Time to Hunt

by Stephen Hunter

  “Shit,” said Bob. “Which way would he go?”

  “Hmmmm,” bluffed Donny, with no real idea of an answer.

  “If he figures them guys is fake, and he looks around, about the only place we could be to shoot at his ass would be here, on this little ridge.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, so to git a shot at our asses, how’s he going to move? He going to try and flank us to the left or the right? What do you think?”

  Donny had no idea. But then he did.

  “If the treeline equals safety, then he’d go that way, wouldn’t he? To his right. He’d put himself closer to it, not closer to Dodge City.”

  “But maybe that’s how he’d figure we’d think, so he’d figure it the other way?”

  “Shit,” said Donny.

  “No,” said Bob. “No, you’re right. Because he’s on his belly, remember? This whole thing’s gonna play out on bellies. And what he’s looking at is an hour of crawling in the hot sun versus two hours. And being a half hour from the treeline is a hell of a lot better than being three hours from it. He’d have to go to the west, right?” He sounded as if he had to convince himself.

  “It would take a lot of goddamn professional discipline,” he continued, arguing with himself. “He’d have to make up his mind and cut free of his commitment to the only targets he’s got. Man, he’s got a set of nuts on him if he can make that decision.”

  He seemed to fight the obvious for a bit. Then he said, “Okay, Area One ain’t it no more. Designate Area Two on your map, being the coordinates of a five hundred by five hundred grid square one thousand yards left. His left. Make it north-northeast. Give me them coordinates.”

  Donny struggled to get the map out, then struggled with the arithmetic. He worked it out, coming up with a new fire mission, hoping the dancing numbers his eyes were conjuring up were correct, scrawling them in the margins of the map. He had the sinking sensation of failing a math test he’d never studied for.

  “Call it in. Call it in now, so we don’t have to fuck with it later.”

  “Yeah.”

  Donny unleashed the aerial to vertical, then took the handset from its cradle, snapped on power, checking quickly to see that the PRC was still set on the right frequency.

  “Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over.”

  “Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, send your immediate, over.”

  “Ah, Foxtrot, we’re going to go from Area One to new target, designated Area Two, over.”

  “Sierra, what the hell, say again, over.”

  “Ah, Foxtrot, I say again, we think our bird has flown to another pea patch, which we are designating Area Two, over.”

  “Sierra, you have new coordinates, all after? Over.”

  “Correct, Foxtrot. New coordinates Bravo-November-two-two-three-two-two-seven at zero-one-three-five-Zulu-July-eight-five. Break over.”

  “Wilco, Romeo. I mark it,” and Foxtrot read the numbers back to him.

  “Roger, Foxtrot, on our fire mission request. Out.”

  “Copy here, and out, Sierra,” said the radio.

  Donny clicked it off.

  “Good,” said Bob, who’d been diddling with a compass. “I make a route about five hundred yards over there to a small bump. That’s where we’ll go. We should be on his flank then. Assuming he goes the way I figure he’s going.”

  “Got you.”

  “Get your weapon.”

  Donny grabbed his rifle, which was not an M14 or even an M16 or a grease gun. Instead, because of the short order in which the job was planned, it was the only scoped rifle that could be gotten quickly, an old fat-barreled M70 Winchester target rifle, with a rattly old Unertl Scope, in .30-06, left in the Da Nang armory since the mid-sixties.

  “Let’s go,” Bob said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Only bright blue sky above, and swaying stalks of the grass. The Russian crawled by dead reckoning, trusting skills it had taken him years to develop. He moved steadily, the rifle pulling ever so gently on his back. It was 0730 according to the Cosmos watch on his wrist. He wasn’t thirsty, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t scared. The only thing in his mind was this thing, right now, here. Get to elevation five hundred yards to the right. Look to the left for targets that in turn will be looking for targets to their front. Two of them: two men like himself, men used to living on their bellies, men who could crawl, who could wait through shit and piss and thirst and hunger and cold and wet. Snipers. Kill the snipers.

