Rebound (4 page)

“Why does the customer need a hair trigger if this rifle has no kick?” he asked Charley.

“I suppose he wants to be doubly sure.” Woodgate answered. “For him I think it’s just a toy. The only person he’ll ever shoot
will be himself, and that will be accidentally. I’ve done some nice work for him before—and so far as I know, he’s a collector
and not a dealer.”

Like all Kalashnikov rip-offs, this rifle was gas-operated and used a simple, two-lug rotating bolt to accomplish the locking
function. The basic design was simple, and stripping involved only lifting the top cover and taking out the gas piston, bolt
carrier, and bolt assembly. There were no springs or small parts to fall out and be lost.

Dartley raised the gun to his shoulder and sighted through the eyepiece. The scope used the illuminated-dot sighting method,
consisting of an illuminated dot reticle and a single horizontal line. The illuminated dot was tops in poor light or even
in full darkness where only an outline could assist in target acquisition. The
unit had a magnification power of 4 and a 40 mm objective lens.

Dartley noted that the magazine release could be worked by either hand and that the trigger guard was large enough to easily
admit a gloved finger. Those were the kind of fine points he admired in a gun design.

“What was wrong with the original Valmet trigger?” he asked Charley.

“Nothing. It broke at five to six pounds, with very little creep or grit. It had the standard military take-up.”

A trigger’s military take-up meant that it would move maybe a quarter of an inch before. its mechanism began to operate,
and after that it operated quickly. This provided a safety margin so that things brushing lightly against the trigger would
not set it off while the soldier was on maneuvers or otherwise occupied.

Woodgate had installed a double-set trigger, which consisted of two triggers, the first to cock the mechanism and the second
to fire the shot. He pulled the enabling trigger and barely touched the front trigger, but this was enough to set it off.
He tried again, and this time the front trigger went off by itself. Both men laughed. It was because of the dangers of such
sensitivity that commercial arms were never sold with hair triggers. When the mechanism was cocked, a large, heavy spring
was caught and held back by a very small lever resting on a notch cut in the metal about two-thousandths of an inch wide.
A breath of air could release it.

“When you’ve finished with that,” Charley said, “I have a reboring job done on a Springfield
Ml-A that needs to be sighted for a variance of less than half an inch in a five-shot group at two hundred yards. That will
give you some outdoor work.”

Charley was doing his best, Dartley could see that. Yet he could not help feeling mildly irritated at his uncle for these
makework efforts. Had he become such a monster that even Charley grew nervous having him lurking around with nothing to do?

Shirley Carter had heard all about the beaches in her husband’s letters months before she and the children had arrived. Coming
from Tennessee, which had some lakes and three big rivers but nothing anyone could call a mighty stretch of water, she had
never expected that one day she would be seeing the sun set over the South China Sea—or any other sea, for that matter. Her
husband was from Murfreesboro, and she had first met him there while he was home visiting his parents. He had the rank of
ensign then and had come out to see her parents in the nearby town of Barfield. Three months later he came back to marry her,
and everyone joked her for marrying a Navy man without ever having seen the sea.

They had been happy in Charleston, South Carolina, where both the children were born and where he reached the rank of lieutenant.
She had some things to say about the lack of privacy involved in being married to a career serviceman—everyone knew how much
money he made according to his rank, and everyone had a comment on how they spent it. Apart
from that, she had no complaints until word came that he was being transferred to the 7th Fleet, in the Philippines, with
a promotion to lieutenant commander promised in the near future. He went. She and the kids followed four months later.

Now she was looking out over the ocean at the sun going down in layers of orange, ocher, mauve, even apple-green and other
colors she had no name for, as her husband swam and the kids played at the water’s edge. She tried to relax and believe that
everything would work out just fine.

She had been in the Philippines for two weeks now, and her husband had not changed toward her—as she feared he might while
they were apart—and they had a nice house, the kids had a playground, and there were plenty of other American children. There
were stores, and she had met some other Navy families she liked. It was only that this was her first time outside America
and it frightened her. Her husband loved it here. The kids loved it. Only she had any misgivings, and she tried to hide them
from the others. Even now she could not just lay back, relax, and enjoy the gorgeous sunset over the calm sea. She sat on
the sand, smoking the third-to-last Salem from the pack she had bought that morning, tense and watchful.

On a four-day leave her husband had taken them on a trip away from the beaches of Subic Bay, thronged with Americans, up the
coast of Zambales province. Here the beaches were empty, the resorts were small and quiet, the coast beautiful and unspoiled.
It was paradise—even
more beautiful than photographs she had seen of such places. She was learning to swim and had been doing quite well until
she had heard stories about sharks. Now she found that she had developed a terrible fear, every time she was in the sea, that
she would be bitten from beneath—that one of her breasts or part of a thigh would be sheared off by the rows of razor-sharp
teeth in the mouth of one of those swimming beasts.

She couldn’t tell her husband about this new fear that had come over her, he was already explaining to her how irrational
all her other fears were. When she had mentioned the possibility of a shark attack to him, he had his usual set of statistics
ready and told her that she was a certain number of times—she could not remember how many—more likely to be hit by a car while
crossing the street than she was to be bitten by a shark while swimming here. She had made a joke of it by saying that judging
from the way Filipinos drove, those odds were not so high.

He would never understand why she no longer stayed in the water for more than a few minutes; her fear became too powerful
for her to control. Now she watched him swimming fearlessly in the orange stain the setting sun made across the calm water.
Her two children played ankle-deep in the wavelets breaking on shore. She had only two cigarettes left to last her until they
got back to where they were staying.

