Time to Hunt

by Stephen Hunter

  Then, standing on the edge of the porch, he saw the woman.

  He was in the soup now.

  The cloud was everywhere, visibility sunk to nothing. He was in the cloud and felt its penetrating moisture. Wetness gathered on his parka, glazing the white arctic-warfare pattern. His eyelashes filled with dampness. It gleamed off the pewter-colored rifle barrel.

  The night-vision goggles were worthless now: engaged, they simply produced green blankness.

  Throw them, he thought. Dump them. Complete shit!

  But instead he pushed them up on his head; what would happen if he came out of it and needed them to negotiate rocks or something?

  Instead he groped onward, the rifle hanging on his shoulder, trying desperately to keep up speed. But now the ground was rockier and he couldn’t see far enough to choose the right paths through the descending gullies, the twisty snow-clogged passage between rocks, the increasing tufts of vegetation bent into nightmare forms by the thick, wet snow. His own breath blossomed before him, foamy and betraying.

  He fell. The snow jammed into his throat, got down inside the parka. His leg hurt like hell. A shiver ran down his body.

  Get up, goddammit!

  He climbed back to his feet, remembering another dark day of fog and wet. That was so long ago; it seemed to have happened in some other lifetime. That day he’d been so electric, so animal, so tiger; his reflexes were alive, and in a secret way he now realized, he loved it all.

  Now he felt old and slow. His limbs were working out of coordination. The cold and the wet fought him. His leg hurt, particularly his hip. A slow sting had begun inside his thigh and he realized that his impact had reopened the incision above his knee where Solaratov’s bullet had nestled all these years in its capsule of scar tissue.

  The rage came again, a hot red tide, a frenzy of mutilating hatred.

  God help me, he prayed.

  God help the sniper.

  He raced downward, coming across a clear spot, and thought for just a moment he might be out of it, but saw in the next second it was only an illusion.

  Snow!

  In the gray light of dawn the snow was like a giant mound of softness. She thought of ice cream, vanilla, in big white piles everywhere, thick enough to grab her body and support her when she threw herself into it. She tasted it and received only messages of coldness and texture, which in the next fraction of a second became cold water, amazingly.

  She giggled in delight.

  “Mommy! It’s fun!”

  “Honey, don’t go far. I can’t get you yet. The sun will be up in a few minutes.”

  “Wheeeeeeee! I want to sled.”

  “No, baby, not yet. Wait till Aunt Sally is up. If you get hurt, I can’t reach you.”

  She struggled through the snow, which reached her knees, not listening a bit. The sled was in the barn. She knew where, exactly. The barn was empty but the sled leaned against the wall, beyond the eight stalls, in a feeding pen. It was an old sled—she could see it exactly in her mind—with rusty red runners and a battered wooden flatbed. She should have gotten it last night when they said it would snow!

  “Nikki!” her mother called.

  Nikki turned back and saw her mother, standing on the edge of the porch, wrapped in a great parka over her immobilizing cast, her hand shielding her eyes from the snippets of snow the wind occasionally caught and flung.

  “Nikki! Come back.”

  Her mother stood there.

  Is it her?

  Goddammit, is it her?

  The woman stood rooted to the front of the porch. Against his finger, the trigger was a tease.

  The mil-dot had her centered perfectly, and no tremor came to his arm. His position was superb. Adductor magnus was firm, anchoring him to the earth. He was four pounds away from the end of the war. No cold, no fear, no tremor, no doubt, no hesitation.

  But … is it her?

  He had only seen her through his scope at 722 meters for one second: he couldn’t tell. She was wrapped in a coat, and one hand held it secured. Possibly that meant the other hand was immobilized in a cast; possibly it meant nothing. That’s how you wore a coat if you didn’t want to put it on and button it. Any person would wear it that way.

  The woman ducked back. She was gone.

  He exhaled.

  “Wheeeeeeeeeeee!” came the far-off sound of the child.

  “Wheeeeeeeeeeee!”

