Time to Hunt bls-1

by Stephen Hunter

  "Yeah, sure, Fenn, no problem."

  "And let me tell you guys something, okay? You kicked the shit out of me, now you listen."

  Some eyes greeted his angrily in the low light, but most looked away. It was hot and rank with sweat and the odor of beer and marijuana.

  "You guys may say Swagger is a psycho and he likes to kill and all that shit. Fine. But have you noticed how come we never get hit and our patrols don't get ambushed?

  Have you noticed we haven't had a KIA in months? Have you noticed our only wounded are booby traps, and they're almost never fatal, and there's almost no ambushes?

  Hasn't been an ambush in months, maybe years.

  You know why that is? Is it because they love you? Is it because they know you're all peaceniks and dope smokers and you flash the peace sign and all you are saying is give peace a chance? Is that why?"

  No voices answered his. His head really hurt. He had been whacked good. His vision was blurry as shit.

  "No. It has nothing to do with you. Nobody gives a fuck about you. No, it's because of him. Of Swagger. Because the NVA and Victor Charles, they fear him. They are scared shitless of him. You say he's psycho, but every time he drops one of them, you benefit. You live. You survive. You're living on the goddamn time he buys for you by putting his ass in the grass. He's your guardian angel. And he'll always wear the curse of being the killer, the man with the gun, while you guys have the luxury of not getting your pretty little hands dirty. He'll always be on the outside because of his kills. He takes the responsibility, he lives with it, and you guys, you worthless assholes, you'll go back to the world on account of it, and all you can do is call him psycho. Man, have you ever heard of shame'! You all ought to be ashamed."

  He turned and slipped out into the night.

  The Russian lay motionless in the high grass, on a little crest maybe twelve hundred yards out from the firebase.

  In the dark, he could see nothing except the steady illumination of guard post flares, one fired every three or four minutes, and the occasional movement of the Marines from hootch to hootch in the night, as sentries changed.

  There was no sense whatsoever of anything wrong.

  He was still tired from the nearly five hours of crawling, but felt himself beginning to rally as the energy flooded back into him. He looked at his watch. It was 0430. The Dragunov was before him in the grass, it was time.

  Deftly, he rolled over a bit, unstrapped the pack, pulled it off his back and opened it. He took out a large cylindrical object, an optical device, mounted to an electronics housing. It was Soviet issue, PPV-5, a night-vision telescope, too clumsy to be mounted on a rifle but fine for stable observation. He set it into the earth before him, and his fingers found the switch. As a rule, he didn't trust these things: too fragile, too awkward, too heavy, worse, one grew wedded to them, until they destroyed initiative and talent, worse still, one lost one's night vision to them.

  But this time, the device was the perfect solution to the tactical problem. He was concealed, but at great range, he had to know exactly when and if the sniper team left in the hour before dawn, so that he could move to his shooting position and take them as they emerged from behind the hill. If they didn't come, he'd simply spend the day there, waiting patiently. He had enough water and food in the pack to last nearly a week, though of course each day he'd be weaker. But today, it felt good.

  Through the green haze of the device, which crudely amplified the ambient light of the night, he saw the camp in surprising detail. He saw the lit cigarettes of smoking sentries, he saw them sneak out into the night for marijuana or to defecate in the latrine, or to drink something--beer, he guessed. But he knew where to look. At the sandbag berm nearest to the intelligence bunker, there was a crease at the base of the hill that led this way directly. He'd even been able to spot the zigzag in the concertina there, and the gap in the preset Claymore mines, and the prongs of the other anti-personal mines buried in the approach zone. It was a path, where men could move and get out of the camp. This is where it would come, if it would come at all.

  The first signal was just a flick of bright light, as the flap on a bunker was momentarily pushed aside, letting the illumination inside escape to register on Solaratov's lens. Solaratov took a deep breath, and in another second, another brief flash came. As he watched, two men, heavily laden, moved to the sandbag berm and paused.

