Time to Hunt

by Stephen Hunter

  Bob marked the address and drove to the nearest convenience store. There, he called the fire department and reported a fire in the house two down on the court. By the time he got back, three trucks had arrived, men were stomping in bushes, two cop cars with flashing light bars had set up perimeter security—it was a carnival. When the black Nova arrived, an agent got out, showed credentials, conferred with the police and firemen, then went to Bonson’s door, unlocked it and went in to check the house and secure it. He went around back to reset the trembler switch.

  Bob went, found a place for lunch, then came back and parked a court down the line. He checked his watch to make certain neither of the patrol vehicles was expected, then walked back to Bonson’s house, where he knocked on the door. No answer came and, after a bit, he used his credit card to pop the door and slipped inside.

  An alarm immediately began to whine. He knew he had sixty seconds to defuse it. The sound of the device enabled Bob to find it in ten seconds, which left fifty. Without giving it a lot of thought, Bob pressed 1-4-7 and nothing happened. The alarm still shrilled. He then hit 1-3-7-9 and the alarm ceased. How had he known? Not that difficult: most people don’t bother with learning numbers; they learn patterns that can easily be found in the dark, or when they are tired or drunk, and 1-4-7, the left-hand side of the nine-unit keypad, is the simplest and the most obvious; 1-3-7-9, the four corners, is the second most obvious. He waited a bit, then slipped out the back and found the trembler switch attached to an electric junction outside the house. It blinked red to indicate entry. With his Case knife, he popped the red plastic cone off the bulb, unscrewed the bulb, then squeezed and compressed the red cone to get it back on. Covering his tracks in the loam, he reentered the house. Soon enough the CIA security team rechecked the house on their rounds, but when the agent got out to check the trembler indicator, he did not get close enough to note the jimmied bulb. He was tired. He’d been through a lot. He returned to the truck.

  Like his codes, Bonson’s home was plain. The furniture was spare but luxurious, mostly Scandinavian and leather, but it was not the home of a man whose pleasures included pleasure. It was banal, expensive, almost featureless. One room was a designated office, with a computer terminal, awards and photos on the wall that could have been of any business executive except that they showed a furiously intense individual who could not broadcast ease for a camera but always seemed angry or at least focused. He was usually pictured among other such men, some of them famous in Washington circles. His house was clean, almost spotless. A University of New Hampshire bachelor’s and a Yale law degree hung on the wall. Nothing indicated the presence of hobbies except, possibly, a slightly fussy fondness for gourmet cooking and wines in the kitchen. But it was the house of a man consumed by mission, by his role in life, by the game he played and dominated. No wife, no children, no relatives, no objects of sentimentality or nostalgia; seemingly no past and no future; instead, simplicity, efficiency, a one-pointed existence.

  Bob poked about. There were no secrets to be had, nothing that could not be abandoned. The closet was full of blue suits, white shirts and red striped ties. The shoes were all black, Brooks Brothers, five eyelets. He appeared to have no casual wear, no blue jeans, no baseball caps or sunglasses or fishing rods, no guns, no porno collections, no fondness for show tunes or electric trains or comic books. There were huge numbers of books—contemporary politics, history, political science, but no fiction or poetry. There was no meaningful art in the home, nothing soiled, nothing that spoke of uncertainty, irrationality or passion.

  Bob sat and waited. The hours clicked by, then the day itself. It turned to night. It got later. Finally, at 11:30 p.m., the door opened and the lights came on. Bob heard a man hanging up his raincoat, closing the closet. He walked into the living room, took off his suit coat, loosened a tie and unbuttoned his collar. He had his mail; which included some bills and the new issue of Foreign Policy. He turned on a CD stereo player, and light classical oozed out of the speakers. He mixed himself a drink, went to the big chair and sat down. Then he saw Bob.

  “W-who are you? What is this?”

  “You’re Bonson, right?”

  “Who the hell are you!” Bonson said, rising.

