Time to Hunt bls-1

by Stephen Hunter

  It was the kind of war fought by men who'd rather be anywhere except in the war.

  Each night, Solaratov would relieve himself, hand-bury his feces, drink from his canteen and slowly, ever so slowly change position. He didn't care what was in the encampment, but he had to know by what routes an experienced man would make an egress on the way to a hunting mission.

  How would Swagger take his spotter out? Which part of the sandbag berm would they go over and from what latitudes was it accessible to rifle fire?

  He made careful notes, identifying eight or nine spots where there appeared to be a lane through the wire and the Claymores and the mines, where an experienced man would travel efficiently, of course, conversely, the other Marines would stay well clear of these areas. He read the land, looking for folds that led out of the camp to the treeline, or a. progression of obstacles behind which two men, moving quickly, could transverse on the way to the job. They were the only two men still fighting the war, they were the only two men keeping this place alive. He wondered if the other soldiers knew it. Probably not.

  Twice, he saw Swagger himself and felt the hot rush of excitement a hunter sees when his prey steps into the kill zone. But always, he cautioned himself to be slow, be sure, not to become excited, that caused mistakes. From this vantage point. Swagger was a tall, thin, hard man, who always appeared parade-ground neat in his camouflaged tunic. Solaratov could read his contempt for the boys of Dodge City, but also his restraint, his disinterest, his commitment to his own duties that kept him apart from them. He was aloof, walking alone always: Solaratov knew this well--it was the sniper's way. The Russian also noted that when Swagger walked through the compound, even the loudest and most disgruntled of the Marines grew quickly still and pretended to work. He worked silently, and moved with economy of motion and style. But he was not going on missions for now, and seemed to spend much of his time indoors, in a bunker that was probably intelligence or communications.

  On the last day, he saw him again, from an even closer vantage point. Solaratov had worked up until he was but fifty meters from the complex of huts where Swagger seemed to spend most of his time, in hopes of getting a good look into the face of the man he proposed to kill. By this time he was quite bold, convinced that the Marines were too narcissistic to notice his presence even if he stood and announced it through a bullhorn.

  It was after the daily helicopter flight. The Huey dipped in fast, landed at the firebase's LZ, and a young man jumped out, even as the rotors still spun and kicked up a pall of dust, he disappeared into the complex but in time Solaratov saw him, this time with Swagger. It looked almost to be a fight. The two raged at each other, far from the others. If he were armed, it might have been a chance to take them both, but there was no escape and if he'd fired shots, even these childish troopers could have brought massive firepower to bear and gotten him. That wasn't the point: he wasn't on a suicide mission. He would never give himself up for an objective, unless there was no other way and the objective represented something that was his own passionate, deeply held conviction, not a job for another department, that he didn't fully trust to begin with.

  So he just listened and watched. The two had it out. It was like a final confrontation between a proud father and his disappointing son or an upright son and his disappointing father. He could hear the anger and the betrayal and the accusation in the voices.

  "What the fuck is wrong with you?" the older man kept screaming in the English that the Russian had studied for years.

  "You cannot do this to me! You do not have the moral authority to do this to me!" the younger screamed back.

  On and on it went, like a grand scene from Dostoyevsky. It was a mark of how each man was held in the respect of his comrades that no witnesses intruded, no officers interceded, their anger drove the young Marines, normally working hard on their suntans by this time, inside.

  Finally, the two men reached some kind of rapprochement, they went back into the intelligence bunker, and after a while the young man left alone and went over to what must have been the living quarters, where he would bunk. He emerged an hour or so later, in full combat gear, with a rifle and a flack vest and went back to the intelligence bunker.

  Solaratov knew: At last, the spotter is back.

  There were no other sightings that day, and at nightfall, Solaratov finished his last canteen, rolled over and began the long crawl back to the tunnel complex in the treeline more than a thousand yards away.

  Senior Colonel, the Human Noodle is here!"

  The call, from a sergeant, rocked Huu Co out of sleep.

