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A Time to Hunt
by
Stephen Hunter But all of this action is only a prelude to Donny's subsequent
relationship with Swagger in Vietnam. Hunter fleshes out the mythology
that he began to create in Point of Impact as readers watch Swagger add
to his famed body count and confront his nemesis, Solaratov.
Hunter moves deftly from the mind of Solaratov to Donny and back to
Swagger, and in each character finds the core of the Vietnam
experience--fear, coldness, sadness, horror, elation.
The last two sections cut to contemporary events and find Swagger
married to Donny's former love, Julie. Slowly, the events of the first
half of the book begin to merge with Swagger's present history and
stories that readers will recognize from Hunter's earlier novels.
Swagger uncovers a deep connection between the Vietnam demonstrations
of the 1970s, the predatory work of the CIA, and the killer who is
after him and his family now. Nothing is as it first seems, and
readers of Point of Impact and Black Light will have to revise all
their expectations.

"STEPHEN HUNTER IS SIMPLY THE BEST WRITER OF
ACTION FICTION IN THE WORLD and Time to Hunt proves it. The action
scenes are topnotch, the mystery kept me guessing until the last page
and Bob the Nailer is a great character. I doubt that I will read
another action thriller as good as this until Hunter writes another
book."
--Phillip Margolin, author of The Undertaker's Widow
"If he's not there already, [Hunter's] fast approaching the rarefied
air at the top of the genre with the likes of Nelson DeMille, Frederick
Forsyth and Ken Follett. Time to Hunt tugs at your heartstrings, then
slaps you around. The intensity is so palpable you nearly break out in
a sweat."
--The Denver Post
"TIME TO HUNT IS MORE THAN A THRILLER .. .
it's a sweeping novel that ranges from the era of the Vietnam War and
the anti-war movement to the present."
--Houston Chronicle
"SURPRISING .. . SATISFYING .. . Swagger is a near-mythic character
without peer in mystery fiction. As we revel in his adventures and
triumphs, we also experience his pain. It's that pain, simmering below
the surface, that keeps Bob Lee on the edge of our consciousness long
past the end of this fine novel."
--Booklist
ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER
FICTION
Black Light Dirty White Boys Point of Impact The Day Before Midnight
Tapestry of Spies The Second Saladin The Master Sniper
NONFICTION
Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie
Mayhem
TIME
TO
HUNT
A NOVEL BY
STEPHEN
HUNTER
ISLAND BOOKS
Published by Dell Publishing a division of Random House, Inc. 1540
Broadway New York, New York 10036
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that
this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and
destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher
has received any payment for this "stripped book."
Copyright 1998 by Stephen Hunter All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without the written
permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For
information address: Doubleday, New York, New York.
The trademark Dell is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office.
ISBN: 0440226457
Reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday Printed in the United States of
America Published simultaneously in Canada April 1999
10 9 8 7
OPM
FOR
CPL John Burke, USMC KIA, I Corps, RSVN, 1967 If any question why we
died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.
--rudyard kipling writing in the voice of his son John, KIA, the Somme,
at the age of sixteen prologue
We are in the presence of a master sniper.
He lies, almost preternaturally still, on hard stone. The air is thin,
still cold; he doesn't shake or tremble.
The sun is soon to rise, pushing the chill from the mountains. As its
light spreads, it reveals fabulous beauty.
High peaks, shrouded in snow; a pristine sky that will be the color of
a pure blue diamond; far mountain pastures of a green so intense it
rarely exists in nature; brooks snaking down through pines that carpet
the mountainsides.
The sniper notices none of this. If you pointed it out to him, he
wouldn't respond. Beauty, in nature or women or even rifles, isn't a
concept he would recognize, not after where he's been and what he's
done. He simply doesn't care; his mind doesn't work that way.
Instead, he sees nothingness. He feels a great cool numbness. No idea
has any meaning to him at this point.
His mind is almost empty, as though he's in a trance.
He's a short-necked man, as so many great shooters are; his blue eyes,
though gifted with an almost freakish 20/10 acuity, appear dull,
signifying a level of mental activity almost startlingly blank. His
pulse rate hardly exists.
He has some oddities, again freakish in some men but weirdly perfect
for a shooter. He has extremely well developed fast-twitch forearm
muscles, still supple and defined at his age, which is beyond fifty.
His hands are large and strong. His stamina is off the charts, as are
his reflexes and his pain tolerance. He's strong, flexible, as charged
with energy as any other world-class athlete. He has both a technical
and a creative mind and a will as directed as a laser.
But none of this really explains him, any more than such analysis would
explain a Williams or a DiMaggio: he simply has an internal genius,
possibly autistic, that gives him extraordinary control over body and
mind, hand and eye, infinite patience, a shrewd gift for the tactical,
and, most of all, total commitment to his arcane art, which in turn
forms the core of his identity and has granted him a life that few
could imagine.
But for now, nothing: not his past, not his future, not the pain of
lying so still in the cold through a long night, not the excitement of
knowing this could be the day. No anticipation, no regret: just
nothing.
Before him is the tool of his trade, lying askew on a hard sandbag. He
knows it intimately, having worked with it a great deal in preparation
for the thirty seconds that will come today or tomorrow or the day
after.
It's a Remington 700, with an H-S Precision fiberglass stock and a
Leupold 10X scope. It's been tricked up by a custom rifle smith to
realize the last tenth of a percent of its potential: the action trued
and honed, and bolted into the metal block at the center of the stock
at maximum torque; a new Krieger barrel free-floated after cryogenic
treatment. The trigger, a Jewell, lets off at four pounds with the
crisp snap of a glass rod breaking.
The sniper has run several weeks' worth of load experimentation through
the rifle, finding the exact harmony that will produce maximum results:
the perfect balance between the weight of a bullet, the depth of its
seating, the selection and amount, to the tenth grain, hand measured,
of the powder. Nothing has been left to chance: the case necks have
been turned and annealed, the primer hole de burred the primer depth
perfected, the primer itself selected for consistency. The rifle
muzzle wears the latest hot lick, a Browning Ballistic Optimizing
System, which is a kind of screw-on nozzle that can be micro-tuned to
generate the best vibrational characteristics for accuracy.
The caliber isn't military but civilian, the 7mm Remington Magnum, once
the flavor of the month in 3
international hunting circles, capable of dropping a ram or a whitetail
at amazing distances. Though surpassed by some flashier loads, it's
still a flat-shooting, hard-hitting cartridge that holds its velocity
as it flies through the thin air, delivering close to two thousand
foot-pounds of energy beyond five hundred yards.
But of all this data, the sniper doesn't care, or no longer cares. He
knew it at one time; he has forgotten it now. The point of the endless
ballistic experimentation was simple: to bring the rifle and its load
to complete perfection so that it could be forgotten. That was one
principle of great shooting--arrange for the best, then forget all
about it.
When the sound comes, it doesn't shock or surprise him. He knew it had
to come, sooner or later. It doesn't fill him with doubt or regret or
anything. It simply means the obvious: time to work.
It's a peal of laughter, girlish and bright, giddy with excitement. It
bounces off the stone walls of the canyon, from the shadow of a draw
onto this high shelf from close to a thousand yards off, whizzing
through the thin air.
The sniper wiggles his fingers, finds the warmth in them. His
concentration cranks up a notch or so. He pulls the rifle to him in a
fluid motion, well practiced from hundreds of thousands of shots in
practice or on missions.
Its stock rises naturally to his cheek as he pulls it in, and as one
hand flies to the wrist, the other sets up beneath the forearm, taking
the weight of his slightly lifted body, building a bone bridge to the
stone below. It rests on a densely packed sandbag. He finds the spot
weld, the one placement of cheek to stock where the scope relief will
be perfect and the circle of the scope will throw up its image as
brightly as a movie screen. His adduct or magnus, a tube of muscle
running through his deep thigh, tenses as he splays his right foot ever
so slightly.
Above, a hawk rides a thermal, gliding through the blue morning sky.
A mountain trout leaps.
A bear looks about for something to eat.
A deer scampers through the brush.
The sniper notices none of it. He doesn't care.
Mommy," shouts eight-year-old Nikki Swagger.
"Come on."
Nikki rides better than either of her parents; she's been almost
literally raised on horseback, as her father, a retired Marine staff
NCO with an agricultural background, had decided to go into the
business of horse care at his own lay-up barn in Arizona, where Nikki
was born.
Nikki's mother, a handsome woman named Julie Fenn Swagger, trails
behind. Julie doesn't have the natural grace of her daughter, but she
grew up in Arizona, where horses were a way of life, and has been
riding since childhood.
Her husband rode as an Arkansas farmboy, then didn't for decades, then
came back to the animals and now loves them so, in their integrity and
loyalty, that he has almost single-mindedly willed himself into
becoming an accomplished saddle man That is one of his gifts.
"Okay, okay," she calls, "be careful, sweetie," though she knows that
careful is the last thing Nikki will ever be, for hers is a hero's
personality, built from a willingness to risk all to gain all and a
seeming absence of fear. She's like an Indian in that way, and like
her father, too, who was once a war hero.
She turns.
"Come on," she calls, replicating her daughter's rhythms.
"You want to see the valley as the sun races across it, don't you?"
"Yep," comes the call from the rider still unseen in the shadows of the
draw.
Nikki bounds ahead, out of the shadows and into the bright light. Her
horse, named Calypso, is a four-year-old thoroughbred gelding, quite a
beast, but Nikki handles it with nonchalance. She is actually riding
English, because it is part of her mother's dream for her that she will
go east to college, and the skills that are the hallmarks of equestrian
sophistication will take her a lot farther than the rowdy ability to
ride like a cowboy. Her father does not care for the English saddle,
which seems hardly enough to protect the girl from the muscles of the
animal beneath, and at horse shows he thinks those puffy jodhpurs and
that little velveteen jacket with its froth of lace at the throat are
sublimely ridiculous.
Calypso bounds over the rocky path, his cleverness as evident as his
fearlessness. To watch the slight girl maneuver the massive horse is
one of the great joys of her father's life: she never seems so alive as
when on horseback, or so happy, or so in command. Now, Nikki's voice
trills with pleasure as the horse at last breaks out onto a shelf of
rock. Before them is the most beautiful view within riding distance
and she races to the edge, seemingly out of control, but actually very
much in control.
"Honey," cries Julie as her daughter careens merrily toward disaster,
"be careful."
The child. The woman. The man.
The child comes first, the best rider, bold and adventurous.
She emerges from the shadow of the draw, letting her horse run, and the
animal thunders across the grass to the edge of the precipice, halts,
then spins and begins to twitch with anticipation. The girl holds him
tightly, laughing.
The woman is next. Not so gifted a rider, she still rides easily, with
loping strides, comfortable in the saddle. The sniper can see her
straw hair, her muscularity under the jeans and work shirt, the way the
sun has browned her face. Her horse is a big chestnut, a stout,
working cowboy's horse, not sleek like the daughter's.
And finally: the man.
He is lean and watchful and there is a rifle in the scabbard under his
saddle. He looks dangerous, like a special man who would never panic,
react fast and shoot straight, which is exactly what he is. He rides
like a gifted athlete, almost one with the animal, controlling it
unconsciously with his thighs. Relaxed in the saddle, he is still
obviously alert.
He would not see the sniper. The sniper is too far out, the hide too
carefully camouflaged, the spot chosen to put the sun in the victim's
eyes at this hour so that he'll see only dazzle and blur if he looks.
The crosshairs ride up to the man, and stay with him as he gallops
along, finding the same rhythm in the cadences, finding the same
up-down plunge of the animal.
The shooter's finger caresses the trigger, feels absorbed by its
softness, but he does not fire.
Moving target, transversing laterally left to right, but also moving up
and down through a vertical plane: 753 meters. By no means an
impossible shot, and many a man in his circumstances would have taken
it. But experience tells the sniper to wait: a better shot will lie
ahead, the best shot. With a man like Swagger, that's the one you
take.
The man joins the woman, and the two chat, and what he says makes her
smile. White teeth flash. A little tiny human part in the sniper
aches for the woman's beauty and ease; he's had prostitutes the world
over, some quite expensive, but this little moment of intimacy is
something that has evaded him completely. That's all right. He has
chosen to work in exile from humanity.
Jesus Christ!
He curses himself. That's how shots are blown, that little fragment of
lost concentration which takes you out of the operation. He briefly
snaps his eyes shut, absorbs the darkness and clears his mind, then
opens them again to what lies before him.
The man and the woman have reached the edge: 721 meters. Before them
runs a valley, unfolding in the sunlight as the sun climbs even higher.
But tactically what this means to the sniper is that at last his quarry
has ceased to move. In the scope he sees a family portrait: man, woman
and child, all at nearly the same level, because the child's horse is
so big it makes her as tall as her parents. They chat, the girl
laughs, points at a bird or something, seethes with motion. The woman
stares into the distance. The man, still seeming watchful, relaxes
just the tiniest bit.
The crosshairs bisect the square chest.
The master sniper expels a breath, seeks the stillness within himself,
but wills nothing. He never decides or commits. It just happens.
The rifle bucks, and as it comes back in a fraction of a second, he
sees the tall man's chest explode as the 7mm Remington Magnum tears
through it.
PART I
THE PARADE DECK
Washington, DC, April-May 1971
chapter one
It was unseasonably hot that spring, and Washington languished under
the blazing sun. The grass was brown and lusterless, the traffic
thick, the citizens surly and uncivil;
even the marble monuments and the white government buildings seemed
squalid. It was as though a torpor hung over the place, or a curse.
Nobody in official Washington went to parties anymore; it was a time of
bitterness and recrimination.
And it was a time of siege. The city was in fact under attack. The
process the president called "Vietnamization" wasn't happening fast
enough for the armies of peace demonstrators who regularly assailed the
city's parks and byways, shutting it down or letting it live, pretty
much unchecked and pretty much as they saw fit. This month already,
the Vietnam Veterans for Peace had commandeered the steps of the
Capitol, showering them with a bitter rain of medals; more action was
planned for the beginning of May, when the May Tribe of the People's
Coalition for Peace and Justice had sworn to close down the city once
again, this time for a whole week.
In all the town there was only one section of truly green grass. Some
would look upon it and see in the green a last living symbol of
American honor, a last best hope.
Others would say the green was artificial, like so much of America: it
was sustained by the immense labor of exploited workers, who had no
choice in the matter. This is what we are changing, they would say.
The green grass was the parade ground, or in the patois of a service
which holds fast to the conceit that all land structures are merely
extensions of and metaphorical representations of the ships of the
fleet, the "parade deck" of the Marine Barracks, at Eighth and I,
Southeast.
The young enlisted men labored over it as intensely as any
12 STEPHEN HUNTER
cathedral gardeners, for, to the Jesuitical minds of the United States
Marine Corps, at any rate, it was holy ground.
The barracks, built in 1801, was the oldest continuously occupied
military installation in the United States.
Even the British dared not burn it when they put the rest of the city
to the torch in 1814. To look across the deck to the officers' houses
on one side, the structures that housed three companies (Alpha, Bravo
and Hotel, for headquarters) on the other, and the commandant's house
at the far end of the quadrangle was to see, preserved, a pristine
version of what service in the Corps and service to the country
theoretically meant.
The ancient bricks were red and the architecture had sprung from an age
in which design was pride in order.
Conceived as a fort in a ruder and more violent age, it had taken on,
with the maturity of its foliage and the replacement of its muddy lanes
with cobblestone, the aspect of an old Ivy League campus. An un ironic
flag flew above it at the end of a high mast; red, white, blue,
rippling in the wind, unashamed. It had a passionate nineteenth
century feel to it; it was somehow an encomium of manifest destiny,
built on a little chunk of land that was almost an independent duchy of
the United States Marine Corps, stuck a mile and a half from and on the
same hill as the Capitol, where the unruly processes of democracy were
currently being strained to the utmost.
Now, on a particularly hot, bright April day, under that beating sun,
young men drilled or loafed, as the authorities permitted.
In the shade at the corner of Troop Walk and the South Arcade, seven
men--boys, actually--squatted and smoked. They wore the uniform called
undressed blues, which consisted of blue trousers, a tan gabardine
short-sleeved shirt open at the neck, and white hat--"cover," as the
Corps called hats--pulled low over their eyes. The only oddity in
their appearance, which to the casual eye separated them from other
Marines, was their oxfords,
which were not merely shined but spit-shined, and gleamed dazzlingly.
The spit shine was a fetish in their culture. Now the young Marines
were on a break and, naturally, PFC Crowe, the team comedian, was
explaining the nature of things.
"See," he explained to his audience, as he sucked on a Marlboro, "it'll
look great on a resume. I tell 'em, I was in this elite unit. I
needed a top-secret security clearance.
We trained and rehearsed for our missions, and then when we went on
them, in the hot, sweltering weather, men dropped all around me. But I
kept going, goddammit.
I was a hero, a goddamn hero. Of course what I don't tell them is, I'm
talking about .. . parades."
He was rewarded with appropriate blasts of laughter from his cohorts,
who regarded him as an amusing and generally harmless character. He
had an uncle who was a congressman's chief fund-raiser, which accounted
for his presence in Company B, the body-bearer company, as opposed to
more rigorous and dangerous duties in WES PAC, as the orders always
called it, or what the young Marines had termed the Land of Bad Things.
He had no overwhelming desire to go to the Republic of South Vietnam.
Indeed, in all of Second Casket Team, only one of the seven had seen
service in RSVN. This was the noncommissioned officer in charge,
Corporal Donny Fenn, twenty-two, of Ajo, Arizona. Donny, a large and
almost freakishly handsome blond kid with a year of college behind him,
had spent seven months in another B Company, 1/9 Bravo, attached to the
III Marine Amphibious Force, in operations near and around An Hoa in I
Corps. He had been shot at many times and hit once, in the lungs, for
which he was hospitalized for six months. He also had something
called, uh, he would mumble, uh, bmzstr, and not look you in the eye.
But now Donny was short. That is, he had just under thirteen months
left to serve and by rumor, at any rate, that meant the Corps would not
in its infinite wisdom ship
14 STEPHEN HUNTER
him back to the Land of Bad Things. This was not because the Corps
loved his young ass. No, it was because the tour of duty in "Nam was
thirteen calendar months, and if you sent anyone over with less than
thirteen calendar months, it hopelessly muddied the tidiness of the
records, so upsetting to the anal-retentive minds of personnel clerks.
So for all intents and purposes, Donny had made it safely through the
central conflict of his age.
"All right," he said, checking his watch as its second hand hurtled
toward 1100 to signify the end of break, "put 'em out and strip 'em.
Put the filters in your pockets, that is if you're a faggot who smokes
filtered cigarettes. If I see any butts out here, I'll PT your asses
until morning muster."
The troops grunted, but obeyed. Of course they knew he didn't mean it;
like them, he was no lifer. Like them, he'd go back to the world.
So as would any listless group of young men in so pitiless an
institution as the Marine Corps, they got with the program with
something less than total enthusiasm. It was another day at Eighth and
I, another day of operations on the parade deck when they weren't on
alert or serving cemetery duty: up at O-dark-30, an hour of PT at 0600,
morning muster at 0700, chow at 0800, and by 0930, the beginning of
long, sometimes endless hours of drill, either of the funeral variety
or of the riot-control variety.
Then the duty day was done: those who had assignments did them, and
otherwise the boys could secure (the married could live off base with
wives; many of the unmarried shared unofficial cheap places available
on Capitol Hill) or lounge about, playing pool, drinking 3.2 in the
enlisted men's bar or going to the movies on the Washington PX circuit
or even trying their luck with women in the bars of Capitol Hill.
But the luck was always bad, a source of much bitterness.
This was only partially because Marines were thought of as baby
killers. The real reason was hair: it was, in the outside world, the
era of hair. Men wore their locks long and puffed up, usually
overwhelming their ears in the process. The poor jarheads--and all the
ceremonial troopers of the Military District of Washington--were
expected to be acolytes to the temple of military discipline.
Thus they offered nearly naked skulls to the world--white sidewalls, it
was called--except for a permitted patch no more than three-quarters of
an inch up top. Their ears stood out like radar bowls. Some of them
looked like Howdy Doody, and no self-respecting hippie chick would
deign spit at them, and since all American girls had become hippie
chicks, they were, in Crowe's memorable term, shit out of luck.
"Gloves on," Donny commanded, and his men, as they rose, pulled on
their white gloves.
Donny started them through another long fifty minutes of casket drill.
As body bearers, all were on the husky side. As body bearers, none
could make a mistake. It seemed meaningless, but a few--Donny, for
one--understood that they did in fact have an important job: to
anesthetize the pain of death with stultifying ritual. They had to
hide the actual fact--there was a boy in the box going into the ground
of Arlington National Cemetery forever, years before his time, and to
what end?--with pomp and precision. And Donny, though an easygoing guy
in most respects, was determined that in this one aspect, they would be
the best.
So the team turned to, under his guidance and soft but forcefully
uttered commands: they walked through the precisely choreographed steps
by which a flag-draped box of boy was smartly removed from the hearse,
which in the rehearsal was only a steel rack, aligned by its bearers,
carried with utter calm dignity to the grave site, laid upon a bier.
Next came the tricky flag folding: the flag was snapped off the box by
six pairs of disciplined hands and, beginning with the man at the boot
of the casket, broken into a triangle which grew thicker with each
rigid fold as it passed from man to man. If the folding went right,
what was finally deposited in Corporal Fenn's hands was a per16
STEPHEN HUNTER
feet triangle, a tricorn, festooned on either side with stars, with no
red stripe showing anywhere. This was not easy, and it took weeks for
a good team to get it right and even longer to break in a new guy.
At this point, Corporal Fenn took the triangle of stars, marched with
stiff precision to the seated mother or father or whoever, and in his
white gloves presented it to her. An odd moment, always: some
recipients were too stunned to respond. Some were too shattered to
notice.
Some were awkward, some even a little star struck for a Marine as
good-looking as Donny, with a chestful of medals hanging heavily from
his dress tunic, his hair gone, his hat as white as his gloves, his
dignity impenetrable, his theater craft immaculate, is indeed an
awesome sight--almost like a movie star--and that charisma frequently
cut through the grief of the moment. One broken mom even took his
picture with an Instamatic as he approached.
But on this run-through, the corporal was not pleased with the
performance of his squad. Of course it was PFC Crowe, not the best man
on the team.
"All right, Crowe," he said, after the sweat-soaked boys had stood down
from the ritual, "I saw you. You were out of step on the walk-to and
you were half a beat behind on the left face-out of the wagon."
"Ah," said Crowe, searching for a quip to memorialize the moment, "my
damn knee. It's the junk I picked up at Khe Sahn."
This did bring a chuckle, for as close as Crowe had come to Khe Sahn
was reading about it in the New Haven Register.
"I forgot you were such a hero," Donny said.
"So only drop and give me twenty-five, not fifty. Out of commemoration
for your great sacrifice."
Crowe muttered darkly but harmlessly and the other team members drew
back to give him room to perform his absolution. He peeled off his
gloves, dropped to the prone and banged out twenty-five
Marine-regulation pushups.
The last six were somewhat sloppy.
"Excellent," said Donny.
"Maybe you're not a girl after all. All right, let's--" But at this
moment, the company commander's orderly, the bespectacled PFC Welch,
suddenly appeared at Donny's right shoulder.
"Hey, Corporal," he whispered, "CO wants to see you."
Shit, thought Donny, what the hell have I done now?
"Ohhh," somebody sang, "somebody's in trouble. ""Hey Donny, maybe
they're going to give you another medal."
"It's his Hollywood contract, it's finally come."
"You know what it's about?" asked Donny of Welch, who was a prime
source of scuttlebutt.
"No idea. Some Navy guys, that's all I know. It's ASAP, though."
"I'm on my way. Bascombe, you take over. Another twenty minutes.
Focus on the face-out of the hearse that seems to have Crowe so
baffled. Then take 'em to chow.
I'll catch up when I can."
"Yes, Corporal."
Donny straightened his starched shirt, adjusted the gig line, wondered
if he had time to change shirts, decided he didn't, and took off.
He headed across the parade deck, passing among other drilling Marines.
The show boats of Company A, the silent drill rifle team, were going
through their elaborate pantomime; the color guard people were
mastering the intricacies of flag work; another platoon had moved on to
riot control and was stomping furiously down Troop Walk, bent double
under combat gear.
Donny reached Center Walk, turned and headed into the barracks proper,
only crossing paths with half a dozen officers in the salute-crazed
Corps and having to toss up a stiff right hand for their response. He
entered the building, turned right and went through the open
hatch-18
STEPHEN HUNTER
Marine for "door"--and down the hall. It was dark and the gleamy
swirls of good buffer work on the wax of the linoleum shone up at him.
Along the green government bulkheads were photos of various Marine
activities supplied by an aggressive Public Information Office for
morale purposes, at which they utterly failed. At last, he turned into
the door marked commanding officer, and under that captain m. c.
dogwood, usmc. The outer office was empty, because PFC Welch was still
running errands.
"Fenn?" came the call from the inner office.
"In here."
Donny stepped into the office, a kind of ghostly crypt to the joint
vanities of Marine machismo and bureaucratic efficiency, to discover
the ramrod-stiff Captain Morton Dogwood sitting with a slender young
man in the summer tans of a lieutenant commander in the Navy and an
even younger man in an ensign's uniform.
"Sir," said Donny, going to attention, "Corporal Fenn reporting as
ordered, sir."
As he was unarmed, he did not salute.
"Fenn, this is Commander Bonson and Ensign Weber," said Dogwood.
"Sirs," said Donny to the naval officers.
"Commander Bonson and his associate are from the Naval Investigative
Service," said Dogwood.
Oh, shit, thought Donny.
The room was dark, the shades drawn. The captain's meager assembly of
service medals hung in a frame on the wall behind him, as well as an
announcement of his degree in International Finance from George
Washington University. His desk was shiny and almost clear except for
the polished 105mm howitzer shell that had been cut down to a paper
clip cup and was everybody's souvenir from service in RSVN, and
pictures of a pretty wife and two baby girls.
"Sit down, Fenn," said Bonson, not looking up from documents he was
studying, which, as Donny saw, were his own jacket, or personnel
records.
"Aye, aye, sir," said Donny. He found a chair and set himself into it
stiffly, facing the three men who seemed to hold his destiny in their
hands. Outside, the shouts of drill came through the windows; outside
it was bright and hot and the day was filled with duty. Donny felt in
murky waters here; what the hell was this all about?
"Good record," said Bonson.
"Excellent job in country.
Good record here in the barracks. Your hitch is up when, Fenn?"
"Sir, May seventy-two."
"Hate to see you leave, Fenn. The Corps needs good men like you."
"Yes, sir," said Donny, wondering if this was some-no, no, it couldn't
be a recruiting pitch. NIS was the Navy and the Corps's own, tinny
version of the FBI: they investigated, they didn't recruit.
"I'm engaged to be married.
I've already been accepted back at the University of Arizona."
"What will you study?" asked the commander.
"Sir, pre-law, I think."
"You know, Fenn, you'll probably get out a corporal.
Rank is hard to come by in the Corps, because it's so small and there
just aren't the positions available, no matter the talent and the
commitment."
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
"Only about eight percent of four-year enlistees come out higher than
corporal. That is, as a sergeant or higher."
"Yes, sir."
"Fenn, think how it would help your law career if you made sergeant.
You'd be one of an incredibly small number of men to do so. You'd
truly be in an elite."
"Ah--" Donny hardly knew what to say.
"The officers have a tremendous opportunity for you, Fenn," said
Captain Dogwood.
"You'd do well to hear them out."
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
"Corporal Fenn, we have a leak. A bad leak. We want you to plug
it."
20 STEPHEN HUNTER
A leak, sir?" said Donny.
"Yes. You know we have sources into most of the major peace groups.
And you've heard rumors that on May Day, they're going to try to shut
the city down and bring the war to a halt by destroying the head of the
machine."
Rumors like that flew through the air. The Weather Underground, the
Black Panthers, SNICC, they were going to close down Washington,
levitate the Pentagon or bury it in rose petals, break into the
armories and lead armed insurrection. It just meant that Bravo Company
was always on alert status and nobody could get any serious liberty
time.
"I've heard." His girlfriend was headed in for the May Day weekend. It
would be great to see her, if he wasn't stuck on alert or, worse,
sleeping under a desk in some building near the White House.
"Well, it's true. May Day. The communist holiday.
They have the biggest mobilization of the war planned.
They really mean to close us down and keep us closed down."
"Yes, sir."
"Our job is simple," said Lieutenant Commander Bonson.
"It's to stop them."
Such determination in the man's voice, even a little tremble. His eyes
seemed to burn with old-fashioned Iwo Jima-style zeal. At the same
time, Donny couldn't help notice the lack of an RSVN service ribbon on
the khaki of his chest.
"Remember November?" asked Bonson.
"Yes, sir," said Donny, and indeed he did. It stuck in his mind, not
the whole thing, really, but one ludicrous moment.
It was late, near 2400, midnight in the American soul, and the Marines
of Bravo in full combat gear were filing into the Treasury Building,
adjacent to the White House, for protective duties against the
possibilities of the next morning in a city where 200,000 angry kids
had camped on the mall. A bone-dry moon shone above; the weather was
crisp but not yet brutal. The Marines debarked from their trucks,
holding their M14s at the high port, bayonets fixed, but still wearing
their metal scabbards.
As Donny led his men downward toward the entrance, his eye was caught
by light and he looked up. The abutment at the end of the ramp was
brick and, being situated between the oh-so-white White House on the
left and the oh-so-dark Treasury on the right, yielded a perspective on
Pennsylvania Avenue, where the architects of the crusade for peace had
organized a silent candlelight vigil.
So one line of young Americans carried rifles into a government
building, under tin pots and thirty-five pounds of gear, while
twenty-odd feet above them, at a perfect right angle, another line of
young Americans filed along the deserted street, cupping candles, the
light of which weirdly illuminated and flickered on their tender faces.
Donny's epiphany came at that moment: no matter what the fiery lifers
said or the screaming-head peaceniks, both groups of Americans were
pretty much the same.
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
"I remember."
"Were you aware, Corporal, that radical elements anticipated the
movements of only one military unit, Company B of Marine Barracks, and
that just by the hairiest of coincidences did a Washington policeman
discover a bomb that was set to take out the phone junction into the
Treasury, thereby effectively cutting off B Company and leaving the
White House and the president defenseless?
Think of it, Corporal. Defenseless!"
He seemed to get a weird charge out of saying Defenseless!, his
nostrils flaring, his eyes lit up.
Donny had no idea what to say. He hadn't heard a thing about a bomb in
a phone junction.
"How did they know you were there? How did they know that's where
you'd be?" demanded the lieutenant commander.
It occurred to Donny: There are two buildings next to the White House.
One is the Executive Office Building,
22 STEPHEN HUNTER
one is the Treasury. If you were going to move troops in, wouldn't you
move them into one of the two buildings?
Where else could they be?
"I don't--" he stammered and almost ended his career right there by
blowing up in a big laugh.
"That's when my team began to investigate. That's when NIS got on the
case!" proclaimed the lieutenant commander.
"Yes, sir."
"We've run exhaustive background checks on everyone in the three line
companies at the Marine Barracks. And we think we've found our man."
Donny was dumbfounded. Then he began to get pissed.
"Sir, I thought we were already investigated for clearances before we
came into the unit."
"Yes, but it's a sloppy process. One investigator handles a hundred
clearances a week. Things get through.
Now, let me ask you something. What would you say if I told you one
member of your company had an illegal off-base apartment and was known
to room with members of a well-known peace initiative?"
"I don't know, sir."
"This PFC Edgar M. Crowe."
Crowe! Of course it would be Crowe.
Ensign Weber spoke up, reading from documents.
"Crowe maintains an apartment at 2311 C Street, Southwest. There he
cohabits a room with one Jeffrey Goldenberg, a graduate student at the
Northwestern University Medin Newsroom in Washington. Crowe is no
ordinary grunt, you know, Fenn. He's a Yale dropout who only came into
the Corps because his uncle had connections to a congressman who could
make certain he'd never go to Vietnam."
"Think of that, Fenn," said Commander Bonson.
"You're over there getting your butt shot off, and he's back here
marching in parades and giving up intelligence to the peace freaks."
Crowe: of course. Perpetual fuck-up, smart guy, goof-off, his furious
intelligence hidden behind a burning ambition to be just good enough
not to get rotated out, but not really good in the larger sense.
Still, Crowe: he was a punk, an unformed boy, he seemed no different
than any of them. He was a kid just out of his teens, mixed up by the
temptations and confusions of a tempting, confusing age.
"We know you, Fenn," said the lieutenant commander.
"You're the only man in the company who enjoys the universal respect of
both the career-track Marines who've done Vietnam and the boys who are
just here to avoid Vietnam. They all like you. So we have an
assignment for you. If you bring it off, and I know in my military
mind that there's no possibility you won't, you will finish your hitch
in twelve days a full E-5 buck sergeant in the United States Marine
Corps. That I guarantee you."
Donny nodded. He didn't like this a bit.
"I want you to become Crowe's new best friend.
You're his buddy, his pal, his father confessor. Flatter him with the
totality of your attentions. Hang out with him.
Go to his peace creep parties, get to know his longhaired friends. Get
drunk with him. He'll tell you things, a little at first, then more as
time goes on. He'll give up all his secrets. He's probably so proud
of himself and his little game he's dying to brag about it and show you
what a smart boy he is. Get us enough material to move against him
before he gives up the unit on May Day. We'll send him to Portsmouth
for a very long time. He'll come out an old man."
Bonson sat back.
There it was, before Donny. What was most palpable was what had not
been said. Suppose he didn't do it?
What would happen to him? Where would they send him?
"I don't really--sir, I'm not trained in intelligence work. I'm not
sure I could bring this off."
"Fenn is a very straightforward Marine," said Captain
24 STEPHEN HUNTER
Dogwood.
"He's a hardworking, gung-ho young man.
He's not a spy."
Donny could see that the captain's interjection deeply irritated
Lieutenant Commander Bonson, but Bonson said nothing, just stared
furiously at Donny in the dark office.
"You have two weeks," he finally said.
"We'll be monitoring you and expect a sitrep every other day. There's
a lot at stake, a lot of people counting on you. There's the honor of
the service and duty to country to consider."
Donny swallowed and hated himself for it.
"You know, you have it pretty good here yourself," said Bonson, to
Donny's silence.
"You have a room in the barracks, not in the squad bay, a very pleasant
duty station, a very pleasant duty day. You're in Washington, DC.
It's spring. You're going back to college, a decorated hero with all
those veteran's benefits, plus a Bronze Star and a nice chunk of rank.
I'd say few young men in America have it quite as made as you."
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
"What the commander is saying," said Ensign Weber, "is that it can all
go away. In a flash. Orders can be cut.
You could be back slogging the paddies in Vietnam, the shit flying all
around you. It's been known to happen. A guy so short suddenly finds
himself in extremely hazardous duty. Well, you know the stories. He
had a day to go and he got zapped. Letters to his mother, stories in
the paper, the horror of it all. The worst luck in the world, poor
guy. But sometimes, that's the way it goes."
More silence in the room.
Donny did not want to go back to Vietnam. He had done his time there,
he'd gotten hit. He remembered the fear he felt, the sheer immense,
lung-crushing density of it, the first time incoming began exploding
the world around him. He hated the squalor, the waste, the sheer
murder of it. He hated having his real life so close and then taken
from him. He hated the prospect of not seeing
Julie ever, ever again. He thought of some peace nerd comforting her
after he was gone, and knew how that one would play out.
Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.
"Great," said Bonson.
"You've made the right decision."
chapter Two
He stood outside, feeling idiotic. Rock music pumped out from inside.
Inside it was loud, bright, crowded, festive. He felt so stupid.
He turned. There was Ensign Weber in the Ford, parked across the way
on C Street. Weber nodded encouragingly, gave a little whisking motion
with his head as if to say, Go on, get going, goddammit.
So now Donny stood outside the Hawk and Dove, a well-known Capitol Hill
watering hole, where the young men and women who ran, opposed or
chronicled the war tended to gather after six when official Washington
closed down, except for the few old men in isolated offices waiting for
the latest news on the air strikes or casualty figures.
It was a beautiful night, temperate and soothing.
Donny was dressed in cutoffs. Jack Purcells, a madras shirt, just like
half the kids who'd entered the place since he'd been standing there,
except that unlike them, his ears stood out and his head wore only a
little topside platter of hair. It said jar head all the way.
But it was the Hawk and Dove where PFC Crowe was known to hang, and so
it was at the Hawk and Dove he had been deposited.
Christ, Donny thought again, looking back to Weber and getting another
of the whisking motions with the head.
He turned and plunged inside.
The place, as expected, was dark and close and jammed. Rock music
pummeled against the walls. It sounded like Buffalo Springfield:
There's a man with a gun over there, what it is ain't exactly
clear--something like that, vaguely familiar to Donny.
Everybody was smoking and cruising. There seemed to be a sense of sex
in the air as people eyed one another in the darkness, the pretty young
girls from the Hill, the slim young men from the Hill. Nearly all the
guys had big puffs of hair, but now and then he spied the whitewalls or
at least the very short haired look of the military. Yet there wasn't
much tension; it was as if everybody just put it aside, left it outside
for a generous helping of tribal bonding, the young not having to show
anything at all in here to the murderous, controlling old.
Donny squeezed to the bar, ordered a Bud, forked over a buck and
remembered, "Keep all your receipts.
You can expense this. Our office will pick it up. But nothing hard.
Bonson will fucking freak if you start chugging Pinch."
"I've never even tasted Pinch," Donny had replied.
"Maybe tonight's the night."
"That's a big negative," said Weber.
Donny sipped his beer. Beside him, a guy was in the middle of a bitter
fight with a girl. It was one of those quiet, muttered things, but
very intense. The boy kept saying, under his breath, "You idiot. You
unbelievable idiot.
How could you let him? Him! How could you let him? You idiot."
The girl merely stared ahead and smoked.
The time passed. His instructions were clear. He was not to approach
Crowe. That would be a mistake. Sooner or later Crowe would see him,
Crowe would approach him, and then it would go where it would go. If
he threw himself at Crowe, the whole damned thing would fall apart.
Donny had another beer, checked his watch. He scoped the action. There
were some attractive chicks but none as cool as Julie, the girl to whom
he was engaged.
Man, he smiled, I still got the best It was the football
hero-cheerleader thing, but not really. Yes, he was a football hero.
Yes, she was a cheerleader.
But he didn't really like football and she didn't really like
cheerleading. They actually were sort of forced
28 STEPHEN HUNTER
together as boyfriend and girlfriend by peer pressure at Pima County
High School, found they didn't really like each other very much, and
broke up. Once they broke up and started hanging out with other
people, they missed each other. One night they went on a double date,
he with Peggy Martin, Julie's best friend, and she with Mike Willis,
his best friend. And that was the night they really connected.
Junior year. The war was far away then, happening on TV. Firefights
in places like Bien Hoa and I Drang that he had never heard of. The
napalm floating off the Phantoms and wobbling downward to blossom in a
huge smear of tumbling fire across the jungle canopy. It meant
nothing. Donny and Julie went everywhere that year. They were
inseparable. It was, he thought, the best summer of his life, but
senior year was better, when he'd led the Southwest Counties League in
yardage, averaging close to two hundred a game. He was big and fast.
Julie was so beautiful but she was nice, somehow. She was so nice. She
was .. . good was the only word he could think of, and it was so
lame.
"Jesus Christ!"
Donny felt a hand on his shoulder as the words exploded into his ear.
He turned.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
Of course it was Crowe, in jeans and a work shirt looking very
proletariat. He had--where the hell did he get that?--a camouflaged
boonie cap on to disguise his hairless ness
He held a beer in his hand and was with three other young men who
looked exactly like him except their hair was real, and long. They
looked like three Jesuses.
"Crowe," said Donny.
"I didn't know this was your kind of place," said Crowe.
"It's a place. They have beer. What the fuck else would I need?"
Donny said.
"This is my corporal," Crowe said to his pals.
"He's a genuine USMC hero. He's actually killed guys. But he's a good
guy. He only made me drop for twenty-five today instead of fifty."
"Crowe, if you'd learn your shit, you wouldn't have to drop for any."
"But then I'd be collaborating."
"Oh, I see. Fucking up funerals is part of your guerrilla war on the
grieving mothers of America."
"No, no, I'm only joking. But the funny thing is, I can't tell my left
from my right. I really can't."
"It's port and starboard in the Marine Corps," said Donny.
"I don't know them either. Well, anyway. You want to join us? Tell
these guys about "Nam?"
"Oh, they don't want to hear."
"No, really," one of the other kids said.
"Man, it must be fucking hairy over there."
"He won a Bronze Star," said Crowe with a surprising measure of
pride.
"He was a hero."
"I was lucky as shit not to get wasted," Donny said.
"No, no war stories. Sorry."
"Look, we're going to a party. We know this guy, he's having a big
party. You want to come, Corporal?"
"Crowe, call me Donny off duty. And you're Ed."
"Eddie and Donny!"
"That's it."
"Come on, Donny. Chicks everywhere. It's over on C, right near the
Supreme Court. This guy is a clerk. He knew my big brother at
Harvard. More pussy in one place than you ever saw."
"You should come, Donny," said one of the boys.
Donny could tell that the hero thing had cut through politics and
somehow impressed these war-haters, who just a few years back had been
worshiping John Wayne.
"I'm engaged," Donny said.
"You can look, can't you? She'll let you look, won't she?"
"I suppose," said Donny.
"But I don't want any Ho
30 STEPHEN HUNTER
Chi Minh shit. Ho Chi Minh tried to kill my ass. He's no hero of
mine."
"It won't be like that," Crowe promised.
"Trig will like him," one of the boys said.
"Trig will turn him into a peacenik," said the other.
"So who's Trig?" said Donny.
It was a short walk and as soon as they were outside, one of the boys
pulled out a joint and lit up. The thing was routinely passed around
until it came to Donny, who hesitated for a moment, then took a toke,
holding it, fighting the fire. He'd had quite the habit for a few
months in "Nam, but had broken it. Now, the familiar sweetness rushed
into his lungs, and his head began to buzz. The world seem to come
aglow with possibility. He exhaled his lungful.
Enough, he thought. I don't need more of that shit.
Capitol Hill had the sense of a small town in Iowa, under leafy trees
that rustled in the night breeze. Then, through a break in the trees,
he suddenly saw the Capitol, its huge white dome arc-lit and blazing in
the night.
"They sacrifice virgins in there," one of the boys said, "to the gods
of war. Every night. You can hear them scream."
Maybe it was the grass, but Donny had to smile. They did sacrifice
virgins, but not in there. They sacrificed them ten thousand miles
away in buffalo shit-water rice paddies.
"Donny," said Crowe.
"Can you call in artillery? We have to destroy the place to save
it."
Again, maybe it was the grass.
"
"Ah, Shotgun-Zulu-Three,"
" he improvised, " I have a fire mission for you, map grid
four-niner-six, six-five-four at Alpha seven-oh-two-five, we are hot
with beaucoup bad guys, request Hotel Echo, fire for effect, please.""
"Cool," one of the kids said.
"What's Hotel Echo?"
"High explosive," said Donny.
"As opposed to frags or white phosphorous."
"Cool as shit!" the boy responded.
Music announced the site of the party far earlier than any visual
confirmation. As at the Hawk and Dove, it blasted out into the night,
hard, psychedelic rock beating the dark back and the devil away. He'd
heard the same stuff over there, though; that was the funny thing. The
young Marines loved the rock. It went everywhere with them, and if
their tough noncoms hadn't stayed on their asses, they'd have played it
on ambush patrols.
"I wonder if Trig is here," one of the boys said.
"You never can tell with Trig," Crowe replied.
"Who's Trig?" Donny asked again.
The party didn't seem at all unlike any other party Donny had attended
back at the University of Arizona, except that the hair was longer.
Milling people of all sorts.
The bar scene, though crammed into smaller, hotter rooms. The smell of
grass, sickly sweet, heavy in the air.
Ho and Che on the walls. In the bathroom, where Donny went to piss,
even an NVA flag, though one manufactured in Schenectady, not downtown
Haiphong. He had a rogue impulse to burn it, but that would sure blow
the gig now.
And really: it was only a flag.
The kids were his own age, some younger, with a few middle-aged men
hanging around with that intense, longhaired look that the DC crowd so
liked. Judging from the hair, only he and Crowe represented the United
States Marines, though Crowe was far from an ambassador. He was
telling some people a familiar story of how he almost got out of the
draft by playing psycho at his physical.
"I'm nude," he was saying, "except for this cowboy hat. I'm very
polite and everybody's very polite to me at first. I do everything
they ask me to do. I bend and spread, I carry my underwear in a little
bag, I smile and call everybody sir. I just won't take off my cowboy
hat.
"Uh, son, would you mind taking off that hat?"
"I can't," I explain.
"I'll die if I take off my cowboy hat." See, the key is to stay
32 STEPHEN HUNTER
polite. If you act nuts they know you're faking. Pretty soon they got
majors and generals and colonels and all screaming at me to take off my
cowboy hat. I'm nude in this little room with all these guys, but I
will not take off my cowboy hat. What a fuckin' hero I am! What a
John Wayne!
They're screaming and I'm just saying, "If I take off my cowboy hat,
I'll die."
" "So you weren't drafted?"
"Well, they kicked me out. It took weeks for the paperwork to catch
up, and by that time, my uncle had cut a deal with the Man to get me
into a slot in the Marines that wouldn't rotate to the "Nam. You know,
when this is over, all those charges will be dropped. Nobody will
care.
We'll write the whole thing off. That's why anybody who lets
themselves get wasted is a total moron. Like, for what?"
Good question, Donny wondered. For what? He tried to remember the
boys in his platoon in 1/3 Bravo who'd gotten zapped in his seven
months with them. It was hard.
And who did you count? Did you count the guy who got hit by an Army
truck in Saigon? Maybe his number was up. Maybe he would have gotten
hit back on the street corner in Sheboygan. Would you count him? Donny
didn't know.
But you definitely had to count the kid--what was his name? what was
his name?--who stepped on a Betty and got his chest shredded. That was
the first one Donny remembered.
He was such a new dick then. The guy just lay back. So much blood.
People gathered around him, exactly in the way you weren't supposed to,
and he seemed remarkably calm before he died. But nobody read any
letter home to Mom afterward in which he told everybody how great the
platoon was and how they were fighting for democracy. They just zipped
him up and left him. He remembered the face, not the name. A sort of
porky kid.
Pancakey face. Small eyes. Didn't have to shave. What was his
name?
Another one got hit by a rifle bullet. He screamed and bucked and
yelled and nobody could quiet him. He seemed so indignant. It was so
unfair! Well, it was unfair.
Why me, he seemed to be asking his friends, why not you?
He was thin and rangy, from Spokane. Didn't talk much.
Always kept his rifle clean. Was bowlegged. What was his name? Donny
didn't remember.
There were a few more, but nothing much. Donny hadn't fought in any
big battles or taken part in any big operations with dramatic code
names that made the news.
Mostly it was walking, scared every day you'd get jumped or you'd trip
something off, or you'd just collapse under the weight of it. So much
of it was boring, so much of it was dirty, so much of it was debasing.
He didn't want to go back. He knew that. Man, if you let them send
you back at this late date, when units were being rotated back to the
world all the time during "Vietnamization," and you got wasted, you
were a moron.
Suddenly someone bumped him hard.
"Oh, sorry," he said, stepping back.
"Yeah, you are," someone said.
Where had this action come from? There were three of them, but big
like he was. Hair pouring from their heads, bright bands around their
skulls, dressed in faded jeans and Army fatigue shirts.
"You're the Marine asshole, right? The lifer?"
"I am a Marine," he said.
"And I'm probably an asshole.
But I'm not a lifer."
The three fixed him with unsteady glares. Their eyes burned with hate.
One of them rocked a little, the team leader, with his fist wrapped
tightly around the neck of a bottle of gin. He held it like a
weapon.
"Yeah, my brother came back in a little sack because of lifer fucks
like you," he said.
"I'm very sorry for your brother," said Donny.
"Asshole lifer got him greased so he could make lieutenant colonel."
"Shit like that happens. Some joker wants a stripe so
34 STEPHEN HUNTER
he sends his guys up the hill. He gets the stripe and they get the
plastic bag."
"Yeah, but it happens mainly 'cause assholes like you let it happen,
'cause you don't have the fuckin' guts to say no to the Man. If you
had the guts to say no, the whole thing stops."
"Did you say no to the Man?"
"I didn't have to," the boy said proudly.
"I was 1-Y. I was out of it."
Donny thought about explaining that it didn't matter what your
classification was, if you obeyed it, you were obeying orders and
working for the Man. Some guys just got better orders than others. But
then the boy took a step toward Donny, his face drunkenly pugnacious.
He gripped the bottle even harder.
"Hey, I didn't come here to fight," said Donny.
"I just drifted in with some guys." He looked around to find himself
in the center of a circle of staring kids. Even the music had stopped
and the smoke had ceased seething in the air.
Crowe had, of course, totally disappeared.
"Well, you drifted into the wrong fucking party, man," said the boy,
and made as if to take another step, as Donny tried to figure out
whether to pop him or to cut and run to avoid the hassle.
But suddenly another figure dipped between them.
"Whoa," he said, "my brothers, my brothers, let's not lose our holy
cools."
"He's a fucking " said the aggressor.
"He's another kid; you can't blame the whole thing on him any more than
you can blame it on anyone. It's the system, don't you get that?
Jesus, don't you get anythingf" "Yeah, well, you have to start
somewhere."
"Jerry, you cool out. Go smoke a joint or something, man. I'm not
letting any three guys with booze bottles jump any poor grunt who came
by looking to get laid."
"Trig, I " But this Trig laid a hand on Jerry's chest and fixed him
TIME TO HUNT 35
with a glare hot enough to melt most things on earth, and Jerry stepped
back, swallowed and looked at his pals.
"Fuck it," he finally said.
"We were splitting anyhow."
And the three of them turned and stormed out.
Suddenly the music started again--Stones, "Satisfaction"--and the party
came back to life.
"Hey, thanks," said Donny.
"The last thing I need is a fight."
"That's okay," said his new friend.
"I'm Trig Carter, by the way." He put out a hand.
Trig had one of those long, grave faces, where the bones showed through
the tight skin and the eyes seemed to be both moist and hot at the same
moment. He really looked a lot like Jesus in a movie. There was
something radiant in the way he fixed you with his eyes. He had
something rare: immediate likability.
"Howdy," Donny said, surprised the grip was so strong in a man so
thin.
"My name's Fenn, Donny Fenn."
"I know. You're Crowe's secret hero. The Bravo."
"Oh, Christ. I can't be a hero to him. I'm in it till my hitch ends,
then I'm gone forever back to the land of the cacti and the Navajo."
"I've been there. Mourning doves, right? Little white birds, dart
through the arroyos and the brush, really hard to spot, really fast?"
"Oh, yeah," said Donny.
"My dad and I used to hunt them. You've got to use a real light shot,
you know, an eight or a nine. Even then, it's a tough shot."
"Sounds like fun," said Trig.
"But in my case I don't shoot 'em with a gun but with a camera. Then I
paint them."
"Paint them?" This made no sense to Donny.
"You know," Trig said.
"Pictures. I'm actually an avian painter. Really, I've traveled the
world painting pictures of birds."
"Wow!" said Donny.
"Does it pay?"
"A little. I illustrated my uncle's book. He's Roger
36 STEPHEN HUNTER
Prentiss Fuller, Birds of North America. The Yale zoologist?"
"Er, can't say I heard of him."
"He was a hunter once. He went on safari in the early fifties with
Elmer Keith."
This did impress Donny. Keith was a famous Idaho shooter who wrote
books like Elmer Keith's Book of the Sixgun and Elmer Keith on Big Game
Rifles.
"Wow," he said.
"Elmer Keith."
"Roger says Keith was a tiny, bitter little man. He had a terrible
burn as a kid and he was always compensating for it. They had a
falling out. Elmer just wanted to shoot and shoot. He couldn't see
any sense to a limit. Roger doesn't shoot anymore."
"Well, after "Nam, I don't think I will either," Donny said.
"You sound okay for a Marine, Donny. Crowe was right about you. Maybe
you'll join us when you get out."
He smiled, his eyes lighting like a movie star's.
"Well .. ." Donny said, provisionally. Himself a peacenik, smoking
dope, long hair, carrying those cards, chanting "Hell, no, we won't
go"? He laughed at the notion.
"Trig! When did you get here?" It was Crowe and his crowd, now with
girls in tow, all leading what seemed to be a kind of electric ripple
toward Trig.
And in seconds. Trig was gone, borne away on currents of some sort of
celebrity hood that Donny didn't understand.
He turned to a girl standing nearby.
"Hey, excuse me," he said.
"Who is this Trig?"
She looked at him in astonishment.
"Man, what planet are you from?" she demanded, then ran after Trig,
her eyes beaming love.
chapter three
"HP rig Carter!" Commander Bonson exclaimed.
J.
"Yeah, that was it, I couldn't quite remember the last name," said
Donny, who could remember the name very well but couldn't quite bring
himself to say it out loud.
"Seemed like a very nice guy."
Bonson's office was an undistinguished chamber in a World War II-era
tempo still standing in the Washington Navy Yard about a half mile from
Eighth and I, where by dim pretext Donny had been sent the next day for
his debriefing on his first day as spy hunter.
"You saw Trig Carter and Crowe together. Is that right?"
Why did Donny feel so sleazy about all this? He felt clammy, as if
someone were listening. He looked around.
President Nixon glowered down at him from the wall, enjoining him to do
his duty for God and Country. A degree from the University of New
Hampshire added to the solemnity of the occasion. A few ceremonial
photos of Lieutenant Commander Bonson with various dignitaries
completed the decor; the room was otherwise completely bereft of
personality or even much sense of human occupation.
It was preternaturally neat; even the paper clips in the little plastic
box had been stacked, not dumped.
Lieutenant Commander Bonson bent forward, fixing Donny in his dark
glare. He was a thin, dark man with a lot of whiskery shadow on his
face and a sense of complete focus. There was something pilgrim like
about him;
he should have been in a pulpit denouncing miniskirts and the
Beatles.
"Yes, sir," Donny finally said.
"The two of them .. .
and about one hundred other people."
"Where was this again?"
38 STEPHEN HUNTER
"A party. Uh, on C Street, on the Hill. I didn't get the address."
"Three-forty-five C, Southeast," said Ensign Weber.
"Did you check it out, Weber?"
"Yes, sir. It's the home of one James K. Phillips, a clerk to Justice
Douglas and a homosexual, according to the FBI."
"Were most of the people there homosexuals, Fenn?
Was it a homo thing?"
Donny didn't know what to say. It just seemed like a party in
Washington, like any party in Washington, with a lot of young people,
some grass, some beer, music, and fun and hope in the air.
"I wouldn't know, sir."
Bonson sat back, considering. The homosexual thing seemed to hang in
his mind, clouding it for a time. But then he was back on the track.
"So you saw them together?"
"Well, sir, not together, really. In the same crowd.
They knew each other, that was clear. But it didn't seem anything out
of the ordinary."
"Could Crowe have given him any deployment intelligence?"
Donny almost laughed, but Bonson was so set in his glare that he knew
to release the pressure he felt building in his chest would have been a
big mistake.
"I don't think so," he said.
"Not that I saw. I mean, does Crowe have any deployment intelligence?
I don't.
How would he?"
But Bonson didn't answer.
He turned to Weber.
"We've got to get closer," he said.
"We've got to get him inside the cell. Trig Carter. Imagine that."
"A wire, sir? Could we wire him?" asked Weber.
Oh, Christ, thought Donny. I'm really not going anywhere with a tape
recorder taped to my belly.
"No, not unless we could get time to set it up quickly.
TIME TO HUNT 39
He's got to stay fluid, flexible, quick on his feet. The wire won't
work, not under these circumstances."
"It was just a suggestion, sir," said Weber.
"Well, Fenn," said Bonson, "you've made a fine start.
But too many times we see fast starters are slow finishers.
You've got to really press now. You've got to make Crowe your pal,
your friend, do you see? He's got to trust you;
that's how you'll crack this thing. Trig Carter, Weber. Isn't that
the damndest thing you ever heard?"
"Sir, if I may ask, who is Trig Carter?"
"Show him, Weber."
Weber looked into a file and slid something over to Donny. Donny
recognized it at once: he'd seen it a thousand times probably, without
really noticing it. It was just part of the living-room imagery of the
war, the scenes that were unforgettable.
It was a cover of Time magazine late in the hot summer of 1968:
Chicago, the Democratic National Convention, the "police riot" outside
on the last night. There was Trig, in shirtsleeves, a gush of blood
cascading down from an ugly welt in his short, neat hair. He was bent
under the weight of another kid he was carrying out of the fog of tear
gas and the blurs that were Chicago policemen pounding anything that
could be pounded. Trig looked impossibly noble and heroic, impossibly
courageous. His eyes were screwed up in the pain of the CS gas, he was
bloody and sweaty, and the veins on his neck stood out from all the
effort he had invested in carrying the dazed, bloody, traumatized boy
out of the zone of violence. He looked like any of a dozen insanely
heroic Corpsmen Donny had seen pull the same thing off amid not cops
but tracer fire and grenades and Bettys over in the Land of Bad Things,
none of whose pictures had ever ended up on the cover of Time
magazine.
the spirit of resistance, said the cover.
"He's their Lancelot," said Weber.
"Was beaten up in Selma by the Alabama State Police, got his picture on
the cover of Time in sixty-eight at the convention. He's been
40 STEPHEN HUNTER
everywhere in the Movement since then. One of the early peace freaks,
a rich kid from an old Maryland family. Just came back from a year in
England, studying drawing at Oxford. Harvard grad, some kind of
painter, isn't that it?"
"Avian painter, sir. That's what he told me."
"Yes. Birds. Loves birds. Very odd," said Bonson.
"Very smart boy," continued Weber.
"But then, that seems to be the profile. It was the profile in
England, too.
The smart ones, they can figure everything out, see through everything.
They'll be the elite after the revolution.
Anyhow, he's big in the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, a
kind of glamorous roving ambassador and organizer. Lives here in DC,
but works the campus circuit, goes where the action is. The FBI's been
monitoring him for years. He'd be exactly the kind of man who'd get to
Crowe and turn him into a spy. He'd be perfect. He's exactly who
we're looking for."
"Fenn, I can't emphasize this enough. You've got less than two weeks
until the big raft of May Day demonstrations is set. Crowe will be
pressed to uncover deployment intelligence, Carter will be on him for
results. You've got to monitor them very carefully. If you can't get
tape or photos, you may have to testify in open court against them."
Donny felt a cold stone drop in his stomach: he saw an image, himself
on the stand, putting the collar on poor Crowe. It made him sick.
"I know you'll make a fine witness," Bonson was saying.
"So begin to discipline your mind: remember details, events,
chronologies. You might write a coded journal so you can recall
things. Remember exact sentences. Get in the habit of making a time
check every few minutes. If you don't want to take notes, imagine
taking notes, because that can fix things in your mind. This is very
important work, do you understand?"
"Ah--" "Doubts? Do I see doubts? You cannot doubt." Bonson leaned
forward until he and he alone filled the world.
TIME TO HUNT 41
"Just as you could have no doubters in a rifle platoon, you can have no
doubters on a counter intelligence mission.
You have to be on the team, committed to the team. The doubts erode
your discipline, cloud your judgment, destroy your memory, Fenn. No
doubts. That's the kind of rigor I need from you."
"Yes, sir," said Donny, hating himself as the world's entire melancholy
weight settled on his strong young shoulders.
Crowe was particularly derelict that afternoon in riot control drill.
"It's so hot, Donny. The mask! Can't we pretend we're wearing our
masks?"
"Crowe, if you have to do it for real, you'll want to be wearing a mask
because otherwise the CS will make you a crybaby in a second. Put the
mask on with the other guys."
Muttering darkly, Crowe slid the mask over his head, then clapped his
two-pound camouflaged steel pot over his skull.
"Squad, on my command, form up shouted Donny, watching as his casket
team, plus assorted others from Bravo Company assigned riot duty in
Third Squad, formed a line. They looked like an insect army: their
eyes hidden behind the plastic lenses of the masks, their faces made
insectoid and ominous by the mandible like filter can, all in Marine
green, with their 782 gear, their pistols, their M14s held at the high
port.
"Squad, fix ... bayonets'." and the rifle butts slammed into the
ground, the blades were drawn from their scabbards and in a single
clanking, machinelike click locked onto the weapon muzzles. Except
one.
Crowe's bayonet skittered away. He had dropped it.
"Crowe, you idiot, give me fifty of the finest!"
Crowe was silenced by his clammy mask, but his body posture radiated
sullen anger. He fell from the formation.
"At ease," said Donny.
The squad relaxed.
42 STEPHEN HUNTER
"One, Corporal, two, Corporal, three, Corporal," Crowe narrated through
the mask as he banged out the push-ups. Donny let him go to fifteen,
then said, "All right, Crowe, back in line ASAP. Let's try it
again."
Crowe shot him a bitter look as he regathered his gear and rejoined the
line.
Donny took them through it again. It was an extremely hot day and the
darkness of his mood was such that he worked the men hard, breaking
them down into standard line formation, flank marching them into an
arrowhead riot element, counting cadence to govern their approach to
the imagined riot, wheeling them left and right, getting them to fix
and unfix bayonets over and over again.
He worked them straight through a break as great wet patches discolored
their utilities until finally the platoon sergeant came over and said,
"All right, Corporal, you can give them a break."
"Yes, Sergeant!" yelled Donny, and even the sergeant, a shit-together
but fairly decent lifer named Ray Case, gave him a look.
"Fall out. Smoke em if you got 'em. If you don't got 'em, borrow 'em.
If you can't borrow 'em, then get outta town because your buddies
can't stand you."
Then, instead of mingling with the silently furious, sweating men, he
himself walked over to the shade of the barracks and declared himself
off-limits. Let 'em grouse.
But soon Crowe detached himself and came over, cheekily enough,
secretly irritating Donny.
"Man, you really put me through it."
"I put the squad through it, Crowe, not you. We may have to do this
shit for real next weekend."
"Oh, shit, none of those guys is going to march with bayonets into a
bunch of kids with flowers in their hair where the girls are showing
their tits. We'll just hang here or go sit in some fucking building
like the last time. What, you figure, the Treasury again?"
Donny let the question simmer in his mind a bit. Then
TIME TO HUNT 43
he said, "Crowe, I don't know. I just go where they tell me."
"Donny, I got it straight from Trig. They're not even coming into DC.
The whole thing's going to the Pentagon.
Let the Army handle it. We won't even leave the barracks."
"If you say so."
"I thought we were--" "Crowe, I had fun last night. But out here, in
the daylight, I'm still the corporal and squad leader, you're still a
PFC, so you still play by my rules. Don't ever call me Donny in front
of the men while we're on drill, okay?"
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry. Anyhow, some of us were going to Trig's
tonight. I thought you might want to come.
You got to admit, he's an interesting guy."
"He's okay for a peacenik."
"Trig's not like that. He was beat up in Selma; he was a fucking hero
in Chicago. Man, they say he went out twenty-five times and dragged
kids in from the pigs. He saved lives."
"I don't know," said Donny.
"It'll be fun. You need to relax more, Corporal."
Donny actually wished the invitation hadn't come; it was his half plan,
dimly formed, just to let his secret assignment peter out, go away in
vagueness and missed opportunities.
But here it was, big and hairy: a chance to do his job.
1 rig, as it turned out, lived off upper Wisconsin, just above
Georgetown, in a row house that was one in a tatty block of similar
dwellings. The house was crowded; it could be no other way. The
furniture was threadbare, almost ascetic. Still, the stench of grass
almost levitated the house and made Donny's nostrils flare when he
entered.
Everything was familiar but unfamiliar: lots of books, a wall full of
shelved albums (classical and jazz, though; no Jimi H. or Bob D.). But
also, no posters, no NVA flags, no commie posters. Instead: birds.
44 STEPHEN HUNTER
Jesus, the guy was a freak for birds. Some were his own paintings, and
he had a considerable talent for capturing the glory of a bird in
flight, all the details perfect, all the feathers precisely laid out,
the colors all the hues of miracle. But others were older and darker,
muted things that appeared to have been painted in another century.
Somehow he found himself talking to a girl about birds and told her
that he, uh, hunted them. It wasn't the right thing to say but she was
one of those snooty Eastern ones, who wore her hair long and straight
and had a pinched look to her.
"You kill them?" she said.
"Those little things?"
"Well, where I'm from they're considered good eating."
"Don't you have stores'!"
This wasn't going too well. This grouping was smaller and more
intimate than last night's and everybody seemed to know everybody. He
felt a little isolated, and looked for Crowe, because even Crowe would
have been a welcome ally. But Crowe was nowhere to be seen. And on
top of that he felt incorrectly dressed: he was in chinos and Jack
Purcells, plus a madras sport shirt. Everyone here wore jeans and work
shirts, had long, exotic hair, beards, and seemed somehow in some kind
of Indian conspiracy against the ways that he felt it was proper for a
young man to dress. It made him uncomfortable.
Some spy, he thought.
"Don't give Donny a hard time," said someone--Trig, of course, simply
appearing dramatically, an event for which he had a little gift.
Trig was more moderate today, his hair back in a ponytail, which he
wore over a blue button-down shirt and, like Donny, a pair of chinos.
He also had an expensive pair of decoratively perforated oxfords on, in
some exotic, rich color.
"Trig, he shoots little animals."
"Sweetie, men have been hunting and eating birds for a million years.
Both the birds and the men are still here."
TIME TO HUNT 45
"I think it's strange."
Donny almost blurted, No, it's really fun, but held himself in.
"Well, anyway," said Trig, drawing Donny away.
"I'm glad you could come. I don't know who half these guys are myself.
People just hang out here. They drink my beer, smoke grass, get stoned
or laid and move on. I'm hardly here, so I really don't care. But it's
cool that you came."
"Thanks, I didn't have much to do. Well, actually, I wanted to talk to
you."
"Oh? Well, go ahead."
"It's Crowe. You know, he's really borderline in the unit, and he
keeps fucking up. I know he's a smart kid.
But if he gets booted from the company, his tour is no longer
stabilized, and he could go on levy to the "Nam.
And I don't think he'd look too good in a body bag."
"I'll talk to him."
"As he said, anyone who gets wasted this late in a lost war is a
moron."
"I'll mention it."
"Cool."
Trig was also cool. Donny could see how he'd be a good man in a
firefight, and while everybody wept or cowered, he'd be the one to go
out and start bringing the people in from the beatings.
"Can I ask you?" he suddenly said to Donny, fixing him in one of those
deep Trig looks.
"Do you doubt it?
Do you ever wonder why, or if it was worth it? Or are you foursquare
the whole way, the whole nine yards?"
"Fuck no," said Donny.
"Sure, of course I doubt it.
But my father fought in a war and so did his father, and I was raised
just to see that as a price for living in a great country. So ... so I
went. I did it, I came back, for better or worse."
They had now wandered into the kitchen, where Trig opened his
refrigerator and got a beer out for Donny and then took one for
himself. It was a foreign beer, Heineken, from a dark, cold green
bottle.
46 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Come on, this way. We'll get away from these idiots."
Trig took Donny out on a back porch, toward two deck chairs. Donny was
surprised to see they were on a little hill and that before him the
elevation fell away; across the falling roofs, in the distance he was
surprised to see the huddled buildings of Georgetown University,
looking medieval in profile.
"I forget what real people are like," Trig said, "that's why it's cool
to talk to you. Nobody's more hypocritical and swinish than the pretty
boys and the fairies of the peace movement. But I know how important
soldiers can be. I was in the Congo in sixty-four--I'd gone with my
uncle to paint the Upper Congo swallowtail darter. We were in
Stanleyville when some guy named Gbenye declared it a people's republic
and took about one thousand of us hostage and set out to 'purify' the
population of its imperialist vermin. Murder squads were everywhere.
Man, I saw some shit. What people do to each other. So anyhow, we're
in this compound, the Congolese Army is fighting its way closer and the
rumor is the rebels are going to kill us all. Holy shit, we're going
to die and nobody gives a shit about us. It's that simple. But when
the door is kicked down, it isn't rebels. It's tattooed, tough ass
kick-butt Belgian paratroopers. They were the meanest pricks I ever
saw in my life and I loved them like you wouldn't believe. Nobody
would stand against the Belgian Airborne. And they got us out in a
convoy, all the white people from the interior. We would have been
butchered. So I'm not one of these assholes who says there's no role
for soldiers. Soldiers saved my life."
"Roger that," said Donny.
"But," said Trig, holding it in the air, "even if I admire courage and
commitment, I have to make a distinction.
Between a moral war and an immoral war. World War II:
moral. Kill Hitler before he kills all the Jews. Kill Tojo before he
turns all the Filipino women into whores. Korea?
Maybe moral. I don't know. Stop the Chinese from
TIME TO HUNT 47
turning Korea into a province. I guess that's moral. I would have
fought in that one."
"But Vietnam. Not moral?"
"I don't know. You tell me."
Trig leaned forward. Another of his little, unsung gifts:
listening. He really wanted to know what Donny thought and he refused
to pigeonhole Donny as a baby killer and Zippo commando.
Donny could not resist this earnest attention.
"What I saw was good American kids trying to do a job they didn't quite
understand. What I saw was kids who thought it was like a John Wayne
movie and got their guts blown out. I was in a place once, a forest or
a former forest. All the leaves were gone, but the trees still stood.
Only, they shined. It was like they were covered in ice. It reminded
me of Vermont. I've never been to Vermont, but it reminded me of it
just the same."
"I think I know where you're headed. I saw the same thing on the
convoy out of Stanleyville."
"Yeah, well, in this case we called in Hotel Echo, on a stand of trees
because we saw movement and thought a unit of gooks was infiltrating
through it. We got 'em, but good. Those were their guts. They were
just pulverized, turned to shiny liquid, and it plastered the stumps
and limbs. Man, I never saw anything like that. Of course it was a
platoon of Army engineers. Twenty-two guys, gone, just like that.
Hotel Echo. It wasn't very pretty."
"Donny, I think you know. Underneath. I can feel you getting there.
You're working on it."
"My girl is already there. She's coming in in this Peace Caravan deal
they got going."
"Good for her. Do you talk about it with her?"
"She says she decided she'd do her part to stop the war when she
visited me in the San Diego Naval Hospital."
"Good for her again. But--are you there?"
Donny couldn't lie. He had no talent for it.
"No. Not yet. Maybe never. It just seems wrong. You
48 STEPHEN HUNTER
have to do what your country tells you. You have to contribute.
It's duty."
Trig was like a confessor: his eyes burned with empathy and drew Donny
forward to reveal more.
"Donny, I know you'd never leave or quit or anything.
I wouldn't ask you to. But consider joining us after you get out. I
think you'll feel much better. And I can't begin to tell you how much
it would mean to us. I hate this idea we're all a bunch of chicken
shits A guy who's been there, won a medal, fought, dedicating himself
to ending it and bringing his buddies home. That's powerful stuff.
I'd be proud to be a part of that."
"I don't know."
"Just think about it. Talk to me, keep in touch. That's all. Just
think about it."
"Donny, my God!" a voice called, and he looked up and saw a dream
coming onto the porch to him. She was thin, blond, athletic, part
tawny cowgirl, part perfect American sweetheart, and he felt helpless
as he always did when he saw her.
It was Julie.
chapter four
W" hat's wrong?" she said.
"Why didn't you call me?"
"I did. And I wrote you, too."
"Oh, shit."
"Can we leave? Can we go someplace? Donny, I haven't seen you since
Christmas.""I don't know. I'm here with this PFC from my squad and I
sort of promised I'd, uh, look after him. I can't leave him."
"Donny!"
"I can't explain it! It's very complicated."
He kept looking off, back into the house as if he was trying to keep
his eye on something.
"Look, let me go tell Crowe I'm leaving. I'll be right back. We'll go
somewhere."
He disappeared back inside the house.
Julie stood there in the Washington dark on a street above Georgetown
as the traffic veered along Wisconsin.
Pretty soon Peter Fan-is came out. Peter was a tall, bearded graduate
student in sociology at the University of Arizona, the head of the
Southwest Regional People's Coalition for Peace and Justice and nominal
honcho of the group of kids he and Julie had shepherded out by Peace
Caravan from Tucson.
"Where's your friend?"
"He'll be back."
"I knew that's what he'd be like. Big, handsome, square."
But then Donny returned, ignoring Peter.
"Hi. It's stupid, but Crowe wants to go to another party and I think I
ought to go with him. I can't .. . It's just .. . I'll get in touch
with you as soon as .. ."
But then he turned, troubled, and before she could say
50 STEPHEN HUNTER
a thing, he said, "Oh, shit, they're leaving. I'll get in touch" and
ran off, leaving the girl he loved behind him.
The next morning, waking early in his room in the barracks, almost an
hour before the 0530 alarm, Donny almost went on sick call. It seemed
the only sane course, the only escape from his troubles. But his
troubles came looking for him.
It was a boneyard day, he knew. His team was up. He had stuff to do.
He skipped breakfast in the chow hall, and instead re-pressed his dress
tunic and trousers, spent a good thirty minutes spit-shining his
oxfords. This was ritual, almost cleansing and purifying.
You put a gob of spit into the black can of polish, and with a scrap of
cotton mixed the black paste and the saliva together, forming a dense
goo. Then you applied just a little dab to the leather and rubbed and
rubbed. You should get a genie for your troubles, you rubbed so
hard.
You rubbed and rubbed, a dab at a time, covering the whole shoe, and
then the other. You let it fry into a dense haze, then went at it
again, with another cotton cloth, went at it like war, snap pity-snap.
It was a lost military art;
they said they were going to bring in patent leather next time because
the young Marines couldn't be trusted to put in the hours. But Donny
was proud of his spit shine, carefully nursed through the long months,
built up over time, until his oxfords gleamed vividly in the sun.
So stupid, he now thought.
So ridiculous. So pointless.
The weather was heavy with the chance of rain and the dogwoods were in
full bloom, another brutal Washington spring day. Arlington's gentle
hills and valleys, full of pink trees and dead boys, rolled away from
the burial site and beyond, like a movie Rome, the white buildings of
the capital of America gleamed even in the gray light. Donny could see
the needle and the dome and the big white house and the weeping Lincoln
hidden in his portico of
TIME TO HUNT 51
marble. Only Jefferson's cute little gazebo was out of sight, hidden
behind an inoffensive, dogwood-and tomb-crazed hill.
The box job was over. It had gone all right, though everybody was
grumpy. For some reason even Crowe had tried hard that day, and
there'd been no slipup as they took L/Cpl. Michael F. Anderson from
the black hearse to the bier to the slow-time march, snapped the flag
off the box, folded it crisply. Donny handed the tricorn of stars to
the grieving widow, a pimply girl. It was always better not to know a
thing about the boy inside. Had L/Cpl. Anderson been a grunt? Had he
been a supply clerk, a helicopter crew member, a military journalist, a
corpsman, combat engineer? Had he been shot, exploded, crushed,
virused or VD'd to death? Nobody knew: he was dead, that was all, and
Donny stood at crisp attention, the poster Marine in his dress blue
tunic, white trousers and white cover, giving a stiff perfect salute to
the wet-nosed, shuddering girl during "Taps." Grief is so ugly. It is
the ugliest thing there is, and he had fucking bathed in it for close
to eighteen long months now. His head ached.
Now it was over. The girl had been led away, and the Marines had
marched smartly back to their bus and climbed aboard for a discreet
smoke. Donny now watched to make certain that if they smoked they took
their white gloves off, for the nicotine could stain them yellow
otherwise.
All complied, even Crowe.
"You want a cigarette, Donny?"
"I don't smoke."
"You should. Relaxes you."
"Well, I'll pass." He looked at his watch, a big Seiko on a chain-mail
strap he'd bought at the naval exchange in Da Nang for $12, and saw
that they had another forty minutes to kill before the next job.
"You ought to hang your coats up," he told the team.
"But don't go outside unless you're buttoned and shined.
Some asshole major might see you, put you on report and
52 STEPHEN HUNTER
off you go to the "Nam. You'd be back for the next box job. Only,
you'd be the one in the box, right, Crowe?"
"Yes, Corporal, sir," Crowe barked, ironic and snide, pretending to be
the shave tail gung-ho lifer he would never even resemble.
"We love our Corps, don't we, Crowe?"
"We love our Corps, Corporal."
"Good man, Crowe," he said.
"Donny?"
It was the driver, looking back.
"Some Navy guys here."
Shit, thought Donny.
"Donny, are you joining the Navy?" Crowe asked.
"You could make & fortune giving jelly rolls in the showers of a
nuclear sub. You could--" Everybody laughed. Give it to Crowe, he was
funny.
"All right, Crowe," said Donny, "I just may put you on report for the
fun of it or kick the shit out of you to save the paperwork. While I
talk to these guys, you give every man on the team a blow job. That's
an order, PFC."
"Yes, Corporal, sir," said Crowe, taking a puff on his cigarette.
Donny buttoned his tunic, pulled on his cover low over his eyes and
stepped outside.
It was Weber, in khakis.
"Good morning, sir," said Donny, saluting.
"Good morning, Corporal," said Weber.
"Would you come over here, please?"
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
As they got out of earshot of the men in the bus, Donny said, "Man,
what the fuck is this all about? I thought I was supposed to be
undercover. This really blows it."
"All right, Fenn, don't get excited. Tell them we're from personnel at
the Pentagon, verifying your RSVN service preparatory to separation.
Very common occurrence, no big deal."
Down the way, in the rear of a tan government Ford,
TIME TO HUNT 53
Lieutenant Commander Bonson sat behind sunglasses, peering ahead.
Donny got in; the engine was running and air-conditioned chill blasted
over him.
"Good morning, Fenn," said the commander. He was a tight-assed,
scrawny lifer in the backseat, sitting ramrod perfect.
"Sir."
"Fenn, I'm going to arrest Crowe today."
Donny sucked a gulp of dry, painful air.
"Excuse me, sir?"
"At 1600 hours, I'll show up at the barracks with a plainclothes
detachment of NIS. We'll incarcerate him at the Navy Yard brig."
"On what charge?"
"Security violation. Naval Penal Code DOD 69455.
Unauthorized possession of classified information. Also, DOD 77-56B,
unauthorized transmission or transference of classified information."
"Ah--on what basis?"
"Your basis, Fenn."
"My basis, sir?"
"Your basis."
"But I haven't reported anything. He went to a couple of parties where
they were flying the NVA flag. Half the apartments in Washington are
hanging the NVA flag. I see it everywhere."
"You can place him in the presence of a known radical organizer."
"Well, I can place myself in that same guy's presence.
And I have no information to suggest he was compromising Marine
security or intelligence. I just saw him talking with a guy, that's
all."
"You can place him in the presence of Trig Carter. Do you know yet who
Trig Carter is?"
"Ah, well, sir, you said--" "Tell him, Weber."
"This is straight from this morning's MDW-Secret Ser54 STEPHEN
HUNTER
vice-FBI briefing, Fenn," said Weber.
"Carter is now suspected of being a member of the Weather
Underground.
He's not 'merely' a peacenik with a placard and some flowers in his
hair, but he's an extreme radical who may be linked to the Weather
Underground's bombing campaign."
Donny was dumbstruck.
"Trig?"
"Don't you see it yet, Corporal?" said Bonson.
"These two bright boys are hatching up something good and bloody for
May Day. We have to stop them. If I collar Crowe, maybe that'll be
enough to save some lives."
"Sir, I saw nothing that would--" "Then get with the fucking program,
Corporal!" Bonson bellowed. He leaned forward, fixing Donny with his
murderous glare. He seemed to bear a grudge against the known world
and was holding Donny responsible for all his disappointments, for all
the women who wouldn't sleep with him, for the fraternities that
wouldn't pledge him, for the schools that wouldn't accept him.
"You think this is some kind of joke, don't you, Corporal?
It's beneath you somehow. So you'll go along to stay out of "Nam, and
just play it cool and cute and rely on your good looks and your charm
to drift through? You won't get your hands dirty, you won't do the
job. Well, that stops today. You have a job. You have a legal order
assigned by higher headquarters and passed down through a legal chain
of command, vetted by your commanding officer. You will perform. Now,
you stop screwing around and pretending like your feelings matter. You
get on this thing and you get inside and you get me what I need, or by
God, I will see to it that you're the only U.S.
Marine on the DMZ when Uncle Ho sends his tanks south to mop up. We'll
get you a Springfield rifle and a campaign hat and see how well you do.
Are you reading me?"
"Loud and clear," said Donny.
"Go do your fucking job," said Bonson icily.
"I'll hold
TIME TO HUNT 55
off a day, maybe two. But get inside before May Day or I'll sweep them
all up and off to Portsmouth and you to the "Nam. Do you copy?"
"I copy, sir," said Donny, blushing at the dressing down.
"Out," said Bonson, signifying the interview was over.
"""You okay?"
"I'm fine," Donny said.
"You look not-cool."
"I'm cool."
"Well, a bunch of us were going over to this party in G-town, Donny. I
found out about it from Trig."
Oh Christ, Donny thought, as the solicitous Crowe loomed over him in
the upstairs barracks room where the off-base men kept their huge gray
lockers and were now stripping down after a hot afternoon in the
boneyard.
"Crowe, you know we may be on alert at any time. Is your riot gear
outstanding? What about steaming and pressing your tunic, washing out
your dark socks, and spending an hour or two on that spit shine, which
has begun to look a little dim. That's what you ought to be doing."
"Yeah, well," said Crowe, "believe me on this one, I know. We're not
going on alert till 2400 tomorrow night."
Donny almost pointed out that if you said "2400" you didn't have to say
"night," but Crowe wasn't stoppable at that point.
"And we'll just hang around here. We may get on trucks and, probably
on Saturday, we'll deploy to a building near the White House. But
it'll be a short deployment.
All the action's going on across the river. The whole point of this
one is to converge on the Pentagon and close it down. Trig told me."
"Trig told you? He told you about the deployment?
Man, that's classified. Why the hell would he know?"
"Don't ask me. Trig knows everything. He has entree everywhere. He
probably is having cocktails with J. Edgar
56 STEPHEN HUNTER
himself right as we speak. By the way, did you know Hoover was a
fruit? He's a goddamn fruit} He hangs out in Y's and shit."
"Crowe, you're not telling Trig shit, are you? I mean, it might seem
like a joke to you, but you could get into deep, serious green crap
that way."
"Man, what do I know? Little Eddie Crowe's just a grunt. He knows
nothing."
"Crowe, I'm not kidding."
"Is someone asking about me?"
"So where's this party?"
"Shouldn't you be trying to find your girl? She didn't look too happy
when you bailed out on her last night to hang out with us. And if I
know my horny hippie peace freaks, that bearded guy hanging on her
shirttails has a serious case of the please-fuck-mes. You may have to
call in a fire mission on him. Hotel Echo."
"Nobody's asking about you."
"
"Cause if they are, here's my advice: give me up. I ain't worth shit.
Seriously, Donny, roll over on me in a second. If it's you or me,
buddy, choose you. It would be a shame any other way."
"Eddie, you're full of shit. Now, where's this party? I need a
fucking keg of beer."
"Maybe Trig can find your girl."
"Maybe he can."
They showered and dressed, and signed out with a warning from the duty
NCO to call in every couple of hours to make sure the company hadn't
gone on alert.
Sure enough, Crowe's obedient buddies waited just outside the barracks'
main gate, on Eighth Street. They climbed in the old Corvair.
"Hey, Donny."
"Cool. Donny, the hero."
He could hardly remember the names. He had a splitting headache. He
had told a lie, direct and flat out. Nobody is asking about you.
But goddammit, how had Crowe known so much?
TIME TO HUNT 57
Why had he asked Donny the other day where they'd deploy?
Why was all this bad shit happening anyway? And what about Julie? She
was camping in some muddy field with what's his face, and he hadn't
even really talked to her. She hadn't called and left a number,
either. Man, it was all coming down.
But when they got there, Trig came over and greeted them, and when
Crowe told him Donny's situation, he said it would be no problem.
"Sure," he said.
"Let me make a call." He went off, and Donny sat among a bunch of
turned-out Georgetown kids, dressed like young Republicans, while
Crowe, in his hair-hiding boonie cap, worked a girl who didn't work him
back. Presently, Trig returned.
"Okay, let's go," he said.
"You found her?"
"Well, I found out where the University of Arizona kids are camping.
That's where she'd be, right?"
"Right," said Donny.
"Okay, I'll run you over."
Donny paused. Was he supposed to be looking after Crowe? But now he'd
set this thing up, and if he hung with Crowe it would look very
strange. And he was supposed to watch Crowe with Trig, right? And if
he was with Trig, then Crowe couldn't be giving up any secrets, could
he?
"Great," said Donny.
"Just let me get my book," said Trig. He disappeared for a second,
then came back with a large, really filthy-looking sketchbook. It had
the sense of a treasured relic.
"Never go anyplace without this. I might see an eastern swallowtail
mud lark He laughed at himself, showing white teeth.
Outside, Trig gestured to the inevitable Trigmobile, a TR-6, bright
red, its canvas roof down.
"Cool wheels," said Donny, hopping in.
"I picked it up a little while ago in England," he said.
"I got burned out on peace shit. I took a little sabbatical,
58 STEPHEN HUNTER
went to London, spent some time in Oxford. The Ruskin School of
Drawing. Bought this baby."
"You must be loaded."
"Oh, I think there's money in the family. Not my father;
he doesn't make a penny. He's in State, planning some tiny part of the
war, the economic infrastructure of the province of Quang Tri. What
does your dad do?" Trig asked.
"My dad was a rancher. He worked like hell and never made a penny. He
died poor."
"But he died clean. In our family, we don't work. The money works. We
play. Working for something you believe in, that's the best. That's
the maximum charge. And if you can have a good time at it, man, that's
really cool."
Donny said nothing. But a darkness settled on him: he was here as a
Judas, wasn't he? He'd sell Trig out for thirty pieces of silver, or
rather three stripes and no trip back to the Land of Bad Things. He
looked over at Trig.
The wind was blowing the slightly older man's hair back lushly, like a
cape streaming behind a horseman. Trig wore Ray-Ban sunglasses and had
one of those high, beautiful foreheads. He looked like a young god on
a good day.
This guy was Weather Underground? This guy would bomb things, blow up
people, that sort of stuff? It didn't seem possible. By no reach of
his imagination could he see Trig as conspiratorial. He was too much
at the center of things; the world had given itself to him too easily
and too eagerly.
"Could you kill anyone?" Donny asked.
Trig laughed, showing white teeth.
"What a question! Wow, I've never been asked that one!"
"I killed seven men," Donny said.
"Well, if you hadn't have killed them, would they have killed you?"
"They were trying to!"
"So, there you have it. You made your decision. But
TIME TO HUNT 59
no, no, I couldn't. I just can't see it. For me, too much would die.
I'd be better off dead myself than having killed anything. That's just
what I believe. I've believed it ever since I looked in a house in
Stanleyville and saw twenty-five kids cut to pieces. I can't even
remember if it's because they were rebels or government. They probably
didn't know. Right then: no more killing. Stop the killing.
Just like the man says, all we are saying is give peace a chance."
"Well, it's hard to give it a chance when a guy is whacking away at you
with an AK-47."
Trig laughed.
"You have me there, partner," he said merrily.
But then he said, "Sure, anybody gets that kind of slack. But you
wouldn't have shot into that ditch in My Lai like those other guys did.
You would have walked away. Hot blood, cold blood. Hell, you're a
cowboy. You were trained to shoot in self-defense. You shot
morally."
Donny didn't know what to say. He just stared ahead glumly until in
the falling light they sped through downtown, past the big government
buildings still shiny in the fading sun, along the park-lined river and
at last reached West Potomac Park, just beyond Jefferson's classy
monument.
Welcome to the May Tribe.
On one side of the street, eight or nine cop cars were parked, and DC
cops in riot gear watched in sullen knots.
Across the street, equally sullen, knots of hippie kids in jeans and
oversized fatigue coats and long flowing hair watched back. It was a
stare-down; nobody was winning.
Trig's presence registered immediately and the kids parted, suddenly
grinning, and Trig drove the Triumph through them and down an asphalt
road that led toward the river, some playing fields, some trees. But
it was more like Sherwood Forest than any college campus. The meadows
streamed with kids in tents, kids at campfires, kids stoned, playing
Frisbee, singing, smoking, eating,
60 STEPHEN HUNTER
necking, bathing topless in the river. Port-a-pots had been put up
everywhere, bright blue and smelly.
"It's the gathering of the tribes," said Donny.
"It's the gathering of our generation," said Trig.
Being with Trig was like being with Mick Jagger. He knew everybody,
and at least three or four times he had to stop the Triumph and clamber
out as proteges came upon him for hugs or advice, for gossip or news,
or just to be with him. Astonishing thing: he remembered everybody's
name. Everybody's. He never fumbled, he never forgot, he never made a
mistake. He seemed to inflate in the love that was thrust upon him, by
boy and girl, man and woman, even some old bearded, be-sandaled
radicals who looked as if they'd probably protested World War I, too.
"Boy, they love you," Donny said.
"I've just been riding this circuit for seven long years.
You get to know folks. I am tired, though. After this weekend, I'm
going to crash at a friend's farm out in Germantown. Paint some birds,
blow some grass, just chill.
You ought to bring Julie, if she's still here, and come out.
Route thirty-five, north of Germantown. Wilson, the mailbox says.
Here, here, I think this is it."
Donny saw her almost immediately. She had camouflaged herself in some
kind of Indian full-length dress and wore her hair up, pinned with a
Navajo silver brooch. He had given it to her. It cost him $75.
The asshole kid Farris was near her, though he wasn't talking to her.
He was just watching her from a ways away, utterly mesmerized.
"Hi," Donny called.
"I brought Young Lochinvar from out of the West," Trig said.
"Oh, Donny."
"Enjoy," said Trig.
"Let me know when you want to get out of here. I'll go listen to Peter
Farris whine for a while."
But Donny wasn't listening. He looked full into the person that was
Julie, and his heart broke all over again.
TIME TO HUNT 61
Every time he saw her was like a first time. His breath came in little
spurts. He felt himself lighting up inside. He gave her a hug.
"I'm sorry I wasn't making much sense last night. I couldn't put it
together fast enough. You know how slow I am."
"Donny. I called the barracks."
"Sometimes those messages get through, sometimes they don't. I was
just all out of joint yesterday."
"What's going on?"
"Ah, it's too complicated to explain. It's nothing I can't handle. How
are you? God, sweetie, it's so good to see you."
"Oh, I'm fine. This camping stuff I could do without. I need a
shower. Where's the nearest Holiday Inn?"
"When this is all over, don't go back," he suddenly blurted, as if
finally seeing a path that made some sense.
"Stay here with me. We'll get married!"
"Donny! What about the big church wedding? What about all my mother's
friends? What about the country club?"
"I--" and then he saw she was joking, and she saw he was not.
"I want us to get married," he said.
"Right now."
"Donny, I want to marry you so much I think I'll die from it."
"We'll do it after this weekend thing."
"Yes. I'll marry you as soon as it's over. I'll move into an
apartment. I'll find work. I'll--" "No, then I want you to go home
and finish your degree.
I'll go for the early out and I'll move back home.
There'll be G.I. Bill money. I can work part-time. We'll get some
kind of married-student housing. It'll be great fun! And you can tell
your mother we'll have all the parties then, so we'll keep her happy
too."
"What brought this on?"
"Nothing. I just realized how important you are to me.
I didn't want this getting away from me. I was an asshole
62 STEPHEN HUNTER
last night. I wanted to put us back together as the first priority.
When I get out, I'll even help you in this peace stuff. We'll stop the
war. You and me. It'll be great."
They walked a bit, amid kids their own ages, but stoned and wild, just
celebrating the youthfulness of their lives in a great merry adventure
in Washington, DC, stopping the war and getting stoned and laid in the
same impulse.
Donny felt isolated from it terribly: he wasn't a part of it. And he
didn't feel as if he were a part of the Marine Corps anymore.
"Okay," he finally said, "I ought to be getting back.
We may be on alert. If not, can I come by tomorrow?"
"I'll try and break off tomorrow if nothing's happening here. We don't
even know ourselves what's going on. They say we're going to march to
the Pentagon over the weekend.
More theater."
"Please be careful."
"I will."
"I'll figure out what we have to do to get married legally.
It might be better to hide it from the Corps. They're all assholes.
Then after it's done, the paperwork will catch up to us."
"Donny, I love you. Ever since that date when you were with Peggy
Martin and I realized I hated her for being with you. Ever since
then."
"We will have a wonderful life. I promise."
Then he saw someone approaching him swiftly. It was Trig, with Peter
Farris and several other acolytes following in his wake.
"Hey," he called, "it just came over the radio. The Military District
of Washington has just declared a full alert and all personnel are
supposed to report to their duty stations."
"Oh, shit," said Donny.
"It's beginning," said Julie.
chapter five
A flare floated in the night. Lights throbbed and swept.
The gas was not so bad now, and the mood was generous, even
adventurous. It had the air of a huge camp-out, a jamboree of some
sort. Who was in charge? Nobody.
Who made these decisions? Nobody. The thing just happened, almost
miraculously, by the sheer osmosis of the May Tribe.
At the Pentagon almost nothing had happened. It was all theater. By
the time Julie and Peter and their knot of Arizona crusaders actually
got onto government property, the word had come back that the Army and
the police weren't arresting anybody and they could stand on the grass
in front of the huge ministry of war forever and nothing would happen.
It was determined by someone that the Pentagon itself wasn't a choke
point, and it made more sense, therefore, to occupy the bridges before
the morning rush hour and in that way close down the city and the
government. Others would besiege the Justice Department, another
favorite target of opportunity.
So now they marched along, past the big Marriott Hotel on the right,
toward the Fourteenth Street Bridge just ahead. Julie had never seen
anything like this: it was a movie, a battle of joy, a stage show,
every pep rally and football game she had ever been to. Excitement
thrummed in the moist air; overhead, police and Army helicopters
buzzed.
"God, have you ever seen anything like this?" she said to Peter.
He replied, "You can't marry him."
"Oh, Peter."
"You can't. You just can't."
"I'm going to marry him next week."
"You probably won't be out of jail next week."
64 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Then I'll marry him the week after."
"They won't let him."
"We'll do it secretly."
"There's too much important work to be done."
They passed the Marriott, maybe fifty abreast and a half-mile long, a
mass of kids. Who led them? A small knot at the front with bullhorns
of the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice; but more
realistically, their own instincts led them. The professional
organizers merely harnessed and marginally directed the generational
energy.
Meanwhile, the smell of grass rose in the air, and the sound of
laughter; now and then a news helicopter would float down from the sky,
hover and plaster them with bright light. They'd wave and dance and
chant.
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR
WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR
or
HO, HO, HO CHI MINH
N-L-FIS GONNA WIN
or
END THE WAR NOW
END THE WAR NOW.
That's when the first tear gas hit.
It was acrid and biting and its overwhelming power to disorient could
not be denied. Julie felt her eyes knit in pain, and the world
suddenly began to whirl about. The air itself became the enemy.
Screams rose, and the sound of panic and confusion spread. Julie
dropped to her knees, coughing hard. Nothing existed for a second but
the pain searing her lungs and the immense crushing power of the gas.
But she stayed there with a few others, though Peter
TIME TO HUNT 65
had disappeared somehow. The evil stuff curled around them, their eyes
now gushing tears. But she thought: I will not move. They cannot make
me move.
Suddenly someone arrived with a bucket full of white washcloths soaked
in water.
"Breathe through this," he screamed, an old vet of this drill, "and it
won't be so hard. If we don't break, they'll fall back. Come on, be
strong, keep the faith."
Some kids fell back, but most just stood there, trying to deal with it.
Someone--no one could ever say who or why--took a step forward, then
another one, and in a second or so those that remained had joined. The
mass moved forward, not on the assault and certainly not to charge, but
just out of the conviction that as young people nothing could deter
them because they were so powerful.
As Julie moved she saw ahead a barricade of DC police cars, their
lights flashing, and behind them Army soldiers, presumably a contingent
of the 7,500 National Guardsmen called up to much hoo-hah in the
newspapers.
They had an insect look, their eyes giant, their snouts long and
descending, like powerful mandibles, their flesh black. The masks, she
realized. They were wearing gas masks, all of them. This infuriated
her.
"You are warned to disperse!" came an amplified voice.
"You are hereby warned to disperse. We will arrest those who do not
disperse. You do not have a parade permit."
"Oh, like that's really crucial," said someone with a laugh.
"Shit, if I'd realized that I never would have come!"
A helicopter floated overhead. To the right, over the Potomac, the sun
began to rise. It was about six, Julie saw, looking at her watch.
"Keep moving!" came a cry.
"One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war!"
Julie hated to curse; she hated it when Donny cursed, but standing
there in the astringent aftermath of the gas, her eyes bawling, her
heart knotted in anger, she picked it up and was not alone.
66 STEPHEN HUNTER
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR
WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR
It was like an anthem, a battle cry. The kids that were left took
their strength from it and began to move more quickly. They came
together in the strobing lights of the police cars and the running
lights of the circling copters.
Those who'd fled regained their heroism, stopped and, moved by the
strength of the few who remained, turned and themselves began to
march.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
More CS gas canisters came at them from the barricade, evil little
grenades spurting viscous clouds of the stuff as they bounced. But the
kids now knew it wouldn't kill them and that the wind would come to
thin it out and take its sting away.
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR
WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR
Julie screamed with all her strength. She cried for pale, poor Donny
in his hospital bed, a sack of plasma over him, his face drawn, his
eyes vacant because of the death that had passed through him. She
screamed for the other boys in that awful place, without legs or hopes,
faces gone, feet gone, penises gone; she cried for the girls she knew
would be bitter forever because their fiances or brothers or husbands
had come home in plastic bags dumped in wooden boxes; she cried for her
father who preached of "duty" but himself had sold insurance through
World War II; she cried for all the beaten kids in all the
demonstrations in the past seven years; she cried for the little girl
running from the napalm cloud, naked and afraid; she cried for the
little man with his hands tied behind him who was shot in the head and
fell to the ground, squirting blood.
TIME TO HUNT 67
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR
WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR
They were all moving forward now, hundreds, thousands.
They were at the police cars, they were beyond the police cars, the
police were fleeing, the National Guard was fleeing.
"Hold it! Hold it, goddammit!" someone was shouting as the melee
halted. Before them was clear bridge, all the way to the Jefferson
Memorial. In the rising light, the Capitol stood before them, and over
some trees the spire of the Washington Monument and off to the right
the Alphaville Blocks of the new HEW complex. But there were no cars
anywhere, and no cops.
"We did it," somebody said.
"We did it!"
Yes, they had. They had taken the bridge, won a great victory. They
had driven the state away. They had claimed the Fourteenth Street
Bridge for the Coalition for Peace and Justice.
They had won.
"We did it," someone was saying next to her; it was Peter.
ncos and squad leaders up front ASAP. NCOs and squad leaders up
front
ASAP!"
The men milled loosely on the broad esplanade of closed-down Route 95
about a half mile on the DC side of the Fourteenth Street Bridge,
behind a barricade of jeeps, police cars, deuce-and-a-halfs. Jefferson
watched in marble splendor from the portside, amid a canopy of dogwoods
and from behind a cage of marble columns. A pale lemon sky oversaw the
scene, and helicopters fluttered through it, making far more noise than
their importance seemed to warrant. It looked like a fifties movie,
the one where the monster has attacked the city and the police and
military set up barricades to impede its progress while in some lab,
white-coated men labor to invent a secret weapon to bring it down.
68 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Napalm," said Crowe helpfully.
"I'd use napalm. Kill about two thousand kids. Roast 'em nice and
tasty-chewie.
Make Kent State look like a picnic. Boy, the war'd be over
tomorrow."
"Don't think the lifers haven't thought of it," said Donny, as he left
to head for the command conference.
He slipped away from Third Squad, slid through other squads and
platoons of young men festooned comically for war, exactly as he was,
who seemed to feel equally foolish with the huge pots banging on their
heads. That was the odd thing about a helmet: when it's not necessary,
it feels completely ludicrous; when it is necessary, it feels like a
gift from God. This was one of the former occasions.
Donny reached the informal conclave where the barracks commander stood
with three men in jumpsuits that said justice deft on the back, some
other officials, cops, firemen and some confused DC Guard officers, of
whom it was said their panic had led to the rout on the bridge.
"All right, all right, people," the colonel said.
"Sergeant Major, all of 'em here?"
The sergeant major made a quick head count of his NCOs and from each
man received a nod to signify that the men under him had arrived; it
was done professionally in about thirty seconds.
"All present, sir."
"Good," said the colonel, climbing into a jeep to give him elevation
over his subordinates, and speaking in the loud, clear voice of
command.
"All right, men. As you know, at 0400 hours a large mass of
demonstrators commandeered the right-hand span of the Fourteenth Street
Bridge, effectively closing it down. The traffic is tied up back
beyond Alexandria. The other bridges have been cleared by this time,
but we've got a choke point. The Department of Justice has requested
the Marine Corps to assist in clearing the bridge, and we've been
authorized by our command structure for that mission. So let me tell
you what that means: we will
TIME TO HUNT 69
clear the bridge, we will do it quickly and professionally and with a
minimum of force and damage. Understood?"
"Aye, aye, sir," came the cry.
"I want A Company and B Company formed up line abreast, with
Headquarters Company in reserve to go by squads to the line as needed.
We do not have arrest powers and I do not want any arrests made. We
will advance under cover of moderate CS gas with bayonets fixed but
sheathed. Under no circumstances will those bayonets be used to draw
blood. We will prevail not by force but by good order and solid
professionalism. A DC Police mass-arrest unit will follow behind,
detaining and shipping those demonstrators who do not disperse. Our
limit of advance will be the far end of the bridge."
"Live ammo, sir?"
"Negative, negative, I say again, negative. No live ammo. Nobody will
be shot today. These are American kids, not VC. We will move out at
0900. Company commanders and senior NCOs, I want you to hold a quick
meeting and get your best squads into the line at the point of contact.
This is a standard DOD anti-riot drill. All right, people, let's be
professional."
"Dismissed!"
Donny made it back to his squad, as around him other squad leaders were
reaching their people. With the weird -sensation of a large herbivore
awakening, the unit was picking itself up, beginning to form up as each
smaller element got instructions. There was some cheering, moderated
by ambiguity, but nevertheless a simple expression of the soldier or
Marine's preference for doing anything rather than nothing.
"We'll be in that arrow-formation, platoons-abreast thing," Donny
explained.
"The sergeant major will be counting cadence."
"Bayonets?"
"On but sheathed. Minimum force. We're moving these people out of
here by our presence. No ammo, no clubbing, just solid Marine
professionalism, got it?"
70 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Masks?"
"I said masks, Crowe, weren't you listening? Some CS will be fired."
He looked about. The sergeant major had set up a hundred yards beyond
the trucks and now the Marines were streaming to him to form up at the
line of departure. Donny looked at his watch. It was 0850.
"All right, let's assemble and march to position. Form up on me, now!"
His men rose to him and found their places. He marched them at the
double time to a formation that was putting itself together on the
broad white band of empty highway.
-Teter held her hand. He was pale but determined, his face still teary
from the gas.
"It'll be okay," he kept saying, almost more to himself than to her.
There was something so sad about him, she had a tender impulse to draw
him toward her and comfort him.
"All right," came the amplified voice, "WTOP has a camera in the sky
and we've just heard that the Marines are forming up to come and move
us."
"Oh, this is going to be merry," said Peter.
"The Marines."
"I want to counsel everybody; you don't want to resist or you may get
clubbed or beaten. Don't yell at them, don't taunt them. Just go
limp. Remember, this is your bridge, it's not theirs. We've liberated
it. We own it. Hell, no, we won't go."
"Hell, no, we won't go," repeated Peter.
"That's the evil part," Julie said bitterly.
"They don't come themselves, the guys in the offices who make it
happen.
They send in Donny, who's just trying to do his job.
He gets the shitty end of the stick."
But Peter wasn't listening.
"Here they come," he said, for ahead, out of the blur, they could now
see them drawing ever closer in a phalanx of rectitude and camouflage:
the United States Marine
TIME TO HUNT 71
Corps advancing at the half-trot, rifles at the high port, helmets
even, gas masks turning them to insects or robots. Hell, no, we won't
go! came the chant, guttural, from the heart. Marines, go home! Then
again, Hell, no, we won't go!
The unit advanced at the half-trot, to the sergeant major's urgent
cadence, Hup-two-THREE-four, Hup-two THREE-four, and Donny's squad
stayed tight in the crowd-control formation, a little to the left of
the point of the arrow.
Jogging actually helped Donny feel a little better; he settled into a
steady rhythm, and the constellation of equipment bounded sloppily on
his body. His helmet banged, riding the spongy straps of the helmet
liner with a kind of liquid mushiness. He felt the sweat run down
inside his mask, catch irritatingly at his eyelashes, then flood into
his eyes. But it didn't matter.
Through the lens of his mask the world seemed slightly tarnished,
slightly dirty. Ahead, he could see the mass of demonstrators sitting
on the bridge as if it were theirs, looking fiercely at them.
Hell, no, we won't go! alternating with Marines, go home! Marines, go
home! rose to fill the air, but it sounded tinny and idiotic. They
closed on the crowd until but fifty yards away, then the sergeant
major's yell reached out to stop them.
"Ready, Halt!"
The two young Americas faced each other on the bridge. On the one
side, about two thousand young people, ages fourteen through possibly
thirty, most around twenty, college America, the nonconformism of
complete conformism: all wore jeans and T-shirts, all had long,
flowing, beautiful hair, all were pale, intense, high on grass or
sanctimony, standing and drawing strength from one another under a
bristle of placards that proclaimed people's coalition for peace and
justice and other, ruder
72 STEPHEN HUNTER
signs, like gis, join us! or stop the war! or fuck the war!
Or RMN MUST GO!
The other America, 650 strong, wore the green twill of duty, three
companies of Marines, average age twenty also, armed with unloaded
rifles and sheathed bayonets.
They were earnest and, behind the rubber and plastic of their masks,
clean-shaven and short-haired, yet in their way just as conflicted and
just as frightened as the kids they faced. They were essentially the
same kids, but nobody noticed. Behind them were cop cars, ambulances,
fire engines, deuce-and-a-halfs, their own Corpsmen, news reporters,
Justice Department officials. But they were the ones out front.
A man in the blue jumpsuit of the Justice Department stepped beyond the
Marine formation. He had a bullhorn.
"This is an illegal parade. You do not have a parade permit. You are
hereby ordered to disperse. If you do not disperse, we will clear the
bridge. You are hereby ordered to disperse."
"Hell, no, we won't go!" came the response.
When it had died down after a sweaty bit, the Justice official
reiterated his position, adding, "We will commence with CS gas
operations in two minutes and the Marine Corps will move you out. You
are hereby ordered to disperse!"
A moment of quiet followed and then a young man stepped forward,
screamed, "Here's your fucking parade permit!" then pivoted smartly,
bent, and peeled down his jeans to reveal two white half moons of
ass.
"God, he's beautiful," said Crowe through his mask, but loudly enough
for the squad to hear.
"I want him!"
"Crowe, shut up," said Donny.
The man from the Justice Department departed. The sun was high, the
weather sticky and heavy. Overhead, helicopters hovered, their rotors
kicking up the only turbulence.
Another amplified voice, this from the demonstrators as the older
people warned the kids.
TIME TO HUNT 73
"Do not attempt to pick up tear gas canisters as they will be very hot.
Do not panic. The gas is not contained and it will disappear very
quickly."
"Gas!" came a command.
Six soft plops marked the firing of six DC Police gas guns, and the
missiles skittered across the pavement leaking white fumes, spun,
rolled and slid raggedly along. The point of firing them into the
ground was to bounce them into the crowd at low velocity rather than
firing them into people at high, possibly killing velocity.
"Gas!" the command came again, and six more CS shells were fired.
The sergeant major's scream carried through the air:
"Assault arms and with that the rifles left the cross-chest position of
carry and were brought around the right side of the body, stocks wedged
under right arms and locked in, muzzles with sheathed bayonets angled
outward at forty-five degrees to the ground.
"Prepare to advance came the command.
Only Crowe's rifle wavered, probably out of excitement, but otherwise
the muzzles lanced outward from the formation. Donny could sense the
crowd of demonstrators drawing back, gathering somehow, then re
inflating with purpose. Tear gas drifted loosely amid their ranks. It
was just a crowd, identities lost in the blur and the gas.
Was Julie over there?
"Advance!" came the final command, and the Marines began to stomp
ahead.
Here we go, thought Donny.
They looked like Cossacks. The rank was green, slanted in two angles
away from the point, an arrowhead of boys, remorseless and helmeted,
their facial features vanished behind their masks.
Julie looked through her tears for Donny, but it was useless. The
Marines all looked the same, staunch defenders of whatever, in their
sharp uniforms with their helmets and now their guns, which jutted out
like threats. A cloud
74 STEPHEN HUNTER
of tear gas washed over her, crunching her eyes in pain;
she coughed, felt the tears run hot and fluid down her face, and rubbed
at them, then dipped for her wet washcloth and wiped the chemical from
them.
"Assholes!" said Peter bitterly, enraged at the troops advancing on
him. He was trembling so hard he was locked in place, his knees
wobbling desperately. But he wasn't going to move.
"Assholes!" he repeated as the Marines closed in at a steady pace.
J-Jonny was in the lead, solid as a rock; next to him, on the left,
Crowe seemed strong. They clomped forward to a steady beat of cadence
from the sergeant major, and through the jiggling stain of his dirty
lenses, Donny watched as the crowd grew closer. The sergeant major's
cadence drove them on; tear gas wafted through the chaos; overhead a
helicopter swept low and its turbulence drove the gas more quickly,
into whirlwinds and spirals, until it rushed like water across the
bridge.
"Steady on the advance!" screamed the sergeant major.
Details suddenly swam at Donny: the faces of the scared kids before
him, their scrawniness, their physical weakness and paleness, how many
of them were girls, the cool way the leader exhorted them with his
bullhorn and that shocking moment when at last the two groups
clashed.
"Steady on the advance!" screamed the sergeant major.
Maybe it was like some ancient battle, legionnaires against Visigoths,
Sumerians against Assyrians, but Donny sensed a great issue of physical
strength, of pure force of will as expressed through bodies, when the
two came together. There was no striking; no Marine lifted his rifle
and drove through for a butt stroke; no blade came unsheathed and leapt
forward into flesh. Rather, there was just a crush as the two masses
crunched together; it
TIME TO HUNT 75
felt more like football than war, that moment when the lines collide
and there are a dozen contests of strength all around you and you lay
what you've got against someone else and hope you get full-body weight
against him and can lift him from his feet.
Donny found himself hard against not an enemy lineman or a Visigoth but
a girl of about fourteen, with freckles and red, frizzy hair and
braces, headband, tie-dyed T-shirt, breastless and innocent. But she
had more hate on her face than any Visigoth ever, and she whacked him
hard on the helmet with her placard, which, he read as it descended,
stated make war no more!
The placard smacked him, its thin wood broke and it slipped away. He
felt his body ramming the girl's and then she was gone, either knocked
back or pushed down and stepped over. He hoped she wasn't hurt; why
hadn't she just fled?
More tear gas drifted in. Screams arose. Melees had broken out
everywhere as demonstrators leaned against Marines, who leaned back.
One could feel strain as the two leaned and leaned and tried to press
the other into panic.
It only lasted a second, really; then the demonstrators broke and fled
and Donny watched as they emptied the bridge, leaving behind
port-a-pots and sandals and squashed Tab cans and water buckets, the
battlefield detritus of a vanquished enemy. There seemed no point in
pursuing.
"Marines, stand easy," the sergeant major yelled.
"Masks off."
The masks came off and the boys sucked hard at the air.
"Good job, good job. Anybody hurt?" yelled the colonel.
But before anybody could answer, a considerable ruckus arose to the
left. Policemen were clustered around the railing of the bridge and
the word soon reached the
76 STEPHEN HUNTER
Marines that someone had panicked as they had approached, and jumped
off. A police helicopter hovered low, an ambulance arrived and
paramedics got out urgently.
Police boats were called, but it took only a few minutes to make it
clear that someone was dead.
chapter Six
The scandal played out pretty much as expected, depending on the
perspective of the account.
girl, 17, killed in demonstration, the Post headlined.
The more conservative Star said, demonstrator dies in bridge mix-up.
marines murder girl, 17, argued the Washington City Paper.
No matter; for the Marine Corps the news was very bad indeed. Seven
liberal House members demanded an investigation into the matter of Amy
Rosenzweig, seventeen, of Glencoe, Illinois, who had evidently panicked
in the tear gas and the approach of the Marines and climbed over the
railing. Before anybody could reach her, though several young Marines
tried, she was gone. Walter Cron-kite appeared to generate a small
tear in his left eye.
Gordon Petersen, of WTOP, developed a catch in his voice as he
discussed the incident with his co-anchor, Max Robinson.
why marines? wondered the Post two days later on its editorial page.
U.S. Marines are among the world's most feared fighting forces, an
elite who have honored their country and their service in hostile
environments since 1776. But what were they doing on the 14th Street
Bridge May I?
Surely, with their esprit de corps and constant immersion in the theory
and practice of land warfare at its most savage, they were a poor
choice for the Justice Department to deploy against peaceful
demonstrators who had taken up a harmless "occupation" of the bridge as
an expression of the long-precious tradition of civil disobedience. The
D.C.
police force, the Park Police, or even Guardsmen
78 STEPHEN HUNTER
from the District's own unit, all riot-trained and all experienced in
dealing with demonstrations, would have been preferable to combat
infantrymen, who tend to perceive all confrontations as us against
them.
The place for the Marines is on the battlefields of the world, and the
parade ground of the Eighth and I barracks, not on American streets. If
the tragedy of Amy Rosenzweig teaches us anything, it teaches us
that.
As for the Eighth and I Marines, in the immediate aftermath they were
trucked back to the barracks, where they remained on alert and in
isolation for two days.
Teams from the FBI and the District Police and the U.S.
Park Police worked over the members of Alpha Company, Second Platoon,
Second Squad, who'd been on the extreme left wing of the crowd control
formation, and who had seen the girl hanging on for dear life. Three
of them had actually dropped their rifles, thrown away their masks and
helmets and rushed to her, but in the instant before they reached her,
she closed her eyes and gave her soul to God, relaxing backward into
space. They got to the railing in time to see her hit the water
thirty-five feet below; they got DC Police there within seconds, and
within minutes a DC rescue boat was on the scene. If they'd had a
rope, they would have rappelled down to the water themselves, but a
quickly arriving platoon sergeant had forbidden any of them to jump off
the bridge in attempts to rescue. It was just too high. And it
wouldn't have mattered. When she was located thirteen minutes later,
it became quickly apparent that Amy's neck had been broken by the
impact of striking the water at an extreme angle. A report later
exonerated the Marines and made it clear that no actual force had been
applied to Amy. The Marines said she chose to martyr herself; the
media said the Marines killed her. Who knew the truth?
On the third day, they arrested Crowe.
TIME TO HUNT 79
Rather, under small arms and under the supervision of two officers from
the Naval Investigation Service, Lieutenant Commander Bonson and Ensign
Weber, four Marine military policemen marched into the barracks where
he and the rest of B company were relaxing while maintaining
ready-alert status, and put him in handcuffs.
Captain Dogwood and the battalion colonel watched it happen.
Then Lieutenant Commander Bonson came up to Donny and said in a loud
voice, "Good job, Corporal Fenn. Damn fine work."
"Good work, Fenn," said Weber.
"You got our man."
In the aftermath, a space seemed to spread around Donny. He felt it
open up, as if oceans of atmosphere had been vacuumed out of the area
between himself and his squad and others in the platoon. Nobody would
meet his eyes. Some looked at him in horror. Others merely left the
vicinity, went into other squad bays or outside to lounge near the
trucks.
"What the hell did he mean?" asked Platoon Sergeant Case.
"Uh, I don't know. Sergeant," Donny said.
"Uh, I don't know what the hell they were talking about."
"You had contact with MS?"
"They talked to me."
"About what?"
"Ah. Well," and Donny swallowed, "they had some security concerns and
somehow I got--" "Let me tell you something, goddammit, Fenn. If it
happens in my platoon, you come tell me about it! You got that? This
ain't a one-man goddamn motherfucking operation. You come tell me,
Fenn, or by God I will make your young sorry ass sorry you didn't!"
The man's blazing spit flew into Donny's face and his eyes lit up like
flares. A vein throbbed on his forehead.
"Sergeant, they told me--" "I don't give a monkey's fuck what they told
you,
80 STEPHEN HUNTER
Fenn. If it happens in my platoon, I have to know about it, or you
ain't worth pig shit to me. Copy that, Corporal?"
"Yes, Sergeant."
"You and me, boy, we got some serious talk ahead."
Donny swallowed.
"Yes, Sergeant."
"Now, get these men off their asses. I'm not going to have them
sitting around all goddamn day like they just won the fucking war all
by themselves. Get 'em on work detail, drill 'em, do something with
them."
"Yes, Sergeant."
"And you and I will talk later."
"Yes, Sergeant."
Donny turned in the wake of Sergeant Case's departure, which was more
like an ejection from a jet fighter than a normal retrograde
adjustment.
"Okay," he said to the squad.
"Okay, let's get outside and run through some riot control drills.
There's no point just sitting in here."
But nobody moved.
"All right, come on, guys. I'm not shitting around here.
You heard the man. We have an order."
They just stared at him. Some looked hurt, the rest disgusted.
"I didn't do anything," Donny said.
"I talked to some Navy lifers and that's all."
"Donny, if I flash the peace sign in a bar, will you turn me in to
NIS?" someone asked.
"All right, fuck that shit!" Donny bellowed.
"I don't have to explain anything to anybody! But if I did, I'd point
out I didn't rat anybody out. Now, get into your gear and let's get
the fuck outside or Case'll have us on a barracks party until 0400 next
Tuesday!"
The men got up, but their slow heaviness expressed their bitterness.
"Who'll take Crowe's place?" someone asked.
There was no answer.
TIME TO HUNT 81
Julie was released from the lockup at the Washington Coliseum at 4 p.m.
that same day, after forty-eight hours of incarceration with several
hundred of the more recalcitrant demonstrators. At least physically,
it was almost pleasant being arrested; the cops were old hands by this
time and as long as everybody cooperated, the process was all right.
She spent two nights on a cot in a field where the Washington Redskins
practiced when it was their season.
The seats of the junky old place rose above like a Pentecostal
cathedral from the twenties, and in the pen, all the kids had a good
time and nobody watched them too carefully. Grass was abundant; the
portable toilets were cleaner than the ones at Potomac Park. The
showers were never crowded and she got a good wash for the first time
since leaving Arizona in the Peace Caravan. Some of the boys caught
fantasy touchdown passes in what had to have been an end zone.
But no word at all from Donny. Had he been there on the bridge? She
didn't know. She'd looked for him, but then it'd all dissolved in
confusion and tears as more of the gas flooded in. She remembered
crumpling, rubbing her eyes desperately as the gas drifted by, and then
there was the shock of the Marines and she found herself looking into
the eyes of a boy, a child, really, big and booming behind his lenses;
she saw fear in them, or at least as much confusion as she herself
felt, and then he was by her and the Marine line moved on, and as she
watched, teams of policemen pounced on the demonstrators behind the
lines and led them away to buses. It was handled very simply, no big
deal at all to anybody concerned.
Only later, in the lockup, did the word come that a girl had somehow
died. Julie tried to work it out but could make no sense of it; the
Marines had seemed quite restrained, really; it wasn't anything like
Kent State. Still, it was an appalling weight. A girl was dead, and
for what?
Why was it necessary? In the lockup, they had a television, and Amy
Rosenzweig's young and tender face, freckled, under sprigs of reddish
hair, was everywhere. She
82 STEPHEN HUNTER
looked to Julie like a girl she'd grown up with, though she could not
remember seeing Amy amid the crowd, but that wasn't surprising, for
there had been thousands, and much confusion on the ground.
They let her out and she went back to the campground in Potomac Park.
It was like a Civil War encampment after Gettysburg: mostly empty now
that the big week was over and the kids in their multitudes had
returned to their campuses and the professional revolutionaries to
their secret cabals to plot the next move in the war against the war.
Litter was everywhere and the cops no longer bothered.
A few tents still stood, but the sense of a new youth culture had
vanished. There was no music and no campfires and the Peace Caravan
had departed. All, that is, except for Peter.
"Oh, hi."
"Hi, how are you?"
"Fine. I stayed behind. Jeff and Susie are driving the Micro back.
Everybody is with them. They'll be all right. I wanted to stay here,
see if you needed anything."
"I'm okay, Peter, really I am. Have you seen Donny at all?"
"Him? Jesus, you know what they did to that girl and you want to know
where he is?"
"Donny didn't do anything. Besides, I read the Marines tried to save
her."
"If there hadn't been any Marines, Amy would still be here," Peter said
obstinately, and then the two just looked at each other. He drew her
close and hugged her and she hugged back.
"Thanks for hanging around, Peter."
"Ah, it's okay. How was the Coliseum?"
"Okay. Not so bad. They finally reduced charges, parading without a
permit. They let us all go today."
"Well," he said.
"If you want me to drive you to the Marine Barracks or something, I
will. Whatever you want.
I have a VW from a guy. It's no problem."
"I'm supposed to get married this week."
TIME TO HUNT 83
"That's fine. That's cool. Good luck and God bless.
Let me see if I can help you in any way."
"I think I ought to hang here until I hear from Donny.
I don't know what happened to him."
"Sure," said Peter.
"That's a good idea."
1 he alert was finally cancelled at 1600 that afternoon, to the cheers
and relief of the companies. It took an hour or so to actually stand
down--that is, to return the rifles to the armory, to shed and repack
the combat gear in its appropriate place in the lockers, to shed the
utilities, bag them for the laundry, shower and shave. But by 1700,
when the work was done, the captain at last released his men--the
married to go home, the rest to relax in town or on base as they
preferred, with only a few left on skeleton duty, such as duty NCO or
armory watch.
That is, except for Donny.
He was done, and still in his cone of isolation, finally changing into
civvies--jeans and a white Izod shirt--when a runner came from
headquarters and said he was wanted ASAP. No, he didn't have to dress
in the uniform of the day.
Donny returned to Captain Dogwood's office, where Bonson and Weber
waited.
"Captain, we could take him to our offices. Or would you allow us to
use yours?"
"Yes, sir, go ahead," said Dogwood, who wanted to get home to see his
own wife and kids too.
"Stay here. Duty NCO will lock up when you're finished."
"Thank you, Captain," said Bonson.
So Donny was alone with them at last. They were in civilian clothes
this time, Weber looking like the Sigma Nu he'd undoubtedly been at
Nebraska, and the dour Bonson in slacks and a black sport shirt,
buttoned to the top. He looked almost like a priest of some sort.
"Coffee?"
"No, sir."
"Oh, sit down, Fenn. You don't have to stand."
84 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
Donny sat.
"We want to go over your testimony with you. Tomorrow there'll be an
arraignment, at the Judge Advocate General's Offices at the Navy Yard,
nothing elaborate. It's simply a preliminary to an indictment and
trial. Ten hundred.
We'll send a car. Your undress blues will be fine; I've arranged with
Captain Dogwood for you to be off the duty roster. Then I think we'll
give you a nice bit of leave.
Two weeks? By that time, we should be able to cut orders for your new
stripes. Sergeant Fenn. How does that sound?"
"Well, I--" "Tomorrow won't be hard, Fenn, I assure you. You'll be
sworn in and then you'll recount how at my instruction you befriended
Crowe and traveled with him into a number of peace movement functions.
You'll tell how you saw him in the presence of peace movement
strategists such as Trig Carter. You saw them in serious conversation,
intense conversation. You needn't testify that you overheard him
giving away deployment intelligence. Just tell what you saw, and let
the JAG prosecutor do the rest. It's enough for an indictment. He'll
have a lawyer, a JAG JG, who'll ask you some rote questions. Then it's
over and done and off you go."
Bonson smiled.
"Clean and simple," said Weber.
"Sir, I just ... I don't know what I can tell them.
There were hundreds of people at those parties. I saw no evidence of
conspiracy or deployment intelligence or--" "Now, Donny," said Bonson,
leaning forward and trying a smile.
"I know this is confusing for you. But trust me. You're doing your
country a great service. You're doing the Marines a great service."
"But I--" "Donny," said Weber, "they knew. They knew."
"Knew?"
"They knew we had Third Infantry committed in VirTIME TO HUNT 85
gin ia that the DC National Guard was a complete fuckup, the 101st
Airborne was stuck at Justice and the 82nd down at the Key Bridge and
that the cops were frazzled beyond endurance after eighty straight duty
hours. It was an elaborate game of chess--they move here, we
countermove; they move there, we countermove--all set up to get them to
that bridge where they'd be faced by United States Marines where the
chances of a big-time screw up on television were huge. And that's
just what they got: another martyr. Another catastrophe. The Justice
Department humiliated. A propaganda victory of immense proportions.
They're parading with Amy's name in London and Paris already. Give
them credit, it was as skillful a campaign as there was."
"Yes, sir, but we tried to save her. The girl panicked. It had
nothing to do with us."
"Oh, it had everything to do with you," said Bonson.
"They wanted her going off the bridge and the Marines to take the fall.
See how much better that is than the Washington Metro Police or some
third-rate National Guard unit, most of whom'd be demonstrating
themselves if they had the chance? No, they wanted a big scandal to be
laid right at the Marines' feet and that's what they got! And Crowe
gave it to them. Now, it is mandatory to get this fact before the
public, to show that we were betrayed from within and to move swiftly
to restore confidence in the system by eliminating the treason. And I
can't think of a more edifying contrast for the American public than
between Crowe, an Ivy League dropout with his fancy connections, and
you, a decorated combat veteran from a small Western town doing his
-duty. It'll be very educational!"
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
"Good, good. Ten hundred. Look sharp, Corporal.
You will impress the JAG officers, I know you will. You will inherit
your own future, the future you and I have been working on, I know
it."
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
86 STEPHEN HUNTER
They rose.
"All right, Weber, we're finished here. You relax, Fenn. Tomorrow is
your big day, the beginning of the rest of your life."
"I'll get the car, sir," said Weber.
"No, I'll get it. You--you know; tell him what's cooking."
"Yes, sir."
Bonson left the two younger men alone.
"Look, Fenn, I'm the bad cop. I'm here to give you the bad news. I've
got photos of you smoking grass with Crowe, okay? Man, they can really
nail you with them. I mean big time. I told you this guy Bonson was
cold. He is beaucoup cold, you know? So give him what he wants, which
is another bad boy's scalp to hang up on his lodge Dole. He's sent a
bunch to the "Nam, and he wants to send more. I don't know why, what
he is driving at, but I know this: he will rotate your ass back to the
Land of Bad Things and not ever even think about it again. He's got
you cold. It's you or it's Crowe. Man, don't throw your life away for
nothing, dig?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good man, Fenn. Knew you'd see it our way."
At 2300, Donny just walked out the front door of the barracks. Who was
there to stop him? Some corporal in first platoon had duty NCO that
night and he was scribbling in the duty logs in the first sergeant's
office as Donny passed.
Donny walked to the main gate and waved at the sentry there, who waved
him past. Technically, the boy was to look for liberty papers, but in
the aftermath of an alert, such niceties of the Marine way had fallen
aside. Donny just walked, crossed I Street, headed down the way, took
a left, and there found, un bothered his 1963 Impala. He climbed in,
turned the key and drove away.
It didn't take him long to reach Potomac Park, site of the recently
abandoned May Tribe. A few tents still stood,
TIME TO HUNT 87
a few fires still burned. He left his car along the side of the road
and walked into the encampment, asked a few questions and soon found
the tent.
"Julie?" he called.
But it was Peter who came out.
"She's sleeping," he said.
"Well, I need to see her."
"It would be better if she slept. I'm watching out for her."
The two faced each other; both wore jeans and tennis shoes. Jack
Purcells. But Donny's were white, as he washed them every week.
Peter's didn't look as though he had washed them since the fifties.
Donny wore a madras short-sleeved button-down shirt; Peter had some
kind of tie-dyed T-shirt on, baggy as a parachute, going almost to his
knees. Donny's hair was short to the point of neuroticism, with a
little pie up top; Peter's was long to the point of neuroticism, a mass
of curly sprigs and tendrils.
Donny's face was lean and pure; Peter's wore a bristle of scraggly red
beard and a headband.
"That's very cool," said Donny.
"But I have to see her.
I need her."
"I need her too."
"Well, she hasn't given you anything. She's given me her love."
"I want her to give me her love."
"Well, you'll have to wait awhile."
"I'm tired of waiting."
"Look, this is ridiculous. Go away or something."
"I won't leave her unguarded."
"Who do you think I am, some kind of rapist or killer?
I'm her fiance. I'm going to marry her."
"Peter," said Julie, coming out of the tent, "it's all right. Really,
it's all right."
"Are you sure?"
Julie looked tired; still, she was a beautiful young woman, with hair
the color of straw and a body as lean and straight as an arrow, and
brilliance showing behind
88 STEPHEN HUNTER
her bright blue eyes. Both boys looked at her and recommitted to her
love again.
"Are you okay?" Donny asked.
"I was in the lockup at the Coliseum."
"Oh, Christ."
"It was fine; it wasn't anything bad."
"You killed a girl," said Peter.
"We didn't kill anyone. You killed her, by telling her being on that
bridge mattered and that we were rapists and murderers. You made her
panic; you made her jump.
We tried to save her."
"You fucking asshole, you killed her. Now, you're a big tough guy and
you can kick the shit out of me, but you killed her!"
"Stop screaming. I never killed anyone who didn't have a rifle and
wasn't trying to kill me or a buddy."
"Peter, it's okay. You have to leave us alone."
"Christ, Julie."
"You have to leave us."
"Ahhh ... all right. But don't say--anyhow, you're a lucky guy, Fenn.
You really are."
He stormed away in the darkness.
"I never saw him so brave," said Julie.
"He loves you. So much."
"He's just a friend."
"I'm sorry I didn't get here earlier. We were on alert.
There was a lot of shit because of Amy. I'm very sorry about Amy, but
we didn't have a thing to do with it."
"Oh, Donny."
"I want to marry you. I love you. I miss you."
"Then let's get married."
"There's this thing," Donny said.
"This thing?"
"Yeah. By the way, I've technically deserted. I'm UA. Unauthorized
absence. I'll be reported tomorrow at morning muster. They'll do
something to me probably.
But I had to see you."
"Donny?"
TIME TO HUNT 89
"Let me tell you about this thing."
And so he told it: from his recruitment to his attempts to enter into a
duplicitous friendship with Crowe to his arrival at the party to his
strange behavior that night until, finally, the action on the bridge,
Crowe's arrest and tomorrow's responsibilities.
"Oh, God, Donny, I'm so sorry. It's so awful." She went to him and in
her warmth for just a second he lost all his problems and was Donny
Fenn of Pima County all over again, the football hero, the big guy that
everybody thought so highly of, who could do a 40 in four-seven, and
bench press 250, yet take pride in his high SATs and the fact that he
was decent to his high school's lowliest creeps and toads and never was
mean to anybody, because that wasn't his way. But then he blinked, and
he was back in the dark in the park, and it was only Julie, her warmth,
her smell, her sweetness, and when he left her embrace, it was all back
again.
"Donny, haven't you done enough for them? I mean, you got shot, you
lay in that horrible hospital for six months, you came back and did
exactly what they said.
When does it end?"
"It ends when you get out. I don't hate the Corps. It's not a Corps
thing. It's these Navy guys, these super-patriots, who have it all
figured out."
"Oh, Donny. It's so awful."
"I don't work that way. I don't like that stuff at all.
That's not me. Not any of it."
"Can't you talk to somebody? Can't you talk to a chaplain or a lawyer
or something? Do they even have the right to put you through that?"
"Well, as I understand it, it's not an illegal order. It's a
legitimate order. It's not like being asked to do something that's
technically wrong, like shoot kids in a ditch. I don't know who I
could talk to who wouldn't say. Just do your duty."
"And they'll send you back to Vietnam if you don't testify."
90 STEPHEN HUNTER
"That's the gist of it, yeah."
"Oh, God," she said.
She turned from him and walked a step or two away.
Across the way, she could see the Potomac and the dark far shore that
was Virginia. Above it, a tapestry of stars unscrolled, dense and
deep.
"Donny," she finally said, "there's only one answer."
"Yeah, I know."
"Go back. Do it. That's what you have to do to save yourself."
"But it's not like I know he's guilty. Maybe he doesn't deserve to get
his life ruined just because--" "Donny. Just do it. You said
yourself, this Crowe is not worth a single thing."
"You're right," Donny finally said.
"I'll go back, I'll do it, I'll get it over. I'm eleven and days, I'll
get out inside a year with an early out, and we can have our life.
That's all there is to it. That's fine, that's cool. I've made up my
mind."
"No, you haven't," she said.
"I can tell when you're lying. You're not lying to me; you never have.
But you're lying to yourself."
"I should talk to someone. I need help on this one."
"And I'm not good enough?"
"If you love me, and I hope and pray you do, then your judgment is
clouded."
"All right, who, then?"
Who,indeed?
There was only one answer, really. Not the chaplain or a JAG lawyer,
not Platoon Sergeant Case or the first sergeant or the sergeant major
or the colonel or even the Commandant, USMC.
"Trig. Trig will know. We'll go see Trig."
Bitterly, from afar, Peter watched them. They embraced, they talked,
they appeared to fight. She broke away. He went after her. It killed
him to sense the intimacy they shared. It was everything he hated in
the world--the
TIME TO HUNT 91
strong, the handsome, the blond, the confident, just taking what was
theirs and leaving nothing behind.
He watched them, finally, go toward Donny's old car and climb in, his
mind raging with anger and counterplots, his energy unbearably high.
Without willing it, he raced to the VW Larry Frankel had lent him. He
turned the key, jacked the car into gear and sped after them. He
didn't know why, he didn't think it would matter, but he also knew he
could not help but follow them.
chapter seven
Peter almost missed them. He had just cleared a crest when he saw the
lights of the other car illuminate a hill and a dirt road beyond a
gate, then flash off. His own lights were off, but there was enough
moonlight to make out the road ahead. He pulled up to the gate and saw
nothing that bore any signal of meaning, except a mailbox, painted
white with the name wilson scribbled on it in black. He was on Route
35, about five miles north of Germantown.
What the hell were they up to? What did they know?
What was going on?
He decided to pull back a hundred yards, and just wait for a while.
Suppose they ran in there, and turned around and collided with him on
the road? That would be a total humiliation.
Instead, he decided just to watch and wait.
At the top of the hill, they turned the engine off. Below lay a farm
of no particular distinction, a nondescript house, a yard, a barn.
Propane tanks and old tractors, rusted out, lay in the yard; there was
no sound of animals.
The farm, in fact, looked like a Dust Bowl relic.
Yet something was going on.
Twin beams illuminated the yard, and Donny, with his unusually good
eyesight, could make out a van with its lights on, a shroud of dust,
and two men who were in the process of moving heavy packages of some
sort out from the barn into the van by the light of the headlamps.
"I think that's Trig," Donny said.
"I don't know who the other guy is."
"Shall we go down?"
Donny was suddenly unsure.
TIME TO HUNT 93
"I don't know," he said.
"I can't figure out what the hell is going on."
"He's helping his friend load up."
"At this hour?"
"Well, he's an irregular guy. The clock doesn't mean much to him."
That was true; Trig wasn't your nine-to-fiver by any interpretation.
"All right," said Donny.
"We'll walk down there. But you hang back. Let me check this out.
Don't let them see you until we figure what's happening. I'll call you
in, okay? I'm just not feeling good about this, okay?"
"You sound a little paranoid."
He did. Some hint of danger filled the air, but he wasn't sure what it
was, what it meant, where it came from. Possibly, it was the mere
strangeness of everything, the way nothing really made any sense.
Possibly it was his own fatigue, raw after the many hours on alert.
They headed down the hill, and Donny detoured them around the house,
until at last they came upon the two men from the rear. Donny could
see them better now, both working in jeans and denim shirts. They were
loading by wheelbarrow immensely awkward sacks of fertilizer into the
van, packing it very full. ammonium nitrate, the sacks said. Dust
that the wheelbarrow tires ripped up from the ground filled the air,
floating in large, shimmering clouds, which shifted through the beams
of the truck lights and in the yellower light that blazed from the barn
door. It lit wherever it could, coating the truck, the men,
everything. Both Trig and the other man wore red bandannas around
their faces.
Pushing Julie back into the dark, Donny stepped out and approached,
coughing at the stuff in the air as it filled his mouth and throat with
grit. He stepped farther; nobody noticed him.
"Trig?" he called.
Trig turned instantly at his name, but it was the other man who reacted
much faster, turning exactly to Donny,
94 STEPHEN HUNTER
his dark eyes devouring him. He had a full, tangled web of blond hair,
much thicker than Trig's, and was large and powerful next to Trig's
delicacy. They looked like a poet and a stevedore standing next to
each other.
"Trig, it's me, Donny. Donny Fenn." He stepped forward a little
hesitantly.
"Donny, Jesus Christ, I didn't expect you."
"Well, you said to come on out."
"I did, yeah. Come on in. Donny, meet Robert Fitzpat-rick, my old
friend at Oxford."
"Halloo," said Robert, pulling off his own bandanna to show a smile
that itself showed a mouthful of porcelain spades, a movie star's gleam
of a smile.
"So you're the war hero, eh? We've hopes for you, that we do! Need
boyos like you for the movement. We'll stop this bloody thing and get
the west field covered in horse shit and ammonium nitrate, if I'm a
judge of things. Roll up your sleeves, boy, and get to work. We could
use some back. The goddamned pickup broke down and I'm stuck with this
piece of shit to git the stuff out to the spreader. We're doing it at
night to beat the heat."
"Robert, he's been on some kind of alert for seventy-two hours. He
can't do manual labor," Trig said.
"No, I--" "No, we're almost done. It doesn't matter."
"You left so suddenly."
"Ah, one more demonstration. I was worn out. What did it prove? I've
lost my will for the movement."
"You'll get your will back, boyo," said the giant Fitzpatrick
heartily.
"I'll go get us a beer for the recharge.
You wait here, Donny Fenn."
"No, no, I just had a thing I wanted to talk over with Trig."
"Oh, Trig'll steer you right, no doubt about it," he said, his voice
light with laughter.
"It's a drink I'll be gittin', Trig. You lads talk."
With that he turned to the house and headed in.
"So what is it, Donny?"
TIME TO HUNT 95
"It's Crowe .. . they arrested him. Violations of the Uniform Code of
Military Justice. I'm supposed to testify against him in"--he looked
at his watch--"about seven hours."
"I see."
"Maybe you don't. I was asked to spy on him. That was my job. That's
why I got close to him. I was supposed to report to them on his
off-base activities and try and put him with known members of the peace
groups. That's why I was with him at the party that night; that's why
I came to your party. I was ordered to spy."
Trig stared at him for a while, then his face broke into the oddest
thing: a smile.
"Oh, that's your big secret? Man, that's if?" He laughed now, really
hard.
"Donny, wise up. You work for them. They can ask you to do that. If
they say so, that's your duty. That's the game in Washington these
days. Everybody's watching everybody. Everybody's got an agenda, a
plan, an idea they're trying to push or sell. I don't give a damn."
"It's worse. They have some idea you were Weather Underground and you
planned the whole thing. I mean, can you imagine anything so stupid?
He was feeding you deployment intelligence so the May Tribe could
humiliate the Corps."
"Boy, their imagination never fails to amaze me!"
"So what should I do, Trig? That's what I'm here to ask. About Crowe.
Should I testify?"
"What happens if you don't?"
"They've got some pictures of me smoking dope.
Funny, I don't smoke dope anymore, but I did to get in with him. They
could send me to Portsmouth. Or, more likely, the "Nam. They could
ship me back for a last go-round, even though I'm short."
"They're really assholes, aren't they?"
"Yeah."
"But that's neither here nor there, is it? This isn't
96 STEPHEN HUNTER
about them. We know who they are. This is about you.
Well, then it's easy."
"Easy?"
"Easy. Testify. For one reason, you can't let them get you killed.
What would that prove? Who benefits from the death of Lochinvar? Who
wins when Lancelot is slain?"
"I'm just a guy, Trig."
"You can't give yourself up to it. Somebody's got to come out on the
other side and say how it was."
"I'm just .. . I'm just a guy."
People were always insisting to Donny that he was somehow more than he
really was, that he represented something. He'd never gotten it. It
was just because he happened to be good-looking, but underneath he was
just as scared, just as ineffective, just as simple as anyone else, no
matter what Trig said.
"I don't know," said Donny.
"Is he guilty? That would matter."
"It doesn't matter. What matters is: you or him?
That's the world you have to deal with. You or him? I vote him. Any
day of the week, I vote him."
"But is he guilty?"
"I'm no longer in the inner circle. I'm sort of a roaming ambassador.
So I really don't know."
"Oh, you'd know. You'd know. Is he guilty?"
Trig paused.
Finally he said, "Well, I wish I could lie to you. But, goddammit, no,
no, he's not guilty. There is some weird kind of intelligence they
have at the top; I just get glimmerings of it. But I don't think it's
Crowe. But I'm telling you the truth: that doesn't matter. You should
dump him and get on with your life. If he's not guilty of that, he's
guilty of lots of other stuff."
Donny looked at Trig for a bit. Trig was leaning against the fender of
the van. He lifted a milk carton and poured it over his head, and
water gushed out, scraping rivulets in the dust that adhered to his
handsome face. Trig shook his
TIME TO HUNT 97
wet hair, and the droplets flew away. Then he turned back.
"Donny, for Christ's sake. Save your own life!"
reter was no good at waiting. He got out of the car and walked along
the shoulder of the road. It was completely dark and silent,
unfamiliar sensations to a young man who'd spent so much time OCS--on
city streets. Now and then he heard the chirp of a cricket; up above,
the stars towered and pinwheeled, but he was not into stars or insects,
so he noticed neither of these realities. Instead, he reached the
gate, paused a moment, and climbed over. He saw before him a faint
rise in the land, almost a small hill, and the dirt road that climbed
it. He knew if a car came over the hill and he were standing on that
road, he'd be dead-cold caught in the lights. So he walked a distance
from the road, then turned to head up the hill, figuring he could then
drop to the ground if Donny and Julie returned.
Gently, he walked up the hill, feeling as alone as that guy who had
walked on the surface of the moon. He reached the top of the hill and
saw the farmhouse below him. No sight of Julie but he saw Trig and
Donny slouched on the fender of a van in the yard between the house and
the barn, and they were chatting animatedly, relaxed and intimate.
There was no sign of danger, no sign of weirdness: just two new friends
bullshiting in the night.
But then small things began to seem off. What was Trig doing way out
here? What was this place? What was going on? It connected with
nothing in Peter's memory of Trig.
Puzzled, he stepped forward and almost tripped as he bumbled into
something.
Two figures rose before him.
Oh, shit, he thought, for they wore suits and one of them carried a
camera with a long lens.
Clearly they were feds, spying on Trig.
They had the pug look of FBI agents, with blunt faces
98 STEPHEN HUNTER
and crew cuts; one wore a hat. They did not look happy to be
discovered.
"W-who are you?" Peter asked in a quavering voice.
"What are you doing?"
"I don't think I can sell him out," said Donny.
"Donny, this isn't a Western. There are no good guys.
Do you hear me? This is real life, hardball style. If it's you or
Crowe, do not give yourself up for Crowe."
"I suppose that's the smart move," said Donny.
"So, there," said Trig.
"I made your decision easy for you. All you have to do is cooperate
with them. Come on, when the war is over, they'll reduce his sentence.
He may never even serve a day. They'll work some deal, he'll get out
and go on with the rest of his life. He won't even be upset."
Donny remembered that once upon a time, even Crowe had given him the
same advice. Roll over on me in a second, Donny, if it ever comes to
that. Somehow Crowe had known it would.
"Okay," he finally said.
"Do your duty, Donny. But think about what it costs you. Okay. Think
about how you feel now. Then when you get out, do me one favor, okay?
No matter what happens to me, promise me one thing."
Trig winced as if in pain in the hot light of the headlights, though
perhaps something had just gotten in his eye. There was an immense
familiarity to that look, the strain on his face, the set of it, the
clearness of vision.
And .. . And what?
"Sure," Donny said.
"Open your mind. Open your mind to the possibility that the power to
define duty is the power of life and death. And if people impose duty
on you, maybe they're not doing it for your best interests or the
country's best interests but for their own best interests. Okay,
Donny?
Force yourself to think about a world in which each man got to set his
own duty and no one could tell anyone what
TIME TO HUNT 99
to do, what was right, what was wrong; the only rules were the Ten
Commandments."
"I--" stammered Donny.
"Here," said Trig.
"I have something for you. I was going to mail it to you from
Baltimore, but this'll save me the postage and the fuss. It's no big
deal."
He went over to some kind of knapsack on the ground, fished around, and
came out with a folder, which he opened to reveal a piece of heavy
paper.
"Sometimes," he said, "when the spirit moves me, I'm even pretty good.
I'm much better at birds, but I did okay on this one. It's nothing."
Donny looked: it was a drawing on a creamy page trimmed from that
sketchbook Trig was always carrying, incredibly delicate and in a
spiderweb of ink, that depicted himself and Julie as they stood and
talked in the trees at West Potomac Park.
There was something special about it: he got them both, maybe not
exactly as a photograph, but somehow their love too, the way they
looked at each other, the faith they had in each other.
"Wow," said Donny.
"Wow, yourself. I dashed it off that night in my book.
It was neat, the two of you. Gives me hope for the world.
Now, go on, get the hell out of here, go back to your duty."
Trig drew him close, and Donny felt the warmth, the musculature, and
maybe something else, too: passion, somehow, oddly misplaced but
genuine and impressive.
Trig was actually crying.
Over the shoulders of the two FBI agents, Peter saw Donny and Trig
embrace, and then Donny stepped out of the light and was gone. He'd
head to his car, which Peter now saw was but fifty or so yards away. He
was screwed.
Donny would see him here with the two feds, who showed no sign at all
of moving, and he would have made an ass out of himself.
100 STEPHEN HUNTER
He felt despair rising in his gorge.
"I have to go," he said to the larger of the two plainclothes
officers.
"No," the man said back, and the other moved to embrace Peter, as if to
wrestle him to the ground. Peter squirmed out of the man's grip, but
he was grabbed and thrust to the ground.
The two men loomed over him.
"This is ridiculous," he said.
They seemed to agree. They looked at each other foolishly, not quite
sure what to do, but suddenly one of them pointed.
Then the engine of Donny's car came to life and its lights flashed
on.
The man with the camera pulled away from Peter, leaving the other, the
bigger, to lean on him, and ran toward the gate.
Well, did he help?" said Julie as they walked through the dark.
"Yeah," said Donny.
"Yes, he did. He really did. I've got it figured out now."
"Should I go meet him?"
"No, he's in a very strange mood. I'm not sure what's going on. Let's
just get out of here. I've got some things to do."
"What did he give you?"
"It's a picture. It's very nice. I'll show you later."
They walked through the dark, up the hill. Donny could see the car
ahead. He had an odd tremor suddenly, a sense of not being alone. It
was a freakish thing, sometimes useful in Indian country: that
sensation of being watched. He scanned the darkness for sign of threat
but saw nothing, only farmland under moon, no movement or anything.
"Who was that blond guy?" she asked.
"His pal Fitzpatrick. Big Irish guy. They were loading up to spread
fertilizer."
TIME TO HUNT 101
"That's strange."
"He said they decided to do the hard part of the job in the cool of the
night. Hell, it was only fertilizer. Who knows?"
"What was going on with Trig?"
"I don't know. He was, uh, strange is all I can call it.
He had the same look on his face that the Time photographer got, when
he was carrying that bleeding kid in from the cops in Chicago and his
own head was bleeding too.
He was very set, very determined, but somehow, underneath it all, very
emotional. He seemed like he was facing death or something. I don't
know why or what. It spooked me a little."
"Poor Trig. Maybe even the rich boys have demons."
"He wanted to hug. He was crying. Maybe there was something weirdo in
it or something. I felt his fingers in my muscles and I felt how happy
he was to be hugging me.
I don't know. Very weird stuff. I don't know."
They reached the car, and Donny started it, turning on the lights. He
backed into the grass, turned around and headed down the road to the
gate.
"Jesus," he said.
"Duck!" For at that moment a figure suddenly rose from a gulch. A man
in a suit, but too far away to do anything. A camera came up. Donny
winced at the bright beam of flash as it exploded his night vision.
Fireballs danced in his head, reminding him of nighttime incoming Hotel
Echo, but he stepped on the gas, gunned up the road and turned right,
then really floored it.
"Jesus, they got our picture," he said.
"A fed. That guy had to be FBI! Holy Christ!"
"My face was turned," said Julie.
"Then you're okay. I don't think he got a license number, because my
rear plate illumination bulb is broken. He just got my picture. A lot
of good that'll do them. A fed!
Man, this whole thing is strange."
"I wonder what's going on?" she said.
"What's going on is that Trig's about to get busted.
102 STEPHEN HUNTER
Trig and that Fitzpatrick guy. We were lucky we weren't rounded up.
I'd be on my way to the brig."
"Poor Trig," said Julie.
"Yes," said Donny.
"Poor Trig."
1 he man let him up. He brushed himself off.
"I haven't done anything," Peter explained.
"I've come to see my friends. You have no right to detain me, do you
understand? I haven't done anything."
The man stared at him sullenly.
"I'm going now. This is none of your business," he said.
He turned and walked away. The agent had seemed genuinely cowed. He
stepped away, awaiting a call, but none came. Another step filled him
with confidence, but he didn't see or hardly feel the judo chop that
broke his spine and, in the fullness of his tender youth and in the
ardor of his love for his generation and its pure idea of peace, killed
him before he hit the ground.
chapter eight
Donny reached DC around four in the morning, and he and Julie checked
into a motel on New York Avenue, in the tourist strip approaching
downtown. They were too tired for sex or love or talk.
He set the cheap alarm for 0800, and slept deeply until its ungentle
signal pulled him awake.
"Donny?" she said, stirring herself.
"Sweetie, I've got some things to do now. You just stay here, get some
more sleep. I paid for two nights. I'll call you sometime today and
we'll decide what to do next."
"Oh, Donny." She blinked awake. Even out of sleep, with a slightly
puffy face and her hair a rat's nest, she seemed to him quite uniquely
beautiful. He leaned over and kissed her.
"Don't do anything stupid and noble," she said.
"They'll kill you."
"Don't you worry about me," he said.
"I'll be all right."
He dressed and drove the mile or so through the section of city called
SE, passing Union Station, then left up the hill until he was in the
shadow of the great Capitol dome, turning down Pennsylvania, then down
Eighth. He arrived, found parking on a street just off the shops
across from the barracks, locked the car and headed to the main gate.
From across Eighth Street, the little outpost of Marine elegance seemed
serene. The officers' houses along the street were stately and
magnificent; between them, Donny could see men on the parade deck in
their modified blues, at parade practice, endlessly trying to master
the arcane requirements of duty and ritual. The imprecations of the
NCOs rose in the air, harsh, precise, demanding. The grass on which
the young men toiled was deep green, in104 STEPHEN HUNTER
tense and pure, like no other green in Washington in that hot, bleak
spring.
Finally, he walked across the street to the main gate, where a PFC
watched him come.
"Corporal Fenn, you've been reported UA," the PFC said.
"I know. I'll take care of it."
"I've been ordered to notify your company commander of your arrival."
"Do your duty, then. Private. Do you call Shore Patrol?"
"They didn't say anything about that. But I have to call Captain
Dogwood."
"Go ahead, then. I'm changing into my duty uniform."
"Yes, Corporal."
Donny walked through the main gate, across the cobblestone parking lot
and turned left down Troop Walk to the barracks.
As he went, he was aware of a strange phenomenon:
the world seemed to stop, or at least the Marine Corps world. It
seemed that whole marching platoons halted to follow his progress. He
felt hundreds of eyes on him, and the air suddenly emptied of its usual
fill of barked commands.
Donny went in, climbed the ladder well as he had done so many hundreds
of times, turned left on the second deck landing and into the squad
bay, at the end of which was his little room.
He unlocked his locker, stripped, slipped into flip flops and a towel
and marched to the showers, where he scalded himself in water and
disinfectant soap. He washed, dried, and headed back to his room,
where he slipped on a new pair of boxers and pulled out his oxfords.
They could be better. For the next ten minutes he applied the full
weight of his attention to the shoes, in regulation old Marine Corps
fashion, until he had burnished the leather to a high gleam. As he
finished the shoes, the
TIME TO HUNT 105
tough professional figure of Platoon Sergeant Case came to hover in the
door.
"I had to put you on UA, Fenn," he said, in that old Corps voice that
sounded like sandpaper on brass.
"Do you want me to Article Fifteen your young ass?"
"I was late. I had personal business. I apologize."
"You're not on the duty roster. They say you've got some legal
obligations at ten hundred."
"Yes, Sergeant. In the Navy Yard."
"Well, I'll get you off report. You do the right thing today, Marine.
Do you hear me?"
"Yes, Sergeant."
Case left him alone after that.
Though he hadn't been so ordered, and in fact didn't even know the
uniform of the day, he decided to put on his blue dress A uniform. He
pulled on socks and taped them to his shins so that they'd never fall,
selected a pair of blue dress trousers from the hanger and pulled them
on. He tied his shiny oxfords. He pulled on a T-shirt, and over it,
finally, the blue dress tunic with its bright brass buttons and red
piping. He pulled tight the immaculately tailored tunic, and buttoned
up to that little cleric's collar, where the eagle, globe and anchor
stood out in brass has-relief. He pulled on a white summer belt,
drawing it tight, giving him the torso of a young Achilles on a stroll
outside Troy. His white summer gloves and white summer cover completed
the transformation into total Marine.
The medals, reduced to ribbons, stood out on his chest--nothing
spectacular, for the Marines are a dour bunch, not into show: only a
smear of red denoting the very hot day when he'd slithered through rice
water and buffalo shit with half the world shooting at him to pull a
wounded PFC back into the world, to life, to possibility.
The blur of purple was for the bullet that had passed through his chest
a few weeks later. The rest was basically crap: a National Defense
Ribbon, the in-service RSVN award, the Presidential Unit Citation for
the overall III Marine Amphibious Force presence in the Land of Bad
106 STEPHEN HUNTER
Things, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantly and expert marksman in rifle
and pistol with second awards. It was no chest of fruit salad, but it
did say, This man is a Marine, who's been in the field, who was shot
at, who tried to do his duty.
He adjusted the white summer cover until it came low over his blue
eyes, then turned and went to face Commander Bonson.
He left the barracks and headed toward the captain's office, where he
was to be picked up. The XO wandered by and he snapped off a quick
salute.
"Fenn, is that the uniform of the day?"
"For what I have to do, sir, yes, sir."
"Fenn-Never mind. Go ahead."
"Thank you, sir."
Two NCOs, including Case, watched him go. By the time he reached Troop
Walk, by some strange vibration in the air, everyone knew he was in his
full dress blues. The men, in their modifieds, watched him with
suspicion, maybe a little hostility, but above all, curiosity. The
uniform, of course, was not the uniform of the day, and for a Marine to
strut out in so flagrant a gesture of rebellion was extremely odd; he
could have been naked and caused less of a ruckus.
Donny strode down Troop Walk, aware of the growing number of eyes upon
him. He had a fleeting impression of men running to catch a glimpse of
him going; even, across the way, when he passed by Center House, the
base's BOQ, a couple of off-duty first lieutenants came out onto the
porch in Bermudas and T's to watch him pass by.
He turned into the parking lot, where a tan government Ford, with a
squid driving, waited by the steps; he then turned left, climbed and
walked across the porch and into the first sergeant's office, which led
to Captain Dogwood's office. The first sergeant, holding a cup of
coffee with Semper Fi emblazoned on the porcelain, nodded at him, as
orderlies and clerks scurried to make way.
TIME TO HUNT 107
"They're waiting on you, Fenn."
"Yes, First Sergeant," said Donny.
He stepped into the office.
Captain Dogwood sat behind his desk, and Bonson and Weber, in their
summer khakis, sat across from him.
"Sir, Corporal Fenn, reporting as ordered, sir," Donny said.
"Ah, very good, Fenn," said Dogwood.
"Did you misunderstand the uniform of the day? I--" "Sir, no, sir
Donny said.
"Sir, permission to speak, sir! Another moment of silence.
"Fenn," said the captain, "I'd consider carefully before--"
"Let him speak," said Bonson, eyeing Donny without love.
Donny turned to face the man fully.
"Sir, the corporal wishes to state categorically that he will not
testify against a fellow Marine on charges of which he has no personal
knowledge. He will not perjure himself; he will not take part in any
proceedings involving the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Sir "Fenn,
what are you pulling?" asked Weber.
"We had an agreement."
"Sir, we never had an agreement. You gave me orders to investigate,
which I did, against my better instincts and in contravention to every
moral belief I have. I did my duty. My investigation was negative.
Sir, that is all I have to say, sir "Fenn," said Bonson, fixing him
with a mean glare, "you have no idea what forces you're playing with
and what can happen to you. This is no game; this is the serious
business of defending the security of our nation."
"Sir, I have fought for our nation and I have bled for our nation. No
man who hasn't has the right to tell me about defending our nation,
whatever his rank, sir} Finally, sir, may I sincerely say, sir, you are
an asshole and a creep and you haven't done one thing for the United
108 STEPHEN HUNTER
States of America, and if you want to meet me out back, let's go. Bring
Weber. I'll kick his ass too!"
"Fenn!" said Dogwood.
"All right, Captain Dogwood," said Bonson.
"I see this is the kind of Marine you have here at Eighth and I. I'm
very disappointed. This reflects on you, Captain, and my report will
so state. Fenn, if I were you, I'd start packing.
Don't forget your jungle boots."
He turned and walked out.
"That was stupid, Fenn," said Weber.
"Fuck you, Weber, you ass-kissing creep."
Weber swallowed and turned to Dogwood.
"Restrict him to quarters. His orders will be cut by four."
Then he turned and walked out.
Dogwood went to the phone and talked in an intimate voice with someone.
Then he hung up.
"Sit down, Fenn," said Dogwood, turning back to Donny.
"Do you smoke?"
"No, sir."
"Well, I do." Shaking a little, he lit up a Marlboro and went to the
door.
"Welch, get in here!"
Welch scurried in.
"Yes, sir."
"You have until four, Welch, to get liberty papers cut for Corporal
Fenn; get 'em back here for my signature.
Seventy-two hours. If you have to run over to personnel at Henderson
Hall, you take my car and driver. Don't stop for traffic. Do you
understand?"
"Uh, well, sir, I, it's highly irregular, I'm not--" "You heard me,
Welch," said the captain.
"Now get going."
He turned back to Donny.
"Okay, Fenn, I can't save you from Vietnam, but I can get you some time
off before you have to go if I can get your orders cut before Bonson's
paperwork catches up with you."
TIME TO HUNT 109
"Yes, sir."
"You go change into civvies now. You be ready to take off as soon as
possible."
"Yes, sir. I-Thank you, sir."
"Oh, just a moment. Yes, here she is."
A woman walked into the room, pleasant, in her late twenties. Donny
recognized her from the picture on the desk as Dogwood's wife.
"Here, Mort," she said, handing an envelope over. She turned to
Donny.
"You must be very foolish, young man.
Or very brave."
"I don't know, ma'am."
"Fenn, here. It's six hundred dollars, cash. It's all we had in our
quarters. It'll take you and your girlfriend someplace for a few
days."
"Sir, I--" "No, no, go ahead, son. Take it. Enjoy yourself. Pay it
back when you can. And when you get to the "Nam, keep your ass down.
That shithole isn't worth another Marine.
Not a single one. Now go. Go, go, son. And good luck."
PART II
SNIPER TEAM
SIERRA-BRAVO-FOUR
RSVN, I Corps February-May 1972
chapter nine
The rain fell in torrents in I Corps. It was the end of the rainy
season and no rainier season is rainier than the one in the Republic of
South Vietnam. Da Nang, the capital of this dying empire, was wet, but
some further hundred klicks out, wetter still, lay the fortified fire
base a few of the Marines left in the Land of Bad Things called Dodge
City, a ramshackle slum of sandbags, 105mm howitzers, S-shops, bunkers,
barbed wire and filthy, open four-holers. It was the tail end of a
lost war and nobody wanted to get wasted before the orders were cut
that got these sad boys home.
But there were Marines even beyond Dodge City, out in Indian Country.
There, in a tangle of scrub trees near the top of a hill identified on
maps only by its height in meters--Hill 519--two of them cowered in the
downpour, watching the drops accumulate on the rims of their boonie
caps, gather and finally drop off, while the rain beat a cold tattoo
against the ponchos that covered both of them and their gear.
One of them dreamed of home. It was Lance Corporal Donny Fenn, and he
was getting very short. In May, his four-year enlistment was up; he
was home free. He knew his DEROS by heart, as did every man in the
"Nam, the ones who first came in 1965, the ones who were still there:
Date of Estimated Return from Overseas Service.
Donny's was 07 May 1972. He was a two-tour guy, with a Purple Heart
and a Bronze Star, and though he no longer believed in the war, he did
believe, passionately, that he was going to make it. He had to.
On this wet morning, Donny dreamed of dry pleasures.
He dreamed of the desert, from where he'd come, Pima County, Arizona,
the town of Ajo, and the hot dry air that pulsed down from the Sonoras
out of Mexico, dry
114 STEPHEN HUNTER
as the devil's breath. He dreamed of baking in such a place, going
back to college, on to law school. He dreamed of a house, of a family,
a job. Most of all, he dreamed of his young wife, who had just written
him, and the words were inscribed in his mind now as he sat in the
downpour: "You keep your spirits high, Marine! I know you'll make it
and I pray for that day. You are the best thing that ever happened to
me and I cannot live without you, so if you get killed, I am going to
be plenty angry! I might never talk to you again, I would be so
mad."
He had written her back just before this boonie jaunt:
"Oh, you sweet thang, I do miss you so. Things are fine here. I
didn't know spiders could get big as lobsters or that it could rain for
three solid months, but these are useful facts and will come in ever so
handy back in the world. But the Sarge will keep me alive, because
he's the smartest Marine that ever lived or breathed and he said if I
got wasted, who the hell would he pick on and that would be no fun at
all!"
Rolled into his hatband, swaddled in cellophane, was a picture of
Julie, now out of her hippie phase, though she worked at the Tucson
Veterans Hospital among the wounded from another war and was even
talking of a nursing career now. In the picture, Julie's beauty was
like a beam in the night for a man lost and starving.
A shiver rose through Donny's spine, a deep and relentless cold. The
world had liquified: it was mud, fog or rain; no other elements
existed. It was an almost incandescent world, whose low lights yielded
no hint to time of day. The vapors simply floated in gray murk, a kind
of universal declamation of misery.
Under his poncho he felt the coldness of one of the few M14s left in
Vietnam, with a twenty-round magazine leaning into his leg, ready for
instant deployment if Sierra-Bravo-Four were bounced, but that would
never happen because the sergeant was so skilled at picking hides.
He carried two canteens, a 782-pack full of C-rats,
TIME TO HUNT 115
mostly barbecued pork, four M26 grenades, a Colt .45 automatic, an M-49
spotting scope, a black phosphate-bladed K-Bar, ten extra twenty-round
7.62 NATO mags, three Claymore mine bandoleers, one M57 electrical
firing device, a canvas bag full of flares and a flare launcher, and,
enemy of his life, bane of his existence, most hated of all objects on
the face of the earth, a PRC-77 radio, fourteen pounds of lifeline to
Dodge.
"Commo check," said the sergeant, who sat a few feet from Donny, gazing
at the same rain-blasted, foliage-dense landscape, the plains and
paddies and jungles and low, mean hills.
"Get on the horn, Pork."
"Shit," said Donny, for deploying the radio meant moving, moving meant
breaking the steamy seal the poncho had formed around his neck, which
meant cold water would cascade down his neck into the sweaty warmth of
his body. There was no colder place than Vietnam, but that was okay,
because there was no hotter place, either.
Donny stirred in the tent of his poncho, got the Prick-77 up and on,
knew its freak was preset accurately, and managed somehow, leaning it
forward precariously, to let its four feet of whip antenna snap forward
and out into the wet air.
He brought the phone to his ear up through his poncho and pushed the
on-off toggle to on. And, yes, a shivery blade of water sluiced down
between his shoulder blades, underneath his jungle cammies. He
shivered, said "Fuck" under his breath and continued to struggle with
the radio.
The problem with the Pricks wasn't only their limited range, their
dense weight, their line-of-sight operational capabilities but, more
critically, their short battery lives.
Therefore grunts used them sparingly on preset skeds, contacting base
for a fast sitrep. He pressed send.
"Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?"
He pressed receive, and for his efforts got a crackly
116 STEPHEN HUNTER
soup of noise. No big surprise, with the low clouds, the rain, and the
terrain's own vagaries at play; sometimes they got through and
sometimes they didn't.
He tried again.
"Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you read? Is
anybody there? Hello, knock, knock, please open the door, over?"
The response was the same.
"Maybe they're all asleep," he said.
"Naw," said the sergeant, in his rich Southern drawl, slow and steady
and funny as shit, "it's too late to be stoned and too early to be
drunk. This is the magic hour when them boys are probably alert. Keep
trying."
Donny hit the send button and repeated his message a couple more times
without luck.
"I'm going to the backup freak," he finally stated.
The sergeant nodded.
Donny spread the poncho so that he could get at the simple controls
atop the unit. Two dials seemed to grin at him next to the two
butterfly knobs that controlled them, one for megahertz, the other for
kilohertz. He diddled, looking for 79.92, to which Dodge City
sometimes defaulted if there was heavy radio traffic or atmospheric
interference, and as he did, the radio prowled through the wave band of
communications that was Vietnam in early 1972, propelled by the weird
reality that it could receive from a far greater distance than it could
send.
They heard a lost truck driver trying to get back to Highway 1, a pilot
looking for his carrier, a commo clerk testing his gear, all of it
crackly and fragmented as the signals in their varying strengths ebbed
and flowed. Some of it was in Vietnamese, for the ARVN were on the
same net; some of it was Army, for there were more soldiers than
Marines left by fifty-odd thousand; some of it was Special Forces, as a
few of the big A-camps still held out to the north or west; some of it
was fire missions, permission to break off search, requests for more
beer and beef.
Finally, Donny lit where he wanted.
TIME TO HUNT 117
"Ah, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you copy?"
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six here; yes, we copy. What is
your sitrep, over?"
"Tell 'em we're drowning," said the sergeant.
"Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, we're all wet. Nothing moving up here. Nothing
living up here, Foxtrot, over."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, does Swagger want to call an abort? Over."
"They want to know, do you want to call an abort?"
The hunter-killer mission was slated to go another twenty-four hours
before air evac, but the sergeant himself appeared to be extremely low
on the probability of contact at this time.
"Affirmative," he said.
"No bad guys anywhere.
They're too smart to go out in shit like this. Tell 'em to get us the
hell out of here as soon as possible."
"That's an affirmative, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six. Request air evac,
over."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, our birds are grounded. You'll have to park it
until we can get airborne again."
"Shit, they're souped in," said Donny.
"Okay, tell 'em we'll sit tight and wait for the weather to break, but
we ain't bringing home any scalps."
Donny hit send.
"Foxtrot, we copy. We'll sit tight and get back to you when the sun
breaks through, over."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, roger that. Out."
The radio crackled to silence.
"Okay," said Donny, "that about ties that one up."
"Yeah," said the sergeant, with just a hint of a question in his
voice.
"Pork," he said after a second or two, "was you paying attention while
you were going to the backup freak? You hear anything?"
The sergeant was like a cop who could understand and decipher the
densest code or the most broken-up sound bits on the radio.
118 STEPHEN HUNTER
"No, I didn't hear a thing," said Donny.
"The chatter, you know, the usual stuff."
"Okay, do me a favor, Pork."
He always called Donny "Pork." He called all his spotters Pork. He'd
had three spotters before Donny.
"Pork, you run through them freaks real slow and you concentrate. I
thought I heard a syllable that sounded like 'gent."" "Gent? As in
gent-prefer blondes?"
"You got a blonde, you should know. No, as in urgent."
Donny's fingers clicked slowly through the chatter on the double dials
as a hundred different signals came and went in the same fractured
militare se made more incomprehensible by radio abbreviations, the
tangle of codes and call signs, Alpha-Four-Delta, Delta-Six-Alpha,
Whiskey-Foxtrot-Niner, Iron-Tree-Three, Rathole Zulu-Six, Tan San Nhut
control, on and on, Good morning, Vietnam, how are you today, it's
raining. It meant nothing.
But the sergeant leaned forward, his whole body tense with
concentration, un shivery in the wet, hardly even human in his
intensity. He was a thin stick of a man, twenty-six, with a blond crew
cut, a sunburn so deep it had almost changed his race, cheekbones like
bed knobs, squinty gray squirrel-shooter's eyes, 100 percent American
redneck with an accent that placed him in the backwoods of some
underdeveloped principality far from sophisticated living, but with an
odd grace and efficiency to him.
He had no dreams, not of desert, not of a farm or a city, not of home,
not of hearth. He was total kick-ass professional Marine Corps lifer,
and if he dreamed of anything, it was only of that harsh and bitter
bitch Duty, whom he'd never once cheated on, whom he'd honored and
served on two other tours, one as a platoon sergeant in sixty-five and
another running long-range patrols up near the DMZ for SOG. If he had
an inner life, he kept it to himself. They said he'd won some big
civilian shooting tournament and they said his daddy was a Marine
too,
TIME TO HUNT 119
back in World War II, and won the Medal of Honor, but the sergeant
never mentioned this and who would have the guts to ask? He had no
family, he had no wife or girlfriend, he had no home, nothing except
the Marine Corps and a sense that he had been produced by turbulent,
hard scrabble times, of which. he preferred not to speak and on whose
agonies he would remain forever silent.
He was many other things, but only one of them mattered to Donny. He
was the best. Man, he was good! He was so fucking good it made your
head spin. If he fired, someone died, an enemy soldier always. He
never shot if he didn't see a weapon. But when he shot, he killed.
Nobody told him otherwise, and nobody would fuck with him. He was
super cool in action, the ice king, who just let it happen, kept his
eyes and ears open and figured it out so fast it made you dizzy. Then
he reacted, took out any moving bad guys, and went about his business.
It was like being in Vietnam with Mick Jagger, or some other legendary
star, because everybody knew who Bob the Nailer was, and if they didn't
love him, by God, they feared him, because he was also Death From Afar,
the Marine Corps way. He was more rifle than man, and more man than
anybody. Even the NVA knew who he was: it was said a 15,000-pi astre
bounty had been placed on his head. The sergeant thought this was
pretty funny.
But in the end, it would kill him, Donny thought. The war would eat
him up in the end. He would try one more brave and desperate thing,
eager somehow to keep it going, to press himself even further, and it
would, in the end, kill his heroic ass. He'd never hit his DEROS. For
boys like this, there was no such thing as DEROS. Vietnam was
forever.
He reminded Donny of someone but Donny hadn't figured it out. There
was something about him, however, oddly familiar, oddly resonant. This
had struck him before but he could never quite nail it down. Was it a
teacher somewhere? Was it a relative, a Marine from his earlier
120 STEPHEN HUNTER
tour or his time at Eighth and I? For a time, he'd thought it was Ray
Case, his furious platoon sergeant there, but as he got to know Bob,
that connection vaporized. Case was a good, tough, professional
Marine, but Bob was a great Marine. They didn't make many of them like
Bob Lee Swagger.
But who was he like? Why did he seem so familiar?
Donny shook the confusion out of his head.
Swagger sat under the poncho, the water dripping off his boonie hat,
his eyes almost blank as he listened to the crackly tapestry of radio.
He was as equally laden as Donny: the taped bull barrel of his M40
sniper rifle-really just a Remington 700 .308 Varmint with a Redfield
9X scope aboard--poked out from the neck of his poncho as he did what
he could to keep the action and the wood, which would swell with
moisture, dry. He also carried four M26 grenades, two Claymore
bandoleers, an M57 electrical firing device, a .45 automatic, two
canteens and a pack full of C-rats (preferred poison: ham and powdered
eggs), and seventy-two rounds of Mil 8 Lake City Arsenal Match ammo,
the 173-grain load used by Army and Marine high-powered shooters at
Camp Perry. But he was a man who traveled well prepared; he had a
Randall Survivor knife with a sawtooth blade, a Colt .380 baby
hammerless in an aviator's shoulder holster under his camo utilities
and, strapped to his back, an M3 grease gun and five thirty-round
magazines.
"There," he said.
"You hear it? Swear to Christ I heard something."
Donny had heard nothing in the murk of chatter; still, he slowed his
diddling and redialed, watching the little numbers on the face crackle
through the gap as he shifted them. Finally he lit on something so
soft you could miss it entirely, and he only received it because it
seemed to be right on the cusp of the megahertz click to another
freak;
if he took the tension off the knob, the signal disappeared.
TIME TO HUNT 121
But, raspy and distant, they did hear it, and the words seemed to
define themselves out of the murk until they became distinct.
"Anyone on this net? Anyone on this net? How you read me? Over?
Urgent, goddammit, over!"
There was no answer.
"This is Arizona-Six-Zulu. I have beaucoup bad guys all over the
goddamn place. Anyone on this net? CharlieCharlieNovember, you there,
over?"
"He's way out of our range," Donny said.
"And who the hell is Arizona-Six-Zulu?" Donny wondered.
-"He's got to be one of the Special Forces camps to the west. They use
states as call signs. They call 'em FOBs, forward operating bases.
He's trying to reach Charlie Charlie November, which is SOG Command and
Control North at Da Nang."
But Arizona-Six-Zulu got a callback.
"Arizona-Six-Zulu, this is Lima-Niner-Mike at Outpost Hickory. Is that
you, Puller? Can hardly read your signal, over."
"Lima-Niner-Mike, my big rig took a hit and I'm on the Prick-77. I
have big trouble. I have bad guys all over the place hitting me front
ally and I hear from scouts a main force unit is moving in to take my
base camp out. I need air or arty, over."
"Arizona-Six-Zulu, neg on the air. We are souped in and everything has
been grounded. Let me check on arty, over."
"I am Team Arizona base camp, grid square Whiskey Delta 5120-1802.1
need Hotel Echo in the worst possible way, over."
"Shit, neg to that, Arizona-Six-Zulu. I have no, repeat no, fire
support bases close enough to get shells to your area. They closed
down Mary Jane and Suzie Q last week, and the Marines at Dodge are too
far, over."
"Over, Lima-Niner-Mike, I am out here on my lonesome with eleven
Americans and four hundred in digs and
122 STEPHEN HUNTER
we are in heavy shit and I am running down on ammo, food, and water. I
need support ASAP, over."
"I have your coordinates, Arizona-Six-Zulu, but I have no artillery
fire bases operational within range. I will go to Navy to see if we
can get naval gunfire in range and I will call up tac air ASAP when
weather clears. You must hang on until weather breaks,
Arizona-Six-Zulu, over."
"Lima-Niner-Mike, if that main force unit gets here before the weather
breaks, I am dog food, over."
"Hang tight, Arizona-Six-Zulu, the weather is supposed to break by noon
tomorrow. I will get through to Charlie-Charlie-November and we will
get Phantoms airborne fastest then, over."
"Roger, Lima-Niner-Mike," said Arizona-Six-Zulu, "and out."
"God bless and good luck, Arizona-Six-Zulu, out," said Lima, and the
freak crackled into nothingness.
"Man, those guys are going to get roasted," said Donny.
"This weather ain't lifting for days."
"You got that map case?" said Swagger.
"Let me see that thing. What were those coordinates?"
"Shit, I don't remember," said Donny.
"Well, then," said Bob, "it's a good thing I do."
He opened the case that Donny shoved over, went through the
plastic-wrapped sheaves of operational territory 1 :50,000s, and at
last came to the one he wanted. He studied hard, then looked over.
"You know, goddamn, if I ain't a fool at map reading, I do believe you
and I are the closest unit to them Special Forces fellows. They are
west of us, at Kham Due, ten klicks out of Laos. We are in grid square
Whiskey Charlie 155-005; they are up in Whiskey Delta 5120-1802. As I
make it, that's about twenty klicks to the west.-" Donny squinted. His
sergeant indeed had located the proper square, and the Special Forces
camp would therefore have been, yes, about twenty klicks. But--there
were foothills, a wide brown snake of river and a mountain range
between here and there, all of it Indian Territory.
TIME TO HUNT 123
"I'm figuring," Bob said, "one man, moving fast, he might just make it
before the main force unit. And those boys would have to move up
through this here An Loc valley. You got into those hills, you'd have
a hell of a lot of targets."
"Christ," said Donny.
"You just might slow 'em up enough so that air could make it in when
the weather broke."
A cold drop of rain deposited itself on Donny's neck and plummeted down
his back. A shiver rose from his bones.
"Raise Dodge again, Pork. Tell 'em I'm going on a little trip."
"I'm going too," said Donny.
Bob paused. Then he said, "My ass you are. I won't have no
short-timer with me. You hunker here, call in extraction when the
weather clears. Don't you worry none about me. I'll get into that
camp and extract with Arizona."
"Bob, I--" "No! You're too short. You'd be too worried about getting
whacked with three and days till DEROS. And if you weren't, I would
be. Plus, I can move a lot faster on my own. This is a one-man job or
it's no job at all. That's an order."
"Sergeant, I--" "No, goddammit. I told you. This ain't no goddamned
game. I can't be worrying about you."
"Goddammit, I'm not sitting here in the fucking rain waiting for
extract. You made us a team. You shoot, I spot targets, I handle
security. Suppose you have to work at night? Who throws flares?
Suppose it's hot and somebody has to call in air? Who works the map
for the coordinates and the radio? Suppose you're bounced from
behind?
Who takes out the fast movers? Who rigs the Claymores?"
"You are fixing to git yourself killed, Lance Corporal.
And, much worse, you are pissing me off beaucoup."
124 STEPHEN HUNTER
"I am not bugging out. I will not bug out!"
Bob's eyes narrowed. He suspected all heroism and self-sacrifice
because his own survival wasn't based on any sense of them, but rather
on shrewd professional combat skills, even shrewder calculation of odds
and, shrewdest of all, a sense that to be aggressive in battle was the
key to coming out alive on the other side.
"What are you trying to prove, kid? You been a hard-ass to prove
something ever since I teamed with you."
"I'm not trying to prove anything. I want no slack, that's all. Zero
fucking slack. I go all the way, that's all there is. When I get back
to the world, maybe then it's different. But out here, goddamn it, I
go all the way."
His fierceness softened Swagger, who'd coaxed many a boy through bad
times with shit coming in, who'd gotten the grunts moving when the last
thing they wanted to do was move, who never lost a spotter to a body
bag and lost a hell of a lot fewer young Marines than some could say.
But this stubborn boy perplexed him all the way, all the time. Only
one of 'em who got up earlier than he did, and who never once made a
mistake on the pr emission equipment checks.
"Donny, ain't nobody going to ever say you bugged out. I'm trying to
cut you some room, boy. No sense dying on this one. This is a Bob
show. This is what old Bob was put here to do. It ain't no college
football game."
"I'm going. Goddamn, we are Sierra-Bravo-Four, and I am going."
"Man, you sure you were born in the right generation?
You belong in the old breed, you salty bastard, with my dead old man.
Okay, let's gear up. Call it in. I'm going to shoot us a goddamn
compass reading to that grid square, and when we're done I'll buy you a
steak and a case of Jack Daniel's."
Donny took the moment to peel off his boonie cap and pull out the
cellophane-wrapped photo of Julie.
He stared at it as the raindrops collected on the plastic. She looked
so dry and far away, and he ached for
TIME TO HUNT 125
her. Three and days till DEROS. He would come home.
Donny would come marching home again, hurrah, hurrah.
Oh, baby, he said to himself, oh baby, I hope you're with me on this
one. Every step of the way.
"Let's go, Pork," sang Bob the Nailer.
chapter ten
After a time, Donny stopped hurting. He was beyond pain. He was also,
ever so briefly, beyond fear. They traveled from landmark to landmark
along Swagger's charted compass readings over the slippery terrain, the
rain so harsh some time you could hardly breathe. At one moment he was
somewhat stunned to discover himself on the crest of a low hill. When
had they climbed it? He had no memory of the ascent. He just had the
sense of the man ahead of him pulling him forward, urging him on,
oblivious to both of their pains, oblivious also to fear and to mud and
to changes in the elevation.
After a while they came to a valley, to discover the classical Vietnam
terrain of rice paddies separated by paddy dikes. The dikes were muddy
as shit, and in a few minutes, the going on them proved slow and
treacherous.
Swagger didn't even bother to tell him, he just lifted his rifle over
his head, stepped off the break and started to fight through the water,
churning up mud as he went.
What difference could it make? They were so wet it didn't matter, but
the water was thick and muddy and at each step the muddy bottom seemed
to suck at Donny's boots.
