by James Thayer
He moved around boulders and trees, the rifle now a burden. No longer did it lead him and encourage him. He staggered but caught himself against a lodgepole pine. When his moccasin kicked a rock downhill he paused, listening, but could hear only the scrape of his throat as it tried to swallow. He knew he might be making many sounds that would signal the Russian, but the pain and thirst were dampening his hearing. He stumbled on, turning more east toward the mouth of the bowl.
The shallow pool was there, the small spring that was Black Bear Creek's headwater. Gray made his way toward it, brushing the undergrowth too loudly, walking in too straight a line, letting his footfalls sound, all careless. Gray felt in himself the beginning of apathy, an indifference and impassivity brought about by his burns and thirst. If he let this new and unbidden pulse from his brain go unchecked, he would die in the bowl. But these were all weak thoughts. He needed water.
He moved toward the pool, through a patch of field mustard and balsam root, and then in a giddy rush of sensation he could smell the water, almost feel the cool liquid on his lips and tongue. He heard the ripple of a thin stream of water rolling over rocks. Predators from frogs to cougars know to lie in wait at a pool of water, and Trusov was nothing if not a predator. Forty yards from the pool, Gray lowered himself to the ground and once again tried to push aside the pain and thirst to focus on the pool and the surrounding brush and grass.
He waited, searching and listening, the pool all the while enticing him with the scent and sound of water to come forward. He waited, smothered by pain, fighting to fasten his attention on the pool.
He whispered, "It's okay, Dad."
He clamped his jaw. His father's voice had just asked about the south fence. Was it in good repair after the storm? A voice Gray had not heard in years had spoken to him, as clearly as if his father had been sitting beside him. Gray clamped his eyes shut for a moment. He had begun hallucinating. He was now fighting the Russian and his own mind.
He waited thirty minutes. He could no longer be certain of his own conclusions, but he did not think anyone was near the pool. He gripped his rifle and crawled forward, across the pine needles, then onto moss at the pool's edge. He could see only vague black outlines of a tree or two, and the inky black water.
He planted his hands on the edge of the pool, and one hand pressed onto a small, soft form. He jerked his hand away, then felt for it again. He brought up a dead salamander. Gray held it close to his eyes to try to determine what had killed it, but then tossed it aside.
He lowered his head to the water, about to drink when he saw another dead salamander, this one floating on the surface of the pool.
Gray carefully touched the water, and it was cool and promising. But when he rubbed his finger and thumb together, his skin felt soapy. His jaw opened involuntarily. Despair made him sag, and his head almost went into the water before he could fight it back. To be sure, he dipped a finger into the water and brought several drops to his mouth. The water stung his tongue, and he spit it out.
He knew what Trusov had done. Lye and fat are combined to make soap. Trusov had dumped lye into the pool, and the slick, soapy feeling on Gray's fingers had resulted from the lye quickly working on the skin there. The water was poison, not meant to kill Gray but to deprive him of water, to weaken him.
Gray gripped his rifle and backed away from the pool. Dampness clouded his vision, and he paused to wipe at his eye. He was losing. His father spoke again. Owen Gray ignored him this time. He did not need his father to tell him he was not going to make it out alive.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Nikolai Trusov stalked all night, traveling counterclockwise in the bowl, making no more than fifty yards an hour, trying again to find Gray's scent. But he did not. Several times he had to blot away blood from his forehead with a sleeve. The shock of the wound was gone. His strength had returned. He used the night to try to cross Gray's trail.
He succeeded. He came to a stump that had dense spiked bushes on both sides and was protected uphill by a tree. The Russian knelt to peer at the ground. Even in the black of night he could see that the needles and leaves and grass had recently been ruffled. Trusov felt the ground and brought up a leaf stained with dried blood. Gray's blood. The American had been here, had used this tree and these bushes as a hide. A good place to begin the stalk again at first light. He leaned against the stump to wait. A bat flitted by.
