Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller Read Free Book Online Page A

such as Broadleaf when you were putting him out in some bloody middle-of-nowhere to do a job. On paper, everything looked good. In the dust and smoke out where it all happened, there was always the human factor, the Clayton Prices going off the path and screwing up the neat calculations and impeccable logic.
    By their own choices, the shadowmen marched in a narrow path of rules and instruction, and any deviation meant things would come to an end for them. Everyone knew that and accepted it; some walked off the path anyway for reasons they alone might understand but probably couldn’t articulate, Years from now, or even tomorrow, the men across from Walter McGrane might go off the path without warning from their actions or words. Fortunately, most of them did not and retired to obscure places where they planted gardens and lived with their images of blood and brains and work carried out for reasons they’d never been told.
    All of them, the scout-snipers, were handpicked. The best were farm boys or other bush-smart kids who spent their growing years in the out-of-doors, where they developed fieldcraft skills and a sharp sense of how nature operates, acquired a sense of belonging to the wild. North country trappers, West Texas deer stalkers, Arkansas squirrel hunters. Excellent noncorrected vision, slow heartbeat. Great physical condition, mental discipline, attention to detail, and, most of all, that thing called patience.
    Over the years, Walter McGrane had worked with Centipede and Broadleaf, never with Tortoise. But he’d heard about him, had read the dossier.
PRICE, CLAYTON LEE
… as with other scout-snipers, Gunnery Sgt. Price has strong mental stability and patience to the extreme. To quote from one study on hired killers, which applies to Sgt. Price, though not necessarily to all snipers: “They are surprisingly ordinary people without spectacular failings… (though) this kind of personality has difficulty forming lasting emotional relationships to people. The pendulum swings of emotion associated with some psychoses are absent. (They) are rational in a negative and perverse Dostoyevskian sense and thoughtfully aware of their motives and the consequences of their acts. Feeling neither joy nor sadness and indifferent to death, they are unable to relate to others. (He) accurately perceives reality but is limited in his capacity to respond to it emotionally. To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton: He is not someone who has lost his reason, rather he is someone who has lost everything but his reason.…”
    And there was something one of Price’s commanders from Vietnam had said that stuck in Walter McGrane’s mind, made him shiver down inside when he thought of it: “I knew Clayton Price from ’Nam and later on in Africa when I was doing some freelance work. Man, he was scary. I always was glad he was on our side in those days, though I’m not sure whose side he might be on now. Being up against Clayton Price is like shooting pool with Pool itself; give him the break and he’ll run the table on you. Afterward, he’ll read the morning paper and never look back.”
    Only four or five of the old ones were left now. But within the Covert Operations Unit, where Walter McGrane drew his pay, they were legends of a sort, discussed over coffee and after-dinner drinks at good restaurants.
    “Christ, can you believe this: Morelock once hit a VC at twenty-five hundred yards with a fifty-caliber machine gun converted into a sniper weapon. Shot him right off a goddamned bicycle.”
    “I know Morelock holds the all-time kill record from ’Nam. Who’s second?”
    “Tortoise—Price—I think. If I recall correctly, he had eighty-two confirmed, something over two hundred more classified as ’probables.’ “
    The stories went on, the legends endured, about White Feather and Centipede and Tortoise and the rest. They were the colorful ones. White Feather had become an instructor at Quantico; the rest, those who weren’t dead or