His feet grew heavier. The rain fell faster. He was wetter, colder,
more fatigued, more desperate, more lonely.
At any moment, some lucky kid with a carbine and a yen to impress his
local cadre could have greased them.
But the rain fell so hard it drove even the VC and the main force NVA
units to cover. They moved across a landscape devoid of human
occupation. The fog coiled and rolled. Once, from afar, the vapors
parted and they saw a village a klick away down a hill, and Donny
imagined what was going on in the warm little huts: the boiling soup
with its floating sheaves of bible tripe and brisket
TIME TO HUNT 127
sliced thin and fish heads floating in it, and the thought of hot food
almost made him keel over.
This is nothing, he told himself. Think of football.
Think of two-a-days in August. No, no, think of games.
Think of ... Think of ... Think of making the catch against Oilman
High; think of third and twelve, we've never beaten them, but for some
odd reason late in this game we're close but now we've stalled. Think
of setting up at tight end instead of running back because you have the
best hands on the team. Think of Julie, a cheerleader in those days,
the concern on her face.
Think of the silliness of it all! It all seemed so important!
Beating Oilman! Why was that so important? It was so silly! Then
Donny remembered why it was important.
Because it was so silly. It meant so little that it meant so much.
Think of going off the set, faking inside, then breaking on a slant for
the sidelines as Vercolone, the quarterback, broke from his
disintegrating pocket and began to rotate toward him, curling around,
his arm cocked then uncocked as he released the ball. Think of the
ball in the air.
Think of seeing it float toward you, Vercolone had led you too much,
the ball was way out of reach, there was no noise, there was no
sensation, there was only the ball sliding past. But think of how you
went airborne.
That was the strange thing. He did not ever remember leaping. It just
happened, one of those instinct things, as the computer in your head
took over your body and off you went.
He remembered straining in the air and, with his one hand stretched out
to the horizon, the slap of contact as the ball glanced off his longest
fingers, popped into the air and seemed to pause forever as he slid
through the air by it, now about to miss it, but somehow he actually
pivoted in air, got his chest out to snare it as it fell, then clasped
his other hand against it, pinning it to him as he thudded to the
ground and by the grace of a God who must love jocks, it did not pop
out, he had caught it for a first down,
128 STEPHEN HUNTER
and three plays later they scored and won the game, beating an ancient
enemy for the first time in living memory.
Oh, that was so very good! That was so very good.
The warmth of that moment came flooding back across him, its
meaningless glory warming and giving him just the slightest tingle of
energy. Maybe he would make it.
But then he went down, floundering, feeling the water flood into his
lungs, and he struggled, coughing out buffalo shit and a million
paramecium. A harsh grip pulled him out and he shook like a wet dog.
It was Swagger, of course.
"Come on," Swagger yelled through the din of pounding rain.
"We're almost out of the paddies. Then all we got is another set of
hills, a river and a goddamn mountain.
Damn, ain't this fun?"
Water. According to the map, the river was called la Trang. It bore
no other name and on the paper was a squiggly black line, its secrets
unrevealed. As it lay before them in reality, however, it was swollen
brown and wide, over spilling its banks, and was a swift, deadly
current. The rain smashed against its turbulent surface like machine
gun fire.
"Guess what?" said Swagger.
"You just got a new job."
"Huh?"
"You just got a new job. You're now the lifeguard."
"Why?"
"
"Cause I cain't swim a lick," he said, with a broad smile.
"Great," said Donny.
"I can't either."
"Oh, this one's going to be a pisser. Damn, why'd you insist on this
trip?"
"I was momentarily deluded into thinking I was important."
"That kind of thinkin'll git you killed every damn time.
Now, let's see if we can find some wood or something."
They ranged the dangerous bank of the river and in
TIME TO HUNT 129
time came to a bombed-out village. The gunships and Phantoms had
worked it over pretty well; nothing could have survived the hell of
that recent day. No structure stood: only timbers, piles of ash
liquified to gunk in the pounding rain, craters everywhere, a long
smear of burned vegetation where the napalm splashed through, killing
everything it touched. A cooking pot lay on its side, speared by a
machine gun bullet, so that it blossomed outward in jagged petals. The
stench of the burning still clung to the ground, despite the rain.
There were no bodies, but just out of the kill zone a batch of newly
dug graves with now-dead Buddhist incense reeds in cheap black jars had
been etched into the ground. Two were very, very small.
"I hope they were bad guys," said Donny, looking at the new cemetery.
"If we run this fucking war right," Swagger said, "we'd have known they
was bad, because we'd have people on the ground, up close. Not this
shit. Not just hosing the place down with firepower. Nobody should
have to die because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time and some
squid pilot's got some ordnance left and don't want to land on no
carrier with it."
Donny looked at him. In five months of extreme togetherness, Bob had
never said a thing about the way the war was waged, what it cost, who
it killed, why it happened.
His, instead, was the practical craft of mission and its close pal
survival: how to do this thing, where to hide, how to track, what to
shoot, how to kill, how to get the job done and come back alive.
"Well, nobody'll ever know, that's for goddamn sure," said Bob.
"Unless you get out of this shit hole and you tell 'em. You got that,
Pork? That's your new MOS: witness.
You got that?"
Familiar again. Where was this from? What did this mean? What
sounded so right about it, the same melody, slightly different
instrument?
"I'll tell 'em."
130 STEPHEN HUNTER
"
"Cause I'm too dumb to tell 'em. They'll never listen to a hillbilly
like me. They'll listen to you, boy, 'cause you looked the goddamn
elephant in the eye and came back to talk about it. Got that?"
"Got it."
"Good. Now let's scare up some wood and build us Noah's ark."
They scrounged in the ruins and came up after a bit with seven decent
pieces of wood, which Bob rigged together in some clever Boy Scout way
with a coil of black rope he carried. He lashed his and Donny's
rifles, the two 782-packs and harnesses, all the grenades, the map
case, the canteens, the PRC-77, the flares and flare gun, and the
pistols to it.
"Okay, you really can't swim?"
"I can sort of."
"Well, I can a bit, too. The deal is, you cling hard to this thing and
you kick hard. I'll be on the other side.
Keep your face out of the water and keep on fighting, no matter what.
And don't let go. The current'll take you and you'll be one dead puppy
dog and nobody'll remember your name till they inscribe it on some
monument and the pigeons come shit on it. Ain't that a pretty
thought?"
"Very pretty."
"So let's do it. Pork. You just became a submariner."
The water was intensely cold and stronger than Zeus.
In the first second Donny panicked, floundered, almost pulled the
rickety raft over and only Bob's strength on the other side kept them
afloat. The raft floated diagonally across and the swiftness and anger
of the river had it in an instant, and Donny, clinging with both
desperate hands to the rope lashings Bob had jury-rigged, felt swept
away, taken by it, the coldness everywhere. His feet flailed, touched
nothing. He sank a bit and it gushed down his throat and he coughed
and leaped like a seal, freeing himself.
It was all water, above and beneath, his chin in the
TIME TO HUNT 131
stuff, his eyes and face pelted by it as. it fell from the gray sky at
a brutal velocity.
"Kick, goddammit!" he heard Bob scream, and with his legs he began a
kind of strangely rhythmic breaststroke.
The craft seemed to spurt ahead just a bit.
But there came a moment when it was all gone. Fog obscured the land
and he felt he was thrashing across an ocean, the English Channel at
the very least, a voyage that had forgotten its beginning and couldn't
imagine its ending.
The water lured him downward to its black numbness;
he could feel it sucking at him, fighting toward his throat and his
lungs, and it stank of napalm, gunpowder, aviation fuel, buffalo shit,
peasants who sold you a Coke by day and cut your throat by night, dead
kids in ditches, flaming vines, friendly-fire casualties, the whole
fucking unstoppable momentum of the last eight years, and who was he to
fight it, just another grunt, a lance corporal and former corporal with
a shaky past, it seemed so huge, so vast, it seemed like history
itself.
"Fight it, goddammit," came Swagger's call from the other side, and
then he knew who Bob was.
Bob was Trig's brother.
Bob and Trig were almost the same man, somehow.
Despite their differing backgrounds, they were the aristocrats of the
actual, singled out by DNA to do things others couldn't, to be heroes
in the causes they gave their lives to, to be always and forever
remembered. They were Odin and Zeus. They were dangerously special,
they got things done, they had an incredible vitality and life force.
The war would kill them. That's why both had commanded him to be the
witness, he now saw. It was his job to survive and sing the story of
the two mad brothers, Bob and Trig, consumed in, devoured by, killed in
the war.
Trig was dead. Trig had blown himself up at the University of
Wisconsin along with some pitiful graduate assistant who happened to be
working late that night. They found Trig's body, smashed and ruptured
by the explosive.
It made him famous, briefly, a freak of headlines:
132 STEPHEN HUNTER
HARVARD GRAD DIES IN BLAST; CARTER FAMILY SCION KILLS
SELF IN BOMB BLAST; TRIG CARTER, THE GENTLE AVIAN
PAINTER TURNED MARTYR TO THE CAUSE OF PEACE.
It had killed Trig, as Trig had known it would. That's what Trig was
telling him that last night; now he understood.
He had to make it back, to tell the story of Trig and his mad brother
Bob, eaten, each in his own way, by the war. Would it ever be over?
Someone had him. He swallowed and looked, and Swagger was yanking him
from the water to the shore, where he collapsed, heaving with
exhaustion.
"Now hear this. The smoking light is now lit," said Bob.
From the wet river through the wet rain they finally reached the
mountain. It wasn't a great mountain. Donny had seen greater
mountains in his time in the desert; he'd even climbed some. Swagger
said he was from mountain country too, but Donny had never heard of
mountains in the South, or Oklahoma or Arkansas or whatever mysterious
backwoods the sniper hailed from.
The mountain was dense with foliage over hard rock, wide open to
observation from hundreds of meters out.
Pick your poison.
"Oh, Christ," said Donny, looking at the steep slope.
Time had no meaning. It seemed to be twilight but it could have been
dawn. He looked upward and the water pelted him in the face.
"I want to get halfway up in the next two hours," Bob said.
"I don't think I can," gulped Donny.
"I don't think I can either," said Bob.
"And, what's worse, if that goddamn main force battalion is in the area
heading on that base camp, they're sure to have security out, just the
thing to keep boys like us out of their hair."
"I can't do it," Donny said.
"I cain't do it neither," said Swagger.
"But it's gotta be
TIME TO HUNT 133
done and I don't see no two other boys here, do you? If I saw two
others, believe me, I'd send them, yessirree."
"Oh, shit," Donny said.
"Well, look at it this way. We only got where we got 'cause we came
through full monsoon. We go back, when the rains dry up Victor C.
gonna come out. He's gonna find us. He's gonna kill us. We weren't
invited into his goddamn yard, and he's gonna be plenty pissed. So we
gotta make that Special Forces base camp or we are going to die out
here for sure. That's just about the size of that piece of shit and
that's all there is to it!"
He smiled, not out of happiness or glee but possibly because he was too
exhausted to do anything else.
"Wish I had a Dexedrine," he said.
"But I don't believe in that shit. Came back from my second tour with
a monkey the size of a ape on my butt. Had to work like hell to kill
that furry bastard, too. Now, that wasn't much fun at all."
The man wasn't in Vietnam; in some sense he was Vietnam. He'd done it
all: sniped, raided, taken hills, led recons, worked intel, advised
ARVN units, run interrogations, done analysis, fought in a thousand
firefights, killed who knew how many, visited hospitals, talked to
generals.
He was one part of his whole goddamned generation rolled into one. This
was entirely new, but unsurprising:
he'd been a speed freak. Maybe he'd done heroin, maybe he'd caught the
clap, maybe he'd been tattooed, maybe he'd murdered prisoners. He was
Trig, at least in the way that he'd done everything to win the war that
Trig had done in his parallel universe to end it, a furious, relentless
crusade, presaged on the obsolete notion that one man could make a
difference.
"You remind me of a guy," Donny said.
"Oh, yeah. Some hillbilly on the radio. Lum or the other one, Abner?
They come from my hometown."
"No, believe it or not, a peacenik."
"Oh, a commie. He has long hair and looked like
134 STEPHEN HUNTER
Jesus. His shit didn't stink, I bet. Mine does, but good, Pork."
"No. He was like you, a hero. He was bigger than the rest of us. He
was a legend."
"To be a legend, don't you have to be dead? Ain't that part of the job
description?"
"He is dead."
"He managed to get his ass wasted demonstrating against the war? Now,
that do take some kind of genius level intelligence. And I remind you
of him? Son, you must have the fever bad."
"He just wouldn't quit. There wasn't any quit in him."
"Yeah, well, there's plenty of quit in me, Pork. One more job, then I
am going to quit for the rest of my life.
Now, let's just git a move on."
"Which way?"
"We go up the switchbacks, they'll bounce us. Only one way. Straight
up."
"Christ."
"We'll eat. Picnic time. It'll be the last meal you git till this is
over or you get killed and you get a nice steak in heaven. Dump your
C-rats and your canteens and your 782. Use your entrenching tool. Set
it at the angle. We going to use it to pull our way up, you got
that?"
"I don't--" "Sure you do. Watch me."
Quickly and expertly, he shed himself of most of his gear; only the
weapons remained. He fished a C-rat out of his dumped pack, and
quickly used his can opener to whip up cold eggs and ham, which he
gobbled quickly.
"Go on, chow time. Eat something."
Donny set out to do the same and in a few seconds was pulling down the
barbecued pork, cold but flavorful.
"When we're done, you gimme the radio. I ain't carrying as much
weight."
"I'll take your rifle."
"The hell you will. Nobody touches the rifle but me."
Of course. The basic rule. He remembered when
TIME TO HUNT 135
Swagger had come looking for him, sitting forlornly on outpost duty at
a forward observation post his third week at Dodge City.
"You Fenn?"
"Uh, yeah. Uh, Sergeant--?"
"Swagger. Name's Swagger. I'm the sniper."
Donny had a momentary intake of breath. In the dark, he could hardly
see him: just a fierce wraith of a man sheathed in darkness, speaking
in a dense Southern accent.
Bob the Nailer, the one with the 15,000-pi astre bounty on his head and
over thirty kills. Donny had the sense that all was quiet, that the
other men had just willed themselves to nothingness out of fear or
respect for Bob the Nailer. Though he could not see the sniper's eyes,
Donny knew they burned at him, and ate him up.
"I just put my spotter on a medevac back to the world with a hole in
his leg," said the sniper.
"I'm looking for a replacement. You shot expert. You have the highest
GET at Dodge. You have twenty-ten vision. You done a tour, won a
medal, so you been shot at some and won't panic.
All that don't mean shit. You was at Eighth and I. That means you done
the ceremonial stuff, which means you have a patience for detail work
and a willingness to be an unnoticed part of a bigger team. I need
that. You interested?"
"Me? I--" "Good perks. I'll get you steak and all the bourbon you can
drink. When we're in, we live like kings. I'll keep you off crap like
night watch and ambush patrols and forward observation and shit-burning
details. I'll get you R&R anywhere you want. Bad shit: A) You don't
touch the rifle. Nobody touches the rifle. B) You don't do drugs.
I catch you with a buzz on, I ship you home under guard and you'll
spend two years in Portsmouth. C) You don't call nobody gook, clink,
slope or zip. These are the very finest soldiers in the world. They
are winning and they will win. We kill them, but by God, we kill them
with respect.
Those are the only three rules, but they ain't to be bent or
136 STEPHEN HUNTER
even breathed hard on. Or, you can sit here in this shit hole waiting
for someone to drop a mortar shell on your head. And somehow I got a
feeling every shit detail, every shit patrol, every piece-of-crap
garbage job that comes up, you're number one on the fuck list. I hope
you like the stink of burning shit because you're going to smell a lot
of it."
"Back in the world, I had some problems," said Donny.
"I got a bad rap. I wouldn't 'cooperate."
" "I figured it from your jacket. Some kind of infraction of orders?
You lost your rating. Hey, kid, this ain't the world. This is the
"Nam, have you noticed? It don't mean shit to me, you got that? You
do the jobs I give you one hundred percent and I'll back you one
hundred percent.
You may get killed, you will work hard, but you will have fun. Killing
people is lots of fun. Now, you want in or what?"
"I guess I'm in."
Within thirty minutes, Donny had been relieved of duty and moved into
the scout-sniper squad bay with S/Sgt. Swagger NCOIC--or, as some
called him, NCGIC, Non-Commissioned God in Charge--and the only man
whose word mattered anywhere in the world.
He had never broken one of the rules until now. He had weighed each M1
18 round Swagger carried against the one-in-a-million chance of an
off-charge at Lake City;
he had cleaned Bob's .45, .380 and grease gun and his own M14 and .45;
he shined and dried the jungle boots; he laid out and assembled the
gear before each mission; he polished the lens of the spotting scope;
he checked the pins on the grenades, the plastic canteens for mildew;
he hand-enameled the brass on the 872 gear dead black; he did laundry;
he learned elevation, windage and range estimation;
he kept range cards; he filled out after-action reports;
he studied the operating area maps like a sacred text; he handled flank
security and once killed two NVC who were infiltrating around Bob's
position; he learned
TIME TO HUNT 137
PRC-77 protocol and maintenance. He worked like hell, and he had never
broken one of the rules.
Only Bob touched the rifle. Bob broke it down after each mission,
cleaned it to the tiniest crevice, scrubbed it dry, re zeroed it,
treated it like a baby or a mistress. He and only he could touch or
carry the rifle.
"It ain't I don't trust you. It ain't you drop it and it gets knocked
out of zero and you don't tell me and I miss a shot and somebody,
probably me, gets killed. It's just that the bedrock here is simple,
clear, powerful and helps us both: nobody touches the rifle but me.
Good fences make good neighbors. Ever hear that one?"
' "I think so."
"Well, the rifle rule is my fence. Got that?"
"I do. Entirely, Sergeant."
"You call me sergeant around the lifers here in Dodge.
In the field, you call me Bob or Swagger or whatever the hell you want.
Don't call me sergeant in the field. One of them boys might be
listening and he might decide to kill me because he heard you call me
sergeant. Got that, Pork?"
"I do."
And he had never forgotten that rule or any of the rules, until now.
"I forgot," he said in the rain to Swagger.
"About the rifle."
"Damn, Fenn, I was just getting to like you, too. I thought you' se
going to work out," Bob said, needling him ever so gently. But then it
was back to mission: "Okay, you done eating? You got your shit wired
in tight? This is it. Over this hill, through their security and then
sleep a bit. Comes morning we get to do some shooting."
Bob went first, down to soaked tiger camos and boonie cap, his rifle
slung upside down on his back. He carried the M3 grease gun in one
hand and the entrenching tool in the other, and he used the tool as a
kind of hook, to sink into roots of trees or the tangles of vegetation
to get
138 STEPHEN HUNTER
himself up the steep incline a few more feet. He moved with slow,
almost calm deliberation. The rain fell still in torrents in the
darkening gloom, and it rattled off the leaves and against the mud. How
could it rain so hard so long? Was God ending the world, washing away
Vietnam and its sins, its atrocities, its arrogances and follies? It
seemed that way.
Donny was fifty yards to the left, doing the same trick, but behind
Swagger and working carefully not to get ahead. Bob was the eyes up
front to the right; Donny's responsibility was behind and to the left,
the flank he was on.
But he saw nothing, just felt the chill of the biting rain, and felt
the weight of the M14, one of the last few left in the "Nam. For this
job, really, the plastic M16 would have been more ideally suited, but
Bob hated the things, calling them poodle shooters, and wouldn't let a
man in his unit carry them.
Every now and then Bob would halt them with a raised right hand, and
both men would drop low to the ground, hidden in the foliage, waiting,
clinging desperately against the incline. But each time whatever Bob
had noticed proved to be nothing, a false alarm, and they continued
their steady, slow climb.
Twice they crossed paths, switchbacks etched into the vegetation, and
Bob waited for five minutes before allowing them out on the open ground
even for the seconds or so that it exposed them.
The darkness was falling. It was harder and harder to see. The
jungle, far from relaxing as they climbed, actually seemed to be
getting denser. There was a time when Donny felt himself cut off
entirely from Bob, and a shot of panic came to him. What if he got
lost? What would he do? He would wander these ghostly mountains until
they caught him and killed him, or he wore down and starved.
You boys ain't so tough, he heard from somewhere, and realized it was a
mocking memory of a football coach somewhere back in his complicated
athletic career.
TIME TO HUNT 139
No, we ain't so tough, he thought. We never said we were. We just
tried to do our job, that was all.
But then he came out of the rubbery-smelling thorns that had swallowed
him, and saw a figure to the right and recognized it for its caution
and precision of movement to be Bob.
He started to rise-No, no-Bob's hand was up urgently, signaling him
still and back. He froze and dropped on his belly low to the ground,
even as Bob himself did the same.
He waited.
Nothing. No, just the sound of the rain, some occasional thunder, now
and then a streak of distant lightning.
It seemed so-The next thing, he was aware of motion on his left. He
did not move, he did not breathe.
How had Swagger seen them? How did he know?
What gave them away? Another step and it was all over, but somehow,
out of some trick of instinct or predator's preternatural nerve
endings, Bob had stunned him into silence and motionlessness a second
before they arrived.
Before him the men passed by, no more than ten feet away, sliding
effortlessly through the foliage and the undergrowth.
He could smell them before he could see them. They had the odor of
fish and rice, for that was what they ate. They were small,
bandy-legged guys, the pros of the army of the Republic of North
Vietnam, a point man, a squad leader, a squad in file picking its way
carefully through the jungle high above the last path, twelve of them.
They were bent forward under beige rain capes and wore regulation dark
green uniforms, those absurd pith helmets, and carried AK47s and
complete combat gear--packs, canteens and bayonets. Three or four of
them wore RPG-40s, the hellish rocket grenades, strapped to their
backs.
He had never been so close to the actual enemy; they seemed almost
magical, or mythological, somehow, the
140 STEPHEN HUNTER
phantoms of so many nightmares at last given flesh. They terrified
him. If he moved or coughed, it was over: they'd turn and fire, whole
minutes before he could get his M14 into action. He had a bad thought
of himself dying up here at the hands of these tough little monkey-men
sliding so confidently through the rain and the jungle that were
exhausting him.
Almost as if one were talking to him, he heard the silence breaking a
few feet away.
"Ahn 6i, mua nhieu qua?"
"Phai roi, chac khQng c6 nguoi my d6m nay," came the buddy's bitter
answer, both voices propelled by the explosive lung energy of
Vietnamese, so foreign to American ears and which sounded almost like
belches.
"Bihn si6i, dung noi, nghe," came a sharp cry from the head of the
unit, a sergeant, the same the world over and whatever the army,
clamping down on his naughty grunts.
The patrol moved slowly along in the dying light and the falling rain,
then slowly disappeared around a bend in the slope. But Bob held Donny
still for a good ten minutes before giving the okay, excruciating
seconds of deathlike stillness in the cold and wet, which cramped the
muscles and hurt the brain. But at last Bob motioned, and he slowly
uncoiled and began to move up again.
Gradually Bob navigated his way over.
"You okay?"
"Yeah. How the hell did you see them?"
"The point man's canteen jingled against his bayonet.
I heard it, that's all. Luck, man; it's better to be lucky than
good."
"Who were they?"
"That's flank security from a main force battalion.
That means we're getting close. They put out security teams when they
move a big unit through, same as us. The sergeant had flashes for the
Number Three Battalion. I don't know what regiment or nothing, but I
think the biggest unit up this ways was the 324th Infantry Division.
TIME TO HUNT 141
Man, they close down that Special Forces camp tomorrow, the rain stays
bad, they could get to Dodge City the day or so after tomorrow."
"Is this some big offensive?"
"There's several newly Vietnamized units there; it'd do 'em a lot of
good to kick all that ARVN ass."
"Great. I wonder what they were saying."
"The first one says, Man, it's raining like shit, and his buddy says.
Ain't no Americans coming out in this, and the sarge yells back. Hey,
you guys, shut up and keep moving."
"You speak Vietnamese?" Donny said in wonderment.
"Picked up a little. Not much, but I can get by. Come on, let's get
out of here. We got to rest. Big day tomorrow.
We kick butt and take names. You bet on it. Marine."
chapter eleven
FOB Arizona was in bad trouble. Puller had lost nineteen men already
and the VC had gotten mortars up close over to the west, and were
pounding the shit out of them so that he couldn't maneuver, and that
main force unit would be in tomorrow at the latest. But worse: he'd
sent out Matthews with a four-man assault unit to take out the mortars
and Matthews hadn't come back. Jim Matthews! Three tours, M/Sgt. Jim
Matthews, Benning, the Zone, one of the old guys who dated all the way
back to Korea, had done everything--gone!
The rage of it flared deep in Major Puller's angry, angry brain.
This wasn't supposed to be happening. Goddamn them, this wasn't
supposed to be happening.
Kham Due was way out on its lonesome, near Laos, where it had fed in
cross-border recon teams for years, but was largely invulnerable
because of the umbrella or air power, so the NVA didn't even bother
with main force units close by. Where had this one come from? He was
feeling very Custerlike, that sick moment when he suddenly realized he
was up against hundreds, maybe thousands.
And where the hell had this weather come from and how fast could this
big-ass, tough-as-shit battalion get down here?
Oh, he wants us. He smells our blood; he wants us.
Puller's antagonist was a slick operator named Huu Co Thahn, a senior
colonel, commanding, No. 3 Battalion, 803rd Infantry Regiment, 324th
Infantry Division, Fifth People's Shock Army. Puller had seen his
picture, knew his resume: from a wealthy, sophisticated Indo French
family and even a graduate of the Ecole Militaire in Paris before
deserting to the North in sixty-one after revulsion at the excesses of
the Diem regime, he had become one of
TIME TO HUNT 143
their most able field grade military commanders, a sure general.
A mortar shell fell outside, close by, and dust shook from the rafters
of the command post.
"Anybody hit?" he called.
"No, sir," came his sergeant's reply.
"The bastards missed."
"Any word from Matthews?"
"No, sir."
Major Richard W. Puller pulled on his boonie cap and slithered out the
dugout door to the trench and looked around at his shaky empire. He
was a lean, desperate man with a thatch of gray hair, and had been in
Fifth Special Forces since 1958, including a tour in the British
Special Air Service Regiment, even seeing some counterinsurgency action
in Malaysia. He'd been to all the right schools: Airborne, Ranger,
Jungle, National War College, Command and Staff at Leavenworth. He
could fly a chopper, speak Vietnamese, repair a radio or fire an RPG.
This was not his first siege. He had been encircled at Pleiku in 1965
for more than a month, under serious bombardment.
He'd been hit then: a Chinese .51-caliber machine gun bullet, which
would kill most men.
He hated the war, but he loved it. He feared it would kill him but a
part of him wanted it never to end. He loved his wife but had had a
string of Chinese and Eurasian mistresses. He loved the Army but hated
it also, the former for its guts and professionalism, the latter for
its stubbornness, its insistence always of fighting the next war by the
tactics of the old.
But what he hated most of all was that he had fucked up. He had realty
fucked up, gambling the lives of his team and all his in digs that the
NVA couldn't get him during his window of vulnerability. He was
responsible for it all; it was happening to them because it was
happening to him.
And nobody could save his ass.
The main gate was down, and where his ammo dump had been, smoke still
boiled from the ground, rising to
144 STEPHEN HUNTER
mingle with the low clouds that hung everywhere. The S-shops were a
shambles as were most of the squad , but a unit of VC sappers that had
gotten into the compound the night before and actually taken over the
Third Squad staging area and what remained of the commo shack had been
finally dislodged in hand-to-hand with the dawn. No structure
remained; most of the wire still stood, but for now, that was the
mortar objective: to pound avenues into his defenses so that when Huu
Co and his battalion got here, they wouldn't get hung up in the shit as
they came over him, backed by their own mortars and a complement of
crew-served weapons.
Puller looked up and caught rain in the eye and felt the chill of the
mist. Night was falling. Would they come at night? They'd move at
night, but probably not attack.
At least not in force: they'd send probers, draw fire, try and get
Arizona to use up its low supplies of ammo on bad or unseen targets,
but mainly work to keep the defenders rattled and sleepless for the No.
3 Battalion.
Would the weather break? On the Armed Forces Net, the meteorological
forecasts were not promising, but Puller knew they'd try like hell, and
if they could get birds up, they'd get 'em up. But maybe the pilots
were reluctant:
who'd want to fly into heavy small-arms fire to drop napalm on a few
more dinks when the war was so close to being over? Who'd want to die
now, at the very tag end of the thing, after all the years and all the
futility? He didn't know the answer to that one himself.
Puller looked down his front to the valley. He could see nothing in
the gloom, of course, but it was a highway, and Huu Co would be
barreling down it at the double time like a fat cat in a limousine,
knowing they ran no danger from the Phantoms or the gunships.
"Major Puller, Major Puller! You ought to come see this, quick."
It was Sergeant Bias, one of his master sergeants who worked with the
Montagnards, a tough little Guamese who had seen a lot of action on too
many tours and also
TIME TO HUNT 145
didn't deserve to get caught in a shit hole like FOB Arizona so late in
a lost and fruitless war.
Bias led him through the trenches to the west side of the perimeter,
crouching now and then when a new mortar shell came whistling their
way, but at last they reached the parapet, and a Montagnard with a
carbine handed Puller a pair of binocs.
Puller used them to peer over the sandbags, and saw in the treeline
three hundred meters out something that was at first indecipherable but
at last assembled itself into a pattern and then some details.
It was a stick and on the stick was Jim Matthews's head.
Three quicksand one slow. Three strongs. That was the rhythm, the
slow steady pace of accomplishment over the long years and the long
bleeding. Now, he was under pressure, great pressure, for one last
quick. Far off, the diplomats were talking. There would be a peace
soon, and the more they controlled when that peace was signed, the more
they would retain afterward and the more they could build upon for a
future, he knew, he would never see, but his children might.
He knew he would not survive. His children would be his monument. He
would leave a new world behind for them, having done his part in
destroying the terrible old one. That was enough for any father, and
his life did not particularly matter; he had given himself up to
struggle, to tomorrow, to the ten rules of the soldier's life:
1) Defend the Fatherland; fight and sacrifice myself for the People's
Revolution.
2) Obey the orders received and carry out the mission of the soldier.
3) Strive to improve the virtues of a Revolutionary Soldier.
4) Study to improve myself and build up a powerful Revolutionary
Army.
146 STEPHEN HUNTER
5) Carry out other missions of the Army.
6) Help consolidate internal unity.
8) Preserve and save public properties.
9) Work for the solidarity between the Army and the People.
10) Maintain the Quality and Honor of the Revolutionary Soldier.
All that remained was this last job, the American Green Beret camp at
Kham Due, at the end of the An Loc Valley, which must be eliminated in
order to take more land before documents were signed.
Three quicks, one slow, three strongs.
Slow plan.
Quick advance.
Strong fight.
Strong assault.
Strong pursuit.
Quick clearance.
Quick withdrawal.
He had developed the plan over three years of operations, gaining
constant intelligence on the E5 sector of administrative division MR-7,
knowing that as the war wound down, it would do, it was explained to
him by higher headquarters and as he himself understood, to make an
example of one of the camps.
Quick advance. That is where No. 3 Battalion was now. The men were
seasoned, toughened campaigners with long battle experience. They
moved quickly from their sanctuary in Laos and were now less than
twenty kilometers from the target, which was already under assault by
local Viet Cong infrastructure under specific orders from Hanoi, and
from whom he got combat intelligence over the radio.
The column moved in the classical structure of an army on the quick,
derived not entirely from the great Giap, father of the Army, but also
from the French genius Napoleon, who understood, when no one in history
since
TIME TO HUNT 147
Alexander had, the importance of quickness, and who slashed across the
world on that principle.
So Huu Co, senior colonel, had elements of his best troops, his
sappers, running security on each flank a mile out in two twelve-men
units per flank; he had his second best people, also sappers, at the
point in a diamond formation, all armed with automatic weapons and
RPGs, setting the pace, ready to deliver grenades and withering fire at
any obstacles. His other companies moved in column by fours at the
double time, rotating the weight of the heavy mortars among them by
platoons so that no unit was more fatigued than any other.
Fortunately, it was cool; the rain was no impediment.
The men, superbly trained, shorn of slackers and wreckers by long years
of struggle, were the most dedicated. Moreover, they were excited
because the weather was holding;
low clouds, fog everywhere, their most feared and hated enemy, the
American airplanes, nowhere in sight. That was the key: to move
freely, almost as if in the last century, without the fear of Phantoms
or Skyhawks screaming in and dropping their napalm and white
phosphorous.
That is why he hated the Americans so much: they fought with flame. It
meant nothing to them to burn his people like grasshoppers plaguing a
harvest. Yet those who stood against the flame, as he had, became
hardened beyond imagination. He who has stood against flame fears
nothing.
Huu Co, senior colonel, was forty-four years old.
Sometimes, memories of the old life floated up before him: Paris in the
late forties and early fifties, when his decadent father had turned him
over to the French, under whose auspices he studied hard. But Paris:
the pleasures of Paris. Who could forget such a place? That was a
revolutionary city and it was there he first smoked Gauloise, read Marx
and Engels and Proust and Sartre and Nietzsche and Apollinaire; it was
there his commitment to the old world, the world of his father, began
to crumble, at first in small, almost meaningless ways. Did the
French
148 STEPHEN HUNTER
have to be so nasty to their yellow guests? Did they have to take such
pleasure in their whiteness, while preaching the oneness of man under
the eye of God? Did they have to take such pleasure in rescuing bright
Indochinese like himself from their yellow ness
But even still, he wondered now, Would I have followed this course had
I known how hard it would be?
Huu Co, senior colonel, fought in seven battles and three campaigns
with the French in the first Indochinese War. He loved the French
soldiers: tough, hardened men, brave beyond words, who truly believed
theirs was the right to master the land they had colonized. They could
understand no other way; he lay in the mud with them at Dien Bien Phu
in 1954, eighteen years ago, praying for the Americans to come and
rescue them with their mighty air power
Huu Co, senior colonel, learned the Catholic God from them, moved south
and fought for the Diem brothers in building a bulwark against the
godless Uncle Ho. In 1955, he led an infantry platoon against the Binh
Xuyen in violent street fighting, then later against the Hoa Hao cult
in the Mekong and was present at the execution of the cult's leader, Ba
Cut, in 1956. Much of the killing he saw was of Indochinese by
Indochinese. It sickened him.
Saigon was no Paris either, though it had cafes and nightclubs and
beautiful women; it was a city of corruption, of prostitutes, gambling,
crime, narcotics, which the Diems not only encouraged but also from
which they profited. How could he love the Diems if they loved silk,
perfume, their own power and pomp more than the people they ruled, whom
they yet felt themselves removed from and immensely superior to? His
father counseled him to forgive them their arrogances and to use them
as a vessel for carrying God's will. But his father never saw the
politics, the corruption, the terrible way they abused the peasants,
the remove from the people.
Huu Co went north in 1961, when the Diems' corruption had begun to
resemble that of a city destroyed in the
TIME TO HUNT 149
Bible. He renounced his Catholicism, his inherited wealth and his
father, whom he would never see again. He knew the South would sink
into treachery and profiteering and would bring flame and retribution
upon itself, as it had.
He was a humble private in the People's Revolutionary Army, he who had
sat in cafes and once met the great Sartre and de Beauvoir at the Deux
Maggots in the Fourteenth Arrondisement; he, a major in the Army of the
Republic of South Vietnam, became a lowly private carrying an SKS and
wanting to do nothing but his duty to the fatherland and the future and
seek purification, but his gifts always betrayed him.
He was always the best soldier among them, and he rose effortlessly,
though now without ambition: he was a student officer after two years,
and his passage in the west and in the south, after six months'
strenuous reeducation in a camp outside Hanoi, where he withstood the
most barbarous pressures and purified himself for the revolutionary
struggle, only toughened him for the decade of war that was to
follow.
Now he was tired. He had been at war since 1950, twenty-two years of
war. It was almost over. Really, all that remained was the camp
called Arizona, and between himself and it, there stood nothing, no
unit, no aircraft, no artillery. He would crush it. Nothing could
stop him.
chapter twelve
In the dream, he had caught a touchdown pass, a slant outside, and as
he broke downfield all the blockers hit their men perfectly, and the
defense went down like tenpins opening lanes toward the end zone. It
was geometry, somehow, or at least a physical problem reduced to the
abstract, very pleasing, and far from the reality which was that you
ran on instinct and hardly ever remembered things exactly. He got into
the end zone: people cheered, it was so very warm, Julie hugged him.
His dad was there, weeping for joy. Trig was there also, among them,
jumping up and down, and so was Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, the sniper
god, a figure of preposterous joy as he pirouetted crazily, laden with
firearms and dappled in a war face of camouflage.
It was such a good dream. It was the best, the happiest, the finest
dream he ever had, and it went away, as such things do, to the steady
pressure of someone rocking his arm and the sudden baffling awareness
that he was not there but here.
"Huh?"
"Time to work. Pork."
Donny blinked and smelled the wet odor of jungle, the wet odor of rain,
and felt the wet cold. Swagger had already turned from him and was off
making his arcane preps.
The dawn came as a blur of light, just the faintest smear of
incandescence to the east, over the mountains on the other side of the
valley.
In its way, it was quite beautiful in that low 0500 light:
vapors of fog clung to the wet earth everywhere, in valleys and hollows
and gulches, nestled thickly in the trees, and though it wasn't at
present raining, surely it would rain
TIME TO HUNT 151
soon, for the low clouds still rolled over, heavy with moisture.
Still, so quiet, so calm, so pristine.
"Come on," whispered Swagger into Donny Fenn's ear.
Donny shook sleep from his eyes and put his dreams of Julie aside and
reconfirmed his existence. He was on a hillside in heavy foliage above
the An Loc Valley, near Kham Due and Laos. It would be another wet
day, and the weather had not broken, so there would be no air.
"We got to get lower," said Bob.
"I can't hit nothing from up here."
The sergeant now wore the M3 grease gun on his back and in his hands
carried the M40 sniper rifle, a dull pewter Remington with a thick bull
barrel and a dull brown wooden stock. It carried a Redfield scope, and
a Marine Corps armorer had labored over it, free floating the barrel,
truing up the bolt to the chamber, glass-bedding the action to the
wood, torquing the screws tight, but it was still far from an elegant
weapon, built merely for effectiveness, never beauty.
Bob had smeared the jungle grease paint on his face, and under the
crinkled brow of the boonie cap his visage looked primitive; he seemed
a creature sprung from someone's worst dreams, some kind of atavistic
war creature totally of the jungle, festooned with pistols and
grenades, all smeared with the colors of nature, even his eyes gone to
nothing.
"Here. Paint up and we'll get going," he said, holding the stick of
camo paint out to Donny, who quickly blurred his own features. Donny
gathered his M14 and the impossibly heavy PRC-77, his real enemy in all
this, and began to ease his way down the slope with Bob.
It seemed they were lowering themselves into the clouds, like angels
returning to earth. The fog would not break; it clung to the floor of
the valley as if it had been enameled there. No sun would burn it
away, not today at any rate.
Now and then some jungle bird would call, now. and
152 STEPHEN HUNTER
then some animal shudder would ripple from the undergrowth, but there
was no sense of human presence, nothing metallic or regular to the eye.
Donny scanned left, Bob scanned right. They moved ever so slowly,
frustratingly slowly, picking their way down, until at last they were
nearly to the valley floor and a field of waist-high grass, in the
center of which a worn track had been beaten, by men or buffaloes or
elephants or whatever.
From far away, at last, came some kind of unnatural noise. Donny
couldn't identify it and then he could; it was the noise of men,
somehow--nothing distinct, not breaking talk discipline--somehow become
a herd, a living, breathing thing. It was No. 3 Battalion, still a
few hundred yards away, gearing up for the last six or so klicks of
quick march to the staging area for their assault.
Bob halted him with a hand.
"Okay," he said.
"Here's how we do it. You got the map coords?"
Donny did; he had memorized them.
"Grid square Whiskey-Delta 51201802."
"Good. If the sky clears and the birds come, you'll have line of sight
to-them and you can go to the Air Force freak and you talk 'em in. They
won't have good visuals.
You talk 'em down into the valley and have 'em plaster the floor."
"What about you? You'll be--" "Don't you worry about that. No squid
Phantom jock is flaming me. I can take care of myself. Now listen
up:
that is your goddamn job. You talk to 'em on the horn.
You're the eyes. Don't you be coming down after me, you got that? You
may hear fighting, you may hear small arms;
don't you fret a bit. That's my job. Yours is to stay up here and
talk to the air. After the air moves out, you should be able to git to
that snake-eater camp. You call them, tell them you're coming in, pop
smoke, and come in from the smoke so they know it's you and not some
NVA hero. Got that? You should be okay if I can hold these bad boys
up for a bit."
TIME TO HUNT 153
"What about security? I'm security. My job is to help you, to cover
your ass. What the hell good am I going to do parked up here?"
"Listen, Pork, I'll fire my first three shots when I get visuals. Then
I'll move back to the right, maybe two hundred yards, because they'll
bring heavy shit down. I'll try and do two, three, maybe four more
from there. Here's how the game works. I pull down on a couple, then
I move back. But guess what? After the third string, I ain't moving
back, I'm moving forward. That's why I want you right here. I'll
never be too far from this area. I don't want 'em to know how many
guys I am, and they'll flank me, and I don't want 'em coming around on
me. I guarantee you, they will have good, tough, fast-moving flank
people out, so you go to ground about twenty minutes after I first hit
them. They may be right close to you; that's all right.
You dig in and sink into the ground, and you'll be all right.
Just watch out for the patrols I know they'll call in. Them boys we
saw last night. They'll be back, that I guarantee."
"You will get killed. You will get killed, I'm telling you, you
cannot--" "I'm giving you a straight order; you follow it. Don't give
me no little-boy shit. I'm telling you what you have to do, and by
God, you will do it, and that's all there is to it, or I will be one
pissed-off motherfucker, Lance Corporal Fenn."
"I_"
"You do it! Goddammit, Fenn, you do it, and that's all there is to it.
Or I will have you up on charges and instead of going home, you'll go
to Portsmouth."
This was bullshit, of course, and Donny saw through it in a second. It
was all bullshit, because if Swagger went into the valley without
security, he was not coming back.
He simply was not. That's what the physics of firepower decreed, and
the physics of firepower were the iron realities of war. There was no
appeal.
He was throwing his life away for some strangers in a camp he'd never
see. He knew it, had known it all along.
154 STEPHEN HUNTER
It was his way. More like Trig: hungry to die, as if the war were so
inside him he knew he could not live without it;
there would be no life to go home to. He had kept himself hard and
pure just for this one mad moment when he could take on a battalion
with a rifle, and if he could not live, it was also clear that he would
fight to the very end. It was as if he knew there would be no place
for warriors in any other world, and so he may as well embrace his
fate, not dodge it.
"Jesus, Bob--" "You got it square?"
"Yes."
"You are a good kid. You go back to the world and that beautiful girl.
You go to her and you put all this bad bullshit behind you, do you
copy?"
"Roger."
"Roger. Time to hunt. Sierra-Bravo-Four, last transmission, and
out."
And, with the sniper's gift for subtle, swift movement, Bob then seemed
to vanish. He slithered off down the hill to the low fog without
looking back.
-Oob worked down through the foliage, aware that he was clicking into
the zone. He had to put it all behind him.
There could be nothing in his head except mission, no other memories or
doubts, no tremor of hesitation to play across the nerves of his
shooting. He tried to get into his war face, to become, in some way,
war. It was a gift his people had; his father had won the Medal of
Honor in the big one against the Japs, messy business on Iwo Jima, and
then come home to get the blue ribbon from Harry Truman and get blowed
out of his socks ten years later by a no-account piece of trash in a
cornfield. There were other soldiers in the line too: hard, proud men,
true sons of Arkansas, who had two gifts: to shoot and see something
die, and to work like hogs the long hot day. It wasn't much; it's what
they had. But there was also a cloud of melancholy attached to the
clan--off and on, over the
TIME TO HUNT 155
Swagger generations back to that strange fellow and his wife who'd
shown up in Tennessee in 1786 from who knew where, they'd been a line
of killers and lonely boys, exiles.
There was a blackness in them. He'd seen it in his father, who never
spoke of war, and was as beloved as a man in a backwater like Blue Eye,
Arkansas, could be, even more so than Sam Vincent, the county
prosecutor, or Harry Etheridge, the famous congressman. But his father
would have black dog days: he could hardly talk or stir; he'd sit in
the dark, and just stare out at nothing. What was dogging him? The
war? Some sense of his own luck? A feeling for the fragility of it?
Memories of all the bullets that had been fired at him, and the shells,
and how nothing had hit him in his vitals? That kind of luck had to
run out, and Daddy knew it, but he went out anyway, and it killed
him.
What could save you?
Nothing. If it was in the cards, by God, it was in the cards, and
Daddy knew that, and faced up to it like a man, looked it in the eyes
and spat in its black-cat face, until at last it reared up and bit him
in a cornfield on the Polk County line.
Nothing could save you. Bob pressed on, sliding deeper into the fog.
Odd how it clung, like clouds of wet wool; he'd never seen anything
like it in the "Nam, and this here was his third tour.
The fear began to eat at him, as it always did. Some fools said he had
no fear, he was such a hero, but that only proved how little they knew.
The fear was like a cold lump of bacon grease in his stomach, hard and
wet and slick, that he could taste and feel at all times. You could
not make it go away, you could not ignore it, and anybody who said you
could was the worst damned kind of fool.
Go on, be scared, he ordered himself. Let it rip. This may be it. But
the one thing that scared him most of all wasn't dying, not really; it
was the idea of not doing the job. That was something to fear in the
heart. He would do the job, by God; that he would.
156 STEPHEN HUNTER
Trees. He slid through them, tree to tree, his eyes working, testing,
looking for possibilities. A hide? A fallback? A line of movement
not under fire? A good field of fire? Damn this fog, could he even
see them? Could he read ranges, gauge the drop on the long shots?
Cover or just concealment? Where was the sun? Nope, didn't matter, no
sun.
A thin, cold rain had begun to fall. How would that affect the
trajectory? What was the wind, the humidity?
How wet was the stock of the rifle? Had it bloated and was now some
little swollen knot rubbing secretly against the barrel, fucking up his
point of impact? Had the scope sprung a leak, and was now a tube of
fog, worthless, leaving him with nothing?
Or: were there NVA ahead? Had they heard him coming?
Were they laughing as he bumbled closer? Were they drawing a bead even
as he considered the possibility? He tried to exile the fear as he had
exiled his own past and future, and concentrate on the mechanical, the
aspect of craft that lay before him, how he would reload fast enough if
it came to that, since the Remingtons didn't have no stripper clips and
the M1 18 had to be threaded in one round at a time. Should he set up
his two Claymores to cover his flanks? He didn't think he had time.
Help me, he prayed to a God he wasn't sure existed, maybe some old
gunny up there above the clouds, just watching out for bad boys like
him on desperate jobs for people who didn't even know his name.
He halted. He was in trees, had good tree cover, and good fog, a
fallback to a hilltop, and then he could cut back the other direction.
Professionally, he saw that this was it. A perfect choke point, with
targets in the open, fog to cover him, a rare opportunity to get at the
NVA in the open, lots of ammunition.
If this is it, by God, then this is it, he thought, settling in behind
a fallen tree, literally slipping into a bush, as he squirmed to find a
good position. He found his prone, and although he couldn't get one
leg flat on the ground for the
TIME TO HUNT 157
gouge of a rock or a stump, he got most of his body down, drawing
stability from the earth itself. The rifle was back and in, left grip
lightly on the forearm, sling tight as it ran from the wood, lashed
around that forearm and headed tautly to the stock. Right hand on the
small of the stock, finger still off the trigger. Breathing easy,
trying to stay cool. Another day at the office. He was situated so no
light would reflect off his lens. The trees around him would muffle
and defuse the sound of the shots. In the first minutes, anyhow, no
one would be able to figure out where the shots were coming from.
He slid his eye behind the scope, finding the proper three inches of
relief. Nothing. It was like peering into a bowl of cream. Drifting
whiteness, the outline of two or three scrub trees, no sense of the
hills forming the other side of the valley, a slight downward angle
into vertigo.
Nothing stood out from which to estimate range.
He checked his watch: 0700 hours. They would be along soon, not moving
quite so quickly because of the fog, but confident that it hid them and
that in hours they'd be in possession of Arizona.
So come on, you bastards.
What are you waiting for?
Then he saw one. It was the hunter's thrill after the long stalk, that
magical moment when the connection between hunter and hunted, fragile
as a china horse, first establishes itself. Blood rushed through him:
old buck fever.
Everybody gets it when they see the beast they will kill and eat;
that's how primordial it is.
I will not eat you, he thought, but by God I will kill you.
More emerged. Jesus Christ ... the first thin line of sappers in cloth
hats with foliage attached, rifles at the high port, eyes strained, at
maximum alertness; more tightly bunched, an infantry platoon, battle
ready, caped and pith-helmeted, chest web gear, green Bata boots and
AKs, Type 56, and no other identifying insignia; the pla158 STEPHEN
HUNTER toon leaders at the front; behind them in a tight little knot
the staff, their ranks unrecognizable in the muddy uniforms.
You never saw this. A North Vietnamese infantry battalion moving at
the half-trot through a choke point in tight formation, not spread out
for four thousand meters or broken down and moving in cells to
reassemble under dark. The pilots never saw it, the photos never got
it. The NVA, goddamn their cold, professional souls, were too quick,
too subtle, too disciplined, too smart for such movement. They moved
at night, in small units, then reassembled;
or they moved through tunnels, or in bomb-free Cambo or Laos, always
careful, risking nothing, knowing surely that the longer they bled the
American beast, the better their chances became. Possibly no American
had seen such a thing.
The CO was pushing them hard, gambling that he could beat the weather,
whack out Arizona and be gone.
Speed was his greatest ally, the bleak weather his next.
The rain fell harder, pelting the ground, but it did not stop the North
Vietnamese, who seemed not to notice.
Onward they came.
He snicked off the safety, and through the scope hunted for an officer,
a radio operator, an ammunition bearer with RPGs, an NCO, a machine-gun
team leader.
The targets drifted before him, floating through the crucifer of the
crosshairs. That he was about to kill never occurred to him; the way
his mind worked, he thought only that he was about to shoot.
Finally: you, little brother. An officer, youngish, with the three
stars of a captain lieutenant, at the head of an infantry platoon. He
would go first; then, back swiftly, to a radio operator; then, swing
left as you run the bolt, and go for the guy with the Chicom RPD 56,
put him down, then fall back. That was the plan, and any plan was
better than no plan.
The reticle of the Redfield scope wobbled downward,
TIME TO HUNT 159
bouncing ever so slightly, tracking the first mark, staying with him as
the shooter took his long breath, hissed a half of it out, found bone
to lock under the rifle, told himself again to keep the gun moving as
he fired, prayed to God for mercy for all snipers, and felt the trigger
break cleanly.
chapter thirteen
"Gooooooood morning, Vietnam," said the guy on VT Captain Taney's
portable, "and hello to all you guys out there in the rain. Well,
fellas, I've got some bad news.
Looks like that old Mr. Sun is still A.W.O.L.. That's UA, for you
leathernecks. Nobody's gonna stop the rain today. But it'll be great
for the flowers, and maybe Mr. Victor Charles will stay indoors
himself today, because his mommy won't let him outside to play."
"What a moron," said Captain Taney, Arizona's XO.
"The weather should break tonight, as a high pressure zone over the Sea
of Japan looks like it's making a beeline for--" "Shit," said Puller.
Why did he put himself through this? It would break when it would
break.
Standing in the parapet outside his command bunker, he glanced around
in the low light, watching the floating mist as it seethed through the
valley that lay beyond.
Should he put an OP out there, so they'd know when the 803rd was
getting close?
But he no longer controlled the hills, so putting an OP out there would
just get its people all killed.
The rain began to fall, thin and cold. Vietnam! Why was it so cold?
He had spent so many days in country over the past eight years but
never had felt it this biting before.
"Not good, sir," said Taney.
"No, it isn't, Taney."
"Any idea when they'll get here?"
"You mean Huu Co? He's already here. He pushed 'em hard through the
night and the rain. He's no dummy.
He wants us busted before our air can get up."
"Yes, sir."
"You have that ammo report ready, Captain?"
TIME TO HUNT 161
"Yes, sir. Mayhorne just finished it. We have twelve thousand rounds
of 5.56 left, and a couple more thousand30 carbine rounds. We're way
low on frags, seventy-nine rounds and belted 7.62. Not a Claymore in
the camp."
"Christ."
"I've got Mayhorne distributing the belted 7.62, but we're down to five
guns and I can't cover any approach completely. We can set up a unit
of quick-movers with one of the guns to jump to the assault sector, but
if he hits us more than one place at once, we screw the pooch."
"He will," said Puller bleakly.
"That's how he operates.
The pooch is screwed."
"You know, sir, some of these "Yards have family here in the compound.
I was thinking--" "No," said Puller.
"If you surrender, Huu Co will kill them all. That's how he operates.
We hang on, pray for a break in the weather, and if we have to, go hand
to hand in the trenches with the motherfuckers."
"Was it ever this bad in sixty-five, sir?"
Puller looked at Taney, who was about twenty-five, a good young Spec
Forces captain with a tour behind him.
But in sixty-five he'd been a high school hotshot; what could you tell
him? Who could even remember?
"It was never this bad, because we always had air and there were plenty
of firebases around. I've never felt so fucking on my own. That's
what trying to be the last man out gets you, Captain. Let it be a
lesson. Get out, get your people out. Copy?"
"I copy, sir."
"Okay, get the platoon leaders and the machine gun team leaders to my
command post in fifteen and--" They both heard it.
"What was that?"
"It sounded like a--" Then another one came. A solitary rifle shot,
heavy, obviously .308, echoing back and forth across the valley.
"Who the fuck is that?" Taney said.
"That's a sniper," said Puller.
162 STEPHEN HUNTER
They waited. It was silent. Then the third shot and Puller could read
the signature of the weapon.
"He's not firing fast enough for an M14. He's shooting a bolt gun, and
that means he's a Marine."
"A Marine? Way the hell out here in Indian Territory?"
"I don't know who this guy is, but he sounds like he's doing some
good."
Then came a wild barrage of full automatic fire, the lighter, crisper
sound of the Chicom 7.62X39mm the AKs fired.
Then the gunfire fell silent.
"Shit," said Taney.
"Sounds like they got him," The sniper fired again.
"Let's run the PRC-77 and see if we can pick up enemy radio
intelligence," Puller said.
"They must be buzzing about this like crazy."
Puller and his XO and Sergeant Bias and Y Dok, the "Yard chieftain, all
went down into the bunker.
"Cameron," Puller said to his commo NCO, "you think you've got any
juice left in the PRC-77?"
"Yes, sir."
"Let's do a quick scan. See if you can get me enemy freaks. They
ought to be close enough to pick up."
"Yes, sir. Sir, if air comes and we need to talk 'em in--" "Air isn't
coming today, Cameron. Not today. But maybe someone else has."
Cameron fiddled with the radio mast on the PRC-77, snapping a cord so
that it flew free above the wood and dirt of the roof, then clicked it
on, and began to diddle with the frequency dials.
"They like to operate in the twelve hundreds," he said.
He pulled through the nets, not bringing anything up except static, the
fucking United States Navy bellowing about beating the Air Force
Academy in a basketball game and-"Shit."
TIME TO HUNT 163
"Yeah," said Puller, leaning forward.
"Can't you get us in a little tighter?"
"It's them, isn't it, sir?" asked Taney.
"Oh, yes, yessy, yessy, yessy," said the head man Y Dok, who wore the
uniform of a major in the ARVN, except for the red tribal scarf around
his neck, "yep, is dem, yep, is dem!" He was a merry little man with
blackened teeth and an inexhaustible lust for war, afraid, literally,
of nothing.
"Dok, can you follow?" asked Puller, whose Vietnamese was good but not
great. He was getting odd words-attack, dead, halt--and he couldn't
follow the verb tenses;
they seemed to be describing a world he couldn't imagine.
"Oh, he say they under assault on right by platoon strength of
marksmen. Snipers. The snipers come for them. Ma my, 'American
ghosts. He says most officers dead, and most machine gun team leaders
also--oh! Oh, now he dead too. Y Dok hear bullet hit him as he talk.
Good shit, I tell you, Major Puller, got good deaths going, oh, so very
many good deaths."
"A platoon?" said Taney.
"The nearest Marine firebase is nearly forty klicks away, if it hasn't
rotated out.
How could they get a platoon over here? And why would they send a
platoon?"
"It's not a platoon," said Puller.
"They couldn't--no, not overland, across that terrain, not without
being bounced. But a team."
"A team?"
"Marine sniper teams are two-men shows. They can move like hell if
they have to. Jesus, Taney, listen to this and be aware of the
privilege you've been accorded. What you are hearing is one man with a
rifle taking on a battalion-strength unit of about three hundred
men."
"Dey say dey got him," said Y Dok.
"Shit," said Taney.
"God bless him," said Puller.
"He put up a hell of a fight."
"Dey say, 'American is dead and head man say, You
164 STEPHEN HUNTER
fellas get going, you got to push on to the end of the valley and de
officer say, Yes, yes, he going to--oh. Oh ho ho ho!" He laughed,
showing his blackened little teeth.
"No. No, no, no, no. He got dem! Oh, yes, he just killed man on
radio. I hear scream. Oh, he is a man who knows the warrior's walk,
dot I know. He got the good deaths, very many, going on."
"You can say that again," said Puller.
chapter fourteen
When the trigger broke, the North Vietnamese captain lieutenant turned
as if to look at Bob just once before he died. All the details were
frozen for a second:
he was a small man, even by NVA standards, with binoculars and a
pistol. An instant ago, he had been full of life and zeal. When the
bullet struck him, it sucked everything from him and he stood with
grave solemnity, colorless, as all the hopes and dreams departed him.
If he had a soul, this would be where it fled to whatever version of
heaven sustained him. Then it was over: with the almost stiff dignity
of formal ceremony, he toppled forward.
Bob threw his bolt fast, tossing out the spent shell, but never
breaking his eye relief with the scope, a good trick it only took a
lifetime to master. In the perfect circle of nine magnifications, he
saw the men who were his targets looking at one another in utter
confusion. There was no inscrutability in their expression: they were
dumbfounded, because this was not supposed to happen, not in the rain,
in the fog, in the perfect freedom of their attack, not after their
long night march, their good discipline, their toughness, their belief.
They had no immediate theory to explain it. No, this was not
possible.
Bob pivoted the rifle just a bit, found a new target, and felt the jolt
as the rifle fired. Two hundred yards out and two tenths of a second
later, the 173-grain bullet arrived at 2,300 odd feet per second. The
tables say that at that range and velocity, it will pack close to two
thousand foot pounds of energy, and it hit this man, a machine gun team
leader standing near his now dead commanding officer, low in his
stomach, literally turning him inside out. That was what such a big
bullet did: it operated on him, opening his intimate biological secrets
to those around him,
166 STEPHEN HUNTER
not a killing shot, but one that would bleed him out in minutes.
Quickly Bob found another and within the time it takes to blink an
eyelash, fired for the third time and set that one down, too.
The North Vietnamese did not panic, though they could not hope to pick
out Bob in the fog, and the muzzle blast was diffused; they only knew
he was on the right somewhere. Someone calmly issued orders; the men
dropped and began to look for a target. A squad formed to flank off to
the right and come around. It was standard operating procedure for a
unit with much experience and professionalism.
But Bob slithered away quickly, and when he felt the fog overwhelm him,
he stood and ran ahead, knowing he had but a few seconds to relocate.
Would they take the casualties and continue to march? Would they send
out flanking parties; would they take the time to set up mortars?
What will they do? he wondered.
He ran one hundred yards fast, slipping three new cartridges into the
breech as he jounced along, because he didn't want to waste time
loading when he had targets.
That was shooting time, precious. He slipped down off the incline onto
the valley floor and crouched as he moved through the elephant grass,
an odd nowhere place sealed off by vapors. He came at last to the
center of the track, and got a good visual without the grass: he was
now three hundred yards away and saw only the dimmest of shapes in the
fog. Sinking to a quick, rice-paddy squat, he put the glass to them,
put the crosshairs on one, quartering them high to account for a little
drop at that distance, and squeezed the trigger. Maybe he was shooting
at a stump.
But the blob fell, and when he quartered another, it fell too. He did
that twice more, and then the blobs disappeared;
they'd dropped into the grass or had withdrawn, he couldn't tell.
Now what?
Now back.
TIME TO HUNT 167
The flankers will come, but slowly, thinking possibly they're up
against a larger force.
Not even bothering to crouch, he ran again, full force through the
mist. Suddenly the NVA opened up and he dropped. But the sleet of
firepower did not come his way and seemed more of a probing effort, a
theoretical thing meant to hit him where, by calculation, he should be.
He watched as tracers hunted him a good hundred yards back, liquid
splashes of neon through the fog, so quick and gossamer they seemed
like optical illusions. When they struck the earth, they ripped it up,
a blizzard of splashy commotion. Then the firing stopped.
He dropped, squirmed ahead and came to a crook in a tree. Quickly he
slipped four more rounds into the M40's breech, throwing the last one
home and locking the bolt downward with the sensation of a vault door
closing.
The rifle came up to him, and he seemed to have lucked into a thinner
spot in the veil of fog, where suddenly they were quite visible. An
officer was talking on the radio phone as around him men fanned out.
Bob killed the officer, killed two of the men. Then he got a good shot
at a man with four RPGs on his back squirming for cover, put the
crosshairs onto a warhead and fired once. Force multiplier: the
quadruple detonation ripped a huge gout in the earth, possibly driving
others back, possibly killing some of them.
He didn't wait to count casualties, or even take a quick look at his
results. He crawled again through the high elephant grass, the sweat
pouring off him. He crawled for what seemed like the longest time.
Tracer rounds floated aimlessly overhead, clipping the grass, making
the odd whup sound a bullet fighting wind will make. Once, when the
firing stopped, he thought he sensed men around him and froze, but
nothing happened. When at last he found some trees so that he could go
back to work, he discovered he was much farther back in the column.
Before him, as the vapors drifted and seethed, were some men who seemed
less soldiers than beasts of burden, so laden were
168 STEPHEN HUNTER
they with their equipment. This was simple murder; he took no pleasure
in it, but neither did he consider it deeply. Targets? Take them
down, eliminate them, take them out. Numbly he did the necessary.
Jnuu Co, senior colonel, had a problem. It wasn't the firepower; there
wasn't much firepower. It was the accuracy.
"When he shoots, brother Colonel," his officer told him, "he hits us.
He is like a phantom. The men are losing their spirit."
Huu Co fumed silently, but he understood. In a frontal attack his men
would stand and fight or charge into guns:
that was battle. This was something else: the terrible fog, the
mysterious bullets singing out of it with unerring accuracy, seeking
officers and leaders, killing them, then .. .
silence.
"Maybe there are more than one," someone said.
"I believe there are at least ten," someone else said.
"No," said Huu Co.
"There is only one and he has only one rifle. It is a bolt-action
rifle, so therefore he is an American Marine, because their army no
longer uses bolt actions. One can tell from the time between the
rounds, the lack of double shots or bursts. You must be calm. He
preys on your fear. That is how he works."
"He can see through the fog."
"No, he cannot see through the fog. He is in the hills to the right,
clearly, and as he moves, he encounters disparities in the density of
the mist. When it is thin, he can see to shoot. Get the men down into
the grass; if they stand they will be killed."
"Brother Colonel, should we continue to march? How many can he kill?
Our duty lies at the end of the valley, not here."
It was a legitimate point, raised by Commissar Tien Phuc Go, the
political officer. Indeed, under certain circumstances, duty demanded
that officers and men simply accept a high rate of casualty in payment
for the TIME TO HUNT 169
importance of the mission. Rule No. 1: Defend the Fatherland;
fight and sacrifice myself for the People's Revolution.
"But this is different," said Huu Co.
"The fog makes it different, and his accuracy. Indiscriminate fire may
be sustained as fair battle loss. The sniper presents a different
proposition, both philosophically and tactically. If the individual
soldier feels himself being targeted, that has disproportionate meaning
to him and erodes his confidence.
In the West they call it 'paranoia," a very useful term, meaning
overimaginative fear for the self. He will give himself up to a cause
or a mission, in the abstract, but he will not give himself up to a
man. It's too personal, too intimate."
"Huu Co is right," argued his executive officer, Nhoung.
"We may not simply accept losses as we travel, for the weight becomes
immense and when we reach our goal, the men are too dispirited. What
then have we accomplished?"
"As you decide," said Phuc Go.
"But you may be criticized later and it will sting for many, many
years."
Huu Co accepted the rebuke; he had been criticized in a reeducation
camp in 1963 for nine long months, and to be criticized, in the
Vietnamese meaning of the term, was excruciating.
Bravely, he thrust ahead.
"A man like this can inflict a surprisingly high number of casualties,
particularly upon officers and noncommissioned officers, the heart of
the Army. Without leadership, the men are lost. He can attrit our
officer staff if we do not deal with him now and immediately. I want
Second Platoon on the right, supported by a machine gun team on each
end for suppressive fire. They are to maneuver on a sweeping movement,
while the rest of the unit holds up in the high grass. I want radio
contact with Company Number Two sappers, and recall them and assign
them in the blocking role. They must move quickly. Latest reports say
the weather will not break. We have some time and I prefer by far to
maintain unit integrity than to push on at
170 STEPHEN HUNTER
this time. We will take him in good time. Patience in all things;
that is our way. Communicate with your leaders and the fighters. Now
is not the time for rash action; this is a test of discipline and
spirit."
"That is understood, sir."
"Then let's do our duties, brothers. I anticipate success within the
hour and I know you will not let me down."
JDonny lay in the high grass, working the spotting scope.
But the range was too far, a good four hundred meters, and in the
valley he just saw the drifting mist, and heard the gunfire.
He took his right eye away from the scope and looked out with both of
them. Again, nothing. The shooting rose and fell, rose and fell,
punctuated now and then by two or three heavy rifle cracks, Bob's
shots. At one point some kind of multiple blast came. Had Bob fired a
Claymore?
He didn't know but he didn't think the sniper would have time, as he'd
been moving this way and that through the hills.
He was well situated, half buried in a clump of vegetation, halfway up
a hill, a little above the fog. He could see far to the right and far
to the left, but he didn't think anybody could get the drop on him. He
had a good compass heading to the Special Forces camp at Kham Due and
knew if he had to be could make it in two or three hard hours. He
drank a little water from his one remaining canteen. He was all right.
All he had to do was sit there, wait for air, direct the air, then get
the hell out of there. If no air came, then he was to move under cover
of nightfall. He was not to go into the valley.
He thought of a familiar remark scrawled in Magic Marker on Marine
helmets and flak jackets: "Yea, though I walk in the Valley of Death, I
shall fear no harm, because I am the meanest motherfucker in the
valley!" Bravado, sheer, thumping bravado, chanted like an
incantation, to keep the Reaper away.
I'm not going into the Valley of Death, he thought.
TIME TO HUNT 171
Those aren't my orders. I followed my orders, I did everything I was
told, I was specifically ordered not to go into the Valley of Death.
He accepted that as both a moral and a tactical proposition as ordered
by a senior staff NCO. No man could challenge that, nor would one want
to or try to.
I am fine, he told himself. I am short, I am fine, I am three and days
till DEROS. I have my whole goddamned life in front of me and no man
can say I shirked or ducked or dodged. No one can ever wonder if my
beliefs were founded on moral logic or my own cowardice. I have to
prove nothing.
Then why do I feel so shitty?
It was true. He felt truly sick, angry at himself, almost to the point
of revulsion. Down there Swagger was probably giving away his life and
Donny had somehow missed the show. Everybody cared about him. Trig,
too, had cared about him. What was so special about him that he had to
survive? He had no writer's gift, he was not conversational or
charismatic--no one could listen to him, he could be no witness.
Why me?
What's so special about my ass?
He heard them before he saw them. It was the thupthupthup of men
running, coming at the oblique. He didn't jerk or move quickly and in
an instant was glad he hadn't, for sudden moves like that get you
spotted.
They passed about twenty-five meters ahead of him, in single file, fast
movers stripped of helmets and packs and canteens, racing toward duty
and combat. It was the twelve-man flanking patrol, recalled by radio
to move on the sniper from behind.
He could see how it would work. They'd form a line and flankers would
drive Bob into them, or they'd come upon him from the rear. In either
event, Bob was finished.
If Donny'd had the grease gun he might have gotten all twelve in a
single burst. But probably not; that was very tricky shooting. If he
had a Claymore set up, he might
172 STEPHEN HUNTER
have gotten them too. But he didn't. He had nothing but his M14.
He watched them go and they pounded along with grace, economy and
authority. They disappeared into the fog.
I have my orders, he thought.
My job is the air, he thought.
Then he thought, Fuck it!" and got up to take them from behind.
They came as he thought they would, good, trained men, willing to take
casualties, a platoon strength unit fanning through the high grass. Bob
could make them out in the mist, dark shapes filing through the weaving
fronds; he thought of a deer he'd once seen in a foggy cornfield back
in Arkansas, and Old Sam Vincent, who'd tried to be a father to him
after his own had passed, telling him to fight the buck fever, to be
calm, to be cool.
He heard Sam now.
"Be cool, boy. Don't rush it. You rush it, it's over and you can't
never get it back."
And so he was calm, he was death, he was the kind hunter who shot for
clean kills and no blood trails, who was a part of nature himself.
But he wasn't.
He was war, at its crudest.
He had never had this feeling before. It scared him, but it excited
him also.
I am war, he thought. I take them all. I make their mothers cry. I
have no mercy. I am war.
It was an odd thought, just fluttering through a mind far gone into
battle intensity, but it could not be denied.
The platoon leader will be to the left, not in the lead, he'll be
talking to his men, holding them together.
He hunted for a talking man and when he found him, he shot him through
the mouth and ceased his talking forever.
I am war, he thought.
TIME TO HUNT 173
He shifted quickly to the man who'd run to the fallen officer and
almost took him, but instead held a second, and waited for another to
join him, grab him, take command, and turn himself to issue orders.
Senior NCO.
I am war.
He took the NCO.
The men looked at each other, dead targets in his eyes, and in a moment
of utter panic did exactly the right thing.
They charged at him.
He couldn't possibly take them all or even half of them; he couldn't
escape or evade. There was only one thing to do.
He stood, war-crazed, face green-black with paint, eyes bulged in rage,
and screamed, "Come on you fuckers, I want to fight some more! Come on
and fight me!"
They saw him standing atop the rise, and almost en masse pivoted toward
him. They froze, confronting him, a mad scarecrow with a dangerous
rifle atop a hill of grass, unafraid of them. For some insane reason,
they did not think to fire.
The moment lingered, all craziness loose in the air, a moment of
exquisite insanity.
Then they ran at him.
He dropped and slithered the one way they would not expect.
Right at them.
He slithered ahead desperately, snaking through the grass, until they
began to fire.
They paused a few feet from him, fired their weapons from the hip as if
in some terrified human ceremony aimed at slaying the devil. The
rounds scorched out, ripping the stalks above his head to land
somewhere behind.
It was a ritual of destruction. They fired and fired, reloading new
mags, sending their bullets out to kill him, literally obliterating the
crest of the hill.
He crawled ahead, until he could see feet and spent brass landing in
heaps.
174 STEPHEN HUNTER
The firing stopped.
He heard in Vietnamese the shouts:
"Brothers, the American is dead. Go find his body, comrades."
"You go find his body."
"He is dead, I tell you. No man could live through that. If he were
alive, he would be firing at us even now."
"Fine, go and cut his head off and bring it to us."
"Father Ho wants me to stay here. Somebody must direct."
"I'll stay, brother. Allow me to give you the privilege of examining
the body."
"You fools, we'll all go. Reload, make ready, shoot at anything that
moves. Kill the American demon."
"Kill the demon, my brothers!"
He watched as the feet began to move toward him.
Get small, he told himself. Be very, very small!
He went into a fetal position, willing himself into a stillness so
total it was almost a replication of genuine animal death. It was a
gift he had, the hunter's gift, to make his body of the earth, not upon
it. He worried only about the smell of his sweat, rich with American
fats, that could alert the wisest of them.
Feet came so close.
He saw canvas boots, and a pair of shower clogs.
They won this fucking war in shower clogs!
The two pairs of feet sloughed through the grass, each vivid in the
perfection of its detail. The man in shower clogs had small, dirty,
tough feet. The clogs were probably just an afterthought; he could
fight barefoot in snow or on gravel. The other's boots were holey,
torn, taped together, a hobo's comic footwear, something Red Skelton's
Clem Kadiddlehopper might wear. But then the boots marched on, passing
by, and Bob scooted ahead, slithering through the grass until he came
to a fold in the earth. He rose, checked around, and saw nothing in
the mist, and then raced off to the right, down the fold, toward the
column,
TIME TO HUNT 175
which had probably resumed its movement toward Arizona.
Then he crashed into the soldier.
NVA.
The two looked at each other for one stupid moment, Bob and this
obvious straggler, the idiot who'd wandered away. The man's mouth
opened as if to scream even as he fumbled to bring his AK to bear, but
Bob launched at him in an animal spring of pure evil brutality,
smashing him in the mouth with his skull, and driving downward on him,
pinning the assault rifle to his chest under his own dense weight. He
got his left hand about the man's throat, crushing it, applying the
full pinning weight of his body while at the same time reaching for his
Randall knife.
The man squirmed and bucked spastically, his own hands beating at Bob's
neck and head. Then one hand dipped, also for a knife, presumably, but
Bob rolled slightly to the left and drew his knee up and drove it into
the man's testicles with all the force he could muster. He heard the
intake of breath as the concussion folded his enemy.
Then he had the knife, and no impulse halted him. He drove it forward
into the belly, turned it sideways so the cutting edge sliced into
entrails, and drew it to the left.
The man spasmed, fighting the pain, his hand flying to Bob's wrist,
gagging sounds leaking from a constricted throat. Bob yanked the knife
out and stabbed upward, feeling the blade sink into throat. He fought
for leverage over the dying soldier, got himself upright and astride
the heaving chest and drove the blade two or three more times into the
torso, the man arching with each stroke.
He sat back. He looked about, saw the Remington a few feet away. He
wiped the Randall blade on his camoflaged trousers, and slipped it back
into the upside-down sheath on his chest. He checked quickly: two
pistols, a canteen. He picked up the Remington but had no time to look
for his hat, which had fallen off in the struggle. A lick of salty
blood ran down from the point on his crown
176 STEPHEN HUNTER
where he'd head-butted the North Vietnamese, and it arrived at the
corner of his mouth, shocking him. He turned, looked at the man.
Why had it been so easy? Why was the man so weak?
The answer was obvious: the soldier was about fourteen.
He'd never shaved in his life. In death, his face was dirty, but
essentially undisturbed. His eyes were open and bright but blank. His
teeth were white. He had acne.
Bob looked at the bloody package that had been a boy.
A feeling of revulsion came over him. He bent, retched up a few gobs
of undigested C-rat, gathered his breath, wiped the blood off his
hands, and turned back to the path that lay ahead of him, which led to
the column.
I am war, he thought; this is what I do.
Huu Co's political officer Phuc Go was adamant. A stocky little man
who'd been to Russian staff school, Phuc Go had the blunt force of a
party apparatchik, a man who lived and breathed the party and was a
master of dialectics.
"Brother Colonel, you must move, despite the cost. To waste more time
is to lose our precious advantage. How many can a single man kill? Can
he kill more than forty, possibly fifty? That is well under a twenty
percent casualty rate; that is entirely acceptable to the Party.
Sometimes, the fighters' lives must be spent to accomplish the
mission."
Huu Co nodded solemnly. Up ahead, sporadic fire broke out, but the
column had bogged down again. There was no word from the flanking
patrol and no word from the sappers who'd been recalled. Still, the
American assailed them with well-aimed shots, cadre his particular
specialty.
How did he know? Cadre wore no rank pins, carried few symbols of the
ego of leadership such as riding crops, swords or funny hats. Leaders
were indistinguishable from fighters, both in party theory and in
actual practice. Yet this American had some instinct for command, and
when
TIME TO HUNT 177
he fired, he brought down leaders, not always but in high enough
percentage to be disruptive.
"He is hitting our cadre, brother Political Officer. And what if we
push on, and he robs us over the kilometers of our leadership? And we
get to the objective and no leaders come forth and our attacks fail?
What will the party say then? Whose ears will ring the most loudly
with criticism?"
"Our fighters can produce leaders from amongst themselves. That is our
strength. That is our power."
"But our leaders must be trained, and to squander them for nothing but
the ego of a political officer who seeks the glory of seeing his column
destroy an American fort late in an already victorious war may itself
be a decision that is commented upon."
"I wonder, dear brother Colonel, if indeed there are not vestiges of
Western humanitarianism, the sick decadence of a doomed society, still
within your soul? You worry too much about such things as the petty
lives of individuals when it is the movement of the masses and the
forces of history and our objective that should be your concern."
"I am humble before my brother's excellent and perceptive critique,"
said the colonel.
"I still believe in patience over the long journey, and that in
patience lies virtue."
"Dearest Colonel," said the man, his face lighting with fire, "I have
sworn to the commissar that the American fort shall fall. I therefore
demand that you give the order to move forward without regard to--"
Phuc Go stopped talking. It was difficult to continue without a lower
jaw and a tongue. He stepped backward, the blood foaming brightly
across his chest and gurgling from the hole that had been his mouth.
Odd arguments came from him, so arcane and densely constructed they
could not be followed. His eyes turned the color of an old two-franc
coin and he died on his feet, falling backward
178 STEPHEN HUNTER
into the high grass amid a splash of muddy water that flew up when he
hit the wet ground.
Around the senior colonel, men dived for cover, but the senior colonel
knew the American would not fire. He realized that he would be spared.
In his way, the American was like a psychiatrist as much as a sniper,
and he operated on the body of the people to remove the self-important,
the vain, the overbearing. Political Officer Phuc Go was an angry man
and had been addressing his senior colonel aggressively, with brisk and
dramatic hand movements and a loud voice, in the gestural vocabulary of
superiority. Examining them, the American had assumed that it was he
who was in command, it was he who was dressing down a naughty inferior.
Thus the senior colonel's total lack of ego and presence had rendered
him effectively invisible in the sniper's scope.
There was another shot; down the column, a sergeant fell, screaming.
The senior colonel turned, one man standing among many cowering men,
and said conversationally to his XO, "Send out another platoon; I fear
our antagonist has evaded the first. And keep the men low in the
grass. We need not die for party vanity or some American's hunt for
glory."
The order was sent.
The senior colonel turned back to the hills, where the American still
hunted them.
You, sir, he thought in the language of his youth, forgotten all these
years, you, sir, are tres formidable.
Then he went back to considering how to kill the man.
Fuller cursed the clouds. They were low, wet, dense, thicker than the
blood on the floor of the triage tent, and they rewarded his anger with
a burst of rain, which fell like gunfire slopping through the mud.
No air.
Not today, not with these low motherfuckers choking the earth. He
looked back to his shabby empire of mud
TIME TO HUNT 179
and slatternly bunkers and smashed squad hootches and blown latrines. A
ragged curl of smoke still rose from where the dump had been blown
yesterday. Tribesmen and cadre huddled behind parapets or ran from
place to place, risking rifle fire. The mud smelled of buffalo shit
and blood and the acrid tang of burned powder.
A mortar shell detonated nearby, and he dropped behind his own parapet,
as a scream went up, "Medic! Goddammit, medic!" But there was no
medic; Jack Deems, who'd been with him since sixty-five and was
cross-trained both as a medic and a demolitions expert, a very good
professional soldier indeed, was hit yesterday. Shot in the chest.
Bled out screaming the names of his children.
Puller shivered.
Another mortar shell hit. Thank God the VC units only had 60-mms,
which lofted a grenade-sized bit of explosive into Arizona, and could
take out a man only if they scored a lucky, direct hit or they got him
in the open and took him down with shrapnel. But when Senior Colonel
Huu Co and his bad boys showed up, they'd have a weapons platoon with
Chicom Type 53s in 82-mm, and those suckers were bad news. If they
chose not to go for the direct kill, they could batter Arizona to
pieces with that much throw-load, then move in and shoot the wounded.
That would be it; then they'd fade into the hills.
The whole front would go: it was exquisitely planned, just as American
strength was ebbing but ARVN confidence not high enough, the temptation
too huge to deny and therefore getting them out of their normal
defensive posture for the first time since sixty-eight.
Puller looked again down the valley, which was shrouded in mist, and
felt the bone-chilling rain on the back of his neck. He stared, as if
he could penetrate that drifting, seething but altogether blank
nothingness. But he could not.
Now and then a shot or two sounded, the heavy smack of the Marine's
.308; it was always answered with a fusillade.
That Marine was still at it.
180 STEPHEN HUNTER
Man, you are a tiger, he thought. Don't know you, brother, but you are
one fucking tiger. You are the only thing between us and a complete
screwing of the pooch.
"They no get him," said Y Dok.
"No," said Puller, wishing he could break a team out to bring in the
sniper, but knowing he couldn't, and that it would be evil waste to
try.
"No, but they will, goddamn them."
Now they had him.
They were going to get him, but it was a question of when: early or
late?
Where had these guys come from?
Then he knew.
They had to be the sapper unit out on flank security, brought back fast
from out there. Probably Huu Co's best troops, real pros.
Bob lay on his belly on the crest of a small knoll, still as death,
breathing in un measurable increments. Underneath him he was wedded to
the Remington sniper rifle, whose bolt now gouged him cruelly in the
stomach. He could see through the wavering scope and watched as they
came for him.
Somehow, they knew this was his hill: it was some hunter's very good
instinct. Then he realized: they found the dead soldier in the gully
and tracked me. As he had moved through the wet elephant grass, he'd
probably left a pattern of disturbance, where the grass was wiped
clean, where the turf was trampled. Good men could follow much less.
Now they had him on this goddamned hill; it would be over in a few
minutes. Oh, these guys were good.
They had spread out, and were moving up very methodically, two
three-men elements of movement, two of cover. No more than three men,
too widely spaced for three shots, were visible at any one moment, and
then only for seconds. They were willing to give up one of the three
to find him and take him out. Soldiers.
TIME TO HUNT 181
He knew he had to get to his grease gun; if they got close, and he was
stuck with the Remington with one cartridge in the spout and a
bolt-throw away from another shot, he was done.
Now it was his turn to move, ever so slowly, ever so noiselessly.
Learn from them, he instructed himself. Learn their lessons: patience,
caution, calmness, freedom from fear, but above all the discipline of
the slow move. He had a complicated thing before him: without making a
sound, he had to reach back under his rain cape, release the sling of
the M3, draw it forward around his body, ease open the ejection port
cover and finger hole the bolt back. Then and only then would he have
a chance, but that destination was long minutes away.
The rain fell in torrents now, disguising his noise just a bit. But
these were sharp, trained men: their ears would hear the sound of
canvas rubbing on leather or metal sliding across flesh; or they would
smell his fear, acrid and penetrating; or they would see his movement
irregular against the steadier rhythms of nature.
Ever so slowly, he eased over to his side from his belly, an inch at a
time, shifting his hand back over the crest of his body. Now he could
hear them calling to each other:
they spoke the language of birds.
"Coo! Coo!" came the call of a dove in a part of the south where
there were no doves.
"Coo!" came the response, from the right.
"Coo!" came another one, clearly from behind. Now they knew he was
here, for the trail had led up the hill but had not led down it; they
had not cut across it. He was thoroughly cooked.
His fingers touched metal. They crawled up the grip of the grease gun,
pawed, climbed up to the tubular receiver and found the sling threaded
through its latch. His fingers struggled against the snap on the
sling.
Oh, come on, he prayed.
These little fuckers could be tough; they could rust
182 STEPHEN HUNTER
shut or simply be tightly fitted and need too much leverage to free
up.
Why didn't you check it?
Agh!
Asshole!
He ordered himself to check the sling snap a thousand times if he ever
got out of this fix, so that he would never, ever again forget.
Come on, baby. Please, come on.
With his fingers pulling, his thumb pushing, he battled the thing. It
was so small, so absurd: twelve men were twenty-five yards away hunting
him, and he was hung up on the cold, wet ground trying to get a fucking
little-Ah!
It popped, with a metallic click that he believed could be heard all
the way to China.
But nobody cooed and he wasn't jumped and gutted on the spot.
The gun slid free and down his back, but he captured it quickly with
his hand, and now withdrew it, very slowly, bringing it around, drawing
it close to him, like a woman to treasure for the rest of his life. He
smelled its oily magnificence, felt its tinny greatness. A reliable,
ugly piece of World War II improvisation, it probably cost a buck fifty
to manufacture from hubcaps and sleds and bikes picked up in
scrap-metal drives in the forties. That's why it had such a cheap,
toylike, rattly feel to it. With his fingers he deftly sprung the
latch on the ejection port, then inserted a finger into the bolt hole
that he had just revealed. With the finger he pushed back, felt the
bolt lock, then let it come forward. He dropped down and drew the gun
up to him.
"Coo! Coo!"
chapter fifteen
The message came by radio to the hasty command post dug into the side
of a hill. It was from the sapper patrol on the right flank.
"Brother Colonel," gasped Sergeant Van Trang, "we have the American
trapped on a hill half a kilometer to the west. We are closing on him
even now. He will be eliminated within the quarter hour."
Huu Co nodded. Van Trang was a banty little north countryman with the
heart of a lion. If he said such a thing was about to happen, then
indeed it would happen.
"Excellent," said the colonel.
"Out."
"There are no shots," his XO told him.
"Not since the unfortunate Phuc Go was martyred."
Huu Co nodded, considering.
Yes, now was the time. Even if he couldn't get the whole battalion
through the pass, he could get enough men through to overwhelm Arizona.
But he had every confidence in Van Trang and his sappers. They were
the most dedicated, the best trained, the most experienced. If they
had the American trapped, the incident was over.
"All right," he said.
"Send runners to One, Two and Three companies. Let's get the men out
of the grass, get them going. Fast, fast, fast. Now is the time for
speed. We have wasted enough time and energy on this American."
The XO rapidly gave the orders.
Huu Co went outside. All around him, men rose from the grass, shook
the accumulated moisture from their uniforms and formed up into loose
company units. A whistle sounded from in front of the column. Behind
Huu Co, with amazing swiftness, members of the combat support platoon
broke down the hasty command post so that nothing remained, then they
too went to their positions.
"Let's go," said Huu Co, and with a gaggle of support
184 STEPHEN HUNTER
personnel around him, he too began to move at the half-trot, ahead
through the mist and the rain, to the end of the valley where the
Americans were under siege.
The long train of men moved quickly, bending back the grass. Overhead,
the blessed clouds still hung, low and dense, to the surface of the
earth. No airplanes would come. He would make Arizona by nightfall,
give the men a few hours' rest, then move them into position and,
sometime after midnight, strike with everything he had, from three
directions. It would be over.
From the right it came, at last: the sudden flurry of fire, the sound
of grenade detonations, a few more shots and then silence.
"They got him," the XO said to him.
"Excellent," said Huu Co.
"At last. We have triumphed.
Frankly, between you and I, the American provided a great service."
"The political officer, Brother Co? I agree, of course.
He loved the party too much and the fighters not enough."
"Such men are necessary," said Huu Co.
"Sometimes."
"That American," said the XO.
"He was some kind of fighter himself. If they were all like that, our
struggle would be nowhere near its conclusion. I wonder what motivates
a man like that?"
Huu Co had known Americans in Paris in the early fifties and then in
Saigon in the early sixties. They had seemed innocent, almost
childish, full of wonder, incapable of deep thought.
"They are not a serious people," he said.
"But I suppose by the odds, every now and then you get one who is."
"I suppose," said the XO.
"I'm glad we killed this one.
I prefer the good ones dead."
He lay very composed, trying not to listen to his heart or to his mind,
or to any part of his body, which yearned to survive. Instead he
listened to nothing and tried to plan.
TIME TO HUNT 185
They are tracking you. They will come right to you. If you let them
carry the fight, you will die. You must shoot first, shoot to kill,
attack decisively. If you are aggressive you may stun them. They will
expect fear and terror. Aggression is the last thing they expect.
He tried to lay it all out, under the knowledge that any plan, even a
bad plan, is better than no plan.
Shoot the visible ones; spray till the mag empties; throw grenades;
fall away to the left; fall back into better cover in the trees. But
most of all: get off this hill.
They were very close, cooing softly to one another, haying converged.
They were patient, calm, very steady.
Oh, these were the best. They were so professional. No problems.
Getting the job done.
One suddenly stood before him. The man was about thirty, very tough
looking, his face a blank. He held an American carbine. He seemed to
have some trouble believing what lay before him on the ground.
Bob fired a five-round burst into his body, sending him down. He
pivoted, rising, and in the same second saw others turning toward him.
He swept the grease gun across them, a long, thudding burst, watching
the bullets chop through the grass in a blizzard of spray, ensnare his
opponents and take them down. Spent shells poured spastically from the
breech of the junky little piece as it rattled itself dry. In the
silence that followed, he heard the ping of grenade pins being pulled
and frantically threw himself backward, rolling through the grass,
feeling it lash and whip at him as he went, so glad he'd left the pack
behind.
The first grenade detonated about ten yards away and he felt the pain
as several pieces of shrapnel tore at his arm and the side of his body
that was exposed. But still he rolled and another grenade detonated,
this one still farther away.
He came to a stop, could hear some hustling around, and pulled a
grenade from his belt, pried the pin out and lofted it in the general
direction of his enemies. As it exploded--was that a scream he
heard?--he got a new
186 STEPHEN HUNTER
magazine into the submachine gun, and though he had no targets, lost
himself in the madness of firing. He emptied the magazine stupidly in
a sustained blast, the gun thudding, the bullets fanning out to splash
through the grass, atomizing stalks they struck, ripping sheets of mud
spray from the earth.
Then he rolled backward and continued to propel himself down the hill.
In one moment of repose, he got another magazine into the gun, but
before he could see targets he heard the soft crush of something heavy
landing nearby, and he went flat as a grenade detonated, sending a
spout of earth high into the sky and numbing his eardrums. Now he
heard nothing: his hearing was momentarily gone and his vision blurred.
The left arm hardly worked; it had numbed out and he saw that it was
bleeding badly.
Oh, shit.
Fire came at him from three points, short, professional bursts from
AK47s. They probed, sending the rounds skirmishing after him in three
vectors. He assumed that a few more were working around behind him.
That's it, he thought.
7 buy it.
This is it.
Oh, fuck, I tried so hard. Don't let me chicken out here at the end.
Oh, please, let me be brave.
But he wasn't brave. His anger melted. A profound sense of regret
washed over him. So much he hadn't done, so much he hadn't seen. He
felt the powerful pain of his own father's death upon him, and how, now
that he was gone, no one would be left alive to mourn and miss Earl
Swagger.
God help me, Daddy, I tried so goddamned hard. I just didn't make
it.
A shot kicked up next to his face, stinging his neck with pricks of
dirt. Another one buzzed by close. They were all shooting now, all of
them that were left.
I ain't no hero, he thought.
TIME TO HUNT 187
Oh, please, God, please don't let me die here. Oh, I don't want to
die, please, please, please.
But nobody answered and nobody listened and it was all over, it was
finished. Bullets cracked past or hit nearby, evicting gouts of angry
earth and pelting spray. He willed himself back, shrinking to
nothingness, but there was only so far he could go. His eyes were
shut. They had him. The next round would-Three fast booming cracks,
heavy and powerful. Then two more.
Silence. "Swagger? Bob Lee? You all right?"
Bob lifted his head; about forty yards away, a young Marine stepped out
of the elephant grass. Donny's boonie hat had fallen to his back and
his hair was golden even in the gray light and the misty rain. He was
an improbable black-and-green-faced angel with the instrument of his
sergeant's deliverance, the U.S. Rifle M14, 7.62 MM
NATO.
"Stay down," Bob called.
"I think I got 'em all."
"Stay down!"
In that second, two men fired at Donny but missed, the bullets pulling
big spouts from the valley floor. Bob turned to watch their shapes
scuttle away in the grass, and he walked bursts over both of them,
until they stopped moving. He crouched, waiting. Nothing. No noise,
just the ringing in his ears, the pounding of his heart, the stench of
the powder.
After a bit, he went to them; one was dead, his arms thrown out, the
blood congealing blackly as it pooled to form a feast for ants. The
other, a few yards away, was on his back, and still breathed. He had
left his AK 30 feet away as he'd crawled after taking the hits. But
now, exhausted, he looked up at Bob with beseeching eyes. His face and
mouth were spotted with blood, and when he breathed heavily, Bob heard
the blood bubble deep in his lungs.
188 STEPHEN HUNTER
The hand seemed to move. Maybe he had a grenade or a knife or a
pistol; maybe he was begging for mercy or deliverance from pain. Bob
would never know, nor did it matter. Three-round burst, center chest.
It was over.
Donny came bounding over.
"We got 'em all. I didn't think I could get here in time.
Christ, I hit three guys in a second."
"Great shooting, Marine. Jesus, you saved this old man's fucking
bacon," Bob said, collapsing.
"You're all right?"
"I'm fine. Dinged up a bit." He held out his bloody left arm; his
side also sang of minor penetration in a hundred or so places. Oddly,
what hurt the most was his neck, where the impacting NVA round had
blown a handful of nasty dirt into the flesh and hair of his scrubby
beard, and for some reason it stung like a bastard.
"Oh, Christ, I thought I was cooked. I was finished.
Wasted, greased. Man, I was a gone motherfucker."
"Let's get the fuck out of here."
"You wait. I left the rifle up top. Just let me catch my breath."
He sucked down a few gulps of the sweetest air he'd ever tasted, then
ran up the hill. The M40 lay where he had dumped it, its muzzle
spouting a crown of turf, its bolt half open and gummed also with
turf.
He grabbed it and ran back to Donny.
"Map?"
Donny fished it out of the case, handed it over.
"All right," Bob said, "he's sure got that column moving again. We've
got to move on, pass them, and jump them again."
"There's not much light left."
Bob looked at his Seiko. Jesus, it was close to 1700 hours. Time
flies when you're having fun.
"Fuck," he said.
He had a moment's gloom. No light, no shoot. They were going to get
close enough to stage an assault in the
TIME TO HUNT 189
dark, and all the snipers in the world wouldn't make a spit's worth of
difference.
"Shit," he said.
But Bob's mind was so fogged with delirium, adrenaline and fatigue it
wasn't processing properly. He had the vague sense of missing
something, as if he'd left his IQ points up there on that ugly little
hill. It was Donny who pulled another sack from around his waist,
opened it, and out came what looked like a small tubular popgun and a
handful of White Star illumination flares; the bag was heavy with the
cartridges.
"Flares!" he said.
"Can you shoot by flares?"
"If I can see it, I can hit it," Bob said.
They moved swiftly through the gloom, amid small hills, in the elephant
grass, ever mindful they were paralleling the movement of the enemy
main force in the valley, ever mindful that there were still scouting
units out in the area.
If and when the NVA discovered their dead recon team, they might send
still other men after them.
They moved at the half-jog, through a fog of fatigue and pain. Bob's
arm hurt desperately and he didn't have any painkillers, not even
aspirin. His head ached and his legs felt withered and shaky. They
followed a compass heading, re shooting it each time they moved around
a hill.
The elephant grass was tall and concealing, but it cut at them
mercilessly. There wasn't much water left and even in the falling
dark, Bob could see that the clouds hadn't broken, still hung low and
close. A wicked, pelting rain started, delivering syringes of cold
where it struck them.
Soon the trip became pure blind misery, two hungry, dead-tired, filthy
men running on faith and hope toward a destination that might not even
exist.
Bob's mind slipped in and out; he tried to concentrate on the job ahead
but it would not stay. At one point, he called a halt.
"I got to rest," he said.
"We been pushing pretty hard," Donny said.
190 STEPHEN HUNTER
Bob slipped down into the grass.
"You've lost a lot of blood."
"I'm okay. I only need a little rest."
"I got some water. Here, take some water."
"Then what'll you drink?"
"I don't need to shoot. I just fire flares. You need to shoot. You
need the water."
"You'd think, all this fucking rain, the last thing we'd be is
thirsty."
"I feel like I just played two football games without quarters or half
times Just two games straight through."
"Oh, man," Bob said, taking a big swig of Donny's water, feeling its
coolness rush down his flaming throat.
"After this, I'm going to sleep for a month," said Donny.
"No, after this," said Bob, "you are going on R&R to be with your wife,
if I have to go to the goddamned general and ass-kick him myself."
It was almost full dark. Somewhere birds were beginning to call; the
jungle was close, just beyond the hill line.
There was, however, nothing alive in view; once again, they seemed
alone in the world, lost in the hills, stuck in a landscape of
desolation.
Suddenly Bob's mind sped to other possibilities.
"I got a idea," he said.
"You got tape? Don't you carry tape? I think I told you to--" Donny
reached into a bellows pocket of his cammies, pulled out a roll of gray
duct tape.
"This would be tape, no?"
"That would be tape, yes. Okay, now .. . goddamn . the spotting
scope. Don't tell me you dumped your spotting scope. You didn't leave
that back with your gear, did you?"
"Fuck," said Donny, "I brought everything except a helicopter. Hmmm,
sink, tent, Phantom jet, mess hall; oh, yeah, here .. ."
He pulled another piece of gear slung around his shoulder. It was a
long, tubular green canvas carrying
TIME TO HUNT 191
case, strapped at either end, which carried an M49 20X spotting scope,
complete with a folded tripod. It was for glassing the really far
targets.
He unslung it and handed it over.
"Now what?"
"Oh, just you watch."
Greedily, Bob bent to the scope case, unscrewed it and reached out to
remove a dull-green metal telescope, disjointed slightly, with a
folding tripod underneath. It must have cost the Marine Corps a
thousand bucks.
"Beautiful, ain't it?" he asked. Then he rammed its delicate lens
against Donny's rifle muzzle, shattering it into a sheet of diamonds.
He reamed the tube out on the rifle barrel, grinding circularly to take
out all the glass and the delicate internal mechanisms for focus
adjustment.
He unscrewed and threw away the tripod. Then he seized the canvas
case, took out his Randall Survivor and began to operate.
"What are you doing?" Donny asked.
"You never mind, but you get my rifle cleaned up. No rules today.
Hurry, Pork, we gotta get a goddamned move on."
Donny worked some rough maintenance on the gun, clearing the muzzle of
mud and grass, scraping the dirt, and in a few minutes had it ready to
shoot again. He looked back to see that Bob had sawed off one end of
the scope case and cut a smaller hole through the other, giving him a
green tube about twelve inches long.
Bob wedged the spotting scope tube back into the case.
"Here, you hold that goddamn muzzle up for me," he commanded, and,
working swiftly, commenced to wedge the scope case and scope on the
muzzle, then wrap yards of tape around the case and the muzzle,
securing the case so that it projected a good eight inches beyond the
muzzle.
It looked like some kind of silencer but Donny knew it wasn't a
silencer.
192 STEPHEN HUNTER
"What is?"
"Field expedient flash suppressor," said Bob.
"Flash is just powder burning beyond the muzzle. If you can lengthen
the cover on the barrel, it'll burn up in there, not in the air, where
it'll light me up like a Christmas tree. It's pretty flimsy and won't
hold much more than a few dozen shots, but by God, I don't want them
tracking my flash and hitting me with the goddamned kitchen sink. Now,
let's mount out."
A last fast.
The troops were driven by duty and destiny. An extraordinary
accomplishment, the long double-time march from Laos, the ordeal of the
sniper in the valley, the victory over the man, and now, on to the
Green Beret camp at Kham Due. Battalion No. 3 was just a kilometer
away from the staging point, maintaining good order, moving smartly.
Huu Co, senior colonel, glanced at his watch and saw that it was near
midnight. They would be in place in another hour, and could use a
little time to relax and gather themselves. Then the assault teams
would stage and the weapons platoon would set up the 81mm Type 53s, and
the last stage would commence. It would be over by dawn.
The weather wouldn't matter.
Still, it was holding beautifully for him. Above there was a starless
night, gray and dim, the clouds close to the earth. In his old mind,
his Western mind, he could believe that God himself had willed the
Americans from the earth. It was as if God were saying, "Enough,
begone.
Back to your land. Let these people be."
In his new mind, he merely noted that his luck had held, and that luck
is sometimes the reward for boldness.
The Fatherland appreciated daring and skill; he had gambled and won,
and the eventual fall of the Kham Due camp would be his reward.
"It is good," said the XO.
"Yes, it is," said Huu Co.
"When this is over, I will--"
TIME TO HUNT 193
But Nhoung's face suddenly lit up. Huu Co turned to wonder about the
source of illumination.
A single flare hung in the sky beneath a parachute, bringing light to
the dark night. As it settled the light grew brighter, and there was
one lucid moment in which the battalion, gathered as it plunged toward
its study, seemed to stand out in perfect clarity. It was a beautiful
moment too, suffused with white light, gentle and complete, exposing
the people's will as contained and expressed through its army, nestled
between close hills, churning onward toward whatever tomorrow brought,
unhesitatingly, heroic, stoic, self-sacrificing.
Then the shot rang out.
Fuller dreamed of Chinh. His second tour. He hadn't planned to, it
just happened; she was Eurasian, lived in Cholon, he'd been in the
field eleven months and, suffering from combat exhaustion, had been
brought back to MACV in Saigon, given a staff job, just to save him
from killing himself. It was a safe job back then, sixty-seven, a year
before Tet, and Chinh was just there one day, the daughter of a French
woman and a Vietnamese doctor, more beautiful than he could imagine.
Was she a spy?
There was that possibility, but there wasn't much to know;
it was brief, intense, pure pleasure, not a whisper of guilt.
Her husband had been killed, she said, by the communists.
Maybe it was so, maybe it was not. It didn't matter.
The communists killed her one night on the road in her Citreon after
she'd spent hours making love with him. She ran through an ambush
they'd propped for an ARVN official:
just blew her away.
He dreamed of his oldest daughter, Mary. She rode horses and had
opinions. She hated the Army, watched her mother play the game, suck
up all the way through in the shit posts like Gemstadt or Benning,
always making a nice home, always sucking up to the CO's wife.
"I won't have it," Mary said.
"I won't live like that.
What does it get you?"
194 STEPHEN HUNTER
His wife had no answer.
"It's what we do," she finally said.
"Your father and me. We're both in the Army. That's how it works."
"It won't work that way for me," she said.
He hoped it wouldn't. She was too smart to end up married to some
lifer, some mediocrity who would go nowhere and only married her
because she was the daughter of the famous Dick Puller, the lion of
Pleiku, who'd taken a Chicom .51 in the chest and wouldn't even let
himself be medevaced out and who died in the shitty little Forward
Operations Base at Kham Due a year after the war was lost, threw
himself away for nothing that nobody could make any sense of.
Puller came awake. It was dark. He checked his watch.
It would start soon, be over soon. He smelled wet sand from the soaked
bags out of which the bunker was built, dirt and mud, gun oil, Chinese
cooking, blood, the works, the complete total that was life in the
field.
But he had an odd sensation: something was happening.
He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. Time to
get up and-"Sir."
It was young Captain Taney, who would probably also die tonight.
"Yeah?"
"It's--ah--you won't believe it."
"What?"
"He's still out there."
"Who?" Puller thought instantly of Huu Co.
"Him. Him. That goddamned Marine sniper."
"Does he have night vision?"
"No, sir. You can see it from the parapet. You can hear it. He's got
flares."
idle didn't get good targets. Not enough light. But in the shimmering
glow of the floating flares he got enough:
movement, fast, frightened, scurrying, the occasional hero who would
stand and try and mount a rally, the runner
TIME TO HUNT 195
who was sent to the rear to report to command, the machine gun team
that peeled off to try and flank him.
The flares fired with a dry, faraway pop, like nothing else in the
"Nam. They lit at about three hundred feet with a spurt of
illumination; then the 'chute would open and grab the wind, and they'd
begin to float downward, flickering, spitting sparks and ash. It was
white. It turned the world white. The lower they got the brighter it
got, but when they swung in the breeze, they turned the world to a riot
of shadows chasing each other through the dimness of his scope.
But still, he'd get targets. He'd fire at what his instincts told him
was human, what looked odd in the swinging light, the sparks, the glow
that filled the world, the crowd of panicked men who now felt utterly
naked to the sniper's reach. The night belonged to Charlie, it was
said.
Not this night. It belonged to Bob.
They'd worked it right. No movement, not now. It was too dark to move
and they'd get mixed up, get out of contact with one another and that
would be that. Donny was on the hilltop, Bob halfway down. The bad
guys were moving left to right beyond them, one hundred yards out,
where the grass was shorter and there wasn't any cover. It was a good
killing zone, and the first element of the column was hung up, pinned
in the grass, believing that if they moved they would die, which was
correct.
Donny would fire a flare and move a hundred steps or so on the hilltop,
while Bob waited for the flare to get low enough to see the movement.
Bob would fire twice, maybe three times in the period of brightest
light. Then he'd move too, the same one hundred steps, through the
grass, and set up again.
Forward; then they'd move back. They couldn't see one another, but
they had the rhythm. They'd send people up after him, but not soon
enough. They wouldn't be sure where the flares were coming from,
because, God bless the little fireworks, they didn't trail illumination
as they ascended.
196 STEPHEN HUNTER
Bob couldn't even see the reticle. He just saw the movement and knew
where the reticle would be because that's where it always was, and he
fired, the rifle cracking, its flash absorbed in the steel tube that
surrounded the muzzle but would sooner or later have to give way. No
one could yet see where the shots were coming from.
The flare floated, showering sparks. In its cone of light, Bob saw a
man drop into vegetation and he put a bullet into him. He flicked the
bolt fast, jacking out the spent case, and watched as another man came
through the light to his fallen comrade, and he killed him too. The
trick was the light; the flares had to be constant; there couldn't be a
dark moment when there was no light because these guys would move on
him then, and they'd be too close, too fast and it would be over.
It lasted for ten minutes; then, having planned it, Donny stopped
firing and Bob stopped firing. They both fell back, met at the far
side of the hill, and took off on the dead run, leaving behind the
confusion. They moved on, looking for another setup.
"That'll slow 'em. It'll take 'em ten minutes to figure out we're
gone. Then they'll get moving again. We should be able to hit them
again. I want to set up on that side now. You watch me."
Donny had the M14 at high port. Bob's rifle was slung and he carried
the M3 in his hands, though he was down now to two magazines. Both his
handguns were cocked and locked.
"Okay, you ready?"
"I think so."
"You cover me if I take fire."
"Gotcha."
Bob stepped out of the grass onto the valley floor.
He felt so naked. He was all alone. The wind whistled, and once again
it began to rain. The NVA must have been a half klick or so behind.
Suddenly, the sky behind them lit up: an assault team had moved up to
and taken the now empty hill on which they had situated. Grenade
blasts
TIME TO HUNT 197
rocked the night, and blades of the sheer light slashed from the
concussion. Heavy automatic weapons fire followed:
again, they were slaying the demon.
Bob got halfway across, then turned with his grease gun to cover, and
called out for Donny to join him.
"Come on!" he shouted.
The boy came across the valley floor and passed Bob, and went to set up
on the other side. Bob raced over.
Quickly, they found another hill.
"You get on up there," Bob said.
"When you hear me shoot, you fire the first flare. I'm going to open
up further out this time. Meanwhile, you set up Claymores. I'm down
to about twenty rounds and I want a fallback. If we get bounced, we'll
counter bounce with the Claymores, then fall back. Set them up, and
wait to pop flares. Password is . fuck, I don't know; make up a
password."
"Ah--Julie."
"Julie. As in "Julie is beautiful," roger that?"
"Roger that."
"You hear movement coming to you and he don't sing out "Julie is
beautiful," you go to Claymores, use the confusion to fall back and
find a hide, then you wait until tomorrow and call in a bird after a
while. Okay? There'll be a bird tomorrow. Got it?"
"Got it."
"If I don't make it back, same deal. Fall back, go to ground, call in
a bird. They'll be buzzing all over this zone tomorrow, no problem.
Now, how many flares you got?"
Donny did a quick check on his bag.
"Looks like about ten."
"Okay, when they're gone, they're gone. Then we're out of business.
Fall back, hide, bird. Okay?"
"Check," said Donny.
"You all right? You sound kind of shaky."
"I'm just beat. I'm tired. I'm scared."
"Shit, you can't be scared. I'm scared enough for both of us. I got
all the fear in the whole fucking world."
"I don't--"
198 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Just this last bad thing, then we are the fuck out of here, and I'm
going to make sure you get home in one piece, I give you my word. You
done yours. Nobody can say, He didn't do his. You done it all ten
times over. You get to go home after this one, I swear to you."
There was an odd throb in his own voice that Bob had never heard
before. Where did it come from? He didn't know. But somehow Bob had
a blinding awareness that in some way, the life of the world now
depended on getting Donny home in one piece. Donny was the world,
somehow, and if he, Bob, got him killed out here for this shit, he
would answer for all eternity. Very strange; nothing he'd ever felt
before on any battlefield.
"I'm cool," Donny said.
"See you in a bit, Sierra-Bravo-Four."
Donny watched the sergeant go. The man was like some Mars or Achilles
or something, so lost in the ecstasy of the battle that he somehow
didn't want it to end, didn't want to come back. Once again, Donny had
the odd feeling that he was destined to witness all this and tell it.
To whom?
Who would care? Who would listen? The idea of soldiers as heroes was
completely gone. Now, they were baby killers or, if not that, they
were fools, suckers, morons who hadn't figured out how to beat the
machine.
So maybe that was his job: to remember the Bob Lee Swaggers of the
world and, when the times somehow changed, the story could be retrieved
and told. How one crazy Arkansas sumbitch, mean as a snake, dry as a
stick, brave as the mountains, took on and fucked up an entire
battalion, for almost nothing, really, except so that nobody would ever
say of him. He let us down.
What made such a man? His brutal, hard scrabble childhood? The Corps
as his home, his love of fighting, his sense of country? Nothing
explained it; it was beyond explanation.
Why was he so meaninglessly brave? What compelled him to treat his
life so cheaply?
TIME TO HUNT 199
Donny made it to the top of the hill. It was a queer little empire,
much smaller than the last hill, a little hump that overlooked the
larger valley before it. Here is where they would fight.
He unstrapped his three Claymores bandoleers and took the things out,
your basic M18A1 Directional Mine.
Jesus, were these nasty little packages. About eight inches across and
four inches tall, they were little con vexes of plastic-sheathed C-4,
impregnated with about seven hundred pieces of buckshot apiece. You
opened a compartment, pulled out about one hundred meters of wire,
unspooled it to your safe hole, and there crimped it to the Electrical
Firing Device M57, which came packed in the bandoleer and looked like a
green plastic hand exerciser.
When you clamped it, you jacked a goose of electricity through the wire
to the detonator, the pound and a half of C-4 went kaboom, and the
seven hundred steel balls went sailing through the air at about two
thousand miles an hour. For a couple of hundred feet, anything in
their way--man, beast, vegetable or mineral--got turned to instant
spaghetti. Just the thing for human wave attacks, night ambushes,
perimeter defense or those annoying staff meetings, though the Marine
Corps thoughtfully added the message front toward enemy for its dimmer
recruits, so they wouldn't get mixed up in all the excitement and blow
a nasty hole in their own lines.
Donny pulled down the folding scissors legs on each mine, made sure
that the front indeed faced the enemy, and set up the three of them
about sixty feet apart, atop the hill. There was some little technical
business to be done involving blasting caps, shipping plug priming
adaptors, the detonator well, wire crimped and so on.
Then the wire was fed backward, where he used his entrenching tool to
dig a quick, low hole, though he knew that if he ever had to go to the
mines, it meant there were enough zips coming at them that whether he
survived the backblast or not was kind of a moot point.
He took a last swig on his canteen and tossed it away.
200 STEPHEN HUNTER
He wished he had a C-rat left, but he'd left them back with most of his
gear. Now, however, instead of the usual huge burden, he felt almost
light-headed. He had no food, no canteen, no spotting scope, no
Claymores. The only burden, beside his M14 magazines, was the
goddamned PRC-77, tied tightly to his back by a couple of cruel straps.
He even dared peel it off, and now felt really light.
He felt like dancing. The freedom from the ache of going into battle
with sixty pounds of gear and then twenty pounds of gear and now
nothing was astonishing. He had trained himself to ignore the ache in
his back; now it vanished.
Cool, he thought, I get to die without a backache, first time in my
career in the "Nam.
Then the shot came, and Donny hastily pulled out his flare device,
slipped a flare into the breech, screwed it shut and thrust it against
the ground to fire. Like a tiny mortar, the flare popped out and
hissed skyward, seeming to disappear. A second passed, then the night
bloomed illumination as the flare lit, its 'chute opened and it began
to float down into the valley, showering sparks and white.
It was snowing light.
Bob was shooting now.
The last act had begun.
They were much closer than he anticipated. The scope was cranked down
to three power so that he could get as clear and wide a view as
possible. Still, they weren't targets so much as possibilities,
squirms of movement that in their rhythm seemed human against the
stiller spectacle of the natural world, though it was all made stranger
yet by the rushing shadows the swing of the flare created as it
descended.
He saw, he fired. Something stopped moving, or just went down. He'd
had eighty rounds; he was down to less than twenty. God, I killed some
boys today. Jesus fucking Christ, I did some killing today. I was
death today, I was the Marine Corps's finest creation, the stone
killer, destroying all that moved before me.
TIME TO HUNT 201
Something moved, he shot it, it stopped. Clearly the NVA couldn't
locate him, and he was so close, and now the boss man had made a
decision--to keep going, to take casualties, to make the rallying point
for the attack on Arizona, to march through the minefields, as a
Russian general had put it.
It was as though he were saying to Bob: You can't kill us all. We will
defeat you through our willingness to absorb death. That is how we won
this war; that is how we will win this battle.
He could hear sergeants screaming, "Bi! Bi! Bi!" meaning "go, go,
go," urging the troops onward, but they could not see him because of
his flash hider, the panic, the fear. The troops did not want to go,
clearly. He'd gotten into their heads: that was the sniper thing; that
was what was so terrible about the sniper. He was intimate and
personal in a way which nothing else that kills in war can be; his
humanness preys on your humanness, and it was hardest for even the most
disciplined of troops to face.
He jacked out a round into the breech, fired, watched someone die. He
fired again, quickly, in the fading light;
then another flare popped, the light renewed and he saw more targets,
so close it was criminal murder to take them, but that was his job
tonight: he took them, reloaded, fell back through the high grass,
emerged when another flare fired off, and killed some more. He was
gone totally in the red, screaming urgency of his own head, not a man
anymore, but a total killing system, conscienceless, instinctive, his
brain singing with blood lust. It was so easy.
Co Nhoung was gone. The bullet snuffed his life out in a second,
drilling him through the neck with the sound of an ax hitting a side of
raw beef. Nhoung died on his feet, and hit the ground a corpse. His
soul flew away to be with his ancestors.
"We are dying! He can see us! There is no hope!" a young soldier
screamed.
202 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Shut up, you fool," yelled Huu Co, yearning to reach to the sky and
crush those blasphemous flares with his bare hands, then rip the skulls
from the bodies of the sniper and his spotter.
"They're on the left this time," he screamed again, because he had seen
the XO fall to the right, pushed by the impact of the bullet.
"On the left. Fire for effect, brothers, fire now, kill the demons!"
His troops began to open fire helter-skelter, without much thought, the
lacy neon of the tracers jumping through the darkness like spiderwebs,
ripping vaguely where they struck tree or vegetation, but the point of
it was to calm them while he figured out what to do.
He stood. A flare lit over his head. He was in bold relief and the
flare seemed to be falling directly toward him. The man next to him
fell, stricken; the man behind him fell, stricken. He was in the cone
of light; he was the target. It didn't matter. His life didn't
matter.
"Number One assault platoon, advance one hundred meters to the left;
Number Two assault platoon, provide covering fire during the movement;
weapons platoon, set up mortar units to be ranged at 150 meters on the
hill at 1000 hours to our front. Machine gun platoon, set up automatic
weapons one hundred meters to the right."
He waited for the sniper to kill him.
But instead, an astonishing thing happened. No bullet came at all. The
sniper lit a torch and began waving at him, as if to say, Here I am.
Come kill me. He could see the man, surprisingly close, waving the
torch.
"There he is; kill him! You see him. Kill him," Huu Co shouted.
As he came out of the grass, another flare popped, low this time,
filling the night with white light. The spectacle was awesome through
the scope, jacked up three times:
he saw men run in panic, he saw the blind fire directed
TIME TO HUNT 203
outward, he saw men in the center of the position yelling
desperately.
Commanding officer, he thought.
Oh, baby, if I can do you, I can call this one a day!
Three men stood. The center of the scope found one and he pulled the
trigger with--damn!--enough jerk so the shot went high and he knew he
hit high, in the neck; in the perfect circle of the scope, his target
sank backward, stiff and totaled. Bob cocked fast, but the flare died.
He could hear nothing. The fire lashed outward pointlessly, unaimed,
mere fireworks as if the terrified were trying to drive demons away.
Another flare popped: low and bright and harsh.
Bob blinked at the brightness of it, saw another man stand, fired,
taking him down. As he pivoted slightly, he went past a second man to
a third, fired quickly, hit him off center and put him down. Then he
came back to the second man as he rushed through the bolt cycle.
Got you.
You're it.
You're the man.
He caught his breath, steadied himself. The flare seemed to be falling
right toward this brave individual, and Bob saw that yes: this was him,
whoever he was.
The officer alone stood, taking the full responsibility of the moment.
He called directions so forcefully, Bob could hear the Vietnamese
vowels through the noise of the fire. He was fortyish, small, tough,
very professional looking, and on his green fatigues he wore the three
stars of the senior colonel, visible only now because the light was so
bright as the flare descended.
Bob took a second's worth of breath, noticing that in the brightness of
the instant, the reticle had even materialized;
the crosshairs stood out bold and merciless upon the colonel's chest,
and in that second Bob took the slack out and with the snap of a piece
of balsa wood shattering, the trigger went, the rifle recoiled, death
from afar was sent upon its way.
204 STEPHEN HUNTER
But something was wrong; instead of a sight picture, Bob saw bright
lights, bouncing balls of sheer incandescence, his night vision
shattering as he blinked to clear but the world had caught on fire.
Flames ate the darkness. It made no sense.
Then he realized what had happened. The jury-rigged suppressor,
sustained in its nest of tape, had finally yielded to the hammering of
muzzle blast and flash, slipped down into the trajectory of the bullet,
deflected it and, exposed directly to the detonation of flash, the
canvas exploded into flame. The rifle had become a torch signaling his
location. He stared at it for an oafish moment, realized it was his
own death, and threw the whole mad blazing apparatus away.
Now there was nothing left except the remotest possibility of
survival.
He turned to flee, as bullets clipped about, whacking through the.
stalks He was hit hard, on the back, driven to the earth. The pain
was excruciating.
He saw it very clearly: I am dead. I die now. This is it. But no
life sprung before his eyes; he had no sense of wastage, loss,
recrimination, only sharp and abiding pain.
He reached back to discover not hot blood but hot metal. A bullet
aimed for his spine had instead hit the slung M3 grease gun, driving it
savagely into him, but doing him no permanent harm. He shucked the
disabled weapon, and began to slither maniacally through the grass as
the world seemed to explode around him.
He didn't know what direction; he just crawled, pathetically, a fool
begging for life, so far from heroic it was ludicrous, thinking only
one phrase like a mantra: I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I
don't want to die.
He kept going, through his terror, and came at last to a little nest of
trees, into which he dove and froze. Men moved around him in the
darkness; shots were fired, but the action, after the longest time,
seemed to die away, and he slipped in another direction.
He got so far when someone shouted, and then, god TIME TO HUNT 205
damn them, the NVA fired their own flares. Theirs were green, less
powerful, but they had more of them: the sky filled with multiple suns
from a distant planet, sparky green, descending through green muck as
if it were an aquarium.
In a moment of primeval fear, Bob simply turned and ran. He ran like a
motherfucker. He ran crazily, insanely to escape the cone of light,
but even as it promised to die, another blast of candlepower lit the
night as another dozen or so green Chicom flares popped.
This seemed to be the place. He ran upward, screaming madly, "Julie is
beautiful, Julie is beautiful!", saw Donny rise above him with his M14
in a good, solid standing offhand and begin to fire on his pursuing
targets very professionally. Bob ran to the boy, feeling the armies of
the night on his butt, and dove into Donny's shallow hole.
"Claymores!" he screamed.
"They're not close enough!" Donny responded. Bob rose: more flares
came, and this time a whole company seemed to be rushing at them to
destroy them.
"Now!" he screamed.
"No!" screamed Donny, who had the three firing devices.
Where had this kid got this much cool? He held them, the shots
cracking up the hill, tracers flicking by, the green flares floating
down, the screams of the rushing men louder and louder until he fell
back, smiled and squeezed the three firing devices simultaneously.
chapter sixteen
Donny had three M14 mags left, with twenty rounds each; Bob had seven
rounds in his .45, one loaded magazine, and seven rounds in his .380
with no extra magazines.
Donny had four grenades. Bob had his Randall Survivor. Donny had a
bayonet.
That was it.
"Shit," said Donny.
"We're cooked," said Bob.
"Shit," said Donny.
"I fucked up," said Bob.
"Sorry, Pork. I could have led them away from here. I didn't have to
come back up this hill. I wasn't thinking."
"It doesn't matter," said Donny.
The NVA scurried around at the base of the hill. Presumably they'd
carried off their dead and wounded, but it wasn't clear yet what their
next move would be. They hadn't fired any flares recently, but they
were maneuvering around the hill, Bob supposed, for the last push.
"They may think we have more Claymores," he said.
"But probably they don't."
It was dark. Donny had no flares. They crouched in the hole at the
top of the hill, one facing east, the other west. The dead M57s with
their firing wires lay in the hole too, getting in the way. The stench
of C-4, oddly pungent, filled the air, even now, close to an hour after
the blasts.
Donny held his M14, Bob a pistol in each hand. They could see nothing.
A cold wind whipped through the night.
"They'll probably set up their 81s, zero us, and take us out that way.
Why take more casualties? Then they can be on their way."
"We tried," said Donny.
"We fought a hell of a fight," said Bob.
"We hung 'em
TIME TO HUNT 207
up a bit. Your old dad up in Ranger heaven would be proud of you."
"I just hope they find the bodies, and my next of kin is notified."
"You ever file that marriage report?"
"No. It didn't seem important. No off-post living in the "Nam."
"Yeah, well, you want her to get the insurance benefits, don't you?"
"Oh, she doesn't need the money. They have money.
My brothers could use it for school. It's okay the way it is."
Nothing much to say. They could hear movement at the base of the hill,
the occasional secret muttering of NCOs to their squads.
"I lost the picture," Donny said.
"That's what bothers me."
"Julie's picture?"
"Yeah."
"When?"
"Sometime in the night. No, the late afternoon, when I went after that
flank security unit. I don't remember. My hat fell off."
"It was in your hat?"
"Yeah."
"Well, tell you what, I can't git you out of here and I can't git you
the Medal of Honor you deserve, but if I can git you your hat back,
would you say I done okay by you?"
"You always did okay by me."
"Yeah, well, guess what? Your hat fell off your head, all right, but
you been so busy, and now you're so tired you ain't figured out that
you was wearing a cord around the hat to pull it tight in the rain.
It's still there. It's hanging off your neck, across your back."
"Jesus!"
Donny reached around his neck and felt the cord; he drew it tight,
pulled the hat up from around his back and removed it.
208 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Shit," he said, because he could think of nothing else to say.
"Go on," said Bob, "that's your wife; look at her."
Donny pulled at the lining of the hat and removed the cellophane
package, unpeeled it and removed, a little curled and bent, slightly
damp, the photograph.
He stared at it and could see nothing in the darkness, but nevertheless
it helped.
In his mind, she was there. One more time. He wanted to cry. She was
so sweet, and he remembered the three days they'd had. They got
married in Warrenton, Virginia, and drove up to the Skyline Drive and
rented a cabin in one of the parks. They spent each day going for long
walks. That place had paths that ran along the sides of the mountains,
and you could look down into the Shenandoahs or, if you were on the
other side, into the Piedmont. It was green, rolling country,
checkerboard farms, as far as you could see; beautiful, all right.
Maybe it was his imagination, but the weather seemed perfect. It was
early May, spring, and life was breaking from the crust of the earth
with a vengeance, green buds everywhere. Sometimes it was just them
alone in the world, high above the rest of the earth. Or was it just
that all soldiers remember their last leave as special and beautiful?
"Here, look," said Donny.
"It's too dark."
"Go on, look he commanded, the first time he had ever spoken sharply to
his sergeant.
Swagger gave him a sad look, but took the picture.
He looked at Julie, but saw nothing. Still, he knew the picture. It
was a snapshot taken in some spring forest, and the wind and the sun
played in her hair. She wore a turtleneck and had one of those smiles
that made you melt with pain. She seemed clean, somehow, so very, very
clean.
Straw blond hair, straight white strong teeth, a tan face, an outdoorsy
face. She was a beautiful girl, model or movie-star beautiful. Bob
had a brief, broken moment when he contemplated the brute fact that no
one nowhere
TIME TO HUNT 209
loved him or would miss him or give a shit about his death. He had no
one. A middle-aged lawyer in Arkansas might shed a tear or two, but he
had his own kids and his own life and the old man would probably still
miss Bob's father more than he'd miss Bob. That was the way it went.
"She's a great-looking young woman," Bob said.
"I
can tell she loves you a lot."
"Our honeymoon. Skyline Drive. My old captain gave me six hundred
dollars to take her away when I got my orders cut. Emergency leave. He
got me three days. He was a great guy. I tried to pay him back, but
the letter came back, and it was stamped, saying he had left the
service."
"That's too bad. He sounds like a good man."
"They got him too."
"Yeah, they get everyone in the end."
"No, I don't just mean 'them, they." I mean a specific guy, with
influence, who set about to purify the world. We were part of the
purification process. I'd still like to look that guy up. Commander
Bonson. Here's to you, Commander Bonson, and your little victory. You
won in the end. Your kind always does."
Flare. Green, high. Then two or three more green suns descending.
"Git ready," said Bob.
They could hear the ponk-ponk-ponk as a few hundred yards away, three
81mm mortar shells were dropped down their tubes. The shells climbed
into the air behind a faint whistle, then reached apogee and began
their downward flight.
"Get down!" screamed Bob. The two flattened into the mud of the
shallow hole.
The three shells landed fifty meters away, exploding almost
simultaneously. The noise split the air and the two Marines bounced
from the ground.
"Ah, Christ!"
A minute passed.
210 STEPHEN HUNTER
Three more flares opened, green and almost wet, spraying sparks all
over the place.
Bob wished he had targets, but what the hell difference did it make
now? He lay facedown in the mud, feeling the texture of Vietnam in his
face, smelling its smells, knowing he would never see another of its
dawns.
Ponkponkponk.
The shells climbed, whispering of death and the end of possibilities,
then descended.
Oh, Jesus, Bob prayed, oh, dear Jesus, let me live, please, let me
live.
The shells detonated thirty meters away, triple concussions, loud as
hell. Something in his shoulder began to sting even before he landed
again in Vietnam, having been lifted by the force of the blast. Acrid
Chinese smoke filled his eyes and nostrils.
He knew the drill. Somewhere a spotter was calling in corrections.
Fifty back, right fifty, that should put you right on it.
Oh, it was so very near.
"I was a bad son," Donny sobbed.
"I'm so sorry I was a bad son. Oh, please, forgive me, I was a bad
son. I couldn't stand to visit my dad in the hospital, he looked so
awful, oh. Daddy, I'm so sorry."
"You were a good son," Bob whispered fiercely.
"Your daddy understood, don't you worry about it none."
Ponkponkponk.
Bob thought of his own daddy. He wished he'd been a better son too. He
remembered his daddy pulling out in his state trooper cruiser that last
night in the twilight.
Who knew it was a last time? His mother wasn't there.
His daddy put his hand out to wave to Bob, then turned left, heading
back to Blue Eye, and would there go on out U.S. 71 to his rendezvous
with Jimmy Pye and his and Jimmy's deaths in a cornfield that looked
like any other cornfield in the world.
The explosions lifted them, and more parts of Bob seemed to go numb,
then sting. This triple shot bracketed
TIME TO HUNT 211
the position. This was it. They had them; they had merely to drop a
few more shells down the tube and the direct hit would come out of
statistical inevitability, and it would be all over. Fire for
effect.
"I'm so sorry," Donny was sobbing.
Bob held him close, felt his young animal fear, knew there was no glory
in any of it, only an ending, a mercy, and who would know they lived or
died or fought here on this hilltop?
"I'm so sorry," Donny was sobbing.
"There, there," Bob said. Someone fired an orange flare over on the
horizon. It was a big one, it hung there for the longest time, and
only far past the moment when reasonable men would have caught on did
it at last dawn on them that it wasn't a flare at all, it was the
sun.
And with the sun came the Phantoms.
The Phantoms came low, screaming in from the east, along the axis of
the valley, their jet growls filling the air, almost splitting it. They
dropped long tubes that rolled through the air into the valley beneath,
and blossomed or anger than the sun, or anger and hotter than any sun,
with the power of thousands of pounds of jellied gasoline.
"God!" screamed Bob.
"Air! Air!"
They peeled off, almost in climbing victory rolls, and a second flight
hammered down, filling the valley with its cleansing flame.
Then the gunships.
Cobras, not like snakes but like thrumming insects, thin and agile in
the air: they roared in, their miniguns screaming like chainsaws
ripping through lumber, just eating up the valley.
"The radio," Bob said.
Donny rolled over, thrust the PRC-77 at Bob, who swiftly got it on,
searched for the preset band that was the air-ground freak.
"Hit eight, hit eight!" Donny was screaming, and Bob found it, turned
it on to find people looking for him.
212 STEPHEN HUNTER
"--Bravo-Four, Sierra-Bravo-Four, come in, please, immediate. Where
are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four? This is Yankee-Niner-Papa,
Yankee-Niner-Papa. I am Army FAC at far end valley; I need your
position immediate, over."
"Yankee-Niner-Papa, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four. Goddamn, ain't you boys
a sight!"
"Where are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?"
"I am on a hill approximately two klicks outside Arizona on the eastern
side of the valley; uh, I don't got no reading on it, I don't got no
map, I--" "Drop smoke, Sierra-Bravo-Four, drop smoke."
"Yankee-Niner-Papa, I drop smoke."
Bob grabbed a smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it. Whirls of
angry yellow fog spurted from the spinning, hissing grenade, and
fluttered high and ragged against the dawn.
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, I eyeball your yellow smoke, over."
"Yankee-Niner-Papa, that is correct. Uh, I have beaucoup bad guys all
around the farm. I need help immediate.
Can you clean out the barnyard for me, Yankee Niner-Papa, over?"
"Wilco, Sierra-Bravo. Y'all hang tight while I direct immediate. Stay
by your smoke, out."
In seconds, the Cobras diverted to the little hill upon which Bob and
Donny cowered. The mini-guns howled, the rockets screamed; then the
gunships fell back and a squadron of Phantoms flashed by low and fast,
and directly in front of Bob and Donny, the napalm bloomed hot and
bright in tumbling flame. The smell of gasoline reached their noses.
Soon enough, it was quiet.
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Yankee-Zulu-Nineteen. I am coming in to
get you."
It was the bird, the Huey, Army OD, its rotors beating as if to force
the devil down, as it settled over them, whipping up the dust and
flattening the vegetation. Bob clapped Donny on the back of the neck
and pushed him
TIME TO HUNT 213
toward the bird; they ran the twenty-odd feet to the open hatch, where
eager hands pulled them away from the Land of Bad Things. The chopper
zoomed skyward, into the light.
"Hey," Donny said over the roar, "it's stopped raining."
chapter seventeen
Even in the hospital, Huu Co, Senior Colonel, was criticized.
It was merciless. It was relentless. It went beyond cruelty. Each
day, at 1000 hours, he was wheeled into the committee room, his burned
left arm swaddled in bandages, his head dopey with painkillers, his
brain ringing with revolutionary adages with which nurses and doctors
alike pummeled him in all his waking hours.
He sat stiffly in the heat, waiting as the painkillers gradually
diminished, facing faceless accusers from behind banks of lights.
"Senior Colonel, why did you not press on despite your casualties?"
"Senior Colonel, who advised you to halt your progress and send units
to deal with the American sniper?"
"Senior Colonel, are you infected with the typhus of ego? Do you not
trust the Fatherland and its vessel, the party?"
"Senior Colonel, why did you waste time setting up mortars, when a
small unit could have kept the Americans pinned, and you might have
made your attack on the Camp Arizona before dawn?"
"Senior Colonel, did Political Commissar Phut Go argue with you as to
the best course of action before his heroic death, and if so, why did
you discount his advice?
Do you not know he spoke with the authority of the party?"
The questions were endless, as was his pain.
They were also right in their implication: he had behaved
unprofessionally, egged on by the demon of Western ego, whose poison
was evidently deep in his soul, un purged by years of rigor and
asceticism. He had allowed it to become a personal duel between
himself and the American who so bedeviled him. He had given up the
TIME TO HUNT 215
mission to kill the American, and failed at both, if intelligence
reports could be believed.
He was in disgrace. No meaningful future loomed before him. He had
failed because his heart was weak and his character flawed. Everything
they said about him was true, and the criticism he received was not
nearly enough punishment. They could not punish him more than he
punished himself. He deserved the fury of hell; he deserved oblivion.
He was a cockroach who had-But then the strangest thing happened. Even
as he endured yet another session, feeling the unbending wills of-the
political officers crushing against the fragility of his own pitiful
identity, the doors were flung open and two men from the Politburo
rushed in, handed an envelope to the senior inquisitioner, which the
man tore open and read nervously.
Then his face broke into a huge smile of love and compassion. He
looked at Huu Co as if he were looking at the savior of the people, the
great Uncle Ho himself.
"Oh, Colonel," he brayed in the voice of such sugary sweetness it
seemed nearly indecent, "oh, Colonel, you look so uncomfortable in that
chair. Surely you would like a glass of tea? Tran, quickly, run to
the kitchen, get the colonel a glass of tea. And some nice candy?
Sugar beet?
American chocolate? Hershey's, we have Hershey's, probably, if I do
say so myself, with .. . almonds."
"Almonds?" said the colonel, who, yes, far down, did in fact enjoy
Hershey's with almonds.
Tran, who had an instant before been upbraiding the colonel for his
stupidity, rushed out with the furious urgency of a lackey, and
returned in seconds with treats and drinks and almond-studded Hershey
bars for the new celebrity.
In very short time, the committee had gathered around their new great
friend and revolutionary hero, the colonel, and even old Tran himself
pushed the colonel to the automobile in his wheelchair, inquiring
warmly about the colonel's beautiful wife and his six wonderful
children.
The committee waved good-bye merrily as the colonel
216 STEPHEN HUNTER
was driven away in a shiny Citreon by the two Politburo officers, who
said nothing, but offered him cigarettes and a thermos of tea and did
everything to assure his comfort.
"Why am I suddenly rehabilitated?" he asked.
"I am a class traitor and coward. I am a wrecker, an obstructionist, a
deviationist, a secret Western spy."
"Oh, Colonel," the senior of the men said, laughing uncomfortably, "you
joke. You are so funny! Is he not a funny one? The colonel's wit is
legendary!"
And Huu Co saw that this man, too, was terrified.
What on earth could be happening?
And then he knew. Only one presence in the Republic of North Vietnam
could explain such a sea change: the Russians.
At their military compound, Soviet experts from GRU-Chief Intelligence
Directorate--grilled him intently, though no effort was made to assign
guilt. The men were remote and intense at once, in black SPETSNAZ
combat uniforms without rank, though subtle distinctions on the team
could be recognized. They never once mentioned politics or the
revolution. He understood clearly: this wasn't preparation for a
trial, it was an intelligence operation.
They were very thorough in their Western way. He talked them through
it slowly, working first from maps and then, after the first day, from
a scale model of the valley before Kham Due, quickly built and painted
with surprising accuracy. The conversations were all in Russian.
"You were .. . ?"
"Here, when the first shots came."
"How many?"
"He fired three times."
"Semiauto?"
"No, bolt action. He never fired quickly enough for semiauto, though
he was very, very good with that bolt.
TIME TO HUNT 217
He may have been the fastest man with a bolt I've ever heard of."
The Russians listened intently, but it wasn't just the sniper that
interested them; that was clear. No, it was the whole action, the loss
of the sapper squad, the sounds of fire from the right flank, the
presence of the flares. The flares, especially.
"The flares. You can describe them?"
"Well, yes, comrade. They appeared to be standard American combat
flares, bright white, more powerful than our green Chinese equivalent.
They hung in the air approximately two minutes and grew brighter as
they descended."
They listened, taking notes, keeping elaborate charts and time lines
trying to reconstruct the event in painstaking detail. It was even
clear they had interviewed other participants of the Kham Due battle.
They forced him to no conclusions: instead, they seemed his partner in
a journey to understanding.
"Now, Colonel," the team leader asked, a small, ratty man who smoked
Marlboros, "based on what we've learned, I wonder if you'd venture a
guess as to what happened. What is the significance of the flares,
particularly given their location vis-a-vis the angle of most of the
fire directed at you?"
"Clearly, there was another man. These American Marine sniper teams,
they are almost always two-men operations."
"Yes," the team leader said.
"Yes, that is what we think also. And interestingly enough, the
ballistics bear you out. Some men were killed by 173-grain bullets,
which is the American match target ammunition, which is the sniper's
round. But we also recovered bodies with 150-grain slugs, which is the
standard combat load of the M14.
So clearly, one of the rifles was the Remington bolt action and the
other the M14. Of course, that's different than the men killed by the
forty-five-caliber submachine gun.
We believe that was the sniper's secondary weapon."
218 STEPHEN HUNTER
The colonel was astounded: they had torn into this as if it were an
autopsy, as if its last secrets must be exhumed.
It was so important to them, as if their most precious asset were
somehow at risk, and now they were committed totally to the destruction
of the threat.
"Do you wish to know about these men?"
The colonel did, yes. But his own ego had to be conquered, for to
learn about the men who had destroyed his battalion and his reputation
and his future would be to further personalize the event and make it
private, an obsession, an extension of his own life, as if its
significance were him and not the cause.
"No, I think not. I care nothing for personality."
"Well spoken. But alas, it is now a necessity. It is part of your new
assignment."
Well, wasn't this interesting? A new assignment under Russian
sponsorship. What possibly could it mean?
And so it was that he learned of his primary antagonist, a man called
Swagger, a sergeant, who had once won a great shooting championship and
had done much damage to the cause of the Fatherland in his three tours
in Vietnam and was even now prowling the glades in hunt of yet more
victims.
They had a picture of him from something called Leatherneck magazine,
and what he saw was what he expected.
He knew Americans from Paris and from his time in Saigon with the
puppets. This one was a type, perhaps exaggerated, but familiar. Thin,
hard, resilient, braver even than the French, brave as any Germans in
the Legion.
Cunning, with that specially devious quality of mind that let him
instinctively understand weakness and move decisively against it.
Disciplined in a way the Americans almost never were. He would have
made a brilliant party official, so tight and focused was his mind.
The picture simply showed a slit-eyed young man with prominent
cheekbones, his leathery face lit with a grin.
He held some ludicrous trophy thing in his arms; next to him was an
older version of the same man, same slit eyes,
TIME TO HUNT 219
close-cropped hair but with more vanity on his chest.
"Sergeant Swagger accepts the congratulations of the Commandant after
winning at Camp Perry," read the caption, translated into the
Vietnamese. It was warrior's glee, the colonel knew; and he saw in
those slit eyes the deaths of so many, and the remorseless ness that
had driven their executioner.
"For this one," he said, "the war is not a cause. It is merely an
excuse."
"Possibly," said the Russian intelligence chief.
"Perhaps even the war releases him to find his greatness. But do you
not think he has a certain discipline? He is not profligate, he is not
one of their criminals, like the Calleys and the Medinas. He has never
raped or murdered in combat. He has no sexual weaknesses, a pathology
associated with psychopathy."
"He is not a psychopath," Huu Co said.
"He is a hero, though the line between them is thin, possibly fragile.
He needs a cause to find his true self, that is what I mean. He is the
sort who must have a cause to live. He needs something to humble
himself in front of. Take that from him and you take everything."
"Very good. Here, here is more, here is what we have."
It was more on Swagger, culled from various American public resources.
The package included, unbelievably, Marine records, obviously from a
very sensitive source.
"Yes."
"Study this man. Study him well. Learn him. He is your new
responsibility."
"Yes, of course. I accept. And what is the ultimate arrival of this
project?"
"Why ... his death, of course. His death and the death of the other
one, too. They both must die."
He slept Swagger, he dreamed Swagger, he read Swagger, he ate Swagger.
Swagger engaged and caused the rebirth of the Western part of his mind:
he struggled to grasp principles like pride and honor and courage and
220 STEPHEN HUNTER
how their existence sustained a corrupt bourgeoisie state.
For such a state could not exist without the pure fire of such
centurions as Swagger standing watch, ready to die, on the Rhines of
its empires.
"Why me?" he asked the Russian.
"Why not one of your own analysts?"
"What can our analysts know? You have been fighting these people since
1964."
"You have been fighting them since 1917."
"But ours is a distant fight, a theoretical fight. Yours is up close,
close enough to smell blood and shit and piss.
That's experience hard bought and much respected."
Then another day brought another surprise: reconnaissance photos, taken
from a high-flying vehicle of some sort, of what appeared to be a
Marine post in the jungles of some province of his own country.
"I Corps," said the Russian.
"About forty kilometers from Kham Due. One of the last American combat
posts left in the zone. They call it Firebase Dodge City. A Marine
installation. It is from here the American Swagger and his spotter
mount their missions."
"Yes?"
"Yes, well, if we're to take him, it'll be on his territory.
He'll always have the advantage, unless, of course, we can learn the
terrain as well as he knows it."
"Surely local cadre .. ."
"Well, now, isn't that an interesting situation? Local cadre have been
extremely inactive in that region for some months. This man Swagger
terrifies them. They call him, in your language, quan toi."
"The Nailer."
"The Nailer. Like a carpenter. The nailer. He nails them. At any
rate, at the local cadre level, most combat operations have ceased.
That is why Firebase Dodge City still exists, when so many other
Marines have been shipped home. Because the Nailer has nailed so many
people that nobody likes to operate in his area. What is
TIME TO HUNT 221
the point? The war will be over soon, he will be recalled, that will
be that. But we cannot let that be that, can we?"
But try as he might, Huu Co could not hate the American.
It seemed pointless. The man was no architect of war, no policy
designer; he clearly had no sadistic side to him, no tendency toward
atrocity: he was merely an excellent professional soldier, of the sort
all armies have relied upon for thousands of years. He had some extra
gene for aggression, some extra gene for shooting ability, and that was
it. He was a believer--or maybe not. The colonel remembered, from his
other life, the Frenchman Camus, who said, "When men of action cease to
believe in a cause, they believe only in action."
It didn't matter. Nor did it matter that he wondered what the delay
was. Why were they not moving now, if this was so important? Why were
they waiting, what were they waiting for? He applied himself to the
problem, and set out to master the terrain in and around Firebase Dodge
City.
It was situated on a hill, and the Americans had deforested for a
thousand yards all around it with their Agent Orange. The camp was
typical: he'd seen hundreds in his long years of war. Its tactical
problems were typical, too.
In many respects it was similar to the un fallen A-Camp Arizona. The
doctrine was primitive, but usually effective:
approach at night, rally in the dark, send in sappers to blow the wire,
attack in strength. But for the killing of one sniper team, that was a
different tactical problem. The team would probably exit at night,
that is, if they weren't helicopter extracted. The trick would then be
understanding from which point from the perimeter they would leave, and
what would be their typical passage across the open zone. One could
therefore hope to intercept them if one knew the terrain and the way
Swagger's mind worked.
Studying the photos, Huu Co saw three natural paths away from the camp,
through gulches, enfilades, natural depressions in the land, where men
would travel to avoid being spotted. One would set an ambush at such
points,
222 STEPHEN HUNTER
yes. It would be possibly effective, a long stalk, luck playing the
most likely role. But if for some reason, the Americans could be
induced to leaving during the day, right, say, at first dawn, a good
shooter might have a chance to hit them from a hill not quite fifteen
hundred yards out.
Oh, it was a long shot, a desperately long shot, but the right man
might bring it off, much more effectively, say, than an ambush team,
who's luck might be on or off.
But where would such a man be found? He knew the North Vietnamese
certainly didn't have such a man. In fact, such a man, such a
specialist might not exist, at least not effectively. Huu Co said
nothing about his conclusions;
the Russians did not ask him. And then one night, he was awakened
roughly by SPETSNAZ troopers and informed that they had a journey to
make.
He climbed into a shiny black Zil limousine in his dress uniform, among
four or five Russians, all talking and laughing boisterously among
themselves. They ignored him.
They drove into Hanoi, through darkened streets, down the broad but now
empty boulevards, and by the ceremonial plazas where the American
Phantoms were displayed. Banners napped mightily in the wind: onward
TO VICTORY, BROTHERS and LONG LIVE THE FATHERLAND and LET US EMBRACE
THE REVOLUTIONARY FUTURE. The Russians paid them no mind, and laughed,
and talked of women and alcohol and smoked American cigarettes; they
were like Americans in many ways, not an observant or respectful
people, but men who took their own destiny so much for granted that
they could be annoying.
After a time, Huu Co realized where they were going:
unmistakably, they headed for the People's Revolutionary Airfield,
north of Hanoi, passed through its wire defenses and guard posts with
the wave of passes of the highest clearance, and sped not to the main
building but to an out-of-the-way compound, which was heavily guarded
by white men with automatic weapons, in the combat uniforms of
SPETSNAZ, the hotshots who got all the sexy
TIME TO HUNT 223
assignments and handled training for NVA cadre on certain dark, arcane
secret arts.
The Zil parked, debarking its men, who escorted Huu Co inside, to
discover an extremely comfortable little chunk of Russia, complete with
televisions, a bar, elaborate Western furniture and the like. Also,
many Playboy magazines lay about, and empty beer bottles, and the walls
were festooned with pictures of blond women with large, gravity-defying
breasts and no pubic hair.
Russians, thought Huu Co.
After a time, the little party went out to the tarmac, parked at the
obscure end of a runway and awaited the arrival of someone designated
Solaratov, whether a real name or a trade name, Huu Co was not
informed. No rank, either; no first name. Just Solaratov, as if the
name itself conveyed quite enough information, thank you.
Again, it was chilly, though no rain. The hot season was hard on them,
but it had not arrived yet. In the emerging gray light, Huu Co stood a
little apart from the crowd of bawdy, laughing Russian intelligence and
SPETSNAZ people, himself the solitary man, not a part of their
camaraderie and unsure why his presence was required.
Yet clearly, they wanted him here: he was seeing things possibly no
North Vietnamese below the Politburo level had seen. Why? What was
the meaning of it all?
The sound of a jet airplane asserted itself, low but insistent, coming
in from the east, out of the sun. The plane flashed overhead, glinting
in the rising light, revealing itself to be a Tupolev Tu-16, code-named
by the Americans "Badger," a twin-engine, three-man bombing craft with
a bubble canopy and sparkle of plastic at the nose. It wore combat
drab, and its red stars stood out boldly against green camouflage. Its
flaps were down and it peeled to the west, found a landing vector and
set down on the main runway. It taxied for a distance, then began to
head over toward the little party standing by itself on the runway.
The plane halted and its jet engines screamed a final
224 STEPHEN HUNTER
time, then died; a hatch door opened beneath the nose, just behind the
forward tire of the tricycle landing gear, and almost immediately two
aviators descended, waved to the crowd, then got aboard a little car
that had come for them, while Russian ground crew attended to the
airplane.
"Oh, he'll make us wait, of course," one of the Russians said.
"The bastard. Nobody hurries him. He'd make the party secretary wait
if it suited his fucking purpose!"
There was some laughter, but after a while, another figure descended
from the aircraft, climbing slowly down, then landing on the tarmac. He
wore an aviator's black jumpsuit, but he was no aviator. He carried
with him something awkward, a long, flat case; a musical instrument or
something?
He turned to look at the greeters and his face instantly silenced
them.
He was a wintry little man, late thirties, with a stubble of gray hair
and a thick, short bull neck. His eyes were blue beads in a leather
mask that was his grim face. He had immense hands and Huu Co saw that
he was quite muscular for so short a fellow, with a broad chest and a
spring of power to his movements.
No salutes were offered, no exchange of military courtesies.
If he knew any of the Russians, he hid the information.
There seemed nothing emotional about him at all, no sense of
ceremony.
A man rushed to him to take the package he carried.
The little fellow silenced him with a vicious glare and made it
apparent that he would carry the case, the severity of his response
driving the man back into humiliated confusion.
"Solaratov," said the Russian intelligence chief, "how was the
flight?"
"Cramped," said Solaratov.
"I should tell them I only fly first class."
There was nervous laughter.
TIME TO HUNT 225
Solaratov walked by the colonel without noticing him, surrounded by
sycophants and boot lickers He actually reminded Huu Co of a figure
that had been pointed out to him back in the late forties, in Paris,
another man of glacial isolation whose glare quieted the masses, who
nevertheless--or perhaps for that reason, indeed--attracted sycophants
in the legions but who paid them no attention at all, whose reputation
was like the cloud of blue ice that seemed to surround him. That one
was named Sartre.
chapter eighteen
Vietnam leaped up at him as if out of a dream: green, endless, crusted
with mountains, voluptuous, violent, ugly, beautiful all at once. The
Land of Bad Things. But also, in some way, the Land of Good Things.
Where I went to war, Donny thought. Where I fought with Bob Lee
Swagger.
It wasn't a dream; it never had been. It was the real McCoy, as
glimpsed through the dirty plastic of an aircraft dipping toward that
destination from Okinawa, where grunts headed to the "Nam touched down
on the way back from R&R. Monkey Mountain loomed ahead on the crazed
peninsula above China Beach, and beyond that, like downtown Dayton, the
multi service base and airstrip at Da Nang displayed itself in a
checkerboard of buildings, streets and airstrips. Hills 364, 268 and
327 stood like dusty warts beyond it.
The C-130 oriented itself off the coastline, dropped through the low
clouds and slid through tropic haze until it touched down at the ghost
town that had once been one of the most populous cities of the world,
the capital of the Marine country of I Corps, home of the ruling body
of the Marine war, the III Marine Amphibious Force.
The palms still blew in the breeze, and around it the mountains still
rose in green tropic splendor, but the place was largely empty now, its
ma inside structure shrunken to a few tempo buildings, an empty or at
least Vietnamized metropolis. A few offices were still staffed, a few
barracks still lived in, but the techies and the staffs and the experts
who'd run the war in Vietnam were home safe except for the odd laggard
unit, like the boys of Firebase Dodge City and a few others in the
haphazard distribution of late-leavers across I Corps.
The plane finally stopped taxiing. Its four props ended
TIME TO HUNT 227
their mission with a turbine-powered whine as their fuel was cut off.
The plane shuddered mightily, paused like a giant beast and went still.
In seconds the rear door descended, and Donny and the cargo of
twenty-odd short-timers and reluctant warriors felt the furnace blast
of heat and the stench of burning shit that announced they were back.
He stepped into the radiance, felt it slam him.
"This fuckin' place will git me yet," said a black old salt, with a
dozen or so stripes on his sleeve, and enough wound ribbons to have
bled out a platoon.
"Ain't you short?" someone asked.
"I ain't as short as the lance corporal," he said, winking at Donny,
with whom he'd struck up a bantering relationship on the flight over
from Kadena Air Force Base on Okie.
"If I was as short as him, I'd twist an ankle and head straight for
sick bay."
"He's a hero," the other lifer said.
"He ain't going in no sick bay."
The old black sarge pulled him aside.
"Don't you be takin' no bad-ass chances in the bush, you hear?" the
man said.
"Two and days, Fenn? Shit, don't git busted up. It ain't worth it.
This shit-hole place ain't worth a thing if you ain't a career sucker
gittin' the ticket punched one more time. Don't let the Man git
you."
"I copy."
"Now git over to reception and git your grunt ass squared away."
"Peace," said Donny, flashing the sign.
The sergeant looked around, saw no one close enough to overhear or
overlook, and flashed the sign back.
"Peace and freedom and all that good shit, bro," he said with a wink.
Donny hit reception with his sea bag, to arrange temporary quarters for
the night and the soonest chopper hop back to Dodge City.
He felt .. . good. A week on Maui with Julie. Oh,
228 STEPHEN HUNTER
Christ, who wouldn't feel good? Could it have been any better? Swagger
had slipped him an envelope as he'd choppered out after debriefing, and
he'd been stunned to discover a thousand dollars cash, with
instructions to bring none of it back. Why would Swagger do such a
thing? It was so generous, so spontaneous--just a strange-ass way of
doing things.
It was--well, a young man back from the war with his beautiful young
wife, in the paradise of Hawaii, under a hot and purifying sun, flush
with money and possibility and so short he could finally, after three
years and nine months and days, see the end. See it.
/ made it.
I'm out.
She said, "It's almost too cruel. We could have this and then you
could get killed."
"No. That's not how it works. The NVA fights twice a year, in the
spring and fall. They fought their big spring offensive, and now
they're all stuck up in a siege around An Loc City, fighting the ARVN
way down near Saigon.
We're out of it. Nothing will happen in our little area.
We're home free. It's just a question of getting through the boredom,
I swear to you."
"I don't think I could stand it."
"There's nothing to worry about."
"You sound like the guy in the war movie who always gets killed."
"They don't make war movies anymore," he said.
"Nobody cares about war movies."
Then they made love again, for what seemed like the 28,000th time. He
found new plateaus from which to observe her, new angles into her, new
sensations, tastes and ecstacies.
"It doesn't get much better than this," he finally said.
"God, Hawaii. We'll come back here on our fiftieth anni ver--" "No!"
she said suddenly, as sweaty as he and just as flushed.
"Don't say that. It's bad luck."
TIME TO HUNT 229
"Sweetie, I don't need luck. I have Bob Lee Swagger on my side. He is
luck itself."
That was then, this was now, and Donny stood at the bank of
fluorescent-lit desks in a big green room that was reception until a
buck sergeant finally noticed him, put down the phone and gestured him
to the desk.
Donny sat, handed over his documents.
"Hi, I'm Fenn, 2-5-Hotel, back from R&R on sked.
Here's my paperwork. I need a billet for the night and then a jump out
to Dodge City on the 0600."
"Fenn?" said the sergeant, looking at the order.
"All right, let me just check it out; looks okay. You're one of the
guys in the Kham Due?"
He entered Donny's return in the logbook, stamped the orders, adroitly
forged his captain's signature and slipped them back to Donny, all in a
single motion.
"Yeah, that was me. My NCO pulled in some favors and got me R&R'd out
for ten days."
"You've been nominated for the Navy Cross."
"Jesus."
"You won't get it, though. They're not giving out big medals
anymore."
"Well, I really don't care."
"They'll probably buck it down to a Star."
"I have a Star."
"No, a Silver."
"Wow!"
"Hero. Too bad it don't count for shit back in the world. In the old
days, you could have been a movie star."
"I just want to make it back in one piece. I can pay to see movies.
That's as close to movies as I want to get."
"Well, then, I have good news for you, Fenn. You got new orders. Your
transfer came through."
Donny thought he misunderstood.
"What? I mean, there must be--What do you mean, transfer? I didn't
ask for a transfer. I don't see what--" "Here it is, Fenn. Your
orders were cut three days ago.
You been dumped in 1-3-Charlie, and assigned to batta1230 STEPHEN
HUNTER
ion S-3. That's us, here in Da Nang; we're the administrative
battalion for what's left of Marine presence. My guess is, you'll be
running a PT program here in Da Nang for a couple of months before you
DEROS out on the big freedom bird. Your days in the bush are over.
Congratulations, grunt. You made it, unless you get hit by a truck on
the way to the slop chute."
"No, see, I don't--" "You go on over to battalion, check in with the
duty NCO and he'll get you squared away, show you your new quarters.
You're in luck. You won't believe this. We closed down our barracks
and moved into some the Air Force vacated, 'cause they were closer to
the airstrip. Air-conditioning, Fenn. Air-conditioning!"
Donny just looked at him, as if the comment made no sense.
"Fenn, this is a milk run. You got it made in the shade.
It's a number-one job. You'll be working for Gunny Bannister, a good
man. Enjoy."
"I don't want a transfer," Donny said.
The sergeant looked up at him. He was a mild, patient man, sandy blond
hair, professional-bureaucrat type of REMF, the sort of sandy-dry man
who always makes the machine work cleanly.
He smiled dryly.
"Fenn," he explained, "the Marine Corps really doesn't care if you want
a transfer or not. In its infinite military wisdom, it has decreed
that you will teach a PT class to lard-ass rear-echelon motherfuckers
like me until you go home. You won't even see any more Vietnamese.
You will sleep in an air-conditioned building, take a shower twice a
day, wear your tropicals pressed, salute every shit bird officer that
walks no matter how stupid, not work very hard, stay very drunk or high
and have an excellent time. You'll take beaucoup three-day weekends at
China Beach. Those are your orders. They are better orders than some
poor grunt's stuck out on the DMZ or Hill
TIME TO HUNT 231
553, but they are your orders, nevertheless, and that is the name of
that tune. Clear, Fenn?"
Donny took a deep breath.
"Where does this come from?"
"It comes straight from the top. Your CO and your NCOIC signed off on
it."
"No, who started it? Come on, I have to know."
The sergeant looked at him.
"I have to know. I was Sierra-Bravo-Four. Sniper team. I don't want
to lose that job. It's the best job there is."
"Son, any job the Marine Corps gives you is the best job."
"But you could find out? You could check. You could see where it
comes from. I mean, it is unusual that a guy with bush time left
suddenly gets rotated out of his firebase slot and stowed in some
make-work pussy job, isn't it, Sergeant?"
The sergeant sighed deeply, then picked up the phone.
He schmoozed with whomever was on the other end of the line, waited a
bit, schmoozed some more, and finally nodded, thanked his
co-conspirator and hung up.
"Swagger, that's your NCO?"
"Yes."
"Swagger choppered in here last week and went to see the CO. Not
battalion but higher, the FMF PAC CO, the man with three stars on his
collar. Your orders were cut the next day. He wants you out of there.
Swagger don't want you humping the bush with him no more."
Donny checked in with the PFC on duty at 1-3-Charlie, got a bunk and a
locker in the old Air Force barracks, which were more like a college
dormitory, and spent an hour getting stowed away. Looking out the
window, he could not see a single palm tree: just an ocean of tarmac,
buildings, offices. It could have been Henderson Hall, back in
Arlington, or Cameron Station, the multi service
232 STEPHEN HUNTER
PX out at Bailey's Crossroads. No yellow people could be seen: just
Americans doing their jobs.
Then he went to storage to pick up his stowed 782 gear and boonie duds,
and lugged the sea bag to supply to return it, but learned supply was
already closed for the day, so he lugged the stuff back to his locker.
He checked back in at company headquarters to meet his new gunny and
the CO; neither man could be found--both had gone back to quarters
early. He went by the S-3 office--operations and training--to look for
Bannister, the PT NCO, and found that office locked too, and Bannister
long since retreated to the staff NCO club. He went back to the
barracks, where some other kids were getting ready to go to the
movies--Patton, already two years old, was the picture--and then to the
1-2-3 Club for a night of dowsing their sorrows in cheap PX Budweiser.
They seemed like nice young guys and they clearly knew who Donny was
and were hungry to get close to him, but he said no, for reasons he
himself did not quite understand.
He was tired. He climbed into the rack early, pulling clean, newly
issued sheets around him, feeling the springiness of the cot beneath.
The air conditioner churned with a low hum, pumping out gallons of dry,
cold air. Donny shivered, pulled the sheets closer about him.
There were no alerts that night, no incoming. There hadn't been
incoming in months. At 0100 he was awakened by the drunken kids
returning from the 1-2-3 Club.
But when he stirred, they quieted down fast.
Donny lay in the dark as the others slipped in, listening to the roar
of the air conditioner.
I have it made, he told himself.
/ am out of here.
I am the original DEROS kid.
I am made in the shade, I am the milk-run boy.
He dreamed of Pima County, of Julie, of an ordered, becalmed and
rational life. He dreamed of love and duty.
He dreamed of sex; he dreamed of children and the good
TIME TO HUNT 233
life all Americans have an absolute right to if they work hard enough
for it.
At O-dark-30, he arose quietly, showered in. the dark, pulled on his
bush utilities and gathered up his 782 gear and headed out to the
chopper strip. It was a long walk in the predawn. Above him, mute
piles and piles of stars were humped up tall and deep like a mountain
range.
Now and then, from somewhere in this dark land, came the far-off,
artificial sound of gunfire. Once some flares lit the horizon.
Somewhere something exploded.
The choppers were warming up. He ducked into the Operations shack,
chatted with another lance corporal, then jogged to the Marine-green
Huey, its rotors already whirring on the tarmac. He leaned in, and the
crew chief looked at him.
"This is Whiskey-Romeo-Fourteen?"
"That's us."
"You're the bus to Dodge City?"
"Yeah. You're Fenn, right? We took you outta here two weeks back.
Great job at Kham Due, Fenn."
"Can you hump me back to the City? It's time to go home."
"Climb aboard, son. We are homeward bound."
chapter nineteen
"You will crawl all night," Huu Co explained to the Russian.
"If you do not make it, they will see you in the morning and kill
you."
If he expected the man to react, once again, he was wrong. The Russian
responded to nothing. He seemed, in some respects, hardly human. Or
at least he had no need for some of the things humans needed: rest,
community, conversation, humanity even. He never spoke. He appeared
phlegmatic to the point of being almost vegetable.
Yet at the same time he never complained, he would not wear out, he
applied no formal sense of will against Huu Co and the elite commandos
of the 45th Sapper Battalion on their long Journey of Ten Thousand
Miles, down the trail from the North. He never showed fear, longing,
thirst, discomfort, humor, anger or compassion. He seemed not to
notice much and hardly ever talked, and then only in grunts.
He was squat, isolated, perhaps desolated. In his army, Huu Co's
heroes were designated "Brother Ten" when they distinguished themselves
by killing ten Americans:
this man, Huu Co realized, was Brother Five Hundred, or some such
number. He had no ideology, no enthusiasms;
he simply was. Solaratov: solitary. The lone man. It suited him
well.
The Russian looked across the fifteen hundred yards of flattened land
to the Marine base the enemy called Dodge City, studying it. There was
no approach, no visible approach, except on one's belly, the long, long
way.
"Could you hit him from this range?"
The Russian considered.
"I could hit a man from this range, yes," he finally said.
"But how would I know it was the right man? I
TIME TO HUNT 235
cannot see a face from this distance. I have to hit the right man;
that is the point."
The argument was well made.
"So then .. . you must crawl."
"I can crawl."
"If you hit him, how will you get out?"
"This time I'm only looking. But when I hit him, I'll wait till dark,
then come out the same way I came in."
"They'll call in mortars, artillery, napalm even. It is their way."
"Yes, I may die."
"In napalm? Not pleasant. I've heard many scream as it ate the flesh
from their bones. It's over in an instant, but I had the impression it
was a long instant."
The Russian merely glared at him, no recognition in his eyes at all,
even though they'd lived in close proximity for a week and had for days
before that pored over the photos and the mock-up of Dodge City.
"My advice, comrade brother," said Huu Co, "is that you follow the
depression in the earth three hundred meters.
You move at dark, in maximum camouflage. They have night scopes and
they will be hunting. But the scopes aren't one hundred percent
reliable. It'll be a long stalk, a terrible stalk. I can only hope
you are up to it and that your heart is strong and pure."
"I have no heart," said the solitary man.
"I am the sniper."
For the first recon, Solaratov did not take his case, which by now all
considered a rifle sheath. He carried no weapons except a SPETSNAZ
dagger, black and thin and wicked.
He left at nightfall, dappled in camouflage, looking more like an
ambulatory swamp than a man. Behind his back, the sappers called him
not the Solitary Man or the Russian but, with the eternal insouciance
of soldiers, the Human Noodle, because the stalks were stiff like
unboiled
236 STEPHEN HUNTER
noodles. In seconds, as he slithered off through the elephant grass,
he was invisible.
Huu Co noted that his technique was extraordinary, a mastery of the
self. This was the ultimate slow. He moved with delicacy, one limb at
a time, a pace so slow and deliberate it almost didn't exist. Who
would have patience for such a journey?
"He is mad," one of the sappers said to another.
"All Russians are mad," said the other.
"You can see it in their eyes."
"But this one is really mad. He's nuts!"
The sappers waited quietly underground, in elaborate tunnels built in
the Year of the Snake, 1965. They cooked meals, enjoyed jury-rigged
showers and treated the event almost like a furlough. It was a happy
time for men who had fought hard, been wounded many times. At least
six of them were Brothers Ten. They were shrewd, experienced
professionals.
For his time, Huu Co studied the photographs or waited up top, hidden
in the grass, using up his eyestrain to stare at the strange fort
fifteen hundred yards off, which looked so artificial cut into the
earth of his beloved country by men from across the sea with a
different sensibility and no sense of history.
He waited, staring at the sea of grass. His arm hurt. He could hardly
close his hand. When he grew bored, he snatched a book from his tunic,
in English. It was Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkein, very amusing.
It took him away from this world but always, when Frodo's adventures
vanished, he had to return to Firebase Dodge City and his deepest
question: when would the sniper return?
1 he fire ants were only the first of his many ordeals.
Attracted to his sweat, they came and crawled into the folds of his
neck, tasting his blood, crawling, biting, feasting.
He was a banquet for the insect world. After the ants, others were
drawn. Mosquitoes big as American helicopters buzzed around his ears,
lit on his face, stung him
TIME TO HUNT 237
gently and departed, bloated. What else? Spiders, mites, ticks,
dragonflies, the whole phyla drawn to the miasma of decay a sweating
man produces in the tropics on a hot morning. But not maggots. Maggots
are for the dead, and perhaps in some way the maggots respected him.
He was not dead and, moreover, he fed the maggots much in his time on
earth. They left him alone.
It wasn't that Solaratov was beyond feeling such things. He felt them,
all right. He felt every sting, bite, prick or tweak; his aches and
swellings and blotches and throbbings were the same as any man's. He
had just some.
how managed to disconnect the feeling part of his body from the
registering part of his brain. It can be learned, and at the upper
reaches of the performance envelope, among those who are not merely
brave, willful or dedicated but truly among the best in the world,
extraordinary things are routine.
He lay now in the elephant grass, approximately one hundred yards from
the sandbag perimeter of Firebase Dodge City, just outside the double
strands of concertina wire. He could see Claymore mines facing him
from a dozen angles, and the half-buried detonators of other, larger
mines. But he could also hear American rock and roll bellowing out of
the transistor radios all the young Marines seemed to carry, and
listening to it was his only pleasure.
"I can't get no satisfaction," someone sang with a loud raspy voice,
and Solaratov understood: he could get no satisfaction either.
The Marines were unbearably sloppy. He had seen the Israelis from
extremely close range in some of his ops and the British SAS and even
the fabled American Green Berets;
all were sound troops. These boys thought the war was over for them;
they were worse than Cubans or Angolans.
They lounged around sunbathing, played touch football or baseball or
basketball, sneaked out to smoke hemp, got in fights or got drunk.
Their sentries slept at night. The officers didn't bother to shave.
Nobody dressed
238 STEPHEN HUNTER
in anything resembling a uniform, and most spent the days in shorts,
undershirts (or shirtless) and shower shoes.
Even when they went on combat patrol, they were loud and stupid. The
point men paid no attention, the flank security drifted in toward the
column, the machine gunner had his belts tangled around him, and his
assistant, with other belts, fell too far behind him to do him any good
in a fight. Clearly they had not been in a fight in months, if ever;
clearly they expected no such thing to occur as they waited for the
order to leave the country.
Once, a patrol stumbled right over him. Five men, hustling through the
elephant grass on the way out for a night ambush mission, walked so
close to him that if any had been even remotely awake, they would have
killed him easily. He saw their jungle boots, big as mountains, just
inches from his face. But two of the men were listening to radios, one
was clearly high, one so young and frightened he belonged in school,
and the platoon leader, stuck with these silly boys, looked terrified.
Solaratov knew exactly what would happen; the patrol would go out a
thousand yards and the sergeant would hunker them down in some high
grass, where they'd sit all night, smoking and talking and pretending
they weren't at war. In the morning the sergeant would bring them in
and file a no-contact report.
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
TIME TO HUNT 239
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
240 STEPHEN HUNTER
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
TIME TO HUNT 241
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 TIME
TO
HUNT 243
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?"
244 STEPHEN HUNTER
"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
TIME TO HUNT 245
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
246 STEPHEN HUNTER
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
TIME TO HUNT 247
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 eyeful. 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
248 STEPHEN HUNTER
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.
Possibly two hundred meters at the longest. The rifle holds to four
inches at two hundred meters and I always shoot for the chest, never
the head. The head shot is too difficult for a combat situation."
He was fully dressed. He wore a ghillie suit of his own construction,
and was well tufted with a matting of beige strips identical in color
to the elephant grass. His hat was tufted too, and under it, he'd
painted his face in combat colors, a smear of ochre and black and
beige.
250 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Sundown," came a cry from above.
"It's time," said Him Co.
The sniper rose and threw a large pack over his back, the rifle strap
diagonally over his shoulder, and with a soft swaying as of many
different feathers, like some exotic bird, he walked to the ladder and
climbed out of the tunnel.
He rose in the dusk, and Huu Co followed him. It was but a few hundred
feet to the treeline and the long crawl down the valley toward the
American firebase.
"You have this planned?" Huu Co asked.
"I need to know for my report."
"Well planned," said the Russian.
"They'll go out just before sunrise, over their berm and through their
wire. I can tell you exactly where, because it's the one place where
they're higher; there aren't any subtle rises in the ground. They'll
continue in the rising light on a north-northwest axis, then turn to
the west. When the sun is full, they'll have a last few hundred meters
to go through the grass toward the north. I've examined their own
after-action reports. Swagger runs his missions the same each time,
but what varies is where he'll operate. If he's headed south, toward
Kontum, he'll go toward the Than Quit River. If he heads north, toward
the Hai Van Peninsula, then he'll go toward Hoi An. And so forth. In
any event, that small rise out there, that's his intersection. Which
way will he turn from there? I'm betting tonight it's toward the
north, because he worked the west when he headed out toward Kham Due.
It's the north's turn. I'll set up behind him; that is, between
himself and the firebase.
He'll never expect shots from that direction. I'll take them both when
they come out from behind the hill. It'll be over quickly; two quick
rounds to the body, two more when they're down. Nobody from the base
camp can reach me by the time I'm back here, and I've got a good, clean
escape route with two fall backs if need be."
"Well thought out."
"And so it is. That's what I do."
TIME TO HUNT 251
There was little left to say. The sappers gathered around the banty
little Russian, clapped him on the back, embarrassing him. Night was
coming quickly, all was silent, and in the far distance the firebase
stood like a sore on the flank of a woman.
"For the Fatherland," Huu Co said.
"For the Fatherland," chimed the tough sappers.
"For survival," said the sniper, who knew better.
The last briefing was at sundown. Donny faced himself.
Or rather, the man who would be himself, a lance corporal named
Featherstone, roughly his own size and coloring.
Featherstone would wear Donny's camouflaged utilities, carry his 782
gear complete to Claymores and M49 spotting scope, and the only M14
that could be found in the camp. Featherstone, and Brophy similarly
tricked out as Bob Lee Swagger, were bait.
Featherstone, a large, slow boy, was not happy at this job; he had been
volunteered for it by virtue of his similarity to Donny. Now he sat,
looking very scared, in the S-2 bunker, amid a slew of officers and
civilians in various uniforms. Everybody except Featherstone seemed
very excited.
There was a kind of party like atmosphere, long absent from Firebase
Dodge City.
Bob went to the front of the group, as they sat down, and addressed the
primary players: Captain Feamster, who was CO here at Dodge City; an
intelligence major who represented the Marine Corps's higher interest,
in from Da Nang; an army colonel who'd choppered in from MACV S-2; an
Air Force liaison officer; and a civilian in a jumpsuit with a Swedish
K submachine gun who radiated Agency from all his pores. A map of the
immediate area had been rigged on a large sheet of cardboard, reducing
the clearing around Dodge City to its contours and land-forms and the
base itself to a big X at the bottom.
"Okay, gentlemen," Bob started, and no officer in the room felt it
peculiar to be briefed by a staff sergeant, or at least this staff
sergeant, "let's run this through one more
252 STEPHEN HUNTER
time to make sure everybody's on the same page in the hymn book. The
game starts at 2200, when Fenn and I, dressed in black and painted up
like black whores, head out. It's approximately thirteen hundred yards
to what I'm designating Area 1. That's where, based on my reading of
the land and this guy's operating procedure as the files from
Washington reveal, I think he's going to operate.
Fenn and I will set up about three hundred yards from his most probable
shooting zone. I don't want to get too close; this bird has a nose for
trouble. At 0500 Lieutenant Brophy and Lance Corporal Featherstone
roll over the berm at the point designated Roger One."
He pointed to it on the map.
"Why there, Sergeant?"
"This guy has eyeballed Dodge City, believe you me, and maybe from as
close as this bunker. He's been here.
He knows where the best place to get quickly into this little dip here
is"--he pointed--"which gives you close to half mile of nearly
unobserved terrain."
"Do you know that for a fact?" asked the leg colonel.
"No, sir, I do not. But before this problem came up, it's where I took
my teams out ninety percent of the time, unless we choppered somewhere.
He'll know that, too."
"Carry on, Sergeant."
"From there, the lieutenant and Featherstone follow the route I have
indicated." He addressed the two of them directly.
"It's very important you stay there. He can't get a good shot at you,
because he can't get close enough, but he'll know you're there. He'll
start tracking you about five hundred yards out, but you're still too
far out to shoot. He don't have a rifle that he can trust to make that
far a shot;
plus, he wants you out of sight of camp when he hits you, so that he'll
have time to make his get-out."
"How do we know he just won't take them out, then fade?" asked the Air
Force major.
"Well, sir, again, we don't. But I been all over that ground. I don't
think he can get a shot when they're in the gulch. That's why they
have to be right careful to stay
TIME TO HUNT 253
there, to move slowly. Now, about one thousand yards out, you got a
little-bitty bit of hill. It's Hill Fifty-two, meaning it ain't but
fifty-two meters high. It's hardly a tit.
You wouldn't give it a squeeze on Saturday night."
"I would," said Captain Feamster, and everybody laughed.
"I may go do it now, in fact!"
After they settled down, Bob continued.
"Sir, when y'all git behind that hill, you go flat. I mean, you dig
in, you stay put. He's going to watch you come, he'll be set up on the
other side, where you come out to high ground and make your decision
which way you're going to turn the mission. You stay put. Now, it may
take some time. This bird's patient. But, you disappearing suddenly,
he's going to get annoyed, then irritated. He'll move. Maybe just a
bit, but when he moves, we put the glass on him, I quarter him and
waste his ass."
"Sergeant Swagger?" It was Brophy.
"Sir?"
"Do you want us to move out in support after you engage him?"
"No, sir. I don't want no other targets in the zone. If I see
movement, I may have to shoot without ID. I'd hate it to be you or
Featherstone. Y'all just go to earth once you get behind that hill,
then move back under cover of the choppers, if we have to call in
choppers."
"Sounds good."
"This sucks," Featherstone whispered bitterly to Donny.
"I'm going to get smoked, I know it. It isn't fair. I didn't sign up
for this shit."
"You'll be okay," Donny said to the shaky man.
"You just walk, then dig in and wait for help. Swagger's got it
figured."
Featherstone shot him a look of pure hatred.
"Anyhow," continued Swagger at the front of the bunker, "I take him
when he rises to move. If I don't get a solid hit or if I get a miss,
that's when I signal Fenn, who's sitting on the PRC-77. You've checked
out the radio?"
"Of course," said Donny.
254 STEPHEN HUNTER
"At that moment I signal, Fenn's on the horn with you Air Force
boys."
It was the Air Force major's turn.
"We've laid on a C-130 Hercules call-signed Night-Hag-Three, holding in
orbit about five klicks away, just off Than Nuc. We can have Night Hag
there in less than thirty seconds. The Night Hag brings major pee:
four side-mounted Vulcan twenty-mm mini-guns and four 7.62 NATO
mini-guns. It can unload four thousand rounds in less than thirty
seconds. It'll turn anything in a thousand square yards to tenderized
hamburger."
"That's better than napalm or Hotel Echo, sir?"
"Much better. More accurate, more responsive to ground direction.
Plus, these guys are really good. They've been on these suppression
missions for years. They can pinwheel over a zone just above stalling
speed like a gull floating over the beach. Only, they're pumping out
lead all the while. They bring unbelievable smoke. The snake eaters
love them. You know the napalm problem. It can go any way, and if the
wind catches it and takes it in your direction, you got a problem."
"Sounds good," said Bob.
"Sergeant Swagger?"
It was the CIA man, who'd brought the Solaratov documents.
"Yes, sir, Mr. Nichols?"
"I'm just asking: is there any conceivable way you could take this man
alive? He'd be an incomparable intelligence asset."
"Sir, I should say, hell, yes, I'll try my damndest, and we'll share
whatever we git with our friends who've cooperated with us. But this
bastard's tricky and dangerous as hell. If I get him in the scope, I
have to take him out. If he gets away, we go to gunships. That's
all."
"I respect your honesty, Sergeant. It's your ass on the line. But let
me tell you one thing. The Sovs have a new sniper rifle called the
Dragunov, or SVD. He might have one."
TIME TO HUNT 255
"I've heard of it, sir."
"We've yet to shake it out. Even the Israelis haven't uncovered one.
Be very nice if you brought that out alive."
"I'll give it my best, sir."
"Good man."
Donny was supposed to get a last few hours of sleep before he geared
up, but of course he couldn't. So much ran through his mind, and he
lay in the bunker, listening to music coming from the squad bays a few
dozen meters away
CCR was banging out something from last year on somebody's tape deck.
It sounded familiar. Donny listened.
Long as I remember, the rain been coming down, Clouds of mystery
falling, confusion on the ground, Good men through the ages, trying to
track the sun, And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain?
It had some kind of anti-war meaning, he knew. The rain was war, or
had become war. Some of these kids had known nothing but the war; it
had started when they were fourteen and now they were twenty and over
here and it was still going on. It was coming for them, they'd get
caught in the rain, that's why the song was so popular to them. Kids
had picked it up in DC last year and it was everywhere. He knew
Commander Bonson had heard it.
He thought of Bonson now.
Bonson came back to him. Navy guy, starchy, duty-haunted, rigid,
black-and-white Bonson. In his khakis. His beard dark, his flesh taut
and white, his eyes glaring, set in rectitude.
He remembered the look on Bonson's face when he
256 STEPHEN HUNTER
told him he wasn't going to testify against Crowe. Man, that may have
been worth it, that one moment, let Solaratov grease my ass, it was
worth it, the way his jaw fell, the way confusion--no, clouds of
mystery, confusion on the ground--came into his eyes. He could not
process it.
He could not accept that someone would turn his little plan over.
Someone would actually tell him to go fuck off, derail his little
train.
Donny had a nice dream of it all, the moment of soaring triumph he'd
felt.
Oh, that's just the beginning, he thought. I will get back to the
world and we will see what became of Commander Bonson, what his crusade
got him. What goes round, comes round. You put shit out in this
world, somehow you get it back. Donny believed that.
Now, sleep was impossible. He rose, restless, bathed in sweat. He had
another three hours to kill before they mounted out.
He rose, left the bunker and wandered for a bit, not sure where he was
going, but then realizing he did in fact have a destination. He was in
grunt city, among the line Marines, the proles of 2-5-Hotel, who really
were Firebase Dodge City.
He saw a shadow.
"You know where Featherstone would be?"
"Two hootches back. Oh. You. The hero. Yeah, he's back there,
getting ready to get his ass wasted in the grass."
The anger Donny felt surprised him. What the hell was this all about?
Why was everybody so pissed at him? What had he done?
Donny walked back, dipped into the hootch. Four bunks, the fraternity
squalor of young men living together, the stink of rotting burlap, the
shine of various Playmates of the Month pinned to whatever surface
would absorb a tack and, of course, the smell, sweet and dense, of
marijuana.
Featherstone sat amid a dark circle of fellow martyrs,
TIME TO HUNT 257
all stoned. He was so still and depressed he seemed almost dead. But
it was clear he wasn't the ringleader here;
another Marine was doing all the talking, a bitter rant about "We don't
mean shit,"
"It's all a game,"
"Fucking lifers just getting their tickets punched," that sort of
thing.
Donny butted in.
"Hey, Featherstone, you wanna go light on that stuff.
You may have to move fast tomorrow; you don't want that shit still in
your head."
Featherstone didn't seem to hear him. He didn't look up.