  Bob rose more pugnaciously, pushed him back into the chair, hard, asserting physical authority and the willingness to do much harm fast and well. Bonson’s eyes flashed fearfully on him, and read him for what he was: a determined, focused man well-versed in violence. He recognized instantly that he was overmatched. He got quiet quickly.

  Bob saw a trim fifty-seven-year-old man of medium height with thinning hair slicked back and shrewd eyes. The suit pants and shirt he wore fit him perfectly and everything about him seemed unexceptional except for the glitter in his eyes, which suggested he was thinking rapidly.

  “The false alarm; yeah, I should have figured. Do you want money?”

  “Do I look like a thief?”

  “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “You and I have business.”

  “Are you an agent? Is this something over a vetting or an internal security report or a career difficulty? There are channels and procedures. You cannot do yourself any good at all with this kind of behavior. It is no longer tolerated. The days of the cowboys are over. If you have a professional problem, it must be dealt with professionally.”

  “I don’t work for your outfit. At least not for thirty years or so.”

  “Who are you?” Bonson said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously as he tried to click back to his file on thirty years ago.

  “Swagger. Marine Corps. I done some work for y’all up near Cambodia, sixty-seven.”

  “I was in college in 1967.”

  “I ain’t here about 1967. I’m here about 1971. By that time, you was a squid lieutenant commander, in NIS. Your specialty was finding bad boy Marines and having them shipped to the ’Nam if they didn’t do what you said. I asked some questions. I know what you did.”

  “That was a long time ago. I have nothing to apologize for. I did what was necessary.”

  “One of those boys was named Donny Fenn. You had him shipped from Eighth and I to ’Nam, even though he was under his thirteen. He served with me. He died with me on the day before DEROS.”

  “Jesus Christ—Swagger! The sniper. Oh, now I get it. Oh, Christ, you’re here for some absurd revenge thing? I sent Fenn to ’Nam, he got killed, it’s my fault? That is probably how your mind works! What about the North Vietnamese; don’t they have something to do with it? Oh, please. Don’t make me laugh. Another cowboy! You guys just don’t get it, do you?”

  “This ain’t about me.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I have to know what happened back then. What happened to Donny. What was that thing all about? What did he know?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I think the Russians tried to kill him. I think it was him they were targeting, not me.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “There was no Russian involvement?” “That’s classified. High top-secret. You have no need to know.”

  “I’ll decide what’s ridiculous. I’ll decide what I need to know. You talk, Bonson, or this’ll be a long evening for you.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Bonson.

  “Finish your drink and talk.”

  Bonson took a swallow.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I shook your Social Security number out of your service records. With a Social Security number you can find anybody.”

  “All right. You could have made an appointment. I’m in the book.”

  “I prefer to talk on my terms, not yours.”

  Bonson rose, poured himself another bourbon.

  “Drink, Sergeant?”

  “Not for me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  He sat down.

  “All right, there was Russian involvement. Tertiary, but definite. But Fenn could not have known a thing. He knew noth
ing that would make him valuable enough for the Russians to target. I went over that case, over and over it. Believe me, he could not have known a thing.”

  “Tell me the fucking story. I’ll decide what it means.”

  “All right, Swagger, I’ll tell you. But understand I am only doing so under what appears to be threat of physical duress, because you have threatened me. Second, I prefer to tape this conversation and the terms under which it took place. Is that fair?”

  “It’s already being taped, Bonson. I saw your setup.”

  “You don’t miss much. You’d make a good field man, I can tell.”

  “Get to the fucking story.”

  “Fenn. Big handsome kid, good Marine, from Utah, was it?”

  “Arizona.”

  “Yes, Arizona. Too bad he got hit, but a lot of people got hit over there.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Bob.

  Bonson took a drink of his bourbon, sat back, almost relaxing. A little smile came across his face.

  “Fenn was nothing. We were after someone much bigger. If Fenn had played his part, we might have gotten him, too. But Fenn was a hero. I never counted on that. It didn’t seem there were any heroes left at that time. It seemed it was a time where every man looked after his own ass. But not Fenn. God, he was a stubborn bastard! He really ripped me a new asshole. I could have had him up on charges for insubordination! He might have spent the next ten years in Portsmouth instead of—well, instead.”

