Time to Hunt

by Stephen Hunter

  Still, it was holding beautifully for him. Above there was a starless night, gray and dim, the clouds close to the earth. In his old mind, his Western mind, he could believe that God himself had willed the Americans from the earth. It was as if God were saying, “Enough, begone. Back to your land. Let these people be.”

  In his new mind, he merely noted that his luck had held, and that luck is sometimes the reward for boldness. The Fatherland appreciated daring and skill; he had gambled and won, and the eventual fall of the Kham Duc camp would be his reward.

  “It is good,” said the XO.

  “Yes, it is,” said Huu Co. “When this is over, I will—”

  But Nhoung’s face suddenly lit up. Huu Co turned to wonder about the source of illumination.

  A single flare hung in the sky beneath a parachute, bringing light to the dark night. As it settled the light grew brighter, and there was one lucid moment in which the battalion, gathered as it plunged toward its study, seemed to stand out in perfect clarity. It was a beautiful moment too, suffused with white light, gentle and complete, exposing the people’s will as contained and expressed through its army, nestled between close hills, churning onward toward whatever tomorrow brought, unhesitatingly, heroic, stoic, self-sacrificing.

  Then the shot rang out.

  Puller dreamed of Chinh. His second tour. He hadn’t planned to, it just happened; she was Eurasian, lived in Cholon, he’d been in the field eleven months and, suffering from combat exhaustion, had been brought back to MACV in Saigon, given a staff job, just to save him from killing himself. It was a safe job back then, sixty-seven, a year before Tet, and Chinh was just there one day, the daughter of a French woman and a Vietnamese doctor, more beautiful than he could imagine. Was she a spy? There was that possibility, but there wasn’t much to know; it was brief, intense, pure pleasure, not a whisper of guilt. Her husband had been killed, she said, by the communists. Maybe it was so, maybe it was not. It didn’t matter. The communists killed her one night on the road in her Citreon after she’d spent hours making love with him. She ran through an ambush they’d prepped for an ARVN official: just blew her away.

  He dreamed of his oldest daughter, Mary. She rode horses and had opinions. She hated the Army, watched her mother play the game, suck up all the way through in the shit posts like Gemstadt or Benning, always making a nice home, always sucking up to the CO’s wife.

  “I won’t have it,” Mary said. “I won’t live like that. What does it get you?”

  His wife had no answer. “It’s what we do,” she finally said. “Your father and me. We’re both in the Army. That’s how it works.”

  “It won’t work that way for me,” she said.

  He hoped it wouldn’t. She was too smart to end up married to some lifer, some mediocrity who would go nowhere and only married her because she was the daughter of the famous Dick Puller, the lion of Pleiku, who’d taken a Chicom .51 in the chest and wouldn’t even let himself be medevaced out and who died in the shitty little Forward Operations Base at Kham Duc a year after the war was lost, threw himself away for nothing that nobody could make any sense of.

  Puller came awake. It was dark. He checked his watch. It would start soon, be over soon. He smelled wet sand from the soaked bags out of which the bunker was built, dirt and mud, gun oil, Chinese cooking, blood, the works, the complete total that was life in the field.

  But he had an odd sensation: something was happening. He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. Time to get up and—

  “Sir.”

  It was young Captain Taney, who would probably also die tonight.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s—ah—you won’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  “He’s still out there.”

  “Who?” Puller thought instantly of Huu Co.

  “Him. Him. That goddamned Marine sniper.”

  “Does he have night vision?”

  “No, sir. You can see it from the parapet. You can hear it. He’s got flares.”

  He didn’t get good targets. Not enough light. But in the shimmering glow of the floating flares he got enough: movement, fast, frightened, scurrying, the occasional hero who would stand and try and mount a rally, the runner who was sent to the rear to report to command, the machine gun team that peeled off to try and flank him.

  The flares fired with a dry, faraway pop, like nothing else in the ’Nam. They lit at about three hundred feet with a spurt of illumination; then the ’chute would open and grab the wind, and they’d begin to float downward, flickering, spitting sparks and ash. It was white. It turned the world white. The lower they got the brighter it got, but when they swung in the breeze, they turned the world to a riot of shadows chasing each other through the dimness of his scope.

