The Third Bullet (66 page)

Authors: Stephen Hunter

BOOK: The Third Bullet

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For a demonstration of my method, take as an example the shooting from the Book Depository and Oswald’s last run. I accept as factual the following: that he took three shots, that he cocked a last live cartridge into his chamber, that he walked across the ninety feet of the sixth floor, rifle in hand, that he hid the rifle at the head of the stairway down, that he escaped north up Elm and took a bus south down Elm, then a cab to his roominghouse on North Beckley in Oak Cliff, where he secured his revolver. Fifteen minutes later and a mile distant, he shot Officer Tippit, including a coup de grâce to the head. He was arrested in the Texas Theatre fifteen or so minutes after that. The Warren Commission, Posner, and Bugliosi agree on that.

To that historical record, I added motives and reasonable conjectures—that he planned to shoot when Kennedy was just below the sixth-floor window but somehow botched the opportunity; that he hurried all three shots at a diminishing target (exacerbating exponentially the likelihood of a miss on his last shot); that he was driven by a more pungent fear of his betrayers than he was of law enforcement,
which drove him to an extremely foolhardy trip through the assassination zone to recover his .38; that he administered the final brain shot to Officer Tippit out of rage at his betrayal.

I should also add that all the firearms and reloading data in the book have been tested by myself and colleagues; it is possible to fire a Carcano bullet from the .264 Winchester Magnum case in a Model 70, with great velocity and accuracy. (NOTE: Firing a jacketed .267 Carcano bullet throught a .264 bore is not a recommended reloading practice, and the fact that we were able to do it without incident does not mean you will.) There are some tweaks I purposely left out to keep non–gun culture people from slipping into a coma, but in general, it is easily accomplished as I have described it.

I should add that I have deliberately avoided conspiracy books and have stayed out of assassination-community culture in hopes of not inadvertently picking up somebody else’s intellectual property. If I have accidentally absorbed something by osmosis or random white noise, I do apologize. I mean to steal no one’s bread.

I should also add that I made no inquiries into the state of the Abercrombie & Fitch firearms records and my account of their location and disposition is entirely fictitious.

Acknowledgments

Any book has a multitude of starting points. This one began on November 22, 1963, in the lunch hall of New Trier High School, in Winnetka, Illinois, where I got the news. I followed the events of the next three days with the concentration of any teenager whose world has just been rocked. And I followed the subsequent developments over time. It was the kind of thing that never went away.

I basically paused at each of the stations of the cross of assassination theory over the following forty-nine years. I believed the Warren Commission, then I believed Mark Lane and his compatriots (I never believed the secret surgery at Andrews Air Force Base, however; did anyone?), then I believed Posner and Bugliosi.

In my mind, it was pretty much settled history until John Carroll, the great editor of
The Baltimore Sun,
knowing I knew a thing or two about guns, asked me to cover Howard Donahue and the book
Mortal Error,
written about his theories, by Bonar Menninger. I met Howard, a Baltimorean through and through, I respected Howard, I liked Howard (who didn’t?); however, like Swagger, I found his explanation of the third bullet convincing but thought he went off into the wild blue yonder by ascribing it to a Secret Service agent with an AR-15 in a following car. It was hard to believe such a thing could happen in front of two thousand witnesses and nobody would see it.

Later in the process, Howard invited me to lunch. By that time he’d been pretty well fried in the press and was looking for a new method to illustrate his idea; he asked me to write a novel expressing his theory. I politely declined. I guess my subconscious, however, took up the challenge, and in a way, this is the book that Howard
wanted me to write. To do it, I had to come up with my own theory about the second-rifle/third-bullet mystery.

Somewhere in all this—I can’t remember the exact chronology—I wrote a book called
Point of Impact
. It was inspired by the old
Sun
reporter Ralph Reppert’s earlier account of Howard’s theory in the
Sun
magazine. Howard had been one of the shooters in the tower at the H. P. White Ballistic lab in Maryland who took and hit the Oswald shots for CBS News’s re-creation. That was what started Howard on his odyssey.

I picked up on the idea of a marksman in a tower solving a shooting problem against a time clock and later realizing from the angles and the speed that he’d just reenacted the JFK assassination. I had to come up with a shooter, and so, with the help of Carlos Hathcock, I invented Bob Lee Swagger.

The idea was that the actual assassins were using Swagger in another hit, casting him in the role of Lee Harvey Oswald, to their infinite regret. As I progressed, I lost faith in my ability to bring it off, and I lost faith in conspiracy theories (I think
Case Closed
came out around then), so I ultimately kept Swagger but ditched JFK. At one point, I went through the manuscript and got rid of all the JFK references. Alas, I am by nature sloppy, so I missed many, and those accidental survivors later became the joinery between
Point of Impact
and this book. That’s how Hugh Meachum and Lon Scott came into it.

