Time to Hunt

by Stephen Hunter

  Maybe he’s not there. Maybe he’s moved, he’s working his way up another slope, he’s flanked me, and now he’s just taking his time.

  Two more seconds dribbled by, each encapsulating a lifetime, until Bob knew he could wait no longer, and as he began to duck back into a world of zero possibility, here it came, at last.

  The yellow streak was like a crack in the wall of the universe. It pinged right at him from nothingness and lasted but an instant, but there it was, a straight line as the shooter below measured the distance to the shooter above.

  Bob locked the source of the brief beam into his muscle memory and his sense of time and space. He could not move a muscle, an atom; he could not disturb the rigidity of his body, for it all depended on holding that invisible point before himself in the infinity of his mind as he brought the rifle up in one smooth, whipping motion and in to his shoulder and did not move his head to find the scope but moved the scope to that precise lock of his vision.

  The scope flew before him and he saw nothing, even as his hands locked around the pistol grip and his finger found the curve of the trigger, caressed its delicacy, felt and loved its tension and sought to be one with it. He felt no tension, not now: here was the rest of his life; here was everything.

  And as he flung away the goggles with a toss of his head, here was his ancient enemy. Bob saw the sniper, swaddled behind a horizontal trunk, his shape barely recognizable in the swirl of pewter-to-white dappling of the snow and his arctic warfare camouflaging, only the line of the rifle rising as it came toward Bob, hard and regular.

  So many years, he thought, as he closed his focus down until he saw only the harsh cruciform of the reticle, made a slight correction to shoot lower to compensate for the downward angle, and then, without willing it as the reticle became such a statement of clarity it seemed to fill the whole universe, the trigger went and he fired.

  You never hear the one that gets you.

  Solaratov was on his target, racing through the excitement of knowing that at long last he had him, but he hesitated for just a second to compute the new range. And then he realized that the man above was aimed—incredibly—at him.

  He felt no pain, only shock.

  He seemed to be in the center of an explosion. Then time stopped, he was briefly removed from the universe, and when he was reinserted into it, he was not an armed man with a rifle boring in on a target but a supine man in the cold snow, amid a splatter of blood. His own breath spurted out raggedly, white cloud and red spray sending broken signals upward.

  Someone was drunkenly playing a broken accordion or a damaged pipe organ nearby. The music had no melody, was only a whine with a slight edge or buzz to it. Sucking chest wound. Left side, left lung gone, blood pouring out both exit and entrance wounds. Blood everywhere.

  Internal damage total. Death near. Death coming. Death at last, his old friend, come to pick him up.

  He blinked, disbelieving, and wondered at the alchemy by which such a result could have been engineered.

  His life flashed and fled, dissolved in a blur, went away and came back.

  He thought: I’m gone.

  He wondered if he had the strength to gather the rifle, find a position and wait for the man until he bled to death, but the man would not be foolish.

  He thought next of how the mission had redefined itself.

  To kill the man who had killed him meant nothing. There was no escape. The only option left was: failure or success.

  He pulled himself up, saw the house five hundred yards away through the snowy trees and felt he could make it. He could make it, for the shooter would now lay low, unsure as to whether or not the sniper was dead.

  He could make it to the house, get in, and with that little Glock pistol finish the job that had killed him.

  That would be his legacy in the world: he finished the last job. He did it. He was successful.

  Finding the strength somewhere, amazed at how clear it all seemed, he headed off, bleeding, in a winter wonderland.

  Swagger lay close to the rock for a minute or so, recalling the sight picture: the reticle, swollen in the intensity of his focus so that it was big and bold as a fist, held low on the covering tree because you hold low when shooting downward, so that the bullet would hit center chest, a nice big target. But it’s tricky: the rifle was zeroed for five hundred yards, according to his shooter’s instructions, but maybe the man who zeroed it held it slightly differently than he did; maybe there was a twig, a branch slightly unresolved in the 10X power of the scope. Maybe there was a wind he didn’t feel, a sierra blowing around the contour of the mountain.

  But the sight picture was as perfect as it could be. It was held where it should be held, and if he had to call the shot, he’d call it a hit.

  He edged around the right, squinting out. He tried to find the shooting site of his enemy, but it was much harder to see from this angle. Instead, he scanned back and forth in what he determined was the proper sector, and saw nothing, no movement, no anything. He finally found the fallen tree he was convinced had supported his enemy, but there was no sign of him, there was no sign of disturbance in the snow. A spot, a little farther back, could have been blood, but it was impossible to tell. It could also have been a black stone, a broken limb.

  He lowered the rifle, slipped down the nightscope lenses and watched in the murk for a while. It stayed green, uncut by the flick of a laser.

  Did I hit him?

  Is he dead?

  How much time should I give him?

  A dozen scenarios instantly occurred to him. Maybe Solaratov had moved to a fallback position. Maybe he had moved laterally. Maybe he was even advancing on him. He might even be headed now toward the house, certain he had Bob trapped.

  That last seemed the most logical. After all, the job was to hit the woman, not Swagger. Swagger’s death had no real meaning; Julie’s had all the meaning.

  And if he were seen, he’d kill witnesses too.

