Time to Hunt

by Stephen Hunter

  “Jesus,” said Swagger, “you think I give a fuck what you think about the war? I don’t give a shit about politics. I’m a Marine. That’s all I care about.”

  He sat back.

  “All right, I’ll tell you what’s going on, finally. You have earned that. I’ll tell you why I want you out of here. There’s somebody out there.”

  “Huh? Out there? Out where?”

  “There, in the bush, some new bird. That’s why I’ve been huddling with Brophy. It was bucked down from headquarters. There’s a guy out there, and he’s hunting for me. He’s a Russian, we think. The Israelis have a very good source in Moscow and they got a picture of a guy climbing into a TU-16 for the normal intel run to Hanoi. They knew him, because he’d trained Arab snipers in the Bekaa Valley and they tried to hit him a couple of times, but he was too goddamn smart. Our people think he worked Africa too, lots of stuff in Africa. He may have been in Cuba. Anywhere they got shit to be settled, he’s the one to settle it. Anyhow, his name has something to do with ‘Solitary’ or ‘Single,’ something like that. He may be a championship shooter named T. Solaratov, who won a gold medal in prone rifle at the sixty Olympics. Then NSA got a radio intercept a week or two back. One NVA regional commander talking to another, about this Ahn So Muoi, as they call it. They have this thing called Brother Ten, which is an award and a nickname they call someone who’s killed ten Americans. It’s as close in their language as they come to the word sniper. Anyhow, in this intercept, the officers were jawing about the ‘White Brother Ten’ moving down the trail to our province. White sniper, in other words. They got this special guy, this Russian, he’s coming after me and anybody I’m with.”

  “Jesus,” said Donny, “you really pissed them off.”

  “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” Bob replied. “And here’s the new joke. I’m going to kill this guy. I’m going to nail him between the eyes and we’ll send the word back to them very simply: do not fuck with the United States Marine Corps.”

  Donny suddenly said, “It’s a trap! It’s a trap!”

  “That’s right. I’m going to play cat-and-mouse with him; only, he thinks he’s the cat, when he’s the mouse. We want this bird swollen with confidence, thinking he’s the cock of the walk. It’s all a big phony show so we can get him to hit me in a certain way, only, I ain’t gonna be there, I’m gonna be behind his sorry ass and I will drill him clean, and if I can’t drill him, I will call in gunships with so much smoke there won’t be nothing left but cinders. Now, that is dangerous work and it don’t seem to me it has one thing to do with being a grunt in Vietnam. That is why I want your young ass out of here. You ain’t getting killed in anything this personal. This is between me and this Solitary Man. That’s it.”

  “No. I want in.”

  “No way. You’re out of here. This ain’t your show. This is about me.”

  “No, this is about the Kham Duc. I was at Kham Duc. He wants to take us for Kham Duc. Swell, then he wants to take me. I’ll go against him. I’m not afraid of him.”

  “You are an idiot. I’m scared shitless.”

  “No, we have the advantage.”

  “Yeah, and what if he zeros me out in the bush, and you’re left alone? You against him, out in the bad, bad bush. The fact that you’re married, got a great future, had a great war, done your duty, won some medals, all that don’t mean shit. He don’t care. He just wants to ice you.”

  “No, I will be there. Forget me. You need another man. Who are you taking, Brophy? Brophy isn’t good enough, no one here is good enough. I’m the best you got, and I’ll go with you and we’ll fight this goddamn thing to the end, and nobody can say about me, oh, he had connections, he got off easy, his sergeant got wasted but he got a cush job in the air-conditioning.”

  “You are one screwed-up kid. What do I say to Julie if I get you wasted?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re a sergeant. You can’t think like that. You only think of the mission, okay? That’s your job. Mine is to back you up. I’ll run the radio, back you up. We’ll get this asshole, then we’ll go home. It’s time to hunt.”

  “You asshole kid. You think you want to meet this guy? Okay, you come with me. Come on, I’ll introduce you two boys.”

  Swagger pulled him out of the S-2 bunker and out toward the perimeter.

  “Come on, scream a little at me!”

  “Huh?”

