The Third Bullet (Bob Lee Swagger #8)

by Stephen Hunter

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down. —“FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH,” BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD

Epigraph

Conspiracy theory. Second shooter. Third shooter. Triangulation of fire. All that Oliver Stone stuff. How could you think about this thing at all with all the crap around it? You couldn’t see the target, there was so much camouflage, some of it deceitful, some of it well meant, some of it earnest, some of it crazy. CIA. Castro. From deep within the government. The trilateral commission.

There was one unassailable fact: only one bullet was found that could be associated with the murder of John F. Kennedy. That is what is called an anomaly. Swagger knew from too much experience that many shootings feature anomalies: things that could not be predicted, that could not be expected, that were seemingly impossible. Yet they happened, because reality does not care what people think or expect.

I knew he read Lippman in the Post and admired Murrow on CBS and had what might be called “enlightened” social ideas about Negroes and Jews, and while he wanted to destroy communism, he didn’t particularly want to kill anyone doing it, especially not millions of innocent Russian peasants. We all felt that way. And he hated, as did most Ivy League people, General Walker, who seemed part of a long tradition of recent American troglodytes, from Martin Dies to Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon to the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, men who saw Commies everywhere and made it much tougher on those of us charged with fighting real Commies, men who hated Negroes and wished them to stay backward and pathetic and never equal under law or in opportunity, men who still hated Jews and thought they secretly controlled everything, men who just hated because that was all they had been taught to do.

Lon grunted. “This is sort of like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I’m John Wayne. I do the real killing. I must say, Hugh, I never thought I’d get a chance to play the John Wayne role.”

I knew I had to convince three people to help me tilt Operation LIBERTY VALANCE a little bit, so that instead of shooting General Edwin Walker on November 25, 1963, we would shoot John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, two and a half days hence. The three people were Lon Scott, Jimmy Costello, and myself. As for Alek—Lee Harvey Oswald—I knew the glory pig would take zero convincing. The idiot would be like a rabid dog pulling on a leash. He might have come up with it himself if he’d read the paper. It was everything his fetid little sewer-Commie mind demanded and had dreamed about for years. His eagerness would surely get him killed and everyone else electrocuted. But I felt I could control him and improvise a new plan so brilliant that even he couldn’t screw it up too badly. I would see him tonight at the bus stop. As for me: Did I believe in what I was about to do? And if I didn’t, how could I convince the others? I tried to apply the dictates of the New

My clinical reading of the text that was JFK demanded only one answer: what were his intentions in the Republic of South Vietnam? I didn’t give a damn about Castro or Cuba, I didn’t see much that could be done in Europe except minor maneuvering for minor leverage, a missile base exchanged here or there, a spy betrayed, a minister blackmailed, all of it, in the long haul, meaningless.

The issue was: would JFK get us into a big shooting war there? If so, who would fight it? The tiny yellows he cared nothing about—they would die in the hundreds of thousands, for sure—or a generation of college kids unlikely to care to risk a war to save a country so far away, whose rise or fall meant so little to them and would not be worth dying for.

The place was infinitely more complex than anybody in Washington suspected, and it had the kind of suction that could drag us down to ruin in its whirlpools of deceit and danger, its anthropological conundrums and village traditions, its cruelty; our enemies would degrade us, but not as much as we would degrade ourselves in fighting them.

“Lon,” I said, “Kennedy is going to send thousands of young Americans off to a war we cannot win. He’s going to do that because he wants the reelection, and he can’t be called soft on communism. We were going to correct that problem by eliminating a fellow who called him soft on communism the loudest. Now I see it. We have a chance not to ‘correct’ but to ‘eliminate.’ To erase totally.

Synesthesia.

Main article: Number form  A number form from one of Francis Galton's subjects (1881).[10] Note how the first 12 digits correspond to a clock face. A number form is a mental map of numbers that automatically and involuntarily appears whenever someone who experiences number-forms synesthesia thinks of numbers. Number forms were first documented and named in 1881 by Francis Galton in "The Visions of Sane Persons"

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.

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.

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?

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.

Cops are predictable; they want to put things in a box, and the sooner and tighter it fits, the happier they are, and the more outsiders tug and pull and poke at the contents of the box, the more stubborn and angry they become. It’s all personal to them.

But Bob Lee Swagger beat me to it. Can you imagine a name like that? What a moniker to conjure with. He was every Ole Miss quarterback, every NASCAR driver, every tiny-town police chief or state trooper rolled into one. He was actually a gunnery sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, with an intelligence background, as he’d worked with another Agency jamboree, called the Studies and Observation Group, on an earlier tour.

I do not kill for money, I do not kill for anger, I do not kill for pleasure. I kill to preserve my legacy and the legacy of the institutions and people I served. That is enough. People have killed for a lot less, for pennies, or, more worthless, for pride.

Since he was by nature a gunman, and since guns were in a way his Yoknapatawpha, I understood instinctively that he’d come at me through the guns. He would have no choice. They were what he knew, his terrain; he was the master navigator of that small world, and he would feel the most confidence in that arena.