’s chest, and at the moment of minimum movement and maximum proximity, pulled the trigger to discover that the rifle would not fire.
Had he put the safety on his loaded weapon and, in the heat of the moment, forgotten to remove it? The safety on a Mannlicher-Carcano is a devilishly small thing, poorly designed and not for battle usage. It’s a button located under the bolt plunger at the rear of the receiver. To manipulate it, you’ve got to break your hold, look at the fucking thing, and carefully guide it out of one condition and into the other. The idiot whom the other boys called Ozzie Rabbit snapped dry, panicked, went through the process, then went back into the shooting position, aware that he was already behind the action curve. His first shot may have been premature, as he was hunting for a target through the trees and stacking the trigger for the final pull, and the M-C trigger, unlike most of the age, is surprisingly light.
The rifle fires. He knows it’s a clear miss and now the clock is ticking on his effort and his old friend failure is nipping at his heels again. He rushes through cocking the weapon, reacquires the position, and is amazed to see the car emerge from the trees into plain view with almost no reaction from occupants, security, or crowd. He throws the crosshairs onto the president—this is his most likely shot to hit the brain, as the president is much less than two hundred feet away; the angle is beneficial to Oswald, producing little lateral movement and only slight diminishment, probably not even noticeable through the cheap glass of the inferior optical device; and he’s on much firmer ground regarding the trigger pull, knowing exactly how much slack to take out to get the trigger to stack up at the point of firing and when to exert that last ounce of pressure to fire.
And he misses again.
Of course, that’s the famous magic bullet, and not only does he not miss, he puts a bullet through two men. It’s not God’s point of view that matters, however, but Oswald’s point of view. The president does not react spastically to the bullet strike; rather, he makes a little jerk, which, being lost in the blur of the recoiling scope, Oswald may not see. By the time he gets the rifle cocked and is back to the target, he sees—nothing. That is, the president doesn’t collapse, tip, tilt, implode, pitch forward, splay his arms. Instead, he begins a slow, subtle forward lean, and his hands go toward his throat, but not with any wounded-animal instinct or speed. Oswald cannot see any indication of a hit and must think, You idiot! Another fuckup! And he must think, What the hell is wrong with this scope? I was right on, and I missed. Is it all fucked up? Where do I hold to make the shot?
Given that psychological reality, Swagger found it mind-blowing that Oswald recovered enough to reacquire the target after running the rough action a second time, and though the target was smaller, his psychological condition possibly more scattered, his doubts about his system more intense, his fear of failure even more concentrated, he managed the perfect brain shot.
What the fuck? How did this schmuck go from two strikes to a home run? How did he recover so fast and pull it off? You can look for years at his record for any hint of such a moment and be bewildered. There is nothing but utter failure; random mediocrity is his best accomplishment.
Swagger sat back, astounded that he was sweating and that he’d been transported to a faraway place and time. Now he was back in a sordid room smelling of piss and puke, sleeping on a dirty mattress, man on the run all the way.
Yet the dreamscape of Lee Harvey Oswald killing a president would not abandon his head. In another second, it took over his brain and Swagger was back among the boxes, smelling the burnt powder, standing next to the little prick who brought such shame on all of us who call ourselves shooters. The question, eternal and lingering: what the fuck?
Was it simple sniper’s luck that he hit that last shot? It could have been. The wild shot can hit as accidentally as it misses. The bullet doesn’t know where it’s going, what’s on the other end. It just goes where the physics tell it to go, and that can be into a brain or a curb, whatever.
Swagger understood that this idea sucked: nobody wants the key moment of the late twentieth century turning on nothing more than a nobody loser’s one stroke of luck. But maybe that was what happened.
Luck or whatever, Oswald has just shot the president in the head. Freeze the moment, which is the most interesting moment in the entire event. He has just seen his bullet detonate the president’s head into a geyser of brain matter and blood. Even if he lost specifics of the image in the recoil, when he comes back on target out of the recoil stroke, he sees chaos, panic, and hysteria in the back of the car. And what does he do?
He cocks the rifle again.
Excuse me, but what the fuck?
Why?
Does he mean to shoot again? Is it pure reflex? It wasn’t learned in the Marine Corps, where his M-1 automatically reloaded itself. What is his motive? Most good hunters have trained themselves to cock again for a fast follow-up, but by no means is this ass-clown an experienced hunter, and there’s no indication that he’s hunted in five years. Or does he need a motive at the time? Maybe it can’t be explained; it just is, it happened because it happened, and to look for motive is to see him as rational when he was an irrational man at an irrational moment.
Still, it seemed to Swagger, aware of the sniper’s instincts after the kill, in that situation, his task done, Oswald now knows that his chances at escape can be measured in mere seconds. It seems far more likely that instead of cocking the rifle, he abandons it, exits the nest, and beelines toward the only stairway, which is over ninety feet away diagonally across the empty space of the sixth floor.