  “Scream! So he notices us and gets an eyeful. I want him to know we’re back and tomorrow we’re going out again.”

  “I don’t—”

  “He’s out there. I guarantee you, he’s out there, in the grass, a hundred meters or so away, but don’t look at him.”

  “He can—”

  “He can’t do shit. If he shoots from this close, we’ll call in artillery and napalm. The squids’ll soak his ass in burning gas. And he knows it. He’s a sniper, not a kamikaze. The challenge ain’t just gunning me, no sir. It’s gunning me and going back to Hanoi to eat grilled pork, fuck a nice gal, and going home on the seven o’clock bus to Moscow. But he’s there, setting up, planning. He’s reading the land, getting ready for us, figuring how to do us, the motherfucker. But we’re going to bust his ass. Now, come on, yell.”

  Donny got with the program.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Russian finally opened his case, quickly assembled the parts with an oily clacking sound, until he had built what appeared to be a rifle.

  “The Dragon,” he said.

  Huu Co thought: does he think I’m a peasant from the South, soaked in buffalo shit and rice water?

  He of course recognized the weapon as a Dragunov, the new Soviet-bloc sniper weapon as yet unknown to Vietnam. It was a semiauto, in the old Mosin-Nagant 7.62 × 54 caliber, a ten-round magazine, a mechanism based on the AK47’s, though it had a long, elegant barrel. It wore a skeletal stock that extended from a pistol grip. A short, electrically illuminated four-power scope squatted atop the receiver.

  The sniper inserted the match rounds into the magazine, then inserted the magazine into the rifle. With a snap, he threw the bolt, chambering a round, flicked the safety on, then set the rifle down. Then he set to wrap the rifle in a thick tape to obscure the glint of its steel and the precision of its outline. As he wound, Huu Co talked to him.

  “You do not need to zero?”

  “The scope never left the receiver, so no, I don’t. In any event, it won’t be a long shot, as I have planned it. Possibly two hundred meters at the longest. The rifle holds to four inches at two hundred meters and I always shoot for the chest, never the head. The head shot is too difficult for a combat situation.”

  He was fully dressed. He wore a ghillie suit of his own construction, and was well tufted with a matting of beige strips identical in color to the elephant grass. His hat was tufted too, and under it, he’d painted his face in combat colors, a smear of ochre and black and beige.

  “Sundown,” came a cry from above.

  “It’s time,” said Huu Co.

  The sniper rose and threw a large pack over his back, the rifle strap diagonally over his shoulder, and with a soft swaying as of many different feathers, like some exotic bird, he walked to the ladder and climbed out of the tunnel.

  He rose in the dusk, and Huu Co followed him. It was but a few hundred feet to the treeline and the long crawl down the valley toward the American firebase.

  “You have this planned?” Huu Co asked. “I need to know for my report.”

  “Well planned,” said the Russian. “They’ll go out just before sunrise, over their berm and through their wire. I can tell you exactly where, because it’s the one place where they’re higher; there aren’t any subtle rises in the ground. They’ll continue in the rising light on a north-northwest axis, then turn to the west. When the sun is full, they’ll have a last few hundred meters to go through the grass toward the north. I’ve examined their own after-action reports. Swagger runs his missions the same each time, but what varies is where he�
��ll operate. If he’s headed south, toward Kontum, he’ll go toward the Than Quit River. If he heads north, toward the Hai Van Peninsula, then he’ll go toward Hoi An. And so forth. In any event, that small rise out there, that’s his intersection. Which way will he turn from there? I’m betting tonight it’s toward the north, because he worked the west when he headed out toward Kham Duc. It’s the north’s turn. I’ll set up behind him; that is, between himself and the firebase. He’ll never expect shots from that direction. I’ll take them both when they come out from behind the hill. It’ll be over quickly; two quick rounds to the body, two more when they’re down. Nobody from the base camp can reach me by the time I’m back here, and I’ve got a good, clean escape route with two fallbacks, if need be.”

  “Well thought out.”

  “And so it is. That’s what I do.”