  But still, he’d get targets. He’d fire at what his instincts told him was human, what looked odd in the swinging light, the sparks, the glow that filled the world, the crowd of panicked men who now felt utterly naked to the sniper’s reach. The night belonged to Charlie, it was said. Not this night. It belonged to Bob.

  They’d worked it right. No movement, not now. It was too dark to move and they’d get mixed up, get out of contact with one another and that would be that. Donny was on the hilltop, Bob halfway down. The bad guys were moving left to right beyond them, one hundred yards out, where the grass was shorter and there wasn’t any cover. It was a good killing zone, and the first element of the column was hung up, pinned in the grass, believing that if they moved they would die, which was correct.

  Donny would fire a flare and move a hundred steps or so on the hilltop, while Bob waited for the flare to get low enough to see the movement. Bob would fire twice, maybe three times in the period of brightest light. Then he’d move too, the same one hundred steps, through the grass, and set up again.

  Forward; then they’d move back. They couldn’t see one another, but they had the rhythm. They’d send people up after him, but not soon enough. They wouldn’t be sure where the flares were coming from, because, God bless the little fireworks, they didn’t trail illumination as they ascended.

  Bob couldn’t even see the reticle. He just saw the movement and knew where the reticle would be because that’s where it always was, and he fired, the rifle cracking, its flash absorbed in the steel tube that surrounded the muzzle but would sooner or later have to give way. No one could yet see where the shots were coming from.

  The flare floated, showering sparks. In its cone of light, Bob saw a man drop into vegetation and he put a bullet into him. He flicked the bolt fast, jacking out the spent case, and watched as another man came through the light to his fallen comrade, and he killed him too. The trick was the light; the flares had to be constant; there couldn’t be a dark moment when there was no light because these guys would move on him then, and they’d be too close, too fast and it would be over.

  It lasted for ten minutes; then, having planned it, Donny stopped firing and Bob stopped firing. They both fell back, met at the far side of the hill, and took off on the dead run, leaving behind the confusion. They moved on, looking for another setup.

  “That’ll slow ’em. It’ll take ’em ten minutes to figure out we’re gone. Then they’ll get moving again. We should be able to hit them again. I want to set up on that side now. You watch me.”

  Donny had the M14 at high port, Bob’s rifle was slung and he carried the M3 in his hands, though he was down now to two magazines. Both his handguns were cocked and locked.

  “Okay, you ready?”

  “I think so.”

  “You cover me if I take fire.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Bob stepped out of the grass onto the valley floor.

  He felt so naked. He was all alone. The wind whistled, and once again it began to rain. The NVA must have been a half klick or so behind. Suddenly, the sky behind them lit up: an assault team had moved up to and taken the now empty hill on which they had situated. Grenade blasts rocked the night, and blades
of the sheer light slashed from the concussion. Heavy automatic weapons fire followed: again, they were slaying the demon.

  Bob got halfway across, then turned with his grease gun to cover, and called out for Donny to join him.

  “Come on!” he shouted.

  The boy came across the valley floor and passed Bob, and went to set up on the other side. Bob raced over. Quickly, they found another hill.

  “You get on up there,” Bob said. “When you hear me shoot, you fire the first flare. I’m going to open up further out this time. Meanwhile, you set up Claymores. I’m down to about twenty rounds and I want a fallback. If we get bounced, we’ll counterbounce with the Claymores, then fall back. Set them up, and wait to pop flares. Password is … fuck, I don’t know; make up a password.”

  “Ah—Julie.”

  “Julie. As in ‘Julie is beautiful,’ roger that?”

  “Roger that.”

  “You hear movement coming to you and he don’t sing out ‘Julie is beautiful,’ you go to Claymores, use the confusion to fall back and find a hide, then you wait until tomorrow and call in a bird after a while. Okay? There’ll be a bird tomorrow. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “If I don’t make it back, same deal. Fall back, go to ground, call in a bird. They’ll be buzzing all over this zone tomorrow, no problem. Now, how many flares you got?”