As she watched and worried, she saw what she dreaded happen right before her eyes. Her
husband cried in pain out on the water. He thrust his arms in the air and struggled, yelled again, sank for a moment, and
came to the surface again. She leapt to her feet but was nearly powerless to move after that from shock and anguish. At any
moment she expected to see the black triangular fin of the beast attacking her husband. Instead she saw a round black object,
smaller than a basketball, poke out of the water between her husband, still struggling and shouting, and her two small children
at the water’s edge, looking out to sea at their father.

The round object moved closer to her children. She did not know what it was until it rose out of the water and she saw that
it was a frogman’s head. The man’s wet suit glistened black, and he carried a spear gun in one hand. He raised the glass visor
from his face and looked at the two children. Then he waded through the water toward them, changing the spear gun from his
right hand to his left. As he neared the little girl he pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt.

She did not know if he had seen her, or if he had, whether he had dismissed her as a lone, helpless mother on the beach. But
this Tennessee woman had once saved her younger sister from a rattler with a single shot from a .22 rifle. Against what she
thought was a shark, she could do nothing. Against a man attacking her children, she could be as fierce as a mother bear.
She bent down and fetched her husband’s Colt .45 pistol from where he had concealed it in his folded shirt next to the blanket.
She snapped the safety and levered a shell into the chamber,
glad now that she had taken pistol lessons from her husband back in South Carolina. She fired four shots at the frogman, and
each of the four bullets smacked through the wet suit and ripped through the man’s innards. Knife in hand, he fell facedown
in knee-deep water, still several feet from her daughter.

The children ran weeping to meet their mother, who stumbled across the sand to meet them, still clutching the smoking pistol.
They clung to her legs and wanted to know where their father was.

She looked out to sea, now a gold-copper color in the blinding sunset. He had disappeared.

Richard Dartley’s real name was Richard John Woodgate. His father, Charley’s brother, was “something in the State Department”
and did a lot of traveling. When he was twelve, his mother told him they had adopted him, that he wasn’t really their child.

“So I am not really Richard Woodgate at all,” he said to her, trying to hold back his tears. “I’m really someone else.”

She tried to assure him that he was as much a son to them as any son of their own flesh and blood could be, but from that
day on he was always convinced, somewhere in his mind, that this was all a pretense and that he was really someone else. His
adoptive parents did not know the names of his natural parents—all the records had been sealed by the adoption agency. It
was not until he was twenty-two that he
found out, through illegal access to court records, that his birth name was Paul Savage and that he was the illegitimate offspring
of teenagers, members of two important Washington law families.

He grew up in a fine old house in Chevy Chase, went to church, finished high school, and went to Vietnam. He hadn’t been good
at anything in particular; he was just a regular, ordinary kid who didn’t know his ass from his elbow. The first man he killed
was a Cong stalking him through elephant grass. Dartley heard him come, waited, his hands trembling on his M16, and emptied
a clip of sixteen rounds into his face. The bullets tore away the man’s entire face, from the chin up, yet he stood there
staring at the young American who had just shot him, though he had no eyes left and only chopped hamburger for a face. It
must have been twenty seconds before he fell. If he had taken any longer about it, Dartley would have been the one to hit
the ground first, passed out from horror.

That was the beginning. One time Dartley was separated from his platoon when they went in to find missing Americans from a
downed chopper. On the ground they came under North Vietnamese Army fire and had to scatter to avoid being overrun. Dartley
was working his way back to their drop point when he came across an American who was wounded in the right shoulder and had
been staked to the ground and skinned. The man was still alive and begged Dartley to kill him. Dartley had no radio. He could
not carry this hideous peeled-raw body
without causing him unbearable agony. He had no painkillers to give him. Except a bullet. That’s what the soldier begged him
for. Dartley put his M16 next to his forehead and told him good-bye. The man thanked him. Dartley squeezed the trigger.

The end came in Saigon. He had fallen in love with a Viet beauty and planned to take her with him somehow when he left. When
she tried to kill him, he realized that all the time she had been working for the Viet Cong. In a crazed fury he crushed her
skull with the heel of his combat boot. He was nuts for a long time after that.

Back in the States, he didn’t do much of anything. Nothing worked for him. A woman, a job, a bottle of whiskey—they were good
for a day or two, and then he would move on.

On September 11, 1976, his adoptive father was shot in the forehead by an AK-47 bullet outside the American Embassy in Buenos
Aires. Only hours beforehand, an ex-CIA agent, disillusioned with the agency, had made public a list of CIA operatives in
the field. Dartley’s father was high on the list. In an oration at his funeral the vice-president referred to him as a “courageous
warrior,” and the State Department told the newspapers that he was a “security adviser.” He was only one of several men on
that list to die, all within hours of each other.

His death knocked Richard Dartley out of his stupor. He came to realize that his father had been, in his way, a defender of
his country. And like the Viet vets, no one had a good word for CIA agents. Everyone was always willing to
believe the worst and dismiss anything that sounded positive.

Dartley grew up in a hurry. He began to see that someone had to do the work while the majority took it easy and complained.
The ones who got things done could expect little recognition for it. That’s what politicians were for, to take the credit.
He moved to a studio apartment above a store on K Street in Georgetown, stopped drinking and smoking, watched what he ate,
and worked out every day along the C&O Canal. He gradually became fit again, and as his body grew healthy his mind calmed.
He didn’t try to fool himself that his mind was normal again—like he had been in high school—but now, when he put things together,
he was coming up with halfway logical conclusions.