I looked at him. “I don’t think you’re half as dumb as you act, Dox. And you might not even be as dumb as that.”
He laughed. “I always knew you loved me.”
“What about the money?”
“Shit, I’d rather take twenty-five thousand for nothing than a hundred thousand for doing something that didn’t sit right with me, wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe. But won’t Crawley want the money back?”
“Well, he might, and I might like to give it to him. Trouble is, I can’t remember where I put it. Think maybe I invested it with a securities trader or some other unscrupulous type. It might already be gone.”
I smiled. “Crawley might be angry about that.”
“I expect he will be. He might even try to hire another ‘patriot’ to ‘remove’ me for taking advantage of him. But that would cost him another hundred grand. No, I think I know Mr. Crawley’s type. I think he’ll decide it’s best to just swallow the insult and live to fight another day. That is, if he lives another day. I know the news I’m giving you might make you righteous angry. It would me.”
He picked up his soup bowl, raised it to his mouth, and drained it. “Aaaaah,” he said, setting the bowl down on the table and leaning back in his chair. “Nothing like caterpillar fungus. You know, there’s one more thing. You may not have noticed it at the time, but you were always decent to me in ’Stan. I was the only one there who hadn’t served in Vietnam, and the other guys were a little cliquish, I always thought. Made me feel like I wasn’t welcome. You weren’t like that. Not that you ever acted like we were long-lost brothers, but you didn’t seem to have a problem with me, either.”
I shrugged. “You were good in the field.”
He nodded and started to say something, then looked down and swallowed. What I’d said had been as dry to me as it was true, and I wasn’t expecting any particular response in reaction. So it took me a second to realize that Dox was struggling with his emotions.
After a moment he looked at me, his eyes determined, almost fierce. “And that’s all that should count,” he said.
I thought of the rumors I’d heard in Afghanistan about how he’d had to leave the Corps after getting physical with an officer. “Somebody once tell you otherwise?” I asked.
He drummed his fingers on the table, looking into the dregs of his caterpillar soup. Then he said, “I’m a damn good sniper, man. Damn good. I’d never been in combat before ’Stan, but I knew what I could do. Top of my class at Sniper School at Quantico. But there was one instructor who had it in for me. Because, even though my skills were top-quality-spotting and target detection, stalking and movement, marksmanship-I didn’t always act like what a sniper is supposed to act like.”
I couldn’t help a gentle smile. “You’re a little more reserved than most snipers,” I said.
He smiled back. “Yeah, snipers tend to be a soft-spoken breed, it’s true. They start out that way, and their work reinforces the tendency. But I’m not like that, and never was. When I’m in the zone, I’m as stealthy and deadly as anyone. But when I’m not in the zone, I need to cut loose sometimes. That’s just who I am.”
I nodded, surprised at the sympathy I felt. “And not everyone liked that.”
He shrugged. “You know, regular military types aren’t comfortable with snipers. They think we’re cold-blooded killers, assassins, whatever. Sure, it’s okay to return fire in a mad minute firefight, or mortar someone from a mile away, but moving through the woods like a ghost? Picking up your quarry’s sign like he’s just a deer or something? Stalking him, or waiting in a hide, then blowing his brains out with Zen-like calm? You should hear the way the regulars will beg for your help when they’ve got a problem that only a sniper can solve, though. Then you’re everybody’s daddy. Of course, that’s only until the problem’s solved. Anyway, what snipers do, it all makes the hypocrites uncomfortable.”
I nodded. “I know.”
He nodded back. “I know you do. Truth is, partner, in a lot of ways, you act more like a sniper than I do. I don’t know what kind of marksman you are, but you’ve got that habit of stillness about you. And you know what it’s like to hunt humans. You don’t have a problem with it.”
There was a short stretch of silence, during which I considered his words. It wasn’t the first time I’d been the recipient of that particular “praise,” but I wanted to hear Dox’s story, not tell him mine.
After a moment, he said, “Anyway, yeah, the regular marines thought I was one of the sociopaths, and the snipers thought I was a freak. The fact that my scores were higher than theirs just pissed them off. Especially a certain officer. Now, all snipers get subjected to stress during training. When you’re trying to shoot, the instructors will be screaming at you, or playing loud music they know you hate, or otherwise trying to fuck with you. That’s all good, it produces dead shots and you better be able to deal with stress if you want your skills to work in the real world. But this guy kept doing more and more, ’cause none of the shit he was coming up with was throwing me off. Finally he started ‘accidentally’ jarring my rifle while he was screaming at me, and even though I could give a shit about the screaming, of course his bumping into my rifle was enough to throw off my shot. Well, the first time I didn’t say anything. The second time I stood up and got in his face. Which is what that fuck was hoping for. He wrote in my fitness report that I had ‘anger management’ issues and in his opinion was ‘temperamentally unsuited’ to be a sniper. When I found out about that, I busted him up good.”
I nodded, thinking of how the young eager beaver CIA officer Holtzer had been in Vietnam had run a similar game with me, and how he had elicited a similarly stupid, albeit satisfying, reaction. Holtzer had gone on to become the CIA’s Station Chief in Tokyo, and had carried a grudge all the way to the grave I finally sent him to.
“They court-martial you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, enough people knew this guy was an asshole so that someone pulled some strings and saved me from all that. But the fitness report was permanent, and my career wasn’t going anywhere after all that. At least not until the Russians decided to try and swallow Afghanistan. Then Uncle Sam needed tainted people like me, and all was forgiven.”
“It always seemed like you had something to prove over there,” I said.
He smiled. “Well yeah, I did. You know, I had a lot of personal kills in ’Stan-three of them at over a thousand yards. Not bad for someone ‘temperamentally unsuited,’ I’d say. Carlos Hathcock would have been proud.”
Carlos Hathcock was the most successful sniper ever, with ninety-three confirmed kills in Vietnam, one of them a twenty-five-hundred-yard shot with a.50-caliber rifle, and maybe three times that many unconfirmed.
“You know, I met Hathcock once,” I said, thinking of what Dox had just said about my sniper’s stillness. “In Vietnam. Before anyone knew who he was.”
“No! You met the man?”
I nodded.
“Well, what did he say to you?”
I shrugged. “Not much. He was sitting by himself at a table in a bar in Saigon. The only empty seat was at the table, so I took it. We just introduced ourselves, really, that was all. I had a beer and left. I don’t think we exchanged more than a couple dozen words.”
“No? He didn’t say anything to you?”
I was quiet for a moment, remembering. “When I left, he told me I should be a sniper.”
“Damn, man, he saw your soul. That’s like being blessed by the Pope.”