Time to Hunt

by Stephen Hunter

  “What?”

  “It’s over. I’m telling you straight. We go out on three missions a week, see, but we don’t go nowhere. We go out into the treeline and we lay up for a couple of days. We don’t take no shots, we don’t go on no treks, no long wanders; we don’t set up no ambushes. No, sir, we lay up in the tall grass and relax, and come in, like all the other patrols. You think I don’t know that shit is going on? Nobody in this shit hole is fighting the war and nobody is fighting back in Da Nang. S-2 Da Nang don’t give a shit, Captain Feamster don’t give a shit, USMC HQ RSVN don’t give a shit, WES PAC don’t give a shit, USMC HQ Henderson Hall don’t give a shit. Nobody wants to die, that’s what it’s all about. It’s over, and if we get fucking wasted, we are just throwing our lives away. For nothing, you hear what I’m saying? We done our bit. It’s time to think about number one. You hear what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, you’ll do that till I DEROS out of here back to the world, then you’ll go out on your own, and get more kills and go back to your job. You’ll have to because by then the gooks will be getting very fucking bold and you’ll be afraid they’ll hit this place and take all these worthless assholes down, and you’ll get hosed for them, and if that isn’t the biggest waste there ever was, I don’t know what is.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Yeah, you will. I know you.”

  “No way at all.”

  “All right, I’ll do this on one condition.”

  “I’m your goddamned sergeant. You can’t ‘one condition’ me.”

  “On this one I can. That is: I go to Nichols, tell him you want on that Aberdeen team, but you got stuff to do first, and you can’t go till a certain date. On the date I DEROS, you go to Aberdeen. Is that fair? That’s fair! Goddamn, that’s fair, that’s what I want!”

  “You young college smart-ass hippie bastard.”

  “I’ll go get him now. Okay? I want to hear you make that statement to him, then I’ll do this.”

  Bob’s eyes narrowed.

  “You ain’t never outsmarted me before.”

  “And maybe I won’t ever again, but by God, this is the night I do! Ha! Got you, Swagger! At last. Got you.”

  Swagger spat into the dust, took a swallow. Then he looked at Donny and goddamn if the silliest goddamn thing didn’t happen. He smiled.

  “Go get Mr. CIA,” he said.

  “Wahoo!” shrieked Donny, and went off to find the man.

  The days passed. The sappers relaxed and treated the mission as a leave, a time for restoring hard-pressed spirits, catching up on correspondence with loved ones, renewing acquaintanceship with political and patriotic principles that could be lost in the heat of combat. They lounged in the tunnel complex on the edge of the defoliated zone two thousand yards from Dodge City, enjoying the amenities.

  At night, Huu Co sent them on probing patrols, nothing aggressive, just simply to make certain the Americans at Dodge City weren’t up to anything. He directed: no engagements, not at this time. So the tiny men in the dun-colored uniforms with the patience of biblical scholars simply waited and watched. Waited for what?

  “Senior Colonel, the Human Noodle is not coming back. No man could survive that. We had best return to base camp and a new mission. The Fatherland needs us.”

  “My instructions,” Huu Co told his sergeant, “are from the highest elements of the government, and they are to support and sustain our Russian comrade in any way possible. Until I determine that mission is no longer viable, we shall stay.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Long live the Fatherland.”

  “Long live the Fatherland.”

  But privately, he had grave doubts. It was true: no man could stand up to the intensity of the air attack with those fast-firing guns, and no man, particularly, could stand up to the flames from the American flamethrowers, a ghastly weapon that he believed they would never use against enemies of their own racial grouping.

  And of course this: another failure.

  Not his, surely, but failure has a way of spreading itself out and tainting all who are near it. He had led the mission, he had helped plan it, he had organized it. Was his heart not pure enough? Was he still infected with the virus of Western vanity? Was there some character defect that attended to him and him alone that caused him to continually misjudge, to make the wrong decision at the wrong time?

