“None of the big American ammo companies can touch this stuff,” said the colonel. “Not even the expensive grade lines, the Winchester Supreme, the Federal Premium, the Remington Extended Range. I guarantee Minute of Angle in a proper rifle.”

“Neck turned,” Bob said, his finger touching the bright band. “How can you mass-produce a neck-turned round? That’s a handloader’s job. I don’t see how it can be done.”

“Lasers.”

“Hmm,” said Bob. “Okay, I know some outfits these days use lasers as sighting devices. But y’all use them in the loading?”

“That’s right,” said the colonel, leaning forward. “Industrial lasers are the coming thing in precision manufacturing. Now, they’re used in the manufacture of electronic components, missile guidance systems, high-tech materials. My brainstorm was to try them on ammunition. They can be coded into a computerized program so that you get extraordinary repeatability. You know what the secret of a quality round is. Precision. So all the things that a handloader can do on a very small scale, we can do on a larger scale with brilliant perfection: we buy our brass from Remington in hundred-thousand case quantities; our lasers score the neck of the case both inside and out so that it has the exact diameter all the way around and each case has the exact diameter of every other case. Exactly. Precisely. Then, we can deburr the flash hole, and seat each primer the identical depth. We can manage it with laser-guided machining. In other words, we can code the machines to follow laser tracks as specified by a computer program. We can get the kind of careful quality thousands of rounds by thousands of rounds that you can get round by round on your Lee or RCBS or Wilson or whatever dies it is you use.”

Bob looked down at the round in his hand.

“I’ve gotten some pretty damned fine.308 groups over the years.”

“But you’ve had to work to get them, is that right?” said the colonel.

“Yes sir, that’s right.”

“That’s it, in a box. It’s a natural for the police market, which is considerable. Later, maybe we’ll expand to the civilian if we can establish a law enforcement reputation.”

“So what is it you want from me?”

“Mr. Swagger, I’m looking for a professional shooter to fly around the country and put on shooting demonstrations for police departments that are upgrading their SWAT capabilities. But I need a man with a reputation. A man who’s been in hard places, kept his head, and come back alive.”

“Why don’t you get Carl Hitchcock? He’s famous. They wrote a damn book about him and made up a poster. He’s number one.”

“Carl is making too much money on the personal appearance circuit. They pay him two thousand dollars just to appear at a gun show for one day, did you know that?”

“Carl always was a lucky boy.”

“We have a facility in Garrett County, Maryland, where we’re doing our testing. What we’d like to do is fly you up there for a weekend at our expense, of course. You bring your favorite rifle, your favorite handloads. Okay? Then you can go out on the range with some of our shooters and engineers, fire our rounds and your rounds side by side. We think if you do that, you’ll see how our rounds group consistently with your own. That’s all we ask. Your forbearance. Give us a chance to let you believe. If you believe, all else will follow.”

Bob had no real need or urge to leave his mountain. The fact was, except for getting his hair cut, picking up magazines and his government check at the post office once a month and a chat or two with old Sam Vincent and now and then having a routine checkup on his health or his teeth, he hadn’t been down in five years.

“It would be a great job,” said the colonel. “I’d fly you around the country and you’d be with men who’d respect you. You know, the world has changed since Vietnam. They say the Vietnam syndrome is dead. We had a war that we won, big time, and now everybody who was in the military can be a hero again. You’d get exactly what you didn’t get the first time. You’d get respect and love and appreciation.”

Bob made a sour look. He’d believe it when he saw it. But he knew he couldn’t stay up here forever. He looked at the rifle cartridge. He was curious. Goddamned thing looked like it would shoot the tits off a mother flea, but there was only proof in the shooting, not in the looking. But he heard it singing to him in a strange way. Poked. He was poked in the head. Hadn’t been poked in the head since he’d given up the drinking.

“When?”

“When’s convenient?”

“Can’t leave now. Got a rifle gone barn sour on me. Say, next weekend?”

“Well, all right. Whatever. You have a credit card?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You go ahead and charge your tickets. Keep all the receipts and we’ll expense it out. Or, you could sign a contract now and we could write you an advance check and – ”

“No thanks on the contract.”

“I didn’t think so. And do you want to be picked up at the Baltimore airport or rent your own car?”

“I’d take the car, thank you.”

“It’s done.”

“Then that’s all there is to it,” said Bob. “Now I have to feed my damn dog.”

Bob made his inquiries discreetly. From Bill Dodge’s Exxon station on Route 270, he called an old NCO buddy who was a master sergeant going for his thirty, now working Personnel in the Pentagon, and put certain questions before him. The next day, the friend replied with a telegram.

DEAR COOT, it said, YOUR PAL COL. BRUCE IS THE REAL MCCOY. HE LED AN APC ATTACK ON A BUNKER POSITION, WAS HIT TWICE, AND PULLED HIS MEN OUT OF THE BURNING THING HIMSELF. THEY SAY HE DID BECOME A COP IN ARIZONA. SEMPER FI, BUD.

That learned, Bob stopped in at Sara Vincent’s travel agency – Sara was Sam Vincent’s divorced daughter, and a woman so plain she’d even scare Mike – and bought his tickets, made arrangements with Sam to check his property once or twice a day, and feed the dog, and tried to get himself ready for the world again.

He was all right, too, until the last night. He knew he had to get up early for the drive to Little Rock and just when he’d thought he had everything checked out and was ready for the sack, it came over him. That’s the way it came: fast, without preparation, without announcement. It just came and there it was.

It was a bad one. He hadn’t had it so bad since the president declared the little war in the desert a victory, and America went on a bender and everybody was happy except himself and maybe another million boys who wondered why nobody put up ribbons for them twenty years ago, when it might have mattered.

Now you hold it on down, he told himself, aching for a glass of smooth brown whiskey to flatten himself out, knowing that if he had one many more would follow.

But there was no whiskey, nothing to blunt what happened in his mind. The memories hit him hard. He remembered the VC he shot who turned out to be an eight-year-old boy with a hoe – it had looked like an AK through the 9× at eight hundred meters in the bad light of sunset. He remembered the smell of burned villages after the Search and Destroys, and the crying of the women and the way the goddamned kids just looked at you during his first tour. He remembered the bellytime, moving through the high grass, avoiding the crest lines, as the ants crawled over you and the snakes slithered by and you just lay there, waiting, for days sometimes, until someone passed into the kill zone eight hundred meters out and you could put them down. He remembered the way they fell when hit, instant rag doll, the toppling surrender, the small cloud of dust it raised. So many of them. The “confirmed” kills were only the ones with a spotter there, to write it in the log and make a report.

But mostly he remembered the sudden shock as his hip went numb and he collapsed and slid down the earthen dam of the perimeter. He looked down and saw the smashed flesh, the pulsing red. Remembering, he put his hand on the wound, and it throbbed some. Then he remembered Donny scrambling down.