"He's gonna be dead tomorrow. What difference does it make?" the
smart guy said.
"Who invited you here, anyhow?"
"I just came by to check on Featherstone," said Donny.
"He ought to pull himself out of this funk or he's gonna get wasted,
and if you guys claim to be his buds, you ought to help him."
"He's gonna get zapped tomorrow, no matter what.
We who are not about to die salute him."
"Nothing's going to happen to him. He's going to go for a walk, then
hide in the bush. A plane will come and shoot the fuck out of a zone
250 yards ahead of him. He'll probably get a Bronze Star out of it and
go back to the world a hero."
"Nobody cares about heroes back in the world."
"Well, he just has to keep his head. That's--" "Do you even know what
this is all about?"
"Yes."
"What is it?"
"I can't tell you. Classified."
"No, not the shit about the Russian sniper. That's just shit. You
know what this is really about?"
"What are you talking about?"
"It's about the championship."
"The what?"
"The championship," said the man, fixing Donny in a bitter, dark
gaze.
258 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Of what?"
"Of snipers."
"What?"
"In 1967, a gunny named Carl Hitchcock went home with ninety-three
kills. The most so far. Now along comes this guy Swagger. He's in
the fifties till that stunt you pulled off in the valley. They gave
him credit for thirty-odd kills. I hear he's up to eighty-seven in one
whack.
Now, he gets six more, he ties. He gets seven more, he's the champ. It
doesn't mean shit to me and it doesn't mean shit in the world, but for
these lifers, let me tell you, something like that gets you noticed and
you end up the fucking command sergeant major of the whole United
States Marine Corps. So what if a couple of grunts get wasted to get
you your last few kills? Who the fuck cares about that?"
"That's shit," said Donny. He looked at his antagonist's name, saw
that it was one Mahoney, and then recalled, yes, another college guy,
Mahoney, always riding the line, dozens of Article 15s, angry and
pissed off and just desperate to get out of there.
"It's not shit. It's how military cultures operate if you knew
anything about it at all."
"I've been with Swagger in the bush for six months.
I've never, ever seen him claim credit for a kill. I record the kills
in a book, as per regs. I have to do that; it's the rule. The sniper
employment officer writes up the kills. I just write down what I see.
Swagger's never asked me to claim kills for him. He doesn't give a
shit about that. On top of that, the number thirty-seven or whatever
is completely made up; he had eighty rounds, he probably hit
seventy-five of those, if he missed at all. The record doesn't mean a
thing. That's a load of crap."
"He just likes the killing. Man, he must like to squeeze that little
trigger and watch some gook dot go still. It's as close to being God
as you can get. There's something so psychotic about it, you--" Donny
hit him, left side of the face, hard. It was
TIME TO HUNT 259
stupid. In seconds, h& was down, pinned, and somebody kicked him in
the head, and his eyes filled with stars. He squirmed and yelped, but
more body blows came, and he felt the pressure of many hands pressing
him down, and still more punches driving through. At last someone
pulled his antagonists off him. Of course it was the pacifist
Mahoney.
"Settle down, settle down," Mahoney screamed.
"Man, you'll get lifers in here, and we are cooked!"
Donny's head flared. Someone had really nailed him.
"You assholes," he said.
"You fucking crybaby assholes, you're going to get your buddy wasted
for nothing except your own sense of victimization. You have nothing
to be sorry about. You made it. You're golden."
"All right, all right," said Mahoney, holding the swelling that
distended his face, "you hit me, they hit you, let's call it even. No
one on staff has to hear about this."
"Man, my fucking head aches," said Donny, climbing to his feet.
"You're not going to tell on anyone, are you, Fenn? It was just
tempers. We all get fucked if you tell."
"Shit," said Donny.
"My goddamn head hurts."
"Get him an aspirin. You want a beer? We have some Vietnamese shit,
but I think there's a couple of Buds left.
Get him a Bud. Good, cold Bud."
"No, I'm all right."
He looked at them, saw only dark faces and glaring eyeballs.
"Look, let's forget all about this shit, but just get
him"--Featherstone, who still sat, zombie like on the cot--"straight
for tomorrow. Okay? He can't be fucked up out there; he'll get
killed."
"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.
260 STEPHEN HUNTER
"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 crawl TIME TO
HUNTing, 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
262 STEPHEN HUNTER
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.
TIME TO HUNT 263
"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-264 STEPHEN HUNTER
"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
TIME TO HUNT 265
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.
266 STEPHEN HUNTER
"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
TIME TO HUNT 267
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
268 STEPHEN HUNTER
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, really 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
270 STEPHEN HUNTER
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.
He will move, he thought. He was looking for me, I was not there, he
will move.
Blackness.
Somewhere in his peripheral, a flash of black.
Solaratov did not turn to stare. No, he kept his eyes where they were,
fighting the temptation to crank them around and refocus. Let his
unconscious mind, far more effective in these matters, scan for them.
Blackness again.
TIME TO HUNT 271
He had it.
To the right, almost three hundred yards away. Of course. He's
flanking me to my right.
Slowly, he turned his head; slowly, he brought up the binoculars.
Nothing. Movement. Nothing. Movement.
He struggled with the focus.
The unnatural blackness was a face. The Marine sniper had blackened it
at night, for his long crawl into position; he'd shed his black
clothes, and now wore combat dapple camouflage, but he had made a
mistake. He had forgotten to take off his face paint. Now, black
against the dun and yellow of the elephant grass, it stood out just the
slightest bit.
Solaratov watched, fascinated. The man low-crawled two strokes, then
froze. He waited a second or two, then low-crawled another two. His
face, its features masked by the paint, was a study in warrior's
concentration: tense, drawn, almost cracked with intensity. His rifle
was on his back, wearing a tangle of strips for its own camouflage.
He tried to deny it, but Solaratov felt a flare of pleasure as intense
as anything in his life.
He laid the binoculars down, and raised the rifle to his shoulder,
finding the right position, rifle to bone to earth, finding the grip,
finding the trigger, finding the eyepiece.
Swagger crawled through his scope. The crosshairs quartered his head.
The Russian's thumb took the safety off and he expelled half a breath.
His finger began its slow squeeze of the trigger.
Goddamn," Bob said.
"What is it?" Donny said behind him.
"It's thinned out here. Goddamn. Less cover."
Donny could see nothing. He was lost in elephant grass; it was in his
ears, his nose, in the folds of his flesh.
The ants were feasting on him. He heard the dry buzz of flies drawn to
the delicious odor of his sweat and blood272 STEPHEN HUNTER
he'd been cut a hundred or so times by the blades of the grass.
Ahead of him were the two soles of Bob's jungle boots.
"Shit," Bob said.
"I don't like this one goddamn bit."
"We could just call in the Night Hag. She'd chew the shit out of all
this. We'd pop smoke so she wouldn't whack us up."
"And if he ain't here, he knows we got him, and he's double careful or
he don't come back at all and we never know why he came and we don't
git us a Dragunov. Nah."
He paused.
"You still got that Model Seventy?"
"I do."
"All right. I want you to reorient yourself to the right.
You squirt on ahead; see that little hummock or something?"
"Yeah."
"You set up on that, you scope it out for me. If you say it's okay,
I'm going to shimmy on over there, to where it's thick again. I'll set
up over there and cover for you. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough," said Donny. He squirmed around, took a deep breath and
wiggled ahead.
"Damn, boy, I hope he ain't in earshot. You're grunting louder than a
goddamn pig."
"This is hard work," Donny said, and it was.
He got up to the hummock, peered over it. He saw nothing.
"Go to the M49?"
"Nah. Don't got time. Just check it with your Unertl."
Donny slipped his eye behind the scope, which was a long, thin piece of
metal tubing suspended in an odd frame. When you zeroed this old
thing, it had external controls, which meant the whole scope moved,
propelled this way and that by screws for windage and elevation. It
had been assembled sometime back in the early forties, but rumor said
it had killed more than its share of Japs,
TIME TO HUNT 273
North Koreans and VC. It wasn't even a 7.62mm NATO but the old
Springfield cartridge, the long .3006.
The optics were great. He scanned the grass as far as he could see,
and saw no sign of human presence. But the blur had not gone away. He
was aware he was missing fine detail. He squeezed the bridge of his
nose with his fingers, and nothing improved. No, nothing out there,
nothing that he could see.
"It looks clear."
"I didn't ask how it looked. I asked how it was."
"Clear, clear."
"Okay," said Bob.
"You keep eyeballing."
The sergeant began to creep outward, this time at an even slower rate
than before. He crawled slowly, ever so slowly, halting each two pulls
forward, going still.
Donny returned to his scope. Back and forth, he swept the likely
shooting spots, seeing nothing. It was clear. This was beginning to
seem ridiculous. Maybe they were out here in the middle of nothing,
acting like complete idiots.
The bees buzzed, the flies ate, the dragonflies skittered.
He couldn't keep his eye behind the scope for very long because it fell
completely out of focus. He had to blink, look away. When would the
call come from Bob that he was all right?
1 he trigger rocked back, stacked up and was on the very cusp of
firing.
Where is the other one?
His finger came off the trigger.
There were two. He had to kill them both. If he fired, the other
might take him or, seeing his partner with his head blown open, simply
slide back farther into the grass and disappear. He'd call in air,
possibly, and Solaratov would have to get out of the area.
Where was the other one?
He looked up from the scope. He realized he could see the sniper
because for some odd reason, the grass was thinner there. The other
one would be nearby, covering,
274 STEPHEN HUNTER
as he was vulnerable. He would be vulnerable for only a few more
seconds.
A plan formed in Solaratov's mind: Find the spotter.
Kill the spotter. Come back and kill the sniper. It was possible
because of the semiautomatic nature of the weapon and the fact that the
distance was under three hundred meters.
He returned to the scope and very carefully began to crank backward,
looking for another black face against the dun and the tan of the
vertical thickets of stalks. He came back a bit more, no, nothing,
nothing .. . and there! An arm! The arm led to a body, which led to
the form of another prone man hunched over a rifle--he took a gasp of
air, a little spurt of pleasure--and then continued up the trunk to the
torso to discover that it was indeed a man but he was not a spotter, he
was another sniper, and his rifle was pointing exactly at him. At
Solaratov.
The man fired.
Donny looked up from his scope. His head ached. When would the call
come from Bob? God, he needed an aspirin.
He glanced about, seeing nothing, only the endless grass.
A dragonfly flashed close by. It was odd how their wings somehow
caught the sunlight and threw a reflection just like-Donny went back to
the scope.
He was so close!
The sniper was less than three hundred yards away-or rather, the
snipers, for there was a smear of enemy, blurry in the haze of Donny's
concussion, well sunk in the grass. The man was bent into his rifle,
moving slowly, tracking, and with a start, Donny realized he had
located Swagger.
Kill him! he ordered himself. Shoot! Do it now!
The crosshairs seemed to quarter the head. He squeezed the trigger.
TIME TO HUNT 275
He lost his sight picture as the pressure increased. He squeezed
harder. Nothing happened.
The safety, the safety. He reached for where it should have been, that
nub in front of the trigger, but it wasn't there. That's where it was
on an M14. On an M70, it was up on the bolt housing. He took his eye
off the scope, looked for the flange that was the safety, and snapped
it forward. He ducked to the scope, saw the man had turned and the
rifle's muzzle was coming .. . right at him.
He jerked at the trigger and the rifle fired.
Bob crawled forward. Only a few more yards and then he was into the
higher grass and-The shot, so unexpected, sounded like a drumbeat
against his own ears. He froze--lost it, the great Bob Lee
Swagger--and had a moment of twisted panic.
What? Huh? Oh, Christ!
Then he picked himself up, ran like a son of a bitch for the higher
grass, waiting to get nailed and trying to sort it out.
"He's there! I saw him!" Donny screamed, and instantly from three
hundred yards out, an answering shot sounded. It struck near Donny,
blowing a big puff of dirt into the air.
Donny fired back almost instantly and Bob looked, saw the puff of dust
where his shot hit.
"Get down!" he screamed, now terrified that Donny would take a shot in
the head. He dove into the brush, righted himself, squirmed until he
could see the dusty bank.
He threw the rifle to his shoulder, put his eye to the glass and saw ..
. nothing.
"He's there!" Donny screamed again, but Bob could see nothing. Then a
shot cracked out, seeming to come from the left, and he swung his rifle
just a bit, saw some dust in the air from the disturbance of muzzle
blast, and fired. He cycled, fired again, fast as he was able to, not
seeing a target but hoping one was there.
276 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Get down!" he screamed again.
"Get down and call Foxtrot for air!"
He worked the bolt, but could not see the sniper in the dust that
floated in the grass in the area Donny had identified.
Where was he? Where was he?
Donny edged back a bit and the second shot blasted the earth just a few
inches from his face. Owl The dirt blossomed as if a cherry bomb had
detonated, and a hundred tiny flecks of grit bit him; he blinked, slid
back even farther.
He could hear Bob screaming but he couldn't make the words out. He
thought: the radio. Call air. Get air.
But then Bob fired, fired again, and it filled Donny with courage. He
squirmed up over the other side of the hummock, going to a left-handed
shooting position. He couldn't throw the bolt from here, not easily,
but a lot less of him stuck out, and that pleased him.
Where is he? Where are you, motherfucker?
Through the scope, he saw nothing, just dust hanging in the air, the
slow wobble of grass signifying recent commotion but nothing to shoot
at all.
He scanned left and right a few yards, didn't see a damned thing. He
had this idea that he, not Bob, would be the one who brought the
Russian down. Images from a forgotten boyhood book played suddenly
through his mind: that would be like Lieutenant May getting the Red
Baron instead of salty old pro Roy Brown. A gush of excitement came to
him and a spurt of intense pleasure.
Where was he?
We can take him under fire from two sources, he realized.
We can take this motherfucker.
"Air!" he heard Bob scream.
Yes, air. Get the Night Hag in here, smoke this fucker, blow him to-On
a wide scan, he saw him, much farther back, crawling away
desperately.
Got you!
He put the crosshairs on the bobbing head, not a
TIME TO HUNT 277
shape so much as a suggestion in the blur of his vision. He tried to
find the center, quartered it with the scope, felt in supreme control,
felt the trigger rock against his finger, stack up just a tiny bit and
then surprise the hell out of him when the shot occurred.
The man's rifle leaped, his hat popped off and he rolled over into the
grass, still.
"/ got him!" he screamed. "/ hit him!"
"Air," Bob screamed.
"Get us air!"
Donny let the rifle slide away, drew the PRC off his back and hit the
on switch.
"Foxtrot, this is Sierra-Bravo, flash, I say again, flash, flash. We
have contact, over."
"Sierra-Bravo, what are your needs? Are you calling air,
Sierra-Bravo?"
Suddenly Bob was next to him, snatching the handset from him.
"Foxtrot, get us Night Hag super fast I'm designating Area Two for the
strike, bring in Night Hag, I say again, immediate, Area Two, Area
Two."
"She is coming in, Sierra-Bravo; watch your butt, over."
"I got him!" Donny said.
"I am popping smoke to designate my position for Night Hag, over," said
Bob. He grabbed a smoker off his belt, yanked the pin and tossed it.
It spun and hissed and torrents of green smoke began to pour out of
it.
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Night Hag, I eyeball green smoke, over," a
new voice on the net declared, even as they heard the roar of engines
rising.
"That is correct, Night Hag, we are buttoning up, out."
Bob pulled Donny down and close to the hummock.
A shadow passed over them and Donny looked up and saw the great plane
as it flashed overhead, began to bank. It seemed huge and predatory,
its engines beating at the air. It was pitch black, an angel of death,
and it banked to the right, raising a wing, presenting the side of its
fuselage to the earth it was about to devastate.
278 STEPHEN HUNTER
The eight mini-guns fired simultaneously, tongues of gobbling flame
streaking from the black flank, the sound not of guns firing quickly,
but just a steady, screaming roar.
"Jesus," said Donny. He thought of worlds ending, of the end of
civilization, of Hiroshima. This sucker brought heat. He couldn't
imagine it.
The thousands of rounds poured from the guns to the earth, each fifth
one a tracer, and the guns fired so fast it seemed they fired nothing
but tracers. The bullets didn't strike the earth so much as
disintegrate it. They pulverized, raising clouds of destruction and
debris. The air filled with darkness as if the weather itself had
turned to gunfire. It was a locust plague of lead that devoured that
upon which it settled. Earlier versions of this baby had been called
Puff the Magic Dragon, but they only had one gun. With eight, Night
Hag could put a mythological hurt on the world. She just ate up Area 2
for what seemed like years but was in reality just a few seconds. She
had only thirty seconds worth of shooting time, she ate so fast.
The plane pivoted as if tethered, the roar of its engines huge as it
curled above them, then again its eight guns fired and again the ground
shook and a blizzard of debris flew from the earth. Then it
straightened out, climbed slightly and began to describe a holding
pattern.
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, that's my best trick, over."
"Night Hag, should be sufficient, good work. Foxtrot, you there,
over?"
"Sierra, this is Foxtrot."
"Foxtrot, let's move the teams out. I think we got him.
I think we nailed him."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, Wilco and good job. Out."
Huu Co, senior colonel, and the sappers watched the airplane hunt the
sniper from the relative safety of the treeline. It was quite a
spectacle: the huge plane wheeling, the thunderous streams of fire it
brought to the defoliated zone, the rending of the earth where the
bullets struck.
TIME TO HUNT 279
"Oh, the Human Noodle will be turned to the human sieve by that thing,"
one of the men said.
"Only the Americans would hunt a single man with an airplane," said
another.
"They would send an airplane to fix a toilet," someone else shouted, to
the laughter of some others.
But Huu Co understood that the sniper was dead, that the outlaw Swagger
had once again prevailed. No man could withstand the barrage, and what
came later, when, in the immediate aftermath of the airplane, when its
dust still hung in the air, five jeeps suddenly burst from the fort and
came crashing across the field, stopping right where two American
snipers suddenly emerged from hiding a little to the east of the
devastated area.
The men began to work methodically with flamethrowers.
The squirts of flame spurted out, and where they touched, they lit the
grass. The flames rose and spread, and burned furiously, as black,
oily smoke rolled upward.
"The Human Noodle has now been roasted," someone said.
The flames burned for hours, out of control, rolling across the prairie
of the defoliated zone, blazing vividly, as more and more men from the
post came out in patrols, set up a line, and began to follow the
flames. Soon enough, a flight of helicopters flew in from the east and
began to hover over the field. They were hunting for a body.
"They will probably eat him if they can find him."
"There won't be enough left. They could put him in soup."
Though the Russian was a chilly little number, Huu Co still had a
moment's melancholy over his fate. The airplane made war so totally;
it was the most feared weapon in the American arsenal of super weapons
How horrible to be hunted by such a flying beast and to feel the world
disintegrating around you as the shells exploded. He shivered a bit.
The Americans picked through the blasted field for
280 STEPHEN HUNTER
some time, until nearly nightfall, at one time finding something that
excited them very much--Huu Co watched through his binoculars, but
could not make it out--until finally retreating.
"Brother Colonel, shall we retreat?" his sergeant wished to know.
"There is clearly nothing left for us here."
"No," said the colonel.
"We wait. I don't know for how long, but we wait."
It was a lance corporal from First Squad who found the Dragunov.
"Whooie!" he shouted.
"Lookie here. Gook sniper rifle."
"Corporal, bring that over here," called Brophy.
"Good work."
The man, pleased to be singled out, came over with his trophy and
turned it over to Brophy.
"There's your rifle," Bob said to the CIA man, Nichols.
The command team crowded around the new weapon, something no one had
seen before. Like a kid unwrapping a Christmas present, Nichols
wrapped the camouflage tape off the weapon.
"The legendary SVD. That's the first one we've recovered," said
Nichols.
"Congratulations, Swagger. That's not a small thing."
Donny just looked at it, feeling nothing, his head pounding from the
stench of the gasoline and the oily smoke. It was a crude-looking
thing, not at all sleek and well machined.
"Looks like an AK got stuck in a tractor pull," Bob said. He handled
the weapon, looked it over, worked the action a few times, looked
through the scope, then became bored with it and passed it on to other,
more eager hands.
He moved away from the crowd, and watched with narrowed eyes and utter
stillness as the Marines probed
TIME TO HUNT 281
the burn zone while others set up flank security, under the CO's
direction. Meanwhile Hueys and Cobra gunships hovered about the
perimeter.
"Do you think he got away?" Donny finally asked him.
"Don't know. Them flames could have burned him up.
Six or seven twenty-mm shells could have blown him to pieces, and the
flames charred what meat was left off the bone. He could be
indistinguishable from the landscape, I suppose. I just don't know. I
didn't see any blood trails."
"Wouldn't the flames have burned the blood?"
"Maybe. I don't know."
"I'm pretty sure I hit him."
"I think you did too. Otherwise, I'd be a dead monkey.
I'm going to put you in for another medal."
"I didn't do anything."
"You saved my bacon," said Bob. He seemed somehow genuinely shaken, as
if he'd somehow learned today that he could die. Donny had never seen
him quite like this.
"Man, I could use me a bottle of bourbon tonight," the sergeant
added.
"I could use it real bad."
Donny nodded. He had invested totally in the idea that he had shot the
white sniper. He re-created it in his mind: the crosshairs on the
head, the jerk of the trigger, the squirm of the man as if hit, the
flying hat, the leap and twist of his rifle, then stillness. It felt
like a hit, somehow.
Everything about it felt good. But the rifle hadn't been found in the
rough area where memory told him the sniper had been when he'd taken
his shot.
And, he had the terrifying feeling, un confessed to anyone, that maybe
in the blur of his concussion--gone now--he'd zeroed incorrectly and
killed a phantasm, not the real thing. He couldn't bring himself to
express this, but it filled him with the blackest dread.
"I don't see how he could have gotten away," Donny said.
"Nothing could stand up to it and-nobody's that lucky."
"No way he could have stood up to it. If he was in the
282 STEPHEN HUNTER
middle of it, he was wasted, no doubt about it at all. But-was he in
the middle of it?"
That was the question and Donny had no answer. He and he alone had
seen the sniper, but by the time the plane was done chewing the world
up, and he looked again, that world had changed: it was tattered,
eviscerated;
the grass was flattened; dust hung in the air. Then the flamethrower
teams worked it over, and it burned and burned. Hard to figure now
exactly where he'd been, what he'd seen, where it had been.
"Well, we'll see," said Bob.
"Meanwhile, you come by tonight and we'll have us a drink or two."
Swagger was drunk. He was so drunk the world made no sense at all to
him, and he liked it that way. The bourbon was like a nurse's hand on
his shoulder in the middle of the night, when he awoke screaming in the
Philippines after having gotten hit on his first tour, really messed up
through the upper lung. The nurse had touched him and said, "There,
there, there."
Now the bourbon said, "There, there, there."
"Fucking good stuff," Bob said.
"The fucking-A best."
"It is," said Donny, smoking a giant cigar he'd gotten from somewhere.
There were some others too: Brophy and Nichols of the CIA, Captain
Feamster, the always mild XO, the company gunny--Firebase Dodge City's
inner circle, as it was, drunk as skunks in the intel bunker.
Somewhere Mick Jagger was blaring out over an eight-track, the one
about satisfaction.
"Well, we got some satisfaction today, goddamn," said Feamster, an
amiable professional who would never make bird colonel.
"We did, we did," confirmed the XO, who would make brigadier, because
he agreed with everything that was said by anybody above him in rank.
A couple of other sergeants made faces at the XO's fawning, but only
Swagger caught it.
TIME TO HUNT 283
"Goddamn right," he said to make the officers go away, and after a bit
they did.
He took another taste. Prairie fire. Crackling. The sense of
merciful blur; the world again full of possibility.
Now it was Nichols's turn to pay homage.
The CIA officer wandered over shyly, and said, "You know, it was a
great day."
"We didn't get no head on the wall," said Bob.
"Oh, the Russian's dead, all right," said Nichols.
"Nobody could live through that. No, but what I'm talking about is the
rifle."
The rifle? thought Donny.
Oh, yeah. The rifle.
"You know how long we've been looking for that rifle?" Nichols turned
and looked at Donny, who puffed on his cigar, took another swallow of
bourbon and answered with a goofy smile.
"Well," said Nichols, "we've been looking since 1958, when Evgenie
Dragunov drew up the plans at the Izhevsk Machine Factory. Some of our
analysts said it would revolutionize their capacities. But others
said, no, it was nothing."
"Looks like a piece of Russian crap to me," said Bob.
"I don't think them guys know shit about building a precision rifle.
They ain't got no Townie Whelans or no Warren Pages or no P. 0.
Ackleys. They just got tractor drivers in monkey suits."
Donny couldn't tell if Swagger, out of some obscure sense of need, was
putting on the earnest, ambitious intelligence officer or not.
"Well, whatever," said Nichols.
"Now we don't have to wonder. Now we'll be able to tell. And do you
know what that means?"
"No."
"Nothing here. This shit is over and it never meant shit to the
Russians except as a way to bleed us dry. They wouldn't even send
Dragunovs to the "Nam, that's how
284 STEPHEN HUNTER
low on the priority list it was. The Dragunov was a higher priority
than Vietnam to them."
This didn't play well with Swagger, and a darkness came over his face,
but the CIA man didn't notice and kept on yapping.
"No, Russia's interested in Europe. That's where all the Russian
divisions are. Now, with the Dragunovs coming down to platoon level in
the next few years, and reaching the other Warsaw Bloc countries after
that, what does that mean for our tactics? What level of precision
fire can they bring against us if they move? Are they committing to
sniper warfare in a big way? That'll have a great deal to do with our
dispositions, our troop strength, our alignments, our relationships to
our allies and the general thrust of NATO policy over the next few
years. Dammit, you gave it to us! No one could get one, no one could
buy one, they were nowhere except under lock and key, and old Bob Lee
Swagger goes out in the bad bush and brings one back alive. Goddamn,
it was a good day!" His eyes were bright and happy. He wasn't even
drunk.
"Right now, it's been shipped priority flash to Aberdeen in Maryland
for thorough testing at the Army Weapons Lab. They'll wring it out
like you won't believe.
They'll make that rifle sing!"
"A real feather in your cap," said Donny.
"A victory for our side. One of damn few of late. You did a hell of a
job, Swagger. I'll see this goes into your record. I'll see phone
calls are made, the right people are informed. You are a piece of
action, my friend. But I will say one damned thing. You must have
really pissed them off if they were willing to engage you with a
Dragunov.
Man, they want you all the ways there are. If you want, I can let it
be known your expertise is invaluable and we can get you on the next
flight to Aberdeen, Sergeant, on that team. No need to get iced, if
they try again."
"I got a few months yet till my DEROS, Mr. Nichols.
It's just fine, thanks."
"Think it over. Chew on it in your mind. You could be
TIME TO HUNT 285
TDY Aberdeen Proving Ground the day after tomorrow.
Baltimore? The Block? Those beauties up there? Blaze Starr? A damn
fine town, Baltimore. A man could have himself some fun there, you
know. A hell of a lot finer than Dodge City, I Corps, RSV-fuckingN!"
"Mr. Nichols, I extended and I have a tour to serve. I got four
months and days till DEROS."
"You are hard-core, Swagger. The hardest. The old Corps, the hardest,
the best. Well, thanks, and God bless.
You are a piece of action!"
He wandered away.
"You should do that," said Donny.
"Yeah, clap in Baltimore and hanging out with a bunch of soldiers with
long hippie hair and unshined boots. No thanks. Not for me,
goddammit."
"Well, at least we're heroes," said Donny.
"Today. They'll forget all about it in a few hours, when they sober
up. That's a headquarters man for you. Your basic REMF."
He took another deep swallow of the bourbon.
"You sure you should be drinking that much?"
"I can hold my liquor. That's something the Swagger boys was always
good at."
"Boy, I'll say."
"You know, I want to tell you something," he finally said.
"Your gal. She is, goddammit, the prettiest goddamn woman I ever saw.
You are one lucky boy."
"I am," said Donny, grinning like a monkey, taking a great slug of
bourbon, then a draught on the cigar, expelling the smoke like vapors
of chemwar.
"Here, I got something I want to show you."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I've showed you the photo. Look at this."
He reached into his pocket and drew out a folded sheaf of heavy paper
and delicately unfolded it.
"It was that Trig guy. He was an artist. He did it."
Bob looked at it unsteadily in the flickering light. It was a creamy
piece of paper, very carefully torn along one
286 STEPHEN HUNTER
edge. But it wasn't the paper that caught Bob's eyes, it was the
drawing itself. Bob didn't know a goddamned thing about art, but
whoever this bird was, he had something.
He really caught Donny in a few lines; it was as if he loved Donny.
Somehow you could feel the attraction.
The girl was next to him and the artist's feelings toward her were more
complex. She was beautiful, hopelessly beautiful. A girl in a
million. He felt a little part of himself die, knowing he'd never have
a woman like that; it just wasn't in the cards. He'd be alone all his
life, and maybe he preferred it that way.
"Hell of a nice picture," said Bob, handing it back.
"It is. He really got her. I think he was in love with her too.
Everybody who sees Julie falls in love with her. I am so lucky."
"And you know what?" said Swagger.
"No, uh-uh."
"She is a damned lucky woman, too. She's got you.
You are the best. You are going to have a happy, wonderful life back
in the world."
Bob lifted the bottle, took two deep swallows and handed the bottle to
Donny.
"You're a hero," said Donny.
"You'll have a great life, too."
"I am finished. When you opened up on that bird, it come to me: you
don't want to be here, you want to live.
You gave me my life back, you son of a bitch. Goddamn, I owe no man
not a thing. But I owe you beaucoup, partner."
"You are drunk."
"So I am. And I got one more thing for you. You come over here and
listen to me, Pork, away from these lifer bastards."
Donny was shocked. He had never heard the term "lifer" from Bob's lips
before.
Bob drew him outside.
"This ain't the booze talking, okay? This is me, this is
TIME TO HUNT 287
your friend, Bob Lee Swagger. This is Sierra-Bravo. You reading me
clear, over?"
"I have you, Sierra, over."
"Okay. Here it is. I have thought this out. Guess what?
The war is over for us."
"What?"
"It's over. I'm telling you straight. We go out on three missions a
week, see, but we don't go nowhere. We go out into the treeline and we
lay up for a couple of days. We don't take no shots, we don't go on no
treks, no long wanders; we don't set up no ambushes. No, sir, we lay
up in the tall grass and relax, and come in, like all the other
patrols. You think I don't know that shit is going on?
Nobody in this shit hole is fighting the war and nobody is fighting
back in Da Nang. S-2 Da Nang don't give a shit, Captain Feamster don't
give a shit, USMC HQ RSVN don't give a shit, WES PAC don't give a shit,
USMC HQ Henderson Hall don't give a shit. Nobody wants to die, that's
what it's all about. It's over, and if we get fucking wasted, we are
just throwing our lives away. For nothing, you hear what I'm saying?
We done our bit. It's time to think about number one. You hear what
I'm saying?"
"Yeah, you'll do that till I DEROS out of here back to the world, then
you'll go out on your own, and get more kills and go back to your job.
You'll have to because by then the gooks will be getting very fucking
bold and you'll be afraid they'll hit this place and take all these
worthless assholes down, and you'll get hosed for them, and if that
isn't the biggest waste there ever was, I don't know what is."
"No, I won't."
"Yeah, you will. I know you."
"No way at all."
"All right, I'll do this on one condition."
"I'm your goddamned sergeant. You can't 'one condition' me."
"On this one I can. That is: I go to Nichols, tell him you want on
that Aberdeen team, but you got stuff to do
288 STEPHEN HUNTER
first, and you can't go till a certain date. On the date I DEROS, you
go to Aberdeen. Is that fair? That's fair!
Goddamn, that's fair, that's what I want!"
"You young college smart-ass hippie bastard."
"I'll go get him now. Okay? I want to hear you make that statement to
him, then I'll do this."
Bob's eyes narrowed.
"You ain't never outsmarted me before."
"And maybe I won't ever again, but by God, this is the night I do! Ha!
Got you. Swagger! At last. Got you."
Swagger spat into the dust, took a swallow. Then he looked at Donny
and goddamn if the silliest goddamn thing didn't happen. He smiled.
"Go get Mr. CIA," he said.
"Wahoo!" shrieked Donny, and went off to find the man.
1 he days passed. The sappers relaxed and treated the mission as a
leave, a time for restoring hard-pressed spirits, catching up on
correspondence with loved ones, renewing acquaintanceship with
political and patriotic principles that could be lost in the heat of
combat. They lounged in the tunnel complex on the edge of the
defoliated zone two thousand yards from Dodge City, enjoying the
amenities.
At night, Huu Co sent them on probing patrols, nothing aggressive, just
simply to make certain the Americans at Dodge City weren't up to
anything. He directed: no engagements, not at this time. So the tiny
men in the dun-colored uniforms with the patience of biblical scholars
simply waited and watched. Waited for what?
"Senior Colonel, the Human Noodle is not coming back. No man could
survive that. We had best return to base camp and a new mission. The
Fatherland needs us."
"My instructions," Huu Co told his sergeant, "are from the highest
elements of the government, and they are to support and sustain our
Russian comrade in any
TIME TO HUNT 289
way possible. Until I determine that mission is no longer viable, we
shall stay."
"Yes, sir."
"Long live the Fatherland."
"Long live the Fatherland."
But privately, he had grave doubts. It was true: no man could stand up
to the intensity of the air attack with those fast-firing guns, and no
man, particularly, could stand up to the flames from the American
flamethrowers, a ghastly weapon that he believed they would never use
against enemies of their own racial grouping.
And of course this: another failure.
Not his, surely, but failure has a way of spreading itself out and
tainting all who are near it. He had led the mission, he had helped
plan it, he had organized it. Was his heart not pure enough? Was he
still infected with the virus of Western vanity? Was there some
character defect that attended to him and him alone that caused him to
continually misjudge, to make the wrong decision at the wrong time?
He rededicated himself to the study of Marxism and the principles of
revolution. He read Mao's book for the four hundredth time, and
Lao-tzu's for the thousandth.
He buried his grief and fear in study. His eyes ate the hard little
knots of words; his mind grappled with their deeper meanings, their sub
texts their contexts, their linkages to past and present. He was a
hard taskmaster to himself. He gave himself no mercy, and refused to
take painkillers for his crippled hand and its caul of burn. Only his
dreams betrayed him. Only in his dreams was he a traitor.
He dreamed of Paris. He dreamed of red wine, the excitement of the
world's most beautiful city, his own youth, the hope and joy of a
brilliant future. He dreamed of crooked streets, the smell of cheese
and pastry, the taste of Gauloises and pommes frites; he dreamed of the
imperial grandeur of the place, of its sense of empire, the confidence
with which its monuments blazed.
290 STEPHEN HUNTER
It was on one such night, as he tossed on his pallet, his semiconscious
mind rife with bright images out of Lautrec, that the hands of a whore
imploring him to her bed became the hands of his sergeant, beckoning
him from sleep.
He rose. It was dark; candles had burned low. The man led him from
his chamber, down earthen tunnels, to the mess hall. There, in the
dark, a squat figure sat hunched over a table, eating with unbelievable
gusto.
The sergeant lit a candle and the room flickered, then filled with low
light.
It was the white sniper.
chapter twenty-three
They lay in the high grass, or in the hills under the scrubby trees and
bamboo, watching and tracking but never shooting.
A VC squad moved into the zone of fire, four men with AKs, infiltrating
farther south. Easy shots; he could have taken two and driven the
other two into the high grass and waited them out and taken them, too.
But farther south was only ARVN, and Bob figured it was a Vietnamese
problem, and the ARVNs could handle it or they could handle the ARVNs,
depending. Another time, a VC tax collector clearly blew his cover and
was making his rounds. It was an easy shot, 140-odd yards into a soft
target. But Bob said no. The war was over for them.
They lay concealed or they tracked, looking for sign of big bodies of
men, of units moving into position for an assault on Firebase Dodge
City, whose immediate environs they patrolled. There was nothing. It
was as if a kind of enchantment had fallen over this little chunk of I
Corps. The peasants came out and resumed work in their paddies, the
farmers went back to furrowing the hills with their ox-pulled plows.
The rainy season was over. Birds sang; now and then a bright butterfly
would skitter about.
Above, fewer contrails marred the high sky, and if you flicked across
the FM bandwidths on the PRC-77, you could tell that the war had wound
way down; nobody was shooting at anything.
Two weeks into it, orders came for Bob, assigning him TDY to Army
Weapons Lab, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, Maryland. He was
slated to leave the day after Donny's DEROS. Feamster told him since
he was so short and enemy activity so quiet and nothing coming down
from Battalion S-2, he and Donny didn't have to go out anymore, but the
two said they'd do it anyway, looking
292 STEPHEN HUNTER
for signs of an assault but not for kills. Feamster may have gotten
it; that was okay by him. He said that word of turning Dodge City over
to ARVN forces was imminent-"Vietnamization," they called it--and the
whole unit would be DEROSed back to the States before the summer came,
no matter where the guys were in their tours.
"This is pretty cool," said Donny.
Bob just grunted and spat.
Solaratov slept for two days solid and then rose and came to see Huu
Co. The story of his escape went untold.
He made no report. How he had survived, where he had gone, what he had
suffered, all of it went unrecorded and no one dared ask him. A medic
attended his burns, which were severe but not debilitating, and he
never complained or winced. He seemed disconnected from the agonies of
his body. He had one trophy. It was his SPETSNAZ field cap, a floppy,
beige thing that looked like a deflated beret or an American sailor hat
that had been run over by a tank. It had two holes in it on the left
side of the crown, an entrance wound and an exit wound. How could his
head have survived such a thing? He had no comment but liked to wiggle
his fingers through the two holes at the sappers, who would dash away
in confusion.
On the morning he came to Huu Co, he said, "These people are very good.
Good craft, good tactics, very well-thought-out planning. I was
impressed."
"How did you possibly survive?"
"Not a remarkable story. Luck, guile, courage, the usual. Anyhow, I
am not prepared to give up the mission."
"What do you require of us?"
"I will never maneuver close enough, I see that now.
Plus, of course, I lost my weapon, much to my embarrassment.
I hope it perished in the flames or was destroyed by cannon fire."
He frowned; failure in his profession was not an acceptable outcome.
TIME TO HUNT 293
"But, no matter. I have certain requirements for a new weapon. I will
be shooting at over a thousand yards. I can do it no other way, that
is, unless I want to die myself, and I prefer not to."
"Our armorers are dedicated to their jobs, but I doubt we have a weapon
capable of such accuracy."
"Yes, I know. Nor, frankly, do we. But you must have some small cache
of American weapons, no? Your intelligence people would maintain an
inventory? It's common for guerrillas to turn the enemy's weapons
against himself."
"Yes."
"Now, I will give you a very specific type of American weapon. It must
be found and delivered here within two weeks. It has to be this exact
weapon; with no other would I have a chance."
"Yes."
"But that is not all. You must also contact the Soviet SPETSNAZ unit
at the airfield; they will be required to acquire certain components
from outside Asia. These are very specific also; no deviation can be
allowed. There is a place where such a list can be filled out in just
a few seconds, and they will have access to capabilities to do so."
"Yes, comrade. I--" "You see, it's not merely the rifle. The rifle is
only part of the system. It's also the ammunition. I have to
construct ammunition capable of the task which I have in mind."
He handed over the list, which was in English. Huu Co did not
recognize the rifle by type, nor the list of "ingredients," which
appeared to be of a chemical or scientific nature. He did recognize
one word, but it had no meaning to him: Match King
1 he sniper worked with care. He studied the reconnaissance photos of
the area, discussed the topography once again with Huu Co, trying to
find the right combination of
294 STEPHEN HUNTER
elements. He worked very, very carefully. After devising theories, he
went to test them, exploring the area at night and spending his days
hidden in the grass, trying to learn what there was to learn.
This time he never went near the base. He was acclimatizing himself to
the very long shots, and hunting for a shooting position. He finally
found one on a nameless hill that, by his judgment, was close to
fourteen hundred yards from the base, but it offered the most generous
angle into the encampment, with the least drop, the least exposure to
wind pressure, the most favorable light in the early morning, when such
a thing would take place, and it was also sited immediately to the
north of the original ambush site, a gamble, but a calculated one.
Solaratov reasoned that on general principle alone, the American sniper
team would be reluctant to go out the same way as the one that had
almost gotten them killed. But they would consider going out the
opposite side too obvious. Therefore, on their missions they would
either leave above, to the north, or below, to the south. He had a
one-in-two chance of encountering them, and in the days that he waited,
he saw them leave the post three times. Tiny dots, so far away.
Hardly human.
Fourteen hundred yards. It was a hellaciously long shot. It was a
shot nobody had any business trying to make. Beyond six hundred yards,
the margin of error shrinks to nothing; the play of the elements
increases exponentially.
You would need more power than the Dragunov's 7.62 X 54 round; you
would need more power than any round available under normal
circumstances in either the North Vietnamese or the American inventory,
because war had become a thing of light, fast-firing weapons that kill
by firepower, not accuracy. He had contempt for such a philosophy. It
was the philosophy of the common un trainable man, not of the elite
professional who masters all the variables in his preparation and who
has genius-level skill at his task. War nowadays no longer demanded
special men but ordinary men--lots of them.
TIME TO HUNT 295
He lay on the hill, trying to will himself into the mental state
necessary. He had to be calm, his eyesight perfect, his judgment
secure. He had to dope the wind, the mirage, the temperature, the
angle of travel of the targets, his bullet's trajectory, the time in
flight, everything. At this range, it was not like rifle shooting; it
was like naval gunfire, for the bullet would have to rise in high
apogee and describe an arc across the sky, and float downward with
perfect, perfect placement. There were not but a dozen men in the
world who could take such a shot with confidence.
He watched, through binoculars: the Marines far off scuttled about
behind their berm, making ready to depart, confident that for them the
war was almost over. And for two of them, it was.
Finally: the rifle. It came almost at the end of the two-week period,
and not without difficulty. It had been a trophy in the People's
Museum of Great Struggle in downtown Hanoi; thousands of schoolchildren
had looked upon it with great horror as part of their political
education. It demonstrated the evil will of the colonialists and the
capitalists, that they took such great pains to construct the devil's
own tool. In this, it was very useful indeed, and it took Russian
intervention at the highest levels to have it withdrawn from the
permanent exhibit. A special sapper unit was ordered to transport it
down the Trail of Ten Thousand Miles to Huu Co's little hidden post on
the outskirts of the defoliated zone of Firebase Dodge City.
The Russian broke it down, for the first step to mastering a rifle is
to master what makes it work. He studied the system, the cleverness of
it, the robustness of it, the rise and fall of springs, the thrusting
of rods, the gizmo of the trigger group. It was ingenious: over
engineered in the American fashion, but ingenious. This one had been
crudely accurized with flash hider, a fiberglass bedding for the action
in the stock, a wad of leather around the comb
296 STEPHEN HUNTER
to provide a nest for the cheek in relation to the scope, which was a
mere four-power and, Solaratov saw, the weakest element in the system,
attached to the rifle parallel to but not above the barrel, creating
problems in parallax that had to be mastered. But his main focus of
interest was that trigger group, a mesh of springs and levers that
could be pulled whole from the receiver group. He broke it down to the
tiniest component, then carefully polished each engagement surface to
give the piece a crisper let-off.
At this point, the box of "components" came from the Soviet
intelligence service. They were the easiest mission requirements to
acquire: a Soviet asset had merely gone to a Southern California gun
store and purchased them, for cash; they had been shipped to the Soviet
Union via diplomatic pouch and to North Vietnam by the daily TU16
flight. To look at them was to see nothing: these were actually
reloading tools, which looked like steel chambers of mysterious
purpose, and green boxes of bullets, cans of powder, DuPont IMR 4895,
tools for re sizing the case, pressing in new primers, reinserting the
bullet. He knew that no military round could deliver the accuracy he
needed and that it would take great attention to detail and
consistency.
He took the entire rig for a day's march to the north, and there, out
of the eyes of Westerners and Vietnamese alike except for a security
team of sappers and the ever-curious Huu Co, he set up a
fourteen-hundred-meter range, shooting at two close targets, white
silhouettes that were easy to see and would not be moving like they
would on the day of his attempt.
The scope was small and had an ancient, obsolete reticle:
a post, like a knife point, rising above a single horizontal line.
Additionally, it did not have enough elevation to enable him to hit out
to fourteen hundred meters, close to three times the rifle's known
efficiency, though well within the cartridge's lethal capability. He
hand-filed
TIME TO HUNT 297
shims from pieces of metal and inserted them within the scope rings to
elevate the scope higher, and tightened the assembly with aircraft glue
so that it would hold to a thousand-yard zero over the course of his
testing.
He worked with infinite patience. He seemed lost in a world no one
could penetrate. He seemed distracted to an absurd degree, almost
catatonic. His nickname, "the Human Noodle," took on added comic
meaning as he entered a zone of total vagueness that was actually total
concentration. He seemed to see nothing.
Gradually, increment by increment, he managed to -walk his shots into
the target. Once he was on the target, he began hitting regularly,
primarily through mastery of trigger control and breathing and finding
the same solid position off a sandbag. The sandbag was the important
feature: it had to be just so dense, packed so tight, and it had to
support the rifle's forestock in just such a way.
Infinitely patient micro-experimentation was gradually revealing the
precise harmony among rifle and load and position and his own
concentration that would make his success at least possible.
Finally, he took to having the sappers present the targets from over a
berm, so that he could see them for just the second they'd be visible.
He'd teach himself to shoot fast. It went slowly and he burned out the
sappers with his patience, his insistence on recleaning the rifle
painstakingly every sixteen rounds, his demand that all his ejected
cartridges be located and preserved in the order that they were fired.
All the time he kept a notebook of almost unreadable pedantry as he
assembled his attempts.
"For a sniper, he is a very dreary fellow," the sergeant said to Huu
Co.
"You want a romantic hero," said Huu Co.
"He is a bureaucrat of the rifle, infinitely obsessed with
micro-process. It's how his mind works."
"Only the Russians could create such a man."
"No, I believe the Americans could too."
298 STEPHEN HUNTER
Finally, the day came when the Russian hit his two targets in the kill
zone twice in the same five seconds.
Then he did it another day and then another, all at dawn, after lying
the night through on his stomach.
"I am ready," he announced.
chapter twenty-four
The sandbags were the hardest. He had grown almost superstitious about
them. He would let no one touch them, for fear of somehow shifting the
sand they concealed and altering irrevocably their inner dynamics.
"The Human Noodle has gone insane," someone said.
"No, brother," his comrade responded.
"He has always been insane. We are only noticing it now."
The sandbags were packed with the care of rare, crucial medicines, and
transported back to the tunnel complex in the treeline, with the Human
Noodle watching them with the concentration of a hawk. He literally
never let them out of his sight; the rifle and its scope, strapped
inside a gun case and more or less suspended and shock-proofed by foam
rubber pellets taken from American installations, bothered him much
less than the sandbags.
That held true for his gradual setup as well. He began with the
sandbags, examining them minutely for leaks, for some alteration of
their density. Finding none, he convinced himself he was satisfied,
and made the sappers delicately transport them to the treeline. There
he had rigged a kind of harness, a flat piece of wood to be tied to his
back when he was prone, upon which the sandbags themselves were to be
tied.
"I hope he isn't crushed," said Huu Co, genuinely alarmed.
"He could suffocate," said his sergeant.
Ever so delicately, weighted down under the nearly one hundred pounds
of sand--two forty-pound bags and a ten-pound bag--the Russian began
his long crawl to the shooting position, which was a good two thousand
yards from the tunnel complex far from the burned zone. It took six
hours--six back-breaking, degrading hours of slow, steady crawl through
the grass, suffering not merely
300 STEPHEN HUNTER
from back pain but from the crushing fear of his utter helplessness. A
man under a hundred pounds of sand, crawling into enemy territory. What
could be more ridiculous, more pathetic, more poignant? Any idiot with
a rifle could have killed him. He had no energy, his senses were
dulled by the pain in his back and the breathless smash of the huge
bags on his back. He crawled, he crawled, he crawled, seemingly
forever.
He made it, somehow, and crawled back, just before the first light of
dawn, looking more dead than alive. He slept all day, and all the next
day, because his back still ached.
On the third day, again he crawled, this time with the rifle and a
batch of his specially constructed cartridges. It was much easier. He
made it to the small hill well before dawn and had plenty of time to
set up.
He loaded the rifle, tried to find some sense of relaxation, tried to
will himself into the sort of trance he knew he needed. But he never
could quite relax. He felt tense, twitchy. Twice, noises startled
him. His imagination began to play tricks on him: he saw the great
black plane hovering overhead, and felt the earth open up as it fired.
He remembered crawling desperately, his mind livid with fear, as the
world literally exploded behind him. You could not crawl through such
madness; there was no "through." He crawled and crawled, the
explosions ringing in his ears, dumbstruck that he had chosen to crawl
in the right direction. And what was the right direction?
"If he's out there, he's dead now," he heard one Marine say to
another.
"Nothing could come through that," said the other.
They were so close! They were ten feet away, chatting like workers on
a lunch break!
Solaratov willed himself to nothingness. Like an animal he ceased to
consciously exist. He may not even have been breathing, not as normal
humans would define it, anyhow. His pulse nearly stopped; his body
temp dropped; his eyes closed to slits. He gave himself up to the
TIME TO HUNT 301
earth totally and let himself sink into it and would not let his body
move a millimeter over the long day. Marines walked all around him,
once so close he could see the jungle boots. He smelled the acrid
stench of the burning gasoline when they used the flamethrowers and he
sensed first their joy, when they recovered the rifle he had abandoned
in panic, and then their irritation, when no body itself could be
located. The body was right there, almost under their feet; it still
breathed!
Movement!
The flash of movement recalled him from that day to this one. Through
his binoculars he could see movement just behind the berm in the
predawn light, though it was so far away. The rifle was set into the
bags, firmly moored, sunk into sand so dense and unyielding it was
almost concrete, the heel of its butt wedged just as tightly into the
smaller bag. He squirmed behind it, felt himself pouring himself
around the rifle, not moving it a hair, so perfectly was it placed. His
eye went to the eyepiece.
Again, he saw movement: a face, peering out?
Up, down, then up again, then down.
His finger touched the trigger, his heart hammered.
Here, after so long, the long hunt was over.
No.
He watched them rise, the shooter, then the spotter, rolling over the
sandbag berm so far away, gathering themselves in a gulch at its
bottom, and then heading out.
Infinite regret poured through him.
You were afraid to shoot.
No, he told himself. You were not able today. You were not in the
zone. You could not have made the shot.
It was true.
Better to let them go and gamble that sometime soon he'd have another
opportunity than to rush and destroy all the work he'd invested and all
the hopes and responsibilities riding on his shoulders.
No. You did the right thing.
302 STEPHEN HUNTER
Not months anymore. Not even days. Donny was down to a day.
One more day.
And he would spend it processing out. Then a wake-up, and the chopper
would arrive at 0800 the day after tomorrow and at 0815 it would leave
and he would be on it. He'd be back to Da Nang in an hour, processed
out by 1600, on the freedom bird by nightfall, home eighteen hours
later.
DEROS.
Date of estimated return from overseas. How many had dreamed of it,
had fantasized about it? For his generation, the generation of men
sent to do a duty they didn't quite understand, and that made them
especially hated in their own country, this was as good as it got.
There would be no parades, no monuments, no magazine covers, no movies,
no one waiting to call them heroes. You only got DEROS, your little
piece of heaven. You earned it the hard way, and it wasn't much, but
that's what you got.
What a feeling! He'd never felt anything quite like it before, so
powerful and consuming. It went deep into his bones; it touched his
soul. No joy was so pure. The last time, after getting hit, there'd
been only the fear and the pain and the long months in a crappy
hospital. No
DEROS.
This time, within twenty-four hours: DEROS.
"Hey, Fenn?"
He looked up. It was Mahoney, the ringleader in the anti-Swagger
mutiny, under whose auspices he'd gotten kicked in the head by
somebody.
"Oh, yeah," said Donny, rising from his cot.
"Hey, look, I wanted to come by and tell you I was sorry about that
thing that happened. You're an okay guy.
It turned out all right. Shake my hand on it?"
"Yeah, sure," said Donny, who always found it impossible to hold a
grudge.
He took the other lance corporal's hand, shook it.
"How's Featherstone?"
TIME TO HUNT 303
"He's cool. He's down to one and days; he'll rotate back to the world.
Me, too. Well, two and days, then my ass is on the golden bird."
"You may not even have to make it that far. I hear the ARVN are going
to take over Dodge City, and you guys'll be rotating out early. You
won't even have to see your
DEROS."
"Yeah, I heard that too, but I don't want to count on anything the
Marine Corps wants to give me. I'm still locked onto DEROS. I make
DEROS and I'm home free.
Back to city streets, NYC, the Big Apple."
"Cool," said Donny, "you'll have a good time."
"I'd ask you what it felt like to be so short and I'd buy you a beer,
but I know you want to go to bed and make tomorrow come earlier. All
that processing out." It was company policy that no man went into the
field on his last day.
"Well, sometime back in the world, you can buy me a beer and we'll have
a big laugh over this one."
"We will. You're staying in, right? You're not going out with Swagger
tomorrow."
"Huh?"
"You're not going out with Swagger tomorrow?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I saw him hunched up with and Brophy and a couple of the lifer NCOs in
the S-2 bunker. Like he was going on a mission."
"Shit," said Donny.
"Hey, you sit tight. If they didn't ask you, you don't got to go. Just
be cool. Time to take the golden bird back to the land of honeys and
Milky Ways."
"Yeah."
"Go in peace, bro."
"Peace," said Donny, and Mahoney dipped out of the hootch.
Donny lay back. He checked his watch. It was 2200 hours. He tried to
forget. He tried to relax. Everything was cool, everything was calm,
he was home free.
304 STEPHEN HUNTER
But what the fuck was Swagger up to?
It ate at him. What deal was this?
It bothered him.
He can't go out. He promised.
Shit.
He rose, slipped out the hootch and walked across the compound to the
dark bunker of the S-2 shop, where he found Bob, Feamster and Brophy
bent over maps.
"Sir, permission to enter," he said, entering.
"Fenn, what the hell are you doing here? You should be checking your
gear to turn in to supply tomorrow," said Feamster.
"Is something going on with Sierra-Bravo-Four?"
"Sierra-Bravo-Four is going back to the world; that's what's going on
with Sierra-Bravo-Four," said Bob.
"Looks like a mission briefing to me."
"It ain't nothing that concerns you."
"That's a map. I see route markers pinned on it and coordinates
penciled in. You going on a job, Sierra-Bravo?"
"Negative," said Bob.
"You are too," said Donny.
"It ain't a goddamn thing. Now, you git your young ass out of here,
got that? You got work you should be doing.
This ain't no time for screwing off, even if you're down to a day and a
wake-up."
"What is it?" Donny said.
"Nothing. No big deal."
"Sir?"
"Sergeant," said Feamster, "you ought to tell him."
"It's a rinky-dink recon, that's all, a one-man thing. We haven't
covered the north in a couple of weeks. They could have infiltrated
in, gone through the trees and have set up in the north, a few klicks
out. I'm just going to mosey out to see if I cut tracks to the north.
A couple klicks out, a couple klicks in. I'll be back by nightfall."
"I'm going."
TIME TO HUNT 305
"My ass, you are. You have to spend tomorrow processing out. Nobody
goes into the field on the last day."
"That's right, Fenn," said Captain Feamster.
"Company policy."
"Sir, I can process out in an hour. Just this one last mission."
"Christ," said Swagger.
"I'll worry about it all the way back."
"Man, can't you take no slack at all? Nobody goes out with just a
wake-up left. It's a Marine Corps policy."
"It is, my ass. It's the same deal, a guy to spot, a guy to talk on
the radio. A guy to work security if it comes to that."
"Christ," said Swagger. He looked over at Feamster and Brophy.
"It really is a two-man job," said Brophy.
"If we go, we go. Full field packs, Claymores, cocked and locked. I
would hate to get caught short on the last day."
"Cocked and locked, rock and roll, the whole goddamn nine yards," Donny
said.
"When did you take over this outfit?"
"I'm only doing my job."
"You are a stubborn crazy bastard and I hope that poor girl knows what
a hardhead she's looped up with."
At O-dark-30, Donny rose and found Bob already up.
He slipped into his camouflages for the last time, pulled the pack on.
Canteens ready. Claymores ready. Grenades ready. He painted his face
jungle green and brown. Last time, he told himself in the mirror. He
smiled, showing white teeth against the earthy colors.
He checked his weapons: .45, three mags, M14, eight mags. There was a
ritual here, a natural order, checking one thing then the next, then
checking it all again. It was all ready.
He crawled from his hootch, went to the S-2 bunker, where Bob,
similarly accoutred except that he had the
306 STEPHEN HUNTER
Remington rifle instead of an M14, waited, sipping coffee, talking
quietly with Brophy over the map.
"You don't have to go, Fenn," said Bob, looking over to him.
"I'm going," said Donny.
"Check your weapons, then do a commo check."
Donny examined his M14, pulling the bolt to seat a round in the
chamber, then letting it fly forward. He put the safety on, then took
out the .45, ascertained that the mag was full but the chamber empty,
as Swagger had instructed him to carry the piece. He ran the quick
commo check, and all systems were functioning.
"Okay," said Bob, "last briefing. Up here, toward Hoi An. We go a
straight northward course, through heavy bush, across a paddy dike. We
should hit Hill 840 by 1000 hours. We'll set up there, glass the
paddies below in the valley for a couple of hours, and head back by
1400 hours.
We'll be in by 1800 at the latest. We'll stay in PRC range the whole
time."
"Good work," said Brophy.
"You all set, Fenn?" Bob asked.
"Gung ho, Semper Fi and all that good shit," said Donny, at last
strapping the radio on, getting it set just right. He picked up his
M14 and left the bunker. The light was beginning to seep over the
horizon.
"I don't want to go out the north," said Bob.
"Just in case. I want to break our pattern. We go out the east this
time, just like we did before. We ain't never repeated our-self;
anybody tracking us couldn't anticipate that."
"He's gone, he's dead, you got him," said Brophy.
"Yeah, well."
They reached the parapet wall. A sentry came over from the guard post
down the way.
"All clear?" Swagger asked.
"Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain't
nothing out there."
Bob slipped his head over the sandbags, looked out into the defoliated
zone, which was lightening in the rising
TIME TO HUNT 307
sun. He couldn't see much. The sun was directly in his eyes.
"Okay," he said, "last day-time to hunt."
He set his rifle on the sandbag berm, pulled himself over, gathered the
rifle and rolled off. Donny made ready to follow.
How many days now? Four, five? He didn't know. The canteen had bled
its last drop of water into his throat yesterday before noon. He was
so thirsty he thought he'd die. He hallucinated through the night: he
saw men he had killed, he saw Sydney, where he won the gold, he saw
women he had fucked, he saw his mother, he saw Africa, he saw Cuba, he
saw China, he saw it all.
I am losing my mind, he thought.
Everything was etched in neon. His nerves fired, his stomach heaved,
he had starvation fantasies. I should have brought more food.
Something in his blood sugar made him twitch uncontrollably.
This would be the last day. He could stand it no more.
The days were the worst. There was no shield from the sun and it had
burned his body red in slivers, between the brim of his soft cap and
his collar. The backs of his hands were now so swollen he could hardly
close them.
But the nights were no better: it got cold at night and he shivered. He
was afraid to sleep because he might miss the Americans on their way
out. So he stayed awake at night and slept during the day, except that
it was too hot to sleep well. The insects devoured him. He'd never
leave this cursed chunk of bare ground in the most forgotten land in
the world. He could smell his own physical squalor and knew he was
living beyond the bounds of both civilization and sanitation. He was
putting himself through the absolute worst for this job. Why was he
here?
Then he remembered why he was here.
He looked at his watch: 0600. If they were going on a mission today,
this was the time they'd go.
Wearily, he brought the binoculars to his eyes, and
308 STEPHEN HUNTER
peered ahead. He had to struggle with the focus and he lacked the
strength to hold it steady.
Why didn't I take that shot when-Movement.
He blinked, unbelieving, feeling the sense of miracle a hunter feels
when after the long stalk he at last sees his game.
There was motion down there, though it was hard to make out in the low
light. It looked like the movement of men from the bunkers toward the
berm but he could not be sure.
He abandoned the binoculars, shifted left and squirmed behind the
rifle, trying his hardest not to jar its placement. He poured himself
around it, half mounting the sandbag into which the toe of its butt was
jammed, his fingers finding the grip, his face swimming up toward the
spot weld, feeling the jam of his thumb against his cheekbone.
He looked through it, saw nothing, but in a second his focus
returned.
He could see motion behind the berm, a small gathering of men.
It was an unbearably long shot, he now saw, a shot no man had the right
to take.
The wind, the temperature, the humidity, the distance, the light: it
all said, You cannot take this shot.
Yet he felt a strange calm confidence now.
All his agonies vanished. Whatever it was inside him that made him the
best was now fully engaged. He felt strong, purposeful. The world
ceased to exist. It gradually bled away as he gave himself to the
circle of light before him, his position perfect, the right leg cocked
just to the right to put some tension in his body, tightening his
Adductor magnus but not too much, his hands strong and steady on the
rifle, the spot weld perfect, no parallax in the scope, the butt strong
against his shoulder; it was all so perfect. He controlled his breath,
exhaling most of it, holding just a trace of oxygen in his lungs.
TIME TO HUNT 309
Reticle, he thought.
His focus went to the ancient reticle, to the dagger point that stood
up just beyond the horizontal line that bisected the circle of light,
and watched now, in amazement, as, like a phantasm springing from the
very earth itself, a man came over the berm, dappled in camouflage,
face painted, but even from this far, far distance recognizable as a
member of his own rare species.
He did not command himself to fire; one cannot. One trusts the brain,
which makes the computations; one trusts the nerves, which fire the
processed information down their networks and circuits; one trusts that
little patch of fingertip that alone on the still body must be
responsive.
The rifle fired.
Time in flight: one full second. But the bullet would arrive far
before the sound of it did.
The scope stirred, the rifle cycled lazily, called another cartridge
into its chamber and settled back, all before, ever so lazily, the
green man went down.
He knew the second would come fast and that to hit him he had to do the
nearly unthinkable. Fire before he saw him. Fire on the sure
knowledge that his love would propel him after his partner, just hit,
the knowledge that the bullet must be on its way before the man himself
had even decided what he must do.
But Solaratov knew his man.
He fired just a split second before the second man jumped into view,
arms extended in urgent despair, and as the man climbed, the bullet
traveled its long parabola, rode its arc, rising and falling as the man
himself was squirming desperately over the berm, and when it fell, it
met him exactly as he landed on the ground and lurched toward his
partner and it took him down.
PART III
HUNTING IDAHO
The Sawtooth Mountains Earlier this year
chapter twenty-five
The black dogs were everywhere. They yipped at him at night,
preventing him from sleeping; they haunted his dreams with their
infernal racket; they made him wake early, crabby, bitter, spent.
Were they dreams from bad old times? Or were they just the generalized
melancholy that attends a man who begins to understand he can never be
what he was before he reached fifty, that his body and eyesight and
gift of feel and stamina were on the decline? Or were they from some
deep well of grief, once opened impossible to shut down?
Bob didn't know. What he knew was that he awoke, as usual, with a
headache. It was not yet dawn, but his wife, Julie, was already up, in
the barn, saddling the horses. She clung to her habits even during his
dark times. Ride early, work hard, never complain. What a woman! How
he loved her! How he needed her! How he mistreated her!
He felt hungover, but it was a dream of post-alcoholic pain. He had
not allowed liquor to touch his lips since 1985. He didn't need it.
He'd lost close to a decade and a half to the booze, he'd lost a
marriage, a batch of friendships, half his memories, several jobs and
opportunities;
he'd lost it all to the booze.
No booze. He could do it. Each day was the first day of the rest of
his life.
Lord, I need a drink, he thought today, as he thought every day. He
wanted it so bad. Bourbon was his poison, smooth and crackling, all
harsh smoke and glorious blur.
In the bourbon, there was no pain, no remorse, no bad thoughts: only
more bourbon.
The hip hurt. Inexplicably, after many years of near painlessness, it
had begun to ache all over again. He had
314 STEPHEN HUNTER
to see a doctor about it, and stop gobbling ibuprofen, but he could
not, somehow, make himself do it.
"It hurts," his wife would say.
"I can tell. You don't complain, but your face is white and you move
slowly and you sigh too much. I can tell. You have to see
somebody."
He answered her as he answered everybody these days: a sour grimace, a
furious stubbornness, then wintry retreat behind what she once called
the wall of Bobness, that private place he went, even in the most
public of circumstances, where nobody, not even his wife and the mother
of his only child, was admitted.
He went and stood naked under a shower, and let its heat pound at him.
But it did not purify him. He emerged in as much pain as he had
entered. He opened the medicine cabinet, poured out three or four ibus
and downed them without water. It was the hip. Its pain was dull,
like a deep bone bruise, that throbbed, and lighted the fire of other
pains in his knees and his head and his arms. He'd been hit in so many
places over the years: his body was a lacework of scars that testified
to close calls and not a little luck.
He pulled on ancient jeans and a plaid shirt, and a pair of good old
Tony Lamas, his oldest friends. He went down to the kitchen, found the
coffee hot and poured himself a cup. The TV was on.
Something happening in Russia. This new guy everybody was scared of,
an old-fashioned nationalist, they said. Like the czars in the
nineteenth century, he believed in Russia over everything. And if he
got control, things would get wobbly, since they still had so many
rockets and atomic warheads, and were only a few hours' work from re
targeting America's cities. There was an election coming up in a
couple of months; it had everybody worried.
Even the name was scary. It was Passion. Actually, it was Pashin,
Evgeny Pashin, brother of a fallen hero.
It made Bob's headache worse. He thought Russia had fallen. We'd
stood up to them, their economy had collapsed, they'd had their Vietnam
in Afghanistan, and it
TIME TO HUNT 315
had all fallen apart on them. Now they were back, in some new form. It
didn't seem fair.
Bob didn't like Russians. A Russian had hit him in the hip all those
years ago, and started this run of bad luck that, just recently he
thought he'd beaten down, but then it had returned, ugly and
remorseless.
Bob finished the coffee, threw on a barn jacket and an old beat-up
Stetson and went out of the bright warm kitchen into the predawn cold,
looking like an old cowboy who'd been to his last roundup. A grizzle
of beard clung to his still sunken jaws and he felt woozy, a beat
behind, his mind filled with cobwebs and other junk.
Just enough of the mountains were visible in the rising light. They
stirred him still, but only just. They were so huge, caped in snow,
remote, unknowing, vaster by far than the mountains he had grown up in
back in Arkansas.
They promised what he needed: solitude, beauty, freedom, a place for a
man who went his own ways and only got himself into deep trouble when
he got involved with other men.
He saw the barn, heard the snuffle and rasp of horses, and knew that
Julie and Nikki were saddling up for their morning ride, a family
ritual. He was late. His horse, Junior, would be saddled too, so that
he could join them at the last second. It was not right: to earn the
right to ride a horse, you should saddle it yourself. But Julie let
him sleep for those rare moments when he seemed to do so calmly. She
just didn't know what nightmares lay inside his calm sleep.
He looked about for his other enemy. The landscape, high in the
mountains but still a good mile from the snow, was barren. He saw only
the meadows, where some cattle drifted and fed, miles of dense trees,
and the rugged crinkles of the passes as they led to openings in the
peaks that were the Sawtooths.
But no reporters. No agents. No TV cameras, Hollywood jockeys, slick
talkers with smooth hair and suits that
316 STEPHEN HUNTER
fitted like cream on milk. He hated them. They were the worst. They
had exiled him from a life he had loved.
It began when Bob, at the insistence of a good young man who reminded
him a bit of his wife's first husband, Donny Fenn, had urged him to
return to Arkansas to look into the matter of the death of Earl
Swagger, his father, in 1955. Things got complicated and hairy fast;
some people tried to stop him and he had to shoot back. No indictments
were ever handed down as no physical evidence could be located and
nobody in Polk County would talk to outsiders. But some rag had gotten
wind of it, linked him to another set of events that took place a few
years before that, and taken a picture of him and his wife, Julie, as
they'd walked out of church back in Arizona some months later. He woke
up the next Wednesday to discover that he was america's deadliest man
and that he had struck again. Wherever ex-Marine sniper Bob Lee
Swagger hangs his hat, men die, it pointed out, relating his presence
to a roadside shootout that left ten men, all felons, dead, and the
mysterious deaths of three men, including an ex-Army sniper, in the
remote forest, and recalling that some years earlier he had briefly
been a famous suspect in the shooting of a Salvadorian archbishop in
New Orleans, until the government dropped the charges for reasons that
were to this day unclear. Why, he had even married the widow of a
Vietnam buddy, the paper reported.
Time and Newsweek picked it up and for a few weeks there, Bob had the
worst kind of fame his country could offer: he was hounded by reporters
and cameras wherever he went. It seemed many people thought he held
the keys to a fortune, that he knew things, that he was glamorous,
sexy, a natural-born killer, which, by some odd current loose in
America, made him, in the argot, "hot."
So here he was, on a ranch that was owned by his wife's father's estate
as an investment property, living essentially on charity, without a
penny to his name except for a piddling pension and no way of making
one. The future was unsettled and dark; the peace and quiet and
TIME TO HUNT 317
good living he had achieved seemed all gone. Where am I going to get
the money? My pension ain't enough, by a damn sight. Though it had
never been expressed, he had become convinced that his wife secretly
wished he'd do something with the one asset he owned, his "story,"
which many people believed was worth millions.
He walked toward the barn, watching the sun just begin to smear the sky
over the mountains. The black dogs came upon him and overpowered him
halfway between the structures. That was his name for them: the sense
that he was a worthless failure, that everything he touched turned to
shit, that his presence hurt the two people he cared about the most,
that everything he'd done had been a mistake, every decision wrong, and
anybody who'd gone along with him had ended up dead.
The dogs came fast and hard. They got their teeth into him good, and
in seconds, he was no longer in the barnyard under the mountains where
a red sun was about to pull itself up and light the world with the hope
of a new day, but in some other, dank, foul place, where his own
failures seemed the most prominent land form and the only mercy was
bourbon.
"Well, Mister, nice of you to join us," called Julie.
He looked at his wife, at her smile, which continued to dazzle him if
even now there seemed a layer of fear behind it. He had seen her first
on a cellophane-wrapped photograph that a young man had carried in his
boonie cap in Vietnam, and maybe he had fallen in love with her in that
second. Or maybe he fell in love with her the second the young man
died and she was the only part of him still alive. Still, it took long
years, many of them soaked in bourbon, before he'd finally met her and,
by the odd twists that his life seemed always to take, ended up being
the lucky jerk she took as her second husband. Yet now .. . was it
falling apart on him?
"Daddy, Daddy," yelled Nikki, eight, running to meet him. She grabbed
his blue-jeaned leg.
"Howdy, honey, how's my girl this morning?"
318 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Oh, Daddy, you know. We're going to ride up to Widow's Pass and watch
the sun come across the valley."
"We do that every morning. Maybe we ought to find a new place."
"Honey," said Julie.
"She loves that view."
"I'm only saying," Bob said, "it might be nice to change. Forget it.
It don't mean a thing."
He had more edge in his voice than he'd meant.
Where had it come from? Julie shot him a hurt look at his harsh words,
and he thought. Well, that's fine, I deserve that, and he had himself
in control, everything was fine, he was fine, it was-"I do get tired of
riding the same goddamn place every goddamn morning. You know, there
are other places to ride."
"All right, Bob," she said.
"I mean, we can ride there, no problem. Is that where you want to
ride, sweetie? If that's where you want to ride, that's fine."
"I don't care. Daddy."
"Good. That's where we'll ride."
Who was talking? He was talking. Why was he so mad? Where was this
coming from? What was going on?
But then he had himself back and he was fine again and it would be-"And
why the hell is she riding English? You want her to be some fancy
person? You want her to go to little shows where she wears some red
jacket and helmet and jumps over fences and all the fags clap and the
rich people come and drink champagne, and she learns her old man, who
don't talk so good and swears a mite, he ain't up to them folks who
ride English, he's just an old farm boy from shit-apple Arkansas? Is
that what you want?"
He was yelling. It had come on so fast, so ugly, it had just blown in,
a squall of killing anger. Why was he so mad these days? It made him
sick.
"Bob," his wife, Julie, said with slow, fake sweetness,
TIME TO HUNT 319
"I just want to widen her horizons. Open up some possibilities."
"Daddy, I like English. It's more leg than stirrup; it doesn't hurt
the horse."
"Well, I don't know nothing about English. I'm just a cop's kid from
Hick Town, Arkansas, and I didn't go to no college, I went into the
Marine Corps. Nobody ever gave me nothing. When I see her riding like
that--" He bellowed for a while, as Julie got smaller and smaller, and
Nikki began to cry and his hip hurt and his head ached and finally
Junior spooked.
"Oh, fuck it!" he said.
"What the hell difference does it make?" and stormed back to the
house.
He'd left the TV on, and sat before it, nursing his fury, angered by
the terrible unfairness of it all. Why couldn't he support his family?
What could he have done different?
What could he do?
After a bit, he turned and watched the two of them ride out through the
fence and head up toward Widow's Pass.
Good, that was fine. They could do that. He was better off alone. He
knew where he wanted to go. He stood, raging with fury, and though it
was early, turned and walked to the cellar door, went down into it.
He'd meant to set up a shop here, where he could reload for next
hunting season and work out some ideas he had for wildcat cartridges,
new ways to get more pop out of some old standards. But somehow he'd
never found the energy; he didn't know how long they'd be here, he
didn't know if-He went instead to the workbench, where a previous
occupant had left a set of old, rusty tools and nails and such, and
reached around to grab what was stashed there.
It was a bottle, a pint of Jim Beam, subtly curved like a Claymore,
with its black label and white printing.
The bottle had weight and solidarity to it--it felt serious, like a
gun. He hefted it, went to the steps and sat down. The cellar smelled
of damp and rot, for this was wet country, snowy in the winter and ripe
for floods in the
320 STEPHEN HUNTER
spring. He'd been so long in dry country, this all seemed new. Its
smell was unpleasant: mildew, perpetual moisture.
He held the bottle in his hand, examined it carefully.
Shifting it ever so slightly sent the cargo inside sloshing this way
and that, like the sea at China Beach, where he'd gone on R&R one time
or another, but he couldn't say on which of his three tours.
His hand closed around the cap of the bottle, its seal still pristine.
Just the slightest twist of his hand could open it, much less strength
than that required to kill a man with a rifle, which he had done so
many times.
He looked carefully at the thing. He waggled it just a bit, feeling
the slosh of the fluid. Its brown ness was clear and butterscotchy; it
beckoned him onward.
Yes, do it. One sip, just to take the edge off, to make the bad
pictures go away, blunt the worries about money and prying reporters
and TV cameras, to retreat to some sacred, private land of blur and
wobble and laughter, where only good times are remembered.
Drink to the lost. Drink to the boys. Drink to the dead boys of
Vietnam, drink to poor Donny. Drink to what happened to Donny and how
Donny haunted him, how he had married Donny's wife and fathered Donny's
child and done what could be done to resurrect Donny, to keep Donny
still on this earth.
Yes, drink to Donny, and all the boys killed before their time for Veet
Nam to stop communism.
Oh, how the bottle called him.
Fuck this, he thought.
I have a wife and a daughter and they are out on the range without me,
and so I had best get to them. That is one thing left I can do.
He put the bottle back and climbed the stairs. His hip hurt, but what
the fuck. He headed for the barn, his horse, and his wife and
daughter.
chapter twenty-six
They rode up through the meadow, found the track through the pines and
followed that, always trending upward. The air was cool, though not
really cold, and the sun's presence in the east, over the mountains,
gave the prospect of warmth.
Julie nuzzled her coat closer, tried to cleanse her thoughts of trouble
and put her anger at her husband and what had happened to their life
behind her. Her daughter, the better rider, galloped ahead merrily,
the ugliness of the scene in the barn seemingly forgotten. Nikki rode
so well; she had a gift for it, a natural affinity for the horses, and
was never happier than when she was out in the barn with the animals,
tending them, feeding them, washing them.
But Nikki's happiness was also somewhat illusory. As they neared the
treeline and the ride across the high desert toward Widow's Pass and
the trip to overlook the far valley, she drifted back to her mother.
"Mommy," she said, "is Daddy sick?"
"Yes, he is," said Julie.
"Is he going to be all right?"
"Your father is as strong as ten horses and he has faced and beaten
many enemies in his long and hard life.
He'll beat this one, too."
"What is it. Mommy?" Nikki asked.
"It's a terrible disease called post-traumatic stress disorder.
It has to do with the war he was in. He was in heavy fighting and many
of his very close friends were killed. He was strong enough to put
that behind him and build us a very fine and happy life. But sometimes
there are things that just can't be kept away. It's like a little
black dog has escaped from the secret part of his brain and come out.
It barks, it bites, it attacks. His old wounds are hurting, but
322 STEPHEN HUNTER
also his memory keeps recalling things he thought it had forgotten. He
has trouble sleeping. He is angry all the time and doesn't know why.
He loves you very, very much, though. No matter what happens and how
he acts, he loves you very much."
"I hope he's all right."
"He will be. He needs our help, though, and he needs the help of a
doctor or something. He'll understand that eventually and get some
help, and then he'll be better again. But you know what a stubborn man
he is."
The two rode on in silence.
"I don't like it when he yells at you. It scares me."
"He's not really yelling at me, honey. He's yelling at the men who
killed his friends and the men who sent him over there to fight that
war and then walked away from it.
He's yelling for all the poor boys who got killed and never came back
to the lives they deserved and were forgotten."
"He loves you, Mommy."
"I know he does, honey. But sometimes that's not enough."
"He'll be all right."
"I believe he will be, too. He needs our help, but he needs mostly to
help himself, get some medication, find a way to take advantage of his
very special skills and knowledge."
"I can ride Western. I don't mind."
"I know. It's not about that, really. It's about how mad he is at
things he can't stop. We just have to love him and hope that he sees
how important it is to get some help."
They were out of the trees. The high chaparral was desolate, rock
strewn, clustered with primitive forms of vegetation. Ahead, in the
shadow of the snowcaps, the cut in the earth between mountains that was
called Widow's Pass beckoned, and beyond it, after a course on a shelf
of dirty rock and broken slope, a precipice from which could be seen as
much beauty as has been put on earth. Julie loved it and so did Nikki.
Bob loved it too. They rode here nearly every morning; it got the day
off to a fine start.
TIME TO HUNT 323
"Oh, here we go, baby. Be careful."
The track was tricky, and Julie was speaking more to herself than to
her nimble daughter or to her daughter's horse, the better athlete of
the two animals.
She felt the tension come into her; this was delicate work and she
wished her husband were here. How had they ended up like this?
Nikki laughed.
When the noise came, it didn't shock or surprise the sniper. He had
waited in the dawn for targets before. He knew it had to come, sooner
or later, and it did. It didn't fill him with doubt or regret or
anything. It simply meant:
time to work.
The noise was a peal of laughter, girlish and bright. It bounced off
the stone walls of the canyon, from the shadow of a draw onto this high
plain from close to a thousand yards off, whizzing through the thin
air.
The sniper wiggled his fingers, finding the warmth in them. His
concentration cranked up a notch or so. He pulled the rifle to him in
a fluid motion, well practiced from hundreds of thousands of shots in
practice or on missions.
Its stock rose naturally to his cheek as he pulled it in, and as one
hand flew to the comb, the other set up beneath the forearm, taking the
weight of his slightly lifted body, building a bone bridge to the stone
below. He found the spot weld, the one placement of cheek to stock
where the scope relief would be perfect and the circle of the scope
would throw up its image as brightly as a movie screen. He cocked one
knee halfway up toward his torso to build a muscular tension into his
position, as he had been trained to do.
The child. The woman. The man.
Hey, there!"
She turned at the voice to see her husband riding toward her and her
heart soared.
324 STEPHEN HUNTER
But then it subsided: it was not Bob Lee Swagger but the neighboring
rancher, an older widower named Dade Fellows, another tan, tall,
leathery coot, on a chestnut roan he controlled exquisitely.
"Mr. Fellows!"
"Hello, Mrs. Swagger. How're you this morning?"
"Well, we're just fine."
"Hello there, honey."
"Hi, Dade," said Nikki. Dade was an occasional hanger-on at the ranch,
welcome for his knowledge of the area, his sure way with animals and
guns.
"Y'all haven't seen a dogie or two up this way? My fence is down and
I'm a little short. They're so stupid, they might have come this
way."
"No, it's been completely quiet. We're riding through the pass to see
the sun come across the valley."
"That is a sight, isn't it?"
"Would you care to join us?"
"Well, ma'am, I've got a full day and I'd like to find my baby cows.
But, hell, why not? I ain't seen the sun rise in quite a while. I'm
up too early."
"You work too hard, Mr. Fellows. You should slow down."
"If I slow down, I might notice how old I got," he laughed, "and what a
shock that would be! Okay, there, Nikki, you lead the way. I'll
follow your mother.
Nimble Nikki took her big chestnut along the climbing path, and it rose
between the narrow canyon walls until they seemed to swallow her. Then
she sunk into shadow where the pass was really deep. Julie was close
behind, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw her daughter
break clear, into the light. At the end of the enfilade was a shelf of
land that ran along the mountainside for half a mile, gently trending
upward, and then it reached a vantage point on the far valley.
Nikki laughed at the freedom she felt when she emerged, and in a second
had freed her horse to find its own pace; it preferred speed and began
to gallop. A fear
TIME TO HUNT 325
rose in Julie's heart; she could never catch the girl, nor stay up with
her if she had to, and she felt the urge to call out, but suppressed it
as pointless, for there was no stopping Nikki, a natural-born hero like
her father. The eight-year-old galloped ahead, the horse's bounding
grace eating up the distance to the vantage point.
Julie then came into the light and saw that, safely, Nikki had slowed
to a walk as she neared the precipice.
She turned back and called, "Come on, Mr. Fellows!
You'll miss it."
"I'm coming, ma'am," he yelled back at her.
She cantered ahead, feeling the rise of the mountains on either side
but also the freedom of the open space ahead of her. Its beauty
lightened her burden and the mountains looked down solemn and dignified
and implacable.
She approached Nikki, even as she heard Fellows coming up behind her,
driving his horse a bit harder.
"Look, Mommy!" Nikki cried, holding her horse tight between her strong
thighs, leaning forward and pointing out.
Here, there was no downslope beyond the edge, just sheer drop, which
afforded a vista of the valley beyond, the ridge of mountains beyond
that as the sun crested them. The valley was green and undulating,
thatched with pines, yet also open enough to show off, sparkling in the
new sun, its creeks and streams. Across the way there was a falls, a
spume of white feathery water that cascaded down a far cliff. Under
the cloudless sky and in the pale power of the not yet fully risen sun,
it had a kind of storybook quality to it that was, even if you'd seen
it a hundred-odd times, breathtaking.
"Ain't that something?" said Fellows.
"That is the true West, the one they write about, yes, sir."
Swagger had aged, as all men do, even as the sniper himself had aged.
But he was still lean and watchful and there was a rifle in the
scabbard under his saddle. He looked dangerous, like a special man who
would never
326 STEPHEN HUNTER
panic, who would react fast and shoot straight, which is exactly what
he was. His eyes darted about under the hood of his cowboy hat. He
rode like a gifted athlete, almost one with the animal, controlling it
unconsciously with his thighs while his eyes scanned for signs of
aggression.
He would not see the sniper. The sniper was too far out, the hide too
carefully camouflaged, the spot chosen to put the sun in the victim's
eyes at this hour so that he'd see only dazzle and blur if he looked.
The crosshairs rode up to Swagger, and stayed with the man as he
galloped along, finding the same rhythm in the cadences, finding the
same up-down plunge of the animal. The shooter's finger caressed the
trigger, felt absorbed by its beckoning softness, but he did not fire.
He knew the range perfectly: 742 meters.
Moving target, transversing laterally left to right, but also moving up
and down through a vertical plane. By no means an impossible shot, and
many a man in his circumstances would have taken it. But experience
told the sniper to wait: a better shot would lie ahead, the best
shot.
With a man like Swagger, that's the one you took.
Swagger joined his wife, and the two chatted, and what Swagger said
made her smile. White teeth flashed. A little tiny human part in the
sniper ached for the woman's beauty and ease; he'd had prostitutes the
world over, some quite expensive and beautiful, but this little moment
of intimacy was something that had evaded him completely.
That was all right. He had chosen to work in exile from humanity.
Seven hundred thirty-one meters.
He cursed himself. That's how shots were blown, that little fragment
of lost concentration which took you out of the operation. He briefly
snapped his eyes shut, absorbed the darkness and cleared his mind, then
opened them again to what lay before him.
Swagger and his wife had reached the edge: 722 meters.
Before them would run a valley, unfolding in the sunlight as the sun
climbed even higher. But what this
TIME TO HUNT 327
meant to the sniper is that at last his quarry had ceased to move. In
the scope he saw a family portrait: man, woman and child, all at nearly
the same level, because the child's horse was so big it put her up with
her parents. They chatted, the girl laughed, pointed at a bird or
something, seethed with motion. The mother stared into the distance.
The father, his eyes still seeming watchful, relaxed just the tiniest
bit.
The crosshairs bisected the square chest.
He stroked the trigger and the gun jarred and as it came back in a
fraction of a second, he saw the tall man's chest explode as the
Remington 7mm Magnum tore through it.
It was a moment of serene perfection, until she heard a sound that
reminded her somehow of meat dropping on a linoleum floor--it had a
flat, moist, dense reverberation to it, somehow--and at that same
instant felt herself sprayed with warm jelly. She turned to see Dade's
gray face, his eyes lost and locked on nothingness as he fell backward
off his horse. His chest had been somehow eviscerated, as with an ax,
its organs exposed and spewing blood in torrents, his heart
decompressing with a pulsing jet of deoxygenated, almost black liquid
spurting in an arc over the precipice. He hit the ground, in a cloud
of dust, landing with the solidity of a sack of potatoes falling off a
truck as his horse panicked and bucked, hooves flailing in the air. As
a nurse, from too many nights in a reservation ER, Julie was no
stranger to blood or to what mysteries lay inside of bodies, but the
transformation was so instantaneous that it shocked her, even as, from
far off, the report of a rifle shot finally arrived.
The sound seemed to unlock her brain from the paralysis into which it
had blundered. She knew in the next nanosecond that they were under
fire, and in the nanosecond after that her daughter was in danger, and
she found the will to turn and yell "Run!" as loud as possible, and
328 STEPHEN HUNTER
yanked hard to the left on her reins, driving her horse into Nikki's to
butt it about.
My daughter, she thought. Don't kill my daughter.
But like hers, Nikki's reflexes were fast and sure, and the girl had
already reached the same conclusion, reeled her horse to the left, and
in another second, both horses were free of the ruckus caused by Dade's
plunging animal.
"Go!" shrieked Julie, kicking and lashing her horse with the reins.
The animal churned ahead, its long legs bounding over the dirt toward
the narrow enfilade of the pass. She was to the left of and a little
behind Nikki, that is, between Nikki and the shooter, which is where
she wanted to be.
The horses thundered along, careering madly for safety, and Julie was
bent over the neck of hers like a jockey, but she could not keep up
with Nikki's, which, a stronger animal with a much lighter load, began
to gun away and ahead, exposing the child.
"Nikki!" she screamed.
Then the world went. It twisted into fragments, the sky was somehow
beneath her, dust rose like a gas, thick and blinding, and she felt
herself floating, her heart gathering fear for the knowledge of what
would come next. The horse screamed piteously and she slammed into the
ground, her head filling with stars, her will scattering in confusion.
But as she slid through the dust and the pain, feeling her skin rip and
something in her body shatter, and the horse scampered away, she looked
to see that Nikki had halted and was circling around toward her.
She rose, astounded that she could move through all the fire that was
eating her skin, and had a moment when she noticed the blood pouring
across her shirt. She staggered, went to one knee, but then rose
again, and screamed at Nikki, "No! No! Run! Run!" waving her away
desperately.
The girl pulled up, confused, the fear bright on her face.
"Run for Daddy!" Julie screamed, then turned herself
TIME TO HUNT 329
and began to scramble for a ravine to the right, a copse of rough
vegetation and tough little trees, hoping that the shooter would follow
her and not the girl.
Nikki watched her mother run toward the edge of the shelf, then turned
herself, lashed the horse, felt it churn into a gallop. The dust of
the slashing hooves floated everywhere, clotting her breathing, and the
tears on her face matted up with it, but she stayed low and whipped the
horse and whipped it again, and though it neighed in pain, whipped it
still a third time, gouging it with her English boots, and in seconds,
the dark shadows of the enfilade covered her and she knew she was
safe.
Then she heard a shot.
chapter twenty-seven
He fired and the sight picture at the moment of ignition--the stout,
heroic chest quadrisected perfectly by the crosshairs zeroed exactly
for a range of seven hundred meters--told him instantly that he had
hit. As the scope came back, he saw red from the falling body, just a
fraction of a second's worth, but square in the full chest, until it
was lost in the dust.
Then he shifted to the woman but-He was astonished by the swiftness
with which the woman responded. His whole shooting scenario was based
on her utter paralysis when her husband's chest exploded.
She would be stupefied and the next shot would be easy.
The woman reeled her horse about almost instantaneously and he was
astounded at how much dust floated into the air. You cannot anticipate
everything, and he had not anticipated the dust. He had no shot for
almost a second, and then, faster than he could have begun to imagine,
she and the child were racing hellbent and crazed toward the pass and
safety.
He had a momentary flash of panic--never before had such a thing
happened!--and took his eye from the scope to get an unimpeded visual
on the fleeing woman. She was much farther away than he had figured;
the angle was oblique, dust floated in the air. Impossible shot! Only
seconds remained as she and the girl raced toward the pass.
He fought his terror, and instead let the rifle sit, and picked up his
secret advantage in all this, a set of Leica binoculars with a laser
range finder, since unknown distance shooting is almost pointless, and
he put the glasses on her to see the readout as it shot back to him,
straight and true. She was now 765 meters, now 770, racing away.
TIME TO HUNT 331
His mind did the computations as he figured the lead, all while setting
the binocs down and reacquiring the rifle, flipping through a bolt
throw with the shell ejecting cleanly to the right. A lifetime's
experience and a gift for numbers told him he had to shoot a good nine
meters ahead of her--no, no, it would be nine if she were preceding at
an exact ninety degrees, but she was on the oblique, more like
forty-five or fifty degrees, so he compensated to seven meters. A
mil-dot--that is, one of a series of dots etched into the
crosshairs--in the scope, at this range, was about thirty inches, so
when he went back to the rifle, he led her six mils and a mil high,
that is, putting her just inside the edge of the solid part of the
horizontal cross hair
Impossible shot! Incredible shot! Close to eight hundred meters on a
fast-mover at the oblique away from him in heavy dust.
The rifle jolted in recoil and came back to reveal a ruckus of
disturbance. He could see nothing. The horse was down, then up,
bucking and kicking in fury, dust floating in the air.
He cycled the bolt again.
Where was she? The child was forgotten but that was not important.
He searched the dust, then put the rifle down and seized the
binoculars, which would give him a much bigger field of vision.
Where was she? Had he hit her? Was she about? Was she dead? Was it
over? He waited for centuries, and without oxygen. But now, there she
was, hit--he could see the blood on her blue shirt--and stiff with the
pain of the fall.
But she had not gone into shock, was not surrendering and, like many
who discover themselves in mortal circumstances for the first time,
giving up to lie and wait for the final blow. Heroically she moved
away from the horse and the dust to the edge.
Soft target. Giving herself up for the girl, who didn't matter.
332 STEPHEN HUNTER
She was at the edge.
He put the binoculars squarely on her and had just a glimpse of her
face, only the fleetest impression of her beauty. A melancholy closed
upon him, but his heart was strong and hard and he put it away. He
pressed a button to fire a spurt of smart laser at her and it bounced
back and he looked to the readout and got a range of 795 meters, and
knew he'd have to hold dead center of the first low vertical mil-dot.
He set the binocs down, went back to the rifle and saw her at the edge,
just standing there, daring him to concentrate on her while the
daughter vanished into the shadows of the pass. The woman's foolish
courage sickened him.
Her dead husband's insane courage sickened him.
Who were these people? What right did they have to such nobility of
spirit? Why did they consider themselves so special? What gave them
the right? He put the center of the first mil-dot below the horizontal
cross hair on her.
The hatred flared as he pulled the trigger.
The rifle jolted. Time in flight was about a second, maybe a little
less. As the 175 grains of 7mm Remington Magnum arched across the
canyon, tracing an invisible parabola, unstoppable and tragic, he had
the briefest second to study her. Composed, calm, on two feet, defiant
even at the end, holding her wound. Then she disappeared as,
presumably, the bullet struck her. She tumbled down and down, raising
dust, until she vanished from sight.
He felt nothing.
He was done. It was over.
He sat back, amazed to discover the inside of his jacket soaked with
sweat. He felt only emptiness, just like the last time he'd had this
man in his scope--only the professional's sense of another job being
over.
He put the scope back on the man. Clearly he had been eliminated. The
gravity of the wound, its immensity, its savagery, was apparent even
from this distance. But he
TIME TO HUNT 333
paused. So resilient, so powerful, such an antagonist. Why take the
chance?
It felt unclean, as if he were dishonoring someone who might be as
great as himself. But he again yielded to practicality:
this wasn't about honor among snipers but doing the job.
He threw the bolt, ejecting a shell, and put the crosshairs squarely on
the underside of the chin, exposed to him by the man's supine, splayed
position. This would drive a bullet upward through the brain at
eighteen-hundred feet per second. A four-inch target at 722 meters.
Another great shot. He calmed himself, watched the crosshairs still,
and felt the trigger break. The scope leaped, then leaped back; the
body jerked and again there seemed to be a cloud, a vapor, of pinkish
mist. He'd seen it before. The head shot, evacuating brains in a fog
of droplets. The fog dissipated. There was nothing more to see or
think.
He rose, threw the rifle over his shoulder. He gathered the
equipment--the ten-pound sandbag was the heaviest--and re cased the
binoculars. He looked about for traces of himself and found plenty:
scuffs in the dust, the three ejected shells, which he scooped up. He
grabbed a piece of vegetation from the earth and used it to sweep the
dust of his shooting position, rubbing back and forth until he was
convinced no sign of his having been there existed. He threw the brush
down into the canyon before him, and then set out walking, trying to
stay on hard ground so as to leave no tracks.
He climbed higher into the mountains, expertly and without fear. He
knew it would be hours at the least before any kind of police reaction
to his operation could be commenced. His problem now would be the
remote possibility of running into random hunters or hikers, and he had
no wish to kill witnesses, unless he had to, which he would do without
qualm.
He walked and climbed for several hours, finally passing over the
crests and descending to rough ground. He
334 STEPHEN HUNTER
hit his rendezvous spot by three and got out the small transmitter and
sent his confirmation.
The helicopter arrived within an hour, flying low from the west. The
evac was swift and professional.
He was done.
chapter twenty-eight
Bob rode up through the trees and across the barren, high desert to the
mountains. He loped easily along, trying to calm himself, wondering if
he could make it before the sun rose fully. The black dogs seemed to
have gone back to their kennel. They kept no schedule, nothing set
them off; they were just there some days and not some others. Who
knew? Who could tell, who could predict?
He tried to think coherently about his future. Clearly he could not
stay here much longer, because the weight of living off his in-laws was
more than he could bear. It turned all things sour and made him hate
himself. But he doubted he could get started in his profession, which
was running a lay-up barn for horses, not until he sold his spread in
Arizona and had the money to invest in an upgraded barn and other
facilities. Plus, it would mean getting to meet the local vets,
getting them to give him referrals. Maybe the place was already
crowded with lay-up barns.
He could sell his "story." Too bad old Sam Vincent wasn't around to
advise him, but Sam had come to a sorry end in that Arkansas matter
which even now Bob had his doubts about starting up. It got a lot of
people killed, for not much but the settling of forgotten scores. He
had some shame left in him for that thing. Maybe scores weren't worth
it.
But if Sam wasn't around, who could he trust? The answer was, nobody.
He had an FBI agent friend in New Orleans and a young writer still
struggling with a book, but not yet having had any success. Who could
he approach?
The jackals of the press? No, thank you, ma'am.
They turned him off beaucoup.
No, the "story" thing wasn't any solution to his problems, not without
the advice of somebody he trusted. That
336 STEPHEN HUNTER
left shooting. He knew his name was worth something in that
world--some fools considered him a hero, even, like his father, a
blasphemy he couldn't begin to even express--and the idea of making
that pay somehow sickened him. But if he could pick up work at a
shooting school, where they taught self-defense skills to cops and
military personnel, maybe that could bring in some money and some
contacts. He thought he knew some people to call. Maybe that would
work. At least he'd be among men who'd been in the real world and knew
what it meant to both put out and receive fire. He tried to imagine
such a life.
The sound was clear and distinct, though far off. No man knew it
better than he.
Rifle shot. Through the pass. High-velocity round, lots of echo, a
big-bore son of a bitch.
He tensed, feeling the alarm blast through him, and had a moment of
panic as he worked out that it was possible the shot had come from
exactly where Julie and Nikki ought to be. In the next split second he
realized he didn't have a rifle himself and he felt broken and
useless.
Then he heard a second shot.
He kicked Junior and the horse bolted ahead. He raced across the high
desert toward the approaching mountains, his mind filling with fear.
Hunters, who happened to get a good shot at a ram or an antelope in the
vicinity of his women? Random shooters, plinkers? But not up this
high. Maybe there was some trick of the atmosphere, which made the
sound of the shots travel from miles away, up through the canyons, and
it only now reached him and was meaningless. He didn't like the second
shot. A stupid hunter could shoot at something wrong, but then he
wouldn't shoot again. If he shot again, he was trying to kill what he
was shooting at.
There was a third shot.
He kicked the horse, bucking a little extra speed out of it.
Then he heard the fourth shot.
TIME TO HUNT 337
Christ!
Now he was really panicked. He reached the darkness of the pass but
had a moment's clarity and realized the last thing he should do would
be to race out there, in case someone was shooting.
As he slowed the animal down to a walk, he saw Nikki's horse, its
saddle empty, come limping toward him.
A stab of pain and panic shot through his heart. My baby? What has
happened to my baby? Oh, Christ, what has happened to my baby?
A prayer, not one of which had passed his lips in Vietnam, came to him,
and he said it briefly but passionately.
Let my daughter be all right.
Let my wife be all right.
"Daddy?"
There she was, huddled in the shadows, crying.
He ran to her, snatched her up, feeling her warmth and the strength of
her young body. He kissed her feverishly.
"Oh, God, baby, oh, thank God, you're all right, oh, sweetie, what
happened, where's Mommy?"
He knew his wild-eyed fear and near loss of control were not helping
the girl at all, and she sobbed and shuddered.
"Oh, baby," he said, "oh, my sweet, sweet baby," soothing her, trying
to get both himself and her calmed down, back in some kind of
operational zone.
"Honey? Honey, you have to tell me. Where's Mommy? What happened?"
"I don't know where Mommy is. She was behind me and then she
wasn't."
"What happened?"
"We were looking at the sunrise across the valley. Mr.
Dade was there. Suddenly he blew up. Mommy screamed, the horses
bucked, and we turned and rode for safety.
Mommy was--oh, Daddy, she was right behind me.
Where's Mommy, Daddy? Oh, Daddy, what happened to Mommy?"
338 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Okay, sweetie, you have to be brave now and get a hold of yourself. We
are going to have to ride out of here soon. You have to settle down
and be calm. I'm going to go look for Mommy."
"No, Daddy, no, please don't go, he'll kill you too!"
"Honey, now, you be calm. I will take a look-see. You stay here in
the shadows. When you feel up to it, gather your horse and get
Junior's reins. We will be riding like hell out of here very shortly.
All right?"
His daughter nodded solemnly through her tears.
Bob turned, whipped off his hat, and slithered along the wall of the
pass toward the light. As he neared it, he slowed .. . way .. . down.
Fast movement would attract the eye, draw another shot if the bad boy
was still scoping. Swagger thought he wouldn't be. Swagger thought
he'd hit his primary and his secondary and the girl couldn't figure in
anything, and so he was beating it to higher elevations or his pickup
or whatever. Who knew?
That had to be figured out later. The issue now was Julie.
He edged ever so slowly toward the light, at last setting himself so
that he had a good vantage point. Some dust still hung in the air, but
the sun was bright now. He could see poor Dade about one hundred-odd
yards away, right at the edge. From Dade's broken posture alone it was
clear the old man was finished, but a monstrous head wound testified to
no possibility of survival. Bad work.
Expanding bullet, presumably fired in through the eye or something, a
cranial vault explosion, gobbets of brain and blood flung everywhere.
He looked about for a sign of his wife, but there was none. He saw her
horse over in the shade, calm now, chewing on some vegetation. He
looked about for a hide in case she had gotten to one, but there were
no rocks or bushes thick enough to conceal or protect her. That left
the edge; he tried to recall what lay beyond the edge, and built an
image of a rough slope littered with scrub vegetation and rocks, down a
few hundred feet to a dense mess
TIME TO HUNT 339
of pines where the creek ran through. Was that right, or was it some
other place?
He thought to call, but held back.
The sniper hadn't seen him yet.
There really wasn't a decision to be made. He knew what had to be
done.
He slipped back to where Nikki, who had now collected herself, stood
with the two horses.
"Do you have any sense of where the shots came from, sweetie? Did you
hear them at all?"
"I only remember the last one. As I was riding and had reached the
pass. It came from behind."
"Okay," he said. If the shot came from "behind," that probably meant
he was shooting from across the canyon, on the ridgeline that ran
anywhere from two hundred meters to one thousand meters away. That
jibed with the position of Dade's body, too. Whatever, it meant the
shooter was cut off from where they were by the gap between the
mountains and wouldn't be able to reach them from here on out, unless
he came after them. But he wouldn't come after them. He'd fall back,
get to safe ground, hit his escape route and be out of here.
"All right," he said, "we are getting the hell out of here and bee
lining straight for home, where we'll call the sheriff and get him and
his boys in here."
She looked at him, stricken.
"But, Mommy--she's out there."
"I know she is, honey. But I can't get her now. If I go out there, he
may shoot me, and then what have we got?"
He didn't think he would be. He had worked it out to the next logical
step: whoever had done the shooting, his target was not Dade Fellows
but Bob Lee Swagger. Someone had reconned him, planned the shot, knew
his tendencies and lay in wait from a safe hide a long way off. It was
a sniper, Bob felt, another professional.
"She might be hurt. She might need help bad."
"Listen to me, honey. When you are shot, if it's a bad hit, you die
right away, like poor Mr. Dade. If it ain't hit
340 STEPHEN HUNTER
you seriously, you can last for several hours. I saw it in Vietnam;
the body is very tough and it'll fight on its own for a long time, and
you know how tough Mommy is! So there's no real advantage to going to
Mommy right now.
We can't risk that. She's either already dead or she's going to pull
through. There's nothing in between."
"I--I want Mommy," said Nikki.
"Mommy's hurt."
"I want Mommy, too," said Bob.
"But sweetie, please trust me on this one. We can't help Mommy by
getting ourselves killed. He may still be there."
"I'll stay," said Nikki.
"You're such a brave girl. But you can't stay. We have to get out of
here, get the state cops and a medical team here fast. Do you
understand, baby girl? That's what's best for Mommy, all right?"
His daughter shook her head; she was not convinced and nothing would
ever convince her but Bob knew in his Marine heart that he had made the
right decision--the tough one, but the right one.
chapter twenty-nine
It had to happen sooner or later and he was glad it happened sooner. It
had to be gotten out of the way.
"Mr. Swagger," said Lieutenant Benteen, the chief investigator of the
Idaho State Police, "would you mind stepping over here for a second,
sir?"
Bob knew what was coming. As he stood on the escarpment, two and a
half hours had passed since the shooting. His daughter was with a
female state police detective and a nurse back at the house; here, an
investigation team and coroner's team worked the crime site, while
below a team of sheriffs deputies struggled through the trees and
underbrush for a sign of Julie Swagger.
Across the gorge, detectives and deputies looked for evidence of the
shooting site, ferried there by a state police helicopter that idled on
that side of the gap.
"I figured you would be talking with me," said Bob.
"You go ahead. Let's get it done with."
"Yes, sir. You know, when a wife is killed it's been my experience
that ninety-eight percent of the time, the husband is somehow involved,
if he didn't do the thing himself.
Seen a lot of that."
"Sure, it figures."
"So I have to ask you to account for your whereabouts at the time of
the shooting."
"I was on the other side of the pass, riding up to join my wife and
daughter. We usually go out for an early morning ride. Today we had
words, and I let the girls go alone. Then I got mad at myself for
letting my damn ego seem so important, so I went after them. I heard
four shots and rode like hell, to find my baby girl in the shadows of
the pass. I looked out and saw poor Dade. I decided the best thing
was to get Nikki back to the house, where I called you all and you know
the rest."
342 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Did it occur to you to look for your wife?"
"It did, but I had no medical supplies and I didn't know if the shooter
was around, so I thought it best to get the girl out of here and call
in the sheriff and a medical team."
"You are, sir, I believe, a marksman of some note."
"I am a shooter, yes. I was a Marine sniper many years ago. I won the
big shoot they hold in the east back in 1970. The Wimbledon Cup, they
call it. Not for tennis, for long-range shooting. Also, I have been
in some scrapes over the years. But, sir, can I point a thing out?"
"Go ahead, Mr. Swagger."
"I think you'll find them shots came from the other side of the gap.
That's what my daughter said, and that's what the indication of Dade's
body said. Now, there ain't no way I could have fired those shots from
over there and gotten to my daughter over here in a very few seconds.
There's a huge drop-off, then some rough country to negotiate.
I was with my daughter within thirty seconds of the last shot. You can
also see the tracks of my horse up here from the ranch house, and no
tracks that in any way connect me with what went on over there. And
finally, you have surely figured out by now that poor Dade is gone
because whoever pulled the trigger thought he was hitting me."
"Duly noted, Mr. Swagger. But I will have to look into this further,
to let you know. I will be asking questions. I have no choice."
"You go ahead. Do I need a lawyer?"
"I will notify you if you are considered a suspect, sir.
That's how we do it out here."
"Thank you."
"But you were a shooter who used a rifle with a scope?
And if I don't miss my best guess, this was a pretty piece of shooting
with just such a rig."
"Possibly. I don't know yet."
"This couldn't be some sniper thing? Some other
TIME TO HUNT 343
sniper? Maybe someone getting even with you for something in your
past?"
"I don't know, sir. I have no idea at all."
The lieutenant's radio crackled and he picked it up.
"Benteen here, over."
"Lieutenant, I think we found it. Got a couple of shells and some
tracks, a coffee thermos and some messed-up ground. You care to come
and look?"
"I'll hop right over, Walt, thanks." He turned to Bob.
"They think they found the shooting position. Care to look at it, Mr.
Swagger? Maybe you can tell me a thing or two about this sort of
work."
"I would like to see it, yes, sir. There's no word on my wife?"
"Not yet. They'll call as soon as they know."
"Then let's go."
Of course the chopper was a Huey; it was always a Huey and Bob had the
briefest of flashbacks as the odor of aviation fuel and grease floated
to his nose. The bird rose gracefully, stirring up some dust, and
hopped the canyon to the ridgeline on the other side and set its cargo
down.
Bob and the lieutenant jumped out and the bird evacuated.
A hundred yards away and up, a state policeman signaled and the two men
followed a rough track up to the position. There, the younger cop
stood over a little patch of bare ground. Something glittered and Bob
could see two brass shells in the dust. There were some other marks
and scuffs, and a Kmart thermos.
"This appears to be the spot," said the young officer.
"Maybe we'll get prints off the thermos," Benteen said.
Bob bent and looked at the marks in the earth.
"See that," he said, pointing to two circular indentations in the dust
right at the edge of the patch.
"Those are marks of a Harris bipod. The rifle rested on a Harris
bipod."
"Yeah," said the cop.
344 STEPHEN HUNTER
Bob turned and looked back across the gulf to where Dade's body still
rested under a coroner's sheet. He gauged the distance to be close to
two hundred meters dead on, maybe a little downward elevation but
nothing challenging.
"A hard shot, Mr. Swagger?"
"No, I would say not," he said.
"Any half-practiced fool could make that shot prone off the bipod with
a zeroed rifle."
"So you would look at this and not necessarily conclude that it's a
professional sniper's work."
"No. In the war we did most of our shooting at four hundred to eight
hundred meters, on moving targets. This is much simpler: the distance
is close, his angle to the target was dead on, the target was still.
Then he misses the other two shots he takes at my wife, or at least he
didn't hit her squarely. Then he comes back and hits the old man in
the head as he lays dead in the dirt. No, as I look at this, I can't
say I see anything that speaks of a trained man to me. It could have
been some random psycho, someone who had a rifle and the itch to see
something die and suddenly he sees this chance and his darker self gets
a hold of him."
"It's been known to happen."
"Yes, it has."
"Still, it would be a mighty big coincidence, wouldn't it? That such a
monster just happens to nail your wife? I mean, given who and what you
were?"
"As you say, such things have been known to happen.
Let's take a look at the shell."
"Can't pick it up till we photo it," said the younger man.
"He's right. That's procedure."
"Okay, you mind if I squat down and get a look at the head stamp?"
"Go ahead."
Bob bent down, brought his eyes close to the shell's rear end.
TIME TO HUNT 345
"What is it?" asked Benteen.
"Seven-millimeter Remington Mag."
"Is that a good bullet?"
"Yes, sir, it is. Very flat shooting, very powerful. They use them
mainly in hunting over long distances. Rams, 'lopes, elk, the like.
Lot of 'em in these parts."
"A hunter's round, then. Not a professional sniper's round."
"It is a hunter's round: I've heard the Secret Service snipers use it,
but nobody else."
He stood, looked back across the gap. Bipod marks, circular, where the
bipod sat in the dust, supporting the rifle. Two 7mm Remington Mag
shells. Range less than two hundred meters, a good, easy shot. Nearly
anyone could have made it with a reasonable outfit. Now what was
bothering him?
He didn't know.
But there was some oddness here, too subtle for his conscious mind to
track. Maybe his unconscious brain, the smarter part of him, would
figure it out.
He shook his head, to himself, mainly.
What is wrong with this picture?
"I wonder why there's only two shells," said Benteen, "if he fired four
times. That would be two missing."
"Only one," said Bob.
"He may not have ejected the last shell. As for the third shell, maybe
it caught on his clothes or something, or he kicked it when he got up.
Or it was right by him and he picked it up. That's not surprising.
The shells are light; they get moved about easily. You can never find
all your shells. I wouldn't pay too much attention to that."
Was that it?
"Good point," said the elderly officer.
But then the radio crackled again. Old Benteen picked it off his belt,
listened to the stew of syllables, then turned to Bob.
"They found your wife."
chapter thirty
She would live. She lay encased in bandages. The broken ribs, five of
them, were difficult; time alone would heal them. The shattered
collarbone, where a bullet had driven through, missing arteries and
blood-bearing organs by bare millimeters, would heal with more
difficulty, and orthopedic surgery lay ahead. The abraded skin from
her long roll down the mountainside, the dislocated hip, the
contusions, bruises, muscle aches and pains, all would heal
eventually.
So now she lay heavily sedated and immobile in the intensive care unit
of the Boise General Hospital, linked to an EKG whose solid beeping
testified to the sturdiness of her heart despite all the fractures and
the pain. Her daughter sat on her bed, flowers filled the room, two
Boise cops guarded the door, the doctor's prognostication was
optimistic and her husband was there for her.
"What happened?" she finally said.
"Do you remember?"
"Not much. The police have talked to me. Poor Mr.
Fellows."
"He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I am very sorry about
that."
"Who did this?"
"The police seem to think it was some random psycho in the hills. Maybe
a militia boy, full of foolish ideas, or someone who just couldn't
handle the temptation of the rifle."
"Have they caught anybody?"
"No. And there were no distinguishable prints on a cheap thermos they
recovered. They really don't have much. A couple of shells, some
scuffs in the dust."
She looked off. Nikki was coloring steadily, a big TIME TO HUNT 347
Disney book. The scent of flowers and disinfectant filled the room.
"I hate seeing you here," Bob said.
"You don't belong here."
"But I am here," she said.
"I've asked Sally Memphis to come up and stay with you. She's a couple
of months pregnant but she was eager to help. I called Dade Fellows's
daughter, and she said her father has a ranching property over in
Custer County, remote and safe in a valley. When you get better, I
want Sally to move you up there. I want you and Nikki protected."
"What are you talking about?"
"Nikki, honey, why don't you go get a Coke?"
"Daddy, I don't want a Coke. I just had a Coke."
"Well, sweetie, why don't you get another Coke. Or get Daddy a Coke,
all right?"
Nikki knew when she was being kicked out. She got up reluctantly,
kissed her mother and left the room.
"I haven't told the cops," he said, "because they wouldn't get it and
they couldn't do anything about it. But I don't think this is a
wandering Johnny with a rifle. I think we got us a big-time serious
professional killer and I think I'm the boy he's after."
"Why on earth?"
"There could be many reasons. As you know, I have been in some
scrapes. I don't know which of 'em would produce this. But what that
means is until I get this figured out, I believe you are in more danger
around me than less. And I need freedom. I need to get about, to look
at things, to get some items sorted out. This guy's got a game going
on me; but now I have the advantage because for a few days more he
won't know he missed me. I have to operate fast and learn what I can
in the opening."
"Bob, you should talk to the FBI if you don't think these Idaho people
are sophisticated enough."
"I don't have anything they'd recognize yet. I have to
348 STEPHEN HUNTER
develop some evidence. I'd just get myself locked in the loony bin."
"Oh, Lord," she said.
"This is going to be one of your things, isn't it?"
There was a long moment of quiet. He let the anger in him rise, then
top off, then fall; then he began to hurt a little.
"What do you mean, 'things'?"
"Oh, you have these crusades. You go off and you get involved in some
ruckus. You don't talk about it but you come back spent and happy. You
get to be alive again and do what you do the best. You get to be a
sniper again. The war never ended for you. You never wanted it to
end. You loved it too deeply. You loved it more than you ever loved
any of us, I see that now."
"Julie, honey, you don't know what you're saying.
You're on painkillers. I want you to be comfortable. I'm just going
to look into some things for a while."
She shook her head sadly.
"I can't have it. Now it's come to my daughter. The war. It killed
my first husband and now it's come into my life and you want to go off
and fight it all over again, and my daughter, who is eight, had to see
a man die. Do you have any idea how traumatizing that is? No child
should have to see that. Ever."
"I agree, but what we have is what we have and it has to be dealt with.
It can't be ignored. It won't go away."
He could see that she was crying.
"Get some help," she finally said.
"Call Nick; he's with the FBI. Call some Marine general; he'll have
connections.
Call one of those writers who's always wanting to do a book with you.
Get some help. Take some money from my family's account and hire some
private guards. Don't be Bob the Nailer anymore. Be Bob the husband
and Bob the father. Bob the man at home. I can't stand that this is
in our life again. I thought it was over, but it's never over."
"Sweetie, I didn't invent this. It's not something I
TIME TO HUNT 349
thought up. Please, you're upset, you had a terrible experience,
you're in what we call post-traumatic stress syndrome, where it keeps
flashing before your eyes and you're angry all the time. I've been
there. Time is going to heal you up, your mind as well as your
body."
She said nothing. She looked at Bob, but wasn't seeing him any
longer.
"But I have to deal with this. Okay? Just let me deal with this."
"Oh, Bob--" She started to cry again.
"I can't lose you, too. I can't lose both you and Donny to the same
war. I can't. I can't bear it."
"I just have to look into this. I'll be careful. I know this stuff; I
can work a lot faster alone and you'll be safer without me there at
all. Okay?"
She shook her head disconsolately.
"You have to answer me a question or two, please. All right?"
After a bit, she nodded.
"You went over this with the cops, only they won't let me see the
report. But they don't have a clue. He's already got them outfoxed.
Now, I'm assuming no two shots followed upon each other closely. Is
that right?"
She paused again, thinking, and then at last yielded.
"Yes."
"There must have been at least two seconds between shots?"
"It felt like less than that."
"But if he hits Dade in the chest, then he hits you in the collarbone,
and you're forty, fifty yards away, it took him some time to track and
fire. So it had to be at least two, maybe three seconds."
"You won't put Nikki through this?"
"No. Now--he hits you moving. I'm guessing you were really galloping,
right?"
"Yes."
"That's a pretty good shot."
350 STEPHEN HUNTER
He sat back, his respect slightly increased. An oblique fast-mover, at
two hundred yards.
"Why does he hit you in the collarbone and not in the full body?"
"It's my right collarbone, not my left one," she said.
"That means he was aiming at my back, dead center.
What I remember is the horse seemed to stumble forward just a bit, and
the next second it was like somebody hit me in the shoulder with a
baseball bat. The second after that I was down; there was dust
everywhere. Nikki came back to me. Somehow I got up. I was afraid
he'd shoot at her, so I yelled at her. Then I ran away from her so
that he'd shoot me instead."
"It still makes no sense. If he's two hundred yards out, then the time
in flight is so minimal he hits the sight picture he sees, and he don't
shoot if he don't see the right sight picture. You're sure the horse
stumbled?"
"I felt it. Then, whack, and I was down, there was dust everywhere,
the horse was crying."
"Okay. Next, I heard four shots fired. One into Dade, the knock-down
shot, the third shot, then the fourth into Dade's head."
"Thank God I never saw that."
"But there was a third shot?"
"I think so. But I went off the edge."
"You jumped off the edge? You weren't knocked down?"
"I jumped."
"God. Great move. Right move, great move, smart move. Guts move.
Guts move. That gets you a medal in the Marine Corps."
"It was all I could think to do."
"So he did take a third shot. He was shooting at you.
Man, I cannot figure why he is missing. Why is he missing?
You jump, but at two hundred meters or less, with a seven-millimeter
Remington Mag, what he sees is what he gets. He can't miss from that
range. Maybe he's not so good."
TIME TO HUNT 351
"Maybe he's not."
"Maybe the cops are right. It's some psycho."
"Maybe it is. But that would cheat you out of your crusade, wouldn't
it? So it can't be a psycho. It's got to be a master sniper."
He let her hostility pass.
"Another thing I can't figure is how come he's shooting at you at all?
You'd think once he did me, it's over.
That's it. Time to--" But then something came into his mind.
"No. No, I see. He has to hit you, because he knows exactly how
quickly you could get back to the ranch and a phone and that's cutting
it too close. Nikki's not a problem, she's probably not together
enough to think of that.
But he has to do you to give himself the right amount of time to make
his getaway. He's figured out the angles. I can see how his mind
works. Very methodical, very savvy."
"Maybe you're dreaming all this up."
"Maybe I am."
"But you want the man-to-man thing. I can tell. You against him, just
like Vietnam. Just like all the other places. God, I hate that war.
It killed Donny, it stole your mind. It was so evil."
But then Nikki came back with a Coke for her dad and a nurse came in
with pills and their time alone was finished.
chapter thirty-one
The wind howled; it was cloudy today, and maybe rain would fall. Bob's
horse, Junior, nickered nervously at the possibility, stamped, then put
his head down to some mountain vegetation and began to chew.
Bob stood at the shooter's site. It was a flat nest of dust across an
arroyo, not more than two hundred meters from where Dade had been shot
and maybe 280 from where Julie fell. If he had had a range finder, he
would have known the range for sure, but those things--laser-driven
these days, much more compact than the Barr and Stroud he'd once
owned--cost a fortune, and only wealthy hunters and elite SWAT or
sniper teams had them. It didn't matter; the range was fairly easy to
estimate from here because the body sizes were easy to read.
If you know the power of your scope, as presumably this boy would, you
could pretty much gauge the distance from how much of the body you got
into your lens. That worked out to about three hundred yards, and then
it was a different matter altogether: you entered a different universe
when the distances were way out.
Why did you miss her? he wondered. She's running away, she's on the
horse, the angle is tough; the only answer is, you're a crappy shot.
You're a moron. You're some asshole who's read too many books and
dreamed of the kick you get looking through the scope when the gun
fires, and you see something go slack. So you do the old man, then you
swing onto the racing woman, her horse bounding up and down, and it's
too much shot for you.
You misread the angle, you misread the distance, you just ain't the boy
for the job.
Okay. You fire, you bring her down. There's dust, and then she
emerges from the dust, running toward the edge.
She wants you to shoot her, so you concentrate on her,
TIME TO HUNT 353
not the girl. You've really got plenty of time. There's no rush,
there's no up-down plunge as there would be on a horse; it's really a
pretty elementary shot.
But you miss again, this time totally.
No, you ain't the boy you think you are.
That added up. That made sense. Some asshole who thought too much
about guns and had no other life, no family, no sane connection to the
world. It was the sickening part of the Second Amendment computation,
but there you had it: some people just could not say no to the godlike
power of the gun.
But how come there ain't no tracks?
Apparent contradiction: he's not good enough to make the shot, but he
is good enough to get out cold without any stupid mistakes, like the
print of his boot in the dust, which would at least narrow it down a
bit. Yet he leaves two shells and a thermos. Yet all three are clean
of prints. How could that be? Is he a professional or not? Or is he
just a lucky amateur?
Bob looked at the bipod marks, still immaculate in the dust,
undisturbed by the process of making plaster casts of them. They would
last until the rain, and then be gone forever. They told him nothing;
bipod, big deal. You could buy the Harris bipod in any gun store in
America. Varmint shooters used them and so did police snipers. Some
men used them when they took their rifles to the range for zeroing or
load development, but not usually: because the bipod fit by an
attachment to the screw hole in which the front swing swivel was set.
That meant the screw could work lose under a long bench session and
that it could change the point of impact much more readily than a good
sandbag. Some hunters used them, but it was a rarity, because you
almost never got a prone position in the field, so the extra weight was
not worth it. Some men used them because they thought they looked
cool. Would that be our guy?
He stared at imprints of the legs, trying to divine a
354 STEPHEN HUNTER
meaning from their two, neat square images. No meaning arrived.
Nothing.
But contemplating the bipod got him going in another direction: What's
he see? Bob wondered. What's he see from up here?
So he went to the prone and took up a position indexed to the marks in
the dust. From there he had a good, straight-on view of Dade's
position, yes; and the shot-with the stable rifle, the sun behind you,
the wind calm as it was at that point in the day--it was just a matter
of concentrating on the crosshairs, trusting the rig, squeezing the
trigger and presto, instant kill. You threw the bolt, and no more than
a few seconds later you had the woman.
He now saw how truly heroic Julie had been. Nine-hundred-ninety-nine
out of a thousand inexperienced people just freeze on the spot. Sniper
cocks, pivots a degree or so, and he has a second kill. But bless her
brilliant soul, she reacted on the dime when Dade went down, and off
she went with Nikki. He had to track her.
Bob had a thought here. What happens if the point where she was hit
wasn't within pivot range of this spot?
What happens if there's some impediment? But there wasn't. It was an
easy crank, an arc of about forty degrees, nothing in the way, you just
track her, lead her a bit and pull the trigger.
Why did he miss?
Bob thought he had it.
He probably didn't keep the rifle moving as he pulled the trigger.
That's why he hits her behind the line of her spine, he's centered on
her, but he stops when he fires, and the bullet, arriving a tenth of a
second later, drills her trailing collarbone.
That made a sort of sense, though usually when you were tracking a bird
or a clay with a shotgun and you stopped the gun, you missed the whole
sucker, not just hit behind on it. Maybe the birds moved faster. On
the other hand, the range was a lot farther than any wing or clay
TIME TO HUNT 355
shooting. On the third hand, the velocity of the rifle bullet was much
faster.
There were so many goddamned variables.
He sat back.
Used to be pretty goddamned good at this stuff, he thought. Used to
have a real talent for understanding the dynamics of a two- or
three-second interval when the guns were in play.
None of this made any goddamned sense, not really, and he had no way of
figuring it out and his head ached and it was about to rain and destroy
the physical evidence forever and Junior nickered again, bored.
Okay, he thought, rising, troubled, facing the fact that he had not
really made any progress. He turned to go back to the horse and his
empty house and his unopened bottle of Jim Beam and Then he saw the
footprint.
Yeah, the cops missed a footprint, that's likely.
He looked more closely and saw in a second that it was his own
footprint, a Tony Lama boot, size 11, the one he was wearing, yes, it
was his goddamned own. A little hard to ID because he'd turned and
sort of stretched it out and That was it.
There it was.
He turned back, quickly, and stared at the bipod imprints.
If he has to pivot the bipod, the bipod marks would be distorted.
They'd be rounded from the fast, forceful pivot as he followed her, and
one would inscribe an arc through the dust. But these bipod marks were
squared off, perfectly.
Bob looked at them closely.
Yes: round, perfect, the mark of the bipod resting in the dust until
the rain came and washed it away.
He saw it now: this was a classic phony hide. This hide was built to
suggest the possibility that a screwball did the
356 STEPHEN HUNTER
shooting. But our boy didn't shoot from here. He shot from somewhere
else, a lot farther out.
Bob looked at the sky. It looked like rain.
He rode the ridgeline for what seemed like hours, the wind increasing,
the clouds screaming in from the west, taking the mountains away. It
felt like fog, damp to the skin. Up here, the weather could change
just like that. It could kill you just like that.
But death wasn't on his mind. Rather, his own depression was. The
chances of finding the real hide were remote, if traces remained at
all. When the rain came, they would be gone forever. Again he
thought: nicely thought out. Not only does the phony hide send the
investigation off in the wrong direction, it also prevents anyone from
seeing the real hide until it is obliterated by the changing weather.
So if he does miss something, the weather takes it out.
Bob was beginning to feel the other's mind. Extremely thorough. A man
who thinks of everything, will have rehearsed it in his mind a hundred
times, has been through this time and time again. He knows how to do
it, knows the arcane logic of the process. It isn't just pure autistic
shooting skill, it's also a sense of tactical craft, a sense of the
numbers that underlie everything and the confidence to crunch them fast
under great pressure, then rely on the crunching and make it happen in
the real world. Also:
stamina, courage, the guts of a burglar, the patience of a great
hunter.
He knew we came this way. But some mornings we did not. He may have
had to wait. He was calm and confident and able to flatten his brain
out, and wait for the exact morning. That was the hardest skill, the
skill that so few men really had. But you have it, don't you,
brother?
A sprinkle of rain fell against his face. It would start pounding soon
and the evidence would be gone forever.
Why didn't I think this through yesterday? I'd have had
TIME TO HUNT 357
him, or some part of him. But now, no, it would be gone.
He's won again.
He searched for hides, looking down from the trail into the rough rocks
beneath. Every so often there'd be a spot flat enough to conceal a
prone man, but upon investigation, each spot was empty of sign. And as
he rode, of course, he got farther out. And from not everywhere on the
ridge was the shelf of land visible where both Dade and Julie could be
hit in the same sweep.
So on he went, feeling the dampness rise and his sense of futility rise
with it. He must have missed it, he thought, or it's already gone.
Damn, he was a long way out. He was a long way out. He was getting
beyond the probable into the realm of the merely possible. Yet still
no sign, and Junior drifted along the ridge, over the small trail,
tense at the coming rain, Bob himself chilled to the bone and close to
giving up.
He couldn't be out this far!
He rode on even farther. No sign yet. He stopped, turned back. The
target zone was miniature. It was far distant. It was-Bob dismounted,
let Junior cook in his own nervousness.
He'd thought he'd seen a little point under the edge of the ridge,
nothing much, just a possibility. He eased down, peeking this way and
that, convinced that, no, he was too far out, he had to go back and
look for something he had missed.
But then he saw something just the slightest bit odd. It was a tuft of
dried brush, caught halfway down the ridge.
Wind damage? But no other tufts lay about. What had dislodged it?
Probably some freak accident of nature .. .
but on the other hand, a man wiping away marks of his presence in the
dust, he might just have used a piece of brush to do it, then tossed
the brush down into the gap.
But it caught, and as it dried out over the two days, it turned brown
enough so a man looking for the tiniest of anomalies might notice it.
Bob figured the wind always ran north to northwest
358 STEPHEN HUNTER
through this little channel in the mountains. If the wind carried it,
it would have come off the cliff just a bit farther back. He turned
and began to pick his way back in that direction and had already missed
it when, looking back to orient himself to the tuft of bush, he noticed
a crevice and, peering into it, he looked down to see just the tiniest,
coffin-sized flatness in the earth, where a man could lie unobserved
and have a good view of the target zone.
He eased down, oriented himself to where Dade had died and Julie fell.
He was careful not to disturb the earth, in case any scuff marks
remained, but he could see none. At last he turned to get his best and
first look at the killing zone from the shooting site.
Jesus Christ!
He was eight hundred, maybe a thousand meters out.
The killing zone was a tiny shelf far off at the oblique.
There were no features by which he could get an accurate
distance-by-size estimation, and even on horseback, the targets would
have been tiny. The scope wouldn't have blown them up too much,
either: too big a scope would have amplified the wobble effect until a
sight picture was simply unobtainable and, worse, it would have had too
small a breadth of vision at this range. If he lost contact with his
targets, he might never have gotten them back in time. He had to be
shooting a 10X, nothing bigger than a 12X, but probably a 10.
That's some shooting. That's beyond good; that's in some other sphere.
Careful, precise, deliberate, mathematical long-range shooting is very
good shooting. Knowing instinctively how far to lead a moving target
in the crux of the fraction of the second you've got, knowing it
automatically, subconsciously .. . that is great shooting.
Man, that is so far out there, it's almost beyond belief. He knew of
one man who could hit that shot, but he was dead, a bullet having
exploded his head in the Ouachitas.
There might be two or three others but-He now saw too why the shooter
had missed the kill on Julie.
TIME TO HUNT 359
He didn't make a mistake: he had the shot perfectly.
He was just betrayed by the physics of the issue, the bullet's time in
flight. When he fired, he had her dead to rights. But it takes a
second for the bullet to travel that long arc, to float down on her;
and there's plenty of time, even in that limited period, for her to
alter her body movement or direction enough to cause the miss. That's
why Dade is at least an easier shot. He's not moving, to say nothing
of at the oblique, on horseback galloping away as Julie was.
Bob sat back. His head ached; he felt dizzy; his heart beat wildly.
He thought of another man who might have done this.
He'd buried the name and the memory so far it didn't usually intrude,
though sometimes, in the night, it would come from nowhere, or even in
the daylight it would flash back upon him, that which he had tried to
forget.
But he had to find out. There had to be a sign. Somehow, some way,
the shooter would have left something that only another shooter could
read.
Oh, you bastard. Come on, you bastard. Show me yourself. Let me see
your face, this once.
He forced himself to concentrate on the hard scrabble dirt before him.
He felt a raindrop, cold and absolute, against his face. Then another.
The wind rose, howling.
Junior, made restive, whinnied uncomfortably. The rain was moments
away. He looked and he could see it, a gray blur hurtling down from
the mountains. It would come and destroy. The sniper had planned for
it. He was brilliant, well schooled in stratagems.
But who was he?
Bob leaned forward; he saw only dust. Then, no, no, yes, yes, he
leaned forward even farther, and up front, where the dust had clearly
been swept clean, he saw very small particulate residue. Tiny beads of
it, tiny grains.
White sand. White sand from a sandbag, because a great shooter will go
off the bag, prone.
The rain began to slash. He pulled his jacket tight. If
360 STEPHEN HUNTER
the sandbag was here--it had to be, to index the rifle to the killing
zone--then the legs were splayed this way. He bent to where they'd
have been, hoping for the indent of a knee, anything to leave a human
mark of some sort. But it was all scratched out, and gone, and now the
rain would take it forever.
The rain was cold and bitter. It was like the rain of Kham Due. It
would come and wipe anything away.
But then he went down farther, and amid the small and meaningless
dunes, he at last found what he had yearned for. It was about two
inches of a sharp cut in the dust, with notches for the thread holding
sole to boot.
Yes. It was an imprint of the shooter's boot, the edge of the sole,
the tiny strands of thread, the smoothness of the contour of the boot
itself, all perfectly preserved in the dust. The shooter had splayed
his foot sideways, to give him just the hint of muscular tension that
would tighten his muscles up through his body. It was an adduct or
muscle, Adductor magnus. That was the core of the system, as isolated
by a coach who'd gotten so far into it he'd worked out the precise
muscles involved.
That was Russian. A shooting position developed by the coach A.
Lozgachev prior to the fifty-two Olympics, where the Eastern Bloc
shooters simply ran the field. In sixty, someone else had been coached
by A. Lozgachev and his system of the magic Adductor magnus to win the
gold in prone rifle.
T. Solaratov, the Sniper.
chapter thirty-two
It was late at night. Outside, the wind still howled, and the rain
still fell. It was going to be a three-day blow.
The man was alone in a house that was not his own, halfway up a
mountain in a state he hardly knew at all. His daughter was in town,
close to her injured mother, in the care of a hired nurse until an FBI
agent's wife would arrive.
In the house, there was no sound. A fire burned in the fireplace, but
it was not crackly or inviting. It was merely a fire and one that
hadn't been tended in a while.
The man sat in the living room, in somebody else's chair, staring at
something he had placed on the table before him. Everything in the
room was somebody else's;
at fifty-two, he owned nothing, really; some property in Arizona that
was now fallow, some property in Arkansas that was all but abandoned.
He had a pension and his wife's family had some money, but it wasn't
much to show for fifty-two years.
In fact, what he had to show for those fifty-two years was one thing,
and it was before him on the table.
It was a quart bottle of bourbon: Jim Beam, white label, the very best.
He had not tasted whiskey in many years. He knew that if he ever did,
it might kill him: he could wash away on it so easily, because in its
stupefying numbness there was some kind of relief from the things that
he could not make go away in any other way.
Well, sir, he thought, tonight we drink the whiskey.
He had bought it in 1982 in Beaufort, South Carolina, just outside
Parris Island. He had no idea why he was there: it seemed some drunken
journey back to his roots, the basic training installation of the
United States Marine Corps, as if nothing existed before or after. It
was the end of an epic, seven-week drunk, the second week of which
362 STEPHEN HUNTER
his first wife had fled for good. Not many memories of the time or
place could be recalled, but he did remember staggering into a liquor
store and putting down his ten spot getting the change and the bottle
and going out, in the heat, to his car, where what remained of his
belongings were dumped.
He sat there in the parking lot, hearing the cicadas sing and getting
set to crack the seal and drown out his headache, his shakes, his
flashbacks, his anger in a smooth brown tide. But that day, for some
reason, he thought to himself: maybe I could wait just a bit before I
open it up.
Just a bit. See how far I can get.
He had gotten over twelve years out of it.
Well, yes, sir, tonight is the night I open it up.
Bob cracked the seal on the bottle. It fought him for just a second,
then yielded with a dry snap, slid open with the feeling of cheap metal
gliding on glass. He unscrewed the cap, put it on the table, then
poured a couple of fingers' worth into a glass. It settled, brown and
stable, not creamy at all but thin, like water. He stared at it as if
in staring at it he could recognize some meaning. But he saw the
futility, and after a bit raised it to his lips.
The smell hit him first, like the sound of a lost brother calling his
name, something he knew so well but had missed so long. It was
infinitely familiar and beckoning, and it overpowered, for that was the
way of whiskey: it took everything and made everything whiskey. That
was its brilliance and its damnation too.
The sip exploded on his tongue, hot with smooth fire, raspy with
pouring smoke, with the totality that made him wince. His eyes burned,
his nose filled, he blinked and felt it in his mouth, sloshing around
his teeth. Even at this last moment it was not too late, but he
swallowed it, and it burned its way down, like a swig of napalm,
unpleasant as it descended, and then it hit and its first wave
detonated, and there was fire everywhere.
He remembered. He forced himself to.
Last mission. Donny was DEROS. He should have
TIME TO HUNT 363
been out processing No, the little bastard, he couldn't let anything
alone. He had to be so perfect. He had to be the perfect Marine. He
had to go along.
Why did you let him?
Did you hate him? Was there something in you that wanted to see him
get hit? Was it Julie? Was it that you hated him so fiercely because
he was going back to Julie and you knew you'd never have her if he made
it?
Donny hadn't made it. Bob did have Julie. He was married to her,
though it took some doing. So in a terrible sense he had gotten
exactly what he desired. He had benefited.
Hadn't seemed so at the time, but the one Johnny who came out of the
fracas with more than he went into it was he, himself, Gy.Sgt. Bob Lee
Swagger, USMC (Ret.).
Don't think, he warned himself. Don't interpret; list.
List it all. Dredge it up. He had to concentrate only on the
exactness of the event, the hard questions, the knowable, the palpable,
the feel able
What time was it?
O-dark-30, 0530, 06 May 72. Duty NCO nudges me awake, but I am already
conscious and I have heard him come.
"Sarge?"
"Yeah, fine."
I rise before the sun. I decide not to wake Donny yet;
let him sleep. He's DEROS tomorrow, on his way back to the world. I
check my equipment. The M40 is clean, having been examined carefully
the night before both by myself and the armorer. Eighty rounds of M1
18 7.62mm NATO Match ammunition have been wiped and packed into pouches
on an 872 harness. I slip into my shoulder holster for my .380; over
that I pull on my cammies, I lace and tighten my boots. I darken my
face with the colors of the jungle. I find my boonie cap. I slip into
the 782 gear, with the ammunition, the canteens, the .45, all checked
last night. I take the rifle, which hangs by its sling, off the nail
in the bunker wall, slide five M118s into it, closing the bolt to drive
the top one into the chamber. I pull back to
364 STEPHEN HUNTER
put on safe, just behind the bolt handle. I'm ready to go to the
office.
It's going to be a hot one. The rainy season is finally over, and the
heat has come out of the east, settling like a mean old lady on us poor
grunts. But it's not hot yet. I stop by the mess tent, where
somebody's already got coffee going, and though I don't like the
caffeine to jimmy my nerves, it's been so quiet of late I don't see any
harm in having a cup.
A PFC pours it for me into a big khaki USMC mug, and I feel the great
smell, then take a long, hard hot pull on it. Damn, that tastes good.
That's what a man needs in the morning.
Sitting in his living room, the fire burning away, Bob took another sip
on the whiskey. It, too, burned on the way down, then seemed to whack
him between the eyes, knock him to blur and gone. He felt the tears
come.
06 May 1972. 0550.
I head to the S-2 bunker and duck in. Lieutenant Brophy is already up.
He's a good man, and knows just when to be present and when not to be.
He's here this morning, freshly shaved, in starched utilities. There
seems to be some sort of ceremonial thing going on.
"Morning, Sergeant."
"Morning, sir."
"Overnight your orders came through on the promotion.
I'm here to tell you you're officially a gunnery sergeant in the United
States Marine Corps. Congratulations, Swagger."
"Thank you, sir."
"You've done a hell of a job. And I know you'll be bang-up beaucoup
number one at Aberdeen."
"Looking forward to it, sir."
Maybe the lieutenant feels the weight of history.
Maybe he knows this is Bob the Nailer's last go-round.
Three tours in the "Nam with an extension for the last one, to give him
nineteen straight months in country. He
TIME TO HUNT 365
wants to observe it properly and that satisfies me. In some way,
Brophy gets it, and that's good.
We go over the job. We work the maps. It's an easy one. I'll go
straight out the north side, over the berm and out to the treeline.
Then we work our way north toward Hoi An, through heavy bush and across
a paddy dike. We go maybe four klicks to a hill that stands 840 meters
high and is therefore called Hill 840. We'll go up it, set up
observation and keep a good Marine Corps eyeball on Ban Son Road and
the Thu Bon River. I'm done killing:
it's straight scout work. I'm here for firebase security, nothing
else. Along those lines, we plan to look for sign of large-body troop
movements, to indicate enemy presence, on the way out and the way
back.
The lieutenant himself types up the operational order and enters it in
the logbook. I sign the order. It's official now.
I tell the clerk to go get Fenn. It's 0620. We're running a little
late, because I've let Fenn sleep. Why did I do this?
Well, it seemed kind. I didn't want to break his balls on the last
day. He really isn't needed until we leave the perimeter, as the
mission has been well discussed and briefed the night before; he knows
the specs better than I do.
He shows up ten minutes later, the sleep still in his eyes, but his
face made-up green, like mine. Someone gets him some coffee. The
lieutenant asks him how he's doing.
He says he's fine, he just wants to get it over with and head back to
the world.
"You don't have to go, Fenn," I say.
"I'm going," he says.
Why? Why does he have to go? What is driving him? I never understood
it then; I don't understand it now.
There was no reason, not one that ever made no sense to me. It was the
last, the tiniest, the least significant of all the things we did in
the "Nam. It was the one we could have skipped and oh, what a
different world we'd live in now if we had.
366 STEPHEN HUNTER
Bob threw down another choker of bourbon. Hot fire.
Napalm splashes, the whack between the eyes. The brown glory of it.
"Check your weapons," I tell Fenn, "and then do commo."
Donny makes certain the M14 is charged, safety on.
He takes out his .45, drops the mag, sees that the chamber is empty.
That's the way I've told him to carry it. Then he checks out the
PRC-77, which of course reads loud and clear since the receiving
station is about four feet away.
But we do it by the numbers, just like always.
"You all set, Fenn?" I ask.
"Gung ho, Semper Fi and all that good shit," says Donny, at last
strapping the radio on, getting it set just right, then picks up the
weapon, just as I pick mine up.
We leave the bunker. The light is beginning to seep over the horizon;
it's still cool and characteristically calm.
The air smells sweet.
But then I say, "I don't want to go out the north. Just in case. I
want to break our pattern. We go out the east this time, just like we
did before. We ain't never repeated ourself; anybody tracking us
couldn't anticipate that."
Why did I say that? What feeling did I have? I did have a feeling. I
know I had one. Why didn't I listen to it?
You've got to pay attention, because those little things, they're some
part of you you don't know nothing about, trying to reach you with
information.
But now there was no reaching back all these years; he had made a snap
decision because it felt so right, and it was so wrong. Bob finished
the glass with a last hot swig, then quickly poured another one, two
fingers, neat, as on so many lost nights over so many lost years. He
held it before his eyes as the blur hit him, and almost laughed.
He didn't feel so bad now. It was easy. You could just dig it out
that simply, and it was there, before him, as if recorded on videotape
or as if, after all these years, the memory somehow wanted to come out
at last.
"He's gone, he's dead, you got him," says Brophy,
TIME TO HUNT 367
meaning, The white sniper is gone, there's nobody out there, don't
worry about it. He should have been dead, too. We cooked his ass in
20mm and 7.62. The Night Hag sprayed him with lead. The flamethrower
teams barbecued him to melted fat and bone ash. Who could live through
that? We recovered his rifle. It was a great coup, waiting to be
studied back at Aberdeen by none other than yours truly.
But--why did we believe he was dead? We didn't find no body, we only
found the rifle. But how could he have survived all that fire, and the
follow-up with the flamethrowers and then the sweep with grunts? No
one could have survived that. Then again, this was a terrifically
efficient professional. He didn't panic, he'd been under a lot of
fire, he'd taken lots of people down. He kept his cool, he had great
stamina.
"Yeah, well," I tell the lieutenant.
We reach the eastern parapet wall. A sentry comes over from the guard
post down the way.
"All clear?" I ask.
"Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain't
nothing out there."
But how would he know? The night vision is only good for a few hundred
yards. The night vision tells you nothing.
It simply means there's nobody up close, like a sapper platoon. Why
didn't I realize that?
He took another dark, long swallow. It was as if something hit him
upside the head with a two-by-four, and his consciousness slipped a
little; he felt his bourbon-powered mellowness battling the melancholy
of his memory as it presented itself to him after all these years.
I slip my head over the sandbags, look out into the defoliated zone,
which is lightening in the rising sun. I can't see much. The sun is
directly in my eyes. I can only see flatness, a slight undulation in
the terrain, low vegetation, blackened stumps from the defoliant. No
details, just a landscape of emptiness.
368 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Okay," I say.
"Last day: time to hunt." I always say this. Why do I think it's so
cool? It's stupid, really.
I set my rifle on the sandbag berm, pull myself over, gather the rifle
and roll off.
I land, and there's a moment there where everything is fine, and then
there's a moment when it isn't. I've done this hundreds of times
before over the past nineteen months, and this feels just like all
those times. Then time stops. Then it starts again and when I try to
account for the missing second, it seems a lot has happened. I've been
punched backwards, come to rest against the berm itself.
For some reason my right leg is up around my ears. I can make no sense
of this until I look down and see my hip, pulped, smashed, pulsing my
own blood like a broken faucet.
Somewhere in here I hear the crack of the rifle shot, which arrives
just a bit after I'm hit.
It makes no sense at all and I panic. Then I think:
mother fuck I'm going to die. This fills even my hard heart with
terror. I don't want to die. That's all I'm thinking: I don't want to
die.
There's blood everywhere, and I put my fingers on my wound to stanch
it, but the blood squirts out between them. It's like trying to carry
dry sand; it slips away. I can see bone, shattered. I feel the wet.
Again an odd second where there is no pain and then the pain is so
heavy I think I'll die from it alone. I'm thinking of nothing but
myself now: there's no one in the world but me. A single word forms in
my head, and it's morphine.
Bob looked into the amber bourbon, so still, so calm.
The wind rushed outside, cold and harsh. He heard himself screaming,
"I'm hit!" from across the years, and saw himself, hip smashed, blood
pouring out. And he knew what happened next.
He took a swallow. It landed hard. He was quite drunk. The world
wobbled and twisted, fell out of and back into focus a dozen times. He
was crying now. He hadn't cried then but he was crying now.
"No!" he screamed, but it was too late, for the boy had
TIME TO HUNT 369
leaped over the berm too, to cover his sergeant, to inject morphine, to
drag the wounded man to cover.
Donny lands and at that precise moment he is hit. The bullet excites
such vibration from him as it crashes through that the dust seems to
snap off his chest. There's no geyser, no spurt, nothing; he just goes
down, dead weight, his pupils slipping up into his head. From far off
comes the crack of that rifle. Is there something familiar in it? Why
does it now seem so familiar?
The sound of it played in his ears: crisp, echoless, far away, but
clear. Familiar? Why familiar? Rifles and loads all have their
signature, but this one, what was it? What about it? What information
did it convey? What message did it carry?
"Donny!" I cry, as if my cry can bring him back, but he's so gone
there's no reaching him. He collapses into the dust a foot or so from
me with the crash of the uncaring, and how I do it I don't know, but I
somehow squirm to him and hold him close.
"Donny!" I scream, shaking him as if to drive the bullet out, but his
eyes are glassy and unfocused, and blood is coming out of his mouth and
nose. It's also coming out of his chest, pouring out. No one ever
gets how much blood there is: there's lots of it, and it comes out like
water, thin and sloppy and soaking.
His eyelids flutter but he's not seeing anything. There's a little
sound in his throat, and somehow I have him in my arms and now I'm
screaming, "Corpsman! Corpsman!"
I hear machine gun fire. Someone has jumped to the berm with an M60
and is throwing out suppressive fire, arcs and arcs of tracers that
skip out across the field, lifting the dirt where they hit. A 57mm
recoil-less rifle fires, big booming flash, that blows a mushroom cloud
into the landscape to no particular point, and more and more men come
to the berm, as if repulsing a human-wave attack.
Meanwhile, Brophy has jumped, and he's on both of us, and there are
three or four more grunts, pressing
370 STEPHEN HUNTER
against us, firing out into the emptiness. Brophy hits me with
morphine, then hits me again.
"Donny!" I scream, but as the morphine whacks me out, I feel his
fingers loosening from my wrist, and I know that he is dead.
Bob hit the bottle again, this time dispensing with the glass. The
fluid coursed down. His mind was now almost thoroughly wasted. He
couldn't remember Donny anymore.
Donny was gone, Donny was lost, Donny was history, Donny was a name on
a long black wall. Were there even any photos of him? He tried to
recall Donny but his mind wouldn't let him.
Gray face. Unfocused eyes staring at eternity. The sound of machine
gun fire. The taste of dust and sand.
Blood everywhere. Brophy jacking the morphine in. Its warmth and
spreading, easing numbness. I won't let go of Donny. I must hold him
still. They're trying to pull me away, over the berm. The blackness
of the morphine taking me out.
I sleep.
I sleep.
Days pass, I'm lost in morphine.
I'm finally awakened by a corpsman. He's shaving me.
That is, my pubic region.
"Huh?" I say, so groggy I can hardly breathe. I feel inflated, creamy
with grease, bound by weight.
"Surgery, Gunny," he says.
"You're going to be operated on now."
"Where am I?" I ask.
"The Philippines. Onstock Naval Hospital, Orthopedic Surgery Ward.
They'll fix you up good. You been out for a week."
"Am I going to die?"
"Hell, no. You'll be back in the Major Leagues next season."
He shaves me. The light is gray. I can't remember much, but somewhere
underneath it there's pain. Donny?
Donny's gone. Dodge City? What happened to Dodge
TIME TO HUNT 371
City? Brophy, Feamster, the grunts. That little place out there all
by itself.
"Dodge?"
"Dodge?" he asks.
"You ain't heard?"
"No," I say, "I been out."
"Sure. Bad news. The dinks jumped it a few days after you got hit.
Sappers got in with grenades. Killed thirty guys, wounded sixty-five
more."
"Oh, fuck."
He shaves me expertly, a man who knows what he's doing.
"Brophy?" I say.
"I don't know. They got a lot of officers; they hit the command
bunkers. I know they got the CO and a bunch of grunts. Poor guys.
Probably the last Marines to die in the Land of Bad Things. They say
there'll be a big investigation.
Careers ended, a colonel, maybe even a general will go down. You're
lucky you got out, Gunny."
Loss. Endless loss. Nothing good came out of it. No happy endings.
We went, we lost, we died, we came home to--to what?
I feel old and tired. Used up. Throw me out. Kill me. I don't want
to live. I want to die and be with my people.
"Corpsman?" I grab his arm.
"Yeah?"
"Kill me. Hit me with morphine. Finish me. Everything you got.
Please."
"Can't do it, Gunny. You're a goddamned hero.
You've got everything to live for. You're going to get the Navy Cross.
You'll be the Command Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps."
"I hurt so bad."
"Okay, Gunny. I'm done. Let me give you some Mike.
Only a little, though, to make the pain go away."
He hits me with it. I go under and the next time I awake, I'm in full
traction in San Diego, where I'll spend a year alone, which will be
followed by a year in a body cast, also alone.
372 STEPHEN HUNTER
But now the morphine hits and thank God, once again, I go under.
The light awakened him, then noise. The door cracked open and Sally
Memphis walked in.
"Thought I'd find you here."
"Oh, Christ, what time is it?"
"Mister, it's eleven-thirty in the morning and you ought to be with
your wife and daughter, not out here getting drunk."
Bob's head ached and his mouth felt dry. He could smell himself, not
pleasant. He was still in yesterday's clothes and the room had the
stench of unwashed man to it.
Sally bustled around, opening window shades. Outside, the sun glared;
the three-day blow had lasted only one and then was gone. Idaho sky,
pure diamond blue, blasted through the windows, lit by sun. Bob
blinked, hoping the pain would go away but it wouldn't.
"She was operated on at seven a.m. for her collarbone.
You should have been there. Then you were supposed to pick me up at
the airport at nine-thirty. Remember?"
Sally, who had just graduated from law school, was the wife of one of
Bob's few friends, a special agent in the FBI named Nick Memphis who
now ran the Bureau's New Orleans office. She was about thirty-five and
had acquired, over the years, a puritan aspect to her, unforgiving and
unshaded. She was going to start as an assistant prosecutor in the New
Orleans district attorney's office that fall; but she'd come here out
of her and her husband's love of Bob.
"I had a bad night."
"I'll say."
"It ain't what it appears," he said feebly.
"You fell off the wagon but good, that's what it appears."
"I had to do some work last night. I needed the booze to get where I
had to go."
TIME TO HUNT 373
"You are a stubborn man, Bob Swagger. I pity your beautiful wife, who
has to live with your flintiness. That woman is a saint. You never
are wrong, are you?"
"I am wrong all the time, as a matter of fact. Just don't happen to be
wrong on this one. Here, loo key here."
He picked up the uncapped bottle of Jim Beam, three quarters gone, and
walked out on the front porch. His hip ached a little. Sally
followed. He poured the stuff into the ground.
"There," he said.
"No drunk could do that. It's gone, it's finished, it won't never
touch these lips again."
"So why did you get so drunk? Do you know I called you? You were
hopeless on the phone."
"Nope. Sorry, don't remember that."
"Why the booze?"
"I had to remember something that happened to me long ago. I drunk for
years to forget it. Then when I got sober finally, I found I
disremembered it. So I had to hunt it out again."
"So what did you learn on your magical mystery tour?"
"I didn't learn nothing yet."
"But you will," she said.
"I know where to look for an answer," he finally said.
"And where would that be?"
"There's only one place."
She paused.
"Oh, I'll bet this one is rich," she said.
"It just gets better and better."
"Yep," he said.
"I don't never want to disappoint you, Sally. This one is really
rich."
"Where is it?"
"Where a Russian put it. Where he hid it twenty-five years ago. But
it's there, and by God, I'll dig it out."
"What are you talking about?"
"It's in my hip. The bullet that crippled me. It's still there. I'm
going to have it cut out."
chapter thirty-three
It was dark and the doctor was still working. Bob found him out back
of the Jennings place, down the road from the Holloways, where he'd had
to help a cow through a difficult birth. Now he was with a horse
called Rufus whom the Jennings girl, Amy, loved, although Rufus was
getting on in years. But the doctor assured her that Rufus was fine;
he would just be getting up slower these days. He was an old man, and
should be treated with the respect of the elderly. Like that old man
over there, the doctor said, pointing to Bob.
"Mr. Swagger," said Amy.
"I'd heard you'd left these parts."
"I did," he said.
"But I came back to see my good friend Dr. Lopez."
"Amy, honey, I'll send over a vitamin supplement I want you to add to
Rufus's oats every morning. I bet that'll help him."
"Thank you. Dr. Lopez."
"It's all right, honey. You run up to the house now. I think Mr.
Swagger wants a private chat."
"
"Bye, Mr. Swagger."
"Good-bye, sweetie," said Bob, as the girl skipped back to the house.
"Thought those reporters chased you out of this place for good," the
doctor said.
"Well, I did too. The bastards are still looking for me."
"Where'd you go to cover?"
"A ranch up in Idaho, twenty-five miles out of Boise.
Just temporarily, waiting for all this to blow over."
"I knew you were something big in the war. I never knew you were a
hero."
"My father was a hero. I was just a sergeant. I did a job, that's
all."
TIME TO HUNT 375
"Well, you ran a great lay-up barn. I wish you'd come back into the
area, Bob. There's no first-class outfit this side of Tucson."
"Maybe I will."
"But you didn't come all this way to talk about horses," said Dr.
Lopez.
"No, Doc, I didn't. In fact, I flew down this afternoon.
Took the two-ten American from Boise to Tucson, rented a car, and here
I am."
Bob explained what he wanted. The doctor was incredulous.
"I can't just do that. Give me a reason."
"I am plumb tired of setting off airport alarms. I want to get on an
airplane without a scene."
"That's not good enough. I have an oath, as well as a complex set of
legal regulations, Bob. And let me point out one other thing. You are
not an animal."
"Well," said Bob, "actually I am. I am a Homo sapien.
But I know you are the best vet in these parts and you have operated on
many animals, and most of 'em are still with us today. I remember you
nursed Billy Hancock's paint through two knee operations, and that old
boy's still roaming the range."
"That was a good horse. It was a pleasure to save that animal."
"You never even charged him."
"I charged him plenty. I just never collected. Every few months,
Billy sends me ten or fifteen dollars. It should be paid up by the
next century."
"Well, I am a good horse, too. And I have this here problem and that's
why I come to you. If I go to VA, it could take months for the
paperwork to clear. If I go to a private MD, I got a passel of
questions I have to answer and a big operating room to tie up and weeks
to recover, whether I need it or not. I need this thing now.
Tonight."
"Tonight!"
"I need you to go in on local, dig it out, and sew me up."
376 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Bob, we are talking about serious, invasive work. It would take any
normal man a month to recover, under intensive medical care. You won't
be whole again for a long time."
"Doc, I been hit before. You know that. I still come back fast. It's
a matter of time. I can't tell you why, but I'm under the gun on time.
I have to find something out so I can go to the FBI. I need a piece of
evidence. I need your help."
"Oh, Lord."
"I know you did a tour over there. It's a thing guys like us have in
common. We ought to help each other when we can."
"No one else will, that's for sure," said Dr. Lopez.
"You was a combat medic and you probably saw more gunshot wounds and
worked on more than any ten MDs.
You know what you're doing."
"I saw enough of it over there."
"It's a nasty thing to fire a bullet into a man," said Bob.
"I was never the same, and now that I am getting old, I feel my back
firing up because of the damage it did to my structure. And the VA
don't recognize pain. They just tell you to live with it, and cut your
disability ten percent every year. So on I go, and on all of us go
with junk in us or limbs missing or whatever."
"That war was a very bad idea. Nothing good ever came out of it."
"I copy you there. I wouldn't be here if I didn't have no other
choice. I need that bullet."
"You are a fool if you think what I can offer you is as safe as modern
hospital medicine."
"You dig the bullet out and put in the stitches. If you don't do it,
I'll have to do it myself and that won't be pretty."
"I believe you would. Bob. Well, they say you are one tough son of a
bitch. You better be, because you're going to need every bit of tough
to get through the next few days."
TIME TO HUNT 377
Bob lay on his back, looking at the large mirror above him. The
ugliness of the entrance wound was visible; he hated to look at it. The
bullet had hit him almost dead on at a slight downward angle, plowed
through skin and the tissue of his sheathing gluteus medius muscle,
then shattered the plate like flange of the hip bone, deflecting off to
plunge down the inside of his leg, ripping out muscle as it went. The
bullet hole was unfilled: it was that alone and nothing else-- a
channel, a void, an emptiness in his hip that plunged inward,
surrounded by an ugly pucker of ruined flesh.
"No false hip?" said Dr. Lopez, feeling at it, examining it
carefully.
"No, sir," said Bob.
"They patched it up with bone grafts from my other shin and screws. On
cold days, them screws can light up, let me tell you."
"Did it break a leg, too?"
"No, sir, it just tore up tissue traveling down the leg."
The doctor probed Bob's inner thigh, where a long dead patch described
the careening bullet's terrible passage through flesh. Bob looked up,
away, feeling the acute humiliation of it. The doctor's operating
theater was immaculately clean, though out of scale to human bodies, as
its most usual patients were horses with leg or eye problems.
Except for the two of them, it was deserted.
"Well, you're lucky," Dr. Lopez said.
"I was afraid it still might be hung up in the mechanics of the hip. If
that had happened, you were out of luck. I couldn't take it out
without permanently crippling you."
"I am lucky," said Bob.
"Yeah," the doctor said, "I can feel it here, nested in the thigh, down
close to the knee. I know what happened.
They had to screw your hip together with transplants; the deep,
muscular wound of the bullet didn't matter to them.
They didn't even bother to look for it. They just sewed it up. They
were trying to keep you alive and ambulatory,
378 STEPHEN HUNTER
not make sure you could get through airport metal detectors."
"You can get it?"
"Bob, this is going to hurt like hell. I have to cut through an inch
of muscle, get down close to the femur. I can feel it in there. You
will bleed like a dog on the roadway.
I will sew you up, but you will need a good long rest.
This isn't a small thing. It isn't a huge thing, but you ought to
spend at least a couple of weeks off your feet."
"You cut it out tonight. I'll sleep here and be gone in the morning.
You give me a good pain shot and that will be that."
"You are a hard case," said the doctor.
"My wife says the same."
"Your wife and I bet anyone that ever met you. All right, you sit
back. I'm going to wash you up, then shave you. Then I'll go scrub,
and we'll give you a painkiller and we'll do what's gotta be done."
Bob watched with a numb leg and an odd feeling of dislocation.
The doctor had put an inflatable tourniquet around the upper leg to cut
down on blood loss. Then he'd wrapped his leg in a sterile Ace
bandage, and now he cut through it, a horizontal incision with a
scalpel an inch deep and three inches long into the lower inside of his
right thigh. Bob felt nothing. The blood jetted out in a spurt, as if
an artery had been snipped, but it hadn't, and as the initial jet was
soaked up by the bandage, the new blood crept back to seep out of the
ugly gash.
He'd seen so much blood, but the blood he remembered was Donny's blood.
Because the bullet had shattered his heart and lungs, it had gotten
into his throat fast and he'd gagged it out. There was so much, it
overcame his pipes and found new tunnels out of which to surge: it came
from his nose and mouth, as if he'd been punched in the face. Donny's
face was ruined, taken from them all by the black-red delta as it
fanned from the center of his face down to his chin.
TIME TO HUNT 379
The doctor tweaked and squeezed the incision, opening it as one would a
coin purse; then he took a long probe and inserted it into the wound
and began to press and feel.
"Is it there?"
"I don't have it--yeah, yeah, there it is, I ticked against it. It
seems to be encapsulated in some scar-type tissue. I'd guess that's
standard for an old bullet."
He removed the probe, now sticky with blood, gleaming in the bright
light of the operating theater, and set it down. Picking up a new
scalpel, he cut more deeply; more blood flowed.
"I'm going to have to irrigate," he said through his mask.
"I can't see much; all that damn blood."
"They will do that on you, won't they?" said Bob.
Lopez merely grunted, squirted a blast of water into the wound, so that
it bubbled.
It was so strange: Swagger could feel the water as pressure, not
unpleasant, even a little ticklish; he could feel the probe, could
almost feel as the pincers tugged at the bullet. The sensations were
precise, the doctor tugging at the thing, which was evidently quite
disfigured and jammed into some tissue and wouldn't just pop out as a
new bullet would. Bob felt all these details of the operation.
He saw the opening in his leg, saw the blood, saw the doctor's gloved
fingers begin to glow with blood, and the blood begin to spot his
surgeon's gown and smock.
But he felt nothing; it could have been happening to someone else. It
was unrelated to him.
At last, with a tiny tug, Lopez pulled the bloody pincers out of the
wound and held the trophy up for Bob to see: the bullet was crusted in
gristle, white and fatty, and the doctor cut it free with his scalpel.
It had mangled when it had met his bone, its me plat collapsing into
its body, so that it was deformed into a little flattened splat, like a
mushroom, oddly askew atop the column of what remained. But it hadn't
broken into pieces; it was all there, an ugly little twist of gilding
metal sheathing lead,
380 STEPHEN HUNTER
and its original aerodynamic sleekness, its missile ness was still
evident in the twisted version. He could see striations running down
it, where the rifle's grooves had gripped it as it spun through the
barrel so long ago on its journey toward him.
"Can you weigh it?"
"Yeah, right, I'll weigh it and then I'll wax it, and then I'll
gift-wrap it while you quietly bleed to death. Just hold your horses,
Bob."
He dropped the bullet into a little porcelain tray, where it tinkled
like a penny thrown into a blind man's cup, then went back to Bob.
"Please weigh it," said Bob.
"You ought to be committed," the doctor said. He irrigated the wound
again, poured in disinfectant and inserted a little sterile plastic
tube, for drainage. Then he quickly and expertly sewed it up with
coarse surgical thread. After finishing, he restitched with a finer
thread.
Then he bandaged the wound, wrapped an inflatable splint around it and
blew hard until the splint held the leg stiff, nearly immobile. Then
he loosened the Velcro on the tourniquet and tossed it aside.
"Pain?"
"Nothing," said Bob.
"You're lying. I felt you begin to tense five minutes ago."
"Okay, it hurts a bit, yeah."
Actually, it now hurt like hell. But he didn't want another shot or
anything that would drug him, flatten him, keep him woozy. He had
other stuff to do.
"Okay," said the doctor.
"Tomorrow I'll rebandage it and remove the tube. But it'll relieve the
pressure tonight.
Now--" "Please. I have to know. Weigh it. I have to know."
Dr. Lopez rolled his eyes, took the porcelain cup to a table where a
medical scale was sitting, and fiddled and twisted.
"All right," said the doctor.
TIME TO HUNT 381
"Go on," said Bob.
"It's 167.8 grains."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm very sure."
"Christ!"
"What's wrong?"
"This thing just got so twisted it don't make 'no sense at all."
He slept dreamlessly for the first time in weeks in one of Doc Lopez's
spare bedrooms; the pain woke him early, and the unbearable stiffness
in the leg. The doctor redressed the wound, then replaced the
inflatable splint.
"No major damage. You ought to be able to get around a little bit."
He had some crutches lying around, and advised Bob to seek professional
medical help as soon as possible. Bob could not walk or bathe, but he
insisted on going to the airport, on the power of ibuprofen and will
alone. Whitefaced and oily with sweat, he was pushed to the
ten-fifteen plane in a wheelchair by a stewardess, and used the
crutches to get aboard. He got to enter the plane early; it was like
being important.
No one was seated next to him, as the flight was only half full. The
plane took off, stabilized and eventually coffee was brought. He took
four more ibus, washed them down with the coffee, then at last took out
his grisly little treasure in its plasticine envelope.
Well, now, ain't you a problem, brother, he thought, examining the
little chunk of metal, mushroomed into the agony of impact, frozen
forever in the configuration of the explosion it had caused against his
hip bone.
One hundred sixty-eight grains.
Big problem. The only 168-grain bullet in the world in 1972 was
American--the Sierra 168-grain Match King the supreme .30-caliber
target round then and, pretty much, now. He was expecting a 150-grain
Soviet bullet, for the
382 STEPHEN HUNTER
7.62mm x 54, as fired in either a Dragunov or the old Mosin-Nagant
sniper rifle.
No. This boy was working with an American hand load as the
168-grainers weren't used on manufactured bullets until the services
adopted the M852 in the early nineties.
Nor was it the 173-grain match American bullet, loaded equally into the
M72 .30-06 round or the Ml 18 7.62 NATO round.
No. American hand load tailored, planned, its last wrinkle worked out.
A serious professional shooter, at the extended ranges of his craft.
That meant this was a total effort, even to somehow obtaining American
components in RSVN to get the absolute maximum out of the system.
Why?
He tried to think it out.
T. Solaratov has lost his Dragunov. The fieldexpedient choice would
then be an American sniper rifle, presumably available in some degree
within the NVA supply system; after all, half their stuff was
captured.
Bob bet it was an M1-D, the sniper version of the old M1 Garand rifle
that the GIs won World War II with.
The more he thought about it, the more sense it made, up to a point.
Yes, that would explain the almost subconscious familiarity of the
sound signature. In his time, he'd fired thousands of rounds with an
M-1. It had been his first Marine rifle, a solid, chunky, robust,
brilliantly engineered piece of work that would never let you down.
This is my rifle, this is my gun.
This is killing, this is for fun.
Every recruit had marched in his underwear around the squad bay some
indeterminate number of hours, a ton of unloaded Ml on his shoulder,
Parris Island's sucking bogs out beyond the wire, his dick in his left
hand, that primitive rhyme sounding in his ears under the guidance of a
drill instructor who seemed like a God, only crueler and tougher and
smarter.
TIME TO HUNT 383
Yeah, he thought, he uses a Garand rifle with a scope, he works out the
load with the best possible components, he takes me down, he's the
hero.
Looking at the striations imprinted in the copper sheathing of the
bullet by its explosive passage up the barrel that day, he guessed
closer examination by experts would prove them to be the mark of a
rifling system that held to ten twists per inch, not twelve, for that
would prove the bullet was fired from a match grade Ml and not an M14.
He saw the logic in that, too. It made sense to choose a .30-06 over a
.308 because downrange the .3006, with its longer cartridge case and
higher powder capacity, would deliver more energy, particularly beyond
a thousand yards. It really was a long-range cartridge, as so many
deer had found out over the years; the .308 was a mere wannabe.
But here's where he hit the wall.
If in fact he decided to go with the .30-06 cartridge, then why the
hell wouldn't he have used a Model 701', a bolt gun? That was the
Marine sniper rifle of the first five years of the war. There had to
be plenty of those still around; hell, even Donny had come up with one
of them in that one shot at Solaratov they'd had.
Why would the Russian use the less accurate, considerably more
problematic semiauto instead of one of the most classic sniper rifles
in the world? Carl Hitchcock, the great Marine sniper of 1967, with
his ninety-two kills, he'd used a 70T, with a sportsman's stock and an
8X Unerti externally adjusted scope. That would be the rifle to use.
What the hell was this Russian bird up to?
Could it be: no Model 70s available?
Well, he could check out combat losses through friends in the Pentagon,
but it seemed impossible that the Russian wouldn't be able to pick up a
Model 70. He could probably have gotten one of Bob's own Model 700
Remingtons if he'd wanted it.
What was there about the Ml that made it mandatory for the Russian's
selection?
384 STEPHEN HUNTER
It was indeed a very accurate rifle. Maybe he'd wanted the semiauto
capacity to bracket the target, to put three or four shots into the
area fast, in hopes that one would hit.
Nah. Not at that range. Each shot had to be precise.
The problem with the Garand as a sniper rifle was it was at its best
with national match iron sights. It ruled in service rifle competition
in which telescopic sights were not permissible. But the weapon became
difficult when a scope was added, because its straight-down topside en
bloc loading and straight-up ejection made it impossible to mount the
scope over the axis of the bore. Instead, through a complicated system
never really satisfactory, the Ml had worn a parallel scope, one
mounted a little to the left of the action. That meant at a given
range, the scope was intersecting the target but it was not on the same
axis as the bore, which made rapid computation very difficult,
particularly when the target was not exactly zeroed, or moved, or some
such.
Yet he chose this rifle.
What the hell was going on?
Bob mulled, trying to make sense of it all.
He had the feeling of missing something. There was a thing he could
not see. He could not even conceive of it. What am I missing?
What in me prevents me from seeing it?
I can't even conceive it.
"Sir?"
"Oh, yes?" he said, looking up at the flight attendant.
"You'll have to put up your lap tray and straighten your seat back.
We're about to land at Boise."
"Oh, yeah, sorry, wasn't paying any attention."
She smiled professionally, and he glimpsed out the windows to see the
Sawtooths, the down-homey little Boise skyline, and the airfield, named
after a famous ace who'd died young in war.
chapter thirty-four
Bob drove to the hospital straight from the airport.
During a brief gap in the power of the ibuprofen, his incision began to
knit in truly exquisite pain. He knew bruising would start by tomorrow
and the thing would be agonizing for weeks--but he didn't want to
stop.
He drove through the quiet, bright streets of Boise, as unpretentious a
town as existed anywhere, and finally reached the hospital where the
crutches got him in, the ibuprofen got him beyond the agony again and
an elevator got him to his wife's room, outside of which his daughter
and Sally Memphis waited.
"Oh, hi!"
"Daddy!"
"Sweetie, how are you?" he said, gathering up his daughter and giving
her a big hug.
"Oh, it's great to see my gal! Are you okay? You doin' what Sally
says?"
"I'm fine, Dad. What's wrong with you?"
"Sweetie, nothing. Just a little cut on my leg, that's all," he said,
as Sally shot him a disbelieving look.
He chatted with his daughter for a bit and with Sally, whose response
to him was cool. It seemed that Julie was sleeping now, but there
hadn't been any real complications from the surgery. They thought
she'd get out sometime soon and Sally had made arrangements to go to
the small ranch in Custer County as Bob had planned. She agreed with
him that it was a safe security arrangement, at least until the
situation clarified.
Finally, Julie awakened and Bob went in to his wife.
Her torso was in a full-body cast that supported the arm on the side
where the collarbone had been shattered.
His poor girl! She looked so wan and colorless and somehow shrunken in
the cast.
"Oh, sweetie," he said, rushing to her.
386 STEPHEN HUNTER
She smiled but not with a lot of force or enthusiasm and asked how he
was and he didn't bother to answer her, but instead went on about her,
caught up on her medical situation, checked on the security
arrangements, finally told her he thought he was on to something.
"I could tell; you're all lit up."
"It's a long story. There's something I can't figure out, and I need
help."
"Bob, how can I help you? I don't know anything. I've told you
everything I know."
"No, no, I don't mean about it. I mean about me."
"Now you've lost me."
"Honey, I got this thing I have to figure out. It doesn't make no
sense to me. So either it's wrong, or I am wrong.
If it's wrong, there's nothing I can do about it. If it's me that's
wrong, then I can figure it out."
"Oh, Lord. I get shot and it's all about you."
He let the cut simmer, not responding.
Finally he said, "I'm very sorry you got hit. I'm very happy you
survived. You should concentrate on how lucky you were to make it
through, not how unlucky you were.
You handled yourself well, you took control, you were a hero. You got
your life, you got your daughter, you got your husband. It ain't no
time to be angry."
She said nothing.
"It ain't about me. It's about us. I have to figure this thing
out."
"Can't you let the police, the FBI do it? They're all over the place.
That's their job. Your job is to be here with your family."
"I have a man hunting me. The more around you I am, the more danger
you're in. Don't you see that?"
"So you'll be off again. I knew it. You weren't there when I got
shot, you weren't there when I lay in that gulch for three hours, you
weren't there when I was operated on, you weren't there when I came out
of the operation, you haven't been taking care of your daughter, you're
evidently not going with us to the mountains, I hear you've
TIME TO HUNT 387
been drinking, you've obviously been in some kind of fight or
something, because of the terrible way you're limping and the way your
face is completely sheet-white, and all you want to do is go off again.
And .. . somehow, you're happy."
"I wasn't in a fight. I had a bullet cut out of my leg, that's all.
It's nothing. I'm sorry," he said.
"This is the best way, I think."
"I don't know how much of this I can take."
"I just want this to be over."
"Then stay here. Stay here, with us.""I can't. That puts you in
danger. He'll know soon enough, if not yet, that I wasn't the man he
hit. So he'll come back. I have to be able to move, to operate, to
think, to defend myself. Not only that, if he comes after me again,
and you're there again, do you think I can defend you? Nobody can
defend you. Let him come after me.
That's what he was trained to do. Maybe I can get him, maybe not, but
I sure as shit ain't going to let him go after you."
"Bob," she said.
"Bob, I called a lawyer."
"What?"
"I said, I called a lawyer."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"It means I think we ought to separate."
Certain moments, you just feel your chest turning to ice. It just
freezes solid on you. You have trouble breathing.
You swallow, there's no air, then there's no saliva in your mouth. Your
ears hammer, your head aches, blood rushes through your veins, pumping
crazily. You're that close to losing it. It had never happened to him
when the shit was flying in the air and people were dying all around
him, but it happened now.
"Why?" he finally said.
"Bob, we can't live like this. It's one thing to say we love each
other, we have a family, we take care of each other. It's another when
you go off every so often and I hear rumors that people are dead and
you won't talk
388 STEPHEN HUNTER
about it. It's another when you're so angry all the time you won't
talk or touch me or support me and you snap at me all the time. I can
just make so many excuses to our daughter. But then the next thing,
the worst thing, the war comes into our house and I'm shot with a
bullet and my daughter sees a man die before her very eyes. And then
you go off again. I love you, Lord, I love you, but I cannot have my
daughter going through that again."
"I'm--I'm very sorry, Julie. I didn't see how hard this was on you."
"It's not just the violence. It's that you somehow love it so. It's
that it's always in you. I can see it in your eyes, the way you're
always searching the terrain, the way you're never quite relaxed, the
way there's always a loaded gun close at hand, the way you drive me
out. You're not a sniper anymore; that was years ago. But you're
still over there. I can't compete with the war in Vietnam; you love
her more than us."
Bob breathed heavily.
"Please, don't do this to me. I can't lose you and Nikki. I don't
have anything else. You're all I value in this world."
"Not true. You value yourself and what you became.
Secretly, you're so happy to be Bob the Nailer, different from all men,
better than all men, loved and respected or at least feared by all men.
It's like a drug addiction. I feel that in you, and the angrier you
get and the older you get, the worse it becomes."
He could think of nothing to say.
"Please don't do this to me."
"We should be apart."
"Please. I can't lose you. I can't lose my daughter. I'll do what
you want. I'll go with you to the mountains. I can change. I can
become the man you want. You watch me! I can do it. Please."
"Bob, I've made up my mind. I've been thinking about this for a long
time. You need space, I need space. The shooting business just makes
it more important. I have to
TIME TO HUNT 389
get away from you and get my own life, and get away from the war."
"It's not the war."
"It is the war. It cost me the boy I loved and now it's cost me the
man I loved. It cannot take my daughter. I've thought all this
through. I'm filing for separation. After I recover, I'm returning to
Pima County and my family. We can work out financial details. It
doesn't have to he had or ugly. You can always see Nikki, any time,
unless you're off at war or in the middle of a gunfight. But I just
can't have this. I'm sorry it didn't work out any better, but there
you have it."
"I'll go. Just promise me you'll think it over. Don't do anything
stupid or sudden. I'll take care of this business--"
"Don't you see? I can't have you taking care of this business and
getting yourself killed. I can't lose someone else. It almost killed
me the first time. You think you had it hard in your traction and your
VA hospital? Well, I never came back. There isn't a day I don't wake
up and not remember what it felt like when the doorbell rang and it was
Donny's brother, and he looked like hell and I knew what was happening.
It took me ten, maybe twenty years to get over that and I only just
barely did."
He felt utterly defeated. He could think of nothing to say.
"I'll go now," he said.
"You need to rest. I'll say goodbye to Nikki. I'll check on you, stay
in contact. That's okay, isn't it?"
"Yes, of course."
"You be careful."
"We'll be all right."
"When this is all over, you'll see. I'll fix it. I can do that. I
can fix myself, change myself. I know it."
"Bob--" "I know I can."
He bent and kissed her.
"Bob--"
390 STEPHEN HUNTER
"What?"
"You wanted to ask me what was wrong with you. Why you couldn't figure
something out?"
"Yes."
"I'll tell you why. It's because of the great male failing of your
age. Vanity. You're publicly modest but privately insanely proud. You
think everything is about you, and that blinds you to what is going on
in the world. That's your weakness. You have to attack your problem
without ego and vanity. Approach it objectively. Put yourself out of
it."
T___
"It's the truth. I've never told you that, but it's the truth. Your
anger, your violence, your bravery; it's all part of the same thing.
Your pride. Pride goeth before the fall.
You cannot survive unless you see through your pride. All right?"
"All right," he said, and turned to leave.
Here I am, right back where I started from, he thought.
The room was shabby, a motel on the outskirts of Boise, not a chain but
one of those older, forties places on a road that had long since been
surpassed by other, brighter highways.
I am slipping, he thought. I am losing everything.
The room smelled of dust and mildew. Every surface was slightly warped
wood, the bathroom was only nominally clean, the lightbulbs were
low-wattage and pale.
I drank a lot of bourbon in rooms like this, he thought.
He was here on more or less sound principles. The first was that by
this time, whoever had been trying to kill him surely realized he had
missed and was back on the hunt again. Therefore the ranch house, with
its clothes, its life, was out. He knew that place and to go there was
to get yourself killed, this time for real, with no poor old Dade
Fellows to stop the bullet.
So, after doubling back and crossing his own tracks a dozen times, and
setting up look-sees for followers and
TIME TO HUNT 391
finally satisfying himself nobody was onto him yet, he was here. Paid
cash, too. No more credit cards, because whoever this bird was working
for, he might have a way of tracking credit cards. No more phone calls
except from public phones.
What he needed now was a gun and cash, like any man on the run. The
cash he knew he could get. He had $16,000 left from a libel case the
late Sam Vincent had won for him years ago, and he'd moved it from a
cache in Arkansas to a cache here in Idaho. If he was clear again
tomorrow, he would get it.
A gun was another problem. He felt naked without one, and the gun laws
here in Idaho weren't troubling yet, but there was still that goddamn
seven-day wait by national law. He could head back to his property,
where his45 Commander was stored away, but did he really want to carry
it on a daily basis? Suppose he had to take an airline or wandered
into a bank with a metal detector? Sometimes it was more trouble than
it was worth. Besides, how could he shoot it out against a sniper with
a 7mm Remington Magnum with a .45? If the white sniper found him, it
was over, that was all.
Bob sat back, turning the TV on by remote, discovering to his surprise
that it worked. The news came on.
Bob paid no attention. It was just white noise.
His head ached. He held a bottle in his hands, between his legs as he
lay on the bed, on a thin chintz bedspread.
Jim Beam, $9.95 at the Boise Lik-r-mart, recently purchased.
There were water spots on the ceiling; the room stank of ancient woe,
of raped girlfriends and beaten wives and hustled salesmen. Cobwebs
fogged the corners;
the toilet had a slightly unwholesome odor to it, like heads he'd
pissed in the world over.
I am losing it, he thought.
He tried to press his brain against the riddle again.
He felt if he could get that, he would have something.
Why, all those years ago, did Soloratov use an Ml rifle, a much less
accurate semiauto? It appeared to be
392 STEPHEN HUNTER
one of those mysteries that had no solution. Or, even worse, the
answer was mundane, stupid, boring: he couldn't get a bolt gun, so he
settled for the most accurate American rifle available, an MID Sniper.
Yes, that made perfect sense but ... . but if he could get an MID, he
could get a Model 70T or a Remington 700!
/( don't make no goddamn sense!