  He came after a time to a small knoll. He had been counting as he moved: two thousand strokes. That is, two thousand half-yard pulls across the grass. His head hurt, his hands hurt, his belly hurt. He didn’t notice, he didn’t care. Two thousand strokes meant one thousand yards. He was there.

  He shimmied up the knoll, really more of a knob, not four feet high. He set himself up, very carefully, flat on the crest, well shielded in a tuft of grass. He checked the sun, saw that it was no longer directly in front of him and would not bounce off his lens. He brought the Dragunov up, slipped it through the grass close to his shoulder and his hand, a smooth second’s easy capture and grasp. Then he opened his binocular case and pulled out a pair of excellent West German 25X’s. He eased himself behind their eyepieces and began to examine a world twenty-five times as large as the one he left behind.

  The day was bright and, owing to the peculiarity of the vegetation in the defoliated zone and the oddities in the rise and fall of the land, he saw nothing but an ocean of yellow elephant grass, some high, some low and threadbare, marked here and there by a rill of earth. He felt as if he were alone on a raft in the Pacific: endless undulation and ripple, endless dapple of shadow, endless subtle play of color, endless, endless.

  He hunted methodically, never leaping ahead, never listening to hunches or obeying impulses. His instinct and brain told him the Marines would be five hundred yards ahead of him, on an oblique. They would seek elevation; their rifle barrels would be hard and flat and perfect against the vertical organization of the world. He found the low ridge where by all rights they should have been sited, and began to explore it slowly. The 25X lenses resolved the world beautifully; he could see every twig, every buried stone, every stunted tree, every stump that had survived the chemical agent all those years ago, every small hill. Everything except Marines.

  He put the glasses down. A little flicker of panic licked through him.

  Not there. They are not there. Where are they, then? Why aren’t they there?

  He considered falling back, trying another day. It was becoming an uncontrollable situation.

  No, he told himself. No, just stay still, stay patient. They think you are over there, and you are over here. After a bit their curiosity will get the best of them. They are Americans: hardy, active people with active minds, attracted to sensations, actions, that sort of thing. They haven’t the long-term commitment to a cause.

  He will move, he thought. He was looking for me, I was not there, he will move.

  Blackness.

  Somewhere in his peripheral, a flash of black.

  Solaratov did not turn to stare. No, he kept his eyes where they were, fighting the temptation to crank them around and refocus. Let his unconscious mind, far more effective in these matters, scan for them.

  Blackness again.

  He had it.

  To the right, almost three hundred yards away. Of course. He’s flanking me to my right.

  Slowly, he turned his head; slowly, he brought up the binoculars.

  Nothing. Movement. Nothing. Movement.

  He struggled with the focus.

  The unnatural blackness was a face. The Marine sniper had blackened it at night, for his long crawl into position; he’d shed his black clothes, and now wore combat dapple camouflage, but he had made a mistake. He had forgotten to take off his face paint. Now, black against the dun and yellow of the elephant grass, it stood out just the slightest bit.

  Solaratov watche
d, fascinated. The man low-crawled two strokes, then froze. He waited a second or two, then low-crawled another two. His face, its features masked by the paint, was a study in warrior’s concentration: tense, drawn, almost cracked with intensity. His rifle was on his back, wearing a tangle of strips for its own camouflage.

  He tried to deny it, but Solaratov felt a flare of pleasure as intense as anything in his life.

  He laid the binoculars down, and raised the rifle to his shoulder, finding the right position, rifle to bone to earth, finding the grip, finding the trigger, finding the eyepiece.

  Swagger crawled through his scope. The crosshairs quartered his head. The Russian’s thumb took the safety off and he expelled half a breath. His finger began its slow squeeze of the trigger.

  “Goddamn,” Bob said.

  “What is it?” Donny said behind him.

  “It’s thinned out here. Goddamn. Less cover.”