  He rededicated himself to the study of Marxism and the principles of revolution. He read Mao’s book for the four hundredth time, and Lao-tzu’s for the thousandth. He buried his grief and fear in study. His eyes ate the hard little knots of words; his mind grappled with their deeper meanings, their subtexts, their contexts, their linkages to past and present. He was a hard taskmaster to himself. He gave himself no mercy, and refused to take painkillers for his crippled hand and its caul of burn. Only his dreams betrayed him. Only in his dreams was he a traitor.

  He dreamed of Paris. He dreamed of red wine, the excitement of the world’s most beautiful city, his own youth, the hope and joy of a brilliant future. He dreamed of crooked streets, the smell of cheese and pastry, the taste of Gauloises and pommes frites; he dreamed of the imperial grandeur of the place, of its sense of empire, the confidence with which its monuments blazed.

  It was on one such night, as he tossed on his pallet, his semiconscious mind rife with bright images out of Lautrec, that the hands of a whore imploring him to her bed became the hands of his sergeant, beckoning him from sleep.

  He rose. It was dark; candles had burned low. The man led him from his chamber, down earthen tunnels, to the mess hall. There, in the dark, a squat figure sat hunched over a table, eating with unbelievable gusto.

  The sergeant lit a candle and the room flickered, then filled with low light.

  It was the white sniper.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  They lay in the high grass, or in the hills under the scrubby trees and bamboo, watching and tracking but never shooting.

  A VC squad moved into the zone of fire, four men with AKs, infiltrating farther south. Easy shots; he could have taken two and driven the other two into the high grass and waited them out and taken them, too. But farther south was only ARVN, and Bob figured it was a Vietnamese problem, and the ARVNs could handle it or they could handle the ARVNs, depending. Another time, a VC tax collector clearly blew his cover and was making his rounds. It was an easy shot, 140-odd yards into a soft target. But Bob said no. The war was over for them.

  They lay concealed or they tracked, looking for sign of big bodies of men, of units moving into position for an assault on Firebase Dodge City, whose immediate environs they patrolled. There was nothing. It was as if a kind of enchantment had fallen over this little chunk of I Corps. The peasants came out and resumed work in their paddies, the farmers went back to furrowing the hills with their ox-pulled plows. The rainy season was over. Birds sang; now and then a bright butterfly would skitter about. Above, fewer contrails marred the high sky, and if you flicked across the FM bandwidths on the PRC-77, you could tell that the war had wound way down; nobody was shooting at anything.

  Two weeks into it, orders came for Bob, assigning him TDY to Army Weapons Lab, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, Maryland. He was slated to leave the day after Donny’s DEROS. Feamster told him since he was so short and enemy activity so quiet and nothing coming down from Battalion S-2, he and Donny didn’t have to go out anymore, but the two said they’d do it anyway, looking for signs of an assault but not for kills. Feamster may have gotten it; that was okay by him. He said that word of turning Dodge City over to ARVN forces was imminent—“Vietnamization,” they called it—and the whole unit would be DEROSed back to the States before the summer came, no matter where the guys were in their tours.

  “This is pretty cool,” said Donny.

  Bob just grunted and spat.

  Solaratov slept for two days solid and then rose and came to see Huu Co. The story of his escape went untold. He made no report. How he had survived, where he had
gone, what he had suffered, all of it went unrecorded and no one dared ask him. A medic attended his burns, which were severe but not debilitating, and he never complained or winced. He seemed disconnected from the agonies of his body. He had one trophy. It was his SPETSNAZ field cap, a floppy, beige thing that looked like a deflated beret or an American sailor hat that had been run over by a tank. It had two holes in it on the left side of the crown, an entrance wound and an exit wound. How could his head have survived such a thing? He had no comment but liked to wiggle his fingers through the two holes at the sappers, who would dash away in confusion.

  On the morning he came to Huu Co, he said, “These people are very good. Good craft, good tactics, very well-thought-out planning. I was impressed.”