He doesn’t do this.
Instead, he carries the rifle with him, loaded and unlocked, across the floor those ninety-odd feet. Suppose he meets a colleague? Suppose someone sees him from a building across the street, the Dal-Tex Building or the Dallas County Records building, both of which have floors and windows that look directly onto his area? At that point he is acting more like a marine on combat patrol, fearing ambush, than he is a fleeing assassin.
He reaches the stairway directly in the floor at the other corner of the building, and realizing he can’t reenter the world with rifle in hand, he shoves it between two boxes there at the stairs, where it will be found, fully loaded, shell in chamber, an hour or so later.
Why does he cock the rifle after killing the president? Why does he carry it with him as he proceeds across the floor? These issues seemed to bother nobody. They bothered Swagger.
Finally, enough time passed so that Stronksi felt safe enough to set a night; he met Swagger again, this time in the back of a van, to arrange the debrief and pass over the money.
“You swear,” said Stronski, “that after I have this thing for you, we will proceed directly to embassy, I will watch you enter, and
“Absolutely.”
“Now tell me where to meet.”
“No.”
“Swagger, you are such a bastard. Such a stubborn son of bitch. You don’t trust me?”
“What choice have I got? But let’s take elementary precautions. Though troublesome in the long run, they will cut down on the yips, and we can concentrate on our work.”
“You talk like general. All the time soothing, reasonable, and probably right. Goddamn you, man, you are a hard friend to have.”
“I’m just a country boy scared of city slickers, that’s all.”
“I don’t know what ‘slicker’ is, but I get the meaning. So when we settle on place?”
“I will call you on a cell that morning after you are out of the Lubyanka. I will give you a street. You will drive down it. At a set time, I will call you with a turn to make. I will guide you by me in this way and make sure nobody follows. I may do that two or three times. When I am certain you are alone, I will give you the destination, my choice, and you will be dropped. We will chat, then head by another cab to the embassy. Is that acceptable?”
“You have a cunning Russian mind. No rush to do anything.”
“It’s how I earned a glorious retirement in the basement of a bicycle shop where I watch the plaster slowly fall from the ceiling.”
“It is not very interesting, I am sure, but still, I am sure it is more interesting than death.”
“It is.”
Swagger gave him the envelope: ten thousand dollars in rubles.
“I hope what I get for you is worth that. There are no refunds,” said Stronski.
“I understand. I take the risk cheerfully.”
“I wonder: why do you do this, Swagger? The money it costs, the danger you run, after all you’ve been through. It’s so insane. I can make no sense of such a thing. Vengeance. You took the death of this president fifty years ago so seriously, the pain is so deep?”
Swagger laughed. “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t give a shit about JFK.”
Three days later, Stronski called at precisely 7 a.m.
“I have it,” said Stronski. “It was fine. Walked in, found the Second Directorate volumes, found the right year, found the report, broke the rules by writing it down, he never asked or wondered, got out easily, now I am with driver.”
“Anyone following?”
“Hard to tell. It’s crowded. All Porsches look the same. But no, I think not.”
“Take a few more turns around the town. I’ll call back shortly and give you a boulevard.”
Shortly, Swagger called. “Go to Bruskaya, then go north on Bruskaya.”
“That’s seven miles.”
“I will call in half an hour.”
Then it was “Bruskaya to Simonovich, left on Simonovich.”
Swagger waited forty minutes. “Simonovich to Chekhov. Right on Chekhov.”
He himself stood in an alley on Chekhov and watched as Stronski’s black Cherokee roared by. He watched the busy Moscow traffic flow that followed, looking for cars with intent pairs of middle-aged men, their eyes hammered to the vehicle they were following. He saw nothing like that, mainly commuters as glum as those on any freeway in America, truckies cursing the schedule, buses driven by women, a few cars of youngsters too full of booze and vitality to notice how early it was.
He moved a block, rerouted Stronski around another street, brought him by, and again noted no professional followers; this time he looked for repeats from the first batch of vehicles he’d monitored. He found none.
“Okay,” he said, “you’ve heard of the Park of Fallen Heroes, near the Tretyakov Gallery?”
“I know it well.”
“I will meet you there in an hour. I will take the Underground to the Okty—er, Okty—”
“—abrskaya station. Yes, it’s a few blocks.”
“See you at”—looked at watch—“nine-thirty or so.”
“Sit in front of Comrade Dzerzhinsky. He will appreciate the company,” said Stronski.