  He watched. He waited. If only he had a rifle capable of hitting at fifteen hundred yards! He could do it and be done. But no such weapon existed in his own or his host country's inventory. Finally a man rose, peered over the edge of the berm, then pulled himself over it and fell the three-odd feet to the ground. He snaked down the dirt slope to a gully at the base. In time, another Marine duplicated the efforts, though he was a larger, more ponderous man. He too fell to the ground, but gracelessly, then he rolled down the dirt embankment and joined his leader.

  The two hesitated in their next move, watching, waiting.

  The leader lifted his rifle--yes, it had a scope--and searched the horizon for sign of an ambush. Making none out, he lowered the weapon and spoke to the assistant.

  The assistant rose unsteadily from cover, and began to move ever so slowly through the mines and the Claymores, finding gaps in the wire exactly where they should be and slipping through them. His leader followed him, and when both were free of the approach zone, the leader stepped forward and, moving at a slow, steady, hunched pace, began to work his way down the draw. Solaratov watched them until they disappeared.

  They come, he thought.

  He flicked off the scope, and began to slither through the grass toward his shooting position.

  Around 0630 the suns began to rise. There were two of them, both orange, both shimmery, both peering over the edges of the earths, just beyond the far trees. Donny blinked hard, blinked again. His head ached.

  "You okay?" Swagger hissed, lying next to him.

  "I'm fine," he lied.

  "You keep blinking. What the hell is going on?"

  "I'm fine," Donny insisted, but Swagger looked back into that patch of yellow grass and undulating earth he had designated Area 1.

  Of course Donny wasn't fine. He thought of a book he once read about bomber pilots in World War II and a soldier who saw everything twice. He was seeing everything twice. But he didn't scream "I see everything twice" like that guy did.

  He had a simple concussion, that was all, not enough to sickbay him or bellyache him out of any job in the Corps--except, of course, this one. The spotter was eyes, that was all he was.

  "What the hell happened to you?"

  "Huh?"

  "What the hell happened to you. You're swole up like a grapefruit. Someone bang you?"

  "I fell. It's nothing."

  "Goddamn you, Fenn, this is the one fucking day in your life when you cannot have goddamn fallen. Oh, Christ, you got double vision, you got pain, you got dead spots in your vision?"

  "I am fine. I am roger to go."

  "Bullshit. Goddammit."

  Swagger turned back, furiously. He lay in blazing concentration on the ridge, his sniper rifle before him, gazing through a pair of binoculars, sweeping Area 1. Donny blinked, wished he had a goddamn aspirin and put his eye to the M49 spotting scope planted in the earth before him.

  Using one eye resolved the double-image problem, but not the blur. It didn't matter that he looked only with his best eye, there was still only a smear of visual information, like a television set without an aerial, getting mostly fuzz.

  The right thing to do: say, Sarge, I have blurred vision.

  Sorry, I'm not worth shit out here. Let's call an abort before they get into range and-

  "Shit!" said Bob.

  "They are moving too fast, they have panicked, they gonna be here in ten seconds."

  Donny looked back and saw four--actually two-camo boonie hats just above the fold in the earth that took them out of sight. Something was wrong. They were moving too fast, almost running.
The pressure of living a few seconds in a sniper's scope had gotten to them. They were headed in a beeline like half-milers for the hill and the comfort it supposedly provided.

  "He'll know that ain't me. Goddammit!"

  "What do we do?" said Donny, sickly aware that the situation had passed beyond his meager ability to influence, and full of images of that scared Featherstone, called to be a hero by nothing more than freak physical similarity, running to stop the shit from dribbling out his ass and the poor lieutenant, unable to yell, stuck with him, trailing behind, knowing that if he let him get away, Solaratov would take him down in a second.

  "Fuck," said Bob, bitterly.

  "Get back on the scope.

  Maybe he'll bite anyhow."

  nmmmm. The sniper considered.

  Why are they moving so fast? They have a long journey ahead of them, and they know there is much less chance of being observed if they move slowly than if they run.

