The Third Bullet by Stephen Hunter
I saw the surly Alek emerge from a door at the rear of the crowded room. He was shackled to a cartoon figure out of the old west, some sort of gigantic cowpoke in a smallish Stetson—it was like mine, though light where mine was gray—and what had to be called a westerner’s suit, apparently khaki. It was Captain Fritz of the Dallas Homicide Squad, but he looked to our uneducated eyes like a foursquare avatar of Texas Ranger justice. He stood out in a sea of dark suits and snap-brim hats, as if intent on representing the best of Texas to a shocked world. Next to him, Alek jauntily, perhaps even smugly, set the pace. He’d been allowed to clean up and change clothes and wore a black sweater over some kind of sport shirt. He grasped his hands at his waist and, for some reason, projected a “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up” sense of self-possession.
I have to say that the quality of the broadcast was exceedingly fine. Every detail stood out, almost as if iridescent; the lines were bold and sharp; the depth of the image was startling. I don’t think I ever saw anything so clearly in my life.
Alek never knew what hit him. Deus ex machina hit him. Fate hit him. Retribution hit him. The fellow Ruby stepped from nowhere and jammed the pistol—a gangster’s snub-nose, so appropriate to a strip club owner—into his side. I don’t think there was a flash, but the report was enough to carry the news.
The famous photo almost does the scene a disservice. It freezes and therefore distorts. You can see Captain Fritz bending backward in surprise, Ruby hunched like a boxer who’s delivered a solid gut hit, and Alek, mouth open in pain, eyes wincing. In reality, it was so damned fast, like a man slipping under the waves in the grasp of an undertow; he’s there and then he’s gone in the flashing of a nerve synapse.
Then chaos, disbelief, the whirls of spinning figures, as people fled the shot, Alek pulled Captain Fritz down with him, and various officers leaped on Ruby and shoved him to the ground. If the famous cry “Jack, you son of a bitch” was uttered, I missed it in my disbelief. I sat back and watched the melancholy play end. Alek, uncuffed, slid onto a stretcher and wheeled out, fast. Ruby pulled away. The reporters tried to make sense of it, interviewing each other to make certain the gigantic plot twist they’d just seen had actually happened.
I got a glimpse of Alek’s colorless, expressionless, perhaps breathless face as they wheeled him out and knew he was a goner. You don’t come back from that one, for I’d gotten a good fix on the bullet’s diagonal trajectory through innards, and I knew the violence it would do to the sweetbread of mysterious but crucial organs that the middle of the body conceals.
Perhaps you’ll think better of me for it, but my first thought was sadness at his death. Another man dead of violence in America, as if I hadn’t been the one who killed the last man dead of violence in America. It seemed like a contagion. You sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind, and I had to wonder when my whirlwind would come.
I’d known him and loathed him, as all did, while at the same time understanding that he was nevertheless human, like the rest of us. Did he “deserve” it? I suppose so; Jack Ruby thought so, and a few days later, I’d hear my oldest son say, “I’m glad they got him.”
Alek was a jerk, he was a fool, he was utterly incapable of doing a single thing right, but he was human and died as all too many humans do, alone, in pain, abruptly.
It wasn’t until that night that it occurred to me, amid the hysterical news reporting, that again we’d caught another gigantic break. Luck does favor the bold, no question of it. Now that Alek’s lips were forever closed, there’d be no crazed stories of manipulations by cynical red spies who set him up and played him as a sucker. A myth wouldn’t spring forth—others did, of course, all patently incorrect—to tantalize the imaginative for decades to come. Books wouldn’t be written, not about the Red Master at least, nor movies made, nor TV series commissioned. All Alek’s secrets would be buried with him, and the narrative would shift its focus to this apparition out of Chicago Confidential, this fireplug-like gunman with his titillating connection to the demimonde and women with improbably large hair and breasts and arcs of eye shadow. I thought, You know what? I don’t have to learn a goddamn thing about Mr. Jack Ruby, and that’s okay with me.
I viewed the end of Alek in solitude, because Lon and Jimmy had already left, both of them early on Sunday the twenty-fourth.
