White Star

by James Thayer

  Trusov needed a closer look. He crawled away from the hide, rose to a crouch, and sped fifty yards east down the gradual incline toward the blackened field. He dropped to a crawl, his rifle in his right hand. A perfect hide was ahead, a log topped with brush. He moved toward it, then along the log, secure behind it.

  Then he stalled. An animal was ahead of him, digging with a paw at the fallen tree, then moving several steps toward Trusov. The creature walked with a rolling sailor's gait, its toes in and its heavy tail brushing the ground behind it, obscuring its trail. Its blunt nose and button eyes were followed by a mass of tan and black quills that shifted left and right as it walked. The porcupine waddled toward him, unhurried and unconcerned, safe beneath its mantle of needle-sharp barbs. Its snout was to the ground, its thirty thousand quills quivering and shifting. It did not see or did not care about the Russian. The animal stopped below the brush growing on top of the log.

  Trusov may never have seen anything like it. But the Russian was in a hurry and had no time to wonder about the strange animal. The creature was in his way, occupying Trusov's perfect hide. He brought out the knife from his belt and moved toward the animal. When he reached the porcupine he slashed down once, then again, the knife cutting into the animal, blood pouring instantly. The porcupine shivered its quills and caterwauled, then trotted away, leaving a trail of blood. Trusov wiped the blade on his pant leg and returned it to his belt. He crawled into the cover of a thimbleberry bush.

  He brought up his binoculars, but before he could place them against his eyes his nose came up. He had a scent. It was faint, there and gone. He sniffed the air hungrily. And the scent was there again.

  He allowed himself a small smile, a terrible grin where the corners of his mouth were turned down. He had, after all, caught Gray in the grass. He smelled burned meat. Gray's burned flesh. Gray was either dead or injured. The Russian's victory was closer. Still wearing the rictus smile of a cadaver, Trusov peered through the binoculars and began scanning the blackened grass field.

  Gray had to keep moving. He began a low crawl, keeping his body flat against the ground. He gripped the sling at the upper swivel with the rifle resting on his forearm and the butt dragging on the ground. He moved his arms forward and brought up his right leg, then pulled with his arms and pushed with the right leg. It was slow, but nothing of Gray or his weapon rose more than fourteen inches above the ground. His burns made it feel as if the ground was clawing at him with sharp talons. He crawled through mountain heath, its pointed leaves raking his face.

  Gray flinched and dug his head into the ground at the sound of a projectile soaring in at him and passing a few inches from his ear. He cursed himself. It was a hummingbird, curious and fearless, then bored and gone as quickly as it came.

  He rose behind a pine, his back to the tree. He swung his gaze along the protective trees uphill from him on the south slope. Nothing visible amid all the trees and brush. Because he never looked around a tree unless his head was close to the ground, he lowered himself again. He turned toward the tree, pressing his cheek and temple against the coarse bark, then brought an eye around.

  His view was of much of the bowl, from the mouth off to his right to the high banks of the north wall. He again brought out the binoculars. Nothing. Gray's mouth pulled down. The sound of a woodpecker's rapping came from the thick wedge of trees downhill at the bowl's center. The fire was burning itself out near the mouth of the bowl. The wind was slowly clearing the bowl of smoke.

  Huckleberry and heath and sorrel offered low cover. Gray crawled from tree to tree, traveling a hundred yards, then another hundred, moving west farther into the bowl. Its snout forward, the Winchester urged him on.

  Early in his sniper career Gray would stay up most of the night before a mission because it was thought that being tired reduced pressure. But on the mission Gray had found his concentration wandering, perhaps in search of sleep. Instead, as he learned more and more about his craft and recognized the nuances of the wilderness, he discovered that the sheer volume of information pushed aside the pressure and fear. Now it was the same. Leaning into the tree trunk, critical intelligence poured into Gray. The sun's position, humidity, wind, temperature, ground cover, sights and sounds, all were ever changing. Every few feet he journeyed he had to assess entirely new conditions. He looked for unusual movement, he searched for possible hides, he searched for untoward reflections, he listened for peculiar sounds. Gray knew that whoever could best marshal his mental resources and keep them honed the longest would leave Shepherd's Bowl that day. All Gray needed to do was concentrate.