  He watched them, now about five hundred yards out, rushing pell-mell along the gully, almost out of sight.

  Possibly they want to get into the shelter of the trees before full daylight?

  No, no, not possible: they've never operated like that before. Therefore there are two possibilities: A) they know a man is out here and they are scared or B) they are bait, they are pretenders, and the real sniper is already out here, looking in my direction for some kind of movement, at which point he sends a bullet crashing my way.

  Of the two possibilities, he had no favorites. His preference was not to over interpret data. It was always to pick the worst possibility, assume that it was correct and counter react

  Therefore: I am being hunted.

  Therefore: where would a man be to get a good shot at me?

  He turned and to the east, about three hundred yards away, made out a low undulation in the shine of the rising sun, not much, really, but just enough elevation to give a shooter a peek into this sea of grass here in the defoliated zone.

  He looked at the sun: he'd be behind the sun, because he'd not want its reflection on his lens. Therefore, yes, the ridge.

  But if he turned in that direction and put his own glass upon it, then he'd clearly get the reflection and the bullet.

  Therefore, he had to move to the north or south to get a deflection shot into them.

  Slowly, he began to move.

  "No, goddammit," said Bob.

  "No, what?"

  "No, he ain't biting. Not at them two birds. Shit!"

  He paused, considering.

  "Should we pull back?"

  "Don't you get it, goddammit? We ain't hunting him no more. He's hunting us!"

  The information settled on Donny uncomfortably. He began to feel the ooze and trickle of sweat down his sides from his pits. He glanced about. The world, which had seemed so benign just a second ago, now seemed to seethe with menace. They were alone in a sea of grass.

  The sniper, if Bob no longer believed him to be in Area 1, could therefore be anywhere, closing in on them even now.

  No, not yet. Because if he read the fake sniper team moving too fast, he would not have had enough time to react and get out of there. He would still be an hour by low crawl away.

  "Shit," said Bob.

  "Which way would he go?"

  "Hmmmm," bluffed Donny, with no real idea of an answer.

  "If he figures them guys is fake, and he looks around, about the only place we could be to shoot at his ass would be here, on this little ridge."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah, so to git a shot at our asses, how's he going to move? He going to try and flank us to the left or the right? What do you think?"

  Donny had no idea. But then he did.

  "If the treeline equals safety, then he'd go that way, wouldn't he? To his right. He'd put himself closer to it, not closer to Dodge City."

  "But maybe that's how he'd figure we'd think, so he'd figure it the other way?"

  "Shit," said Donny.

  "No," said Bob.

  "No, you're right. Because he's on his belly, remember? This whole thing's gonna play out on bellies. And what he's looking at is an hour of crawling in the hot sun versus two hours. And being a half hour from the treeline is a hell of a lot better than being three hours from it. He'd have to go to the west, right?" He sounded as if he had to convince himself.

  "It would take a lot of goddamn professional discipline," he continued, arguing with himself.

  "He'd have to make up his mind and cut free of his commitment to the only targets he's got. Man, he's got a set of nuts on him if he can make that decision."

  He seemed to fight the obvious for a bit. Then he said, "Okay, Area One ain't it no more. Designate Area Two on your map, being the coordinates of a five hundred by five hundred grid square one thousand yards left. His left.

  Make it north-northeast. Give me them coordinates."

  Donny struggled to get the map out, then struggled with the arithmetic. He worked it out, coming up with a new fire mission, hoping the dancing numbers his eyes were conjuring up were correct, scrawling them in the margins of the map. He had the sinking sensation of failing a math test he'd never studied for.

  "Call it in. Call it in now, so we don't have to fuck with it later."

  "Yeah."

  Donny unleashed the aerial to vertical, then took the handset from its cradle, snapped on power, checking quickly to see that the PRC was still set on the right frequency.

  "Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over.

  ""Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, send your immediate, over."

  "Ah, Foxtrot, we're going to go from Area One to new target, designated Area Two, over."

  "Sierra, what the hell, say again, over."