  It was so far away, light, dry, just the smallest of things. Maybe a freak twist of wind blew it up to him or the kindness of God.

  But there it was: my child.

  He’d know it anywhere—the throaty timbre, the vitality, the heroism. Spirit. Goddamn, did that girl have some spunk. Got it from her granddad; now there was a man with spunk!

  She was to the left somewhere, very far away. In that direction he could see nothing except rougher ground.

  Fuck it, he thought.

  He unslung the rifle and with a swift open-and-shut cocked it, jacking one of Federal’s primo .308s into the spout.

  He ran. He ran. He ran.

  He dashed through the rocks, building momentum, his legs fighting the splash of snow that each one’s energy unleashed. It ate at his heart and lungs, all the work, and his breath came in dry spurts, wrapped in a sheath of pain. Still, he pressed, he ran, and when he came out of the rocks, the slope dropped off closer to vertical and he had to slow up to keep from falling, almost leaping down through the snow, his momentum again building, right on the tippy edge of control.

  Then suddenly he was out of it.

  The day lightened as the cloud disappeared and before him stretched a valley filled with snow, like a vast bowl of off-color vanilla ice cream, still only gray in the rising illumination. He saw a house, telephone poles signaling a road, a corral with only the tips of the posts visible in the blanket of white, a barn itself laden with the stuff, all pretty as a greeting card—and his child.

  She was a few yards in front of the porch, dancing.

  “Wheeeeeeeeeee!” she screamed again, her voice powerful and ringing.

  Bob saw that he was on a ridge to the far side of the horseshoe of elevation that surrounded the place on three sides.

  He saw lights in the house, a warm slash of brilliance from an open door and, on the porch now, something else moved and came out.

  He saw her, standing on the steps, a parka wrapped about her, his wife. Nikki threw a snowball at her and she ducked and there was just a moment when her coat fell open and slipped and he could see the cast on her left arm.

  He turned and flopped to the ground, finding prone, building the position, trying to slow the pounding of his heart.

  The sniper. Find the sniper.

  It was her. She ducked, the coat came open, then she shuddered it back onto her shoulders. But her left arm was immobilized in plaster.

  Yes. Now.

  He squirmed, making minute corrections. He didn’t rush. What was the point of rushing?

  There was nothing in the world except the woman standing there in her coat.

  Five hundred fifty-seven meters.

  Hold two dots below the reticle, that is, two dots high, to account for the bullet’s drop over the long flight and the subtle effects of gravity over the downward trajectory.

  Concentrate.

  It’s just another soft target, he thought, in a world full of soft targets.

  He expelled a half breath, held the rest in his lungs. His body was a monument, Adductor magnus tight. The mil-dots didn’t move: they were on her like death itself. The rifle was a chastised lover, so still and obedient. His mind emptied. Only the trigger stood between himself and the end of the war. It was a four-and-a-half-pound trigger, and four pounds were already gone.

  Bob scanned the ridge as it curved away from him, knowing his man would set up to the east to keep the sun to his back. The scope was 10X, which was big enough to give him a little width of vision. God, why didn’t he have binoculars? Binoculars would—


  There he was.

  Not him, not the man, but the rifle barrel, black against the white snow, sheltered near a boulder. The rifle was still, braced on one hand in a steady, perfect prone. In the lee of the rock, Bob knew Solaratov was making his last-second corrections, nursing his concentration to the highest point.

  Long shot. Oh, such a long shot.

  He steadied, prayed, for he knew the man was ready to fire.

  It was close to a thousand meters. With a rifle he’d never zeroed, whose trigger was unknown to him.

  But only a second remained, and his crosshairs found the rifle barrel, then rose above it based on his instinctive guesstimate of the range.

  Is it right? Is this it?

  Oh shit, he thought.

  Time to hunt, he thought, and fired.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Bonson felt a huge blast of utter, scalding frustration shudder through him. Agh! Ugh! Umf! This is where your major strokes came from: some little fritz in the brain and, in the blink of an eye, you’re fried. His blood pressure felt dangerously high. He wished he had somebody to smack or kill. His muscles tightened into brick; redness flashed in his mind. His teeth ground against one another.