  He crawled over a mat of moss campion then through a spread of wheatgrass. Lodgepole pines marked his way on both sides. The tick was along for the ride. Gray could not pinch off its swollen body because its head would remain below the skin and might become infected. Later he would put a lighted match close to the tick's behind, and the insect would back out of Gray's skin on its own volition. This presumed there was a later for Gray.

  He moved over the ground quickly and quietly. He should have been as comfortable crawling on all fours as a weasel, but his skin howled with every motion. He was thirsty and had no water, and he knew that thirst, magnified by pain, would alter his judgment. He would need water soon.

  He brushed by gumweed that left a sticky resin on his arms and cocklebur that deposited green burrs on his pants. He crawled forward between a pine and a tree stump that was bracketed by gorse, a thick bush with vicious spikes on its stems. He could see through trees to the bowl's center. When he reached into his pack for the binoculars, his back and shoulders sent electric jolts of pain deeply into Gray. His hand trembled when he brought out the field glasses.

  When he pressed the binoculars against his face, his hand jumped. He swatted at his face, knocking a paper wasp away from the corner of his eye. He had been stung at the lines near the corner of his left eye. Had his back and shoulders and leg not been in agony, Gray would have laughed. Fate had decided Gray just wasn't suffering enough yet, so it added a wasp sting and a tick bite to the mix. Gray touched the corner of his eye. The skin was already swelling. It should have smarted, but the pain was lost in the suffering of the burns. He looked skyward to find a nest the size of a basketball in the tree eight feet above the ground. A dozen wasps angrily patrolled near the nest's mouth. A wasp flitted down toward him. Gray resisted the instinct to swat at it because a sudden movement would alert Trusov if the Russian were surveying the area with field glasses. The wasp moved away. Gray returned the binoculars to his eyes.

  Not for long. Pain altered perception, but Gray still trusted his ears, and they picked up a delicate sound, a wispy press of a leaf against another leaf. Other sounds reached Gray—the last crackling of the fire at the base of the bowl behind and below Gray, the brush of wind-tossed needles in the trees, the drone of the wasps overhead. But this slight crackle from the other side of Gray's pine tree was against the grain of the bowl's sounds. It stood out, however trifling. And Gray knew that whoever had made the little sound had not intended it to escape.

  It came again, just barely penetrating the threshold of Gray's perception. A tiny crackle, there and gone, but closer, coming from the other side of the pine and gorse. A stalker, someone good at it, someone intent on Gray, coming to kill him, believing Gray was living his last seconds on this earth.

  With a calm and slow and utterly quiet motion, Gray brought the rifle up so that its bore was above his head, aimed at the gorse to the left of the tree. He flicked off the safety and put his finger on the trigger.

  This time the sound was so quiet, so professional, that Gray could only suspect he heard it. Coming from behind the tree, a little to its left. The nudging of a pine needle.

  Gray shut down his systems. No breathing or blinking. He willed his heart to slow. So intent was he on the predator coming toward him that the pain from his burns subsided. The world and all that was in it was on the other side of the brush, coming for him.

  Gray
felt himself switch onto automatic. All discretion was gone. Gray's instincts and training would tell him when to move without Gray consciously making the decision.

  A branch of the gorse wiggled unnaturally, a small flicker. The predator was four feet away with only a tree trunk intervening.

  Gray waited three beats, then another and another.

  He suddenly pushed himself left with his knees, a leap from behind the tree that took him left to the edge of the gorse for a view of the stalker, Gray's rifle ahead of him, the trigger beginning its short and lethal motion.

  Gray was as startled as the bobcat.

  The animal's stubby black-barred tail shot up. The bobcat seemed to inflate as the fur on its back and chest rose. It showed its fangs and hissed, a searing noise like steam escaping a locomotive. The bobcat's legs were striped, and its face was decorated with black lines that fanned out to its wide cheek ruff. The cat leaped straight up in fright, and landed in a dead run, back the way it had come, leaving Gray's breath in his throat.