  It was a good thing, too. As on most nights, he was reliving the moment when the American Phantoms came roaring down the valley and the napalm pods tumbled lazily from under their wings. They hit about fifty meters ahead of his forward position in the valley and bounced majestically, pulling a curtain of living flame behind them.

  He arose swiftly and located the Russian, eating with gusto and lack of sophistication in the tunnel's mess hall.

  The Russian devoured everything in sight, including noodles, fish head soup, chunks of raw cabbage, beef, pork, tripe. He ate with his fingers, which were now coated with grease, he ate with perfect clarity and concentration, pausing now and then for a satisfying belch, or to wipe a paw across his greasy mouth. He drank too, glass after glass of tea and water. Finally, when he was done, he asked for vodka, which was produced, a small Russian bottle. He finished it in a single draught.

  At last, he turned and faced the senior colonel.

  "Now I wash, then I sleep. Maybe forty-eight hours.

  Then, on the third day, I will move out."

  "You have a plan."

  "I know when and where he'll leave, and how he'll move. It's in the land. If you can read the land, you can read the other man's mind. I'll kill them both three days from now."

  For the first time, he smiled.

  CHAPTER twenty.

  The Huey dipped low and landed in a swirl of dust.

  Quickly, the crew chief kicked off that run's supplies--a couple of crates of belted 7.62mm NATO, a couple more of 5.56mm NATO for the M16s, package of medical provisions, an intelligence pouch, a command pouch--nothing major, just the routine deliveries of war--and Donny.

  The chopper zoomed upward, leaving him standing there in the maelstrom, choking.

  "Jesus, you're back!"

  It was a lance corporal in another platoon, a vague acquaintance.

  "Yeah, they tried to fire me. But I love this place so much, I had to come back."

  "Jesus Christ, Fenn, you had it knocked. Nobody ever got out of here early. The Man sends you to the world and you come back to this shit hole, short as you are? Man, you are fucked in the head!"

  "Yeah, well."

  "A hero," the lance corporal spat derisively, threw the intel and command packs around his shoulders and headed out to deliver the mail. The ammo would sit until someone had the gumption to gather it in.

  Donny blinked, and took a fraction of a second to reorient. He knew he wanted to stay away from the command bunker and the old man, officially he had no standing, and he didn't want to face that shit until he faced Swagger. He went off to the scout-sniper platoon area, where Bob was king. But when he got there, two other NCOs told him Bob was now over in the intel bunker and he better get his young ass over there and get this squared away. One of them pointed out to him that he was officially UA from his new assignment in downtown Da Nang, and there'd be hell to pay.

  Donny navigated through the S-shop area of the base, a warren of sandbagged bunkers with crudely stencilled signs, until at last he came to S-2, next to commo, a low structure from which flew an American flag. He ducked into it, feeling the temp drop a few degrees in the dark shadow, smelled the mildew of the rotting burlap bags that comprised the bunker's walls, saw maps and photos hung on a bulletin board and two men hunched over a desk, one of whom was most definitely Swagger and the other of whom was a first lieutenant named Brophy, the
company intelligence honcho and sniper employment officer.

  Swagger looked up, down, then back in a hurry.

  "What the fuck are you doing here?" he said fiercely.

  "I'm back, ready for duty, thanks very much. I had a wonderful time. Now I've got a tour to finish and I'm here to finish it."

  "Lieutenant, this here boy is UA from Da Nang. He'd better get his young ass back there or he'll finish up in the brig. You put him on report, or I will. I want him gone."

  Swagger almost never talked to officers this way, because of course like many NCOs he preferred to allow them the illusion that they had something to do with running the war. But he no longer cared for protocol, and the officer, a decent-enough guy but way overmatched against a legend, chose discretion over valor.

  "You work it out with him, Sergeant," he said, and beat a hasty advance to the rear.

  "I want you out of here, Fenn," growled Swagger.

  "No damn way."

  "You are too goddamn short. You will be out there thinking about humping Suzie Q instead of humping I Corps and you will get your own and my ass greased. I've seen it a hundred times."