  He spoke again into the microphone.

  “Bob One, Bob One, this is Bob Control, come in, come in, goddammit, come in!”

  “He isn’t there, sir,” said the tech sergeant, who was in the radio bay with him. “We’ve lost him.”

  Or the fucking cowboy’s on his own, Bonson thought.

  “Okay, switch me through to the larger net.”

  The sergeant dialed the new frequency on the console of the radio.

  “Ah, Hill, this is Bonson, are you there?”

  “Yes, sir,” spoke his second in command from Mountain Home Air Force Base. “The whole team is in. We’re in good shape.”

  “You’ve liaised with the state police?”

  “Yes, sir. I have a Major Hendrikson on standby.”

  “Okay, here’s the deal. We’ve lost contact with our asset. Tell this major to get state police helicopters in there as soon as possible. Sooner, if possible.”

  “Yes, sir, but the word I’m getting is that nobody’s flying into those mountains until at least ten A.M. There’s still real bad weather. And these guys are spread pretty thin.”

  “Shit.”

  “I did talk to Air Force. We can get some low-level radars set up on three surrounding mountains by 1200, assuming they can move in by 1000, and we can get good position on any incoming helos. If this Russian plans to exit by helo, we’ll nab him.”

  “This guy’s the best in the world at escape and evasion. He’s worked mountains before. Swagger knew that. If Swagger doesn’t get him, he’s gone. It’s that simple.”

  The man on the other end was silent.

  “Goddamn, I hate to be beat by him! I hate it,” said Bonson to nobody in particular. He ripped off his earphones and threw them against the fuselage of the plane; the plastic on one of them cracked and a piece spun off and landed at his feet. He stomped it into the floor, grunting mightily.

  The sergeant happened to look away at precisely that moment, as the navigator came back to get some coffee from the thermos in the radio bay, and the two aviators locked eyes. The sergeant rolled his eyes, pointed his finger at his head and rotated it quickly, communicating in the universal language of human gesture a single idea: screwball.

  The navigator nodded.

  Julie knew at once it was a shot. The supersonic crack was sharp and trailed a wake of echo as it bounced off the sheltering hills.

  “Nikki! Get in here! Now!” she screamed.

  The little girl turned, paused in confusion, and then there was another one, like the snap of a whip, and Nikki ran toward her. Both recognized it from the time they’d been shot at so recently.

  “Come on, come on!” yelled Julie, and she grabbed her daughter, pulled her into the house, locked the door.

  She heard another shot, from a different location; an answering shot.

  Men were trying to kill each other nearby.

  “Get downstairs,” she said to her daughter. “Now! And don’t come up, no matter what, until you hear the police.”

  The girl ran into the cellar. Julie grabbed a phone, and found at once there was no dial tone. It was dead.

  She looked outside and could see nothing except the hugeness of the snow, now lightening as full dawn approached. She heard no more shots.

  She ran upstairs, and found Sally groggily wandering down the hall.

  “Did you—?”

  “Someone’s shooting,” Julie yelled.

  “Jesus,” Sally said. “Did you call the police?”

  “The line’s down or dead or something.” “Who—?”

  “I don’t know. There’s two of them. Come on, we have to get into the basement.”

  The two women ran down the stairs, found the door into the cellar and descended into near darkness.

  The cellar windows had been snowed in and only diffuse light showed through them. It was cold.

  “Mommy,” said Nikki. “I’m scared.”

  “I’m scared too,” said Julie.

  “I wish Daddy was here.”

  “I do too,” said Julie.

  “Now, you get in the corner,” said Sally. “I’ll figure out some way to block the door, just in case. I’m sure it’s just hunters or something.”

  “No,” said Julie. “They were shooting at each other. They’re not hunters. They’re snipers.”

  “I wish Daddy were here,” said Nikki again.

