Good as Gone: A Novel of Suspense by David Kazzie

Author:David Kazzie [Kazzie, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grub Club Publishing
Published: 2022-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Ulysses was not his real name, but that had been his nickname since April 1968, when he entered the Army as a bloodthirsty private with a burning desire to kill North Vietnamese soldiers. During the bus ride to Fort Benning, Georgia to begin basic training, a recruit named Hollis Thornton began razzing a fellow grunt about the James Joyce novel that he was reading. That literarily inclined recruit did not take it well, breaking Thornton’s nose with a single punch, a punch that no other passenger on the bus reported seeing. The reason was that most of the other guys didn’t like the kid who’d been reading Ulysses, but they liked Thornton even less, and amazingly, not one passenger on the bus had seen Ulysses, as he came to be known, pop the annoying Thornton. The drill sergeant was not impressed, and they all did five miles in the Georgia sun when they got to Benning before they even went to Requisitions. Every one of the sixty-four new soldiers vomited up their induction breakfast inside of three miles.

Within ten days, Ulysses had distinguished himself as the best marksman at Benning. Some people play piano. Others are virtuosos with a paintbrush. Ulysses turned killing into an art form. He was snatched up from his infantry unit and trained as a sniper, where he displayed deadly accuracy from distances ranging up to 1,500 yards. Almost a mile.

In July 1968, Ulysses’s squadron shipped out to Vietnam, arriving in Saigon in a hot, steamy downpour, which didn’t let up for four days. By then, Ulysses was in country, transformed by terror into a cold killing machine. He loved killing. He thrived on it, never feeling more alive, from the top of an outhouse or perched on a thick tree branch, a single round, the cold bore shot, piercing the skull of some NVA officer, sending the army unit under his command into disarray.

For three years, Ulysses roamed the countryside like the boogeyman, turning down more than one chance to go home because nothing was waiting for him there. He became the deadliest American sniper in the war, amassing ninety-nine confirmed kills during that time. And then, one day, he had missed. Scheduled as his hundredth kill, it was supposed to be an easy shot, through some trees in clear weather. No wind. The target had been a middle-level diplomat, visiting the troops in Hanoi. Ulysses was on the roof of an abandoned farmhouse about four hundred yards south of the podium. Everything had gone according to plan. He peered through the 10X telescope sight of his U.S. M40A1 sniper rifle, the target’s head appearing as big as a watermelon. After proceeding through his mental checklist, Ulysses took the shot and was breaking down his weapon before he realized that something had gone wrong.

What exactly had gone wrong was a matter that still kept Ulysses up at night. Maybe the target had sneezed, rocking his head forward just as the bullet screamed through the unexpectedly empty kill zone.

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