  There was little left to say. The sappers gathered around the banty little Russian, clapped him on the back, embarrassing him. Night was coming quickly, all was silent, and in the far distance the firebase stood like a sore on the flank of a woman.

  “For the Fatherland,” Huu Co said.

  “For the Fatherland,” chimed the tough sappers.

  “For survival,” said the sniper, who knew better.

  The last briefing was at sundown. Donny faced himself. Or rather, the man who would be himself, a lance corporal named Featherstone, roughly his own size and coloring. Featherstone would wear Donny’s camouflaged utilities, carry his 782 gear complete to Claymores and M49 spotting scope, and the only M14 that could be found in the camp. Featherstone, and Brophy similarly tricked out as Bob Lee Swagger, were bait.

  Featherstone, a large, slow boy, was not happy at this job; he had been volunteered for it by virtue of his similarity to Donny. Now he sat, looking very scared, in the S-2 bunker, amid a slew of officers and civilians in various uniforms. Everybody except Featherstone seemed very excited. There was a kind of partylike atmosphere, long absent from Firebase Dodge City.

  Bob went to the front of the group, as they sat down, and addressed the primary players: Captain Feamster, who was CO here at Dodge City; an intelligence major who represented the Marine Corps’s higher interest, in from Da Nang; an army colonel who’d choppered in from MACV S-2; an Air Force liaison officer; and a civilian in a jumpsuit with a Swedish K submachine gun who radiated Agency from all his pores. A map of the immediate area had been rigged on a large sheet of cardboard, reducing the clearing around Dodge City to its contours and landforms and the base itself to a big X at the bottom.

  “Okay, gentlemen,” Bob started, and no officer in the room felt it peculiar to be briefed by a staff sergeant, or at least this staff sergeant, “let’s run this through one more time to make sure everybody’s on the same page in the hymn book. The game starts at 2200, when Fenn and I, dressed in black and painted up like black whores, head out. It’s approximately thirteen hundred yards to what I’m designating Area 1. That’s where, based on my reading of the land and this guy’s operating procedure as the files from Washington reveal, I think he’s going to operate. Fenn and I will set up about three hundred yards from his most probable shooting zone. I don’t want to get too close; this bird has a nose for trouble. At 0500 Lieutenant Brophy and Lance Corporal Featherstone roll over the berm at the point designated Roger One.”

  He pointed to it on the map.

  “Why there, Sergeant?”

  “This guy has eyeballed Dodge City, believe you me, and maybe from as close as this bunker. He’s been here. He knows where the best place to get quickly into this little dip here is”—he pointed—“which gives you close to half mile of nearly unobserved terrain.”

  “Do you know that for a fact?” asked the leg colonel.

  “No, sir, I do not. But before this problem came up, it’s where I took my teams out ninety percent of the time, unless we choppered somewhere. He’ll know that, too.”

  “Carry on, Sergeant.”

  “From there, the lieutenant and Featherstone follow the route I have indicated.” He addressed the two of them directly. “It’s very important you stay there. He can’t get a good shot at you, because he can’t get close enough, but he’ll know you’re there. He’ll start tracking you about five hundred yards out, but you’re still too far out to shoot. He don’t have a rifle that he can trust to make that far a shot; plus, he wants you out of sight of camp when he hits you, so that he’ll have time to make his get-out.”

  “How do we know he just won’t take them out, then fade?” asked the Air Force major.

  “Well, sir, again, we don’t. But I been all over that ground. I don’t think he can get a shot when they’re in the gulch. That’s why they have to be right careful to stay there, to move slowly. Now, about one thousand yards out, you got a little-bitty bit of hill. It’s Hill Fifty-two, meaning it ain’t but fifty-two meters high. It’s hardly a tit. You wouldn’t give it a squeeze on Saturday night.”

  “I would,” said Captain Feamster, and everybody laughed. “I may go do it now, in fact!”

  After they settled down, Bob continued.

  “Sir, when y’all git behind that hill, you go flat. I mean, you dig in, you stay put. He’s going to watch you come, he’ll be set up on the other side, where you come out to high ground and make your decision which way you’re going to turn the mission. You stay put. Now, it may take some time. This bird’s patient. But, you disappearing suddenly, he’s going to get annoyed, then irritated. He’ll move. Maybe just a bit, but when he moves, we put the glass on him, I quarter him and waste his ass.”