  Snow showered across Solaratov and his mind came out of its deep pool of concentration to recognize the familiar cloud of debris a high-velocity round delivers when it strikes, and the next split second the whipsong of the rifle crack reached him as it shattered the sound barrier.

  Under fire.

  The left.

  The left.

  Another detonation spewed snow into the sky.

  Under fire.

  He tore himself from the scope, looked to the left to see nothing, because of the shielding rock. But he knew from the sound that the man had to be on the rim of the ridge.

  He looked back into the valley to just catch the little girl as she dipped under the porch roof, and in another split second heard the door slam.

  Damn!

  They were gone.

  Who was shooting at him?

  He realized now he was invisible to the shooter, else he’d be dead. The shooter could not see him behind his rock.

  He knew too the man now had the rock zeroed, knowing full well that Solaratov would have to come around it to return fire.

  He felt no fear. He felt no curiosity. He felt no disappointment, he felt no surprise. His mind did not work that way. Only: Problem? Process. And, solution!

  Instead of rising to come around the rock, he backed, low as a lizard, through the snow, trusting that the man’s scope would be so powerful that its field of view would be narrow and that the whiteness of his camouflage would also shield him from recognition.

  He squirmed backward as low in the snow as a man could be, sliding through the stuff as if he were some kind of arctic snake. He canted his head as he backed, and as he slid out from behind the rock, he saw his antagonist, a disturbance ever so slight along the line of the ridge that could only be a man hunched over a rifle, desperately looking for a target. He studied and was sure he saw it move or squirm or something.

  What was the distance? He pivoted on the ground, finding a good angle to the target, splaying his legs, coming into that good, solid prone. Adductor magnus. In the scope, yes, a man, possibly. In white. Another sniper. Low on the ridge. He watched his crosshairs settle, telling himself not to hurry, not to rush, not to jerk. He couldn’t get a clear sight picture and he didn’t have time to shoot a laser at the target to get its distance. He pivoted slightly, found a bush coned in snow, which he took to be of three feet girth. By covering it in the scope with mil-d
ots and racking through the math—the black mass covered two dots; multiply the assumed one meter in height by one thousand and divide by two to get the approximation of a thousand yards: say, less than a thousand but more than nine hundred yards he held four dots high. With greater concentration and less art, he steadied himself, pivoted to find the disturbance that had to be the man but was not really clear, felt his finger on the trigger but did not think about it, and let it decide itself, as if it had a brain, what to do next, and then it fired.

  A geyser of snow erupted seven feet to the right of Bob, followed by the whipcrack of sound. Windage. The Russian had the range but there was some crosswind and the 7mm hadn’t quite the weight to stand up to it. It had drifted ever so slightly. But how could Solaratov have read wind if he were shooting across the raw space of the valley? He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  But quickly he’d understand that, cock again and shoot.

  Bob squirmed back, feeling himself sliding a little off the edge of the ridge, and in the next split second, another eruption blew a hole in the surface of the planet, a big spout of flung snow and rock frags. It hit exactly where he’d been but just barely was no longer.

  Oh, this motherfucker is so good. This motherfucker won’t make another mistake.

  Bob slid back farther.

  No shots had gone toward the house. For a little while, at least, his wife was safe. He knew she’d have the sense to head to the cellar with Nikki and Sally and lock up and wait.

  Meanwhile he had but one choice. That was to low-crawl along the ridge and hope that its tiny incline was enough to shield him from Solaratov’s vision. Solaratov would realize he couldn’t go up or down, he’d never go toward him; he could only fall back around the mountain until he disappeared around it, and could then get up and move to cover and set up an ambush. Solaratov would go up; elevation was power in this engagement. Whoever reigned on high, reigned, because he’d have the angle into a target where the other man would have nothing.

  That was the plan: to get out of this area of dangerous vulnerability, move like hell when safe and find a good hide. Solaratov would have to come around the mountain to get him, but he’d come around high. Bob knew he’d get a good shot, maybe only one, but he knew he could make it.