  Bob took a deep breath.

  Then he pushed himself up, scuttled down a few yards, turned angles obliquely, dodged, jumped, found cover. He tried to make himself difficult to hit, knowing he could not make himself impossible to hit.

  But no shot came.

  From his new cover his angle was lower, so his view of the valley was less distinct. He could only see a bit of the flatland through the snowy trees, and could see nothing moving on it, approaching the house. But his target would be camouflaged, moving at angles, dropping, easily evading him.

  His heart was beating rapidly. There was no breath left in his lungs. The planet seemed scorched dry of oxygen.

  He pulled himself out and moved at the assault again.

  He fell twice in the snow and almost blacked out the second time. And when he looked up, the house seemed no closer.

  His mind raced; it would not stay where he put it. He thought of sight pictures, of men going limp against reticles, of long stalks in mountains and jungles and cities. He had hunted in them all and been victorious in them all.

  He thought of the crawl with the sandbag, the long, slow crawl outside the American fort and the earlier moment when they had him, and then the large black plane, like a vulture, hung in the air for just a split second before its guns pulverized the universe.

  He thought of the times he’d been hit: over the years, it amounted to no less than twenty-two wounds, though two were blade wounds, one inflicted by an Angolan, one by a mujahideen woman. He thought of thirst, fear, hunger, discomfort. He thought of rifles. He thought of the past and the future, which was running out quickly.

  He rose the last time, and stumbled through the snow, which fought him. It was not cold. The snow still fell, harder now, in swirls and pinwheels, dancing in the wind, the heavy damp flakes of Eastern European cities.

  Where am I?

  What has happened?

  Why has it happened?

  But then he was at the house.

  All was silent.

  He bent
to the storm cellar door, pulled hard, even as he reached inside his coat and drew out the Glock pistol.

  A nail seemed to hold him back. He felt the door want to yield but hang up. He pulled harder, finding strength somewhere in the backwash of his mind, and with a crack, the nail gave and he pulled the door open. It revealed three cement steps down into a dark entrance that looked jammed with clutter.

  He slid by the door and stepped down into the darkness, aware only marginally that he had made it. He felt clear-eyed, suddenly, recommitted to his purpose, certain of what he must do.

  He kicked his way through the impediments: a saw-horse, a bicycle, bed springs, boxes of old newspapers, and as he got through he felt the door slam shut behind him, sealing him off in the darkness. He took another step, kicking things aside, looking and waiting for his vision to clear. He smelled moisture, mildew, rot, old leather and paper, decaying material, ancient wood.

  Then he could see them.

  They were over against the far wall, huddled under the steps, two women and a girl clutching each other, crying.

  Swagger made it into the treeline. This is where he needed a pistol, a short, handy, fast-firing weapon with a lot of firepower. But the Beretta was somewhere up the mountain, buried under a ton of snow.

  He carried the rifle like a submachine gun in the low assault position, poking through the woods as he closed from the flank on the sniper’s hide.

  He paused, waiting, listening. There was no sound, no sense of life at all in the haunted place. Branches and bushes distended by heavy, moist, fresh snow stood out in extravagant shapes like a display of modern art. Through the gray, the snow fell, swirling.

  Bob’s breath rose above him, then parted. He advanced slowly. If the sniper was here, he was well hidden, completely disciplined.

  He could see the fallen tree, and then made out the disturbance in the snow where the man had supported himself while shooting upward.

  Bob slid as silently as he could on the oblique through the heavy trees, trying to shake no snow loose, and at last came to the site, paused a second, then stepped behind the cover to put his rifle muzzle on the man. But nobody was there. He heard only his own harsh breath heaving in the cold.

  The blood told the story.

  Solaratov had been hit bad. His rifle lay in the snow; the ranging binoculars were there too. A raspberry sherbet marked where he’d bled most profusely, driven to the ground by the impact of the .308.

  Got him! Bob thought, but the moment of exultation never fully developed, for in the next seconds he read the tracks and the blood trail and saw that the man, seriously wounded but nothing like dead, had moved back through the trees toward the house.

  At that moment he heard a bang, which could have been a shot, but it wasn’t. He turned and saw through the trees the house and a little puff of flung snow. That helped identify the sound. It had been the sound of a heavy cellar door closing, and when it had slammed shut, it had vibrated free a cloud of snow.

  He’s in there with my family, Bob thought.

  He had a rooted moment of terror. It felt like ice sliding down through his body, smooth and unbearably cold, numbing all the organs it brushed as it rushed through him.

  But some part of his brain refused to panic, and he saw what he must do.

  He raced to pick up the 7mm Remington Magnum, for the three hundred extra feet of velocity and the five hundred extra pounds of energy and, throwing aside his parka, ran, ran like a fool on fire or in love, not toward the house, which was too far, but for a good, straight-in angle on the door.

  ———

  They heard the door creak as someone tried to pull on it.

  “Oh, God,” said Sally.

  “Over here,” instructed Julie.

  She grabbed her daughter, and with the younger woman they fled to the back of the cellar, but only as far as the brick wall. There was no escape, for the stairwell up was jammed with junk to keep the same man out.