  “Sergeant Swagger?” It was Brophy.

  “Sir?”

  “Do you want us to move out in support after you engage him?”

  “No, sir. I don’t want no other targets in the zone. If I see movement, I may have to shoot without ID. I’d hate it to be you or Featherstone. Y’all just go to earth once you get behind that hill, then move back under cover of the choppers, if we have to call in choppers.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “This sucks,” Featherstone whispered bitterly to Donny. “I’m going to get smoked, I know it. It isn’t fair. I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

  “You’ll be okay,” Donny said to the shaky man. “You just walk, then dig in and wait for help. Swagger’s got it figured.”

  Featherstone shot him a look of pure hatred.

  “Anyhow,” continued Swagger at the front of the bunker, “I take him when he rises to move. If I don’t get a solid hit or if I get a miss, that’s when I signal Fenn, who’s sitting on the PRC-77. You’ve checked out the radio?”

  “Of course,” said Donny.

  “At that moment I signal, Fenn’s on the horn with you Air Force boys.”

  It was the Air Force major’s turn.

  “We’ve laid on a C-130 Hercules call-signed Night-Hag-Three, holding in orbit about five klicks away, just off Than Nuc. We can have Night Hag there in less than thirty seconds. The Night Hag brings major pee: four side-mounted Vulcan twenty-mm mini-guns and four 7.62 NATO mini-guns. It can unload four thousand rounds in less than thirty seconds. It’ll turn anything in a thousand square yards to tenderized hamburger.”

  “That’s better than napalm or Hotel Echo, sir?”

  “Much better. More accurate, more responsive to ground direction. Plus, these guys are really good. They’ve been on these suppression missions for years. They can pinwheel over a zone just above stalling speed like a gull floating over the beach. Only, they’re pumping out lead all the while. They bring unbelievable smoke. The snake eaters love them. You know the napalm problem. It can go any way, and if the wind catches it and takes it in your direction, you got a problem.”

  “Sounds good,” said Bob.

  “Sergeant Swagger?”

  It was the CIA man, who’d brought the Solaratov documents.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Nichols?”

  “I’m just asking: is there any conceivable way you could take this man alive? He’d be an incomparable intell
igence asset.”

  “Sir, I should say, hell, yes, I’ll try my damndest, and we’ll share whatever we git with our friends who’ve cooperated with us. But this bastard’s tricky and dangerous as hell. If I get him in the scope, I have to take him out. If he gets away, we go to gunships. That’s all.”

  “I respect your honesty, Sergeant. It’s your ass on the line. But let me tell you one thing. The Sovs have a new sniper rifle called the Dragunov, or SVD. He might have one.”

  “I’ve heard of it, sir.”

  “We’ve yet to shake it out. Even the Israelis haven’t uncovered one. Be very nice if you brought that out alive.”

  “I’ll give it my best, sir.”

  “Good man.”

  Donny was supposed to get a last few hours of sleep before he geared up, but of course he couldn’t. So much ran through his mind, and he lay in the bunker, listening to music coming from the squad bays a few dozen meters away.

  CCR was banging out something from last year on somebody’s tape deck. It sounded familiar. Donny listened.

  Long as I remember, the rain been coming down,

  Clouds of mystery falling, confusion on the

  ground,

  Good men through the ages, trying to track the

  sun,

  And I wonder, still I wonder, who’ll stop the

  rain?

  It had some kind of anti-war meaning, he knew. The rain was war, or had become war. Some of these kids had known nothing but the war; it had started when they were fourteen and now they were twenty and over here and it was still going on. It was coming for them, they’d get caught in the rain, that’s why the song was so popular to them. Kids had picked it up in DC last year and it was everywhere. He knew Commander Bonson had heard it.

  He thought of Bonson now.

  Bonson came back to him. Navy guy, starchy, duty-haunted, rigid, black-and-white Bonson. In his khakis. His beard dark, his flesh taut and white, his eyes glaring, set in rectitude.