Savant by Rex Miller Read Free Book Online

ticking.
    From the first time he took one of his father's hunting rifles into his small hands, it was love at first sight. Where children from more prosaic backgrounds grew up with Red Ryder BB carbines, Bobby was given an expensive "varmint" toy, one that fired the genuine article—.22-caliber long rifle ammo.
    Bobby took to the weapon like a duck takes to the wet stuff, and—unsupervised and indulged—he began to kill. "Shitbirds," he called them. Within a few weeks the "shitbird" population in the Price section of suburban Fort Worth had dwindled alarmingly.
    Bobby Price had found his calling. He loved to kill. Loved … to kill. It became his philosophy, his raison d'être, his religion. His obsession with weapons had begun in earnest.
    When Bobby was fourteen he had grown bored with slaying birds and animals. Already the veteran of two wild-boar hunts and innumerable big-game hunting excursions, Bobby became fascinated with the prospect of taking down some two-footed trophies. He started scoping traffic and snap-shooting an empty Weatherby-Magnum at the passing cars.
    One day it was just too much for him. A farmer came chugging along in an old beat-up pickup truck, and he could no more have stopped himself than the man in the moon. He snapped a .357 round into the empty chamber, snicked that oiled bolt into lock 'n' load, and squeezed one off. That time he ended up in an asylum. Daddy saw to that. Daddy and Daddy's legal talent.
    When he came back out—still in "deep therapy," of course, he went to work for some people there in Texas, who thought "Shooter" Price was just what the doctor ordered. Not long after that he was arrested as a prime suspect in a mob-style execution, and again Daddy's lawyers went to work. It was a bit tougher this time. Bobby was seventeen. A lot of people thought Bobby should get the electric chair. But then a lot of people suddenly came into a whole bunch of money, and changed their minds.
    The deal was this: Bobby could walk, but only on one condition. The kid had to join the U.S. Army. There was a nasty little war going on in Vietnam. One outfit in particular liked the cut of Shooter Price's jib. They all agreed—this li'l ol' boy from Texas was nothin' but a flat-out born killer.

    Quang Tri Province, Republic of Vietnam

    The Sixties found Bobby Price in I Corps Tactical Zone, killing for peace. Diem and Kennedy were but two of the better-known casualties of that time. SAUCOG, a mysterious and clandestine intelligence group, in league with the Clandestine Services unit of a monolithic "fact-gathering" agency, had found several mutant personalities, some of whom had been institutionalized at the time.
    A plan had been devised for inserting "killer robots," as one unfortunate memorandum phrase had described the action personnel, into situations involving highly sensitive operations: assassinations, over-the-fence jobs, torture and terrorism; no act was to be beyond the purview of this special unit. In a war where our allies were often our enemies, a sanitized hit squad was worth its weight in gold.
    The mandate appeared to be presidential, and the combined forces unit had drawn on both military and civilian resources. It was a mixed bag of horror stories.
    In a secure Quonset hootch within the perimeter of the spook complex near the Quang Tri airstrip, admittance to which required special clearance, an old man and the kid—known to his colleagues as Shooter Price—talked about a unique weapon system, The old man did most of the talking.
    "The .50-caflber sniper weapon is nothing new. As you know there have been isolated kills made with the so-called Ma Deuce—the M-2—and the Hotchkiss .50 is performing admirably as you can attest." He turned and removed what appeared to be a large map cover. Bobby Price saw a cutaway schematic of a firing device.
    "Ray guns—electrical guns more properly—fall into three groups: rail, coil, and polarizer. That's a rail Those are capacitor banks."