  Donny could see nothing. He was lost in elephant grass; it was in his ears, his nose, in the folds of his flesh. The ants were feasting on him. He heard the dry buzz of flies drawn to the delicious odor of his sweat and blood—he’d been cut a hundred or so times by the blades of the grass.

  Ahead of him were the two soles of Bob’s jungle boots.

  “Shit,” Bob said. “I don’t like this one goddamn bit.”

  “We could just call in the Night Hag. She’d chew the shit out of all this. We’d pop smoke so she wouldn’t whack us up.”

  “And if he ain’t here, he knows we got him, and he’s double careful or he don’t come back at all and we never know why he came and we don’t git us a Dragunov. Nah.”

  He paused.

  “You still got that Model Seventy?”

  “I do.”

  “All right. I want you to reorient yourself to the right. You squirt on ahead; see that little hummock or something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You set up on that, you scope it out for me. If you say it’s okay, I’m going to shimmy on over there, to where it’s thick again. I’ll set up over there and cover for you. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough,” said Donny. He squirmed around, took a deep breath and wiggled ahead.

  “Damn, boy, I hope he ain’t in earshot. You’re grunting louder than a goddamn pig.”

  “This is hard work,” Donny said, and it was.

  He got up to the hummock, peered over it. He saw nothing.

  “Go to the M49?”

  “Nah. Don’t got time. Just check it with your Unertl.”

  Donny slipped his eye behind the scope, which was a long, thin piece of metal tubing suspended in an odd frame. When you zeroed this old thing, it had external controls, which meant the whole scope moved, propelled this way and that by screws for windage and elevation. It had been assembled sometime back in the early forties, but rumor said it had killed more than its share of Japs, North Koreans and VC. It wasn’t even a 7.62mm NATO but the old Springfield cartridge, the long .30-06.

  The optics were great. He scanned the grass as far as he could see, and saw no sign of human presence. But the blur had not gone away. He was aware he was missing fine detail. He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers, and nothing improved. No, nothing out there, nothing that he could see.

  “It looks clear.”

  “I didn’t ask how it looked. I asked how it was.”

  “Clear, clear.”

  “Okay,” said Bob. “You keep eyeballing.”

  The sergeant began to creep outward, this time at an even slower rate than before. He crawled slowly, ever so slowly, halting each two pulls forward, going still.

  Donny returned to his scope. Back and forth, he swept the likely shooting spots, seeing nothing. It was clear. This was beginning to seem ridiculous. Maybe they were out here in the middle of nothing, acting like complete idiots. The bees buzzed, the flies ate, the dragonflies skittered. He couldn’t keep his eye behind the scope for very long because it fell completely out of focus. He had to blink, look away. When would the call come from Bob that he was all right?

  The trigger rocked back, stacked up and was on the very cusp of firing.

  Where is the other one?

  His finger came off the trigger.

  There were two. He had to kill them both. If he fired, the other might take him or, seeing his partner with his head blown open, simply slide back farther into the grass and disappear. He’d call in air, possibly, and Solaratov would have to get out of the area.

  Where was the other one?

  He looked up from the scope. He realized he could see the sniper because for some odd reason, the grass was thinner there. The other one would be nearby, covering, as he was vulnerable. He would be vulnerable for only a few more seconds.

  A plan formed in Solaratov’s mind: Find the spotter. Kill the spotter. Come back and kill the sniper. It was possible because of the semiautomatic nature of the weapon and the fact that the distance was under three hundred meters.

  He returned to the scope and very carefully began to crank backward, looking for another black face against the dun and the tan of the vertical thickets of stalks. He came back a bit more, no, nothing, nothing … and there! An arm! The arm led to a body, which led to the form of another prone man hunched over a rifle—he took a gasp of air, a little spurt of pleasure—and then continued up the trunk to the torso to discover that it was indeed a man but he was not a spotter, he was another sniper, and his rifle was pointing exactly at him. At Solaratov.

  The man fired.

  Donny looked up from his scope. His head ached. When would the call come from Bob? God, he needed an aspirin. He glanced about, seeing nothing, only the endless grass.