During those same hours Gray was lying on his belly near the pool. He had gathered handfuls of the damp moss and had held it above his mouth and had squeezed out drops of water. He had spent two hours extracting precious water, in all not more than half a cup, and if it had restored him to any degree he could not feel it. Then he lay on the stream bank and waited for the night to pass. Nights in the Sawtooths are cold, even in summer. Gray spent the dark hours shuddering with cold and pain, his thoughts meandering. He gripped his rifle fiercely as if that might compensate for his slipping mind.
He might have slept. He could not be sure. The first purple light of false dawn found Gray on the moss and dirt, his eyes and his mouth open. He tried to rise, but his body refused. He argued with his body, demanding it rise, and at the first motion the pain from his shoulders and leg and back erupted anew. He gripped his gun. He was so weak he felt nailed to the ground. He crawled forward, away from the dead pool.
He heard a rough scrape. At first he thought it was his father again, clearing his throat for some new pronouncement. He heard it again, carried in the soft wind. He thought it was real, not a trick of his mind, but he could not be sure.
Dawn had begun, streaking the high rim of the bowl in faint purple but leaving the basin in blacks and grays. Gray turned to the south slope to face the sound. He could see nothing. He wrestled his gun to his shoulder anyway and put his eye to the scope.
Trusov had coughed in his sleep, and the ragged sound had brought him out of it. He hugged the ground. In the still bowl, a cough was the equivalent of a foghorn blast. He lay utterly still. His position between the uphill tree and the stump he was leaning against was well protected. Any shot fired his way from the center or the opposite side of the bowl would sail over the stump, and he was below the stump.
Trusov recoiled when the sound of a shot reached him. Gray had fired. At what? Trusov looked left and right. The Russian was well hidden. What had the American fired at?
A full-throated roar suddenly came from above Trusov. He looked skyward, to the uphill pine tree. A wasp nest had a ragged hole through it, and bits of the nest were floating to the ground. And a black ball of wasps was growing in the air next to the nest.
The nest blew apart as the second bullet sailed through it. The sound of the shot followed. Patches of brown paper fluttered to the ground. As wasps streamed out of their fractured nest the black ball of insects floating in the air grew and grew. Then the wasps found their enemy, the alien on the ground below their ruined home.
Within five seconds of the second shot, fifty wasps were on Trusov, and within fifteen seconds three hundred more. Then five hundred and more.
Gray knew where he was. The Russian dared not move from that spot. The wasps covered Trusov's face in a wriggling black and brown mask, working their stingers repeatedly. His shirt and hands were also soon covered with the insects. So many wasps crawled angrily over Trusov that his form seemed molten.
His face was bunched against the pain, but he could do nothing against the wasps lest Gray's third bullet find him. So he lay there, and he lay there. His eyelids were stung, and his lips and ears, every square millimeter of his forehead, stung and stung again. Wasps crawled partway into his nostrils to sting him there. All along his neck, all over his face. After several moments the wasps began to calm and to lift away from him. The mask dissolved and the squirming shirt dissipated. Trusov had been stung hundreds of times. The inhuman effort not to move or to scream seemed to have stilled Trusov, because when it was time to search for a safe way out from under Gray's rifle, the Russian did not move. A mom
ent passed before he opened his eyes.
Or he tried to. His face had begun to swell. His eyelids and nose puffed up. His bony face began to lose its contours and the skin bloated with the wasps' poison. His hands inflated to resemble mittens.
Four hundred yards down the slope and east, Owen Gray was exhausted, desperate, and pain-racked. But he grinned.
Then he moved out, this little encouragement helping him walk in the direction of the wasps' nest, under brush and alongside pine, carrying his rifle, trying not to let it drag on the ground. Progress was slow. Each yard was marked by pain, but he traveled toward Trusov, one tree at a time, keeping himself covered. He came to the shattered wasps' nest. The insects still patrolled, but they paid no attention to Gray.
He lowered himself to his knees and began following Trusov's trail. Perhaps the Russian had been in too much pain to disguise his obvious trail. But after fifty yards it became less so, as if Trusov was slowly gaining control of himself. Then even less so.