It doesn't have to make sense, he told himself. Not everything does.
Some things just can't be explained; they happen in a certain way
because that's the way of the world.
Bob looked at the bottle again, his fingers stole to the cap and the
plastic seal that kept the amber fluid and its multiple mercies from
his lips, and yearned to crack it and drink. But he didn't.
Won't never touch my lips again, he remembered telling someone.
Liar. Lying bastard. Talking big, not living up to it.
He tried to lose himself in what was on the tube. The news, some
talking head from Russia. Oh, yeah, it sounded familiar. Big
elections coming up, everybody all scared because some joker who
represented the old ways was in the lead and would carry the day, and
the Cold War would start up all over again. The guy was this Evgeny
Pashin, handsome big guy, powerful presence. Bob looked at him.
Thought we won that war, he said to himself.
Thought that was one we did okay in, and now here's this guy and he's
going to take over and restore Russia and all the missiles go back into
the silos and it's the same old crock of shit.
Man, there was no good news anywhere, was there?
He was feeling powerfully maudlin. He yearned for his old life: his
wife, his lay-up barn, the sick animals he was so good at caring for,
his perfect baby daughter, enough money. Man, had it knocked.
It all was taken away from him.
TIME TO HUNT 393
He turned the TV off and the room was quiet. But only for a moment. A
couple of units down, somebody was yelling at somebody. Somewhere
outside, a kid was crying. Other TVs vibrated through the walls.
Traffic hummed along. Looking out the window he saw the buzz of neon,
blurry and mashed together, from fast food joints and bars and liquor
stores across the way.
Man, I hate to be alone anymore, he thought.
That's why Solaratov will get me. He likes being alone. I lived alone
for years, I fought alone. But I lost whatever edge I had.
I want my family. I want my daughter.
The lyrics of some old rock and roll song sounded in his ears, moist,
rich, poignant.
Black is black, he heard the music, / want my baby back.
Yeah, well, you am 't going to get her back. You 're just going to sit
here until that fucking Russian hunts you down and blows you away.
Ceiling, discolored. Cobwebs, mildew, the sound of other people's
grief over the traffic and me stuck by myself with no goddamn way in
hell to figure out what I got to figure out.
You think everything is about you and that blinds you to the world, his
wife had told him.
Yeah, as if she would know. She really never did get him, he thought
bitterly.
His hand involuntarily cranked on the bottle top and he heard it crack
as the seal broke. He opened the bottle, looked down into the open
muzzle. He knew a form of doom lay behind that muzzle. It was like
looking down the barrel of a loaded rifle, the incredible temptation it
had to some weak and deranged people, because to look down it was to
look straight into death's own eye. So it was with the bottle for an
ex-drunk. Look into it, take what it has to offer and you are gone.
You are history.
He yearned for the strength to throw it out but knew he didn't have it.
He raised the bottle to his lips, wise with
394 STEPHEN HUNTER
the knowledge that he was about to die, and brought the bottle-You
think everything is about you.
Bob stopped. He considered something so fundamental he'd not seen it
before, but suddenly it seemed as big as a mountain: his assumption
that Solaratov came to Vietnam to kill him and had returned to Idaho to
kill him.
But suppose it wasn't about him?
What could it be about, then?
He tried to think.
The sniper had a semiauto.
He could fire twice, fast.
He had to take them both to make sure of hitting one.
But suppose I wasn't the one he had to hit.
Well, who else was there?
Only Donny.
Could it be about .. . Donny?
chapter thirty-five
He awoke early, without a hangover, because he had not been drunk. He
looked at his watch and saw that it was eight here, which meant it was
eleven in the East.
He picked up the phone, then called Henderson Hall, United States
Marine Corps Headquarters, Arlington, Virginia. He asked to be
connected to the Command Sergeant Major of the Corps, got an office and
a young buck sergeant, and eventually got through to the great man
himself, with whom he'd served a tour in Vietnam in sixty-five and run
into a few odd, friendly times over the years.
"Bob Lee, you son of a bitch."
"Howdy, Vern. They ain't kicked you out yet?"
"Tried many a time. It's them pictures I got of a general and his
goat."
"Those'll git a man a long way."
"In Washington, they'll git you all the way."
The two old sergeants laughed.
"So anyhow, Bob Lee, what you got cooking? You ain't written a book
yet?"
"Not yet. Maybe one of these years. Look, I need a favor. You're the
only man that could do it."
"So? Name it."
"I'm flying to DC this afternoon. I need to look at some paperwork. It
would be the service jacket of my spotter, a kid that got killed in May
1972."
"What was his name?"
"Fenn, Donny. Lance corporal, formerly corporal. I have to see what
happened to him over his career."
"What for? What're you looking for?"
"Hell, I don't know. I got something to check out involving him. What
it is, I don't know. It's come up, though."
396 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Didn't you end up marrying his widow?"
"I did, yeah. A terrific lady. We're sort of on the outs now."
"Well, I hope you get it straightened out. This may take me a day or
so. Or maybe not. I can probably get it, if not from here, from our
archives, out in Virginia."
"Real fine, Sergeant Major. I appreciate it much."
"You call me when you get in."
"I will."
Bob hung up, hesitated, thought about the booze he did not drink and
then dialed the Boise General Hospital and eventually was connected to
his wife's room.
"Hi," he said.
"It's me. How are you? Did I wake you?"
"No, no. I'm fine. Sally took Nikki to school. There's nobody
around. How are you?"
"Oh, fine. I wish you'd reconsider."
"I can't."
He was silent for a while.
"All right," he finally said, "just think about it."
"All right."
"Now I have something else to ask."
"What?"
"I need your help. This last little thing. Just a question or two.
Something you would know that I don't."
"What?"
"It's about Donny."
"Oh, God, Bob."
"I think this may have something to do with Donny.
I'm not sure, it's just a possibility. I have to check it out."
"Please. You know how I hate to go back there. I'm over that now. It
took a long time."
"It's a nothing question. A Marine question, that's all."
"Bob."
"Please."
She sighed and said nothing.
"Why was he sent to Vietnam? He had less than TIME TO HUNT 397
thirteen months to serve. But he had just lost his rating. He was a
full corporal and he showed up in "Nam just a lance corporal. So he
had to be sent there for punitive reasons.
They did that in those days."
"It was punitive."
"I thought it was. But that doesn't sound like Donny."
"I only caught bits and pieces of it. I was only there at the end. It
was some crisis. They wanted him to spy on some other Marines who they
thought were slipping information to the peace marchers. There was
this big screw up at a demonstration, a girl got killed, it was a mess.
He was ordered to spy on these other boys and he got to know them, but
in the end, he wouldn't. He refused. They told him they'd ship him to
Vietnam, and he said, Go ahead, ship me to Vietnam. So they did. Then
he met you, became a hero and got killed on his last day. You didn't
know that?"
"I knew there was something. I just didn't know what."
"Is that a help?"
"Yes, it is. Do you know who sent him?"
"No. Or if I did, I forgot. It was so long ago."
"Okay. I'm going back to DC."
"What? Bob--" "I'll only be gone a few days. I'm flying out there.
I've got to find out what happened to Donny. You listen to Sally; you
be careful. I'll call you in a few days."
"Oh, Bob--" "I've got some money, some cash. Don't worry."
"Don't get in trouble."
"I'm not getting in any trouble. I promise. I'll call you soon."
There it was: WES PAC.
He remembered the first time he had seen it, that magic, frightening
phrase, when the orders came through for that first tour in 1965: WES
PAC. Western Pacific, which was Marine for Vietnam. He remembered
sitting
398 STEPHEN HUNTER
outside the company office at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and
thinking, Oh, brother, I am in the shit.
"That's it," said the sergeant major's aide.
"That's it," said Bob.
He sat in the anteroom in Henderson Hall, with the tall, thin young man
with hair so short it hardly existed and movements so crisp they seemed
freshly dry-cleaned.
"We got it this morning from Naval Records Storage Facility, Annandale.
Sergeant Major used lots of smoke.
He served with the CO's chief petty officer on the old Iowa City."
"You'll tell him I appreciate it."
"Yes, sir. I'm sniper-rated, by the way. Great school, out at
Quantico. They still talk about you. Understand you fought a hell of
a fight at Kham Due."
"Long time ago, son. I can hardly remember it."
"I heard of it a hundred times," said the young sergeant.
"I won't ever forget it."
"Well, son, that's kind of you."
"I'll be in my office next door. You let me know if you need anything
else."
"Thank you, son."
The jacket was thick, all that remained of FENN, DON NY J."s almost,
but not quite four years in the Marine Corps. It was full of various
orders, records of his first tour in the Nam with a line unit, his
Bronze Star citation, his Silver Star nomination for Kham Due, travel
vouchers, shot records, medical reports, evaluations going back to
Parris Island in the far-off land of 1968 when he enlisted, GET
results, the paper trail any military career, good, bad or indifferent,
inevitably accumulates over the passage of time. There was even a copy
of the Death in Battle report, filled out by the long-dead Captain
Feamster, who only survived Donny a few weeks until the sappers took
out Dodge City. But this one sheet, now faded and fragile, was the one
that mattered; this was the one that sent him to the Nam.
TIME TO HUNT 399
HEADQUARTERS, USMC, 1C-MLT: 111
1320.1
15 MAY 1971
SPECIAL ORDER: TRANSFER
NUMBER 164071
REF: (A) CMC LTR DFB1/1 13 MAY 70
(B) MCO 1050.8F
1. IN ACCORDANCE WITH REFERENCE (A),
EFFECTIVE 22 AUGUST 70, THE PERSONNEL
LISTED ON THE REVERSE HEREOF
ARE TRANSFERRED FROM THIS COMMAND
TO WES PAC (III MAF) FOR DUTIES
SPECIFIED BY CO WES PAC (III MAF).
2. PRIOR TO TRANSFER, THE COMMANDING
OFFICER WILL ASSIGN AS PRIMARY
THE MOS SHOWN FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE AUTHORITY
CONTAINED IN EXISTING REGULATIONS.
3. TRAVEL VIA GOVERNMENT PROCURED
TRANSPORTATION IS DIRECTED FOR ALL
TRAVEL PERFORMED BETWEEN THIS
COMMAND AND WES PAC (III MAF) IN ACCORDANCE
WITH PARAGRAPH 4100, JOINT
TRAVEL REGULATIONS.
4. EACH INDIVIDUAL LISTED ON THE REVERSE
HEREOF IS DIRECTED TO REPORT
TO THE DISBURSING OFFICER WITHIN
THREE WORKING DAYS AFTER COMPLETION
OF TRAVEL INVOLVED IN THE EXECUTION
OF THESE ORDERS FOR AN
AUDIT OF REFUNDS.
400 STEPHEN HUNTER
It was signed OF Peatross, Major General, U.S.
Marine Corps, Commanding, and below that bore the simple designation
DIST: "N' (and WNY, TEMPO C, RM 4598).
Bob had received just such a document three times, and three times he'd
come back from it, at least breathing.
Not Donny: it got him a name inscription on a long black wall with
bunches of other boys who'd much rather have been working in factories
or playing golf than inscribed on a long black wall.
Bob turned it over, not to find the usual computerized list of lucky
names but only one: FENN, DON NY J, L/
CPL 264 38 85 037 36 68 01 0311, COMPANY B,
MARINE BARRACKS WASHINGTON DC MOS 0311.
The rest of the copy was junk, citations of applicable regulations,
travel information, a list of required items all neatly checked off
(SRB, HEALTH RECORD, DENTAL RECORD, ORIG ORDERS, ID CARD and so on),
and the last, melancholy list of destinations on the travel sub voucher
from Norton AFB in California to Kadena AFB on Okinawa to Camp Hansen
on Okinawa and on to Camp Schwab before final deployment to WES PAC
(III MAF), meaning Western Pacific, III Marine Amphibious Force.
Donny's own penmanship, known so well to Bob from their months
together, seemed to scream of familiarity as he looked at it.
Now what? he thought. What's this supposed to mean?
He tried to remember his own documents and scanned this one for
deviations. But his memory had faded over the years and nothing seemed
at all different or strange. It was just orders to the Land of Bad
Things; thousands and thousands of Marines had gotten them between 1965
and 1972.
There seemed to be nothing: no taint of scandal, no hint of punitive
action, nothing at all. In Donny's evals, particularly those filed in
his company at the Marine Barracks, there were no indications of
difficulty. In fact, those
TIME TO HUNT 401
recordings were uniformly brilliant in content, suggesting an exemplary
young man. A SSGT Ray Case had observed, as late as March 1971, "Cpl.
Fenn shows outstanding professional dedication to his duties and is
well-respected by personnel both above and below him in the ranks. He
performs his duties with thoroughness, enthusiasm and great enterprise.
It is hoped that the Corporal will consider making the Marine Corps a
career; he is outstanding officer material."
Bob knew the secret language of these things: where praise is the
standard vocabulary, Case's belief in Donny clearly went beyond that
into the eloquent.
Even Donny's loss of rating order, which demoted him from corporal to
lance corporal, dated 12 May 71, was empty of information. It carried
no meaning whatsoever:
it simply stated the fact that a reduction in rank had occurred.
It was signed by his commanding officer, M. C. Dogwood, Captain,
USMC.
No Article 15s, no Captain's Masts, nothing in the record suggesting
any disciplinary problems.
Whatever had happened to him, it had left no records at all.
He stood up and went to the door of the sergeant major's aide.
"Is there a personnel specialist around? I'd like to run something by
him."
"I can get Mr. Ross. He worked personnel for six years before coming
to headquarters."
"That'd be great."
In time the warrant officer arrived, and he too knew of Bob and treated
him like a movie star. But he scanned the documents and could find
nothing at all unusual except-"Now this is strange, Gunny."
"Yes, sir?"
"Can't say I ever saw it before."
"And what is that, Mr. Ross?"
"Well, sir, on this last order, the one that sent Fenn to Vietnam. See
here"--he pointed--"it says "DIST: "N."
402 STEPHEN HUNTER
That means, distribution to normal sources, i.e. the duty jacket, the
new duty station. Pentagon personnel, MDW personnel and so forth, the
usual grinding wheels of our great bureaucracy in action."
"Yes, sir."
"But what I see here is odd. In parentheses '(and
WNY TEMPO C, RM 4598)."
" "What would that mean?"
"Well, I'd guess Washington Naval Yard, Temporary Building C, Room
4598."
"What's that?"
"I don't know. I was twelve in 1971" "Any idea how I could find
out?"
"Well, the only sure way is to go to the Pentagon, get an
authorization, and try and dig up a Washington Naval Personnel logbook
or phone book or at least an MDW phone book from the year 1971. They
might have one over there. Then you'd just have to go through it entry
by entry--it would take hours--until you came across that
designation."
"Oh, brother," said Bob.
1 he next night, Bob drove his rented car out to a pleasant suburban
house in the suburbs of America and there had dinner with his old pal
the Command Sergeant Major of the United States Marine Corps, his wife
and three of his four sons.
The sergeant major grilled steaks out on the patio while the two
younger boys swam in the pool and the sergeant major's wife, Marge,
threw together a salad, some South Carolina recipe for baked beans and
stewed tomatoes. She was an old campaigner herself and Bob had met her
twice before, at a reception after he had been awarded the
Distinguished Service Cross for Kham Due-1976, four years after the
incident itself, a year after he finally left the physical therapy
program and the year he decided he could no longer cut it as a
Marine--and the next year, when he did retire.
TIME TO HUNT 403
"How's Suzy?" she asked, and Bob remembered that she and his first
wife had had something of an acquaintanceship;
at that point, he'd been higher in rank than the man who was hosting
him.
"Oh, we don't talk too much. You heard, I went through some bad times,
had a drinking problem. She left me, and was smart to do it. She's
married to a Cadillac dealer now. I hope she's happy."
"I actually ran into her last year," Marge said.
"She seemed fine. She asked after you. You've had an adventurous few
years."
"I seem to have a knack for trouble."
"Bob, you won't get Vern's career in any trouble? He retires this year
after thirty-five years. I'd hate to see anything happen."
"No, ma'am. I'll be leaving very shortly. My time here is done, I
think."
They had a nice dinner and Bob tried to hide the melancholy that seeped
into him; here was the life he would have had if he hadn't gotten hit,
if Donny hadn't gotten killed, if it all hadn't gone so sour on him. He
yearned now for a drink, a soothing blur of bourbon to blunt the edge
he felt, and he recalled a dozen times on active duty when he and this
man or a man just like this man had spent the night recalling sergeants
and officers and squids and ships and battles the world over, and
enjoying immensely their lives in the place where they'd been born
hard-wired to spend it, the United States Marine Corps.
But that was gone now. Face it, he thought. It's gone, it's finished,
it's over.
That night they went to a baseball game, Legion Ball, where the
youngest boy, a scholarship athlete at the University of Virginia, got
three hits while giving up only two as pitcher over the game's seven
innings. Again: a wonderful America, the best America--the suburbs on
a spring evening, the weather warm, the night hazy, baseball, family
and beer.
404 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Do you miss your wife?" asked the sergeant major's wife.
"I do, a lot. I miss my daughter."
"Tell me about her."
"Oh," said Bob, "she's a rider. She's a great horsewoman.
Her mother has her riding English in case she decides to come east for
college."
And off he went, for twenty uncontrollable minutes, missing his
daughter and his wife and the whole thing even more. Black is black,
he thought, / want my baby back.
The game was over and in triumph everybody went back to the sergeant
major's house. Beer was opened, though Bob had Coke; some other senior
NCOs came over and Bob knew a few, and all had heard of him. It was a
good time; cigars came out, the men moved outside, the night was lovely
and unthreatening. Then finally a young man showed up, trim, about
thirty, with hard eyes and a crew cut, in slacks and a polo shirt. Bob
understood that he was the sergeant major's oldest boy, a major at
Quantico, in the training command, back recently from a rough year in
Bosnia and before that an even nastier one in the desert.
Bob was introduced and they chatted and once again he encountered a
young man who loved him. What good did it do if his own family didn't?
But it was nice, all the same, and eventually the talk turned to his
own day. He'd spent it in the DOD library in the Pentagon, where the
sergeant major's pass had got him admitted, going painfully through old
phone books, trying to find out what this office was.
"Any luck?" asked the sergeant major.
"Yeah, finally. Room 4598 in Tempo C in the Washington Navy Yard, it
was the location of an office of the Naval Investigative Service."
"Those squid bastards," said the Command Sergeant Major.
"At least now I've got a name to go on," Bob said.
TIME TO HUNT 405
"The CO was some lieutenant commander named Bonson.
W. S. Bonson. I wonder what became of him."
"Bonson?" said the gunny's son.
"Ward Bonson?"
"I guess," said Bob.
"Well," said the young officer, "he shouldn't be too hard to find. I
served a tour with the Defense Intelligence Agency in ninety-one. He
was in and out of that shop."
"You knew him?"
"I was just a staff officer," he said.
"He wouldn't notice or remember me."
"Who is he?" asked Bob.
"He's now the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency."
chapter thirty-six
He watched through binoculars as the car, a black Ford sedan, arrived
at 6:30 a.m. and picked up the occupant of 1455 Briarwood, Reston,
Virginia. Bob followed at a distance. The lone passenger sat in the
back, reading the morning papers as the car wound its way through the
nearly empty streets. It progressed toward the Beltway, then followed
that road north, toward Maryland;
at the George Washington Parkway it surged off, westward, until it
reached Langley, and then took that otherwise unremarkable exit. Bob
languished back, then broke contact as the car disappeared down the
unmarked road that led to the large installation that was unnamed from
the road but which he knew to be the headquarters of the Central
Intelligence Agency.
Instead, he drove back to Reston and relocated the house. He parked on
the next court over--it was in a prosperous unit of connected
townhouses--and slid low into the seat. It took almost two hours
before he figured the pattern. There were two security vehicles, one a
black Chevy Nova and the other a Ford Econoline van. Each had two men
in them, and one or the other showed up every forty minutes, pausing on
the street in front of the house and on the street in back. At that
point, one of the men walked around back, bent in the weeds and checked
something, presumably some sort of trembler switch that indicated if
any kind of entry had been made.
Bob marked the address and drove to the nearest convenience store.
There, he called the fire department and reported a fire in the house
two down on the court. By the time he got back, three trucks had
arrived, men were stomping in bushes, two cop cars with flashing light
bars had set up perimeter security--it was a carnival. When the black
Nova arrived, an agent got out, showed TIME TO HUNT 407
credentials, conferred with the police and firemen, then went to
Bonson's door, unlocked it and went in to check the house and secure
it. He went around back to reset the trembler switch.
Bob went, found a place for lunch, then came back and parked a court
down the line. He checked his watch to make certain neither of the
patrol vehicles was expected, then walked back to Bonson's house, where
he knocked on the door. No answer came and, after a bit, he used his
credit card to pop the door and slipped inside.
An alarm immediately began to whine. He knew he had sixty seconds to
defuse it. The sound of the device enabled Bob to find it in ten
seconds, which left fifty.
Without giving it a lot of thought, Bob pressed 1-4-7 and nothing
happened. The alarm still shrilled. He then hit 1-3-7-9 and the alarm
ceased. How had he known? Not that difficult: most people don't
bother with learning numbers; they learn patterns that can easily be
found in the dark, or when they are tired or drunk, and 1-4-7, the
left-hand side of the nine-unit keypad, is the simplest and the most
obvious; 1-3-7-9, the four corners, is the second most obvious. He
waited a bit, then slipped out the back and found the trembler switch
attached to an electric junction outside the house. It blinked red to
indicate entry.
With his Case knife, he popped the red plastic cone off the bulb,
unscrewed the bulb, then squeezed and compressed the red cone to get it
back on. Covering his tracks in the loam, he reentered the house. Soon
enough the CIA security team rechecked the house on their rounds, but
when the agent got out to check the trembler indicator, he did not get
close enough to note the jimmied bulb.
He was tired. He'd been through a lot. He returned to the truck.
Like his codes, Bonson's home was plain. The furniture was spare but
luxurious, mostly Scandinavian and leather, but it was not the home of
a man whose pleasures included pleasure. It was banal, expensive,
almost featureless.
One room was a designated office, with a computer
408 STEPHEN HUNTER
terminal, awards and photos on the wall that could have been of any
business executive except that they showed a furiously intense
individual who could not broadcast ease for a camera but always seemed
angry or at least focused.
He was usually pictured among other such men, some of them famous in
Washington circles. His house was clean, almost spotless. A
University of New Hampshire bachelor's and a Yale law degree hung on
the wall. Nothing indicated the presence of hobbies except, possibly,
a slightly fussy fondness for gourmet cooking and wines in the kitchen.
But it was the house of a man consumed by mission, by his role in life,
by the game he played and dominated. No wife, no children, no
relatives, no objects of sentimentality or nostalgia; seemingly no past
and no future; instead, simplicity, efficiency, a one-pointed
existence.
Bob poked about. There were no secrets to be had, nothing that could
not be abandoned. The closet was full of blue suits, white shirts and
red striped ties. The shoes were all black. Brooks Brothers, five
eyelets. He appeared to have no casual wear, no blue jeans, no
baseball caps or sunglasses or fishing rods, no guns, no porno
collections, no fondness for show tunes or electric trains or comic
books. There were huge numbers of books--contemporary politics,
history, political science, but no fiction or poetry. There was no
meaningful art in the home, nothing soiled, nothing that spoke of
uncertainty, irrationality or passion.
Bob sat and waited. The hours clicked by, then the day itself. It
turned to night. It got later. Finally, at 11:30 p.m., the door
opened and the lights came on. Bob heard a man hanging up his
raincoat, closing the closet. He walked into the living room, took off
his suit coat, loosened a tie and unbuttoned his collar. He had his
mail, which included some bills and the new issue of Foreign Policy. He
turned on a CD stereo player, and light classical oozed out of the
speakers. He mixed himself a drink, went to the big chair and sat
down. Then he saw Bob.
TIME TO HUNT 409
"W-who are you? What is this?"
"You're Bonson, right?"
"Who the hell are you!" Bonson said, rising.
Bob rose more pugnaciously, pushed him back into the chair, hard,
asserting physical authority and the willingness to do much harm fast
and well. Bonson's eyes flashed fearfully on him, and read him for
what he was: a determined, focused man well-versed in violence. He
recognized instantly that he was overmatched. He got quiet quickly.
Bob saw a trim fifty-seven-year-old man of medium height with thinning
hair slicked back and shrewd eyes.
The suit pants and shirt he wore fit him perfectly and everything about
him seemed unexceptional except for the glitter in his eyes, which
suggested he was thinking rapidly.
"The false alarm; yeah, I should have figured. Do you want money?"
"Do I look like a thief?"
"Who are you? What are you doing here?"
"You and I have business."
"Are you an agent? Is this something over a vetting or an internal
security report or a career difficulty? There are channels and
procedures. You cannot do yourself any good at all with this kind of
behavior. It is no longer tolerated.
The days of the cowboys are over. If you have a professional problem,
it must be dealt with professionally."
"I don't work for your outfit. At least not for thirty years or so."
"Who are you?" Bonson said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously as he
tried to click back to his file on thirty years ago.
"Swagger. Marine Corps. I done some work for y'all up near Cambodia,
sixty-seven."
"I was in college in 1967."
"I ain't here about 1967. I'm here about 1971. By that time, you was
a squid lieutenant commander, in NIS.
410 STEPHEN HUNTER
Your specialty was finding bad boy Marines and having them shipped to
the "Nam if they didn't do what you said.
I asked some questions. I know what you did."
"That was a long time ago. I have nothing to apologize for. I did
what was necessary."
"One of those boys was named Donny Fenn. You had him shipped from
Eighth and I to "Nam, even though he was under his thirteen. He served
with me. He died with me on the day before DEROS."
"Jesus Christ--Swagger! The sniper. Oh, now I get it.
Oh, Christ, you're here for some absurd revenge thing? I sent Fenn to
"Nam, he got killed, it's my fault? That is probably how your mind
works! What about the North Vietnamese; don't they have something to
do with it? Oh, please. Don't make me laugh. Another cowboy! You
guys just don't get it, do you?"
"This ain't about me."
"What do you want?"
"I have to know what happened back then. What happened to Donny. What
was that thing all about? What did he know?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I think the Russians tried to kill him. I think it was him they were
targeting, not me."
"Ridiculous."
"There was no Russian involvement?"
"That's classified. High top-secret. You have no need to know."
"I'll decide what's ridiculous. I'll decide what I need to know. You
talk, Bonson, or this'll be a long evening for you."
"Jesus Christ," said Bonson.
"Finish your drink and talk."
Bonson took a swallow.
"How did you find me?"
"I shook your Social Security number out of your service records. With
a Social Security number you can find anybody."
TIME TO HUNT 411
"All right. You could have made an appointment. I'm in the book."
"I prefer to talk on my terms, not yours."
Bonson rose, poured himself another bourbon.
"Drink, Sergeant?"
"Not for me."
"Fair enough."
He sat down.
"All right, there was Russian involvement. Tertiary, but definite. But
Fenn could not have known a thing. He knew nothing that would make him
valuable enough for the Russians to target. I went over that case,
over and over it. Believe me, he could not have known a thing."
"Tell me the fucking story. I'll decide what it means."
"All right. Swagger, I'll tell you. But understand I am only doing so
under what appears to be threat of physical duress, because you have
threatened me. Second, I prefer to tape this conversation and the
terms under which it took place. Is that fair?"
"It's already being taped, Bonson. I saw your setup."
"You don't miss much. You'd make a good field man, I can tell."
"Get to the fucking story."
"Fenn. Big handsome kid, good Marine, from Utah, was it?"
"Arizona."
"Yes, Arizona. Too bad he got hit, but a lot of people got hit over
there."
"Tell me about it," said Bob.
Bonson took a drink of his bourbon, sat back, almost relaxing. A
little smile came across his face.
"Fenn was nothing. We were after someone much bigger.
If Fenn had played his part, we might have gotten him, too. But Fenn
was a hero. I never counted on that. It didn't seem there were any
heroes left at that time. It seemed it. was a time where every man
looked after his own ass. But not Fenn. God, he was a stubborn
bastard!
He really ripped me a new asshole. I could have had him
412 STEPHEN HUNTER
up on charges for insubordination! He might have spent the next ten
years in Portsmouth instead of--well, instead."
Bob leaned forward.
"You don't say nothing about Donny. I won't listen to any lip on
Donny."
"Oh, I see. We can't tell the truth, we just worship the dead. You
won't learn anything that way, Sergeant."
"Go on, goddammit. You are pissing me off."
"Fenn. Yes, I used Fenn."
"How?"
"We had a bad apple named Crowe. Crowe, we knew, had contacts within
the peace movement, through a young man named Trig Carter, a kind of
Mick Jagger type, very popular, connected, highly thought of."
The name sounded familiar.
"Trig was bisexual. He had sex with boys. Not always, not frequently,
but occasionally, late at night, after drinks or drugs. The FBI had a
good workup on him. I needed someone who fit the pattern. He liked
the strong, farmboy type, the football hero, blond, Western. That's
why I picked Fenn."
"Jesus Christ."
"It worked, too. Fenn started hanging out with Crowe and in a few
nights. Carter had glommed onto him. He was an artist, by the way.
Carter."
Bob remembered a far-off moment when Donny showed him a drawing of
himself and Julie on heavy paper.
It was just after they got Solaratov, or so they thought. But maybe
not. It all ran together. But he remembered how the picture thrummed
with life. There was some lust in it, as Bonson suggested. It was so
long ago.
"Carter had a very brilliant mind, one of those fancy, well-born boys
who sees through everything," Bonson continued.
"But he was just another run-of-the-mill amateur revolutionary, if I
recall, until 1970 and 1971, when he burned out on the protests and
took a year in England.
TIME TO HUNT 413
Oxford. That's where we think it happened. Why not?
Classical spy-hunting ground."
"What are you talking about?"
"We believed that the peace movement had been penetrated by Soviet
Intelligence. We had a code intercept that suggested they were active
at Oxford. We even knew he was an Irishman. Except he wasn't an
Irishman. He only played one on TV."
He smiled at his little joke.
"We think this guy was sent to "Oxford to recruit Trig Carter. Not
recruit; it wasn't done that crudely. No, it would have been subtler.
Whoever he was, he was straight Soviet professional, one of their very
best. Smart, tough, funny, a natural gift for languages, the nerves of
a burglar.
He was the Lawrence of Arabia of the Soviet Union.
Man, he would have been a prize! Oh, Lord, he would have been a
prize!"
"You never got him?"
"No. No, he got away. We never got a name on him or anything. We
don't know what his objective was. We don't know what the operation
was all about. It was my call; I fucked up. We had him somewhere in
the DC area. But we never quite got him. Fenn was supposed to give us
Crowe, who'd give us Carter, who'd give us the Russian.
Classic domino theory! A Soviet agent working the peace movement beat!
God, what a thing that would have been!
That would have been the god damed white buffalo."
"How did he get away?"
"We lost time with Fenn; the case against Crowe wouldn't stand. We
lost a day, we never nabbed Trig. We almost had him at a farm in
Germantown, but by the time we found it, there was nobody there. We
missed him at his mother's outside Baltimore; she wouldn't tell us a
thing.
He was gone, disappeared. The next thing--" "Trig was killed. I
remember Donny mentioning it. He was killed in a bomb blast."
"Under the math lab at the University of Wisconsin.
414 STEPHEN HUNTER
Yes, he was. And we never found hide nor hair of anybody else. Whoever
he was, he got away clean."
"If he existed."
"I still believe he existed."
"What a waste!"
"Yes, and some poor graduate student working late on algorhythms got
wasted too. Two dead."
"Three dead. Donny."
"Donny. I didn't send him to "Nam to die, Swagger. I sent him to "Nam
because it was my duty. We were fighting a clever, subtle, brilliant
enemy. We had to enforce discipline in our troops. You were an NCO;
you know the responsibility. My war was much subtler, much harder,
much more stressful."
"You don't look like you done so bad."
"Well, it ruined my Navy career. I was passed over. I read the
writing on the wall, went to law school. I was a corporate lawyer on
my way to a partnership and high six figures. But the agency took an
interest in me and decided it had to have me, and so in 1979, I took an
offer. I haven't looked back since. I'm still fighting the war.
Swagger.
I've lost a few more Donny Fenns along the way, but that's the price
you pay. You're out of it, I'm still in it."
"All right, Bonson."
"What is this all about?"
"We always heard the man who made the shot on me--on us--was a
Russian."
"So? They had advisers over there in all the branches.
Nothing remarkable."
"It was said this guy flew in special. Your own people were involved,
because they wanted the rifle he had, an SVD Dragunov. We didn't have
one until then."
"I suppose. That's not my area. I can check records.
What does this have to do with today?"
"Okay, so four days ago, someone makes a great shot on an old cowboy in
Idaho. Blows him so far out of the saddle hardly nothing left. Seven
hundred-odd meters, crosswind. He wings a woman with him."
TIME TO HUNT 415
"So?"
"So," Bob said, "the woman was my wife. The old man should have been
me. Luckily, it wasn't. But ... he was trying for me. I examined the
shooting site. I don't know much, but I know shooting, and I'll tell
you this Johnny was world-class and he employed Soviet shooting
doctrine, which I recognize. Maybe it's not, but it sure seems like
the same guy is on my track now as was on it then."
Bonson listened carefully, his eyes narrowing.
"What do you make of this?" he said.
"Donny knew something. Or they thought he did.
Same difference. So they have to take him out. They think the war
will do it, but he's a good Marine and it looks like he's going to come
out all right. So they have to take him.
They send in this special man, mount this special operation--"
"Weren't you some kind of hero? Weren't you especially targeted?"
"I can only think what I done in Kham Due alerted them to Donny's
whereabouts. It made good cover, too.
The Russians wouldn't care a shit about how many NVA some hillbilly
dusted in a war that was already won. We always thought they requested
the sniper; no, now I think the Russians insisted on the sniper."
"Hmmm," said Bonson.
"That's very interesting."
"Then a little while ago, I got famous."
"Yes, I know."
"I thought you might."
"Go on."
"I get famous and they get to worrying. Whatever it was he knew, maybe
he would have told me. So ... they have to get me. It's that
simple."
"Hmmm," said Bonson again. His face seemed to reassemble itself into a
different configuration. His eyes narrowed and focused on something
far away as behind them, his mind whirred through possibilities. Then
he looked back to Swagger.
"And you don't know what it is?"
416 STEPHEN HUNTER
"No idea. Nothing."
"Hmmmmm," said Bonson again.
"But what I don't get--there is no more Soviet Union.
There is no more KGB. They're gone, they're finished. So what the
fuck does it matter now? I mean, the regime that tried to kill me and
did kill Donny, it's gone."
Bonson nodded.
"Well," he finally said, "the truth is, we really don't know what's
going on in Russia. But don't think the old Soviet KGB apparatus has
just gone away. It's still there, calling itself Russian now instead
of Soviet, and still representing a state with twenty-thousand nuclear
weapons and the delivery systems to blow the world to hell and gone.
What is going on is a political tussle over who makes the
decisions--the old-line Soviets, the secret communists?
Or a new nationalist party, called PAMYAT, run by a guy named Evgeny
Pashin. There's an election coming, by the way."
"So I heard."
"That election will have a lot to do with whose Russia it will be in
the next twenty-five years and what happens to those twenty-thousand
nukes--and to us. It's very complicated, rather dangerous, and it's
not at all improbable that there's some kind of Russian interest in
this business you've spoken of."
Bob's eyes narrowed as he considered this.
"You're thinking. I can tell. What do you intend to do?
That is, if I don't swear out charges for breaking and entering?"
"You won't," said Bob.
"Well, to find out what happened to Donny, I guess I have to find out
what happened to Trig. I guess I'll follow that trail. I have to
solve this if I have any chance of nailing this guy who's hunting me.
If I keep moving, keep him away from my family, it may work out."
"This is very interesting to me, Swagger. I want to follow up on this.
I can get you people. A team. Backup, shooters, security people. The
best."
TIME TO HUNT 417
"No. I work alone. I'm the sniper."
"Look, Swagger, I'm going to give you a phone number.
If you get in trouble, if you learn something, if you get in a jam with
the law, if anything happens, you call that phone and the person will
say "Duty Officer' and you say, ah, think up a code word."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four. You say "Sierra-Bravo-Four' and you will get my
attention immediately and you will be stunned at what I can do for you
and how fast. All right?"
"Fair enough."
"Swagger, it's too bad about Fenn. The game can be rough."
Bob didn't say anything.
"Now go on, get out of here."
"I should beat the shit out of you for what you did to Donny. He was
too good to use that way."
"I did my job. I was a professional. That's all there is to it. And
if you ever do strike me, I will use the full authority of the law to
punish you. You don't have the right to go around hitting people. But
if you do, Swagger, remember: not the face. Never the face. I have
meetings."
chapter thirty-seven
Bob wondered what it would be like to be born in a house like this one.
It was not really in Baltimore, but north of Baltimore, out in what
they called the Valley, good horse country, full of rolling hills, well
packed with lush green vegetation, and marked with fine old houses that
spoke not merely of wealth but of generations of wealth.
But no houses as fine as this house. It was at the end of a road,
which was at the end of another road, which was at the end of still
another road. It had a dark roof and many complexities, and was red
brick swaddled in vine, with all the trim white, freshly painted.
Beyond it lay acres of rolling paradise, mostly apple orchards; but the
house itself, tall and dignified and a century old, could have been
another form of paradise. The oak trees surrounding it threw down a
network of shadows. A cul-de-sac announced a final destination outside
it, and off to the right were formal gardens, now somewhat overgrown.
Bob parked the rented Chevy, adjusted the knot on his tie and walked to
the door. He knocked. After a while the door opened and a black face,
ancient as slavery, peeked out.
"Yes, sir?"
"Sir, I am here to talk to Mrs. Carter. I spoke to her on the phone.
She invited me out."
"Mr. Stagger?"
"Swagger."
"Yes, come in."
He stepped into the last century, hushed, now threadbare.
It smelled of mildew and old tapestries, a museum without a sign in
front of it or a guidebook. He was escorted through silent corridors
and empty rooms with elegant, dusty furniture and under the haunted
gaze of
TIME TO HUNT 419
illustrious predecessors until he reached the sunroom, where the old
lady sat in a wicker chair, looking out fiercely on her estate. Beyond,
from this vantage, the windows displayed a view of a formal garden and
a long, sloping path down through the apple trees.
"Mrs. Carter, ma'am?"
The old woman looked up and gave him a quick, bright once-over, then
gestured him to the wicker sofa.
She was about seventy, her skin very dark with too much Florida tan,
her eyes very penetrating. Her hair was a duck tail of iron gray. She
wore slacks and a sweater and had a drink in her hand.
"Mr. Swagger. Now, you wish to talk about my son. I have invited you
here. Your explanation of why you wanted this discussion was frankly
rather vaporous. But you sounded determined. Do you care about my
son?"
"Well, ma'am, yes, I do. About what happened to him."
"Are you a writer, Mr. Swagger? He has been mentioned in several
dreadful books and even got a whole chapter in one of them. Awful
stuff. I hope you are not a writer."
"No, ma'am, I'm not. I have read those books."
"You look like a police officer. Are you a police officer or a private
detective? Is this some paternity suit? Some snotty
twenty-five-year-old now says Trig was his father and he wants the
bucks? Well, let me tell. you, those bucks aren't going to anybody
except the American Heart Association, Mr. Swagger, so you can forget
that idea right now."
"No, ma'am. I'm not here about money."
"You're a soldier, then. I can see it in your bearing."
"I was a Marine for many years, yes, ma'am. We would never say
soldier. We were Marines."
"My husband--Trig's father--fought with Merrill in Burma. The
Marauders, they called them. It was very rigorous.
His health broke; he saw and did terrible things. It was very
unpleasant."
420 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Wars are unpleasant things, ma'am."
"Yes, I know. I take it you fought in the one my only son gave up his
idiotic life to end?"
"Yes, ma'am, I was there."
"Were you in the actual fighting?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Were you a hero?"
"No, ma'am."
"I'm sure you're merely being modest. So why are you here, if you're
not writing a book?"
"Your son's death is somehow tied up with something that hasn't yet
been answered. It's also tied up, I think, with the death of that
young man I mentioned earlier, another Marine. I just have a glimmer
of it; I don't get it yet. I was hoping you could tell me what you
knew, that maybe in that way there could be some understanding."
"You said on the phone you didn't think my son killed himself. You
think he was murdered."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't yet know."
"Do you have any evidence?"
"Circumstantial. There seems to be some level of intelligence
involvement in this situation. He may have seen something or someone.
But it seems clear to me that there were spooks involved."
"So my son wasn't a moron who blew himself up for nothing except the
piety of the left and the sniggering contempt of the right?"
"That would be my theory, yes, ma'am."
"What would be more of your theory? Where is this heading?"
"Possibly he was used as a dupe. Possibly he was murdered, his body
left in the ruins to make it look like it was a protest thing. His
body would make that almost certain."
She looked hard at him.
"You're not a crank, are you? You look sensible, but
TIME TO HUNT 421
you're not some awful man with a radio show or a newsletter or a
conspiracy theory?"
"No, ma'am."
"And if you do come to understand this, what would you do with that
understanding?"
"Use it to stay alive. A man is trying to kill me. I think he's also
a Spock. If I'm to stop him, I have to figure out why he's after
me."
"It sounds very dangerous and romantic."
"It's a pretty crappy way to live."
"Well, if you went into most houses in America and laid out that story,
you'd be dismissed in a second. But my husband spent twenty-eight
years in the diplomatic corps, and I knew spooks, Mr. Swagger. They
were malicious little people who were capable of anything to advance
their own ends. Theirs, ours, anyone's. So I know what spooks do. And
if the spooks of the world killed my son, then the world should know
that."
"Yes, ma'am," said Bob.
"Michael," she called, "tell Amanda Mr. Swagger is staying for lunch.
I will show him around the house and then afterwards he and I will have
a long talk. If anybody comes looking to kill him, please tell the
gentleman we are not to be disturbed."
"Yes, ma'am," said the butler.
It is exactly as it was," she said, "on that last day."
He looked around. The studio had been built out back, in what had once
been servants' quarters. The house was small, but its walls had been
ripped out, leaving one huge raw room with red brick walls, a gigantic
window that looked down across the orchards. It still smelled of oil
paint and turpentine. Dirty brushes stood in old paint cans on a
bench; the floor was spotted with paint drops and dust. Three or four
canvases lay against the wall, evidently finished; one more was still
on the easel.
"The FBI went through this, I guess?" Bob asked.
422 STEPHEN HUNTER
"They did, rather offhandedly. I mean, after all, he was dead by that
time."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Come look at this one. It's his last. It's very interesting."
She took Bob to a painting clamped rigidly on an easel.
"Rather trite," she said.
"Yet I suppose it was the correct project for him to express his
anxieties."
It was, unbelievably, a bald eagle, with the classic white head, brown,
majestic body stout with power, anchored to a tree limb by clenching
talons. Bob looked at it, trying to see what was so different, so
alive, so painful.
Then he had it: this wasn't a symbol at all, but a bird, a living
creature. It had obviously just survived some ordeal, and the gleam in
its eyes wasn't the predator's gleam, the winner's smug beam of
superiority, but the survivor's dazed, traumatic shock. It was called
the thousand-yard stare in the Corps, the look that stole into the eyes
after the last frontal had been repulsed with bayonets and entrenching
tools. Bob saw that the talons which gripped this tree branch were
dark with blood and that the bird's feathers, low on its stout body,
were spotted with blood.
He bent closer, looked more carefully. It was amazing how subtly Trig
got all the components: the slight sense of the blood spots being
heavier, moist against the fluff of the other feathers.
He looked at the bird's single visible eye: it seemed haunted by
horrors unforgotten, its iris an incredibly detailed mix of smaller
color pigments that were different in color yet formed a whole, a
living whole. Bob could sense the muscles twitching under its netting
of feathers, and the breath coming heavily to it after much exertion.
"That boy was in one hell of a fight," he said.
"Yes, he was."
"Did he work from models? It ain't like no eagle I ever saw. You'd
have to be out in the wild and just seen the bird after it got out of a
mix-up to get that look."
TIME TO HUNT 423
"Or, possibly, see it in a man's face, and project it onto a bird's.
But he'd been out West. He'd been all over, doing his paintings. He'd
been all over the world, to Harvard, in a war, in every major peace
demonstration, on committees, and the illustrator of a best-selling
book by the time he was twenty-five."
"Is he using the eagle as his country?"
"I don't know. Possibly. I suspect that such a bird would be less
alive, more rigid. This bird is too alive to be symbolic. Maybe it's
his own revulsion for bloodshed he's displaying. I don't see much
heroic about that bird; I see a shaken survivor. But I don't think you
can know too much from it."
"Yes, ma'am," said Bob.
"For some reason, he had to finish this painting. Or finish the bird.
He showed up late, in a pickup truck. He was dirty and sweaty. I
asked him what he was doing? He said, "Mother, don't worry, I can
handle it." I asked him what he was doing here. He said he had to
finish the bird.
"Then he came out here and he painted for seven straight hours. I had
seen the preliminary sketches. It was different, conventional. Good,
but nothing inspired. On that last night, this is the one place he had
to go, the one thing he had to do."
"Can you tell me about him? Was he different after he got back from
England? What was going on with him, ma'am?"
"Did something happen to him? Is that what you're asking?"
"Yes, ma'am. The intelligence officer I spoke to about all this said
that the security services monitoring him believed he'd changed in
England."
"They kept a watch on all the bad boys, didn't they?"
"They sure tried."
They walked outside, where a few more rustic pieces of furniture
languished. She sat.
"He was burnt out by seventy. He'd been marching since sixty-five. I
think like all the young people then, it
424 STEPHEN HUNTER
was more of a party than a crusade. Sex, drugs, all that.
What young people do. What we would have done in the forties if we
hadn't had a war to win. But by seventy, I had never seen him so low.
All the marching, the jail sentences, the times he was beaten up, the
people he'd seen used up: it seemed to do no good. There was still a
war, boys were still getting killed, they were still using napalm.
He was traveling, also painting; he had a place in Washington, he was
everywhere. He spent four months in jail in 1968 and was indicted two
more times. He was very heroic, in his way, and if you believed in his
cause. But it wore him out. And there was the problem with Jack. That
is, his father, who was forced by circumstance and perhaps inclination
to accept the government's view of the war.
His father was still in the State Department and was, I suppose,
actively engaged in planning some aspect of the war. Jack and Trig had
been so close once, but by the end of the sixties they weren't even
talking. He once said to me, "I never thought that decent, kind man
who raised me would turn out to be evil by every value I hold dear, but
that's what has happened." Rather a cruel judgment, I thought, for
Jack had always loved and supported Trig, and I think he felt Trig's
alienation more painfully than anyone. I do know that Trig's death
ultimately killed Jack, too. He died three years later. He never
really recovered.
He was a casualty of that war, too, I suppose. It was such a cruel
war, wasn't it?"
"Yes, ma'am. You were telling me about 1970. Trig goes to England."
"Yes, I was, wasn't I?
"I need to get out of here," he said. I have to get away from it." He
took a year at the Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford. Do you know
Oxford, Mr. Swagger?"
"No, ma'am," said Bob.
"He really was a wonderful artist. I think it had more to do with his
decision just to get out, though, than with any particular artistic
need."
"Yes, ma'am."
TIME TO HUNT 425
"Well, somehow, for some reason, it worked. He came back more excited,
more dedicated, more passionate and more compassionate than I'd seen
him since 1965. This was the early winter of 1971. He had evidently
made some personal discoveries of a profound nature over there. He met
some kind of mentor. I believe the name was Fitzpatrick, some
charismatic Irishman. The two of them were going to end the war,
somehow. It was so uncharacteristic of Trig, who was so cautious, so
Harvard. But whatever this Fitzpatrick had sold him on, it somehow
transfigured Trig. He came back obsessed with ending the war, but also
obsessed with pacifism. He had never formally been a pacifist before,
though he was never an aggressive or a brutal young man. But now he
formally believed in pacifism.
I felt he was on the verge of something, possibly something great,
possibly something tragic. I felt he was capable of dousing himself
with gasoline on the Pentagon steps and setting himself aflame. He was
dangerously close to martyrdom. We were very worried."
"Yet he was planning something else. He obviously was planning the
bombing."
"Mr. Swagger, let me tell you what has haunted me all these years. My
son was incapable of taking a human life.
He simply would not do it. How he ended up dynamiting a building with
a man inside it is beyond my capacity to understand. I understand that
it was meant to be a 'symbolic act of defiance," against property and
not against flesh. Yet another man was killed. Ralph Goldstein, a
young mathematics teaching assistant, a name largely lost to history,
I'm afraid. You see it in none of the books about my son's martyrdom,
but I got a wretched note from his wife, and so I know it. I know it
by heart. He was another wonderful young man, I'm sorry to report. But
Trig would not have killed anyone, not even by accident.
The accounts that portray him as a naive idiot are simply wrong. Trig
was an extremely capable young man. He would not have blown himself up
and he would not have blown up the building without checking the
building. He
426 STEPHEN HUNTER
was very thorough, very Harvard in that way. He was competent,
completely competent, not one of those dreamy idiots."
Bob nodded.
"Fitzpatrick," he said, then over again.
"Fitzpatrick.
There's not a record, a photo of Fitzpatrick, anything solid."
"No .. . not even in the sketchbook."
"I see," said Bob.
It took several seconds before he made the next connection.
"Which sketchbook?" he asked.
"Why, Trig was an artist, Mr. Swagger. He had a sketchbook with him
always. It was a kind of visual diary.
He kept one everywhere. He kept one at Oxford. He kept one here,
during his last days. I still have it."
Bob nodded.
"Has anybody seen it?"
"No."
"Mrs. Carter, could--" "Of course," the old lady said.
"I've been waiting all these years for someone to look at it."
chapter thirty-eight
The thing was dirty. Thick and motheaten, it had the softness of old
parchment, but also of filth: the lead of pencil and the dust of
charcoal lay thick on every page.
To touch it was to come away with stained fingertips. That gave it an
air of tremendous intimacy: the last will and testament or, worse, a
reliquary of Saint Trig the Martyr.
Bob felt somehow blasphemed as he peered into it, pausing to mark the
dates on the upper right hand of the cover: "Oxford, 1970--T. C.
Carter III."
But it had this other thing. It was familiar. Why was it familiar? He
looked at the creamy stock and realized that it was in this book Trig
had drawn his picture of Donny and Julie, then ripped it out to give to
Donny. Bob had seen it in Vietnam. The strange sense of a ghost
chilled him.
He turned the first pages. Birds. The boy had drawn birds originally.
The first several pages were lovely, lively with English sparrows,
rooks, small, undistinguished flyers, nothing with plumage or glory to
it. But you could tell he had the gift. He could make a single
spidery line sing, he could capture the blur of flight or the patience
of a tiny, instinct-driven brain sedate in its fragile skull as the
creature merely perched, conceiving no yesterday or tomorrow.
He caught the ordinariness of birds quite extraordinarily.
But soon his horizons expanded, as if he were awaking from a long
sleep. He began to notice things. The drawings became extremely
casual little blots of density where out of nothing Trig would suddenly
decide to record "View from the loo," and do an exquisite little
picture of the alley out back of his digs, the dilapidated brickiness
of it, the far, lofty towers of the university in the distance; or,
"Mr. Jenson, seen in a pub," and Mr. Jenson would throb
428 STEPHEN HUNTER
to life, with veins and carbuncles and a hairy forest in his nose. Or:
"Thames, at the point, the boat houses," and there it would be, the
broad river, green in suggestion, the smaller river branching off, the
incredible greenness of it all, the willows weeping into the water, the
high, bright English sun suffusing the whole scene, although it was a
miniature in black pencil, dashed off in a second. Still, Bob could
feel it, taste it, whatever, even if he didn't quite know what it
was.
Trig was losing himself in the legendary beauty of Oxford in the
spring. Who could blame him? He drew lanes, parks, buildings that
looked like old castles, pubs, rivers, English fields, as if he were
tasting the world for the first time.
But then it all went away. The vacation was over. At first Bob
squinted. He could not understand as he turned to the new page; the
images had a near abstraction to them, but then they gradually emerged
from the fury of the passion-smeared charcoal. It was the girl, the
child, reduced to shape, running out of the flames of her village,
which had just been splashed in American fire. Bob remembered seeing
it: the war's most famous, most searing image, the child naked and
exposed to the fierce world, her face a mask of shock and numbness yet
achingly alive.
She was shamelessly naked, but modesty meant nothing, for one could see
the cottage-cheesey streaks where the napalm had burned her, as it had
incinerated her family behind her. Even a man whose life has been
saved by napalm had a sickening response to that image: Why? he
wondered now, all the years later. Why? She was just a child. We
didn't fight it right, that was our goddamn problem.
He put the book down, looked off into the long darkness.
The black dogs were outside now, ready to pounce.
He needed a drink. His head hurt. His throat was dry.
Around him, in the empty studio, the birds danced and perched. The
eagle fixed him with its panicked glare.
TIME TO HUNT 429
When will this shit be over? he wondered and went back to the
sketchbook.
Trig too had had some kind of powerful emotional reaction. He'd given
himself over to flesh. The next few pages were husky boys,
working-class studs, their muscles taut, their butts prominent, their
fingers naturally curled inward by the density of their forearms. There
was even one drawing of a large, uncircumsized penis.
Bob felt humiliated, intrusive, awkward. He couldn't concentrate on
the drawings and rushed forward, skipping several pages. At last the
season of sex was over; the images changed to something more noble.
Trig seemed stricken with admiration for a certain heroic figure, a
lone man sculling on the river. He drew him obsessively for a period
of weeks: an older man, Herculean in his passions, his muscles agleam
but in a nonsexual way, just an older athlete, a charisma merchant.
Was this Fitzpatrick, or some other lost love? Who would know, who
could tell? There wasn't even a portrait of the face by which the man
could be recognized. But the pictures had somehow lost their
originality, become standard.
The hero had arrived, from a Western, or out of the Knights of the
Round Table, or something. Bob could feel the force of Trig's belief
in this man.
The drawings went on, as the weeks passed, and as Trig's excitement
mounted. He was actually happy now, happier than he'd been. The
explosion became a new motif in his doodling; it took him but a few
tries, and suddenly he got quite good at capturing the violence, the
sheer liberation of anarchistic energy a blast unleashed, and its
beauty, the way the clouds unfurled from the detonation's center like
the opening of a flower. But that was all: there was no horror in his
work, no fear that any man who's been around an explosion feels. It
was all theory and beauty to Trig.
The final drawing was of a shiny new TR-6.
Bob closed the book and held it up to the light and saw a kind of gap
running along the spine of the book
430 STEPHEN HUNTER
suggesting that something was missing. He reopened it and looked
carefully and saw that, very carefully, the last few pages had been
sliced out.
He left the studio and walked back to the big house, where the old lady
nursed a scotch in the study.
"Would you care for a drink, Mr. Swagger?"
"A soda. Nothing else."
"Oh, I see."
She poured him the soda.
"Well, Sergeant Swagger. What do you think?"
"He was a wonderful artist," Bob said.
"Can't ask for more, can you?"
"No, you can't. I made a mistake just then, didn't I?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"I called you sergeant. You never told me your rank."
"No, ma'am."
"I still know a fool or two in State. After you called me, I called a
man. Just before you arrived, he called back. You were a hero. You
were a great warrior. You were everything that my son could never
understand."
"I did my job, somehow."
"No, you did more than your job. I heard about it. You stopped a
battalion. One man. They say it may never have been done in history,
what you did. Amazing."
"There was another Marine there. Everybody forgets that. I couldn't
have done it without him. It was his fight as much as mine."
"Still, it was your aggressiveness, your bravery, your willingness to
kill, to take on the mantel of the killer for your country. Is it
difficult to live with?"
"I killed a boy that day with a knife. Now and then I think of that
with sorrow."
"I'm so sorry. Your heroism aside, nothing good came of that war, did
it?"
"My heroism included, nothing good came of that war."
"So tell me; why did my son die? You of all men might know."
TIME TO HUNT 431
"I'm no expert in these matters. It ain't my department.
But it looks to me like he was picked up by a pro.
Someone who knew his weaknesses, had studied him, who knew of his
troubles with his father and played on them.
He's in the drawings as a heroic rower. I can feel Trig's love for
him. He may be this Fitzpatrick. Trig was different, you said. When
he came back?"
"Yes. Excited, committed, energetic. Troubled."
"He had to finish that painting?"
"Yes. Is there a message in the painting?"
"I don't know. I don't understand it either."
"But you think he was innocent of murder? That would be so important
to me."
"Innocent of first-degree murder, yes, I do. The death of that man may
have been unintended. If so, it would have been second-degree murder,
or some form of manslaughter.
I won't lie to you. He may be guilty of that."
"I appreciate the honesty. Trig will have to face his own
consequences. But at least someone believes he wasn't a murderer and
an idiot."
"I don't know what was really going on yet. I can't figure what it was
about, why it happened, what the point was. It seemed to have no
point, not then, not now, and what's happening to me would then have no
point. Maybe I'm completely wrong about all this and am just off on a
wild goose chase, because I'm under a lot of pressure. But tell me ..
. are you aware that the last few pages in the sketchbook are missing?
The American pages?"
"No. I had no idea."
"Do you have any idea where they might be?"
"No."
"Is it possible they're here?"
"You're free to look. But if they were here, I think I would have
found them."
"Possibly. Did he have a place, a favorite spot around here?"
"He loved to bird-watch at a spot in Harford County.
432 STEPHEN HUNTER
Out near Havre de Grace, overlooking the Susquehanna.
I could show you on a map. For some reason that was a spot especially
alive with birds, even the occasional Baltimore oriole."
"Could you show me on the map?"
"Yes. Do you think the pages are there?"
"I think I'd better look, that's all I know."
Bob drove through the failing light across Baltimore County, then north
up 1-95 until he passed into Harford County and turned off on a road
that led him to Havre de Grace, a little town on the great river that
eventually formed the Chesapeake Bay.
He didn't know what he was looking for, but there was always a chance.
If Trig ripped those sketches out, he probably wanted to destroy them.
But there was just a shred of the other possibility: that he learned
something that scared him, that he saw something he didn't understand,
that he had begun to see through Robert Fitzpatrick.
He was frightened, he didn't know what to do. He came here to paint;
because of some passionate psychological, stress-induced oddness or
other, he had to finish the painting of a bird. He did, then he
decided to remove the late sketches and hide them. He could have hid
them anywhere, sure--but his mind worked a certain way, it was
organized, pure, concise, it dealt front ally with problems and came up
with frontal solutions. So: hide the sketches. Hide them in a place
away from the house, for surely investigators will come to the house.
Hide them where I will never forget and where someone tracking me
sympathetically could find them. Yes, my "spot." My place. Where I
go to relax, to chill, to cool down, to watch the birds gliding in and
out across the flat, silent water. It made a species of sense: he
could have driven to this upcoming spot, wrapped the sketches in
plastic or screwed them into a jar, hid them somehow, buried them,
planted them under a rock, in a cave.
Trig, after all, had traveled the wilderness on his bird TIME TO
HUNTing quests. He'd been to South America, to Africa, all across the
remote parts of the United States, its deserts, its mountains. So he
knew field craft; he was adroit in the out-of-doors, not some helpless
idiot. His mother even said so: he was competent, he got things done,
he handled them.
So what am I looking for?
A mark, a possible triangulation of marks, something.
Bob tried to think it through, and reminded himself that such a sign,
if it had been cut into the bark of a tree, say, would have been
distorted horizontally in twenty-odd years' growth. It would be wide,
not high, as trees grow from the top.
He drove for a time along the river's edge. It was a huge flat pan of
water here, though back beyond the town the land rose to form bluffs
and he could see huge bridges spanning them. A train crossed one, an
orange bullet headed toward New York. Beyond that was a
superhighway.
At last he came to the site Trig's mother had designated on the map,
and he knew immediately he would have no luck. He saw not geese and
ducks but golden arches, and where a glade by the river had once been,
uniquely attractive to birds the region over, now a McDonald's stood. A
clown waved at him from behind the bright bands of glass that marked
the restaurant. He was hungry, he parked, walked around a few minutes,
and realized it was hopeless. That site was forever gone, and whatever
secrets it may or may not have concealed, they had been plowed under in
the process of making the world safe for beef.
He went in, had a couple of burgers and an order of fries and a Coke,
then went back to his car to begin the long drive to his motel room
near the airport, during which time he hoped to settle the puzzlement
of his next move.
It was here that he noticed the same black Pathfinder
434 STEPHEN HUNTER
that had preceded him up 1-95. But it peeled off, to be replaced by a
Chevy Nova, teal and rusty, and then, three exits down, when it
disappeared, by a FedEx truck.
He was being followed, full-press, by a damned good team.
chapter thirty-nine
Bonson financed the operation out of a black fund he and three other
senior executives had access to, because he didn't want it going
through regular departmental vetting procedures, not until he knew
where it was leading and what it might uncover. He operated this way
frequently; it was always better to begin low-profile and let the thing
develop slowly, undistorted by the pressures of expectation.
He picked his team with great care too, drawing on a tempo manpower
pool of extremely experienced people who were kept on retainer for just
such ad hoc, high deniability missions. He ended up with three ex-FBI
agents, two former state policemen, a former Baltimore policewoman and
a surprisingly good surveillance expert cashiered by the Internal
Revenue Service.
"Okay," he told them in the safe house in Rosslyn, Virginia, the agency
maintained as a staging area for emergency ops, "don't kid yourself.
This guy is very, very experienced. He has been in gunfights and
battles his whole life. He operated as a recon team leader for SOG for
a long year up near and inside Cambodia in sixty seven
He was an immensely heroic sniper who may be the only man in history to
have stopped a battalion by himself, in seventy-two. If you look at
the dossier I've distributed, you see that he's been involved in dust
ups ever since then: some business in New Orleans in ninety-two and
then, two years ago, he spent some time in his hometown in Arkansas and
the state death-by-shooting rate skyrocketed. This is a very, very
salty, competent individual.
He is strictly at the top of the pyramid.
"So let me repeat: your job is to monitor him, to report his
activities, to tap into his discoveries, but that is
436 STEPHEN HUNTER
all. I want this understood. This is not an apprehension;
it's no kind of wet work. Is that clear?"
The team nodded, but there were questions.
"Commander, do you want his lines tapped?"
Bonson hesitated. That would be helpful. But it was illegal without a
court order and you never knew how these things would end up playing
out. His career was his most important possession.
"No. Nothing illegal. This isn't the old days."
"We might be able to make a nice acoustic penetration on him in the old
lady's place."
"If you can get that, fine. If not, that's okay, too."
"If he burns us, do we disengage?"
"No, you go to backups. That's why I want six cars, not the usual
four. You stay in radio contact. I'll be monitoring in the control
van. Each hour I'm going to broadcast a frequency change, to cut down
on the possibility of him counter monitoring us."
The team understood immediately how unusual this was. Under normal
circumstances, no executive at Bonson's level would serve as case
officer on an operation. It was like a brigadier general taking over a
platoon.
"Are we armed?"
"No, you are not armed. If you should unexpectedly encounter him, if
he should make you and turn you out, you go into immediate deniability.
You deny everything;
you all have fake IDs. If you have to, you go to jail without
compromising operational security. I do not want him knowing he's
being watched."
Notes were taken, procedures written down. Bonson discussed call
signs, probable routes he'd take to the old woman's house north of
Baltimore, that sort of thing. But then-"One last thing: this man
claims he is also being hunted by a former Russian sniper. I tend to
believe him, though his record would incline him toward paranoia. But
we have to take the sniper as a real, not an imaginary
TIME TO HUNT 437
threat. So let's assume that sniper has no idea where he is and thinks
he's still in Idaho. But he's an enormously resourceful man. If the
Russian is farther ahead of the game than I have even begun to suspect,
and you encounter him, you fall back and contact me immediately and, if
no other option exists, you may have to move aggressively.
You may have to risk your lives to save Swagger, in that
eventuality."
"Jesus Christ."
"Swagger knows something. Or he has the power to figure it out. He's
a key, somehow, to something very deep and troubling. He cannot be
lost. He still has work to do for his country. He doesn't know it
yet, but he's still got a mission."
"Commander, could you tell us what this is about?"
"The past. Old men's dreams, young men's deaths.
The spy that never was but is again. Ladies and gentlemen, we're on a
mole hunt. We're after the one that got away."
In Boise, Solaratov's first move was to call the hospital, asking to
speak to Mrs. Swagger. Mrs. Swagger had checked out of the hospital
two days earlier. Where had she gone and in whose care had she been
left? The hospital operator wasn't permitted to release such
information.
What was her doctor's name? Again, no answer.
Late that afternoon, Solaratov parked his rented car in a national park
that provided access to the Sawtooth National Forest, and, outfitted as
any hiker, began the seventeen-mile trek along the ridgeline that
ultimately left national property and deposited him nine hundred yards
above Swagger's ranch house. He set up a good spotting position, well
hidden from casual hikers, of whom there were likely to be none, and
equally invisible from the meadows and pastures that stretched beneath
him. He settled in to wait.
He waited two full days. The house was absolutely
438 STEPHEN HUNTER
empty. Even the livestock had been sent elsewhere. In the middle of
the second night, he came down off the ridge and penetrated, using a
lock pick to spring the locks.
Then, making certain the shades were drawn, he explored the house using
a powerful flashlight for six hours, a thorough, professional
examination as he sought some clue as to where the Swagger family had
gone to cover. But on the first pass, the house yielded nothing. The
Swaggers had vanished.
The home was orderly, jammed with books on the subject of war, very
clean. The little girl's room was the messiest, but only by a small
margin. The living room was messy too, but it was a superficial mess,
a one-day job, not the accrual of weeks of untidiness, and he could see
where someone had spent a long night on the sofa. He found an empty
bottle of bourbon in the garbage under the sink.
One ordinary hunting rifle, a Model 70 in .308, more a useful tool in
this part of the country. A lightly customized .45 Colt Commander. No
precision rifles. Swagger had seemed to leave that behind him. There
was a study, where someone had done a lot of reading, but that was
about all. He looked for family account books or financial files, in
hopes that such would yield another possibility, but again, he found
nothing.
It appeared to be hopeless. He was wondering what to do next. He went
outdoors, carefully locking the door behind him, and went over to the
garbage cans by the side of the house, still in the cart by which they
would be hauled to the road twice a week. He opened one can and found
it empty, but the second produced a last green plastic bag, knotted
with yellow plastic ribbon at the top; it hadn't been picked up or even
set out. Perhaps the garbage contract had been cancelled when the
family decamped.
He took the bag to the barn, sliced it open with his Spyderco, and went
through the materials very carefully.
Not much: old yogurt cups, the bones of steaks and chops and chickens
eaten carefully, used paper towels, tin cans,
TIME TO HUNT 439
an ice cream package, very sticky, coffee grounds, the usual detritus.
But then: something crinkled, a yellow Post-It tab. Very carefully he
unrolled it and saw what it revealed.
"Sally M.," it said.
"American 1435, 9:40 a.m."
chapter forty
Bob took his time driving back from the McDonald's, letting his
baby-sitters enjoy their presumed advantage over him. He went back to
his motel room just outside the airport, called Mrs. Carter and told
her that he hadn't found anything at the site but that he had some
other ideas to pursue and he would certainly keep her informed.
He went out, got some dinner and caught a movie at a suburban mall, a
stupid thing about commandos who fired and never missed and who took
fire and never got hit, just to eat up the time. When he got out of
the film it was 2300, which meant in London it was 0600 tomorrow. That
was fine. Instead of returning immediately to his car, he walked
around the strip mall until he found a pay phone, well aware that at
least two cars of watchers were in the lot, eyeballing him.
Using his phone card, he placed an overseas call to the American
embassy in London, getting a night-shift receptionist;
he asked to be transferred to the embassy Marine guard detachment, was
passed on to the duty NCO and asked for the NCOIC, Master Sergeant
Mallory, who should be up and about, and in a few seconds Mallory came
to the line.
"Mallory, sir."
"Jack, you remember your old platoon sarge, Bob Lee Swagger?"
"Jesus Christ, Bob Lee Swagger, you son of a bitch! I ain't spoke to
you in thirty years, since I medevaced out of the "Nam. How the hell
are you, Gunny? You done some great things in your third tour."
"Well, I am okay, still kicking around on a pension, no bad
problems."
"Now what in hell is this all about? You bringing a
TIME TO HUNT 441
missus to London and want a place to stay? I got an apartment and you
can camp there all you want."
"No, Jack, it ain't that. It's an S-2 thing."
"You name it and it's yours."
"It's not a big thing, a little favor."
"Fire when ready, Gunny."
"Now, I'm thinking that with your embassy security responsibilities,
you have probably made contact with folks in the British security
apparatus."
"I deal with Scotland Yard and the two Mi's all the goddamn time. We
got two officers over here, but, shit, you know officers."
"Do I ever. So, anyhow, you got a good NCO-type in Six or Five you
know?"
"Jim Bryant, used to be a color sergeant in SAS. He now handles
embassy coordination in security for MI-6.1 meet with him all the
goddamn time, especially when we have people coming in that present
security problems."
"Good, counted on that. Now, here's the thing. In 1970, a guy named
Fitzpatrick operated in Great Britain, but I think he was a Russian
agent, or a Russian-hired agent. I don't know who the hell he was or
what he did or what became of him, but it would be goddamned helpful
for me to find out. Could you run that by your pal and see what shakes
out? Their intel people would have the shit on him if anybody did."
"Gunny, what's this all about?"
"Old business. Very old business that's come around and is biting me
in the ass."
"Okay, I'll give it a run. If it's in there and it ain't real
top-secret or whatever, Jim Bryant can nose it out for me.
I'll get back to you soonest. What's your time frame?"
"Well, I'm about to sack out now. It's getting close to midnight over
here."
"I'll give Jim a call and get to him as soon as possible.
You got a number?"
"Let me call you. What's a good time?"
442 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Call me at 1800 hours my time. That would be, what, 1100 yours?"
"That's it."
"Get me direct at 04-331-22-09. Right to my office;
don't go through the embassy switchboard."
"Good man."
"You got me on that chopper, Gunny. Wouldn't be here if you hadn't. I
owe you this one."
"Now we're even, Jack."
"Out here."
"Out," said Bob.
He went back to his car and drove to the motel. His room had been
expertly tossed and everything replaced neatly, including the cap on
his toothpaste tube. But they'd been here, he could tell. They were
watching him.
He undressed, showered and turned the lights out. It would be more
comfortable in here than out there.
He went to breakfast at a Denny's the next morning, went for a little
walk, watching the campers struggle to stay unseen, and precisely at
1100, put his longdistance call through to London.
"Mallory here."
"Jack."
"Howdy, Gunny."
"Any luck?"
"Well, yes and no."
"Shoot."
"This Fitzpatrick is more rumor or innuendo than actual operator. The
Brits know he operated here around that time, but that info came late,
from decoded radio intercepts after he'd gone on to his next duty
station, wherever the hell that was. But there was no way of covering
him through their regular ways of watching, which means he didn't
operate out of an embassy or a known cell."
"Is that strange?"
"As in, very strange."
TIME TO HUNT 443
"Ummmm," said Bob.
"So they have no photos. Nobody knows what he looks like. Nobody
really knows who he was, whether he was a recruited Irishman or a
native-born Russian citizen. They do say that when the Russians go
abroad, they tend more than not to impersonate Irishmen, because
there's a correspondence between the accents. In other words, a
Russian can't play an Englishman in England or an American in America,
but they've got a good record of playing an Irishman in England or
America. The Russian phonetic ah sound is very similar in tongue
placement to the ac of the classic Irish accent."
"So they think he's Russian?"
"Ah, they can't say for sure. That seems to be the best possible
interpretation. The file has been dead for nearly fifteen years. Poor
Jim had to drive all the way out to a records depository to even find
the goddamn thing."
"I see."
"They only have some radio transmissions and some defector
debriefings."
"What would they be?"
"Ah, a guy came over in seventy-eight and then another came over in
eighty-one, both low-level KGB operatives, in political trouble, afraid
they were going to get an all-expenses-paid TDY to the gulags. They
gave up everything they had: a funny thing, you know, the Russians are
all worried about confusing issues so they 'register' work names, code
names, the like; they got so many agencies, they want to make sure
nobody uses the name and things get all fouled up. The work name
"Robert Fitzpatrick' was one item in the registry that both these guys
gave up. But here's the odd part."
"Okay."
"According to these guys, to both of 'em, he wasn't in the First
Directorate. That's the KGB section that specializes in foreign
operations, recruitments, penetrations, that sort of thing."
"The straight-up spies."
444 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Yeah, you know, hiring informants, getting pictures, running networks,
working out of embassies, that sort of thing. The usual KGB deal."
"So what was he?"
"According to these clerks, the work name "Robert Fitzpatrick' was the
property of GRU."
"And what was that?"
GRUis Russian military intelligence."
"Hmmm," said Bob again, unsure what this information could possibly
mean.
"He was army?" he finally asked.
"Well, yes and no. I asked Jim too. It seems GRU was uniquely tasked
with penetration of strategic targets. That is, missiles, nuke
delivery systems, satellite shit, that whole shebang. All the big
atomic spies, like the Rosenbergs, like Klaus Fuchs, all them
guys--they were GRU. This guy Fitzpatrick would be interested--I mean,
if he existed, if he was Russian, if this, if that--he'd be doing
something that was global, not local. He'd be trying to get inside our
missile complexes, bomb plants, research facilities, the satellite
program, anti-missile research."
"Shit," said Bob, seeing the thing just twist out of his control.
"Man, I don't know crap about that and I'm much too old to learn."
"Plus you got your other problem; the Soviet Union broke up, all these
guys went who-knows-where. Some are still working for Russian GRU,
some are working for KGB or other competing organizations with
different agendas, some for the Russian mafia, some for all these
little republics. If it was hard to understand then, it don't make no
sense now."
"Yeah. Anything else?"
"Gunny, that's it. It ain't much. A possible name, a suggestion of
possible affiliation. Man, that's all they got."
"Christ," said Bob. He searched his memory for anything that he had
learned about Trig that touched on any issue of strategic warfare, but
came up blank. It was all Vietnam, the war, that sort of thing.
TIME TO HUNT 445
"Sorry I wasn't any help."
"Jack, you were great. I'm much obliged."
"Talk to you."
"Out here."
"Out."
Bob put the phone down, more confused than ever.
He felt everything was now hopelessly twisted out of his slender
ability to grasp it. The "strategic" business had him buffaloed. Where
the hell did that come from? What did it mean?
He called Trig's mother and got her right away.
- "Have you learned anything, Sergeant Swagger?"
"Well, maybe. It turns out the fellow's name is Robert Fitzpatrick.
The rower."
"Yes. The Irishman."
"Yeah, him. The British think he was a Russian agent, but not the sort
that would be interested in the peace movement or anything like that.
They think his mission would have been nuclear warfare, missiles, that
sort of thing. Is there anything in Trig's life that would touch on
that?"
"Good heavens, no. I mean, I assume the conventional peace movement
wisdom on strategic warfare was simply "Let's ban the bomb and
everything will be peachy," but it wasn't an issue, not at all. They
were fighting to stop the war that was going on, the war they saw on
television, the war that threatened them."
"Your husband was in the State Department. Did he have any connection
with any of this?"
"Not at all. He was in the counselor service. We served in a number
of embassies abroad representing American interests but never had a
thing to do with the missiles or that sort of thing. He finished up
his career managing an economic research project."
"A brother, a sister?"
"My brother is the famous Yale ornithologist; two of Jack's are dead,
one a doctor, the other a lawyer in New York; the third, a survivor,
manages the family money; my
446 STEPHEN HUNTER
sister is three times divorced and lives in New York, spending money
and trying to look younger."
"All right."
"You'll get it. Eventually, Sergeant Swagger, you'll figure it out."
"I think I'm out of my league this time, ma'am. I will keep working on
it, though."
"Good luck."
"Thanks."
He hung up, stumped. He opened the phone book, found a commercial
shooting range called On Target over near the airport. There, he
rented a stock .45 and spent an hour shooting holes in a target at
twenty-five yards while his campers cooled their heels outside in the
parking lot.
When he emerged, the food choices weren't great:
Popeyes Fried Chicken, a Pizza Hut, a Subway and, down the road a bit,
a Hardee's. He decided on Subway, and was walking toward it when he
realized what it had to be and where he had to go next.
JBonson was flagged down after the 3 p.m. meeting by his secretary, who
said there was an urgent call from Team Cowboy. He took it in his
office.
"He burned us."
"Shit."
"He knew we were there all along."
"Where did he go?"
"He slipped us so easily it was pathetic. Went into a Subway bathroom,
never came out."
"Subway, where, in DC or Baltimore?"
"No, the sandwich shop. On Route 175 near Fort Meade. Went in, never
came out. We waited and finally checked it out. He was long gone. His
rental car was still there in the parking lot, but he was long gone."
"Shit," said Bonson.
Where has the cowboy gone? What does he know?
chapter forty-one
Solaratov knew the one sound rule that held true the world over: to
catch a professional, hire a professional.
This meant that in his time he had worked with criminals of all stripe
and shape, including mujahideen skyjackers, Parisian strong-arm men,
Angolese poachers and Russian mafioso. But never a seventeen-year-old
boy, with dreadlocks, a baseball cap backward on his head and a pair of
trousers so baggy they could contain three or four editions of his
thin, wiry body. He wore a T-shirt that said:
just do it.
They met in an alley in the dockside section of New Orleans. And why
New Orleans? Because the origin of "Sally M's" flight on the Post-It
slip was that city.
The boy sashayed toward him with an abundance of style in his bopping
walk that was astounding: he pulsed with rhythm and attitude,
contrapuntal and primary, his eyes blank behind a pair of mirror-finish
glasses.
"Yo, man, you got the change?"
"Yes," said Solaratov.
"You can do this?"
"Like fly, Jack," said the boy, taking the envelope, which contained
$10,000. "You come this way, my man."
They walked down sweltering alleys, where the garbage, uncollected,
stank. They passed sleeping men wrapped around bottles and now and
then other crews of tough-looking youths dressed almost identically to
Solaratov's host, but with this young gangster in command, nobody
assaulted them. Then they turned into a backyard and made their way
into a decrepit slum dwelling, went up dark, urine-soaked stairs and
reached a door. It was locked; the boy's quick hands flew to his
pockets and came out with a key. The lock was sprung; Solaratov
followed him into a decrepit room, then through another
448 STEPHEN HUNTER
door to an inner office where possibly a million dollars' worth of
computer equipment blinked and hummed.
"Yo, Jimmy," said another boy who was watching a bank of TV monitors
that commanded all approaches to the computer room. He had a shorty
CAR-15 with a thirty-round mag and a suppressor.
"Yo," responded Jimmy, and the sentry moved aside, making room for the
master.
Jimmy seated himself at a keyboard.
"Okay," he said.
"M. You said M, from New Orleans, receiving phone calls from Idaho, is
that it?"
"Yes, that's it."
"Cool. Now what we do, see, we got to get into the phone company's
billing computer. All that takes is a code."
"I have no code."
"Not a problem. Not a problem," said Jimmy. He called up a directory,
and learned the code.
"How do you know?"
"My peoples regularly be going Dumpster diving, man.
We hit the Dumpsters behind the phone company three times a week. A
week don't go by we don't git their code memos. Yeah, here it is, a
simple dial-in."
The computer produced the mechanized tones of dialing, then announced
LINKED and produced what Solaratov took to be the index of its billing
system, with a blinking cursor requesting an order.
"This is the FAC," said the boy, "Southern Bell's facilities computer.
Gitting into this one is easy. No problem.
Kiddie shit."
He asked the computer to search for calls received in the greater New
Orleans area from Idaho's 208 area code, and the machine obediently
rifled its files and presented a list of several hundred possibilities
over the past week.
"Memphis," said Solaratov.
"Our information says the husband once had a friendship with a New
Orleans-area federal agent named Memphis. My guess is "Sally M." is
this agent's wife, come up to Idaho to take care of the
TIME TO HUNT 449
woman. She would call home from wherever she's hiding.
That is my thinking. She--" "Don't tell me too much, man. Don't want
to know too much. Just want to find you your buddy. Okay, Memphis."
"Memphis," said Solaratov, but by that time the boy had it up. A
Nicholas C. Memphis, 2132 Terry Drive, Metarie, Louisiana, telephone
5045552389.
"Now we cooking," said the boy.
"I'll just ask Mr.
FACS to locate and--" He did so; a new set of numbers popped onto the
screen.
"--there's your billing address and service records.
Now let's see."
He looked.
"Yes, yes, yes. Your friend Mr. Memphis, he got calls from outside
Boise beginning late afternoon May fourth--" Solaratov knew this as the
date of the shooting.
"Three, four calls from--" "That number is not important. That is the
ranch house number."
"Hey, man, I done told you, I don't want to know nothing."
"Go on, go on."
"Then nothing, then the last three days, one call a night from
2085555430."
"Can you locate the source of that call?"
"Well, let's see, we can git the F-1, which is the primary distribution
point and that turns out to be .. ."
He typed and waited.
"That turns out to be the Bell Substation at Custer County, in central
Idaho, near a town called Mackay."
"Mackay," said Solaratov.
"Custer County. Central Idaho. Is there an address?"
"No, but there's an F-2: 459912."
"What's that?"
"That's the secondary distribution point. The pole."
450 STEPHEN HUNTER
"The pole?"
"Yeah, the pole nearest wherever they are. That be the pole that the
phone wire is directly wired to. It can't be more than one hundred
feet away from the house, probably closer than that. They got all the
poles labeled, man.
That's how Ma Bell do it."
"Can I get an address on that?"
"Not here. I don't have access to their computer from here. What you
got to do is go to that little phone substation and break in somehow.
You got to get into their computer or their files and get an address
for F-2 459912.
That'll put you there, no problem."
"I can't do computers. You come with me. You do it.
Much money."
"Yeah, me in Idaho, with the dreads and the 'tude.
That'd be rich. Man, them white boy five-Os arrest me for how I be
looking. No, man: you got to do it yourself. You want that address,
you break in. It ain't no big deal. You may even get it out of the
Dumpster. But you break in, you check the files, you find the F-2
listings. You might even find a map with the F-2s designated, you dig?
Ain't no big thing, brother. I ain't shitting you."
"You could call, no? Bluff them into giving you information?"
"Here, no sweat. In any big city in America, no sweat.
You can social engineer the shit out of these boys. But out there:
they hear a brother in a place where there ain't no brothers, I think
you got problems. I don't want to risk blowing your caper, man. What
I'm telling you, it's the best way, it really is. You'll see; you be
chilling in no time."
Solaratov nodded grimly.
"You can do it, man. It ain't a problem."
"No problem," Solaratov said.
chapter forty-two
In the graduate degree ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 132 men and women were awarded their PhD's in assorted
academic and scientific specialties. But only one received the Ball
Prize as the Institute Scholar, for only one was the ranking member of
the class.
He was a tall young man, prematurely bald, of surprising gravity and
focus. He took his degree--"Certain Theories of Solar Generation As
Applied to Celestial Navigation" was his dissertation--in quantum
physics from the clean and was asked to speak some words, and when he
assumed the podium, his remarks were short.
"I want to thank you," he said, "for the chance you have given me. I
have been a scholarship student since my undergraduate years and even
before that. I came from a poor family; my mother worked hard, but
there was never enough. But institutions such as this one--and Yale
University and Harvard University and Madison High School--were kind to
me and doors were opened. Without your generosity I could not be here
and I am honored by that, and by your faith in me. I only wish my
parents could be here to share this moment. They were good people,
both of them. Thank you very much."
He stepped down to polite applause and went back to his place in line
as the ceremony--interminable to an uninvested outsider--went on hour
after hour. It was a hot day and cloudless in Boston. The Charles
River was smooth as blackened, ancient ivory; a thin veil of clouds
filtered the sun, but did nothing to help the heat. The Orioles were
in town, to play the Red Sox in a four game series; the president had
just announced a new at452 STEPHEN HUNTER
tempt to curb welfare growth; the international news was grave--the
Russian election had the pundits worried, with everybody's favorite bad
guy leading by a seemingly unassailable margin--and the stock market
was up four points. None of this meant anything to the tall man in the
khaki suit who sat in the last row of the graduation ceremony.
He waited impassively as the minutes churned by until at last the crowd
broke up and families rejoined, old friends embraced, the whole litany
of human joy was reenacted.
He walked through the milling people toward the podium and at last he
spotted his quarry, the young man who was the Ball Prize winner.
He watched him; the young man accepted the attentions he had earned
somewhat passively and seemed not to respond to them with a great deal
of enthusiasm. He accepted the embraces of colleagues and professors
and administrators, but after a while--surprisingly quickly, as a
matter of fact--he was alone. He took off his cap and hung his gown
over his arm to reveal a nondescript, almost shabby suit, and began to
leave. He had, in fact, the look of a loner, the boy who's ever so
rarely at the center but prefers to blur through the margins of any
situation, is uncomfortable with eye contact or attempts at intimacy,
and will lose himself readily enough in the arcane, be it quantum
physics, Dungeons & Dragons or sniper warfare.
It was a quality of melancholy.
Bob intercepted him.
"Say there," he said, "just wanted to tell you that was a damned nice
little talk you gave there."
The boy was not so mature that he didn't appreciate a compliment, so an
unguarded smile crossed his face.
"Thanks," he said.
"What's next for you?"
"Oh, the prize thing is an automatic year at Oxford as a research
fellow. I leave for England tomorrow. Very exciting. They have a
good department, lots of provocative
TIME TO HUNT 453
people. I'm looking forward to it. Say--excuse me, I didn't catch
your name."
"Swagger," Bob said.
"Oh, well, it's nice to talk to you, Mr. Swagger. I've, uh, got to be
going now. Thanks again, I--" "Actually, it's not just coincidence, me
running into you. It took some digging to find you."
The young man's eyes narrowed with hostility.
"I don't give interviews if this is some press thing. I have nothing
to say."
"Well, see, the funny thing is, I ain't here about you.
I'm here about your dad."
The boy nodded, swallowed involuntarily.
"My father's been dead since 1971."
"I know that," said Bob.
"What is this? Are you a cop or anything?"
"Not at all."
"A writer? Listen, I'm sorry, the last two times I gave interviews to
writers, they didn't even use the stuff, so why should I waste my--"
"No, I ain't a writer. Fact is, I pretty much hate writers.
They always get it wrong. I never encountered a profession that got
more wrong than being a writer. Anyhow, I'm just a former Marine. And
your dad's death is mixed up in some business that just won't go
away."
"More on the great Trig Carter, eh? The great Trig Carter, hero of the
left, who sacrificed his life to stop the war in Vietnam? Everybody
remembers him. There'll probably be a movie one of these days. This
fucking country, how can they worship a prick like him? He was a
killer. He blew my father to little pieces, and crushed him under a
hundred tons of rubble. And nobody gives a fuck.
They think Trig is the big hero, the victim, the martyr, because he
came from a long line of Protestant swine and sold out to anybody that
would have him."
But then his bitterness vanished.
"Look, this isn't doing any good. I never knew my 454 STEPHEN
HUNTER
father; I was less than a year old when he was killed. What difference
does it make?"
"Well," said Swagger, "maybe it still makes a little.
See, I was struck by the same thing as I looked into this.
There ain't nothing about your father nowhere. Excuse my grammar, I
never had a fancy education."
"Overrated, believe me."
"I do believe you on that one. Anyhow, he's the mystery man in this
affair. Nobody wants to know, nobody's interested."
"Why is this of interest to you? Who cares?"
"I care. Maybe your father wasn't the poor guy in the wrong place at
the wrong time, like everybody says.
Maybe he was more important than people think. That's a possibility
I'm looking at. And maybe the folks who pulled the strings are still
around. And maybe I'm interested in looking into this and maybe I'm
the only man who cares about your dad--" "My mother was a saint, by the
way. She taught, tutored, worked like hell to give me the chances I
had.
She died my freshman year at Harvard."
"I'm very sorry. You were a lucky young man, though, who had parents
who cared and sacrificed."
"Yes, I was. So you think--you have some conspiracy theory about my
father? Do you have a radio show or something?"
"No, sir. I'm not in this for the money. I'm just a Marine trying to
get some old business straightened out.
Believe it or not, it connects with the death of still another member
of that generation, a boy who died in Vietnam.
That was another great loss for his family and our country."
"Who are you?"
"I was with that boy when he died. May seventh, 1972.
He bled out in my arms. This is something I been working on a long
time."
"Urn," said the boy.
"Look, I know you're busy. You must be. But I was
TIME TO HUNT 455
hoping you'd have a cup of coffee with me. I'd like to talk about your
dad. I want to know about him."
"He was quite a guy," the boy said.
"Or so I hear." He looked at his watch.
"Hell, why not? I have nothing else to do."
chapter forty-three
Bonson was debriefing the team in the Rossyin safe house. It was not a
happy time.
"I warned you he was good. You people were supposed to be the best.
What the hell went on?"
"He was good. He was professional. He read us, burned us and turned
us when it suited him," came the answer.
"Sometimes people are just too good and they can do that to you. That's
all."
"All right, let's go through it again, very carefully."
For what seemed the tenth time, the team narrated their one day of
adventures with Bob Lee Swagger, where he'd been, what they'd learned,
how indifferent to them he seemed, how swiftly and effectively he had
slipped them.
Bonson listened carefully.
"Usually there's a moment," one of the ex-FBI agents said, "when you
can tell you've been burned. There was nothing like that this time. He
just disappeared."
"I figure he made it out back, cut through the neighborhood behind us
and called a cab from another little shopping center about a mile away.
Or maybe he went up to the roof and waited until nightfall and slipped
away."
"You didn't see him interact with anybody?"
"Nobody."
"He had no contacts?"
"He made those phone calls."
"We did get that, sir."
The agents had written down the numbers of the phone booths and through
them tracked the destinations of the calls, which turned out to be the
American embassy in London, first the general number, and the next day
the office of the Marine NCOIC of the embassy guard.
"We could have inquiries made."
TIME TO HUNT 457
"No, no, I know what he was asking about. He's very smart, this guy.
He looks like Clint Eastwood and talks like Gomer Pyle and yet he's got
a natural gift for this sort of thing. He's very--" It was at this
time an earnest young man entered the room.
"Commander Bonson," he said, "Sierra-Bravo-Four is on the phone."
Bonson looked about himself, stunned, then took the phone and waited
for the switchboard to route it to him.
"Bonson."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four here," he heard Swagger's voice.
"Where the hell are you?"
"You didn't tell me about the baby-sitters."
"It's for your own good."
"I work alone. I made that clear, Bonson."
"We don't do it that way anymore. You have to come in. You have to
come under control. It's the only way I can help you."
"I need some questions answered."
"Where are you? I can have you picked up in an hour."
There was a pause.
"I'm outside, asshole."
"What?"
"I said, I'm outside, with a cellular I picked up at the Kmart a few
minutes ago."
"How did--" There was a clang as something hit the window.
"I just threw a rock at your window, asshole. Good thing it wasn't an
RPG; you wouldn't last long in a war, asshole. I rented another car
and followed the baby-sitters you had staking out my car back to your
place. Now, let me in and let's start talking."
Swagger came in, past the team whom he had so adroitly out managed
"All right, people, get out of here. I'll talk to him."
458 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Do you need security, Commander?" said an ex-state cop, correctly
reading the anger in Bob's body.
"No. He'll see reason. He knows this isn't a pissing contest between
him and this team, right. Swagger?"
"You just answer my questions and we'll see what's what."
The men and women he had vanquished slid out of the room and then
Bonson took him into another one, neatly set up as an operational HQ
with computer terminals and phone banks. A few technicians worked the
consoles.
"Okay, everybody on break," Bonson called.
They too left. Bob and Bonson sat down on a beat-up sofa.
"I got the name of your Russian."
"All right," said Bonson.
"His name was Robert Fitzpatrick; he was affiliated with GRU, according
to the Brits. But they don't have nothing on him, what he was up
to."
"Swagger, good. Damn, you are an operator. I'm impressed.
So what did you do with this? Where did you go?"
"You'll find out when I put it all together, which I ain't done yet,
but I have some ideas. What have y'all got on this guy? I need to
find out who he was or is, what became of him, what this is all about.
He had the Brits buffaloed.
They only found out he was operating in their country after he was long
gone."
"Fitzpatrick," said Bonson.
"Fitzpatrick was a recruiter.
That was his specialty. He was one of those seductive, smooth
presences who just gulled people into doing what he wanted, and they
never, ever knew he was persuading them. You see, that's what's
interesting about him. I don't think Trig was his only project. I
think he may have recruited others, and whatever his business with Trig
was, it wasn't the main reason he came to the United States."
"What was he doing?"
"He was recruiting a mole."
TIME TO HUNT 459
"Man," said Bob, "this shit is getting fucked up.
Secret-agent crap, like some paperback novel. I do not want to be a
part of this shit. My mind don't work that way."
"Nevertheless, that was his great gift, his special talent.
We know a little more about him than the Brits--and the timing works
out right."
"What do you mean?"
"For the past twenty years, the Agency has been in a curious down
cycle. It seems to have had an enormous fund of bad luck. Every once
in a while we smoke somebody out. In the early eighties, there was a
guy named Yost Ver Steeg. A little later there was Robert Howard.
Early in the nineties, we finally caught onto Aldrich Ames. And we
think, well, that's it, we're clean at last. But somehow it never
quite pans out that way. It never does.
We're always a little behind, a little slow, a little off.
They're always a little ahead of us. Even after the breakup, they've
stayed strangely ahead of us. I'm convinced he's here. I can feel
him. I can smell him. He's someone you'd never believe, someone
totally secure.
He's not in it for the money; he's not so active he's obvious.
But he's here, I know it, goddammit, and I will catch him. And I know
this goddamn "Fitzpatrick' recruited him in the year 1971 when he was
in this country. And, goddammit, I just missed him that year. I was a
couple of hours slow, because your pal Fenn wouldn't roll over for
me."
"So what happened to Fitzpatrick?"
"Disappeared. Gone. We have no idea. He was never serviced out of an
embassy, never had a cut-out, any of the classic ploys of the craft. We
never cut into his phone network. He was entirely a singleton. We
don't know who serviced him. We don't even know what he looks like. We
never got a photo. But it is provocative that suddenly all this is
active again. Why would that be? Your picture goes in the paper and
suddenly they're out to kill you?"
"But my picture has been in the paper before. It's
460 STEPHEN HUNTER
been on the cover of Time and Newsweek. They couldn't miss that. So
what's different this time?"
"That's a great question, Sergeant. I can't answer it. I even have a
team of analysts working on it back at Langley and so far they have
come up with nothing. It makes no sense. And to make it more
complicated, Fitzpatrick may not even be working for the Russians, or
for the old Soviet communist regime, which is still there, believe
me.
He may be working against it now. It's a tough call, I'll tell you,
but I guarantee it's simple underneath. Mole. Penetration of the
Agency. The notification of your existence, something coming active
over there, your elimination to prevent--what? I don't know."
Something didn't quite add up. There was some little thing here that
didn't connect.
"You look puzzled," said Bonson.
"I can't figure it out," said Bob.
"I'm getting a little alarm. Don't know what it is. Something you
said--" Photograph.
"You don't know what Fitzpatrick looks like?"
"No. No photos. That's how good he was."
What is wrong?
"Why aren't there any photos?"
"We never got close enough. We were never there. We were always
behind him. It took too long, I told you. I was trying to set up a--"
Photograph.
"There is a photograph."
"I don't--" "The FBI has a photograph. The FBI was there."
"We're not on the same page. The FBI was where?"
"At the farm. The farm in Germantown in 1971. Trig had told Donny
where it was. My wife went out there with Donny the night he was
trying to decide whether or not to give up Crowe. He was looking for
Trig for guidance. She saw Fitzpatrick. She said the FBI was there,
and when she and Donny left, they got their picture. They were on the
hill above the farm. They were about to bust Trig."
TIME TO HUNT 461
"The FBI was not there. The FBI was back in Washington with Lieutenant
Commander Bonson trying to figure out where the hell everybody had gone
to," "There were agents there. They got a picture of Donny and Julie
leaving the farm. She told me that less than a week ago."
"It wasn't the FBI."
"Could it have been some other security agency, moving in on Trig,
unaware of the--" "No. It didn't work that way. We were together."
"Who was there?"
"Call your wife. Find out."
He pushed the phone toward Bob, who took out the small piece of paper
on which he had written the number of the ranch house in Custer
County.
He dialed, listened as the phone rang. It was midafternoon out
there.
After three rings, he heard, "Hello?"
"Sally?"
"Oh, the husband. The missing husband. Where the hell have you been!
She is in great discomfort and you have not called in days."
"I'm sorry, I've been involved in some stuff."
"Bob, this is your family. Don't you understand that?"
"I understand that. I'm just about to come home and spell you and
everything will be happy. She did separate from me, you remember."
"You still have responsibilities," she said.
"You are not on vacation."
"I am trying to take care of things. How's Nikki?"
"She's fine. It's snowing. They say there's going to be a bad
snowfall, one of those late spring things."
"It's June, for God's sake."
"They do things by their own rules in Idaho."
"I guess so. Is Julie able to come to the phone? It's important."
"I'll see if she's awake."
He waited and the minutes passed.
462 STEPHEN HUNTER
At last another extension clicked on, and his wife said, "Bob?"
"Yes. How are you?"
"I'm all right. I'm still in a cast, but at least I'm out of that
awful traction."
"Traction sucks."
"Where are you?"
"I'm in Washington right now, working on this thing."
"God, Bob. No wonder my lawyer couldn't find you."
"I'll be home soon. I just have this thing to deal with."
She was silent.
"I had to ask you something."
"What?"
"You told me that when you and Donny left that farm, you were
photographed, right? Some guys were in the hills, monitoring the
situation, and they got a photo."
"Yes."
"You're sure?"
"Of course I'm sure. Why would I make something like that up?"
"Well, you might have it mixed up with something else."
"It was very straightforward. Donny knew where the farm was; we drove
out there. We found Trig and some big blond guy he said was Irish. We
left after Donny talked to Trig. We got to our car, got in, and this
guy came out of nowhere and took our picture. That's it."
"Hmmm," he said. He put the phone down.
"She says yes, definitely, there was a picture taken."
"What did the guy look like?"
Bob asked her.
"Guy in a suit. Heavy-set, blunt, I guess. I didn't get a good look.
It was dark, remember? Cops. FBI agents."
"Just cops," Bob said.
"Don't you see," said Bonson.
"Some kind of Soviet security team. Covering for Fitzpatrick."
Yes, Bob thought. That made sense.
TIME TO HUNT 463
"And that was everybody that was out there?" he asked.
"Well .. . Peter, Peter Farris."
"Peter?" Bob asked. Peter? Something rang in his head from far
away.
"I don't know that he was there."
"Who was Peter?" he asked, struggling to remember.
He thought he could recall Donny mentioning a Peter somewhere some time
or other and had a bad feeling.
"He was one of my friends in the movement. He thought he was in love
with me. He may have followed us out there."
"You don't know?"
"He disappeared that night. His body was found several months later. I
wrote Donny about it."
"Okay," said Bob, "I'll call you as soon as I get back, and we can work
this out however you want. You're safe in all this snow?"
"We may be snowed in for a few days, it's so isolated.
But that's okay; we have plenty of food and fuel. Sally's here. It's
not a problem. I feel very safe."
"Okay," he said.
"Good-bye," she said.
"That was a dead end," he said, after hanging up.
Peter, he thought. Peter is dead. Peter disappeared that night. Yet
something taunted him. He remembered other words, spoken directly to
him: It's not about you this time.
"Well, it's another good bit of circumstantial that the Russians had
committed to a major operation, and they were running high-level
security on it."
Then a thought just sort of fluttered through Bob's mind.
"It is odd," he noted, "that of all the people that went to that
farm--Trig, a kid named Peter Farris, Donny-they're all dead. In fact,
they all died within a few months of that night."
"Everybody except your wife."
464 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Yeah. And--" Except my wife, he thought.
Except my wife.
Bob stopped, caught up suddenly. Something snapped into perfect focus.
It wasn't there, then it was; there was no coming into being, no sense
of emergence: it was just indisputably there, big as life.
"You know--" started Bonson.
"Shut up," said Bob.
He was silent another second.
"I get it," he said.
"The picture, the timing, the target."
"What are you talking about?"
"They killed everyone except Julie. They didn't know who Julie was but
they had a picture of her. The picture they got that night. But Donny
never officially recorded his marriage with the Marine Corps. So there
were no records of who she was. She was a mystery to them. Then, when
my picture was on Time's cover over that business in New Orleans, it
didn't matter, it meant nothing. I didn't even know Julie yet. But
two months ago, my picture runs again in Time. And the National Star,
when I'm famous again for a weekend. It was snapped by a tabloid
photographer as we were coming out of church, Julie and I. It's not my
picture they're interested in, or even me. That story told how I had
married the widow of my spotter in Vietnam."
He turned to Bonson.
"It's Julie. They're trying to kill Julie. They have to kill everyone
who was at that farm and saw Fitzpatrick with Trig loading that truck.
This whole thing isn't about killing me. It's about killing Julie. He
fired at what he thought was me first in the mountains because I was
armed. He had to take the armed man first. But she was the target."
Bonson nodded.
Bob picked up the phone, dialed quickly. But the line was out.
chapter forty-four
The snow didn't scare Solaratov. He had seen snow before. He had
lived and hunted in snow. He had trekked the mountains of Afghanistan
above the snowline with a SPETSNAZ team hunting for mujahideen
leadership cadres. The snow was the sniper's ally. It drove security
forces under cover, it grounded air cover and, best of all, it covered
tracks. The sniper loved snow.
It fell in huge, lofty feathers, a wet, lush snow from a dark mountain
sky. It adhered and quickly covered the earth and drove most people to
shelter. The weatherman said it would snow all night, a last blast of
winter, unusual but not unheard of. Twelve, maybe twenty inches of it,
endless and silent.
He drove through already thinning traffic and had no trouble finding
the Idaho Bell outstation that had been the F-1--primary distribution
point--for the phone calls from remote rural Custer County to Nick
Memphis's New Orleans address. It was a low, bleak building, built to
modern American standards without windows. The happy Bell sign stood
outside; inside, it was dark, presumably working entirely by robotics.
To one side stood a phalanx of transformers, fenced off and marked with
fierce danger signs, which produced a nexus of wires that rose to poles
to shunt the miracle of communication around Custer County. A small
parking lot was empty. Out back, a cyclone fence sealed off what
appeared to be a sort of motor pool, where six vans with idaho bell
emblazoned on them were parked next to what looked like a sheetmetal
maintenance garage. But it was dark too. Even better, the building
was far from downtown, such as "downtown" was, along a country road
that would now not be much traveled.
Still, he did not dare park in the lot, for that lone car
466 STEPHEN HUNTER
on a dark night could attract some attention. He drove several hundred
yards into a small development of houses, where some cars were parked
along the street, and pulled in, turning the engine off. He waited in
darkness, as the snow fell silently on the hood of the car, soon
veiling the windshield. He opened the door, got out, slipped it shut
without a slam, for the noise would have seemed even louder in the
quiet.
It was an easy walk, between two dark houses, across a field, and then
next to the Cyclone fence. He looked for sign of an alarm or
electrification or notice of a dog.
There was none. Taking a pair of wire cutters from the pocket of his
parka, he used the massive strength in his forearms to cut the cyclone
and bend back an entrance to the wire. He slithered through. He
slipped between vans, around the garage, and felt his way along the
back of the phone building until he found a metal door. He looked
about for signs of an alarm and, finding none, took from his pocket a
leather envelope of lock picks. The lock was a simple but solid pin
tumbler; he took the two tools he would need, the tension tool and the
feeler pick, and set to work. He inserted the tension tool. It was a
matter of delicate feel, the tension tool holding the pins down, the
feeler tool locating them one by one along the shear line of the
cylinder and pushing them back until he felt a slight thump, signifying
that he'd gotten all the pins aligned.
The cylinder turned; the door sprang open.
He stepped inside, pulled out a pair of glasses with a small, powerful
flashlight mounted to them and began to explore the building.
It didn't take long. He found a map on the wall in what appeared to be
the bullpen for the Bell linemen and took it down. It seemed to be
Custer County as broken down into phone zones. Indeed, as he searched
it in the illumination of the flashlight, he quickly noted small
circles denoted along the roads that were numbered in integer sequences
similar to the one he'd uncovered in New Or TIME TO HUNT 467
leans. These would be the secondary distribution points for the calls,
the F-2s.
He had a powerful impulse just to flee with the map, but it was stiff
and large, and carrying it across the field back to the car would be
very difficult. Instead, he began a patient search, zone by zone, of
the chart, searching for the magic numbers 459912. Again, it took some
time, but at last, along a mountain road high in the Lost River range,
he found the pole; it stood in a valley near a rectangle that clearly
denoted a ranch house. From the crush of elevation contours close by,
he understood that it stood under the mountains, giving him a perfect
angle for a killing shot. He carefully copied the map onto a sheet of
paper, which he would later compare with the exhaustive maps he had
already acquired as he set up his approach to the target area.
He had the map hung on the wall again when he heard sounds. He fought
the urge to panic and slipped down the wall until he found a desk
behind which he could hide. He switched off his light, and took a
Glock 19 out of his shoulder holster under the heavy parka.
The lights came on at that moment, and he heard the sound of a man
walking to a desk, sitting down and fiddling with papers, sighing with
the approach of a night's duty. The man picked up the phone and dialed
a number.
"Bobby? Yeah, I want the guys in. Grace is already on the way. The
state cops told me they got downed lines near Sunbeam Dam and I want
somebody to check the meadow there at Arco; those suckers always go
down. I'll start calling the A-line, you start calling the B's. Yeah,
I know, I'm pissed too. This late. Oh, well, buddy, you wanted to be
in management, that means long nights and no overtime. But free
coffee, Bobby."
The man hung up.
Solaratov faced reality. In minutes the room would fill up with
linemen come in to work the unexpected weather emergency. He was in a
tenuous situation as it was, only undiscovered because the supervisor
was so focused on
468 STEPHEN HUNTER
his labors. When the others arrived, he would soon be discovered; even
if he could hide, he'd be pinned for hours as the long night's repair
effort was coordinated and executed.
"Mrs. Bellamy? This is Walter Fish at work. Is Gene there? Yes,
ma'am, we're recalling the workforce; please wake him. That's right,
ma'am. Thanks very much."
Walter Fish bent over his phones and was making another call when the
shadow of Solaratov fell across him.
He looked up; a bafflement fell across his features that transfigured
almost instantaneously into a reflexive Western smile, and then became
a mask of panic.
Solaratov shot him in the face, below the left eye, with a 147-grain
Federal Hydra-Shock. The gun popped in his hand, cycled, spitting a
shell across the room. Fish jerked backward as if in a different, a
faster, time sequence. His brain tissue sprayed the wall behind him,
and a small gouge of plaster blew out where the bullet exited the skull
and plunked into the wall.
Solaratov turned and looked for the ejected shell; he spied it across
the room, under a desk, and went quickly to pick it up. When he arose,
he faced a woman in the doorway, with a thermos in one hand, still
wrapped up babushka like against the weather. Her features became
unglued at the horror she saw and her eyes opened like quarters.
Solaratov shot her in the chest but missed the heart. She staggered
backward, spun and began to stagger down the hall, screaming, "No, no,
no, no, no, no!"
He stepped into the hall, locked the Glock in both hands, acquired the
nightlit front sight and shot her in the base of the spine. She went
down, her hand reaching convulsively back to touch the wound itself.
Why did they do that? They always did that. He walked to her; she
still moved. He bent, put the muzzle to the back of her head and fired
again. The muzzle flash ignited her hair. It blazed with an acrid,
chemical stench, then extinguished itself, producing a vapor of smoke,
and Solaratov realized she'd been wearing a wig of some artificial
substance.
TIME TO HUNT 469
Now there was no time to pick up shells. He walked swiftly down the
corridor, found the door and slipped out the back. Thank God it was
still snowing heavily; in seconds, minutes at the most, his tracks
would be gone.
He went across the field, the pistol still hot in his hand.
He had no sense of shame or doubt or pain; he was the professional and
he did what was necessary, the hard thing always, and kept going. But
it shook him nevertheless:
the look on the poor man's face in the second before the bullet blew
through his cheekbone; and the woman who could only scream "No, no, no,
no" as she rushed along the corridor.
It seemed to put a curse on his enterprise. He was not superstitious
and he was too experienced by far to consider such nontechnical
elements as having any meaning;
still, it didn't feel right.
chapter forty-five
Bonson had promised Bob that he could surprise him with how much he
could do and how quickly, and now he made good on that statement.
He picked up the phone and dialed a certain number and said, very
calmly, "Duty officer, this is Deputy Director Bonson, authenticating
code Alpha-Actual-Two-Five-Nine, do you acknowledge?"
When the man on the other end did so, Bonson said, "I am hereby
declaring a Code Blue Critical Incident.
Please notify the Fifth Floor and set up a Domestic Crisis Team. I
want two senior analysts--Wigler and Marbella. I want my senior
analysts from Team Cowboy. I want some people from computer division.
I want to lay on air ASAP;
I'm at 2854 Arlington Avenue, in Rosslyn. We will make our way to the
USA Today building for pickup. I'd like that in the next five
minutes."
He waited, got the reply he wanted.
"I also want an FBI HRT unit put on alert and ready to coordinate with
our liaison ASAP. This may involve a shooting situation and I want the
best guys. Do you copy?"
Getting his last acknowledgment, he hung up.
"Okay," he said, turning to Bob, "we have to get a ride to the
newspaper building, and the chopper will pick us up. We'll be in
Langley inside fifteen minutes and put our best people to work in
twenty. I can have a security team on-site in four hours."
"Not if it's snowing," said Bob.
"What?"
"She said it was snowing. That's going to close the whole thing
down."
"Shit," said Bonson.
"It won't shut him down," said Bob.
"Not this boy.
TIME TO HUNT 471
He's been in the mountains. He hunted the mountains for years."
"It may be premature to worry," said Bonson.
"No, he'll go as soon as he can. He won't wait or goof around or take
a break. He's got a job to do. It's the way his mind works. He's
very thorough, very committed, very gifted, very patient, but when he
sees it, he'll go for it instantly. He's been hunting her as I've been
hunting him.
And he's much closer."
"Shit," said Bonson again.
"Call them back and get them working the area. We're going to need
maps, weather, satellite tracking, maybe.
It's Custer County, about five miles outside of Mackay, Idaho, in the
center of the state, in the Lost River Range.
It's north of Mackay, off Route Ninety-three, in the foothills of the
Lost River, as I understand it."
"That's good," said Bonson, and turned to make the call.
A half hour later they got the bad news.
"Sir," said a staff assistant with the grave face of a junior officer
carrying the news no one wanted to hear, "we got some real problems out
there."
"Go ahead," said Bonson, trailing along in Bob's wake into a room that
could have been any meeting room in any office building in America but
just happened to be in the headquarters of the Central Intelligence
Agency in Langley, Virginia.
"There's a freak front moving in from Canada across central Idaho. The
weather service people say it'll dump sixteen, eighteen inches on the
place. Nothing's moving there; the roads will be closed until they can
be plowed, and they can't be plowed until morning. Nothing's flying
either. That area is totally sealed off. Nobody's going anywhere."
"Shit," said Bonson.
"Notify FBI. Tell them to stand down."
"Yes, sir, but there's more."
472 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Go ahead."
"We have been in contact with Idaho State Police authorities.
Just to make things worse, there's been a double homicide at the phone
company. A supervisor and his secretary, coming on to run the snow
emergency shift, were shot and killed. Whoever did it got completely
away.
Nothing was stolen, nothing taken. Maybe it was domestic, but they say
it looked like a professional hit."
"It's him," said Bob.
"He's there. He probably had to get the final location out of the
phone company files or something. He got surprised by these two people
and he did what he had to do."
"Cold," said Bonson.
"Very cold."
"I'll tell you what we need real fast," said Swagger.
"We need an extremely good workup on the terrain there.
Let's figure out, given the time of the shootings, if he'd have a
chance at making it on foot to a shooting position.
Where would he dump his car, how far would he have to go, what kind of
speed could an experienced mountain operator be expected to make? Then
double that, and you'll know what this guy is doing. What time will he
make it there? Where would he likely set up? He'd want the sun behind
him, that I know."
"Get cracking," said Bonson.
-Nikki watched the snow.
"It's pretty," she said.
"But I never knew it could snow in June."
"That's the mountains," said Aunt Sally.
"It snows when it wants to."
"When we get back to Arizona," said her mother from the sofa, "you'll
never see snow again, I promise."
"I think I like snow," said Nikki, "even if you can't ride in it."
She watched in the fading light as the world whitened.
Outside, she could see a corral and beyond that the barn.
There were no animals way up here, so there was nothing to worry about.
The highway was about a half mile away,
TIME TO HUNT 473
and it was her job to follow the long dirt road each day and check the
solitary mailbox that stood where Upper Cedar Road, that high, lonely
ribbon of dirt which connected them to Route 93, passed by.
But the mountains dominated what she could see. The house was in a
high meadow, surrounded by them. Mount McCaleb was the closest, a huge
brute of a mountain; it loomed above them, now unseen in the driving
snow. Farther to the north was Leatherman Peak; farther to the south,
Invisible Mountain. These were the peaks of the Lost River Range,
dominated farther toward Challis by Mount Borah, the highest in Idaho.
There was the sense of their presence, even though they were invisible.
On an evening like this, it was much darker; you could feel them
through your bones, dark and solid, just beyond the veil of the seen.
"Brrrr," Nikki said.
"It looks so cold out."
"This snow'll be gone by the end of the week," Aunt Sally said.
"That's what they said on the radio. Unseasonable cold front from
Canada, but it'll be in the seventies by Monday. It'll melt away.
Maybe it'll cause some flooding.
It does feel like midwinter, doesn't it?"
"It does," said Nikki's mommy, who was at least ambulatory now. Her
left arm and collarbone were secured in a half-body cast, but the
abrasions and cuts had healed enough so that she could move about. She
wore a bathrobe over jeans. She looked thin, Nikki thought.
"You know what?" said Aunt Sally, who with her spunky personality and
Southern accent had quickly become Nikki's favorite person in the whole
wide world, "I think it's a soup night. Don't you girls? I mean,
snow, soup, what else goes together better? We'll do up some nice
Campbell's tomato with crackers, and then we'll settle down and watch a
video. Not Born Free, though. I cannot sit through that again."
"I love Born Free," said Nikki.
"Nikki, honey, let's let Aunt Sally pick the movie tonight.
She's a little tired of Born Free. So am I."
474 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Welllllll .. . ," Nikki considered.
"What about Singin' in the Rain?"
"That's a good one."
"What is it?" said Nikki.
"A musical. About these people who worked in old time movies and how
much fun they had. There's a lot of great singing and dancing."
"A man dances in the rain," said Sally.
"Ew," said Nikki.
"Why would he do that? It's stupid."
Solaratov worked the maps by comparing his crude drawing with the U.S.
Geologic Survey maps he had back in his motel room just north of
Mackay. He tried to work quickly because he knew it would be a matter
of time before the police began checking motels for strangers, and who
knew if anybody had seen him come in half an hour after the murders?
But at the same time, too much haste was no help at all. He tried to
find the zone: that smooth place in his mind where his reflexes were at
their best, his brain most efficient, his nerves calmest. He pushed
his brain against the whirling topographic patterns of the map, located
Route 93 and traced the path from his drawing to the map. He saw that
the ranch house site was farther out 93, at the Mackay Reservoir. But
there you turned right, drove across the flats and began to climb up
FRan "unimproved road," by the map symbol, which mounted the Lost
Rivers and penetrated them, following Upper Cedar Creek. There was a
natural fold in the rise of the mountains as the road went deeper, and
at the end of that stood the ranch, surrounded on three sides by Mount
McCaleb, Massacre Mountain and Leatherman Peak. The mountains were
represented on the map by dizzying twirls of elevation lines, and the
denser they were the more sheer the rise. He saw that the fast way in
would be along Route 93, but that would not work, for the road was now
officially closed, barely passable, and probably being monitored by the
police. Who else would be driving
TIME TO HUNT 475
through such a storm on such a night except a murderer fleeing the
scene of his crime?
But he was a mere few miles from the south slope of Mount McCaleb, and
the way was well marked, as it followed Lower Cedar Creek. The creek,
protected from drifting snow by the furrow it had cut in the earth,
would not be frozen this quickly, but it might be low, and no snow
would adhere to it. Therefore, it might be surprisingly easy walking,
even in the dark. When he got to McCaleb, he'd climb about two
thousand feet--the slope didn't turn sheer for another five thousand
feet--and could then just follow the ridge around and site himself
above the ranch house. Again, the drifting snow could make it
difficult, but he knew that on promontories, the snow doesn't drift or
collect; in fact, that way might be easy too. He calculated the trip
would take about six or seven hours; plenty of time to set up, lase the
range, and get to his soft target in the morning, when the sun was due
to break through. Then he could fall back, continue around McCaleb
toward Massacre Mountain deeper into the Lost River Range, call in his
helicopter, and be in another state by noon, leaving nothing but an
empty motel room and a truck rented under a pseudonym.
He picked up his cellular and called.
"Yes, hello," came the answer.
"Yes, I've located the target," he said, and gave them the position.
"I am moving out tonight to set up."
"Isn't it snowing, old man?"
"That's good. The snow doesn't mean a thing to me.
I've seen snow before."
"All right. What then?"
"I'll be completing the deal sometime tomorrow morning whenever the
client becomes visible. The husband isn't around. She'll be the one
whose arm is in the cast. I'll execute cleanly, then fall back through
the mountains about two miles and scale a foothill between McCaleb and
Massacre. You have the map? You are following me?"
476 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Yes, we have it."
"Your helicopter pilot can navigate to that point?"
"Of course. If the sun is out, he'll have no problem."
"I'll call when the deal is closed. He'll be flying from .. . ?"
"You don't need to know, old man. He's relocated close to your area.
We're in contact with him."
"Yes, I'll call when I reach the area of the pickup.
When I see him, I'll pop smoke. I have smoke. He can come in and take
me out--and then it's done."
"And then it's done, yes."
The working party met at 2330 with the best available intelligence. It
felt so familiar, like a battalion operations meeting: stern men with
dim but focused personalities, a sense of hierarchy and urgency, the
maps on the wall, too many Styrofoam cups of coffee on the table. It
reminded Bob of a similar meeting twenty-six years earlier, where the
CIA and Air Force and S-2 Brophy and CO Feamster had met with him and
Donny as they mapped their plans to nail Solaratov then.
"All right," said the map expert, "assuming he's located somewhere in
the greater Mackay area and the roads are closed and he's going to go
in overland, it's actually well within an experienced man's range, if
he knows where he's going, he has good harsh-weather gear and he's
determined."
"What time?"
"Oh, he can make it well before light. If he finds an exposed ridge,
he won't have much snow accumulation, given a fair amount of wind. If
he gets a tailwind, it could actually help him, though we don't have
the wind tendency dope in yet. He'd almost certainly make it before
light. He could set himself up without much difficulty.
I don't know where--" "He'll be to the east," Swagger said.
"He'll want the sun behind him. He won't want any chance of the light
hitting his lens and reflecting down into the target area."
TIME TO HUNT 477
"How soon can Idaho State Police or park rangers make it in?" asked
Bonson, who was running this show with glaring ferocity. He was
apparently something of a legend in these precincts, Bob could tell;
all the others deferred to him and at the same time were subtly eager
for his attention and his approval. Bob had seen it in staff briefings
a thousand times.
"Probably not till midmorning. They can't helicopter in; they can't
navigate with snow mobiles or tracked vehicles at night."
"Can't they walk in?" said Bonson.
"I mean, if Solaratov can walk, why can't they?"
"Well, sir," said the analyst, "don't forget they have a civil
emergency on their hands. They're going to have people stuck along
highways in snowdrifts for fifty miles each way, they're going to have
accidents, frostbite, wires down, messed-up communications,
hypothermia, the whole shebang of a public safety emergency. Sir, you
could call the governor and get him to divert some people;
that might work. But I don't know how it would play in--" "It doesn't
matter," said Bob.
"If he runs into cops or rangers, he'll just kill them too and go on
about his business.
It's not a problem for him. These guys have no idea what they're up
against. He can take them out, take out my wife, then escape and evade
for weeks until pickup.
That's how good he is. That's what his whole life has been about."
"Sir, with all due respect," said the young analyst, "I'd like to make
a point which I'd be more comfortable making in private. But I have to
make it here and now, so I hope Sergeant Swagger will understand that
it's not about personalities, it's about responsibilities."
"Go ahead," said Swagger.
"Speak freely. Say what has to be said."
"Well, sir," said the young analyst, "I have to think that it might be
wise to concede the Russian his mission.
We ought to be thinking about contingency plans for tak478 STEPHEN
HUNTER
ing him down on the out route. He's an incredible asset.
The information he has! Our first priority ought to be to take him
alive and absorb the casualties--" "No!" boomed Bonson, like Odin
throwing thunderbolts.
"Sergeant Swagger's wife is obviously in possession of valuable
knowledge. You'd let that go? They think she's important enough to
run this high-risk, maximum-effort mission, and you're going to let
them get her? And you're saying to Sergeant Swagger here, we're just
going to let your wife die? It's more important that we get some
information on old ops? We'll just let him do his little thing, then
we'll pick him up in the afternoon?"
"Sir, I'm trying to be realistic. I'm sorry, Sergeant Swagger. I get
paid to call them as I see them."
"I understand," said Bob.
"It ain't a problem."
"How fast could we get FBI HRT in there, or Idaho State Police SWAT?"
asked Bonson again.
"It's a no-go for stopping the shot," said the analyst.
"It just can't happen. We can't get people in there fast enough. Man,
this guy's really caught some breaks!"
Bonson turned to him.
"I am not willing to concede him his mission. I absolutely am not.
Will one of you bright young geniuses solve this problem? That also is
what you're paid for."
"I'm just thinking out loud, but you could target the sniper's likely
location with cruise missiles," someone said.
"They're very accurate. You'd have a pretty good chance of--" "No,
no," someone else said, "the cruises are low altitude slow-movers, with
not a lot of wing to give them much maneuverability. They'd never get
through the inclement weather. Plus, they have to read land forms to
navigate and we don't have time to program them. Finally, the nearest
cruises are on a nuclear missile frigate in San Diego. There's no
mission sustain ability in the time frame."
"Could we smart bomb?"
"The infrared could see through the clouds, but the
TIME TO HUNT 479
land forms in the mountains are so goddamned confusing that I don't see
how he could pinpoint the target area."
"No, but that's promising," said Bonson.
"All right, Wigler, I want you to run a feasibility study, and I mean
instantaneously."
Wigler nodded, grabbed his coffee and raced out.
It was quiet. Bob looked at his watch. Midnight. Solaratov was well
on his way. Six, maybe seven hours till daylight out there. He'd take
his shot, Julie would join Donny and Trig and Peter Farris, and
whatever secret she had would be gone forever. Maybe they could take
Solaratov alive. But that was an illusion too. He'd have an L-pill.
He was a professional. There was no way to stop him or take him. He
was going to win. Again.
Then Bob said, "There is one way."
1 he banks of the creek shielded the shallow lick of water and
Solaratov built a good rhythm as he plunged along, as if on a sidewalk
that led to the mountains. He wore nightvision goggles, which, lit the
way for him as he walked through green-tinted whiteness, following the
course of the creek bed as it wound along the flats. The wind howled;
the snow cut down diagonally, gathering quickly or swirling.
But he felt good. He wore a Gore-Tex parka over a down vest, mountain
boots, mountain pants, long underwear, a black wool knit cap. The
boots, expensive American ones by Danner, were as comfortable as any
he'd ever worn, much nicer than the old Soviet military issue. He had
a canteen, a compass, forty rounds of hand loaded ammunition, the 7mm
Remington, the Leica range finding binoculars, his night-vision
goggles, and the Glock 19 in its shoulder holster with a reloaded
fifteen-round magazine, and two other fifteen-rounders hanging under
his other shoulder. He'd improvised a snow cape from the motel room
sheets.
After two hours of steady pumping, he reached the place where the creek
bed petered out as it went under480 STEPHEN HUNTER
ground. Above him soared the lower heights of Mount McCaleb, barren
and swept with snow and light vegetation.
The mountains were too new, too arid to hold much life. He looked
upward at the hard scrabble escarpment.
Then he looked back across the flats into the center of the valley.
It was if the world had ended in snow. There was a foot of it
everywhere and it had closed down everything.
No lights, no sign of civilization or even human habitation stood
against the whiteness of the landscape and its hugeness and emptiness,
even in the green wash of the ambient light.
Solaratov had a brief moment of melancholy: this was the sniper's life,
was it not? This, always: loneliness, some mission that someone says
is important, the worst weather elements, the presence of fear, the
persistence of discomfort, the rush always of time.
He began to climb. The wind howled, the snow slashed. He climbed
through the emptiness.
I'll bet this is good," said Bonson.
"HALO," said Bob.
"HALO?" asked Bonson.
"He'd never make it," said the military analyst.
"He'd have no idea what the winds would do. The terrain is impossible;
the drop would probably kill him."
"I didn't say he," said Bob.
"I wouldn't ask another man to do it. But I'd do it."
"What the hell is HALO?" asked Bonson.
"High Altitude, Low Opening."
"It's an airborne insertion technique," said the young man.
"Highly trained airborne operators have tried it, with mixed success.
You go out very high. You fall very far. It's sort of like bungee
jumping, without the bungee.
You fall like hell, and in the last six hundred feet or so, the chute
deploys. You land hard. The point is to fall through radar. You're
falling so fast you don't make a parachute signature on radar. Most
Third World radars
TIME TO HUNT 481
can't even pick up a falling man. But I've never heard of anyone doing
it in the mountains in a blizzard at night.
The winds will play havoc all the way down; you have no idea where the
hell you'd wind up. You could be blown sideways into a face. SOG
tried it in "Nam. But it never worked there."
"I was in SOG," said Bob.
"It didn't work there because the problem was the linkup after the
drop. We never could figure out how to reassemble the team. But here
there ain't a team. There's only me."
"Sergeant, there's real low survivability on that one. I don't think
this dog hunts."
"I'm airborne qualified," said Bob.
"I did the jump course at Benning in sixty-six, when I was back from my
first tour."
"That was thirty years ago," someone pointed out.
"I've made twenty-five jumps. Now, you guys have terrific avionics for
night navigation. You got terrific computers.
You can pinpoint the drop location and you can get there easily enough
by flying above the storm. You can plot a drop point where the odds of
my landing in the appropriate area are very high. Right?"
The silence meant assent.
Then someone said, "Instead of a smart bomb, we send a smart guy."
"Here's the deal. You get me there, over the storm. I'll fall through
the blizzard. I can't chute through it, but I can cannonball through
it and my deviation won't be that bad.
I can open 'way low, to minimize wind drift, maybe as low as three
hundred feet. If you liaise up an Air Force jet and a good crew, you
can have me there in six hours. I can't think of another way to get a
counter sniper on the ground in that circumstance. When I'm on the
ground, you can triangulate me with a satellite and I can get an
accurate position and I can move overland and get there in time."
"Jesus," said Bonson.
"You owe me, Bonson."
"I suppose I do," said Bonson.
482 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Sergeant Swagger, there's not one man in a hundred who could survive
that."
"I been there before, sonny," said Swagger.
"Get Air Force," said Bonson.
"Get this thing set up."
Swagger had one more thing to say.
"I need a rifle. I need a good rifle."
chapter forty-six
Go down and shoot her, he thought.
Go down now, kick in the door, kill her and be out of here before the
sun is up. It's all over then. No risk, no difficulty.
But he could not.
He stood on a ridge, about five hundred yards from the ranch house,
which was dark and hardly visible through the whirling snow. Its
lights were out and it stood in the middle of a blank, drifted field of
white. It was a classical old cowboy place from the Westerns Solaratov
had seen in the Ukraine and Bengal and Smolensk and Budapest:
two-storied, many-gabled, clap boarded with a Victorian look to it. A
wisp of smoke rose from the chimney, evidence of a dying fire.
He hunched, looked at his Brietling. It was 0550; the light would rise
in another few minutes and it would probably be light enough to shoot
by 0700, if the storm abated.
But what would bring them out? Why wouldn't they stay in there, cozy
and warm, drinking cocoa and waiting for time to pass? What would
bring them out?
The child would, the girl. She'd have to frolic in the snow. The two
women would come onto the porch and watch her. If she was as bold and
restless as he knew her to be--he'd seen her ride, after all--she'd be
up early and she'd have the whole house up.
Yet still a voice spoke to him: go down now, kill the woman, escape
deeper into the mountains and get out, go home.
But if he went down, he'd have to kill them all. There was no other
way. He'd have to shoot the child and the other woman.
Do it, he thought.
484 STEPHEN HUNTER
You have killed so many, what difference does it make?
Do it and be gone.
But he could not force himself to. That was not how his mind worked,
that was not how he had worked in the past; that, somehow, would bring
him unhappiness in the retirement that was so close and the escape from
his life.
Do it, the smart part of himself said.
Nyet, he answered in Russian. I cannot. He was tseini, which is a
very Russian term for a certain kind of personality.
It is a personality that is bold and aggressive and fearless of pain or
risk. But it is in some way one piece, or seamless: it has no other
parts, no flexibility, no other textures. He was committed to a
certain life and as stubborn in the mastering of it as a man could be;
he could not change now. It was impossible.
I cannot do it, he thought.
Instead, as he moved along the ridge, he at last located the spot he
wanted, where he could see onto the porch yet was still far enough to
the east that the sun would be behind him, and would not pick up on his
lens. He squatted, took off the Leica ranging binoculars and bounced a
laser shot off the house to read the range. It was 560 meters. Using
a 7mm Remington Magnum at a velocity of 3010 feet per second and a
175-grain Sierra Spitzer Boattail bullet developing muzzle energy of
over two thousand foot-pounds would drop about forty-five inches at
that range, a fantastic load-velocity combination, untouchable by any
.308 in the world. But he knew that to compensate, he'd still have to
hold high, that is, to aim not with the cross hair but the second
mil-dot beneath it in the reticle.
That would put him nearly dead on, though he might have to correct
laterally for windage. But it was usually calm after a blizzard, the
wind spent and gone. Remember, he cautioned himself: account for the
downward angle in your hold.
He visualized, a helpful exercise for shooters. See the woman. See
her standing there. See the second mil-dot covering her chest, how
rock steady it is, how perfect is
TIME TO HUNT 485
the range, how easy the shooting platform. Feel the trigger with the
tip of your finger, but don't think about it.
Don't think about anything. Your breathing has stopped, you've willed
your body to near-death stillness, there's no wind, you put your whole
being into that mil-dot on the chest, you don't even feel the rifle
recoil.
The bullet will reach her before the sound of it. It'll take her in
the chest, a massive, totally destructive shot-still over eighteen
hundred pounds of energy--that explodes her heart and lungs, breaks her
spine, shorts out her central nervous system. She'll feel nothing. The
secrets locked into her brain will be locked there forever.
And that's it. It's so easy, then. You fall back, about four miles,
and you call in the helicopter on the cellular.
He'll be on you in twenty minutes for evacuation. No police or civil
authority will reach this place until midafternoon at the earliest, and
you'll be far gone by that time.
He slipped down behind a rock to take himself out of the gusting wind.
He settled in to nurse himself through the coldness that lay ahead. But
it would not be a problem, he knew. He had beaten that one a long time
ago.
The dark of the plane was serene, cocoon like Swagger was geared up.
He wore jump boots, some kind of super tight jumpsuit and was
struggling to get his chute straps tightened. He was quite calm. It
was Bonson who was nervous.
"We're getting close," Bonson said.
"Altitude is thirty-six thousand feet. The computers have pinpointed a
dropping point that should put you down in the flat just northwest of
the Mackay Reservoir, about a mile or so from the location of the
house. If you carry farther you'll go into the Lost River Mountains,
see, here."
He pointed to the map, which clearly showed the Thousand Springs Valley
that ran northwest by southeast through central Idaho, cut by the Big
Lost River between the Lost River range and the White Knob Mountains.
"The chute will deploy at five hundred feet and you
486 STEPHEN HUNTER
should land softly enough. You'll just have to make it across the
flatlands under the cover of dark, get into the house, warn the
targets, and if you have to, engage him."
"If I get the shot, I'll take it."
"That's fine. Our priority here is your wife. She's the target of
this mission, so thwarting him is what counts. As soon as it's
flyable, I've got a squad of air policemen heloing in from Mountain
Home to set up a defensive perimeter, and park rangers and Idaho State
Policemen ready to go into the mountains after this guy. If you get
the shot, take it. But, man, if we could get him alive and her alive,
we'd have--" "Forget it," Swagger said.
"He's a professional. He killed two people already. He won't be taken
alive. The rest of his life in a federal prison is no life for this
guy.
He'd take the L-pill, laughing at you as he checked out."
"Maybe so," said Bonson.
Swagger finished with the parachute; it seemed okay, with the preset
altitude-sensitive deployment device.
That was the tricky part. The altitude sensor read altitude from ,a
predetermined height above sea level so that it was set to pop the
chute five hundred feet over the flatland; if he drifted into the
mountains, the chute might not pop at all before he hit some gigantic
vertical chunk of planet. The Air Force people had explained this to
him, and told him that, more than anything, was why this was so
foolhardy. The computers could read the wind tendencies, compute his
weight, the math of his acceleration, add in the C-130's airspeed and
determine a spot where the trajectory would be right, navigate the bird
to that spot and tell him when it was time to go. But the jump
wouldn't be in a computer, it would be in the real world, unpredictable
and unknowable; a gust of tailwind, some tiny imperfection, and he'd be
dead and what good would that do?
The plane was making about 320 miles an hour, after a government Lear
jet had zoomed them from Andrews to Mountain Home in less than five
hours, during which time
TIME TO HUNT 487
he and Bonson had been on the radio with various experts trying to work
out the details.
They landed at Mountain Home and were airborne again in ten minutes.
Bob checked his electronics and other gear, all secured in a jump bag
that was tethered to his ankle. In it, a cold weather arctic-pattern
camouflaged Gore-Tex parka and leggings had been folded. He also had a
new Motorola radio, MTX-810 Dual Mode portable, with microprocessor and
digitized, a tenth the weight of the old PRC-77 and with three times
the range, which would keep him in contact with a network; it was
linked to his belt, and secured to his head by a throat mike,
sound-sensitive, so all he had to do was talk and he was on the net. He
also had a Magellan uplink device to read the Global Positioning System
satellites, which orbited overhead broadcasting a mesh of
ultra-accurate signals, similarly digitized and microprocessor-driven,
which could enable him to chart his position in milliseconds if he
should wander off track.
He had night-vision gear, the latest things; M912A nightvision goggles
from Litton with two 18mm Gen II Plus image-intensifier assemblies,
which provided three times the system gain of the standard AN/PVS-5A.
He had a Beretta 92 in a shoulder holster under his left arm, a 9mm
mouse gun shooting a lot (sixteen) of little cartridges not worth a
damn, but nobody had .45s anymore, goddamn their souls.
And he had a rifle.
Taken from the Agency's sterile weapons inventory, it appeared to be
some Third World assassination kit of which the rifle was but one part.
The rifle lay encased in a foam-lined aluminum case, the Remington
M40A1, Marine-issue, in .308, with its fiberglass stock, its free
floated barrel, its Unerti 10X scope. It would shoot an inch at one
hundred yards, no problem; and two boxes of Federal Premium 168-grain
Match King boat tailed hollowpoints.
488 STEPHEN HUNTER
He'd examined it closely and saw that the proprietary shooter had taped
a legend to the butt stock.
"Zeroed at 100 Yards," it said. And under that: "200 yards: 9 klicks
up; 300 yards: 12 klicks up; 400 yards: 35 klicks up; 500 yards: 53
klicks up."
"Okay," said Bonson, leaning close, "let's check commo."
"Just a goddamn second," said Bob, trying to guess the range he'd be
shooting at.
What the fuck, he thought, and started clicking, fifty three times.
"Come on, let's check commo," said Bonson again.
Clearly the tools of the trade at this basic level did not much
interest Bonson; they may even have frightened him. But there were
other devices cut into the padded foam of the case; one was an SOG
knife in a kydex sheath, a dark and deadly thing; another was leather
encased sap, just the thing for thumping sentries as you got to your
hide; and still another, so discreet in its green canvas M7 bandoleer
and therefore complete with firing device and wiring, was the M18A1
anti-personnel mine known as the Claymore, so familiar from Vietnam and
just the thing for flank security on some kind of assassination mission
outside Djakarta.
He had a moment when he wondered if he should have junked all this
shit, but as it was all going into the para pack and would be tethered
to his leg, he decided not to worry about it. He locked the case up.
"Come on," said Bonson for a third time, "let's check commo."
"We just checked commo."
"Yeah, I'm nervous. You okay?"
"I'm fine, Commander."
"Okay, I'm going to run up to the cockpit and check with the pilots."
"Got you."
He turned and walked up the big ship's dark bay to the cabin, cracked a
door and leaned in.
TIME TO HUNT 489
Back here it was dark, with a few red safety lamps lit, and the subtle
roar of the big engines chewing through air on the other side of the
fuselage. It felt very World War II, very we-jump-tonight, strangely
melodramatic.
Here I am again, he thought.
Here I go. Face some other motherfucker with a rifle.
Been here before.
But he did not feel lucky tonight. He felt scared, tense, rattled,
keeping it hidden only because poor Bonson was so much more rattled.
He looked at the end of the bay, where the big ramp was cranked up. In
a few minutes, it would yawn open into a platform and he would get a
signal and he would step out, and gravity would take him. He'd fall
for two minutes. Maybe the chute would work and maybe it wouldn't. He
wouldn't know until it happened.
He tried to exile his feelings. If you get mad, you get excited, you
get careless, you get dead. Don't think about all that shit. You just
do what has to be done, calmly, professionally, with a commitment to
mission and survival.
Don't think about the other man. It's what has to be done. It's the
only thing that makes sense.
He tried not to think of Julie or of the man who'd come across time and
space to kill her for what she didn't even know she knew. He tried not
to think of his ancient enemy and all the things that had been taken
from him by the man. He tried not to think of larger meanings, of the
geopolitics of it all, of the systems opposed to each other, and
himself and the other, as mere surrogates. He exiled all that.
"Sarge?"
He turned; it was a young air crewman, a tech sarge who looked about
fifteen.
"Yeah?"
"You got your parachute on upside down."
"Oh, Christ," said Bob.
"You haven't been to jump school, have you?"
490 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Saw a guy parachute in a movie once. Ain't it the same thing?"
The kid smiled.
"Not quite. Here, let me help you."
It took just a few seconds for the young NCO to have him geared up
correctly.
Yeah, that made sense. It felt much better; now it fit right, it was
okay.
"You need oxygen, too, you know. There's no air to breathe this
high."
"Yeah, they told me."
The kid had a helmet for him, a jet pilot thing with a plastic face
shield, an oxygen mask and a small green tank. The tank was yet
another weight on the belt over his jumpsuit, and the tube ran up to
the helmet, which fit close around his skull and supported it in
plastic webbing.
"I feel like a goddamned astronaut," Swagger said.
It was nearly time.
Bonson came back.
Behind them, with a shriek of frigid wind, the ramp door of the
Hercules opened. It settled downward with an electrical grind, and
outside the dark sky swirled by.
Bonson hooked himself up to a guy wire so he wouldn't be sucked out.
The tech sarge gave Bob a last go-round, pronounced him fit and wished
him well. With the ramp down, there was no oxygen and so they were all
on oxygen. He felt the gush of air into his lungs from the clammy
rubber mask around his mouth, under the face plate. He tasted
rubber.
Bob and Bonson edged down the walkway to the yawning rear of the
aircraft. The wind rose, howled and buffeted them; the temperature
dropped. Bob felt the straps of the chute, the weight of the jump bag
tethered to his ankle, the warmth of the jump helmet. Outside he could
see nothingness with a sense of commotion.
"You cool?" said Bonson over the radio.
Bob nodded. He was too old for this. He felt weighed
TIME TO HUNT 491
down with the rifle, the optics gear, the boots, the helmet, the
parachute, all of it too much, all of it pulling on him.
"You got it? You just cannonball when you go out. You fall, you fall,
you fall, then the thing opens up automatically.
You can stabilize with the risers on the left or the right of the
chute. I don't need to tell you. You've done it before."
Again, Bob nodded, as Bonson went ahead nervously into his own
microphone.
"No problem. You get there, you save the women, you'll be all right.
And we get Solaratov, no problem.
We've got it all set up. As soon as the weather breaks, another team
goes in; it's all taken care of."
Another nod.
"Okay, they're saying thirty seconds now."
"Let's go."
Bob moved slowly toward the gap in the rear of the plane. There was no
sense of anything; just blackness beyond the ramp.
"Okay, get ready," said Bonson.
Bob paused in the buffeting torrent of black air. He was scared.
"Go!" said Bonson, and Bob stepped forward and off, into
nothingness.
-Nikki awoke early, before first light. It was a habit she could not
break, partially because of her own pulsating energies but also because
she had for so long awakened then to feed the horses.
Today, there were no horses to feed, but there was a whole new world of
snow to explore.
She threw a bathrobe on over her pajamas and stepped into her moccasins
and went downstairs. The fire was sleepy, so she threw a log onto it,
and amid a spray of sparks, it began to stir to life. Then she went to
the doorway, cracked it open. A wintry blast howled through, and yes,
it was still snowing, but not as hard. She got the door
492 STEPHEN HUNTER
open and crept out on the porch, pulling her bathrobe tight.
The world was lost in snow. Its natural shapes were blurred and
softened. It was everywhere; on the fences, drifting over them; in
strange hills that had been bushes;
mounded on the roof of the barn and on the woodpile.
She had never seen so much snow in her life.
The children who had once lived here had a sled; she'd seen it in the
barn. She knew where she'd go, too. Off to the left, not too far,
there was a slope, not a steep one but just enough to get up some good
momentum.
She looked through the darkness to the mountains of the east, invisible
in the slanting, falling snow. But she could feel a change coming
somehow. She couldn't wait for daylight. She couldn't wait!
Solaratov watched the child through his night-vision goggles, a far-off
figure in a field of green in the bottom of the aquarium that was the
world of electronically amplified ambient light. Excited by the
temptations of snow, she'd come early and stood, outside on the porch,
a little green blob. Then she reached down and cupped a clutch of snow
into a neat little ball, and threw it out into the yard.
The waiting was at last over. He pushed up the NV goggles, and took up
the Leica range finder. He put the ranging dot on her and pressed the
button, sending an invisible spurt of laser out to bounce off her and
back, trailing its logo of data. Five hundred fifty-seven, it said in
the display superimposed on the right of the image.
Five hundred fifty-seven meters. He thought for a second, computing
drift and drop, and then lifted the rifle to place the mil-dot beneath
the crosshairs on her. It felt obscene to target a child like this,
but he had to familiarize himself with the sensations.
The dot blotted out her heroic little chest. His muscles, though
stiff, remained hard, and he locked the rifle under a bridge of bone to
the earth, and held the dot
TIME TO HUNT 493
there with the professional shooter's discipline. No wobble, no
tremble, nothing to betray fear or doubt. His finger touched the
trigger. Were he to will it, four and a half pounds of pressure and
she would leave the earth forever.
He put the rifle down, glad that he still had energy.
Clearly now, it was just a matter of time.
He knew something was wrong immediately.
Instead of curling his body into a cannonball, he flailed, feeling
panic and fear. He had never fallen before, and the sense of no
control completely stunned him. It was no question of courage, just
his limbic system; he was suddenly unmanned by the sense of utter
helplessness.
The wind hammered at him like fists; his body planed and fluttered and
he tried to bring his ankles up to his wrists but he could get nothing
to work against the power of the air rushing up at him at hundreds of
miles an hour.
He screamed but there was no sound, because he screamed into an oxygen
mask. But it was a scream, nevertheless, mad and ripped from his lungs
like a physical thing, like an animal. He heard it rattling around in
his helmet.
He had never screamed before in a hundred or a thousand fights. He had
never screamed at Parris Island or any of the places where he'd had to
kill or die. He had never screamed on the nights before action, in
contemplation of what might happen on the next day, and he never
screamed the day after, in contemplation of the horrors that he had
seen or caused or had just missed him. He'd never screamed in grief or
rage.
He screamed.
The scream was pure fury boiling out of his soul, unstoppable but lost
in the hugeness of the air pressure.
He fell through darkness, feeling lost and powerless and, above all,
vulnerable.
Don't let me die, he thought, all commitment to mission, all dedication
to justice, all sense of fatherhood gone. He fell screaming in
complete treason to everything
494 STEPHEN HUNTER
he thought he believed in, his arms clawing at the air, his legs
pumping, the sense of weightlessness almost rendering him useless.
Don't let me die, he thought, feeling tears on his face under the
Plexiglas of the helmet, gasping for breath. Please don't let-The
parachute shuddered open with a bang; he could simply sense it mutating
strangely on his back, and the next split second, he was slammed into
something that felt like a wall but was only air as the chute filled
and grabbed him from doom. He could see nothing in the blackness, but
he knew the ground was close and then, far before it should have
happened, he whacked into it and felt his head fill with stars and
concussion and confusion, as his body went hard against the ground. He
staggered to his feet, trying to find the release lever for the chute
in case it filled with air and pulled him away. He could not; it
puffed and began to drag him, and the Plexiglas before him splintered;
his face began to sting and bleed. His arm was numb. The equipment
bag banged over the rocks as he slid along and seemed to rack his leg a
couple of extra inches. He clawed at the harness, and then it popped
open and the harness somehow rid itself of him, as if he were unwanted
baggage, and deposited him in the snow as it went its merry way.
Oh, Christ, he thought, blinking, feeling pain everywhere.
He looked around and saw nothing at all recognizable.
He struggled to pop off his helmet, and felt just a second's worth of
air until the air turned frozen. He pulled a white watch cap from his
pocket and yanked a snow mask down from its folds. He pulled the
equipment bag over, opened it and got the parka and the leggings on.
The warmth comforted him. Then he yanked out the night-vision goggles,
fiddled for the switch and looked around.
Oh, Christ, he thought.
Nothing was as it seemed. He was on a slope, not a
TIME TO HUNT 495
flat; there was no ranch house ahead because in the most obvious
possible way there was no ahead.
There was only down, barren and remote.
He was way up.
He was lost in the mountains.
chapter forty-seven
Julie was dreaming. In the dream she and Bob and Donny were at a
picnic somewhere in the green mountains by a lake. It felt very real,
but was still clearly a dream. Everybody was so happy, much happier
than they'd ever been in their conscious lives. Bob and Donny were
drinking beer and laughing. Her father was there, too, and Bob's
father, Earl, who'd been killed way back in 1955, and she was cooking
hamburgers on a grill and all the men were drinking beer and laughing
and tossing a ball around and flirting with Nikki.
Maybe it wasn't a dream. Maybe it had begun as a dream, something spun
out of her subconscious, but now she was aware that she was controlling
it, and somehow trying to keep it alive, to make it last longer as she
hung in a gray zone just between wakefulness and sleep. Peter was
there too. Earnest, decent, dedicated Peter Farris, who'd loved her
so, his ardency poignant. He looked strange because Bob and Donny were
so Marine-straight with their short, neat hair and Peter was the
complete hippie, with a splotchy purple tie-dyed T-shirt, a headband,
his hair a mess, a sad little Jesus beard. Peter's feelings got very
hurt because he felt so powerless next to the two stronger men, and
that somehow made him more poignant.
He loved her so! Donny apologized, because it wasn't in him to hurt
anybody's feelings. Bob was just watching them, Mr. Southern Cracker
Alpha Male, amused by their silly youthfulness, and his dad and her dad
were having a good laugh, though what a state trooper and a heart
surgeon, one dead in 1955, the other in 1983, would have had to talk
about was anybody's guess.
And there was someone else.
He was by himself, a graceful young man, also amused
TIME TO HUNT 497
by the manhood convention here on the shores of the Gitche Gumee or
wherever it was, and it took her a while to figure out who he was, and
then at last she knew it was Trig.
She'd seen him twice, no, three times. She'd seen him that night when
Peter had dragged her to that party in Georgetown and he lived in that
funny little place with all the bird paintings, and she'd seen him when
he'd driven Donny out in the red Triumph to find her at West Potomac
Park just before the last big May Day demonstration, and she saw him
again, three nights later, at the farm in Germantown, where he and that
Irishman were loading bags of fertilizer into the truck.
Trig: another of the lost boys of the Vietnam War. All of them were
linked in some terrible chain, forever changed, forever mutilated.
Nobody ever came back from that one. No one got home free. Donny,
dead on DEROS. Peter, smashed, somehow, and found with a broken spine
months later. Trig, blown to pieces in Madison, Wisconsin. And Bob,
the only survivor but maybe the most hurting of them all, with his
black-dog moods and his lost years and his self-hatred and his need to
test himself against gunfire again and again and again, as if to
finally earn the death he yearned for so intently and join his friends.
Death or DEROS: which would come to Bob Lee Swagger first?
"Mommy?" her daughter asked her.
"Oh, honey," she said, but it was not in the dream, it was here in the
dark, warm bedroom.
Julie blinked and came out of it. No, it wasn't a dream.
It couldn't have been a dream. It was too real to be a dream.
"Mommy, please, I want to go ride the sled."
"Oh, Lord, honey, it's--" "Please, Mommy."
She turned and looked at the clock. It was close to seven. Outside,
just the faintest hint of light pressed through the margins of the
shade.
498 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Oh, baby," she said, "it's so early. The snow's going to be around
for a long, long time."
The deep ache in her body was there and the awkwardness conferred by
the arm cast. She hadn't taken a painkiller since last night, halfway
through Singin' in the Rain when her baby girl had fallen asleep on her
lap.
"Please, Mommy. I'll go get Aunt Sally."
"Don't you dare wake Aunt Sally. God bless her, she's earned her
escape from the Swaggers and all their problems.
I'll get up, baby. Just give me a moment or two."
"Yes, Mommy. I'll go get dressed."
The child ran out.
So early, thought Julie. So damned early.
He tried the GPS receiver. Nothing happened. Eventually it lit up but
the LCD produced a rattle of red digitized gibberish. Evidently it had
banged too hard when the bag hit the ground and was out of whack. He
turned on the radio, and heard through his earphones, "Bob One, Bob
One, where are you, we have lost contact; goddammit, Swagger, where are
you?"
He spoke: "Bob Control, this is Bob One, do you copy?"
"Bob One, Bob One, we have lost contact. Bob One, where are you?"
"Do you copy, Bob Control, do you copy? I am sending, does anybody
hear me?"
"Bob One, Bob One, please notify control, we have lost contact."
Shit!
He ripped the thing off and threw it in the snow. The next thing to
check was the rifle. He opened the case, gave it a once-over, saw that
it seemed okay, but he doubted it. The same harsh impact that had
screwed the electronics might have knocked the scope out of zero. There
was no way to know except in the shooting. He couldn't shoot now so
there wasn't a thing to do except hope that Unerti
TIME TO HUNT 499
built the scope real nice and tight and that it would stand up where
the other stuff didn't.
He stood. Pain rocked him, and he had a flash where he thought he
might lose it, faint, and die under the snow.
They'd find him next year. It would be in all the newspapers.
Fuck me if I can't take a joke, he thought.
He looked about. In one direction lay only an endless sea of snowy
mountains. That couldn't be the way, and by God, yes, beyond the
mountains at the horizon was just the faintest smear of light,
signifying the east.
He appeared to be on the highest one. He knew the overflight went on a
northwest-southeast access, aiming to put him into the flats below the
mountains and the ranch.
If he had overshot his mark, the deviation was longitudinal, not
latitudinal; that would put him on Mount Me Caleb theoretically on its
northwest slope. Down below, say six thousand feet, that would be
where the ranch was.
He couldn't see; the valley in that direction was lost in a strata of
cloud, which closed it off like a lost world. He could see only peaks
across a gap that he took to be a valley.
He slung the rifle over his shoulder, checked his compass and set off
down the slope.
The land was barren, without vegetation, as if in some recent time a
nuclear bomb had cleaned out all the life.
The snow lay in undulating forms, sometimes thick and difficult, other
times surprisingly light. Twice he tripped on rocks unseen under the
smooth white crust.
Flakes still fell, stinging his eyes. But the fierce wind had died and
no snow devils whirled up to defy him. He couldn't even hear the wind.
He went downhill at an angle, almost galloping, feeling the boots bite
into the stuff, trying to find a rhythm, a balance between speed and
care.
He was breathing hard and inside his parka began to sweat. He came to
a rock outcropping and detoured around it.
Occasionally, he'd stop, flip down the night-vision 500 STEPHEN
HUNTER
goggles, and see--nothing. Ahead and below, the clouds lingered like a
solid wall, impenetrable. The goggles resolved the cloud mass as
green, only partially distinct from the green of the snow up here, and
amplified the light so much that distinctions could hardly be made, and
no valley could yet be seen through them: only an infinity of green,
cut now and then by a black scut of rock.
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,
TIME TO HUNT 501
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.
502 STEPHEN HUNTER
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
TIME TO HUNT 503
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?
504 STEPHEN HUNTER
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, particularly 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,
TIME TO HUNT 505
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
506 STEPHEN HUNTER
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 TIME TO HUNT 507
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.
508 STEPHEN HUNTER
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,
510 STEPHEN HUNTER
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.
"Nikki! Get in here! Now!" she screamed.
The little girl turned, paused in confusion, and then there was another
one, like the snap of a whip, and Nikki ran toward her. Both
recognized it from the time they'd been shot at so recently.
"Come on, come on!" yelled Julie, and she grabbed her daughter, pulled
her into the house, locked the door.
She heard another shot, from a different location; an answering shot.
Men were trying to kill each other nearby.
"Get downstairs," she said to her daughter.
"Now!
And don't come up, no matter what, until you hear the police."
TIME TO HUNT 511
The girl ran into the cellar. Julie grabbed a phone, and found at once
there was no dial tone. It was dead.
She looked outside and could see nothing except the hugeness of the
snow, now lightening as full dawn approached.
She heard no more shots.
She ran upstairs, and found Sally groggily wandering down the hall.
"Did you--?"
"Someone's shooting," Julie yelled.
"Jesus," Sally said.
"Did you call the police?"
"The line's down or dead or something."
"Who--?"
"I don't know. There's two of them. Come on, we have to get into the
basement."
The two women ran down the stairs, found the door into the cellar and
descended into near darkness.
The cellar windows had been snowed in and only diffuse light showed
through them. It was cold.
"Mommy," said Nikki.
"I'm scared."
"I'm scared too," said Julie.
"I wish Daddy was here."
"I do too," said Julie.
"Now, you get in the corner," said Sally.
"I'll figure out some way to block the door, just in case. I'm sure
it's just hunters or something."
"No," said Julie.
"They were shooting at each other.
They're not hunters. They're snipers."
"I wish Daddy were here," said Nikki again.
Snow showered across Solaratov and his mind came out of its deep pool
of concentration to recognize the familiar cloud of debris a
high-velocity round delivers when it strikes, and the next split second
the whip song of the rifle crack reached him as it shattered the sound
barrier.
Under fire.
The left.
The left.
Another detonation spewed snow into the sky.
512 STEPHEN HUNTER
Under fire.
He tore himself from the scope, looked to the left to see nothing,
because of the shielding rock. But he knew from the sound that the man
had to be on the rim of the ridge.
He looked back into the valley to just catch the little girl as she
dipped under the porch roof, and in another split second heard the door
slam.
Damn!
They were gone.
Who was shooting at him?
He realized now he was invisible to the shooter, else he'd be dead. The
shooter could not see him behind his rock.
He knew too the man now had the rock zeroed, knowing full well that
Solaratov would have to come around it to return fire.
He felt no fear. He felt no curiosity. He felt no disappointment, he
felt no surprise. His mind did not work that way. Only: Problem?
Process. And, solution!
Instead of rising to come around the rock, he backed, low as a lizard,
through the snow, trusting that the man's scope would be so powerful
that its field of view would be narrow and that the whiteness of his
camouflage would also shield him from recognition.
He squirmed backward as low in the snow as a man could be, sliding
through the stuff as if he were some kind of arctic snake. He canted
his head as he backed, and as he slid out from behind the rock, he saw
his antagonist, a disturbance ever so slight along the line of the
ridge that could only be a man hunched over a rifle, desperately
looking for a target. He studied and was sure he saw it move or squirm
or something.
What was the distance? He pivoted on the ground, finding a good angle
to the target, splaying his legs, coming into that good, solid prone.
Adductor magnus. In the scope, yes, a man, possibly. In white.
Another sniper. Low on the ridge. He watched his crosshairs settle,
telling him TIME TO HUNT 513
self not to hurry, not to rush, not to jerk. He couldn't get a clear
sight picture and he didn't have time to shoot a laser at the target to
get its distance. He pivoted slightly, found a bush coned in snow,
which he took to be of three feet girth. By covering it in the scope
with mil-dots and racking through the math--the black mass covered two
dots; multiply the assumed one meter in height by one thousand and
divide by two to get the approximation of a thousand yards: say, less
than a thousand but more than nine hundred yards he held four dots
high. With greater concentration and less art, he steadied himself,
pivoted to find the disturbance that had to be the man but was not
really clear, felt his finger on the trigger but did not think about
it, and let it decide itself, as if it had a brain, what to do next,
and then it fired.
A geyser of snow erupted seven feet to the right of Bob, followed by
the whip-crack of sound. Windage. The Russian had the range but there
was some crosswind and the 7mm hadn't quite the weight to stand up to
it. It had drifted ever so slightly. But how could Solaratov have
read wind if he were shooting across the raw space of the valley? He
wouldn't make that mistake again.
But quickly he'd understand that, cock again and shoot.
Bob squirmed back, feeling himself sliding a little off the edge of the
ridge, and in the next split second, another eruption blew a hole in
the surface of the planet, a big spout of flung snow and rock frags. It
hit exactly where he'd been but just barely was no longer.
Oh, this motherfucker is so good. This motherfucker won't make another
mistake.
Bob slid back farther.
No shots had gone toward the house. For a little while, at least, his
wife was safe. He knew she'd have the sense to head to the cellar with
Nikki and Sally and lock up and wait.
Meanwhile he had but one choice. That was to low514 STEPHEN HUNTER
crawl along the ridge and hope that its tiny incline was enough to
shield him from Solaratov's vision. Solaratov would realize he
couldn't go up or down, he'd never go toward him; he could only fall
back around the mountain until he disappeared around it, and could then
get up and move to cover and set up an ambush. Solaratov would go up;
elevation was power in this engagement. Whoever reigned on high,
reigned, because he'd have the angle into a target where the other man
would have nothing.
That was the plan: to get out of this area of dangerous vulnerability,
move like hell when safe and find a good hide. Solaratov would have to
come around the mountain to get him, but he'd come around high. Bob
knew he'd get a good shot, maybe only one, but he knew he could make
it.
He tried to calculate the differences between his .308 168-grain round
and the Russian's 7mm Remington Magnum.
The Magnum flew four hundred feet per second faster with almost a
thousand pounds more muzzle energy;
it shot so much flatter. The Russian, if he were under five hundred
yards, could hold just a bit over him and pull the trigger, not
worrying about drop. So he'd have to stay at least five hundred yards
ahead, because the slight drop, plus the windage, would be his best
defense.
He turned back, squirmed to the lip of the ridge, but could see nothing
except the quiet house far below and the ridgeline running around the
base of the mountain.
But he was coming. The Russian was coming. The Russian was hunting
him.
Solaratov studied the situation. He looked across the horseshoe
through his Leica binoculars at the ridge where he'd spotted the other
shooter and understood the man couldn't go up or down, for both would
expose him and he'd be dead in a second. He could only crawl
desperately away, round the flank of the mountain, and try and set up
in the mountain's next cove, waiting for a shot.
He shot a laser over and the readout told him the
TIME TO HUNT 515
range was about 987 meters. He calculated the drop to be about
forty-two inches from his five hundred-yard zero, which was four dots
high on the mil-dot reticle. Now that he'd solved the distance, he
felt confident. But there was one other thing left to do.
He pulled the rifle down, and quickly unscrewed the BOSS nozzle, which
controlled barrel vibrations. He reached inside his jacket and removed
an AWC suppressor.
It was a long black tube of anodized aluminum packed with "baffles,"
sound-absorbent material, like steel wool, and washers called "wipes";
it would reduce the 460-dB level of the gas exploding out of his muzzle
by trapping it and bleeding it off, down to under a hundred db's,
approximately the sound of a BB gun. From long distance, in the cone
of the suppressor's pattern, that sound would be not merely
significantly quieter but also more diffuse. There'd be no signature
to reveal his position.
Anyone on the receiving end would hear only the crack of the bullet as
it broke the sound barrier, but nothing from the rifle's muzzle that
could pinpoint a location.
That meant he could shoot at his antagonist but his antagonist could
not locate him by sound to shoot back. The downside: it changed his
zero somewhat. How much?
He'd have to reckon visually and make adjustments as he fired. He
still felt that with the range finder, the suppressor gave him
significant tactical advantage. He carefully screwed the suppressor
tight to the muzzle.
He knew one other thing, because he had studied the topographical maps:
that once his antagonist got around the mountain, he would be in for a
surprise. The elevation was much steeper. There were no ridges as
there were here fronting the valley. He'd have no place to hide. He'd
be in the open.
Solaratov knew the wise move would be to scamper upward to gain further
advantage of height. As he had the initiative at this point, he
probably had a good four- or five-minute window of time where he could
ascend, slide
516 STEPHEN HUNTER
over one of the lesser hills of Mount McCaleb, and then shoot down upon
his antagonist.
But he also knew that is exactly how the man's mind would work; that's
how he'd figure it and he himself, once under shelter, would ascend
quickly to try and prevent the Russian from gaining the height
advantage.
But none of this mattered. The objective was the woman. The higher
Solaratov got, the farther from the woman he got. It wasn't about some
man-on-man thing, some sniper duel, some engagement of vanity. That
was his advantage. The other man--it had to be Swagger-meant nothing
to him. Solaratov's ego was uninvested;
what had happened all those years back in Vietnam was totally
disconnected from today, and that itself was a significant advantage.
Thus Solaratov made his plan: he would drop back a few yards behind the
shield of an enfilade and then descend in freedom to the valley floor.
He'd have a dangerous period of vulnerability as he went across the
valley floor, but with his snow skills and his understanding of the
other man's fear, he knew the other man would be busy setting up a hide
in the next fold for a man he thought would ascend to fight.
Instead, the Russian would work from the ground and shoot uphill. He'd
find cover in a treeline or behind rocks, he'd scope the distance, and
he'd put his silent shots onto the antagonist, precise and perfect.
Swagger would not even know where the shots came from. He'd hear
nothing. He'd be driven back until he was out of cover, and then he'd
die.
Then, thought Solaratov, I'll backtrack, get into the house and do the
women. Witnesses. I'll have to kill them all.
Bob squirmed in a last desperate burst of energy and came around the
mountain. There is no lower or more degrading mode of transportation
than the low crawl, and he had crawled enough in his time. His elbows
and knees
TIME TO HUNT 517
ached from the endless banging against the rock. Snow had gotten into
his mouth and down his neck. Now at last:
some kind of safety.
He paused, breathing hard, feeling wet with sweat. At least Solaratov
had not gotten above him to fire down on him as he crawled.
His mouth was dry, his body heaved for oxygen that he could not
replenish fast enough. His heart hammered like a drum beaten by a
madman. His focus rolled in and out.
But with a surge of will, he settled down. He pulled himself up the
mountain and peeked back over some rocks at the valley he'd left
behind.
Nothing.
No sign of Solaratov. The house lay undisturbed far below, in a huge
field of undisturbed snow. The rock along the ridgeline where the
Russian had set up now appeared deserted.
Bob picked up the rifle and used its scope to scan the mountain above.
If he were Solaratov, that's what he would have done: climbed, worked
around, always trying to get the elevation.
But he saw nothing; there was no snow in the air, no sign of
disturbance. Putting the scope down, he tried to will himself into a
kind of blankness, by which his subconscious, peripheral vision might
note something his front on focused eyes might not, and send him a
signal of warning. But he saw nothing; no movement registered on the
slopes before him or the flatness beneath. He drew back.
Had Solaratov gone low, tried to get to the house and finish the job?
Doubtful; he'd be exposed too long, and at any moment a shot could take
him. He rethought it: yes, he has to come after me. His first
priority is to eliminate the threat, because he is not on a kamikaze
mission, he's no zealot. He's a professional. It only makes sense for
him if he can escape; that means he's got an escape route, a fallback
route, everything.
He will come.
518 STEPHEN HUNTER
He will hunt me.
Bob looked up. The slope of the mountain increased until it
disappeared into fog, which was really cloud. Solaratov would get up
there, come down by some magic and shoot down upon him.
He backed around, looking for a place to set up a hide.
The news was not good.
The ridge on which he perched, like a shelf that traced the jagged
contours of the mountain, gave out 250 yards ahead; or, rather, it ran
into a ravine, where a gash had been cut in the mountain, a long,
ragged scar left by some ancient natural cataclysm. Now it was full of
vegetation and rocks, all pristine with snow. But beyond the gap,
there was nothing. The mountain slope was smooth and bare, offering no
protection at all.
He looked up. It was too steep to climb at this point, though maybe
beyond the gap he could engineer some elevation.
He looked down into a sector of valley. The floor was covered with
snow-humped trees and brush, all bent into extravagant postures and
made smooth under the weight of their white burden. It was a sculpture
garden, a winter wonderland, a theme park, beautiful and grotesque and
delicate at once, the frail tracery of the lesser branches all bearing
their inch of white stuff. It looked quite poetic from six hundred
yards up, but if you got caught down there, you'd never be able to move
out.
There was really no choice. He had to get to the gash and take up a
position in the rocks. He'd get one good shot at Solaratov, who would
probably work his way down from above. Solaratov would have the
advantage of elevation, but he wouldn't know where to look. He'd have
to scout and he'd have to expose himself when he looked.
That's when I get him, Bob thought, wishing he believed it.
Then he noticed: it had begun to snow. Flakes cascaded down again,
fluting and canting in the wind, a screen of them, dense and
unyielding.
TIME TO HUNT 519
Visibility closed in.
Bob didn't like this a bit.
It was snowing. Solaratov, breathing hard, found a trail inside the
scruffy vegetation that edged the mountain, where the overhanging
leaves had cut down on snow accumulation.
He almost ran, skirting the flat of the valley, staying off its
exposure, staying away from the house for now. He knew that Bob could
not see him from any elevation, through the snow-bearing branches. He
probably wouldn't even look in the right direction.
Solaratov came around a curve of the valley, edged to the treeline and
went hunched behind a fallen log that was somehow suspended by its
branches. The snow fell gently around him out of the gray light. There
was no sound at all in the world.
He read the land, looking for natural hides where an experienced man
would go to ground. It was not a difficult problem, for the
mountainside was largely featureless there, with only sparse vegetation
to distract the eye. In fact the whole little war between them had
been distilled to its most nearly abstract: two men in white in a
white, cold world in white mountains of extreme elevation, hunting each
other, going for whatever little edge of experience and luck they could
find. Whoever read the problem better would win: it had nothing to do
with courage or, really, even marksmanship. It would come down to this
one thing: who was the better practitioner of the sniper's skills?
He could see a kind of gash in the mountainside ahead of him and
realized that his quarry, coming around the edge, would have no choice
but to seek refuge at its top.
He picked up his binoculars and scanned. He could see nothing but the
rocks under their packing of snow.
Visibility was not bad, though blurred by the falling snow.
He's up there. He's got to be.
He triggered a laser to the top of the gash, bounced it off a rock, and
read the range in the readout: 654 meters.
520 STEPHEN HUNTER
Known distance. Upward. He did the math quickly and knew where to
hold, computing in the uphill angle. He'd shoot from the center of the
third mil-dot; that would put him there, crudely but close enough. And
he felt his nearness to the mountain would shield the bullet from the
predations of the wind; it wouldn't drift laterally.
He hunted patiently, looking for target indicators, for some
implication that his prey was alive and hiding, and had not circled
behind him. The rocks were everywhere, a kind of garden of stone
humped in snow. He looked for disturbances in the snow, for sign of a
man who'd crawled, upending the crust of white. But he could not see
that for the angle.
What is his sign?
What is the sign?
Then he knew: the man's breath. It will rise like fog, maybe just a
vapor, but it will show. It has to show. He has to breathe.
It was the slightest thing. Was it really there, or an optical
illusion? But no, there it was: a slight curl through the snow, the
suggestion of atmospheric density. It could be a man's breath leaking
out as he huddled motionlessly in the rocks, awaiting his prey as he
scanned upward.
Yes, my friend. There you are, he thought, slowly picking out the
pattern of the arctic warfare camouflage, snow dappled with a little
dead brown vegetation.
The man was on his belly, nestled behind rocks, in a little collection
of them at the very top of the gash. He lay with the sniper's
professional patience, totally engaged, totally calm. Solaratov could
not see the rifle, but he saw the man.
There you are, he thought. There you are.
He again fired a laser at him: exactly 658 meters. He had the
target.
He fixed markers in his mind's eye--a stand of snow laden pines--put
the binoculars down, raised the rifle and went to the scope. Of course
it was not nearly so powerful as the binocs, and its field of vision
was much smaller. But
TIME TO HUNT 521
he found the pines, tracked down, waited, and yes, found the little
trail of vapor that marked his prey.
He settled in, looking for the target. He could see just a half an
inch of camouflaged parka above the rock, probably the upper surface of
the prone back. He settled on this target, centering it on the third
dot.
Should I fire?
I may not quite have enough of him visible to drive into the
blood-bearing inner organs. I might just wound him.
My zero might be way off.
But then: so what? I have a suppressor.
He will not know where I am shooting from.
He will have to move as I bring him under fire.
He won't know if I'm above him or below him.
He'll have to move; I can chase him across the ravine.
He'll run out of rocks. I'll have him.
He exhaled his breath, commanded his senses, felt the slow tick and
twitch of his body as he made minute corrections, waited until the
total rightness of it all fell across him.
The trigger broke, and with its odd, tiny sound, the rifle fired.
Bob lay quietly in the rocks. Above him a screen of snowy pines
shielded him somewhat but left him with a good view of the direction
he'd come. With the most discipline his body could invent, he scanned
three zones: the first was the ridge, right where it came around the
mountain;
the next was a crop of rocks perhaps sixty meters above that; and the
next was a notch in the mountain, perhaps two hundred meters up, that
swam into and out of visibility as the cloud permitted. Solaratov
would appear at one of those places as he came high around the
mountain, with the idea of shooting downward.
Methodically he moved his eyes between them, the first, the second, the
third, waiting.
Well, I did it, he tried to tell himself. I got him away
522 STEPHEN HUNTER
from my wife. In a little while they'll be here. He'll come, I'll get
my shot, it'll be over then.
But he did not feel particularly good about it all.
There was no sense of anything except unfinished business and that now,
all these years later, it was his time.
/ die today, came the message, insistent and powerful.
This is the day I die.
He'd finally run up against a man who was smarter, a better shot, had
more guts. Couldn't be many in the world, but by God, this was one.
The snow was falling more heavily now. It pirouetted downward from the
low gray sky, and as he looked back to the house, still barely visible,
he could hardly see it. It looked like it would snow for hours. That
was not good.
The longer it snowed, the longer it would take for help to arrive. He
was on his own. He, and his ancient enemy.
Where is he?
It was making him nuts.
Where is-A tremendous pain came across his back, as though someone had
stood over him and whacked him, hard, with a fireplace poker.
Bob curled in the pain and knew instantly that he'd been hit. But no
shock poured through him and took him out of his brain as it had when
he'd been hit before. Instead a powerful spasm of fury kicked through
him, and he knew in a second that he wasn't hit seriously.
He drew his legs up and at that moment the odd BEOWWWWWW!
of a bullet singing off a rock exploded just to his right, an inch
above his skull.
He's got me, he thought, listening as the crack of the bullet snapping
the sound barrier arrived.
But where was the muzzle blast?
There was no muzzle blast.
Suppressor, he thought. The motherfucker has a suppressor.
The sniper could be anywhere. Bob lay behind his rack of stones,
waiting. No other shot came. Clearly he was
TIME TO HUNT 523
completely zeroed but not quite visible enough for a good body or head
shot.
Bob was almost paralyzed. No place to run, zeroed, completely
outfoxed. Completely faked out.
He tried to run through the possibilities. Clearly Solaratov was not
at one of the three places that Bob had determined. He'd gotten around
somehow, and Bob believed him to be below, given the one shot that had
ricocheted off the stone that shielded his head. The round had struck
from downslope. If Solaratov were above him, it would be all over. The
Russian had out thought him by descending into the valley and was now
shooting upward.
Bob tried to remember what was down there, and recalled a little patch
of snow-packed forest. Somewhere the sniper was down there, but
without a sound signature to locate him, he was effectively
invisible.
Do something.
Sure: but what?
Move, crawl.
He has you.
If you move he kills you.
Checkmate. No moves possible. Caught in the rocks, trapped.
Then he realized that the Russian was but a few hundred yards from the
house where the undefended women hid. After he killed Bob, it would
take him five minutes to finish the job. Since it would be close-range
work, he could leave no witnesses.
It was almost over now.
The Russian could see the man cowering behind the rocks and could sense
his fear and rage and the closing in of his possibilities.
He filled with confidence. He had not fired twice but three times. The
first shot landed about four feet above his target. That was the new
zero. Swagger had not even noticed it. Quickly he dialed in the
correction, fired again.
524 STEPHEN HUNTER
He hit him! The next shot barely missed him. But he knew: he had
him!
It occurred to him to move ever so slightly, find a better shooting
position and try and drive the killing shot home. But he had such an
advantage now, why worry about it? Why move, not be able to shoot,
just when the man is so helpless, has already been hit, is presumably
leaking blood and in great pain.
The rifle rested on the tree trunk; he was comfortable behind it, sure
that he was invisible from the ridge. The reticle was steady; he knew
the range. It was merely a matter of time, of so little time.
What can he do?
He can do nothing.
Bob tried to clear the rattle from his head.
In the field, what would I do?
Call in artillery.
Call in smoke.
No artillery.
No smoke.
Throw a grenade.
No grenade.
Fire the Claymore.
No Claymore. The Claymore was in the case three thousand feet up the
mountain. He wished he had it now.
Call in a chopper.
No chopper.
Call in tactical air.
No tactical air.
But a word caught somewhere in his mind.
Smoke.
No smoke.
It would not go away.
Smoke.
You move under smoke. Under smoke he cannot see you.
There is no smoke.
TIME TO HUNT 525
Why would the word not leave his head? Why would it not go away?
Smoke.
What is smoke: gaseous chemicals producing a blur of atmospheric
disturbance.
There is no smoke.
Smoke.
There is no-But there was snow.
Snow, agitated, could hang in the air like smoke.
Plenty of snow. Snow all around.
He turned to his right to face a wall of snow. Above him, on a
precipice, more snow. The snow that had fallen silently through the
night and even now glided down from the heavens.
Solaratov loves snow. He knows snow.
But Bob saw now that above him, several hundred pounds of the stuff
rested on the branches of a pine, which had turned it into some kind of
upside-down vanilla cone. In fact, several of the trees were above
him. The snow fell and caught on them in the gray mountain light.
He could almost feel them groaning, yearning for some kind of
freedom.
He reached out with his rifle barrel but could touch none of it.
But then the plan formed in his mind.
He edged to his side, making certain to keep his body profile low
behind the rocks, so that Solaratov would not get the last shot free.
His right hand crept across the parka, unzipped it, and he reached
inside and removed the Beretta.
He steeled himself.
It was instinct shooting, unaimed fire, but his reflexes at this arcane
pistol skill had always been quite good. He threaded his other wrist
through the sling of the Remington M40, to secure it for his move.
He thumbed back the hammer. He looked at each of his targets.
He took a deep breath.
526 STEPHEN HUNTER
So do it, he thought. So do it!
[Something was happening.
A series of dry popping cracks reached Solaratov's ears, far away, but
definitely coming off the mountain.
What?
He looked hard through the scope, not daring to take it from the
trapped man. He thought he saw a flash, the flight of something small
through the air, a disturbance in the snow, and quickly came up with
the idea of an automatic pistol, but what was he doing, trying to
signal men in the area? Who could be in the area?
But in the next second his question was answered. He was shooting into
the snow-laden pines above him, striking their trunks and driving the
impact vibrations out their limbs, shooting fast so that the vibrations
accumulated in their effect, and almost astonishingly, the snow loads
of four pines yielded and slid down the mountain toward the supine man,
where they hit and exploded into a fine blast of powder, a sheet of
density that momentarily took his sight picture away from him.
Where is he?
He put the scope down because he could never find the man in the narrow
width of vision, and saw him, rolling down the mountain a good fifty
feet from the commotion he'd stirred.
Solaratov brought the rifle up fast, but couldn't find the man, he was
moving so quickly. At last he located him and saw that he had gotten a
full fifty meters down the hill.
He picked up the good moving sight picture, fired quickly, remembering
to lead on the moving target, but the bullet impacted behind the
target, kicking up a huge geyser of snow.
Of course! The range had changed subtly; he was still holding for 654
meters, and the range was probably down to six hundred or so.
TIME TO HUNT 527
By the time he figured this out, the man had come to rest in the rocks
below, and was now much better situated behind them, having picked up
some maneuverability and the position to shoot back.
Goddamn him! he thought.
With a thud he caught on something, taking his breath away. He had
come to rest in a new nest of rocks fifty meters downslope. The snow
still hung in the air, and in his desperate fall-run, it had gotten
into his parka and down his neck. But in the complete un coordination
of the moment, he made certain he was behind cover. He breathed hard.
He hurt everywhere, but felt warmth pouring down the side of his face,
and reached up to touch blood.
Had he been hit?
No: the fucking night-vision goggles, totally worthless but forgotten
in the crisis, had slipped down his head crookedly, and one strap cut a
wicked gash in his ear. The cut stung. He grabbed the things and had
an impulse to toss them away. What was the point now?
But maybe Solaratov wasn't sure where he was now, nestled behind a
slightly wider screen of rocks. He looked and saw he had a little more
room to move from rock to rock.
Maybe he could even get a shot off.
But at what?
And then he saw that the slope dropped off intensely and, worse, the
rocks had run out.
This is it, he thought.
This is as far as I go.
What did I get out of it?
Nothing.
His ear stung.
They've moved," Sally said.
"Now they're behind the house. You can hear the shots are over
there."
"Are we going to be all right?" asked Nikki.
528 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Yes, baby," Julie said, holding her daughter close.
The three were in the cellar of the house, and Sally had spent the past
few minutes jamming old chairs, trunks and boxes against the door at
the head of the steps, just in case someone came looking for them with
bad intentions.
The cellar smelled of mold and faded material, and spring floods that
had soaked everything some years back.
It was dirty and dark, only meager light coming through snow-covered
windows.
There was one other door, to the outside, one of those slanted wood
things that led down three steps to them.
Sally had piled up more impediments to that passageway, but there was
no way of really locking the doors. They could only forestall
things.
"I wish we had a gun," said Nikki.
"I wish we did too," said Sally.
"I wish Daddy was here," said Nikki.
Bob had a rare moment of visual freedom, a long, clean look into the
stunted snow-covered trees at the base of the mountain. But he could
see nothing, no movement, no hint of disturbance.
Then a bullet sang off the rock an inch beyond his face, kicking a puff
of granite spray into his eye. He fell back, stifling a yell, and felt
the telltale numbness that indicated some kind of trauma. But only for
a second;
then it lit into raw, harsh but meaningless pain, and he winced,
driving more pain into the eye.
Goddamn him!
Solaratov had seen just the faintest portion of head exposed and he was
on it that fast, putting a bullet an inch shy of the target. An inch
at six hundred-odd meters.
Could that son of a bitch shoot or what?
Swagger felt his eye puff, his lid flare, and he closed it, sensing the
throb of pain. He touched the wounded sector of his face: blood, lots
of it, from the stone spray, but nothing quite serious. He blinked,
opened the eye, and
TIME TO HUNT 529
saw hazily out of it. Not blind. Trapped but not blind, not yet.
The guy was so good.
No ranging shots; he got the range right every single time, had Bob
pinned and eyeballed.
No goddamn ranging shots.
Solaratov had an odd gift, a perfect gift for estimating distance. It
made the package complete. Some men had it, some didn't. Some could
learn it with experience, some couldn't. It was in fact the weakest
part of Swagger's own game, his ability to estimate range. It had cost
him a few shots over the years because he lacked the natural
inclination to read distances while possessing in spades all the
shooter's other natural gifts.
Donny had a gift for it; Donny could look and tell you automatically.
But Bob was so lame at it, he'd once spent a fortune on an old Barr &
Stroud naval gunfire range finder, a complex, ancient optical
instrument that with its many lenses and calibration gizmos could
eventually work the farthest unknown distance into a recognizable
quantity.
"Some day they'll make 'em real small," he remembered telling Donny at
one lost moment or other.
"Then you won't need a gofer like me," Donny had said with a laugh,
"and I can sit the next war out."