  They fell back and cowered when the door cracked open, then was yanked wide, filling the dark space with light, destroying their adjusted vision.

  He lumbered wheezily down the steps, kicking the junk aside like an enraged, drunken father home late from a night with the boys, come home to beat his wife. It stirred something deep in Julie, a memory of dread long buried, never examined. The cellar door slammed behind him, and he kicked more stuff aside until he came into the center of the room.

  He blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust, but he was everything they could possibly fear: a muscular gray savage dressed in white, except that a profuse smear of blood had irrigated a raggedy delta from a source on his chest, leaking down to his trousers and his boots.

  He had a gray, blunt face, a crew cut and wintry little eyes. He smiled madly, and blood showed on his teeth. He coughed, and it erupted from his mouth. He seemed barely conscious, seemed almost to fall, but he stopped, caught himself and looked at them fiercely. He was insane with pain, his eyes lit weirdly, his whole body trembling.

  The gun muzzle played across them all.

  She stepped out.

  The killer laughed for some strange reason, and another spurt of blood came from his mouth down to splash on his chest. His lungs were full of blood. He was drowning in it. Why wouldn’t he fall?

  He lifted the pistol until it pointed into her face.

  Julie heard her baby crying, heard the intake of Sally’s breath and thought of her husband and the man she’d loved before, the only two men she could ever love. She closed her eyes.

  But he did not fire.

  She opened them.

  He had fallen halfway, but then he pulled himself up, and thrust the gun at her, his eyes filling with mad determination.

  Bob ran until he had a good angle into the door.

  He’ll stop. He has to wait for his eyes to adjust.

  He saw it. The man would step into the darkness and pause as his eyes adjusted. He’d be there, just beyond the door, for the length of time it took his pupils to adjust. With Solaratov, that interval would be a second or so.

  He dropped to one knee, braced the rifle on his leg, found the good shooting position. It was five hundred yards if it was an inch, but that had to be the zero on the rifle, for Solaratov had come so close to him so often.

  Without thinking, he wrapped the sling tight about his left, supporting arm as he slipped into a good Marine Corps position, feeling a bite of pain from the opened wound, but leaning through it. He took three breaths, building up his oxygen, and looked for his natural point of aim as something in him screamed Faster! Faster! and another part cooed Slower, slower. He laid the crosshairs dead-center on the door, just a patch of gray wood smeared with snow, and prayed for the extra oomph of the 7mm to do its thing.

  He had one moment of clarity, and at the subliminal level willed all he knew of shooting into the effort: the relaxation of the finger, trained over the hard years; the discipline of the respiratory cycle, and the rhythm of deeper and shallower exhalation; the cooperation of rods and cones in the back wall of the eye, the orchestration of pupil, eye and lens, and the overall guidance and wisdom of the retina; but most of all, that deep, willed plunge into stillness, where the world is gray and almost gone, yet at the same time sharp and clear.

  Nothing matters, the man coached himself when things mattered most.

  And then it was gone as the rifle fired, kicked against him, blowing the sight picture to nothing but blur, and when he came back on target he saw a mushroom of snow mist floating from the vibes where the bullet had blasted through the wood.

  The pistol settled down; she saw the hugeness of its bore just feet away from her and then felt—

  Splatter in her face, a sense of mist or fog suddenly filling the air, a meaty vapor.

  Mixed into this sensation was a sound which was that of wood splitting.

  In it too was a grunt, almost involuntary, as if lungs gurgled, somehow human.

  She found herself wet with droplets that prov
ed to be warm and heavy: blood.

  The sniper transfigured before her. What had been the upper quadrant of his face had somehow been pulped, ripped open, revealing a terrible wound of splintered bone and spurting blood. One eye looked dead as a nickle; the other was gone in the mess. Even as these details were fixing themselves in her memory, he fell sideways with a thump, his head banging on the cement floor, exposing the ragged entry wound in the corresponding rear quadrant of the skull, where the bones now seemed broken and frail.

  A single light beam came through the cellar door where the bullet had passed.

  She looked down, saw the stumpy little man fallen like a white angel into a red pool, as his satiny blood spread ever wider from his ruined face.

  She turned to her daughter and her friend, who regarded her with mouths agape, and horror, more than relief, registering in both their eyes.

  Then she spoke with perfect deliberation:

  “Daddy’s home.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  He had not fired a second time because he had no more ammunition. But in another second, the cellar door had been flung open and he recognized Sally, leaping to signal him that it was over.

  By the time Bob got to the house, three Air Force Hueys and a state police helicopter had landed and more were on their way. Then another Air Force job, a big Blackhawk, arrived and disgorged still more staff. It almost looked like an advanced firebase when the war was at its hottest, the way the choppers kept ferrying people in.

  He got the news immediately: everybody was all right, though medics were attending them. The sniper was dead.

  His own wounds were tended: an emergency technician resewed, with anesthetic, the gash in his thigh that had opened up under the pressure of all the moving and jumping, and then picked stone and bullet fragments out of his face and eye for half an hour, before disinfecting, then covering the raw cuts with gauze. Nothing appeared to have hit the eye proper; more shooter’s luck.