  "Goddamnit," he mouthed after a moment. "When this is done I'm coming back here and making mittens out of you."

  Gray slowly rose to his feet and started west through the trees. So fearsome was the pain from his back and shoulders that they felt they were still on fire. With each step his skin pulled at itself, washing him with agony. His left leg from thigh to moccasin was burned down to the muscle, and was raw and seeping, and caked in mud and leaves. It rocked Gray with pain with each step.

  He slowed, then slowed again. He was not gathering information like he should. The pain was diverting his attention, not letting him gather and filter all the bowl was offering. The pain was numbing his senses. In this arena the slightest disadvantage might be lethal.

  An ancient tree stump—so old it was losing its shape as the wood rotted away—offered a spot where Gray could try to recoup. His life depended on pushing the pain away. When he neared the stump he saw a porcupine to one side, rocking back and forth. The animal was gurgling pitiably, and not until Gray reached the stump did he notice the trail of blood the porcupine had been leaving. The animal seemed indifferent to Gray, not moving away, only mewling terribly. Gray quickly surveyed the view of the north slope from the stump, saw nothing, then looked more closely at the porcupine.

  Blood was bubbling up from the creature's shoulder and back. Nothing in the wilderness made those wounds. To Gray's knowledge, the only way a wilderness carnivore—usually the fisher, a large and rare and ferocious marten—attacks a porcupine is to flip it to get to the unprotected wiry hairs on the porcupine's belly. These wounds were made by a man with a knife. Trusov.

  The porcupine's blood trail showed the animal had come from the west. Trusov was to the west.

  The animal was suffering, grunting and panting and swaying, and was clearly going to die, but perhaps not for an hour or two. The porcupine has an Achilles' heel, a lethally vulnerable spot—its snout. Gray whispered, "Sorry, friend," then brought his rifle barrel down sharply across the animal's nose. It collapsed instantly, dead, a pile of sharp points.

  Gray pushed himself up the rotting tree trunk. He was facing north, with the mouth of the bowl to his right and the high ridges all around. The view was only partial, with much of the bowl obscured by trees on the lower south slope. Some of the charred field was visible, and across was the parched north slope. Hundreds of trees interrupted Gray's view, and the Russian might be behind any one of them. Or behind fallen logs or thick brush or boulders or clumps of grass.

  Just as he was about to crawl on, a glint of light held him to the stump. The metallic shimmer had been distant and faint; and just as he had felt with the bobcat's footfalls, Gray knew the fleeting light had been a mistake. Something was below him, fifteen compass clicks west, a quarter mile away. The view was through a veil of vegetation, and Gray could make out no forms other than trees and undergrowth. Yet there was the tiny flash again. He moved his head slowly a foot left, then back. The speck of light returned at the center of this motion, and when Gray held himself still, the silver pink light remained. It had been his motion that had made it flicker, and when Gray was still it was constant, but only an infinitesimal leak of light, a thin beam, the smallest of offerings. Gray lifted his binoculars.

  Two hours later, in the failing light of evening, Gray's binoculars were still at his eyes. He had lowered them and brought them up again and again to avoid eyestrain as he stared at the dot of light. All he knew was that the source of the light was out of place in the wilderness. It was man-made, and it came from a backpack buckle tongue, a boot's metal eyelet ring, a jacket button, a telescope lens, or a piece of litter.

  Two hours studying, all the while growing weaker and more thirsty. Although his stomach and chest and right leg and face had been spared by the fire, every square inch of his skin seemed to emit pulses of pain. The burns frequently pried Gray's mind from the task at hand and allowed it to wander dangerously. Toward the end of those hours, the binoculars were almost too heavy to lift, and Gray slipped lower and lower against the stump. His tongue felt as if it had swollen and he could no longer swallow. He was so thirsty he caught himself daydreaming about a water fountain.

  And as he stared at the glint and tried to imagine something recognizable from the surrounding brush, his mind started to play, throwing shadows across the bowl's floor, creating phantoms around the puny light. Ruses of the mind, Gray knew, but the pain carried along his thoughts. If only he could send a bullet at the light and end the waiting, but he could not. A wasted shot would alert the Russian to Gray's location.