I saw Lon before he was gone. I gave him Jimmy’s report and delivered the rifle. I watched him put the parts in the gun case. He seemed dolorous and depressed; I got little out of him. Jimmy awakened and came by, and the two embraced. Then Lon was gone, and Jimmy was off to pack for his later flight, and I was enmeshed in the Oswald denouement.
Jimmy always got it more than Lon did, and he was too professional to let it affect him. I couldn’t have known then that within six months Jimmy would be dead. Another Clandestine Services colleague enlisted him to do a routine wiretap insertion on an East-bloc embassy in Canada. It was a low-level, routine thing. But somehow he was spotted—a first—and a Mountie, of all people, saw his shadow in the alley and drew. Jimmy knew he couldn’t surrender and testify; it would embarrass too many people. He turned, and the Mountie fired one shot and Jimmy fell dead on the streets of Ottowa, the death addressed as “mysterious,” as in “Why was an American businessman messing about in the alleys behind the Czechoslovakian embassy, and why did he flee the Mountie?” Requiescat in pace, good friend, loyal operative, hero.
As for Lon, I knew I wouldn’t hear from him for a long time, until he worked some things out. If you are thinking, Danger Man, he was the only one who knew, why didn’t you have him eliminated?, you’ve seen too many movies. The answer is, I don’t eliminate. I don’t even like the euphemism “eliminate” for “kill”; it sounds like cheap fiction. I am a moral murderer. I can kill only for policy. I cannot kill for personal reasons, such as to deter threat or to earn money or for the pleasure of removing one of the world’s annoyances. What will come will come, and I will accept it. If Lon went mad with guilt and decided to confess, then I would accept that decision and ride the horse where it took me. But the world wasn’t worth living in if you didn’t trust the people you loved, so I let it go at that, and that is what happened; I didn’t see him again until 1993, when he had a different name and a different identity.
I stayed in the hotel until Monday the twenty-fifth, ironically, the day we’d planned the General Walker job. I stayed even though I was anxious to get home to Peg and the boys and help them through the emotional crisis that they couldn’t have suspected was my invention. But I couldn’t hurry, because I didn’t want anyone associating my coming and going with events in Dallas, the overcaution of an overcautious mind. I returned, took a day off, then went back to work in an effort to impose workaday normality on the inchoate grief that was everywhere.
Since this is memoir and not autobiography, allow me to skip details of the healing of the family, the stunned disbelief in Clandestine, the sorrow of even Cord Meyer, the lugubrious mourning of Washington, D.C., that seemed to last through winter and into spring. You’re familiar with the iconic images of the period, no doubt, the lasting one for me being the prancing of the riderless horse, Black Jack, with its single boot mounted backward in the stirrup. If I suggest, horribly, that I felt grief for the man I had murdered, it’s still the truth. Never did I feel joy except that one moment when Jimmy showed up and I knew we had done it, and that was a professional’s pride in craft, not a hunter’s exhortation of bloodlust after the kill.
I should not have been surprised, moreover, at the way in which Kennedy, a mild failure of a president who had shown a little promise and the barest possibility of intellectual growth, immediately became a symbol of greatness and his time in office christened “Camelot” and held up to the popular imagination as a bright and shining moment of moral excellence, star glamour, vivid beauty, and so forth. Yet I was not sickened. It happens that way, and in my mid-thirties, I was barely mature enough to get it. Nothing makes the heart grow fonder than a nice bl
Dully, I soldiered on. I lost myself in the Agency and began working the terrible hours that I later became famous for. I wasn’t escaping guilt or voices in my head or the sad faces of my family upon my return or anything like that. I didn’t feel that I owed anything or that redemption was in order. It just seemed the way to go, and if I wasn’t already the section star, I shortly became one, and in time a legend. It’s amazing what a little hard work can do.