"Yes, you can," Bob had said.
"One war is enough."
An idea flirted with him. From where? From Donny?
Well, from somewhere over the long years. But it wasn't solid yet: he
just felt it beyond the screen of his consciousness, unformed, like a
little bit of as-yet-unrecognizable melody.
This guy is so good. How can he be so good?
Donny had the answer. Donny wanted to tell him.
Donny knew up in heaven or wherever he was, and Donny yearned somehow
to tell him.
Tell me! he demanded.
But Donny was silent.
And down below Solaratov waited, scoping the rocks,
530 STEPHEN HUNTER
waiting for just a bit of a sliver of a body part to show so he could
nail it, and then get on with business.
He is so good.
He made great shots.
He hit Dade Fellows dead on, he hit Julie riding at an oblique angle
flat out at over eight hundred meters, he was just the-That scene
replayed in his mind.
What was odd about it, he now saw, was how featureless it had been. A
ridge on a mountain, with a wall of rock behind it, very little
vegetation. It had been almost plain, almost abstract.
So?
So how did he range it?
There were no guidelines, no visual data, no known objects visible to
make a range estimate, only the woman on the horse getting smaller as
she got farther away on the oblique.
How did he know where to hold, when her range changed so radically
after the first shot?
He must be a genius. He must just have the gift, the ability to
somehow, by the freakish mechanics of the brain, to just know. Donny
had that. Maybe it's not so rare.
But then he knew. Or rather Donny told him, reaching across the
years.
"You idiot," Donny whispered hoarsely in his ear, "don't you see it
yet? Why he's so good? It's so obvious."
Bob knew then why the man had shot at him as he fell but missed. The
range had changed; he estimated the lead and got it slightly wrong and
just missed. But once his target was still, he knew exactly the range.
And that's how he could hit Julie. He knew exactly. He solved the
distance equation, and knew how far she was and where to hold to take
her down.
He has a range finder, Bob thought. The son of a bitch has a range
finder.
TIME TO HUNT 531
Solaratov looked at his watch. It was just past 0700. The light was
now gray approaching white, a kind of sealed-off pewter kind of
weather. The snow was falling harder and a little breeze had kicked
up, tossing and twisting the flakes, pummeling as they rotated down.
The wind got under the crack of his hood, where his flesh was sweaty,
and cut him like a scythe. A little chill ran up his spine.
How long can I wait? he wondered.
Nobody was flying in for yet another few hours, but maybe they could
get in with snowmobiles or plow the highway and get in that way.
A sudden, uncharacteristic uneasiness settled over him.
He made a list:
1.) Kill the sniper.
2.) Kill the woman.
3.) Kill the witnesses.
4.) Escape into the mountains.
5.) Contact the helo.
6.) Rendezvous.
An hour's worth of work, he thought, possibly two.
He kept on the scope, the rifle cocked, his finger riding the curve of
the trigger, his mind clear, his concentration intense.
How long can I stay at this level?
When do I have to blink, look away, yawn, piss, think of warmth, food,
a woman?
He pivoted on the fulcrum of the log, running the scope along the ridge
of rocks, looking for target indicators.
More breath? A shadow out of place? Some disturbed snow? A regular
line? A trace of movement? It would happen, it had to, for Swagger
wouldn't be content to wait. His nature would compel action and then
compel doom.
He can't see me.
532 STEPHEN HUNTER
He doesn't know where I am.
It's just a matter of time.
He tried to figure out a range finder. How do the goddamn things work?
His old Barr & Stroud was mechanical, like a surveyor's piece of
equipment, with gears and lenses. That's why it was so heavy. It was
a combination binocular and adding machine: completely impractical.
But no modern shooter would have such a device: too old, too heavy, too
delicate.
Laser. It has to work off a laser. It has to shoot a laser to an
object, measure the time and make a sure, swift calculation off of
that.
Lasers were everywhere. They used them to guide bombs, aim guns,
operate on the eye, remove tattoos, imitate fireworks. But what kind
of laser was this one?
Off the visible spectrum, since it projected no beam, no red dot.
Ultraviolet?
Infrared?
How could it be brought into the visible spectrum?
It's a kind of light. How do I see it?
One idea: light being heat, if he could get Solaratov to project it
through an ice mist, its heat would burn tracks in the snow. Then he
could shoot back down the tracks and .. .
But that was absurd. Besides involving setting up some complex linkage
of actions, any one of which could catch him a 7mm Magnum through the
lungs, he didn't even know if it would work.
Idea two: get Solaratov to shoot the laser through a piece of ice. It
would bend, and send back some faulty reading. He would over- or under
compensate miss and .. .
Insane. Unworkable.
Think! Think, Goddammit. How do I see it?
And then it occurred to him.
TIME TO HUNT 533
Would I see it on night vision? Would I see it in my goggles? Would
they register it?
He picked them up where they lay, half in, half out of the snow, slid
the harness over his skull, pulled the goggles down and snapped them
on. They yielded a green dense landscape, as if the world had ended in
water. The seas had risen. Green was everywhere. Nothing else was
clear.
How can I get him to lase me again?
He knew. He had to move one more time, change the range.
Solaratov would go to his laser range finder.
If it works, it'll be like a neon sign in the green, saying I AM THE
SNIPER.
Now something was happening.
He saw puffs of breath rising above a certain accumulation of boulders,
signifying some kind of physical exertion.
He watched and one of the rocks seemed somehow to tremble.
Is he moving the rock?
Why would he move the rock?
But in the same second, as he steadied himself, as the rock wobbled
truly erratically, seemed to pause, and then tumbled ever so
majestically forward, pulling a score of smaller rocks with it,
uncurling a shroud of snow as it fell, he knew.
He's trying to bury me, Solaratov thought.
He's trying to start an avalanche, to send tons of snow down the
mountain and bury me.
But it wasn't going to work. Avalanche snow, Solaratov knew, was old
snow, its structure eroded by melt, its moisture mostly evaporated, so
that it was dry and treacherous, a network of unsafe stresses and fault
lines. Then and only then could a single fracture cut out its
underpinnings and send it crashing down. This avalanche would never go
anywhere. The snow was too wet and new; it might fly a
534 STEPHEN HUNTER
bit, but it wouldn't build. It would peter out a few hundred yards
down.
On top of that, clearly the man didn't even know where he was. Even
now, as the rocks and their screen of snow tumbled abortively down the
hill, not picking up energy but losing it, they were on no course
toward himself, but more or less to the right about one hundred yards.
The falling snow simply could not reach him.
He almost chuckled at the futility of it, remembering that his quarry
was a jungle fighter, not a man of the mountains.
The rocks tumbled, trailing snow, but down the slope where the angle
flattened, they lost their energy and rolled to a halt.
Solaratov watched them tumble, then brought the rifle back to bear on
the original line of rocks. As he was shifting it upward, he thought
he made out a white shape sloshing desperately through the snow.
He rose above it, came back, could not quite find it and then did track
it quickly, but never quite got the fraction of line between third and
fourth mil-dots precisely on it- He saw that Swagger had moved,
literally floundering his way downhill to this new position. So? He
was a few dozen meters closer? Now he had less maneuverability.
What possible difference did it make? He had made his last mistake.
The game, Solaratov thought, is almost over.
He put down his rifle, picked up the binoculars and prepared to shoot a
laser, just to verify the distance to the new position.
Bob came to the halted rocks and hit them with a whack, but couldn't
stop to acknowledge the pain. Instead he pulled himself up, put his
head and shoulders over the top, flicked the night-vision goggles down
as he snapped them on and peered desperately into the void. He knew he
was violating every rule in U.S. Marine Corps Sniping
TIME TO HUNT 535
FMFM1-3B, which tells snipers never, ever to look over an obstacle, for
that makes you too obvious to counterfire;
no, you drop to your haunches and look around it. But he didn't have
the time.
There was no definition in the green murk, no shape, no depth, nothing
but flat, vaguely phosphorescent green.
He scanned, registered this nothingness, but was too intense to feel
much in the way of despair, even if he knew he was hung out over the
lip of the rock and that Solaratov could take him in an instant.
He waited. A second, then another, finally a third yanked by like
trains slowed by the sludgy blood his heart pumped.
Nothing.
Maybe the laser wasn't visible in the spectrum of the goggles. Who
knew of such stuff? Maybe the laser ranging device was part of some
advanced scope he knew nothing about, and it would announce itself, but
be followed in another nanosecond by close to 1,500 foot-pounds of
Remington 7mm Magnum arriving to erase him from the earth.
Maybe he's not there. Maybe he's moved, he's working his way up
another slope, he's flanked me, and now he's just taking his time.
Two more seconds dribbled by, each encapsulating a lifetime, until Bob
knew he could wait no longer, and as he began to duck back into a world
of zero possibility, here it came, at last.
The yellow streak was like a crack in the wall of the universe. It
pinged right at him from nothingness and lasted but an instant, but
there it was, a straight line as the shooter below measured the
distance to the shooter above.
Bob locked the source of the brief beam into his muscle memory and his
sense of time and space. He could not move a muscle, an atom; he could
not disturb the rigidity of his body, for it all depended on holding
that invisible point before himself in the infinity of his mind as he
536 STEPHEN HUNTER
brought the rifle up in one smooth, whipping motion and in to his
shoulder and did not move his head to find the scope but moved the
scope to that precise lock of his vision.
The scope flew before him and he saw nothing, even as his hands locked
around the pistol grip and his finger found the curve of the trigger,
caressed its delicacy, felt and loved its tension and sought to be one
with it. He felt no tension, not now: here was the rest of his life;
here was everything.
And as he flung away the goggles with a toss of his head, here was his
ancient enemy. Bob saw the sniper, swaddled behind a horizontal trunk,
his shape barely recognizable in the swirl of pewter-to-white dappling
of the snow and his arctic warfare camouflaging, only the line of the
rifle rising as it came toward Bob, hard and regular.
So many years, he thought, as he closed his focus down until he saw
only the harsh cruciform of the reticle, made a slight correction to
shoot lower to compensate for the downward angle, and then, without
willing it as the reticle became such a statement of clarity it seemed
to fill the whole universe, the trigger went and he fired.
You never hear the one that gets you.
Solaratov was on his target, racing through the excitement of knowing
that at long last he had him, but he hesitated for just a second to
compute the new range.
And then he realized that the man above was aimed-incredibly--at him.
He felt no pain, only shock.
He seemed to be in the center of an explosion. Then time stopped, he
was briefly removed from the universe, and when he was reinserted into
it, he was not an armed man with a rifle boring in on a target but a
supine man in the cold snow, amid a splatter of blood. His own breath
spurted out raggedly, white cloud and red spray sending broken signals
upward.
Someone was drunkenly playing a broken accordion or
TIME TO HUNT 537
a damaged pipe organ nearby. The music had no melody, was only a whine
with a slight edge or buzz to it. Sucking chest wound. Left side,
left lung gone, blood pouring out both exit and entrance wounds. Blood
everywhere.
Internal damage total. Death near. Death coming.
Death at last, his old friend, come to pick him up.
He blinked, disbelieving, and wondered at the alchemy by which such a
result could have been engineered.
His life flashed and fled, dissolved in a blur, went away and came
back.
He thought: I'm gone.
He wondered if he had the strength to gather the rifle, find a position
and wait for the man until he bled to death, but the man would not be
foolish.
He thought next of how the mission had redefined itself.
To kill the man who had killed him meant nothing.
There was no escape. The only option left was: failure or success.
He pulled himself up, saw the house five hundred yards away through the
snowy trees and felt he could make it. He could make it, for the
shooter would now lay low, unsure as to whether or not the sniper was
dead.
He could make it to the house, get in, and with that little Glock
pistol finish the job that had killed him.
That would be his legacy in the world: he finished the last job. He
did it. He was successful.
Finding the strength somewhere, amazed at how clear it all seemed, he
headed off, bleeding, in a winter wonderland.
Swagger lay close to the rock for a minute or so, recalling the sight
picture: the reticle, swollen in the intensity of his focus so that it
was big and bold as a fist, held low on the covering tree because you
hold low when shooting downward, so that the bullet would hit center
chest, a nice big target. But it's tricky: the rifle was zeroed for
five hundred yards, according to his shooter's instructions, but
maybe
538 STEPHEN HUNTER
the man who zeroed it held it slightly differently than he did; maybe
there was a twig, a branch slightly unresolved in the 10X power of the
scope. Maybe there was a wind he didn't feel, a sierra blowing around
the contour of the mountain.
But the sight picture was as perfect as it could be. It was held where
it should be held, and if he had to call the shot, he'd call it a
hit.
He edged around the right, squinting out. He tried to find the
shooting site of his enemy, but it was much harder to see from this
angle. Instead, he scanned back and forth in what he determined was
the proper sector, and saw nothing, no movement, no anything. He
finally found the fallen tree he was convinced had supported his enemy,
but there was no sign of him, there was no sign of disturbance in the
snow. A spot, a little farther back, could have been blood, but it was
impossible to tell. It could also have been a black stone, a broken
limb.
He lowered the rifle, slipped down the nightscope lenses and watched in
the murk for a while. It stayed green, uncut by the flick of a
laser.
Did I hit him?
Is he dead?
How much time should I give him?
A dozen scenarios instantly occurred to him. Maybe Solaratov had moved
to a fallback position. Maybe he had moved laterally. Maybe he was
even advancing on him. He might even be headed now toward the house,
certain he had Bob trapped.
That last seemed the most logical. After all, the job was to hit the
woman, not Swagger. Swagger's death had no real meaning; Julie's had
all the meaning.
And if he were seen, he'd kill witnesses too.
Bob took a deep breath.
Then he pushed himself up, scuttled down a few yards, turned angles
obliquely, dodged, jumped, found cover. He tried to make himself
difficult to hit, knowing he could not make himself impossible to
hit.
TIME TO HUNT 539
But no shot came.
From his new cover his angle was lower, so his view of the valley was
less distinct. He could only see a bit of the flatland through the
snowy trees, and could see nothing moving on it, approaching the house.
But his target would be camouflaged, moving at angles, dropping, easily
evading him.
His heart was beating rapidly. There was no breath left in his lungs.
The planet seemed scorched dry of oxygen.
He pulled himself out and moved at the assault again.
He fell twice in the snow and almost blacked out the second time. And
when he looked up, the house seemed no closer.
His mind raced; it would not stay where he put it. He thought of sight
pictures, of men going limp against reticles, of long stalks in
mountains and jungles and cities. He had hunted in them all and been
victorious in them all.
He thought of the crawl with the sandbag, the long, slow crawl outside
the American fort and the earlier moment when they had him, and then
the large black plane, like a vulture, hung in the air for just a split
second before its guns pulverized the universe.
He thought of the times he'd been hit: over the years, it amounted to
no less than twenty-two wounds, though two were blade wounds, one
inflicted by an Angolan, one by a mujahideen woman. He thought of
thirst, fear, hunger, discomfort. He thought of rifles. He thought of
the past and the future, which was running out quickly.
He rose the last time, and stumbled through the snow, which fought him.
It was not cold. The snow still fell, harder now, in swirls and
pinwheels, dancing in the wind, the heavy damp flakes of Eastern
European cities.
Where am I?
What has happened?
Why has it happened?
But then he was at the house.
All was silent.
540 STEPHEN HUNTER
He bent to the storm cellar door, pulled hard, even as he reached
inside his coat and drew out the Glock pistol.
A nail seemed to hold him back. He felt the door want to yield but
hang up. He pulled harder, finding strength somewhere in the backwash
of his mind, and with a crack, the nail gave and he pulled the door
open. It revealed three cement steps down into a dark entrance that
looked jammed with clutter.
He slid by the door and stepped down into the darkness, aware only
marginally that he had made it. He felt clear-eyed, suddenly,
recommitted to his purpose, certain of what he must do.
He kicked his way through the impediments: a sawhorse, a bicycle, bed
springs, boxes of old newspapers, and as he got through he felt the
door slam shut behind him, sealing him off in the darkness. He took
another step, kicking things aside, looking and waiting for his vision
to clear. He smelled moisture, mildew, rot, old leather and paper,
decaying material, ancient wood.
Then he could see them.
They were over against the far wall, huddled under the steps, two women
and a girl clutching each other, crying.
Swagger made it into the treeline. This is where he needed a pistol, a
short, handy, fast-firing weapon with a lot of firepower. But the
Beretta was somewhere up the mountain, buried under a ton of snow.
He carried the rifle like a submachine gun in the low assault position,
poking through the woods as he closed from the flank on the sniper's
hide.
He paused, waiting, listening. There was no sound, no sense of life at
all in the haunted place. Branches and bushes distended by heavy,
moist, fresh snow stood out in extravagant shapes like a display of
modern art. Through the gray, the snow fell, swirling.
Bob's breath rose above him, then parted. He advanced slowly. If the
sniper was here, he was well hidden, completely disciplined.
TIME TO HUNT 541
He could see the fallen tree, and then made out the disturbance in the
snow where the man had supported himself while shooting upward.
Bob slid as silently as he could on the oblique through the heavy
trees, trying to shake no snow loose, and at last came to the site,
paused a second, then stepped behind the cover to put his rifle muzzle
on the man. But nobody was there. He heard only his own harsh breath
heaving in the cold.
The blood told the story.
Solaratov had been hit bad. His rifle lay in the snow;
the ranging binoculars were there too. A raspberry sherbet marked
where he'd bled most profusely, driven to the ground by the impact of
the .308.
Got him! Bob thought, but the moment of exultation never fully
developed, for in the next seconds he read the tracks and the blood
trail and saw that the man, seriously wounded but nothing like dead,
had moved back through the trees toward the house.
At that moment he heard a bang, which could have been a shot, but it
wasn't. He turned and saw through the trees the house and a little
puff of flung snow. That helped identify the sound. It had been the
sound of a heavy cellar door closing, and when it had slammed shut, it
had vibrated free a cloud of snow.
He's in there with my family, Bob thought.
He had a rooted moment of terror. It felt like ice sliding down
through his body, smooth and unbearably cold, numbing all the organs it
brushed as it rushed through him.
But some part of his brain refused to panic, and he saw what he must
do.
He raced to pick up the Remington Magnum, for the three hundred extra
feet of velocity and the five hundred extra pounds of energy and,
throwing aside his parka, ran, ran like a fool on fire or in love, not
toward the house, which was too far, but for a good, straight-in angle
on the door.
542 STEPHEN HUNTER
1 hey heard the door creak as someone tried to pull on it.
"Oh, God," said Sally.
"Over here," instructed Julie.
She grabbed her daughter, and with the younger woman they fled to the
back of the cellar, but only as far as the brick wall. There was no
escape, for the stairwell up was jammed with junk to keep the same man
out.
They fell back and cowered when the door cracked open, then was yanked
wide, filling the dark space with light, destroying their adjusted
vision.
He lumbered wheezily down the steps, kicking the junk aside like an
enraged, drunken father home late from a night with the boys, come home
to beat his wife. It stirred something deep in Julie, a memory of
dread long buried, never examined. The cellar door slammed behind him,
and he kicked more stuff aside until he came into the center of the
room.
He blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust, but he was everything they
could possibly fear: a muscular gray savage dressed in white, except
that a profuse smear of blood had irrigated a raggedy delta from a
source on his chest, leaking down to his trousers and his boots.
He had a gray, blunt face, a crew cut and wintry little eyes. He
smiled madly, and blood showed on his teeth. He coughed, and it
erupted from his mouth. He seemed barely conscious, seemed almost to
fall, but he stopped, caught himself and looked at them fiercely. He
was insane with pain, his eyes lit weirdly, his whole body trembling.
The gun muzzle played across them all.
She stepped out.
The killer laughed for some strange reason, and another spurt of blood
came from his mouth down to splash on his chest. His lungs were full
of blood. He was drowning in it. Why wouldn't he fall?
He lifted the pistol until it pointed into her face.
Julie heard her baby crying, heard the intake of Sally's breath and
thought of her husband and the man she'd
TIME TO HUNT 543
loved before, the only two men she could ever love. She closed her
eyes.
But he did not fire.
She opened them.
He had fallen halfway, but then he pulled himself up, and thrust the
gun at her, his eyes filling with mad determination.
Bob ran until he had a good angle into the door.
He'll stop. He has to wait for his eyes to adjust.
He saw it. The man would step into the darkness and pause as his eyes
adjusted. He'd be there, just beyond the door, for the length of time
it took his pupils to adjust.
With Solaratov, that interval would be a second or so.
He dropped to one knee, braced the rifle on his leg, found the good
shooting position. It was five hundred yards if it was an inch, but
that had to be the zero on the rifle, for Solaratov had come so close
to him so often.
Without thinking, he wrapped the sling tight about his left, supporting
arm as he slipped into a good Marine Corps position, feeling a bite of
pain from the opened wound, but leaning through it. He took three
breaths, building up his oxygen, and looked for his natural point of
aim as something in him screamed Faster! Faster! and another part
cooed Slower, slower. He laid the crosshairs dead-center on the door,
just a patch of gray wood smeared with snow, and prayed for the extra
oomph of the 7mm to do its thing.
He had one moment of clarity, and at the subliminal level willed all he
knew of shooting into the effort: the relaxation of the finger, trained
over the hard years; the discipline of the respiratory cycle, and the
rhythm of deeper and shallower exhalation; the cooperation of rods and
cones in the back wall of the eye, the orchestration of pupil, eye and
lens, and the overall guidance and wisdom of the retina; but most of
all, that deep, willed plunge into stillness, where the world is gray
and almost gone, yet at the same time sharp and clear.
544 STEPHEN HUNTER
Nothing matters, the man coached himself when things mattered most.
And then it was gone as the rifle fired, kicked against him, blowing
the sight picture to nothing but blur, and when he came back on target
he saw a mushroom of snow mist floating from the vibes where the bullet
had blasted through the wood.
1 he pistol settled down; she saw the hugeness of its bore just feet
away from her and then felt-Splatter in her face, a sense of mist or
fog suddenly filling the air, a meaty vapor.
Mixed into this sensation was a sound which was that of wood
splitting.
In it too was a grunt, almost involuntary, as if lungs gurgled, somehow
human.
She found herself wet with droplets that proved to be warm and heavy:
blood.
The sniper transfigured before her. What had been the upper quadrant
of his face had somehow been pulped, ripped open, revealing a terrible
wound of splintered bone and spurting blood. One eye looked dead as a
nickle; the other was gone in the mess. Even as these details were
fixing themselves in her memory, he fell sideways with a thump, his
head banging on the cement floor, exposing the ragged entry wound in
the corresponding rear quadrant of the skull, where the bones now
seemed broken and frail.
A single light beam came through the cellar door where the bullet had
passed.
She looked down, saw the stumpy little man fallen like a white angel
into a red pool, as his satiny blood spread ever wider from his ruined
face.
She turned to her daughter and her friend, who regarded her with mouths
agape, and horror, more than relief, registering in both their eyes.
Then she spoke with perfect deliberation:
"Daddy's home."
chapter forty-nine
He had not fired a second time because he had no more ammunition. But
in another second, the cellar door had been flung open and he
recognized Sally, leaping to signal him that it was over.
By the time Bob got to the house, three Air Force Hueys and a state
police helicopter had landed and more were on their way. Then another
Air Force job, a big Blackhawk, arrived and disgorged still more staff.
It almost looked like an advanced firebase when the war was at its
hottest, the way the choppers kept ferrying people in.
He got the news immediately: everybody was all right, though medics
were attending them. The sniper was dead.
His own wounds were tended: an emergency technician re sewed with
anesthetic, the gash in his thigh that had opened up under the pressure
of all the moving and jumping, and then picked stone and bullet
fragments out of his face and eye for half an hour, before
disinfecting, then covering the raw cuts with gauze. Nothing appeared
to have hit the eye proper; more shooter's luck.
There was little to be done about the back wound. It had penetrated
his camouflage and grazed the flesh of his back, scoring both burn and
bruise. But other than disinfectant, only time and painkillers would
make it go away.
A cop wanted to take a statement, but Bonson pulled rank and declared
the ranch a federal crime site, until corroborating FBI agents could
chopper in within the hour from Boise. In the cellar, a state police
crime team worked the body of the dead sniper, hit twice, once through
the left lung, once in the back of the head.
"Great shooting," said a cop.
"You want to take a look at your handiwork?"
But Swagger had no desire to see the fallen man. What
546 STEPHEN HUNTER
good would it do? He felt nothing except that he'd seen enough
corpses.
"I'd rather see my daughter and my wife," he said.
"Well, your wife is being treated by our medical people.
We've got to debrief her as soon as possible. Mrs.
Memphis is with Nikki."
"Can I go?"
"They're in the kitchen."
He walked through a strange house full of strangers.
People talked on radios, and computers had been set up.
A squad of uninteresting young people hung about, talking shop, clearly
agitated at the prospect of a big treat. He remembered when Agency
people were all ex-FBI men, beefy cop types, who carried Swedish Ks and
liked to talk about "pegging gooks." These boys and girls looked like
they belonged in prep school, but they sure made themselves at home,
with the instant insouciance of the young.
He walked through them, and they parted, and he could feel their
wonder. What would they make of him:
his kind of war was so far from their kind it probably made no sense.
He found Sally in the kitchen, and next to her, there was his baby
girl. These were the moments worth living for. Now he knew why he
bothered to survive Vietnam.
"Hi, baby!"
"Oh, Daddy," she said, her eyes widening with deep pleasure. He felt a
warmth in his heart so intense he might melt. His child. Through it
all, after it all, his own:
flesh, blood, brains. She flew to him and he absorbed her tininess,
felt her vitality as he picked her up and hugged her passionately.
"Oh, you sweet thing!" he sang.
"You are the sweetest thing there is."
"Oh, Daddy. They say you shot the bad man!"
He laughed.
"You never mind that. How are you? How's Mommy?"
TIME TO HUNT 547
"I'm fine, I'm fine. It was scary. He came into the basement with a
gun."
"Well, he won't bother you no nevermore, all right?"
She clung to him. Sally fixed him with her usual gimlet eye.
"Bob Swagger," she said, "you are a mean and ornery piece of work, and
you aren't much of a husband or a father, but by God, you do have a
gift for the heroic."
"I can see you're still my biggest fan, Sally," he said.
"Well, anyhow, thanks for hanging around."
"It sure was interesting. How are you?"
"My back hurts," he said.
"So does my leg and my eye.
I am plenty hungry. And there're too goddamned many young people out
there. I hate young people. How is she?"
"She's fine. We're all fine. Nobody was hurt. But only just barely.
Another tenth of a second and he would have pulled that trigger."
"Well, to hell with him if he can't take a joke."
"I'll leave you two alone."
"See if you can get one of these Harvard kids to fix some coffee."
"They probably don't do coffee, and there isn't a Starbucks around, but
I'll see what I can manage."
And so he sat with his baby daughter in the kitchen and caught up on
the news and told her about the superficiality of his wounds and made a
promise he hoped he'd now be able to keep: to return with her and her
mother to Arizona, and resume the good life they had together.
In half an hour a young man came to him.
"Mr. Swagger?"
"Yes?"
"We're going to have to debrief your wife now. She's asked that you be
present."
"All right."
"She's very insistent. She won't talk unless you're there."
548 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Sure, she's spooked."
"This way, sir."
Sally came back to take care of Nikki.
"Sweetie," he said to his daughter, "I'm going to go with these people
to talk to Mommy. You stay here with Aunt Sally."
"Daddy!"
She gave him a last hug, and he now saw how deeply she'd been
traumatized. The war had come to her: she'd seen what few Americans
ever saw anymore--combat death, the power of the bullet on flesh.
"Sweetie, I'll be back. Then this'll be over. It'll be fine, you'll
see."
They took him upstairs. The Agency team had set up in a bedroom,
pushing aside the bed and dresser and installing a sofa from the living
room and a group of chairs.
Cleverly, they weren't arranged before the sofa, as if to seat an
audience, but rather in a semicircle, as if in a group counseling
session. Tape-recording equipment had been installed, and computer
terminals.
The room was crowded and hushed, but finally, he saw her. He walked
through the milling analysts and agents, and found her, sitting alone
on the sofa. She looked composed now, though her arm was still locked
in its cast.
She'd insisted on dressing and wore some jeans and a sweatshirt and her
boots. She had a can of Diet Coke.
"Well, hello there," he said. ' "Well, hello yourself," she said with
a smile.
"You're okay, they say."
"Well, it's a little bothersome when a Russian comes into your house
and points a gun at you and then your husband blows half his head away.
I'm damn lucky to have a husband who could do such a thing."
"Oh, I'm such a big hero. Sweetie, I just pulled a trigger."
"Oh, baby."
He held her tight and it was fine: his wife; he'd slept next to her for
years now, the same strong, tough beautiTIME TO HUNT 549
fill woman, about as good as they made them. Her smell was achingly
familiar. Strawberries, she smelled of strawberries always. He first
saw her in a picture wrapped in cellophane that came from a young
Marine's boonie hat.
The rain was falling. There was a war. He fell in love with her then
and never came close to falling out in all the years since.
"Where did you come from?" she said.
"How did you get here so fast?"
"They didn't tell you? Damn idiot me, I got me a new hobby. I
parachuted through the storm. Pretty exciting."
"Oh, Bob."
"I never been so scared in my life. If I'd had clean underwear, I'd
have pissed in the ones I was wearing.
Only, I didn't have no clean underwear."
"Oh, Bob--" "We'll talk about all that stuff. That's up ahead."
"What in hell is this all about?" she finally asked.
"He came for met That's what these people say."
"Yeah. It has to do with something that happened a long time ago. I
have it half figured. These geniuses think they know all the answers,
or they can figure them. You up to this?"
"Yes. I just want it over."
"Then we'll get it all straightened out, I swear to you."
"I know."
"Bonson?"
Bonson came over.
"She's ready."
"That's terrific, Mrs. Swagger. We'll try and make this as easy as
possible. Are you comfortable? Do you want anything? Another
Coke?"
"No, I'm fine. I want my husband here, that's all."
"That's fine."
"Okay, people," Bonson said in a louder voice, "we're all set. The
debriefing can begin."
He turned back to her.
"I have two lead analysts who'll run this. They're both
550 STEPHEN HUNTER
psychologists. Just relax, take your time. You're under no pressure
of any sort. This is not adversarial and it has no legal standing.
It's not an interrogation. In fact, we'll probably share things with
you that you are not security cleared to hear. But that's all right.
We want this to be easy for you, and for you not to sense reluctance or
authority or power or discretion on our part. If you can, try and
think of us as your friends, not your government."
"Should I salute?" she said.
Bonson laughed.
"No. Nor will we be playing the national anthem or waving any flags.
It's just a chat between friends. Now, let us set up things for you,
so you have some idea of a context in which this inquiry is taking
place, and why your information is so vital."
"Sure."
It began. The crowd settled, the kids obediently found chairs, and
Julie sat relaxed on the couch. There were no harsh lights. One of
the questioners cleared his throat, and began to speak.
"Mrs. Swagger, for reasons as yet unclear to us, factions within
Russia have sent an extremely competent professional assassin to this
country to kill you. That's extraordinarily venturesome, even for
them. You probably wonder why, and so do we. So in the past
seventy-two hours, we've been poring through old records, trying to
find something that you might know that would make your death important
to someone over there. May I begin by assuming you have no idea?"
"Nothing. I've never talked knowingly to a Russian in my life."
"Yes, ma'am. But we've put this into a larger pattern.
It seems that three other people in your circle in the year 1971 were
also killed under circumstances that suggest possible Soviet or Russian
involvement. One is your first husband--" Julie gasped
involuntarily.
"This may be painful," Bonson said.
TIME TO HUNT 551
Bob touched her shoulder.
"It's all right," she said.
The young man continued, "Your husband, Donny Fenn, killed in the
Republic of South Vietnam 6 May 1972. Another was a young man who was
active with you in the peace movement, named Peter Farris, discovered
dead with a broken neck, 6 October 1971, dead for several months at the
time. And the third was another peace demonstrator of some renown,
named Thomas Charles "Trig' Carter III, killed in a bomb blast at the
University of Wisconsin 9 May 1971."
"I knew Peter. He was so harmless. I only met Trig once .. . twice,
actually."
"Hmmmm. Can you think of a specific circumstance that united the four
of you? Marine, peace demonstrators, 1971?"
"We were all involved in one of the last big demonstrations, May Day of
that year. The three of us as demonstrators, Donny as a Marine."
"Julie," said Bonson, "we're thinking less of an ideological
unification here and more of a specific, geographic one. A time, a
place, not an idea. And a private place, too."
"The farm," she finally said.
There was no sound.
Finally, Bonson prompted her.
"The farm," he said.
"Donny was distraught over an assignment he'd been asked to do."
Bob looked at Bonson and saw nothing, just the face of a smooth,
professional actor in the role of concerned intelligence executive. No
flicker of emotion, grief, doubt, regrets: nothing. Bonson didn't even
blink, and Julie, remembering nothing of him and his role in what had
happened, went on.
"He believed this Trig, of whom he thought so highly, might have some
idea what he should do with his ethical dilemma. We went to Trig's
house in DC but he wasn't
552 STEPHEN HUNTER
there. Donny remembered that he was going out to a farm near
Germantown. I think Peter may have followed us.
Peter thought he was in love with me."
"What did you see on that farm?" asked the young analyst.
She laughed.
"Nothing. Nothing at all. What can have been so important about
it?"
"We'd like to know."
"There was a man. An Irishman named Fitzpatrick.
He and Trig were loading fertilizer into a van. It was very late at
night."
"How clearly did you see him?"
"Very. I was just out of the light, maybe fifteen, twenty-five feet
away. I don't think he ever saw me.
Donny, for some reason, wanted me to stay back. So he and Trig and
this Fitzpatrick talked for a few minutes.
Then Fitzpatrick left. Then Donny and Trig talked some more and
finally hugged. Then we left. There was some kind of agent in the
hills. He got our picture--Donny's and mine--as we drove away. Donny's
mostly. I was ducking.
And that's it."
"That's it."
"Do you remember Fitzpatrick?"
"I suppose."
"Do you think you'd be able to describe--" "No," said Bonson.
"Go straight to the pictures."
"Mrs. Swagger, we'd like to have you look at some pictures. They're
pictures of a variety of politicians, espionage agents, lawyers,
scientists, military, mostly in the old Eastern Bloc, but some are
genuinely Irish, some English, some French. They're all in their
forties or fifties, so you'll have to imagine them as they'd have been
in 1971."
"Yes," she said.
"Just take your time."
One of the kids walked across the room and handed her a sheaf of
photographs. She flipped through them slowly, stopping now and then to
sip on her Coke can.
TIME TO HUNT 553
"Could I have another Coke?" she asked at one time.
Somebody raced out.
Bob watched as the gray, firm faces slid by, men possibly his own age
or older, most of them dynamic in appearance, with square, ruddy faces,
lots of hair, the unmistakable imprint of success.
They were hunting for a mole, he realized. They thought that
somehow--was this Bonson's madness?-this Fitzpatrick had implanted
someone in the fabric of the West, prosperous and powerful, but that
his heart still belonged to the East, or what remained of it. If they
could solve the mystery of Fitzpatrick, they could solve the mystery of
the mole.
Bob felt an odd twist of bitterness. That war, the cold one, it really
had nothing to do with the little hot dirty one that had consumed so
many men he had known and so wantonly destroyed his generation. Who'll
stop the rain?
It wasn't even about the rain.
"No," she said.
"He's not here, I'm sorry."
"Okay, let's go to the citizens."
Another file of photos was provided.
"Take your time," said one of the de briefers
"Remember, he'll be heavier, balder, he may have facial hair, he--"
"Mel, I think Julie understands that," said Bonson.
Julie was quiet. She nipped through the pictures, now and then
pausing. But another pile disappeared without a moment of recognition.
Another pile was brought, this time designated "security nationals."
She had a possible, but paused, and then it too went to the discards,
though into a separate category of "almosts."
But then, finally, there were no more pictures.
"I'm sorry," she said.
The disappointment in the room was palpable.
"Okay," Bonson finally said.
"Let's knock off for a while. Julie, why don't you take a break? Maybe
a walk, stretch your legs. We'll have to do it the hard way."
554 STEPHEN HUNTER
"What does that mean?" she asked.
"Drugs? Torture?"
"No, we'll get you together with a forensic artist. He'll draft a
drawing from your instructions. We'll get our computers to run a much
wider comparison on a much wider database. Mel, be sure to get the
'almosts' too. Have Mr.
Jefferson factor those in too. That'll get us another bunch of
candidates. We've got food. Would you care for some lunch or a nap or
something?"
"I'm fine. I think I'd like to check on my daughter."
She and Bob walked downstairs and found Nikki-asleep. She was
stretched across Sally's lap, snoozing gently, pinning Sally with her
fragile weight.
"I can't even get up," said Sally.
"I'll take her."
"No, that's okay. These child geniuses got the cable running. The
remote even works now. It didn't. See."
She held up the little device and punched a few buttons and the picture
flicked across the channels: Lifetime, CNN, Idaho Public TV, HBO, the
Discovery Channel, ESPN, CNN Headline News-"My God," said Julie.
"Oh, my God."
"What?" Bob said, and from around the house, others looked in, came to
check.
"That's him," said Julie.
"My God, yes, fatter now, healthier; yes, that's him. That's
Fitzpatrick!" She was pointing at the television, where a powerful,
dynamic man was giving an impromptu news conference in a European
city.
"Jesus," said one of the kids, "that's Evgeny Pashin, the next
president of Russia."
1 he second meeting was smaller, more informal. It was after lunch,
prepared in an Air Force mess tent set up outside the house.
Surprisingly good, nourishing food, too. More to the point, someone
had come up with a nice batch of Disney
TIME TO HUNT 555
videos for Nikki, that is, when she got back from a sledding diversion
with three state troopers.
Now, Julie and Bob sat upstairs with a much smaller contingent, the
inner circle, as it were.
"Julie," said Bonson, "we're going to discuss the meaning of this right
here, before you and your husband.
That's because I want you on the inside now, not on the outside. I'm
drawing the two of you in. You're not civilians.
I want you to feel like you're part of the team. You will, in fact,
both be paid as agency consultants; we pay well, you'll see."
"Fine," she said.
"We could use the money."
"Now, I'm not even going to ask you if you're sure. I know you're
sure. But I have to say: this guy has been on TV a lot lately. Can
you explain why it's only now that you recognize him?"
"Mr. Bonson, have you ever been a mother?"
There was some laughter.
"No," he admitted.
"Have you ever been the wife to a somewhat melancholy yet incredibly
heroic man, particularly as he's feeling his life has been taken from
him by some unnecessary publicity and we had to move from one location
to another?"
"No, no, I haven't," said Bonson.
"Well, I was both, simultaneously. Does that suggest to you why I
wasn't watching much TV?"
"Yes, it does."
"Now, today, you take me back. You force me to think about faces. I
pick several faces that are somewhat similar in structure to his. I'm
working on re-creating that face in my own mind. Do you see?"
"Yes."
"The points are all well made," Bonson said.
"Well then, let's throw it open for general discussion. Can someone
tell me what possible meaning this has?"
"Sir, I think I can explain the sequencing."
"Go ahead," said Bonson.
556 STEPHEN HUNTER
"In 1971, four people saw Pashin operating undercover in this country
as this Fitzpatrick. That is, really interfaced with him in commission
of his duties. Three were eliminated quickly. But they had no ID on
the fourth, and as I recollect, according to official Marine Corps
records, Mrs. Swagger's first marriage to Donny Fenn was
unrecorded."
"That's right," said Julie.
"I received no benefits. It didn't matter to me. I didn't want
anything to do with the Marine Corps. Although I ended up marrying
it."
"But," continued the analyst, "they have a bad picture of her, the one
they got at the farm. They can't ID it. It haunts them over the
years. The decades pass. SovUn breaks up. Pashin is no longer GRU,
he's part of PAMYAT, the nationalist party. He begins his political
career. He's handsome, heroic, the brother of a martyred nationalist
hero, has lots of mafia backing; he's scaring the old-line commies,
he's within a few weeks of winning an election and control of twenty
thousand nukes. Then, two months ago, a picture of Bob Lee Swagger
appears in The National Star and subsequently in Time and Newsweek, who
call him "America's most violent man." If you recall: it was a picture
snapped by a Star photographer of Bob coming out of church in Arizona,
with his wife. Her picture appears in the national media. And it
contains the information that Bob is married to his spotter's widow.
Donny's widow, the woman who got away, who's been haunting them all
these years. The last survivor of that night on the farm. Suddenly,
it becomes clear to PAMYAT and all the interests betting on Pashin that
one witness from his undercover days still exists and can still put him
on that farm. All right? So ... from that point on, they have to take
her out, and her husband's gaudy past certainly provides a kind of
pretext."
"That's sequencing," said Bonson.
"Fine, good, it makes sense. It's a theory that fits. But still .. .
why?"
"Ah, he was involved with a famous peace demonstrator in blowing up a
building."
TIME TO HUNT 557
"So?"
"Well .. ."
Bonson argued savagely, trying to compel the young man to a next
leap.
"It's widely known he had an intelligence background. It's known in
some circumstances that the peace movement had some East Bloc
involvement.
Actually, that might help his candidacy in today's Russia. I don't
understand why the same security mandates would be operational
twenty-seven years later. They were protecting assets then. What can
they be protecting now?
Ideas, anybody?"
None of the senior people had any.
"Well, then, we're sort of stuck, aren't we?" said Bonson.
"It's very interesting, but we still don't--" "Should I explain it to
you now, or do you want to yammer on a bit?" asked Bob.
"You ain't got it yet, Bonson," said Bob.
"You still bought into the cover story. You still look at the cover
story and you don't see the real story. And all your smart boys,
too."
"Well, Sergeant," said Bonson evenly, "then go ahead.
You explain the real story."
"I will. You missed the big news. There was a bomb explosion at the
University of Wisconsin 9 May 1971 all right. A kid named Trig Carter
blew himself up protesting the war in Vietnam. Maybe most of you are
too young to remember it, but I do. He gave his life to peace. He was
a rich kid, could have had anything, but he gave his life up for his
ideals. They even wrote books about him. He may have been brave, too.
I don't know.
"But the one name you won't find in that book or in any other books
about the peace movement or the history of our country in 1971 is the
name Ralph Goldstein. Anybody here recognize it?"
There was silence in the room.
"That's the big story. Ralph Goldstein was the doctoral student who
was killed that night in the University of
558 STEPHEN HUNTER
Wisconsin Math Center. Jewish boy, twenty-seven, married, from Skokie,
Illinois. Went to the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus,
not a very impressive school compared to the fancy schools where Trig
Carter went. He didn't know nobody. He just did his work and tried to
get his degree and do his research. Smart as a whip, but very obscure.
Never went to no demonstrations, smoked no dope, got no free love, or
nothing. I did something nobody has yet done: I went and talked to his
son, now himself a very bright kid. I hope nobody don't blow him
up."
He could feel their eyes on him. He cracked a little smile. All the
pointy heads, listening to him.
"But Ralph Goldstein had published a paper in Duke Higher Mathematics
Quarterly, which he called "Certain Higher Algorhythmic Functions of
Topographical Form Reading in Orbital Applications." Don't mean a
thing to me. But guess what? We now got about 350 satellites in orbit
watching the world because Ralph Goldstein figured out the math of it.
He was only a grad student, and he himself didn't even know it, but
he'd been picked to join the staff at the Satellite Committee at the
Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Lab in Maryland, where they did all the
high-power number crunching that made the satellite program possible.
Okay, so what his death meant practically was it took us three extra
years to get terrain-recognition birds in the air. If it matters,
that's three years where the Sovs upgraded their own satellite program,
and closed a gap in the Cold War. That's three more years that kept
them in the race. Which one of you geniuses or experts can tell me
which part of Soviet staff was responsible for strategic warfare?"
"GRU," came the reply.
"That's right. And what was Pashin?"
"GRU."
"That's right. So guess what? His job wasn't to stop the war in
Vietnam. He didn't give a shit about the war in Vietnam, or about Trig
Carter or about nothing. It was to
TIME TO HUNT 559
kill a little Jewish guy in an office in Madison, Wisconsin, who was
just about to put the Americans way ahead in the Cold War. Kill him in
such a way that no one would ever, in a hundred years, think it had to
do with the Russians.
Kill him in such a way that no one would even think about his death but
only about the death of the man who killed him. To make him an extra
in his own murder. That was Pashin's mission: it was straight GRU wet
work, a murder job. Trig Carter and the peace movement were just part
of the props."
He could hear them breathing heavily in the room, but no one spoke.
"And don't you see the cynicism in it, the goddamned motherfucking
brilliance? They knew this country so goddamn well. They just knew
that when any of you Ivy League heroes looked at that data, you
couldn't see past Trig, because, no matter which side he was on, he was
one of you. That would be the tragedy, and the fog it would release in
your little pea fucking brains would keep you from ever figuring it
out. It takes an outsider, someone who ain't been to no college and
doesn't think the word Harvard or Yale means shit in this world. It
takes gutter trash rednecks who you all pay to do the dirty work with
the rifles so you can sit in your clubs and make ironic little jokes.
Or plan your little wars that the Swaggers and the Fenns and the
Goldsteins have to go fight."
The silence lasted for a long moment.
Then finally, Bonson spoke: "Class anger aside, does this make any
sense to you Skull and Bones boys?"
It took a while, but finally someone said, almost laconically, "Yeah,
it makes perfect sense. It even explains why it's happening now. It
puts them in a desperate situation.
They--that's PAMYAT, the old GRU security bunch hiding behind
nationalism and financed by mob money-have to keep this information
quiet. They couldn't take a chance that just as he's closing in on the
presidency, their man is revealed as a murderer of American nationals
on American soil. That would make it impossible for him to
560 STEPHEN HUNTER
work with any American president or with big American corporations.
That information has to be buried at all costs. Their lives, their
futures, their party depend on it.
They had to eliminate the last witness, particularly as Pashin's fame
is getting bigger and bigger."
"Sir," said someone else, "I think we could game out some very
interesting tactical deployment for this information.
We might have a hand ourselves in determining who their next president
is."
"Okay," said Bonson, "you game it out. But I want it going in one
direction. I want to kill this motherfucker."
PART IV
BACK TO THE WORLD
The Present
chapter fifty
The snow didn't last. It melted on the third day after it had fallen,
causing floods in the lowlands, closing roads, wrecking bridges,
creating mud slides. But on Upper Cedar Creek it was a serene day,
with blue skies, eastern zephyrs and creeks full of sparkling water.
The pines shed their cloak of snow; the grass began to emerge, green
and lush, and seemingly undamaged by the ordeal.
By now the excitement was over. Bonson had departed with a handshake
the previous morning, after ensuring that a quickly convened Custer
County grand jury found no culpability in the death by misadventure of
one Frank Vborny, of Cleveland, Ohio, as the fake identification
documents read in the dead sniper's pocket. Ballistics confirmed that
indeed Mr. Vbomy had shot and killed two innocent people in the Custer
County Idaho Bell substation in Mackay; obviously a berserker, he next
attacked a house that was luckily rented out by a gun owner, who was
able to defend himself. The gun owner's name was never published but
that was all right, and in Idaho most people took satisfaction from the
moral purity of the episode and its subtle endorsement of the great old
Second Amendment, a lesson most Westerners felt had been forgotten in
the East.
Up in the mountains, the state police had pulled out, the helicopters
and all the young men and women had gone back to wherever it was they
came from, and there was little sign that they'd been there.
Bob and Julie had a check, in the odd sum of $146,589.07, and had no
idea how that exact figure had been selected. It was from the
Department of the Treasury, and the invoice banally read,
"Consultancy," with the proper dates listed and his Social Security
number.
The last of the security team left, the rifle and 564 STEPHEN HUNTER
recovered Beretta were returned, the foam case with its cargo marked
officially as "operational loss," and Sally had taken Nikki for a walk
down to the mailbox on Route 93, when he at last had an opportunity to
talk to his wife.
"Well, howdy," he said.
"Hi," she said. Doctors had examined her after her ordeal; she was in
fine shape, her collarbone knitting properly. She seemed much stronger
now, and was able to get about better. Sally would soon be leaving.
"Well, I have some things to say. Care to have a listen?"
"Yes."
"You know we have some money now. I'd like to git on back to Arizona
and restart the business. Joe Lopez says they seem to miss me down
there. It was a good business and a good life."
"It was a good life."
"I went a little crazy there. I put everybody through a lot. I wasn't
very grown-up about my troubles. That's all in the past now. And what
I learned was how important my family was. I want my family back.
That's the only thing I want. No more adventures, no more screwing
around.
That's all finished."
"It wasn't your fault," she said.
"It had nothing to do with you. It was all about me. How could I
blame you for anything? You saved all--" "Now, now," he said.
"No need for that. I thought all this out. I just want the old life
back. I want you to be my wife, I want my baby girl to be fine, I want
to work with the horses and take care of y'all. That's the best life
there is, the only life I've ever wanted. I get these bad moods.
Or I used to; I hope I'm over that. If I had some ghosts, they ain't
walking out of the cemetery no more. So ... well, what do you say?
Will you let me come back?"
"I already called the lawyer. He recalled the separation request."
"That's great."
"It'll be good," she said.
"I think we should use some
TIME TO HUNT 565
of that money and go on a nice vacation. We should close up the house
here, the house outside of Boise, but then go to some warm island for
two weeks. Then we can go back to Arizona. R&R."
"God, does that sound like a plan to me," he said with a smile.
"There's only one last little thing. Trig's mother.
She was very helpful and she told me that if I ever learned anything
about the way her son died, I should tell her. Tell her the truth. I
still feel that obligation. So in a couple of months or so, when all
this dies down, when we're back, I may take a bit of time and head back
there to Baltimore."
"Do you want us to come with you?"
"Oh, it ain't worth it. I'll just fly in, rent a car, fly back.
It'll be over quicker 'n' you can believe. No sense putting no trouble
to it or taking Nikki away from her riding.
Hell, I may drive instead of flying, save some money that way."
He smiled. For just a second she thought there might be something in
his eyes, some vagrant thought, some evidence of another idea, another
agenda; but no, not a thing could be seen. They were depthless and
gray and revealed nothing except the love he felt for her.
Little by little, life for the Swagger family reassembled itself toward
some model of normality. Even the big news of a spectacular murder in
Russia failed to make much of a stir. Bob just watched a little of it
on CNN, saw the burning Jeep Cherokee and the dead man in the back, and
when the hysterical analysts came on to explain it all, he changed
channels.
Sally stayed until they moved back to Boise, and then Bob drove her to
the airport.
"Once again," she said at the gate, "the great Bob Lee Swagger
triumphs. You killed your enemies, you got your wife and family back.
Can't keep a good man down."
"Sally, I got 'em all fooled but you, don't I? You see clean through
me."
"Bob, seriously. Pay attention to them this time. I
566 STEPHEN HUNTER
know it's easy to say, but you have to let the past go.
You're married, you have a wonderful, brave, strong wife and a
beautiful little girl. That's your focus."
"I know. It will be."
"There's no more old business."
"Is that a question or a statement?"
"Both. If there's one little thing left, let it go. It doesn't
matter. It can't matter."
"There's nothing left," he said.
"You are one ornery sumbitch," she said.
"I swear, I don't know what that woman sees in you."
"Well, I don't neither. But she's pretty smart, so maybe she knows
something you and I don't."
Sally smiled, and then turned to leave, good friend and soldier to the
very end. She winked at him, as if to say, "You are hopeless."
And he knew he was.
When the cast came off a little later, and Julie was back among the
supple, the family flew to St. John, in the U.S.
Virgins for two glorious weeks. They rented a villa just outside Cruz
Bay on the little island, and each morning took a taxi to the beautiful
Trunk Bay beach, where they snorkeled and lay in the sand and watched
the time pass ever so slowly as they turned browner and browner. They
were a handsome family, the natural aristocrats of nature:
the tall, grave man with gray eyes and abundant hair, and his wife,
every bit as handsome, her hair a mesh of honey and brown, her
cheekbones strong, her lips thin, her eyes powerful. She had been a
cheerleader years ago, but she was if anything more beautiful now than
ever. And the daughter, a total ball of fire, a complete kamikaze who
always had to be called in, who pushed the snorkeling to its maximum,
who begged her father to let her scuba or go water- or para-skiing.
"You got plenty of time to break your neck when you're older," he told
her.
"Your old mommy and I can't
TIME TO HUNT 567
keep up with such a thing. You have to give us a break.
This is our vacation, too."
"Oh, Daddy," she scolded, "you're such a chicken."
And when she said that, he did an imitation of a chicken that was
clearly based on a little real time in the barnyard, and they all
laughed, first at how funny it was but second at the idea that a man of
such reserve could at last find some way to let himself go, to be
silly. An astonishment.
At night, they went into town and ate at the restaurants there. Bob
never had a drink, didn't seem to want one. It was idyllic, really too
good. It reminded Julie just a bit of an R&R she'd had with Donny in
Hawaii, just before .. .
well, just before.
And Bob seemed to relax totally too. She'd never seen him so calm, so
at ease. The wariness that usually marked his passage in society--a
feeling for terrain and threat, a tendency to mark escape routes, to
look too carefully at strangers--disappeared. And he never had
nightmares.
Not once did he awake screaming, drenched in cold sweat, or with the
shakes, or with that hurt, hunted look that sometimes came into his
eyes. His scars almost seemed to disappear as he grew tanner and
tanner, but they were always there, the puckers of piebald flesh that
could only be bullet wounds: so many of them. One of the Virgin
Islanders stared at them once, then turned to say something to one of
his colleagues, in that musical, impenetrable English of theirs, so
fast and full of strange rhythms, but Julie heard the word "bombom
mon," which she took to mean "boom-boom man," which she in turn took to
be "gunman."
But Bob appeared not to notice. He was almost friendly, his natural
reserve blurred into something far more open and pleasant to the world.
She'd never quite seen him like this.
There was only one night when she awoke and realized he wasn't in bed
with her. She rose, walked through the dark living room, until she
found him on the deck, under
568 STEPHEN HUNTER
a tropic night, sitting quietly. Before them was a slope of trees, a
hill and then the sea, a serene sheet of glass throwing off tints of
moonlight. He sat with utter stillness, staring at a book, as if it
had some secret meaning to it.
"What is that?" she asked.
"This? Oh, it's called Birds of North America by Roger Prentiss
Fuller."
She came over and saw that he was gazing at a section on eagles.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
"Oh, nothing. This book has some pretty pictures. Kid who painted
them really knew his birds."
"Bob, it's so unlike you."
"I was just curious, that's all."
"Eagles?"
"Eagles," he said.
1 hey returned to Arizona and with the money, Bob was able to upgrade
the barn, hire two Mexican assistants, buy a new pickup and reintroduce
himself to the Pima County horsey set. In just a little bit of time,
they had patients-seven, eight, then ten horses in various states of
healing, all ministered to with tender care. His lay-up barn became a
thriving concern after a while, mostly on the basis of his own sweat,
but also because people trusted him.
Nikki went back to school but she rode every day, English style, and
would start showing on the circuit's junior level the next spring, her
coach insisted. Julie resumed working three days a week at the Navajo
reservation clinic, helping the strong young braves mend after fights
or drinking bouts, helping the rickety children, doing a surprising
amount of good in a small compass.
No reporters ever showed; no German TV crews set up in the barnyard; no
young men came by to request interviews for their books; no gun show
entrepreneurs offered him money to stand at a booth and sell
autographs;
no writers from the survivalist press wanted to write admiring
profiles. He and the war he represented seemed
TIME TO HUNT 569
once again to have disappeared. No part of it remained, its wounds
healed or at least scarred over.
One night, Bob sat down and wrote a letter to Trig Carter's mother. He
told her he was planning a trip east some time in weeks to come and, as
he said, he'd like to stop by and share with her what he had learned
about the death of her son.
She wrote back immediately, pleased to hear from him. She suggested a
time, and he called her and said that was fine, that's when she should
look for him.
He loaded his new pickup with gear and began the long trip back. He
drove up to Tucson, to the veterans cemetery there, and walked the
ranks of stones, white in the desert sun, until at last he came to:
Donny M. Fenn Lance Corporal
USMC.
Nothing set it apart. There were dozens of other stones from that and
other wars, the last years always signifying some violent eddy in
American history: 1968, 1952, 1944, 1918. A wind whistled out of the
mountains.
The day was so bright it hurt his eyes. He had no flowers, nothing to
offer the square of dry earth and the stone tablet.
He'd been in so many other cemeteries; this one felt no different at
all. He had nothing to say, for so much had been said. He just soaked
up the loss of Donny: Donny jumping over the berm, the vibration as the
bullet went through him, lifting the dust from his chest; Donny
falling, his eyes going blank and sightless, his hand grasping Bob's
arm, the blood in his mouth and foaming obscenely down his nose.
After a while--he had no idea how long--he left, got back in the truck
and settled in for a long pull across
570 STEPHEN HUNTER
Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and on to the East.
1 he last part of the trip took him to the Virginia suburbs of
Washington, DC, where once again he bunked with an old friend who had
become the Command Sergeant Major of the United States Marine Corps. As
a few months before, he fell in with cronies, both still on active duty
or recently retired, men of his own generation and stamp, leathery,
sinewy men who bore the career imprint of the Corps. There were a few
loud nights at the CSM's house in the suburbs, the whole thing slightly
more celebrative.
It was the next day that he called Mrs. Carter and told her he'd be up
the next night. She said she couldn't wait.
He hung up and waited on the line for the telltale click of a wiretap.
He didn't hear it, but he knew that meant nothing: there were other
methods of penetration.
Now, he thought, only this last thing.
chapter fifty-one
Bob drove carefully through the far reaches of Baltimore County, at
sunset. It was as he remembered, the beautiful houses of the rich and
propertied, of old families, of the original owners of America--people
who rode English. At last he turned down a lane and drove under the
overhanging elms until he found Trig's ancestral home.
He pulled in, once again momentarily humbled by the immensity of the
place, its suggestion of stability and propriety and what endured in
the world. At last he got out, adjusted his tie and went to the
door.
It was September now, turning coolish at night here in the East. The
leaves hadn't yet begun to redden but there was nevertheless a definite
edge in the air. Things would change soon: that was the message.
He knocked; the old black butler answered, as before.
He was led through the same halls of antiques, paintings of patriots,
exotic plants, dense Oriental rugs, damask curtains, lighting fixtures
configured to represent the flicker of candles. Since it was darker,
there wasn't quite the sense of the threadbare that had been so evident
his first time out here.
The old man led him into the study, where the woman waited. She stood
erect as the mast of a ship--the family had owned shipping once, of
course, as well as railroads, oil, coal and more. She was still stern,
still rigid, still had that iron-gray uplift to her hair. She was
demurely dressed in a conservative suit, and he could see, even more
now, that at one time she must have been a great beauty. Now an air of
tragic futility attended her. Or maybe it was his imagination. But
she'd lost a son and a husband to a war that the husband said was worth
fighting and the son said wasn't. It had broken her family apart, as
it had broken
572 STEPHEN HUNTER
apart so many families. No family was immune, that was the lesson: not
even this one, so protected by its wealth and property.
"Well, Sergeant Swagger, you look as if you've become a movie star."
"I've been working outdoors, ma'am."
"No, I don't mean the tan. I have sources still, I believe I told you.
There's some news afoot about your heroics in Idaho, how you
disconnected some terrible conspiracy. I'm sure I don't understand it,
but the information has even reached the society of doddering State
Department widows."
"They say we were able to get some good work done, yes, ma'am."
"Are you congenitally modest. Sergeant? For a man so powerful, you
are so unassuming you seem hardly to be there at all."
"Fm just a polite Southern boy, ma'am."
"Please sit down. I won't offer you a drink, since I know you no
longer drink. A club soda, a cup of coffee or tea, a soft drink,
something like that?"
"No, ma'am, I'm fine."
They sat across from each other, in the study. One of Trig's birds
observed them; it was a blue mallard.
"Well, then, I know you came here to tell me something.
I suppose I'm ready to hear it. Will I need a drink, Sergeant Swagger?
A great shot of vodka, perhaps?"
"No, ma'am, I don't believe so."
"Well, then, go ahead."
"Ma'am, I have satisfied myself on this one issue: I don't believe no
way your son would have killed another human being and I don't believe
he killed himself. I think he was duped by a professional Soviet
agent--rather, Soviet in those days. Your son was sort of charmed
into--" "What a quaint euphemism. But I have to tell you I'm aware of
my son's homosexual leanings. You believe it was a homosexual
thing?"
"I don't know, ma'am. That's not my department. I
TIME TO HUNT 573
only know the result, that somehow he was snookered into assisting in
what was represented as an act of symbolic violence as a way of re
energizing the peace movement.
But the Russian operator, he didn't give a tinker's dam about the peace
movement. He was only interested in your boy's fame and reputation as
a masking device for the mission's real target, Ralph Goldstein, who
was working on satellite topography-reading technologies and seemed on
the verge of a breakthrough the Russians felt would put them way behind
in the Cold War."
"It was only about murder, in the end. And some other boy was the
target?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"So my poor Trig wasn't even the star of his own murder?"
"No, ma'am."
"Well, he'd been the star of so many other things, I don't suppose it
matters."
"My guess is, he had begun to have doubts; perhaps he even tried to
back out, or go to the FBI or something.
Possibly there's some record of his doubts in his missing sketches. But
it appears I won't never see them. He was killed, probably with a judo
chop to the back of the neck.
That was their specialty in those days. In fact, everybody who saw
this agent was killed, at some effort, including another peace
demonstrator named Peter Fan-is, a Marine named Donny Fenn, and later
attempts were made on my wife, who had seen the agent with Trig. She
was married to Donny Fenn at the time. I believe Ralph Goldstein was
killed in the same way. Their bodies were put in the building and it
was detonated. It goes down into the books as a violent fool and a
math geek. But the books are always wrong. It was something entirely
different;
kids used by older, smarter, far more ruthless men, then thrown away
for a momentary strategic advantage. It was a war, but the cold one,
not the hot one."
"The one we won."
"I suppose we did."
574 STEPHEN HUNTER
"What happened to the Russian?"
"Well, our intelligence people found out a way to turn the information
against him. I don't know much about it, but he's dead. They had it
on CNN. You could see the burned bodies in the back of the Jeep."
"That nasty boy?"
"That one."
"And the man who was trying to kill you?"
"Well, he wasn't trying to kill me. He was trying to kill my wife. He
was stopped," Bob said.
"And he ain't never coming back."
"Were you responsible?"
Bob just nodded.
"Do you know what you are? Sergeant, you're a sacred killer. All
societies need them. All civilizations need them.
It is to the eternal shame and the current damnation of this country
that it refuses anymore to acknowledge them and thinks it can get by
without respecting them. So let an old bat speak a truth: you are the
necessary man. Without you it all goes away."
Bob said nothing. Speculation on his place in the nature of things was
not his style.
The old lady sensed this, and asked for an accounting of the politics
of the affair, the details of history. He gave it, succinctly
enough.
"Odd, isn't it? As you've explained it, after it's all counted up and
all the accounts are settled, the one party to it all that could be
said to benefit is the old Russian communist apparatus. It's kept them
from going under another few years. And who can tell what that'll
mean?
The cruel irony of history, I suppose."
"I wouldn't know about that, ma'am. They were very happy, the
intelligence people, that they were able to stop this fellow Pashin. He
was their real target. My wife was his, but he was ours, and we got
him first."
"Well, anyway: you've provided a measure of serenity to my life. My
son wasn't a fool; he was overmatched by
TIME TO HUNT 575
professionals, who've been punished. Justice isn't much, but it helps
the nights go easier."
"Yes, ma'am. I agree."
"Sometimes you don't even get that, so one must be very grateful for
what one does get."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Now ... I know you weren't working for me, you were never my employee.
But the one power I still have in the world is to satisfy myself
through my checkbook. I would very much enjoy getting it out now and
writing a nice big, fat one."
"Thank you," he said.
"That's not necessary."
"Are you sure?"
"I am."
"Soon there'll be college expenses."
"Not for a while. We're doing fine."
"Oh, I hope I haven't spoiled things by bringing up money."
"No, ma'am."
"Well, then--" "There is one thing, though."
"Name it."
"The painting."
"The painting?"
"The eagle after the fight. I don't know a thing about art and I don't
know a thing about birds, but I'd be honored to have that. It has some
meaning to me."
"You felt your breast stir when you saw it?"
"Well, something like that."
"Then you shall have it. Come with me, Sergeant Swagger."
She led him forthrightly out of the room, commanded the old butler to
get a "torch"--a flashlight--and led Bob in the butler's uncertain
illumination to the studio. Their breaths plumed in the frosty air.
She opened the door, found a switch and the birds flashed to life,
still and majestic.
"These are worth quite a lot of money to connoisseurs
576 STEPHEN HUNTER
of the macabre, I expect," she said.
"But the eagle .. .
it's so atypical, and also unsigned. Would you want a certificate of
authenticity? It might seem pointless now, but when your daughter goes
to school, it could mean the difference between buying one year at
Radcliffe or four years."
"No, ma'am," he said, walking to the painting.
"I just want it for what it is."
He stood before it, and felt its pain, its distraught, logy mind, its
survivor's despair.
"I wonder how he got so much into it," she said.
He unscrewed the painting from the easel, where it had been clamped
since May of 1971. It was unframed, but the canvas was tacked stoutly
to a wood backing.
"I hope you'll let me pay for the framing," said the old woman.
"That at least I can do."
"I'll send you the bill," he said.
He wrapped the painting carefully in some rags, making certain not to
disturb the elegant depth of the crusted pigment, and put the whole
package delicately under an arm.
"All set," he said.
"Sergeant Swagger, again, I can't thank you enough.
You've made my dotage appreciably better, to no real gain of your
own."
"Oh, I gained, Mrs. Carter. I gained."
The team watched him from far off, through night-vision binoculars. It
had been a long stakeout until he showed, longer still since he was in
there. Where had he been all afternoon? Still, it didn't matter. Now
it was going to happen.
Swagger turned his truck around, pulled out, drove down the lane, and
by the time he got back to Falls Road, the number-one van had moved
into position, not behind his turn, as amateurs will do, but before it,
letting him overtake them, and falling into position from behind that
way, without attracting notice.
TIME TO HUNT 577
Swagger pulled around the van, scooted ahead and settled into an
unhurried pace.
"Blue One, this is Blue Two," said the observer into his microphone.
"Ah, we have him picked up very nicely, no problems. I have Blue Three
behind me, you want to run this by management?"
"Blue Two, management just got here."
"You stay on him. Blue Two, but don't rush it," came the impatient
voice any of them knew as Bonson's.
"Play in the other van if you think you're in danger of being burned.
Don't be too aggressive. Give me an update--""Whoa, isn't this
interesting, Blue One. He didn't do the beltway. He just stayed on
Falls Road on the way into Baltimore."
"Doesn't that become Eighty-three?" asked Bonson.
"Yes, sir, it does. Goes straight downtown."
"But his motel is out at BW."
"That's the credit card data. He had something with him, some kind of
package. Maybe he's going to do something with it."
"Got you, Blue Two, you just stay on him."
They watched as Bob drove unconsciously into downtown Baltimore on the
limited access highway that plunges into that city's heart. He passed
Television Hill with its giant antennae, and the train station, then
the Sun, and finally the road drifted off its abutments to street level
and became a lesser boulevard called President Street just east of
downtown.
"He's turning left," said Blue Two.
"It's, uh, Fleet Street."
"The map says he's headed towards Fells Point."
"What the hell is he doing there? Is he starring in a John Waters
movie?"
"Cut the joking on the net," said Bonson.
"You stay with him. I'm coming in; be in town very shortly."
The men knew Bonson and his radio team were in a hangar at B-W Airport,
less than twenty minutes south of
578 STEPHEN HUNTER
town this time of night, assuming there was no backup at the tunnel.
Bob turned up Fleet, and the traffic grew a bit thicker.
He did not look around. He did not notice either the white or the
black vans that had been on him since the country.
He passed through Fells Point, jammed with cars, kids, scum and bars,
presumably the shady night town of the city, and kept on driving.
Another mile or two and he turned on the diagonal down a beat-up street
called Boston.
"Blue One, this is Blue Two. The traffic is thinning out. He's headed
out Boston toward the docks. I'm going to stay on Reet, run a
parallel, and let Blue Three close on him, just to be safe."
"Read you, Two," said the observer in the second van.
There was no way Swagger could tell, now that the van which had been
closest to him sped away down another road and the unseen secondary
vehicle closed the gap, that he was under surveillance. More
important, he exhibited nothing in his driving that demonstrated the
signature of a surveil lee who'd burned his trackers: he didn't dart in
and out of traffic, he didn't signal right, then turn left, he didn't
turn without signaling. He just drove blandly ahead, intent on his
destination.
But once he passed two large apartment buildings on the right, at the
harbor's edge, he began to slow down, as if he were looking for
something.
It was a kind of post-industrial zone, with ruined, deserted factories
everywhere; oil-holding facilities for offloading by tankers; huge,
weedy fields that served no apparent purpose at all but were
nevertheless Cyclonefenced.
There was little traffic and almost no pedestrian activity; it was a
blasted zone, where humans may have worked during the day, but deserted
almost totally at night.
The number-two van was a good three hundred feet behind him when he
turned right, down another street--it
TIME TO HUNT 579
was called South Clinton Street--that seemed to veer closer to the
docks. The van didn't turn; it went straight, after its observer
notified the first vehicle, which had run parallel down Boston, and
itself turned right on the street Bob had turned down.
"Two, I have him," said the observer.
"Cool. I'll roam a bit, then take up a tail position."
"That's good work," said Bonson, over the net.
"We're going to lose you now. We're going through the tunnel."
"I'll stay on him, Blue One."
"Catch you when we get out of the tunnel."
The first van maintained about a four hundred-foot gap between itself
and Swagger's truck, which now coursed down desolate South Clinton
Street. Off to the right, a giant naval vessel, under construction,
suddenly loomed, gray and arc-lit for drama and security. Bob passed
it, passed a bank, a few small working men's restaurants, then stopped
by the side of the road.
"Goddammit," said Two.
"Burned. Goddammit."
His own driver started to slow, but he was exceedingly professional.
"No, just keep driving. Just drive by him. Don't eyeball him as you
pass him, don't even think about it; he'll feel you paying attention.
I'm dropping out of sight."
The driver continued at the same speed, while the observer dropped into
the seat well, knowing that a single driver was much less of a giveaway
signature for a tail job.
And he hit the send button.
"Blue Three, do you read?"
"Yeah, I'm past the Boston-South Clinton Street exchange, just pulled
over."
"Okay, he's stopped. We're going to pass him; you come on by and pull
off a long way down. He's on the right. Don't use your lights. Go to
night vision and monitor his moves."
The lead vehicle sped around the curve, passed several mountains of
coal ready for loading on the right.
580 STEPHEN HUNTER
He pulled off when he was out of sight of the parked man.
"Two, this is Three. I'm in position and I've got him in my night
lenses. He's just sitting there, waiting. I think he's turned off his
engine. No, no, he's turned off his lights, now he's pulling ahead,
he's turning in--now I've lost him."
"Okay, he's gone to ground."
"Sitrep, people," came the voice of Bonson, who had just cleared the
tunnel and was now on this side of the harbor.
"Sir, he just pulled into a yard or something in the warehouse district
down by the docks. Just off Boston. We have him under observation."
"I'm right at Boston Street here. Do we go east or west off of
Ninety-five?"
"You go west. Go about a mile and turn left again, on South Clinton
Street. I'm off by the side of the road just around that turn, lights
off, left side of the road. Two is on the other side, around the
curve. We're both about a half mile away from where he's gone to
rest."
"Okay, let's meet one at a time in two-minute intervals two hundred
yards this side, my side, of the location. You go first, Three, then
you Two, from the other side, then I'll join you. Keep your lights on
in case he's looking out. If he saw unlit vehicles, he could go
ballistic."
"Sir, I honestly don't think he's seen a damned thing.
He was off in his own world. He wasn't even looking around when he
stopped. He's just looking for some deserted place."
"We'll know in a few minutes," said Bonson, just as his car turned left
and pulled in behind one of the vans.
Bob parked to the left of the silent, corrugated-metal building, as far
back and out of sight as he could. He paused, waiting. He heard no
sounds; there was no night watchman. The place was some kind of grain
storage facility, again for loading cargo ships, but no ship floated
in
TIME TO HUNT 581
the water. He could see the shimmering lights on the flat, calm water,
and beyond that the skyline of the city, spangled in illumination. But
here, there was nothing except the rush of cars from the tunnel exit
nearby, a separate world sealed off by concrete abutments.
He got out, taking the wrapped painting, a powerful flashlight and a
heavy pair of wire cutters with him, and headed to the warehouse. It
was padlocked. But where the lock was strong, the metal fastener that
secured door to wall was not, and the wire cutters made quick work of
it. The lock fell, still secure, to the ground, wearing a little
necklace of sheared steel. He pulled the door open, stepped into a
space that in the darkness appeared to be cut by bins, now mostly
empty. The dust of grains--wheat mostly, though he smelled soya beans
too--filled the air.
He walked, his shoes echoing on the bricks, until at last he came to
the center of the room. He stopped by a pillar and a drain, then
turned on the light. The beam skipped across the empty building,
finding nothing of interest but more emptiness, dramatic shadows, fire
extinguishers, light switches, closets, crates. He went and got a
crate, pulled it into the center and set it down. Finally, he set the
light on the floor, aimed back toward where he had left the package. It
cast a cold white eye on the painting.
He walked over, and leaned into the circle of light.
Slowly, he peeled the rags away, until at last the painting stood
exposed. He examined it carefully, saw how the tacks held the canvas
to the backing. He took out his Case pocketknife, and very slowly used
its blade to scrape at the paint.
It was thick and cracked easily, falling to the ground in chunks and
strips. He scraped, destroying the image of the eagle, pulling at the
paint, watching it flake in colored chunks downward. In a minute or
so, he came to a ridge under the paint, and ran the knife blade along
it until he reached a corner. It was the top of a heavy piece of
paper, and it had been literally buried under the heavy oil
pigmentation of the image.
582 STEPHEN HUNTER
With the blade, he pried the corner loose enough to get a grip on, set
the knife down and very carefully pulled the sheet of paper free. It
cracked off the canvas. As he finally freed it, there was a kind of
soft, slipping sound:
paper, sliding loose, fluting down to land with a rattle on the dirty
floor. He set the backing down and bent there in the harsh light to
see what secrets he had unlocked.
It was the last few sketches from Trig's book. Bob began to shuffle
through them, finding images of a campus building in Madison,
Wisconsin, portraits of people at parties in Washington, crowd scenes
of big demonstrations.
There was a portrait of Donny. It must have been made about the time
he did the scene of Donny and Julie, which Bob had seen in Vietnam. He
brought those days vividly to life, and Bob began to feel his
passion--and his pain.
chapter fifty-two
One man had gone ahead and returned with a report.
"He's in there with a flashlight, reading some pages or something. I
can't figure it out."
"Okay," said Bonson.
"I think I know what he's got.
Let's finish this, once and for all."
The guns came out. The team consisted now of five men besides Bonson.
They were large men in crew cuts in their late forties. They were
tough-looking, exuding that alpha-male confidence that suggested no
difficulty in doing violence if necessary. They looked like large
policemen, soldiers, firemen, extremely well developed, extremely
competent. They drew the guns from under their jackets, and there was
a little ceremony of clicks and snaps, as safeties came off and slides
were eased back to check chambers, just in case. Then the suppressors
were screwed on.
Bonson led them along the road, into the lot and up to the old grain
warehouse. Above, stars pinwheeled and blinked. Water sounds filled
the night, the lapping of the tides against ancient docks. From
somewhere came a low, steady roar of automobiles. He reached the metal
door and through the gap between it and the building proper, he could
see Bob in the center of the room, sitting on a crate he'd gotten from
somewhere, reading by the light of a flashlight. The painting was on
the floor, somehow standing straight, as if on display, and Bob was
leaning against a thick pillar that supported the low ceiling. Bonson
could see that the image had somehow been destroyed, yielding a large
white square in its center.
What is wrong with this picture, he asked himself.
He studied it for a second.
No, nothing. The man is unaware. The man is lost.
584 STEPHEN HUNTER
The man is unprepared. The man is defenseless. The man is the
ultimate soft target.
He nodded.
"Okay," he whispered.
One of the men opened the door and he walked in.
Bob looked up to see them as their lights flashed on him.
"Howdy," he said.
"Lights," said Bonson.
One of the men walked away, found an electrical junction and the place
leaped into light, which showed the rawness of industrial space, a
gravel floor, the air filled with dust and agricultural vapors.
"Hello, Swagger," said Bonson.
"My, my, what's that?"
"It's the last sketches from Trig Carter's book. Real damn
interesting," said Bob, loudly.
"How'd you find it?"
"What?"
What was wrong with his ears?
"I said, "How did you find it?"
" "When I thought about his last painting, I figured it, pretty close.
The reason the painting was so different was his clue: his way of
saying to those who came after him, "Look this over." But no one ever
came. Not until me."
"Nice work," said Bonson.
"What's in it?"
"What?"
What was wrong with his ears?
"I said, "What's in it?"
" "Oh. Just what you'd expect," said Bob, still a bit loud.
"People, places, things he ran into as he began to prepare his symbolic
explosion of the math building. A couple of nice drawings of Donny."
"Trig Carter was a traitor," said Bonson.
"Yeah?" said Bob mildly.
"Do tell."
"Give it over here," said Bonson.
"You don't want to see the drawings, Bonson? They're pretty damned
interesting."
TIME TO HUNT 585
"We'll look at them. That's enough."
"Oh, it gits better. There's a nice drawing of this Fitzpatrick.
Damn, that boy could draw. It's Pashin; everybody will be able to
tell. That's quite a find, eh? That's proof, cold, solid dead-on
proof the peace movement was infiltrated by elements of Soviet
intelligence."
"So what?" said Bonson.
"That's all gone and forgotten.
It doesn't matter."
"Oh, no?" said Bob.
"See, there's someone else in the drawing. Poor Trig must have grown
extremely suspicious, so one day, late, right after the big May Day
mess, he followed Fitzpatrick. He watched him meet somebody.
He did. He watched them deep in conversation. And he recorded it."
Bob held it up, a folded piece of paper, the lines that were Pashin
brilliantly clear.
Bob unfolded the rest of the drawing.
"See, Bonson, here's the funny part," said Bob, loudly.
"There's someone else here. It's you."
There was a moment of silence. Bonson's eyes narrowed tightly, and
then he relaxed, turned to his team and smiled. He almost had to
laugh.
"Who are you, Bonson?" Swagger asked, more quietly now.
"Really, I'd like to know. I had some ideas. I just couldn't make no
sense of them. But just tell me. Who are you? What are you? Are you
a traitor? Are you a professional Soviet agent masquerading as an
American? Are you some kind of cynic playing the sides against each
other? Are you in it for the money? Who are you, Bonson?"
"Kill him?" asked one of the men on the team, holding up a suppressed
Beretta.
"No," said Bonson.
"No, not yet. I want to see how far he's gotten."
"Finally it makes sense," Bob said.
"The great CIA mole. The big one they've been hunting all these
years.
Who makes a better mole than the head mole hunter?
586 STEPHEN HUNTER
Pretty goddamned smart. But what's the deal? Why did no one ever
suspect you?"
He could sense that Bonson wanted to tell him. He had probably never
told anyone, had repressed his reality so deep and imposed such
discipline on himself that it was almost not real to him, except when
it needed to be. But now at last, he had a chance to explain.
"The reason I was never suspected," he said finally, "was because they
recruited me. I never went to them.
They offered me a job when I left the Navy, but I said no.
I went to law school, I spent three years on Wall Street, they came
after me three more times, and I always said no. Finally--God, it took
some discipline--finally I said yes."
"Why did they want you so much?"
"Because of the NIS prosecutions. That was the plan. I sent
fifty-seven young men to Vietnam, Marines, naval seaman, even a couple
of junior officers. I reported on dozens more that I turned up in the
other services, and many of them went, too. There was never a better
secret policeman anywhere, one with less mercy and more ambition.
They could see how fierce I was. I was so good. I was astonishing.
They wanted me so bad it almost killed them, and I played so hard to
get it still amazes me. But that was our plan from the beginning."
His face gleamed with vanity and pride. This was his great triumph,
the core of his life, what made him better than other men, his work of
art.
"Who are you, Bonson? Who the fuck are you?"
"The only time I ever came out on a wet operation was that one night
when that idiot Pashin showed up without a driver's license. You
needed a driver's license to buy that much ammonium nitrate, even in
Virginia! That idiot.
GRU begged the committee for help, and I had the best identity running,
so I drove down to Leesburg and bought it. I met him in the restaurant
to tell him where it was secured. He was a brilliant operator, but in
little practical things like that he was stupid."
TIME TO HUNT 587
"And you were unlucky. Trig the human camera had followed him."
"I always worried about that. That was my one moment of vulnerability.
But now, you've taken care of that for me."
"Who are you?" said Bob.
"You have to tell me that."
"I don't have to tell you anything. I can kill you and I'm forever
secure."
"In seventy-one, you were the source of deployment intelligence,
weren't you?"
"You bet I was," said Bonson.
"I invented chaos. It was the best professional penetration in
history, the way I orchestrated it."
"You killed the little girl on the bridge, right? Amy Rosenzweig,
seventeen. I looked it up. I saw how much trouble it caused."
"Oh, Swagger, goddamn, you are smart. We picked her up, shot her up
and dropped her into the crowd. It was a massive dose of LSD. She
never knew what hit her.
My friend Bill here"--he indicated a man on his team-"did it. She
freaked and went over. God, what a stink it caused; it almost wrecked
the credibility of the U.S. government in that one thing. The pressure
it caused."
"Those are your boys, aren't they, your security team? Which of 'em
killed poor Peter Fan-is?"
The five men in suits arrayed around Bonson glowered at him. They had
hard eyes, glittering with pure aggression, and taut, professional
faces. Their pistols were in their hands.
"That was Nick."
"Who got the picture of Donny and my wife?"
"That was Michael. You'd like them, Swagger. They're all ex-NCOs in
the Black Sea Marines and SPETSNAZ.
They've been with me for a long time."
"Who blew the building in Wisconsin?"
"That was a team job."
"And when you were running the mission against Solaratov, you were
really running it against PAMYAT.
588 STEPHEN HUNTER
Against Pashin, who was now a nationalist, and if he wins the
presidency it sets you guys back even farther. You always knew Pashin
was Fitzpatrick, but you had to find a way to get that information to
us without compromising your position. You turned everything inside
out, so that in the end, the American government was working in the
interests of the communist party. The Cold War never ended for you,
right?"
"It never will. History runs in cycles. We're in retreat now, largely
underground. But we've been underground before. We started
underground. We have to eliminate our enemies in Russia. First
Russia, then the world, as the great Stalin understood. We'll be back.
This great, rich, fat country of yours is about to explode at the
seams; it'll destroy itself and I'll help it. I should get the
directorship shortly. From there, politics. The very interesting part
of my plan is just about to start happening."
"Who are you?" boomed Bob.
Why was he talking so loud?
"I'll tell you. But first, you satisfy me: when did you know?"
"I began to suspect at the meeting when the kid wanted to let Solaratov
take out Julie and nab him on the way out. That was the smart move;
even I knew that. But you said no, you couldn't do that to me. Fuck
you, that was never you. You could send anybody down. I knew that
about you from what you done to Donny. So when you say you could never
do that, I knew you was lying. You had to stop Solaratov. That was
your first mission."
"Smart," said Bonson.
"Smart, smart, smart."
"It gets me thinking. In seventy-two, you guys must have been shitting
because you let the most important witness to Pashin and Trig get away.
You couldn't track him because a good officer gave him liberty and then
he was on his way back to Vietnam. He has to be killed, not only to
protect Pashin, but to protect you. So ... how do the goddamn Russians
know where he is and what he's doing in Vietnam? How can they target
him? That's a
TIME TO HUNT 589
very tough piece of info to come by, and their whole plan turns on it.
They had to have someone inside. Someone had to get into naval
personnel and figure out where the boy was. Somebody had to target
him. Solaratov was only the technician. You was the shooter."
Bonson stared at him.
"Funny, how when you make the breakthrough, it all kind of swings into
shape," Bob said.
"It all makes some kind of sense. Your last mistake: haw fast the
information got to Moscow, got to higher parties in PAMYAT, to destroy
Pashin's presidential thing. Man, that was fast work.
You're telling me the Agency is that fast? No way. Had to be some
inside thing, someone who just had to make a phone call. Damn! And
everybody keeps saying, "Ain't it funny the communist party really
benefits from all this?"
Yeah, the real joke is, through you, the communist party is running all
this. Who are you?"
"You are smart," said Bonson.
"You just weren't quick enough, were you?"
"Who are you?" repeated Bob.
"You'd never believe this, but I'm history. I'm the future.
I'm mankind. I'm hope. I'm the messiah of what must be."
He smiled again, a pure pilgrim of his own craziness.
"Not even Solaratov believed that shit," said Bob.
"All right, I'll tell you," said Bonson.
"And then I'll kill you. This is a great privilege for you."
"Who are you?"
"You'd know the original family name, or you could dig it up. It's in
some books. My parents were workingclass Americans and fervent members
of the American Communist Party. In 1938, the year I was born, they
were asked to drop out and go underground for the committee.
Of course they agreed. It was the greatest honor they'd ever been
paid. So they renounced the party, turned on all their friends and
spent the next fifteen years working as couriers, cut-outs, bag men for
the atom bomb spies. They serviced the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Klaus
Fuchs, the
590 STEPHEN HUNTER
whole brilliant thing we ran in this country. They were heroes. My
father was a great man. He was greater than your father, Swagger. He
was greater, braver, stronger, tougher, more resilient than your
father. He was the best and my mother was a saint."
Bonson's eyes shown with tears as he recalled the beauty of his
mother.
"You know the rest. NSA de crypts finally gave them away. My father
hung himself in a holding tank on Rikers Island. My mother got me out,
and then poisoned herself as the agents were coming up the stairs to
arrest her. They were heroes of the Soviet Union! They gave it all to
the revolution. Someone in the network got me out of the country, and
by the following Tuesday I was in Moscow. I was fourteen years old and
totally American, a Yankees and Giants fan, with an IQ of 160 and an
absolute commitment to bringing down the system that murdered my
parents. I was trained for six years. When I reinfiltrated I was
already a major in the KGB. I'm now a three-star general. I have more
decorations than you'll ever dream about. I am a hero of the Soviet
Union."
"You're a psychopath. And there ain't no Soviet Union," said Bob.
"Too bad you won't be around to see how wrong you are."
The two ancient enemies faced each other in silence.
Finally Bonson said, "All right. That's enough. Kill him."
The team raised their pistols. The suppressed 9mm bores looked at Bob.
There was complete silence.
"Any last words?" asked Bonson.
"Any message for the family?"
"Last words?" said Bob.
"Yeah, three of 'em: front toward enemy."
He turned his hand over to show them what it held and Bonson realized
in an instant why he had been speaking so loudly. Because he was
wearing earplugs. He held the M57 electrical firing device, the green
plastic clapper
TIME TO HUNT 591
with a wire running down to the painting, behind which stood on its
silly little set of tripods an M18A1 antipersonnel mine, better known
as a Claymore. One or two, the faster, may have tried to fire, but
Bob's reflexes were faster still as he triggered the demolition.
The one and a half pounds of plastic explosive encased in the mine
detonated instantly, and a nanosecond later the seven hundred ball
bearings, a blizzard of steel, arrived upon them at close to four
thousand feet per second.
The mine did what the mine was supposed to do: it took them out.
It literally dissolved them: their upper bodies were fragmented in one
instant of, maximum, total butchery.
They exploded as if they'd swallowed grenades and become part of the
atmosphere.
As for Bob, he saw none of this. The pillar, as planned, saved his
life by blocking the force of the concussion. The earplugs saved his
eardrums. But a pound and a half of plastic explosive is no small
thing. He felt himself pulled out of his body, and his soul went
sailing through the air until it struck something hard, and his mind
filled with a bright fog, an incandescent emptiness. He blacked out
for a minute or two.
No police arrived. The waterfront is a place of odd noises from
unspecified localities: freighters' horns, the rumble of trucks,
backfires and an almost total night emptiness of human life. The sound
of the blast was just another unexplained aural phenomenon in a city
full of unexplained aural phenomenon.
When Bob pulled himself out of his fog, he tasted blood. He smelled it
too. The blood he tasted was his own: his nose bled and both his ears
rang like fire bells despite the plugs. He felt pain. He thought he'd
broken his arm, but he hadn't, although he'd bruised it deeply. He
picked himself up, saw flashbulbs prance through the air as his
short-circuited optic nerves sputtered ineffectively.
He blinked, staggered, sat, pulled himself up, blinked again and then
beheld the horror.
592 STEPHEN HUNTER
The blood he smelled was theirs, and much of it, atomized, still
floated in waves in the air, lit by flickering lights.
There had been six of them: now there were three legs left standing,
though no two belonged to any one of the men.
What remained of Ward Bonson, deputy director of the CIA for
counter-intelligence. Wall Street lawyer, three star general in the
KGB and a hero of the Soviet Union, was applied to the punctured metal
of the wall behind him, mixed completely with the remains of the men
who'd served him so ably over the long years. No one would have the
heart--or the stomach--to separate them. It was a pure hose job.
Small fires burned everywhere in the smoky space. The sketches had
been scattered about. Slowly, Bob gathered them up, then went to the
largest of the fires.
He knelt, and one by one fed them into the hungry fire. It gobbled
them, and he watched them seized, then curl to delicacy as they were
blackened and devoured, then transfigure again into crispy ash, which
fragmented and floated away in the hot current.
In the way his mind worked, he thought he saw the souls of those three
lost boys, his friend Donny and Donny's friend Trig and Trig's victim,
Ralph, somehow released to rise and float free, DEROS at last.
He picked up the fingerprinted M57 and dropped it into his pocket for
later disposal, his last physical connection to the fate of Bonson and
his team. Then he rose and walked out, turning for one last glimpse at
the slaughterhouse he had created and the end of all complications of
his violent life.
He thought: Sierra-Bravo-Four. Last transmission. Out.
He walked into the night air, sucked in its freshness, headed to his
truck and, though he ached and bled, knew it would be best to start the
long drive west. It was time to rotate back to the world.
acknowledgments
The author would like to begin by making certain readers understand
that the foregoing in no way advances a claim for his own heroism,
which is, of course, nonexistent.
He was not a Marine sniper nor even a Marine; he never went to Vietnam
but served as the least efficient ceremonial soldier in the 1st
Battalion (Reinf.), Third Infantry, in Washington, DC, 1969-1970. His
own war story:
he was present at the occupation of the Treasury Building.
It was very boring. And once he cut his lip on some barb wire at Camp
A.P. Hill in Virginia.
Readers will also recognize that I've seized events from Vietnam,
fictionalized them and reinserted them in a bogus time frame for my own
dramatic purposes. That includes inventing an extra year of Marine
ground combat.
Most Marine units left RSVN in 1971; I was stuck with 1972 because I
chose that year without doing a lick of research when I was writing
Point of Impact, the first of the Bob Lee Swagger books, many years
back. In earlier books, I also set the action near An Loc, which turns
out to be close to Saigon, and nowhere near I Corps, where the Marines
served. So in a belated attempt at the illusion of accuracy, I've
deemphasized An Loc and moved the location of Bob and Donny's fight in
the rain up to I Corps, near the Special Forces camp at Kham Due.
I've also simplified the complicated events in Washington over the
first four days of May 1971 into a single night, put the massacre of
Firebase Mary Ann--my Dodge City--in a different year and ascribed it
to a different service, and invented my own "Nam jargon under the
license of telling stories, not writing history. In fact, one of the
few things recounted in this book that actually happened was the great
catch that Donny remembered making against Oilman High School. It was
made against
594 STEPHEN HUNTER
Oilman, a prep school not in Arizona but Baltimore, by my son Jake
Hunter, in Boys' Latin's victory over Oilman in 1995.
I should add that I've made a good-faith effort to reconcile events of
this book with events previously referred to in Point of Impact and
Black Light. Alas, far too many times events were irreconcilable, so
you'll simply have to trust my assertion that in other books things
happened that way, but in this book they happen this way..
But where I've made up much, I've also talked with many people who had
firsthand knowledge of the kind of events I describe. They're all good
men and deserve no blame for my inaccuracies or the ends to which I've
put information that they earned the hard way.
Ed De Carlo retired Army CSGT, and Alvin Guyton, retired Gy. Sgt,
USMC, both good buddies from On Target Shooting Range, where I spend
vast amounts of time and money, shared Vietnam memories and data with
me.
Ed was a radio operator and briefed me on the intricacies of the PRC-77
and map reading; Alvin, a recon Marine, lent me tons of reference
material and even loaned me copies of his orders to Vietnam on which to
base my version of Donny's, and tried to make me feel Marine culture
well enough to imagine it. Two of the usual suspects, Weyman Swagger
and John Feamster, offered their usual supplies of endless labor,
commentary and suggestion, each reading the manuscript with a great
deal of precision.
Lenne Miller, another Vietnam vet and an old college friend, was
equally generous with time and observation.
My brother Tim Hunter sent me a terrific letter of constructive
criticism. Jeff Weber not only lent me his name for one of the
characters but also read the manuscript and offered good advice. Bob
Lopez came up with a crucial idea at a crucial moment. J. D.
Considine, the pop-music critic of The Baltimore Sun, my old paper,
drew up a compilation tape of 1971 hits, to whose accompaniment this
book was written. Mike Hill was very helpful. Bill Phillips, an
ex-Marine officer, Vietnam vet and author of The Night
TIME TO HUNT 595
of Silver Stars, read the manuscript carefully and helped me sort out
Army jargon and replace it with Marine, but if I've called it a latrine
somewhere instead of a head, it's my fault, not Bill's. Tim Carpenter,
of Bushnell's, explained the subtleties of infrared ranging devices to
me.
Dave Lauck, of D&L Sports in Gillette, Wyoming, and author of The
Tactical Marksman, ran his fine professional eye over the manuscript,
to my great benefit. Kathy Lally and Will England, the Sun's Moscow
correspondents, gave me tips and data on that city for a chapter that
was ultimately cut. Warrant Officer Joe Boyer of the Marine Barracks
took me on a prowl through that installation and patiently answered my
questions. Jean Marbella, of my old paper and my new life, was her
usual fabulous self and listened to me prattle on about titles and
narrative issues late into the night. John Pancake, arts editor of my
new paper, The Washington Post, just smiled every time I told him I was
leaving early to work on the book. David Von Drehle, editor of the
Post's Style section, was equally generous in letting me disappear when
I deemed it necessary.
Steve Proctor, of the Sun, had instituted a similar policy in my many
years there, and he too should be recognized and thanked.
Former Green Beret Don Pugsley wrote to me at great length about
communications procedures from A camps.
Charles H. "Hap" Hazard, a Sun artist and former Army intelligence
enlisted man, translated a lot of stuff into Vietnamese for me, very
helpfully. Dr. Jim Fisher introduced me to Dr. Charlie Partjens, an
orthopedic surgeon, who discussed the physical realities of an old
bullet with me. Bill Ochs, former Army sergeant, discussed something
of far more intensity: the trauma of his own hip wound, acquired in
action in RSVN. I really appreciate his willingness to let a stranger
invade his privacy like that.
I should also thank authors who have come before me.
Peter R. Senich, the Thucydides of sniper warfare, came out with The
One-Shot War, a history of Marine sniper
596 STEPHEN HUNTER
operations in Vietnam, just as I was beginning. Then Michael Lee
Lanning and Dan Cragg published Inside the VC and the NVA, which was
very helpful for tough little Huu Co, senior colonel. Of course I've
drawn from Charles Henderson's Marine Sniper, and Joseph T. Ward's Dear
Mom: A Sniper's Vietnam, as well as the standard history texts. I
never spoke to any Marine snipers, however, because I needed to be free
to envision Bob Lee Swagger as I wanted him to be, warts and all.
Last, in the professional realm, I must thank my brilliant, wonderful
agent Esther Newberg of ICM and my great editor. Bill Thomas, of
Doubleday. And something finally for the book's dedicatee, John Burke,
who was the great Carlos Hathcock's spotter in Vietnam, and didn't make
it to DEROS. I never knew him but his story so moved me that I had to
find a way to cast it into a book, and he became my Donny Fenn. So in
a way this whole thing--this book and the three that proceeded it--all
came from his sacrifice. Thanks, Marine.



A Time to Hunt
by
Stephen Hunter But all of this action is only a prelude to Donny's subsequent
relationship with Swagger in Vietnam. Hunter fleshes out the mythology
that he began to create in Point of Impact as readers watch Swagger add
to his famed body count and confront his nemesis, Solaratov.
Hunter moves deftly from the mind of Solaratov to Donny and back to
Swagger, and in each character finds the core of the Vietnam
experience--fear, coldness, sadness, horror, elation.
The last two sections cut to contemporary events and find Swagger
married to Donny's former love, Julie. Slowly, the events of the first
half of the book begin to merge with Swagger's present history and
stories that readers will recognize from Hunter's earlier novels.
Swagger uncovers a deep connection between the Vietnam demonstrations
of the 1970s, the predatory work of the CIA, and the killer who is
after him and his family now. Nothing is as it first seems, and
readers of Point of Impact and Black Light will have to revise all
their expectations.

"STEPHEN HUNTER IS SIMPLY THE BEST WRITER OF
ACTION FICTION IN THE WORLD and Time to Hunt proves it. The action
scenes are topnotch, the mystery kept me guessing until the last page
and Bob the Nailer is a great character. I doubt that I will read
another action thriller as good as this until Hunter writes another
book."
--Phillip Margolin, author of The Undertaker's Widow
"If he's not there already, [Hunter's] fast approaching the rarefied
air at the top of the genre with the likes of Nelson DeMille, Frederick
Forsyth and Ken Follett. Time to Hunt tugs at your heartstrings, then
slaps you around. The intensity is so palpable you nearly break out in
a sweat."
--The Denver Post
"TIME TO HUNT IS MORE THAN A THRILLER .. .
it's a sweeping novel that ranges from the era of the Vietnam War and
the anti-war movement to the present."
--Houston Chronicle
"SURPRISING .. . SATISFYING .. . Swagger is a near-mythic character
without peer in mystery fiction. As we revel in his adventures and
triumphs, we also experience his pain. It's that pain, simmering below
the surface, that keeps Bob Lee on the edge of our consciousness long
past the end of this fine novel."
--Booklist
ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER
FICTION
Black Light Dirty White Boys Point of Impact The Day Before Midnight
Tapestry of Spies The Second Saladin The Master Sniper
NONFICTION
Violent Screen: A Critic's 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie
Mayhem
TIME
TO
HUNT
A NOVEL BY
STEPHEN
HUNTER
ISLAND BOOKS
Published by Dell Publishing a division of Random House, Inc. 1540
Broadway New York, New York 10036
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that
this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and
destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher
has received any payment for this "stripped book."
Copyright 1998 by Stephen Hunter All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without the written
permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For
information address: Doubleday, New York, New York.
The trademark Dell is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office.
ISBN: 0440226457
Reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday Printed in the United States of
America Published simultaneously in Canada April 1999
10 9 8 7
OPM
FOR
CPL John Burke, USMC KIA, I Corps, RSVN, 1967 If any question why we
died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.
--rudyard kipling writing in the voice of his son John, KIA, the Somme,
at the age of sixteen prologue
We are in the presence of a master sniper.
He lies, almost preternaturally still, on hard stone. The air is thin,
still cold; he doesn't shake or tremble.
The sun is soon to rise, pushing the chill from the mountains. As its
light spreads, it reveals fabulous beauty.
High peaks, shrouded in snow; a pristine sky that will be the color of
a pure blue diamond; far mountain pastures of a green so intense it
rarely exists in nature; brooks snaking down through pines that carpet
the mountainsides.
The sniper notices none of this. If you pointed it out to him, he
wouldn't respond. Beauty, in nature or women or even rifles, isn't a
concept he would recognize, not after where he's been and what he's
done. He simply doesn't care; his mind doesn't work that way.
Instead, he sees nothingness. He feels a great cool numbness. No idea
has any meaning to him at this point.
His mind is almost empty, as though he's in a trance.
He's a short-necked man, as so many great shooters are; his blue eyes,
though gifted with an almost freakish 20/10 acuity, appear dull,
signifying a level of mental activity almost startlingly blank. His
pulse rate hardly exists.
He has some oddities, again freakish in some men but weirdly perfect
for a shooter. He has extremely well developed fast-twitch forearm
muscles, still supple and defined at his age, which is beyond fifty.
His hands are large and strong. His stamina is off the charts, as are
his reflexes and his pain tolerance. He's strong, flexible, as charged
with energy as any other world-class athlete. He has both a technical
and a creative mind and a will as directed as a laser.
But none of this really explains him, any more than such analysis would
explain a Williams or a DiMaggio: he simply has an internal genius,
possibly autistic, that gives him extraordinary control over body and
mind, hand and eye, infinite patience, a shrewd gift for the tactical,
and, most of all, total commitment to his arcane art, which in turn
forms the core of his identity and has granted him a life that few
could imagine.
But for now, nothing: not his past, not his future, not the pain of
lying so still in the cold through a long night, not the excitement of
knowing this could be the day. No anticipation, no regret: just
nothing.
Before him is the tool of his trade, lying askew on a hard sandbag. He
knows it intimately, having worked with it a great deal in preparation
for the thirty seconds that will come today or tomorrow or the day
after.
It's a Remington 700, with an H-S Precision fiberglass stock and a
Leupold 10X scope. It's been tricked up by a custom rifle smith to
realize the last tenth of a percent of its potential: the action trued
and honed, and bolted into the metal block at the center of the stock
at maximum torque; a new Krieger barrel free-floated after cryogenic
treatment. The trigger, a Jewell, lets off at four pounds with the
crisp snap of a glass rod breaking.
The sniper has run several weeks' worth of load experimentation through
the rifle, finding the exact harmony that will produce maximum results:
the perfect balance between the weight of a bullet, the depth of its
seating, the selection and amount, to the tenth grain, hand measured,
of the powder. Nothing has been left to chance: the case necks have
been turned and annealed, the primer hole de burred the primer depth
perfected, the primer itself selected for consistency. The rifle
muzzle wears the latest hot lick, a Browning Ballistic Optimizing
System, which is a kind of screw-on nozzle that can be micro-tuned to
generate the best vibrational characteristics for accuracy.
The caliber isn't military but civilian, the 7mm Remington Magnum, once
the flavor of the month in 3
international hunting circles, capable of dropping a ram or a whitetail
at amazing distances. Though surpassed by some flashier loads, it's
still a flat-shooting, hard-hitting cartridge that holds its velocity
as it flies through the thin air, delivering close to two thousand
foot-pounds of energy beyond five hundred yards.
But of all this data, the sniper doesn't care, or no longer cares. He
knew it at one time; he has forgotten it now. The point of the endless
ballistic experimentation was simple: to bring the rifle and its load
to complete perfection so that it could be forgotten. That was one
principle of great shooting--arrange for the best, then forget all
about it.
When the sound comes, it doesn't shock or surprise him. He knew it had
to come, sooner or later. It doesn't fill him with doubt or regret or
anything. It simply means the obvious: time to work.
It's a peal of laughter, girlish and bright, giddy with excitement. It
bounces off the stone walls of the canyon, from the shadow of a draw
onto this high shelf from close to a thousand yards off, whizzing
through the thin air.
The sniper wiggles his fingers, finds the warmth in them. His
concentration cranks up a notch or so. He pulls the rifle to him in a
fluid motion, well practiced from hundreds of thousands of shots in
practice or on missions.
Its stock rises naturally to his cheek as he pulls it in, and as one
hand flies to the wrist, the other sets up beneath the forearm, taking
the weight of his slightly lifted body, building a bone bridge to the
stone below. It rests on a densely packed sandbag. He finds the spot
weld, the one placement of cheek to stock where the scope relief will
be perfect and the circle of the scope will throw up its image as
brightly as a movie screen. His adduct or magnus, a tube of muscle
running through his deep thigh, tenses as he splays his right foot ever
so slightly.
Above, a hawk rides a thermal, gliding through the blue morning sky.
A mountain trout leaps.
A bear looks about for something to eat.
A deer scampers through the brush.
The sniper notices none of it. He doesn't care.
Mommy," shouts eight-year-old Nikki Swagger.
"Come on."
Nikki rides better than either of her parents; she's been almost
literally raised on horseback, as her father, a retired Marine staff
NCO with an agricultural background, had decided to go into the
business of horse care at his own lay-up barn in Arizona, where Nikki
was born.
Nikki's mother, a handsome woman named Julie Fenn Swagger, trails
behind. Julie doesn't have the natural grace of her daughter, but she
grew up in Arizona, where horses were a way of life, and has been
riding since childhood.
Her husband rode as an Arkansas farmboy, then didn't for decades, then
came back to the animals and now loves them so, in their integrity and
loyalty, that he has almost single-mindedly willed himself into
becoming an accomplished saddle man That is one of his gifts.
"Okay, okay," she calls, "be careful, sweetie," though she knows that
careful is the last thing Nikki will ever be, for hers is a hero's
personality, built from a willingness to risk all to gain all and a
seeming absence of fear. She's like an Indian in that way, and like
her father, too, who was once a war hero.
She turns.
"Come on," she calls, replicating her daughter's rhythms.
"You want to see the valley as the sun races across it, don't you?"
"Yep," comes the call from the rider still unseen in the shadows of the
draw.
Nikki bounds ahead, out of the shadows and into the bright light. Her
horse, named Calypso, is a four-year-old thoroughbred gelding, quite a
beast, but Nikki handles it with nonchalance. She is actually riding
English, because it is part of her mother's dream for her that she will
go east to college, and the skills that are the hallmarks of equestrian
sophistication will take her a lot farther than the rowdy ability to
ride like a cowboy. Her father does not care for the English saddle,
which seems hardly enough to protect the girl from the muscles of the
animal beneath, and at horse shows he thinks those puffy jodhpurs and
that little velveteen jacket with its froth of lace at the throat are
sublimely ridiculous.
Calypso bounds over the rocky path, his cleverness as evident as his
fearlessness. To watch the slight girl maneuver the massive horse is
one of the great joys of her father's life: she never seems so alive as
when on horseback, or so happy, or so in command. Now, Nikki's voice
trills with pleasure as the horse at last breaks out onto a shelf of
rock. Before them is the most beautiful view within riding distance
and she races to the edge, seemingly out of control, but actually very
much in control.
"Honey," cries Julie as her daughter careens merrily toward disaster,
"be careful."
The child. The woman. The man.
The child comes first, the best rider, bold and adventurous.
She emerges from the shadow of the draw, letting her horse run, and the
animal thunders across the grass to the edge of the precipice, halts,
then spins and begins to twitch with anticipation. The girl holds him
tightly, laughing.
The woman is next. Not so gifted a rider, she still rides easily, with
loping strides, comfortable in the saddle. The sniper can see her
straw hair, her muscularity under the jeans and work shirt, the way the
sun has browned her face. Her horse is a big chestnut, a stout,
working cowboy's horse, not sleek like the daughter's.
And finally: the man.
He is lean and watchful and there is a rifle in the scabbard under his
saddle. He looks dangerous, like a special man who would never panic,
react fast and shoot straight, which is exactly what he is. He rides
like a gifted athlete, almost one with the animal, controlling it
unconsciously with his thighs. Relaxed in the saddle, he is still
obviously alert.
He would not see the sniper. The sniper is too far out, the hide too
carefully camouflaged, the spot chosen to put the sun in the victim's
eyes at this hour so that he'll see only dazzle and blur if he looks.
The crosshairs ride up to the man, and stay with him as he gallops
along, finding the same rhythm in the cadences, finding the same
up-down plunge of the animal.
The shooter's finger caresses the trigger, feels absorbed by its
softness, but he does not fire.
Moving target, transversing laterally left to right, but also moving up
and down through a vertical plane: 753 meters. By no means an
impossible shot, and many a man in his circumstances would have taken
it. But experience tells the sniper to wait: a better shot will lie
ahead, the best shot. With a man like Swagger, that's the one you
take.
The man joins the woman, and the two chat, and what he says makes her
smile. White teeth flash. A little tiny human part in the sniper
aches for the woman's beauty and ease; he's had prostitutes the world
over, some quite expensive, but this little moment of intimacy is
something that has evaded him completely. That's all right. He has
chosen to work in exile from humanity.
Jesus Christ!
He curses himself. That's how shots are blown, that little fragment of
lost concentration which takes you out of the operation. He briefly
snaps his eyes shut, absorbs the darkness and clears his mind, then
opens them again to what lies before him.
The man and the woman have reached the edge: 721 meters. Before them
runs a valley, unfolding in the sunlight as the sun climbs even higher.
But tactically what this means to the sniper is that at last his quarry
has ceased to move. In the scope he sees a family portrait: man, woman
and child, all at nearly the same level, because the child's horse is
so big it makes her as tall as her parents. They chat, the girl
laughs, points at a bird or something, seethes with motion. The woman
stares into the distance. The man, still seeming watchful, relaxes
just the tiniest bit.
The crosshairs bisect the square chest.
The master sniper expels a breath, seeks the stillness within himself,
but wills nothing. He never decides or commits. It just happens.
The rifle bucks, and as it comes back in a fraction of a second, he
sees the tall man's chest explode as the 7mm Remington Magnum tears
through it.
PART I
THE PARADE DECK
Washington, DC, April-May 1971
chapter one
It was unseasonably hot that spring, and Washington languished under
the blazing sun. The grass was brown and lusterless, the traffic
thick, the citizens surly and uncivil;
even the marble monuments and the white government buildings seemed
squalid. It was as though a torpor hung over the place, or a curse.
Nobody in official Washington went to parties anymore; it was a time of
bitterness and recrimination.
And it was a time of siege. The city was in fact under attack. The
process the president called "Vietnamization" wasn't happening fast
enough for the armies of peace demonstrators who regularly assailed the
city's parks and byways, shutting it down or letting it live, pretty
much unchecked and pretty much as they saw fit. This month already,
the Vietnam Veterans for Peace had commandeered the steps of the
Capitol, showering them with a bitter rain of medals; more action was
planned for the beginning of May, when the May Tribe of the People's
Coalition for Peace and Justice had sworn to close down the city once
again, this time for a whole week.
In all the town there was only one section of truly green grass. Some
would look upon it and see in the green a last living symbol of
American honor, a last best hope.
Others would say the green was artificial, like so much of America: it
was sustained by the immense labor of exploited workers, who had no
choice in the matter. This is what we are changing, they would say.
The green grass was the parade ground, or in the patois of a service
which holds fast to the conceit that all land structures are merely
extensions of and metaphorical representations of the ships of the
fleet, the "parade deck" of the Marine Barracks, at Eighth and I,
Southeast.
The young enlisted men labored over it as intensely as any
12 STEPHEN HUNTER
cathedral gardeners, for, to the Jesuitical minds of the United States
Marine Corps, at any rate, it was holy ground.
The barracks, built in 1801, was the oldest continuously occupied
military installation in the United States.
Even the British dared not burn it when they put the rest of the city
to the torch in 1814. To look across the deck to the officers' houses
on one side, the structures that housed three companies (Alpha, Bravo
and Hotel, for headquarters) on the other, and the commandant's house
at the far end of the quadrangle was to see, preserved, a pristine
version of what service in the Corps and service to the country
theoretically meant.
The ancient bricks were red and the architecture had sprung from an age
in which design was pride in order.
Conceived as a fort in a ruder and more violent age, it had taken on,
with the maturity of its foliage and the replacement of its muddy lanes
with cobblestone, the aspect of an old Ivy League campus. An un ironic
flag flew above it at the end of a high mast; red, white, blue,
rippling in the wind, unashamed. It had a passionate nineteenth
century feel to it; it was somehow an encomium of manifest destiny,
built on a little chunk of land that was almost an independent duchy of
the United States Marine Corps, stuck a mile and a half from and on the
same hill as the Capitol, where the unruly processes of democracy were
currently being strained to the utmost.
Now, on a particularly hot, bright April day, under that beating sun,
young men drilled or loafed, as the authorities permitted.
In the shade at the corner of Troop Walk and the South Arcade, seven
men--boys, actually--squatted and smoked. They wore the uniform called
undressed blues, which consisted of blue trousers, a tan gabardine
short-sleeved shirt open at the neck, and white hat--"cover," as the
Corps called hats--pulled low over their eyes. The only oddity in
their appearance, which to the casual eye separated them from other
Marines, was their oxfords,
which were not merely shined but spit-shined, and gleamed dazzlingly.
The spit shine was a fetish in their culture. Now the young Marines
were on a break and, naturally, PFC Crowe, the team comedian, was
explaining the nature of things.
"See," he explained to his audience, as he sucked on a Marlboro, "it'll
look great on a resume. I tell 'em, I was in this elite unit. I
needed a top-secret security clearance.
We trained and rehearsed for our missions, and then when we went on
them, in the hot, sweltering weather, men dropped all around me. But I
kept going, goddammit.
I was a hero, a goddamn hero. Of course what I don't tell them is, I'm
talking about .. . parades."
He was rewarded with appropriate blasts of laughter from his cohorts,
who regarded him as an amusing and generally harmless character. He
had an uncle who was a congressman's chief fund-raiser, which accounted
for his presence in Company B, the body-bearer company, as opposed to
more rigorous and dangerous duties in WES PAC, as the orders always
called it, or what the young Marines had termed the Land of Bad Things.
He had no overwhelming desire to go to the Republic of South Vietnam.
Indeed, in all of Second Casket Team, only one of the seven had seen
service in RSVN. This was the noncommissioned officer in charge,
Corporal Donny Fenn, twenty-two, of Ajo, Arizona. Donny, a large and
almost freakishly handsome blond kid with a year of college behind him,
had spent seven months in another B Company, 1/9 Bravo, attached to the
III Marine Amphibious Force, in operations near and around An Hoa in I
Corps. He had been shot at many times and hit once, in the lungs, for
which he was hospitalized for six months. He also had something
called, uh, he would mumble, uh, bmzstr, and not look you in the eye.
But now Donny was short. That is, he had just under thirteen months
left to serve and by rumor, at any rate, that meant the Corps would not
in its infinite wisdom ship
14 STEPHEN HUNTER
him back to the Land of Bad Things. This was not because the Corps
loved his young ass. No, it was because the tour of duty in "Nam was
thirteen calendar months, and if you sent anyone over with less than
thirteen calendar months, it hopelessly muddied the tidiness of the
records, so upsetting to the anal-retentive minds of personnel clerks.
So for all intents and purposes, Donny had made it safely through the
central conflict of his age.
"All right," he said, checking his watch as its second hand hurtled
toward 1100 to signify the end of break, "put 'em out and strip 'em.
Put the filters in your pockets, that is if you're a faggot who smokes
filtered cigarettes. If I see any butts out here, I'll PT your asses
until morning muster."
The troops grunted, but obeyed. Of course they knew he didn't mean it;
like them, he was no lifer. Like them, he'd go back to the world.
So as would any listless group of young men in so pitiless an
institution as the Marine Corps, they got with the program with
something less than total enthusiasm. It was another day at Eighth and
I, another day of operations on the parade deck when they weren't on
alert or serving cemetery duty: up at O-dark-30, an hour of PT at 0600,
morning muster at 0700, chow at 0800, and by 0930, the beginning of
long, sometimes endless hours of drill, either of the funeral variety
or of the riot-control variety.
Then the duty day was done: those who had assignments did them, and
otherwise the boys could secure (the married could live off base with
wives; many of the unmarried shared unofficial cheap places available
on Capitol Hill) or lounge about, playing pool, drinking 3.2 in the
enlisted men's bar or going to the movies on the Washington PX circuit
or even trying their luck with women in the bars of Capitol Hill.
But the luck was always bad, a source of much bitterness.
This was only partially because Marines were thought of as baby
killers. The real reason was hair: it was, in the outside world, the
era of hair. Men wore their locks long and puffed up, usually
overwhelming their ears in the process. The poor jarheads--and all the
ceremonial troopers of the Military District of Washington--were
expected to be acolytes to the temple of military discipline.
Thus they offered nearly naked skulls to the world--white sidewalls, it
was called--except for a permitted patch no more than three-quarters of
an inch up top. Their ears stood out like radar bowls. Some of them
looked like Howdy Doody, and no self-respecting hippie chick would
deign spit at them, and since all American girls had become hippie
chicks, they were, in Crowe's memorable term, shit out of luck.
"Gloves on," Donny commanded, and his men, as they rose, pulled on
their white gloves.
Donny started them through another long fifty minutes of casket drill.
As body bearers, all were on the husky side. As body bearers, none
could make a mistake. It seemed meaningless, but a few--Donny, for
one--understood that they did in fact have an important job: to
anesthetize the pain of death with stultifying ritual. They had to
hide the actual fact--there was a boy in the box going into the ground
of Arlington National Cemetery forever, years before his time, and to
what end?--with pomp and precision. And Donny, though an easygoing guy
in most respects, was determined that in this one aspect, they would be
the best.
So the team turned to, under his guidance and soft but forcefully
uttered commands: they walked through the precisely choreographed steps
by which a flag-draped box of boy was smartly removed from the hearse,
which in the rehearsal was only a steel rack, aligned by its bearers,
carried with utter calm dignity to the grave site, laid upon a bier.
Next came the tricky flag folding: the flag was snapped off the box by
six pairs of disciplined hands and, beginning with the man at the boot
of the casket, broken into a triangle which grew thicker with each
rigid fold as it passed from man to man. If the folding went right,
what was finally deposited in Corporal Fenn's hands was a per16
STEPHEN HUNTER
feet triangle, a tricorn, festooned on either side with stars, with no
red stripe showing anywhere. This was not easy, and it took weeks for
a good team to get it right and even longer to break in a new guy.
At this point, Corporal Fenn took the triangle of stars, marched with
stiff precision to the seated mother or father or whoever, and in his
white gloves presented it to her. An odd moment, always: some
recipients were too stunned to respond. Some were too shattered to
notice.
Some were awkward, some even a little star struck for a Marine as
good-looking as Donny, with a chestful of medals hanging heavily from
his dress tunic, his hair gone, his hat as white as his gloves, his
dignity impenetrable, his theater craft immaculate, is indeed an
awesome sight--almost like a movie star--and that charisma frequently
cut through the grief of the moment. One broken mom even took his
picture with an Instamatic as he approached.
But on this run-through, the corporal was not pleased with the
performance of his squad. Of course it was PFC Crowe, not the best man
on the team.
"All right, Crowe," he said, after the sweat-soaked boys had stood down
from the ritual, "I saw you. You were out of step on the walk-to and
you were half a beat behind on the left face-out of the wagon."
"Ah," said Crowe, searching for a quip to memorialize the moment, "my
damn knee. It's the junk I picked up at Khe Sahn."
This did bring a chuckle, for as close as Crowe had come to Khe Sahn
was reading about it in the New Haven Register.
"I forgot you were such a hero," Donny said.
"So only drop and give me twenty-five, not fifty. Out of commemoration
for your great sacrifice."
Crowe muttered darkly but harmlessly and the other team members drew
back to give him room to perform his absolution. He peeled off his
gloves, dropped to the prone and banged out twenty-five
Marine-regulation pushups.
The last six were somewhat sloppy.
"Excellent," said Donny.
"Maybe you're not a girl after all. All right, let's--" But at this
moment, the company commander's orderly, the bespectacled PFC Welch,
suddenly appeared at Donny's right shoulder.
"Hey, Corporal," he whispered, "CO wants to see you."
Shit, thought Donny, what the hell have I done now?
"Ohhh," somebody sang, "somebody's in trouble. ""Hey Donny, maybe
they're going to give you another medal."
"It's his Hollywood contract, it's finally come."
"You know what it's about?" asked Donny of Welch, who was a prime
source of scuttlebutt.
"No idea. Some Navy guys, that's all I know. It's ASAP, though."
"I'm on my way. Bascombe, you take over. Another twenty minutes.
Focus on the face-out of the hearse that seems to have Crowe so
baffled. Then take 'em to chow.
I'll catch up when I can."
"Yes, Corporal."
Donny straightened his starched shirt, adjusted the gig line, wondered
if he had time to change shirts, decided he didn't, and took off.
He headed across the parade deck, passing among other drilling Marines.
The show boats of Company A, the silent drill rifle team, were going
through their elaborate pantomime; the color guard people were
mastering the intricacies of flag work; another platoon had moved on to
riot control and was stomping furiously down Troop Walk, bent double
under combat gear.
Donny reached Center Walk, turned and headed into the barracks proper,
only crossing paths with half a dozen officers in the salute-crazed
Corps and having to toss up a stiff right hand for their response. He
entered the building, turned right and went through the open
hatch-18
STEPHEN HUNTER
Marine for "door"--and down the hall. It was dark and the gleamy
swirls of good buffer work on the wax of the linoleum shone up at him.
Along the green government bulkheads were photos of various Marine
activities supplied by an aggressive Public Information Office for
morale purposes, at which they utterly failed. At last, he turned into
the door marked commanding officer, and under that captain m. c.
dogwood, usmc. The outer office was empty, because PFC Welch was still
running errands.
"Fenn?" came the call from the inner office.
"In here."
Donny stepped into the office, a kind of ghostly crypt to the joint
vanities of Marine machismo and bureaucratic efficiency, to discover
the ramrod-stiff Captain Morton Dogwood sitting with a slender young
man in the summer tans of a lieutenant commander in the Navy and an
even younger man in an ensign's uniform.
"Sir," said Donny, going to attention, "Corporal Fenn reporting as
ordered, sir."
As he was unarmed, he did not salute.
"Fenn, this is Commander Bonson and Ensign Weber," said Dogwood.
"Sirs," said Donny to the naval officers.
"Commander Bonson and his associate are from the Naval Investigative
Service," said Dogwood.
Oh, shit, thought Donny.
The room was dark, the shades drawn. The captain's meager assembly of
service medals hung in a frame on the wall behind him, as well as an
announcement of his degree in International Finance from George
Washington University. His desk was shiny and almost clear except for
the polished 105mm howitzer shell that had been cut down to a paper
clip cup and was everybody's souvenir from service in RSVN, and
pictures of a pretty wife and two baby girls.
"Sit down, Fenn," said Bonson, not looking up from documents he was
studying, which, as Donny saw, were his own jacket, or personnel
records.
"Aye, aye, sir," said Donny. He found a chair and set himself into it
stiffly, facing the three men who seemed to hold his destiny in their
hands. Outside, the shouts of drill came through the windows; outside
it was bright and hot and the day was filled with duty. Donny felt in
murky waters here; what the hell was this all about?
"Good record," said Bonson.
"Excellent job in country.
Good record here in the barracks. Your hitch is up when, Fenn?"
"Sir, May seventy-two."
"Hate to see you leave, Fenn. The Corps needs good men like you."
"Yes, sir," said Donny, wondering if this was some-no, no, it couldn't
be a recruiting pitch. NIS was the Navy and the Corps's own, tinny
version of the FBI: they investigated, they didn't recruit.
"I'm engaged to be married.
I've already been accepted back at the University of Arizona."
"What will you study?" asked the commander.
"Sir, pre-law, I think."
"You know, Fenn, you'll probably get out a corporal.
Rank is hard to come by in the Corps, because it's so small and there
just aren't the positions available, no matter the talent and the
commitment."
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
"Only about eight percent of four-year enlistees come out higher than
corporal. That is, as a sergeant or higher."
"Yes, sir."
"Fenn, think how it would help your law career if you made sergeant.
You'd be one of an incredibly small number of men to do so. You'd
truly be in an elite."
"Ah--" Donny hardly knew what to say.
"The officers have a tremendous opportunity for you, Fenn," said
Captain Dogwood.
"You'd do well to hear them out."
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
"Corporal Fenn, we have a leak. A bad leak. We want you to plug
it."
20 STEPHEN HUNTER
A leak, sir?" said Donny.
"Yes. You know we have sources into most of the major peace groups.
And you've heard rumors that on May Day, they're going to try to shut
the city down and bring the war to a halt by destroying the head of the
machine."
Rumors like that flew through the air. The Weather Underground, the
Black Panthers, SNICC, they were going to close down Washington,
levitate the Pentagon or bury it in rose petals, break into the
armories and lead armed insurrection. It just meant that Bravo Company
was always on alert status and nobody could get any serious liberty
time.
"I've heard." His girlfriend was headed in for the May Day weekend. It
would be great to see her, if he wasn't stuck on alert or, worse,
sleeping under a desk in some building near the White House.
"Well, it's true. May Day. The communist holiday.
They have the biggest mobilization of the war planned.
They really mean to close us down and keep us closed down."
"Yes, sir."
"Our job is simple," said Lieutenant Commander Bonson.
"It's to stop them."
Such determination in the man's voice, even a little tremble. His eyes
seemed to burn with old-fashioned Iwo Jima-style zeal. At the same
time, Donny couldn't help notice the lack of an RSVN service ribbon on
the khaki of his chest.
"Remember November?" asked Bonson.
"Yes, sir," said Donny, and indeed he did. It stuck in his mind, not
the whole thing, really, but one ludicrous moment.
It was late, near 2400, midnight in the American soul, and the Marines
of Bravo in full combat gear were filing into the Treasury Building,
adjacent to the White House, for protective duties against the
possibilities of the next morning in a city where 200,000 angry kids
had camped on the mall. A bone-dry moon shone above; the weather was
crisp but not yet brutal. The Marines debarked from their trucks,
holding their M14s at the high port, bayonets fixed, but still wearing
their metal scabbards.
As Donny led his men downward toward the entrance, his eye was caught
by light and he looked up. The abutment at the end of the ramp was
brick and, being situated between the oh-so-white White House on the
left and the oh-so-dark Treasury on the right, yielded a perspective on
Pennsylvania Avenue, where the architects of the crusade for peace had
organized a silent candlelight vigil.
So one line of young Americans carried rifles into a government
building, under tin pots and thirty-five pounds of gear, while
twenty-odd feet above them, at a perfect right angle, another line of
young Americans filed along the deserted street, cupping candles, the
light of which weirdly illuminated and flickered on their tender faces.
Donny's epiphany came at that moment: no matter what the fiery lifers
said or the screaming-head peaceniks, both groups of Americans were
pretty much the same.
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
"I remember."
"Were you aware, Corporal, that radical elements anticipated the
movements of only one military unit, Company B of Marine Barracks, and
that just by the hairiest of coincidences did a Washington policeman
discover a bomb that was set to take out the phone junction into the
Treasury, thereby effectively cutting off B Company and leaving the
White House and the president defenseless?
Think of it, Corporal. Defenseless!"
He seemed to get a weird charge out of saying Defenseless!, his
nostrils flaring, his eyes lit up.
Donny had no idea what to say. He hadn't heard a thing about a bomb in
a phone junction.
"How did they know you were there? How did they know that's where
you'd be?" demanded the lieutenant commander.
It occurred to Donny: There are two buildings next to the White House.
One is the Executive Office Building,
22 STEPHEN HUNTER
one is the Treasury. If you were going to move troops in, wouldn't you
move them into one of the two buildings?
Where else could they be?
"I don't--" he stammered and almost ended his career right there by
blowing up in a big laugh.
"That's when my team began to investigate. That's when NIS got on the
case!" proclaimed the lieutenant commander.
"Yes, sir."
"We've run exhaustive background checks on everyone in the three line
companies at the Marine Barracks. And we think we've found our man."
Donny was dumbfounded. Then he began to get pissed.
"Sir, I thought we were already investigated for clearances before we
came into the unit."
"Yes, but it's a sloppy process. One investigator handles a hundred
clearances a week. Things get through.
Now, let me ask you something. What would you say if I told you one
member of your company had an illegal off-base apartment and was known
to room with members of a well-known peace initiative?"
"I don't know, sir."
"This PFC Edgar M. Crowe."
Crowe! Of course it would be Crowe.
Ensign Weber spoke up, reading from documents.
"Crowe maintains an apartment at 2311 C Street, Southwest. There he
cohabits a room with one Jeffrey Goldenberg, a graduate student at the
Northwestern University Medin Newsroom in Washington. Crowe is no
ordinary grunt, you know, Fenn. He's a Yale dropout who only came into
the Corps because his uncle had connections to a congressman who could
make certain he'd never go to Vietnam."
"Think of that, Fenn," said Commander Bonson.
"You're over there getting your butt shot off, and he's back here
marching in parades and giving up intelligence to the peace freaks."
Crowe: of course. Perpetual fuck-up, smart guy, goof-off, his furious
intelligence hidden behind a burning ambition to be just good enough
not to get rotated out, but not really good in the larger sense.
Still, Crowe: he was a punk, an unformed boy, he seemed no different
than any of them. He was a kid just out of his teens, mixed up by the
temptations and confusions of a tempting, confusing age.
"We know you, Fenn," said the lieutenant commander.
"You're the only man in the company who enjoys the universal respect of
both the career-track Marines who've done Vietnam and the boys who are
just here to avoid Vietnam. They all like you. So we have an
assignment for you. If you bring it off, and I know in my military
mind that there's no possibility you won't, you will finish your hitch
in twelve days a full E-5 buck sergeant in the United States Marine
Corps. That I guarantee you."
Donny nodded. He didn't like this a bit.
"I want you to become Crowe's new best friend.
You're his buddy, his pal, his father confessor. Flatter him with the
totality of your attentions. Hang out with him.
Go to his peace creep parties, get to know his longhaired friends. Get
drunk with him. He'll tell you things, a little at first, then more as
time goes on. He'll give up all his secrets. He's probably so proud
of himself and his little game he's dying to brag about it and show you
what a smart boy he is. Get us enough material to move against him
before he gives up the unit on May Day. We'll send him to Portsmouth
for a very long time. He'll come out an old man."
Bonson sat back.
There it was, before Donny. What was most palpable was what had not
been said. Suppose he didn't do it?
What would happen to him? Where would they send him?
"I don't really--sir, I'm not trained in intelligence work. I'm not
sure I could bring this off."
"Fenn is a very straightforward Marine," said Captain
24 STEPHEN HUNTER
Dogwood.
"He's a hardworking, gung-ho young man.
He's not a spy."
Donny could see that the captain's interjection deeply irritated
Lieutenant Commander Bonson, but Bonson said nothing, just stared
furiously at Donny in the dark office.
"You have two weeks," he finally said.
"We'll be monitoring you and expect a sitrep every other day. There's
a lot at stake, a lot of people counting on you. There's the honor of
the service and duty to country to consider."
Donny swallowed and hated himself for it.
"You know, you have it pretty good here yourself," said Bonson, to
Donny's silence.
"You have a room in the barracks, not in the squad bay, a very pleasant
duty station, a very pleasant duty day. You're in Washington, DC.
It's spring. You're going back to college, a decorated hero with all
those veteran's benefits, plus a Bronze Star and a nice chunk of rank.
I'd say few young men in America have it quite as made as you."
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
"What the commander is saying," said Ensign Weber, "is that it can all
go away. In a flash. Orders can be cut.
You could be back slogging the paddies in Vietnam, the shit flying all
around you. It's been known to happen. A guy so short suddenly finds
himself in extremely hazardous duty. Well, you know the stories. He
had a day to go and he got zapped. Letters to his mother, stories in
the paper, the horror of it all. The worst luck in the world, poor
guy. But sometimes, that's the way it goes."
More silence in the room.
Donny did not want to go back to Vietnam. He had done his time there,
he'd gotten hit. He remembered the fear he felt, the sheer immense,
lung-crushing density of it, the first time incoming began exploding
the world around him. He hated the squalor, the waste, the sheer
murder of it. He hated having his real life so close and then taken
from him. He hated the prospect of not seeing
Julie ever, ever again. He thought of some peace nerd comforting her
after he was gone, and knew how that one would play out.
Almost imperceptibly, he nodded.
"Great," said Bonson.
"You've made the right decision."
chapter Two
He stood outside, feeling idiotic. Rock music pumped out from inside.
Inside it was loud, bright, crowded, festive. He felt so stupid.
He turned. There was Ensign Weber in the Ford, parked across the way
on C Street. Weber nodded encouragingly, gave a little whisking motion
with his head as if to say, Go on, get going, goddammit.
So now Donny stood outside the Hawk and Dove, a well-known Capitol Hill
watering hole, where the young men and women who ran, opposed or
chronicled the war tended to gather after six when official Washington
closed down, except for the few old men in isolated offices waiting for
the latest news on the air strikes or casualty figures.
It was a beautiful night, temperate and soothing.
Donny was dressed in cutoffs. Jack Purcells, a madras shirt, just like
half the kids who'd entered the place since he'd been standing there,
except that unlike them, his ears stood out and his head wore only a
little topside platter of hair. It said jar head all the way.
But it was the Hawk and Dove where PFC Crowe was known to hang, and so
it was at the Hawk and Dove he had been deposited.
Christ, Donny thought again, looking back to Weber and getting another
of the whisking motions with the head.
He turned and plunged inside.
The place, as expected, was dark and close and jammed. Rock music
pummeled against the walls. It sounded like Buffalo Springfield:
There's a man with a gun over there, what it is ain't exactly
clear--something like that, vaguely familiar to Donny.
Everybody was smoking and cruising. There seemed to be a sense of sex
in the air as people eyed one another in the darkness, the pretty young
girls from the Hill, the slim young men from the Hill. Nearly all the
guys had big puffs of hair, but now and then he spied the whitewalls or
at least the very short haired look of the military. Yet there wasn't
much tension; it was as if everybody just put it aside, left it outside
for a generous helping of tribal bonding, the young not having to show
anything at all in here to the murderous, controlling old.
Donny squeezed to the bar, ordered a Bud, forked over a buck and
remembered, "Keep all your receipts.
You can expense this. Our office will pick it up. But nothing hard.
Bonson will fucking freak if you start chugging Pinch."
"I've never even tasted Pinch," Donny had replied.
"Maybe tonight's the night."
"That's a big negative," said Weber.
Donny sipped his beer. Beside him, a guy was in the middle of a bitter
fight with a girl. It was one of those quiet, muttered things, but
very intense. The boy kept saying, under his breath, "You idiot. You
unbelievable idiot.
How could you let him? Him! How could you let him? You idiot."
The girl merely stared ahead and smoked.
The time passed. His instructions were clear. He was not to approach
Crowe. That would be a mistake. Sooner or later Crowe would see him,
Crowe would approach him, and then it would go where it would go. If
he threw himself at Crowe, the whole damned thing would fall apart.
Donny had another beer, checked his watch. He scoped the action. There
were some attractive chicks but none as cool as Julie, the girl to whom
he was engaged.
Man, he smiled, I still got the best It was the football
hero-cheerleader thing, but not really. Yes, he was a football hero.
Yes, she was a cheerleader.
But he didn't really like football and she didn't really like
cheerleading. They actually were sort of forced
28 STEPHEN HUNTER
together as boyfriend and girlfriend by peer pressure at Pima County
High School, found they didn't really like each other very much, and
broke up. Once they broke up and started hanging out with other
people, they missed each other. One night they went on a double date,
he with Peggy Martin, Julie's best friend, and she with Mike Willis,
his best friend. And that was the night they really connected.
Junior year. The war was far away then, happening on TV. Firefights
in places like Bien Hoa and I Drang that he had never heard of. The
napalm floating off the Phantoms and wobbling downward to blossom in a
huge smear of tumbling fire across the jungle canopy. It meant
nothing. Donny and Julie went everywhere that year. They were
inseparable. It was, he thought, the best summer of his life, but
senior year was better, when he'd led the Southwest Counties League in
yardage, averaging close to two hundred a game. He was big and fast.
Julie was so beautiful but she was nice, somehow. She was so nice. She
was .. . good was the only word he could think of, and it was so
lame.
"Jesus Christ!"
Donny felt a hand on his shoulder as the words exploded into his ear.
He turned.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
Of course it was Crowe, in jeans and a work shirt looking very
proletariat. He had--where the hell did he get that?--a camouflaged
boonie cap on to disguise his hairless ness
He held a beer in his hand and was with three other young men who
looked exactly like him except their hair was real, and long. They
looked like three Jesuses.
"Crowe," said Donny.
"I didn't know this was your kind of place," said Crowe.
"It's a place. They have beer. What the fuck else would I need?"
Donny said.
"This is my corporal," Crowe said to his pals.
"He's a genuine USMC hero. He's actually killed guys. But he's a good
guy. He only made me drop for twenty-five today instead of fifty."
"Crowe, if you'd learn your shit, you wouldn't have to drop for any."
"But then I'd be collaborating."
"Oh, I see. Fucking up funerals is part of your guerrilla war on the
grieving mothers of America."
"No, no, I'm only joking. But the funny thing is, I can't tell my left
from my right. I really can't."
"It's port and starboard in the Marine Corps," said Donny.
"I don't know them either. Well, anyway. You want to join us? Tell
these guys about "Nam?"
"Oh, they don't want to hear."
"No, really," one of the other kids said.
"Man, it must be fucking hairy over there."
"He won a Bronze Star," said Crowe with a surprising measure of
pride.
"He was a hero."
"I was lucky as shit not to get wasted," Donny said.
"No, no war stories. Sorry."
"Look, we're going to a party. We know this guy, he's having a big
party. You want to come, Corporal?"
"Crowe, call me Donny off duty. And you're Ed."
"Eddie and Donny!"
"That's it."
"Come on, Donny. Chicks everywhere. It's over on C, right near the
Supreme Court. This guy is a clerk. He knew my big brother at
Harvard. More pussy in one place than you ever saw."
"You should come, Donny," said one of the boys.
Donny could tell that the hero thing had cut through politics and
somehow impressed these war-haters, who just a few years back had been
worshiping John Wayne.
"I'm engaged," Donny said.
"You can look, can't you? She'll let you look, won't she?"
"I suppose," said Donny.
"But I don't want any Ho
30 STEPHEN HUNTER
Chi Minh shit. Ho Chi Minh tried to kill my ass. He's no hero of
mine."
"It won't be like that," Crowe promised.
"Trig will like him," one of the boys said.
"Trig will turn him into a peacenik," said the other.
"So who's Trig?" said Donny.
It was a short walk and as soon as they were outside, one of the boys
pulled out a joint and lit up. The thing was routinely passed around
until it came to Donny, who hesitated for a moment, then took a toke,
holding it, fighting the fire. He'd had quite the habit for a few
months in "Nam, but had broken it. Now, the familiar sweetness rushed
into his lungs, and his head began to buzz. The world seem to come
aglow with possibility. He exhaled his lungful.
Enough, he thought. I don't need more of that shit.
Capitol Hill had the sense of a small town in Iowa, under leafy trees
that rustled in the night breeze. Then, through a break in the trees,
he suddenly saw the Capitol, its huge white dome arc-lit and blazing in
the night.
"They sacrifice virgins in there," one of the boys said, "to the gods
of war. Every night. You can hear them scream."
Maybe it was the grass, but Donny had to smile. They did sacrifice
virgins, but not in there. They sacrificed them ten thousand miles
away in buffalo shit-water rice paddies.
"Donny," said Crowe.
"Can you call in artillery? We have to destroy the place to save
it."
Again, maybe it was the grass.
"
"Ah, Shotgun-Zulu-Three,"
" he improvised, " I have a fire mission for you, map grid
four-niner-six, six-five-four at Alpha seven-oh-two-five, we are hot
with beaucoup bad guys, request Hotel Echo, fire for effect, please.""
"Cool," one of the kids said.
"What's Hotel Echo?"
"High explosive," said Donny.
"As opposed to frags or white phosphorous."
"Cool as shit!" the boy responded.
Music announced the site of the party far earlier than any visual
confirmation. As at the Hawk and Dove, it blasted out into the night,
hard, psychedelic rock beating the dark back and the devil away. He'd
heard the same stuff over there, though; that was the funny thing. The
young Marines loved the rock. It went everywhere with them, and if
their tough noncoms hadn't stayed on their asses, they'd have played it
on ambush patrols.
"I wonder if Trig is here," one of the boys said.
"You never can tell with Trig," Crowe replied.
"Who's Trig?" Donny asked again.
The party didn't seem at all unlike any other party Donny had attended
back at the University of Arizona, except that the hair was longer.
Milling people of all sorts.
The bar scene, though crammed into smaller, hotter rooms. The smell of
grass, sickly sweet, heavy in the air.
Ho and Che on the walls. In the bathroom, where Donny went to piss,
even an NVA flag, though one manufactured in Schenectady, not downtown
Haiphong. He had a rogue impulse to burn it, but that would sure blow
the gig now.
And really: it was only a flag.
The kids were his own age, some younger, with a few middle-aged men
hanging around with that intense, longhaired look that the DC crowd so
liked. Judging from the hair, only he and Crowe represented the United
States Marines, though Crowe was far from an ambassador. He was
telling some people a familiar story of how he almost got out of the
draft by playing psycho at his physical.
"I'm nude," he was saying, "except for this cowboy hat. I'm very
polite and everybody's very polite to me at first. I do everything
they ask me to do. I bend and spread, I carry my underwear in a little
bag, I smile and call everybody sir. I just won't take off my cowboy
hat.
"Uh, son, would you mind taking off that hat?"
"I can't," I explain.
"I'll die if I take off my cowboy hat." See, the key is to stay
32 STEPHEN HUNTER
polite. If you act nuts they know you're faking. Pretty soon they got
majors and generals and colonels and all screaming at me to take off my
cowboy hat. I'm nude in this little room with all these guys, but I
will not take off my cowboy hat. What a fuckin' hero I am! What a
John Wayne!
They're screaming and I'm just saying, "If I take off my cowboy hat,
I'll die."
" "So you weren't drafted?"
"Well, they kicked me out. It took weeks for the paperwork to catch
up, and by that time, my uncle had cut a deal with the Man to get me
into a slot in the Marines that wouldn't rotate to the "Nam. You know,
when this is over, all those charges will be dropped. Nobody will
care.
We'll write the whole thing off. That's why anybody who lets
themselves get wasted is a total moron. Like, for what?"
Good question, Donny wondered. For what? He tried to remember the
boys in his platoon in 1/3 Bravo who'd gotten zapped in his seven
months with them. It was hard.
And who did you count? Did you count the guy who got hit by an Army
truck in Saigon? Maybe his number was up. Maybe he would have gotten
hit back on the street corner in Sheboygan. Would you count him? Donny
didn't know.
But you definitely had to count the kid--what was his name? what was
his name?--who stepped on a Betty and got his chest shredded. That was
the first one Donny remembered.
He was such a new dick then. The guy just lay back. So much blood.
People gathered around him, exactly in the way you weren't supposed to,
and he seemed remarkably calm before he died. But nobody read any
letter home to Mom afterward in which he told everybody how great the
platoon was and how they were fighting for democracy. They just zipped
him up and left him. He remembered the face, not the name. A sort of
porky kid.
Pancakey face. Small eyes. Didn't have to shave. What was his
name?
Another one got hit by a rifle bullet. He screamed and bucked and
yelled and nobody could quiet him. He seemed so indignant. It was so
unfair! Well, it was unfair.
Why me, he seemed to be asking his friends, why not you?
He was thin and rangy, from Spokane. Didn't talk much.
Always kept his rifle clean. Was bowlegged. What was his name? Donny
didn't remember.
There were a few more, but nothing much. Donny hadn't fought in any
big battles or taken part in any big operations with dramatic code
names that made the news.
Mostly it was walking, scared every day you'd get jumped or you'd trip
something off, or you'd just collapse under the weight of it. So much
of it was boring, so much of it was dirty, so much of it was debasing.
He didn't want to go back. He knew that. Man, if you let them send
you back at this late date, when units were being rotated back to the
world all the time during "Vietnamization," and you got wasted, you
were a moron.
Suddenly someone bumped him hard.
"Oh, sorry," he said, stepping back.
"Yeah, you are," someone said.
Where had this action come from? There were three of them, but big
like he was. Hair pouring from their heads, bright bands around their
skulls, dressed in faded jeans and Army fatigue shirts.
"You're the Marine asshole, right? The lifer?"
"I am a Marine," he said.
"And I'm probably an asshole.
But I'm not a lifer."
The three fixed him with unsteady glares. Their eyes burned with hate.
One of them rocked a little, the team leader, with his fist wrapped
tightly around the neck of a bottle of gin. He held it like a
weapon.
"Yeah, my brother came back in a little sack because of lifer fucks
like you," he said.
"I'm very sorry for your brother," said Donny.
"Asshole lifer got him greased so he could make lieutenant colonel."
"Shit like that happens. Some joker wants a stripe so
34 STEPHEN HUNTER
he sends his guys up the hill. He gets the stripe and they get the
plastic bag."
"Yeah, but it happens mainly 'cause assholes like you let it happen,
'cause you don't have the fuckin' guts to say no to the Man. If you
had the guts to say no, the whole thing stops."
"Did you say no to the Man?"
"I didn't have to," the boy said proudly.
"I was 1-Y. I was out of it."
Donny thought about explaining that it didn't matter what your
classification was, if you obeyed it, you were obeying orders and
working for the Man. Some guys just got better orders than others. But
then the boy took a step toward Donny, his face drunkenly pugnacious.
He gripped the bottle even harder.
"Hey, I didn't come here to fight," said Donny.
"I just drifted in with some guys." He looked around to find himself
in the center of a circle of staring kids. Even the music had stopped
and the smoke had ceased seething in the air.
Crowe had, of course, totally disappeared.
"Well, you drifted into the wrong fucking party, man," said the boy,
and made as if to take another step, as Donny tried to figure out
whether to pop him or to cut and run to avoid the hassle.
But suddenly another figure dipped between them.
"Whoa," he said, "my brothers, my brothers, let's not lose our holy
cools."
"He's a fucking " said the aggressor.
"He's another kid; you can't blame the whole thing on him any more than
you can blame it on anyone. It's the system, don't you get that?
Jesus, don't you get anythingf" "Yeah, well, you have to start
somewhere."
"Jerry, you cool out. Go smoke a joint or something, man. I'm not
letting any three guys with booze bottles jump any poor grunt who came
by looking to get laid."
"Trig, I " But this Trig laid a hand on Jerry's chest and fixed him
TIME TO HUNT 35
with a glare hot enough to melt most things on earth, and Jerry stepped
back, swallowed and looked at his pals.
"Fuck it," he finally said.
"We were splitting anyhow."
And the three of them turned and stormed out.
Suddenly the music started again--Stones, "Satisfaction"--and the party
came back to life.
"Hey, thanks," said Donny.
"The last thing I need is a fight."
"That's okay," said his new friend.
"I'm Trig Carter, by the way." He put out a hand.
Trig had one of those long, grave faces, where the bones showed through
the tight skin and the eyes seemed to be both moist and hot at the same
moment. He really looked a lot like Jesus in a movie. There was
something radiant in the way he fixed you with his eyes. He had
something rare: immediate likability.
"Howdy," Donny said, surprised the grip was so strong in a man so
thin.
"My name's Fenn, Donny Fenn."
"I know. You're Crowe's secret hero. The Bravo."
"Oh, Christ. I can't be a hero to him. I'm in it till my hitch ends,
then I'm gone forever back to the land of the cacti and the Navajo."
"I've been there. Mourning doves, right? Little white birds, dart
through the arroyos and the brush, really hard to spot, really fast?"
"Oh, yeah," said Donny.
"My dad and I used to hunt them. You've got to use a real light shot,
you know, an eight or a nine. Even then, it's a tough shot."
"Sounds like fun," said Trig.
"But in my case I don't shoot 'em with a gun but with a camera. Then I
paint them."
"Paint them?" This made no sense to Donny.
"You know," Trig said.
"Pictures. I'm actually an avian painter. Really, I've traveled the
world painting pictures of birds."
"Wow!" said Donny.
"Does it pay?"
"A little. I illustrated my uncle's book. He's Roger
36 STEPHEN HUNTER
Prentiss Fuller, Birds of North America. The Yale zoologist?"
"Er, can't say I heard of him."
"He was a hunter once. He went on safari in the early fifties with
Elmer Keith."
This did impress Donny. Keith was a famous Idaho shooter who wrote
books like Elmer Keith's Book of the Sixgun and Elmer Keith on Big Game
Rifles.
"Wow," he said.
"Elmer Keith."
"Roger says Keith was a tiny, bitter little man. He had a terrible
burn as a kid and he was always compensating for it. They had a
falling out. Elmer just wanted to shoot and shoot. He couldn't see
any sense to a limit. Roger doesn't shoot anymore."
"Well, after "Nam, I don't think I will either," Donny said.
"You sound okay for a Marine, Donny. Crowe was right about you. Maybe
you'll join us when you get out."
He smiled, his eyes lighting like a movie star's.
"Well .. ." Donny said, provisionally. Himself a peacenik, smoking
dope, long hair, carrying those cards, chanting "Hell, no, we won't
go"? He laughed at the notion.
"Trig! When did you get here?" It was Crowe and his crowd, now with
girls in tow, all leading what seemed to be a kind of electric ripple
toward Trig.
And in seconds. Trig was gone, borne away on currents of some sort of
celebrity hood that Donny didn't understand.
He turned to a girl standing nearby.
"Hey, excuse me," he said.
"Who is this Trig?"
She looked at him in astonishment.
"Man, what planet are you from?" she demanded, then ran after Trig,
her eyes beaming love.
chapter three
"HP rig Carter!" Commander Bonson exclaimed.
J.
"Yeah, that was it, I couldn't quite remember the last name," said
Donny, who could remember the name very well but couldn't quite bring
himself to say it out loud.
"Seemed like a very nice guy."
Bonson's office was an undistinguished chamber in a World War II-era
tempo still standing in the Washington Navy Yard about a half mile from
Eighth and I, where by dim pretext Donny had been sent the next day for
his debriefing on his first day as spy hunter.
"You saw Trig Carter and Crowe together. Is that right?"
Why did Donny feel so sleazy about all this? He felt clammy, as if
someone were listening. He looked around.
President Nixon glowered down at him from the wall, enjoining him to do
his duty for God and Country. A degree from the University of New
Hampshire added to the solemnity of the occasion. A few ceremonial
photos of Lieutenant Commander Bonson with various dignitaries
completed the decor; the room was otherwise completely bereft of
personality or even much sense of human occupation.
It was preternaturally neat; even the paper clips in the little plastic
box had been stacked, not dumped.
Lieutenant Commander Bonson bent forward, fixing Donny in his dark
glare. He was a thin, dark man with a lot of whiskery shadow on his
face and a sense of complete focus. There was something pilgrim like
about him;
he should have been in a pulpit denouncing miniskirts and the
Beatles.
"Yes, sir," Donny finally said.
"The two of them .. .
and about one hundred other people."
"Where was this again?"
38 STEPHEN HUNTER
"A party. Uh, on C Street, on the Hill. I didn't get the address."
"Three-forty-five C, Southeast," said Ensign Weber.
"Did you check it out, Weber?"
"Yes, sir. It's the home of one James K. Phillips, a clerk to Justice
Douglas and a homosexual, according to the FBI."
"Were most of the people there homosexuals, Fenn?
Was it a homo thing?"
Donny didn't know what to say. It just seemed like a party in
Washington, like any party in Washington, with a lot of young people,
some grass, some beer, music, and fun and hope in the air.
"I wouldn't know, sir."
Bonson sat back, considering. The homosexual thing seemed to hang in
his mind, clouding it for a time. But then he was back on the track.
"So you saw them together?"
"Well, sir, not together, really. In the same crowd.
They knew each other, that was clear. But it didn't seem anything out
of the ordinary."
"Could Crowe have given him any deployment intelligence?"
Donny almost laughed, but Bonson was so set in his glare that he knew
to release the pressure he felt building in his chest would have been a
big mistake.
"I don't think so," he said.
"Not that I saw. I mean, does Crowe have any deployment intelligence?
I don't.
How would he?"
But Bonson didn't answer.
He turned to Weber.
"We've got to get closer," he said.
"We've got to get him inside the cell. Trig Carter. Imagine that."
"A wire, sir? Could we wire him?" asked Weber.
Oh, Christ, thought Donny. I'm really not going anywhere with a tape
recorder taped to my belly.
"No, not unless we could get time to set it up quickly.
TIME TO HUNT 39
He's got to stay fluid, flexible, quick on his feet. The wire won't
work, not under these circumstances."
"It was just a suggestion, sir," said Weber.
"Well, Fenn," said Bonson, "you've made a fine start.
But too many times we see fast starters are slow finishers.
You've got to really press now. You've got to make Crowe your pal,
your friend, do you see? He's got to trust you;
that's how you'll crack this thing. Trig Carter, Weber. Isn't that
the damndest thing you ever heard?"
"Sir, if I may ask, who is Trig Carter?"
"Show him, Weber."
Weber looked into a file and slid something over to Donny. Donny
recognized it at once: he'd seen it a thousand times probably, without
really noticing it. It was just part of the living-room imagery of the
war, the scenes that were unforgettable.
It was a cover of Time magazine late in the hot summer of 1968:
Chicago, the Democratic National Convention, the "police riot" outside
on the last night. There was Trig, in shirtsleeves, a gush of blood
cascading down from an ugly welt in his short, neat hair. He was bent
under the weight of another kid he was carrying out of the fog of tear
gas and the blurs that were Chicago policemen pounding anything that
could be pounded. Trig looked impossibly noble and heroic, impossibly
courageous. His eyes were screwed up in the pain of the CS gas, he was
bloody and sweaty, and the veins on his neck stood out from all the
effort he had invested in carrying the dazed, bloody, traumatized boy
out of the zone of violence. He looked like any of a dozen insanely
heroic Corpsmen Donny had seen pull the same thing off amid not cops
but tracer fire and grenades and Bettys over in the Land of Bad Things,
none of whose pictures had ever ended up on the cover of Time
magazine.
the spirit of resistance, said the cover.
"He's their Lancelot," said Weber.
"Was beaten up in Selma by the Alabama State Police, got his picture on
the cover of Time in sixty-eight at the convention. He's been
40 STEPHEN HUNTER
everywhere in the Movement since then. One of the early peace freaks,
a rich kid from an old Maryland family. Just came back from a year in
England, studying drawing at Oxford. Harvard grad, some kind of
painter, isn't that it?"
"Avian painter, sir. That's what he told me."
"Yes. Birds. Loves birds. Very odd," said Bonson.
"Very smart boy," continued Weber.
"But then, that seems to be the profile. It was the profile in
England, too.
The smart ones, they can figure everything out, see through everything.
They'll be the elite after the revolution.
Anyhow, he's big in the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, a
kind of glamorous roving ambassador and organizer. Lives here in DC,
but works the campus circuit, goes where the action is. The FBI's been
monitoring him for years. He'd be exactly the kind of man who'd get to
Crowe and turn him into a spy. He'd be perfect. He's exactly who
we're looking for."
"Fenn, I can't emphasize this enough. You've got less than two weeks
until the big raft of May Day demonstrations is set. Crowe will be
pressed to uncover deployment intelligence, Carter will be on him for
results. You've got to monitor them very carefully. If you can't get
tape or photos, you may have to testify in open court against them."
Donny felt a cold stone drop in his stomach: he saw an image, himself
on the stand, putting the collar on poor Crowe. It made him sick.
"I know you'll make a fine witness," Bonson was saying.
"So begin to discipline your mind: remember details, events,
chronologies. You might write a coded journal so you can recall
things. Remember exact sentences. Get in the habit of making a time
check every few minutes. If you don't want to take notes, imagine
taking notes, because that can fix things in your mind. This is very
important work, do you understand?"
"Ah--" "Doubts? Do I see doubts? You cannot doubt." Bonson leaned
forward until he and he alone filled the world.
TIME TO HUNT 41
"Just as you could have no doubters in a rifle platoon, you can have no
doubters on a counter intelligence mission.
You have to be on the team, committed to the team. The doubts erode
your discipline, cloud your judgment, destroy your memory, Fenn. No
doubts. That's the kind of rigor I need from you."
"Yes, sir," said Donny, hating himself as the world's entire melancholy
weight settled on his strong young shoulders.
Crowe was particularly derelict that afternoon in riot control drill.
"It's so hot, Donny. The mask! Can't we pretend we're wearing our
masks?"
"Crowe, if you have to do it for real, you'll want to be wearing a mask
because otherwise the CS will make you a crybaby in a second. Put the
mask on with the other guys."
Muttering darkly, Crowe slid the mask over his head, then clapped his
two-pound camouflaged steel pot over his skull.
"Squad, on my command, form up shouted Donny, watching as his casket
team, plus assorted others from Bravo Company assigned riot duty in
Third Squad, formed a line. They looked like an insect army: their
eyes hidden behind the plastic lenses of the masks, their faces made
insectoid and ominous by the mandible like filter can, all in Marine
green, with their 782 gear, their pistols, their M14s held at the high
port.
"Squad, fix ... bayonets'." and the rifle butts slammed into the
ground, the blades were drawn from their scabbards and in a single
clanking, machinelike click locked onto the weapon muzzles. Except
one.
Crowe's bayonet skittered away. He had dropped it.
"Crowe, you idiot, give me fifty of the finest!"
Crowe was silenced by his clammy mask, but his body posture radiated
sullen anger. He fell from the formation.
"At ease," said Donny.
The squad relaxed.
42 STEPHEN HUNTER
"One, Corporal, two, Corporal, three, Corporal," Crowe narrated through
the mask as he banged out the push-ups. Donny let him go to fifteen,
then said, "All right, Crowe, back in line ASAP. Let's try it
again."
Crowe shot him a bitter look as he regathered his gear and rejoined the
line.
Donny took them through it again. It was an extremely hot day and the
darkness of his mood was such that he worked the men hard, breaking
them down into standard line formation, flank marching them into an
arrowhead riot element, counting cadence to govern their approach to
the imagined riot, wheeling them left and right, getting them to fix
and unfix bayonets over and over again.
He worked them straight through a break as great wet patches discolored
their utilities until finally the platoon sergeant came over and said,
"All right, Corporal, you can give them a break."
"Yes, Sergeant!" yelled Donny, and even the sergeant, a shit-together
but fairly decent lifer named Ray Case, gave him a look.
"Fall out. Smoke em if you got 'em. If you don't got 'em, borrow 'em.
If you can't borrow 'em, then get outta town because your buddies
can't stand you."
Then, instead of mingling with the silently furious, sweating men, he
himself walked over to the shade of the barracks and declared himself
off-limits. Let 'em grouse.
But soon Crowe detached himself and came over, cheekily enough,
secretly irritating Donny.
"Man, you really put me through it."
"I put the squad through it, Crowe, not you. We may have to do this
shit for real next weekend."
"Oh, shit, none of those guys is going to march with bayonets into a
bunch of kids with flowers in their hair where the girls are showing
their tits. We'll just hang here or go sit in some fucking building
like the last time. What, you figure, the Treasury again?"
Donny let the question simmer in his mind a bit. Then
TIME TO HUNT 43
he said, "Crowe, I don't know. I just go where they tell me."
"Donny, I got it straight from Trig. They're not even coming into DC.
The whole thing's going to the Pentagon.
Let the Army handle it. We won't even leave the barracks."
"If you say so."
"I thought we were--" "Crowe, I had fun last night. But out here, in
the daylight, I'm still the corporal and squad leader, you're still a
PFC, so you still play by my rules. Don't ever call me Donny in front
of the men while we're on drill, okay?"
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry. Anyhow, some of us were going to Trig's
tonight. I thought you might want to come.
You got to admit, he's an interesting guy."
"He's okay for a peacenik."
"Trig's not like that. He was beat up in Selma; he was a fucking hero
in Chicago. Man, they say he went out twenty-five times and dragged
kids in from the pigs. He saved lives."
"I don't know," said Donny.
"It'll be fun. You need to relax more, Corporal."
Donny actually wished the invitation hadn't come; it was his half plan,
dimly formed, just to let his secret assignment peter out, go away in
vagueness and missed opportunities.
But here it was, big and hairy: a chance to do his job.
1 rig, as it turned out, lived off upper Wisconsin, just above
Georgetown, in a row house that was one in a tatty block of similar
dwellings. The house was crowded; it could be no other way. The
furniture was threadbare, almost ascetic. Still, the stench of grass
almost levitated the house and made Donny's nostrils flare when he
entered.
Everything was familiar but unfamiliar: lots of books, a wall full of
shelved albums (classical and jazz, though; no Jimi H. or Bob D.). But
also, no posters, no NVA flags, no commie posters. Instead: birds.
44 STEPHEN HUNTER
Jesus, the guy was a freak for birds. Some were his own paintings, and
he had a considerable talent for capturing the glory of a bird in
flight, all the details perfect, all the feathers precisely laid out,
the colors all the hues of miracle. But others were older and darker,
muted things that appeared to have been painted in another century.
Somehow he found himself talking to a girl about birds and told her
that he, uh, hunted them. It wasn't the right thing to say but she was
one of those snooty Eastern ones, who wore her hair long and straight
and had a pinched look to her.
"You kill them?" she said.
"Those little things?"
"Well, where I'm from they're considered good eating."
"Don't you have stores'!"
This wasn't going too well. This grouping was smaller and more
intimate than last night's and everybody seemed to know everybody. He
felt a little isolated, and looked for Crowe, because even Crowe would
have been a welcome ally. But Crowe was nowhere to be seen. And on
top of that he felt incorrectly dressed: he was in chinos and Jack
Purcells, plus a madras sport shirt. Everyone here wore jeans and work
shirts, had long, exotic hair, beards, and seemed somehow in some kind
of Indian conspiracy against the ways that he felt it was proper for a
young man to dress. It made him uncomfortable.
Some spy, he thought.
"Don't give Donny a hard time," said someone--Trig, of course, simply
appearing dramatically, an event for which he had a little gift.
Trig was more moderate today, his hair back in a ponytail, which he
wore over a blue button-down shirt and, like Donny, a pair of chinos.
He also had an expensive pair of decoratively perforated oxfords on, in
some exotic, rich color.
"Trig, he shoots little animals."
"Sweetie, men have been hunting and eating birds for a million years.
Both the birds and the men are still here."
TIME TO HUNT 45
"I think it's strange."
Donny almost blurted, No, it's really fun, but held himself in.
"Well, anyway," said Trig, drawing Donny away.
"I'm glad you could come. I don't know who half these guys are myself.
People just hang out here. They drink my beer, smoke grass, get stoned
or laid and move on. I'm hardly here, so I really don't care. But it's
cool that you came."
"Thanks, I didn't have much to do. Well, actually, I wanted to talk to
you."
"Oh? Well, go ahead."
"It's Crowe. You know, he's really borderline in the unit, and he
keeps fucking up. I know he's a smart kid.
But if he gets booted from the company, his tour is no longer
stabilized, and he could go on levy to the "Nam.
And I don't think he'd look too good in a body bag."
"I'll talk to him."
"As he said, anyone who gets wasted this late in a lost war is a
moron."
"I'll mention it."
"Cool."
Trig was also cool. Donny could see how he'd be a good man in a
firefight, and while everybody wept or cowered, he'd be the one to go
out and start bringing the people in from the beatings.
"Can I ask you?" he suddenly said to Donny, fixing him in one of those
deep Trig looks.
"Do you doubt it?
Do you ever wonder why, or if it was worth it? Or are you foursquare
the whole way, the whole nine yards?"
"Fuck no," said Donny.
"Sure, of course I doubt it.
But my father fought in a war and so did his father, and I was raised
just to see that as a price for living in a great country. So ... so I
went. I did it, I came back, for better or worse."
They had now wandered into the kitchen, where Trig opened his
refrigerator and got a beer out for Donny and then took one for
himself. It was a foreign beer, Heineken, from a dark, cold green
bottle.
46 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Come on, this way. We'll get away from these idiots."
Trig took Donny out on a back porch, toward two deck chairs. Donny was
surprised to see they were on a little hill and that before him the
elevation fell away; across the falling roofs, in the distance he was
surprised to see the huddled buildings of Georgetown University,
looking medieval in profile.
"I forget what real people are like," Trig said, "that's why it's cool
to talk to you. Nobody's more hypocritical and swinish than the pretty
boys and the fairies of the peace movement. But I know how important
soldiers can be. I was in the Congo in sixty-four--I'd gone with my
uncle to paint the Upper Congo swallowtail darter. We were in
Stanleyville when some guy named Gbenye declared it a people's republic
and took about one thousand of us hostage and set out to 'purify' the
population of its imperialist vermin. Murder squads were everywhere.
Man, I saw some shit. What people do to each other. So anyhow, we're
in this compound, the Congolese Army is fighting its way closer and the
rumor is the rebels are going to kill us all. Holy shit, we're going
to die and nobody gives a shit about us. It's that simple. But when
the door is kicked down, it isn't rebels. It's tattooed, tough ass
kick-butt Belgian paratroopers. They were the meanest pricks I ever
saw in my life and I loved them like you wouldn't believe. Nobody
would stand against the Belgian Airborne. And they got us out in a
convoy, all the white people from the interior. We would have been
butchered. So I'm not one of these assholes who says there's no role
for soldiers. Soldiers saved my life."
"Roger that," said Donny.
"But," said Trig, holding it in the air, "even if I admire courage and
commitment, I have to make a distinction.
Between a moral war and an immoral war. World War II:
moral. Kill Hitler before he kills all the Jews. Kill Tojo before he
turns all the Filipino women into whores. Korea?
Maybe moral. I don't know. Stop the Chinese from
TIME TO HUNT 47
turning Korea into a province. I guess that's moral. I would have
fought in that one."
"But Vietnam. Not moral?"
"I don't know. You tell me."
Trig leaned forward. Another of his little, unsung gifts:
listening. He really wanted to know what Donny thought and he refused
to pigeonhole Donny as a baby killer and Zippo commando.
Donny could not resist this earnest attention.
"What I saw was good American kids trying to do a job they didn't quite
understand. What I saw was kids who thought it was like a John Wayne
movie and got their guts blown out. I was in a place once, a forest or
a former forest. All the leaves were gone, but the trees still stood.
Only, they shined. It was like they were covered in ice. It reminded
me of Vermont. I've never been to Vermont, but it reminded me of it
just the same."
"I think I know where you're headed. I saw the same thing on the
convoy out of Stanleyville."
"Yeah, well, in this case we called in Hotel Echo, on a stand of trees
because we saw movement and thought a unit of gooks was infiltrating
through it. We got 'em, but good. Those were their guts. They were
just pulverized, turned to shiny liquid, and it plastered the stumps
and limbs. Man, I never saw anything like that. Of course it was a
platoon of Army engineers. Twenty-two guys, gone, just like that.
Hotel Echo. It wasn't very pretty."
"Donny, I think you know. Underneath. I can feel you getting there.
You're working on it."
"My girl is already there. She's coming in in this Peace Caravan deal
they got going."
"Good for her. Do you talk about it with her?"
"She says she decided she'd do her part to stop the war when she
visited me in the San Diego Naval Hospital."
"Good for her again. But--are you there?"
Donny couldn't lie. He had no talent for it.
"No. Not yet. Maybe never. It just seems wrong. You
48 STEPHEN HUNTER
have to do what your country tells you. You have to contribute.
It's duty."
Trig was like a confessor: his eyes burned with empathy and drew Donny
forward to reveal more.
"Donny, I know you'd never leave or quit or anything.
I wouldn't ask you to. But consider joining us after you get out. I
think you'll feel much better. And I can't begin to tell you how much
it would mean to us. I hate this idea we're all a bunch of chicken
shits A guy who's been there, won a medal, fought, dedicating himself
to ending it and bringing his buddies home. That's powerful stuff.
I'd be proud to be a part of that."
"I don't know."
"Just think about it. Talk to me, keep in touch. That's all. Just
think about it."
"Donny, my God!" a voice called, and he looked up and saw a dream
coming onto the porch to him. She was thin, blond, athletic, part
tawny cowgirl, part perfect American sweetheart, and he felt helpless
as he always did when he saw her.
It was Julie.
chapter four
W" hat's wrong?" she said.
"Why didn't you call me?"
"I did. And I wrote you, too."
"Oh, shit."
"Can we leave? Can we go someplace? Donny, I haven't seen you since
Christmas.""I don't know. I'm here with this PFC from my squad and I
sort of promised I'd, uh, look after him. I can't leave him."
"Donny!"
"I can't explain it! It's very complicated."
He kept looking off, back into the house as if he was trying to keep
his eye on something.
"Look, let me go tell Crowe I'm leaving. I'll be right back. We'll go
somewhere."
He disappeared back inside the house.
Julie stood there in the Washington dark on a street above Georgetown
as the traffic veered along Wisconsin.
Pretty soon Peter Fan-is came out. Peter was a tall, bearded graduate
student in sociology at the University of Arizona, the head of the
Southwest Regional People's Coalition for Peace and Justice and nominal
honcho of the group of kids he and Julie had shepherded out by Peace
Caravan from Tucson.
"Where's your friend?"
"He'll be back."
"I knew that's what he'd be like. Big, handsome, square."
But then Donny returned, ignoring Peter.
"Hi. It's stupid, but Crowe wants to go to another party and I think I
ought to go with him. I can't .. . It's just .. . I'll get in touch
with you as soon as .. ."
But then he turned, troubled, and before she could say
50 STEPHEN HUNTER
a thing, he said, "Oh, shit, they're leaving. I'll get in touch" and
ran off, leaving the girl he loved behind him.
The next morning, waking early in his room in the barracks, almost an
hour before the 0530 alarm, Donny almost went on sick call. It seemed
the only sane course, the only escape from his troubles. But his
troubles came looking for him.
It was a boneyard day, he knew. His team was up. He had stuff to do.
He skipped breakfast in the chow hall, and instead re-pressed his dress
tunic and trousers, spent a good thirty minutes spit-shining his
oxfords. This was ritual, almost cleansing and purifying.
You put a gob of spit into the black can of polish, and with a scrap of
cotton mixed the black paste and the saliva together, forming a dense
goo. Then you applied just a little dab to the leather and rubbed and
rubbed. You should get a genie for your troubles, you rubbed so
hard.
You rubbed and rubbed, a dab at a time, covering the whole shoe, and
then the other. You let it fry into a dense haze, then went at it
again, with another cotton cloth, went at it like war, snap pity-snap.
It was a lost military art;
they said they were going to bring in patent leather next time because
the young Marines couldn't be trusted to put in the hours. But Donny
was proud of his spit shine, carefully nursed through the long months,
built up over time, until his oxfords gleamed vividly in the sun.
So stupid, he now thought.
So ridiculous. So pointless.
The weather was heavy with the chance of rain and the dogwoods were in
full bloom, another brutal Washington spring day. Arlington's gentle
hills and valleys, full of pink trees and dead boys, rolled away from
the burial site and beyond, like a movie Rome, the white buildings of
the capital of America gleamed even in the gray light. Donny could see
the needle and the dome and the big white house and the weeping Lincoln
hidden in his portico of
TIME TO HUNT 51
marble. Only Jefferson's cute little gazebo was out of sight, hidden
behind an inoffensive, dogwood-and tomb-crazed hill.
The box job was over. It had gone all right, though everybody was
grumpy. For some reason even Crowe had tried hard that day, and
there'd been no slipup as they took L/Cpl. Michael F. Anderson from
the black hearse to the bier to the slow-time march, snapped the flag
off the box, folded it crisply. Donny handed the tricorn of stars to
the grieving widow, a pimply girl. It was always better not to know a
thing about the boy inside. Had L/Cpl. Anderson been a grunt? Had he
been a supply clerk, a helicopter crew member, a military journalist, a
corpsman, combat engineer? Had he been shot, exploded, crushed,
virused or VD'd to death? Nobody knew: he was dead, that was all, and
Donny stood at crisp attention, the poster Marine in his dress blue
tunic, white trousers and white cover, giving a stiff perfect salute to
the wet-nosed, shuddering girl during "Taps." Grief is so ugly. It is
the ugliest thing there is, and he had fucking bathed in it for close
to eighteen long months now. His head ached.
Now it was over. The girl had been led away, and the Marines had
marched smartly back to their bus and climbed aboard for a discreet
smoke. Donny now watched to make certain that if they smoked they took
their white gloves off, for the nicotine could stain them yellow
otherwise.
All complied, even Crowe.
"You want a cigarette, Donny?"
"I don't smoke."
"You should. Relaxes you."
"Well, I'll pass." He looked at his watch, a big Seiko on a chain-mail
strap he'd bought at the naval exchange in Da Nang for $12, and saw
that they had another forty minutes to kill before the next job.
"You ought to hang your coats up," he told the team.
"But don't go outside unless you're buttoned and shined.
Some asshole major might see you, put you on report and
52 STEPHEN HUNTER
off you go to the "Nam. You'd be back for the next box job. Only,
you'd be the one in the box, right, Crowe?"
"Yes, Corporal, sir," Crowe barked, ironic and snide, pretending to be
the shave tail gung-ho lifer he would never even resemble.
"We love our Corps, don't we, Crowe?"
"We love our Corps, Corporal."
"Good man, Crowe," he said.
"Donny?"
It was the driver, looking back.
"Some Navy guys here."
Shit, thought Donny.
"Donny, are you joining the Navy?" Crowe asked.
"You could make & fortune giving jelly rolls in the showers of a
nuclear sub. You could--" Everybody laughed. Give it to Crowe, he was
funny.
"All right, Crowe," said Donny, "I just may put you on report for the
fun of it or kick the shit out of you to save the paperwork. While I
talk to these guys, you give every man on the team a blow job. That's
an order, PFC."
"Yes, Corporal, sir," said Crowe, taking a puff on his cigarette.
Donny buttoned his tunic, pulled on his cover low over his eyes and
stepped outside.
It was Weber, in khakis.
"Good morning, sir," said Donny, saluting.
"Good morning, Corporal," said Weber.
"Would you come over here, please?"
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
As they got out of earshot of the men in the bus, Donny said, "Man,
what the fuck is this all about? I thought I was supposed to be
undercover. This really blows it."
"All right, Fenn, don't get excited. Tell them we're from personnel at
the Pentagon, verifying your RSVN service preparatory to separation.
Very common occurrence, no big deal."
Down the way, in the rear of a tan government Ford,
TIME TO HUNT 53
Lieutenant Commander Bonson sat behind sunglasses, peering ahead.
Donny got in; the engine was running and air-conditioned chill blasted
over him.
"Good morning, Fenn," said the commander. He was a tight-assed,
scrawny lifer in the backseat, sitting ramrod perfect.
"Sir."
"Fenn, I'm going to arrest Crowe today."
Donny sucked a gulp of dry, painful air.
"Excuse me, sir?"
"At 1600 hours, I'll show up at the barracks with a plainclothes
detachment of NIS. We'll incarcerate him at the Navy Yard brig."
"On what charge?"
"Security violation. Naval Penal Code DOD 69455.
Unauthorized possession of classified information. Also, DOD 77-56B,
unauthorized transmission or transference of classified information."
"Ah--on what basis?"
"Your basis, Fenn."
"My basis, sir?"
"Your basis."
"But I haven't reported anything. He went to a couple of parties where
they were flying the NVA flag. Half the apartments in Washington are
hanging the NVA flag. I see it everywhere."
"You can place him in the presence of a known radical organizer."
"Well, I can place myself in that same guy's presence.
And I have no information to suggest he was compromising Marine
security or intelligence. I just saw him talking with a guy, that's
all."
"You can place him in the presence of Trig Carter. Do you know yet who
Trig Carter is?"
"Ah, well, sir, you said--" "Tell him, Weber."
"This is straight from this morning's MDW-Secret Ser54 STEPHEN
HUNTER
vice-FBI briefing, Fenn," said Weber.
"Carter is now suspected of being a member of the Weather
Underground.
He's not 'merely' a peacenik with a placard and some flowers in his
hair, but he's an extreme radical who may be linked to the Weather
Underground's bombing campaign."
Donny was dumbstruck.
"Trig?"
"Don't you see it yet, Corporal?" said Bonson.
"These two bright boys are hatching up something good and bloody for
May Day. We have to stop them. If I collar Crowe, maybe that'll be
enough to save some lives."
"Sir, I saw nothing that would--" "Then get with the fucking program,
Corporal!" Bonson bellowed. He leaned forward, fixing Donny with his
murderous glare. He seemed to bear a grudge against the known world
and was holding Donny responsible for all his disappointments, for all
the women who wouldn't sleep with him, for the fraternities that
wouldn't pledge him, for the schools that wouldn't accept him.
"You think this is some kind of joke, don't you, Corporal?
It's beneath you somehow. So you'll go along to stay out of "Nam, and
just play it cool and cute and rely on your good looks and your charm
to drift through? You won't get your hands dirty, you won't do the
job. Well, that stops today. You have a job. You have a legal order
assigned by higher headquarters and passed down through a legal chain
of command, vetted by your commanding officer. You will perform. Now,
you stop screwing around and pretending like your feelings matter. You
get on this thing and you get inside and you get me what I need, or by
God, I will see to it that you're the only U.S.
Marine on the DMZ when Uncle Ho sends his tanks south to mop up. We'll
get you a Springfield rifle and a campaign hat and see how well you do.
Are you reading me?"
"Loud and clear," said Donny.
"Go do your fucking job," said Bonson icily.
"I'll hold
TIME TO HUNT 55
off a day, maybe two. But get inside before May Day or I'll sweep them
all up and off to Portsmouth and you to the "Nam. Do you copy?"
"I copy, sir," said Donny, blushing at the dressing down.
"Out," said Bonson, signifying the interview was over.
"""You okay?"
"I'm fine," Donny said.
"You look not-cool."
"I'm cool."
"Well, a bunch of us were going over to this party in G-town, Donny. I
found out about it from Trig."
Oh Christ, Donny thought, as the solicitous Crowe loomed over him in
the upstairs barracks room where the off-base men kept their huge gray
lockers and were now stripping down after a hot afternoon in the
boneyard.
"Crowe, you know we may be on alert at any time. Is your riot gear
outstanding? What about steaming and pressing your tunic, washing out
your dark socks, and spending an hour or two on that spit shine, which
has begun to look a little dim. That's what you ought to be doing."
"Yeah, well," said Crowe, "believe me on this one, I know. We're not
going on alert till 2400 tomorrow night."
Donny almost pointed out that if you said "2400" you didn't have to say
"night," but Crowe wasn't stoppable at that point.
"And we'll just hang around here. We may get on trucks and, probably
on Saturday, we'll deploy to a building near the White House. But
it'll be a short deployment.
All the action's going on across the river. The whole point of this
one is to converge on the Pentagon and close it down. Trig told me."
"Trig told you? He told you about the deployment?
Man, that's classified. Why the hell would he know?"
"Don't ask me. Trig knows everything. He has entree everywhere. He
probably is having cocktails with J. Edgar
56 STEPHEN HUNTER
himself right as we speak. By the way, did you know Hoover was a
fruit? He's a goddamn fruit} He hangs out in Y's and shit."
"Crowe, you're not telling Trig shit, are you? I mean, it might seem
like a joke to you, but you could get into deep, serious green crap
that way."
"Man, what do I know? Little Eddie Crowe's just a grunt. He knows
nothing."
"Crowe, I'm not kidding."
"Is someone asking about me?"
"So where's this party?"
"Shouldn't you be trying to find your girl? She didn't look too happy
when you bailed out on her last night to hang out with us. And if I
know my horny hippie peace freaks, that bearded guy hanging on her
shirttails has a serious case of the please-fuck-mes. You may have to
call in a fire mission on him. Hotel Echo."
"Nobody's asking about you."
"
"Cause if they are, here's my advice: give me up. I ain't worth shit.
Seriously, Donny, roll over on me in a second. If it's you or me,
buddy, choose you. It would be a shame any other way."
"Eddie, you're full of shit. Now, where's this party? I need a
fucking keg of beer."
"Maybe Trig can find your girl."
"Maybe he can."
They showered and dressed, and signed out with a warning from the duty
NCO to call in every couple of hours to make sure the company hadn't
gone on alert.
Sure enough, Crowe's obedient buddies waited just outside the barracks'
main gate, on Eighth Street. They climbed in the old Corvair.
"Hey, Donny."
"Cool. Donny, the hero."
He could hardly remember the names. He had a splitting headache. He
had told a lie, direct and flat out. Nobody is asking about you.
But goddammit, how had Crowe known so much?
TIME TO HUNT 57
Why had he asked Donny the other day where they'd deploy?
Why was all this bad shit happening anyway? And what about Julie? She
was camping in some muddy field with what's his face, and he hadn't
even really talked to her. She hadn't called and left a number,
either. Man, it was all coming down.
But when they got there, Trig came over and greeted them, and when
Crowe told him Donny's situation, he said it would be no problem.
"Sure," he said.
"Let me make a call." He went off, and Donny sat among a bunch of
turned-out Georgetown kids, dressed like young Republicans, while
Crowe, in his hair-hiding boonie cap, worked a girl who didn't work him
back. Presently, Trig returned.
"Okay, let's go," he said.
"You found her?"
"Well, I found out where the University of Arizona kids are camping.
That's where she'd be, right?"
"Right," said Donny.
"Okay, I'll run you over."
Donny paused. Was he supposed to be looking after Crowe? But now he'd
set this thing up, and if he hung with Crowe it would look very
strange. And he was supposed to watch Crowe with Trig, right? And if
he was with Trig, then Crowe couldn't be giving up any secrets, could
he?
"Great," said Donny.
"Just let me get my book," said Trig. He disappeared for a second,
then came back with a large, really filthy-looking sketchbook. It had
the sense of a treasured relic.