  "You recommended me for the Navy Cross! Now you're firing me?"

  "I had a heart-to-heart with my closest pal, Bob Lee Swagger, and he told me you are black poison in the field.

  I want you running a PT program somewhere. You go home, you git out of

  "Nam. I fired you. You're a Marine and you follow orders and those are your orders!"

  "Why?"

  "Because I say so, that's why. I'm sniper team leader and NCOIC of scout-sniper platoon. It's my call. It ain't your call. I don't need your permission."

  "Why?"

  "Fenn, you are getting on my damn nerves."

  "I'm not going until you tell me why. Tell me why, goddammit. I earned that much."

  Swagger's eyes narrowed-up, tight like coin slots in a Coke machine.

  "What is with you?" he finally asked.

  "I've had three spotters before you, good boys all of them. But no one like you. You didn't have no limits. You'd do anything I goddamned asked you to. I don't like that. You don't have no sense. If I had to think about it, I'd say you were trying to get yourself killed. Or trying to prove something, which amounts to the same goddamn thing. Now you come clean with me, goddammit. What's going on in that head of yours? Why the hell are you out here?"

  Donny looked away.

  He thought a bit, and finally decided to spit it out.

  "All right, I'll tell you. You can't tell anyone. It's between you and me."

  Swagger stared hard at him.

  "I knew a guy named Trig. I mentioned him to you.

  Well, he was a star peacenik, but a real good guy. A hero, too. He was willing to give his life to stop the war. Well, I hate the war too. Not only for all the reasons everyone knows, but also because it's killing people we can't afford to lose. Like Trig. It'll kill you, too, Sergeant Swagger. So I'm going to stop it. I will chain myself to the White House gate if I have to, I will throw my medals back on the Senate steps if I have to, I will blow myself up in a building. It's so fucking evil, what we are doing to these people and to ourselves. But I cannot let anybody say I quit, I bugged out, I shortcut my duty. They can have no doubts about me. So I will fight the war full-bang dead out till the day I DEROS and then I will fight full-bang dead out against it!"

  He was screaming, sweating, like an insane man. He'd flared up, big as life, larger than Bob, stronger than him, menacing him for the first time, inconceivable until it happened.

  He stepped back now, relaxing.

  ' "Jesus," said Swagger, "you think I give a fuck what you think about the war? I don't give a shit about politics.

  I'm a Marine. That's all I care about."

  He sat back.

  "All right, I'll tell you what's going on, finally. You have earned that. I'll tell you why I want you out of here.

  There's somebody out there."

  "Huh? Out there? Out where?"

  "There, in the bush, some new bird. That's why I've been huddling with Brophy. It was bucked down from headquarters. There's a guy out there, and he's hunting for me. He's a Russian, we think. The Israelis have a very good source in Moscow and they got a picture of a guy climbing into a TU-16 for the normal intel run to Hanoi.

  They knew him, because he'd trained Arab snipers in the Bekaa Valley and they tried to hit him a couple of times, but he was too goddamn smart. Our people think he worked Africa too, lots of stuff in Africa. He may have been in Cuba. Anywhere they got shit to be settled, he's the one to settle it. Anyhow, his name has something to do with

  "Solitary' or "Single," something like that. He may be a championship shooter named T. Solaratov, who won a gold medal in prone rifle at the sixty Olympics. Then NSA got a radio intercept a week or two back. One NVA regional commander talking to another, about this Ahn So Muoi, as they call it. They have this thing called Brother Ten, which is an award and a nickname they call someone who's killed ten Americans. It's as close in their language as they come to the word sniper. Anyhow, in this intercept, the officers were jawing about the "White Brother Ten' moving down the trail to our province. White sniper, in other words. They got this special guy, this Russian, he's coming after me and anybody I'm with."

  "Jesus," said Donny, "you really pissed them off."

  "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," Bob replied.

  "And here's the new joke. I'm going to kill this guy. I'm going to nail him between the eyes and we'll send the word back to them very simply: do not fuck with the United States Marine Corps."