God love Peggy, who stayed true as an arrow’s flight through it all, the travel, the intensity of the effort, the distraction. She was the real soldier. She raised three fine boys through difficult American teenage years almost on her own, though when around, I did try to get to the football and lacrosse games. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my forebears, who had the perspicuity to invest wisely so that we were always comfortable, which helps immensely when the father figure is absent. Nobody ever wanted for anything, and I also hope and believe I taught by example that dedication to task is its own reward, even at some personal cost. I’m happy to say that each son surfed through the horrors of the sixties without a major wipeout—no drugs, no binges, no criminal misdemeanors, no bombs planted in police stations—and each has prospered off the work-ethic lesson that was their real inheritance from me. My deepest regret is that in my present circumstances, I’m not able to enjoy the pleasures of grandfatherhood.
It would be a time yet before we realized the obvious: that my attempt to game history was an utter and inglorious failure. You might say the patient died, but the operation wasn’t a success. Who on earth would have guessed that the pea-brained egomaniac Lyndon Johnson would have wanted, as I’d predicted, his domestic revolution at the same time, as I had not predicted, that he decided to win a major land war in Asia? No one could be so foolish, but he—egged on by the slippery, weaselly opportunings of the Kennedy hotshots he inherited (until they deserted him, as was easily foretold)—proved himself equal to the task. No vain murderous folly has ever been more obvious and more unstoppable. Many is the time I wished I knew where Lon was and that Jimmy was alive so the old unit could go into action on LIBERTY VALANCE II.
It was madness, and by ’66, at least, it was obvious that the American future in Vietnam was bleak and bloody, that countless boys would die or come home in that dreadful steel chair for nothing beyond the vainglory of a stubborn old man hellbent on proving he was right. The more the Kennedy slime deserted him, the more stubborn he became. The pusillanimous Robert McNamara was the worst, in my book, later stating that he stayed long after he had quit believing, thus sending men to their death for no other reason than his own reputation in a cause he cared nothing about. When it was over and he grew tired of not being invited to the good parties on the Vineyard, he mea culpa’ed his way back into the good graces of the liberals who’d abandoned old LBJ years earlier. It was truly scoundrel time in America, and with my peculiar burdens of guilt and responsibility, I found the going difficult.
My answer was to offer myself up to the war gods. It was to taunt irony, which those gods do seem to enjoy a good deal, and let them kill me in the war I had committed blasphemy to stop. I suppose I felt I owed it to my sons, and that better I go and die than one of them, though by the time the eldest was fodder for the draft, Nixon had ended it, the one thing I thank him for.
As for me: three tours, each of a year’s length, the first running agents and supervising operations, 1966–’67; the second, 1970–’71, overseeing psywar ops against the North from a bunker inside Tan Son Nhut; and, as I have stated, the third as head of the murder program, Operation Phoenix, 1972–’73. I tried hard to get myself killed, and the North Vietnamese tried hard to kill me, even putting a reward on my head and coming damned close enough times to turn my hair gray, but even they, clever little devils, were never able to bring it off. I am proud to say that within Langley, I was known as the coldest of the cold warriors and the hottest of the hot warriors. Though I was a murderer, I made it clear to any who cared, and that would probably be only myself, that I was not a coward.
Here I leave off personal narrative only to say that after Vietnam, I was able to return to Soviet affairs, my true calling, and again I prospered. I grew a reputation for ruthless rationality—applying the precepts of the New Criticism again—and developed keen judgment; a vast network of sources inside Russia; savvy, superb reflexes; and a taste for vodka in the Russian style, neat in a peasant’s glass. I could drink that stuff all night, until Peggy finally objected, at which point I quit cold and didn’t take another drop until after her death, when, you might say, I made up for lost time. I’m still making up.
In September 1964, after employing hundreds and working eighteen-hour days, the Warren Commission released its report. You might think I’d gobble it up, but I didn’t. I read the news coverage in the Times and the Post and realized that no matter how diligent the eight hundred investigators had been, they still hadn’t a clue what happened. I left it at that and continued my total immersion in Agency affairs.
I can’t say I was surprised, but at the same time, I was annoyed when the first of the anti-commission books came out in ’65, Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. My annoyance had more to do with the temerity of Lane: how easy it is to sit back and carp and bitch at the efforts of people who work so hard under a mission mandate to find out the truth and allay national fears; how easy to make a fortune out of nitpicking. It seemed likely that the report contained errors, as anything run by the government on so large a scale and compiled at such breakneck speed is bound to. What was called for was a second edition with a few corrections, not the initiation of a culture that would swell grotesquely and display its leftist tendencies and true agenda, which was to protect the left from any involvement in spite of the fact that Alek was created solely in the hothouse culture of screwball Commie crackpotism, and to sow general distrust of a government bent on winning its war in Asia, damn the cost in treasure and lives.