"Never go anyplace without this. I might see an eastern swallowtail
mud lark He laughed at himself, showing white teeth.
Outside, Trig gestured to the inevitable Trigmobile, a TR-6, bright
red, its canvas roof down.
"Cool wheels," said Donny, hopping in.
"I picked it up a little while ago in England," he said.
"I got burned out on peace shit. I took a little sabbatical,
58 STEPHEN HUNTER
went to London, spent some time in Oxford. The Ruskin School of
Drawing. Bought this baby."
"You must be loaded."
"Oh, I think there's money in the family. Not my father;
he doesn't make a penny. He's in State, planning some tiny part of the
war, the economic infrastructure of the province of Quang Tri. What
does your dad do?" Trig asked.
"My dad was a rancher. He worked like hell and never made a penny. He
died poor."
"But he died clean. In our family, we don't work. The money works. We
play. Working for something you believe in, that's the best. That's
the maximum charge. And if you can have a good time at it, man, that's
really cool."
Donny said nothing. But a darkness settled on him: he was here as a
Judas, wasn't he? He'd sell Trig out for thirty pieces of silver, or
rather three stripes and no trip back to the Land of Bad Things. He
looked over at Trig.
The wind was blowing the slightly older man's hair back lushly, like a
cape streaming behind a horseman. Trig wore Ray-Ban sunglasses and had
one of those high, beautiful foreheads. He looked like a young god on
a good day.
This guy was Weather Underground? This guy would bomb things, blow up
people, that sort of stuff? It didn't seem possible. By no reach of
his imagination could he see Trig as conspiratorial. He was too much
at the center of things; the world had given itself to him too easily
and too eagerly.
"Could you kill anyone?" Donny asked.
Trig laughed, showing white teeth.
"What a question! Wow, I've never been asked that one!"
"I killed seven men," Donny said.
"Well, if you hadn't have killed them, would they have killed you?"
"They were trying to!"
"So, there you have it. You made your decision. But
TIME TO HUNT 59
no, no, I couldn't. I just can't see it. For me, too much would die.
I'd be better off dead myself than having killed anything. That's just
what I believe. I've believed it ever since I looked in a house in
Stanleyville and saw twenty-five kids cut to pieces. I can't even
remember if it's because they were rebels or government. They probably
didn't know. Right then: no more killing. Stop the killing.
Just like the man says, all we are saying is give peace a chance."
"Well, it's hard to give it a chance when a guy is whacking away at you
with an AK-47."
Trig laughed.
"You have me there, partner," he said merrily.
But then he said, "Sure, anybody gets that kind of slack. But you
wouldn't have shot into that ditch in My Lai like those other guys did.
You would have walked away. Hot blood, cold blood. Hell, you're a
cowboy. You were trained to shoot in self-defense. You shot
morally."
Donny didn't know what to say. He just stared ahead glumly until in
the falling light they sped through downtown, past the big government
buildings still shiny in the fading sun, along the park-lined river and
at last reached West Potomac Park, just beyond Jefferson's classy
monument.
Welcome to the May Tribe.
On one side of the street, eight or nine cop cars were parked, and DC
cops in riot gear watched in sullen knots.
Across the street, equally sullen, knots of hippie kids in jeans and
oversized fatigue coats and long flowing hair watched back. It was a
stare-down; nobody was winning.
Trig's presence registered immediately and the kids parted, suddenly
grinning, and Trig drove the Triumph through them and down an asphalt
road that led toward the river, some playing fields, some trees. But
it was more like Sherwood Forest than any college campus. The meadows
streamed with kids in tents, kids at campfires, kids stoned, playing
Frisbee, singing, smoking, eating,
60 STEPHEN HUNTER
necking, bathing topless in the river. Port-a-pots had been put up
everywhere, bright blue and smelly.
"It's the gathering of the tribes," said Donny.
"It's the gathering of our generation," said Trig.
Being with Trig was like being with Mick Jagger. He knew everybody,
and at least three or four times he had to stop the Triumph and clamber
out as proteges came upon him for hugs or advice, for gossip or news,
or just to be with him. Astonishing thing: he remembered everybody's
name. Everybody's. He never fumbled, he never forgot, he never made a
mistake. He seemed to inflate in the love that was thrust upon him, by
boy and girl, man and woman, even some old bearded, be-sandaled
radicals who looked as if they'd probably protested World War I, too.
"Boy, they love you," Donny said.
"I've just been riding this circuit for seven long years.
You get to know folks. I am tired, though. After this weekend, I'm
going to crash at a friend's farm out in Germantown. Paint some birds,
blow some grass, just chill.
You ought to bring Julie, if she's still here, and come out.
Route thirty-five, north of Germantown. Wilson, the mailbox says.
Here, here, I think this is it."
Donny saw her almost immediately. She had camouflaged herself in some
kind of Indian full-length dress and wore her hair up, pinned with a
Navajo silver brooch. He had given it to her. It cost him $75.
The asshole kid Farris was near her, though he wasn't talking to her.
He was just watching her from a ways away, utterly mesmerized.
"Hi," Donny called.
"I brought Young Lochinvar from out of the West," Trig said.
"Oh, Donny."
"Enjoy," said Trig.
"Let me know when you want to get out of here. I'll go listen to Peter
Farris whine for a while."
But Donny wasn't listening. He looked full into the person that was
Julie, and his heart broke all over again.
TIME TO HUNT 61
Every time he saw her was like a first time. His breath came in little
spurts. He felt himself lighting up inside. He gave her a hug.
"I'm sorry I wasn't making much sense last night. I couldn't put it
together fast enough. You know how slow I am."
"Donny. I called the barracks."
"Sometimes those messages get through, sometimes they don't. I was
just all out of joint yesterday."
"What's going on?"
"Ah, it's too complicated to explain. It's nothing I can't handle. How
are you? God, sweetie, it's so good to see you."
"Oh, I'm fine. This camping stuff I could do without. I need a
shower. Where's the nearest Holiday Inn?"
"When this is all over, don't go back," he suddenly blurted, as if
finally seeing a path that made some sense.
"Stay here with me. We'll get married!"
"Donny! What about the big church wedding? What about all my mother's
friends? What about the country club?"
"I--" and then he saw she was joking, and she saw he was not.
"I want us to get married," he said.
"Right now."
"Donny, I want to marry you so much I think I'll die from it."
"We'll do it after this weekend thing."
"Yes. I'll marry you as soon as it's over. I'll move into an
apartment. I'll find work. I'll--" "No, then I want you to go home
and finish your degree.
I'll go for the early out and I'll move back home.
There'll be G.I. Bill money. I can work part-time. We'll get some
kind of married-student housing. It'll be great fun! And you can tell
your mother we'll have all the parties then, so we'll keep her happy
too."
"What brought this on?"
"Nothing. I just realized how important you are to me.
I didn't want this getting away from me. I was an asshole
62 STEPHEN HUNTER
last night. I wanted to put us back together as the first priority.
When I get out, I'll even help you in this peace stuff. We'll stop the
war. You and me. It'll be great."
They walked a bit, amid kids their own ages, but stoned and wild, just
celebrating the youthfulness of their lives in a great merry adventure
in Washington, DC, stopping the war and getting stoned and laid in the
same impulse.
Donny felt isolated from it terribly: he wasn't a part of it. And he
didn't feel as if he were a part of the Marine Corps anymore.
"Okay," he finally said, "I ought to be getting back.
We may be on alert. If not, can I come by tomorrow?"
"I'll try and break off tomorrow if nothing's happening here. We don't
even know ourselves what's going on. They say we're going to march to
the Pentagon over the weekend.
More theater."
"Please be careful."
"I will."
"I'll figure out what we have to do to get married legally.
It might be better to hide it from the Corps. They're all assholes.
Then after it's done, the paperwork will catch up to us."
"Donny, I love you. Ever since that date when you were with Peggy
Martin and I realized I hated her for being with you. Ever since
then."
"We will have a wonderful life. I promise."
Then he saw someone approaching him swiftly. It was Trig, with Peter
Farris and several other acolytes following in his wake.
"Hey," he called, "it just came over the radio. The Military District
of Washington has just declared a full alert and all personnel are
supposed to report to their duty stations."
"Oh, shit," said Donny.
"It's beginning," said Julie.
chapter five
A flare floated in the night. Lights throbbed and swept.
The gas was not so bad now, and the mood was generous, even
adventurous. It had the air of a huge camp-out, a jamboree of some
sort. Who was in charge? Nobody.
Who made these decisions? Nobody. The thing just happened, almost
miraculously, by the sheer osmosis of the May Tribe.
At the Pentagon almost nothing had happened. It was all theater. By
the time Julie and Peter and their knot of Arizona crusaders actually
got onto government property, the word had come back that the Army and
the police weren't arresting anybody and they could stand on the grass
in front of the huge ministry of war forever and nothing would happen.
It was determined by someone that the Pentagon itself wasn't a choke
point, and it made more sense, therefore, to occupy the bridges before
the morning rush hour and in that way close down the city and the
government. Others would besiege the Justice Department, another
favorite target of opportunity.
So now they marched along, past the big Marriott Hotel on the right,
toward the Fourteenth Street Bridge just ahead. Julie had never seen
anything like this: it was a movie, a battle of joy, a stage show,
every pep rally and football game she had ever been to. Excitement
thrummed in the moist air; overhead, police and Army helicopters
buzzed.
"God, have you ever seen anything like this?" she said to Peter.
He replied, "You can't marry him."
"Oh, Peter."
"You can't. You just can't."
"I'm going to marry him next week."
"You probably won't be out of jail next week."
64 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Then I'll marry him the week after."
"They won't let him."
"We'll do it secretly."
"There's too much important work to be done."
They passed the Marriott, maybe fifty abreast and a half-mile long, a
mass of kids. Who led them? A small knot at the front with bullhorns
of the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice; but more
realistically, their own instincts led them. The professional
organizers merely harnessed and marginally directed the generational
energy.
Meanwhile, the smell of grass rose in the air, and the sound of
laughter; now and then a news helicopter would float down from the sky,
hover and plaster them with bright light. They'd wave and dance and
chant.
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR
WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR
or
HO, HO, HO CHI MINH
N-L-FIS GONNA WIN
or
END THE WAR NOW
END THE WAR NOW.
That's when the first tear gas hit.
It was acrid and biting and its overwhelming power to disorient could
not be denied. Julie felt her eyes knit in pain, and the world
suddenly began to whirl about. The air itself became the enemy.
Screams rose, and the sound of panic and confusion spread. Julie
dropped to her knees, coughing hard. Nothing existed for a second but
the pain searing her lungs and the immense crushing power of the gas.
But she stayed there with a few others, though Peter
TIME TO HUNT 65
had disappeared somehow. The evil stuff curled around them, their eyes
now gushing tears. But she thought: I will not move. They cannot make
me move.
Suddenly someone arrived with a bucket full of white washcloths soaked
in water.
"Breathe through this," he screamed, an old vet of this drill, "and it
won't be so hard. If we don't break, they'll fall back. Come on, be
strong, keep the faith."
Some kids fell back, but most just stood there, trying to deal with it.
Someone--no one could ever say who or why--took a step forward, then
another one, and in a second or so those that remained had joined. The
mass moved forward, not on the assault and certainly not to charge, but
just out of the conviction that as young people nothing could deter
them because they were so powerful.
As Julie moved she saw ahead a barricade of DC police cars, their
lights flashing, and behind them Army soldiers, presumably a contingent
of the 7,500 National Guardsmen called up to much hoo-hah in the
newspapers.
They had an insect look, their eyes giant, their snouts long and
descending, like powerful mandibles, their flesh black. The masks, she
realized. They were wearing gas masks, all of them. This infuriated
her.
"You are warned to disperse!" came an amplified voice.
"You are hereby warned to disperse. We will arrest those who do not
disperse. You do not have a parade permit."
"Oh, like that's really crucial," said someone with a laugh.
"Shit, if I'd realized that I never would have come!"
A helicopter floated overhead. To the right, over the Potomac, the sun
began to rise. It was about six, Julie saw, looking at her watch.
"Keep moving!" came a cry.
"One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war!"
Julie hated to curse; she hated it when Donny cursed, but standing
there in the astringent aftermath of the gas, her eyes bawling, her
heart knotted in anger, she picked it up and was not alone.
66 STEPHEN HUNTER
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR
WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR
It was like an anthem, a battle cry. The kids that were left took
their strength from it and began to move more quickly. They came
together in the strobing lights of the police cars and the running
lights of the circling copters.
Those who'd fled regained their heroism, stopped and, moved by the
strength of the few who remained, turned and themselves began to
march.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
More CS gas canisters came at them from the barricade, evil little
grenades spurting viscous clouds of the stuff as they bounced. But the
kids now knew it wouldn't kill them and that the wind would come to
thin it out and take its sting away.
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR
WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR
Julie screamed with all her strength. She cried for pale, poor Donny
in his hospital bed, a sack of plasma over him, his face drawn, his
eyes vacant because of the death that had passed through him. She
screamed for the other boys in that awful place, without legs or hopes,
faces gone, feet gone, penises gone; she cried for the girls she knew
would be bitter forever because their fiances or brothers or husbands
had come home in plastic bags dumped in wooden boxes; she cried for her
father who preached of "duty" but himself had sold insurance through
World War II; she cried for all the beaten kids in all the
demonstrations in the past seven years; she cried for the little girl
running from the napalm cloud, naked and afraid; she cried for the
little man with his hands tied behind him who was shot in the head and
fell to the ground, squirting blood.
TIME TO HUNT 67
ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR
WE DON'T WANT YOUR FUCKING WAR
They were all moving forward now, hundreds, thousands.
They were at the police cars, they were beyond the police cars, the
police were fleeing, the National Guard was fleeing.
"Hold it! Hold it, goddammit!" someone was shouting as the melee
halted. Before them was clear bridge, all the way to the Jefferson
Memorial. In the rising light, the Capitol stood before them, and over
some trees the spire of the Washington Monument and off to the right
the Alphaville Blocks of the new HEW complex. But there were no cars
anywhere, and no cops.
"We did it," somebody said.
"We did it!"
Yes, they had. They had taken the bridge, won a great victory. They
had driven the state away. They had claimed the Fourteenth Street
Bridge for the Coalition for Peace and Justice.
They had won.
"We did it," someone was saying next to her; it was Peter.
ncos and squad leaders up front ASAP. NCOs and squad leaders up
front
ASAP!"
The men milled loosely on the broad esplanade of closed-down Route 95
about a half mile on the DC side of the Fourteenth Street Bridge,
behind a barricade of jeeps, police cars, deuce-and-a-halfs. Jefferson
watched in marble splendor from the portside, amid a canopy of dogwoods
and from behind a cage of marble columns. A pale lemon sky oversaw the
scene, and helicopters fluttered through it, making far more noise than
their importance seemed to warrant. It looked like a fifties movie,
the one where the monster has attacked the city and the police and
military set up barricades to impede its progress while in some lab,
white-coated men labor to invent a secret weapon to bring it down.
68 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Napalm," said Crowe helpfully.
"I'd use napalm. Kill about two thousand kids. Roast 'em nice and
tasty-chewie.
Make Kent State look like a picnic. Boy, the war'd be over
tomorrow."
"Don't think the lifers haven't thought of it," said Donny, as he left
to head for the command conference.
He slipped away from Third Squad, slid through other squads and
platoons of young men festooned comically for war, exactly as he was,
who seemed to feel equally foolish with the huge pots banging on their
heads. That was the odd thing about a helmet: when it's not necessary,
it feels completely ludicrous; when it is necessary, it feels like a
gift from God. This was one of the former occasions.
Donny reached the informal conclave where the barracks commander stood
with three men in jumpsuits that said justice deft on the back, some
other officials, cops, firemen and some confused DC Guard officers, of
whom it was said their panic had led to the rout on the bridge.
"All right, all right, people," the colonel said.
"Sergeant Major, all of 'em here?"
The sergeant major made a quick head count of his NCOs and from each
man received a nod to signify that the men under him had arrived; it
was done professionally in about thirty seconds.
"All present, sir."
"Good," said the colonel, climbing into a jeep to give him elevation
over his subordinates, and speaking in the loud, clear voice of
command.
"All right, men. As you know, at 0400 hours a large mass of
demonstrators commandeered the right-hand span of the Fourteenth Street
Bridge, effectively closing it down. The traffic is tied up back
beyond Alexandria. The other bridges have been cleared by this time,
but we've got a choke point. The Department of Justice has requested
the Marine Corps to assist in clearing the bridge, and we've been
authorized by our command structure for that mission. So let me tell
you what that means: we will
TIME TO HUNT 69
clear the bridge, we will do it quickly and professionally and with a
minimum of force and damage. Understood?"
"Aye, aye, sir," came the cry.
"I want A Company and B Company formed up line abreast, with
Headquarters Company in reserve to go by squads to the line as needed.
We do not have arrest powers and I do not want any arrests made. We
will advance under cover of moderate CS gas with bayonets fixed but
sheathed. Under no circumstances will those bayonets be used to draw
blood. We will prevail not by force but by good order and solid
professionalism. A DC Police mass-arrest unit will follow behind,
detaining and shipping those demonstrators who do not disperse. Our
limit of advance will be the far end of the bridge."
"Live ammo, sir?"
"Negative, negative, I say again, negative. No live ammo. Nobody will
be shot today. These are American kids, not VC. We will move out at
0900. Company commanders and senior NCOs, I want you to hold a quick
meeting and get your best squads into the line at the point of contact.
This is a standard DOD anti-riot drill. All right, people, let's be
professional."
"Dismissed!"
Donny made it back to his squad, as around him other squad leaders were
reaching their people. With the weird -sensation of a large herbivore
awakening, the unit was picking itself up, beginning to form up as each
smaller element got instructions. There was some cheering, moderated
by ambiguity, but nevertheless a simple expression of the soldier or
Marine's preference for doing anything rather than nothing.
"We'll be in that arrow-formation, platoons-abreast thing," Donny
explained.
"The sergeant major will be counting cadence."
"Bayonets?"
"On but sheathed. Minimum force. We're moving these people out of
here by our presence. No ammo, no clubbing, just solid Marine
professionalism, got it?"
70 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Masks?"
"I said masks, Crowe, weren't you listening? Some CS will be fired."
He looked about. The sergeant major had set up a hundred yards beyond
the trucks and now the Marines were streaming to him to form up at the
line of departure. Donny looked at his watch. It was 0850.
"All right, let's assemble and march to position. Form up on me, now!"
His men rose to him and found their places. He marched them at the
double time to a formation that was putting itself together on the
broad white band of empty highway.
-Teter held her hand. He was pale but determined, his face still teary
from the gas.
"It'll be okay," he kept saying, almost more to himself than to her.
There was something so sad about him, she had a tender impulse to draw
him toward her and comfort him.
"All right," came the amplified voice, "WTOP has a camera in the sky
and we've just heard that the Marines are forming up to come and move
us."
"Oh, this is going to be merry," said Peter.
"The Marines."
"I want to counsel everybody; you don't want to resist or you may get
clubbed or beaten. Don't yell at them, don't taunt them. Just go
limp. Remember, this is your bridge, it's not theirs. We've liberated
it. We own it. Hell, no, we won't go."
"Hell, no, we won't go," repeated Peter.
"That's the evil part," Julie said bitterly.
"They don't come themselves, the guys in the offices who make it
happen.
They send in Donny, who's just trying to do his job.
He gets the shitty end of the stick."
But Peter wasn't listening.
"Here they come," he said, for ahead, out of the blur, they could now
see them drawing ever closer in a phalanx of rectitude and camouflage:
the United States Marine
TIME TO HUNT 71
Corps advancing at the half-trot, rifles at the high port, helmets
even, gas masks turning them to insects or robots. Hell, no, we won't
go! came the chant, guttural, from the heart. Marines, go home! Then
again, Hell, no, we won't go!
The unit advanced at the half-trot, to the sergeant major's urgent
cadence, Hup-two-THREE-four, Hup-two THREE-four, and Donny's squad
stayed tight in the crowd-control formation, a little to the left of
the point of the arrow.
Jogging actually helped Donny feel a little better; he settled into a
steady rhythm, and the constellation of equipment bounded sloppily on
his body. His helmet banged, riding the spongy straps of the helmet
liner with a kind of liquid mushiness. He felt the sweat run down
inside his mask, catch irritatingly at his eyelashes, then flood into
his eyes. But it didn't matter.
Through the lens of his mask the world seemed slightly tarnished,
slightly dirty. Ahead, he could see the mass of demonstrators sitting
on the bridge as if it were theirs, looking fiercely at them.
Hell, no, we won't go! alternating with Marines, go home! Marines, go
home! rose to fill the air, but it sounded tinny and idiotic. They
closed on the crowd until but fifty yards away, then the sergeant
major's yell reached out to stop them.
"Ready, Halt!"
The two young Americas faced each other on the bridge. On the one
side, about two thousand young people, ages fourteen through possibly
thirty, most around twenty, college America, the nonconformism of
complete conformism: all wore jeans and T-shirts, all had long,
flowing, beautiful hair, all were pale, intense, high on grass or
sanctimony, standing and drawing strength from one another under a
bristle of placards that proclaimed people's coalition for peace and
justice and other, ruder
72 STEPHEN HUNTER
signs, like gis, join us! or stop the war! or fuck the war!
Or RMN MUST GO!
The other America, 650 strong, wore the green twill of duty, three
companies of Marines, average age twenty also, armed with unloaded
rifles and sheathed bayonets.
They were earnest and, behind the rubber and plastic of their masks,
clean-shaven and short-haired, yet in their way just as conflicted and
just as frightened as the kids they faced. They were essentially the
same kids, but nobody noticed. Behind them were cop cars, ambulances,
fire engines, deuce-and-a-halfs, their own Corpsmen, news reporters,
Justice Department officials. But they were the ones out front.
A man in the blue jumpsuit of the Justice Department stepped beyond the
Marine formation. He had a bullhorn.
"This is an illegal parade. You do not have a parade permit. You are
hereby ordered to disperse. If you do not disperse, we will clear the
bridge. You are hereby ordered to disperse."
"Hell, no, we won't go!" came the response.
When it had died down after a sweaty bit, the Justice official
reiterated his position, adding, "We will commence with CS gas
operations in two minutes and the Marine Corps will move you out. You
are hereby ordered to disperse!"
A moment of quiet followed and then a young man stepped forward,
screamed, "Here's your fucking parade permit!" then pivoted smartly,
bent, and peeled down his jeans to reveal two white half moons of
ass.
"God, he's beautiful," said Crowe through his mask, but loudly enough
for the squad to hear.
"I want him!"
"Crowe, shut up," said Donny.
The man from the Justice Department departed. The sun was high, the
weather sticky and heavy. Overhead, helicopters hovered, their rotors
kicking up the only turbulence.
Another amplified voice, this from the demonstrators as the older
people warned the kids.
TIME TO HUNT 73
"Do not attempt to pick up tear gas canisters as they will be very hot.
Do not panic. The gas is not contained and it will disappear very
quickly."
"Gas!" came a command.
Six soft plops marked the firing of six DC Police gas guns, and the
missiles skittered across the pavement leaking white fumes, spun,
rolled and slid raggedly along. The point of firing them into the
ground was to bounce them into the crowd at low velocity rather than
firing them into people at high, possibly killing velocity.
"Gas!" the command came again, and six more CS shells were fired.
The sergeant major's scream carried through the air:
"Assault arms and with that the rifles left the cross-chest position of
carry and were brought around the right side of the body, stocks wedged
under right arms and locked in, muzzles with sheathed bayonets angled
outward at forty-five degrees to the ground.
"Prepare to advance came the command.
Only Crowe's rifle wavered, probably out of excitement, but otherwise
the muzzles lanced outward from the formation. Donny could sense the
crowd of demonstrators drawing back, gathering somehow, then re
inflating with purpose. Tear gas drifted loosely amid their ranks. It
was just a crowd, identities lost in the blur and the gas.
Was Julie over there?
"Advance!" came the final command, and the Marines began to stomp
ahead.
Here we go, thought Donny.
They looked like Cossacks. The rank was green, slanted in two angles
away from the point, an arrowhead of boys, remorseless and helmeted,
their facial features vanished behind their masks.
Julie looked through her tears for Donny, but it was useless. The
Marines all looked the same, staunch defenders of whatever, in their
sharp uniforms with their helmets and now their guns, which jutted out
like threats. A cloud
74 STEPHEN HUNTER
of tear gas washed over her, crunching her eyes in pain;
she coughed, felt the tears run hot and fluid down her face, and rubbed
at them, then dipped for her wet washcloth and wiped the chemical from
them.
"Assholes!" said Peter bitterly, enraged at the troops advancing on
him. He was trembling so hard he was locked in place, his knees
wobbling desperately. But he wasn't going to move.
"Assholes!" he repeated as the Marines closed in at a steady pace.
J-Jonny was in the lead, solid as a rock; next to him, on the left,
Crowe seemed strong. They clomped forward to a steady beat of cadence
from the sergeant major, and through the jiggling stain of his dirty
lenses, Donny watched as the crowd grew closer. The sergeant major's
cadence drove them on; tear gas wafted through the chaos; overhead a
helicopter swept low and its turbulence drove the gas more quickly,
into whirlwinds and spirals, until it rushed like water across the
bridge.
"Steady on the advance!" screamed the sergeant major.
Details suddenly swam at Donny: the faces of the scared kids before
him, their scrawniness, their physical weakness and paleness, how many
of them were girls, the cool way the leader exhorted them with his
bullhorn and that shocking moment when at last the two groups
clashed.
"Steady on the advance!" screamed the sergeant major.
Maybe it was like some ancient battle, legionnaires against Visigoths,
Sumerians against Assyrians, but Donny sensed a great issue of physical
strength, of pure force of will as expressed through bodies, when the
two came together. There was no striking; no Marine lifted his rifle
and drove through for a butt stroke; no blade came unsheathed and leapt
forward into flesh. Rather, there was just a crush as the two masses
crunched together; it
TIME TO HUNT 75
felt more like football than war, that moment when the lines collide
and there are a dozen contests of strength all around you and you lay
what you've got against someone else and hope you get full-body weight
against him and can lift him from his feet.
Donny found himself hard against not an enemy lineman or a Visigoth but
a girl of about fourteen, with freckles and red, frizzy hair and
braces, headband, tie-dyed T-shirt, breastless and innocent. But she
had more hate on her face than any Visigoth ever, and she whacked him
hard on the helmet with her placard, which, he read as it descended,
stated make war no more!
The placard smacked him, its thin wood broke and it slipped away. He
felt his body ramming the girl's and then she was gone, either knocked
back or pushed down and stepped over. He hoped she wasn't hurt; why
hadn't she just fled?
More tear gas drifted in. Screams arose. Melees had broken out
everywhere as demonstrators leaned against Marines, who leaned back.
One could feel strain as the two leaned and leaned and tried to press
the other into panic.
It only lasted a second, really; then the demonstrators broke and fled
and Donny watched as they emptied the bridge, leaving behind
port-a-pots and sandals and squashed Tab cans and water buckets, the
battlefield detritus of a vanquished enemy. There seemed no point in
pursuing.
"Marines, stand easy," the sergeant major yelled.
"Masks off."
The masks came off and the boys sucked hard at the air.
"Good job, good job. Anybody hurt?" yelled the colonel.
But before anybody could answer, a considerable ruckus arose to the
left. Policemen were clustered around the railing of the bridge and
the word soon reached the
76 STEPHEN HUNTER
Marines that someone had panicked as they had approached, and jumped
off. A police helicopter hovered low, an ambulance arrived and
paramedics got out urgently.
Police boats were called, but it took only a few minutes to make it
clear that someone was dead.
chapter Six
The scandal played out pretty much as expected, depending on the
perspective of the account.
girl, 17, killed in demonstration, the Post headlined.
The more conservative Star said, demonstrator dies in bridge mix-up.
marines murder girl, 17, argued the Washington City Paper.
No matter; for the Marine Corps the news was very bad indeed. Seven
liberal House members demanded an investigation into the matter of Amy
Rosenzweig, seventeen, of Glencoe, Illinois, who had evidently panicked
in the tear gas and the approach of the Marines and climbed over the
railing. Before anybody could reach her, though several young Marines
tried, she was gone. Walter Cron-kite appeared to generate a small
tear in his left eye.
Gordon Petersen, of WTOP, developed a catch in his voice as he
discussed the incident with his co-anchor, Max Robinson.
why marines? wondered the Post two days later on its editorial page.
U.S. Marines are among the world's most feared fighting forces, an
elite who have honored their country and their service in hostile
environments since 1776. But what were they doing on the 14th Street
Bridge May I?
Surely, with their esprit de corps and constant immersion in the theory
and practice of land warfare at its most savage, they were a poor
choice for the Justice Department to deploy against peaceful
demonstrators who had taken up a harmless "occupation" of the bridge as
an expression of the long-precious tradition of civil disobedience. The
D.C.
police force, the Park Police, or even Guardsmen
78 STEPHEN HUNTER
from the District's own unit, all riot-trained and all experienced in
dealing with demonstrations, would have been preferable to combat
infantrymen, who tend to perceive all confrontations as us against
them.
The place for the Marines is on the battlefields of the world, and the
parade ground of the Eighth and I barracks, not on American streets. If
the tragedy of Amy Rosenzweig teaches us anything, it teaches us
that.
As for the Eighth and I Marines, in the immediate aftermath they were
trucked back to the barracks, where they remained on alert and in
isolation for two days.
Teams from the FBI and the District Police and the U.S.
Park Police worked over the members of Alpha Company, Second Platoon,
Second Squad, who'd been on the extreme left wing of the crowd control
formation, and who had seen the girl hanging on for dear life. Three
of them had actually dropped their rifles, thrown away their masks and
helmets and rushed to her, but in the instant before they reached her,
she closed her eyes and gave her soul to God, relaxing backward into
space. They got to the railing in time to see her hit the water
thirty-five feet below; they got DC Police there within seconds, and
within minutes a DC rescue boat was on the scene. If they'd had a
rope, they would have rappelled down to the water themselves, but a
quickly arriving platoon sergeant had forbidden any of them to jump off
the bridge in attempts to rescue. It was just too high. And it
wouldn't have mattered. When she was located thirteen minutes later,
it became quickly apparent that Amy's neck had been broken by the
impact of striking the water at an extreme angle. A report later
exonerated the Marines and made it clear that no actual force had been
applied to Amy. The Marines said she chose to martyr herself; the
media said the Marines killed her. Who knew the truth?
On the third day, they arrested Crowe.
TIME TO HUNT 79
Rather, under small arms and under the supervision of two officers from
the Naval Investigation Service, Lieutenant Commander Bonson and Ensign
Weber, four Marine military policemen marched into the barracks where
he and the rest of B company were relaxing while maintaining
ready-alert status, and put him in handcuffs.
Captain Dogwood and the battalion colonel watched it happen.
Then Lieutenant Commander Bonson came up to Donny and said in a loud
voice, "Good job, Corporal Fenn. Damn fine work."
"Good work, Fenn," said Weber.
"You got our man."
In the aftermath, a space seemed to spread around Donny. He felt it
open up, as if oceans of atmosphere had been vacuumed out of the area
between himself and his squad and others in the platoon. Nobody would
meet his eyes. Some looked at him in horror. Others merely left the
vicinity, went into other squad bays or outside to lounge near the
trucks.
"What the hell did he mean?" asked Platoon Sergeant Case.
"Uh, I don't know. Sergeant," Donny said.
"Uh, I don't know what the hell they were talking about."
"You had contact with MS?"
"They talked to me."
"About what?"
"Ah. Well," and Donny swallowed, "they had some security concerns and
somehow I got--" "Let me tell you something, goddammit, Fenn. If it
happens in my platoon, you come tell me about it! You got that? This
ain't a one-man goddamn motherfucking operation. You come tell me,
Fenn, or by God I will make your young sorry ass sorry you didn't!"
The man's blazing spit flew into Donny's face and his eyes lit up like
flares. A vein throbbed on his forehead.
"Sergeant, they told me--" "I don't give a monkey's fuck what they told
you,
80 STEPHEN HUNTER
Fenn. If it happens in my platoon, I have to know about it, or you
ain't worth pig shit to me. Copy that, Corporal?"
"Yes, Sergeant."
"You and me, boy, we got some serious talk ahead."
Donny swallowed.
"Yes, Sergeant."
"Now, get these men off their asses. I'm not going to have them
sitting around all goddamn day like they just won the fucking war all
by themselves. Get 'em on work detail, drill 'em, do something with
them."
"Yes, Sergeant."
"And you and I will talk later."
"Yes, Sergeant."
Donny turned in the wake of Sergeant Case's departure, which was more
like an ejection from a jet fighter than a normal retrograde
adjustment.
"Okay," he said to the squad.
"Okay, let's get outside and run through some riot control drills.
There's no point just sitting in here."
But nobody moved.
"All right, come on, guys. I'm not shitting around here.
You heard the man. We have an order."
They just stared at him. Some looked hurt, the rest disgusted.
"I didn't do anything," Donny said.
"I talked to some Navy lifers and that's all."
"Donny, if I flash the peace sign in a bar, will you turn me in to
NIS?" someone asked.
"All right, fuck that shit!" Donny bellowed.
"I don't have to explain anything to anybody! But if I did, I'd point
out I didn't rat anybody out. Now, get into your gear and let's get
the fuck outside or Case'll have us on a barracks party until 0400 next
Tuesday!"
The men got up, but their slow heaviness expressed their bitterness.
"Who'll take Crowe's place?" someone asked.
There was no answer.
TIME TO HUNT 81
Julie was released from the lockup at the Washington Coliseum at 4 p.m.
that same day, after forty-eight hours of incarceration with several
hundred of the more recalcitrant demonstrators. At least physically,
it was almost pleasant being arrested; the cops were old hands by this
time and as long as everybody cooperated, the process was all right.
She spent two nights on a cot in a field where the Washington Redskins
practiced when it was their season.
The seats of the junky old place rose above like a Pentecostal
cathedral from the twenties, and in the pen, all the kids had a good
time and nobody watched them too carefully. Grass was abundant; the
portable toilets were cleaner than the ones at Potomac Park. The
showers were never crowded and she got a good wash for the first time
since leaving Arizona in the Peace Caravan. Some of the boys caught
fantasy touchdown passes in what had to have been an end zone.
But no word at all from Donny. Had he been there on the bridge? She
didn't know. She'd looked for him, but then it'd all dissolved in
confusion and tears as more of the gas flooded in. She remembered
crumpling, rubbing her eyes desperately as the gas drifted by, and then
there was the shock of the Marines and she found herself looking into
the eyes of a boy, a child, really, big and booming behind his lenses;
she saw fear in them, or at least as much confusion as she herself
felt, and then he was by her and the Marine line moved on, and as she
watched, teams of policemen pounced on the demonstrators behind the
lines and led them away to buses. It was handled very simply, no big
deal at all to anybody concerned.
Only later, in the lockup, did the word come that a girl had somehow
died. Julie tried to work it out but could make no sense of it; the
Marines had seemed quite restrained, really; it wasn't anything like
Kent State. Still, it was an appalling weight. A girl was dead, and
for what?
Why was it necessary? In the lockup, they had a television, and Amy
Rosenzweig's young and tender face, freckled, under sprigs of reddish
hair, was everywhere. She
82 STEPHEN HUNTER
looked to Julie like a girl she'd grown up with, though she could not
remember seeing Amy amid the crowd, but that wasn't surprising, for
there had been thousands, and much confusion on the ground.
They let her out and she went back to the campground in Potomac Park.
It was like a Civil War encampment after Gettysburg: mostly empty now
that the big week was over and the kids in their multitudes had
returned to their campuses and the professional revolutionaries to
their secret cabals to plot the next move in the war against the war.
Litter was everywhere and the cops no longer bothered.
A few tents still stood, but the sense of a new youth culture had
vanished. There was no music and no campfires and the Peace Caravan
had departed. All, that is, except for Peter.
"Oh, hi."
"Hi, how are you?"
"Fine. I stayed behind. Jeff and Susie are driving the Micro back.
Everybody is with them. They'll be all right. I wanted to stay here,
see if you needed anything."
"I'm okay, Peter, really I am. Have you seen Donny at all?"
"Him? Jesus, you know what they did to that girl and you want to know
where he is?"
"Donny didn't do anything. Besides, I read the Marines tried to save
her."
"If there hadn't been any Marines, Amy would still be here," Peter said
obstinately, and then the two just looked at each other. He drew her
close and hugged her and she hugged back.
"Thanks for hanging around, Peter."
"Ah, it's okay. How was the Coliseum?"
"Okay. Not so bad. They finally reduced charges, parading without a
permit. They let us all go today."
"Well," he said.
"If you want me to drive you to the Marine Barracks or something, I
will. Whatever you want.
I have a VW from a guy. It's no problem."
"I'm supposed to get married this week."
TIME TO HUNT 83
"That's fine. That's cool. Good luck and God bless.
Let me see if I can help you in any way."
"I think I ought to hang here until I hear from Donny.
I don't know what happened to him."
"Sure," said Peter.
"That's a good idea."
1 he alert was finally cancelled at 1600 that afternoon, to the cheers
and relief of the companies. It took an hour or so to actually stand
down--that is, to return the rifles to the armory, to shed and repack
the combat gear in its appropriate place in the lockers, to shed the
utilities, bag them for the laundry, shower and shave. But by 1700,
when the work was done, the captain at last released his men--the
married to go home, the rest to relax in town or on base as they
preferred, with only a few left on skeleton duty, such as duty NCO or
armory watch.
That is, except for Donny.
He was done, and still in his cone of isolation, finally changing into
civvies--jeans and a white Izod shirt--when a runner came from
headquarters and said he was wanted ASAP. No, he didn't have to dress
in the uniform of the day.
Donny returned to Captain Dogwood's office, where Bonson and Weber
waited.
"Captain, we could take him to our offices. Or would you allow us to
use yours?"
"Yes, sir, go ahead," said Dogwood, who wanted to get home to see his
own wife and kids too.
"Stay here. Duty NCO will lock up when you're finished."
"Thank you, Captain," said Bonson.
So Donny was alone with them at last. They were in civilian clothes
this time, Weber looking like the Sigma Nu he'd undoubtedly been at
Nebraska, and the dour Bonson in slacks and a black sport shirt,
buttoned to the top. He looked almost like a priest of some sort.
"Coffee?"
"No, sir."
"Oh, sit down, Fenn. You don't have to stand."
84 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
Donny sat.
"We want to go over your testimony with you. Tomorrow there'll be an
arraignment, at the Judge Advocate General's Offices at the Navy Yard,
nothing elaborate. It's simply a preliminary to an indictment and
trial. Ten hundred.
We'll send a car. Your undress blues will be fine; I've arranged with
Captain Dogwood for you to be off the duty roster. Then I think we'll
give you a nice bit of leave.
Two weeks? By that time, we should be able to cut orders for your new
stripes. Sergeant Fenn. How does that sound?"
"Well, I--" "Tomorrow won't be hard, Fenn, I assure you. You'll be
sworn in and then you'll recount how at my instruction you befriended
Crowe and traveled with him into a number of peace movement functions.
You'll tell how you saw him in the presence of peace movement
strategists such as Trig Carter. You saw them in serious conversation,
intense conversation. You needn't testify that you overheard him
giving away deployment intelligence. Just tell what you saw, and let
the JAG prosecutor do the rest. It's enough for an indictment. He'll
have a lawyer, a JAG JG, who'll ask you some rote questions. Then it's
over and done and off you go."
Bonson smiled.
"Clean and simple," said Weber.
"Sir, I just ... I don't know what I can tell them.
There were hundreds of people at those parties. I saw no evidence of
conspiracy or deployment intelligence or--" "Now, Donny," said Bonson,
leaning forward and trying a smile.
"I know this is confusing for you. But trust me. You're doing your
country a great service. You're doing the Marines a great service."
"But I--" "Donny," said Weber, "they knew. They knew."
"Knew?"
"They knew we had Third Infantry committed in VirTIME TO HUNT 85
gin ia that the DC National Guard was a complete fuckup, the 101st
Airborne was stuck at Justice and the 82nd down at the Key Bridge and
that the cops were frazzled beyond endurance after eighty straight duty
hours. It was an elaborate game of chess--they move here, we
countermove; they move there, we countermove--all set up to get them to
that bridge where they'd be faced by United States Marines where the
chances of a big-time screw up on television were huge. And that's
just what they got: another martyr. Another catastrophe. The Justice
Department humiliated. A propaganda victory of immense proportions.
They're parading with Amy's name in London and Paris already. Give
them credit, it was as skillful a campaign as there was."
"Yes, sir, but we tried to save her. The girl panicked. It had
nothing to do with us."
"Oh, it had everything to do with you," said Bonson.
"They wanted her going off the bridge and the Marines to take the fall.
See how much better that is than the Washington Metro Police or some
third-rate National Guard unit, most of whom'd be demonstrating
themselves if they had the chance? No, they wanted a big scandal to be
laid right at the Marines' feet and that's what they got! And Crowe
gave it to them. Now, it is mandatory to get this fact before the
public, to show that we were betrayed from within and to move swiftly
to restore confidence in the system by eliminating the treason. And I
can't think of a more edifying contrast for the American public than
between Crowe, an Ivy League dropout with his fancy connections, and
you, a decorated combat veteran from a small Western town doing his
-duty. It'll be very educational!"
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
"Good, good. Ten hundred. Look sharp, Corporal.
You will impress the JAG officers, I know you will. You will inherit
your own future, the future you and I have been working on, I know
it."
"Yes, sir," said Donny.
86 STEPHEN HUNTER
They rose.
"All right, Weber, we're finished here. You relax, Fenn. Tomorrow is
your big day, the beginning of the rest of your life."
"I'll get the car, sir," said Weber.
"No, I'll get it. You--you know; tell him what's cooking."
"Yes, sir."
Bonson left the two younger men alone.
"Look, Fenn, I'm the bad cop. I'm here to give you the bad news. I've
got photos of you smoking grass with Crowe, okay? Man, they can really
nail you with them. I mean big time. I told you this guy Bonson was
cold. He is beaucoup cold, you know? So give him what he wants, which
is another bad boy's scalp to hang up on his lodge Dole. He's sent a
bunch to the "Nam, and he wants to send more. I don't know why, what
he is driving at, but I know this: he will rotate your ass back to the
Land of Bad Things and not ever even think about it again. He's got
you cold. It's you or it's Crowe. Man, don't throw your life away for
nothing, dig?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good man, Fenn. Knew you'd see it our way."
At 2300, Donny just walked out the front door of the barracks. Who was
there to stop him? Some corporal in first platoon had duty NCO that
night and he was scribbling in the duty logs in the first sergeant's
office as Donny passed.
Donny walked to the main gate and waved at the sentry there, who waved
him past. Technically, the boy was to look for liberty papers, but in
the aftermath of an alert, such niceties of the Marine way had fallen
aside. Donny just walked, crossed I Street, headed down the way, took
a left, and there found, un bothered his 1963 Impala. He climbed in,
turned the key and drove away.
It didn't take him long to reach Potomac Park, site of the recently
abandoned May Tribe. A few tents still stood,
TIME TO HUNT 87
a few fires still burned. He left his car along the side of the road
and walked into the encampment, asked a few questions and soon found
the tent.
"Julie?" he called.
But it was Peter who came out.
"She's sleeping," he said.
"Well, I need to see her."
"It would be better if she slept. I'm watching out for her."
The two faced each other; both wore jeans and tennis shoes. Jack
Purcells. But Donny's were white, as he washed them every week.
Peter's didn't look as though he had washed them since the fifties.
Donny wore a madras short-sleeved button-down shirt; Peter had some
kind of tie-dyed T-shirt on, baggy as a parachute, going almost to his
knees. Donny's hair was short to the point of neuroticism, with a
little pie up top; Peter's was long to the point of neuroticism, a mass
of curly sprigs and tendrils.
Donny's face was lean and pure; Peter's wore a bristle of scraggly red
beard and a headband.
"That's very cool," said Donny.
"But I have to see her.
I need her."
"I need her too."
"Well, she hasn't given you anything. She's given me her love."
"I want her to give me her love."
"Well, you'll have to wait awhile."
"I'm tired of waiting."
"Look, this is ridiculous. Go away or something."
"I won't leave her unguarded."
"Who do you think I am, some kind of rapist or killer?
I'm her fiance. I'm going to marry her."
"Peter," said Julie, coming out of the tent, "it's all right. Really,
it's all right."
"Are you sure?"
Julie looked tired; still, she was a beautiful young woman, with hair
the color of straw and a body as lean and straight as an arrow, and
brilliance showing behind
88 STEPHEN HUNTER
her bright blue eyes. Both boys looked at her and recommitted to her
love again.
"Are you okay?" Donny asked.
"I was in the lockup at the Coliseum."
"Oh, Christ."
"It was fine; it wasn't anything bad."
"You killed a girl," said Peter.
"We didn't kill anyone. You killed her, by telling her being on that
bridge mattered and that we were rapists and murderers. You made her
panic; you made her jump.
We tried to save her."
"You fucking asshole, you killed her. Now, you're a big tough guy and
you can kick the shit out of me, but you killed her!"
"Stop screaming. I never killed anyone who didn't have a rifle and
wasn't trying to kill me or a buddy."
"Peter, it's okay. You have to leave us alone."
"Christ, Julie."
"You have to leave us."
"Ahhh ... all right. But don't say--anyhow, you're a lucky guy, Fenn.
You really are."
He stormed away in the darkness.
"I never saw him so brave," said Julie.
"He loves you. So much."
"He's just a friend."
"I'm sorry I didn't get here earlier. We were on alert.
There was a lot of shit because of Amy. I'm very sorry about Amy, but
we didn't have a thing to do with it."
"Oh, Donny."
"I want to marry you. I love you. I miss you."
"Then let's get married."
"There's this thing," Donny said.
"This thing?"
"Yeah. By the way, I've technically deserted. I'm UA. Unauthorized
absence. I'll be reported tomorrow at morning muster. They'll do
something to me probably.
But I had to see you."
"Donny?"
TIME TO HUNT 89
"Let me tell you about this thing."
And so he told it: from his recruitment to his attempts to enter into a
duplicitous friendship with Crowe to his arrival at the party to his
strange behavior that night until, finally, the action on the bridge,
Crowe's arrest and tomorrow's responsibilities.
"Oh, God, Donny, I'm so sorry. It's so awful." She went to him and in
her warmth for just a second he lost all his problems and was Donny
Fenn of Pima County all over again, the football hero, the big guy that
everybody thought so highly of, who could do a 40 in four-seven, and
bench press 250, yet take pride in his high SATs and the fact that he
was decent to his high school's lowliest creeps and toads and never was
mean to anybody, because that wasn't his way. But then he blinked, and
he was back in the dark in the park, and it was only Julie, her warmth,
her smell, her sweetness, and when he left her embrace, it was all back
again.
"Donny, haven't you done enough for them? I mean, you got shot, you
lay in that horrible hospital for six months, you came back and did
exactly what they said.
When does it end?"
"It ends when you get out. I don't hate the Corps. It's not a Corps
thing. It's these Navy guys, these super-patriots, who have it all
figured out."
"Oh, Donny. It's so awful."
"I don't work that way. I don't like that stuff at all.
That's not me. Not any of it."
"Can't you talk to somebody? Can't you talk to a chaplain or a lawyer
or something? Do they even have the right to put you through that?"
"Well, as I understand it, it's not an illegal order. It's a
legitimate order. It's not like being asked to do something that's
technically wrong, like shoot kids in a ditch. I don't know who I
could talk to who wouldn't say. Just do your duty."
"And they'll send you back to Vietnam if you don't testify."
90 STEPHEN HUNTER
"That's the gist of it, yeah."
"Oh, God," she said.
She turned from him and walked a step or two away.
Across the way, she could see the Potomac and the dark far shore that
was Virginia. Above it, a tapestry of stars unscrolled, dense and
deep.
"Donny," she finally said, "there's only one answer."
"Yeah, I know."
"Go back. Do it. That's what you have to do to save yourself."
"But it's not like I know he's guilty. Maybe he doesn't deserve to get
his life ruined just because--" "Donny. Just do it. You said
yourself, this Crowe is not worth a single thing."
"You're right," Donny finally said.
"I'll go back, I'll do it, I'll get it over. I'm eleven and days, I'll
get out inside a year with an early out, and we can have our life.
That's all there is to it. That's fine, that's cool. I've made up my
mind."
"No, you haven't," she said.
"I can tell when you're lying. You're not lying to me; you never have.
But you're lying to yourself."
"I should talk to someone. I need help on this one."
"And I'm not good enough?"
"If you love me, and I hope and pray you do, then your judgment is
clouded."
"All right, who, then?"
Who,indeed?
There was only one answer, really. Not the chaplain or a JAG lawyer,
not Platoon Sergeant Case or the first sergeant or the sergeant major
or the colonel or even the Commandant, USMC.
"Trig. Trig will know. We'll go see Trig."
Bitterly, from afar, Peter watched them. They embraced, they talked,
they appeared to fight. She broke away. He went after her. It killed
him to sense the intimacy they shared. It was everything he hated in
the world--the
TIME TO HUNT 91
strong, the handsome, the blond, the confident, just taking what was
theirs and leaving nothing behind.
He watched them, finally, go toward Donny's old car and climb in, his
mind raging with anger and counterplots, his energy unbearably high.
Without willing it, he raced to the VW Larry Frankel had lent him. He
turned the key, jacked the car into gear and sped after them. He
didn't know why, he didn't think it would matter, but he also knew he
could not help but follow them.
chapter seven
Peter almost missed them. He had just cleared a crest when he saw the
lights of the other car illuminate a hill and a dirt road beyond a
gate, then flash off. His own lights were off, but there was enough
moonlight to make out the road ahead. He pulled up to the gate and saw
nothing that bore any signal of meaning, except a mailbox, painted
white with the name wilson scribbled on it in black. He was on Route
35, about five miles north of Germantown.
What the hell were they up to? What did they know?
What was going on?
He decided to pull back a hundred yards, and just wait for a while.
Suppose they ran in there, and turned around and collided with him on
the road? That would be a total humiliation.
Instead, he decided just to watch and wait.
At the top of the hill, they turned the engine off. Below lay a farm
of no particular distinction, a nondescript house, a yard, a barn.
Propane tanks and old tractors, rusted out, lay in the yard; there was
no sound of animals.
The farm, in fact, looked like a Dust Bowl relic.
Yet something was going on.
Twin beams illuminated the yard, and Donny, with his unusually good
eyesight, could make out a van with its lights on, a shroud of dust,
and two men who were in the process of moving heavy packages of some
sort out from the barn into the van by the light of the headlamps.
"I think that's Trig," Donny said.
"I don't know who the other guy is."
"Shall we go down?"
Donny was suddenly unsure.
TIME TO HUNT 93
"I don't know," he said.
"I can't figure out what the hell is going on."
"He's helping his friend load up."
"At this hour?"
"Well, he's an irregular guy. The clock doesn't mean much to him."
That was true; Trig wasn't your nine-to-fiver by any interpretation.
"All right," said Donny.
"We'll walk down there. But you hang back. Let me check this out.
Don't let them see you until we figure what's happening. I'll call you
in, okay? I'm just not feeling good about this, okay?"
"You sound a little paranoid."
He did. Some hint of danger filled the air, but he wasn't sure what it
was, what it meant, where it came from. Possibly, it was the mere
strangeness of everything, the way nothing really made any sense.
Possibly it was his own fatigue, raw after the many hours on alert.
They headed down the hill, and Donny detoured them around the house,
until at last they came upon the two men from the rear. Donny could
see them better now, both working in jeans and denim shirts. They were
loading by wheelbarrow immensely awkward sacks of fertilizer into the
van, packing it very full. ammonium nitrate, the sacks said. Dust
that the wheelbarrow tires ripped up from the ground filled the air,
floating in large, shimmering clouds, which shifted through the beams
of the truck lights and in the yellower light that blazed from the barn
door. It lit wherever it could, coating the truck, the men,
everything. Both Trig and the other man wore red bandannas around
their faces.
Pushing Julie back into the dark, Donny stepped out and approached,
coughing at the stuff in the air as it filled his mouth and throat with
grit. He stepped farther; nobody noticed him.
"Trig?" he called.
Trig turned instantly at his name, but it was the other man who reacted
much faster, turning exactly to Donny,
94 STEPHEN HUNTER
his dark eyes devouring him. He had a full, tangled web of blond hair,
much thicker than Trig's, and was large and powerful next to Trig's
delicacy. They looked like a poet and a stevedore standing next to
each other.
"Trig, it's me, Donny. Donny Fenn." He stepped forward a little
hesitantly.
"Donny, Jesus Christ, I didn't expect you."
"Well, you said to come on out."
"I did, yeah. Come on in. Donny, meet Robert Fitzpat-rick, my old
friend at Oxford."
"Halloo," said Robert, pulling off his own bandanna to show a smile
that itself showed a mouthful of porcelain spades, a movie star's gleam
of a smile.
"So you're the war hero, eh? We've hopes for you, that we do! Need
boyos like you for the movement. We'll stop this bloody thing and get
the west field covered in horse shit and ammonium nitrate, if I'm a
judge of things. Roll up your sleeves, boy, and get to work. We could
use some back. The goddamned pickup broke down and I'm stuck with this
piece of shit to git the stuff out to the spreader. We're doing it at
night to beat the heat."
"Robert, he's been on some kind of alert for seventy-two hours. He
can't do manual labor," Trig said.
"No, I--" "No, we're almost done. It doesn't matter."
"You left so suddenly."
"Ah, one more demonstration. I was worn out. What did it prove? I've
lost my will for the movement."
"You'll get your will back, boyo," said the giant Fitzpatrick
heartily.
"I'll go get us a beer for the recharge.
You wait here, Donny Fenn."
"No, no, I just had a thing I wanted to talk over with Trig."
"Oh, Trig'll steer you right, no doubt about it," he said, his voice
light with laughter.
"It's a drink I'll be gittin', Trig. You lads talk."
With that he turned to the house and headed in.
"So what is it, Donny?"
TIME TO HUNT 95
"It's Crowe .. . they arrested him. Violations of the Uniform Code of
Military Justice. I'm supposed to testify against him in"--he looked
at his watch--"about seven hours."
"I see."
"Maybe you don't. I was asked to spy on him. That was my job. That's
why I got close to him. I was supposed to report to them on his
off-base activities and try and put him with known members of the peace
groups. That's why I was with him at the party that night; that's why
I came to your party. I was ordered to spy."
Trig stared at him for a while, then his face broke into the oddest
thing: a smile.
"Oh, that's your big secret? Man, that's if?" He laughed now, really
hard.
"Donny, wise up. You work for them. They can ask you to do that. If
they say so, that's your duty. That's the game in Washington these
days. Everybody's watching everybody. Everybody's got an agenda, a
plan, an idea they're trying to push or sell. I don't give a damn."
"It's worse. They have some idea you were Weather Underground and you
planned the whole thing. I mean, can you imagine anything so stupid?
He was feeding you deployment intelligence so the May Tribe could
humiliate the Corps."
"Boy, their imagination never fails to amaze me!"
"So what should I do, Trig? That's what I'm here to ask. About Crowe.
Should I testify?"
"What happens if you don't?"
"They've got some pictures of me smoking dope.
Funny, I don't smoke dope anymore, but I did to get in with him. They
could send me to Portsmouth. Or, more likely, the "Nam. They could
ship me back for a last go-round, even though I'm short."
"They're really assholes, aren't they?"
"Yeah."
"But that's neither here nor there, is it? This isn't
96 STEPHEN HUNTER
about them. We know who they are. This is about you.
Well, then it's easy."
"Easy?"
"Easy. Testify. For one reason, you can't let them get you killed.
What would that prove? Who benefits from the death of Lochinvar? Who
wins when Lancelot is slain?"
"I'm just a guy, Trig."
"You can't give yourself up to it. Somebody's got to come out on the
other side and say how it was."
"I'm just .. . I'm just a guy."
People were always insisting to Donny that he was somehow more than he
really was, that he represented something. He'd never gotten it. It
was just because he happened to be good-looking, but underneath he was
just as scared, just as ineffective, just as simple as anyone else, no
matter what Trig said.
"I don't know," said Donny.
"Is he guilty? That would matter."
"It doesn't matter. What matters is: you or him?
That's the world you have to deal with. You or him? I vote him. Any
day of the week, I vote him."
"But is he guilty?"
"I'm no longer in the inner circle. I'm sort of a roaming ambassador.
So I really don't know."
"Oh, you'd know. You'd know. Is he guilty?"
Trig paused.
Finally he said, "Well, I wish I could lie to you. But, goddammit, no,
no, he's not guilty. There is some weird kind of intelligence they
have at the top; I just get glimmerings of it. But I don't think it's
Crowe. But I'm telling you the truth: that doesn't matter. You should
dump him and get on with your life. If he's not guilty of that, he's
guilty of lots of other stuff."
Donny looked at Trig for a bit. Trig was leaning against the fender of
the van. He lifted a milk carton and poured it over his head, and
water gushed out, scraping rivulets in the dust that adhered to his
handsome face. Trig shook his
TIME TO HUNT 97
wet hair, and the droplets flew away. Then he turned back.
"Donny, for Christ's sake. Save your own life!"
reter was no good at waiting. He got out of the car and walked along
the shoulder of the road. It was completely dark and silent,
unfamiliar sensations to a young man who'd spent so much time OCS--on
city streets. Now and then he heard the chirp of a cricket; up above,
the stars towered and pinwheeled, but he was not into stars or insects,
so he noticed neither of these realities. Instead, he reached the
gate, paused a moment, and climbed over. He saw before him a faint
rise in the land, almost a small hill, and the dirt road that climbed
it. He knew if a car came over the hill and he were standing on that
road, he'd be dead-cold caught in the lights. So he walked a distance
from the road, then turned to head up the hill, figuring he could then
drop to the ground if Donny and Julie returned.
Gently, he walked up the hill, feeling as alone as that guy who had
walked on the surface of the moon. He reached the top of the hill and
saw the farmhouse below him. No sight of Julie but he saw Trig and
Donny slouched on the fender of a van in the yard between the house and
the barn, and they were chatting animatedly, relaxed and intimate.
There was no sign of danger, no sign of weirdness: just two new friends
bullshiting in the night.
But then small things began to seem off. What was Trig doing way out
here? What was this place? What was going on? It connected with
nothing in Peter's memory of Trig.
Puzzled, he stepped forward and almost tripped as he bumbled into
something.
Two figures rose before him.
Oh, shit, he thought, for they wore suits and one of them carried a
camera with a long lens.
Clearly they were feds, spying on Trig.
They had the pug look of FBI agents, with blunt faces
98 STEPHEN HUNTER
and crew cuts; one wore a hat. They did not look happy to be
discovered.
"W-who are you?" Peter asked in a quavering voice.
"What are you doing?"
"I don't think I can sell him out," said Donny.
"Donny, this isn't a Western. There are no good guys.
Do you hear me? This is real life, hardball style. If it's you or
Crowe, do not give yourself up for Crowe."
"I suppose that's the smart move," said Donny.
"So, there," said Trig.
"I made your decision easy for you. All you have to do is cooperate
with them. Come on, when the war is over, they'll reduce his sentence.
He may never even serve a day. They'll work some deal, he'll get out
and go on with the rest of his life. He won't even be upset."
Donny remembered that once upon a time, even Crowe had given him the
same advice. Roll over on me in a second, Donny, if it ever comes to
that. Somehow Crowe had known it would.
"Okay," he finally said.
"Do your duty, Donny. But think about what it costs you. Okay. Think
about how you feel now. Then when you get out, do me one favor, okay?
No matter what happens to me, promise me one thing."
Trig winced as if in pain in the hot light of the headlights, though
perhaps something had just gotten in his eye. There was an immense
familiarity to that look, the strain on his face, the set of it, the
clearness of vision.
And .. . And what?
"Sure," Donny said.
"Open your mind. Open your mind to the possibility that the power to
define duty is the power of life and death. And if people impose duty
on you, maybe they're not doing it for your best interests or the
country's best interests but for their own best interests. Okay,
Donny?
Force yourself to think about a world in which each man got to set his
own duty and no one could tell anyone what
TIME TO HUNT 99
to do, what was right, what was wrong; the only rules were the Ten
Commandments."
"I--" stammered Donny.
"Here," said Trig.
"I have something for you. I was going to mail it to you from
Baltimore, but this'll save me the postage and the fuss. It's no big
deal."
He went over to some kind of knapsack on the ground, fished around, and
came out with a folder, which he opened to reveal a piece of heavy
paper.
"Sometimes," he said, "when the spirit moves me, I'm even pretty good.
I'm much better at birds, but I did okay on this one. It's nothing."
Donny looked: it was a drawing on a creamy page trimmed from that
sketchbook Trig was always carrying, incredibly delicate and in a
spiderweb of ink, that depicted himself and Julie as they stood and
talked in the trees at West Potomac Park.
There was something special about it: he got them both, maybe not
exactly as a photograph, but somehow their love too, the way they
looked at each other, the faith they had in each other.
"Wow," said Donny.
"Wow, yourself. I dashed it off that night in my book.
It was neat, the two of you. Gives me hope for the world.
Now, go on, get the hell out of here, go back to your duty."
Trig drew him close, and Donny felt the warmth, the musculature, and
maybe something else, too: passion, somehow, oddly misplaced but
genuine and impressive.
Trig was actually crying.
Over the shoulders of the two FBI agents, Peter saw Donny and Trig
embrace, and then Donny stepped out of the light and was gone. He'd
head to his car, which Peter now saw was but fifty or so yards away. He
was screwed.
Donny would see him here with the two feds, who showed no sign at all
of moving, and he would have made an ass out of himself.
100 STEPHEN HUNTER
He felt despair rising in his gorge.
"I have to go," he said to the larger of the two plainclothes
officers.
"No," the man said back, and the other moved to embrace Peter, as if to
wrestle him to the ground. Peter squirmed out of the man's grip, but
he was grabbed and thrust to the ground.
The two men loomed over him.
"This is ridiculous," he said.
They seemed to agree. They looked at each other foolishly, not quite
sure what to do, but suddenly one of them pointed.
Then the engine of Donny's car came to life and its lights flashed
on.
The man with the camera pulled away from Peter, leaving the other, the
bigger, to lean on him, and ran toward the gate.
Well, did he help?" said Julie as they walked through the dark.
"Yeah," said Donny.
"Yes, he did. He really did. I've got it figured out now."
"Should I go meet him?"
"No, he's in a very strange mood. I'm not sure what's going on. Let's
just get out of here. I've got some things to do."
"What did he give you?"
"It's a picture. It's very nice. I'll show you later."
They walked through the dark, up the hill. Donny could see the car
ahead. He had an odd tremor suddenly, a sense of not being alone. It
was a freakish thing, sometimes useful in Indian country: that
sensation of being watched. He scanned the darkness for sign of threat
but saw nothing, only farmland under moon, no movement or anything.
"Who was that blond guy?" she asked.
"His pal Fitzpatrick. Big Irish guy. They were loading up to spread
fertilizer."
TIME TO HUNT 101
"That's strange."
"He said they decided to do the hard part of the job in the cool of the
night. Hell, it was only fertilizer. Who knows?"
"What was going on with Trig?"
"I don't know. He was, uh, strange is all I can call it.
He had the same look on his face that the Time photographer got, when
he was carrying that bleeding kid in from the cops in Chicago and his
own head was bleeding too.
He was very set, very determined, but somehow, underneath it all, very
emotional. He seemed like he was facing death or something. I don't
know why or what. It spooked me a little."
"Poor Trig. Maybe even the rich boys have demons."
"He wanted to hug. He was crying. Maybe there was something weirdo in
it or something. I felt his fingers in my muscles and I felt how happy
he was to be hugging me.
I don't know. Very weird stuff. I don't know."
They reached the car, and Donny started it, turning on the lights. He
backed into the grass, turned around and headed down the road to the
gate.
"Jesus," he said.
"Duck!" For at that moment a figure suddenly rose from a gulch. A man
in a suit, but too far away to do anything. A camera came up. Donny
winced at the bright beam of flash as it exploded his night vision.
Fireballs danced in his head, reminding him of nighttime incoming Hotel
Echo, but he stepped on the gas, gunned up the road and turned right,
then really floored it.
"Jesus, they got our picture," he said.
"A fed. That guy had to be FBI! Holy Christ!"
"My face was turned," said Julie.
"Then you're okay. I don't think he got a license number, because my
rear plate illumination bulb is broken. He just got my picture. A lot
of good that'll do them. A fed!
Man, this whole thing is strange."
"I wonder what's going on?" she said.
"What's going on is that Trig's about to get busted.
102 STEPHEN HUNTER
Trig and that Fitzpatrick guy. We were lucky we weren't rounded up.
I'd be on my way to the brig."
"Poor Trig," said Julie.
"Yes," said Donny.
"Poor Trig."
1 he man let him up. He brushed himself off.
"I haven't done anything," Peter explained.
"I've come to see my friends. You have no right to detain me, do you
understand? I haven't done anything."
The man stared at him sullenly.
"I'm going now. This is none of your business," he said.
He turned and walked away. The agent had seemed genuinely cowed. He
stepped away, awaiting a call, but none came. Another step filled him
with confidence, but he didn't see or hardly feel the judo chop that
broke his spine and, in the fullness of his tender youth and in the
ardor of his love for his generation and its pure idea of peace, killed
him before he hit the ground.
chapter eight
Donny reached DC around four in the morning, and he and Julie checked
into a motel on New York Avenue, in the tourist strip approaching
downtown. They were too tired for sex or love or talk.
He set the cheap alarm for 0800, and slept deeply until its ungentle
signal pulled him awake.
"Donny?" she said, stirring herself.
"Sweetie, I've got some things to do now. You just stay here, get some
more sleep. I paid for two nights. I'll call you sometime today and
we'll decide what to do next."
"Oh, Donny." She blinked awake. Even out of sleep, with a slightly
puffy face and her hair a rat's nest, she seemed to him quite uniquely
beautiful. He leaned over and kissed her.
"Don't do anything stupid and noble," she said.
"They'll kill you."
"Don't you worry about me," he said.
"I'll be all right."
He dressed and drove the mile or so through the section of city called
SE, passing Union Station, then left up the hill until he was in the
shadow of the great Capitol dome, turning down Pennsylvania, then down
Eighth. He arrived, found parking on a street just off the shops
across from the barracks, locked the car and headed to the main gate.
From across Eighth Street, the little outpost of Marine elegance seemed
serene. The officers' houses along the street were stately and
magnificent; between them, Donny could see men on the parade deck in
their modified blues, at parade practice, endlessly trying to master
the arcane requirements of duty and ritual. The imprecations of the
NCOs rose in the air, harsh, precise, demanding. The grass on which
the young men toiled was deep green, in104 STEPHEN HUNTER
tense and pure, like no other green in Washington in that hot, bleak
spring.
Finally, he walked across the street to the main gate, where a PFC
watched him come.
"Corporal Fenn, you've been reported UA," the PFC said.
"I know. I'll take care of it."
"I've been ordered to notify your company commander of your arrival."
"Do your duty, then. Private. Do you call Shore Patrol?"
"They didn't say anything about that. But I have to call Captain
Dogwood."
"Go ahead, then. I'm changing into my duty uniform."
"Yes, Corporal."
Donny walked through the main gate, across the cobblestone parking lot
and turned left down Troop Walk to the barracks.
As he went, he was aware of a strange phenomenon:
the world seemed to stop, or at least the Marine Corps world. It
seemed that whole marching platoons halted to follow his progress. He
felt hundreds of eyes on him, and the air suddenly emptied of its usual
fill of barked commands.
Donny went in, climbed the ladder well as he had done so many hundreds
of times, turned left on the second deck landing and into the squad
bay, at the end of which was his little room.
He unlocked his locker, stripped, slipped into flip flops and a towel
and marched to the showers, where he scalded himself in water and
disinfectant soap. He washed, dried, and headed back to his room,
where he slipped on a new pair of boxers and pulled out his oxfords.
They could be better. For the next ten minutes he applied the full
weight of his attention to the shoes, in regulation old Marine Corps
fashion, until he had burnished the leather to a high gleam. As he
finished the shoes, the
TIME TO HUNT 105
tough professional figure of Platoon Sergeant Case came to hover in the
door.
"I had to put you on UA, Fenn," he said, in that old Corps voice that
sounded like sandpaper on brass.
"Do you want me to Article Fifteen your young ass?"
"I was late. I had personal business. I apologize."
"You're not on the duty roster. They say you've got some legal
obligations at ten hundred."
"Yes, Sergeant. In the Navy Yard."
"Well, I'll get you off report. You do the right thing today, Marine.
Do you hear me?"
"Yes, Sergeant."
Case left him alone after that.
Though he hadn't been so ordered, and in fact didn't even know the
uniform of the day, he decided to put on his blue dress A uniform. He
pulled on socks and taped them to his shins so that they'd never fall,
selected a pair of blue dress trousers from the hanger and pulled them
on. He tied his shiny oxfords. He pulled on a T-shirt, and over it,
finally, the blue dress tunic with its bright brass buttons and red
piping. He pulled tight the immaculately tailored tunic, and buttoned
up to that little cleric's collar, where the eagle, globe and anchor
stood out in brass has-relief. He pulled on a white summer belt,
drawing it tight, giving him the torso of a young Achilles on a stroll
outside Troy. His white summer gloves and white summer cover completed
the transformation into total Marine.
The medals, reduced to ribbons, stood out on his chest--nothing
spectacular, for the Marines are a dour bunch, not into show: only a
smear of red denoting the very hot day when he'd slithered through rice
water and buffalo shit with half the world shooting at him to pull a
wounded PFC back into the world, to life, to possibility.
The blur of purple was for the bullet that had passed through his chest
a few weeks later. The rest was basically crap: a National Defense
Ribbon, the in-service RSVN award, the Presidential Unit Citation for
the overall III Marine Amphibious Force presence in the Land of Bad
106 STEPHEN HUNTER
Things, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantly and expert marksman in rifle
and pistol with second awards. It was no chest of fruit salad, but it
did say, This man is a Marine, who's been in the field, who was shot
at, who tried to do his duty.
He adjusted the white summer cover until it came low over his blue
eyes, then turned and went to face Commander Bonson.
He left the barracks and headed toward the captain's office, where he
was to be picked up. The XO wandered by and he snapped off a quick
salute.
"Fenn, is that the uniform of the day?"
"For what I have to do, sir, yes, sir."
"Fenn-Never mind. Go ahead."
"Thank you, sir."
Two NCOs, including Case, watched him go. By the time he reached Troop
Walk, by some strange vibration in the air, everyone knew he was in his
full dress blues. The men, in their modifieds, watched him with
suspicion, maybe a little hostility, but above all, curiosity. The
uniform, of course, was not the uniform of the day, and for a Marine to
strut out in so flagrant a gesture of rebellion was extremely odd; he
could have been naked and caused less of a ruckus.
Donny strode down Troop Walk, aware of the growing number of eyes upon
him. He had a fleeting impression of men running to catch a glimpse of
him going; even, across the way, when he passed by Center House, the
base's BOQ, a couple of off-duty first lieutenants came out onto the
porch in Bermudas and T's to watch him pass by.
He turned into the parking lot, where a tan government Ford, with a
squid driving, waited by the steps; he then turned left, climbed and
walked across the porch and into the first sergeant's office, which led
to Captain Dogwood's office. The first sergeant, holding a cup of
coffee with Semper Fi emblazoned on the porcelain, nodded at him, as
orderlies and clerks scurried to make way.
TIME TO HUNT 107
"They're waiting on you, Fenn."
"Yes, First Sergeant," said Donny.
He stepped into the office.
Captain Dogwood sat behind his desk, and Bonson and Weber, in their
summer khakis, sat across from him.
"Sir, Corporal Fenn, reporting as ordered, sir," Donny said.
"Ah, very good, Fenn," said Dogwood.
"Did you misunderstand the uniform of the day? I--" "Sir, no, sir
Donny said.
"Sir, permission to speak, sir! Another moment of silence.
"Fenn," said the captain, "I'd consider carefully before--"
"Let him speak," said Bonson, eyeing Donny without love.
Donny turned to face the man fully.
"Sir, the corporal wishes to state categorically that he will not
testify against a fellow Marine on charges of which he has no personal
knowledge. He will not perjure himself; he will not take part in any
proceedings involving the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Sir "Fenn,
what are you pulling?" asked Weber.
"We had an agreement."
"Sir, we never had an agreement. You gave me orders to investigate,
which I did, against my better instincts and in contravention to every
moral belief I have. I did my duty. My investigation was negative.
Sir, that is all I have to say, sir "Fenn," said Bonson, fixing him
with a mean glare, "you have no idea what forces you're playing with
and what can happen to you. This is no game; this is the serious
business of defending the security of our nation."
"Sir, I have fought for our nation and I have bled for our nation. No
man who hasn't has the right to tell me about defending our nation,
whatever his rank, sir} Finally, sir, may I sincerely say, sir, you are
an asshole and a creep and you haven't done one thing for the United
108 STEPHEN HUNTER
States of America, and if you want to meet me out back, let's go. Bring
Weber. I'll kick his ass too!"
"Fenn!" said Dogwood.
"All right, Captain Dogwood," said Bonson.
"I see this is the kind of Marine you have here at Eighth and I. I'm
very disappointed. This reflects on you, Captain, and my report will
so state. Fenn, if I were you, I'd start packing.
Don't forget your jungle boots."
He turned and walked out.
"That was stupid, Fenn," said Weber.
"Fuck you, Weber, you ass-kissing creep."
Weber swallowed and turned to Dogwood.
"Restrict him to quarters. His orders will be cut by four."
Then he turned and walked out.
Dogwood went to the phone and talked in an intimate voice with someone.
Then he hung up.
"Sit down, Fenn," said Dogwood, turning back to Donny.
"Do you smoke?"
"No, sir."
"Well, I do." Shaking a little, he lit up a Marlboro and went to the
door.
"Welch, get in here!"
Welch scurried in.
"Yes, sir."
"You have until four, Welch, to get liberty papers cut for Corporal
Fenn; get 'em back here for my signature.
Seventy-two hours. If you have to run over to personnel at Henderson
Hall, you take my car and driver. Don't stop for traffic. Do you
understand?"
"Uh, well, sir, I, it's highly irregular, I'm not--" "You heard me,
Welch," said the captain.
"Now get going."
He turned back to Donny.
"Okay, Fenn, I can't save you from Vietnam, but I can get you some time
off before you have to go if I can get your orders cut before Bonson's
paperwork catches up with you."
TIME TO HUNT 109
"Yes, sir."
"You go change into civvies now. You be ready to take off as soon as
possible."
"Yes, sir. I-Thank you, sir."
"Oh, just a moment. Yes, here she is."
A woman walked into the room, pleasant, in her late twenties. Donny
recognized her from the picture on the desk as Dogwood's wife.
"Here, Mort," she said, handing an envelope over. She turned to
Donny.
"You must be very foolish, young man.
Or very brave."
"I don't know, ma'am."
"Fenn, here. It's six hundred dollars, cash. It's all we had in our
quarters. It'll take you and your girlfriend someplace for a few
days."
"Sir, I--" "No, no, go ahead, son. Take it. Enjoy yourself. Pay it
back when you can. And when you get to the "Nam, keep your ass down.
That shithole isn't worth another Marine.
Not a single one. Now go. Go, go, son. And good luck."
PART II
SNIPER TEAM
SIERRA-BRAVO-FOUR
RSVN, I Corps February-May 1972
chapter nine
The rain fell in torrents in I Corps. It was the end of the rainy
season and no rainier season is rainier than the one in the Republic of
South Vietnam. Da Nang, the capital of this dying empire, was wet, but
some further hundred klicks out, wetter still, lay the fortified fire
base a few of the Marines left in the Land of Bad Things called Dodge
City, a ramshackle slum of sandbags, 105mm howitzers, S-shops, bunkers,
barbed wire and filthy, open four-holers. It was the tail end of a
lost war and nobody wanted to get wasted before the orders were cut
that got these sad boys home.
But there were Marines even beyond Dodge City, out in Indian Country.
There, in a tangle of scrub trees near the top of a hill identified on
maps only by its height in meters--Hill 519--two of them cowered in the
downpour, watching the drops accumulate on the rims of their boonie
caps, gather and finally drop off, while the rain beat a cold tattoo
against the ponchos that covered both of them and their gear.
One of them dreamed of home. It was Lance Corporal Donny Fenn, and he
was getting very short. In May, his four-year enlistment was up; he
was home free. He knew his DEROS by heart, as did every man in the
"Nam, the ones who first came in 1965, the ones who were still there:
Date of Estimated Return from Overseas Service.
Donny's was 07 May 1972. He was a two-tour guy, with a Purple Heart
and a Bronze Star, and though he no longer believed in the war, he did
believe, passionately, that he was going to make it. He had to.
On this wet morning, Donny dreamed of dry pleasures.
He dreamed of the desert, from where he'd come, Pima County, Arizona,
the town of Ajo, and the hot dry air that pulsed down from the Sonoras
out of Mexico, dry
114 STEPHEN HUNTER
as the devil's breath. He dreamed of baking in such a place, going
back to college, on to law school. He dreamed of a house, of a family,
a job. Most of all, he dreamed of his young wife, who had just written
him, and the words were inscribed in his mind now as he sat in the
downpour: "You keep your spirits high, Marine! I know you'll make it
and I pray for that day. You are the best thing that ever happened to
me and I cannot live without you, so if you get killed, I am going to
be plenty angry! I might never talk to you again, I would be so
mad."
He had written her back just before this boonie jaunt:
"Oh, you sweet thang, I do miss you so. Things are fine here. I
didn't know spiders could get big as lobsters or that it could rain for
three solid months, but these are useful facts and will come in ever so
handy back in the world. But the Sarge will keep me alive, because
he's the smartest Marine that ever lived or breathed and he said if I
got wasted, who the hell would he pick on and that would be no fun at
all!"
Rolled into his hatband, swaddled in cellophane, was a picture of
Julie, now out of her hippie phase, though she worked at the Tucson
Veterans Hospital among the wounded from another war and was even
talking of a nursing career now. In the picture, Julie's beauty was
like a beam in the night for a man lost and starving.
A shiver rose through Donny's spine, a deep and relentless cold. The
world had liquified: it was mud, fog or rain; no other elements
existed. It was an almost incandescent world, whose low lights yielded
no hint to time of day. The vapors simply floated in gray murk, a kind
of universal declamation of misery.
Under his poncho he felt the coldness of one of the few M14s left in
Vietnam, with a twenty-round magazine leaning into his leg, ready for
instant deployment if Sierra-Bravo-Four were bounced, but that would
never happen because the sergeant was so skilled at picking hides.
He carried two canteens, a 782-pack full of C-rats,
TIME TO HUNT 115
mostly barbecued pork, four M26 grenades, a Colt .45 automatic, an M-49
spotting scope, a black phosphate-bladed K-Bar, ten extra twenty-round
7.62 NATO mags, three Claymore mine bandoleers, one M57 electrical
firing device, a canvas bag full of flares and a flare launcher, and,
enemy of his life, bane of his existence, most hated of all objects on
the face of the earth, a PRC-77 radio, fourteen pounds of lifeline to
Dodge.
"Commo check," said the sergeant, who sat a few feet from Donny, gazing
at the same rain-blasted, foliage-dense landscape, the plains and
paddies and jungles and low, mean hills.
"Get on the horn, Pork."
"Shit," said Donny, for deploying the radio meant moving, moving meant
breaking the steamy seal the poncho had formed around his neck, which
meant cold water would cascade down his neck into the sweaty warmth of
his body. There was no colder place than Vietnam, but that was okay,
because there was no hotter place, either.
Donny stirred in the tent of his poncho, got the Prick-77 up and on,
knew its freak was preset accurately, and managed somehow, leaning it
forward precariously, to let its four feet of whip antenna snap forward
and out into the wet air.
He brought the phone to his ear up through his poncho and pushed the
on-off toggle to on. And, yes, a shivery blade of water sluiced down
between his shoulder blades, underneath his jungle cammies. He
shivered, said "Fuck" under his breath and continued to struggle with
the radio.
The problem with the Pricks wasn't only their limited range, their
dense weight, their line-of-sight operational capabilities but, more
critically, their short battery lives.
Therefore grunts used them sparingly on preset skeds, contacting base
for a fast sitrep. He pressed send.
"Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?"
He pressed receive, and for his efforts got a crackly
116 STEPHEN HUNTER
soup of noise. No big surprise, with the low clouds, the rain, and the
terrain's own vagaries at play; sometimes they got through and
sometimes they didn't.
He tried again.
"Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you read? Is
anybody there? Hello, knock, knock, please open the door, over?"
The response was the same.
"Maybe they're all asleep," he said.
"Naw," said the sergeant, in his rich Southern drawl, slow and steady
and funny as shit, "it's too late to be stoned and too early to be
drunk. This is the magic hour when them boys are probably alert. Keep
trying."
Donny hit the send button and repeated his message a couple more times
without luck.
"I'm going to the backup freak," he finally stated.
The sergeant nodded.
Donny spread the poncho so that he could get at the simple controls
atop the unit. Two dials seemed to grin at him next to the two
butterfly knobs that controlled them, one for megahertz, the other for
kilohertz. He diddled, looking for 79.92, to which Dodge City
sometimes defaulted if there was heavy radio traffic or atmospheric
interference, and as he did, the radio prowled through the wave band of
communications that was Vietnam in early 1972, propelled by the weird
reality that it could receive from a far greater distance than it could
send.
They heard a lost truck driver trying to get back to Highway 1, a pilot
looking for his carrier, a commo clerk testing his gear, all of it
crackly and fragmented as the signals in their varying strengths ebbed
and flowed. Some of it was in Vietnamese, for the ARVN were on the
same net; some of it was Army, for there were more soldiers than
Marines left by fifty-odd thousand; some of it was Special Forces, as a
few of the big A-camps still held out to the north or west; some of it
was fire missions, permission to break off search, requests for more
beer and beef.
Finally, Donny lit where he wanted.
TIME TO HUNT 117
"Ah, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you copy?"
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six here; yes, we copy. What is
your sitrep, over?"
"Tell 'em we're drowning," said the sergeant.
"Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, we're all wet. Nothing moving up here. Nothing
living up here, Foxtrot, over."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, does Swagger want to call an abort? Over."
"They want to know, do you want to call an abort?"
The hunter-killer mission was slated to go another twenty-four hours
before air evac, but the sergeant himself appeared to be extremely low
on the probability of contact at this time.
"Affirmative," he said.
"No bad guys anywhere.
They're too smart to go out in shit like this. Tell 'em to get us the
hell out of here as soon as possible."
"That's an affirmative, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six. Request air evac,
over."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, our birds are grounded. You'll have to park it
until we can get airborne again."
"Shit, they're souped in," said Donny.
"Okay, tell 'em we'll sit tight and wait for the weather to break, but
we ain't bringing home any scalps."
Donny hit send.
"Foxtrot, we copy. We'll sit tight and get back to you when the sun
breaks through, over."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, roger that. Out."
The radio crackled to silence.
"Okay," said Donny, "that about ties that one up."
"Yeah," said the sergeant, with just a hint of a question in his
voice.
"Pork," he said after a second or two, "was you paying attention while
you were going to the backup freak? You hear anything?"
The sergeant was like a cop who could understand and decipher the
densest code or the most broken-up sound bits on the radio.
118 STEPHEN HUNTER
"No, I didn't hear a thing," said Donny.
"The chatter, you know, the usual stuff."
"Okay, do me a favor, Pork."
He always called Donny "Pork." He called all his spotters Pork. He'd
had three spotters before Donny.
"Pork, you run through them freaks real slow and you concentrate. I
thought I heard a syllable that sounded like 'gent."" "Gent? As in
gent-prefer blondes?"
"You got a blonde, you should know. No, as in urgent."
Donny's fingers clicked slowly through the chatter on the double dials
as a hundred different signals came and went in the same fractured
militare se made more incomprehensible by radio abbreviations, the
tangle of codes and call signs, Alpha-Four-Delta, Delta-Six-Alpha,
Whiskey-Foxtrot-Niner, Iron-Tree-Three, Rathole Zulu-Six, Tan San Nhut
control, on and on, Good morning, Vietnam, how are you today, it's
raining. It meant nothing.
But the sergeant leaned forward, his whole body tense with
concentration, un shivery in the wet, hardly even human in his
intensity. He was a thin stick of a man, twenty-six, with a blond crew
cut, a sunburn so deep it had almost changed his race, cheekbones like
bed knobs, squinty gray squirrel-shooter's eyes, 100 percent American
redneck with an accent that placed him in the backwoods of some
underdeveloped principality far from sophisticated living, but with an
odd grace and efficiency to him.
He had no dreams, not of desert, not of a farm or a city, not of home,
not of hearth. He was total kick-ass professional Marine Corps lifer,
and if he dreamed of anything, it was only of that harsh and bitter
bitch Duty, whom he'd never once cheated on, whom he'd honored and
served on two other tours, one as a platoon sergeant in sixty-five and
another running long-range patrols up near the DMZ for SOG. If he had
an inner life, he kept it to himself. They said he'd won some big
civilian shooting tournament and they said his daddy was a Marine
too,
TIME TO HUNT 119
back in World War II, and won the Medal of Honor, but the sergeant
never mentioned this and who would have the guts to ask? He had no
family, he had no wife or girlfriend, he had no home, nothing except
the Marine Corps and a sense that he had been produced by turbulent,
hard scrabble times, of which. he preferred not to speak and on whose
agonies he would remain forever silent.
He was many other things, but only one of them mattered to Donny. He
was the best. Man, he was good! He was so fucking good it made your
head spin. If he fired, someone died, an enemy soldier always. He
never shot if he didn't see a weapon. But when he shot, he killed.
Nobody told him otherwise, and nobody would fuck with him. He was
super cool in action, the ice king, who just let it happen, kept his
eyes and ears open and figured it out so fast it made you dizzy. Then
he reacted, took out any moving bad guys, and went about his business.
It was like being in Vietnam with Mick Jagger, or some other legendary
star, because everybody knew who Bob the Nailer was, and if they didn't
love him, by God, they feared him, because he was also Death From Afar,
the Marine Corps way. He was more rifle than man, and more man than
anybody. Even the NVA knew who he was: it was said a 15,000-pi astre
bounty had been placed on his head. The sergeant thought this was
pretty funny.
But in the end, it would kill him, Donny thought. The war would eat
him up in the end. He would try one more brave and desperate thing,
eager somehow to keep it going, to press himself even further, and it
would, in the end, kill his heroic ass. He'd never hit his DEROS. For
boys like this, there was no such thing as DEROS. Vietnam was
forever.
He reminded Donny of someone but Donny hadn't figured it out. There
was something about him, however, oddly familiar, oddly resonant. This
had struck him before but he could never quite nail it down. Was it a
teacher somewhere? Was it a relative, a Marine from his earlier
120 STEPHEN HUNTER
tour or his time at Eighth and I? For a time, he'd thought it was Ray
Case, his furious platoon sergeant there, but as he got to know Bob,
that connection vaporized. Case was a good, tough, professional
Marine, but Bob was a great Marine. They didn't make many of them like
Bob Lee Swagger.
But who was he like? Why did he seem so familiar?
Donny shook the confusion out of his head.
Swagger sat under the poncho, the water dripping off his boonie hat,
his eyes almost blank as he listened to the crackly tapestry of radio.
He was as equally laden as Donny: the taped bull barrel of his M40
sniper rifle-really just a Remington 700 .308 Varmint with a Redfield
9X scope aboard--poked out from the neck of his poncho as he did what
he could to keep the action and the wood, which would swell with
moisture, dry. He also carried four M26 grenades, two Claymore
bandoleers, an M57 electrical firing device, a .45 automatic, two
canteens and a pack full of C-rats (preferred poison: ham and powdered
eggs), and seventy-two rounds of Mil 8 Lake City Arsenal Match ammo,
the 173-grain load used by Army and Marine high-powered shooters at
Camp Perry. But he was a man who traveled well prepared; he had a
Randall Survivor knife with a sawtooth blade, a Colt .380 baby
hammerless in an aviator's shoulder holster under his camo utilities
and, strapped to his back, an M3 grease gun and five thirty-round
magazines.
"There," he said.
"You hear it? Swear to Christ I heard something."
Donny had heard nothing in the murk of chatter; still, he slowed his
diddling and redialed, watching the little numbers on the face crackle
through the gap as he shifted them. Finally he lit on something so
soft you could miss it entirely, and he only received it because it
seemed to be right on the cusp of the megahertz click to another
freak;
if he took the tension off the knob, the signal disappeared.
TIME TO HUNT 121
But, raspy and distant, they did hear it, and the words seemed to
define themselves out of the murk until they became distinct.
"Anyone on this net? Anyone on this net? How you read me? Over?
Urgent, goddammit, over!"
There was no answer.
"This is Arizona-Six-Zulu. I have beaucoup bad guys all over the
goddamn place. Anyone on this net? CharlieCharlieNovember, you there,
over?"
"He's way out of our range," Donny said.
"And who the hell is Arizona-Six-Zulu?" Donny wondered.
-"He's got to be one of the Special Forces camps to the west. They use
states as call signs. They call 'em FOBs, forward operating bases.
He's trying to reach Charlie Charlie November, which is SOG Command and
Control North at Da Nang."
But Arizona-Six-Zulu got a callback.
"Arizona-Six-Zulu, this is Lima-Niner-Mike at Outpost Hickory. Is that
you, Puller? Can hardly read your signal, over."
"Lima-Niner-Mike, my big rig took a hit and I'm on the Prick-77. I
have big trouble. I have bad guys all over the place hitting me front
ally and I hear from scouts a main force unit is moving in to take my
base camp out. I need air or arty, over."
"Arizona-Six-Zulu, neg on the air. We are souped in and everything has
been grounded. Let me check on arty, over."
"I am Team Arizona base camp, grid square Whiskey Delta 5120-1802.1
need Hotel Echo in the worst possible way, over."
"Shit, neg to that, Arizona-Six-Zulu. I have no, repeat no, fire
support bases close enough to get shells to your area. They closed
down Mary Jane and Suzie Q last week, and the Marines at Dodge are too
far, over."
"Over, Lima-Niner-Mike, I am out here on my lonesome with eleven
Americans and four hundred in digs and
122 STEPHEN HUNTER
we are in heavy shit and I am running down on ammo, food, and water. I
need support ASAP, over."
"I have your coordinates, Arizona-Six-Zulu, but I have no artillery
fire bases operational within range. I will go to Navy to see if we
can get naval gunfire in range and I will call up tac air ASAP when
weather clears. You must hang on until weather breaks,
Arizona-Six-Zulu, over."
"Lima-Niner-Mike, if that main force unit gets here before the weather
breaks, I am dog food, over."
"Hang tight, Arizona-Six-Zulu, the weather is supposed to break by noon
tomorrow. I will get through to Charlie-Charlie-November and we will
get Phantoms airborne fastest then, over."
"Roger, Lima-Niner-Mike," said Arizona-Six-Zulu, "and out."
"God bless and good luck, Arizona-Six-Zulu, out," said Lima, and the
freak crackled into nothingness.
"Man, those guys are going to get roasted," said Donny.
"This weather ain't lifting for days."
"You got that map case?" said Swagger.
"Let me see that thing. What were those coordinates?"
"Shit, I don't remember," said Donny.
"Well, then," said Bob, "it's a good thing I do."
He opened the case that Donny shoved over, went through the
plastic-wrapped sheaves of operational territory 1 :50,000s, and at
last came to the one he wanted. He studied hard, then looked over.
"You know, goddamn, if I ain't a fool at map reading, I do believe you
and I are the closest unit to them Special Forces fellows. They are
west of us, at Kham Due, ten klicks out of Laos. We are in grid square
Whiskey Charlie 155-005; they are up in Whiskey Delta 5120-1802. As I
make it, that's about twenty klicks to the west.-" Donny squinted. His
sergeant indeed had located the proper square, and the Special Forces
camp would therefore have been, yes, about twenty klicks. But--there
were foothills, a wide brown snake of river and a mountain range
between here and there, all of it Indian Territory.
TIME TO HUNT 123
"I'm figuring," Bob said, "one man, moving fast, he might just make it
before the main force unit. And those boys would have to move up
through this here An Loc valley. You got into those hills, you'd have
a hell of a lot of targets."
"Christ," said Donny.
"You just might slow 'em up enough so that air could make it in when
the weather broke."
A cold drop of rain deposited itself on Donny's neck and plummeted down
his back. A shiver rose from his bones.
"Raise Dodge again, Pork. Tell 'em I'm going on a little trip."
"I'm going too," said Donny.
Bob paused. Then he said, "My ass you are. I won't have no
short-timer with me. You hunker here, call in extraction when the
weather clears. Don't you worry none about me. I'll get into that
camp and extract with Arizona."
"Bob, I--" "No! You're too short. You'd be too worried about getting
whacked with three and days till DEROS. And if you weren't, I would
be. Plus, I can move a lot faster on my own. This is a one-man job or
it's no job at all. That's an order."
"Sergeant, I--" "No, goddammit. I told you. This ain't no goddamned
game. I can't be worrying about you."
"Goddammit, I'm not sitting here in the fucking rain waiting for
extract. You made us a team. You shoot, I spot targets, I handle
security. Suppose you have to work at night? Who throws flares?
Suppose it's hot and somebody has to call in air? Who works the map
for the coordinates and the radio? Suppose you're bounced from
behind?
Who takes out the fast movers? Who rigs the Claymores?"
"You are fixing to git yourself killed, Lance Corporal.
And, much worse, you are pissing me off beaucoup."
124 STEPHEN HUNTER
"I am not bugging out. I will not bug out!"
Bob's eyes narrowed. He suspected all heroism and self-sacrifice
because his own survival wasn't based on any sense of them, but rather
on shrewd professional combat skills, even shrewder calculation of odds
and, shrewdest of all, a sense that to be aggressive in battle was the
key to coming out alive on the other side.
"What are you trying to prove, kid? You been a hard-ass to prove
something ever since I teamed with you."
"I'm not trying to prove anything. I want no slack, that's all. Zero
fucking slack. I go all the way, that's all there is. When I get back
to the world, maybe then it's different. But out here, goddamn it, I
go all the way."
His fierceness softened Swagger, who'd coaxed many a boy through bad
times with shit coming in, who'd gotten the grunts moving when the last
thing they wanted to do was move, who never lost a spotter to a body
bag and lost a hell of a lot fewer young Marines than some could say.
But this stubborn boy perplexed him all the way, all the time. Only
one of 'em who got up earlier than he did, and who never once made a
mistake on the pr emission equipment checks.
"Donny, ain't nobody going to ever say you bugged out. I'm trying to
cut you some room, boy. No sense dying on this one. This is a Bob
show. This is what old Bob was put here to do. It ain't no college
football game."
"I'm going. Goddamn, we are Sierra-Bravo-Four, and I am going."
"Man, you sure you were born in the right generation?
You belong in the old breed, you salty bastard, with my dead old man.
Okay, let's gear up. Call it in. I'm going to shoot us a goddamn
compass reading to that grid square, and when we're done I'll buy you a
steak and a case of Jack Daniel's."
Donny took the moment to peel off his boonie cap and pull out the
cellophane-wrapped photo of Julie.
He stared at it as the raindrops collected on the plastic. She looked
so dry and far away, and he ached for
TIME TO HUNT 125
her. Three and days till DEROS. He would come home.
Donny would come marching home again, hurrah, hurrah.
Oh, baby, he said to himself, oh baby, I hope you're with me on this
one. Every step of the way.
"Let's go, Pork," sang Bob the Nailer.
chapter ten
After a time, Donny stopped hurting. He was beyond pain. He was also,
ever so briefly, beyond fear. They traveled from landmark to landmark
along Swagger's charted compass readings over the slippery terrain, the
rain so harsh some time you could hardly breathe. At one moment he was
somewhat stunned to discover himself on the crest of a low hill. When
had they climbed it? He had no memory of the ascent. He just had the
sense of the man ahead of him pulling him forward, urging him on,
oblivious to both of their pains, oblivious also to fear and to mud and
to changes in the elevation.
After a while they came to a valley, to discover the classical Vietnam
terrain of rice paddies separated by paddy dikes. The dikes were muddy
as shit, and in a few minutes, the going on them proved slow and
treacherous.
Swagger didn't even bother to tell him, he just lifted his rifle over
his head, stepped off the break and started to fight through the water,
churning up mud as he went.
What difference could it make? They were so wet it didn't matter, but
the water was thick and muddy and at each step the muddy bottom seemed
to suck at Donny's boots.
His feet grew heavier. The rain fell faster. He was wetter, colder,
more fatigued, more desperate, more lonely.
At any moment, some lucky kid with a carbine and a yen to impress his
local cadre could have greased them.
But the rain fell so hard it drove even the VC and the main force NVA
units to cover. They moved across a landscape devoid of human
occupation. The fog coiled and rolled. Once, from afar, the vapors
parted and they saw a village a klick away down a hill, and Donny
imagined what was going on in the warm little huts: the boiling soup
with its floating sheaves of bible tripe and brisket
TIME TO HUNT 127
sliced thin and fish heads floating in it, and the thought of hot food
almost made him keel over.
This is nothing, he told himself. Think of football.
Think of two-a-days in August. No, no, think of games.
Think of ... Think of ... Think of making the catch against Oilman
High; think of third and twelve, we've never beaten them, but for some
odd reason late in this game we're close but now we've stalled. Think
of setting up at tight end instead of running back because you have the
best hands on the team. Think of Julie, a cheerleader in those days,
the concern on her face.
Think of the silliness of it all! It all seemed so important!
Beating Oilman! Why was that so important? It was so silly! Then
Donny remembered why it was important.
Because it was so silly. It meant so little that it meant so much.
Think of going off the set, faking inside, then breaking on a slant for
the sidelines as Vercolone, the quarterback, broke from his
disintegrating pocket and began to rotate toward him, curling around,
his arm cocked then uncocked as he released the ball. Think of the
ball in the air.
Think of seeing it float toward you, Vercolone had led you too much,
the ball was way out of reach, there was no noise, there was no
sensation, there was only the ball sliding past. But think of how you
went airborne.
That was the strange thing. He did not ever remember leaping. It just
happened, one of those instinct things, as the computer in your head
took over your body and off you went.
He remembered straining in the air and, with his one hand stretched out
to the horizon, the slap of contact as the ball glanced off his longest
fingers, popped into the air and seemed to pause forever as he slid
through the air by it, now about to miss it, but somehow he actually
pivoted in air, got his chest out to snare it as it fell, then clasped
his other hand against it, pinning it to him as he thudded to the
ground and by the grace of a God who must love jocks, it did not pop
out, he had caught it for a first down,
128 STEPHEN HUNTER
and three plays later they scored and won the game, beating an ancient
enemy for the first time in living memory.
Oh, that was so very good! That was so very good.
The warmth of that moment came flooding back across him, its
meaningless glory warming and giving him just the slightest tingle of
energy. Maybe he would make it.
But then he went down, floundering, feeling the water flood into his
lungs, and he struggled, coughing out buffalo shit and a million
paramecium. A harsh grip pulled him out and he shook like a wet dog.
It was Swagger, of course.
"Come on," Swagger yelled through the din of pounding rain.
"We're almost out of the paddies. Then all we got is another set of
hills, a river and a goddamn mountain.
Damn, ain't this fun?"
Water. According to the map, the river was called la Trang. It bore
no other name and on the paper was a squiggly black line, its secrets
unrevealed. As it lay before them in reality, however, it was swollen
brown and wide, over spilling its banks, and was a swift, deadly
current. The rain smashed against its turbulent surface like machine
gun fire.
"Guess what?" said Swagger.
"You just got a new job."
"Huh?"
"You just got a new job. You're now the lifeguard."
"Why?"
"
"Cause I cain't swim a lick," he said, with a broad smile.
"Great," said Donny.
"I can't either."
"Oh, this one's going to be a pisser. Damn, why'd you insist on this
trip?"
"I was momentarily deluded into thinking I was important."
"That kind of thinkin'll git you killed every damn time.
Now, let's see if we can find some wood or something."
They ranged the dangerous bank of the river and in
TIME TO HUNT 129
time came to a bombed-out village. The gunships and Phantoms had
worked it over pretty well; nothing could have survived the hell of
that recent day. No structure stood: only timbers, piles of ash
liquified to gunk in the pounding rain, craters everywhere, a long
smear of burned vegetation where the napalm splashed through, killing
everything it touched. A cooking pot lay on its side, speared by a
machine gun bullet, so that it blossomed outward in jagged petals. The
stench of the burning still clung to the ground, despite the rain.
There were no bodies, but just out of the kill zone a batch of newly
dug graves with now-dead Buddhist incense reeds in cheap black jars had
been etched into the ground. Two were very, very small.
"I hope they were bad guys," said Donny, looking at the new cemetery.
"If we run this fucking war right," Swagger said, "we'd have known they
was bad, because we'd have people on the ground, up close. Not this
shit. Not just hosing the place down with firepower. Nobody should
have to die because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time and some
squid pilot's got some ordnance left and don't want to land on no
carrier with it."
Donny looked at him. In five months of extreme togetherness, Bob had
never said a thing about the way the war was waged, what it cost, who
it killed, why it happened.
His, instead, was the practical craft of mission and its close pal
survival: how to do this thing, where to hide, how to track, what to
shoot, how to kill, how to get the job done and come back alive.
"Well, nobody'll ever know, that's for goddamn sure," said Bob.
"Unless you get out of this shit hole and you tell 'em. You got that,
Pork? That's your new MOS: witness.
You got that?"
Familiar again. Where was this from? What did this mean? What
sounded so right about it, the same melody, slightly different
instrument?
"I'll tell 'em."
130 STEPHEN HUNTER
"
"Cause I'm too dumb to tell 'em. They'll never listen to a hillbilly
like me. They'll listen to you, boy, 'cause you looked the goddamn
elephant in the eye and came back to talk about it. Got that?"
"Got it."
"Good. Now let's scare up some wood and build us Noah's ark."
They scrounged in the ruins and came up after a bit with seven decent
pieces of wood, which Bob rigged together in some clever Boy Scout way
with a coil of black rope he carried. He lashed his and Donny's
rifles, the two 782-packs and harnesses, all the grenades, the map
case, the canteens, the PRC-77, the flares and flare gun, and the
pistols to it.
"Okay, you really can't swim?"
"I can sort of."
"Well, I can a bit, too. The deal is, you cling hard to this thing and
you kick hard. I'll be on the other side.
Keep your face out of the water and keep on fighting, no matter what.
And don't let go. The current'll take you and you'll be one dead puppy
dog and nobody'll remember your name till they inscribe it on some
monument and the pigeons come shit on it. Ain't that a pretty
thought?"
"Very pretty."
"So let's do it. Pork. You just became a submariner."
The water was intensely cold and stronger than Zeus.
In the first second Donny panicked, floundered, almost pulled the
rickety raft over and only Bob's strength on the other side kept them
afloat. The raft floated diagonally across and the swiftness and anger
of the river had it in an instant, and Donny, clinging with both
desperate hands to the rope lashings Bob had jury-rigged, felt swept
away, taken by it, the coldness everywhere. His feet flailed, touched
nothing. He sank a bit and it gushed down his throat and he coughed
and leaped like a seal, freeing himself.
It was all water, above and beneath, his chin in the
TIME TO HUNT 131
stuff, his eyes and face pelted by it as. it fell from the gray sky at
a brutal velocity.
"Kick, goddammit!" he heard Bob scream, and with his legs he began a
kind of strangely rhythmic breaststroke.
The craft seemed to spurt ahead just a bit.
But there came a moment when it was all gone. Fog obscured the land
and he felt he was thrashing across an ocean, the English Channel at
the very least, a voyage that had forgotten its beginning and couldn't
imagine its ending.
The water lured him downward to its black numbness;
he could feel it sucking at him, fighting toward his throat and his
lungs, and it stank of napalm, gunpowder, aviation fuel, buffalo shit,
peasants who sold you a Coke by day and cut your throat by night, dead
kids in ditches, flaming vines, friendly-fire casualties, the whole
fucking unstoppable momentum of the last eight years, and who was he to
fight it, just another grunt, a lance corporal and former corporal with
a shaky past, it seemed so huge, so vast, it seemed like history
itself.
"Fight it, goddammit," came Swagger's call from the other side, and
then he knew who Bob was.
Bob was Trig's brother.
Bob and Trig were almost the same man, somehow.
Despite their differing backgrounds, they were the aristocrats of the
actual, singled out by DNA to do things others couldn't, to be heroes
in the causes they gave their lives to, to be always and forever
remembered. They were Odin and Zeus. They were dangerously special,
they got things done, they had an incredible vitality and life force.
The war would kill them. That's why both had commanded him to be the
witness, he now saw. It was his job to survive and sing the story of
the two mad brothers, Bob and Trig, consumed in, devoured by, killed in
the war.
Trig was dead. Trig had blown himself up at the University of
Wisconsin along with some pitiful graduate assistant who happened to be
working late that night. They found Trig's body, smashed and ruptured
by the explosive.
It made him famous, briefly, a freak of headlines:
132 STEPHEN HUNTER
HARVARD GRAD DIES IN BLAST; CARTER FAMILY SCION KILLS
SELF IN BOMB BLAST; TRIG CARTER, THE GENTLE AVIAN
PAINTER TURNED MARTYR TO THE CAUSE OF PEACE.
It had killed Trig, as Trig had known it would. That's what Trig was
telling him that last night; now he understood.
He had to make it back, to tell the story of Trig and his mad brother
Bob, eaten, each in his own way, by the war. Would it ever be over?
Someone had him. He swallowed and looked, and Swagger was yanking him
from the water to the shore, where he collapsed, heaving with
exhaustion.
"Now hear this. The smoking light is now lit," said Bob.
From the wet river through the wet rain they finally reached the
mountain. It wasn't a great mountain. Donny had seen greater
mountains in his time in the desert; he'd even climbed some. Swagger
said he was from mountain country too, but Donny had never heard of
mountains in the South, or Oklahoma or Arkansas or whatever mysterious
backwoods the sniper hailed from.
The mountain was dense with foliage over hard rock, wide open to
observation from hundreds of meters out.
Pick your poison.
"Oh, Christ," said Donny, looking at the steep slope.
Time had no meaning. It seemed to be twilight but it could have been
dawn. He looked upward and the water pelted him in the face.
"I want to get halfway up in the next two hours," Bob said.
"I don't think I can," gulped Donny.
"I don't think I can either," said Bob.
"And, what's worse, if that goddamn main force battalion is in the area
heading on that base camp, they're sure to have security out, just the
thing to keep boys like us out of their hair."
"I can't do it," Donny said.
"I cain't do it neither," said Swagger.
"But it's gotta be
TIME TO HUNT 133
done and I don't see no two other boys here, do you? If I saw two
others, believe me, I'd send them, yessirree."
"Oh, shit," Donny said.
"Well, look at it this way. We only got where we got 'cause we came
through full monsoon. We go back, when the rains dry up Victor C.
gonna come out. He's gonna find us. He's gonna kill us. We weren't
invited into his goddamn yard, and he's gonna be plenty pissed. So we
gotta make that Special Forces base camp or we are going to die out
here for sure. That's just about the size of that piece of shit and
that's all there is to it!"
He smiled, not out of happiness or glee but possibly because he was too
exhausted to do anything else.
"Wish I had a Dexedrine," he said.
"But I don't believe in that shit. Came back from my second tour with
a monkey the size of a ape on my butt. Had to work like hell to kill
that furry bastard, too. Now, that wasn't much fun at all."
The man wasn't in Vietnam; in some sense he was Vietnam. He'd done it
all: sniped, raided, taken hills, led recons, worked intel, advised
ARVN units, run interrogations, done analysis, fought in a thousand
firefights, killed who knew how many, visited hospitals, talked to
generals.
He was one part of his whole goddamned generation rolled into one. This
was entirely new, but unsurprising:
he'd been a speed freak. Maybe he'd done heroin, maybe he'd caught the
clap, maybe he'd been tattooed, maybe he'd murdered prisoners. He was
Trig, at least in the way that he'd done everything to win the war that
Trig had done in his parallel universe to end it, a furious, relentless
crusade, presaged on the obsolete notion that one man could make a
difference.
"You remind me of a guy," Donny said.
"Oh, yeah. Some hillbilly on the radio. Lum or the other one, Abner?
They come from my hometown."
"No, believe it or not, a peacenik."
"Oh, a commie. He has long hair and looked like
134 STEPHEN HUNTER
Jesus. His shit didn't stink, I bet. Mine does, but good, Pork."
"No. He was like you, a hero. He was bigger than the rest of us. He
was a legend."
"To be a legend, don't you have to be dead? Ain't that part of the job
description?"
"He is dead."
"He managed to get his ass wasted demonstrating against the war? Now,
that do take some kind of genius level intelligence. And I remind you
of him? Son, you must have the fever bad."
"He just wouldn't quit. There wasn't any quit in him."
"Yeah, well, there's plenty of quit in me, Pork. One more job, then I
am going to quit for the rest of my life.
Now, let's just git a move on."
"Which way?"
"We go up the switchbacks, they'll bounce us. Only one way. Straight
up."
"Christ."
"We'll eat. Picnic time. It'll be the last meal you git till this is
over or you get killed and you get a nice steak in heaven. Dump your
C-rats and your canteens and your 782. Use your entrenching tool. Set
it at the angle. We going to use it to pull our way up, you got
that?"
"I don't--" "Sure you do. Watch me."
Quickly and expertly, he shed himself of most of his gear; only the
weapons remained. He fished a C-rat out of his dumped pack, and
quickly used his can opener to whip up cold eggs and ham, which he
gobbled quickly.
"Go on, chow time. Eat something."
Donny set out to do the same and in a few seconds was pulling down the
barbecued pork, cold but flavorful.
"When we're done, you gimme the radio. I ain't carrying as much
weight."
"I'll take your rifle."
"The hell you will. Nobody touches the rifle but me."
Of course. The basic rule. He remembered when
TIME TO HUNT 135
Swagger had come looking for him, sitting forlornly on outpost duty at
a forward observation post his third week at Dodge City.
"You Fenn?"
"Uh, yeah. Uh, Sergeant--?"
"Swagger. Name's Swagger. I'm the sniper."
Donny had a momentary intake of breath. In the dark, he could hardly
see him: just a fierce wraith of a man sheathed in darkness, speaking
in a dense Southern accent.
Bob the Nailer, the one with the 15,000-pi astre bounty on his head and
over thirty kills. Donny had the sense that all was quiet, that the
other men had just willed themselves to nothingness out of fear or
respect for Bob the Nailer. Though he could not see the sniper's eyes,
Donny knew they burned at him, and ate him up.
"I just put my spotter on a medevac back to the world with a hole in
his leg," said the sniper.
"I'm looking for a replacement. You shot expert. You have the highest
GET at Dodge. You have twenty-ten vision. You done a tour, won a
medal, so you been shot at some and won't panic.
All that don't mean shit. You was at Eighth and I. That means you done
the ceremonial stuff, which means you have a patience for detail work
and a willingness to be an unnoticed part of a bigger team. I need
that. You interested?"
"Me? I--" "Good perks. I'll get you steak and all the bourbon you can
drink. When we're in, we live like kings. I'll keep you off crap like
night watch and ambush patrols and forward observation and shit-burning
details. I'll get you R&R anywhere you want. Bad shit: A) You don't
touch the rifle. Nobody touches the rifle. B) You don't do drugs.
I catch you with a buzz on, I ship you home under guard and you'll
spend two years in Portsmouth. C) You don't call nobody gook, clink,
slope or zip. These are the very finest soldiers in the world. They
are winning and they will win. We kill them, but by God, we kill them
with respect.
Those are the only three rules, but they ain't to be bent or
136 STEPHEN HUNTER
even breathed hard on. Or, you can sit here in this shit hole waiting
for someone to drop a mortar shell on your head. And somehow I got a
feeling every shit detail, every shit patrol, every piece-of-crap
garbage job that comes up, you're number one on the fuck list. I hope
you like the stink of burning shit because you're going to smell a lot
of it."
"Back in the world, I had some problems," said Donny.
"I got a bad rap. I wouldn't 'cooperate."
" "I figured it from your jacket. Some kind of infraction of orders?
You lost your rating. Hey, kid, this ain't the world. This is the
"Nam, have you noticed? It don't mean shit to me, you got that? You
do the jobs I give you one hundred percent and I'll back you one
hundred percent.
You may get killed, you will work hard, but you will have fun. Killing
people is lots of fun. Now, you want in or what?"
"I guess I'm in."
Within thirty minutes, Donny had been relieved of duty and moved into
the scout-sniper squad bay with S/Sgt. Swagger NCOIC--or, as some
called him, NCGIC, Non-Commissioned God in Charge--and the only man
whose word mattered anywhere in the world.
He had never broken one of the rules until now. He had weighed each M1
18 round Swagger carried against the one-in-a-million chance of an
off-charge at Lake City;
he had cleaned Bob's .45, .380 and grease gun and his own M14 and .45;
he shined and dried the jungle boots; he laid out and assembled the
gear before each mission; he polished the lens of the spotting scope;
he checked the pins on the grenades, the plastic canteens for mildew;
he hand-enameled the brass on the 872 gear dead black; he did laundry;
he learned elevation, windage and range estimation;
he kept range cards; he filled out after-action reports;
he studied the operating area maps like a sacred text; he handled flank
security and once killed two NVC who were infiltrating around Bob's
position; he learned
TIME TO HUNT 137
PRC-77 protocol and maintenance. He worked like hell, and he had never
broken one of the rules.
Only Bob touched the rifle. Bob broke it down after each mission,
cleaned it to the tiniest crevice, scrubbed it dry, re zeroed it,
treated it like a baby or a mistress. He and only he could touch or
carry the rifle.
"It ain't I don't trust you. It ain't you drop it and it gets knocked
out of zero and you don't tell me and I miss a shot and somebody,
probably me, gets killed. It's just that the bedrock here is simple,
clear, powerful and helps us both: nobody touches the rifle but me.
Good fences make good neighbors. Ever hear that one?"
' "I think so."
"Well, the rifle rule is my fence. Got that?"
"I do. Entirely, Sergeant."
"You call me sergeant around the lifers here in Dodge.
In the field, you call me Bob or Swagger or whatever the hell you want.
Don't call me sergeant in the field. One of them boys might be
listening and he might decide to kill me because he heard you call me
sergeant. Got that, Pork?"
"I do."
And he had never forgotten that rule or any of the rules, until now.
"I forgot," he said in the rain to Swagger.
"About the rifle."
"Damn, Fenn, I was just getting to like you, too. I thought you' se
going to work out," Bob said, needling him ever so gently. But then it
was back to mission: "Okay, you done eating? You got your shit wired
in tight? This is it. Over this hill, through their security and then
sleep a bit. Comes morning we get to do some shooting."
Bob went first, down to soaked tiger camos and boonie cap, his rifle
slung upside down on his back. He carried the M3 grease gun in one
hand and the entrenching tool in the other, and he used the tool as a
kind of hook, to sink into roots of trees or the tangles of vegetation
to get
138 STEPHEN HUNTER
himself up the steep incline a few more feet. He moved with slow,
almost calm deliberation. The rain fell still in torrents in the
darkening gloom, and it rattled off the leaves and against the mud. How
could it rain so hard so long? Was God ending the world, washing away
Vietnam and its sins, its atrocities, its arrogances and follies? It
seemed that way.
Donny was fifty yards to the left, doing the same trick, but behind
Swagger and working carefully not to get ahead. Bob was the eyes up
front to the right; Donny's responsibility was behind and to the left,
the flank he was on.
But he saw nothing, just felt the chill of the biting rain, and felt
the weight of the M14, one of the last few left in the "Nam. For this
job, really, the plastic M16 would have been more ideally suited, but
Bob hated the things, calling them poodle shooters, and wouldn't let a
man in his unit carry them.
Every now and then Bob would halt them with a raised right hand, and
both men would drop low to the ground, hidden in the foliage, waiting,
clinging desperately against the incline. But each time whatever Bob
had noticed proved to be nothing, a false alarm, and they continued
their steady, slow climb.
Twice they crossed paths, switchbacks etched into the vegetation, and
Bob waited for five minutes before allowing them out on the open ground
even for the seconds or so that it exposed them.
The darkness was falling. It was harder and harder to see. The
jungle, far from relaxing as they climbed, actually seemed to be
getting denser. There was a time when Donny felt himself cut off
entirely from Bob, and a shot of panic came to him. What if he got
lost? What would he do? He would wander these ghostly mountains until
they caught him and killed him, or he wore down and starved.
You boys ain't so tough, he heard from somewhere, and realized it was a
mocking memory of a football coach somewhere back in his complicated
athletic career.
TIME TO HUNT 139
No, we ain't so tough, he thought. We never said we were. We just
tried to do our job, that was all.
But then he came out of the rubbery-smelling thorns that had swallowed
him, and saw a figure to the right and recognized it for its caution
and precision of movement to be Bob.
He started to rise-No, no-Bob's hand was up urgently, signaling him
still and back. He froze and dropped on his belly low to the ground,
even as Bob himself did the same.
He waited.
Nothing. No, just the sound of the rain, some occasional thunder, now
and then a streak of distant lightning.
It seemed so-The next thing, he was aware of motion on his left. He
did not move, he did not breathe.
How had Swagger seen them? How did he know?
What gave them away? Another step and it was all over, but somehow,
out of some trick of instinct or predator's preternatural nerve
endings, Bob had stunned him into silence and motionlessness a second
before they arrived.
Before him the men passed by, no more than ten feet away, sliding
effortlessly through the foliage and the undergrowth.
He could smell them before he could see them. They had the odor of
fish and rice, for that was what they ate. They were small,
bandy-legged guys, the pros of the army of the Republic of North
Vietnam, a point man, a squad leader, a squad in file picking its way
carefully through the jungle high above the last path, twelve of them.
They were bent forward under beige rain capes and wore regulation dark
green uniforms, those absurd pith helmets, and carried AK47s and
complete combat gear--packs, canteens and bayonets. Three or four of
them wore RPG-40s, the hellish rocket grenades, strapped to their
backs.
He had never been so close to the actual enemy; they seemed almost
magical, or mythological, somehow, the
140 STEPHEN HUNTER
phantoms of so many nightmares at last given flesh. They terrified
him. If he moved or coughed, it was over: they'd turn and fire, whole
minutes before he could get his M14 into action. He had a bad thought
of himself dying up here at the hands of these tough little monkey-men
sliding so confidently through the rain and the jungle that were
exhausting him.
Almost as if one were talking to him, he heard the silence breaking a
few feet away.
"Ahn 6i, mua nhieu qua?"
"Phai roi, chac khQng c6 nguoi my d6m nay," came the buddy's bitter
answer, both voices propelled by the explosive lung energy of
Vietnamese, so foreign to American ears and which sounded almost like
belches.
"Bihn si6i, dung noi, nghe," came a sharp cry from the head of the
unit, a sergeant, the same the world over and whatever the army,
clamping down on his naughty grunts.
The patrol moved slowly along in the dying light and the falling rain,
then slowly disappeared around a bend in the slope. But Bob held Donny
still for a good ten minutes before giving the okay, excruciating
seconds of deathlike stillness in the cold and wet, which cramped the
muscles and hurt the brain. But at last Bob motioned, and he slowly
uncoiled and began to move up again.
Gradually Bob navigated his way over.
"You okay?"
"Yeah. How the hell did you see them?"
"The point man's canteen jingled against his bayonet.
I heard it, that's all. Luck, man; it's better to be lucky than
good."
"Who were they?"
"That's flank security from a main force battalion.
That means we're getting close. They put out security teams when they
move a big unit through, same as us. The sergeant had flashes for the
Number Three Battalion. I don't know what regiment or nothing, but I
think the biggest unit up this ways was the 324th Infantry Division.
TIME TO HUNT 141
Man, they close down that Special Forces camp tomorrow, the rain stays
bad, they could get to Dodge City the day or so after tomorrow."
"Is this some big offensive?"
"There's several newly Vietnamized units there; it'd do 'em a lot of
good to kick all that ARVN ass."
"Great. I wonder what they were saying."
"The first one says, Man, it's raining like shit, and his buddy says.
Ain't no Americans coming out in this, and the sarge yells back. Hey,
you guys, shut up and keep moving."
"You speak Vietnamese?" Donny said in wonderment.
"Picked up a little. Not much, but I can get by. Come on, let's get
out of here. We got to rest. Big day tomorrow.
We kick butt and take names. You bet on it. Marine."
chapter eleven
FOB Arizona was in bad trouble. Puller had lost nineteen men already
and the VC had gotten mortars up close over to the west, and were
pounding the shit out of them so that he couldn't maneuver, and that
main force unit would be in tomorrow at the latest. But worse: he'd
sent out Matthews with a four-man assault unit to take out the mortars
and Matthews hadn't come back. Jim Matthews! Three tours, M/Sgt. Jim
Matthews, Benning, the Zone, one of the old guys who dated all the way
back to Korea, had done everything--gone!
The rage of it flared deep in Major Puller's angry, angry brain.
This wasn't supposed to be happening. Goddamn them, this wasn't
supposed to be happening.
Kham Due was way out on its lonesome, near Laos, where it had fed in
cross-border recon teams for years, but was largely invulnerable
because of the umbrella or air power, so the NVA didn't even bother
with main force units close by. Where had this one come from? He was
feeling very Custerlike, that sick moment when he suddenly realized he
was up against hundreds, maybe thousands.
And where the hell had this weather come from and how fast could this
big-ass, tough-as-shit battalion get down here?
Oh, he wants us. He smells our blood; he wants us.
Puller's antagonist was a slick operator named Huu Co Thahn, a senior
colonel, commanding, No. 3 Battalion, 803rd Infantry Regiment, 324th
Infantry Division, Fifth People's Shock Army. Puller had seen his
picture, knew his resume: from a wealthy, sophisticated Indo French
family and even a graduate of the Ecole Militaire in Paris before
deserting to the North in sixty-one after revulsion at the excesses of
the Diem regime, he had become one of
TIME TO HUNT 143
their most able field grade military commanders, a sure general.
A mortar shell fell outside, close by, and dust shook from the rafters
of the command post.
"Anybody hit?" he called.
"No, sir," came his sergeant's reply.
"The bastards missed."
"Any word from Matthews?"
"No, sir."
Major Richard W. Puller pulled on his boonie cap and slithered out the
dugout door to the trench and looked around at his shaky empire. He
was a lean, desperate man with a thatch of gray hair, and had been in
Fifth Special Forces since 1958, including a tour in the British
Special Air Service Regiment, even seeing some counterinsurgency action
in Malaysia. He'd been to all the right schools: Airborne, Ranger,
Jungle, National War College, Command and Staff at Leavenworth. He
could fly a chopper, speak Vietnamese, repair a radio or fire an RPG.
This was not his first siege. He had been encircled at Pleiku in 1965
for more than a month, under serious bombardment.
He'd been hit then: a Chinese .51-caliber machine gun bullet, which
would kill most men.
He hated the war, but he loved it. He feared it would kill him but a
part of him wanted it never to end. He loved his wife but had had a
string of Chinese and Eurasian mistresses. He loved the Army but hated
it also, the former for its guts and professionalism, the latter for
its stubbornness, its insistence always of fighting the next war by the
tactics of the old.
But what he hated most of all was that he had fucked up. He had realty
fucked up, gambling the lives of his team and all his in digs that the
NVA couldn't get him during his window of vulnerability. He was
responsible for it all; it was happening to them because it was
happening to him.
And nobody could save his ass.
The main gate was down, and where his ammo dump had been, smoke still
boiled from the ground, rising to
144 STEPHEN HUNTER
mingle with the low clouds that hung everywhere. The S-shops were a
shambles as were most of the squad , but a unit of VC sappers that had
gotten into the compound the night before and actually taken over the
Third Squad staging area and what remained of the commo shack had been
finally dislodged in hand-to-hand with the dawn. No structure
remained; most of the wire still stood, but for now, that was the
mortar objective: to pound avenues into his defenses so that when Huu
Co and his battalion got here, they wouldn't get hung up in the shit as
they came over him, backed by their own mortars and a complement of
crew-served weapons.
Puller looked up and caught rain in the eye and felt the chill of the
mist. Night was falling. Would they come at night? They'd move at
night, but probably not attack.
At least not in force: they'd send probers, draw fire, try and get
Arizona to use up its low supplies of ammo on bad or unseen targets,
but mainly work to keep the defenders rattled and sleepless for the No.
3 Battalion.
Would the weather break? On the Armed Forces Net, the meteorological
forecasts were not promising, but Puller knew they'd try like hell, and
if they could get birds up, they'd get 'em up. But maybe the pilots
were reluctant:
who'd want to fly into heavy small-arms fire to drop napalm on a few
more dinks when the war was so close to being over? Who'd want to die
now, at the very tag end of the thing, after all the years and all the
futility? He didn't know the answer to that one himself.
Puller looked down his front to the valley. He could see nothing in
the gloom, of course, but it was a highway, and Huu Co would be
barreling down it at the double time like a fat cat in a limousine,
knowing they ran no danger from the Phantoms or the gunships.
"Major Puller, Major Puller! You ought to come see this, quick."
It was Sergeant Bias, one of his master sergeants who worked with the
Montagnards, a tough little Guamese who had seen a lot of action on too
many tours and also
TIME TO HUNT 145
didn't deserve to get caught in a shit hole like FOB Arizona so late in
a lost and fruitless war.
Bias led him through the trenches to the west side of the perimeter,
crouching now and then when a new mortar shell came whistling their
way, but at last they reached the parapet, and a Montagnard with a
carbine handed Puller a pair of binocs.
Puller used them to peer over the sandbags, and saw in the treeline
three hundred meters out something that was at first indecipherable but
at last assembled itself into a pattern and then some details.
It was a stick and on the stick was Jim Matthews's head.
Three quicksand one slow. Three strongs. That was the rhythm, the
slow steady pace of accomplishment over the long years and the long
bleeding. Now, he was under pressure, great pressure, for one last
quick. Far off, the diplomats were talking. There would be a peace
soon, and the more they controlled when that peace was signed, the more
they would retain afterward and the more they could build upon for a
future, he knew, he would never see, but his children might.
He knew he would not survive. His children would be his monument. He
would leave a new world behind for them, having done his part in
destroying the terrible old one. That was enough for any father, and
his life did not particularly matter; he had given himself up to
struggle, to tomorrow, to the ten rules of the soldier's life:
1) Defend the Fatherland; fight and sacrifice myself for the People's
Revolution.
2) Obey the orders received and carry out the mission of the soldier.
3) Strive to improve the virtues of a Revolutionary Soldier.
4) Study to improve myself and build up a powerful Revolutionary
Army.
146 STEPHEN HUNTER
5) Carry out other missions of the Army.
6) Help consolidate internal unity.
8) Preserve and save public properties.
9) Work for the solidarity between the Army and the People.
10) Maintain the Quality and Honor of the Revolutionary Soldier.
All that remained was this last job, the American Green Beret camp at
Kham Due, at the end of the An Loc Valley, which must be eliminated in
order to take more land before documents were signed.
Three quicks, one slow, three strongs.
Slow plan.
Quick advance.
Strong fight.
Strong assault.
Strong pursuit.
Quick clearance.
Quick withdrawal.
He had developed the plan over three years of operations, gaining
constant intelligence on the E5 sector of administrative division MR-7,
knowing that as the war wound down, it would do, it was explained to
him by higher headquarters and as he himself understood, to make an
example of one of the camps.
Quick advance. That is where No. 3 Battalion was now. The men were
seasoned, toughened campaigners with long battle experience. They
moved quickly from their sanctuary in Laos and were now less than
twenty kilometers from the target, which was already under assault by
local Viet Cong infrastructure under specific orders from Hanoi, and
from whom he got combat intelligence over the radio.
The column moved in the classical structure of an army on the quick,
derived not entirely from the great Giap, father of the Army, but also
from the French genius Napoleon, who understood, when no one in history
since
TIME TO HUNT 147
Alexander had, the importance of quickness, and who slashed across the
world on that principle.
So Huu Co, senior colonel, had elements of his best troops, his
sappers, running security on each flank a mile out in two twelve-men
units per flank; he had his second best people, also sappers, at the
point in a diamond formation, all armed with automatic weapons and
RPGs, setting the pace, ready to deliver grenades and withering fire at
any obstacles. His other companies moved in column by fours at the
double time, rotating the weight of the heavy mortars among them by
platoons so that no unit was more fatigued than any other.
Fortunately, it was cool; the rain was no impediment.
The men, superbly trained, shorn of slackers and wreckers by long years
of struggle, were the most dedicated. Moreover, they were excited
because the weather was holding;
low clouds, fog everywhere, their most feared and hated enemy, the
American airplanes, nowhere in sight. That was the key: to move
freely, almost as if in the last century, without the fear of Phantoms
or Skyhawks screaming in and dropping their napalm and white
phosphorous.
That is why he hated the Americans so much: they fought with flame. It
meant nothing to them to burn his people like grasshoppers plaguing a
harvest. Yet those who stood against the flame, as he had, became
hardened beyond imagination. He who has stood against flame fears
nothing.
Huu Co, senior colonel, was forty-four years old.
Sometimes, memories of the old life floated up before him: Paris in the
late forties and early fifties, when his decadent father had turned him
over to the French, under whose auspices he studied hard. But Paris:
the pleasures of Paris. Who could forget such a place? That was a
revolutionary city and it was there he first smoked Gauloise, read Marx
and Engels and Proust and Sartre and Nietzsche and Apollinaire; it was
there his commitment to the old world, the world of his father, began
to crumble, at first in small, almost meaningless ways. Did the
French
148 STEPHEN HUNTER
have to be so nasty to their yellow guests? Did they have to take such
pleasure in their whiteness, while preaching the oneness of man under
the eye of God? Did they have to take such pleasure in rescuing bright
Indochinese like himself from their yellow ness
But even still, he wondered now, Would I have followed this course had
I known how hard it would be?
Huu Co, senior colonel, fought in seven battles and three campaigns
with the French in the first Indochinese War. He loved the French
soldiers: tough, hardened men, brave beyond words, who truly believed
theirs was the right to master the land they had colonized. They could
understand no other way; he lay in the mud with them at Dien Bien Phu
in 1954, eighteen years ago, praying for the Americans to come and
rescue them with their mighty air power
Huu Co, senior colonel, learned the Catholic God from them, moved south
and fought for the Diem brothers in building a bulwark against the
godless Uncle Ho. In 1955, he led an infantry platoon against the Binh
Xuyen in violent street fighting, then later against the Hoa Hao cult
in the Mekong and was present at the execution of the cult's leader, Ba
Cut, in 1956. Much of the killing he saw was of Indochinese by
Indochinese. It sickened him.
Saigon was no Paris either, though it had cafes and nightclubs and
beautiful women; it was a city of corruption, of prostitutes, gambling,
crime, narcotics, which the Diems not only encouraged but also from
which they profited. How could he love the Diems if they loved silk,
perfume, their own power and pomp more than the people they ruled, whom
they yet felt themselves removed from and immensely superior to? His
father counseled him to forgive them their arrogances and to use them
as a vessel for carrying God's will. But his father never saw the
politics, the corruption, the terrible way they abused the peasants,
the remove from the people.
Huu Co went north in 1961, when the Diems' corruption had begun to
resemble that of a city destroyed in the
TIME TO HUNT 149
Bible. He renounced his Catholicism, his inherited wealth and his
father, whom he would never see again. He knew the South would sink
into treachery and profiteering and would bring flame and retribution
upon itself, as it had.
He was a humble private in the People's Revolutionary Army, he who had
sat in cafes and once met the great Sartre and de Beauvoir at the Deux
Maggots in the Fourteenth Arrondisement; he, a major in the Army of the
Republic of South Vietnam, became a lowly private carrying an SKS and
wanting to do nothing but his duty to the fatherland and the future and
seek purification, but his gifts always betrayed him.
He was always the best soldier among them, and he rose effortlessly,
though now without ambition: he was a student officer after two years,
and his passage in the west and in the south, after six months'
strenuous reeducation in a camp outside Hanoi, where he withstood the
most barbarous pressures and purified himself for the revolutionary
struggle, only toughened him for the decade of war that was to
follow.
Now he was tired. He had been at war since 1950, twenty-two years of
war. It was almost over. Really, all that remained was the camp
called Arizona, and between himself and it, there stood nothing, no
unit, no aircraft, no artillery. He would crush it. Nothing could
stop him.
chapter twelve
In the dream, he had caught a touchdown pass, a slant outside, and as
he broke downfield all the blockers hit their men perfectly, and the
defense went down like tenpins opening lanes toward the end zone. It
was geometry, somehow, or at least a physical problem reduced to the
abstract, very pleasing, and far from the reality which was that you
ran on instinct and hardly ever remembered things exactly. He got into
the end zone: people cheered, it was so very warm, Julie hugged him.
His dad was there, weeping for joy. Trig was there also, among them,
jumping up and down, and so was Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, the sniper
god, a figure of preposterous joy as he pirouetted crazily, laden with
firearms and dappled in a war face of camouflage.
It was such a good dream. It was the best, the happiest, the finest
dream he ever had, and it went away, as such things do, to the steady
pressure of someone rocking his arm and the sudden baffling awareness
that he was not there but here.
"Huh?"
"Time to work. Pork."
Donny blinked and smelled the wet odor of jungle, the wet odor of rain,
and felt the wet cold. Swagger had already turned from him and was off
making his arcane preps.
The dawn came as a blur of light, just the faintest smear of
incandescence to the east, over the mountains on the other side of the
valley.
In its way, it was quite beautiful in that low 0500 light:
vapors of fog clung to the wet earth everywhere, in valleys and hollows
and gulches, nestled thickly in the trees, and though it wasn't at
present raining, surely it would rain
TIME TO HUNT 151
soon, for the low clouds still rolled over, heavy with moisture.
Still, so quiet, so calm, so pristine.
"Come on," whispered Swagger into Donny Fenn's ear.
Donny shook sleep from his eyes and put his dreams of Julie aside and
reconfirmed his existence. He was on a hillside in heavy foliage above
the An Loc Valley, near Kham Due and Laos. It would be another wet
day, and the weather had not broken, so there would be no air.
"We got to get lower," said Bob.
"I can't hit nothing from up here."
The sergeant now wore the M3 grease gun on his back and in his hands
carried the M40 sniper rifle, a dull pewter Remington with a thick bull
barrel and a dull brown wooden stock. It carried a Redfield scope, and
a Marine Corps armorer had labored over it, free floating the barrel,
truing up the bolt to the chamber, glass-bedding the action to the
wood, torquing the screws tight, but it was still far from an elegant
weapon, built merely for effectiveness, never beauty.
Bob had smeared the jungle grease paint on his face, and under the
crinkled brow of the boonie cap his visage looked primitive; he seemed
a creature sprung from someone's worst dreams, some kind of atavistic
war creature totally of the jungle, festooned with pistols and
grenades, all smeared with the colors of nature, even his eyes gone to
nothing.
"Here. Paint up and we'll get going," he said, holding the stick of
camo paint out to Donny, who quickly blurred his own features. Donny
gathered his M14 and the impossibly heavy PRC-77, his real enemy in all
this, and began to ease his way down the slope with Bob.
It seemed they were lowering themselves into the clouds, like angels
returning to earth. The fog would not break; it clung to the floor of
the valley as if it had been enameled there. No sun would burn it
away, not today at any rate.
Now and then some jungle bird would call, now. and
152 STEPHEN HUNTER
then some animal shudder would ripple from the undergrowth, but there
was no sense of human presence, nothing metallic or regular to the eye.
Donny scanned left, Bob scanned right. They moved ever so slowly,
frustratingly slowly, picking their way down, until at last they were
nearly to the valley floor and a field of waist-high grass, in the
center of which a worn track had been beaten, by men or buffaloes or
elephants or whatever.
From far away, at last, came some kind of unnatural noise. Donny
couldn't identify it and then he could; it was the noise of men,
somehow--nothing distinct, not breaking talk discipline--somehow become
a herd, a living, breathing thing. It was No. 3 Battalion, still a
few hundred yards away, gearing up for the last six or so klicks of
quick march to the staging area for their assault.
Bob halted him with a hand.
"Okay," he said.
"Here's how we do it. You got the map coords?"
Donny did; he had memorized them.
"Grid square Whiskey-Delta 51201802."
"Good. If the sky clears and the birds come, you'll have line of sight
to-them and you can go to the Air Force freak and you talk 'em in. They
won't have good visuals.
You talk 'em down into the valley and have 'em plaster the floor."
"What about you? You'll be--" "Don't you worry about that. No squid
Phantom jock is flaming me. I can take care of myself. Now listen
up:
that is your goddamn job. You talk to 'em on the horn.
You're the eyes. Don't you be coming down after me, you got that? You
may hear fighting, you may hear small arms;
don't you fret a bit. That's my job. Yours is to stay up here and
talk to the air. After the air moves out, you should be able to git to
that snake-eater camp. You call them, tell them you're coming in, pop
smoke, and come in from the smoke so they know it's you and not some
NVA hero. Got that? You should be okay if I can hold these bad boys
up for a bit."
TIME TO HUNT 153
"What about security? I'm security. My job is to help you, to cover
your ass. What the hell good am I going to do parked up here?"
"Listen, Pork, I'll fire my first three shots when I get visuals. Then
I'll move back to the right, maybe two hundred yards, because they'll
bring heavy shit down. I'll try and do two, three, maybe four more
from there. Here's how the game works. I pull down on a couple, then
I move back. But guess what? After the third string, I ain't moving
back, I'm moving forward. That's why I want you right here. I'll
never be too far from this area. I don't want 'em to know how many
guys I am, and they'll flank me, and I don't want 'em coming around on
me. I guarantee you, they will have good, tough, fast-moving flank
people out, so you go to ground about twenty minutes after I first hit
them. They may be right close to you; that's all right.
You dig in and sink into the ground, and you'll be all right.
Just watch out for the patrols I know they'll call in. Them boys we
saw last night. They'll be back, that I guarantee."
"You will get killed. You will get killed, I'm telling you, you
cannot--" "I'm giving you a straight order; you follow it. Don't give
me no little-boy shit. I'm telling you what you have to do, and by
God, you will do it, and that's all there is to it, or I will be one
pissed-off motherfucker, Lance Corporal Fenn."
"I_"
"You do it! Goddammit, Fenn, you do it, and that's all there is to it.
Or I will have you up on charges and instead of going home, you'll go
to Portsmouth."
This was bullshit, of course, and Donny saw through it in a second. It
was all bullshit, because if Swagger went into the valley without
security, he was not coming back.
He simply was not. That's what the physics of firepower decreed, and
the physics of firepower were the iron realities of war. There was no
appeal.
He was throwing his life away for some strangers in a camp he'd never
see. He knew it, had known it all along.
154 STEPHEN HUNTER
It was his way. More like Trig: hungry to die, as if the war were so
inside him he knew he could not live without it;
there would be no life to go home to. He had kept himself hard and
pure just for this one mad moment when he could take on a battalion
with a rifle, and if he could not live, it was also clear that he would
fight to the very end. It was as if he knew there would be no place
for warriors in any other world, and so he may as well embrace his
fate, not dodge it.
"Jesus, Bob--" "You got it square?"
"Yes."
"You are a good kid. You go back to the world and that beautiful girl.
You go to her and you put all this bad bullshit behind you, do you
copy?"
"Roger."
"Roger. Time to hunt. Sierra-Bravo-Four, last transmission, and
out."
And, with the sniper's gift for subtle, swift movement, Bob then seemed
to vanish. He slithered off down the hill to the low fog without
looking back.
-Oob worked down through the foliage, aware that he was clicking into
the zone. He had to put it all behind him.
There could be nothing in his head except mission, no other memories or
doubts, no tremor of hesitation to play across the nerves of his
shooting. He tried to get into his war face, to become, in some way,
war. It was a gift his people had; his father had won the Medal of
Honor in the big one against the Japs, messy business on Iwo Jima, and
then come home to get the blue ribbon from Harry Truman and get blowed
out of his socks ten years later by a no-account piece of trash in a
cornfield. There were other soldiers in the line too: hard, proud men,
true sons of Arkansas, who had two gifts: to shoot and see something
die, and to work like hogs the long hot day. It wasn't much; it's what
they had. But there was also a cloud of melancholy attached to the
clan--off and on, over the
TIME TO HUNT 155
Swagger generations back to that strange fellow and his wife who'd
shown up in Tennessee in 1786 from who knew where, they'd been a line
of killers and lonely boys, exiles.
There was a blackness in them. He'd seen it in his father, who never
spoke of war, and was as beloved as a man in a backwater like Blue Eye,
Arkansas, could be, even more so than Sam Vincent, the county
prosecutor, or Harry Etheridge, the famous congressman. But his father
would have black dog days: he could hardly talk or stir; he'd sit in
the dark, and just stare out at nothing. What was dogging him? The
war? Some sense of his own luck? A feeling for the fragility of it?
Memories of all the bullets that had been fired at him, and the shells,
and how nothing had hit him in his vitals? That kind of luck had to
run out, and Daddy knew it, but he went out anyway, and it killed
him.
What could save you?
Nothing. If it was in the cards, by God, it was in the cards, and
Daddy knew that, and faced up to it like a man, looked it in the eyes
and spat in its black-cat face, until at last it reared up and bit him
in a cornfield on the Polk County line.
Nothing could save you. Bob pressed on, sliding deeper into the fog.
Odd how it clung, like clouds of wet wool; he'd never seen anything
like it in the "Nam, and this here was his third tour.
The fear began to eat at him, as it always did. Some fools said he had
no fear, he was such a hero, but that only proved how little they knew.
The fear was like a cold lump of bacon grease in his stomach, hard and
wet and slick, that he could taste and feel at all times. You could
not make it go away, you could not ignore it, and anybody who said you
could was the worst damned kind of fool.
Go on, be scared, he ordered himself. Let it rip. This may be it. But
the one thing that scared him most of all wasn't dying, not really; it
was the idea of not doing the job. That was something to fear in the
heart. He would do the job, by God; that he would.
156 STEPHEN HUNTER
Trees. He slid through them, tree to tree, his eyes working, testing,
looking for possibilities. A hide? A fallback? A line of movement
not under fire? A good field of fire? Damn this fog, could he even
see them? Could he read ranges, gauge the drop on the long shots?
Cover or just concealment? Where was the sun? Nope, didn't matter, no
sun.
A thin, cold rain had begun to fall. How would that affect the
trajectory? What was the wind, the humidity?
How wet was the stock of the rifle? Had it bloated and was now some
little swollen knot rubbing secretly against the barrel, fucking up his
point of impact? Had the scope sprung a leak, and was now a tube of
fog, worthless, leaving him with nothing?
Or: were there NVA ahead? Had they heard him coming?
Were they laughing as he bumbled closer? Were they drawing a bead even
as he considered the possibility? He tried to exile the fear as he had
exiled his own past and future, and concentrate on the mechanical, the
aspect of craft that lay before him, how he would reload fast enough if
it came to that, since the Remingtons didn't have no stripper clips and
the M1 18 had to be threaded in one round at a time. Should he set up
his two Claymores to cover his flanks? He didn't think he had time.
Help me, he prayed to a God he wasn't sure existed, maybe some old
gunny up there above the clouds, just watching out for bad boys like
him on desperate jobs for people who didn't even know his name.
He halted. He was in trees, had good tree cover, and good fog, a
fallback to a hilltop, and then he could cut back the other direction.
Professionally, he saw that this was it. A perfect choke point, with
targets in the open, fog to cover him, a rare opportunity to get at the
NVA in the open, lots of ammunition.
If this is it, by God, then this is it, he thought, settling in behind
a fallen tree, literally slipping into a bush, as he squirmed to find a
good position. He found his prone, and although he couldn't get one
leg flat on the ground for the
TIME TO HUNT 157
gouge of a rock or a stump, he got most of his body down, drawing
stability from the earth itself. The rifle was back and in, left grip
lightly on the forearm, sling tight as it ran from the wood, lashed
around that forearm and headed tautly to the stock. Right hand on the
small of the stock, finger still off the trigger. Breathing easy,
trying to stay cool. Another day at the office. He was situated so no
light would reflect off his lens. The trees around him would muffle
and defuse the sound of the shots. In the first minutes, anyhow, no
one would be able to figure out where the shots were coming from.
He slid his eye behind the scope, finding the proper three inches of
relief. Nothing. It was like peering into a bowl of cream. Drifting
whiteness, the outline of two or three scrub trees, no sense of the
hills forming the other side of the valley, a slight downward angle
into vertigo.
Nothing stood out from which to estimate range.
He checked his watch: 0700 hours. They would be along soon, not moving
quite so quickly because of the fog, but confident that it hid them and
that in hours they'd be in possession of Arizona.
So come on, you bastards.
What are you waiting for?
Then he saw one. It was the hunter's thrill after the long stalk, that
magical moment when the connection between hunter and hunted, fragile
as a china horse, first establishes itself. Blood rushed through him:
old buck fever.
Everybody gets it when they see the beast they will kill and eat;
that's how primordial it is.
I will not eat you, he thought, but by God I will kill you.
More emerged. Jesus Christ ... the first thin line of sappers in cloth
hats with foliage attached, rifles at the high port, eyes strained, at
maximum alertness; more tightly bunched, an infantry platoon, battle
ready, caped and pith-helmeted, chest web gear, green Bata boots and
AKs, Type 56, and no other identifying insignia; the pla158 STEPHEN
HUNTER toon leaders at the front; behind them in a tight little knot
the staff, their ranks unrecognizable in the muddy uniforms.
You never saw this. A North Vietnamese infantry battalion moving at
the half-trot through a choke point in tight formation, not spread out
for four thousand meters or broken down and moving in cells to
reassemble under dark. The pilots never saw it, the photos never got
it. The NVA, goddamn their cold, professional souls, were too quick,
too subtle, too disciplined, too smart for such movement. They moved
at night, in small units, then reassembled;
or they moved through tunnels, or in bomb-free Cambo or Laos, always
careful, risking nothing, knowing surely that the longer they bled the
American beast, the better their chances became. Possibly no American
had seen such a thing.
The CO was pushing them hard, gambling that he could beat the weather,
whack out Arizona and be gone.
Speed was his greatest ally, the bleak weather his next.
The rain fell harder, pelting the ground, but it did not stop the North
Vietnamese, who seemed not to notice.
Onward they came.
He snicked off the safety, and through the scope hunted for an officer,
a radio operator, an ammunition bearer with RPGs, an NCO, a machine-gun
team leader.
The targets drifted before him, floating through the crucifer of the
crosshairs. That he was about to kill never occurred to him; the way
his mind worked, he thought only that he was about to shoot.
Finally: you, little brother. An officer, youngish, with the three
stars of a captain lieutenant, at the head of an infantry platoon. He
would go first; then, back swiftly, to a radio operator; then, swing
left as you run the bolt, and go for the guy with the Chicom RPD 56,
put him down, then fall back. That was the plan, and any plan was
better than no plan.
The reticle of the Redfield scope wobbled downward,
TIME TO HUNT 159
bouncing ever so slightly, tracking the first mark, staying with him as
the shooter took his long breath, hissed a half of it out, found bone
to lock under the rifle, told himself again to keep the gun moving as
he fired, prayed to God for mercy for all snipers, and felt the trigger
break cleanly.
chapter thirteen
"Gooooooood morning, Vietnam," said the guy on VT Captain Taney's
portable, "and hello to all you guys out there in the rain. Well,
fellas, I've got some bad news.
Looks like that old Mr. Sun is still A.W.O.L.. That's UA, for you
leathernecks. Nobody's gonna stop the rain today. But it'll be great
for the flowers, and maybe Mr. Victor Charles will stay indoors
himself today, because his mommy won't let him outside to play."
"What a moron," said Captain Taney, Arizona's XO.
"The weather should break tonight, as a high pressure zone over the Sea
of Japan looks like it's making a beeline for--" "Shit," said Puller.
Why did he put himself through this? It would break when it would
break.
Standing in the parapet outside his command bunker, he glanced around
in the low light, watching the floating mist as it seethed through the
valley that lay beyond.
Should he put an OP out there, so they'd know when the 803rd was
getting close?
But he no longer controlled the hills, so putting an OP out there would
just get its people all killed.
The rain began to fall, thin and cold. Vietnam! Why was it so cold?
He had spent so many days in country over the past eight years but
never had felt it this biting before.
"Not good, sir," said Taney.
"No, it isn't, Taney."
"Any idea when they'll get here?"
"You mean Huu Co? He's already here. He pushed 'em hard through the
night and the rain. He's no dummy.
He wants us busted before our air can get up."
"Yes, sir."
"You have that ammo report ready, Captain?"
TIME TO HUNT 161
"Yes, sir. Mayhorne just finished it. We have twelve thousand rounds
of 5.56 left, and a couple more thousand30 carbine rounds. We're way
low on frags, seventy-nine rounds and belted 7.62. Not a Claymore in
the camp."
"Christ."
"I've got Mayhorne distributing the belted 7.62, but we're down to five
guns and I can't cover any approach completely. We can set up a unit
of quick-movers with one of the guns to jump to the assault sector, but
if he hits us more than one place at once, we screw the pooch."
"He will," said Puller bleakly.
"That's how he operates.
The pooch is screwed."
"You know, sir, some of these "Yards have family here in the compound.
I was thinking--" "No," said Puller.
"If you surrender, Huu Co will kill them all. That's how he operates.
We hang on, pray for a break in the weather, and if we have to, go hand
to hand in the trenches with the motherfuckers."
"Was it ever this bad in sixty-five, sir?"
Puller looked at Taney, who was about twenty-five, a good young Spec
Forces captain with a tour behind him.
But in sixty-five he'd been a high school hotshot; what could you tell
him? Who could even remember?
"It was never this bad, because we always had air and there were plenty
of firebases around. I've never felt so fucking on my own. That's
what trying to be the last man out gets you, Captain. Let it be a
lesson. Get out, get your people out. Copy?"
"I copy, sir."
"Okay, get the platoon leaders and the machine gun team leaders to my
command post in fifteen and--" They both heard it.
"What was that?"
"It sounded like a--" Then another one came. A solitary rifle shot,
heavy, obviously .308, echoing back and forth across the valley.
"Who the fuck is that?" Taney said.
"That's a sniper," said Puller.
162 STEPHEN HUNTER
They waited. It was silent. Then the third shot and Puller could read
the signature of the weapon.
"He's not firing fast enough for an M14. He's shooting a bolt gun, and
that means he's a Marine."
"A Marine? Way the hell out here in Indian Territory?"
"I don't know who this guy is, but he sounds like he's doing some
good."
Then came a wild barrage of full automatic fire, the lighter, crisper
sound of the Chicom 7.62X39mm the AKs fired.
Then the gunfire fell silent.
"Shit," said Taney.
"Sounds like they got him," The sniper fired again.
"Let's run the PRC-77 and see if we can pick up enemy radio
intelligence," Puller said.
"They must be buzzing about this like crazy."
Puller and his XO and Sergeant Bias and Y Dok, the "Yard chieftain, all
went down into the bunker.
"Cameron," Puller said to his commo NCO, "you think you've got any
juice left in the PRC-77?"
"Yes, sir."
"Let's do a quick scan. See if you can get me enemy freaks. They
ought to be close enough to pick up."
"Yes, sir. Sir, if air comes and we need to talk 'em in--" "Air isn't
coming today, Cameron. Not today. But maybe someone else has."
Cameron fiddled with the radio mast on the PRC-77, snapping a cord so
that it flew free above the wood and dirt of the roof, then clicked it
on, and began to diddle with the frequency dials.
"They like to operate in the twelve hundreds," he said.
He pulled through the nets, not bringing anything up except static, the
fucking United States Navy bellowing about beating the Air Force
Academy in a basketball game and-"Shit."
TIME TO HUNT 163
"Yeah," said Puller, leaning forward.
"Can't you get us in a little tighter?"
"It's them, isn't it, sir?" asked Taney.
"Oh, yes, yessy, yessy, yessy," said the head man Y Dok, who wore the
uniform of a major in the ARVN, except for the red tribal scarf around
his neck, "yep, is dem, yep, is dem!" He was a merry little man with
blackened teeth and an inexhaustible lust for war, afraid, literally,
of nothing.
"Dok, can you follow?" asked Puller, whose Vietnamese was good but not
great. He was getting odd words-attack, dead, halt--and he couldn't
follow the verb tenses;
they seemed to be describing a world he couldn't imagine.
"Oh, he say they under assault on right by platoon strength of
marksmen. Snipers. The snipers come for them. Ma my, 'American
ghosts. He says most officers dead, and most machine gun team leaders
also--oh! Oh, now he dead too. Y Dok hear bullet hit him as he talk.
Good shit, I tell you, Major Puller, got good deaths going, oh, so very
many good deaths."
"A platoon?" said Taney.
"The nearest Marine firebase is nearly forty klicks away, if it hasn't
rotated out.
How could they get a platoon over here? And why would they send a
platoon?"
"It's not a platoon," said Puller.
"They couldn't--no, not overland, across that terrain, not without
being bounced. But a team."
"A team?"
"Marine sniper teams are two-men shows. They can move like hell if
they have to. Jesus, Taney, listen to this and be aware of the
privilege you've been accorded. What you are hearing is one man with a
rifle taking on a battalion-strength unit of about three hundred
men."
"Dey say dey got him," said Y Dok.
"Shit," said Taney.
"God bless him," said Puller.
"He put up a hell of a fight."
"Dey say, 'American is dead and head man say, You
164 STEPHEN HUNTER
fellas get going, you got to push on to the end of the valley and de
officer say, Yes, yes, he going to--oh. Oh ho ho ho!" He laughed,
showing his blackened little teeth.
"No. No, no, no, no. He got dem! Oh, yes, he just killed man on
radio. I hear scream. Oh, he is a man who knows the warrior's walk,
dot I know. He got the good deaths, very many, going on."
"You can say that again," said Puller.
chapter fourteen
When the trigger broke, the North Vietnamese captain lieutenant turned
as if to look at Bob just once before he died. All the details were
frozen for a second:
he was a small man, even by NVA standards, with binoculars and a
pistol. An instant ago, he had been full of life and zeal. When the
bullet struck him, it sucked everything from him and he stood with
grave solemnity, colorless, as all the hopes and dreams departed him.
If he had a soul, this would be where it fled to whatever version of
heaven sustained him. Then it was over: with the almost stiff dignity
of formal ceremony, he toppled forward.
Bob threw his bolt fast, tossing out the spent shell, but never
breaking his eye relief with the scope, a good trick it only took a
lifetime to master. In the perfect circle of nine magnifications, he
saw the men who were his targets looking at one another in utter
confusion. There was no inscrutability in their expression: they were
dumbfounded, because this was not supposed to happen, not in the rain,
in the fog, in the perfect freedom of their attack, not after their
long night march, their good discipline, their toughness, their belief.
They had no immediate theory to explain it. No, this was not
possible.
Bob pivoted the rifle just a bit, found a new target, and felt the jolt
as the rifle fired. Two hundred yards out and two tenths of a second
later, the 173-grain bullet arrived at 2,300 odd feet per second. The
tables say that at that range and velocity, it will pack close to two
thousand foot pounds of energy, and it hit this man, a machine gun team
leader standing near his now dead commanding officer, low in his
stomach, literally turning him inside out. That was what such a big
bullet did: it operated on him, opening his intimate biological secrets
to those around him,
166 STEPHEN HUNTER
not a killing shot, but one that would bleed him out in minutes.
Quickly Bob found another and within the time it takes to blink an
eyelash, fired for the third time and set that one down, too.
The North Vietnamese did not panic, though they could not hope to pick
out Bob in the fog, and the muzzle blast was diffused; they only knew
he was on the right somewhere. Someone calmly issued orders; the men
dropped and began to look for a target. A squad formed to flank off to
the right and come around. It was standard operating procedure for a
unit with much experience and professionalism.
But Bob slithered away quickly, and when he felt the fog overwhelm him,
he stood and ran ahead, knowing he had but a few seconds to relocate.
Would they take the casualties and continue to march? Would they send
out flanking parties; would they take the time to set up mortars?
What will they do? he wondered.
He ran one hundred yards fast, slipping three new cartridges into the
breech as he jounced along, because he didn't want to waste time
loading when he had targets.
That was shooting time, precious. He slipped down off the incline onto
the valley floor and crouched as he moved through the elephant grass,
an odd nowhere place sealed off by vapors. He came at last to the
center of the track, and got a good visual without the grass: he was
now three hundred yards away and saw only the dimmest of shapes in the
fog. Sinking to a quick, rice-paddy squat, he put the glass to them,
put the crosshairs on one, quartering them high to account for a little
drop at that distance, and squeezed the trigger. Maybe he was shooting
at a stump.
But the blob fell, and when he quartered another, it fell too. He did
that twice more, and then the blobs disappeared;
they'd dropped into the grass or had withdrawn, he couldn't tell.
Now what?
Now back.
TIME TO HUNT 167
The flankers will come, but slowly, thinking possibly they're up
against a larger force.
Not even bothering to crouch, he ran again, full force through the
mist. Suddenly the NVA opened up and he dropped. But the sleet of
firepower did not come his way and seemed more of a probing effort, a
theoretical thing meant to hit him where, by calculation, he should be.
He watched as tracers hunted him a good hundred yards back, liquid
splashes of neon through the fog, so quick and gossamer they seemed
like optical illusions. When they struck the earth, they ripped it up,
a blizzard of splashy commotion. Then the firing stopped.
He dropped, squirmed ahead and came to a crook in a tree. Quickly he
slipped four more rounds into the M40's breech, throwing the last one
home and locking the bolt downward with the sensation of a vault door
closing.
The rifle came up to him, and he seemed to have lucked into a thinner
spot in the veil of fog, where suddenly they were quite visible. An
officer was talking on the radio phone as around him men fanned out.
Bob killed the officer, killed two of the men. Then he got a good shot
at a man with four RPGs on his back squirming for cover, put the
crosshairs onto a warhead and fired once. Force multiplier: the
quadruple detonation ripped a huge gout in the earth, possibly driving
others back, possibly killing some of them.
He didn't wait to count casualties, or even take a quick look at his
results. He crawled again through the high elephant grass, the sweat
pouring off him. He crawled for what seemed like the longest time.
Tracer rounds floated aimlessly overhead, clipping the grass, making
the odd whup sound a bullet fighting wind will make. Once, when the
firing stopped, he thought he sensed men around him and froze, but
nothing happened. When at last he found some trees so that he could go
back to work, he discovered he was much farther back in the column.
Before him, as the vapors drifted and seethed, were some men who seemed
less soldiers than beasts of burden, so laden were
168 STEPHEN HUNTER
they with their equipment. This was simple murder; he took no pleasure
in it, but neither did he consider it deeply. Targets? Take them
down, eliminate them, take them out. Numbly he did the necessary.
Jnuu Co, senior colonel, had a problem. It wasn't the firepower; there
wasn't much firepower. It was the accuracy.
"When he shoots, brother Colonel," his officer told him, "he hits us.
He is like a phantom. The men are losing their spirit."
Huu Co fumed silently, but he understood. In a frontal attack his men
would stand and fight or charge into guns:
that was battle. This was something else: the terrible fog, the
mysterious bullets singing out of it with unerring accuracy, seeking
officers and leaders, killing them, then .. .
silence.
"Maybe there are more than one," someone said.
"I believe there are at least ten," someone else said.
"No," said Huu Co.
"There is only one and he has only one rifle. It is a bolt-action
rifle, so therefore he is an American Marine, because their army no
longer uses bolt actions. One can tell from the time between the
rounds, the lack of double shots or bursts. You must be calm. He
preys on your fear. That is how he works."
"He can see through the fog."
"No, he cannot see through the fog. He is in the hills to the right,
clearly, and as he moves, he encounters disparities in the density of
the mist. When it is thin, he can see to shoot. Get the men down into
the grass; if they stand they will be killed."
"Brother Colonel, should we continue to march? How many can he kill?
Our duty lies at the end of the valley, not here."
It was a legitimate point, raised by Commissar Tien Phuc Go, the
political officer. Indeed, under certain circumstances, duty demanded
that officers and men simply accept a high rate of casualty in payment
for the TIME TO HUNT 169
importance of the mission. Rule No. 1: Defend the Fatherland;
fight and sacrifice myself for the People's Revolution.
"But this is different," said Huu Co.
"The fog makes it different, and his accuracy. Indiscriminate fire may
be sustained as fair battle loss. The sniper presents a different
proposition, both philosophically and tactically. If the individual
soldier feels himself being targeted, that has disproportionate meaning
to him and erodes his confidence.
In the West they call it 'paranoia," a very useful term, meaning
overimaginative fear for the self. He will give himself up to a cause
or a mission, in the abstract, but he will not give himself up to a
man. It's too personal, too intimate."
"Huu Co is right," argued his executive officer, Nhoung.
"We may not simply accept losses as we travel, for the weight becomes
immense and when we reach our goal, the men are too dispirited. What
then have we accomplished?"
"As you decide," said Phuc Go.
"But you may be criticized later and it will sting for many, many
years."
Huu Co accepted the rebuke; he had been criticized in a reeducation
camp in 1963 for nine long months, and to be criticized, in the
Vietnamese meaning of the term, was excruciating.
Bravely, he thrust ahead.
"A man like this can inflict a surprisingly high number of casualties,
particularly upon officers and noncommissioned officers, the heart of
the Army. Without leadership, the men are lost. He can attrit our
officer staff if we do not deal with him now and immediately. I want
Second Platoon on the right, supported by a machine gun team on each
end for suppressive fire. They are to maneuver on a sweeping movement,
while the rest of the unit holds up in the high grass. I want radio
contact with Company Number Two sappers, and recall them and assign
them in the blocking role. They must move quickly. Latest reports say
the weather will not break. We have some time and I prefer by far to
maintain unit integrity than to push on at
170 STEPHEN HUNTER
this time. We will take him in good time. Patience in all things;
that is our way. Communicate with your leaders and the fighters. Now
is not the time for rash action; this is a test of discipline and
spirit."
"That is understood, sir."
"Then let's do our duties, brothers. I anticipate success within the
hour and I know you will not let me down."
JDonny lay in the high grass, working the spotting scope.
But the range was too far, a good four hundred meters, and in the
valley he just saw the drifting mist, and heard the gunfire.
He took his right eye away from the scope and looked out with both of
them. Again, nothing. The shooting rose and fell, rose and fell,
punctuated now and then by two or three heavy rifle cracks, Bob's
shots. At one point some kind of multiple blast came. Had Bob fired a
Claymore?
He didn't know but he didn't think the sniper would have time, as he'd
been moving this way and that through the hills.
He was well situated, half buried in a clump of vegetation, halfway up
a hill, a little above the fog. He could see far to the right and far
to the left, but he didn't think anybody could get the drop on him. He
had a good compass heading to the Special Forces camp at Kham Due and
knew if he had to be could make it in two or three hard hours. He
drank a little water from his one remaining canteen. He was all right.
All he had to do was sit there, wait for air, direct the air, then get
the hell out of there. If no air came, then he was to move under cover
of nightfall. He was not to go into the valley.
He thought of a familiar remark scrawled in Magic Marker on Marine
helmets and flak jackets: "Yea, though I walk in the Valley of Death, I
shall fear no harm, because I am the meanest motherfucker in the
valley!" Bravado, sheer, thumping bravado, chanted like an
incantation, to keep the Reaper away.
I'm not going into the Valley of Death, he thought.
TIME TO HUNT 171
Those aren't my orders. I followed my orders, I did everything I was
told, I was specifically ordered not to go into the Valley of Death.
He accepted that as both a moral and a tactical proposition as ordered
by a senior staff NCO. No man could challenge that, nor would one want
to or try to.
I am fine, he told himself. I am short, I am fine, I am three and days
till DEROS. I have my whole goddamned life in front of me and no man
can say I shirked or ducked or dodged. No one can ever wonder if my
beliefs were founded on moral logic or my own cowardice. I have to
prove nothing.
Then why do I feel so shitty?
It was true. He felt truly sick, angry at himself, almost to the point
of revulsion. Down there Swagger was probably giving away his life and
Donny had somehow missed the show. Everybody cared about him. Trig,
too, had cared about him. What was so special about him that he had to
survive? He had no writer's gift, he was not conversational or
charismatic--no one could listen to him, he could be no witness.
Why me?
What's so special about my ass?
He heard them before he saw them. It was the thupthupthup of men
running, coming at the oblique. He didn't jerk or move quickly and in
an instant was glad he hadn't, for sudden moves like that get you
spotted.
They passed about twenty-five meters ahead of him, in single file, fast
movers stripped of helmets and packs and canteens, racing toward duty
and combat. It was the twelve-man flanking patrol, recalled by radio
to move on the sniper from behind.
He could see how it would work. They'd form a line and flankers would
drive Bob into them, or they'd come upon him from the rear. In either
event, Bob was finished.
If Donny'd had the grease gun he might have gotten all twelve in a
single burst. But probably not; that was very tricky shooting. If he
had a Claymore set up, he might
172 STEPHEN HUNTER
have gotten them too. But he didn't. He had nothing but his M14.
He watched them go and they pounded along with grace, economy and
authority. They disappeared into the fog.
I have my orders, he thought.
My job is the air, he thought.
Then he thought, Fuck it!" and got up to take them from behind.
They came as he thought they would, good, trained men, willing to take
casualties, a platoon strength unit fanning through the high grass. Bob
could make them out in the mist, dark shapes filing through the weaving
fronds; he thought of a deer he'd once seen in a foggy cornfield back
in Arkansas, and Old Sam Vincent, who'd tried to be a father to him
after his own had passed, telling him to fight the buck fever, to be
calm, to be cool.
He heard Sam now.
"Be cool, boy. Don't rush it. You rush it, it's over and you can't
never get it back."
And so he was calm, he was death, he was the kind hunter who shot for
clean kills and no blood trails, who was a part of nature himself.
But he wasn't.
He was war, at its crudest.
He had never had this feeling before. It scared him, but it excited
him also.
I am war, he thought. I take them all. I make their mothers cry. I
have no mercy. I am war.
It was an odd thought, just fluttering through a mind far gone into
battle intensity, but it could not be denied.
The platoon leader will be to the left, not in the lead, he'll be
talking to his men, holding them together.
He hunted for a talking man and when he found him, he shot him through
the mouth and ceased his talking forever.
I am war, he thought.
TIME TO HUNT 173
He shifted quickly to the man who'd run to the fallen officer and
almost took him, but instead held a second, and waited for another to
join him, grab him, take command, and turn himself to issue orders.
Senior NCO.
I am war.
He took the NCO.
The men looked at each other, dead targets in his eyes, and in a moment
of utter panic did exactly the right thing.
They charged at him.
He couldn't possibly take them all or even half of them; he couldn't
escape or evade. There was only one thing to do.
He stood, war-crazed, face green-black with paint, eyes bulged in rage,
and screamed, "Come on you fuckers, I want to fight some more! Come on
and fight me!"
They saw him standing atop the rise, and almost en masse pivoted toward
him. They froze, confronting him, a mad scarecrow with a dangerous
rifle atop a hill of grass, unafraid of them. For some insane reason,
they did not think to fire.
The moment lingered, all craziness loose in the air, a moment of
exquisite insanity.
Then they ran at him.
He dropped and slithered the one way they would not expect.
Right at them.
He slithered ahead desperately, snaking through the grass, until they
began to fire.
They paused a few feet from him, fired their weapons from the hip as if
in some terrified human ceremony aimed at slaying the devil. The
rounds scorched out, ripping the stalks above his head to land
somewhere behind.
It was a ritual of destruction. They fired and fired, reloading new
mags, sending their bullets out to kill him, literally obliterating the
crest of the hill.
He crawled ahead, until he could see feet and spent brass landing in
heaps.
174 STEPHEN HUNTER
The firing stopped.
He heard in Vietnamese the shouts:
"Brothers, the American is dead. Go find his body, comrades."
"You go find his body."
"He is dead, I tell you. No man could live through that. If he were
alive, he would be firing at us even now."
"Fine, go and cut his head off and bring it to us."
"Father Ho wants me to stay here. Somebody must direct."
"I'll stay, brother. Allow me to give you the privilege of examining
the body."
"You fools, we'll all go. Reload, make ready, shoot at anything that
moves. Kill the American demon."
"Kill the demon, my brothers!"
He watched as the feet began to move toward him.
Get small, he told himself. Be very, very small!
He went into a fetal position, willing himself into a stillness so
total it was almost a replication of genuine animal death. It was a
gift he had, the hunter's gift, to make his body of the earth, not upon
it. He worried only about the smell of his sweat, rich with American
fats, that could alert the wisest of them.
Feet came so close.
He saw canvas boots, and a pair of shower clogs.
They won this fucking war in shower clogs!
The two pairs of feet sloughed through the grass, each vivid in the
perfection of its detail. The man in shower clogs had small, dirty,
tough feet. The clogs were probably just an afterthought; he could
fight barefoot in snow or on gravel. The other's boots were holey,
torn, taped together, a hobo's comic footwear, something Red Skelton's
Clem Kadiddlehopper might wear. But then the boots marched on, passing
by, and Bob scooted ahead, slithering through the grass until he came
to a fold in the earth. He rose, checked around, and saw nothing in
the mist, and then raced off to the right, down the fold, toward the
column,
TIME TO HUNT 175
which had probably resumed its movement toward Arizona.
Then he crashed into the soldier.
NVA.
The two looked at each other for one stupid moment, Bob and this
obvious straggler, the idiot who'd wandered away. The man's mouth
opened as if to scream even as he fumbled to bring his AK to bear, but
Bob launched at him in an animal spring of pure evil brutality,
smashing him in the mouth with his skull, and driving downward on him,
pinning the assault rifle to his chest under his own dense weight. He
got his left hand about the man's throat, crushing it, applying the
full pinning weight of his body while at the same time reaching for his
Randall knife.
The man squirmed and bucked spastically, his own hands beating at Bob's
neck and head. Then one hand dipped, also for a knife, presumably, but
Bob rolled slightly to the left and drew his knee up and drove it into
the man's testicles with all the force he could muster. He heard the
intake of breath as the concussion folded his enemy.
Then he had the knife, and no impulse halted him. He drove it forward
into the belly, turned it sideways so the cutting edge sliced into
entrails, and drew it to the left.
The man spasmed, fighting the pain, his hand flying to Bob's wrist,
gagging sounds leaking from a constricted throat. Bob yanked the knife
out and stabbed upward, feeling the blade sink into throat. He fought
for leverage over the dying soldier, got himself upright and astride
the heaving chest and drove the blade two or three more times into the
torso, the man arching with each stroke.
He sat back. He looked about, saw the Remington a few feet away. He
wiped the Randall blade on his camoflaged trousers, and slipped it back
into the upside-down sheath on his chest. He checked quickly: two
pistols, a canteen. He picked up the Remington but had no time to look
for his hat, which had fallen off in the struggle. A lick of salty
blood ran down from the point on his crown
176 STEPHEN HUNTER
where he'd head-butted the North Vietnamese, and it arrived at the
corner of his mouth, shocking him. He turned, looked at the man.
Why had it been so easy? Why was the man so weak?
The answer was obvious: the soldier was about fourteen.
He'd never shaved in his life. In death, his face was dirty, but
essentially undisturbed. His eyes were open and bright but blank. His
teeth were white. He had acne.
Bob looked at the bloody package that had been a boy.
A feeling of revulsion came over him. He bent, retched up a few gobs
of undigested C-rat, gathered his breath, wiped the blood off his
hands, and turned back to the path that lay ahead of him, which led to
the column.
I am war, he thought; this is what I do.
Huu Co's political officer Phuc Go was adamant. A stocky little man
who'd been to Russian staff school, Phuc Go had the blunt force of a
party apparatchik, a man who lived and breathed the party and was a
master of dialectics.
"Brother Colonel, you must move, despite the cost. To waste more time
is to lose our precious advantage. How many can a single man kill? Can
he kill more than forty, possibly fifty? That is well under a twenty
percent casualty rate; that is entirely acceptable to the Party.
Sometimes, the fighters' lives must be spent to accomplish the
mission."
Huu Co nodded solemnly. Up ahead, sporadic fire broke out, but the
column had bogged down again. There was no word from the flanking
patrol and no word from the sappers who'd been recalled. Still, the
American assailed them with well-aimed shots, cadre his particular
specialty.
How did he know? Cadre wore no rank pins, carried few symbols of the
ego of leadership such as riding crops, swords or funny hats. Leaders
were indistinguishable from fighters, both in party theory and in
actual practice. Yet this American had some instinct for command, and
when
TIME TO HUNT 177
he fired, he brought down leaders, not always but in high enough
percentage to be disruptive.
"He is hitting our cadre, brother Political Officer. And what if we
push on, and he robs us over the kilometers of our leadership? And we
get to the objective and no leaders come forth and our attacks fail?
What will the party say then? Whose ears will ring the most loudly
with criticism?"
"Our fighters can produce leaders from amongst themselves. That is our
strength. That is our power."
"But our leaders must be trained, and to squander them for nothing but
the ego of a political officer who seeks the glory of seeing his column
destroy an American fort late in an already victorious war may itself
be a decision that is commented upon."
"I wonder, dear brother Colonel, if indeed there are not vestiges of
Western humanitarianism, the sick decadence of a doomed society, still
within your soul? You worry too much about such things as the petty
lives of individuals when it is the movement of the masses and the
forces of history and our objective that should be your concern."
"I am humble before my brother's excellent and perceptive critique,"
said the colonel.
"I still believe in patience over the long journey, and that in
patience lies virtue."
"Dearest Colonel," said the man, his face lighting with fire, "I have
sworn to the commissar that the American fort shall fall. I therefore
demand that you give the order to move forward without regard to--"
Phuc Go stopped talking. It was difficult to continue without a lower
jaw and a tongue. He stepped backward, the blood foaming brightly
across his chest and gurgling from the hole that had been his mouth.
Odd arguments came from him, so arcane and densely constructed they
could not be followed. His eyes turned the color of an old two-franc
coin and he died on his feet, falling backward
178 STEPHEN HUNTER
into the high grass amid a splash of muddy water that flew up when he
hit the wet ground.
Around the senior colonel, men dived for cover, but the senior colonel
knew the American would not fire. He realized that he would be spared.
In his way, the American was like a psychiatrist as much as a sniper,
and he operated on the body of the people to remove the self-important,
the vain, the overbearing. Political Officer Phuc Go was an angry man
and had been addressing his senior colonel aggressively, with brisk and
dramatic hand movements and a loud voice, in the gestural vocabulary of
superiority. Examining them, the American had assumed that it was he
who was in command, it was he who was dressing down a naughty inferior.
Thus the senior colonel's total lack of ego and presence had rendered
him effectively invisible in the sniper's scope.
There was another shot; down the column, a sergeant fell, screaming.
The senior colonel turned, one man standing among many cowering men,
and said conversationally to his XO, "Send out another platoon; I fear
our antagonist has evaded the first. And keep the men low in the
grass. We need not die for party vanity or some American's hunt for
glory."
The order was sent.
The senior colonel turned back to the hills, where the American still
hunted them.
You, sir, he thought in the language of his youth, forgotten all these
years, you, sir, are tres formidable.
Then he went back to considering how to kill the man.
Fuller cursed the clouds. They were low, wet, dense, thicker than the
blood on the floor of the triage tent, and they rewarded his anger with
a burst of rain, which fell like gunfire slopping through the mud.
No air.
Not today, not with these low motherfuckers choking the earth. He
looked back to his shabby empire of mud
TIME TO HUNT 179
and slatternly bunkers and smashed squad hootches and blown latrines. A
ragged curl of smoke still rose from where the dump had been blown
yesterday. Tribesmen and cadre huddled behind parapets or ran from
place to place, risking rifle fire. The mud smelled of buffalo shit
and blood and the acrid tang of burned powder.
A mortar shell detonated nearby, and he dropped behind his own parapet,
as a scream went up, "Medic! Goddammit, medic!" But there was no
medic; Jack Deems, who'd been with him since sixty-five and was
cross-trained both as a medic and a demolitions expert, a very good
professional soldier indeed, was hit yesterday. Shot in the chest.
Bled out screaming the names of his children.
Puller shivered.
Another mortar shell hit. Thank God the VC units only had 60-mms,
which lofted a grenade-sized bit of explosive into Arizona, and could
take out a man only if they scored a lucky, direct hit or they got him
in the open and took him down with shrapnel. But when Senior Colonel
Huu Co and his bad boys showed up, they'd have a weapons platoon with
Chicom Type 53s in 82-mm, and those suckers were bad news. If they
chose not to go for the direct kill, they could batter Arizona to
pieces with that much throw-load, then move in and shoot the wounded.
That would be it; then they'd fade into the hills.
The whole front would go: it was exquisitely planned, just as American
strength was ebbing but ARVN confidence not high enough, the temptation
too huge to deny and therefore getting them out of their normal
defensive posture for the first time since sixty-eight.
Puller looked again down the valley, which was shrouded in mist, and
felt the bone-chilling rain on the back of his neck. He stared, as if
he could penetrate that drifting, seething but altogether blank
nothingness. But he could not.
Now and then a shot or two sounded, the heavy smack of the Marine's
.308; it was always answered with a fusillade.
That Marine was still at it.
180 STEPHEN HUNTER
Man, you are a tiger, he thought. Don't know you, brother, but you are
one fucking tiger. You are the only thing between us and a complete
screwing of the pooch.
"They no get him," said Y Dok.
"No," said Puller, wishing he could break a team out to bring in the
sniper, but knowing he couldn't, and that it would be evil waste to
try.
"No, but they will, goddamn them."
Now they had him.
They were going to get him, but it was a question of when: early or
late?
Where had these guys come from?
Then he knew.
They had to be the sapper unit out on flank security, brought back fast
from out there. Probably Huu Co's best troops, real pros.
Bob lay on his belly on the crest of a small knoll, still as death,
breathing in un measurable increments. Underneath him he was wedded to
the Remington sniper rifle, whose bolt now gouged him cruelly in the
stomach. He could see through the wavering scope and watched as they
came for him.
Somehow, they knew this was his hill: it was some hunter's very good
instinct. Then he realized: they found the dead soldier in the gully
and tracked me. As he had moved through the wet elephant grass, he'd
probably left a pattern of disturbance, where the grass was wiped
clean, where the turf was trampled. Good men could follow much less.
Now they had him on this goddamned hill; it would be over in a few
minutes. Oh, these guys were good.
They had spread out, and were moving up very methodically, two
three-men elements of movement, two of cover. No more than three men,
too widely spaced for three shots, were visible at any one moment, and
then only for seconds. They were willing to give up one of the three
to find him and take him out. Soldiers.
TIME TO HUNT 181
He knew he had to get to his grease gun; if they got close, and he was
stuck with the Remington with one cartridge in the spout and a
bolt-throw away from another shot, he was done.
Now it was his turn to move, ever so slowly, ever so noiselessly.
Learn from them, he instructed himself. Learn their lessons: patience,
caution, calmness, freedom from fear, but above all the discipline of
the slow move. He had a complicated thing before him: without making a
sound, he had to reach back under his rain cape, release the sling of
the M3, draw it forward around his body, ease open the ejection port
cover and finger hole the bolt back. Then and only then would he have
a chance, but that destination was long minutes away.
The rain fell in torrents now, disguising his noise just a bit. But
these were sharp, trained men: their ears would hear the sound of
canvas rubbing on leather or metal sliding across flesh; or they would
smell his fear, acrid and penetrating; or they would see his movement
irregular against the steadier rhythms of nature.
Ever so slowly, he eased over to his side from his belly, an inch at a
time, shifting his hand back over the crest of his body. Now he could
hear them calling to each other:
they spoke the language of birds.
"Coo! Coo!" came the call of a dove in a part of the south where
there were no doves.
"Coo!" came the response, from the right.
"Coo!" came another one, clearly from behind. Now they knew he was
here, for the trail had led up the hill but had not led down it; they
had not cut across it. He was thoroughly cooked.
His fingers touched metal. They crawled up the grip of the grease gun,
pawed, climbed up to the tubular receiver and found the sling threaded
through its latch. His fingers struggled against the snap on the
sling.
Oh, come on, he prayed.
These little fuckers could be tough; they could rust
182 STEPHEN HUNTER
shut or simply be tightly fitted and need too much leverage to free
up.
Why didn't you check it?
Agh!
Asshole!
He ordered himself to check the sling snap a thousand times if he ever
got out of this fix, so that he would never, ever again forget.
Come on, baby. Please, come on.
With his fingers pulling, his thumb pushing, he battled the thing. It
was so small, so absurd: twelve men were twenty-five yards away hunting
him, and he was hung up on the cold, wet ground trying to get a fucking
little-Ah!
It popped, with a metallic click that he believed could be heard all
the way to China.
But nobody cooed and he wasn't jumped and gutted on the spot.