  Donny did a quick check on his bag.

  “Looks like about ten.”

  “Okay, when they’re gone, they’re gone. Then we’re out of business. Fall back, hide, bird. Okay?”

  “Check,” said Donny.

  “You all right? You sound kind of shaky.”

  “I’m just beat. I’m tired. I’m scared.”

  “Shit, you can’t be scared. I’m scared enough for both of us. I got all the fear in the whole fucking world.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Just this last bad thing, then we are the fuck out of here, and I’m going to make sure you get home in one piece, I give you my word. You done yours. Nobody can say, He didn’t do his. You done it all ten times over. You get to go home after this one, I swear to you.”

  There was an odd throb in his own voice that Bob had never heard before. Where did it come from? He didn’t know. But somehow Bob had a blinding awareness that in some way, the life of the world now depended on getting Donny home in one piece. Donny was the world, somehow, and if he, Bob, got him killed out here for this shit, he would answer for all eternity. Very strange; nothing he’d ever felt before on any battlefield.

  “I’m cool,” Donny said.

  “See you in a bit, Sierra-Bravo-Four.”

  Donny watched the sergeant go. The man was like some Mars or Achilles or something, so lost in the ecstasy of the battle that he somehow didn’t want it to end, didn’t want to come back. Once again, Donny had the odd feeling that he was destined to witness all this and tell it.

  To whom?

  Who would care? Who would listen? The idea of soldiers as heroes was completely gone. Now, they were baby killers or, if not that, they were fools, suckers, morons who hadn’t figured out how to beat the machine.

  So maybe that was his job: to remember the Bob Lee Swaggers of the world and, when the times somehow changed, the story could be retrieved and told. How one crazy Arkansas sumbitch, mean as a snake, dry as a stick, brave as the mountains, took on and fucked up an entire battalion, for almost nothing, really, except so that nobody would ever say of him, He let us down.

  What made such a man? His brutal, hardscrabble childhood? The Corps as his home, his love of fighting, his sense of country? Nothing explained it; it was beyond explanation. Why was he so meaninglessly brave? What compelled him to treat his life so cheaply?

  Donny made it to the top of the hill. It was a queer little empire, much smaller than the last hill, a little hump that overlooked the larger valley before it. Here is where they would fight.

  He unstrapped his three Claymores bandoleers and took the things out, your basic M18A1 Directional Mine. Jesus, were these nasty little packages. About eight inches across and four inches tall, they were little convexes of plastic-sheathed C-4, impregnated with about seven hundred pieces of buckshot apiece. You opened a compartment, pulled out about one hundred meters of wire, unspooled it to your safe hole, and there crimped it to the Electrical Firing Device M57, which came packed in the bandoleer and looked like a green plastic hand exerciser. When you clamped it, you jacked a goose of electricity through the wire to the detonator, the pound and a half of C-4 went kaboom, and the seven hundred steel balls went sailing through the air at about two thousand miles an hour. For a couple of hundred feet, anything in their way—man, beast, vegetable or mineral—got turned to instant spaghetti. Just the thing for human wave attacks, night ambushes, perimeter defense or those annoying staff meetings, though the Marine Corps thoughtfully added the message FRONT TOWARD ENEMY for its dimmer recruits, so they wouldn’t get mixed up in all the excitement and blow a nasty hole in their own lines.

  Donny pulled down the folding scissors legs on each mine, made sure that the front indeed faced the enemy, and set up the three of them about sixty feet apart, atop the hill. There was some little technical business to be done involving blasting caps, shipping plug priming adaptors, the detonator well, wire crimped and so on. Then the wire was fed backward, where he used his entrenching tool to dig a quick, low hole, though he knew that if he ever had to go to the mines, it meant there were enough zips coming at them that whether he survived the backblast or not was kind of a moot point.