  Donny suddenly said, "It's a trap! It's a trap!"

  "That's right. I'm going to play cat-and-mouse with him, only, he thinks he's the cat, when he's the mouse. We want this bird swollen with confidence, thinking he's the cock of the walk. It's all a big phony show so we can get him to hit me in a certain way, only, I ain't gonna be there, I'm gonna be behind his sorry ass and I will drill him clean, and if I can't drill him, I will call in gunships with so much smoke there won't be nothing left but cinders.

  Now, that is dangerous work and it don't seem to me it has one thing to do with being a grunt in Vietnam. That is why I want your young ass out of here. You ain't getting killed in anything this personal. This is between me and this Solitary Man. That's it."

  "No. I want in."

  "No way. You're out of here. This ain't your show.

  This is about me."

  "No, this is about the Kham Due. I was at Kham Due.

  He wants to take us for Kham Due. Swell, then he wants to take me. I'll go against him. I'm not afraid of him."

  "You are an idiot. I'm scared shitless."

  "No, we have the advantage."

  "Yeah, and what if he zeros me out in the bush, and you're left alone? You against him, out in the bad, bad bush. The fact that you're married, got a great future, had a great war, done your duty, won some medals, all that don't mean shit. He don't care. He just wants to ice you."

  "No, I will be there. Forget me. You need another man. Who are you taking, Brophy? Brophy isn't good enough, no one here is good enough. I'm the best you got, and I'll go with you and we'll fight this goddamn thing to the end, and nobody can say about me, oh, he had connections, he got off easy, his sergeant got wasted but he got a cush job in the air-conditioning."

  "You are one screwed-up kid. What do I say to Julie if I get you wasted?"

  "It doesn't matter. You're a sergeant. You can't think like that. You only think of the mission, okay? That's your job. Mine is to back you up. I'll run the radio, back you up. We'll get this asshole, then we'll go home. It's time to hunt."

  "You asshole kid. You think you want to meet this guy? Okay, you come with me. Come on, I'll introduce you two boys."

  Swagger pulled him out of the S-2 bunker and out toward the perimeter.

  "Come on, scream a little at me!"

  "Huh?"

  "Scream! So he notices us and gets an eyefu
l. I want him to know we're back and tomorrow we're going out again."

  "I don't--" "He's out there. I guarantee you, he's out there, in the grass, a hundred meters or so away, but don't look at him."

  "He can--" "He can't do shit. If he shoots from this close, we'll call in artillery and napalm. The squids'll soak his ass in burning gas. And he knows it. He's a sniper, not a kamikaze.

  The challenge ain't just gunning me, no sir. It's gunning me and going back to Hanoi to eat grilled pork, fuck a nice gal, and going home on the seven o'clock bus to Moscow. But he's there, setting up, planning. He's reading the land, getting ready for us, figuring how to do us, the motherfucker. But we're going to bust his ass. Now, come on, yell."

  Donny got with the program.

  CHAPTER twenty-one.

  The Russian finally opened his case, quickly assembled the parts with an oily clacking sound, until he had built what appeared to be a rifle.

  "The Dragon," he said.

  Huu Co thought: does he think I'm a peasant from the South, soaked in buffalo shit and rice water? He of course recognized the weapon as a Dragunov, the new Soviet-bloc sniper weapon as yet unknown to Vietnam. It was a semiauto, in the old Mosin-Nagant 7.62 x 54 caliber, a ten-round magazine, a mechanism based on the AK47's, though it had a long, elegant barrel. It wore a skeletal stock that extended from a pistol grip. A short, electrically illuminated four-power scope squatted atop the receiver.

  The sniper inserted the match rounds into the magazine, then inserted the magazine into the rifle. With a snap, he threw the bolt, chambering a round, flicked the safety on, then set the rifle down. Then he set to wrap the rifle in a thick tape to obscure the glint of its steel and the precision of its outline. As he wound, Huu Co talked to him.

  "You do not need to zero?"

  "The scope never left the receiver, so no, I don't. In any event, it won't be a long shot, as I have planned it.