  Bob leaned forward.

  “You don’t say nothing about Donny. I won’t listen to any lip on Donny.”

  “Oh, I see. We can’t tell the truth, we just worship the dead. You won’t learn anything that way, Sergeant.”

  “Go on, goddammit. You are pissing me off.”

  “Fenn. Yes, I used Fenn.”

  “How?”

  “We had a bad apple named Crowe. Crowe, we knew, had contacts within the peace movement, through a young man named Trig Carter, a kind of Mick Jagger type, very popular, connected, highly thought of.”

  The name sounded familiar.

  “Trig was bisexual. He had sex with boys. Not always, not frequently, but occasionally, late at night, after drinks or drugs. The FBI had a good workup on him. I needed someone who fit the pattern. He liked the strong, farmboy type, the football hero, blond, Western. That’s why I picked Fenn.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “It worked, too. Fenn started hanging out with Crowe and in a few nights, Carter had glommed onto him. He was an artist, by the way, Carter.”

  Bob remembered a far-off moment when Donny showed him a drawing of himself and Julie on heavy paper. It was just after they got Solaratov, or so they thought. But maybe not. It all ran together. But he remembered how the picture thrummed with life. There was some lust in it, as Bonson suggested. It was so long ago.

  “Carter had a very brilliant mind, one of those fancy, well-born boys who sees through everything,” Bonson continued. “But he was just another run-of-the-mill amateur revolutionary, if I recall, until 1970 and 1971, when he burned out on the protests and took a year in England. Oxford. That’s where we think it happened. Why not? Classical spy-hunting ground.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We believed that the peace movement had been penetrated by Soviet Intelligence. We had a code intercept that suggested they were active at Oxford. We even knew he was an Irishman. Except he wasn’t an Irishman. He only played one on TV.”

  He smiled at his little joke.

  “We think this guy was sent to Oxford to recruit Trig Carter. Not recruit; it wasn’t done that crudely. No, it would have been subtler. Whoever he was, he was straight Soviet professional, one of their very best. Smart, tough, funny, a natural gift for languages, the nerves of a burglar. He was the Lawrence of Arabia of the Soviet Union. Man, he would have been a prize! Oh, Lord, he would have been a prize!”

  “You never got him?”

  “No. No, he got away. We never got a name on him or anything. We don’t know what his objective was. We don’t know what the operation was all about. It was my call; I fucked up. We had him somewhere in the DC area. But we never quite got him. Fenn was supposed to give us Crowe, who’d give us Carter, who’d give us the Russian. Classic domino theory! A Soviet agent working the peace movement beat! God, what a thing that would have been! That would have been the goddamed white buffalo.”

  “How did he get away?”

  “We lost time with Fenn; the case against Crowe wouldn’t stand. We lost a day, we never nabbed Trig. We almost had him at a farm in Germantown, but by the time we found it, there was nobody there. We missed him at his mother’s outside Baltimore; she wouldn’t tell us a thing. He was gone, disappeared. The next thing—”

  “Trig was killed. I remember Donny mentioning it. He was killed in a bomb blast.”

  “Under the math lab at the University of Wisconsin. Yes, he was. And we never found hide nor hair of anybody else. Whoever he was, he got away clean.”

  “If he existed.”

  “I still believe he existed.”

  “What a waste!”

  “Yes, and some poor graduate student working late on algorhythms got wasted too. Two dead.”

  “Three dead. Donny.”

  “Donny. I didn’t send him to ’Nam to die, Swagger. I sent him to ’Nam because it was my duty. We were fighting a clever, subtle, brilliant enemy. We had to enforce discipline in our troops. You were an NCO; you know the responsibility. My war was much subtler, much harder, much more stressful.”

  “You don’t look like you done so bad.”