Gray had noticed in Vietnam that when he was on a mission—stalking, low to the earth, rapt with the danger—he was incapable of contemplation that took him more than eight inches above the ground. He might lie on his belly for two days waiting for the mark, and in all that time he would be unable to think of his parents or the Sawtooths or the nurse he had met at the division hospital. No daydreaming, no escape. His mental horizon was the dirt two inches in front of his nose, but it was a focused horizon. He missed nothing, absorbing every tiny crease in the land and every minuscule facet of the flora. The smallest irregularity—a drop of blood, a shallow footprint, a shell casing, a few grains of spilled rice, the scent of human urine—was made plain and portentous by his closeness to the ground. Now, despite his wounds, and revived by his small success with the wasps, he believed he was missing nothing.
So it was that when Gray had gone a hundred yards from the wasps' nest he was brought up by a slight resistance, a negligible increase in friction of the ground. He froze, at first unaware where the irregularity was, then determined it was from his left arm, his wrist, maybe a finger. He did not breathe, he did not swallow, he did not incline his head even a fraction of an inch. He moved only his eyeballs, and even them slowly. His gaze coursed along his arm to his left wrist, which was ahead of him on the ground, partly hidden by grass. He could see nothing wrong. Sweat trickled into his eyes. He was utterly motionless, and he could hear and see and feel nothing irregular, yet he was certain that at the end of his left arm was a vast peril.
The rifle was in his right hand. He let it slip slowly from his grip, its stock and trigger guard and swivel pin settling on the ground with no more force than a tuft of airborne thistledown. He moved his right hand slowly forward, sliding up the rifle barrel so he could see his right hand in front of him. With the tip of one finger of his right hand he parted grass stalks. The finger worked its way into the grass, nudging aside the brittle stems until he saw a glint of reflected green light, a slight foreign spark three inches above the ground.
A length of fishing line. The little finger of Gray's left hand had caught it and pulled it an inch out of its taut north–south line. It was the trip wire of a spring gun hidden to Gray's left or right. Set by Trusov. Gray willed his mind to work. Some lethal devices, such as the Claymore mine, relied not on pressure but on the release of that pressure. As long as the infantryman stood on the mine he was safe. Gray tried to recall snare techniques that used back pressure. He knew of none. He pressed his cheek against the ground and slowly pulled back his left hand from the fishing line. The spring gun was silent.
When his hand was under his chin, he brought his head up. He looked left up the slope. At first he saw only horseweed and cheat grass among the pine trees. Then he detected the two menacing black holes eight feet to his left, the dark eyes of a double-barrel shotgun. To his right the line was tied to the branch of a Scotch broom. The weapon had been placed here to cut down anyone on Gray's route. Which meant that Nikolai Trusov felt he could not cover this approach.
Gray quelled a rising sense of triumph, fought it back as useless and premature. This trap was not a warning or a feint. The shotgun was well hidden and the trip wire detectable virtually only by intuition. His right hand found his Winchester. He rose to his knees and crossed over the trip wire one limb at a time, moving like a cloud on a calm day, soundless, his eyes ever on the fishing line. When his trailing foot slipped over the line, Gray again lowered himself to his stomach. He slithered forward again.
He came to a short whitebark pine, more a shrub than a tree, with a twisted and irregular trunk. On the ground beneath it was a blanket of thick scales from the tree's cones that had been torn apart by chipmunks and nutcrackers for the seeds. The whitebark offered a rising cover. Gray lifted his head, ducking branches, twisting his body to insert it up between the boughs without jiggling them. He brought up the binoculars. Nothing ahead. Yet Trusov had to be there. The spring gun meant Trusov was protecting this passage to his hide.
Just as he was about to return to the ground, the slightest of motions, as insignificant as it was out of place in the high country, caught the corner of his eye. Gray trusted his peripheral vision. Its best use was at dusk when objects that couldn't be seen directly might be observed at the edge of the eye. In daylight, side vision would pick up an oddity, some angle or motion that did not fit into the wilderness pattern that might be missed if viewed straight on. Gray slowly brought his head around to face the irregularity.