  "Ah, Foxtrot, I say again, we think our bird has flown to another pea patch, which we are designating Area Two, over."

  "Sierra, you have new coordinates, all after? Over."

  "Correct, Foxtrot. New coordinates Bravo-November-two-two-three-two-two-seven at zero-one-three-five-Zulu-July-eight-five.

  Break over."

  "Wilco, Romeo. I mark it," and Foxtrot read the numbers back to him.

  "Roger, Foxtrot, on our fire mission request. Out."

  "Copy here, and out, Sierra," said the radio.

  Donny clicked it off.

  "Good," said Bob, who'd been diddling with a compass.

  "I make a route about five hundred yards over there to a small bump. That's where we'll go. We should be on his flank then. Assuming he goes the way I figure he's going."

  "Got you."

  "Get your weapon."

  Donny grabbed his rifle, which was not an M14 or even an M16 or a grease gun. Instead, because of the short order in which the job was planned, it was the only scoped rifle that could be gotten quickly, an old fat-barreled M70 Winchester target rifle, with a rattly old Unerti Scope, in .30-06, left in the Da Nang armory since the mid-sixties.

  "Let's go," Bob said.

  CHAPTER twenty-two.

  Only bright blue sky above, and swaying stalks of the grass. The Russian crawled by dead reckoning, trusting skills it had taken him years to develop. He moved steadily, the rifle pulling ever so gently on his back. It was 0730 according to the Cosmos watch on his wrist. He wasn't thirsty, he wasn't angry, he wasn't scared. The only thing in his mind was this thing, right now, here. Get to elevation five hundred yards to the right. Look to the left for targets that in turn will be looking for targets to their front. Two of them: two men like himself, men used to living on their bellies, men who could crawl, who could wait through shit and piss and thirst and hunger and cold and wet. Snipers. Kill the snipers.

  He came after a time to a small knoll. He had been counting as he moved: two thousand strokes. That is, two thousand half-yard pulls across the grass. His head hurt, his hands hurt, his belly hurt. He didn't notice, he didn't care. Two thousand strokes meant one thousand yards.

  He was there.

  He shimmied up the knoll, real
ly more of a knob, not four feet high. He set himself up, very carefully, flat on the crest, well shielded in a tuft of grass. He checked the sun, saw that it was no longer directly in front of him and would not bounce off his lens. He brought the Dragunov up, slipped it through the grass close to his shoulder and his hand, a smooth second's easy capture and grasp. Then he opened his binocular case and pulled out a pair of excellent West German 25X's. He eased himself behind their eyepieces and began to examine a world twenty-five times as large as the one he left behind.

  The day was bright and, owing to the peculiarity of the vegetation in the defoliated zone and the oddities in the rise and fall of the land, he saw nothing but an ocean of yellow elephant grass, some high, some low and threadbare, marked here and there by a rill of earth. He felt as if he were alone on a raft in the Pacific: endless undulation and ripple, endless dapple of shadow, endless subtle play of color, endless, endless.

  He hunted methodically, never leaping ahead, never listening to hunches or obeying impulses. His instinct and brain told him the Marines would be five hundred yards ahead of him, on an oblique. They would seek elevation, their rifle barrels would be hard and flat and perfect against the vertical organization of the world. He found the low ridge where by all rights they should have been sited, and began to explore it slowly. The 25X lenses resolved the world beautifully, he could see every twig, every buried stone, every stunted tree, every stump that had survived the chemical agent all those years ago, every small hill. Everything except Marines.

  He put the glasses down. A little flicker of panic licked through him.

  Not there. They are not there. Where are they, then? Why aren't they there?

  He considered falling back, trying another day. It was becoming an uncontrollable situation.

  No, he told himself. No, just stay still, stay patient.

  They think you are over there, and you are over here.

  After a bit their curiosity will get the best of them. They are Americans: hardy, active people with active minds, attracted to sensations, actions, that sort of thing. They haven't the long-term commitment to a cause.