  “Well, it ruined my Navy career. I was passed over. I read the writing on the wall, went to law school. I was a corporate lawyer on my way to a partnership and high six figures. But the agency took an interest in me and decided it had to have me, and so in 1979, I took an offer. I haven’t looked back since. I’m still fighting the war, Swagger. I’ve lost a few more Donny Fenns along the way, but that’s the price you pay. You’re out of it, I’m still in it.”

  “All right, Bonson.”

  “What is this all about?”

  “We always heard the man who made the shot on me—on us—was a Russian.”

  “So? They had advisers over there in all the branches. Nothing remarkable.”

  “It was said this guy flew in special. Your own people were involved, because they wanted the rifle he had, an SVD Dragunov. We didn’t have one until then.”

  “I suppose. That’s not my area. I can check records. What does this have to do with today?”

  “Okay, so four days ago, someone makes a great shot on an old cowboy in Idaho. Blows him so far out of the saddle hardly nothing left. Seven hundred-odd meters, crosswind. He wings a woman with him.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Bob said, “the woman was my wife. The old man should have been me. Luckily, it wasn’t. But … he was trying for me. I examined the shooting site. I don’t know much, but I know shooting, and I’ll tell you this Johnny was world-class and he employed Soviet shooting doctrine, which I recognize. Maybe it’s not, but it sure seems like the same guy is on my track now as was on it then.”

  Bonson listened carefully, his eyes narrowing.

  “What do you make of this?” he said.

  “Donny knew something. Or they thought he did. Same difference. So they have to take him out. They think the war will do it, but he’s a good Marine and it looks like he’s going to come out all right. So they have to take him. They send in this special man, mount this special operation—”

  “Weren’t you some kind of hero? Weren’t you especially targeted?”

  “I can only think what I done in Kham Duc alerted them to Donny’s whereabouts. It made good cover, too. The Russians wouldn’t care a shit about how many NVA some hillbilly dusted in a war that was already won. We always thought they requested the sniper; no, now I think the Russians insisted on the sniper.”

  “Hmmm,” said Bonson. “That’s
very interesting.”

  “Then a little while ago, I got famous.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “Go on.”

  “I get famous and they get to worrying. Whatever it was he knew, maybe he would have told me. So … they have to get me. It’s that simple.”

  “Hmmm,” said Bonson again. His face seemed to reassemble itself into a different configuration. His eyes narrowed and focused on something far away as behind them, his mind whirred through possibilities. Then he looked back to Swagger.

  “And you don’t know what it is?”

  “No idea. Nothing.”

  “Hmmmmm,” said Bonson again.

  “But what I don’t get—there is no more Soviet Union. There is no more KGB. They’re gone, they’re finished. So what the fuck does it matter now? I mean, the regime that tried to kill me and did kill Donny, it’s gone.”

  Bonson nodded.

  “Well,” he finally said, “the truth is, we really don’t know what’s going on in Russia. But don’t think the old Soviet KGB apparatus has just gone away. It’s still there, calling itself Russian now instead of Soviet, and still representing a state with twenty-thousand nuclear weapons and the delivery systems to blow the world to hell and gone. What is going on is a political tussle over who makes the decisions—the old-line Soviets, the secret communists? Or a new nationalist party, called PAMYAT, run by a guy named Evgeny Pashin. There’s an election coming, by the way.”

  “So I heard.”

  “That election will have a lot to do with whose Russia it will be in the next twenty-five years and what happens to those twenty-thousand nukes—and to us. It’s very complicated, rather dangerous, and it’s not at all improbable that there’s some kind of Russian interest in this business you’ve spoken of.”

  Bob’s eyes narrowed as he considered this.

  “You’re thinking. I can tell. What do you intend to do? That is, if I don’t swear out charges for breaking and entering?”

  “You won’t,” said Bob. “Well, to find out what happened to Donny, I guess I have to find out what happened to Trig. I guess I’ll follow that trail. I have to solve this if i have any chance of nailing this guy who’s hunting me. If i keep moving, keep him away from my family, it may work out.”