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

well and the Mexican government stayed out of their way, the reticles on the
     sniper’s scope would lie across the chest of Clayton Price, who would never hear the sound that killed him.
    Walter McGrane didn’t like going after one of their own. He didn’t much like any of this anymore. But so be it and so it lay.
     He was a field man by his own preference, and he’d been ordered to do it by the Pure Intelligence office boys, the suits,
     the idiot theoreticians, “espiocrats,” as le Carre or somebody had called them. Those who’d never used a dead drop in Bucharest,
     had never worn goggles in the blowing dust of Algeria while a jeep climbed rocky outcrops, had never done a goddamned thing
     except go to school. Had no idea what the field was like, the calm and concentration on the face of a man 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