Time to Hunt bls-1

by Stephen Hunter

  It occurred to him that he might have completely mis figured

  He could be anywhere, just heading foolishly down to some empty, remote valley where there would be no highway, no ranch, no Julie, no Sally, no Nikki. Just empty Western space, as Jeremiah Johnson had found it.

  Then what?

  Then nothing.

  Then it's over. He'd wander, maybe hunting a little.

  He'd live, certainly, but in three days or a week, under a growth of beard, he'd emerge to find a different world, without a wife, with a bitter, orphaned daughter, with everything he'd worked for gone, all his achievements gone.

  Solaratov gone back to Moscow for blintz and borscht, with a nice reward in his pocket.

  Just go, he thought.

  Just push it out, think it through and do it.

  He looked over his shoulder and got more bad news: it was getting lighter.

  He raced the day downhill.

  A light came on. Upstairs.

  Solaratov stirred.

  He was not cold at all. He rolled over, cracking fingers and joints, fighting the general numbness that his body had picked up in its long stay on the ground.

  A shawl of snow cracked on his back as he moved, splitting and falling from him. He'd picked up the last inch. That was all right, he knew. A man can actually last in snow much longer than a rifle can.

  The rifle was more problematical. Lubrication can solidify in the cold, turn to gum, destroy the trigger pull, catch in the next cycle of the bolt. The gasses don't burn as hot, so the bullet flies to a new point of impact, unpredictable.

  The scope stiffens somehow, comes out of zero.

  His breath could fog on it, obscuring his vision. Nothing works quite as well. There were a hundred reasons why a good shot could go bad.

  He opened the Remington's bolt, slid it backward. No impediment marked the smoothness of the glide: no, the oil had not gummed in any way.

  He pushed it ever so slowly forward until it would go no farther, then pushed the bolt handle downward two inches, feeling the bolt lock in place.

  Without assuming the position to shoot, he put his hand around the pistol grip of the rifle, threaded a finger through the trigger guard, felt the curvature of the trigger.

  His finger caressed it through the glove. Without consciously willing it, his trigger finger squeezed ever so slightly, feeling a dry twig of resistance for an instant, and then the trigger broke with the precision of a bone-china teacup handle snapping off. Perfect: four and a half pounds, not an ounce more, not an ounce less.

  He pulled the rifle to him and examined the muzzle where the Browning Optimizing System was screwed to a precise setting to control barrel vibration. The setting was perfect and tight.

  Next, he slipped his glove off, unzipped his parka, reached inside the many layers until he reached his shirt, where he'd stored twenty rounds in a plastic case. Close to his heart. Close to the warmest part of him. He opened the box and removed four. Then he carefully returned the box to the pocket, to preserve the warmer environment.

  He opened the bolt and slid the cartridges, one by one, into the magazine. This somehow always pleased him. It was the heart of the issue of the rifle: the careful fit of round to chamber, the slow orchestration of the bolt syncopating this union, then vouchsafing it with the final, cam ming lockdown that felt solid as a bank vault.

  No safety. Never used safeties. Didn't believe in them.

  If you used safeties, it meant you didn't trust yourself. If you gave yourself up to the whim of mechanics, you begged trouble. You just kept your finger off the trigger until you were on target. That's how it worked.

  Solaratov blew on his hand, pulled the glove on, then shifted his vision downhill to the house.

  In the slightly intensified light of the rising dawn, the house was more distinct. The upstairs light remained on, but now one downstairs had been added. Its orange glow suffused the night. Because of the angle he could see one of the windows but the others were shielded by the rake of the porch roof. Behind that visible window, now and then a figure moved. It would be the woman, would it not, preparing breakfast? Making coffee, scrambling eggs, pouring milk for cereal for the child.

  But which woman? The FBI agent's wife? Or the sniper's wife? That's why he couldn't send a shot into the shadow and be gone. Suppose it was the wrong woman?

  He could not afford another failure and, worse, he would never, ever again come upon conditions so totally in his favor.

  Do not rush, he told himself. Do not move until you are sure.

  The light rose, eventually, though second by second one could detect no difference. Now the day had gone from black edging to pewter to pewter edging to gray. The clouds were still low, though no snow was falling, no sun today. It would be hours before anyone could helicopter in, hours beyond that before they could come overland, except by snowmobile, and what point was there to that?

  By that time he'd be far, far away from the scene of the crime.

  Telephone!

  Of course! That last detail, the one you forgot, the one that could get you killed.

  He fires, kills the woman and retreats. But the other woman sees her dead in the snow, and quickly picks up the phone and calls the sheriffs office. Deputies nearby on snowmobiles are reached by radio. They could get here in minutes, they'd zoom up the slope and quickly find his tracks. They'd call in his location. Other deputies would be dispatched. He'd end up in some half-baked last stand in this godforsaken chunk of America, brought low by a hayseed with a deer rifle who was a part-time deputy sheriff or forest ranger.

  His eyes went back to the house, explored it carefully until at last he found the junction of the phone wires where they left the pole that ran along the road and descended to the house. His eyes met an astonishment!

  The line was already down! The snow had taken the line down!

  Now there was an omen! It was as if the God he had been taught not to believe in had come to his aid, not merely by bringing in the storm to cover his tracks but by breaking the phone line! Was God a communist?

  He smiled just the littlest bit.

  He looked back. A sudden slash of orange light flicked across the snow, as the front door opened.

  He watched as a little girl ran off the porch and dived into a pile of snow. He could hear her laughter all the way up here. There was no other sound.

  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, particu
larly 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.

  Now!

  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-andahalf-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.