  “How did you possibly survive?”

  “Not a remarkable story. Luck, guile, courage, the usual. Anyhow, I am not prepared to give up the mission.”

  “What do you require of us?”

  “I will never maneuver close enough, I see that now. Plus, of course, I lost my weapon, much to my embarrassment. I hope it perished in the flames or was destroyed by cannon fire.”

  He frowned; failure in his profession was not an acceptable outcome.

  “But, no matter. I have certain requirements for a new weapon. I will be shooting at over a thousand yards. I can do it no other way, that is, unless I want to die myself, and I prefer not to.”

  “Our armorers are dedicated to their jobs, but I doubt we have a weapon capable of such accuracy.”

  “Yes, I know. Nor, frankly, do we. But you must have some small cache of American weapons, no? Your intelligence people would maintain an inventory? It’s common for guerrillas to turn the enemy’s weapons against himself.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, I will give you a very specific type of American weapon. It must be found and delivered here within two weeks. It has to be this exact weapon; with no other would I have a chance.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that is not all. You must also contact the Soviet SPETSNAZ unit at the airfield; they will be required to acquire certain components from outside Asia. These are very specific also; no deviation can be allowed. There is a place where such a list can be filled out in just a few seconds, and they will have access to capabilities to do so.”

  “Yes, comrade. I—”

  “You see, it’s not merely the rifle. The rifle is only part of the system. It’s also the ammunition. I have to construct ammunition capable of the task which I have in mind.”

  He handed over the list, which was in English. Huu Co did not recognize the rifle by type, nor the list of “ingredients,” which appeared to be of a chemical or scientific nature. He did recognize one word, but it had no meaning to him: MatchKing.

  The sniper worked with care. He studied the reconnaissance photos of the area, discussed the topography once again with Huu Co, trying to find the right combination of elements. He worked very, very carefully. After devising theories, he went to test them, exploring the area at night and spending his days hidden in the grass, trying to learn what there was to learn.

  This time he never went near the base. He was acclimatizing himself to the very long shots, and hunting for a shooting position. He finally found one on a nameless hill that, by his judgment, was close to fourteen hundred yards from the base, but it offered the most generous angle into the encampment, with the least drop, the least exposure to wind pressure, the most favorable light in the early morning, when such a thing would take place, and it was also sited immediately to the north of the original ambush site, a gamble, but a calculated one. Solaratov reasoned that on general principle alone, the American sniper team would be reluctant to go out the same way as the one that had almost gotten them killed. But they would consider going out the opposite side too obvious. Therefore, on their missions they would either leave above, to the north, or below, to the south. He had a one-in-two chance of encountering them, and in the days that he waited, he saw them leave the post three times. Tiny dots, so far away. Hardly human.

  Fourteen hundred yards. It was a hellaciously long shot. It was a shot nobody had any business trying to make. Beyond six hundred yards, the margin of error shrinks to nothing; the play of the elements increases exponentially. You would need more power than the Dragunov’s 7.62 × 54 round; you would need more power than any round available under normal circumstances in either the North Vietnamese or the American inventory, because war had become a thing of light, fast-firing weapons that kill by firepower, not accuracy. He had contempt for such a philosophy. It was the philosophy of the common untrainable man, not of the elite professional who masters all the variables in his preparation and who has genius-level skill at his task. War nowadays no longer demanded special men but ordinary men—lots of them.

  He lay on the hill, trying to will himself into the mental state necessary. He had to be calm, his eyesight perfect, his judgment secure. He had to dope the wind, the mirage, the temperature, the angle of travel of the targets, his bullet’s trajectory, the time in flight, everything. At this range, it was not like rifle shooting; it was like naval gunfire, for the bullet would have to rise in high apogee and describe an arc across the sky, and float downward with perfect, perfect placement. There were not but a dozen men in the world who could take such a shot with confidence.

  He watched, through binoculars: the Marines far off scuttled about behind their berm, making ready to depart, confident that for them the war was almost over. And for two of them, it was.