Possibly Comrade Dzerzhinsky did enjoy the company. He had no one else there. He stood on his pillar twenty feet above the ground, wrapped in a swirling greatcoat, his strong face ascowl with contempt for the world he looked upon. The man had ruled from the same altitude in the center of the square named after him, where he had commanded the ceremonial space before the Lubyanka, whose apparatuses he had invented as founder of Cheka in the early days after the revolution. He was the first of the Communist intelligence geniuses, if Polish by birth, and had helped Lenin cement his hold and built the machine that helped Stalin sustain his. He ruled from that spot in stone certitude for years, radiating the red terror from each eye.
Now, covered in graffiti and bird shit, he commanded nothing. Look ye mighty and despair, was that the message? Something like that. After the fall, he had been removed to this far place, a glade behind the Tretyakov art gallery. He had become a perch for the avian citizens of the state, and he looked out on a small patch of grass and bush in which other dead gods had been dumped, including about twenty-five Stalins, some big, some small, all broad with the muscular mustache and the wide Georgian cheekbones but all turned somehow comic by their extreme proximity to the earth. It was as if the Russians were afraid to throw out the icon that was the Boss, but at the same time they couldn’t honor him with a dictator’s height from which to command fear and obedience. So, low to the ground, sometimes swaddled in weeds, sometimes noseless or otherwise defaced from street action at various colorful times, he looked, in his rows on rows, like a mysterious ancient statue, unknowable, mysterious, vaguely menacing but easy to ignore, and he was ignored, for of the many beautiful Moscow parks, this was the least beautiful and maybe the least visited. It was unkempt and overgrown, unlike the formal perfection that was within the Kremlin walls. It was strictly an afterthought.
Swagger sat in almost perfect aloneness with the stone men. Sparsely visited in normal time, the park was even more desolate this early. He felt secure from his hunters: he had not been followed on the Underground, he had not been followed on his walk over. He checked constantly and knew himself to be unmonitored. It was a matter of minutes before Stronski arrived, and then he could go home and get on with it. He yearned for a shower, American food, a good, deep sleep, and a fresh start. Maybe all this shit would begin to swing into focus after he got away from it for a while. He knew he had to persist in his nighttime journeys with the creep Oswald. Who? What? How? Why? Nah, fuck why. Why wouldn’t make any sense. Only how mattered.
Oswald went away, and Swagger returned to man-on-the-run guy. He looked up and down the sidewalk; from the direction of the Tretyakov, a museum whose modern fortresslike walls could be seen through the trees, he saw Stronski approaching. He had read Stronski’s file, which Nick had obtained through CIA sources; he knew that Stronski had his finger in a hundred dirty pies, but everyone in Russia did. Some didn’t have so many pies. He also knew Stronski was known as a reputable assassin. He always delivered, he never betrayed. His stock in trade was efficiency combined with trustworthiness; he worked with equanimity for whichever bratva needed a job done, never tarnishing himself with their affairs, never playing their games.
So Swagger trusted him as well as he trusted anyone in this game.
“This is Petrel Five at Tretyakov, do you read?”
Static crackled over the handheld radio set, but the young man on the roof of the Tretyakov waited patiently until it cleared.
“—have you loud and clear, Petrel Five, go ahead.”
“Ah, I think I see Stronski.”
“What’s your distance?”
“About four hundred meters. I’m on the roof. He’s got Stronski’s hair, his build, muscular, he looks to be about the age.”
“Where is he going?”
“He’s in the park, just like you said. No rush. No worry. No indication he realizes he’s un
“Okay, drop out of sight, let the situation settle. Come back up in three minutes and tell us what you have.”
“Got it.”
The young observer did as he was told, sliding into repose below the edge of the wall at the roof’s precipice. He was by profession a construction worker in one of the companies that the Izmaylovskaya mob owned, but he and many others had been pulled out for observation duties on sites known to be favored by Stronski. This was quite exciting for him, for like many young men, he dreamed of gangster glory, of running with the feared Izzies on their violent adventures in Moscow. The chicks, the blow, the bling! It was the same for gangsters everywhere.
He rose, looked through his heavy binoculars, had a moment of panic, and then made contact.
“Petrel Five.”
“Go ahead.”
“He is sitting on a park bench with someone. Yes, now I see, a taller man, at least his legs are longer. Thin, not so big as Stronski. Workingman, probably, not a Westerner. Doesn’t look like an American.”
“Can you see his face? His eyes?”
“Let me move a bit.” The young man slid down the wall of the flat roof, coming to the corner. This would give him the best angle.
“I can now see they are sitting before the statue of Dzerzhinsky.”
“The eyes.”
He dialed the focus carefully, hoping to squeeze a bit more resolution out of it.
“The eyes,” he said. “Very wary. Hunter’s eyes.”
“Good work, Petrel Five. Now stay undercover.”
“First the good news,” said Stronski. “The good news is that there is no bad news.”