The most recent starting point was February 2011. I was writing a book called
Soft Target
and sitting around with my good pal Gary Goldberg in the living room. Somehow, the JFK assassination came up, and I performed my assassin-from-the-future routine, just as Richard does, and then I did riffs on the context of the Mannlicher-Carcano, the angles versus the proximity issue and several other subjects that I reuse in this book. We had a good old time, and I think there was hooch involved.

I said to Gary, “You know, maybe I ought to have Bob Lee Swagger
solve the JFK conspiracy,” and we got a hearty laugh out of that one, and one second later, I thought, You know what? That’s a damn good idea. I
ought
to get Bob Lee Swagger to solve the JFK assassination.

The day after I finished
Soft Target,
I began
The Third Bullet.
It was a great ride, believe me. One of the best ever. Let me thank all those who pitched in.

First of all, Gary. He was with me from the start, and he became my researcher and contact with the world. He took care of all my computer glitches, dug up all the relevant WC testimony, found the new owners of Dal-Tex, and secured permission for me to go a-prowl in its mysterious (to me) insides. Gary even took over an eBay auction for me and got me the exact scope mount and Hollywood scope that LHO used. Gary was great.

Kathy Lally, who might be the basis of Kathy Reilly, put my wife and me up in Moscow and hauled us around with her husband, Will Englund. They are, jointly, the
Washington Post
correspondents in that most engaging city, as well as being old
Sun
alumni. In fact, Kathy invented my life back in 1982, when she prevailed on the debauched aristos who ran the
Sun
in those days to appoint me film critic. They probably wanted someone who would work for free.

My great friends and enthusiastic readers Lenne P. Miller, Bill Smart, Jay Carr, Jeff Weber, and Mike Hill were extremely supportive and enthusiastic. My editor at Simon & Schuster, Sarah Knight, was terrific and helped me reorganize the material into a more accessible form.

Barrett Tillman, the distinguished aviation and naval historian, was also an early reader and enthusiastic supporter. My good friend John Bainbridge returned to proofreading duties and, as usual, caught fifteen things I never would have.

Dave Emary, the brilliant technician at Hornady (he devised the 6.5 Creedmore) discussed Mannlicher-Carcano ballistics with me and revealed that he had come to a similar conclusion regarding the third bullet. He loaded a dummy .264 Win Mag/Carcano hybrid for me and sent it on with some other sample bullets doctored as we
agreed the conspirators would have done them. I was introduced to Dave by Mark Keefe IV, the editor of
American Rifleman
.

My gun buddy Roger Troup also helped; it was under his auspices that we reloaded some .264 Win Mag/Carcano cartridges for real and tried them out in one of two pre-’64 Model 70s in that caliber I had bought for this project, by which we learned that not only was it feasible but the load produced excellent accuracy and velocity.

Through Roger, I met Bill Vanderpool, retired FBI Special Agent and firearms instructor. He patiently met with me and had many good ideas and contacts.

Dan Shea, the entrepreneur behind
Small Arms Review
and Long Mountain Outfitters of Henderson, Nevada, gave me counsel on suppressors circa 1963 and light machine guns circa 2012. I’m indebted to his wisdom and experience.

Also, Jeff Clemmer, of LWRC, the superb AR builder in Cambridge, Maryland, took me through the plant and coached me on the intricacies of the M-6s Blues 1–4 used in their unfortunate matchup with Swagger. I told him his guys were going to lose, but after all, they were up against Bob the Nailer! He was okay with that.

In Dallas, Scott W. Ehley, of International Capital, LLC, current owners of Dal-Tex, guided me through the building and answered my questions about its past. He was a very good guy to my enterprise, about which he knew nothing and which he took entirely on trust.

Dr. David Fowler, the chief medical examiner of Maryland and a good friend, gave me time and patience as he vetted my velocity-explosive theory of November 22, 1963. In the sci-fi tale that Richard tells Bob via Hugh’s instructions, the time travel/location in space is a last gift from my late and wonderful friend Bob Lopez.
Vaya con Dios, amigo
.

And, of course, my wife, Jean Marbella. I have no doubt she would go out to Idaho and sit in a diner for a month to persuade Bob Lee Swagger to investigate
my
death, exactly as her doppelgänger does in this book. More to the point, she put up with my nutty enthusiasm,
my purchase of four Mannlicher-Carcanos (it took that many to get one that would shoot!), my distraction, and my babbling on the subject of each new idea, and she made the coffee that got me going every single day, which may be why there’s so much coffee in this book. She did all this while pursuing her own extraordinary career at the
Sun
.

Of course, no blame for errors should attach to any of these fine people; I and I alone am responsible.

STEPHEN HUNTER
is the author of eighteen novels, including
I, Sniper
and
Point of Impact
. In 2003 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism for his work at
The
Washington Post
, where he retired as chief film critic. He has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work about the attempted assassination of Harry Truman,
American Gunfight
.

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