A moment passed before he located it. A rifle barrel. Even at a hundred and fifty yards, the barrel, so true and purposeful, seemed a violation of the mountains. Only eighteen inches of the barrel appeared above a fallen log, but when the bush behind it, perhaps a grouseberry, wafted gently in the slight breeze, the barrel stayed fixed in position. Then the barrel moved on its own, stark against the soft grouseberry background. He could not tell if Trusov was facing him or another direction. He could not see the Russian's head. Moving as slowly as if in a barrel of molasses, Gray lifted the Winchester.
He found the Russian's rifle barrel through the Unertl scope. He could see its blued front sight and bore. Gray lowered his rifle a hair. In the scope now was a brown wool cap. Only the top few inches of the cap, but enough.
Gray was acutely aware he might be pulling down on a dummy position, an artful trap left by the enemy that would cause the shooter to reveal his position. Nikolai Trusov's father had used this ruse at Stalingrad. But Gray could not wait. He was at the end of his resources.
Deep breath. Let half out. Hold. Crosshair once. Crosshair twice, softly, ever so softly, squeeze.
The Winchester bellowed and leaped back into Gray's shoulder. He lost the target in his sights but he quickly brought the rifle back down, searching through the scope for the target.
Gray's left hand vanished in a spray of blood and gristle that filled the air in front of him. He cried out and yanked himself down to the ground, his head bouncing against two whitebark limbs. His face plowed into the ground and he rolled onto his belly to flatten himself. Only then did he hear the distant roar of a rifle shot as it chased the bullet. The echo raced around the bowl's walls, washing over Gray again and again.
Gray frantically grabbed the Winchester and rolled to his right, out from under the pine and across a bed of needles and through bunches of cheat grass, turning over and over like a child down a hill. He left a trail of blood. But a second shot did not come. Gray bumped into a tree. Only then did he look at his arm.
Trusov's bullet had blown out a third of Gray's left palm. Several bones lay bare and others might have been missing. Much of the carpus was gone. Flaps of skin and shattered tendons dangled in the breeze. The little finger and ring finger seemed only nominally attached to his hand. Blood spurted from the wound with each of Gray's heartbeats, shooting out three feet as if from a squirt gun. Gray had brought no twine or a thong to use as a tourniquet.
He fought the churning white clouds of shock that dipped down at him
from above. He had felt no pain, just a dead tingling somewhere near his left elbow. But then his mouth was pried open by a spear of agony that flew up his arm and neck and landed behind his eyes. Gray's head snapped into the ground, jolted by the pain. The entire left side of his body was spiked by it. He desperately wanted to run away, to leave behind the maimed part of himself and all the suffering it was dispensing.
The day seemed to fade. Tiny dots of neon colors blinked on and off in front of Gray's eyes. He was growing faint with the loss of blood. Holding his breath, Gray reached into his pack. Even this small motion amplified the pain. He breathed deeply, but this acted like a bellows on the pain. His body shook. Blood splattered the tree trunk and rifle. He guessed he had only a minute or two before the heart would have no more blood to pump.
With his right hand he brought out one of the matchbooks. He bit off a match, then dropped the matchbook to the ground. He scraped the match against the score several times before his trembling hand could press down hard enough. When the match head sputtered to life he held the flame to the matchbook. It flared. Gray pinched the matchbook at the staple and held the flame under his wounded left hand.
The fire cooked his hand, turning the ragged gash brown, then black. Flesh crackled and hissed. The air was filled with a nauseating scent. Pain was an acid coursing back and forth in his body. Gray's teeth sank deeply into his tongue, and blood squirted from between his teeth and down his chin.
The hanging flaps of skin curled and shrank. Grease dripped from the cooking flesh. And still Gray held the matchbook in place. His trigger finger and thumb burned as flames consumed the matchbook down to the staple and score. Finally blood from the exposed radial artery stopped spurting. Gray dropped the matchbook and lowered a knee over it to extinguish it before pine needles and dry grass caught fire. He did not have the mental capacity to pray that Trusov had not seen the smoke from the matches. Gray coughed with agony. Every limb shook with suffering.