I watched from Washington and even abroad as the conspiracy theories metastasized into a huge tumor on the body politic, all of the conspiracies shamefully absurd and manufactured out of nothing more than occasional coincidence or good-faith errors in the rush, all of them driven by animus and the profit motive. I detested them: lefty scavengers picking at the bones to make political points and dough. Did I read them? No, but I read the reviews assiduously to see if anyone came close. I did see the Dal-Tex Building mentioned here and there, usually as a shooting site in either the four-rifle theory or the seven-rifle theory. I noted that the police did apprehend a fellow there, though they let him go the next day. Still, it was clear that we’d pulled it off, as all the theories and speculations remained comically off the mark. They seemed to think it was a “big” conspiracy, because only a huge governmental agency would have the wherewithal to make such an event happen, which included secretly influencing the Secret Service and the White House and poor Alek in a concerto of such exquisite timing and psychological acuity that it resembled a Swiss watch set to music by Mozart.
I suppose I should temper my contempt with a little understanding. After all, I knew things that no investigator did. For example, it was possible that the down-range sonic boom caused by Lon’s shot, obeying some unpredictable acoustical logic, rebounded weirdly in the echo chamber that was Dealey Plaza and caused a pressure spike or a reverberation or even a report-like sound, which would strike many ears as coming from the grassy knoll. Perhaps it was that confusion that spawned the thousand-odd theories.
As well, I knew that the extreme velocity of the bullet Lon fired could have easily unleashed a fragment that would travel another three hundred feet and draw blood from James Tague, situated at the triple overpass. Mr. Tague’s facial wound has long baffled and tantalized theorists because the Mannlicher-Carcano, grievously underpowered and slow-moving, wouldn’t have had the oomph to reach out and touch a person so far away. The detonation of Lon’s bullet, moving at close to three thousan
Anyhow, we succeeded exactly because we weren’t a government operation, despite my connections. It was my op, and the team was bound in blood and loyalty, working without pay, risking all for a belief system. It was the kind of highly professional, small-scale enterprise that is the only hope of success, that needed no documentation, no vetting committees, no senior supervisors, no cliques with their concomitant resenters and traitors, no office politics, no budget, nothing. It could be betrayed only from the inside; no detective could unravel it because there wasn’t one clever enough to read the signs in the dust, which were too subtle. We were too smart for them, for at least fifty years. The next few days? We’ll see.
Anyhow, back from my first tour in Vietnam as a kind of hero, with a few empty weeks to fill before a tour in Moscow, I decided it was time to read the damned report and see what they had learned. By that time, my own internal turmoil had settled and I felt I’d be able to confront the findings in a more or less rational manner. My conclusions were mainly that the operation had succeeded brilliantly, particularly Lon’s solution of the ballistics issue. If you recall, our problem was to shoot a man with a bullet that would leave no trace of itself except in tiny metallic residue that could be traced only to a specific bullet identified by category and lot but not to any particular rifle. (I suppose if Lon’s rifle were located, traces of the same metal might be found within its barrel. But Lon—though we never discussed this, I’m sure it’s so—would have destroyed the rifle so that no such discovery was possible.)
That is exactly what Lon managed: the head-shot bullet exploded dynamically when it hit the skull, leaving no fragment large enough to be tracked to Alek’s rifle and therefore no fragment that could be ID’d as not from Alek’s rifle. The investigators did locate two fragments in the limousine large enough to examine under the electron microscope, but clearly, they were not from the head shot. They were both pristine, without any contamination by blood or brain tissue, as the FBI expert explained in detail during his testimony. He also testified that, although fragments are generally hard to relate to a particular rifle, these two, one twenty-one grains, the other forty-four grains, did bear marks that related them to Alek’s rifle. The only explanation for their presence is that they were fragments from Alek’s first missed shot.