The gun slid free and down his back, but he captured it quickly with
his hand, and now withdrew it, very slowly, bringing it around, drawing
it close to him, like a woman to treasure for the rest of his life. He
smelled its oily magnificence, felt its tinny greatness. A reliable,
ugly piece of World War II improvisation, it probably cost a buck fifty
to manufacture from hubcaps and sleds and bikes picked up in
scrap-metal drives in the forties. That's why it had such a cheap,
toylike, rattly feel to it. With his fingers he deftly sprung the
latch on the ejection port, then inserted a finger into the bolt hole
that he had just revealed. With the finger he pushed back, felt the
bolt lock, then let it come forward. He dropped down and drew the gun
up to him.
"Coo! Coo!"
chapter fifteen
The message came by radio to the hasty command post dug into the side
of a hill. It was from the sapper patrol on the right flank.
"Brother Colonel," gasped Sergeant Van Trang, "we have the American
trapped on a hill half a kilometer to the west. We are closing on him
even now. He will be eliminated within the quarter hour."
Huu Co nodded. Van Trang was a banty little north countryman with the
heart of a lion. If he said such a thing was about to happen, then
indeed it would happen.
"Excellent," said the colonel.
"Out."
"There are no shots," his XO told him.
"Not since the unfortunate Phuc Go was martyred."
Huu Co nodded, considering.
Yes, now was the time. Even if he couldn't get the whole battalion
through the pass, he could get enough men through to overwhelm Arizona.
But he had every confidence in Van Trang and his sappers. They were
the most dedicated, the best trained, the most experienced. If they
had the American trapped, the incident was over.
"All right," he said.
"Send runners to One, Two and Three companies. Let's get the men out
of the grass, get them going. Fast, fast, fast. Now is the time for
speed. We have wasted enough time and energy on this American."
The XO rapidly gave the orders.
Huu Co went outside. All around him, men rose from the grass, shook
the accumulated moisture from their uniforms and formed up into loose
company units. A whistle sounded from in front of the column. Behind
Huu Co, with amazing swiftness, members of the combat support platoon
broke down the hasty command post so that nothing remained, then they
too went to their positions.
"Let's go," said Huu Co, and with a gaggle of support
184 STEPHEN HUNTER
personnel around him, he too began to move at the half-trot, ahead
through the mist and the rain, to the end of the valley where the
Americans were under siege.
The long train of men moved quickly, bending back the grass. Overhead,
the blessed clouds still hung, low and dense, to the surface of the
earth. No airplanes would come. He would make Arizona by nightfall,
give the men a few hours' rest, then move them into position and,
sometime after midnight, strike with everything he had, from three
directions. It would be over.
From the right it came, at last: the sudden flurry of fire, the sound
of grenade detonations, a few more shots and then silence.
"They got him," the XO said to him.
"Excellent," said Huu Co.
"At last. We have triumphed.
Frankly, between you and I, the American provided a great service."
"The political officer, Brother Co? I agree, of course.
He loved the party too much and the fighters not enough."
"Such men are necessary," said Huu Co.
"Sometimes."
"That American," said the XO.
"He was some kind of fighter himself. If they were all like that, our
struggle would be nowhere near its conclusion. I wonder what motivates
a man like that?"
Huu Co had known Americans in Paris in the early fifties and then in
Saigon in the early sixties. They had seemed innocent, almost
childish, full of wonder, incapable of deep thought.
"They are not a serious people," he said.
"But I suppose by the odds, every now and then you get one who is."
"I suppose," said the XO.
"I'm glad we killed this one.
I prefer the good ones dead."
He lay very composed, trying not to listen to his heart or to his mind,
or to any part of his body, which yearned to survive. Instead he
listened to nothing and tried to plan.
TIME TO HUNT 185
They are tracking you. They will come right to you. If you let them
carry the fight, you will die. You must shoot first, shoot to kill,
attack decisively. If you are aggressive you may stun them. They will
expect fear and terror. Aggression is the last thing they expect.
He tried to lay it all out, under the knowledge that any plan, even a
bad plan, is better than no plan.
Shoot the visible ones; spray till the mag empties; throw grenades;
fall away to the left; fall back into better cover in the trees. But
most of all: get off this hill.
They were very close, cooing softly to one another, haying converged.
They were patient, calm, very steady.
Oh, these were the best. They were so professional. No problems.
Getting the job done.
One suddenly stood before him. The man was about thirty, very tough
looking, his face a blank. He held an American carbine. He seemed to
have some trouble believing what lay before him on the ground.
Bob fired a five-round burst into his body, sending him down. He
pivoted, rising, and in the same second saw others turning toward him.
He swept the grease gun across them, a long, thudding burst, watching
the bullets chop through the grass in a blizzard of spray, ensnare his
opponents and take them down. Spent shells poured spastically from the
breech of the junky little piece as it rattled itself dry. In the
silence that followed, he heard the ping of grenade pins being pulled
and frantically threw himself backward, rolling through the grass,
feeling it lash and whip at him as he went, so glad he'd left the pack
behind.
The first grenade detonated about ten yards away and he felt the pain
as several pieces of shrapnel tore at his arm and the side of his body
that was exposed. But still he rolled and another grenade detonated,
this one still farther away.
He came to a stop, could hear some hustling around, and pulled a
grenade from his belt, pried the pin out and lofted it in the general
direction of his enemies. As it exploded--was that a scream he
heard?--he got a new
186 STEPHEN HUNTER
magazine into the submachine gun, and though he had no targets, lost
himself in the madness of firing. He emptied the magazine stupidly in
a sustained blast, the gun thudding, the bullets fanning out to splash
through the grass, atomizing stalks they struck, ripping sheets of mud
spray from the earth.
Then he rolled backward and continued to propel himself down the hill.
In one moment of repose, he got another magazine into the gun, but
before he could see targets he heard the soft crush of something heavy
landing nearby, and he went flat as a grenade detonated, sending a
spout of earth high into the sky and numbing his eardrums. Now he
heard nothing: his hearing was momentarily gone and his vision blurred.
The left arm hardly worked; it had numbed out and he saw that it was
bleeding badly.
Oh, shit.
Fire came at him from three points, short, professional bursts from
AK47s. They probed, sending the rounds skirmishing after him in three
vectors. He assumed that a few more were working around behind him.
That's it, he thought.
7 buy it.
This is it.
Oh, fuck, I tried so hard. Don't let me chicken out here at the end.
Oh, please, let me be brave.
But he wasn't brave. His anger melted. A profound sense of regret
washed over him. So much he hadn't done, so much he hadn't seen. He
felt the powerful pain of his own father's death upon him, and how, now
that he was gone, no one would be left alive to mourn and miss Earl
Swagger.
God help me, Daddy, I tried so goddamned hard. I just didn't make
it.
A shot kicked up next to his face, stinging his neck with pricks of
dirt. Another one buzzed by close. They were all shooting now, all of
them that were left.
I ain't no hero, he thought.
TIME TO HUNT 187
Oh, please, God, please don't let me die here. Oh, I don't want to
die, please, please, please.
But nobody answered and nobody listened and it was all over, it was
finished. Bullets cracked past or hit nearby, evicting gouts of angry
earth and pelting spray. He willed himself back, shrinking to
nothingness, but there was only so far he could go. His eyes were
shut. They had him. The next round would-Three fast booming cracks,
heavy and powerful. Then two more.
Silence. "Swagger? Bob Lee? You all right?"
Bob lifted his head; about forty yards away, a young Marine stepped out
of the elephant grass. Donny's boonie hat had fallen to his back and
his hair was golden even in the gray light and the misty rain. He was
an improbable black-and-green-faced angel with the instrument of his
sergeant's deliverance, the U.S. Rifle M14, 7.62 MM
NATO.
"Stay down," Bob called.
"I think I got 'em all."
"Stay down!"
In that second, two men fired at Donny but missed, the bullets pulling
big spouts from the valley floor. Bob turned to watch their shapes
scuttle away in the grass, and he walked bursts over both of them,
until they stopped moving. He crouched, waiting. Nothing. No noise,
just the ringing in his ears, the pounding of his heart, the stench of
the powder.
After a bit, he went to them; one was dead, his arms thrown out, the
blood congealing blackly as it pooled to form a feast for ants. The
other, a few yards away, was on his back, and still breathed. He had
left his AK 30 feet away as he'd crawled after taking the hits. But
now, exhausted, he looked up at Bob with beseeching eyes. His face and
mouth were spotted with blood, and when he breathed heavily, Bob heard
the blood bubble deep in his lungs.
188 STEPHEN HUNTER
The hand seemed to move. Maybe he had a grenade or a knife or a
pistol; maybe he was begging for mercy or deliverance from pain. Bob
would never know, nor did it matter. Three-round burst, center chest.
It was over.
Donny came bounding over.
"We got 'em all. I didn't think I could get here in time.
Christ, I hit three guys in a second."
"Great shooting, Marine. Jesus, you saved this old man's fucking
bacon," Bob said, collapsing.
"You're all right?"
"I'm fine. Dinged up a bit." He held out his bloody left arm; his
side also sang of minor penetration in a hundred or so places. Oddly,
what hurt the most was his neck, where the impacting NVA round had
blown a handful of nasty dirt into the flesh and hair of his scrubby
beard, and for some reason it stung like a bastard.
"Oh, Christ, I thought I was cooked. I was finished.
Wasted, greased. Man, I was a gone motherfucker."
"Let's get the fuck out of here."
"You wait. I left the rifle up top. Just let me catch my breath."
He sucked down a few gulps of the sweetest air he'd ever tasted, then
ran up the hill. The M40 lay where he had dumped it, its muzzle
spouting a crown of turf, its bolt half open and gummed also with
turf.
He grabbed it and ran back to Donny.
"Map?"
Donny fished it out of the case, handed it over.
"All right," Bob said, "he's sure got that column moving again. We've
got to move on, pass them, and jump them again."
"There's not much light left."
Bob looked at his Seiko. Jesus, it was close to 1700 hours. Time
flies when you're having fun.
"Fuck," he said.
He had a moment's gloom. No light, no shoot. They were going to get
close enough to stage an assault in the
TIME TO HUNT 189
dark, and all the snipers in the world wouldn't make a spit's worth of
difference.
"Shit," he said.
But Bob's mind was so fogged with delirium, adrenaline and fatigue it
wasn't processing properly. He had the vague sense of missing
something, as if he'd left his IQ points up there on that ugly little
hill. It was Donny who pulled another sack from around his waist,
opened it, and out came what looked like a small tubular popgun and a
handful of White Star illumination flares; the bag was heavy with the
cartridges.
"Flares!" he said.
"Can you shoot by flares?"
"If I can see it, I can hit it," Bob said.
They moved swiftly through the gloom, amid small hills, in the elephant
grass, ever mindful they were paralleling the movement of the enemy
main force in the valley, ever mindful that there were still scouting
units out in the area.
If and when the NVA discovered their dead recon team, they might send
still other men after them.
They moved at the half-jog, through a fog of fatigue and pain. Bob's
arm hurt desperately and he didn't have any painkillers, not even
aspirin. His head ached and his legs felt withered and shaky. They
followed a compass heading, re shooting it each time they moved around
a hill.
The elephant grass was tall and concealing, but it cut at them
mercilessly. There wasn't much water left and even in the falling
dark, Bob could see that the clouds hadn't broken, still hung low and
close. A wicked, pelting rain started, delivering syringes of cold
where it struck them.
Soon the trip became pure blind misery, two hungry, dead-tired, filthy
men running on faith and hope toward a destination that might not even
exist.
Bob's mind slipped in and out; he tried to concentrate on the job ahead
but it would not stay. At one point, he called a halt.
"I got to rest," he said.
"We been pushing pretty hard," Donny said.
190 STEPHEN HUNTER
Bob slipped down into the grass.
"You've lost a lot of blood."
"I'm okay. I only need a little rest."
"I got some water. Here, take some water."
"Then what'll you drink?"
"I don't need to shoot. I just fire flares. You need to shoot. You
need the water."
"You'd think, all this fucking rain, the last thing we'd be is
thirsty."
"I feel like I just played two football games without quarters or half
times Just two games straight through."
"Oh, man," Bob said, taking a big swig of Donny's water, feeling its
coolness rush down his flaming throat.
"After this, I'm going to sleep for a month," said Donny.
"No, after this," said Bob, "you are going on R&R to be with your wife,
if I have to go to the goddamned general and ass-kick him myself."
It was almost full dark. Somewhere birds were beginning to call; the
jungle was close, just beyond the hill line.
There was, however, nothing alive in view; once again, they seemed
alone in the world, lost in the hills, stuck in a landscape of
desolation.
Suddenly Bob's mind sped to other possibilities.
"I got a idea," he said.
"You got tape? Don't you carry tape? I think I told you to--" Donny
reached into a bellows pocket of his cammies, pulled out a roll of gray
duct tape.
"This would be tape, no?"
"That would be tape, yes. Okay, now .. . goddamn . the spotting
scope. Don't tell me you dumped your spotting scope. You didn't leave
that back with your gear, did you?"
"Fuck," said Donny, "I brought everything except a helicopter. Hmmm,
sink, tent, Phantom jet, mess hall; oh, yeah, here .. ."
He pulled another piece of gear slung around his shoulder. It was a
long, tubular green canvas carrying
TIME TO HUNT 191
case, strapped at either end, which carried an M49 20X spotting scope,
complete with a folded tripod. It was for glassing the really far
targets.
He unslung it and handed it over.
"Now what?"
"Oh, just you watch."
Greedily, Bob bent to the scope case, unscrewed it and reached out to
remove a dull-green metal telescope, disjointed slightly, with a
folding tripod underneath. It must have cost the Marine Corps a
thousand bucks.
"Beautiful, ain't it?" he asked. Then he rammed its delicate lens
against Donny's rifle muzzle, shattering it into a sheet of diamonds.
He reamed the tube out on the rifle barrel, grinding circularly to take
out all the glass and the delicate internal mechanisms for focus
adjustment.
He unscrewed and threw away the tripod. Then he seized the canvas
case, took out his Randall Survivor and began to operate.
"What are you doing?" Donny asked.
"You never mind, but you get my rifle cleaned up. No rules today.
Hurry, Pork, we gotta get a goddamned move on."
Donny worked some rough maintenance on the gun, clearing the muzzle of
mud and grass, scraping the dirt, and in a few minutes had it ready to
shoot again. He looked back to see that Bob had sawed off one end of
the scope case and cut a smaller hole through the other, giving him a
green tube about twelve inches long.
Bob wedged the spotting scope tube back into the case.
"Here, you hold that goddamn muzzle up for me," he commanded, and,
working swiftly, commenced to wedge the scope case and scope on the
muzzle, then wrap yards of tape around the case and the muzzle,
securing the case so that it projected a good eight inches beyond the
muzzle.
It looked like some kind of silencer but Donny knew it wasn't a
silencer.
192 STEPHEN HUNTER
"What is?"
"Field expedient flash suppressor," said Bob.
"Flash is just powder burning beyond the muzzle. If you can lengthen
the cover on the barrel, it'll burn up in there, not in the air, where
it'll light me up like a Christmas tree. It's pretty flimsy and won't
hold much more than a few dozen shots, but by God, I don't want them
tracking my flash and hitting me with the goddamned kitchen sink. Now,
let's mount out."
A last fast.
The troops were driven by duty and destiny. An extraordinary
accomplishment, the long double-time march from Laos, the ordeal of the
sniper in the valley, the victory over the man, and now, on to the
Green Beret camp at Kham Due. Battalion No. 3 was just a kilometer
away from the staging point, maintaining good order, moving smartly.
Huu Co, senior colonel, glanced at his watch and saw that it was near
midnight. They would be in place in another hour, and could use a
little time to relax and gather themselves. Then the assault teams
would stage and the weapons platoon would set up the 81mm Type 53s, and
the last stage would commence. It would be over by dawn.
The weather wouldn't matter.
Still, it was holding beautifully for him. Above there was a starless
night, gray and dim, the clouds close to the earth. In his old mind,
his Western mind, he could believe that God himself had willed the
Americans from the earth. It was as if God were saying, "Enough,
begone.
Back to your land. Let these people be."
In his new mind, he merely noted that his luck had held, and that luck
is sometimes the reward for boldness.
The Fatherland appreciated daring and skill; he had gambled and won,
and the eventual fall of the Kham Due camp would be his reward.
"It is good," said the XO.
"Yes, it is," said Huu Co.
"When this is over, I will--"
TIME TO HUNT 193
But Nhoung's face suddenly lit up. Huu Co turned to wonder about the
source of illumination.
A single flare hung in the sky beneath a parachute, bringing light to
the dark night. As it settled the light grew brighter, and there was
one lucid moment in which the battalion, gathered as it plunged toward
its study, seemed to stand out in perfect clarity. It was a beautiful
moment too, suffused with white light, gentle and complete, exposing
the people's will as contained and expressed through its army, nestled
between close hills, churning onward toward whatever tomorrow brought,
unhesitatingly, heroic, stoic, self-sacrificing.
Then the shot rang out.
Fuller dreamed of Chinh. His second tour. He hadn't planned to, it
just happened; she was Eurasian, lived in Cholon, he'd been in the
field eleven months and, suffering from combat exhaustion, had been
brought back to MACV in Saigon, given a staff job, just to save him
from killing himself. It was a safe job back then, sixty-seven, a year
before Tet, and Chinh was just there one day, the daughter of a French
woman and a Vietnamese doctor, more beautiful than he could imagine.
Was she a spy?
There was that possibility, but there wasn't much to know;
it was brief, intense, pure pleasure, not a whisper of guilt.
Her husband had been killed, she said, by the communists.
Maybe it was so, maybe it was not. It didn't matter.
The communists killed her one night on the road in her Citreon after
she'd spent hours making love with him. She ran through an ambush
they'd propped for an ARVN official:
just blew her away.
He dreamed of his oldest daughter, Mary. She rode horses and had
opinions. She hated the Army, watched her mother play the game, suck
up all the way through in the shit posts like Gemstadt or Benning,
always making a nice home, always sucking up to the CO's wife.
"I won't have it," Mary said.
"I won't live like that.
What does it get you?"
194 STEPHEN HUNTER
His wife had no answer.
"It's what we do," she finally said.
"Your father and me. We're both in the Army. That's how it works."
"It won't work that way for me," she said.
He hoped it wouldn't. She was too smart to end up married to some
lifer, some mediocrity who would go nowhere and only married her
because she was the daughter of the famous Dick Puller, the lion of
Pleiku, who'd taken a Chicom .51 in the chest and wouldn't even let
himself be medevaced out and who died in the shitty little Forward
Operations Base at Kham Due a year after the war was lost, threw
himself away for nothing that nobody could make any sense of.
Puller came awake. It was dark. He checked his watch.
It would start soon, be over soon. He smelled wet sand from the soaked
bags out of which the bunker was built, dirt and mud, gun oil, Chinese
cooking, blood, the works, the complete total that was life in the
field.
But he had an odd sensation: something was happening.
He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. Time to
get up and-"Sir."
It was young Captain Taney, who would probably also die tonight.
"Yeah?"
"It's--ah--you won't believe it."
"What?"
"He's still out there."
"Who?" Puller thought instantly of Huu Co.
"Him. Him. That goddamned Marine sniper."
"Does he have night vision?"
"No, sir. You can see it from the parapet. You can hear it. He's got
flares."
idle didn't get good targets. Not enough light. But in the shimmering
glow of the floating flares he got enough:
movement, fast, frightened, scurrying, the occasional hero who would
stand and try and mount a rally, the runner
TIME TO HUNT 195
who was sent to the rear to report to command, the machine gun team
that peeled off to try and flank him.
The flares fired with a dry, faraway pop, like nothing else in the
"Nam. They lit at about three hundred feet with a spurt of
illumination; then the 'chute would open and grab the wind, and they'd
begin to float downward, flickering, spitting sparks and ash. It was
white. It turned the world white. The lower they got the brighter it
got, but when they swung in the breeze, they turned the world to a riot
of shadows chasing each other through the dimness of his scope.
But still, he'd get targets. He'd fire at what his instincts told him
was human, what looked odd in the swinging light, the sparks, the glow
that filled the world, the crowd of panicked men who now felt utterly
naked to the sniper's reach. The night belonged to Charlie, it was
said.
Not this night. It belonged to Bob.
They'd worked it right. No movement, not now. It was too dark to move
and they'd get mixed up, get out of contact with one another and that
would be that. Donny was on the hilltop, Bob halfway down. The bad
guys were moving left to right beyond them, one hundred yards out,
where the grass was shorter and there wasn't any cover. It was a good
killing zone, and the first element of the column was hung up, pinned
in the grass, believing that if they moved they would die, which was
correct.
Donny would fire a flare and move a hundred steps or so on the hilltop,
while Bob waited for the flare to get low enough to see the movement.
Bob would fire twice, maybe three times in the period of brightest
light. Then he'd move too, the same one hundred steps, through the
grass, and set up again.
Forward; then they'd move back. They couldn't see one another, but
they had the rhythm. They'd send people up after him, but not soon
enough. They wouldn't be sure where the flares were coming from,
because, God bless the little fireworks, they didn't trail illumination
as they ascended.
196 STEPHEN HUNTER
Bob couldn't even see the reticle. He just saw the movement and knew
where the reticle would be because that's where it always was, and he
fired, the rifle cracking, its flash absorbed in the steel tube that
surrounded the muzzle but would sooner or later have to give way. No
one could yet see where the shots were coming from.
The flare floated, showering sparks. In its cone of light, Bob saw a
man drop into vegetation and he put a bullet into him. He flicked the
bolt fast, jacking out the spent case, and watched as another man came
through the light to his fallen comrade, and he killed him too. The
trick was the light; the flares had to be constant; there couldn't be a
dark moment when there was no light because these guys would move on
him then, and they'd be too close, too fast and it would be over.
It lasted for ten minutes; then, having planned it, Donny stopped
firing and Bob stopped firing. They both fell back, met at the far
side of the hill, and took off on the dead run, leaving behind the
confusion. They moved on, looking for another setup.
"That'll slow 'em. It'll take 'em ten minutes to figure out we're
gone. Then they'll get moving again. We should be able to hit them
again. I want to set up on that side now. You watch me."
Donny had the M14 at high port. Bob's rifle was slung and he carried
the M3 in his hands, though he was down now to two magazines. Both his
handguns were cocked and locked.
"Okay, you ready?"
"I think so."
"You cover me if I take fire."
"Gotcha."
Bob stepped out of the grass onto the valley floor.
He felt so naked. He was all alone. The wind whistled, and once again
it began to rain. The NVA must have been a half klick or so behind.
Suddenly, the sky behind them lit up: an assault team had moved up to
and taken the now empty hill on which they had situated. Grenade
blasts
TIME TO HUNT 197
rocked the night, and blades of the sheer light slashed from the
concussion. Heavy automatic weapons fire followed:
again, they were slaying the demon.
Bob got halfway across, then turned with his grease gun to cover, and
called out for Donny to join him.
"Come on!" he shouted.
The boy came across the valley floor and passed Bob, and went to set up
on the other side. Bob raced over.
Quickly, they found another hill.
"You get on up there," Bob said.
"When you hear me shoot, you fire the first flare. I'm going to open
up further out this time. Meanwhile, you set up Claymores. I'm down
to about twenty rounds and I want a fallback. If we get bounced, we'll
counter bounce with the Claymores, then fall back. Set them up, and
wait to pop flares. Password is . fuck, I don't know; make up a
password."
"Ah--Julie."
"Julie. As in "Julie is beautiful," roger that?"
"Roger that."
"You hear movement coming to you and he don't sing out "Julie is
beautiful," you go to Claymores, use the confusion to fall back and
find a hide, then you wait until tomorrow and call in a bird after a
while. Okay? There'll be a bird tomorrow. Got it?"
"Got it."
"If I don't make it back, same deal. Fall back, go to ground, call in
a bird. They'll be buzzing all over this zone tomorrow, no problem.
Now, how many flares you got?"
Donny did a quick check on his bag.
"Looks like about ten."
"Okay, when they're gone, they're gone. Then we're out of business.
Fall back, hide, bird. Okay?"
"Check," said Donny.
"You all right? You sound kind of shaky."
"I'm just beat. I'm tired. I'm scared."
"Shit, you can't be scared. I'm scared enough for both of us. I got
all the fear in the whole fucking world."
"I don't--"
198 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Just this last bad thing, then we are the fuck out of here, and I'm
going to make sure you get home in one piece, I give you my word. You
done yours. Nobody can say, He didn't do his. You done it all ten
times over. You get to go home after this one, I swear to you."
There was an odd throb in his own voice that Bob had never heard
before. Where did it come from? He didn't know. But somehow Bob had
a blinding awareness that in some way, the life of the world now
depended on getting Donny home in one piece. Donny was the world,
somehow, and if he, Bob, got him killed out here for this shit, he
would answer for all eternity. Very strange; nothing he'd ever felt
before on any battlefield.
"I'm cool," Donny said.
"See you in a bit, Sierra-Bravo-Four."
Donny watched the sergeant go. The man was like some Mars or Achilles
or something, so lost in the ecstasy of the battle that he somehow
didn't want it to end, didn't want to come back. Once again, Donny had
the odd feeling that he was destined to witness all this and tell it.
To whom?
Who would care? Who would listen? The idea of soldiers as heroes was
completely gone. Now, they were baby killers or, if not that, they
were fools, suckers, morons who hadn't figured out how to beat the
machine.
So maybe that was his job: to remember the Bob Lee Swaggers of the
world and, when the times somehow changed, the story could be retrieved
and told. How one crazy Arkansas sumbitch, mean as a snake, dry as a
stick, brave as the mountains, took on and fucked up an entire
battalion, for almost nothing, really, except so that nobody would ever
say of him. He let us down.
What made such a man? His brutal, hard scrabble childhood? The Corps
as his home, his love of fighting, his sense of country? Nothing
explained it; it was beyond explanation.
Why was he so meaninglessly brave? What compelled him to treat his
life so cheaply?
TIME TO HUNT 199
Donny made it to the top of the hill. It was a queer little empire,
much smaller than the last hill, a little hump that overlooked the
larger valley before it. Here is where they would fight.
He unstrapped his three Claymores bandoleers and took the things out,
your basic M18A1 Directional Mine.
Jesus, were these nasty little packages. About eight inches across and
four inches tall, they were little con vexes of plastic-sheathed C-4,
impregnated with about seven hundred pieces of buckshot apiece. You
opened a compartment, pulled out about one hundred meters of wire,
unspooled it to your safe hole, and there crimped it to the Electrical
Firing Device M57, which came packed in the bandoleer and looked like a
green plastic hand exerciser.
When you clamped it, you jacked a goose of electricity through the wire
to the detonator, the pound and a half of C-4 went kaboom, and the
seven hundred steel balls went sailing through the air at about two
thousand miles an hour. For a couple of hundred feet, anything in
their way--man, beast, vegetable or mineral--got turned to instant
spaghetti. Just the thing for human wave attacks, night ambushes,
perimeter defense or those annoying staff meetings, though the Marine
Corps thoughtfully added the message front toward enemy for its dimmer
recruits, so they wouldn't get mixed up in all the excitement and blow
a nasty hole in their own lines.
Donny pulled down the folding scissors legs on each mine, made sure
that the front indeed faced the enemy, and set up the three of them
about sixty feet apart, atop the hill. There was some little technical
business to be done involving blasting caps, shipping plug priming
adaptors, the detonator well, wire crimped and so on.
Then the wire was fed backward, where he used his entrenching tool to
dig a quick, low hole, though he knew that if he ever had to go to the
mines, it meant there were enough zips coming at them that whether he
survived the backblast or not was kind of a moot point.
He took a last swig on his canteen and tossed it away.
200 STEPHEN HUNTER
He wished he had a C-rat left, but he'd left them back with most of his
gear. Now, however, instead of the usual huge burden, he felt almost
light-headed. He had no food, no canteen, no spotting scope, no
Claymores. The only burden, beside his M14 magazines, was the
goddamned PRC-77, tied tightly to his back by a couple of cruel straps.
He even dared peel it off, and now felt really light.
He felt like dancing. The freedom from the ache of going into battle
with sixty pounds of gear and then twenty pounds of gear and now
nothing was astonishing. He had trained himself to ignore the ache in
his back; now it vanished.
Cool, he thought, I get to die without a backache, first time in my
career in the "Nam.
Then the shot came, and Donny hastily pulled out his flare device,
slipped a flare into the breech, screwed it shut and thrust it against
the ground to fire. Like a tiny mortar, the flare popped out and
hissed skyward, seeming to disappear. A second passed, then the night
bloomed illumination as the flare lit, its 'chute opened and it began
to float down into the valley, showering sparks and white.
It was snowing light.
Bob was shooting now.
The last act had begun.
They were much closer than he anticipated. The scope was cranked down
to three power so that he could get as clear and wide a view as
possible. Still, they weren't targets so much as possibilities,
squirms of movement that in their rhythm seemed human against the
stiller spectacle of the natural world, though it was all made stranger
yet by the rushing shadows the swing of the flare created as it
descended.
He saw, he fired. Something stopped moving, or just went down. He'd
had eighty rounds; he was down to less than twenty. God, I killed some
boys today. Jesus fucking Christ, I did some killing today. I was
death today, I was the Marine Corps's finest creation, the stone
killer, destroying all that moved before me.
TIME TO HUNT 201
Something moved, he shot it, it stopped. Clearly the NVA couldn't
locate him, and he was so close, and now the boss man had made a
decision--to keep going, to take casualties, to make the rallying point
for the attack on Arizona, to march through the minefields, as a
Russian general had put it.
It was as though he were saying to Bob: You can't kill us all. We will
defeat you through our willingness to absorb death. That is how we won
this war; that is how we will win this battle.
He could hear sergeants screaming, "Bi! Bi! Bi!" meaning "go, go,
go," urging the troops onward, but they could not see him because of
his flash hider, the panic, the fear. The troops did not want to go,
clearly. He'd gotten into their heads: that was the sniper thing; that
was what was so terrible about the sniper. He was intimate and
personal in a way which nothing else that kills in war can be; his
humanness preys on your humanness, and it was hardest for even the most
disciplined of troops to face.
He jacked out a round into the breech, fired, watched someone die. He
fired again, quickly, in the fading light;
then another flare popped, the light renewed and he saw more targets,
so close it was criminal murder to take them, but that was his job
tonight: he took them, reloaded, fell back through the high grass,
emerged when another flare fired off, and killed some more. He was
gone totally in the red, screaming urgency of his own head, not a man
anymore, but a total killing system, conscienceless, instinctive, his
brain singing with blood lust. It was so easy.
Co Nhoung was gone. The bullet snuffed his life out in a second,
drilling him through the neck with the sound of an ax hitting a side of
raw beef. Nhoung died on his feet, and hit the ground a corpse. His
soul flew away to be with his ancestors.
"We are dying! He can see us! There is no hope!" a young soldier
screamed.
202 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Shut up, you fool," yelled Huu Co, yearning to reach to the sky and
crush those blasphemous flares with his bare hands, then rip the skulls
from the bodies of the sniper and his spotter.
"They're on the left this time," he screamed again, because he had seen
the XO fall to the right, pushed by the impact of the bullet.
"On the left. Fire for effect, brothers, fire now, kill the demons!"
His troops began to open fire helter-skelter, without much thought, the
lacy neon of the tracers jumping through the darkness like spiderwebs,
ripping vaguely where they struck tree or vegetation, but the point of
it was to calm them while he figured out what to do.
He stood. A flare lit over his head. He was in bold relief and the
flare seemed to be falling directly toward him. The man next to him
fell, stricken; the man behind him fell, stricken. He was in the cone
of light; he was the target. It didn't matter. His life didn't
matter.
"Number One assault platoon, advance one hundred meters to the left;
Number Two assault platoon, provide covering fire during the movement;
weapons platoon, set up mortar units to be ranged at 150 meters on the
hill at 1000 hours to our front. Machine gun platoon, set up automatic
weapons one hundred meters to the right."
He waited for the sniper to kill him.
But instead, an astonishing thing happened. No bullet came at all. The
sniper lit a torch and began waving at him, as if to say, Here I am.
Come kill me. He could see the man, surprisingly close, waving the
torch.
"There he is; kill him! You see him. Kill him," Huu Co shouted.
As he came out of the grass, another flare popped, low this time,
filling the night with white light. The spectacle was awesome through
the scope, jacked up three times:
he saw men run in panic, he saw the blind fire directed
TIME TO HUNT 203
outward, he saw men in the center of the position yelling
desperately.
Commanding officer, he thought.
Oh, baby, if I can do you, I can call this one a day!
Three men stood. The center of the scope found one and he pulled the
trigger with--damn!--enough jerk so the shot went high and he knew he
hit high, in the neck; in the perfect circle of the scope, his target
sank backward, stiff and totaled. Bob cocked fast, but the flare died.
He could hear nothing. The fire lashed outward pointlessly, unaimed,
mere fireworks as if the terrified were trying to drive demons away.
Another flare popped: low and bright and harsh.
Bob blinked at the brightness of it, saw another man stand, fired,
taking him down. As he pivoted slightly, he went past a second man to
a third, fired quickly, hit him off center and put him down. Then he
came back to the second man as he rushed through the bolt cycle.
Got you.
You're it.
You're the man.
He caught his breath, steadied himself. The flare seemed to be falling
right toward this brave individual, and Bob saw that yes: this was him,
whoever he was.
The officer alone stood, taking the full responsibility of the moment.
He called directions so forcefully, Bob could hear the Vietnamese
vowels through the noise of the fire. He was fortyish, small, tough,
very professional looking, and on his green fatigues he wore the three
stars of the senior colonel, visible only now because the light was so
bright as the flare descended.
Bob took a second's worth of breath, noticing that in the brightness of
the instant, the reticle had even materialized;
the crosshairs stood out bold and merciless upon the colonel's chest,
and in that second Bob took the slack out and with the snap of a piece
of balsa wood shattering, the trigger went, the rifle recoiled, death
from afar was sent upon its way.
204 STEPHEN HUNTER
But something was wrong; instead of a sight picture, Bob saw bright
lights, bouncing balls of sheer incandescence, his night vision
shattering as he blinked to clear but the world had caught on fire.
Flames ate the darkness. It made no sense.
Then he realized what had happened. The jury-rigged suppressor,
sustained in its nest of tape, had finally yielded to the hammering of
muzzle blast and flash, slipped down into the trajectory of the bullet,
deflected it and, exposed directly to the detonation of flash, the
canvas exploded into flame. The rifle had become a torch signaling his
location. He stared at it for an oafish moment, realized it was his
own death, and threw the whole mad blazing apparatus away.
Now there was nothing left except the remotest possibility of
survival.
He turned to flee, as bullets clipped about, whacking through the.
stalks He was hit hard, on the back, driven to the earth. The pain
was excruciating.
He saw it very clearly: I am dead. I die now. This is it. But no
life sprung before his eyes; he had no sense of wastage, loss,
recrimination, only sharp and abiding pain.
He reached back to discover not hot blood but hot metal. A bullet
aimed for his spine had instead hit the slung M3 grease gun, driving it
savagely into him, but doing him no permanent harm. He shucked the
disabled weapon, and began to slither maniacally through the grass as
the world seemed to explode around him.
He didn't know what direction; he just crawled, pathetically, a fool
begging for life, so far from heroic it was ludicrous, thinking only
one phrase like a mantra: I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I
don't want to die.
He kept going, through his terror, and came at last to a little nest of
trees, into which he dove and froze. Men moved around him in the
darkness; shots were fired, but the action, after the longest time,
seemed to die away, and he slipped in another direction.
He got so far when someone shouted, and then, god TIME TO HUNT 205
damn them, the NVA fired their own flares. Theirs were green, less
powerful, but they had more of them: the sky filled with multiple suns
from a distant planet, sparky green, descending through green muck as
if it were an aquarium.
In a moment of primeval fear, Bob simply turned and ran. He ran like a
motherfucker. He ran crazily, insanely to escape the cone of light,
but even as it promised to die, another blast of candlepower lit the
night as another dozen or so green Chicom flares popped.
This seemed to be the place. He ran upward, screaming madly, "Julie is
beautiful, Julie is beautiful!", saw Donny rise above him with his M14
in a good, solid standing offhand and begin to fire on his pursuing
targets very professionally. Bob ran to the boy, feeling the armies of
the night on his butt, and dove into Donny's shallow hole.
"Claymores!" he screamed.
"They're not close enough!" Donny responded. Bob rose: more flares
came, and this time a whole company seemed to be rushing at them to
destroy them.
"Now!" he screamed.
"No!" screamed Donny, who had the three firing devices.
Where had this kid got this much cool? He held them, the shots
cracking up the hill, tracers flicking by, the green flares floating
down, the screams of the rushing men louder and louder until he fell
back, smiled and squeezed the three firing devices simultaneously.
chapter sixteen
Donny had three M14 mags left, with twenty rounds each; Bob had seven
rounds in his .45, one loaded magazine, and seven rounds in his .380
with no extra magazines.
Donny had four grenades. Bob had his Randall Survivor. Donny had a
bayonet.
That was it.
"Shit," said Donny.
"We're cooked," said Bob.
"Shit," said Donny.
"I fucked up," said Bob.
"Sorry, Pork. I could have led them away from here. I didn't have to
come back up this hill. I wasn't thinking."
"It doesn't matter," said Donny.
The NVA scurried around at the base of the hill. Presumably they'd
carried off their dead and wounded, but it wasn't clear yet what their
next move would be. They hadn't fired any flares recently, but they
were maneuvering around the hill, Bob supposed, for the last push.
"They may think we have more Claymores," he said.
"But probably they don't."
It was dark. Donny had no flares. They crouched in the hole at the
top of the hill, one facing east, the other west. The dead M57s with
their firing wires lay in the hole too, getting in the way. The stench
of C-4, oddly pungent, filled the air, even now, close to an hour after
the blasts.
Donny held his M14, Bob a pistol in each hand. They could see nothing.
A cold wind whipped through the night.
"They'll probably set up their 81s, zero us, and take us out that way.
Why take more casualties? Then they can be on their way."
"We tried," said Donny.
"We fought a hell of a fight," said Bob.
"We hung 'em
TIME TO HUNT 207
up a bit. Your old dad up in Ranger heaven would be proud of you."
"I just hope they find the bodies, and my next of kin is notified."
"You ever file that marriage report?"
"No. It didn't seem important. No off-post living in the "Nam."
"Yeah, well, you want her to get the insurance benefits, don't you?"
"Oh, she doesn't need the money. They have money.
My brothers could use it for school. It's okay the way it is."
Nothing much to say. They could hear movement at the base of the hill,
the occasional secret muttering of NCOs to their squads.
"I lost the picture," Donny said.
"That's what bothers me."
"Julie's picture?"
"Yeah."
"When?"
"Sometime in the night. No, the late afternoon, when I went after that
flank security unit. I don't remember. My hat fell off."
"It was in your hat?"
"Yeah."
"Well, tell you what, I can't git you out of here and I can't git you
the Medal of Honor you deserve, but if I can git you your hat back,
would you say I done okay by you?"
"You always did okay by me."
"Yeah, well, guess what? Your hat fell off your head, all right, but
you been so busy, and now you're so tired you ain't figured out that
you was wearing a cord around the hat to pull it tight in the rain.
It's still there. It's hanging off your neck, across your back."
"Jesus!"
Donny reached around his neck and felt the cord; he drew it tight,
pulled the hat up from around his back and removed it.
208 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Shit," he said, because he could think of nothing else to say.
"Go on," said Bob, "that's your wife; look at her."
Donny pulled at the lining of the hat and removed the cellophane
package, unpeeled it and removed, a little curled and bent, slightly
damp, the photograph.
He stared at it and could see nothing in the darkness, but nevertheless
it helped.
In his mind, she was there. One more time. He wanted to cry. She was
so sweet, and he remembered the three days they'd had. They got
married in Warrenton, Virginia, and drove up to the Skyline Drive and
rented a cabin in one of the parks. They spent each day going for long
walks. That place had paths that ran along the sides of the mountains,
and you could look down into the Shenandoahs or, if you were on the
other side, into the Piedmont. It was green, rolling country,
checkerboard farms, as far as you could see; beautiful, all right.
Maybe it was his imagination, but the weather seemed perfect. It was
early May, spring, and life was breaking from the crust of the earth
with a vengeance, green buds everywhere. Sometimes it was just them
alone in the world, high above the rest of the earth. Or was it just
that all soldiers remember their last leave as special and beautiful?
"Here, look," said Donny.
"It's too dark."
"Go on, look he commanded, the first time he had ever spoken sharply to
his sergeant.
Swagger gave him a sad look, but took the picture.
He looked at Julie, but saw nothing. Still, he knew the picture. It
was a snapshot taken in some spring forest, and the wind and the sun
played in her hair. She wore a turtleneck and had one of those smiles
that made you melt with pain. She seemed clean, somehow, so very, very
clean.
Straw blond hair, straight white strong teeth, a tan face, an outdoorsy
face. She was a beautiful girl, model or movie-star beautiful. Bob
had a brief, broken moment when he contemplated the brute fact that no
one nowhere
TIME TO HUNT 209
loved him or would miss him or give a shit about his death. He had no
one. A middle-aged lawyer in Arkansas might shed a tear or two, but he
had his own kids and his own life and the old man would probably still
miss Bob's father more than he'd miss Bob. That was the way it went.
"She's a great-looking young woman," Bob said.
"I
can tell she loves you a lot."
"Our honeymoon. Skyline Drive. My old captain gave me six hundred
dollars to take her away when I got my orders cut. Emergency leave. He
got me three days. He was a great guy. I tried to pay him back, but
the letter came back, and it was stamped, saying he had left the
service."
"That's too bad. He sounds like a good man."
"They got him too."
"Yeah, they get everyone in the end."
"No, I don't just mean 'them, they." I mean a specific guy, with
influence, who set about to purify the world. We were part of the
purification process. I'd still like to look that guy up. Commander
Bonson. Here's to you, Commander Bonson, and your little victory. You
won in the end. Your kind always does."
Flare. Green, high. Then two or three more green suns descending.
"Git ready," said Bob.
They could hear the ponk-ponk-ponk as a few hundred yards away, three
81mm mortar shells were dropped down their tubes. The shells climbed
into the air behind a faint whistle, then reached apogee and began
their downward flight.
"Get down!" screamed Bob. The two flattened into the mud of the
shallow hole.
The three shells landed fifty meters away, exploding almost
simultaneously. The noise split the air and the two Marines bounced
from the ground.
"Ah, Christ!"
A minute passed.
210 STEPHEN HUNTER
Three more flares opened, green and almost wet, spraying sparks all
over the place.
Bob wished he had targets, but what the hell difference did it make
now? He lay facedown in the mud, feeling the texture of Vietnam in his
face, smelling its smells, knowing he would never see another of its
dawns.
Ponkponkponk.
The shells climbed, whispering of death and the end of possibilities,
then descended.
Oh, Jesus, Bob prayed, oh, dear Jesus, let me live, please, let me
live.
The shells detonated thirty meters away, triple concussions, loud as
hell. Something in his shoulder began to sting even before he landed
again in Vietnam, having been lifted by the force of the blast. Acrid
Chinese smoke filled his eyes and nostrils.
He knew the drill. Somewhere a spotter was calling in corrections.
Fifty back, right fifty, that should put you right on it.
Oh, it was so very near.
"I was a bad son," Donny sobbed.
"I'm so sorry I was a bad son. Oh, please, forgive me, I was a bad
son. I couldn't stand to visit my dad in the hospital, he looked so
awful, oh. Daddy, I'm so sorry."
"You were a good son," Bob whispered fiercely.
"Your daddy understood, don't you worry about it none."
Ponkponkponk.
Bob thought of his own daddy. He wished he'd been a better son too. He
remembered his daddy pulling out in his state trooper cruiser that last
night in the twilight.
Who knew it was a last time? His mother wasn't there.
His daddy put his hand out to wave to Bob, then turned left, heading
back to Blue Eye, and would there go on out U.S. 71 to his rendezvous
with Jimmy Pye and his and Jimmy's deaths in a cornfield that looked
like any other cornfield in the world.
The explosions lifted them, and more parts of Bob seemed to go numb,
then sting. This triple shot bracketed
TIME TO HUNT 211
the position. This was it. They had them; they had merely to drop a
few more shells down the tube and the direct hit would come out of
statistical inevitability, and it would be all over. Fire for
effect.
"I'm so sorry," Donny was sobbing.
Bob held him close, felt his young animal fear, knew there was no glory
in any of it, only an ending, a mercy, and who would know they lived or
died or fought here on this hilltop?
"I'm so sorry," Donny was sobbing.
"There, there," Bob said. Someone fired an orange flare over on the
horizon. It was a big one, it hung there for the longest time, and
only far past the moment when reasonable men would have caught on did
it at last dawn on them that it wasn't a flare at all, it was the
sun.
And with the sun came the Phantoms.
The Phantoms came low, screaming in from the east, along the axis of
the valley, their jet growls filling the air, almost splitting it. They
dropped long tubes that rolled through the air into the valley beneath,
and blossomed or anger than the sun, or anger and hotter than any sun,
with the power of thousands of pounds of jellied gasoline.
"God!" screamed Bob.
"Air! Air!"
They peeled off, almost in climbing victory rolls, and a second flight
hammered down, filling the valley with its cleansing flame.
Then the gunships.
Cobras, not like snakes but like thrumming insects, thin and agile in
the air: they roared in, their miniguns screaming like chainsaws
ripping through lumber, just eating up the valley.
"The radio," Bob said.
Donny rolled over, thrust the PRC-77 at Bob, who swiftly got it on,
searched for the preset band that was the air-ground freak.
"Hit eight, hit eight!" Donny was screaming, and Bob found it, turned
it on to find people looking for him.
212 STEPHEN HUNTER
"--Bravo-Four, Sierra-Bravo-Four, come in, please, immediate. Where
are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four? This is Yankee-Niner-Papa,
Yankee-Niner-Papa. I am Army FAC at far end valley; I need your
position immediate, over."
"Yankee-Niner-Papa, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four. Goddamn, ain't you boys
a sight!"
"Where are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?"
"I am on a hill approximately two klicks outside Arizona on the eastern
side of the valley; uh, I don't got no reading on it, I don't got no
map, I--" "Drop smoke, Sierra-Bravo-Four, drop smoke."
"Yankee-Niner-Papa, I drop smoke."
Bob grabbed a smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it. Whirls of
angry yellow fog spurted from the spinning, hissing grenade, and
fluttered high and ragged against the dawn.
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, I eyeball your yellow smoke, over."
"Yankee-Niner-Papa, that is correct. Uh, I have beaucoup bad guys all
around the farm. I need help immediate.
Can you clean out the barnyard for me, Yankee Niner-Papa, over?"
"Wilco, Sierra-Bravo. Y'all hang tight while I direct immediate. Stay
by your smoke, out."
In seconds, the Cobras diverted to the little hill upon which Bob and
Donny cowered. The mini-guns howled, the rockets screamed; then the
gunships fell back and a squadron of Phantoms flashed by low and fast,
and directly in front of Bob and Donny, the napalm bloomed hot and
bright in tumbling flame. The smell of gasoline reached their noses.
Soon enough, it was quiet.
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Yankee-Zulu-Nineteen. I am coming in to
get you."
It was the bird, the Huey, Army OD, its rotors beating as if to force
the devil down, as it settled over them, whipping up the dust and
flattening the vegetation. Bob clapped Donny on the back of the neck
and pushed him
TIME TO HUNT 213
toward the bird; they ran the twenty-odd feet to the open hatch, where
eager hands pulled them away from the Land of Bad Things. The chopper
zoomed skyward, into the light.
"Hey," Donny said over the roar, "it's stopped raining."
chapter seventeen
Even in the hospital, Huu Co, Senior Colonel, was criticized.
It was merciless. It was relentless. It went beyond cruelty. Each
day, at 1000 hours, he was wheeled into the committee room, his burned
left arm swaddled in bandages, his head dopey with painkillers, his
brain ringing with revolutionary adages with which nurses and doctors
alike pummeled him in all his waking hours.
He sat stiffly in the heat, waiting as the painkillers gradually
diminished, facing faceless accusers from behind banks of lights.
"Senior Colonel, why did you not press on despite your casualties?"
"Senior Colonel, who advised you to halt your progress and send units
to deal with the American sniper?"
"Senior Colonel, are you infected with the typhus of ego? Do you not
trust the Fatherland and its vessel, the party?"
"Senior Colonel, why did you waste time setting up mortars, when a
small unit could have kept the Americans pinned, and you might have
made your attack on the Camp Arizona before dawn?"
"Senior Colonel, did Political Commissar Phut Go argue with you as to
the best course of action before his heroic death, and if so, why did
you discount his advice?
Do you not know he spoke with the authority of the party?"
The questions were endless, as was his pain.
They were also right in their implication: he had behaved
unprofessionally, egged on by the demon of Western ego, whose poison
was evidently deep in his soul, un purged by years of rigor and
asceticism. He had allowed it to become a personal duel between
himself and the American who so bedeviled him. He had given up the
TIME TO HUNT 215
mission to kill the American, and failed at both, if intelligence
reports could be believed.
He was in disgrace. No meaningful future loomed before him. He had
failed because his heart was weak and his character flawed. Everything
they said about him was true, and the criticism he received was not
nearly enough punishment. They could not punish him more than he
punished himself. He deserved the fury of hell; he deserved oblivion.
He was a cockroach who had-But then the strangest thing happened. Even
as he endured yet another session, feeling the unbending wills of-the
political officers crushing against the fragility of his own pitiful
identity, the doors were flung open and two men from the Politburo
rushed in, handed an envelope to the senior inquisitioner, which the
man tore open and read nervously.
Then his face broke into a huge smile of love and compassion. He
looked at Huu Co as if he were looking at the savior of the people, the
great Uncle Ho himself.
"Oh, Colonel," he brayed in the voice of such sugary sweetness it
seemed nearly indecent, "oh, Colonel, you look so uncomfortable in that
chair. Surely you would like a glass of tea? Tran, quickly, run to
the kitchen, get the colonel a glass of tea. And some nice candy?
Sugar beet?
American chocolate? Hershey's, we have Hershey's, probably, if I do
say so myself, with .. . almonds."
"Almonds?" said the colonel, who, yes, far down, did in fact enjoy
Hershey's with almonds.
Tran, who had an instant before been upbraiding the colonel for his
stupidity, rushed out with the furious urgency of a lackey, and
returned in seconds with treats and drinks and almond-studded Hershey
bars for the new celebrity.
In very short time, the committee had gathered around their new great
friend and revolutionary hero, the colonel, and even old Tran himself
pushed the colonel to the automobile in his wheelchair, inquiring
warmly about the colonel's beautiful wife and his six wonderful
children.
The committee waved good-bye merrily as the colonel
216 STEPHEN HUNTER
was driven away in a shiny Citreon by the two Politburo officers, who
said nothing, but offered him cigarettes and a thermos of tea and did
everything to assure his comfort.
"Why am I suddenly rehabilitated?" he asked.
"I am a class traitor and coward. I am a wrecker, an obstructionist, a
deviationist, a secret Western spy."
"Oh, Colonel," the senior of the men said, laughing uncomfortably, "you
joke. You are so funny! Is he not a funny one? The colonel's wit is
legendary!"
And Huu Co saw that this man, too, was terrified.
What on earth could be happening?
And then he knew. Only one presence in the Republic of North Vietnam
could explain such a sea change: the Russians.
At their military compound, Soviet experts from GRU-Chief Intelligence
Directorate--grilled him intently, though no effort was made to assign
guilt. The men were remote and intense at once, in black SPETSNAZ
combat uniforms without rank, though subtle distinctions on the team
could be recognized. They never once mentioned politics or the
revolution. He understood clearly: this wasn't preparation for a
trial, it was an intelligence operation.
They were very thorough in their Western way. He talked them through
it slowly, working first from maps and then, after the first day, from
a scale model of the valley before Kham Due, quickly built and painted
with surprising accuracy. The conversations were all in Russian.
"You were .. . ?"
"Here, when the first shots came."
"How many?"
"He fired three times."
"Semiauto?"
"No, bolt action. He never fired quickly enough for semiauto, though
he was very, very good with that bolt.
TIME TO HUNT 217
He may have been the fastest man with a bolt I've ever heard of."
The Russians listened intently, but it wasn't just the sniper that
interested them; that was clear. No, it was the whole action, the loss
of the sapper squad, the sounds of fire from the right flank, the
presence of the flares. The flares, especially.
"The flares. You can describe them?"
"Well, yes, comrade. They appeared to be standard American combat
flares, bright white, more powerful than our green Chinese equivalent.
They hung in the air approximately two minutes and grew brighter as
they descended."
They listened, taking notes, keeping elaborate charts and time lines
trying to reconstruct the event in painstaking detail. It was even
clear they had interviewed other participants of the Kham Due battle.
They forced him to no conclusions: instead, they seemed his partner in
a journey to understanding.
"Now, Colonel," the team leader asked, a small, ratty man who smoked
Marlboros, "based on what we've learned, I wonder if you'd venture a
guess as to what happened. What is the significance of the flares,
particularly given their location vis-a-vis the angle of most of the
fire directed at you?"
"Clearly, there was another man. These American Marine sniper teams,
they are almost always two-men operations."
"Yes," the team leader said.
"Yes, that is what we think also. And interestingly enough, the
ballistics bear you out. Some men were killed by 173-grain bullets,
which is the American match target ammunition, which is the sniper's
round. But we also recovered bodies with 150-grain slugs, which is the
standard combat load of the M14.
So clearly, one of the rifles was the Remington bolt action and the
other the M14. Of course, that's different than the men killed by the
forty-five-caliber submachine gun.
We believe that was the sniper's secondary weapon."
218 STEPHEN HUNTER
The colonel was astounded: they had torn into this as if it were an
autopsy, as if its last secrets must be exhumed.
It was so important to them, as if their most precious asset were
somehow at risk, and now they were committed totally to the destruction
of the threat.
"Do you wish to know about these men?"
The colonel did, yes. But his own ego had to be conquered, for to
learn about the men who had destroyed his battalion and his reputation
and his future would be to further personalize the event and make it
private, an obsession, an extension of his own life, as if its
significance were him and not the cause.
"No, I think not. I care nothing for personality."
"Well spoken. But alas, it is now a necessity. It is part of your new
assignment."
Well, wasn't this interesting? A new assignment under Russian
sponsorship. What possibly could it mean?
And so it was that he learned of his primary antagonist, a man called
Swagger, a sergeant, who had once won a great shooting championship and
had done much damage to the cause of the Fatherland in his three tours
in Vietnam and was even now prowling the glades in hunt of yet more
victims.
They had a picture of him from something called Leatherneck magazine,
and what he saw was what he expected.
He knew Americans from Paris and from his time in Saigon with the
puppets. This one was a type, perhaps exaggerated, but familiar. Thin,
hard, resilient, braver even than the French, brave as any Germans in
the Legion.
Cunning, with that specially devious quality of mind that let him
instinctively understand weakness and move decisively against it.
Disciplined in a way the Americans almost never were. He would have
made a brilliant party official, so tight and focused was his mind.
The picture simply showed a slit-eyed young man with prominent
cheekbones, his leathery face lit with a grin.
He held some ludicrous trophy thing in his arms; next to him was an
older version of the same man, same slit eyes,
TIME TO HUNT 219
close-cropped hair but with more vanity on his chest.
"Sergeant Swagger accepts the congratulations of the Commandant after
winning at Camp Perry," read the caption, translated into the
Vietnamese. It was warrior's glee, the colonel knew; and he saw in
those slit eyes the deaths of so many, and the remorseless ness that
had driven their executioner.
"For this one," he said, "the war is not a cause. It is merely an
excuse."
"Possibly," said the Russian intelligence chief.
"Perhaps even the war releases him to find his greatness. But do you
not think he has a certain discipline? He is not profligate, he is not
one of their criminals, like the Calleys and the Medinas. He has never
raped or murdered in combat. He has no sexual weaknesses, a pathology
associated with psychopathy."
"He is not a psychopath," Huu Co said.
"He is a hero, though the line between them is thin, possibly fragile.
He needs a cause to find his true self, that is what I mean. He is the
sort who must have a cause to live. He needs something to humble
himself in front of. Take that from him and you take everything."
"Very good. Here, here is more, here is what we have."
It was more on Swagger, culled from various American public resources.
The package included, unbelievably, Marine records, obviously from a
very sensitive source.
"Yes."
"Study this man. Study him well. Learn him. He is your new
responsibility."
"Yes, of course. I accept. And what is the ultimate arrival of this
project?"
"Why ... his death, of course. His death and the death of the other
one, too. They both must die."
He slept Swagger, he dreamed Swagger, he read Swagger, he ate Swagger.
Swagger engaged and caused the rebirth of the Western part of his mind:
he struggled to grasp principles like pride and honor and courage and
220 STEPHEN HUNTER
how their existence sustained a corrupt bourgeoisie state.
For such a state could not exist without the pure fire of such
centurions as Swagger standing watch, ready to die, on the Rhines of
its empires.
"Why me?" he asked the Russian.
"Why not one of your own analysts?"
"What can our analysts know? You have been fighting these people since
1964."
"You have been fighting them since 1917."
"But ours is a distant fight, a theoretical fight. Yours is up close,
close enough to smell blood and shit and piss.
That's experience hard bought and much respected."
Then another day brought another surprise: reconnaissance photos, taken
from a high-flying vehicle of some sort, of what appeared to be a
Marine post in the jungles of some province of his own country.
"I Corps," said the Russian.
"About forty kilometers from Kham Due. One of the last American combat
posts left in the zone. They call it Firebase Dodge City. A Marine
installation. It is from here the American Swagger and his spotter
mount their missions."
"Yes?"
"Yes, well, if we're to take him, it'll be on his territory.
He'll always have the advantage, unless, of course, we can learn the
terrain as well as he knows it."
"Surely local cadre .. ."
"Well, now, isn't that an interesting situation? Local cadre have been
extremely inactive in that region for some months. This man Swagger
terrifies them. They call him, in your language, quan toi."
"The Nailer."
"The Nailer. Like a carpenter. The nailer. He nails them. At any
rate, at the local cadre level, most combat operations have ceased.
That is why Firebase Dodge City still exists, when so many other
Marines have been shipped home. Because the Nailer has nailed so many
people that nobody likes to operate in his area. What is
TIME TO HUNT 221
the point? The war will be over soon, he will be recalled, that will
be that. But we cannot let that be that, can we?"
But try as he might, Huu Co could not hate the American.
It seemed pointless. The man was no architect of war, no policy
designer; he clearly had no sadistic side to him, no tendency toward
atrocity: he was merely an excellent professional soldier, of the sort
all armies have relied upon for thousands of years. He had some extra
gene for aggression, some extra gene for shooting ability, and that was
it. He was a believer--or maybe not. The colonel remembered, from his
other life, the Frenchman Camus, who said, "When men of action cease to
believe in a cause, they believe only in action."
It didn't matter. Nor did it matter that he wondered what the delay
was. Why were they not moving now, if this was so important? Why were
they waiting, what were they waiting for? He applied himself to the
problem, and set out to master the terrain in and around Firebase Dodge
City.
It was situated on a hill, and the Americans had deforested for a
thousand yards all around it with their Agent Orange. The camp was
typical: he'd seen hundreds in his long years of war. Its tactical
problems were typical, too.
In many respects it was similar to the un fallen A-Camp Arizona. The
doctrine was primitive, but usually effective:
approach at night, rally in the dark, send in sappers to blow the wire,
attack in strength. But for the killing of one sniper team, that was a
different tactical problem. The team would probably exit at night,
that is, if they weren't helicopter extracted. The trick would then be
understanding from which point from the perimeter they would leave, and
what would be their typical passage across the open zone. One could
therefore hope to intercept them if one knew the terrain and the way
Swagger's mind worked.
Studying the photos, Huu Co saw three natural paths away from the camp,
through gulches, enfilades, natural depressions in the land, where men
would travel to avoid being spotted. One would set an ambush at such
points,
222 STEPHEN HUNTER
yes. It would be possibly effective, a long stalk, luck playing the
most likely role. But if for some reason, the Americans could be
induced to leaving during the day, right, say, at first dawn, a good
shooter might have a chance to hit them from a hill not quite fifteen
hundred yards out.
Oh, it was a long shot, a desperately long shot, but the right man
might bring it off, much more effectively, say, than an ambush team,
who's luck might be on or off.
But where would such a man be found? He knew the North Vietnamese
certainly didn't have such a man. In fact, such a man, such a
specialist might not exist, at least not effectively. Huu Co said
nothing about his conclusions;
the Russians did not ask him. And then one night, he was awakened
roughly by SPETSNAZ troopers and informed that they had a journey to
make.
He climbed into a shiny black Zil limousine in his dress uniform, among
four or five Russians, all talking and laughing boisterously among
themselves. They ignored him.
They drove into Hanoi, through darkened streets, down the broad but now
empty boulevards, and by the ceremonial plazas where the American
Phantoms were displayed. Banners napped mightily in the wind: onward
TO VICTORY, BROTHERS and LONG LIVE THE FATHERLAND and LET US EMBRACE
THE REVOLUTIONARY FUTURE. The Russians paid them no mind, and laughed,
and talked of women and alcohol and smoked American cigarettes; they
were like Americans in many ways, not an observant or respectful
people, but men who took their own destiny so much for granted that
they could be annoying.
After a time, Huu Co realized where they were going:
unmistakably, they headed for the People's Revolutionary Airfield,
north of Hanoi, passed through its wire defenses and guard posts with
the wave of passes of the highest clearance, and sped not to the main
building but to an out-of-the-way compound, which was heavily guarded
by white men with automatic weapons, in the combat uniforms of
SPETSNAZ, the hotshots who got all the sexy
TIME TO HUNT 223
assignments and handled training for NVA cadre on certain dark, arcane
secret arts.
The Zil parked, debarking its men, who escorted Huu Co inside, to
discover an extremely comfortable little chunk of Russia, complete with
televisions, a bar, elaborate Western furniture and the like. Also,
many Playboy magazines lay about, and empty beer bottles, and the walls
were festooned with pictures of blond women with large, gravity-defying
breasts and no pubic hair.
Russians, thought Huu Co.
After a time, the little party went out to the tarmac, parked at the
obscure end of a runway and awaited the arrival of someone designated
Solaratov, whether a real name or a trade name, Huu Co was not
informed. No rank, either; no first name. Just Solaratov, as if the
name itself conveyed quite enough information, thank you.
Again, it was chilly, though no rain. The hot season was hard on them,
but it had not arrived yet. In the emerging gray light, Huu Co stood a
little apart from the crowd of bawdy, laughing Russian intelligence and
SPETSNAZ people, himself the solitary man, not a part of their
camaraderie and unsure why his presence was required.
Yet clearly, they wanted him here: he was seeing things possibly no
North Vietnamese below the Politburo level had seen. Why? What was
the meaning of it all?
The sound of a jet airplane asserted itself, low but insistent, coming
in from the east, out of the sun. The plane flashed overhead, glinting
in the rising light, revealing itself to be a Tupolev Tu-16, code-named
by the Americans "Badger," a twin-engine, three-man bombing craft with
a bubble canopy and sparkle of plastic at the nose. It wore combat
drab, and its red stars stood out boldly against green camouflage. Its
flaps were down and it peeled to the west, found a landing vector and
set down on the main runway. It taxied for a distance, then began to
head over toward the little party standing by itself on the runway.
The plane halted and its jet engines screamed a final
224 STEPHEN HUNTER
time, then died; a hatch door opened beneath the nose, just behind the
forward tire of the tricycle landing gear, and almost immediately two
aviators descended, waved to the crowd, then got aboard a little car
that had come for them, while Russian ground crew attended to the
airplane.
"Oh, he'll make us wait, of course," one of the Russians said.
"The bastard. Nobody hurries him. He'd make the party secretary wait
if it suited his fucking purpose!"
There was some laughter, but after a while, another figure descended
from the aircraft, climbing slowly down, then landing on the tarmac. He
wore an aviator's black jumpsuit, but he was no aviator. He carried
with him something awkward, a long, flat case; a musical instrument or
something?
He turned to look at the greeters and his face instantly silenced
them.
He was a wintry little man, late thirties, with a stubble of gray hair
and a thick, short bull neck. His eyes were blue beads in a leather
mask that was his grim face. He had immense hands and Huu Co saw that
he was quite muscular for so short a fellow, with a broad chest and a
spring of power to his movements.
No salutes were offered, no exchange of military courtesies.
If he knew any of the Russians, he hid the information.
There seemed nothing emotional about him at all, no sense of
ceremony.
A man rushed to him to take the package he carried.
The little fellow silenced him with a vicious glare and made it
apparent that he would carry the case, the severity of his response
driving the man back into humiliated confusion.
"Solaratov," said the Russian intelligence chief, "how was the
flight?"
"Cramped," said Solaratov.
"I should tell them I only fly first class."
There was nervous laughter.
TIME TO HUNT 225
Solaratov walked by the colonel without noticing him, surrounded by
sycophants and boot lickers He actually reminded Huu Co of a figure
that had been pointed out to him back in the late forties, in Paris,
another man of glacial isolation whose glare quieted the masses, who
nevertheless--or perhaps for that reason, indeed--attracted sycophants
in the legions but who paid them no attention at all, whose reputation
was like the cloud of blue ice that seemed to surround him. That one
was named Sartre.
chapter eighteen
Vietnam leaped up at him as if out of a dream: green, endless, crusted
with mountains, voluptuous, violent, ugly, beautiful all at once. The
Land of Bad Things. But also, in some way, the Land of Good Things.
Where I went to war, Donny thought. Where I fought with Bob Lee
Swagger.
It wasn't a dream; it never had been. It was the real McCoy, as
glimpsed through the dirty plastic of an aircraft dipping toward that
destination from Okinawa, where grunts headed to the "Nam touched down
on the way back from R&R. Monkey Mountain loomed ahead on the crazed
peninsula above China Beach, and beyond that, like downtown Dayton, the
multi service base and airstrip at Da Nang displayed itself in a
checkerboard of buildings, streets and airstrips. Hills 364, 268 and
327 stood like dusty warts beyond it.
The C-130 oriented itself off the coastline, dropped through the low
clouds and slid through tropic haze until it touched down at the ghost
town that had once been one of the most populous cities of the world,
the capital of the Marine country of I Corps, home of the ruling body
of the Marine war, the III Marine Amphibious Force.
The palms still blew in the breeze, and around it the mountains still
rose in green tropic splendor, but the place was largely empty now, its
ma inside structure shrunken to a few tempo buildings, an empty or at
least Vietnamized metropolis. A few offices were still staffed, a few
barracks still lived in, but the techies and the staffs and the experts
who'd run the war in Vietnam were home safe except for the odd laggard
unit, like the boys of Firebase Dodge City and a few others in the
haphazard distribution of late-leavers across I Corps.
The plane finally stopped taxiing. Its four props ended
TIME TO HUNT 227
their mission with a turbine-powered whine as their fuel was cut off.
The plane shuddered mightily, paused like a giant beast and went still.
In seconds the rear door descended, and Donny and the cargo of
twenty-odd short-timers and reluctant warriors felt the furnace blast
of heat and the stench of burning shit that announced they were back.
He stepped into the radiance, felt it slam him.
"This fuckin' place will git me yet," said a black old salt, with a
dozen or so stripes on his sleeve, and enough wound ribbons to have
bled out a platoon.
"Ain't you short?" someone asked.
"I ain't as short as the lance corporal," he said, winking at Donny,
with whom he'd struck up a bantering relationship on the flight over
from Kadena Air Force Base on Okie.
"If I was as short as him, I'd twist an ankle and head straight for
sick bay."
"He's a hero," the other lifer said.
"He ain't going in no sick bay."
The old black sarge pulled him aside.
"Don't you be takin' no bad-ass chances in the bush, you hear?" the
man said.
"Two and days, Fenn? Shit, don't git busted up. It ain't worth it.
This shit-hole place ain't worth a thing if you ain't a career sucker
gittin' the ticket punched one more time. Don't let the Man git
you."
"I copy."
"Now git over to reception and git your grunt ass squared away."
"Peace," said Donny, flashing the sign.
The sergeant looked around, saw no one close enough to overhear or
overlook, and flashed the sign back.
"Peace and freedom and all that good shit, bro," he said with a wink.
Donny hit reception with his sea bag, to arrange temporary quarters for
the night and the soonest chopper hop back to Dodge City.
He felt .. . good. A week on Maui with Julie. Oh,
228 STEPHEN HUNTER
Christ, who wouldn't feel good? Could it have been any better? Swagger
had slipped him an envelope as he'd choppered out after debriefing, and
he'd been stunned to discover a thousand dollars cash, with
instructions to bring none of it back. Why would Swagger do such a
thing? It was so generous, so spontaneous--just a strange-ass way of
doing things.
It was--well, a young man back from the war with his beautiful young
wife, in the paradise of Hawaii, under a hot and purifying sun, flush
with money and possibility and so short he could finally, after three
years and nine months and days, see the end. See it.
/ made it.
I'm out.
She said, "It's almost too cruel. We could have this and then you
could get killed."
"No. That's not how it works. The NVA fights twice a year, in the
spring and fall. They fought their big spring offensive, and now
they're all stuck up in a siege around An Loc City, fighting the ARVN
way down near Saigon.
We're out of it. Nothing will happen in our little area.
We're home free. It's just a question of getting through the boredom,
I swear to you."
"I don't think I could stand it."
"There's nothing to worry about."
"You sound like the guy in the war movie who always gets killed."
"They don't make war movies anymore," he said.
"Nobody cares about war movies."
Then they made love again, for what seemed like the 28,000th time. He
found new plateaus from which to observe her, new angles into her, new
sensations, tastes and ecstacies.
"It doesn't get much better than this," he finally said.
"God, Hawaii. We'll come back here on our fiftieth anni ver--" "No!"
she said suddenly, as sweaty as he and just as flushed.
"Don't say that. It's bad luck."
TIME TO HUNT 229
"Sweetie, I don't need luck. I have Bob Lee Swagger on my side. He is
luck itself."
That was then, this was now, and Donny stood at the bank of
fluorescent-lit desks in a big green room that was reception until a
buck sergeant finally noticed him, put down the phone and gestured him
to the desk.
Donny sat, handed over his documents.
"Hi, I'm Fenn, 2-5-Hotel, back from R&R on sked.
Here's my paperwork. I need a billet for the night and then a jump out
to Dodge City on the 0600."
"Fenn?" said the sergeant, looking at the order.
"All right, let me just check it out; looks okay. You're one of the
guys in the Kham Due?"
He entered Donny's return in the logbook, stamped the orders, adroitly
forged his captain's signature and slipped them back to Donny, all in a
single motion.
"Yeah, that was me. My NCO pulled in some favors and got me R&R'd out
for ten days."
"You've been nominated for the Navy Cross."
"Jesus."
"You won't get it, though. They're not giving out big medals
anymore."
"Well, I really don't care."
"They'll probably buck it down to a Star."
"I have a Star."
"No, a Silver."
"Wow!"
"Hero. Too bad it don't count for shit back in the world. In the old
days, you could have been a movie star."
"I just want to make it back in one piece. I can pay to see movies.
That's as close to movies as I want to get."
"Well, then, I have good news for you, Fenn. You got new orders. Your
transfer came through."
Donny thought he misunderstood.
"What? I mean, there must be--What do you mean, transfer? I didn't
ask for a transfer. I don't see what--" "Here it is, Fenn. Your
orders were cut three days ago.
You been dumped in 1-3-Charlie, and assigned to batta1230 STEPHEN
HUNTER
ion S-3. That's us, here in Da Nang; we're the administrative
battalion for what's left of Marine presence. My guess is, you'll be
running a PT program here in Da Nang for a couple of months before you
DEROS out on the big freedom bird. Your days in the bush are over.
Congratulations, grunt. You made it, unless you get hit by a truck on
the way to the slop chute."
"No, see, I don't--" "You go on over to battalion, check in with the
duty NCO and he'll get you squared away, show you your new quarters.
You're in luck. You won't believe this. We closed down our barracks
and moved into some the Air Force vacated, 'cause they were closer to
the airstrip. Air-conditioning, Fenn. Air-conditioning!"
Donny just looked at him, as if the comment made no sense.
"Fenn, this is a milk run. You got it made in the shade.
It's a number-one job. You'll be working for Gunny Bannister, a good
man. Enjoy."
"I don't want a transfer," Donny said.
The sergeant looked up at him. He was a mild, patient man, sandy blond
hair, professional-bureaucrat type of REMF, the sort of sandy-dry man
who always makes the machine work cleanly.
He smiled dryly.
"Fenn," he explained, "the Marine Corps really doesn't care if you want
a transfer or not. In its infinite military wisdom, it has decreed
that you will teach a PT class to lard-ass rear-echelon motherfuckers
like me until you go home. You won't even see any more Vietnamese.
You will sleep in an air-conditioned building, take a shower twice a
day, wear your tropicals pressed, salute every shit bird officer that
walks no matter how stupid, not work very hard, stay very drunk or high
and have an excellent time. You'll take beaucoup three-day weekends at
China Beach. Those are your orders. They are better orders than some
poor grunt's stuck out on the DMZ or Hill
TIME TO HUNT 231
553, but they are your orders, nevertheless, and that is the name of
that tune. Clear, Fenn?"
Donny took a deep breath.
"Where does this come from?"
"It comes straight from the top. Your CO and your NCOIC signed off on
it."
"No, who started it? Come on, I have to know."
The sergeant looked at him.
"I have to know. I was Sierra-Bravo-Four. Sniper team. I don't want
to lose that job. It's the best job there is."
"Son, any job the Marine Corps gives you is the best job."
"But you could find out? You could check. You could see where it
comes from. I mean, it is unusual that a guy with bush time left
suddenly gets rotated out of his firebase slot and stowed in some
make-work pussy job, isn't it, Sergeant?"
The sergeant sighed deeply, then picked up the phone.
He schmoozed with whomever was on the other end of the line, waited a
bit, schmoozed some more, and finally nodded, thanked his
co-conspirator and hung up.
"Swagger, that's your NCO?"
"Yes."
"Swagger choppered in here last week and went to see the CO. Not
battalion but higher, the FMF PAC CO, the man with three stars on his
collar. Your orders were cut the next day. He wants you out of there.
Swagger don't want you humping the bush with him no more."
Donny checked in with the PFC on duty at 1-3-Charlie, got a bunk and a
locker in the old Air Force barracks, which were more like a college
dormitory, and spent an hour getting stowed away. Looking out the
window, he could not see a single palm tree: just an ocean of tarmac,
buildings, offices. It could have been Henderson Hall, back in
Arlington, or Cameron Station, the multi service
232 STEPHEN HUNTER
PX out at Bailey's Crossroads. No yellow people could be seen: just
Americans doing their jobs.
Then he went to storage to pick up his stowed 782 gear and boonie duds,
and lugged the sea bag to supply to return it, but learned supply was
already closed for the day, so he lugged the stuff back to his locker.
He checked back in at company headquarters to meet his new gunny and
the CO; neither man could be found--both had gone back to quarters
early. He went by the S-3 office--operations and training--to look for
Bannister, the PT NCO, and found that office locked too, and Bannister
long since retreated to the staff NCO club. He went back to the
barracks, where some other kids were getting ready to go to the
movies--Patton, already two years old, was the picture--and then to the
1-2-3 Club for a night of dowsing their sorrows in cheap PX Budweiser.
They seemed like nice young guys and they clearly knew who Donny was
and were hungry to get close to him, but he said no, for reasons he
himself did not quite understand.
He was tired. He climbed into the rack early, pulling clean, newly
issued sheets around him, feeling the springiness of the cot beneath.
The air conditioner churned with a low hum, pumping out gallons of dry,
cold air. Donny shivered, pulled the sheets closer about him.
There were no alerts that night, no incoming. There hadn't been
incoming in months. At 0100 he was awakened by the drunken kids
returning from the 1-2-3 Club.
But when he stirred, they quieted down fast.
Donny lay in the dark as the others slipped in, listening to the roar
of the air conditioner.
I have it made, he told himself.
/ am out of here.
I am the original DEROS kid.
I am made in the shade, I am the milk-run boy.
He dreamed of Pima County, of Julie, of an ordered, becalmed and
rational life. He dreamed of love and duty.
He dreamed of sex; he dreamed of children and the good
TIME TO HUNT 233
life all Americans have an absolute right to if they work hard enough
for it.
At O-dark-30, he arose quietly, showered in. the dark, pulled on his
bush utilities and gathered up his 782 gear and headed out to the
chopper strip. It was a long walk in the predawn. Above him, mute
piles and piles of stars were humped up tall and deep like a mountain
range.
Now and then, from somewhere in this dark land, came the far-off,
artificial sound of gunfire. Once some flares lit the horizon.
Somewhere something exploded.
The choppers were warming up. He ducked into the Operations shack,
chatted with another lance corporal, then jogged to the Marine-green
Huey, its rotors already whirring on the tarmac. He leaned in, and the
crew chief looked at him.
"This is Whiskey-Romeo-Fourteen?"
"That's us."
"You're the bus to Dodge City?"
"Yeah. You're Fenn, right? We took you outta here two weeks back.
Great job at Kham Due, Fenn."
"Can you hump me back to the City? It's time to go home."
"Climb aboard, son. We are homeward bound."
chapter nineteen
"You will crawl all night," Huu Co explained to the Russian.
"If you do not make it, they will see you in the morning and kill
you."
If he expected the man to react, once again, he was wrong. The Russian
responded to nothing. He seemed, in some respects, hardly human. Or
at least he had no need for some of the things humans needed: rest,
community, conversation, humanity even. He never spoke. He appeared
phlegmatic to the point of being almost vegetable.
Yet at the same time he never complained, he would not wear out, he
applied no formal sense of will against Huu Co and the elite commandos
of the 45th Sapper Battalion on their long Journey of Ten Thousand
Miles, down the trail from the North. He never showed fear, longing,
thirst, discomfort, humor, anger or compassion. He seemed not to
notice much and hardly ever talked, and then only in grunts.
He was squat, isolated, perhaps desolated. In his army, Huu Co's
heroes were designated "Brother Ten" when they distinguished themselves
by killing ten Americans:
this man, Huu Co realized, was Brother Five Hundred, or some such
number. He had no ideology, no enthusiasms;
he simply was. Solaratov: solitary. The lone man. It suited him
well.
The Russian looked across the fifteen hundred yards of flattened land
to the Marine base the enemy called Dodge City, studying it. There was
no approach, no visible approach, except on one's belly, the long, long
way.
"Could you hit him from this range?"
The Russian considered.
"I could hit a man from this range, yes," he finally said.
"But how would I know it was the right man? I
TIME TO HUNT 235
cannot see a face from this distance. I have to hit the right man;
that is the point."
The argument was well made.
"So then .. . you must crawl."
"I can crawl."
"If you hit him, how will you get out?"
"This time I'm only looking. But when I hit him, I'll wait till dark,
then come out the same way I came in."
"They'll call in mortars, artillery, napalm even. It is their way."
"Yes, I may die."
"In napalm? Not pleasant. I've heard many scream as it ate the flesh
from their bones. It's over in an instant, but I had the impression it
was a long instant."
The Russian merely glared at him, no recognition in his eyes at all,
even though they'd lived in close proximity for a week and had for days
before that pored over the photos and the mock-up of Dodge City.
"My advice, comrade brother," said Huu Co, "is that you follow the
depression in the earth three hundred meters.
You move at dark, in maximum camouflage. They have night scopes and
they will be hunting. But the scopes aren't one hundred percent
reliable. It'll be a long stalk, a terrible stalk. I can only hope
you are up to it and that your heart is strong and pure."
"I have no heart," said the solitary man.
"I am the sniper."
For the first recon, Solaratov did not take his case, which by now all
considered a rifle sheath. He carried no weapons except a SPETSNAZ
dagger, black and thin and wicked.
He left at nightfall, dappled in camouflage, looking more like an
ambulatory swamp than a man. Behind his back, the sappers called him
not the Solitary Man or the Russian but, with the eternal insouciance
of soldiers, the Human Noodle, because the stalks were stiff like
unboiled
236 STEPHEN HUNTER
noodles. In seconds, as he slithered off through the elephant grass,
he was invisible.
Huu Co noted that his technique was extraordinary, a mastery of the
self. This was the ultimate slow. He moved with delicacy, one limb at
a time, a pace so slow and deliberate it almost didn't exist. Who
would have patience for such a journey?
"He is mad," one of the sappers said to another.
"All Russians are mad," said the other.
"You can see it in their eyes."
"But this one is really mad. He's nuts!"
The sappers waited quietly underground, in elaborate tunnels built in
the Year of the Snake, 1965. They cooked meals, enjoyed jury-rigged
showers and treated the event almost like a furlough. It was a happy
time for men who had fought hard, been wounded many times. At least
six of them were Brothers Ten. They were shrewd, experienced
professionals.
For his time, Huu Co studied the photographs or waited up top, hidden
in the grass, using up his eyestrain to stare at the strange fort
fifteen hundred yards off, which looked so artificial cut into the
earth of his beloved country by men from across the sea with a
different sensibility and no sense of history.
He waited, staring at the sea of grass. His arm hurt. He could hardly
close his hand. When he grew bored, he snatched a book from his tunic,
in English. It was Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkein, very amusing.
It took him away from this world but always, when Frodo's adventures
vanished, he had to return to Firebase Dodge City and his deepest
question: when would the sniper return?
1 he fire ants were only the first of his many ordeals.
Attracted to his sweat, they came and crawled into the folds of his
neck, tasting his blood, crawling, biting, feasting.
He was a banquet for the insect world. After the ants, others were
drawn. Mosquitoes big as American helicopters buzzed around his ears,
lit on his face, stung him
TIME TO HUNT 237
gently and departed, bloated. What else? Spiders, mites, ticks,
dragonflies, the whole phyla drawn to the miasma of decay a sweating
man produces in the tropics on a hot morning. But not maggots. Maggots
are for the dead, and perhaps in some way the maggots respected him.
He was not dead and, moreover, he fed the maggots much in his time on
earth. They left him alone.
It wasn't that Solaratov was beyond feeling such things. He felt them,
all right. He felt every sting, bite, prick or tweak; his aches and
swellings and blotches and throbbings were the same as any man's. He
had just some.
how managed to disconnect the feeling part of his body from the
registering part of his brain. It can be learned, and at the upper
reaches of the performance envelope, among those who are not merely
brave, willful or dedicated but truly among the best in the world,
extraordinary things are routine.
He lay now in the elephant grass, approximately one hundred yards from
the sandbag perimeter of Firebase Dodge City, just outside the double
strands of concertina wire. He could see Claymore mines facing him
from a dozen angles, and the half-buried detonators of other, larger
mines. But he could also hear American rock and roll bellowing out of
the transistor radios all the young Marines seemed to carry, and
listening to it was his only pleasure.
"I can't get no satisfaction," someone sang with a loud raspy voice,
and Solaratov understood: he could get no satisfaction either.
The Marines were unbearably sloppy. He had seen the Israelis from
extremely close range in some of his ops and the British SAS and even
the fabled American Green Berets;
all were sound troops. These boys thought the war was over for them;
they were worse than Cubans or Angolans.
They lounged around sunbathing, played touch football or baseball or
basketball, sneaked out to smoke hemp, got in fights or got drunk.
Their sentries slept at night. The officers didn't bother to shave.
Nobody dressed
238 STEPHEN HUNTER
in anything resembling a uniform, and most spent the days in shorts,
undershirts (or shirtless) and shower shoes.
Even when they went on combat patrol, they were loud and stupid. The
point men paid no attention, the flank security drifted in toward the
column, the machine gunner had his belts tangled around him, and his
assistant, with other belts, fell too far behind him to do him any good
in a fight. Clearly they had not been in a fight in months, if ever;
clearly they expected no such thing to occur as they waited for the
order to leave the country.
Once, a patrol stumbled right over him. Five men, hustling through the
elephant grass on the way out for a night ambush mission, walked so
close to him that if any had been even remotely awake, they would have
killed him easily. He saw their jungle boots, big as mountains, just
inches from his face. But two of the men were listening to radios, one
was clearly high, one so young and frightened he belonged in school,
and the platoon leader, stuck with these silly boys, looked terrified.
Solaratov knew exactly what would happen; the patrol would go out a
thousand yards and the sergeant would hunker them down in some high
grass, where they'd sit all night, smoking and talking and pretending
they weren't at war. In the morning the sergeant would bring them in
and file a no-contact report.
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
TIME TO HUNT 239
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
240 STEPHEN HUNTER
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
TIME TO HUNT 241
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 TIME
TO
HUNT 243
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?"
244 STEPHEN HUNTER
"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
TIME TO HUNT 245
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
246 STEPHEN HUNTER
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
TIME TO HUNT 247
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 eyeful. 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
248 STEPHEN HUNTER
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.
Possibly two hundred meters at the longest. The rifle holds to four
inches at two hundred meters and I always shoot for the chest, never
the head. The head shot is too difficult for a combat situation."
He was fully dressed. He wore a ghillie suit of his own construction,
and was well tufted with a matting of beige strips identical in color
to the elephant grass. His hat was tufted too, and under it, he'd
painted his face in combat colors, a smear of ochre and black and
beige.
250 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Sundown," came a cry from above.
"It's time," said Him Co.
The sniper rose and threw a large pack over his back, the rifle strap
diagonally over his shoulder, and with a soft swaying as of many
different feathers, like some exotic bird, he walked to the ladder and
climbed out of the tunnel.
He rose in the dusk, and Huu Co followed him. It was but a few hundred
feet to the treeline and the long crawl down the valley toward the
American firebase.
"You have this planned?" Huu Co asked.
"I need to know for my report."
"Well planned," said the Russian.
"They'll go out just before sunrise, over their berm and through their
wire. I can tell you exactly where, because it's the one place where
they're higher; there aren't any subtle rises in the ground. They'll
continue in the rising light on a north-northwest axis, then turn to
the west. When the sun is full, they'll have a last few hundred meters
to go through the grass toward the north. I've examined their own
after-action reports. Swagger runs his missions the same each time,
but what varies is where he'll operate. If he's headed south, toward
Kontum, he'll go toward the Than Quit River. If he heads north, toward
the Hai Van Peninsula, then he'll go toward Hoi An. And so forth. In
any event, that small rise out there, that's his intersection. Which
way will he turn from there? I'm betting tonight it's toward the
north, because he worked the west when he headed out toward Kham Due.
It's the north's turn. I'll set up behind him; that is, between
himself and the firebase.
He'll never expect shots from that direction. I'll take them both when
they come out from behind the hill. It'll be over quickly; two quick
rounds to the body, two more when they're down. Nobody from the base
camp can reach me by the time I'm back here, and I've got a good, clean
escape route with two fall backs if need be."
"Well thought out."
"And so it is. That's what I do."
TIME TO HUNT 251
There was little left to say. The sappers gathered around the banty
little Russian, clapped him on the back, embarrassing him. Night was
coming quickly, all was silent, and in the far distance the firebase
stood like a sore on the flank of a woman.
"For the Fatherland," Huu Co said.
"For the Fatherland," chimed the tough sappers.
"For survival," said the sniper, who knew better.
The last briefing was at sundown. Donny faced himself.
Or rather, the man who would be himself, a lance corporal named
Featherstone, roughly his own size and coloring.
Featherstone would wear Donny's camouflaged utilities, carry his 782
gear complete to Claymores and M49 spotting scope, and the only M14
that could be found in the camp. Featherstone, and Brophy similarly
tricked out as Bob Lee Swagger, were bait.
Featherstone, a large, slow boy, was not happy at this job; he had been
volunteered for it by virtue of his similarity to Donny. Now he sat,
looking very scared, in the S-2 bunker, amid a slew of officers and
civilians in various uniforms. Everybody except Featherstone seemed
very excited.
There was a kind of party like atmosphere, long absent from Firebase
Dodge City.
Bob went to the front of the group, as they sat down, and addressed the
primary players: Captain Feamster, who was CO here at Dodge City; an
intelligence major who represented the Marine Corps's higher interest,
in from Da Nang; an army colonel who'd choppered in from MACV S-2; an
Air Force liaison officer; and a civilian in a jumpsuit with a Swedish
K submachine gun who radiated Agency from all his pores. A map of the
immediate area had been rigged on a large sheet of cardboard, reducing
the clearing around Dodge City to its contours and land-forms and the
base itself to a big X at the bottom.
"Okay, gentlemen," Bob started, and no officer in the room felt it
peculiar to be briefed by a staff sergeant, or at least this staff
sergeant, "let's run this through one more
252 STEPHEN HUNTER
time to make sure everybody's on the same page in the hymn book. The
game starts at 2200, when Fenn and I, dressed in black and painted up
like black whores, head out. It's approximately thirteen hundred yards
to what I'm designating Area 1. That's where, based on my reading of
the land and this guy's operating procedure as the files from
Washington reveal, I think he's going to operate.
Fenn and I will set up about three hundred yards from his most probable
shooting zone. I don't want to get too close; this bird has a nose for
trouble. At 0500 Lieutenant Brophy and Lance Corporal Featherstone
roll over the berm at the point designated Roger One."
He pointed to it on the map.
"Why there, Sergeant?"
"This guy has eyeballed Dodge City, believe you me, and maybe from as
close as this bunker. He's been here.
He knows where the best place to get quickly into this little dip here
is"--he pointed--"which gives you close to half mile of nearly
unobserved terrain."
"Do you know that for a fact?" asked the leg colonel.
"No, sir, I do not. But before this problem came up, it's where I took
my teams out ninety percent of the time, unless we choppered somewhere.
He'll know that, too."
"Carry on, Sergeant."
"From there, the lieutenant and Featherstone follow the route I have
indicated." He addressed the two of them directly.
"It's very important you stay there. He can't get a good shot at you,
because he can't get close enough, but he'll know you're there. He'll
start tracking you about five hundred yards out, but you're still too
far out to shoot. He don't have a rifle that he can trust to make that
far a shot;
plus, he wants you out of sight of camp when he hits you, so that he'll
have time to make his get-out."
"How do we know he just won't take them out, then fade?" asked the Air
Force major.
"Well, sir, again, we don't. But I been all over that ground. I don't
think he can get a shot when they're in the gulch. That's why they
have to be right careful to stay
TIME TO HUNT 253
there, to move slowly. Now, about one thousand yards out, you got a
little-bitty bit of hill. It's Hill Fifty-two, meaning it ain't but
fifty-two meters high. It's hardly a tit.
You wouldn't give it a squeeze on Saturday night."
"I would," said Captain Feamster, and everybody laughed.
"I may go do it now, in fact!"
After they settled down, Bob continued.
"Sir, when y'all git behind that hill, you go flat. I mean, you dig
in, you stay put. He's going to watch you come, he'll be set up on the
other side, where you come out to high ground and make your decision
which way you're going to turn the mission. You stay put. Now, it may
take some time. This bird's patient. But, you disappearing suddenly,
he's going to get annoyed, then irritated. He'll move. Maybe just a
bit, but when he moves, we put the glass on him, I quarter him and
waste his ass."
"Sergeant Swagger?" It was Brophy.
"Sir?"
"Do you want us to move out in support after you engage him?"
"No, sir. I don't want no other targets in the zone. If I see
movement, I may have to shoot without ID. I'd hate it to be you or
Featherstone. Y'all just go to earth once you get behind that hill,
then move back under cover of the choppers, if we have to call in
choppers."
"Sounds good."
"This sucks," Featherstone whispered bitterly to Donny.
"I'm going to get smoked, I know it. It isn't fair. I didn't sign up
for this shit."
"You'll be okay," Donny said to the shaky man.
"You just walk, then dig in and wait for help. Swagger's got it
figured."
Featherstone shot him a look of pure hatred.
"Anyhow," continued Swagger at the front of the bunker, "I take him
when he rises to move. If I don't get a solid hit or if I get a miss,
that's when I signal Fenn, who's sitting on the PRC-77. You've checked
out the radio?"
"Of course," said Donny.
254 STEPHEN HUNTER
"At that moment I signal, Fenn's on the horn with you Air Force
boys."
It was the Air Force major's turn.
"We've laid on a C-130 Hercules call-signed Night-Hag-Three, holding in
orbit about five klicks away, just off Than Nuc. We can have Night Hag
there in less than thirty seconds. The Night Hag brings major pee:
four side-mounted Vulcan twenty-mm mini-guns and four 7.62 NATO
mini-guns. It can unload four thousand rounds in less than thirty
seconds. It'll turn anything in a thousand square yards to tenderized
hamburger."
"That's better than napalm or Hotel Echo, sir?"
"Much better. More accurate, more responsive to ground direction.
Plus, these guys are really good. They've been on these suppression
missions for years. They can pinwheel over a zone just above stalling
speed like a gull floating over the beach. Only, they're pumping out
lead all the while. They bring unbelievable smoke. The snake eaters
love them. You know the napalm problem. It can go any way, and if the
wind catches it and takes it in your direction, you got a problem."
"Sounds good," said Bob.
"Sergeant Swagger?"
It was the CIA man, who'd brought the Solaratov documents.
"Yes, sir, Mr. Nichols?"
"I'm just asking: is there any conceivable way you could take this man
alive? He'd be an incomparable intelligence asset."
"Sir, I should say, hell, yes, I'll try my damndest, and we'll share
whatever we git with our friends who've cooperated with us. But this
bastard's tricky and dangerous as hell. If I get him in the scope, I
have to take him out. If he gets away, we go to gunships. That's
all."
"I respect your honesty, Sergeant. It's your ass on the line. But let
me tell you one thing. The Sovs have a new sniper rifle called the
Dragunov, or SVD. He might have one."
TIME TO HUNT 255
"I've heard of it, sir."
"We've yet to shake it out. Even the Israelis haven't uncovered one.
Be very nice if you brought that out alive."
"I'll give it my best, sir."
"Good man."
Donny was supposed to get a last few hours of sleep before he geared
up, but of course he couldn't. So much ran through his mind, and he
lay in the bunker, listening to music coming from the squad bays a few
dozen meters away
CCR was banging out something from last year on somebody's tape deck.
It sounded familiar. Donny listened.
Long as I remember, the rain been coming down, Clouds of mystery
falling, confusion on the ground, Good men through the ages, trying to
track the sun, And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain?
It had some kind of anti-war meaning, he knew. The rain was war, or
had become war. Some of these kids had known nothing but the war; it
had started when they were fourteen and now they were twenty and over
here and it was still going on. It was coming for them, they'd get
caught in the rain, that's why the song was so popular to them. Kids
had picked it up in DC last year and it was everywhere. He knew
Commander Bonson had heard it.
He thought of Bonson now.
Bonson came back to him. Navy guy, starchy, duty-haunted, rigid,
black-and-white Bonson. In his khakis. His beard dark, his flesh taut
and white, his eyes glaring, set in rectitude.
He remembered the look on Bonson's face when he
256 STEPHEN HUNTER
told him he wasn't going to testify against Crowe. Man, that may have
been worth it, that one moment, let Solaratov grease my ass, it was
worth it, the way his jaw fell, the way confusion--no, clouds of
mystery, confusion on the ground--came into his eyes. He could not
process it.
He could not accept that someone would turn his little plan over.
Someone would actually tell him to go fuck off, derail his little
train.
Donny had a nice dream of it all, the moment of soaring triumph he'd
felt.
Oh, that's just the beginning, he thought. I will get back to the
world and we will see what became of Commander Bonson, what his crusade
got him. What goes round, comes round. You put shit out in this
world, somehow you get it back. Donny believed that.
Now, sleep was impossible. He rose, restless, bathed in sweat. He had
another three hours to kill before they mounted out.
He rose, left the bunker and wandered for a bit, not sure where he was
going, but then realizing he did in fact have a destination. He was in
grunt city, among the line Marines, the proles of 2-5-Hotel, who really
were Firebase Dodge City.
He saw a shadow.
"You know where Featherstone would be?"
"Two hootches back. Oh. You. The hero. Yeah, he's back there,
getting ready to get his ass wasted in the grass."
The anger Donny felt surprised him. What the hell was this all about?
Why was everybody so pissed at him? What had he done?
Donny walked back, dipped into the hootch. Four bunks, the fraternity
squalor of young men living together, the stink of rotting burlap, the
shine of various Playmates of the Month pinned to whatever surface
would absorb a tack and, of course, the smell, sweet and dense, of
marijuana.
Featherstone sat amid a dark circle of fellow martyrs,
TIME TO HUNT 257
all stoned. He was so still and depressed he seemed almost dead. But
it was clear he wasn't the ringleader here;
another Marine was doing all the talking, a bitter rant about "We don't
mean shit,"
"It's all a game,"
"Fucking lifers just getting their tickets punched," that sort of
thing.
Donny butted in.
"Hey, Featherstone, you wanna go light on that stuff.
You may have to move fast tomorrow; you don't want that shit still in
your head."
Featherstone didn't seem to hear him. He didn't look up.
"He's gonna be dead tomorrow. What difference does it make?" the
smart guy said.
"Who invited you here, anyhow?"
"I just came by to check on Featherstone," said Donny.
"He ought to pull himself out of this funk or he's gonna get wasted,
and if you guys claim to be his buds, you ought to help him."
"He's gonna get zapped tomorrow, no matter what.
We who are not about to die salute him."
"Nothing's going to happen to him. He's going to go for a walk, then
hide in the bush. A plane will come and shoot the fuck out of a zone
250 yards ahead of him. He'll probably get a Bronze Star out of it and
go back to the world a hero."
"Nobody cares about heroes back in the world."
"Well, he just has to keep his head. That's--" "Do you even know what
this is all about?"
"Yes."
"What is it?"
"I can't tell you. Classified."
"No, not the shit about the Russian sniper. That's just shit. You
know what this is really about?"
"What are you talking about?"
"It's about the championship."
"The what?"
"The championship," said the man, fixing Donny in a bitter, dark
gaze.
258 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Of what?"
"Of snipers."
"What?"
"In 1967, a gunny named Carl Hitchcock went home with ninety-three
kills. The most so far. Now along comes this guy Swagger. He's in
the fifties till that stunt you pulled off in the valley. They gave
him credit for thirty-odd kills. I hear he's up to eighty-seven in one
whack.
Now, he gets six more, he ties. He gets seven more, he's the champ. It
doesn't mean shit to me and it doesn't mean shit in the world, but for
these lifers, let me tell you, something like that gets you noticed and
you end up the fucking command sergeant major of the whole United
States Marine Corps. So what if a couple of grunts get wasted to get
you your last few kills? Who the fuck cares about that?"
"That's shit," said Donny. He looked at his antagonist's name, saw
that it was one Mahoney, and then recalled, yes, another college guy,
Mahoney, always riding the line, dozens of Article 15s, angry and
pissed off and just desperate to get out of there.
"It's not shit. It's how military cultures operate if you knew
anything about it at all."
"I've been with Swagger in the bush for six months.
I've never, ever seen him claim credit for a kill. I record the kills
in a book, as per regs. I have to do that; it's the rule. The sniper
employment officer writes up the kills. I just write down what I see.
Swagger's never asked me to claim kills for him. He doesn't give a
shit about that. On top of that, the number thirty-seven or whatever
is completely made up; he had eighty rounds, he probably hit
seventy-five of those, if he missed at all. The record doesn't mean a
thing. That's a load of crap."
"He just likes the killing. Man, he must like to squeeze that little
trigger and watch some gook dot go still. It's as close to being God
as you can get. There's something so psychotic about it, you--" Donny
hit him, left side of the face, hard. It was
TIME TO HUNT 259
stupid. In seconds, h& was down, pinned, and somebody kicked him in
the head, and his eyes filled with stars. He squirmed and yelped, but
more body blows came, and he felt the pressure of many hands pressing
him down, and still more punches driving through. At last someone
pulled his antagonists off him. Of course it was the pacifist
Mahoney.
"Settle down, settle down," Mahoney screamed.
"Man, you'll get lifers in here, and we are cooked!"
Donny's head flared. Someone had really nailed him.
"You assholes," he said.
"You fucking crybaby assholes, you're going to get your buddy wasted
for nothing except your own sense of victimization. You have nothing
to be sorry about. You made it. You're golden."
"All right, all right," said Mahoney, holding the swelling that
distended his face, "you hit me, they hit you, let's call it even. No
one on staff has to hear about this."
"Man, my fucking head aches," said Donny, climbing to his feet.
"You're not going to tell on anyone, are you, Fenn? It was just
tempers. We all get fucked if you tell."
"Shit," said Donny.
"My goddamn head hurts."
"Get him an aspirin. You want a beer? We have some Vietnamese shit,
but I think there's a couple of Buds left.
Get him a Bud. Good, cold Bud."
"No, I'm all right."
He looked at them, saw only dark faces and glaring eyeballs.
"Look, let's forget all about this shit, but just get
him"--Featherstone, who still sat, zombie like on the cot--"straight
for tomorrow. Okay? He can't be fucked up out there; he'll get
killed."
"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.
260 STEPHEN HUNTER
"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 crawl TIME TO
HUNTing, 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
262 STEPHEN HUNTER
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.
TIME TO HUNT 263
"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-264 STEPHEN HUNTER
"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
TIME TO HUNT 265
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.
266 STEPHEN HUNTER
"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
TIME TO HUNT 267
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
268 STEPHEN HUNTER
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, really 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
270 STEPHEN HUNTER
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.
He will move, he thought. He was looking for me, I was not there, he
will move.
Blackness.
Somewhere in his peripheral, a flash of black.
Solaratov did not turn to stare. No, he kept his eyes where they were,
fighting the temptation to crank them around and refocus. Let his
unconscious mind, far more effective in these matters, scan for them.
Blackness again.
TIME TO HUNT 271
He had it.
To the right, almost three hundred yards away. Of course. He's
flanking me to my right.
Slowly, he turned his head; slowly, he brought up the binoculars.
Nothing. Movement. Nothing. Movement.
He struggled with the focus.
The unnatural blackness was a face. The Marine sniper had blackened it
at night, for his long crawl into position; he'd shed his black
clothes, and now wore combat dapple camouflage, but he had made a
mistake. He had forgotten to take off his face paint. Now, black
against the dun and yellow of the elephant grass, it stood out just the
slightest bit.
Solaratov watched, fascinated. The man low-crawled two strokes, then
froze. He waited a second or two, then low-crawled another two. His
face, its features masked by the paint, was a study in warrior's
concentration: tense, drawn, almost cracked with intensity. His rifle
was on his back, wearing a tangle of strips for its own camouflage.
He tried to deny it, but Solaratov felt a flare of pleasure as intense
as anything in his life.
He laid the binoculars down, and raised the rifle to his shoulder,
finding the right position, rifle to bone to earth, finding the grip,
finding the trigger, finding the eyepiece.
Swagger crawled through his scope. The crosshairs quartered his head.
The Russian's thumb took the safety off and he expelled half a breath.
His finger began its slow squeeze of the trigger.
Goddamn," Bob said.
"What is it?" Donny said behind him.
"It's thinned out here. Goddamn. Less cover."
Donny could see nothing. He was lost in elephant grass; it was in his
ears, his nose, in the folds of his flesh.
The ants were feasting on him. He heard the dry buzz of flies drawn to
the delicious odor of his sweat and blood272 STEPHEN HUNTER
he'd been cut a hundred or so times by the blades of the grass.
Ahead of him were the two soles of Bob's jungle boots.
"Shit," Bob said.
"I don't like this one goddamn bit."
"We could just call in the Night Hag. She'd chew the shit out of all
this. We'd pop smoke so she wouldn't whack us up."
"And if he ain't here, he knows we got him, and he's double careful or
he don't come back at all and we never know why he came and we don't
git us a Dragunov. Nah."
He paused.
"You still got that Model Seventy?"
"I do."
"All right. I want you to reorient yourself to the right.
You squirt on ahead; see that little hummock or something?"
"Yeah."
"You set up on that, you scope it out for me. If you say it's okay,
I'm going to shimmy on over there, to where it's thick again. I'll set
up over there and cover for you. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough," said Donny. He squirmed around, took a deep breath and
wiggled ahead.
"Damn, boy, I hope he ain't in earshot. You're grunting louder than a
goddamn pig."
"This is hard work," Donny said, and it was.
He got up to the hummock, peered over it. He saw nothing.
"Go to the M49?"
"Nah. Don't got time. Just check it with your Unertl."
Donny slipped his eye behind the scope, which was a long, thin piece of
metal tubing suspended in an odd frame. When you zeroed this old
thing, it had external controls, which meant the whole scope moved,
propelled this way and that by screws for windage and elevation. It
had been assembled sometime back in the early forties, but rumor said
it had killed more than its share of Japs,
TIME TO HUNT 273
North Koreans and VC. It wasn't even a 7.62mm NATO but the old
Springfield cartridge, the long .3006.
The optics were great. He scanned the grass as far as he could see,
and saw no sign of human presence. But the blur had not gone away. He
was aware he was missing fine detail. He squeezed the bridge of his
nose with his fingers, and nothing improved. No, nothing out there,
nothing that he could see.
"It looks clear."
"I didn't ask how it looked. I asked how it was."
"Clear, clear."
"Okay," said Bob.
"You keep eyeballing."
The sergeant began to creep outward, this time at an even slower rate
than before. He crawled slowly, ever so slowly, halting each two pulls
forward, going still.
Donny returned to his scope. Back and forth, he swept the likely
shooting spots, seeing nothing. It was clear. This was beginning to
seem ridiculous. Maybe they were out here in the middle of nothing,
acting like complete idiots.
The bees buzzed, the flies ate, the dragonflies skittered.
He couldn't keep his eye behind the scope for very long because it fell
completely out of focus. He had to blink, look away. When would the
call come from Bob that he was all right?
1 he trigger rocked back, stacked up and was on the very cusp of
firing.
Where is the other one?
His finger came off the trigger.
There were two. He had to kill them both. If he fired, the other
might take him or, seeing his partner with his head blown open, simply
slide back farther into the grass and disappear. He'd call in air,
possibly, and Solaratov would have to get out of the area.
Where was the other one?
He looked up from the scope. He realized he could see the sniper
because for some odd reason, the grass was thinner there. The other
one would be nearby, covering,
274 STEPHEN HUNTER
as he was vulnerable. He would be vulnerable for only a few more
seconds.
A plan formed in Solaratov's mind: Find the spotter.
Kill the spotter. Come back and kill the sniper. It was possible
because of the semiautomatic nature of the weapon and the fact that the
distance was under three hundred meters.
He returned to the scope and very carefully began to crank backward,
looking for another black face against the dun and the tan of the
vertical thickets of stalks. He came back a bit more, no, nothing,
nothing .. . and there! An arm! The arm led to a body, which led to
the form of another prone man hunched over a rifle--he took a gasp of
air, a little spurt of pleasure--and then continued up the trunk to the
torso to discover that it was indeed a man but he was not a spotter, he
was another sniper, and his rifle was pointing exactly at him. At
Solaratov.
The man fired.
Donny looked up from his scope. His head ached. When would the call
come from Bob? God, he needed an aspirin.
He glanced about, seeing nothing, only the endless grass.
A dragonfly flashed close by. It was odd how their wings somehow
caught the sunlight and threw a reflection just like-Donny went back to
the scope.
He was so close!
The sniper was less than three hundred yards away-or rather, the
snipers, for there was a smear of enemy, blurry in the haze of Donny's
concussion, well sunk in the grass. The man was bent into his rifle,
moving slowly, tracking, and with a start, Donny realized he had
located Swagger.
Kill him! he ordered himself. Shoot! Do it now!
The crosshairs seemed to quarter the head. He squeezed the trigger.
TIME TO HUNT 275
He lost his sight picture as the pressure increased. He squeezed
harder. Nothing happened.
The safety, the safety. He reached for where it should have been, that
nub in front of the trigger, but it wasn't there. That's where it was
on an M14. On an M70, it was up on the bolt housing. He took his eye
off the scope, looked for the flange that was the safety, and snapped
it forward. He ducked to the scope, saw the man had turned and the
rifle's muzzle was coming .. . right at him.
He jerked at the trigger and the rifle fired.
Bob crawled forward. Only a few more yards and then he was into the
higher grass and-The shot, so unexpected, sounded like a drumbeat
against his own ears. He froze--lost it, the great Bob Lee
Swagger--and had a moment of twisted panic.
What? Huh? Oh, Christ!
Then he picked himself up, ran like a son of a bitch for the higher
grass, waiting to get nailed and trying to sort it out.
"He's there! I saw him!" Donny screamed, and instantly from three
hundred yards out, an answering shot sounded. It struck near Donny,
blowing a big puff of dirt into the air.
Donny fired back almost instantly and Bob looked, saw the puff of dust
where his shot hit.
"Get down!" he screamed, now terrified that Donny would take a shot in
the head. He dove into the brush, righted himself, squirmed until he
could see the dusty bank.
He threw the rifle to his shoulder, put his eye to the glass and saw ..
. nothing.
"He's there!" Donny screamed again, but Bob could see nothing. Then a
shot cracked out, seeming to come from the left, and he swung his rifle
just a bit, saw some dust in the air from the disturbance of muzzle
blast, and fired. He cycled, fired again, fast as he was able to, not
seeing a target but hoping one was there.
276 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Get down!" he screamed again.
"Get down and call Foxtrot for air!"
He worked the bolt, but could not see the sniper in the dust that
floated in the grass in the area Donny had identified.
Where was he? Where was he?
Donny edged back a bit and the second shot blasted the earth just a few
inches from his face. Owl The dirt blossomed as if a cherry bomb had
detonated, and a hundred tiny flecks of grit bit him; he blinked, slid
back even farther.
He could hear Bob screaming but he couldn't make the words out. He
thought: the radio. Call air. Get air.
But then Bob fired, fired again, and it filled Donny with courage. He
squirmed up over the other side of the hummock, going to a left-handed
shooting position. He couldn't throw the bolt from here, not easily,
but a lot less of him stuck out, and that pleased him.
Where is he? Where are you, motherfucker?
Through the scope, he saw nothing, just dust hanging in the air, the
slow wobble of grass signifying recent commotion but nothing to shoot
at all.
He scanned left and right a few yards, didn't see a damned thing. He
had this idea that he, not Bob, would be the one who brought the
Russian down. Images from a forgotten boyhood book played suddenly
through his mind: that would be like Lieutenant May getting the Red
Baron instead of salty old pro Roy Brown. A gush of excitement came to
him and a spurt of intense pleasure.
Where was he?
We can take him under fire from two sources, he realized.
We can take this motherfucker.
"Air!" he heard Bob scream.
Yes, air. Get the Night Hag in here, smoke this fucker, blow him to-On
a wide scan, he saw him, much farther back, crawling away
desperately.
Got you!
He put the crosshairs on the bobbing head, not a
TIME TO HUNT 277
shape so much as a suggestion in the blur of his vision. He tried to
find the center, quartered it with the scope, felt in supreme control,
felt the trigger rock against his finger, stack up just a tiny bit and
then surprise the hell out of him when the shot occurred.
The man's rifle leaped, his hat popped off and he rolled over into the
grass, still.
"/ got him!" he screamed. "/ hit him!"
"Air," Bob screamed.
"Get us air!"
Donny let the rifle slide away, drew the PRC off his back and hit the
on switch.
"Foxtrot, this is Sierra-Bravo, flash, I say again, flash, flash. We
have contact, over."
"Sierra-Bravo, what are your needs? Are you calling air,
Sierra-Bravo?"
Suddenly Bob was next to him, snatching the handset from him.
"Foxtrot, get us Night Hag super fast I'm designating Area Two for the
strike, bring in Night Hag, I say again, immediate, Area Two, Area
Two."
"She is coming in, Sierra-Bravo; watch your butt, over."
"I got him!" Donny said.
"I am popping smoke to designate my position for Night Hag, over," said
Bob. He grabbed a smoker off his belt, yanked the pin and tossed it.
It spun and hissed and torrents of green smoke began to pour out of
it.
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Night Hag, I eyeball green smoke, over," a
new voice on the net declared, even as they heard the roar of engines
rising.
"That is correct, Night Hag, we are buttoning up, out."
Bob pulled Donny down and close to the hummock.
A shadow passed over them and Donny looked up and saw the great plane
as it flashed overhead, began to bank. It seemed huge and predatory,
its engines beating at the air. It was pitch black, an angel of death,
and it banked to the right, raising a wing, presenting the side of its
fuselage to the earth it was about to devastate.
278 STEPHEN HUNTER
The eight mini-guns fired simultaneously, tongues of gobbling flame
streaking from the black flank, the sound not of guns firing quickly,
but just a steady, screaming roar.
"Jesus," said Donny. He thought of worlds ending, of the end of
civilization, of Hiroshima. This sucker brought heat. He couldn't
imagine it.
The thousands of rounds poured from the guns to the earth, each fifth
one a tracer, and the guns fired so fast it seemed they fired nothing
but tracers. The bullets didn't strike the earth so much as
disintegrate it. They pulverized, raising clouds of destruction and
debris. The air filled with darkness as if the weather itself had
turned to gunfire. It was a locust plague of lead that devoured that
upon which it settled. Earlier versions of this baby had been called
Puff the Magic Dragon, but they only had one gun. With eight, Night
Hag could put a mythological hurt on the world. She just ate up Area 2
for what seemed like years but was in reality just a few seconds. She
had only thirty seconds worth of shooting time, she ate so fast.
The plane pivoted as if tethered, the roar of its engines huge as it
curled above them, then again its eight guns fired and again the ground
shook and a blizzard of debris flew from the earth. Then it
straightened out, climbed slightly and began to describe a holding
pattern.
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, that's my best trick, over."
"Night Hag, should be sufficient, good work. Foxtrot, you there,
over?"
"Sierra, this is Foxtrot."
"Foxtrot, let's move the teams out. I think we got him.
I think we nailed him."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, Wilco and good job. Out."
Huu Co, senior colonel, and the sappers watched the airplane hunt the
sniper from the relative safety of the treeline. It was quite a
spectacle: the huge plane wheeling, the thunderous streams of fire it
brought to the defoliated zone, the rending of the earth where the
bullets struck.
TIME TO HUNT 279
"Oh, the Human Noodle will be turned to the human sieve by that thing,"
one of the men said.
"Only the Americans would hunt a single man with an airplane," said
another.
"They would send an airplane to fix a toilet," someone else shouted, to
the laughter of some others.
But Huu Co understood that the sniper was dead, that the outlaw Swagger
had once again prevailed. No man could withstand the barrage, and what
came later, when, in the immediate aftermath of the airplane, when its
dust still hung in the air, five jeeps suddenly burst from the fort and
came crashing across the field, stopping right where two American
snipers suddenly emerged from hiding a little to the east of the
devastated area.
The men began to work methodically with flamethrowers.
The squirts of flame spurted out, and where they touched, they lit the
grass. The flames rose and spread, and burned furiously, as black,
oily smoke rolled upward.
"The Human Noodle has now been roasted," someone said.
The flames burned for hours, out of control, rolling across the prairie
of the defoliated zone, blazing vividly, as more and more men from the
post came out in patrols, set up a line, and began to follow the
flames. Soon enough, a flight of helicopters flew in from the east and
began to hover over the field. They were hunting for a body.
"They will probably eat him if they can find him."
"There won't be enough left. They could put him in soup."
Though the Russian was a chilly little number, Huu Co still had a
moment's melancholy over his fate. The airplane made war so totally;
it was the most feared weapon in the American arsenal of super weapons
How horrible to be hunted by such a flying beast and to feel the world
disintegrating around you as the shells exploded. He shivered a bit.
The Americans picked through the blasted field for
280 STEPHEN HUNTER
some time, until nearly nightfall, at one time finding something that
excited them very much--Huu Co watched through his binoculars, but
could not make it out--until finally retreating.
"Brother Colonel, shall we retreat?" his sergeant wished to know.
"There is clearly nothing left for us here."
"No," said the colonel.
"We wait. I don't know for how long, but we wait."
It was a lance corporal from First Squad who found the Dragunov.
"Whooie!" he shouted.
"Lookie here. Gook sniper rifle."
"Corporal, bring that over here," called Brophy.
"Good work."
The man, pleased to be singled out, came over with his trophy and
turned it over to Brophy.
"There's your rifle," Bob said to the CIA man, Nichols.
The command team crowded around the new weapon, something no one had
seen before. Like a kid unwrapping a Christmas present, Nichols
wrapped the camouflage tape off the weapon.
"The legendary SVD. That's the first one we've recovered," said
Nichols.
"Congratulations, Swagger. That's not a small thing."
Donny just looked at it, feeling nothing, his head pounding from the
stench of the gasoline and the oily smoke. It was a crude-looking
thing, not at all sleek and well machined.
"Looks like an AK got stuck in a tractor pull," Bob said. He handled
the weapon, looked it over, worked the action a few times, looked
through the scope, then became bored with it and passed it on to other,
more eager hands.
He moved away from the crowd, and watched with narrowed eyes and utter
stillness as the Marines probed
TIME TO HUNT 281
the burn zone while others set up flank security, under the CO's
direction. Meanwhile Hueys and Cobra gunships hovered about the
perimeter.
"Do you think he got away?" Donny finally asked him.
"Don't know. Them flames could have burned him up.
Six or seven twenty-mm shells could have blown him to pieces, and the
flames charred what meat was left off the bone. He could be
indistinguishable from the landscape, I suppose. I just don't know. I
didn't see any blood trails."
"Wouldn't the flames have burned the blood?"
"Maybe. I don't know."
"I'm pretty sure I hit him."
"I think you did too. Otherwise, I'd be a dead monkey.
I'm going to put you in for another medal."
"I didn't do anything."
"You saved my bacon," said Bob. He seemed somehow genuinely shaken, as
if he'd somehow learned today that he could die. Donny had never seen
him quite like this.
"Man, I could use me a bottle of bourbon tonight," the sergeant
added.
"I could use it real bad."
Donny nodded. He had invested totally in the idea that he had shot the
white sniper. He re-created it in his mind: the crosshairs on the
head, the jerk of the trigger, the squirm of the man as if hit, the
flying hat, the leap and twist of his rifle, then stillness. It felt
like a hit, somehow.
Everything about it felt good. But the rifle hadn't been found in the
rough area where memory told him the sniper had been when he'd taken
his shot.
And, he had the terrifying feeling, un confessed to anyone, that maybe
in the blur of his concussion--gone now--he'd zeroed incorrectly and
killed a phantasm, not the real thing. He couldn't bring himself to
express this, but it filled him with the blackest dread.
"I don't see how he could have gotten away," Donny said.
"Nothing could stand up to it and-nobody's that lucky."
"No way he could have stood up to it. If he was in the
282 STEPHEN HUNTER
middle of it, he was wasted, no doubt about it at all. But-was he in
the middle of it?"
That was the question and Donny had no answer. He and he alone had
seen the sniper, but by the time the plane was done chewing the world
up, and he looked again, that world had changed: it was tattered,
eviscerated;
the grass was flattened; dust hung in the air. Then the flamethrower
teams worked it over, and it burned and burned. Hard to figure now
exactly where he'd been, what he'd seen, where it had been.
"Well, we'll see," said Bob.
"Meanwhile, you come by tonight and we'll have us a drink or two."
Swagger was drunk. He was so drunk the world made no sense at all to
him, and he liked it that way. The bourbon was like a nurse's hand on
his shoulder in the middle of the night, when he awoke screaming in the
Philippines after having gotten hit on his first tour, really messed up
through the upper lung. The nurse had touched him and said, "There,
there, there."
Now the bourbon said, "There, there, there."
"Fucking good stuff," Bob said.
"The fucking-A best."
"It is," said Donny, smoking a giant cigar he'd gotten from somewhere.
There were some others too: Brophy and Nichols of the CIA, Captain
Feamster, the always mild XO, the company gunny--Firebase Dodge City's
inner circle, as it was, drunk as skunks in the intel bunker.
Somewhere Mick Jagger was blaring out over an eight-track, the one
about satisfaction.
"Well, we got some satisfaction today, goddamn," said Feamster, an
amiable professional who would never make bird colonel.
"We did, we did," confirmed the XO, who would make brigadier, because
he agreed with everything that was said by anybody above him in rank.
A couple of other sergeants made faces at the XO's fawning, but only
Swagger caught it.
TIME TO HUNT 283
"Goddamn right," he said to make the officers go away, and after a bit
they did.
He took another taste. Prairie fire. Crackling. The sense of
merciful blur; the world again full of possibility.
Now it was Nichols's turn to pay homage.
The CIA officer wandered over shyly, and said, "You know, it was a
great day."
"We didn't get no head on the wall," said Bob.
"Oh, the Russian's dead, all right," said Nichols.
"Nobody could live through that. No, but what I'm talking about is the
rifle."
The rifle? thought Donny.
Oh, yeah. The rifle.
"You know how long we've been looking for that rifle?" Nichols turned
and looked at Donny, who puffed on his cigar, took another swallow of
bourbon and answered with a goofy smile.
"Well," said Nichols, "we've been looking since 1958, when Evgenie
Dragunov drew up the plans at the Izhevsk Machine Factory. Some of our
analysts said it would revolutionize their capacities. But others
said, no, it was nothing."
"Looks like a piece of Russian crap to me," said Bob.
"I don't think them guys know shit about building a precision rifle.
They ain't got no Townie Whelans or no Warren Pages or no P. 0.
Ackleys. They just got tractor drivers in monkey suits."
Donny couldn't tell if Swagger, out of some obscure sense of need, was
putting on the earnest, ambitious intelligence officer or not.
"Well, whatever," said Nichols.
"Now we don't have to wonder. Now we'll be able to tell. And do you
know what that means?"
"No."
"Nothing here. This shit is over and it never meant shit to the
Russians except as a way to bleed us dry. They wouldn't even send
Dragunovs to the "Nam, that's how
284 STEPHEN HUNTER
low on the priority list it was. The Dragunov was a higher priority
than Vietnam to them."
This didn't play well with Swagger, and a darkness came over his face,
but the CIA man didn't notice and kept on yapping.
"No, Russia's interested in Europe. That's where all the Russian
divisions are. Now, with the Dragunovs coming down to platoon level in
the next few years, and reaching the other Warsaw Bloc countries after
that, what does that mean for our tactics? What level of precision
fire can they bring against us if they move? Are they committing to
sniper warfare in a big way? That'll have a great deal to do with our
dispositions, our troop strength, our alignments, our relationships to
our allies and the general thrust of NATO policy over the next few
years. Dammit, you gave it to us! No one could get one, no one could
buy one, they were nowhere except under lock and key, and old Bob Lee
Swagger goes out in the bad bush and brings one back alive. Goddamn,
it was a good day!" His eyes were bright and happy. He wasn't even
drunk.
"Right now, it's been shipped priority flash to Aberdeen in Maryland
for thorough testing at the Army Weapons Lab. They'll wring it out
like you won't believe.
They'll make that rifle sing!"
"A real feather in your cap," said Donny.
"A victory for our side. One of damn few of late. You did a hell of a
job, Swagger. I'll see this goes into your record. I'll see phone
calls are made, the right people are informed. You are a piece of
action, my friend. But I will say one damned thing. You must have
really pissed them off if they were willing to engage you with a
Dragunov.
Man, they want you all the ways there are. If you want, I can let it
be known your expertise is invaluable and we can get you on the next
flight to Aberdeen, Sergeant, on that team. No need to get iced, if
they try again."
"I got a few months yet till my DEROS, Mr. Nichols.
It's just fine, thanks."
"Think it over. Chew on it in your mind. You could be
TIME TO HUNT 285
TDY Aberdeen Proving Ground the day after tomorrow.
Baltimore? The Block? Those beauties up there? Blaze Starr? A damn
fine town, Baltimore. A man could have himself some fun there, you
know. A hell of a lot finer than Dodge City, I Corps, RSV-fuckingN!"
"Mr. Nichols, I extended and I have a tour to serve. I got four
months and days till DEROS."
"You are hard-core, Swagger. The hardest. The old Corps, the hardest,
the best. Well, thanks, and God bless.
You are a piece of action!"
He wandered away.
"You should do that," said Donny.
"Yeah, clap in Baltimore and hanging out with a bunch of soldiers with
long hippie hair and unshined boots. No thanks. Not for me,
goddammit."
"Well, at least we're heroes," said Donny.
"Today. They'll forget all about it in a few hours, when they sober
up. That's a headquarters man for you. Your basic REMF."
He took another deep swallow of the bourbon.
"You sure you should be drinking that much?"
"I can hold my liquor. That's something the Swagger boys was always
good at."
"Boy, I'll say."
"You know, I want to tell you something," he finally said.
"Your gal. She is, goddammit, the prettiest goddamn woman I ever saw.
You are one lucky boy."
"I am," said Donny, grinning like a monkey, taking a great slug of
bourbon, then a draught on the cigar, expelling the smoke like vapors
of chemwar.
"Here, I got something I want to show you."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I've showed you the photo. Look at this."
He reached into his pocket and drew out a folded sheaf of heavy paper
and delicately unfolded it.
"It was that Trig guy. He was an artist. He did it."
Bob looked at it unsteadily in the flickering light. It was a creamy
piece of paper, very carefully torn along one
286 STEPHEN HUNTER
edge. But it wasn't the paper that caught Bob's eyes, it was the
drawing itself. Bob didn't know a goddamned thing about art, but
whoever this bird was, he had something.
He really caught Donny in a few lines; it was as if he loved Donny.
Somehow you could feel the attraction.
The girl was next to him and the artist's feelings toward her were more
complex. She was beautiful, hopelessly beautiful. A girl in a
million. He felt a little part of himself die, knowing he'd never have
a woman like that; it just wasn't in the cards. He'd be alone all his
life, and maybe he preferred it that way.
"Hell of a nice picture," said Bob, handing it back.
"It is. He really got her. I think he was in love with her too.
Everybody who sees Julie falls in love with her. I am so lucky."
"And you know what?" said Swagger.
"No, uh-uh."
"She is a damned lucky woman, too. She's got you.
You are the best. You are going to have a happy, wonderful life back
in the world."
Bob lifted the bottle, took two deep swallows and handed the bottle to
Donny.
"You're a hero," said Donny.
"You'll have a great life, too."
"I am finished. When you opened up on that bird, it come to me: you
don't want to be here, you want to live.
You gave me my life back, you son of a bitch. Goddamn, I owe no man
not a thing. But I owe you beaucoup, partner."
"You are drunk."
"So I am. And I got one more thing for you. You come over here and
listen to me, Pork, away from these lifer bastards."
Donny was shocked. He had never heard the term "lifer" from Bob's lips
before.
Bob drew him outside.
"This ain't the booze talking, okay? This is me, this is
TIME TO HUNT 287
your friend, Bob Lee Swagger. This is Sierra-Bravo. You reading me
clear, over?"
"I have you, Sierra, over."
"Okay. Here it is. I have thought this out. Guess what?
The war is over for us."
"What?"
"It's over. I'm telling you straight. We go out on three missions a
week, see, but we don't go nowhere. We go out into the treeline and we
lay up for a couple of days. We don't take no shots, we don't go on no
treks, no long wanders; we don't set up no ambushes. No, sir, we lay
up in the tall grass and relax, and come in, like all the other
patrols. You think I don't know that shit is going on?
Nobody in this shit hole is fighting the war and nobody is fighting
back in Da Nang. S-2 Da Nang don't give a shit, Captain Feamster don't
give a shit, USMC HQ RSVN don't give a shit, WES PAC don't give a shit,
USMC HQ Henderson Hall don't give a shit. Nobody wants to die, that's
what it's all about. It's over, and if we get fucking wasted, we are
just throwing our lives away. For nothing, you hear what I'm saying?
We done our bit. It's time to think about number one. You hear what
I'm saying?"
"Yeah, you'll do that till I DEROS out of here back to the world, then
you'll go out on your own, and get more kills and go back to your job.
You'll have to because by then the gooks will be getting very fucking
bold and you'll be afraid they'll hit this place and take all these
worthless assholes down, and you'll get hosed for them, and if that
isn't the biggest waste there ever was, I don't know what is."
"No, I won't."
"Yeah, you will. I know you."
"No way at all."
"All right, I'll do this on one condition."
"I'm your goddamned sergeant. You can't 'one condition' me."
"On this one I can. That is: I go to Nichols, tell him you want on
that Aberdeen team, but you got stuff to do
288 STEPHEN HUNTER
first, and you can't go till a certain date. On the date I DEROS, you
go to Aberdeen. Is that fair? That's fair!
Goddamn, that's fair, that's what I want!"
"You young college smart-ass hippie bastard."
"I'll go get him now. Okay? I want to hear you make that statement to
him, then I'll do this."
Bob's eyes narrowed.
"You ain't never outsmarted me before."
"And maybe I won't ever again, but by God, this is the night I do! Ha!
Got you. Swagger! At last. Got you."
Swagger spat into the dust, took a swallow. Then he looked at Donny
and goddamn if the silliest goddamn thing didn't happen. He smiled.
"Go get Mr. CIA," he said.
"Wahoo!" shrieked Donny, and went off to find the man.
1 he days passed. The sappers relaxed and treated the mission as a
leave, a time for restoring hard-pressed spirits, catching up on
correspondence with loved ones, renewing acquaintanceship with
political and patriotic principles that could be lost in the heat of
combat. They lounged in the tunnel complex on the edge of the
defoliated zone two thousand yards from Dodge City, enjoying the
amenities.
At night, Huu Co sent them on probing patrols, nothing aggressive, just
simply to make certain the Americans at Dodge City weren't up to
anything. He directed: no engagements, not at this time. So the tiny
men in the dun-colored uniforms with the patience of biblical scholars
simply waited and watched. Waited for what?
"Senior Colonel, the Human Noodle is not coming back. No man could
survive that. We had best return to base camp and a new mission. The
Fatherland needs us."
"My instructions," Huu Co told his sergeant, "are from the highest
elements of the government, and they are to support and sustain our
Russian comrade in any
TIME TO HUNT 289
way possible. Until I determine that mission is no longer viable, we
shall stay."
"Yes, sir."
"Long live the Fatherland."
"Long live the Fatherland."
But privately, he had grave doubts. It was true: no man could stand up
to the intensity of the air attack with those fast-firing guns, and no
man, particularly, could stand up to the flames from the American
flamethrowers, a ghastly weapon that he believed they would never use
against enemies of their own racial grouping.
And of course this: another failure.
Not his, surely, but failure has a way of spreading itself out and
tainting all who are near it. He had led the mission, he had helped
plan it, he had organized it. Was his heart not pure enough? Was he
still infected with the virus of Western vanity? Was there some
character defect that attended to him and him alone that caused him to
continually misjudge, to make the wrong decision at the wrong time?
He rededicated himself to the study of Marxism and the principles of
revolution. He read Mao's book for the four hundredth time, and
Lao-tzu's for the thousandth.
He buried his grief and fear in study. His eyes ate the hard little
knots of words; his mind grappled with their deeper meanings, their sub
texts their contexts, their linkages to past and present. He was a
hard taskmaster to himself. He gave himself no mercy, and refused to
take painkillers for his crippled hand and its caul of burn. Only his
dreams betrayed him. Only in his dreams was he a traitor.
He dreamed of Paris. He dreamed of red wine, the excitement of the
world's most beautiful city, his own youth, the hope and joy of a
brilliant future. He dreamed of crooked streets, the smell of cheese
and pastry, the taste of Gauloises and pommes frites; he dreamed of the
imperial grandeur of the place, of its sense of empire, the confidence
with which its monuments blazed.
290 STEPHEN HUNTER
It was on one such night, as he tossed on his pallet, his semiconscious
mind rife with bright images out of Lautrec, that the hands of a whore
imploring him to her bed became the hands of his sergeant, beckoning
him from sleep.
He rose. It was dark; candles had burned low. The man led him from
his chamber, down earthen tunnels, to the mess hall. There, in the
dark, a squat figure sat hunched over a table, eating with unbelievable
gusto.
The sergeant lit a candle and the room flickered, then filled with low
light.
It was the white sniper.
chapter twenty-three
They lay in the high grass, or in the hills under the scrubby trees and
bamboo, watching and tracking but never shooting.
A VC squad moved into the zone of fire, four men with AKs, infiltrating
farther south. Easy shots; he could have taken two and driven the
other two into the high grass and waited them out and taken them, too.
But farther south was only ARVN, and Bob figured it was a Vietnamese
problem, and the ARVNs could handle it or they could handle the ARVNs,
depending. Another time, a VC tax collector clearly blew his cover and
was making his rounds. It was an easy shot, 140-odd yards into a soft
target. But Bob said no. The war was over for them.
They lay concealed or they tracked, looking for sign of big bodies of
men, of units moving into position for an assault on Firebase Dodge
City, whose immediate environs they patrolled. There was nothing. It
was as if a kind of enchantment had fallen over this little chunk of I
Corps. The peasants came out and resumed work in their paddies, the
farmers went back to furrowing the hills with their ox-pulled plows.
The rainy season was over. Birds sang; now and then a bright butterfly
would skitter about.
Above, fewer contrails marred the high sky, and if you flicked across
the FM bandwidths on the PRC-77, you could tell that the war had wound
way down; nobody was shooting at anything.
Two weeks into it, orders came for Bob, assigning him TDY to Army
Weapons Lab, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, Maryland. He was
slated to leave the day after Donny's DEROS. Feamster told him since
he was so short and enemy activity so quiet and nothing coming down
from Battalion S-2, he and Donny didn't have to go out anymore, but the
two said they'd do it anyway, looking
292 STEPHEN HUNTER
for signs of an assault but not for kills. Feamster may have gotten
it; that was okay by him. He said that word of turning Dodge City over
to ARVN forces was imminent-"Vietnamization," they called it--and the
whole unit would be DEROSed back to the States before the summer came,
no matter where the guys were in their tours.
"This is pretty cool," said Donny.
Bob just grunted and spat.
Solaratov slept for two days solid and then rose and came to see Huu
Co. The story of his escape went untold.
He made no report. How he had survived, where he had gone, what he had
suffered, all of it went unrecorded and no one dared ask him. A medic
attended his burns, which were severe but not debilitating, and he
never complained or winced. He seemed disconnected from the agonies of
his body. He had one trophy. It was his SPETSNAZ field cap, a floppy,
beige thing that looked like a deflated beret or an American sailor hat
that had been run over by a tank. It had two holes in it on the left
side of the crown, an entrance wound and an exit wound. How could his
head have survived such a thing? He had no comment but liked to wiggle
his fingers through the two holes at the sappers, who would dash away
in confusion.
On the morning he came to Huu Co, he said, "These people are very good.
Good craft, good tactics, very well-thought-out planning. I was
impressed."
"How did you possibly survive?"
"Not a remarkable story. Luck, guile, courage, the usual. Anyhow, I
am not prepared to give up the mission."
"What do you require of us?"
"I will never maneuver close enough, I see that now.
Plus, of course, I lost my weapon, much to my embarrassment.
I hope it perished in the flames or was destroyed by cannon fire."
He frowned; failure in his profession was not an acceptable outcome.
TIME TO HUNT 293
"But, no matter. I have certain requirements for a new weapon. I will
be shooting at over a thousand yards. I can do it no other way, that
is, unless I want to die myself, and I prefer not to."
"Our armorers are dedicated to their jobs, but I doubt we have a weapon
capable of such accuracy."
"Yes, I know. Nor, frankly, do we. But you must have some small cache
of American weapons, no? Your intelligence people would maintain an
inventory? It's common for guerrillas to turn the enemy's weapons
against himself."
"Yes."
"Now, I will give you a very specific type of American weapon. It must
be found and delivered here within two weeks. It has to be this exact
weapon; with no other would I have a chance."
"Yes."
"But that is not all. You must also contact the Soviet SPETSNAZ unit
at the airfield; they will be required to acquire certain components
from outside Asia. These are very specific also; no deviation can be
allowed. There is a place where such a list can be filled out in just
a few seconds, and they will have access to capabilities to do so."
"Yes, comrade. I--" "You see, it's not merely the rifle. The rifle is
only part of the system. It's also the ammunition. I have to
construct ammunition capable of the task which I have in mind."
He handed over the list, which was in English. Huu Co did not
recognize the rifle by type, nor the list of "ingredients," which
appeared to be of a chemical or scientific nature. He did recognize
one word, but it had no meaning to him: Match King
1 he sniper worked with care. He studied the reconnaissance photos of
the area, discussed the topography once again with Huu Co, trying to
find the right combination of
294 STEPHEN HUNTER
elements. He worked very, very carefully. After devising theories, he
went to test them, exploring the area at night and spending his days
hidden in the grass, trying to learn what there was to learn.
This time he never went near the base. He was acclimatizing himself to
the very long shots, and hunting for a shooting position. He finally
found one on a nameless hill that, by his judgment, was close to
fourteen hundred yards from the base, but it offered the most generous
angle into the encampment, with the least drop, the least exposure to
wind pressure, the most favorable light in the early morning, when such
a thing would take place, and it was also sited immediately to the
north of the original ambush site, a gamble, but a calculated one.
Solaratov reasoned that on general principle alone, the American sniper
team would be reluctant to go out the same way as the one that had
almost gotten them killed. But they would consider going out the
opposite side too obvious. Therefore, on their missions they would
either leave above, to the north, or below, to the south. He had a
one-in-two chance of encountering them, and in the days that he waited,
he saw them leave the post three times. Tiny dots, so far away.
Hardly human.
Fourteen hundred yards. It was a hellaciously long shot. It was a
shot nobody had any business trying to make. Beyond six hundred yards,
the margin of error shrinks to nothing; the play of the elements
increases exponentially.
You would need more power than the Dragunov's 7.62 X 54 round; you
would need more power than any round available under normal
circumstances in either the North Vietnamese or the American inventory,
because war had become a thing of light, fast-firing weapons that kill
by firepower, not accuracy. He had contempt for such a philosophy. It
was the philosophy of the common un trainable man, not of the elite
professional who masters all the variables in his preparation and who
has genius-level skill at his task. War nowadays no longer demanded
special men but ordinary men--lots of them.
TIME TO HUNT 295
He lay on the hill, trying to will himself into the mental state
necessary. He had to be calm, his eyesight perfect, his judgment
secure. He had to dope the wind, the mirage, the temperature, the
angle of travel of the targets, his bullet's trajectory, the time in
flight, everything. At this range, it was not like rifle shooting; it
was like naval gunfire, for the bullet would have to rise in high
apogee and describe an arc across the sky, and float downward with
perfect, perfect placement. There were not but a dozen men in the
world who could take such a shot with confidence.
He watched, through binoculars: the Marines far off scuttled about
behind their berm, making ready to depart, confident that for them the
war was almost over. And for two of them, it was.
Finally: the rifle. It came almost at the end of the two-week period,
and not without difficulty. It had been a trophy in the People's
Museum of Great Struggle in downtown Hanoi; thousands of schoolchildren
had looked upon it with great horror as part of their political
education. It demonstrated the evil will of the colonialists and the
capitalists, that they took such great pains to construct the devil's
own tool. In this, it was very useful indeed, and it took Russian
intervention at the highest levels to have it withdrawn from the
permanent exhibit. A special sapper unit was ordered to transport it
down the Trail of Ten Thousand Miles to Huu Co's little hidden post on
the outskirts of the defoliated zone of Firebase Dodge City.
The Russian broke it down, for the first step to mastering a rifle is
to master what makes it work. He studied the system, the cleverness of
it, the robustness of it, the rise and fall of springs, the thrusting
of rods, the gizmo of the trigger group. It was ingenious: over
engineered in the American fashion, but ingenious. This one had been
crudely accurized with flash hider, a fiberglass bedding for the action
in the stock, a wad of leather around the comb
296 STEPHEN HUNTER
to provide a nest for the cheek in relation to the scope, which was a
mere four-power and, Solaratov saw, the weakest element in the system,
attached to the rifle parallel to but not above the barrel, creating
problems in parallax that had to be mastered. But his main focus of
interest was that trigger group, a mesh of springs and levers that
could be pulled whole from the receiver group. He broke it down to the
tiniest component, then carefully polished each engagement surface to
give the piece a crisper let-off.
At this point, the box of "components" came from the Soviet
intelligence service. They were the easiest mission requirements to
acquire: a Soviet asset had merely gone to a Southern California gun
store and purchased them, for cash; they had been shipped to the Soviet
Union via diplomatic pouch and to North Vietnam by the daily TU16
flight. To look at them was to see nothing: these were actually
reloading tools, which looked like steel chambers of mysterious
purpose, and green boxes of bullets, cans of powder, DuPont IMR 4895,
tools for re sizing the case, pressing in new primers, reinserting the
bullet. He knew that no military round could deliver the accuracy he
needed and that it would take great attention to detail and
consistency.
He took the entire rig for a day's march to the north, and there, out
of the eyes of Westerners and Vietnamese alike except for a security
team of sappers and the ever-curious Huu Co, he set up a
fourteen-hundred-meter range, shooting at two close targets, white
silhouettes that were easy to see and would not be moving like they
would on the day of his attempt.
The scope was small and had an ancient, obsolete reticle:
a post, like a knife point, rising above a single horizontal line.
Additionally, it did not have enough elevation to enable him to hit out
to fourteen hundred meters, close to three times the rifle's known
efficiency, though well within the cartridge's lethal capability. He
hand-filed
TIME TO HUNT 297
shims from pieces of metal and inserted them within the scope rings to
elevate the scope higher, and tightened the assembly with aircraft glue
so that it would hold to a thousand-yard zero over the course of his
testing.
He worked with infinite patience. He seemed lost in a world no one
could penetrate. He seemed distracted to an absurd degree, almost
catatonic. His nickname, "the Human Noodle," took on added comic
meaning as he entered a zone of total vagueness that was actually total
concentration. He seemed to see nothing.
Gradually, increment by increment, he managed to -walk his shots into
the target. Once he was on the target, he began hitting regularly,
primarily through mastery of trigger control and breathing and finding
the same solid position off a sandbag. The sandbag was the important
feature: it had to be just so dense, packed so tight, and it had to
support the rifle's forestock in just such a way.
Infinitely patient micro-experimentation was gradually revealing the
precise harmony among rifle and load and position and his own
concentration that would make his success at least possible.
Finally, he took to having the sappers present the targets from over a
berm, so that he could see them for just the second they'd be visible.
He'd teach himself to shoot fast. It went slowly and he burned out the
sappers with his patience, his insistence on recleaning the rifle
painstakingly every sixteen rounds, his demand that all his ejected
cartridges be located and preserved in the order that they were fired.
All the time he kept a notebook of almost unreadable pedantry as he
assembled his attempts.
"For a sniper, he is a very dreary fellow," the sergeant said to Huu
Co.
"You want a romantic hero," said Huu Co.
"He is a bureaucrat of the rifle, infinitely obsessed with
micro-process. It's how his mind works."
"Only the Russians could create such a man."
"No, I believe the Americans could too."
298 STEPHEN HUNTER
Finally, the day came when the Russian hit his two targets in the kill
zone twice in the same five seconds.
Then he did it another day and then another, all at dawn, after lying
the night through on his stomach.
"I am ready," he announced.
chapter twenty-four
The sandbags were the hardest. He had grown almost superstitious about
them. He would let no one touch them, for fear of somehow shifting the
sand they concealed and altering irrevocably their inner dynamics.
"The Human Noodle has gone insane," someone said.
"No, brother," his comrade responded.
"He has always been insane. We are only noticing it now."
The sandbags were packed with the care of rare, crucial medicines, and
transported back to the tunnel complex in the treeline, with the Human
Noodle watching them with the concentration of a hawk. He literally
never let them out of his sight; the rifle and its scope, strapped
inside a gun case and more or less suspended and shock-proofed by foam
rubber pellets taken from American installations, bothered him much
less than the sandbags.
That held true for his gradual setup as well. He began with the
sandbags, examining them minutely for leaks, for some alteration of
their density. Finding none, he convinced himself he was satisfied,
and made the sappers delicately transport them to the treeline. There
he had rigged a kind of harness, a flat piece of wood to be tied to his
back when he was prone, upon which the sandbags themselves were to be
tied.
"I hope he isn't crushed," said Huu Co, genuinely alarmed.
"He could suffocate," said his sergeant.
Ever so delicately, weighted down under the nearly one hundred pounds
of sand--two forty-pound bags and a ten-pound bag--the Russian began
his long crawl to the shooting position, which was a good two thousand
yards from the tunnel complex far from the burned zone. It took six
hours--six back-breaking, degrading hours of slow, steady crawl through
the grass, suffering not merely
300 STEPHEN HUNTER
from back pain but from the crushing fear of his utter helplessness. A
man under a hundred pounds of sand, crawling into enemy territory. What
could be more ridiculous, more pathetic, more poignant? Any idiot with
a rifle could have killed him. He had no energy, his senses were
dulled by the pain in his back and the breathless smash of the huge
bags on his back. He crawled, he crawled, he crawled, seemingly
forever.
He made it, somehow, and crawled back, just before the first light of
dawn, looking more dead than alive. He slept all day, and all the next
day, because his back still ached.
On the third day, again he crawled, this time with the rifle and a
batch of his specially constructed cartridges. It was much easier. He
made it to the small hill well before dawn and had plenty of time to
set up.
He loaded the rifle, tried to find some sense of relaxation, tried to
will himself into the sort of trance he knew he needed. But he never
could quite relax. He felt tense, twitchy. Twice, noises startled
him. His imagination began to play tricks on him: he saw the great
black plane hovering overhead, and felt the earth open up as it fired.
He remembered crawling desperately, his mind livid with fear, as the
world literally exploded behind him. You could not crawl through such
madness; there was no "through." He crawled and crawled, the
explosions ringing in his ears, dumbstruck that he had chosen to crawl
in the right direction. And what was the right direction?
"If he's out there, he's dead now," he heard one Marine say to
another.
"Nothing could come through that," said the other.
They were so close! They were ten feet away, chatting like workers on
a lunch break!
Solaratov willed himself to nothingness. Like an animal he ceased to
consciously exist. He may not even have been breathing, not as normal
humans would define it, anyhow. His pulse nearly stopped; his body
temp dropped; his eyes closed to slits. He gave himself up to the
TIME TO HUNT 301
earth totally and let himself sink into it and would not let his body
move a millimeter over the long day. Marines walked all around him,
once so close he could see the jungle boots. He smelled the acrid
stench of the burning gasoline when they used the flamethrowers and he
sensed first their joy, when they recovered the rifle he had abandoned
in panic, and then their irritation, when no body itself could be
located. The body was right there, almost under their feet; it still
breathed!
Movement!
The flash of movement recalled him from that day to this one. Through
his binoculars he could see movement just behind the berm in the
predawn light, though it was so far away. The rifle was set into the
bags, firmly moored, sunk into sand so dense and unyielding it was
almost concrete, the heel of its butt wedged just as tightly into the
smaller bag. He squirmed behind it, felt himself pouring himself
around the rifle, not moving it a hair, so perfectly was it placed. His
eye went to the eyepiece.
Again, he saw movement: a face, peering out?
Up, down, then up again, then down.
His finger touched the trigger, his heart hammered.
Here, after so long, the long hunt was over.
No.
He watched them rise, the shooter, then the spotter, rolling over the
sandbag berm so far away, gathering themselves in a gulch at its
bottom, and then heading out.
Infinite regret poured through him.
You were afraid to shoot.
No, he told himself. You were not able today. You were not in the
zone. You could not have made the shot.
It was true.
Better to let them go and gamble that sometime soon he'd have another
opportunity than to rush and destroy all the work he'd invested and all
the hopes and responsibilities riding on his shoulders.
No. You did the right thing.
302 STEPHEN HUNTER
Not months anymore. Not even days. Donny was down to a day.
One more day.
And he would spend it processing out. Then a wake-up, and the chopper
would arrive at 0800 the day after tomorrow and at 0815 it would leave
and he would be on it. He'd be back to Da Nang in an hour, processed
out by 1600, on the freedom bird by nightfall, home eighteen hours
later.
DEROS.
Date of estimated return from overseas. How many had dreamed of it,
had fantasized about it? For his generation, the generation of men
sent to do a duty they didn't quite understand, and that made them
especially hated in their own country, this was as good as it got.
There would be no parades, no monuments, no magazine covers, no movies,
no one waiting to call them heroes. You only got DEROS, your little
piece of heaven. You earned it the hard way, and it wasn't much, but
that's what you got.
What a feeling! He'd never felt anything quite like it before, so
powerful and consuming. It went deep into his bones; it touched his
soul. No joy was so pure. The last time, after getting hit, there'd
been only the fear and the pain and the long months in a crappy
hospital. No
DEROS.
This time, within twenty-four hours: DEROS.
"Hey, Fenn?"
He looked up. It was Mahoney, the ringleader in the anti-Swagger
mutiny, under whose auspices he'd gotten kicked in the head by
somebody.
"Oh, yeah," said Donny, rising from his cot.
"Hey, look, I wanted to come by and tell you I was sorry about that
thing that happened. You're an okay guy.
It turned out all right. Shake my hand on it?"
"Yeah, sure," said Donny, who always found it impossible to hold a
grudge.
He took the other lance corporal's hand, shook it.
"How's Featherstone?"
TIME TO HUNT 303
"He's cool. He's down to one and days; he'll rotate back to the world.
Me, too. Well, two and days, then my ass is on the golden bird."
"You may not even have to make it that far. I hear the ARVN are going
to take over Dodge City, and you guys'll be rotating out early. You
won't even have to see your
DEROS."
"Yeah, I heard that too, but I don't want to count on anything the
Marine Corps wants to give me. I'm still locked onto DEROS. I make
DEROS and I'm home free.
Back to city streets, NYC, the Big Apple."
"Cool," said Donny, "you'll have a good time."
"I'd ask you what it felt like to be so short and I'd buy you a beer,
but I know you want to go to bed and make tomorrow come earlier. All
that processing out." It was company policy that no man went into the
field on his last day.
"Well, sometime back in the world, you can buy me a beer and we'll have
a big laugh over this one."
"We will. You're staying in, right? You're not going out with Swagger
tomorrow."
"Huh?"
"You're not going out with Swagger tomorrow?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I saw him hunched up with and Brophy and a couple of the lifer NCOs in
the S-2 bunker. Like he was going on a mission."
"Shit," said Donny.
"Hey, you sit tight. If they didn't ask you, you don't got to go. Just
be cool. Time to take the golden bird back to the land of honeys and
Milky Ways."
"Yeah."
"Go in peace, bro."
"Peace," said Donny, and Mahoney dipped out of the hootch.
Donny lay back. He checked his watch. It was 2200 hours. He tried to
forget. He tried to relax. Everything was cool, everything was calm,
he was home free.
304 STEPHEN HUNTER
But what the fuck was Swagger up to?
It ate at him. What deal was this?
It bothered him.
He can't go out. He promised.
Shit.
He rose, slipped out the hootch and walked across the compound to the
dark bunker of the S-2 shop, where he found Bob, Feamster and Brophy
bent over maps.
"Sir, permission to enter," he said, entering.
"Fenn, what the hell are you doing here? You should be checking your
gear to turn in to supply tomorrow," said Feamster.
"Is something going on with Sierra-Bravo-Four?"
"Sierra-Bravo-Four is going back to the world; that's what's going on
with Sierra-Bravo-Four," said Bob.
"Looks like a mission briefing to me."
"It ain't nothing that concerns you."
"That's a map. I see route markers pinned on it and coordinates
penciled in. You going on a job, Sierra-Bravo?"
"Negative," said Bob.
"You are too," said Donny.
"It ain't a goddamn thing. Now, you git your young ass out of here,
got that? You got work you should be doing.
This ain't no time for screwing off, even if you're down to a day and a
wake-up."
"What is it?" Donny said.
"Nothing. No big deal."
"Sir?"
"Sergeant," said Feamster, "you ought to tell him."
"It's a rinky-dink recon, that's all, a one-man thing. We haven't
covered the north in a couple of weeks. They could have infiltrated
in, gone through the trees and have set up in the north, a few klicks
out. I'm just going to mosey out to see if I cut tracks to the north.
A couple klicks out, a couple klicks in. I'll be back by nightfall."
"I'm going."
TIME TO HUNT 305
"My ass, you are. You have to spend tomorrow processing out. Nobody
goes into the field on the last day."
"That's right, Fenn," said Captain Feamster.
"Company policy."
"Sir, I can process out in an hour. Just this one last mission."
"Christ," said Swagger.
"I'll worry about it all the way back."
"Man, can't you take no slack at all? Nobody goes out with just a
wake-up left. It's a Marine Corps policy."
"It is, my ass. It's the same deal, a guy to spot, a guy to talk on
the radio. A guy to work security if it comes to that."
"Christ," said Swagger. He looked over at Feamster and Brophy.
"It really is a two-man job," said Brophy.
"If we go, we go. Full field packs, Claymores, cocked and locked. I
would hate to get caught short on the last day."
"Cocked and locked, rock and roll, the whole goddamn nine yards," Donny
said.
"When did you take over this outfit?"
"I'm only doing my job."
"You are a stubborn crazy bastard and I hope that poor girl knows what
a hardhead she's looped up with."
At O-dark-30, Donny rose and found Bob already up.
He slipped into his camouflages for the last time, pulled the pack on.
Canteens ready. Claymores ready. Grenades ready. He painted his face
jungle green and brown. Last time, he told himself in the mirror. He
smiled, showing white teeth against the earthy colors.
He checked his weapons: .45, three mags, M14, eight mags. There was a
ritual here, a natural order, checking one thing then the next, then
checking it all again. It was all ready.
He crawled from his hootch, went to the S-2 bunker, where Bob,
similarly accoutred except that he had the
306 STEPHEN HUNTER
Remington rifle instead of an M14, waited, sipping coffee, talking
quietly with Brophy over the map.
"You don't have to go, Fenn," said Bob, looking over to him.
"I'm going," said Donny.
"Check your weapons, then do a commo check."
Donny examined his M14, pulling the bolt to seat a round in the
chamber, then letting it fly forward. He put the safety on, then took
out the .45, ascertained that the mag was full but the chamber empty,
as Swagger had instructed him to carry the piece. He ran the quick
commo check, and all systems were functioning.
"Okay," said Bob, "last briefing. Up here, toward Hoi An. We go a
straight northward course, through heavy bush, across a paddy dike. We
should hit Hill 840 by 1000 hours. We'll set up there, glass the
paddies below in the valley for a couple of hours, and head back by
1400 hours.
We'll be in by 1800 at the latest. We'll stay in PRC range the whole
time."
"Good work," said Brophy.
"You all set, Fenn?" Bob asked.
"Gung ho, Semper Fi and all that good shit," said Donny, at last
strapping the radio on, getting it set just right. He picked up his
M14 and left the bunker. The light was beginning to seep over the
horizon.
"I don't want to go out the north," said Bob.
"Just in case. I want to break our pattern. We go out the east this
time, just like we did before. We ain't never repeated our-self;
anybody tracking us couldn't anticipate that."
"He's gone, he's dead, you got him," said Brophy.
"Yeah, well."
They reached the parapet wall. A sentry came over from the guard post
down the way.
"All clear?" Swagger asked.
"Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain't
nothing out there."
Bob slipped his head over the sandbags, looked out into the defoliated
zone, which was lightening in the rising
TIME TO HUNT 307
sun. He couldn't see much. The sun was directly in his eyes.
"Okay," he said, "last day-time to hunt."
He set his rifle on the sandbag berm, pulled himself over, gathered the
rifle and rolled off. Donny made ready to follow.
How many days now? Four, five? He didn't know. The canteen had bled
its last drop of water into his throat yesterday before noon. He was
so thirsty he thought he'd die. He hallucinated through the night: he
saw men he had killed, he saw Sydney, where he won the gold, he saw
women he had fucked, he saw his mother, he saw Africa, he saw Cuba, he
saw China, he saw it all.
I am losing my mind, he thought.
Everything was etched in neon. His nerves fired, his stomach heaved,
he had starvation fantasies. I should have brought more food.
Something in his blood sugar made him twitch uncontrollably.
This would be the last day. He could stand it no more.
The days were the worst. There was no shield from the sun and it had
burned his body red in slivers, between the brim of his soft cap and
his collar. The backs of his hands were now so swollen he could hardly
close them.
But the nights were no better: it got cold at night and he shivered. He
was afraid to sleep because he might miss the Americans on their way
out. So he stayed awake at night and slept during the day, except that
it was too hot to sleep well. The insects devoured him. He'd never
leave this cursed chunk of bare ground in the most forgotten land in
the world. He could smell his own physical squalor and knew he was
living beyond the bounds of both civilization and sanitation. He was
putting himself through the absolute worst for this job. Why was he
here?
Then he remembered why he was here.
He looked at his watch: 0600. If they were going on a mission today,
this was the time they'd go.
Wearily, he brought the binoculars to his eyes, and
308 STEPHEN HUNTER
peered ahead. He had to struggle with the focus and he lacked the
strength to hold it steady.
Why didn't I take that shot when-Movement.
He blinked, unbelieving, feeling the sense of miracle a hunter feels
when after the long stalk he at last sees his game.
There was motion down there, though it was hard to make out in the low
light. It looked like the movement of men from the bunkers toward the
berm but he could not be sure.
He abandoned the binoculars, shifted left and squirmed behind the
rifle, trying his hardest not to jar its placement. He poured himself
around it, half mounting the sandbag into which the toe of its butt was
jammed, his fingers finding the grip, his face swimming up toward the
spot weld, feeling the jam of his thumb against his cheekbone.
He looked through it, saw nothing, but in a second his focus
returned.
He could see motion behind the berm, a small gathering of men.
It was an unbearably long shot, he now saw, a shot no man had the right
to take.
The wind, the temperature, the humidity, the distance, the light: it
all said, You cannot take this shot.
Yet he felt a strange calm confidence now.
All his agonies vanished. Whatever it was inside him that made him the
best was now fully engaged. He felt strong, purposeful. The world
ceased to exist. It gradually bled away as he gave himself to the
circle of light before him, his position perfect, the right leg cocked
just to the right to put some tension in his body, tightening his
Adductor magnus but not too much, his hands strong and steady on the
rifle, the spot weld perfect, no parallax in the scope, the butt strong
against his shoulder; it was all so perfect. He controlled his breath,
exhaling most of it, holding just a trace of oxygen in his lungs.
TIME TO HUNT 309
Reticle, he thought.
His focus went to the ancient reticle, to the dagger point that stood
up just beyond the horizontal line that bisected the circle of light,
and watched now, in amazement, as, like a phantasm springing from the
very earth itself, a man came over the berm, dappled in camouflage,
face painted, but even from this far, far distance recognizable as a
member of his own rare species.
He did not command himself to fire; one cannot. One trusts the brain,
which makes the computations; one trusts the nerves, which fire the
processed information down their networks and circuits; one trusts that
little patch of fingertip that alone on the still body must be
responsive.
The rifle fired.
Time in flight: one full second. But the bullet would arrive far
before the sound of it did.
The scope stirred, the rifle cycled lazily, called another cartridge
into its chamber and settled back, all before, ever so lazily, the
green man went down.
He knew the second would come fast and that to hit him he had to do the
nearly unthinkable. Fire before he saw him. Fire on the sure
knowledge that his love would propel him after his partner, just hit,
the knowledge that the bullet must be on its way before the man himself
had even decided what he must do.
But Solaratov knew his man.
He fired just a split second before the second man jumped into view,
arms extended in urgent despair, and as the man climbed, the bullet
traveled its long parabola, rode its arc, rising and falling as the man
himself was squirming desperately over the berm, and when it fell, it
met him exactly as he landed on the ground and lurched toward his
partner and it took him down.
PART III
HUNTING IDAHO
The Sawtooth Mountains Earlier this year
chapter twenty-five
The black dogs were everywhere. They yipped at him at night,
preventing him from sleeping; they haunted his dreams with their
infernal racket; they made him wake early, crabby, bitter, spent.
Were they dreams from bad old times? Or were they just the generalized
melancholy that attends a man who begins to understand he can never be
what he was before he reached fifty, that his body and eyesight and
gift of feel and stamina were on the decline? Or were they from some
deep well of grief, once opened impossible to shut down?
Bob didn't know. What he knew was that he awoke, as usual, with a
headache. It was not yet dawn, but his wife, Julie, was already up, in
the barn, saddling the horses. She clung to her habits even during his
dark times. Ride early, work hard, never complain. What a woman! How
he loved her! How he needed her! How he mistreated her!
He felt hungover, but it was a dream of post-alcoholic pain. He had
not allowed liquor to touch his lips since 1985. He didn't need it.
He'd lost close to a decade and a half to the booze, he'd lost a
marriage, a batch of friendships, half his memories, several jobs and
opportunities;
he'd lost it all to the booze.
No booze. He could do it. Each day was the first day of the rest of
his life.
Lord, I need a drink, he thought today, as he thought every day. He
wanted it so bad. Bourbon was his poison, smooth and crackling, all
harsh smoke and glorious blur.
In the bourbon, there was no pain, no remorse, no bad thoughts: only
more bourbon.
The hip hurt. Inexplicably, after many years of near painlessness, it
had begun to ache all over again. He had
314 STEPHEN HUNTER
to see a doctor about it, and stop gobbling ibuprofen, but he could
not, somehow, make himself do it.
"It hurts," his wife would say.
"I can tell. You don't complain, but your face is white and you move
slowly and you sigh too much. I can tell. You have to see
somebody."
He answered her as he answered everybody these days: a sour grimace, a
furious stubbornness, then wintry retreat behind what she once called
the wall of Bobness, that private place he went, even in the most
public of circumstances, where nobody, not even his wife and the mother
of his only child, was admitted.
He went and stood naked under a shower, and let its heat pound at him.
But it did not purify him. He emerged in as much pain as he had
entered. He opened the medicine cabinet, poured out three or four ibus
and downed them without water. It was the hip. Its pain was dull,
like a deep bone bruise, that throbbed, and lighted the fire of other
pains in his knees and his head and his arms. He'd been hit in so many
places over the years: his body was a lacework of scars that testified
to close calls and not a little luck.
He pulled on ancient jeans and a plaid shirt, and a pair of good old
Tony Lamas, his oldest friends. He went down to the kitchen, found the
coffee hot and poured himself a cup. The TV was on.
Something happening in Russia. This new guy everybody was scared of,
an old-fashioned nationalist, they said. Like the czars in the
nineteenth century, he believed in Russia over everything. And if he
got control, things would get wobbly, since they still had so many
rockets and atomic warheads, and were only a few hours' work from re
targeting America's cities. There was an election coming up in a
couple of months; it had everybody worried.
Even the name was scary. It was Passion. Actually, it was Pashin,
Evgeny Pashin, brother of a fallen hero.
It made Bob's headache worse. He thought Russia had fallen. We'd
stood up to them, their economy had collapsed, they'd had their Vietnam
in Afghanistan, and it
TIME TO HUNT 315
had all fallen apart on them. Now they were back, in some new form. It
didn't seem fair.
Bob didn't like Russians. A Russian had hit him in the hip all those
years ago, and started this run of bad luck that, just recently he
thought he'd beaten down, but then it had returned, ugly and
remorseless.
Bob finished the coffee, threw on a barn jacket and an old beat-up
Stetson and went out of the bright warm kitchen into the predawn cold,
looking like an old cowboy who'd been to his last roundup. A grizzle
of beard clung to his still sunken jaws and he felt woozy, a beat
behind, his mind filled with cobwebs and other junk.
Just enough of the mountains were visible in the rising light. They
stirred him still, but only just. They were so huge, caped in snow,
remote, unknowing, vaster by far than the mountains he had grown up in
back in Arkansas.
They promised what he needed: solitude, beauty, freedom, a place for a
man who went his own ways and only got himself into deep trouble when
he got involved with other men.
He saw the barn, heard the snuffle and rasp of horses, and knew that
Julie and Nikki were saddling up for their morning ride, a family
ritual. He was late. His horse, Junior, would be saddled too, so that
he could join them at the last second. It was not right: to earn the
right to ride a horse, you should saddle it yourself. But Julie let
him sleep for those rare moments when he seemed to do so calmly. She
just didn't know what nightmares lay inside his calm sleep.
He looked about for his other enemy. The landscape, high in the
mountains but still a good mile from the snow, was barren. He saw only
the meadows, where some cattle drifted and fed, miles of dense trees,
and the rugged crinkles of the passes as they led to openings in the
peaks that were the Sawtooths.
But no reporters. No agents. No TV cameras, Hollywood jockeys, slick
talkers with smooth hair and suits that
316 STEPHEN HUNTER
fitted like cream on milk. He hated them. They were the worst. They
had exiled him from a life he had loved.
It began when Bob, at the insistence of a good young man who reminded
him a bit of his wife's first husband, Donny Fenn, had urged him to
return to Arkansas to look into the matter of the death of Earl
Swagger, his father, in 1955. Things got complicated and hairy fast;
some people tried to stop him and he had to shoot back. No indictments
were ever handed down as no physical evidence could be located and
nobody in Polk County would talk to outsiders. But some rag had gotten
wind of it, linked him to another set of events that took place a few
years before that, and taken a picture of him and his wife, Julie, as
they'd walked out of church back in Arizona some months later. He woke
up the next Wednesday to discover that he was america's deadliest man
and that he had struck again. Wherever ex-Marine sniper Bob Lee
Swagger hangs his hat, men die, it pointed out, relating his presence
to a roadside shootout that left ten men, all felons, dead, and the
mysterious deaths of three men, including an ex-Army sniper, in the
remote forest, and recalling that some years earlier he had briefly
been a famous suspect in the shooting of a Salvadorian archbishop in
New Orleans, until the government dropped the charges for reasons that
were to this day unclear. Why, he had even married the widow of a
Vietnam buddy, the paper reported.
Time and Newsweek picked it up and for a few weeks there, Bob had the
worst kind of fame his country could offer: he was hounded by reporters
and cameras wherever he went. It seemed many people thought he held
the keys to a fortune, that he knew things, that he was glamorous,
sexy, a natural-born killer, which, by some odd current loose in
America, made him, in the argot, "hot."
So here he was, on a ranch that was owned by his wife's father's estate
as an investment property, living essentially on charity, without a
penny to his name except for a piddling pension and no way of making
one. The future was unsettled and dark; the peace and quiet and
TIME TO HUNT 317
good living he had achieved seemed all gone. Where am I going to get
the money? My pension ain't enough, by a damn sight. Though it had
never been expressed, he had become convinced that his wife secretly
wished he'd do something with the one asset he owned, his "story,"
which many people believed was worth millions.
He walked toward the barn, watching the sun just begin to smear the sky
over the mountains. The black dogs came upon him and overpowered him
halfway between the structures. That was his name for them: the sense
that he was a worthless failure, that everything he touched turned to
shit, that his presence hurt the two people he cared about the most,
that everything he'd done had been a mistake, every decision wrong, and
anybody who'd gone along with him had ended up dead.
The dogs came fast and hard. They got their teeth into him good, and
in seconds, he was no longer in the barnyard under the mountains where
a red sun was about to pull itself up and light the world with the hope
of a new day, but in some other, dank, foul place, where his own
failures seemed the most prominent land form and the only mercy was
bourbon.
"Well, Mister, nice of you to join us," called Julie.
He looked at his wife, at her smile, which continued to dazzle him if
even now there seemed a layer of fear behind it. He had seen her first
on a cellophane-wrapped photograph that a young man had carried in his
boonie cap in Vietnam, and maybe he had fallen in love with her in that
second. Or maybe he fell in love with her the second the young man
died and she was the only part of him still alive. Still, it took long
years, many of them soaked in bourbon, before he'd finally met her and,
by the odd twists that his life seemed always to take, ended up being
the lucky jerk she took as her second husband. Yet now .. . was it
falling apart on him?
"Daddy, Daddy," yelled Nikki, eight, running to meet him. She grabbed
his blue-jeaned leg.
"Howdy, honey, how's my girl this morning?"
318 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Oh, Daddy, you know. We're going to ride up to Widow's Pass and watch
the sun come across the valley."
"We do that every morning. Maybe we ought to find a new place."
"Honey," said Julie.
"She loves that view."
"I'm only saying," Bob said, "it might be nice to change. Forget it.
It don't mean a thing."
He had more edge in his voice than he'd meant.
Where had it come from? Julie shot him a hurt look at his harsh words,
and he thought. Well, that's fine, I deserve that, and he had himself
in control, everything was fine, he was fine, it was-"I do get tired of
riding the same goddamn place every goddamn morning. You know, there
are other places to ride."
"All right, Bob," she said.
"I mean, we can ride there, no problem. Is that where you want to
ride, sweetie? If that's where you want to ride, that's fine."
"I don't care. Daddy."
"Good. That's where we'll ride."
Who was talking? He was talking. Why was he so mad? Where was this
coming from? What was going on?
But then he had himself back and he was fine again and it would be-"And
why the hell is she riding English? You want her to be some fancy
person? You want her to go to little shows where she wears some red
jacket and helmet and jumps over fences and all the fags clap and the
rich people come and drink champagne, and she learns her old man, who
don't talk so good and swears a mite, he ain't up to them folks who
ride English, he's just an old farm boy from shit-apple Arkansas? Is
that what you want?"
He was yelling. It had come on so fast, so ugly, it had just blown in,
a squall of killing anger. Why was he so mad these days? It made him
sick.
"Bob," his wife, Julie, said with slow, fake sweetness,
TIME TO HUNT 319
"I just want to widen her horizons. Open up some possibilities."
"Daddy, I like English. It's more leg than stirrup; it doesn't hurt
the horse."
"Well, I don't know nothing about English. I'm just a cop's kid from
Hick Town, Arkansas, and I didn't go to no college, I went into the
Marine Corps. Nobody ever gave me nothing. When I see her riding like
that--" He bellowed for a while, as Julie got smaller and smaller, and
Nikki began to cry and his hip hurt and his head ached and finally
Junior spooked.
"Oh, fuck it!" he said.
"What the hell difference does it make?" and stormed back to the
house.
He'd left the TV on, and sat before it, nursing his fury, angered by
the terrible unfairness of it all. Why couldn't he support his family?
What could he have done different?
What could he do?
After a bit, he turned and watched the two of them ride out through the
fence and head up toward Widow's Pass.
Good, that was fine. They could do that. He was better off alone. He
knew where he wanted to go. He stood, raging with fury, and though it
was early, turned and walked to the cellar door, went down into it.
He'd meant to set up a shop here, where he could reload for next
hunting season and work out some ideas he had for wildcat cartridges,
new ways to get more pop out of some old standards. But somehow he'd
never found the energy; he didn't know how long they'd be here, he
didn't know if-He went instead to the workbench, where a previous
occupant had left a set of old, rusty tools and nails and such, and
reached around to grab what was stashed there.
It was a bottle, a pint of Jim Beam, subtly curved like a Claymore,
with its black label and white printing.
The bottle had weight and solidarity to it--it felt serious, like a
gun. He hefted it, went to the steps and sat down. The cellar smelled
of damp and rot, for this was wet country, snowy in the winter and ripe
for floods in the
320 STEPHEN HUNTER
spring. He'd been so long in dry country, this all seemed new. Its
smell was unpleasant: mildew, perpetual moisture.
He held the bottle in his hand, examined it carefully.
Shifting it ever so slightly sent the cargo inside sloshing this way
and that, like the sea at China Beach, where he'd gone on R&R one time
or another, but he couldn't say on which of his three tours.
His hand closed around the cap of the bottle, its seal still pristine.
Just the slightest twist of his hand could open it, much less strength
than that required to kill a man with a rifle, which he had done so
many times.
He looked carefully at the thing. He waggled it just a bit, feeling
the slosh of the fluid. Its brown ness was clear and butterscotchy; it
beckoned him onward.
Yes, do it. One sip, just to take the edge off, to make the bad
pictures go away, blunt the worries about money and prying reporters
and TV cameras, to retreat to some sacred, private land of blur and
wobble and laughter, where only good times are remembered.
Drink to the lost. Drink to the boys. Drink to the dead boys of
Vietnam, drink to poor Donny. Drink to what happened to Donny and how
Donny haunted him, how he had married Donny's wife and fathered Donny's
child and done what could be done to resurrect Donny, to keep Donny
still on this earth.
Yes, drink to Donny, and all the boys killed before their time for Veet
Nam to stop communism.
Oh, how the bottle called him.
Fuck this, he thought.
I have a wife and a daughter and they are out on the range without me,
and so I had best get to them. That is one thing left I can do.
He put the bottle back and climbed the stairs. His hip hurt, but what
the fuck. He headed for the barn, his horse, and his wife and
daughter.
chapter twenty-six
They rode up through the meadow, found the track through the pines and
followed that, always trending upward. The air was cool, though not
really cold, and the sun's presence in the east, over the mountains,
gave the prospect of warmth.
Julie nuzzled her coat closer, tried to cleanse her thoughts of trouble
and put her anger at her husband and what had happened to their life
behind her. Her daughter, the better rider, galloped ahead merrily,
the ugliness of the scene in the barn seemingly forgotten. Nikki rode
so well; she had a gift for it, a natural affinity for the horses, and
was never happier than when she was out in the barn with the animals,
tending them, feeding them, washing them.
But Nikki's happiness was also somewhat illusory. As they neared the
treeline and the ride across the high desert toward Widow's Pass and
the trip to overlook the far valley, she drifted back to her mother.
"Mommy," she said, "is Daddy sick?"
"Yes, he is," said Julie.
"Is he going to be all right?"
"Your father is as strong as ten horses and he has faced and beaten
many enemies in his long and hard life.
He'll beat this one, too."
"What is it. Mommy?" Nikki asked.
"It's a terrible disease called post-traumatic stress disorder.
It has to do with the war he was in. He was in heavy fighting and many
of his very close friends were killed. He was strong enough to put
that behind him and build us a very fine and happy life. But sometimes
there are things that just can't be kept away. It's like a little
black dog has escaped from the secret part of his brain and come out.
It barks, it bites, it attacks. His old wounds are hurting, but
322 STEPHEN HUNTER
also his memory keeps recalling things he thought it had forgotten. He
has trouble sleeping. He is angry all the time and doesn't know why.
He loves you very, very much, though. No matter what happens and how
he acts, he loves you very much."
"I hope he's all right."
"He will be. He needs our help, though, and he needs the help of a
doctor or something. He'll understand that eventually and get some
help, and then he'll be better again. But you know what a stubborn man
he is."
The two rode on in silence.
"I don't like it when he yells at you. It scares me."
"He's not really yelling at me, honey. He's yelling at the men who
killed his friends and the men who sent him over there to fight that
war and then walked away from it.
He's yelling for all the poor boys who got killed and never came back
to the lives they deserved and were forgotten."
"He loves you, Mommy."
"I know he does, honey. But sometimes that's not enough."
"He'll be all right."
"I believe he will be, too. He needs our help, but he needs mostly to
help himself, get some medication, find a way to take advantage of his
very special skills and knowledge."
"I can ride Western. I don't mind."
"I know. It's not about that, really. It's about how mad he is at
things he can't stop. We just have to love him and hope that he sees
how important it is to get some help."
They were out of the trees. The high chaparral was desolate, rock
strewn, clustered with primitive forms of vegetation. Ahead, in the
shadow of the snowcaps, the cut in the earth between mountains that was
called Widow's Pass beckoned, and beyond it, after a course on a shelf
of dirty rock and broken slope, a precipice from which could be seen as
much beauty as has been put on earth. Julie loved it and so did Nikki.
Bob loved it too. They rode here nearly every morning; it got the day
off to a fine start.
TIME TO HUNT 323
"Oh, here we go, baby. Be careful."
The track was tricky, and Julie was speaking more to herself than to
her nimble daughter or to her daughter's horse, the better athlete of
the two animals.
She felt the tension come into her; this was delicate work and she
wished her husband were here. How had they ended up like this?
Nikki laughed.
When the noise came, it didn't shock or surprise the sniper. He had
waited in the dawn for targets before. He knew it had to come, sooner
or later, and it did. It didn't fill him with doubt or regret or
anything. It simply meant:
time to work.
The noise was a peal of laughter, girlish and bright. It bounced off
the stone walls of the canyon, from the shadow of a draw onto this high
plain from close to a thousand yards off, whizzing through the thin
air.
The sniper wiggled his fingers, finding the warmth in them. His
concentration cranked up a notch or so. He pulled the rifle to him in
a fluid motion, well practiced from hundreds of thousands of shots in
practice or on missions.
Its stock rose naturally to his cheek as he pulled it in, and as one
hand flew to the comb, the other set up beneath the forearm, taking the
weight of his slightly lifted body, building a bone bridge to the stone
below. He found the spot weld, the one placement of cheek to stock
where the scope relief would be perfect and the circle of the scope
would throw up its image as brightly as a movie screen. He cocked one
knee halfway up toward his torso to build a muscular tension into his
position, as he had been trained to do.
The child. The woman. The man.
Hey, there!"
She turned at the voice to see her husband riding toward her and her
heart soared.
324 STEPHEN HUNTER
But then it subsided: it was not Bob Lee Swagger but the neighboring
rancher, an older widower named Dade Fellows, another tan, tall,
leathery coot, on a chestnut roan he controlled exquisitely.
"Mr. Fellows!"
"Hello, Mrs. Swagger. How're you this morning?"
"Well, we're just fine."
"Hello there, honey."
"Hi, Dade," said Nikki. Dade was an occasional hanger-on at the ranch,
welcome for his knowledge of the area, his sure way with animals and
guns.
"Y'all haven't seen a dogie or two up this way? My fence is down and
I'm a little short. They're so stupid, they might have come this
way."
"No, it's been completely quiet. We're riding through the pass to see
the sun come across the valley."
"That is a sight, isn't it?"
"Would you care to join us?"
"Well, ma'am, I've got a full day and I'd like to find my baby cows.
But, hell, why not? I ain't seen the sun rise in quite a while. I'm
up too early."
"You work too hard, Mr. Fellows. You should slow down."
"If I slow down, I might notice how old I got," he laughed, "and what a
shock that would be! Okay, there, Nikki, you lead the way. I'll
follow your mother.
Nimble Nikki took her big chestnut along the climbing path, and it rose
between the narrow canyon walls until they seemed to swallow her. Then
she sunk into shadow where the pass was really deep. Julie was close
behind, and as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw her daughter
break clear, into the light. At the end of the enfilade was a shelf of
land that ran along the mountainside for half a mile, gently trending
upward, and then it reached a vantage point on the far valley.
Nikki laughed at the freedom she felt when she emerged, and in a second
had freed her horse to find its own pace; it preferred speed and began
to gallop. A fear
TIME TO HUNT 325
rose in Julie's heart; she could never catch the girl, nor stay up with
her if she had to, and she felt the urge to call out, but suppressed it
as pointless, for there was no stopping Nikki, a natural-born hero like
her father. The eight-year-old galloped ahead, the horse's bounding
grace eating up the distance to the vantage point.
Julie then came into the light and saw that, safely, Nikki had slowed
to a walk as she neared the precipice.
She turned back and called, "Come on, Mr. Fellows!
You'll miss it."
"I'm coming, ma'am," he yelled back at her.
She cantered ahead, feeling the rise of the mountains on either side
but also the freedom of the open space ahead of her. Its beauty
lightened her burden and the mountains looked down solemn and dignified
and implacable.
She approached Nikki, even as she heard Fellows coming up behind her,
driving his horse a bit harder.
"Look, Mommy!" Nikki cried, holding her horse tight between her strong
thighs, leaning forward and pointing out.
Here, there was no downslope beyond the edge, just sheer drop, which
afforded a vista of the valley beyond, the ridge of mountains beyond
that as the sun crested them. The valley was green and undulating,
thatched with pines, yet also open enough to show off, sparkling in the
new sun, its creeks and streams. Across the way there was a falls, a
spume of white feathery water that cascaded down a far cliff. Under
the cloudless sky and in the pale power of the not yet fully risen sun,
it had a kind of storybook quality to it that was, even if you'd seen
it a hundred-odd times, breathtaking.
"Ain't that something?" said Fellows.
"That is the true West, the one they write about, yes, sir."
Swagger had aged, as all men do, even as the sniper himself had aged.
But he was still lean and watchful and there was a rifle in the
scabbard under his saddle. He looked dangerous, like a special man who
would never
326 STEPHEN HUNTER
panic, who would react fast and shoot straight, which is exactly what
he was. His eyes darted about under the hood of his cowboy hat. He
rode like a gifted athlete, almost one with the animal, controlling it
unconsciously with his thighs while his eyes scanned for signs of
aggression.
He would not see the sniper. The sniper was too far out, the hide too
carefully camouflaged, the spot chosen to put the sun in the victim's
eyes at this hour so that he'd see only dazzle and blur if he looked.
The crosshairs rode up to Swagger, and stayed with the man as he
galloped along, finding the same rhythm in the cadences, finding the
same up-down plunge of the animal. The shooter's finger caressed the
trigger, felt absorbed by its beckoning softness, but he did not fire.
He knew the range perfectly: 742 meters.
Moving target, transversing laterally left to right, but also moving up
and down through a vertical plane. By no means an impossible shot, and
many a man in his circumstances would have taken it. But experience
told the sniper to wait: a better shot would lie ahead, the best
shot.
With a man like Swagger, that's the one you took.
Swagger joined his wife, and the two chatted, and what Swagger said
made her smile. White teeth flashed. A little tiny human part in the
sniper ached for the woman's beauty and ease; he'd had prostitutes the
world over, some quite expensive and beautiful, but this little moment
of intimacy was something that had evaded him completely.
That was all right. He had chosen to work in exile from humanity.
Seven hundred thirty-one meters.
He cursed himself. That's how shots were blown, that little fragment
of lost concentration which took you out of the operation. He briefly
snapped his eyes shut, absorbed the darkness and cleared his mind, then
opened them again to what lay before him.
Swagger and his wife had reached the edge: 722 meters.