  The sinking sun was turning the little flash purple. The base of the bowl was in deep shadow and was losing its features. The south wall was a deepening smudge of rock against the dark blue sky.

  The pinpoint of light had remained as motionless as a stone for two hours. No human could do that. He needed to decide, and so he decided the light was the reflection off a piece of litter, probably a chewing gum wrapper. It was a fuzzy decision, and a terrible disappointment. He had tapped deeply into his mental and physical reserves to study the tiny light, and it had come to nothing. He was now desperately thirsty and exhausted beyond his ability to make clear judgments. His binoculars came down despite his best effort to hold them in place.

  He had to find the strength to move. The sky was as red as blood. Soon darkness would cloak him. But that maddening glimmer was worth one more look. With an effort that fogged his vision from exhaustion, he brought up the binoculars again.

  At that moment Trusov caught Gray's scent again, the gratifying odor of badly burned flesh. The wind had been shifting and irresolute for much of the afternoon, but for several hours it had been steady from the south, bringing Trusov reliable information about his enemy. Earlier in the afternoon the Russian had moved out of the scent, but the smell had found Trusov again. Gray was alive, was south of the Russian in the trees somewhere, and had slowly moved west. The odor of cooked skin had traveled.

  Trusov would move toward the still-pink sky in the west. His and the American's paths would converge at the western end of the bowl. Because daylight was fading quickly, he would not be able to watch his feet and would have to walk more slowly and softly.

  When Trusov lifted his rifle the jaws of the earth seemed to open up, seize him, and take him down its black throat. Trusov fell into the void, vaulting down into the wicked murk. He spent an age falling into the black pool, and then he slammed against the bottom of the pit.

  He found himself on his knees on the ground. He had only fallen a few feet, but had been blacked out for the two seconds of the fall.

  Then a red sheet fell across his eyes, a veil of blood that blocked his view of the ground. He grabbed at himself until he found the wound, a crease across his forehead a quarter inch deep and pouring blood.

  Gray had shot him.

  Blood spilled through his fingers onto the ground, a torrent of it that filled his vision with cascading red. On his hands and knees he scrambled blin
dly, dragging his rifle, downhill until he felt the resistance of a bush of some sort. He let himself fall to the ground and burrowed under the bush.

  Again he felt his head. The slash was to the bone, into the bone. He could feel his skull, not for the first time.

  Trusov's mouth contorted in rage and pain. Owen Gray's Vietnam shot had marred Trusov, and now the second had crossed the scar of the first. The Russian's head was marked by an X.

  Blood splashed to the ground. He pulled off his pack and pressed it against his forehead, trying to stem the river of blood, all the while his face screwed up in rage. Moments passed. The blood ebbed. He returned the sopping pack to his back. Night had come. He could see little in the black basin. Shaking with rage and revelation, he lifted his rifle and moved west, slowly and silently and skillfully.

  The bowl was lost in darkness. Owen Gray had tried to find his target again, but Trusov had moved quickly, and the gathering darkness prevented Gray from spotting him. Gray had missed. Sheer luck had given Gray a shot, and he had missed. The shard of light he had stared at had indeed been a piece of litter, probably a gum wrapper. Just as Gray had given up on that target, the Russian had walked into Gray's field of vision. None of Gray's tracking skills had been involved. Happenstance had offered him the target. The Russian just happened to travel over the glint of light, and it had blinked out. Gray had lifted his rifle and fired, quickly, before Trusov was lost in the surrounding vegetation. Too quickly. Gray's rifle had bucked up, and by the time he found the spot again in the scope, Trusov was gone. A miss.

  Darkness providing cover, Gray walked downhill. Every yard of ground was an effort. The burns were rapidly sapping his strength. His thirst was an all-consuming craving. His mouth and throat were sawdust. He could not generate saliva and could not swallow. Thirst was deadening him to all else in the bowl. If he could not quench his thirst, Gray's judgment—the only thing keeping him alive—would be impaired, and he would soon begin acting irrationally and dangerously.