  Finally: the rifle. It came almost at the end of the two-week period, and not without difficulty. It had been a trophy in the People’s Museum of Great Struggle in downtown Hanoi; thousands of schoolchildren had looked upon it with great horror as part of their political education. It demonstrated the evil will of the colonialists and the capitalists, that they took such great pains to construct the devil’s own tool. In this, it was very useful indeed, and it took Russian intervention at the highest levels to have it withdrawn from the permanent exhibit. A special sapper unit was ordered to transport it down the Trail of Ten Thousand Miles to Huu Co’s little hidden post on the outskirts of the defoliated zone of Firebase Dodge City.

  The Russian broke it down, for the first step to mastering a rifle is to master what makes it work. He studied the system, the cleverness of it, the robustness of it, the rise and fall of springs, the thrusting of rods, the gizmo of the trigger group. It was ingenious: overengineered in the American fashion, but ingenious. This one had been crudely accurized with flash hider, a fiberglass bedding for the action in the stock, a wad of leather around the comb to provide a nest for the cheek in relation to the scope, which was a mere four-power and, Solaratov saw, the weakest element in the system, attached to the rifle parallel to but not above the barrel, creating problems in parallax that had to be mastered. But his main focus of interest was that trigger group, a mesh of springs and levers that could be pulled whole from the receiver group. He broke it down to the tiniest component, then carefully polished each engagement surface to give the piece a crisper let-off.

  At this point, the box of “components” came from the Soviet intelligence service. They were the easiest mission requirements to acquire: a Soviet asset had merely gone to a Southern California gun store and purchased them, for cash; they had been shipped to the Soviet Union via diplomatic pouch and to North Vietnam by the daily TU-16 flight. To look at them was to see nothing: these were actually reloading tools, which looked like steel chambers of mysterious purpose, and green boxes of bullets, cans of powder, DuPont IMR 4895, tools for resizing the case, pressing in new primers, reinserting the bullet. He knew that no military round could deliver the accuracy he needed and that it would take great attention to detail and consistency.

  He took the entire rig for a day’s march to the north, and there, out of the eyes of Westerners and Vietnamese alike except for a security team of sappers and the ever-curious Huu Co, he set up a fourteen-hundred-meter range, shooting at
two close targets, white silhouettes that were easy to see and would not be moving like they would on the day of his attempt.

  The scope was small and had an ancient, obsolete reticle: a post, like a knife point, rising above a single horizontal line. Additionally, it did not have enough elevation to enable him to hit out to fourteen hundred meters, close to three times the rifle’s known efficiency, though well within the cartridge’s lethal capability. He hand-filed shims from pieces of metal and inserted them within the scope rings to elevate the scope higher, and tightened the assembly with aircraft glue so that it would hold to a thousand-yard zero over the course of his testing.

  He worked with infinite patience. He seemed lost in a world no one could penetrate. He seemed distracted to an absurd degree, almost catatonic. His nickname, “the Human Noodle,” took on added comic meaning as he entered a zone of total vagueness that was actually total concentration. He seemed to see nothing.

  Gradually, increment by increment, he managed to walk his shots into the target. Once he was on the target, he began hitting regularly, primarily through mastery of trigger control and breathing and finding the same solid position off a sandbag. The sandbag was the important feature: it had to be just so dense, packed so tight, and it had to support the rifle’s forestock in just such a way. Infinitely patient micro-experimentation was gradually revealing the precise harmony among rifle and load and position and his own concentration that would make his success at least possible.

  Finally, he took to having the sappers present the targets from over a berm, so that he could see them for just the second they’d be visible. He’d teach himself to shoot fast. It went slowly and he burned out the sappers with his patience, his insistence on recleaning the rifle painstakingly every sixteen rounds, his demand that all his ejected cartridges be located and preserved in the order that they were fired. All the time he kept a notebook of almost unreadable pedantry as he assembled his attempts.