  He took a last swig on his canteen and tossed it away. He wished he had a C-rat left, but he’d left them back with most of his gear. Now, however, instead of the usual huge burden, he felt almost light-headed. He had no food, no canteen, no spotting scope, no Claymores. The only burden, beside his M14 magazines, was the goddamned PRC-77, tied tightly to his back by a couple of cruel straps. He even dared peel it off, and now felt really light. He felt like dancing. The freedom from the ache of going into battle with sixty pounds of gear and then twenty pounds of gear and now nothing was astonishing. He had trained himself to ignore the ache in his back; now it vanished. Cool, he thought, I get to die without a backache, first time in my career in the ’Nam.

  Then the shot came, and Donny hastily pulled out his flare device, slipped a flare into the breech, screwed it shut and thrust it against the ground to fire. Like a tiny mortar, the flare popped out and hissed skyward, seeming to disappear. A second passed, then the night bloomed illumination as the flare lit, its ’chute opened and it began to float down into the valley, showering sparks and white. It was snowing light.

  Bob was shooting now.

  The last act had begun.

  They were much closer than he anticipated. The scope was cranked down to three power so that he could get as clear and wide a view as possible. Still, they weren’t targets so much as possibilities, squirms of movement that in their rhythm seemed human against the stiller spectacle of the natural world, though it was all made stranger yet by the rushing shadows the swing of the flare created as it descended.

  He saw, he fired. Something stopped moving, or just went down. He’d had eighty rounds; he was down to less than twenty. God, I killed some boys today. Jesus fucking Christ, I did some killing today. I was death today, I was the Marine Corps’s finest creation, the stone killer, destroying all that moved before me.

  Something moved, he shot it, it stopped. Clearly the NVA couldn’t locate him, and he was so close, and now the bossman had made a decision—to keep going, to take casualties, to make the rallying point for the attack on Arizona, to march through the minefields, as a Russian general had put it.

  It was as though he were saying to Bob: You can’t kill us all. We will defeat you through our willingness to absorb death. That is how we won this war; that is how we will win this battle.

  He could hear sergeants screaming, “Bi! Bi! Bi!” meaning “go, go, go,” urging the troops onward, but t
hey could not see him because of his flash hider, the panic, the fear. The troops did not want to go, clearly. He’d gotten into their heads: that was the sniper thing; that was what was so terrible about the sniper. He was intimate and personal in a way which nothing else that kills in war can be; his humanness preys on your humanness, and it was hardest for even the most disciplined of troops to face.

  He jacked out a round into the breech, fired, watched someone die. He fired again, quickly, in the fading light; then another flare popped, the light renewed and he saw more targets, so close it was criminal murder to take them, but that was his job tonight: he took them, reloaded, fell back through the high grass, emerged when another flare fired off, and killed some more. He was gone totally in the red, screaming urgency of his own head, not a man anymore, but a total killing system, conscienceless, instinctive, his brain singing with blood lust. It was so easy.

  Xo Nhoung was gone. The bullet snuffed his life out in a second, drilling him through the neck with the sound of an ax hitting a side of raw beef. Nhoung died on his feet, and hit the ground a corpse. His soul flew away to be with his ancestors.

  “We are dying! He can see us! There is no hope!” a young soldier screamed.

  “Shut up, you fool,” yelled Huu Co, yearning to reach to the sky and crush those blasphemous flares with his bare hands, then rip the skulls from the bodies of the sniper and his spotter.

  “They’re on the left this time,” he screamed again, because he had seen the XO fall to the right, pushed by the impact of the bullet.

  “On the left. Fire for effect, brothers, fire now, kill the demons!”

  His troops began to open fire helter-skelter, without much thought, the lacy neon of the tracers jumping through the darkness like spiderwebs, ripping vaguely where they struck tree or vegetation, but the point of it was to calm them while he figured out what to do.

  He stood. A flare lit over his head. He was in bold relief and the flare seemed to be falling directly toward him. The man next to him fell, stricken; the man behind him fell, stricken. He was in the cone of light; he was the target. It didn’t matter. His life didn’t matter.