  A dragonfly flashed close by. It was odd how their wings somehow caught the sunlight and threw a reflection just like—

  Donny went back to the scope.

  He was so close!

  The sniper was less than three hundred yards away—or rather, the snipers, for there was a smear of enemy, blurry in the haze of Donny’s concussion, well sunk in the grass. The man was bent into his rifle, moving slowly, tracking, and with a start, Donny realized he had located Swagger.

  Kill him! he ordered himself. Shoot! Do it now!

  The crosshairs seemed to quarter the head. He squeezed the trigger.

  He lost his sight picture as the pressure increased. He squeezed harder. Nothing happened.

  The safety, the safety. He reached for where it should have been, that nub in front of the trigger, but it wasn’t there. That’s where it was on an M14. On an M70, it was up on the bolt housing. He took his eye off the scope, looked for the flange that was the safety, and snapped it forward. He ducked to the scope, saw the man had turned and the rifle’s muzzle was coming … right at him.

  He jerked at the trigger and the rifle fired.

  Bob crawled forward. Only a few more yards and then he was into the higher grass and—

  The shot, so unexpected, sounded like a drumbeat against his own ears. He froze—lost it, the great Bob Lee Swagger—and had a moment of twisted panic.

  What? Huh? Oh, Christ!

  Then he picked himself up, ran like a son of a bitch for the higher grass, waiting to get nailed and trying to sort it out.

  “He’s there! I saw him!” Donny screamed, and instantly from three hundred yards out, an answering shot sounded. It struck near Donny, blowing a big puff of dirt into the air.

  Donny fired back almost instantly and Bob looked, saw the puff of dust where his shot hit.

  “Get down!” he screamed, now terrified that Donny would take a shot in the head. He dove into the brush, righted himself, squirmed until he could see the dusty bank.

  He threw the rifle to his shoulder, put his eye to the glass and saw … nothing.

  “He’s there!” Donny screamed again, but Bob could see nothing. Then a shot cracked out, seeming to come from the left, and he swung his rifle just a bit, saw some dust in the air from the disturbance of muzzle blast, and fired. He cycled, fi
red again, fast as he was able to, not seeing a target but hoping one was there.

  “Get down!” he screamed again. “Get down and call Foxtrot for air!”

  He worked the bolt, but could not see the sniper in the dust that floated in the grass in the area Donny had identified. Where was he? Where was he?

  Donny edged back a bit and the second shot blasted the earth just a few inches from his face. Ow! The dirt blossomed as if a cherry bomb had detonated, and a hundred tiny flecks of grit bit him; he blinked, slid back even farther. He could hear Bob screaming but he couldn’t make the words out. He thought: the radio. Call air. Get air.

  But then Bob fired, fired again, and it filled Donny with courage. He squirmed up over the other side of the hummock, going to a left-handed shooting position. He couldn’t throw the bolt from here, not easily, but a lot less of him stuck out, and that pleased him.

  Where is he? Where are you, motherfucker?

  Through the scope, he saw nothing, just dust hanging in the air, the slow wobble of grass signifying recent commotion but nothing to shoot at all.

  He scanned left and right a few yards, didn’t see a damned thing. He had this idea that he, not Bob, would be the one who brought the Russian down. Images from a forgotten boyhood book played suddenly through his mind: that would be like Lieutenant May getting the Red Baron instead of salty old pro Roy Brown. A gush of excitement came to him and a spurt of intense pleasure.

  Where was he?

  We can take him under fire from two sources, he realized. We can take this motherfucker.

  “Air!” he heard Bob scream.

  Yes, air. Get the Night Hag in here, smoke this fucker, blow him to—

  On a wide scan, he saw him, much farther back, crawling away desperately.

  Got you!

  He put the crosshairs on the bobbing head, not a shape so much as a suggestion in the blur of his vision. He tried to find the center, quartered it with the scope, felt in supreme control, felt the trigger rock against his finger, stack up just a tiny bit and then surprise the hell out of him when the shot occurred.