“He ain’t that big a deal,” Payne said. “My boys could smoke him.” But still, he took great pleasure in the display. The bullets, soaring raucously upwards and blasting against the summit, had literally torn it to shreds. There was no place to hide or survive on that mean ground; it was the land of the sucking chest wound and the exit hole six times as large as the entrance.

The plan was simple. Three platoons from the counterinsurgency company of Panther Battalion – close to 120 men, all heavily armed with Israeli Galil assault rifles in 5.56mm – were to be deployed at a small deserted airfield some two miles from Lon Scott’s house, their presence completely unknown to the target, and no hints of it allowed to surface. When Bob made his approach, whosoever was playing Lon – not yet determined – would activate a signal simply by removing his hand from the wheelchair grip and thereby allowing a photocell to be stimulated by the light, no buttons to push, no anything. The four choppers with eight men apiece would be airborne in seconds and deploy for the assault within two minutes; four minutes later the choppers would return with the second load of men, then repeat until all 120 men were on site. The debarked troops, as well as the men from RamDyne’s own Action Unit, would converge on the house frontally. Bob, upon seeing the extent of the trap, would almost certainly depart the back, by the pool and the rifle range and discover only Bone Hill, six hundred feet of scrubby pine, gulches, washouts and switchbacks, up top of which was a bare knob. The sniper would almost certainly choose to climb it. Up he’d go, until there was no place to go.

Lon insisted. And Lon could be stubborn and willful and infuriatingly impossible to budge.

“Mr. Scott, I can’t have it,” Shreck said. “We have extremely competent people for this sort of thing. It’s not for you. It’s far too dangerous.”

“It’s my house. I’m the bait,” he said. “So I’ll be the one.”

“The second he sees you in that wheelchair, he’ll know who you are.”

“Fine. It makes no difference.”

“Suppose he shoots you?”

“Then I’ve had a full life. Considering my limitations, I’ve had a wonderful life. If it happens, it’ll happen. But it won’t happen.”

“Why not?”

“This Marine. He’s not like that. He couldn’t pull his pistol and execute a man in a wheelchair no matter what crimes the man in the wheelchair has committed and no matter that he himself, when he hears the helicopters landing, will understand that he’s a dead man. He still won’t do it. I know him. I knew his type among the Southern shooters before I lost my legs. My father was a lot like him. No, he won’t do it. He’s sick with honor.”

Shreck had to concede that Scott was probably right. No less a Bob Lee Swagger expert than Dobbler had given his acquiescence to Scott’s decision.

But Shreck himself was curious about it.

He looked at the misshapen man, whose handsome skull now lolled idiotically to the left, as its owner had momentarily lost control of it.

“Why? What do you gain from it?”

Lon smiled from his wheelchair and Shreck shuddered. Lon’s even, distant, icy gaze bore into him. Outside he could hear the hammers and crowbars pounding and ripping as a work detail from Tiger Battalion tore down the wheelchair ramp into the house.

Finally, Lon Scott answered.

“I want the chance to look him in the eye. I want to share the moment with him. I want him to see me and know who I am and what I’ve done with what I was handed. I want some eye contact with him and see what electricity transfers between us in those last seconds when he knows he’s doomed. The great Bob Lee Swagger, who’s killed so many times. We should have this moment together, Bob and I. We are at the top of our profession.”

Shreck thought it would be quite a meeting; a summit of professional world-class killers, each strangely courageous.

“All right, Mr. Scott, but don’t do anything foolish. Don’t get cute with him. You let him come in, you remove your hand from the light cell, and you hide. Panther Battalion will be here in seconds; and we waste his ass. That’s all it’s about: killing him, before he kills us.”

“Fine.”

The surveillance was extremely soft, men without radios who had been instructed to stare at nothing, to make no eye contact, but just to hope that what they’d been sent to see would arrive. They were established at various roads into the area, at coffee shops, across from shopping malls, at restaurants.

And it did happen, late that night. A rented red Chevy pulled into the parking area outside the Danville Sheraton, and from the darkness on the roof of the Big Boy across the street a RamDyne spotter watched as a tall lanky man got out, stretched in the bright pool of the fluorescent light, then went into the motel office. He came out in a bit and moved the car. Then he and another man, husky and blond, walked up the outside stairs leading to the second-floor balcony that ran the full length of the building and into two adjacent rooms. The spotter watched as they came back out to the car, and was able to follow its passage a quarter of a mile to the Pizza Hut; then he called headquarters.

Within ten minutes, the Electrotek 5400 surveillance van pulled up discreetly across the street.

“You want me to try and get a tap into their rooms?” asked Eddie Nickles.

“Nah,” said Payne, not quite believing it was happening. “Nah, we don’t even know if it’s them.”

But it was. The Chevy pulled up and parked, and Payne watched as Bob Lee Swagger, big as life, got out of the car two hundred yards away. He’d recognize that lanky walk anywhere, with its faint hitch in one leg from the wound so long ago; he’d studied it for weeks, and dreamed about it for months.

Jesus, if he had a rifle with a good night scope. With infrared, he could do Bob right here as he ambled with his buddy toward the stairway up to the second-floor balcony, place the dot in the center of the back and squeeze. Blow his spine out. It would be over in the space of time it took the bullet to eat up the yardage.

But the only thing he had was his Remington sawed-off in the custom rig running down his left side, under his fatigue jacket.

“It’s him?” asked Eddie Nicoletta.

“Yes, goddammit,” Payne said sharply.

“Shit, man, they look like they don’t suspect a thing. Man, we could do it, Payne-O, you, me, the guys. Hit him hard and fast. Kick in the fuckin’ door, you let fly with your double-ought, I empty a clip, then it’s over, man. We’re fuckin’ home free, plus we’re heroes.”

“You think he don’t sleep with a piece cocked and locked? One tenth of a second after you’re through that door, you’re dead. The guy’s a fuckin’ champ, and you know it. Now shut up and let me think.”

He turned to the Electrotek technician.

“Can you put the directional microphone beam on their room?”

“No problem,” said the man. “If there’s not a lot of white noise in the air, we’ll get ’em big as day.”

Suddenly, the door to the young one’s room opened and he went running down the balcony and began banging excitedly on Swagger’s door.

“Fuckin’ guy’s excited, Payne-O.”

“Hurry up,” Payne said to the technician.

Swinging the long foam-covered boom, the technician sighted in, twisted knobs.

“Bring it up,” said Payne. “And get the tapes going.”

Two voices began to crystallize over the babble as the man worked his digitized control panel.

“ – more promising, really. I’m telling you.”

Yes, it was Memphis, emerging out of the background noise.

“I don’t know.”

Swagger now. The voice was bell-clear, its drawly Arkansas rhythms stretching it out.

“Look, listen to me on this just once, okay?”