Before them would run a valley, unfolding in the sunlight as the sun
climbed even higher. But what this
TIME TO HUNT 327
meant to the sniper is that at last his quarry had ceased to move. In
the scope he saw a family portrait: man, woman and child, all at nearly
the same level, because the child's horse was so big it put her up with
her parents. They chatted, the girl laughed, pointed at a bird or
something, seethed with motion. The mother stared into the distance.
The father, his eyes still seeming watchful, relaxed just the tiniest
bit.
The crosshairs bisected the square chest.
He stroked the trigger and the gun jarred and as it came back in a
fraction of a second, he saw the tall man's chest explode as the
Remington 7mm Magnum tore through it.
It was a moment of serene perfection, until she heard a sound that
reminded her somehow of meat dropping on a linoleum floor--it had a
flat, moist, dense reverberation to it, somehow--and at that same
instant felt herself sprayed with warm jelly. She turned to see Dade's
gray face, his eyes lost and locked on nothingness as he fell backward
off his horse. His chest had been somehow eviscerated, as with an ax,
its organs exposed and spewing blood in torrents, his heart
decompressing with a pulsing jet of deoxygenated, almost black liquid
spurting in an arc over the precipice. He hit the ground, in a cloud
of dust, landing with the solidity of a sack of potatoes falling off a
truck as his horse panicked and bucked, hooves flailing in the air. As
a nurse, from too many nights in a reservation ER, Julie was no
stranger to blood or to what mysteries lay inside of bodies, but the
transformation was so instantaneous that it shocked her, even as, from
far off, the report of a rifle shot finally arrived.
The sound seemed to unlock her brain from the paralysis into which it
had blundered. She knew in the next nanosecond that they were under
fire, and in the nanosecond after that her daughter was in danger, and
she found the will to turn and yell "Run!" as loud as possible, and
328 STEPHEN HUNTER
yanked hard to the left on her reins, driving her horse into Nikki's to
butt it about.
My daughter, she thought. Don't kill my daughter.
But like hers, Nikki's reflexes were fast and sure, and the girl had
already reached the same conclusion, reeled her horse to the left, and
in another second, both horses were free of the ruckus caused by Dade's
plunging animal.
"Go!" shrieked Julie, kicking and lashing her horse with the reins.
The animal churned ahead, its long legs bounding over the dirt toward
the narrow enfilade of the pass. She was to the left of and a little
behind Nikki, that is, between Nikki and the shooter, which is where
she wanted to be.
The horses thundered along, careering madly for safety, and Julie was
bent over the neck of hers like a jockey, but she could not keep up
with Nikki's, which, a stronger animal with a much lighter load, began
to gun away and ahead, exposing the child.
"Nikki!" she screamed.
Then the world went. It twisted into fragments, the sky was somehow
beneath her, dust rose like a gas, thick and blinding, and she felt
herself floating, her heart gathering fear for the knowledge of what
would come next. The horse screamed piteously and she slammed into the
ground, her head filling with stars, her will scattering in confusion.
But as she slid through the dust and the pain, feeling her skin rip and
something in her body shatter, and the horse scampered away, she looked
to see that Nikki had halted and was circling around toward her.
She rose, astounded that she could move through all the fire that was
eating her skin, and had a moment when she noticed the blood pouring
across her shirt. She staggered, went to one knee, but then rose
again, and screamed at Nikki, "No! No! Run! Run!" waving her away
desperately.
The girl pulled up, confused, the fear bright on her face.
"Run for Daddy!" Julie screamed, then turned herself
TIME TO HUNT 329
and began to scramble for a ravine to the right, a copse of rough
vegetation and tough little trees, hoping that the shooter would follow
her and not the girl.
Nikki watched her mother run toward the edge of the shelf, then turned
herself, lashed the horse, felt it churn into a gallop. The dust of
the slashing hooves floated everywhere, clotting her breathing, and the
tears on her face matted up with it, but she stayed low and whipped the
horse and whipped it again, and though it neighed in pain, whipped it
still a third time, gouging it with her English boots, and in seconds,
the dark shadows of the enfilade covered her and she knew she was
safe.
Then she heard a shot.
chapter twenty-seven
He fired and the sight picture at the moment of ignition--the stout,
heroic chest quadrisected perfectly by the crosshairs zeroed exactly
for a range of seven hundred meters--told him instantly that he had
hit. As the scope came back, he saw red from the falling body, just a
fraction of a second's worth, but square in the full chest, until it
was lost in the dust.
Then he shifted to the woman but-He was astonished by the swiftness
with which the woman responded. His whole shooting scenario was based
on her utter paralysis when her husband's chest exploded.
She would be stupefied and the next shot would be easy.
The woman reeled her horse about almost instantaneously and he was
astounded at how much dust floated into the air. You cannot anticipate
everything, and he had not anticipated the dust. He had no shot for
almost a second, and then, faster than he could have begun to imagine,
she and the child were racing hellbent and crazed toward the pass and
safety.
He had a momentary flash of panic--never before had such a thing
happened!--and took his eye from the scope to get an unimpeded visual
on the fleeing woman. She was much farther away than he had figured;
the angle was oblique, dust floated in the air. Impossible shot! Only
seconds remained as she and the girl raced toward the pass.
He fought his terror, and instead let the rifle sit, and picked up his
secret advantage in all this, a set of Leica binoculars with a laser
range finder, since unknown distance shooting is almost pointless, and
he put the glasses on her to see the readout as it shot back to him,
straight and true. She was now 765 meters, now 770, racing away.
TIME TO HUNT 331
His mind did the computations as he figured the lead, all while setting
the binocs down and reacquiring the rifle, flipping through a bolt
throw with the shell ejecting cleanly to the right. A lifetime's
experience and a gift for numbers told him he had to shoot a good nine
meters ahead of her--no, no, it would be nine if she were preceding at
an exact ninety degrees, but she was on the oblique, more like
forty-five or fifty degrees, so he compensated to seven meters. A
mil-dot--that is, one of a series of dots etched into the
crosshairs--in the scope, at this range, was about thirty inches, so
when he went back to the rifle, he led her six mils and a mil high,
that is, putting her just inside the edge of the solid part of the
horizontal cross hair
Impossible shot! Incredible shot! Close to eight hundred meters on a
fast-mover at the oblique away from him in heavy dust.
The rifle jolted in recoil and came back to reveal a ruckus of
disturbance. He could see nothing. The horse was down, then up,
bucking and kicking in fury, dust floating in the air.
He cycled the bolt again.
Where was she? The child was forgotten but that was not important.
He searched the dust, then put the rifle down and seized the
binoculars, which would give him a much bigger field of vision.
Where was she? Had he hit her? Was she about? Was she dead? Was it
over? He waited for centuries, and without oxygen. But now, there she
was, hit--he could see the blood on her blue shirt--and stiff with the
pain of the fall.
But she had not gone into shock, was not surrendering and, like many
who discover themselves in mortal circumstances for the first time,
giving up to lie and wait for the final blow. Heroically she moved
away from the horse and the dust to the edge.
Soft target. Giving herself up for the girl, who didn't matter.
332 STEPHEN HUNTER
She was at the edge.
He put the binoculars squarely on her and had just a glimpse of her
face, only the fleetest impression of her beauty. A melancholy closed
upon him, but his heart was strong and hard and he put it away. He
pressed a button to fire a spurt of smart laser at her and it bounced
back and he looked to the readout and got a range of 795 meters, and
knew he'd have to hold dead center of the first low vertical mil-dot.
He set the binocs down, went back to the rifle and saw her at the edge,
just standing there, daring him to concentrate on her while the
daughter vanished into the shadows of the pass. The woman's foolish
courage sickened him.
Her dead husband's insane courage sickened him.
Who were these people? What right did they have to such nobility of
spirit? Why did they consider themselves so special? What gave them
the right? He put the center of the first mil-dot below the horizontal
cross hair on her.
The hatred flared as he pulled the trigger.
The rifle jolted. Time in flight was about a second, maybe a little
less. As the 175 grains of 7mm Remington Magnum arched across the
canyon, tracing an invisible parabola, unstoppable and tragic, he had
the briefest second to study her. Composed, calm, on two feet, defiant
even at the end, holding her wound. Then she disappeared as,
presumably, the bullet struck her. She tumbled down and down, raising
dust, until she vanished from sight.
He felt nothing.
He was done. It was over.
He sat back, amazed to discover the inside of his jacket soaked with
sweat. He felt only emptiness, just like the last time he'd had this
man in his scope--only the professional's sense of another job being
over.
He put the scope back on the man. Clearly he had been eliminated. The
gravity of the wound, its immensity, its savagery, was apparent even
from this distance. But he
TIME TO HUNT 333
paused. So resilient, so powerful, such an antagonist. Why take the
chance?
It felt unclean, as if he were dishonoring someone who might be as
great as himself. But he again yielded to practicality:
this wasn't about honor among snipers but doing the job.
He threw the bolt, ejecting a shell, and put the crosshairs squarely on
the underside of the chin, exposed to him by the man's supine, splayed
position. This would drive a bullet upward through the brain at
eighteen-hundred feet per second. A four-inch target at 722 meters.
Another great shot. He calmed himself, watched the crosshairs still,
and felt the trigger break. The scope leaped, then leaped back; the
body jerked and again there seemed to be a cloud, a vapor, of pinkish
mist. He'd seen it before. The head shot, evacuating brains in a fog
of droplets. The fog dissipated. There was nothing more to see or
think.
He rose, threw the rifle over his shoulder. He gathered the
equipment--the ten-pound sandbag was the heaviest--and re cased the
binoculars. He looked about for traces of himself and found plenty:
scuffs in the dust, the three ejected shells, which he scooped up. He
grabbed a piece of vegetation from the earth and used it to sweep the
dust of his shooting position, rubbing back and forth until he was
convinced no sign of his having been there existed. He threw the brush
down into the canyon before him, and then set out walking, trying to
stay on hard ground so as to leave no tracks.
He climbed higher into the mountains, expertly and without fear. He
knew it would be hours at the least before any kind of police reaction
to his operation could be commenced. His problem now would be the
remote possibility of running into random hunters or hikers, and he had
no wish to kill witnesses, unless he had to, which he would do without
qualm.
He walked and climbed for several hours, finally passing over the
crests and descending to rough ground. He
334 STEPHEN HUNTER
hit his rendezvous spot by three and got out the small transmitter and
sent his confirmation.
The helicopter arrived within an hour, flying low from the west. The
evac was swift and professional.
He was done.
chapter twenty-eight
Bob rode up through the trees and across the barren, high desert to the
mountains. He loped easily along, trying to calm himself, wondering if
he could make it before the sun rose fully. The black dogs seemed to
have gone back to their kennel. They kept no schedule, nothing set
them off; they were just there some days and not some others. Who
knew? Who could tell, who could predict?
He tried to think coherently about his future. Clearly he could not
stay here much longer, because the weight of living off his in-laws was
more than he could bear. It turned all things sour and made him hate
himself. But he doubted he could get started in his profession, which
was running a lay-up barn for horses, not until he sold his spread in
Arizona and had the money to invest in an upgraded barn and other
facilities. Plus, it would mean getting to meet the local vets,
getting them to give him referrals. Maybe the place was already
crowded with lay-up barns.
He could sell his "story." Too bad old Sam Vincent wasn't around to
advise him, but Sam had come to a sorry end in that Arkansas matter
which even now Bob had his doubts about starting up. It got a lot of
people killed, for not much but the settling of forgotten scores. He
had some shame left in him for that thing. Maybe scores weren't worth
it.
But if Sam wasn't around, who could he trust? The answer was, nobody.
He had an FBI agent friend in New Orleans and a young writer still
struggling with a book, but not yet having had any success. Who could
he approach?
The jackals of the press? No, thank you, ma'am.
They turned him off beaucoup.
No, the "story" thing wasn't any solution to his problems, not without
the advice of somebody he trusted. That
336 STEPHEN HUNTER
left shooting. He knew his name was worth something in that
world--some fools considered him a hero, even, like his father, a
blasphemy he couldn't begin to even express--and the idea of making
that pay somehow sickened him. But if he could pick up work at a
shooting school, where they taught self-defense skills to cops and
military personnel, maybe that could bring in some money and some
contacts. He thought he knew some people to call. Maybe that would
work. At least he'd be among men who'd been in the real world and knew
what it meant to both put out and receive fire. He tried to imagine
such a life.
The sound was clear and distinct, though far off. No man knew it
better than he.
Rifle shot. Through the pass. High-velocity round, lots of echo, a
big-bore son of a bitch.
He tensed, feeling the alarm blast through him, and had a moment of
panic as he worked out that it was possible the shot had come from
exactly where Julie and Nikki ought to be. In the next split second he
realized he didn't have a rifle himself and he felt broken and
useless.
Then he heard a second shot.
He kicked Junior and the horse bolted ahead. He raced across the high
desert toward the approaching mountains, his mind filling with fear.
Hunters, who happened to get a good shot at a ram or an antelope in the
vicinity of his women? Random shooters, plinkers? But not up this
high. Maybe there was some trick of the atmosphere, which made the
sound of the shots travel from miles away, up through the canyons, and
it only now reached him and was meaningless. He didn't like the second
shot. A stupid hunter could shoot at something wrong, but then he
wouldn't shoot again. If he shot again, he was trying to kill what he
was shooting at.
There was a third shot.
He kicked the horse, bucking a little extra speed out of it.
Then he heard the fourth shot.
TIME TO HUNT 337
Christ!
Now he was really panicked. He reached the darkness of the pass but
had a moment's clarity and realized the last thing he should do would
be to race out there, in case someone was shooting.
As he slowed the animal down to a walk, he saw Nikki's horse, its
saddle empty, come limping toward him.
A stab of pain and panic shot through his heart. My baby? What has
happened to my baby? Oh, Christ, what has happened to my baby?
A prayer, not one of which had passed his lips in Vietnam, came to him,
and he said it briefly but passionately.
Let my daughter be all right.
Let my wife be all right.
"Daddy?"
There she was, huddled in the shadows, crying.
He ran to her, snatched her up, feeling her warmth and the strength of
her young body. He kissed her feverishly.
"Oh, God, baby, oh, thank God, you're all right, oh, sweetie, what
happened, where's Mommy?"
He knew his wild-eyed fear and near loss of control were not helping
the girl at all, and she sobbed and shuddered.
"Oh, baby," he said, "oh, my sweet, sweet baby," soothing her, trying
to get both himself and her calmed down, back in some kind of
operational zone.
"Honey? Honey, you have to tell me. Where's Mommy? What happened?"
"I don't know where Mommy is. She was behind me and then she
wasn't."
"What happened?"
"We were looking at the sunrise across the valley. Mr.
Dade was there. Suddenly he blew up. Mommy screamed, the horses
bucked, and we turned and rode for safety.
Mommy was--oh, Daddy, she was right behind me.
Where's Mommy, Daddy? Oh, Daddy, what happened to Mommy?"
338 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Okay, sweetie, you have to be brave now and get a hold of yourself. We
are going to have to ride out of here soon. You have to settle down
and be calm. I'm going to go look for Mommy."
"No, Daddy, no, please don't go, he'll kill you too!"
"Honey, now, you be calm. I will take a look-see. You stay here in
the shadows. When you feel up to it, gather your horse and get
Junior's reins. We will be riding like hell out of here very shortly.
All right?"
His daughter nodded solemnly through her tears.
Bob turned, whipped off his hat, and slithered along the wall of the
pass toward the light. As he neared it, he slowed .. . way .. . down.
Fast movement would attract the eye, draw another shot if the bad boy
was still scoping. Swagger thought he wouldn't be. Swagger thought
he'd hit his primary and his secondary and the girl couldn't figure in
anything, and so he was beating it to higher elevations or his pickup
or whatever. Who knew?
That had to be figured out later. The issue now was Julie.
He edged ever so slowly toward the light, at last setting himself so
that he had a good vantage point. Some dust still hung in the air, but
the sun was bright now. He could see poor Dade about one hundred-odd
yards away, right at the edge. From Dade's broken posture alone it was
clear the old man was finished, but a monstrous head wound testified to
no possibility of survival. Bad work.
Expanding bullet, presumably fired in through the eye or something, a
cranial vault explosion, gobbets of brain and blood flung everywhere.
He looked about for a sign of his wife, but there was none. He saw her
horse over in the shade, calm now, chewing on some vegetation. He
looked about for a hide in case she had gotten to one, but there were
no rocks or bushes thick enough to conceal or protect her. That left
the edge; he tried to recall what lay beyond the edge, and built an
image of a rough slope littered with scrub vegetation and rocks, down a
few hundred feet to a dense mess
TIME TO HUNT 339
of pines where the creek ran through. Was that right, or was it some
other place?
He thought to call, but held back.
The sniper hadn't seen him yet.
There really wasn't a decision to be made. He knew what had to be
done.
He slipped back to where Nikki, who had now collected herself, stood
with the two horses.
"Do you have any sense of where the shots came from, sweetie? Did you
hear them at all?"
"I only remember the last one. As I was riding and had reached the
pass. It came from behind."
"Okay," he said. If the shot came from "behind," that probably meant
he was shooting from across the canyon, on the ridgeline that ran
anywhere from two hundred meters to one thousand meters away. That
jibed with the position of Dade's body, too. Whatever, it meant the
shooter was cut off from where they were by the gap between the
mountains and wouldn't be able to reach them from here on out, unless
he came after them. But he wouldn't come after them. He'd fall back,
get to safe ground, hit his escape route and be out of here.
"All right," he said, "we are getting the hell out of here and bee
lining straight for home, where we'll call the sheriff and get him and
his boys in here."
She looked at him, stricken.
"But, Mommy--she's out there."
"I know she is, honey. But I can't get her now. If I go out there, he
may shoot me, and then what have we got?"
He didn't think he would be. He had worked it out to the next logical
step: whoever had done the shooting, his target was not Dade Fellows
but Bob Lee Swagger. Someone had reconned him, planned the shot, knew
his tendencies and lay in wait from a safe hide a long way off. It was
a sniper, Bob felt, another professional.
"She might be hurt. She might need help bad."
"Listen to me, honey. When you are shot, if it's a bad hit, you die
right away, like poor Mr. Dade. If it ain't hit
340 STEPHEN HUNTER
you seriously, you can last for several hours. I saw it in Vietnam;
the body is very tough and it'll fight on its own for a long time, and
you know how tough Mommy is! So there's no real advantage to going to
Mommy right now.
We can't risk that. She's either already dead or she's going to pull
through. There's nothing in between."
"I--I want Mommy," said Nikki.
"Mommy's hurt."
"I want Mommy, too," said Bob.
"But sweetie, please trust me on this one. We can't help Mommy by
getting ourselves killed. He may still be there."
"I'll stay," said Nikki.
"You're such a brave girl. But you can't stay. We have to get out of
here, get the state cops and a medical team here fast. Do you
understand, baby girl? That's what's best for Mommy, all right?"
His daughter shook her head; she was not convinced and nothing would
ever convince her but Bob knew in his Marine heart that he had made the
right decision--the tough one, but the right one.
chapter twenty-nine
It had to happen sooner or later and he was glad it happened sooner. It
had to be gotten out of the way.
"Mr. Swagger," said Lieutenant Benteen, the chief investigator of the
Idaho State Police, "would you mind stepping over here for a second,
sir?"
Bob knew what was coming. As he stood on the escarpment, two and a
half hours had passed since the shooting. His daughter was with a
female state police detective and a nurse back at the house; here, an
investigation team and coroner's team worked the crime site, while
below a team of sheriffs deputies struggled through the trees and
underbrush for a sign of Julie Swagger.
Across the gorge, detectives and deputies looked for evidence of the
shooting site, ferried there by a state police helicopter that idled on
that side of the gap.
"I figured you would be talking with me," said Bob.
"You go ahead. Let's get it done with."
"Yes, sir. You know, when a wife is killed it's been my experience
that ninety-eight percent of the time, the husband is somehow involved,
if he didn't do the thing himself.
Seen a lot of that."
"Sure, it figures."
"So I have to ask you to account for your whereabouts at the time of
the shooting."
"I was on the other side of the pass, riding up to join my wife and
daughter. We usually go out for an early morning ride. Today we had
words, and I let the girls go alone. Then I got mad at myself for
letting my damn ego seem so important, so I went after them. I heard
four shots and rode like hell, to find my baby girl in the shadows of
the pass. I looked out and saw poor Dade. I decided the best thing
was to get Nikki back to the house, where I called you all and you know
the rest."
342 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Did it occur to you to look for your wife?"
"It did, but I had no medical supplies and I didn't know if the shooter
was around, so I thought it best to get the girl out of here and call
in the sheriff and a medical team."
"You are, sir, I believe, a marksman of some note."
"I am a shooter, yes. I was a Marine sniper many years ago. I won the
big shoot they hold in the east back in 1970. The Wimbledon Cup, they
call it. Not for tennis, for long-range shooting. Also, I have been
in some scrapes over the years. But, sir, can I point a thing out?"
"Go ahead, Mr. Swagger."
"I think you'll find them shots came from the other side of the gap.
That's what my daughter said, and that's what the indication of Dade's
body said. Now, there ain't no way I could have fired those shots from
over there and gotten to my daughter over here in a very few seconds.
There's a huge drop-off, then some rough country to negotiate.
I was with my daughter within thirty seconds of the last shot. You can
also see the tracks of my horse up here from the ranch house, and no
tracks that in any way connect me with what went on over there. And
finally, you have surely figured out by now that poor Dade is gone
because whoever pulled the trigger thought he was hitting me."
"Duly noted, Mr. Swagger. But I will have to look into this further,
to let you know. I will be asking questions. I have no choice."
"You go ahead. Do I need a lawyer?"
"I will notify you if you are considered a suspect, sir.
That's how we do it out here."
"Thank you."
"But you were a shooter who used a rifle with a scope?
And if I don't miss my best guess, this was a pretty piece of shooting
with just such a rig."
"Possibly. I don't know yet."
"This couldn't be some sniper thing? Some other
TIME TO HUNT 343
sniper? Maybe someone getting even with you for something in your
past?"
"I don't know, sir. I have no idea at all."
The lieutenant's radio crackled and he picked it up.
"Benteen here, over."
"Lieutenant, I think we found it. Got a couple of shells and some
tracks, a coffee thermos and some messed-up ground. You care to come
and look?"
"I'll hop right over, Walt, thanks." He turned to Bob.
"They think they found the shooting position. Care to look at it, Mr.
Swagger? Maybe you can tell me a thing or two about this sort of
work."
"I would like to see it, yes, sir. There's no word on my wife?"
"Not yet. They'll call as soon as they know."
"Then let's go."
Of course the chopper was a Huey; it was always a Huey and Bob had the
briefest of flashbacks as the odor of aviation fuel and grease floated
to his nose. The bird rose gracefully, stirring up some dust, and
hopped the canyon to the ridgeline on the other side and set its cargo
down.
Bob and the lieutenant jumped out and the bird evacuated.
A hundred yards away and up, a state policeman signaled and the two men
followed a rough track up to the position. There, the younger cop
stood over a little patch of bare ground. Something glittered and Bob
could see two brass shells in the dust. There were some other marks
and scuffs, and a Kmart thermos.
"This appears to be the spot," said the young officer.
"Maybe we'll get prints off the thermos," Benteen said.
Bob bent and looked at the marks in the earth.
"See that," he said, pointing to two circular indentations in the dust
right at the edge of the patch.
"Those are marks of a Harris bipod. The rifle rested on a Harris
bipod."
"Yeah," said the cop.
344 STEPHEN HUNTER
Bob turned and looked back across the gulf to where Dade's body still
rested under a coroner's sheet. He gauged the distance to be close to
two hundred meters dead on, maybe a little downward elevation but
nothing challenging.
"A hard shot, Mr. Swagger?"
"No, I would say not," he said.
"Any half-practiced fool could make that shot prone off the bipod with
a zeroed rifle."
"So you would look at this and not necessarily conclude that it's a
professional sniper's work."
"No. In the war we did most of our shooting at four hundred to eight
hundred meters, on moving targets. This is much simpler: the distance
is close, his angle to the target was dead on, the target was still.
Then he misses the other two shots he takes at my wife, or at least he
didn't hit her squarely. Then he comes back and hits the old man in
the head as he lays dead in the dirt. No, as I look at this, I can't
say I see anything that speaks of a trained man to me. It could have
been some random psycho, someone who had a rifle and the itch to see
something die and suddenly he sees this chance and his darker self gets
a hold of him."
"It's been known to happen."
"Yes, it has."
"Still, it would be a mighty big coincidence, wouldn't it? That such a
monster just happens to nail your wife? I mean, given who and what you
were?"
"As you say, such things have been known to happen.
Let's take a look at the shell."
"Can't pick it up till we photo it," said the younger man.
"He's right. That's procedure."
"Okay, you mind if I squat down and get a look at the head stamp?"
"Go ahead."
Bob bent down, brought his eyes close to the shell's rear end.
TIME TO HUNT 345
"What is it?" asked Benteen.
"Seven-millimeter Remington Mag."
"Is that a good bullet?"
"Yes, sir, it is. Very flat shooting, very powerful. They use them
mainly in hunting over long distances. Rams, 'lopes, elk, the like.
Lot of 'em in these parts."
"A hunter's round, then. Not a professional sniper's round."
"It is a hunter's round: I've heard the Secret Service snipers use it,
but nobody else."
He stood, looked back across the gap. Bipod marks, circular, where the
bipod sat in the dust, supporting the rifle. Two 7mm Remington Mag
shells. Range less than two hundred meters, a good, easy shot. Nearly
anyone could have made it with a reasonable outfit. Now what was
bothering him?
He didn't know.
But there was some oddness here, too subtle for his conscious mind to
track. Maybe his unconscious brain, the smarter part of him, would
figure it out.
He shook his head, to himself, mainly.
What is wrong with this picture?
"I wonder why there's only two shells," said Benteen, "if he fired four
times. That would be two missing."
"Only one," said Bob.
"He may not have ejected the last shell. As for the third shell, maybe
it caught on his clothes or something, or he kicked it when he got up.
Or it was right by him and he picked it up. That's not surprising.
The shells are light; they get moved about easily. You can never find
all your shells. I wouldn't pay too much attention to that."
Was that it?
"Good point," said the elderly officer.
But then the radio crackled again. Old Benteen picked it off his belt,
listened to the stew of syllables, then turned to Bob.
"They found your wife."
chapter thirty
She would live. She lay encased in bandages. The broken ribs, five of
them, were difficult; time alone would heal them. The shattered
collarbone, where a bullet had driven through, missing arteries and
blood-bearing organs by bare millimeters, would heal with more
difficulty, and orthopedic surgery lay ahead. The abraded skin from
her long roll down the mountainside, the dislocated hip, the
contusions, bruises, muscle aches and pains, all would heal
eventually.
So now she lay heavily sedated and immobile in the intensive care unit
of the Boise General Hospital, linked to an EKG whose solid beeping
testified to the sturdiness of her heart despite all the fractures and
the pain. Her daughter sat on her bed, flowers filled the room, two
Boise cops guarded the door, the doctor's prognostication was
optimistic and her husband was there for her.
"What happened?" she finally said.
"Do you remember?"
"Not much. The police have talked to me. Poor Mr.
Fellows."
"He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I am very sorry about
that."
"Who did this?"
"The police seem to think it was some random psycho in the hills. Maybe
a militia boy, full of foolish ideas, or someone who just couldn't
handle the temptation of the rifle."
"Have they caught anybody?"
"No. And there were no distinguishable prints on a cheap thermos they
recovered. They really don't have much. A couple of shells, some
scuffs in the dust."
She looked off. Nikki was coloring steadily, a big TIME TO HUNT 347
Disney book. The scent of flowers and disinfectant filled the room.
"I hate seeing you here," Bob said.
"You don't belong here."
"But I am here," she said.
"I've asked Sally Memphis to come up and stay with you. She's a couple
of months pregnant but she was eager to help. I called Dade Fellows's
daughter, and she said her father has a ranching property over in
Custer County, remote and safe in a valley. When you get better, I
want Sally to move you up there. I want you and Nikki protected."
"What are you talking about?"
"Nikki, honey, why don't you go get a Coke?"
"Daddy, I don't want a Coke. I just had a Coke."
"Well, sweetie, why don't you get another Coke. Or get Daddy a Coke,
all right?"
Nikki knew when she was being kicked out. She got up reluctantly,
kissed her mother and left the room.
"I haven't told the cops," he said, "because they wouldn't get it and
they couldn't do anything about it. But I don't think this is a
wandering Johnny with a rifle. I think we got us a big-time serious
professional killer and I think I'm the boy he's after."
"Why on earth?"
"There could be many reasons. As you know, I have been in some
scrapes. I don't know which of 'em would produce this. But what that
means is until I get this figured out, I believe you are in more danger
around me than less. And I need freedom. I need to get about, to look
at things, to get some items sorted out. This guy's got a game going
on me; but now I have the advantage because for a few days more he
won't know he missed me. I have to operate fast and learn what I can
in the opening."
"Bob, you should talk to the FBI if you don't think these Idaho people
are sophisticated enough."
"I don't have anything they'd recognize yet. I have to
348 STEPHEN HUNTER
develop some evidence. I'd just get myself locked in the loony bin."
"Oh, Lord," she said.
"This is going to be one of your things, isn't it?"
There was a long moment of quiet. He let the anger in him rise, then
top off, then fall; then he began to hurt a little.
"What do you mean, 'things'?"
"Oh, you have these crusades. You go off and you get involved in some
ruckus. You don't talk about it but you come back spent and happy. You
get to be alive again and do what you do the best. You get to be a
sniper again. The war never ended for you. You never wanted it to
end. You loved it too deeply. You loved it more than you ever loved
any of us, I see that now."
"Julie, honey, you don't know what you're saying.
You're on painkillers. I want you to be comfortable. I'm just going
to look into some things for a while."
She shook her head sadly.
"I can't have it. Now it's come to my daughter. The war. It killed
my first husband and now it's come into my life and you want to go off
and fight it all over again, and my daughter, who is eight, had to see
a man die. Do you have any idea how traumatizing that is? No child
should have to see that. Ever."
"I agree, but what we have is what we have and it has to be dealt with.
It can't be ignored. It won't go away."
He could see that she was crying.
"Get some help," she finally said.
"Call Nick; he's with the FBI. Call some Marine general; he'll have
connections.
Call one of those writers who's always wanting to do a book with you.
Get some help. Take some money from my family's account and hire some
private guards. Don't be Bob the Nailer anymore. Be Bob the husband
and Bob the father. Bob the man at home. I can't stand that this is
in our life again. I thought it was over, but it's never over."
"Sweetie, I didn't invent this. It's not something I
TIME TO HUNT 349
thought up. Please, you're upset, you had a terrible experience,
you're in what we call post-traumatic stress syndrome, where it keeps
flashing before your eyes and you're angry all the time. I've been
there. Time is going to heal you up, your mind as well as your
body."
She said nothing. She looked at Bob, but wasn't seeing him any
longer.
"But I have to deal with this. Okay? Just let me deal with this."
"Oh, Bob--" She started to cry again.
"I can't lose you, too. I can't lose both you and Donny to the same
war. I can't. I can't bear it."
"I just have to look into this. I'll be careful. I know this stuff; I
can work a lot faster alone and you'll be safer without me there at
all. Okay?"
She shook her head disconsolately.
"You have to answer me a question or two, please. All right?"
After a bit, she nodded.
"You went over this with the cops, only they won't let me see the
report. But they don't have a clue. He's already got them outfoxed.
Now, I'm assuming no two shots followed upon each other closely. Is
that right?"
She paused again, thinking, and then at last yielded.
"Yes."
"There must have been at least two seconds between shots?"
"It felt like less than that."
"But if he hits Dade in the chest, then he hits you in the collarbone,
and you're forty, fifty yards away, it took him some time to track and
fire. So it had to be at least two, maybe three seconds."
"You won't put Nikki through this?"
"No. Now--he hits you moving. I'm guessing you were really galloping,
right?"
"Yes."
"That's a pretty good shot."
350 STEPHEN HUNTER
He sat back, his respect slightly increased. An oblique fast-mover, at
two hundred yards.
"Why does he hit you in the collarbone and not in the full body?"
"It's my right collarbone, not my left one," she said.
"That means he was aiming at my back, dead center.
What I remember is the horse seemed to stumble forward just a bit, and
the next second it was like somebody hit me in the shoulder with a
baseball bat. The second after that I was down; there was dust
everywhere. Nikki came back to me. Somehow I got up. I was afraid
he'd shoot at her, so I yelled at her. Then I ran away from her so
that he'd shoot me instead."
"It still makes no sense. If he's two hundred yards out, then the time
in flight is so minimal he hits the sight picture he sees, and he don't
shoot if he don't see the right sight picture. You're sure the horse
stumbled?"
"I felt it. Then, whack, and I was down, there was dust everywhere,
the horse was crying."
"Okay. Next, I heard four shots fired. One into Dade, the knock-down
shot, the third shot, then the fourth into Dade's head."
"Thank God I never saw that."
"But there was a third shot?"
"I think so. But I went off the edge."
"You jumped off the edge? You weren't knocked down?"
"I jumped."
"God. Great move. Right move, great move, smart move. Guts move.
Guts move. That gets you a medal in the Marine Corps."
"It was all I could think to do."
"So he did take a third shot. He was shooting at you.
Man, I cannot figure why he is missing. Why is he missing?
You jump, but at two hundred meters or less, with a seven-millimeter
Remington Mag, what he sees is what he gets. He can't miss from that
range. Maybe he's not so good."
TIME TO HUNT 351
"Maybe he's not."
"Maybe the cops are right. It's some psycho."
"Maybe it is. But that would cheat you out of your crusade, wouldn't
it? So it can't be a psycho. It's got to be a master sniper."
He let her hostility pass.
"Another thing I can't figure is how come he's shooting at you at all?
You'd think once he did me, it's over.
That's it. Time to--" But then something came into his mind.
"No. No, I see. He has to hit you, because he knows exactly how
quickly you could get back to the ranch and a phone and that's cutting
it too close. Nikki's not a problem, she's probably not together
enough to think of that.
But he has to do you to give himself the right amount of time to make
his getaway. He's figured out the angles. I can see how his mind
works. Very methodical, very savvy."
"Maybe you're dreaming all this up."
"Maybe I am."
"But you want the man-to-man thing. I can tell. You against him, just
like Vietnam. Just like all the other places. God, I hate that war.
It killed Donny, it stole your mind. It was so evil."
But then Nikki came back with a Coke for her dad and a nurse came in
with pills and their time alone was finished.
chapter thirty-one
The wind howled; it was cloudy today, and maybe rain would fall. Bob's
horse, Junior, nickered nervously at the possibility, stamped, then put
his head down to some mountain vegetation and began to chew.
Bob stood at the shooter's site. It was a flat nest of dust across an
arroyo, not more than two hundred meters from where Dade had been shot
and maybe 280 from where Julie fell. If he had had a range finder, he
would have known the range for sure, but those things--laser-driven
these days, much more compact than the Barr and Stroud he'd once
owned--cost a fortune, and only wealthy hunters and elite SWAT or
sniper teams had them. It didn't matter; the range was fairly easy to
estimate from here because the body sizes were easy to read.
If you know the power of your scope, as presumably this boy would, you
could pretty much gauge the distance from how much of the body you got
into your lens. That worked out to about three hundred yards, and then
it was a different matter altogether: you entered a different universe
when the distances were way out.
Why did you miss her? he wondered. She's running away, she's on the
horse, the angle is tough; the only answer is, you're a crappy shot.
You're a moron. You're some asshole who's read too many books and
dreamed of the kick you get looking through the scope when the gun
fires, and you see something go slack. So you do the old man, then you
swing onto the racing woman, her horse bounding up and down, and it's
too much shot for you.
You misread the angle, you misread the distance, you just ain't the boy
for the job.
Okay. You fire, you bring her down. There's dust, and then she
emerges from the dust, running toward the edge.
She wants you to shoot her, so you concentrate on her,
TIME TO HUNT 353
not the girl. You've really got plenty of time. There's no rush,
there's no up-down plunge as there would be on a horse; it's really a
pretty elementary shot.
But you miss again, this time totally.
No, you ain't the boy you think you are.
That added up. That made sense. Some asshole who thought too much
about guns and had no other life, no family, no sane connection to the
world. It was the sickening part of the Second Amendment computation,
but there you had it: some people just could not say no to the godlike
power of the gun.
But how come there ain't no tracks?
Apparent contradiction: he's not good enough to make the shot, but he
is good enough to get out cold without any stupid mistakes, like the
print of his boot in the dust, which would at least narrow it down a
bit. Yet he leaves two shells and a thermos. Yet all three are clean
of prints. How could that be? Is he a professional or not? Or is he
just a lucky amateur?
Bob looked at the bipod marks, still immaculate in the dust,
undisturbed by the process of making plaster casts of them. They would
last until the rain, and then be gone forever. They told him nothing;
bipod, big deal. You could buy the Harris bipod in any gun store in
America. Varmint shooters used them and so did police snipers. Some
men used them when they took their rifles to the range for zeroing or
load development, but not usually: because the bipod fit by an
attachment to the screw hole in which the front swing swivel was set.
That meant the screw could work lose under a long bench session and
that it could change the point of impact much more readily than a good
sandbag. Some hunters used them, but it was a rarity, because you
almost never got a prone position in the field, so the extra weight was
not worth it. Some men used them because they thought they looked
cool. Would that be our guy?
He stared at imprints of the legs, trying to divine a
354 STEPHEN HUNTER
meaning from their two, neat square images. No meaning arrived.
Nothing.
But contemplating the bipod got him going in another direction: What's
he see? Bob wondered. What's he see from up here?
So he went to the prone and took up a position indexed to the marks in
the dust. From there he had a good, straight-on view of Dade's
position, yes; and the shot-with the stable rifle, the sun behind you,
the wind calm as it was at that point in the day--it was just a matter
of concentrating on the crosshairs, trusting the rig, squeezing the
trigger and presto, instant kill. You threw the bolt, and no more than
a few seconds later you had the woman.
He now saw how truly heroic Julie had been. Nine-hundred-ninety-nine
out of a thousand inexperienced people just freeze on the spot. Sniper
cocks, pivots a degree or so, and he has a second kill. But bless her
brilliant soul, she reacted on the dime when Dade went down, and off
she went with Nikki. He had to track her.
Bob had a thought here. What happens if the point where she was hit
wasn't within pivot range of this spot?
What happens if there's some impediment? But there wasn't. It was an
easy crank, an arc of about forty degrees, nothing in the way, you just
track her, lead her a bit and pull the trigger.
Why did he miss?
Bob thought he had it.
He probably didn't keep the rifle moving as he pulled the trigger.
That's why he hits her behind the line of her spine, he's centered on
her, but he stops when he fires, and the bullet, arriving a tenth of a
second later, drills her trailing collarbone.
That made a sort of sense, though usually when you were tracking a bird
or a clay with a shotgun and you stopped the gun, you missed the whole
sucker, not just hit behind on it. Maybe the birds moved faster. On
the other hand, the range was a lot farther than any wing or clay
TIME TO HUNT 355
shooting. On the third hand, the velocity of the rifle bullet was much
faster.
There were so many goddamned variables.
He sat back.
Used to be pretty goddamned good at this stuff, he thought. Used to
have a real talent for understanding the dynamics of a two- or
three-second interval when the guns were in play.
None of this made any goddamned sense, not really, and he had no way of
figuring it out and his head ached and it was about to rain and destroy
the physical evidence forever and Junior nickered again, bored.
Okay, he thought, rising, troubled, facing the fact that he had not
really made any progress. He turned to go back to the horse and his
empty house and his unopened bottle of Jim Beam and Then he saw the
footprint.
Yeah, the cops missed a footprint, that's likely.
He looked more closely and saw in a second that it was his own
footprint, a Tony Lama boot, size 11, the one he was wearing, yes, it
was his goddamned own. A little hard to ID because he'd turned and
sort of stretched it out and That was it.
There it was.
He turned back, quickly, and stared at the bipod imprints.
If he has to pivot the bipod, the bipod marks would be distorted.
They'd be rounded from the fast, forceful pivot as he followed her, and
one would inscribe an arc through the dust. But these bipod marks were
squared off, perfectly.
Bob looked at them closely.
Yes: round, perfect, the mark of the bipod resting in the dust until
the rain came and washed it away.
He saw it now: this was a classic phony hide. This hide was built to
suggest the possibility that a screwball did the
356 STEPHEN HUNTER
shooting. But our boy didn't shoot from here. He shot from somewhere
else, a lot farther out.
Bob looked at the sky. It looked like rain.
He rode the ridgeline for what seemed like hours, the wind increasing,
the clouds screaming in from the west, taking the mountains away. It
felt like fog, damp to the skin. Up here, the weather could change
just like that. It could kill you just like that.
But death wasn't on his mind. Rather, his own depression was. The
chances of finding the real hide were remote, if traces remained at
all. When the rain came, they would be gone forever. Again he
thought: nicely thought out. Not only does the phony hide send the
investigation off in the wrong direction, it also prevents anyone from
seeing the real hide until it is obliterated by the changing weather.
So if he does miss something, the weather takes it out.
Bob was beginning to feel the other's mind. Extremely thorough. A man
who thinks of everything, will have rehearsed it in his mind a hundred
times, has been through this time and time again. He knows how to do
it, knows the arcane logic of the process. It isn't just pure autistic
shooting skill, it's also a sense of tactical craft, a sense of the
numbers that underlie everything and the confidence to crunch them fast
under great pressure, then rely on the crunching and make it happen in
the real world. Also:
stamina, courage, the guts of a burglar, the patience of a great
hunter.
He knew we came this way. But some mornings we did not. He may have
had to wait. He was calm and confident and able to flatten his brain
out, and wait for the exact morning. That was the hardest skill, the
skill that so few men really had. But you have it, don't you,
brother?
A sprinkle of rain fell against his face. It would start pounding soon
and the evidence would be gone forever.
Why didn't I think this through yesterday? I'd have had
TIME TO HUNT 357
him, or some part of him. But now, no, it would be gone.
He's won again.
He searched for hides, looking down from the trail into the rough rocks
beneath. Every so often there'd be a spot flat enough to conceal a
prone man, but upon investigation, each spot was empty of sign. And as
he rode, of course, he got farther out. And from not everywhere on the
ridge was the shelf of land visible where both Dade and Julie could be
hit in the same sweep.
So on he went, feeling the dampness rise and his sense of futility rise
with it. He must have missed it, he thought, or it's already gone.
Damn, he was a long way out. He was a long way out. He was getting
beyond the probable into the realm of the merely possible. Yet still
no sign, and Junior drifted along the ridge, over the small trail,
tense at the coming rain, Bob himself chilled to the bone and close to
giving up.
He couldn't be out this far!
He rode on even farther. No sign yet. He stopped, turned back. The
target zone was miniature. It was far distant. It was-Bob dismounted,
let Junior cook in his own nervousness.
He'd thought he'd seen a little point under the edge of the ridge,
nothing much, just a possibility. He eased down, peeking this way and
that, convinced that, no, he was too far out, he had to go back and
look for something he had missed.
But then he saw something just the slightest bit odd. It was a tuft of
dried brush, caught halfway down the ridge.
Wind damage? But no other tufts lay about. What had dislodged it?
Probably some freak accident of nature .. .
but on the other hand, a man wiping away marks of his presence in the
dust, he might just have used a piece of brush to do it, then tossed
the brush down into the gap.
But it caught, and as it dried out over the two days, it turned brown
enough so a man looking for the tiniest of anomalies might notice it.
Bob figured the wind always ran north to northwest
358 STEPHEN HUNTER
through this little channel in the mountains. If the wind carried it,
it would have come off the cliff just a bit farther back. He turned
and began to pick his way back in that direction and had already missed
it when, looking back to orient himself to the tuft of bush, he noticed
a crevice and, peering into it, he looked down to see just the tiniest,
coffin-sized flatness in the earth, where a man could lie unobserved
and have a good view of the target zone.
He eased down, oriented himself to where Dade had died and Julie fell.
He was careful not to disturb the earth, in case any scuff marks
remained, but he could see none. At last he turned to get his best and
first look at the killing zone from the shooting site.
Jesus Christ!
He was eight hundred, maybe a thousand meters out.
The killing zone was a tiny shelf far off at the oblique.
There were no features by which he could get an accurate
distance-by-size estimation, and even on horseback, the targets would
have been tiny. The scope wouldn't have blown them up too much,
either: too big a scope would have amplified the wobble effect until a
sight picture was simply unobtainable and, worse, it would have had too
small a breadth of vision at this range. If he lost contact with his
targets, he might never have gotten them back in time. He had to be
shooting a 10X, nothing bigger than a 12X, but probably a 10.
That's some shooting. That's beyond good; that's in some other sphere.
Careful, precise, deliberate, mathematical long-range shooting is very
good shooting. Knowing instinctively how far to lead a moving target
in the crux of the fraction of the second you've got, knowing it
automatically, subconsciously .. . that is great shooting.
Man, that is so far out there, it's almost beyond belief. He knew of
one man who could hit that shot, but he was dead, a bullet having
exploded his head in the Ouachitas.
There might be two or three others but-He now saw too why the shooter
had missed the kill on Julie.
TIME TO HUNT 359
He didn't make a mistake: he had the shot perfectly.
He was just betrayed by the physics of the issue, the bullet's time in
flight. When he fired, he had her dead to rights. But it takes a
second for the bullet to travel that long arc, to float down on her;
and there's plenty of time, even in that limited period, for her to
alter her body movement or direction enough to cause the miss. That's
why Dade is at least an easier shot. He's not moving, to say nothing
of at the oblique, on horseback galloping away as Julie was.
Bob sat back. His head ached; he felt dizzy; his heart beat wildly.
He thought of another man who might have done this.
He'd buried the name and the memory so far it didn't usually intrude,
though sometimes, in the night, it would come from nowhere, or even in
the daylight it would flash back upon him, that which he had tried to
forget.
But he had to find out. There had to be a sign. Somehow, some way,
the shooter would have left something that only another shooter could
read.
Oh, you bastard. Come on, you bastard. Show me yourself. Let me see
your face, this once.
He forced himself to concentrate on the hard scrabble dirt before him.
He felt a raindrop, cold and absolute, against his face. Then another.
The wind rose, howling.
Junior, made restive, whinnied uncomfortably. The rain was moments
away. He looked and he could see it, a gray blur hurtling down from
the mountains. It would come and destroy. The sniper had planned for
it. He was brilliant, well schooled in stratagems.
But who was he?
Bob leaned forward; he saw only dust. Then, no, no, yes, yes, he
leaned forward even farther, and up front, where the dust had clearly
been swept clean, he saw very small particulate residue. Tiny beads of
it, tiny grains.
White sand. White sand from a sandbag, because a great shooter will go
off the bag, prone.
The rain began to slash. He pulled his jacket tight. If
360 STEPHEN HUNTER
the sandbag was here--it had to be, to index the rifle to the killing
zone--then the legs were splayed this way. He bent to where they'd
have been, hoping for the indent of a knee, anything to leave a human
mark of some sort. But it was all scratched out, and gone, and now the
rain would take it forever.
The rain was cold and bitter. It was like the rain of Kham Due. It
would come and wipe anything away.
But then he went down farther, and amid the small and meaningless
dunes, he at last found what he had yearned for. It was about two
inches of a sharp cut in the dust, with notches for the thread holding
sole to boot.
Yes. It was an imprint of the shooter's boot, the edge of the sole,
the tiny strands of thread, the smoothness of the contour of the boot
itself, all perfectly preserved in the dust. The shooter had splayed
his foot sideways, to give him just the hint of muscular tension that
would tighten his muscles up through his body. It was an adduct or
muscle, Adductor magnus. That was the core of the system, as isolated
by a coach who'd gotten so far into it he'd worked out the precise
muscles involved.
That was Russian. A shooting position developed by the coach A.
Lozgachev prior to the fifty-two Olympics, where the Eastern Bloc
shooters simply ran the field. In sixty, someone else had been coached
by A. Lozgachev and his system of the magic Adductor magnus to win the
gold in prone rifle.
T. Solaratov, the Sniper.
chapter thirty-two
It was late at night. Outside, the wind still howled, and the rain
still fell. It was going to be a three-day blow.
The man was alone in a house that was not his own, halfway up a
mountain in a state he hardly knew at all. His daughter was in town,
close to her injured mother, in the care of a hired nurse until an FBI
agent's wife would arrive.
In the house, there was no sound. A fire burned in the fireplace, but
it was not crackly or inviting. It was merely a fire and one that
hadn't been tended in a while.
The man sat in the living room, in somebody else's chair, staring at
something he had placed on the table before him. Everything in the
room was somebody else's;
at fifty-two, he owned nothing, really; some property in Arizona that
was now fallow, some property in Arkansas that was all but abandoned.
He had a pension and his wife's family had some money, but it wasn't
much to show for fifty-two years.
In fact, what he had to show for those fifty-two years was one thing,
and it was before him on the table.
It was a quart bottle of bourbon: Jim Beam, white label, the very best.
He had not tasted whiskey in many years. He knew that if he ever did,
it might kill him: he could wash away on it so easily, because in its
stupefying numbness there was some kind of relief from the things that
he could not make go away in any other way.
Well, sir, he thought, tonight we drink the whiskey.
He had bought it in 1982 in Beaufort, South Carolina, just outside
Parris Island. He had no idea why he was there: it seemed some drunken
journey back to his roots, the basic training installation of the
United States Marine Corps, as if nothing existed before or after. It
was the end of an epic, seven-week drunk, the second week of which
362 STEPHEN HUNTER
his first wife had fled for good. Not many memories of the time or
place could be recalled, but he did remember staggering into a liquor
store and putting down his ten spot getting the change and the bottle
and going out, in the heat, to his car, where what remained of his
belongings were dumped.
He sat there in the parking lot, hearing the cicadas sing and getting
set to crack the seal and drown out his headache, his shakes, his
flashbacks, his anger in a smooth brown tide. But that day, for some
reason, he thought to himself: maybe I could wait just a bit before I
open it up.
Just a bit. See how far I can get.
He had gotten over twelve years out of it.
Well, yes, sir, tonight is the night I open it up.
Bob cracked the seal on the bottle. It fought him for just a second,
then yielded with a dry snap, slid open with the feeling of cheap metal
gliding on glass. He unscrewed the cap, put it on the table, then
poured a couple of fingers' worth into a glass. It settled, brown and
stable, not creamy at all but thin, like water. He stared at it as if
in staring at it he could recognize some meaning. But he saw the
futility, and after a bit raised it to his lips.
The smell hit him first, like the sound of a lost brother calling his
name, something he knew so well but had missed so long. It was
infinitely familiar and beckoning, and it overpowered, for that was the
way of whiskey: it took everything and made everything whiskey. That
was its brilliance and its damnation too.
The sip exploded on his tongue, hot with smooth fire, raspy with
pouring smoke, with the totality that made him wince. His eyes burned,
his nose filled, he blinked and felt it in his mouth, sloshing around
his teeth. Even at this last moment it was not too late, but he
swallowed it, and it burned its way down, like a swig of napalm,
unpleasant as it descended, and then it hit and its first wave
detonated, and there was fire everywhere.
He remembered. He forced himself to.
Last mission. Donny was DEROS. He should have
TIME TO HUNT 363
been out processing No, the little bastard, he couldn't let anything
alone. He had to be so perfect. He had to be the perfect Marine. He
had to go along.
Why did you let him?
Did you hate him? Was there something in you that wanted to see him
get hit? Was it Julie? Was it that you hated him so fiercely because
he was going back to Julie and you knew you'd never have her if he made
it?
Donny hadn't made it. Bob did have Julie. He was married to her,
though it took some doing. So in a terrible sense he had gotten
exactly what he desired. He had benefited.
Hadn't seemed so at the time, but the one Johnny who came out of the
fracas with more than he went into it was he, himself, Gy.Sgt. Bob Lee
Swagger, USMC (Ret.).
Don't think, he warned himself. Don't interpret; list.
List it all. Dredge it up. He had to concentrate only on the
exactness of the event, the hard questions, the knowable, the palpable,
the feel able
What time was it?
O-dark-30, 0530, 06 May 72. Duty NCO nudges me awake, but I am already
conscious and I have heard him come.
"Sarge?"
"Yeah, fine."
I rise before the sun. I decide not to wake Donny yet;
let him sleep. He's DEROS tomorrow, on his way back to the world. I
check my equipment. The M40 is clean, having been examined carefully
the night before both by myself and the armorer. Eighty rounds of M1
18 7.62mm NATO Match ammunition have been wiped and packed into pouches
on an 872 harness. I slip into my shoulder holster for my .380; over
that I pull on my cammies, I lace and tighten my boots. I darken my
face with the colors of the jungle. I find my boonie cap. I slip into
the 782 gear, with the ammunition, the canteens, the .45, all checked
last night. I take the rifle, which hangs by its sling, off the nail
in the bunker wall, slide five M118s into it, closing the bolt to drive
the top one into the chamber. I pull back to
364 STEPHEN HUNTER
put on safe, just behind the bolt handle. I'm ready to go to the
office.
It's going to be a hot one. The rainy season is finally over, and the
heat has come out of the east, settling like a mean old lady on us poor
grunts. But it's not hot yet. I stop by the mess tent, where
somebody's already got coffee going, and though I don't like the
caffeine to jimmy my nerves, it's been so quiet of late I don't see any
harm in having a cup.
A PFC pours it for me into a big khaki USMC mug, and I feel the great
smell, then take a long, hard hot pull on it. Damn, that tastes good.
That's what a man needs in the morning.
Sitting in his living room, the fire burning away, Bob took another sip
on the whiskey. It, too, burned on the way down, then seemed to whack
him between the eyes, knock him to blur and gone. He felt the tears
come.
06 May 1972. 0550.
I head to the S-2 bunker and duck in. Lieutenant Brophy is already up.
He's a good man, and knows just when to be present and when not to be.
He's here this morning, freshly shaved, in starched utilities. There
seems to be some sort of ceremonial thing going on.
"Morning, Sergeant."
"Morning, sir."
"Overnight your orders came through on the promotion.
I'm here to tell you you're officially a gunnery sergeant in the United
States Marine Corps. Congratulations, Swagger."
"Thank you, sir."
"You've done a hell of a job. And I know you'll be bang-up beaucoup
number one at Aberdeen."
"Looking forward to it, sir."
Maybe the lieutenant feels the weight of history.
Maybe he knows this is Bob the Nailer's last go-round.
Three tours in the "Nam with an extension for the last one, to give him
nineteen straight months in country. He
TIME TO HUNT 365
wants to observe it properly and that satisfies me. In some way,
Brophy gets it, and that's good.
We go over the job. We work the maps. It's an easy one. I'll go
straight out the north side, over the berm and out to the treeline.
Then we work our way north toward Hoi An, through heavy bush and across
a paddy dike. We go maybe four klicks to a hill that stands 840 meters
high and is therefore called Hill 840. We'll go up it, set up
observation and keep a good Marine Corps eyeball on Ban Son Road and
the Thu Bon River. I'm done killing:
it's straight scout work. I'm here for firebase security, nothing
else. Along those lines, we plan to look for sign of large-body troop
movements, to indicate enemy presence, on the way out and the way
back.
The lieutenant himself types up the operational order and enters it in
the logbook. I sign the order. It's official now.
I tell the clerk to go get Fenn. It's 0620. We're running a little
late, because I've let Fenn sleep. Why did I do this?
Well, it seemed kind. I didn't want to break his balls on the last
day. He really isn't needed until we leave the perimeter, as the
mission has been well discussed and briefed the night before; he knows
the specs better than I do.
He shows up ten minutes later, the sleep still in his eyes, but his
face made-up green, like mine. Someone gets him some coffee. The
lieutenant asks him how he's doing.
He says he's fine, he just wants to get it over with and head back to
the world.
"You don't have to go, Fenn," I say.
"I'm going," he says.
Why? Why does he have to go? What is driving him? I never understood
it then; I don't understand it now.
There was no reason, not one that ever made no sense to me. It was the
last, the tiniest, the least significant of all the things we did in
the "Nam. It was the one we could have skipped and oh, what a
different world we'd live in now if we had.
366 STEPHEN HUNTER
Bob threw down another choker of bourbon. Hot fire.
Napalm splashes, the whack between the eyes. The brown glory of it.
"Check your weapons," I tell Fenn, "and then do commo."
Donny makes certain the M14 is charged, safety on.
He takes out his .45, drops the mag, sees that the chamber is empty.
That's the way I've told him to carry it. Then he checks out the
PRC-77, which of course reads loud and clear since the receiving
station is about four feet away.
But we do it by the numbers, just like always.
"You all set, Fenn?" I ask.
"Gung ho, Semper Fi and all that good shit," says Donny, at last
strapping the radio on, getting it set just right, then picks up the
weapon, just as I pick mine up.
We leave the bunker. The light is beginning to seep over the horizon;
it's still cool and characteristically calm.
The air smells sweet.
But then I say, "I don't want to go out the north. Just in case. I
want to break our pattern. We go out the east this time, just like we
did before. We ain't never repeated ourself; anybody tracking us
couldn't anticipate that."
Why did I say that? What feeling did I have? I did have a feeling. I
know I had one. Why didn't I listen to it?
You've got to pay attention, because those little things, they're some
part of you you don't know nothing about, trying to reach you with
information.
But now there was no reaching back all these years; he had made a snap
decision because it felt so right, and it was so wrong. Bob finished
the glass with a last hot swig, then quickly poured another one, two
fingers, neat, as on so many lost nights over so many lost years. He
held it before his eyes as the blur hit him, and almost laughed.
He didn't feel so bad now. It was easy. You could just dig it out
that simply, and it was there, before him, as if recorded on videotape
or as if, after all these years, the memory somehow wanted to come out
at last.
"He's gone, he's dead, you got him," says Brophy,
TIME TO HUNT 367
meaning, The white sniper is gone, there's nobody out there, don't
worry about it. He should have been dead, too. We cooked his ass in
20mm and 7.62. The Night Hag sprayed him with lead. The flamethrower
teams barbecued him to melted fat and bone ash. Who could live through
that? We recovered his rifle. It was a great coup, waiting to be
studied back at Aberdeen by none other than yours truly.
But--why did we believe he was dead? We didn't find no body, we only
found the rifle. But how could he have survived all that fire, and the
follow-up with the flamethrowers and then the sweep with grunts? No
one could have survived that. Then again, this was a terrifically
efficient professional. He didn't panic, he'd been under a lot of
fire, he'd taken lots of people down. He kept his cool, he had great
stamina.
"Yeah, well," I tell the lieutenant.
We reach the eastern parapet wall. A sentry comes over from the guard
post down the way.
"All clear?" I ask.
"Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain't
nothing out there."
But how would he know? The night vision is only good for a few hundred
yards. The night vision tells you nothing.
It simply means there's nobody up close, like a sapper platoon. Why
didn't I realize that?
He took another dark, long swallow. It was as if something hit him
upside the head with a two-by-four, and his consciousness slipped a
little; he felt his bourbon-powered mellowness battling the melancholy
of his memory as it presented itself to him after all these years.
I slip my head over the sandbags, look out into the defoliated zone,
which is lightening in the rising sun. I can't see much. The sun is
directly in my eyes. I can only see flatness, a slight undulation in
the terrain, low vegetation, blackened stumps from the defoliant. No
details, just a landscape of emptiness.
368 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Okay," I say.
"Last day: time to hunt." I always say this. Why do I think it's so
cool? It's stupid, really.
I set my rifle on the sandbag berm, pull myself over, gather the rifle
and roll off.
I land, and there's a moment there where everything is fine, and then
there's a moment when it isn't. I've done this hundreds of times
before over the past nineteen months, and this feels just like all
those times. Then time stops. Then it starts again and when I try to
account for the missing second, it seems a lot has happened. I've been
punched backwards, come to rest against the berm itself.
For some reason my right leg is up around my ears. I can make no sense
of this until I look down and see my hip, pulped, smashed, pulsing my
own blood like a broken faucet.
Somewhere in here I hear the crack of the rifle shot, which arrives
just a bit after I'm hit.
It makes no sense at all and I panic. Then I think:
mother fuck I'm going to die. This fills even my hard heart with
terror. I don't want to die. That's all I'm thinking: I don't want to
die.
There's blood everywhere, and I put my fingers on my wound to stanch
it, but the blood squirts out between them. It's like trying to carry
dry sand; it slips away. I can see bone, shattered. I feel the wet.
Again an odd second where there is no pain and then the pain is so
heavy I think I'll die from it alone. I'm thinking of nothing but
myself now: there's no one in the world but me. A single word forms in
my head, and it's morphine.
Bob looked into the amber bourbon, so still, so calm.
The wind rushed outside, cold and harsh. He heard himself screaming,
"I'm hit!" from across the years, and saw himself, hip smashed, blood
pouring out. And he knew what happened next.
He took a swallow. It landed hard. He was quite drunk. The world
wobbled and twisted, fell out of and back into focus a dozen times. He
was crying now. He hadn't cried then but he was crying now.
"No!" he screamed, but it was too late, for the boy had
TIME TO HUNT 369
leaped over the berm too, to cover his sergeant, to inject morphine, to
drag the wounded man to cover.
Donny lands and at that precise moment he is hit. The bullet excites
such vibration from him as it crashes through that the dust seems to
snap off his chest. There's no geyser, no spurt, nothing; he just goes
down, dead weight, his pupils slipping up into his head. From far off
comes the crack of that rifle. Is there something familiar in it? Why
does it now seem so familiar?
The sound of it played in his ears: crisp, echoless, far away, but
clear. Familiar? Why familiar? Rifles and loads all have their
signature, but this one, what was it? What about it? What information
did it convey? What message did it carry?
"Donny!" I cry, as if my cry can bring him back, but he's so gone
there's no reaching him. He collapses into the dust a foot or so from
me with the crash of the uncaring, and how I do it I don't know, but I
somehow squirm to him and hold him close.
"Donny!" I scream, shaking him as if to drive the bullet out, but his
eyes are glassy and unfocused, and blood is coming out of his mouth and
nose. It's also coming out of his chest, pouring out. No one ever
gets how much blood there is: there's lots of it, and it comes out like
water, thin and sloppy and soaking.
His eyelids flutter but he's not seeing anything. There's a little
sound in his throat, and somehow I have him in my arms and now I'm
screaming, "Corpsman! Corpsman!"
I hear machine gun fire. Someone has jumped to the berm with an M60
and is throwing out suppressive fire, arcs and arcs of tracers that
skip out across the field, lifting the dirt where they hit. A 57mm
recoil-less rifle fires, big booming flash, that blows a mushroom cloud
into the landscape to no particular point, and more and more men come
to the berm, as if repulsing a human-wave attack.
Meanwhile, Brophy has jumped, and he's on both of us, and there are
three or four more grunts, pressing
370 STEPHEN HUNTER
against us, firing out into the emptiness. Brophy hits me with
morphine, then hits me again.
"Donny!" I scream, but as the morphine whacks me out, I feel his
fingers loosening from my wrist, and I know that he is dead.
Bob hit the bottle again, this time dispensing with the glass. The
fluid coursed down. His mind was now almost thoroughly wasted. He
couldn't remember Donny anymore.
Donny was gone, Donny was lost, Donny was history, Donny was a name on
a long black wall. Were there even any photos of him? He tried to
recall Donny but his mind wouldn't let him.
Gray face. Unfocused eyes staring at eternity. The sound of machine
gun fire. The taste of dust and sand.
Blood everywhere. Brophy jacking the morphine in. Its warmth and
spreading, easing numbness. I won't let go of Donny. I must hold him
still. They're trying to pull me away, over the berm. The blackness
of the morphine taking me out.
I sleep.
I sleep.
Days pass, I'm lost in morphine.
I'm finally awakened by a corpsman. He's shaving me.
That is, my pubic region.
"Huh?" I say, so groggy I can hardly breathe. I feel inflated, creamy
with grease, bound by weight.
"Surgery, Gunny," he says.
"You're going to be operated on now."
"Where am I?" I ask.
"The Philippines. Onstock Naval Hospital, Orthopedic Surgery Ward.
They'll fix you up good. You been out for a week."
"Am I going to die?"
"Hell, no. You'll be back in the Major Leagues next season."
He shaves me. The light is gray. I can't remember much, but somewhere
underneath it there's pain. Donny?
Donny's gone. Dodge City? What happened to Dodge
TIME TO HUNT 371
City? Brophy, Feamster, the grunts. That little place out there all
by itself.
"Dodge?"
"Dodge?" he asks.
"You ain't heard?"
"No," I say, "I been out."
"Sure. Bad news. The dinks jumped it a few days after you got hit.
Sappers got in with grenades. Killed thirty guys, wounded sixty-five
more."
"Oh, fuck."
He shaves me expertly, a man who knows what he's doing.
"Brophy?" I say.
"I don't know. They got a lot of officers; they hit the command
bunkers. I know they got the CO and a bunch of grunts. Poor guys.
Probably the last Marines to die in the Land of Bad Things. They say
there'll be a big investigation.
Careers ended, a colonel, maybe even a general will go down. You're
lucky you got out, Gunny."
Loss. Endless loss. Nothing good came out of it. No happy endings.
We went, we lost, we died, we came home to--to what?
I feel old and tired. Used up. Throw me out. Kill me. I don't want
to live. I want to die and be with my people.
"Corpsman?" I grab his arm.
"Yeah?"
"Kill me. Hit me with morphine. Finish me. Everything you got.
Please."
"Can't do it, Gunny. You're a goddamned hero.
You've got everything to live for. You're going to get the Navy Cross.
You'll be the Command Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps."
"I hurt so bad."
"Okay, Gunny. I'm done. Let me give you some Mike.
Only a little, though, to make the pain go away."
He hits me with it. I go under and the next time I awake, I'm in full
traction in San Diego, where I'll spend a year alone, which will be
followed by a year in a body cast, also alone.
372 STEPHEN HUNTER
But now the morphine hits and thank God, once again, I go under.
The light awakened him, then noise. The door cracked open and Sally
Memphis walked in.
"Thought I'd find you here."
"Oh, Christ, what time is it?"
"Mister, it's eleven-thirty in the morning and you ought to be with
your wife and daughter, not out here getting drunk."
Bob's head ached and his mouth felt dry. He could smell himself, not
pleasant. He was still in yesterday's clothes and the room had the
stench of unwashed man to it.
Sally bustled around, opening window shades. Outside, the sun glared;
the three-day blow had lasted only one and then was gone. Idaho sky,
pure diamond blue, blasted through the windows, lit by sun. Bob
blinked, hoping the pain would go away but it wouldn't.
"She was operated on at seven a.m. for her collarbone.
You should have been there. Then you were supposed to pick me up at
the airport at nine-thirty. Remember?"
Sally, who had just graduated from law school, was the wife of one of
Bob's few friends, a special agent in the FBI named Nick Memphis who
now ran the Bureau's New Orleans office. She was about thirty-five and
had acquired, over the years, a puritan aspect to her, unforgiving and
unshaded. She was going to start as an assistant prosecutor in the New
Orleans district attorney's office that fall; but she'd come here out
of her and her husband's love of Bob.
"I had a bad night."
"I'll say."
"It ain't what it appears," he said feebly.
"You fell off the wagon but good, that's what it appears."
"I had to do some work last night. I needed the booze to get where I
had to go."
TIME TO HUNT 373
"You are a stubborn man, Bob Swagger. I pity your beautiful wife, who
has to live with your flintiness. That woman is a saint. You never
are wrong, are you?"
"I am wrong all the time, as a matter of fact. Just don't happen to be
wrong on this one. Here, loo key here."
He picked up the uncapped bottle of Jim Beam, three quarters gone, and
walked out on the front porch. His hip ached a little. Sally
followed. He poured the stuff into the ground.
"There," he said.
"No drunk could do that. It's gone, it's finished, it won't never
touch these lips again."
"So why did you get so drunk? Do you know I called you? You were
hopeless on the phone."
"Nope. Sorry, don't remember that."
"Why the booze?"
"I had to remember something that happened to me long ago. I drunk for
years to forget it. Then when I got sober finally, I found I
disremembered it. So I had to hunt it out again."
"So what did you learn on your magical mystery tour?"
"I didn't learn nothing yet."
"But you will," she said.
"I know where to look for an answer," he finally said.
"And where would that be?"
"There's only one place."
She paused.
"Oh, I'll bet this one is rich," she said.
"It just gets better and better."
"Yep," he said.
"I don't never want to disappoint you, Sally. This one is really
rich."
"Where is it?"
"Where a Russian put it. Where he hid it twenty-five years ago. But
it's there, and by God, I'll dig it out."
"What are you talking about?"
"It's in my hip. The bullet that crippled me. It's still there. I'm
going to have it cut out."
chapter thirty-three
It was dark and the doctor was still working. Bob found him out back
of the Jennings place, down the road from the Holloways, where he'd had
to help a cow through a difficult birth. Now he was with a horse
called Rufus whom the Jennings girl, Amy, loved, although Rufus was
getting on in years. But the doctor assured her that Rufus was fine;
he would just be getting up slower these days. He was an old man, and
should be treated with the respect of the elderly. Like that old man
over there, the doctor said, pointing to Bob.
"Mr. Swagger," said Amy.
"I'd heard you'd left these parts."
"I did," he said.
"But I came back to see my good friend Dr. Lopez."
"Amy, honey, I'll send over a vitamin supplement I want you to add to
Rufus's oats every morning. I bet that'll help him."
"Thank you. Dr. Lopez."
"It's all right, honey. You run up to the house now. I think Mr.
Swagger wants a private chat."
"
"Bye, Mr. Swagger."
"Good-bye, sweetie," said Bob, as the girl skipped back to the house.
"Thought those reporters chased you out of this place for good," the
doctor said.
"Well, I did too. The bastards are still looking for me."
"Where'd you go to cover?"
"A ranch up in Idaho, twenty-five miles out of Boise.
Just temporarily, waiting for all this to blow over."
"I knew you were something big in the war. I never knew you were a
hero."
"My father was a hero. I was just a sergeant. I did a job, that's
all."
TIME TO HUNT 375
"Well, you ran a great lay-up barn. I wish you'd come back into the
area, Bob. There's no first-class outfit this side of Tucson."
"Maybe I will."
"But you didn't come all this way to talk about horses," said Dr.
Lopez.
"No, Doc, I didn't. In fact, I flew down this afternoon.
Took the two-ten American from Boise to Tucson, rented a car, and here
I am."
Bob explained what he wanted. The doctor was incredulous.
"I can't just do that. Give me a reason."
"I am plumb tired of setting off airport alarms. I want to get on an
airplane without a scene."
"That's not good enough. I have an oath, as well as a complex set of
legal regulations, Bob. And let me point out one other thing. You are
not an animal."
"Well," said Bob, "actually I am. I am a Homo sapien.
But I know you are the best vet in these parts and you have operated on
many animals, and most of 'em are still with us today. I remember you
nursed Billy Hancock's paint through two knee operations, and that old
boy's still roaming the range."
"That was a good horse. It was a pleasure to save that animal."
"You never even charged him."
"I charged him plenty. I just never collected. Every few months,
Billy sends me ten or fifteen dollars. It should be paid up by the
next century."
"Well, I am a good horse, too. And I have this here problem and that's
why I come to you. If I go to VA, it could take months for the
paperwork to clear. If I go to a private MD, I got a passel of
questions I have to answer and a big operating room to tie up and weeks
to recover, whether I need it or not. I need this thing now.
Tonight."
"Tonight!"
"I need you to go in on local, dig it out, and sew me up."
376 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Bob, we are talking about serious, invasive work. It would take any
normal man a month to recover, under intensive medical care. You won't
be whole again for a long time."
"Doc, I been hit before. You know that. I still come back fast. It's
a matter of time. I can't tell you why, but I'm under the gun on time.
I have to find something out so I can go to the FBI. I need a piece of
evidence. I need your help."
"Oh, Lord."
"I know you did a tour over there. It's a thing guys like us have in
common. We ought to help each other when we can."
"No one else will, that's for sure," said Dr. Lopez.
"You was a combat medic and you probably saw more gunshot wounds and
worked on more than any ten MDs.
You know what you're doing."
"I saw enough of it over there."
"It's a nasty thing to fire a bullet into a man," said Bob.
"I was never the same, and now that I am getting old, I feel my back
firing up because of the damage it did to my structure. And the VA
don't recognize pain. They just tell you to live with it, and cut your
disability ten percent every year. So on I go, and on all of us go
with junk in us or limbs missing or whatever."
"That war was a very bad idea. Nothing good ever came out of it."
"I copy you there. I wouldn't be here if I didn't have no other
choice. I need that bullet."
"You are a fool if you think what I can offer you is as safe as modern
hospital medicine."
"You dig the bullet out and put in the stitches. If you don't do it,
I'll have to do it myself and that won't be pretty."
"I believe you would. Bob. Well, they say you are one tough son of a
bitch. You better be, because you're going to need every bit of tough
to get through the next few days."
TIME TO HUNT 377
Bob lay on his back, looking at the large mirror above him. The
ugliness of the entrance wound was visible; he hated to look at it. The
bullet had hit him almost dead on at a slight downward angle, plowed
through skin and the tissue of his sheathing gluteus medius muscle,
then shattered the plate like flange of the hip bone, deflecting off to
plunge down the inside of his leg, ripping out muscle as it went. The
bullet hole was unfilled: it was that alone and nothing else-- a
channel, a void, an emptiness in his hip that plunged inward,
surrounded by an ugly pucker of ruined flesh.
"No false hip?" said Dr. Lopez, feeling at it, examining it
carefully.
"No, sir," said Bob.
"They patched it up with bone grafts from my other shin and screws. On
cold days, them screws can light up, let me tell you."
"Did it break a leg, too?"
"No, sir, it just tore up tissue traveling down the leg."
The doctor probed Bob's inner thigh, where a long dead patch described
the careening bullet's terrible passage through flesh. Bob looked up,
away, feeling the acute humiliation of it. The doctor's operating
theater was immaculately clean, though out of scale to human bodies, as
its most usual patients were horses with leg or eye problems.
Except for the two of them, it was deserted.
"Well, you're lucky," Dr. Lopez said.
"I was afraid it still might be hung up in the mechanics of the hip. If
that had happened, you were out of luck. I couldn't take it out
without permanently crippling you."
"I am lucky," said Bob.
"Yeah," the doctor said, "I can feel it here, nested in the thigh, down
close to the knee. I know what happened.
They had to screw your hip together with transplants; the deep,
muscular wound of the bullet didn't matter to them.
They didn't even bother to look for it. They just sewed it up. They
were trying to keep you alive and ambulatory,
378 STEPHEN HUNTER
not make sure you could get through airport metal detectors."
"You can get it?"
"Bob, this is going to hurt like hell. I have to cut through an inch
of muscle, get down close to the femur. I can feel it in there. You
will bleed like a dog on the roadway.
I will sew you up, but you will need a good long rest.
This isn't a small thing. It isn't a huge thing, but you ought to
spend at least a couple of weeks off your feet."
"You cut it out tonight. I'll sleep here and be gone in the morning.
You give me a good pain shot and that will be that."
"You are a hard case," said the doctor.
"My wife says the same."
"Your wife and I bet anyone that ever met you. All right, you sit
back. I'm going to wash you up, then shave you. Then I'll go scrub,
and we'll give you a painkiller and we'll do what's gotta be done."
Bob watched with a numb leg and an odd feeling of dislocation.
The doctor had put an inflatable tourniquet around the upper leg to cut
down on blood loss. Then he'd wrapped his leg in a sterile Ace
bandage, and now he cut through it, a horizontal incision with a
scalpel an inch deep and three inches long into the lower inside of his
right thigh. Bob felt nothing. The blood jetted out in a spurt, as if
an artery had been snipped, but it hadn't, and as the initial jet was
soaked up by the bandage, the new blood crept back to seep out of the
ugly gash.
He'd seen so much blood, but the blood he remembered was Donny's blood.
Because the bullet had shattered his heart and lungs, it had gotten
into his throat fast and he'd gagged it out. There was so much, it
overcame his pipes and found new tunnels out of which to surge: it came
from his nose and mouth, as if he'd been punched in the face. Donny's
face was ruined, taken from them all by the black-red delta as it
fanned from the center of his face down to his chin.
TIME TO HUNT 379
The doctor tweaked and squeezed the incision, opening it as one would a
coin purse; then he took a long probe and inserted it into the wound
and began to press and feel.
"Is it there?"
"I don't have it--yeah, yeah, there it is, I ticked against it. It
seems to be encapsulated in some scar-type tissue. I'd guess that's
standard for an old bullet."
He removed the probe, now sticky with blood, gleaming in the bright
light of the operating theater, and set it down. Picking up a new
scalpel, he cut more deeply; more blood flowed.
"I'm going to have to irrigate," he said through his mask.
"I can't see much; all that damn blood."
"They will do that on you, won't they?" said Bob.
Lopez merely grunted, squirted a blast of water into the wound, so that
it bubbled.
It was so strange: Swagger could feel the water as pressure, not
unpleasant, even a little ticklish; he could feel the probe, could
almost feel as the pincers tugged at the bullet. The sensations were
precise, the doctor tugging at the thing, which was evidently quite
disfigured and jammed into some tissue and wouldn't just pop out as a
new bullet would. Bob felt all these details of the operation.
He saw the opening in his leg, saw the blood, saw the doctor's gloved
fingers begin to glow with blood, and the blood begin to spot his
surgeon's gown and smock.
But he felt nothing; it could have been happening to someone else. It
was unrelated to him.
At last, with a tiny tug, Lopez pulled the bloody pincers out of the
wound and held the trophy up for Bob to see: the bullet was crusted in
gristle, white and fatty, and the doctor cut it free with his scalpel.
It had mangled when it had met his bone, its me plat collapsing into
its body, so that it was deformed into a little flattened splat, like a
mushroom, oddly askew atop the column of what remained. But it hadn't
broken into pieces; it was all there, an ugly little twist of gilding
metal sheathing lead,
380 STEPHEN HUNTER
and its original aerodynamic sleekness, its missile ness was still
evident in the twisted version. He could see striations running down
it, where the rifle's grooves had gripped it as it spun through the
barrel so long ago on its journey toward him.
"Can you weigh it?"
"Yeah, right, I'll weigh it and then I'll wax it, and then I'll
gift-wrap it while you quietly bleed to death. Just hold your horses,
Bob."
He dropped the bullet into a little porcelain tray, where it tinkled
like a penny thrown into a blind man's cup, then went back to Bob.
"Please weigh it," said Bob.
"You ought to be committed," the doctor said. He irrigated the wound
again, poured in disinfectant and inserted a little sterile plastic
tube, for drainage. Then he quickly and expertly sewed it up with
coarse surgical thread. After finishing, he restitched with a finer
thread.
Then he bandaged the wound, wrapped an inflatable splint around it and
blew hard until the splint held the leg stiff, nearly immobile. Then
he loosened the Velcro on the tourniquet and tossed it aside.
"Pain?"
"Nothing," said Bob.
"You're lying. I felt you begin to tense five minutes ago."
"Okay, it hurts a bit, yeah."
Actually, it now hurt like hell. But he didn't want another shot or
anything that would drug him, flatten him, keep him woozy. He had
other stuff to do.
"Okay," said the doctor.
"Tomorrow I'll rebandage it and remove the tube. But it'll relieve the
pressure tonight.
Now--" "Please. I have to know. Weigh it. I have to know."
Dr. Lopez rolled his eyes, took the porcelain cup to a table where a
medical scale was sitting, and fiddled and twisted.
"All right," said the doctor.
TIME TO HUNT 381
"Go on," said Bob.
"It's 167.8 grains."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm very sure."
"Christ!"
"What's wrong?"
"This thing just got so twisted it don't make 'no sense at all."
He slept dreamlessly for the first time in weeks in one of Doc Lopez's
spare bedrooms; the pain woke him early, and the unbearable stiffness
in the leg. The doctor redressed the wound, then replaced the
inflatable splint.
"No major damage. You ought to be able to get around a little bit."
He had some crutches lying around, and advised Bob to seek professional
medical help as soon as possible. Bob could not walk or bathe, but he
insisted on going to the airport, on the power of ibuprofen and will
alone. Whitefaced and oily with sweat, he was pushed to the
ten-fifteen plane in a wheelchair by a stewardess, and used the
crutches to get aboard. He got to enter the plane early; it was like
being important.
No one was seated next to him, as the flight was only half full. The
plane took off, stabilized and eventually coffee was brought. He took
four more ibus, washed them down with the coffee, then at last took out
his grisly little treasure in its plasticine envelope.
Well, now, ain't you a problem, brother, he thought, examining the
little chunk of metal, mushroomed into the agony of impact, frozen
forever in the configuration of the explosion it had caused against his
hip bone.
One hundred sixty-eight grains.
Big problem. The only 168-grain bullet in the world in 1972 was
American--the Sierra 168-grain Match King the supreme .30-caliber
target round then and, pretty much, now. He was expecting a 150-grain
Soviet bullet, for the
382 STEPHEN HUNTER
7.62mm x 54, as fired in either a Dragunov or the old Mosin-Nagant
sniper rifle.
No. This boy was working with an American hand load as the
168-grainers weren't used on manufactured bullets until the services
adopted the M852 in the early nineties.
Nor was it the 173-grain match American bullet, loaded equally into the
M72 .30-06 round or the Ml 18 7.62 NATO round.
No. American hand load tailored, planned, its last wrinkle worked out.
A serious professional shooter, at the extended ranges of his craft.
That meant this was a total effort, even to somehow obtaining American
components in RSVN to get the absolute maximum out of the system.
Why?
He tried to think it out.
T. Solaratov has lost his Dragunov. The fieldexpedient choice would
then be an American sniper rifle, presumably available in some degree
within the NVA supply system; after all, half their stuff was
captured.
Bob bet it was an M1-D, the sniper version of the old M1 Garand rifle
that the GIs won World War II with.
The more he thought about it, the more sense it made, up to a point.
Yes, that would explain the almost subconscious familiarity of the
sound signature. In his time, he'd fired thousands of rounds with an
M-1. It had been his first Marine rifle, a solid, chunky, robust,
brilliantly engineered piece of work that would never let you down.
This is my rifle, this is my gun.
This is killing, this is for fun.
Every recruit had marched in his underwear around the squad bay some
indeterminate number of hours, a ton of unloaded Ml on his shoulder,
Parris Island's sucking bogs out beyond the wire, his dick in his left
hand, that primitive rhyme sounding in his ears under the guidance of a
drill instructor who seemed like a God, only crueler and tougher and
smarter.
TIME TO HUNT 383
Yeah, he thought, he uses a Garand rifle with a scope, he works out the
load with the best possible components, he takes me down, he's the
hero.
Looking at the striations imprinted in the copper sheathing of the
bullet by its explosive passage up the barrel that day, he guessed
closer examination by experts would prove them to be the mark of a
rifling system that held to ten twists per inch, not twelve, for that
would prove the bullet was fired from a match grade Ml and not an M14.
He saw the logic in that, too. It made sense to choose a .30-06 over a
.308 because downrange the .3006, with its longer cartridge case and
higher powder capacity, would deliver more energy, particularly beyond
a thousand yards. It really was a long-range cartridge, as so many
deer had found out over the years; the .308 was a mere wannabe.
But here's where he hit the wall.
If in fact he decided to go with the .30-06 cartridge, then why the
hell wouldn't he have used a Model 701', a bolt gun? That was the
Marine sniper rifle of the first five years of the war. There had to
be plenty of those still around; hell, even Donny had come up with one
of them in that one shot at Solaratov they'd had.
Why would the Russian use the less accurate, considerably more
problematic semiauto instead of one of the most classic sniper rifles
in the world? Carl Hitchcock, the great Marine sniper of 1967, with
his ninety-two kills, he'd used a 70T, with a sportsman's stock and an
8X Unerti externally adjusted scope. That would be the rifle to use.
What the hell was this Russian bird up to?
Could it be: no Model 70s available?
Well, he could check out combat losses through friends in the Pentagon,
but it seemed impossible that the Russian wouldn't be able to pick up a
Model 70. He could probably have gotten one of Bob's own Model 700
Remingtons if he'd wanted it.
What was there about the Ml that made it mandatory for the Russian's
selection?
384 STEPHEN HUNTER
It was indeed a very accurate rifle. Maybe he'd wanted the semiauto
capacity to bracket the target, to put three or four shots into the
area fast, in hopes that one would hit.
Nah. Not at that range. Each shot had to be precise.
The problem with the Garand as a sniper rifle was it was at its best
with national match iron sights. It ruled in service rifle competition
in which telescopic sights were not permissible. But the weapon became
difficult when a scope was added, because its straight-down topside en
bloc loading and straight-up ejection made it impossible to mount the
scope over the axis of the bore. Instead, through a complicated system
never really satisfactory, the Ml had worn a parallel scope, one
mounted a little to the left of the action. That meant at a given
range, the scope was intersecting the target but it was not on the same
axis as the bore, which made rapid computation very difficult,
particularly when the target was not exactly zeroed, or moved, or some
such.
Yet he chose this rifle.
What the hell was going on?
Bob mulled, trying to make sense of it all.
He had the feeling of missing something. There was a thing he could
not see. He could not even conceive of it. What am I missing?
What in me prevents me from seeing it?
I can't even conceive it.
"Sir?"
"Oh, yes?" he said, looking up at the flight attendant.
"You'll have to put up your lap tray and straighten your seat back.
We're about to land at Boise."
"Oh, yeah, sorry, wasn't paying any attention."
She smiled professionally, and he glimpsed out the windows to see the
Sawtooths, the down-homey little Boise skyline, and the airfield, named
after a famous ace who'd died young in war.
chapter thirty-four
Bob drove to the hospital straight from the airport.
During a brief gap in the power of the ibuprofen, his incision began to
knit in truly exquisite pain. He knew bruising would start by tomorrow
and the thing would be agonizing for weeks--but he didn't want to
stop.
He drove through the quiet, bright streets of Boise, as unpretentious a
town as existed anywhere, and finally reached the hospital where the
crutches got him in, the ibuprofen got him beyond the agony again and
an elevator got him to his wife's room, outside of which his daughter
and Sally Memphis waited.
"Oh, hi!"
"Daddy!"
"Sweetie, how are you?" he said, gathering up his daughter and giving
her a big hug.
"Oh, it's great to see my gal! Are you okay? You doin' what Sally
says?"
"I'm fine, Dad. What's wrong with you?"
"Sweetie, nothing. Just a little cut on my leg, that's all," he said,
as Sally shot him a disbelieving look.
He chatted with his daughter for a bit and with Sally, whose response
to him was cool. It seemed that Julie was sleeping now, but there
hadn't been any real complications from the surgery. They thought
she'd get out sometime soon and Sally had made arrangements to go to
the small ranch in Custer County as Bob had planned. She agreed with
him that it was a safe security arrangement, at least until the
situation clarified.
Finally, Julie awakened and Bob went in to his wife.
Her torso was in a full-body cast that supported the arm on the side
where the collarbone had been shattered.
His poor girl! She looked so wan and colorless and somehow shrunken in
the cast.
"Oh, sweetie," he said, rushing to her.
386 STEPHEN HUNTER
She smiled but not with a lot of force or enthusiasm and asked how he
was and he didn't bother to answer her, but instead went on about her,
caught up on her medical situation, checked on the security
arrangements, finally told her he thought he was on to something.
"I could tell; you're all lit up."
"It's a long story. There's something I can't figure out, and I need
help."
"Bob, how can I help you? I don't know anything. I've told you
everything I know."
"No, no, I don't mean about it. I mean about me."
"Now you've lost me."
"Honey, I got this thing I have to figure out. It doesn't make no
sense to me. So either it's wrong, or I am wrong.
If it's wrong, there's nothing I can do about it. If it's me that's
wrong, then I can figure it out."
"Oh, Lord. I get shot and it's all about you."
He let the cut simmer, not responding.
Finally he said, "I'm very sorry you got hit. I'm very happy you
survived. You should concentrate on how lucky you were to make it
through, not how unlucky you were.
You handled yourself well, you took control, you were a hero. You got
your life, you got your daughter, you got your husband. It ain't no
time to be angry."
She said nothing.
"It ain't about me. It's about us. I have to figure this thing
out."
"Can't you let the police, the FBI do it? They're all over the place.
That's their job. Your job is to be here with your family."
"I have a man hunting me. The more around you I am, the more danger
you're in. Don't you see that?"
"So you'll be off again. I knew it. You weren't there when I got
shot, you weren't there when I lay in that gulch for three hours, you
weren't there when I was operated on, you weren't there when I came out
of the operation, you haven't been taking care of your daughter, you're
evidently not going with us to the mountains, I hear you've
TIME TO HUNT 387
been drinking, you've obviously been in some kind of fight or
something, because of the terrible way you're limping and the way your
face is completely sheet-white, and all you want to do is go off again.
And .. . somehow, you're happy."
"I wasn't in a fight. I had a bullet cut out of my leg, that's all.
It's nothing. I'm sorry," he said.
"This is the best way, I think."
"I don't know how much of this I can take."
"I just want this to be over."
"Then stay here. Stay here, with us.""I can't. That puts you in
danger. He'll know soon enough, if not yet, that I wasn't the man he
hit. So he'll come back. I have to be able to move, to operate, to
think, to defend myself. Not only that, if he comes after me again,
and you're there again, do you think I can defend you? Nobody can
defend you. Let him come after me.
That's what he was trained to do. Maybe I can get him, maybe not, but
I sure as shit ain't going to let him go after you."
"Bob," she said.
"Bob, I called a lawyer."
"What?"
"I said, I called a lawyer."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"It means I think we ought to separate."
Certain moments, you just feel your chest turning to ice. It just
freezes solid on you. You have trouble breathing.
You swallow, there's no air, then there's no saliva in your mouth. Your
ears hammer, your head aches, blood rushes through your veins, pumping
crazily. You're that close to losing it. It had never happened to him
when the shit was flying in the air and people were dying all around
him, but it happened now.
"Why?" he finally said.
"Bob, we can't live like this. It's one thing to say we love each
other, we have a family, we take care of each other. It's another when
you go off every so often and I hear rumors that people are dead and
you won't talk
388 STEPHEN HUNTER
about it. It's another when you're so angry all the time you won't
talk or touch me or support me and you snap at me all the time. I can
just make so many excuses to our daughter. But then the next thing,
the worst thing, the war comes into our house and I'm shot with a
bullet and my daughter sees a man die before her very eyes. And then
you go off again. I love you, Lord, I love you, but I cannot have my
daughter going through that again."
"I'm--I'm very sorry, Julie. I didn't see how hard this was on you."
"It's not just the violence. It's that you somehow love it so. It's
that it's always in you. I can see it in your eyes, the way you're
always searching the terrain, the way you're never quite relaxed, the
way there's always a loaded gun close at hand, the way you drive me
out. You're not a sniper anymore; that was years ago. But you're
still over there. I can't compete with the war in Vietnam; you love
her more than us."
Bob breathed heavily.
"Please, don't do this to me. I can't lose you and Nikki. I don't
have anything else. You're all I value in this world."
"Not true. You value yourself and what you became.
Secretly, you're so happy to be Bob the Nailer, different from all men,
better than all men, loved and respected or at least feared by all men.
It's like a drug addiction. I feel that in you, and the angrier you
get and the older you get, the worse it becomes."
He could think of nothing to say.
"Please don't do this to me."
"We should be apart."
"Please. I can't lose you. I can't lose my daughter. I'll do what
you want. I'll go with you to the mountains. I can change. I can
become the man you want. You watch me! I can do it. Please."
"Bob, I've made up my mind. I've been thinking about this for a long
time. You need space, I need space. The shooting business just makes
it more important. I have to
TIME TO HUNT 389
get away from you and get my own life, and get away from the war."
"It's not the war."
"It is the war. It cost me the boy I loved and now it's cost me the
man I loved. It cannot take my daughter. I've thought all this
through. I'm filing for separation. After I recover, I'm returning to
Pima County and my family. We can work out financial details. It
doesn't have to he had or ugly. You can always see Nikki, any time,
unless you're off at war or in the middle of a gunfight. But I just
can't have this. I'm sorry it didn't work out any better, but there
you have it."
"I'll go. Just promise me you'll think it over. Don't do anything
stupid or sudden. I'll take care of this business--"
"Don't you see? I can't have you taking care of this business and
getting yourself killed. I can't lose someone else. It almost killed
me the first time. You think you had it hard in your traction and your
VA hospital? Well, I never came back. There isn't a day I don't wake
up and not remember what it felt like when the doorbell rang and it was
Donny's brother, and he looked like hell and I knew what was happening.
It took me ten, maybe twenty years to get over that and I only just
barely did."
He felt utterly defeated. He could think of nothing to say.
"I'll go now," he said.
"You need to rest. I'll say goodbye to Nikki. I'll check on you, stay
in contact. That's okay, isn't it?"
"Yes, of course."
"You be careful."
"We'll be all right."
"When this is all over, you'll see. I'll fix it. I can do that. I
can fix myself, change myself. I know it."
"Bob--" "I know I can."
He bent and kissed her.
"Bob--"
390 STEPHEN HUNTER
"What?"
"You wanted to ask me what was wrong with you. Why you couldn't figure
something out?"
"Yes."
"I'll tell you why. It's because of the great male failing of your
age. Vanity. You're publicly modest but privately insanely proud. You
think everything is about you, and that blinds you to what is going on
in the world. That's your weakness. You have to attack your problem
without ego and vanity. Approach it objectively. Put yourself out of
it."
T___
"It's the truth. I've never told you that, but it's the truth. Your
anger, your violence, your bravery; it's all part of the same thing.
Your pride. Pride goeth before the fall.
You cannot survive unless you see through your pride. All right?"
"All right," he said, and turned to leave.
Here I am, right back where I started from, he thought.
The room was shabby, a motel on the outskirts of Boise, not a chain but
one of those older, forties places on a road that had long since been
surpassed by other, brighter highways.
I am slipping, he thought. I am losing everything.
The room smelled of dust and mildew. Every surface was slightly warped
wood, the bathroom was only nominally clean, the lightbulbs were
low-wattage and pale.
I drank a lot of bourbon in rooms like this, he thought.
He was here on more or less sound principles. The first was that by
this time, whoever had been trying to kill him surely realized he had
missed and was back on the hunt again. Therefore the ranch house, with
its clothes, its life, was out. He knew that place and to go there was
to get yourself killed, this time for real, with no poor old Dade
Fellows to stop the bullet.
So, after doubling back and crossing his own tracks a dozen times, and
setting up look-sees for followers and
TIME TO HUNT 391
finally satisfying himself nobody was onto him yet, he was here. Paid
cash, too. No more credit cards, because whoever this bird was working
for, he might have a way of tracking credit cards. No more phone calls
except from public phones.
What he needed now was a gun and cash, like any man on the run. The
cash he knew he could get. He had $16,000 left from a libel case the
late Sam Vincent had won for him years ago, and he'd moved it from a
cache in Arkansas to a cache here in Idaho. If he was clear again
tomorrow, he would get it.
A gun was another problem. He felt naked without one, and the gun laws
here in Idaho weren't troubling yet, but there was still that goddamn
seven-day wait by national law. He could head back to his property,
where his45 Commander was stored away, but did he really want to carry
it on a daily basis? Suppose he had to take an airline or wandered
into a bank with a metal detector? Sometimes it was more trouble than
it was worth. Besides, how could he shoot it out against a sniper with
a 7mm Remington Magnum with a .45? If the white sniper found him, it
was over, that was all.
Bob sat back, turning the TV on by remote, discovering to his surprise
that it worked. The news came on.
Bob paid no attention. It was just white noise.
His head ached. He held a bottle in his hands, between his legs as he
lay on the bed, on a thin chintz bedspread.
Jim Beam, $9.95 at the Boise Lik-r-mart, recently purchased.
There were water spots on the ceiling; the room stank of ancient woe,
of raped girlfriends and beaten wives and hustled salesmen. Cobwebs
fogged the corners;
the toilet had a slightly unwholesome odor to it, like heads he'd
pissed in the world over.
I am losing it, he thought.
He tried to press his brain against the riddle again.
He felt if he could get that, he would have something.
Why, all those years ago, did Soloratov use an Ml rifle, a much less
accurate semiauto? It appeared to be
392 STEPHEN HUNTER
one of those mysteries that had no solution. Or, even worse, the
answer was mundane, stupid, boring: he couldn't get a bolt gun, so he
settled for the most accurate American rifle available, an MID Sniper.
Yes, that made perfect sense but ... . but if he could get an MID, he
could get a Model 70T or a Remington 700!
/( don't make no goddamn sense!
It doesn't have to make sense, he told himself. Not everything does.
Some things just can't be explained; they happen in a certain way
because that's the way of the world.
Bob looked at the bottle again, his fingers stole to the cap and the
plastic seal that kept the amber fluid and its multiple mercies from
his lips, and yearned to crack it and drink. But he didn't.
Won't never touch my lips again, he remembered telling someone.
Liar. Lying bastard. Talking big, not living up to it.
He tried to lose himself in what was on the tube. The news, some
talking head from Russia. Oh, yeah, it sounded familiar. Big
elections coming up, everybody all scared because some joker who
represented the old ways was in the lead and would carry the day, and
the Cold War would start up all over again. The guy was this Evgeny
Pashin, handsome big guy, powerful presence. Bob looked at him.
Thought we won that war, he said to himself.
Thought that was one we did okay in, and now here's this guy and he's
going to take over and restore Russia and all the missiles go back into
the silos and it's the same old crock of shit.
Man, there was no good news anywhere, was there?
He was feeling powerfully maudlin. He yearned for his old life: his
wife, his lay-up barn, the sick animals he was so good at caring for,
his perfect baby daughter, enough money. Man, had it knocked.
It all was taken away from him.
TIME TO HUNT 393
He turned the TV off and the room was quiet. But only for a moment. A
couple of units down, somebody was yelling at somebody. Somewhere
outside, a kid was crying. Other TVs vibrated through the walls.
Traffic hummed along. Looking out the window he saw the buzz of neon,
blurry and mashed together, from fast food joints and bars and liquor
stores across the way.
Man, I hate to be alone anymore, he thought.
That's why Solaratov will get me. He likes being alone. I lived alone
for years, I fought alone. But I lost whatever edge I had.
I want my family. I want my daughter.
The lyrics of some old rock and roll song sounded in his ears, moist,
rich, poignant.
Black is black, he heard the music, / want my baby back.
Yeah, well, you am 't going to get her back. You 're just going to sit
here until that fucking Russian hunts you down and blows you away.
Ceiling, discolored. Cobwebs, mildew, the sound of other people's
grief over the traffic and me stuck by myself with no goddamn way in
hell to figure out what I got to figure out.
You think everything is about you and that blinds you to the world, his
wife had told him.
Yeah, as if she would know. She really never did get him, he thought
bitterly.
His hand involuntarily cranked on the bottle top and he heard it crack
as the seal broke. He opened the bottle, looked down into the open
muzzle. He knew a form of doom lay behind that muzzle. It was like
looking down the barrel of a loaded rifle, the incredible temptation it
had to some weak and deranged people, because to look down it was to
look straight into death's own eye. So it was with the bottle for an
ex-drunk. Look into it, take what it has to offer and you are gone.
You are history.
He yearned for the strength to throw it out but knew he didn't have it.
He raised the bottle to his lips, wise with
394 STEPHEN HUNTER
the knowledge that he was about to die, and brought the bottle-You
think everything is about you.
Bob stopped. He considered something so fundamental he'd not seen it
before, but suddenly it seemed as big as a mountain: his assumption
that Solaratov came to Vietnam to kill him and had returned to Idaho to
kill him.
But suppose it wasn't about him?
What could it be about, then?
He tried to think.
The sniper had a semiauto.
He could fire twice, fast.
He had to take them both to make sure of hitting one.
But suppose I wasn't the one he had to hit.
Well, who else was there?
Only Donny.
Could it be about .. . Donny?
chapter thirty-five
He awoke early, without a hangover, because he had not been drunk. He
looked at his watch and saw that it was eight here, which meant it was
eleven in the East.
He picked up the phone, then called Henderson Hall, United States
Marine Corps Headquarters, Arlington, Virginia. He asked to be
connected to the Command Sergeant Major of the Corps, got an office and
a young buck sergeant, and eventually got through to the great man
himself, with whom he'd served a tour in Vietnam in sixty-five and run
into a few odd, friendly times over the years.
"Bob Lee, you son of a bitch."
"Howdy, Vern. They ain't kicked you out yet?"
"Tried many a time. It's them pictures I got of a general and his
goat."
"Those'll git a man a long way."
"In Washington, they'll git you all the way."
The two old sergeants laughed.
"So anyhow, Bob Lee, what you got cooking? You ain't written a book
yet?"
"Not yet. Maybe one of these years. Look, I need a favor. You're the
only man that could do it."
"So? Name it."
"I'm flying to DC this afternoon. I need to look at some paperwork. It
would be the service jacket of my spotter, a kid that got killed in May
1972."
"What was his name?"
"Fenn, Donny. Lance corporal, formerly corporal. I have to see what
happened to him over his career."
"What for? What're you looking for?"
"Hell, I don't know. I got something to check out involving him. What
it is, I don't know. It's come up, though."
396 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Didn't you end up marrying his widow?"
"I did, yeah. A terrific lady. We're sort of on the outs now."
"Well, I hope you get it straightened out. This may take me a day or
so. Or maybe not. I can probably get it, if not from here, from our
archives, out in Virginia."
"Real fine, Sergeant Major. I appreciate it much."
"You call me when you get in."
"I will."
Bob hung up, hesitated, thought about the booze he did not drink and
then dialed the Boise General Hospital and eventually was connected to
his wife's room.
"Hi," he said.
"It's me. How are you? Did I wake you?"
"No, no. I'm fine. Sally took Nikki to school. There's nobody
around. How are you?"
"Oh, fine. I wish you'd reconsider."
"I can't."
He was silent for a while.
"All right," he finally said, "just think about it."
"All right."
"Now I have something else to ask."
"What?"
"I need your help. This last little thing. Just a question or two.
Something you would know that I don't."
"What?"
"It's about Donny."
"Oh, God, Bob."
"I think this may have something to do with Donny.
I'm not sure, it's just a possibility. I have to check it out."
"Please. You know how I hate to go back there. I'm over that now. It
took a long time."
"It's a nothing question. A Marine question, that's all."
"Bob."
"Please."
She sighed and said nothing.
"Why was he sent to Vietnam? He had less than TIME TO HUNT 397
thirteen months to serve. But he had just lost his rating. He was a
full corporal and he showed up in "Nam just a lance corporal. So he
had to be sent there for punitive reasons.
They did that in those days."
"It was punitive."
"I thought it was. But that doesn't sound like Donny."
"I only caught bits and pieces of it. I was only there at the end. It
was some crisis. They wanted him to spy on some other Marines who they
thought were slipping information to the peace marchers. There was
this big screw up at a demonstration, a girl got killed, it was a mess.
He was ordered to spy on these other boys and he got to know them, but
in the end, he wouldn't. He refused. They told him they'd ship him to
Vietnam, and he said, Go ahead, ship me to Vietnam. So they did. Then
he met you, became a hero and got killed on his last day. You didn't
know that?"
"I knew there was something. I just didn't know what."
"Is that a help?"
"Yes, it is. Do you know who sent him?"
"No. Or if I did, I forgot. It was so long ago."
"Okay. I'm going back to DC."
"What? Bob--" "I'll only be gone a few days. I'm flying out there.
I've got to find out what happened to Donny. You listen to Sally; you
be careful. I'll call you in a few days."
"Oh, Bob--" "I've got some money, some cash. Don't worry."
"Don't get in trouble."
"I'm not getting in any trouble. I promise. I'll call you soon."
There it was: WES PAC.
He remembered the first time he had seen it, that magic, frightening
phrase, when the orders came through for that first tour in 1965: WES
PAC. Western Pacific, which was Marine for Vietnam. He remembered
sitting
398 STEPHEN HUNTER
outside the company office at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and
thinking, Oh, brother, I am in the shit.
"That's it," said the sergeant major's aide.
"That's it," said Bob.
He sat in the anteroom in Henderson Hall, with the tall, thin young man
with hair so short it hardly existed and movements so crisp they seemed
freshly dry-cleaned.
"We got it this morning from Naval Records Storage Facility, Annandale.
Sergeant Major used lots of smoke.
He served with the CO's chief petty officer on the old Iowa City."
"You'll tell him I appreciate it."
"Yes, sir. I'm sniper-rated, by the way. Great school, out at
Quantico. They still talk about you. Understand you fought a hell of
a fight at Kham Due."
"Long time ago, son. I can hardly remember it."
"I heard of it a hundred times," said the young sergeant.
"I won't ever forget it."
"Well, son, that's kind of you."
"I'll be in my office next door. You let me know if you need anything
else."
"Thank you, son."
The jacket was thick, all that remained of FENN, DON NY J."s almost,
but not quite four years in the Marine Corps. It was full of various
orders, records of his first tour in the Nam with a line unit, his
Bronze Star citation, his Silver Star nomination for Kham Due, travel
vouchers, shot records, medical reports, evaluations going back to
Parris Island in the far-off land of 1968 when he enlisted, GET
results, the paper trail any military career, good, bad or indifferent,
inevitably accumulates over the passage of time. There was even a copy
of the Death in Battle report, filled out by the long-dead Captain
Feamster, who only survived Donny a few weeks until the sappers took
out Dodge City. But this one sheet, now faded and fragile, was the one
that mattered; this was the one that sent him to the Nam.
TIME TO HUNT 399
HEADQUARTERS, USMC, 1C-MLT: 111
1320.1
15 MAY 1971
SPECIAL ORDER: TRANSFER
NUMBER 164071
REF: (A) CMC LTR DFB1/1 13 MAY 70
(B) MCO 1050.8F
1. IN ACCORDANCE WITH REFERENCE (A),
EFFECTIVE 22 AUGUST 70, THE PERSONNEL
LISTED ON THE REVERSE HEREOF
ARE TRANSFERRED FROM THIS COMMAND
TO WES PAC (III MAF) FOR DUTIES
SPECIFIED BY CO WES PAC (III MAF).
2. PRIOR TO TRANSFER, THE COMMANDING
OFFICER WILL ASSIGN AS PRIMARY
THE MOS SHOWN FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE AUTHORITY
CONTAINED IN EXISTING REGULATIONS.
3. TRAVEL VIA GOVERNMENT PROCURED
TRANSPORTATION IS DIRECTED FOR ALL
TRAVEL PERFORMED BETWEEN THIS
COMMAND AND WES PAC (III MAF) IN ACCORDANCE
WITH PARAGRAPH 4100, JOINT
TRAVEL REGULATIONS.
4. EACH INDIVIDUAL LISTED ON THE REVERSE
HEREOF IS DIRECTED TO REPORT
TO THE DISBURSING OFFICER WITHIN
THREE WORKING DAYS AFTER COMPLETION
OF TRAVEL INVOLVED IN THE EXECUTION
OF THESE ORDERS FOR AN
AUDIT OF REFUNDS.
400 STEPHEN HUNTER
It was signed OF Peatross, Major General, U.S.
Marine Corps, Commanding, and below that bore the simple designation
DIST: "N' (and WNY, TEMPO C, RM 4598).
Bob had received just such a document three times, and three times he'd
come back from it, at least breathing.
Not Donny: it got him a name inscription on a long black wall with
bunches of other boys who'd much rather have been working in factories
or playing golf than inscribed on a long black wall.
Bob turned it over, not to find the usual computerized list of lucky
names but only one: FENN, DON NY J, L/
CPL 264 38 85 037 36 68 01 0311, COMPANY B,
MARINE BARRACKS WASHINGTON DC MOS 0311.
The rest of the copy was junk, citations of applicable regulations,
travel information, a list of required items all neatly checked off
(SRB, HEALTH RECORD, DENTAL RECORD, ORIG ORDERS, ID CARD and so on),
and the last, melancholy list of destinations on the travel sub voucher
from Norton AFB in California to Kadena AFB on Okinawa to Camp Hansen
on Okinawa and on to Camp Schwab before final deployment to WES PAC
(III MAF), meaning Western Pacific, III Marine Amphibious Force.
Donny's own penmanship, known so well to Bob from their months
together, seemed to scream of familiarity as he looked at it.
Now what? he thought. What's this supposed to mean?
He tried to remember his own documents and scanned this one for
deviations. But his memory had faded over the years and nothing seemed
at all different or strange. It was just orders to the Land of Bad
Things; thousands and thousands of Marines had gotten them between 1965
and 1972.
There seemed to be nothing: no taint of scandal, no hint of punitive
action, nothing at all. In Donny's evals, particularly those filed in
his company at the Marine Barracks, there were no indications of
difficulty. In fact, those
TIME TO HUNT 401
recordings were uniformly brilliant in content, suggesting an exemplary
young man. A SSGT Ray Case had observed, as late as March 1971, "Cpl.
Fenn shows outstanding professional dedication to his duties and is
well-respected by personnel both above and below him in the ranks. He
performs his duties with thoroughness, enthusiasm and great enterprise.
It is hoped that the Corporal will consider making the Marine Corps a
career; he is outstanding officer material."
Bob knew the secret language of these things: where praise is the
standard vocabulary, Case's belief in Donny clearly went beyond that
into the eloquent.
Even Donny's loss of rating order, which demoted him from corporal to
lance corporal, dated 12 May 71, was empty of information. It carried
no meaning whatsoever:
it simply stated the fact that a reduction in rank had occurred.
It was signed by his commanding officer, M. C. Dogwood, Captain,
USMC.
No Article 15s, no Captain's Masts, nothing in the record suggesting
any disciplinary problems.
Whatever had happened to him, it had left no records at all.
He stood up and went to the door of the sergeant major's aide.
"Is there a personnel specialist around? I'd like to run something by
him."
"I can get Mr. Ross. He worked personnel for six years before coming
to headquarters."
"That'd be great."
In time the warrant officer arrived, and he too knew of Bob and treated
him like a movie star. But he scanned the documents and could find
nothing at all unusual except-"Now this is strange, Gunny."
"Yes, sir?"
"Can't say I ever saw it before."
"And what is that, Mr. Ross?"
"Well, sir, on this last order, the one that sent Fenn to Vietnam. See
here"--he pointed--"it says "DIST: "N."
402 STEPHEN HUNTER
That means, distribution to normal sources, i.e. the duty jacket, the
new duty station. Pentagon personnel, MDW personnel and so forth, the
usual grinding wheels of our great bureaucracy in action."
"Yes, sir."
"But what I see here is odd. In parentheses '(and
WNY TEMPO C, RM 4598)."
" "What would that mean?"
"Well, I'd guess Washington Naval Yard, Temporary Building C, Room
4598."
"What's that?"
"I don't know. I was twelve in 1971" "Any idea how I could find
out?"
"Well, the only sure way is to go to the Pentagon, get an
authorization, and try and dig up a Washington Naval Personnel logbook
or phone book or at least an MDW phone book from the year 1971. They
might have one over there. Then you'd just have to go through it entry
by entry--it would take hours--until you came across that
designation."
"Oh, brother," said Bob.
1 he next night, Bob drove his rented car out to a pleasant suburban
house in the suburbs of America and there had dinner with his old pal
the Command Sergeant Major of the United States Marine Corps, his wife
and three of his four sons.
The sergeant major grilled steaks out on the patio while the two
younger boys swam in the pool and the sergeant major's wife, Marge,
threw together a salad, some South Carolina recipe for baked beans and
stewed tomatoes. She was an old campaigner herself and Bob had met her
twice before, at a reception after he had been awarded the
Distinguished Service Cross for Kham Due-1976, four years after the
incident itself, a year after he finally left the physical therapy
program and the year he decided he could no longer cut it as a
Marine--and the next year, when he did retire.
TIME TO HUNT 403
"How's Suzy?" she asked, and Bob remembered that she and his first
wife had had something of an acquaintanceship;
at that point, he'd been higher in rank than the man who was hosting
him.
"Oh, we don't talk too much. You heard, I went through some bad times,
had a drinking problem. She left me, and was smart to do it. She's
married to a Cadillac dealer now. I hope she's happy."
"I actually ran into her last year," Marge said.
"She seemed fine. She asked after you. You've had an adventurous few
years."
"I seem to have a knack for trouble."
"Bob, you won't get Vern's career in any trouble? He retires this year
after thirty-five years. I'd hate to see anything happen."
"No, ma'am. I'll be leaving very shortly. My time here is done, I
think."
They had a nice dinner and Bob tried to hide the melancholy that seeped
into him; here was the life he would have had if he hadn't gotten hit,
if Donny hadn't gotten killed, if it all hadn't gone so sour on him. He
yearned now for a drink, a soothing blur of bourbon to blunt the edge
he felt, and he recalled a dozen times on active duty when he and this
man or a man just like this man had spent the night recalling sergeants
and officers and squids and ships and battles the world over, and
enjoying immensely their lives in the place where they'd been born
hard-wired to spend it, the United States Marine Corps.
But that was gone now. Face it, he thought. It's gone, it's finished,
it's over.
That night they went to a baseball game, Legion Ball, where the
youngest boy, a scholarship athlete at the University of Virginia, got
three hits while giving up only two as pitcher over the game's seven
innings. Again: a wonderful America, the best America--the suburbs on
a spring evening, the weather warm, the night hazy, baseball, family
and beer.
404 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Do you miss your wife?" asked the sergeant major's wife.
"I do, a lot. I miss my daughter."
"Tell me about her."
"Oh," said Bob, "she's a rider. She's a great horsewoman.
Her mother has her riding English in case she decides to come east for
college."
And off he went, for twenty uncontrollable minutes, missing his
daughter and his wife and the whole thing even more. Black is black,
he thought, / want my baby back.
The game was over and in triumph everybody went back to the sergeant
major's house. Beer was opened, though Bob had Coke; some other senior
NCOs came over and Bob knew a few, and all had heard of him. It was a
good time; cigars came out, the men moved outside, the night was lovely
and unthreatening. Then finally a young man showed up, trim, about
thirty, with hard eyes and a crew cut, in slacks and a polo shirt. Bob
understood that he was the sergeant major's oldest boy, a major at
Quantico, in the training command, back recently from a rough year in
Bosnia and before that an even nastier one in the desert.
Bob was introduced and they chatted and once again he encountered a
young man who loved him. What good did it do if his own family didn't?
But it was nice, all the same, and eventually the talk turned to his
own day. He'd spent it in the DOD library in the Pentagon, where the
sergeant major's pass had got him admitted, going painfully through old
phone books, trying to find out what this office was.
"Any luck?" asked the sergeant major.
"Yeah, finally. Room 4598 in Tempo C in the Washington Navy Yard, it
was the location of an office of the Naval Investigative Service."
"Those squid bastards," said the Command Sergeant Major.
"At least now I've got a name to go on," Bob said.
TIME TO HUNT 405
"The CO was some lieutenant commander named Bonson.
W. S. Bonson. I wonder what became of him."
"Bonson?" said the gunny's son.
"Ward Bonson?"
"I guess," said Bob.
"Well," said the young officer, "he shouldn't be too hard to find. I
served a tour with the Defense Intelligence Agency in ninety-one. He
was in and out of that shop."
"You knew him?"
"I was just a staff officer," he said.
"He wouldn't notice or remember me."
"Who is he?" asked Bob.
"He's now the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency."
chapter thirty-six
He watched through binoculars as the car, a black Ford sedan, arrived
at 6:30 a.m. and picked up the occupant of 1455 Briarwood, Reston,
Virginia. Bob followed at a distance. The lone passenger sat in the
back, reading the morning papers as the car wound its way through the
nearly empty streets. It progressed toward the Beltway, then followed
that road north, toward Maryland;
at the George Washington Parkway it surged off, westward, until it
reached Langley, and then took that otherwise unremarkable exit. Bob
languished back, then broke contact as the car disappeared down the
unmarked road that led to the large installation that was unnamed from
the road but which he knew to be the headquarters of the Central
Intelligence Agency.
Instead, he drove back to Reston and relocated the house. He parked on
the next court over--it was in a prosperous unit of connected
townhouses--and slid low into the seat. It took almost two hours
before he figured the pattern. There were two security vehicles, one a
black Chevy Nova and the other a Ford Econoline van. Each had two men
in them, and one or the other showed up every forty minutes, pausing on
the street in front of the house and on the street in back. At that
point, one of the men walked around back, bent in the weeds and checked
something, presumably some sort of trembler switch that indicated if
any kind of entry had been made.
Bob marked the address and drove to the nearest convenience store.
There, he called the fire department and reported a fire in the house
two down on the court. By the time he got back, three trucks had
arrived, men were stomping in bushes, two cop cars with flashing light
bars had set up perimeter security--it was a carnival. When the black
Nova arrived, an agent got out, showed TIME TO HUNT 407
credentials, conferred with the police and firemen, then went to
Bonson's door, unlocked it and went in to check the house and secure
it. He went around back to reset the trembler switch.
Bob went, found a place for lunch, then came back and parked a court
down the line. He checked his watch to make certain neither of the
patrol vehicles was expected, then walked back to Bonson's house, where
he knocked on the door. No answer came and, after a bit, he used his
credit card to pop the door and slipped inside.
An alarm immediately began to whine. He knew he had sixty seconds to
defuse it. The sound of the device enabled Bob to find it in ten
seconds, which left fifty.
Without giving it a lot of thought, Bob pressed 1-4-7 and nothing
happened. The alarm still shrilled. He then hit 1-3-7-9 and the alarm
ceased. How had he known? Not that difficult: most people don't
bother with learning numbers; they learn patterns that can easily be
found in the dark, or when they are tired or drunk, and 1-4-7, the
left-hand side of the nine-unit keypad, is the simplest and the most
obvious; 1-3-7-9, the four corners, is the second most obvious. He
waited a bit, then slipped out the back and found the trembler switch
attached to an electric junction outside the house. It blinked red to
indicate entry.
With his Case knife, he popped the red plastic cone off the bulb,
unscrewed the bulb, then squeezed and compressed the red cone to get it
back on. Covering his tracks in the loam, he reentered the house. Soon
enough the CIA security team rechecked the house on their rounds, but
when the agent got out to check the trembler indicator, he did not get
close enough to note the jimmied bulb.
He was tired. He'd been through a lot. He returned to the truck.
Like his codes, Bonson's home was plain. The furniture was spare but
luxurious, mostly Scandinavian and leather, but it was not the home of
a man whose pleasures included pleasure. It was banal, expensive,
almost featureless.
One room was a designated office, with a computer
408 STEPHEN HUNTER
terminal, awards and photos on the wall that could have been of any
business executive except that they showed a furiously intense
individual who could not broadcast ease for a camera but always seemed
angry or at least focused.
He was usually pictured among other such men, some of them famous in
Washington circles. His house was clean, almost spotless. A
University of New Hampshire bachelor's and a Yale law degree hung on
the wall. Nothing indicated the presence of hobbies except, possibly,
a slightly fussy fondness for gourmet cooking and wines in the kitchen.
But it was the house of a man consumed by mission, by his role in life,
by the game he played and dominated. No wife, no children, no
relatives, no objects of sentimentality or nostalgia; seemingly no past
and no future; instead, simplicity, efficiency, a one-pointed
existence.
Bob poked about. There were no secrets to be had, nothing that could
not be abandoned. The closet was full of blue suits, white shirts and
red striped ties. The shoes were all black. Brooks Brothers, five
eyelets. He appeared to have no casual wear, no blue jeans, no
baseball caps or sunglasses or fishing rods, no guns, no porno
collections, no fondness for show tunes or electric trains or comic
books. There were huge numbers of books--contemporary politics,
history, political science, but no fiction or poetry. There was no
meaningful art in the home, nothing soiled, nothing that spoke of
uncertainty, irrationality or passion.
Bob sat and waited. The hours clicked by, then the day itself. It
turned to night. It got later. Finally, at 11:30 p.m., the door
opened and the lights came on. Bob heard a man hanging up his
raincoat, closing the closet. He walked into the living room, took off
his suit coat, loosened a tie and unbuttoned his collar. He had his
mail, which included some bills and the new issue of Foreign Policy. He
turned on a CD stereo player, and light classical oozed out of the
speakers. He mixed himself a drink, went to the big chair and sat
down. Then he saw Bob.
TIME TO HUNT 409
"W-who are you? What is this?"
"You're Bonson, right?"
"Who the hell are you!" Bonson said, rising.
Bob rose more pugnaciously, pushed him back into the chair, hard,
asserting physical authority and the willingness to do much harm fast
and well. Bonson's eyes flashed fearfully on him, and read him for
what he was: a determined, focused man well-versed in violence. He
recognized instantly that he was overmatched. He got quiet quickly.
Bob saw a trim fifty-seven-year-old man of medium height with thinning
hair slicked back and shrewd eyes.
The suit pants and shirt he wore fit him perfectly and everything about
him seemed unexceptional except for the glitter in his eyes, which
suggested he was thinking rapidly.
"The false alarm; yeah, I should have figured. Do you want money?"
"Do I look like a thief?"
"Who are you? What are you doing here?"
"You and I have business."
"Are you an agent? Is this something over a vetting or an internal
security report or a career difficulty? There are channels and
procedures. You cannot do yourself any good at all with this kind of
behavior. It is no longer tolerated.
The days of the cowboys are over. If you have a professional problem,
it must be dealt with professionally."
"I don't work for your outfit. At least not for thirty years or so."
"Who are you?" Bonson said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously as he
tried to click back to his file on thirty years ago.
"Swagger. Marine Corps. I done some work for y'all up near Cambodia,
sixty-seven."
"I was in college in 1967."
"I ain't here about 1967. I'm here about 1971. By that time, you was
a squid lieutenant commander, in NIS.
410 STEPHEN HUNTER
Your specialty was finding bad boy Marines and having them shipped to
the "Nam if they didn't do what you said.
I asked some questions. I know what you did."
"That was a long time ago. I have nothing to apologize for. I did
what was necessary."
"One of those boys was named Donny Fenn. You had him shipped from
Eighth and I to "Nam, even though he was under his thirteen. He served
with me. He died with me on the day before DEROS."
"Jesus Christ--Swagger! The sniper. Oh, now I get it.
Oh, Christ, you're here for some absurd revenge thing? I sent Fenn to
"Nam, he got killed, it's my fault? That is probably how your mind
works! What about the North Vietnamese; don't they have something to
do with it? Oh, please. Don't make me laugh. Another cowboy! You
guys just don't get it, do you?"
"This ain't about me."
"What do you want?"
"I have to know what happened back then. What happened to Donny. What
was that thing all about? What did he know?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I think the Russians tried to kill him. I think it was him they were
targeting, not me."
"Ridiculous."
"There was no Russian involvement?"
"That's classified. High top-secret. You have no need to know."
"I'll decide what's ridiculous. I'll decide what I need to know. You
talk, Bonson, or this'll be a long evening for you."
"Jesus Christ," said Bonson.
"Finish your drink and talk."
Bonson took a swallow.
"How did you find me?"
"I shook your Social Security number out of your service records. With
a Social Security number you can find anybody."
TIME TO HUNT 411
"All right. You could have made an appointment. I'm in the book."
"I prefer to talk on my terms, not yours."
Bonson rose, poured himself another bourbon.
"Drink, Sergeant?"
"Not for me."
"Fair enough."
He sat down.
"All right, there was Russian involvement. Tertiary, but definite. But
Fenn could not have known a thing. He knew nothing that would make him
valuable enough for the Russians to target. I went over that case,
over and over it. Believe me, he could not have known a thing."
"Tell me the fucking story. I'll decide what it means."
"All right. Swagger, I'll tell you. But understand I am only doing so
under what appears to be threat of physical duress, because you have
threatened me. Second, I prefer to tape this conversation and the
terms under which it took place. Is that fair?"
"It's already being taped, Bonson. I saw your setup."
"You don't miss much. You'd make a good field man, I can tell."
"Get to the fucking story."
"Fenn. Big handsome kid, good Marine, from Utah, was it?"
"Arizona."
"Yes, Arizona. Too bad he got hit, but a lot of people got hit over
there."
"Tell me about it," said Bob.
Bonson took a drink of his bourbon, sat back, almost relaxing. A
little smile came across his face.
"Fenn was nothing. We were after someone much bigger.
If Fenn had played his part, we might have gotten him, too. But Fenn
was a hero. I never counted on that. It didn't seem there were any
heroes left at that time. It seemed it. was a time where every man
looked after his own ass. But not Fenn. God, he was a stubborn
bastard!
He really ripped me a new asshole. I could have had him
412 STEPHEN HUNTER
up on charges for insubordination! He might have spent the next ten
years in Portsmouth instead of--well, instead."
Bob leaned forward.
"You don't say nothing about Donny. I won't listen to any lip on
Donny."
"Oh, I see. We can't tell the truth, we just worship the dead. You
won't learn anything that way, Sergeant."
"Go on, goddammit. You are pissing me off."
"Fenn. Yes, I used Fenn."
"How?"
"We had a bad apple named Crowe. Crowe, we knew, had contacts within
the peace movement, through a young man named Trig Carter, a kind of
Mick Jagger type, very popular, connected, highly thought of."
The name sounded familiar.
"Trig was bisexual. He had sex with boys. Not always, not frequently,
but occasionally, late at night, after drinks or drugs. The FBI had a
good workup on him. I needed someone who fit the pattern. He liked
the strong, farmboy type, the football hero, blond, Western. That's
why I picked Fenn."
"Jesus Christ."
"It worked, too. Fenn started hanging out with Crowe and in a few
nights. Carter had glommed onto him. He was an artist, by the way.
Carter."
Bob remembered a far-off moment when Donny showed him a drawing of
himself and Julie on heavy paper.
It was just after they got Solaratov, or so they thought. But maybe
not. It all ran together. But he remembered how the picture thrummed
with life. There was some lust in it, as Bonson suggested. It was so
long ago.
"Carter had a very brilliant mind, one of those fancy, well-born boys
who sees through everything," Bonson continued.
"But he was just another run-of-the-mill amateur revolutionary, if I
recall, until 1970 and 1971, when he burned out on the protests and
took a year in England.
TIME TO HUNT 413
Oxford. That's where we think it happened. Why not?
Classical spy-hunting ground."
"What are you talking about?"
"We believed that the peace movement had been penetrated by Soviet
Intelligence. We had a code intercept that suggested they were active
at Oxford. We even knew he was an Irishman. Except he wasn't an
Irishman. He only played one on TV."
He smiled at his little joke.
"We think this guy was sent to "Oxford to recruit Trig Carter. Not
recruit; it wasn't done that crudely. No, it would have been subtler.
Whoever he was, he was straight Soviet professional, one of their very
best. Smart, tough, funny, a natural gift for languages, the nerves of
a burglar.
He was the Lawrence of Arabia of the Soviet Union.
Man, he would have been a prize! Oh, Lord, he would have been a
prize!"
"You never got him?"
"No. No, he got away. We never got a name on him or anything. We
don't know what his objective was. We don't know what the operation
was all about. It was my call; I fucked up. We had him somewhere in
the DC area. But we never quite got him. Fenn was supposed to give us
Crowe, who'd give us Carter, who'd give us the Russian.
Classic domino theory! A Soviet agent working the peace movement beat!
God, what a thing that would have been!
That would have been the god damed white buffalo."
"How did he get away?"
"We lost time with Fenn; the case against Crowe wouldn't stand. We
lost a day, we never nabbed Trig. We almost had him at a farm in
Germantown, but by the time we found it, there was nobody there. We
missed him at his mother's outside Baltimore; she wouldn't tell us a
thing.
He was gone, disappeared. The next thing--" "Trig was killed. I
remember Donny mentioning it. He was killed in a bomb blast."
"Under the math lab at the University of Wisconsin.
414 STEPHEN HUNTER
Yes, he was. And we never found hide nor hair of anybody else. Whoever
he was, he got away clean."
"If he existed."
"I still believe he existed."
"What a waste!"
"Yes, and some poor graduate student working late on algorhythms got
wasted too. Two dead."
"Three dead. Donny."
"Donny. I didn't send him to "Nam to die, Swagger. I sent him to "Nam
because it was my duty. We were fighting a clever, subtle, brilliant
enemy. We had to enforce discipline in our troops. You were an NCO;
you know the responsibility. My war was much subtler, much harder,
much more stressful."
"You don't look like you done so bad."
"Well, it ruined my Navy career. I was passed over. I read the
writing on the wall, went to law school. I was a corporate lawyer on
my way to a partnership and high six figures. But the agency took an
interest in me and decided it had to have me, and so in 1979, I took an
offer. I haven't looked back since. I'm still fighting the war.
Swagger.
I've lost a few more Donny Fenns along the way, but that's the price
you pay. You're out of it, I'm still in it."
"All right, Bonson."
"What is this all about?"
"We always heard the man who made the shot on me--on us--was a
Russian."
"So? They had advisers over there in all the branches.
Nothing remarkable."
"It was said this guy flew in special. Your own people were involved,
because they wanted the rifle he had, an SVD Dragunov. We didn't have
one until then."
"I suppose. That's not my area. I can check records.
What does this have to do with today?"
"Okay, so four days ago, someone makes a great shot on an old cowboy in
Idaho. Blows him so far out of the saddle hardly nothing left. Seven
hundred-odd meters, crosswind. He wings a woman with him."
TIME TO HUNT 415
"So?"
"So," Bob said, "the woman was my wife. The old man should have been
me. Luckily, it wasn't. But ... he was trying for me. I examined the
shooting site. I don't know much, but I know shooting, and I'll tell
you this Johnny was world-class and he employed Soviet shooting
doctrine, which I recognize. Maybe it's not, but it sure seems like
the same guy is on my track now as was on it then."
Bonson listened carefully, his eyes narrowing.
"What do you make of this?" he said.
"Donny knew something. Or they thought he did.
Same difference. So they have to take him out. They think the war
will do it, but he's a good Marine and it looks like he's going to come
out all right. So they have to take him.
They send in this special man, mount this special operation--"
"Weren't you some kind of hero? Weren't you especially targeted?"
"I can only think what I done in Kham Due alerted them to Donny's
whereabouts. It made good cover, too.
The Russians wouldn't care a shit about how many NVA some hillbilly
dusted in a war that was already won. We always thought they requested
the sniper; no, now I think the Russians insisted on the sniper."
"Hmmm," said Bonson.
"That's very interesting."
"Then a little while ago, I got famous."
"Yes, I know."
"I thought you might."
"Go on."
"I get famous and they get to worrying. Whatever it was he knew, maybe
he would have told me. So ... they have to get me. It's that
simple."
"Hmmm," said Bonson again. His face seemed to reassemble itself into a
different configuration. His eyes narrowed and focused on something
far away as behind them, his mind whirred through possibilities. Then
he looked back to Swagger.
"And you don't know what it is?"
416 STEPHEN HUNTER
"No idea. Nothing."
"Hmmmmm," said Bonson again.
"But what I don't get--there is no more Soviet Union.
There is no more KGB. They're gone, they're finished. So what the
fuck does it matter now? I mean, the regime that tried to kill me and
did kill Donny, it's gone."
Bonson nodded.
"Well," he finally said, "the truth is, we really don't know what's
going on in Russia. But don't think the old Soviet KGB apparatus has
just gone away. It's still there, calling itself Russian now instead
of Soviet, and still representing a state with twenty-thousand nuclear
weapons and the delivery systems to blow the world to hell and gone.
What is going on is a political tussle over who makes the
decisions--the old-line Soviets, the secret communists?
Or a new nationalist party, called PAMYAT, run by a guy named Evgeny
Pashin. There's an election coming, by the way."
"So I heard."
"That election will have a lot to do with whose Russia it will be in
the next twenty-five years and what happens to those twenty-thousand
nukes--and to us. It's very complicated, rather dangerous, and it's
not at all improbable that there's some kind of Russian interest in
this business you've spoken of."
Bob's eyes narrowed as he considered this.
"You're thinking. I can tell. What do you intend to do?
That is, if I don't swear out charges for breaking and entering?"
"You won't," said Bob.
"Well, to find out what happened to Donny, I guess I have to find out
what happened to Trig. I guess I'll follow that trail. I have to
solve this if I have any chance of nailing this guy who's hunting me.
If I keep moving, keep him away from my family, it may work out."
"This is very interesting to me, Swagger. I want to follow up on this.
I can get you people. A team. Backup, shooters, security people. The
best."
TIME TO HUNT 417
"No. I work alone. I'm the sniper."
"Look, Swagger, I'm going to give you a phone number.
If you get in trouble, if you learn something, if you get in a jam with
the law, if anything happens, you call that phone and the person will
say "Duty Officer' and you say, ah, think up a code word."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four. You say "Sierra-Bravo-Four' and you will get my
attention immediately and you will be stunned at what I can do for you
and how fast. All right?"
"Fair enough."
"Swagger, it's too bad about Fenn. The game can be rough."
Bob didn't say anything.
"Now go on, get out of here."
"I should beat the shit out of you for what you did to Donny. He was
too good to use that way."
"I did my job. I was a professional. That's all there is to it. And
if you ever do strike me, I will use the full authority of the law to
punish you. You don't have the right to go around hitting people. But
if you do, Swagger, remember: not the face. Never the face. I have
meetings."
chapter thirty-seven
Bob wondered what it would be like to be born in a house like this one.
It was not really in Baltimore, but north of Baltimore, out in what
they called the Valley, good horse country, full of rolling hills, well
packed with lush green vegetation, and marked with fine old houses that
spoke not merely of wealth but of generations of wealth.
But no houses as fine as this house. It was at the end of a road,
which was at the end of another road, which was at the end of still
another road. It had a dark roof and many complexities, and was red
brick swaddled in vine, with all the trim white, freshly painted.
Beyond it lay acres of rolling paradise, mostly apple orchards; but the
house itself, tall and dignified and a century old, could have been
another form of paradise. The oak trees surrounding it threw down a
network of shadows. A cul-de-sac announced a final destination outside
it, and off to the right were formal gardens, now somewhat overgrown.
Bob parked the rented Chevy, adjusted the knot on his tie and walked to
the door. He knocked. After a while the door opened and a black face,
ancient as slavery, peeked out.
"Yes, sir?"
"Sir, I am here to talk to Mrs. Carter. I spoke to her on the phone.
She invited me out."
"Mr. Stagger?"
"Swagger."
"Yes, come in."
He stepped into the last century, hushed, now threadbare.
It smelled of mildew and old tapestries, a museum without a sign in
front of it or a guidebook. He was escorted through silent corridors
and empty rooms with elegant, dusty furniture and under the haunted
gaze of
TIME TO HUNT 419
illustrious predecessors until he reached the sunroom, where the old
lady sat in a wicker chair, looking out fiercely on her estate. Beyond,
from this vantage, the windows displayed a view of a formal garden and
a long, sloping path down through the apple trees.
"Mrs. Carter, ma'am?"
The old woman looked up and gave him a quick, bright once-over, then
gestured him to the wicker sofa.
She was about seventy, her skin very dark with too much Florida tan,
her eyes very penetrating. Her hair was a duck tail of iron gray. She
wore slacks and a sweater and had a drink in her hand.
"Mr. Swagger. Now, you wish to talk about my son. I have invited you
here. Your explanation of why you wanted this discussion was frankly
rather vaporous. But you sounded determined. Do you care about my
son?"
"Well, ma'am, yes, I do. About what happened to him."
"Are you a writer, Mr. Swagger? He has been mentioned in several
dreadful books and even got a whole chapter in one of them. Awful
stuff. I hope you are not a writer."
"No, ma'am, I'm not. I have read those books."
"You look like a police officer. Are you a police officer or a private
detective? Is this some paternity suit? Some snotty
twenty-five-year-old now says Trig was his father and he wants the
bucks? Well, let me tell. you, those bucks aren't going to anybody
except the American Heart Association, Mr. Swagger, so you can forget
that idea right now."
"No, ma'am. I'm not here about money."
"You're a soldier, then. I can see it in your bearing."
"I was a Marine for many years, yes, ma'am. We would never say
soldier. We were Marines."
"My husband--Trig's father--fought with Merrill in Burma. The
Marauders, they called them. It was very rigorous.
His health broke; he saw and did terrible things. It was very
unpleasant."
420 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Wars are unpleasant things, ma'am."
"Yes, I know. I take it you fought in the one my only son gave up his
idiotic life to end?"
"Yes, ma'am, I was there."
"Were you in the actual fighting?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Were you a hero?"
"No, ma'am."
"I'm sure you're merely being modest. So why are you here, if you're
not writing a book?"
"Your son's death is somehow tied up with something that hasn't yet
been answered. It's also tied up, I think, with the death of that
young man I mentioned earlier, another Marine. I just have a glimmer
of it; I don't get it yet. I was hoping you could tell me what you
knew, that maybe in that way there could be some understanding."
"You said on the phone you didn't think my son killed himself. You
think he was murdered."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't yet know."
"Do you have any evidence?"
"Circumstantial. There seems to be some level of intelligence
involvement in this situation. He may have seen something or someone.
But it seems clear to me that there were spooks involved."
"So my son wasn't a moron who blew himself up for nothing except the
piety of the left and the sniggering contempt of the right?"
"That would be my theory, yes, ma'am."
"What would be more of your theory? Where is this heading?"
"Possibly he was used as a dupe. Possibly he was murdered, his body
left in the ruins to make it look like it was a protest thing. His
body would make that almost certain."
She looked hard at him.
"You're not a crank, are you? You look sensible, but
TIME TO HUNT 421
you're not some awful man with a radio show or a newsletter or a
conspiracy theory?"
"No, ma'am."
"And if you do come to understand this, what would you do with that
understanding?"
"Use it to stay alive. A man is trying to kill me. I think he's also
a Spock. If I'm to stop him, I have to figure out why he's after
me."
"It sounds very dangerous and romantic."
"It's a pretty crappy way to live."
"Well, if you went into most houses in America and laid out that story,
you'd be dismissed in a second. But my husband spent twenty-eight
years in the diplomatic corps, and I knew spooks, Mr. Swagger. They
were malicious little people who were capable of anything to advance
their own ends. Theirs, ours, anyone's. So I know what spooks do. And
if the spooks of the world killed my son, then the world should know
that."
"Yes, ma'am," said Bob.
"Michael," she called, "tell Amanda Mr. Swagger is staying for lunch.
I will show him around the house and then afterwards he and I will have
a long talk. If anybody comes looking to kill him, please tell the
gentleman we are not to be disturbed."
"Yes, ma'am," said the butler.
It is exactly as it was," she said, "on that last day."
He looked around. The studio had been built out back, in what had once
been servants' quarters. The house was small, but its walls had been
ripped out, leaving one huge raw room with red brick walls, a gigantic
window that looked down across the orchards. It still smelled of oil
paint and turpentine. Dirty brushes stood in old paint cans on a
bench; the floor was spotted with paint drops and dust. Three or four
canvases lay against the wall, evidently finished; one more was still
on the easel.
"The FBI went through this, I guess?" Bob asked.
422 STEPHEN HUNTER
"They did, rather offhandedly. I mean, after all, he was dead by that
time."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Come look at this one. It's his last. It's very interesting."
She took Bob to a painting clamped rigidly on an easel.
"Rather trite," she said.
"Yet I suppose it was the correct project for him to express his
anxieties."
It was, unbelievably, a bald eagle, with the classic white head, brown,
majestic body stout with power, anchored to a tree limb by clenching
talons. Bob looked at it, trying to see what was so different, so
alive, so painful.
Then he had it: this wasn't a symbol at all, but a bird, a living
creature. It had obviously just survived some ordeal, and the gleam in
its eyes wasn't the predator's gleam, the winner's smug beam of
superiority, but the survivor's dazed, traumatic shock. It was called
the thousand-yard stare in the Corps, the look that stole into the eyes
after the last frontal had been repulsed with bayonets and entrenching
tools. Bob saw that the talons which gripped this tree branch were
dark with blood and that the bird's feathers, low on its stout body,
were spotted with blood.
He bent closer, looked more carefully. It was amazing how subtly Trig
got all the components: the slight sense of the blood spots being
heavier, moist against the fluff of the other feathers.
He looked at the bird's single visible eye: it seemed haunted by
horrors unforgotten, its iris an incredibly detailed mix of smaller
color pigments that were different in color yet formed a whole, a
living whole. Bob could sense the muscles twitching under its netting
of feathers, and the breath coming heavily to it after much exertion.
"That boy was in one hell of a fight," he said.
"Yes, he was."
"Did he work from models? It ain't like no eagle I ever saw. You'd
have to be out in the wild and just seen the bird after it got out of a
mix-up to get that look."
TIME TO HUNT 423
"Or, possibly, see it in a man's face, and project it onto a bird's.
But he'd been out West. He'd been all over, doing his paintings. He'd
been all over the world, to Harvard, in a war, in every major peace
demonstration, on committees, and the illustrator of a best-selling
book by the time he was twenty-five."
"Is he using the eagle as his country?"
"I don't know. Possibly. I suspect that such a bird would be less
alive, more rigid. This bird is too alive to be symbolic. Maybe it's
his own revulsion for bloodshed he's displaying. I don't see much
heroic about that bird; I see a shaken survivor. But I don't think you
can know too much from it."
"Yes, ma'am," said Bob.
"For some reason, he had to finish this painting. Or finish the bird.
He showed up late, in a pickup truck. He was dirty and sweaty. I
asked him what he was doing? He said, "Mother, don't worry, I can
handle it." I asked him what he was doing here. He said he had to
finish the bird.
"Then he came out here and he painted for seven straight hours. I had
seen the preliminary sketches. It was different, conventional. Good,
but nothing inspired. On that last night, this is the one place he had
to go, the one thing he had to do."
"Can you tell me about him? Was he different after he got back from
England? What was going on with him, ma'am?"
"Did something happen to him? Is that what you're asking?"
"Yes, ma'am. The intelligence officer I spoke to about all this said
that the security services monitoring him believed he'd changed in
England."
"They kept a watch on all the bad boys, didn't they?"
"They sure tried."
They walked outside, where a few more rustic pieces of furniture
languished. She sat.
"He was burnt out by seventy. He'd been marching since sixty-five. I
think like all the young people then, it
424 STEPHEN HUNTER
was more of a party than a crusade. Sex, drugs, all that.
What young people do. What we would have done in the forties if we
hadn't had a war to win. But by seventy, I had never seen him so low.
All the marching, the jail sentences, the times he was beaten up, the
people he'd seen used up: it seemed to do no good. There was still a
war, boys were still getting killed, they were still using napalm.
He was traveling, also painting; he had a place in Washington, he was
everywhere. He spent four months in jail in 1968 and was indicted two
more times. He was very heroic, in his way, and if you believed in his
cause. But it wore him out. And there was the problem with Jack. That
is, his father, who was forced by circumstance and perhaps inclination
to accept the government's view of the war.
His father was still in the State Department and was, I suppose,
actively engaged in planning some aspect of the war. Jack and Trig had
been so close once, but by the end of the sixties they weren't even
talking. He once said to me, "I never thought that decent, kind man
who raised me would turn out to be evil by every value I hold dear, but
that's what has happened." Rather a cruel judgment, I thought, for
Jack had always loved and supported Trig, and I think he felt Trig's
alienation more painfully than anyone. I do know that Trig's death
ultimately killed Jack, too. He died three years later. He never
really recovered.
He was a casualty of that war, too, I suppose. It was such a cruel
war, wasn't it?"
"Yes, ma'am. You were telling me about 1970. Trig goes to England."
"Yes, I was, wasn't I?
"I need to get out of here," he said. I have to get away from it." He
took a year at the Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford. Do you know
Oxford, Mr. Swagger?"
"No, ma'am," said Bob.
"He really was a wonderful artist. I think it had more to do with his
decision just to get out, though, than with any particular artistic
need."
"Yes, ma'am."
TIME TO HUNT 425
"Well, somehow, for some reason, it worked. He came back more excited,
more dedicated, more passionate and more compassionate than I'd seen
him since 1965. This was the early winter of 1971. He had evidently
made some personal discoveries of a profound nature over there. He met
some kind of mentor. I believe the name was Fitzpatrick, some
charismatic Irishman. The two of them were going to end the war,
somehow. It was so uncharacteristic of Trig, who was so cautious, so
Harvard. But whatever this Fitzpatrick had sold him on, it somehow
transfigured Trig. He came back obsessed with ending the war, but also
obsessed with pacifism. He had never formally been a pacifist before,
though he was never an aggressive or a brutal young man. But now he
formally believed in pacifism.
I felt he was on the verge of something, possibly something great,
possibly something tragic. I felt he was capable of dousing himself
with gasoline on the Pentagon steps and setting himself aflame. He was
dangerously close to martyrdom. We were very worried."
"Yet he was planning something else. He obviously was planning the
bombing."
"Mr. Swagger, let me tell you what has haunted me all these years. My
son was incapable of taking a human life.
He simply would not do it. How he ended up dynamiting a building with
a man inside it is beyond my capacity to understand. I understand that
it was meant to be a 'symbolic act of defiance," against property and
not against flesh. Yet another man was killed. Ralph Goldstein, a
young mathematics teaching assistant, a name largely lost to history,
I'm afraid. You see it in none of the books about my son's martyrdom,
but I got a wretched note from his wife, and so I know it. I know it
by heart. He was another wonderful young man, I'm sorry to report. But
Trig would not have killed anyone, not even by accident.
The accounts that portray him as a naive idiot are simply wrong. Trig
was an extremely capable young man. He would not have blown himself up
and he would not have blown up the building without checking the
building. He
426 STEPHEN HUNTER
was very thorough, very Harvard in that way. He was competent,
completely competent, not one of those dreamy idiots."
Bob nodded.
"Fitzpatrick," he said, then over again.
"Fitzpatrick.
There's not a record, a photo of Fitzpatrick, anything solid."
"No .. . not even in the sketchbook."
"I see," said Bob.
It took several seconds before he made the next connection.
"Which sketchbook?" he asked.
"Why, Trig was an artist, Mr. Swagger. He had a sketchbook with him
always. It was a kind of visual diary.
He kept one everywhere. He kept one at Oxford. He kept one here,
during his last days. I still have it."
Bob nodded.
"Has anybody seen it?"
"No."
"Mrs. Carter, could--" "Of course," the old lady said.
"I've been waiting all these years for someone to look at it."
chapter thirty-eight
The thing was dirty. Thick and motheaten, it had the softness of old
parchment, but also of filth: the lead of pencil and the dust of
charcoal lay thick on every page.
To touch it was to come away with stained fingertips. That gave it an
air of tremendous intimacy: the last will and testament or, worse, a
reliquary of Saint Trig the Martyr.
Bob felt somehow blasphemed as he peered into it, pausing to mark the
dates on the upper right hand of the cover: "Oxford, 1970--T. C.
Carter III."
But it had this other thing. It was familiar. Why was it familiar? He
looked at the creamy stock and realized that it was in this book Trig
had drawn his picture of Donny and Julie, then ripped it out to give to
Donny. Bob had seen it in Vietnam. The strange sense of a ghost
chilled him.
He turned the first pages. Birds. The boy had drawn birds originally.
The first several pages were lovely, lively with English sparrows,
rooks, small, undistinguished flyers, nothing with plumage or glory to
it. But you could tell he had the gift. He could make a single
spidery line sing, he could capture the blur of flight or the patience
of a tiny, instinct-driven brain sedate in its fragile skull as the
creature merely perched, conceiving no yesterday or tomorrow.
He caught the ordinariness of birds quite extraordinarily.
But soon his horizons expanded, as if he were awaking from a long
sleep. He began to notice things. The drawings became extremely
casual little blots of density where out of nothing Trig would suddenly
decide to record "View from the loo," and do an exquisite little
picture of the alley out back of his digs, the dilapidated brickiness
of it, the far, lofty towers of the university in the distance; or,
"Mr. Jenson, seen in a pub," and Mr. Jenson would throb
428 STEPHEN HUNTER
to life, with veins and carbuncles and a hairy forest in his nose. Or:
"Thames, at the point, the boat houses," and there it would be, the
broad river, green in suggestion, the smaller river branching off, the
incredible greenness of it all, the willows weeping into the water, the
high, bright English sun suffusing the whole scene, although it was a
miniature in black pencil, dashed off in a second. Still, Bob could
feel it, taste it, whatever, even if he didn't quite know what it
was.
Trig was losing himself in the legendary beauty of Oxford in the
spring. Who could blame him? He drew lanes, parks, buildings that
looked like old castles, pubs, rivers, English fields, as if he were
tasting the world for the first time.
But then it all went away. The vacation was over. At first Bob
squinted. He could not understand as he turned to the new page; the
images had a near abstraction to them, but then they gradually emerged
from the fury of the passion-smeared charcoal. It was the girl, the
child, reduced to shape, running out of the flames of her village,
which had just been splashed in American fire. Bob remembered seeing
it: the war's most famous, most searing image, the child naked and
exposed to the fierce world, her face a mask of shock and numbness yet
achingly alive.
She was shamelessly naked, but modesty meant nothing, for one could see
the cottage-cheesey streaks where the napalm had burned her, as it had
incinerated her family behind her. Even a man whose life has been
saved by napalm had a sickening response to that image: Why? he
wondered now, all the years later. Why? She was just a child. We
didn't fight it right, that was our goddamn problem.
He put the book down, looked off into the long darkness.
The black dogs were outside now, ready to pounce.
He needed a drink. His head hurt. His throat was dry.
Around him, in the empty studio, the birds danced and perched. The
eagle fixed him with its panicked glare.
TIME TO HUNT 429
When will this shit be over? he wondered and went back to the
sketchbook.
Trig too had had some kind of powerful emotional reaction. He'd given
himself over to flesh. The next few pages were husky boys,
working-class studs, their muscles taut, their butts prominent, their
fingers naturally curled inward by the density of their forearms. There
was even one drawing of a large, uncircumsized penis.
Bob felt humiliated, intrusive, awkward. He couldn't concentrate on
the drawings and rushed forward, skipping several pages. At last the
season of sex was over; the images changed to something more noble.
Trig seemed stricken with admiration for a certain heroic figure, a
lone man sculling on the river. He drew him obsessively for a period
of weeks: an older man, Herculean in his passions, his muscles agleam
but in a nonsexual way, just an older athlete, a charisma merchant.
Was this Fitzpatrick, or some other lost love? Who would know, who
could tell? There wasn't even a portrait of the face by which the man
could be recognized. But the pictures had somehow lost their
originality, become standard.
The hero had arrived, from a Western, or out of the Knights of the
Round Table, or something. Bob could feel the force of Trig's belief
in this man.
The drawings went on, as the weeks passed, and as Trig's excitement
mounted. He was actually happy now, happier than he'd been. The
explosion became a new motif in his doodling; it took him but a few
tries, and suddenly he got quite good at capturing the violence, the
sheer liberation of anarchistic energy a blast unleashed, and its
beauty, the way the clouds unfurled from the detonation's center like
the opening of a flower. But that was all: there was no horror in his
work, no fear that any man who's been around an explosion feels. It
was all theory and beauty to Trig.
The final drawing was of a shiny new TR-6.
Bob closed the book and held it up to the light and saw a kind of gap
running along the spine of the book
430 STEPHEN HUNTER
suggesting that something was missing. He reopened it and looked
carefully and saw that, very carefully, the last few pages had been
sliced out.
He left the studio and walked back to the big house, where the old lady
nursed a scotch in the study.
"Would you care for a drink, Mr. Swagger?"
"A soda. Nothing else."
"Oh, I see."
She poured him the soda.
"Well, Sergeant Swagger. What do you think?"
"He was a wonderful artist," Bob said.
"Can't ask for more, can you?"
"No, you can't. I made a mistake just then, didn't I?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"I called you sergeant. You never told me your rank."
"No, ma'am."
"I still know a fool or two in State. After you called me, I called a
man. Just before you arrived, he called back. You were a hero. You
were a great warrior. You were everything that my son could never
understand."
"I did my job, somehow."
"No, you did more than your job. I heard about it. You stopped a
battalion. One man. They say it may never have been done in history,
what you did. Amazing."
"There was another Marine there. Everybody forgets that. I couldn't
have done it without him. It was his fight as much as mine."
"Still, it was your aggressiveness, your bravery, your willingness to
kill, to take on the mantel of the killer for your country. Is it
difficult to live with?"
"I killed a boy that day with a knife. Now and then I think of that
with sorrow."
"I'm so sorry. Your heroism aside, nothing good came of that war, did
it?"
"My heroism included, nothing good came of that war."
"So tell me; why did my son die? You of all men might know."
TIME TO HUNT 431
"I'm no expert in these matters. It ain't my department.
But it looks to me like he was picked up by a pro.
Someone who knew his weaknesses, had studied him, who knew of his
troubles with his father and played on them.
He's in the drawings as a heroic rower. I can feel Trig's love for
him. He may be this Fitzpatrick. Trig was different, you said. When
he came back?"
"Yes. Excited, committed, energetic. Troubled."
"He had to finish that painting?"
"Yes. Is there a message in the painting?"
"I don't know. I don't understand it either."
"But you think he was innocent of murder? That would be so important
to me."
"Innocent of first-degree murder, yes, I do. The death of that man may
have been unintended. If so, it would have been second-degree murder,
or some form of manslaughter.
I won't lie to you. He may be guilty of that."
"I appreciate the honesty. Trig will have to face his own
consequences. But at least someone believes he wasn't a murderer and
an idiot."
"I don't know what was really going on yet. I can't figure what it was
about, why it happened, what the point was. It seemed to have no
point, not then, not now, and what's happening to me would then have no
point. Maybe I'm completely wrong about all this and am just off on a
wild goose chase, because I'm under a lot of pressure. But tell me ..
. are you aware that the last few pages in the sketchbook are missing?
The American pages?"
"No. I had no idea."
"Do you have any idea where they might be?"
"No."
"Is it possible they're here?"
"You're free to look. But if they were here, I think I would have
found them."
"Possibly. Did he have a place, a favorite spot around here?"
"He loved to bird-watch at a spot in Harford County.
432 STEPHEN HUNTER
Out near Havre de Grace, overlooking the Susquehanna.
I could show you on a map. For some reason that was a spot especially
alive with birds, even the occasional Baltimore oriole."
"Could you show me on the map?"
"Yes. Do you think the pages are there?"
"I think I'd better look, that's all I know."
Bob drove through the failing light across Baltimore County, then north
up 1-95 until he passed into Harford County and turned off on a road
that led him to Havre de Grace, a little town on the great river that
eventually formed the Chesapeake Bay.
He didn't know what he was looking for, but there was always a chance.
If Trig ripped those sketches out, he probably wanted to destroy them.
But there was just a shred of the other possibility: that he learned
something that scared him, that he saw something he didn't understand,
that he had begun to see through Robert Fitzpatrick.
He was frightened, he didn't know what to do. He came here to paint;
because of some passionate psychological, stress-induced oddness or
other, he had to finish the painting of a bird. He did, then he
decided to remove the late sketches and hide them. He could have hid
them anywhere, sure--but his mind worked a certain way, it was
organized, pure, concise, it dealt front ally with problems and came up
with frontal solutions. So: hide the sketches. Hide them in a place
away from the house, for surely investigators will come to the house.
Hide them where I will never forget and where someone tracking me
sympathetically could find them. Yes, my "spot." My place. Where I
go to relax, to chill, to cool down, to watch the birds gliding in and
out across the flat, silent water. It made a species of sense: he
could have driven to this upcoming spot, wrapped the sketches in
plastic or screwed them into a jar, hid them somehow, buried them,
planted them under a rock, in a cave.
Trig, after all, had traveled the wilderness on his bird TIME TO
HUNTing quests. He'd been to South America, to Africa, all across the
remote parts of the United States, its deserts, its mountains. So he
knew field craft; he was adroit in the out-of-doors, not some helpless
idiot. His mother even said so: he was competent, he got things done,
he handled them.
So what am I looking for?
A mark, a possible triangulation of marks, something.
Bob tried to think it through, and reminded himself that such a sign,
if it had been cut into the bark of a tree, say, would have been
distorted horizontally in twenty-odd years' growth. It would be wide,
not high, as trees grow from the top.
He drove for a time along the river's edge. It was a huge flat pan of
water here, though back beyond the town the land rose to form bluffs
and he could see huge bridges spanning them. A train crossed one, an
orange bullet headed toward New York. Beyond that was a
superhighway.
At last he came to the site Trig's mother had designated on the map,
and he knew immediately he would have no luck. He saw not geese and
ducks but golden arches, and where a glade by the river had once been,
uniquely attractive to birds the region over, now a McDonald's stood. A
clown waved at him from behind the bright bands of glass that marked
the restaurant. He was hungry, he parked, walked around a few minutes,
and realized it was hopeless. That site was forever gone, and whatever
secrets it may or may not have concealed, they had been plowed under in
the process of making the world safe for beef.
He went in, had a couple of burgers and an order of fries and a Coke,
then went back to his car to begin the long drive to his motel room
near the airport, during which time he hoped to settle the puzzlement
of his next move.
It was here that he noticed the same black Pathfinder
434 STEPHEN HUNTER
that had preceded him up 1-95. But it peeled off, to be replaced by a
Chevy Nova, teal and rusty, and then, three exits down, when it
disappeared, by a FedEx truck.
He was being followed, full-press, by a damned good team.
chapter thirty-nine
Bonson financed the operation out of a black fund he and three other
senior executives had access to, because he didn't want it going
through regular departmental vetting procedures, not until he knew
where it was leading and what it might uncover. He operated this way
frequently; it was always better to begin low-profile and let the thing
develop slowly, undistorted by the pressures of expectation.
He picked his team with great care too, drawing on a tempo manpower
pool of extremely experienced people who were kept on retainer for just
such ad hoc, high deniability missions. He ended up with three ex-FBI
agents, two former state policemen, a former Baltimore policewoman and
a surprisingly good surveillance expert cashiered by the Internal
Revenue Service.
"Okay," he told them in the safe house in Rosslyn, Virginia, the agency
maintained as a staging area for emergency ops, "don't kid yourself.
This guy is very, very experienced. He has been in gunfights and
battles his whole life. He operated as a recon team leader for SOG for
a long year up near and inside Cambodia in sixty seven
He was an immensely heroic sniper who may be the only man in history to
have stopped a battalion by himself, in seventy-two. If you look at
the dossier I've distributed, you see that he's been involved in dust
ups ever since then: some business in New Orleans in ninety-two and
then, two years ago, he spent some time in his hometown in Arkansas and
the state death-by-shooting rate skyrocketed. This is a very, very
salty, competent individual.
He is strictly at the top of the pyramid.
"So let me repeat: your job is to monitor him, to report his
activities, to tap into his discoveries, but that is
436 STEPHEN HUNTER
all. I want this understood. This is not an apprehension;
it's no kind of wet work. Is that clear?"
The team nodded, but there were questions.
"Commander, do you want his lines tapped?"
Bonson hesitated. That would be helpful. But it was illegal without a
court order and you never knew how these things would end up playing
out. His career was his most important possession.
"No. Nothing illegal. This isn't the old days."
"We might be able to make a nice acoustic penetration on him in the old
lady's place."
"If you can get that, fine. If not, that's okay, too."
"If he burns us, do we disengage?"
"No, you go to backups. That's why I want six cars, not the usual
four. You stay in radio contact. I'll be monitoring in the control
van. Each hour I'm going to broadcast a frequency change, to cut down
on the possibility of him counter monitoring us."
The team understood immediately how unusual this was. Under normal
circumstances, no executive at Bonson's level would serve as case
officer on an operation. It was like a brigadier general taking over a
platoon.
"Are we armed?"
"No, you are not armed. If you should unexpectedly encounter him, if
he should make you and turn you out, you go into immediate deniability.
You deny everything;
you all have fake IDs. If you have to, you go to jail without
compromising operational security. I do not want him knowing he's
being watched."
Notes were taken, procedures written down. Bonson discussed call
signs, probable routes he'd take to the old woman's house north of
Baltimore, that sort of thing. But then-"One last thing: this man
claims he is also being hunted by a former Russian sniper. I tend to
believe him, though his record would incline him toward paranoia. But
we have to take the sniper as a real, not an imaginary
TIME TO HUNT 437
threat. So let's assume that sniper has no idea where he is and thinks
he's still in Idaho. But he's an enormously resourceful man. If the
Russian is farther ahead of the game than I have even begun to suspect,
and you encounter him, you fall back and contact me immediately and, if
no other option exists, you may have to move aggressively.
You may have to risk your lives to save Swagger, in that
eventuality."
"Jesus Christ."
"Swagger knows something. Or he has the power to figure it out. He's
a key, somehow, to something very deep and troubling. He cannot be
lost. He still has work to do for his country. He doesn't know it
yet, but he's still got a mission."
"Commander, could you tell us what this is about?"
"The past. Old men's dreams, young men's deaths.
The spy that never was but is again. Ladies and gentlemen, we're on a
mole hunt. We're after the one that got away."
In Boise, Solaratov's first move was to call the hospital, asking to
speak to Mrs. Swagger. Mrs. Swagger had checked out of the hospital
two days earlier. Where had she gone and in whose care had she been
left? The hospital operator wasn't permitted to release such
information.
What was her doctor's name? Again, no answer.
Late that afternoon, Solaratov parked his rented car in a national park
that provided access to the Sawtooth National Forest, and, outfitted as
any hiker, began the seventeen-mile trek along the ridgeline that
ultimately left national property and deposited him nine hundred yards
above Swagger's ranch house. He set up a good spotting position, well
hidden from casual hikers, of whom there were likely to be none, and
equally invisible from the meadows and pastures that stretched beneath
him. He settled in to wait.
He waited two full days. The house was absolutely
438 STEPHEN HUNTER
empty. Even the livestock had been sent elsewhere. In the middle of
the second night, he came down off the ridge and penetrated, using a
lock pick to spring the locks.
Then, making certain the shades were drawn, he explored the house using
a powerful flashlight for six hours, a thorough, professional
examination as he sought some clue as to where the Swagger family had
gone to cover. But on the first pass, the house yielded nothing. The
Swaggers had vanished.
The home was orderly, jammed with books on the subject of war, very
clean. The little girl's room was the messiest, but only by a small
margin. The living room was messy too, but it was a superficial mess,
a one-day job, not the accrual of weeks of untidiness, and he could see
where someone had spent a long night on the sofa. He found an empty
bottle of bourbon in the garbage under the sink.
One ordinary hunting rifle, a Model 70 in .308, more a useful tool in
this part of the country. A lightly customized .45 Colt Commander. No
precision rifles. Swagger had seemed to leave that behind him. There
was a study, where someone had done a lot of reading, but that was
about all. He looked for family account books or financial files, in
hopes that such would yield another possibility, but again, he found
nothing.
It appeared to be hopeless. He was wondering what to do next. He went
outdoors, carefully locking the door behind him, and went over to the
garbage cans by the side of the house, still in the cart by which they
would be hauled to the road twice a week. He opened one can and found
it empty, but the second produced a last green plastic bag, knotted
with yellow plastic ribbon at the top; it hadn't been picked up or even
set out. Perhaps the garbage contract had been cancelled when the
family decamped.
He took the bag to the barn, sliced it open with his Spyderco, and went
through the materials very carefully.
Not much: old yogurt cups, the bones of steaks and chops and chickens
eaten carefully, used paper towels, tin cans,
TIME TO HUNT 439
an ice cream package, very sticky, coffee grounds, the usual detritus.
But then: something crinkled, a yellow Post-It tab. Very carefully he
unrolled it and saw what it revealed.
"Sally M.," it said.
"American 1435, 9:40 a.m."
chapter forty
Bob took his time driving back from the McDonald's, letting his
baby-sitters enjoy their presumed advantage over him. He went back to
his motel room just outside the airport, called Mrs. Carter and told
her that he hadn't found anything at the site but that he had some
other ideas to pursue and he would certainly keep her informed.
He went out, got some dinner and caught a movie at a suburban mall, a
stupid thing about commandos who fired and never missed and who took
fire and never got hit, just to eat up the time. When he got out of
the film it was 2300, which meant in London it was 0600 tomorrow. That
was fine. Instead of returning immediately to his car, he walked
around the strip mall until he found a pay phone, well aware that at
least two cars of watchers were in the lot, eyeballing him.
Using his phone card, he placed an overseas call to the American
embassy in London, getting a night-shift receptionist;
he asked to be transferred to the embassy Marine guard detachment, was
passed on to the duty NCO and asked for the NCOIC, Master Sergeant
Mallory, who should be up and about, and in a few seconds Mallory came
to the line.
"Mallory, sir."
"Jack, you remember your old platoon sarge, Bob Lee Swagger?"
"Jesus Christ, Bob Lee Swagger, you son of a bitch! I ain't spoke to
you in thirty years, since I medevaced out of the "Nam. How the hell
are you, Gunny? You done some great things in your third tour."
"Well, I am okay, still kicking around on a pension, no bad
problems."
"Now what in hell is this all about? You bringing a
TIME TO HUNT 441
missus to London and want a place to stay? I got an apartment and you
can camp there all you want."
"No, Jack, it ain't that. It's an S-2 thing."
"You name it and it's yours."
"It's not a big thing, a little favor."
"Fire when ready, Gunny."
"Now, I'm thinking that with your embassy security responsibilities,
you have probably made contact with folks in the British security
apparatus."
"I deal with Scotland Yard and the two Mi's all the goddamn time. We
got two officers over here, but, shit, you know officers."
"Do I ever. So, anyhow, you got a good NCO-type in Six or Five you
know?"
"Jim Bryant, used to be a color sergeant in SAS. He now handles
embassy coordination in security for MI-6.1 meet with him all the
goddamn time, especially when we have people coming in that present
security problems."
"Good, counted on that. Now, here's the thing. In 1970, a guy named
Fitzpatrick operated in Great Britain, but I think he was a Russian
agent, or a Russian-hired agent. I don't know who the hell he was or
what he did or what became of him, but it would be goddamned helpful
for me to find out. Could you run that by your pal and see what shakes
out? Their intel people would have the shit on him if anybody did."
"Gunny, what's this all about?"
"Old business. Very old business that's come around and is biting me
in the ass."
"Okay, I'll give it a run. If it's in there and it ain't real
top-secret or whatever, Jim Bryant can nose it out for me.
I'll get back to you soonest. What's your time frame?"
"Well, I'm about to sack out now. It's getting close to midnight over
here."
"I'll give Jim a call and get to him as soon as possible.
You got a number?"
"Let me call you. What's a good time?"
442 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Call me at 1800 hours my time. That would be, what, 1100 yours?"
"That's it."
"Get me direct at 04-331-22-09. Right to my office;
don't go through the embassy switchboard."
"Good man."
"You got me on that chopper, Gunny. Wouldn't be here if you hadn't. I
owe you this one."
"Now we're even, Jack."
"Out here."
"Out," said Bob.
He went back to his car and drove to the motel. His room had been
expertly tossed and everything replaced neatly, including the cap on
his toothpaste tube. But they'd been here, he could tell. They were
watching him.
He undressed, showered and turned the lights out. It would be more
comfortable in here than out there.
He went to breakfast at a Denny's the next morning, went for a little
walk, watching the campers struggle to stay unseen, and precisely at
1100, put his longdistance call through to London.
"Mallory here."
"Jack."
"Howdy, Gunny."
"Any luck?"
"Well, yes and no."
"Shoot."
"This Fitzpatrick is more rumor or innuendo than actual operator. The
Brits know he operated here around that time, but that info came late,
from decoded radio intercepts after he'd gone on to his next duty
station, wherever the hell that was. But there was no way of covering
him through their regular ways of watching, which means he didn't
operate out of an embassy or a known cell."
"Is that strange?"
"As in, very strange."
TIME TO HUNT 443
"Ummmm," said Bob.
"So they have no photos. Nobody knows what he looks like. Nobody
really knows who he was, whether he was a recruited Irishman or a
native-born Russian citizen. They do say that when the Russians go
abroad, they tend more than not to impersonate Irishmen, because
there's a correspondence between the accents. In other words, a
Russian can't play an Englishman in England or an American in America,
but they've got a good record of playing an Irishman in England or
America. The Russian phonetic ah sound is very similar in tongue
placement to the ac of the classic Irish accent."
"So they think he's Russian?"
"Ah, they can't say for sure. That seems to be the best possible
interpretation. The file has been dead for nearly fifteen years. Poor
Jim had to drive all the way out to a records depository to even find
the goddamn thing."
"I see."
"They only have some radio transmissions and some defector
debriefings."
"What would they be?"
"Ah, a guy came over in seventy-eight and then another came over in
eighty-one, both low-level KGB operatives, in political trouble, afraid
they were going to get an all-expenses-paid TDY to the gulags. They
gave up everything they had: a funny thing, you know, the Russians are
all worried about confusing issues so they 'register' work names, code
names, the like; they got so many agencies, they want to make sure
nobody uses the name and things get all fouled up. The work name
"Robert Fitzpatrick' was one item in the registry that both these guys
gave up. But here's the odd part."
"Okay."
"According to these guys, to both of 'em, he wasn't in the First
Directorate. That's the KGB section that specializes in foreign
operations, recruitments, penetrations, that sort of thing."
"The straight-up spies."
444 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Yeah, you know, hiring informants, getting pictures, running networks,
working out of embassies, that sort of thing. The usual KGB deal."
"So what was he?"
"According to these clerks, the work name "Robert Fitzpatrick' was the
property of GRU."
"And what was that?"
GRUis Russian military intelligence."
"Hmmm," said Bob again, unsure what this information could possibly
mean.
"He was army?" he finally asked.
"Well, yes and no. I asked Jim too. It seems GRU was uniquely tasked
with penetration of strategic targets. That is, missiles, nuke
delivery systems, satellite shit, that whole shebang. All the big
atomic spies, like the Rosenbergs, like Klaus Fuchs, all them
guys--they were GRU. This guy Fitzpatrick would be interested--I mean,
if he existed, if he was Russian, if this, if that--he'd be doing
something that was global, not local. He'd be trying to get inside our
missile complexes, bomb plants, research facilities, the satellite
program, anti-missile research."
"Shit," said Bob, seeing the thing just twist out of his control.
"Man, I don't know crap about that and I'm much too old to learn."
"Plus you got your other problem; the Soviet Union broke up, all these
guys went who-knows-where. Some are still working for Russian GRU,
some are working for KGB or other competing organizations with
different agendas, some for the Russian mafia, some for all these
little republics. If it was hard to understand then, it don't make no
sense now."
"Yeah. Anything else?"
"Gunny, that's it. It ain't much. A possible name, a suggestion of
possible affiliation. Man, that's all they got."
"Christ," said Bob. He searched his memory for anything that he had
learned about Trig that touched on any issue of strategic warfare, but
came up blank. It was all Vietnam, the war, that sort of thing.
TIME TO HUNT 445
"Sorry I wasn't any help."
"Jack, you were great. I'm much obliged."
"Talk to you."
"Out here."
"Out."
Bob put the phone down, more confused than ever.
He felt everything was now hopelessly twisted out of his slender
ability to grasp it. The "strategic" business had him buffaloed. Where
the hell did that come from? What did it mean?
He called Trig's mother and got her right away.
- "Have you learned anything, Sergeant Swagger?"
"Well, maybe. It turns out the fellow's name is Robert Fitzpatrick.
The rower."
"Yes. The Irishman."
"Yeah, him. The British think he was a Russian agent, but not the sort
that would be interested in the peace movement or anything like that.
They think his mission would have been nuclear warfare, missiles, that
sort of thing. Is there anything in Trig's life that would touch on
that?"
"Good heavens, no. I mean, I assume the conventional peace movement
wisdom on strategic warfare was simply "Let's ban the bomb and
everything will be peachy," but it wasn't an issue, not at all. They
were fighting to stop the war that was going on, the war they saw on
television, the war that threatened them."
"Your husband was in the State Department. Did he have any connection
with any of this?"
"Not at all. He was in the counselor service. We served in a number
of embassies abroad representing American interests but never had a
thing to do with the missiles or that sort of thing. He finished up
his career managing an economic research project."
"A brother, a sister?"
"My brother is the famous Yale ornithologist; two of Jack's are dead,
one a doctor, the other a lawyer in New York; the third, a survivor,
manages the family money; my
446 STEPHEN HUNTER
sister is three times divorced and lives in New York, spending money
and trying to look younger."
"All right."
"You'll get it. Eventually, Sergeant Swagger, you'll figure it out."
"I think I'm out of my league this time, ma'am. I will keep working on
it, though."
"Good luck."
"Thanks."
He hung up, stumped. He opened the phone book, found a commercial
shooting range called On Target over near the airport. There, he
rented a stock .45 and spent an hour shooting holes in a target at
twenty-five yards while his campers cooled their heels outside in the
parking lot.
When he emerged, the food choices weren't great:
Popeyes Fried Chicken, a Pizza Hut, a Subway and, down the road a bit,
a Hardee's. He decided on Subway, and was walking toward it when he
realized what it had to be and where he had to go next.
JBonson was flagged down after the 3 p.m. meeting by his secretary, who
said there was an urgent call from Team Cowboy. He took it in his
office.
"He burned us."
"Shit."
"He knew we were there all along."
"Where did he go?"
"He slipped us so easily it was pathetic. Went into a Subway bathroom,
never came out."
"Subway, where, in DC or Baltimore?"
"No, the sandwich shop. On Route 175 near Fort Meade. Went in, never
came out. We waited and finally checked it out. He was long gone. His
rental car was still there in the parking lot, but he was long gone."
"Shit," said Bonson.
Where has the cowboy gone? What does he know?
chapter forty-one
Solaratov knew the one sound rule that held true the world over: to
catch a professional, hire a professional.
This meant that in his time he had worked with criminals of all stripe
and shape, including mujahideen skyjackers, Parisian strong-arm men,
Angolese poachers and Russian mafioso. But never a seventeen-year-old
boy, with dreadlocks, a baseball cap backward on his head and a pair of
trousers so baggy they could contain three or four editions of his
thin, wiry body. He wore a T-shirt that said:
just do it.
They met in an alley in the dockside section of New Orleans. And why
New Orleans? Because the origin of "Sally M's" flight on the Post-It
slip was that city.
The boy sashayed toward him with an abundance of style in his bopping
walk that was astounding: he pulsed with rhythm and attitude,
contrapuntal and primary, his eyes blank behind a pair of mirror-finish
glasses.
"Yo, man, you got the change?"
"Yes," said Solaratov.
"You can do this?"
"Like fly, Jack," said the boy, taking the envelope, which contained
$10,000. "You come this way, my man."
They walked down sweltering alleys, where the garbage, uncollected,
stank. They passed sleeping men wrapped around bottles and now and
then other crews of tough-looking youths dressed almost identically to
Solaratov's host, but with this young gangster in command, nobody
assaulted them. Then they turned into a backyard and made their way
into a decrepit slum dwelling, went up dark, urine-soaked stairs and
reached a door. It was locked; the boy's quick hands flew to his
pockets and came out with a key. The lock was sprung; Solaratov
followed him into a decrepit room, then through another
448 STEPHEN HUNTER
door to an inner office where possibly a million dollars' worth of
computer equipment blinked and hummed.
"Yo, Jimmy," said another boy who was watching a bank of TV monitors
that commanded all approaches to the computer room. He had a shorty
CAR-15 with a thirty-round mag and a suppressor.
"Yo," responded Jimmy, and the sentry moved aside, making room for the
master.
Jimmy seated himself at a keyboard.
"Okay," he said.
"M. You said M, from New Orleans, receiving phone calls from Idaho, is
that it?"
"Yes, that's it."
"Cool. Now what we do, see, we got to get into the phone company's
billing computer. All that takes is a code."
"I have no code."
"Not a problem. Not a problem," said Jimmy. He called up a directory,
and learned the code.
"How do you know?"
"My peoples regularly be going Dumpster diving, man.
We hit the Dumpsters behind the phone company three times a week. A
week don't go by we don't git their code memos. Yeah, here it is, a
simple dial-in."
The computer produced the mechanized tones of dialing, then announced
LINKED and produced what Solaratov took to be the index of its billing
system, with a blinking cursor requesting an order.
"This is the FAC," said the boy, "Southern Bell's facilities computer.
Gitting into this one is easy. No problem.
Kiddie shit."
He asked the computer to search for calls received in the greater New
Orleans area from Idaho's 208 area code, and the machine obediently
rifled its files and presented a list of several hundred possibilities
over the past week.
"Memphis," said Solaratov.
"Our information says the husband once had a friendship with a New
Orleans-area federal agent named Memphis. My guess is "Sally M." is
this agent's wife, come up to Idaho to take care of the
TIME TO HUNT 449
woman. She would call home from wherever she's hiding.
That is my thinking. She--" "Don't tell me too much, man. Don't want
to know too much. Just want to find you your buddy. Okay, Memphis."
"Memphis," said Solaratov, but by that time the boy had it up. A
Nicholas C. Memphis, 2132 Terry Drive, Metarie, Louisiana, telephone
5045552389.
"Now we cooking," said the boy.
"I'll just ask Mr.
FACS to locate and--" He did so; a new set of numbers popped onto the
screen.
"--there's your billing address and service records.
Now let's see."
He looked.
"Yes, yes, yes. Your friend Mr. Memphis, he got calls from outside
Boise beginning late afternoon May fourth--" Solaratov knew this as the
date of the shooting.
"Three, four calls from--" "That number is not important. That is the
ranch house number."
"Hey, man, I done told you, I don't want to know nothing."
"Go on, go on."
"Then nothing, then the last three days, one call a night from
2085555430."
"Can you locate the source of that call?"
"Well, let's see, we can git the F-1, which is the primary distribution
point and that turns out to be .. ."
He typed and waited.
"That turns out to be the Bell Substation at Custer County, in central
Idaho, near a town called Mackay."
"Mackay," said Solaratov.
"Custer County. Central Idaho. Is there an address?"
"No, but there's an F-2: 459912."
"What's that?"
"That's the secondary distribution point. The pole."
450 STEPHEN HUNTER
"The pole?"
"Yeah, the pole nearest wherever they are. That be the pole that the
phone wire is directly wired to. It can't be more than one hundred
feet away from the house, probably closer than that. They got all the
poles labeled, man.
That's how Ma Bell do it."
"Can I get an address on that?"
"Not here. I don't have access to their computer from here. What you
got to do is go to that little phone substation and break in somehow.
You got to get into their computer or their files and get an address
for F-2 459912.
That'll put you there, no problem."
"I can't do computers. You come with me. You do it.
Much money."
"Yeah, me in Idaho, with the dreads and the 'tude.
That'd be rich. Man, them white boy five-Os arrest me for how I be
looking. No, man: you got to do it yourself. You want that address,
you break in. It ain't no big deal. You may even get it out of the
Dumpster. But you break in, you check the files, you find the F-2
listings. You might even find a map with the F-2s designated, you dig?
Ain't no big thing, brother. I ain't shitting you."
"You could call, no? Bluff them into giving you information?"
"Here, no sweat. In any big city in America, no sweat.
You can social engineer the shit out of these boys. But out there:
they hear a brother in a place where there ain't no brothers, I think
you got problems. I don't want to risk blowing your caper, man. What
I'm telling you, it's the best way, it really is. You'll see; you be
chilling in no time."
Solaratov nodded grimly.
"You can do it, man. It ain't a problem."
"No problem," Solaratov said.
chapter forty-two
In the graduate degree ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 132 men and women were awarded their PhD's in assorted
academic and scientific specialties. But only one received the Ball
Prize as the Institute Scholar, for only one was the ranking member of
the class.
He was a tall young man, prematurely bald, of surprising gravity and
focus. He took his degree--"Certain Theories of Solar Generation As
Applied to Celestial Navigation" was his dissertation--in quantum
physics from the clean and was asked to speak some words, and when he
assumed the podium, his remarks were short.
"I want to thank you," he said, "for the chance you have given me. I
have been a scholarship student since my undergraduate years and even
before that. I came from a poor family; my mother worked hard, but
there was never enough. But institutions such as this one--and Yale
University and Harvard University and Madison High School--were kind to
me and doors were opened. Without your generosity I could not be here
and I am honored by that, and by your faith in me. I only wish my
parents could be here to share this moment. They were good people,
both of them. Thank you very much."
He stepped down to polite applause and went back to his place in line
as the ceremony--interminable to an uninvested outsider--went on hour
after hour. It was a hot day and cloudless in Boston. The Charles
River was smooth as blackened, ancient ivory; a thin veil of clouds
filtered the sun, but did nothing to help the heat. The Orioles were
in town, to play the Red Sox in a four game series; the president had
just announced a new at452 STEPHEN HUNTER
tempt to curb welfare growth; the international news was grave--the
Russian election had the pundits worried, with everybody's favorite bad
guy leading by a seemingly unassailable margin--and the stock market
was up four points. None of this meant anything to the tall man in the
khaki suit who sat in the last row of the graduation ceremony.
He waited impassively as the minutes churned by until at last the crowd
broke up and families rejoined, old friends embraced, the whole litany
of human joy was reenacted.
He walked through the milling people toward the podium and at last he
spotted his quarry, the young man who was the Ball Prize winner.
He watched him; the young man accepted the attentions he had earned
somewhat passively and seemed not to respond to them with a great deal
of enthusiasm. He accepted the embraces of colleagues and professors
and administrators, but after a while--surprisingly quickly, as a
matter of fact--he was alone. He took off his cap and hung his gown
over his arm to reveal a nondescript, almost shabby suit, and began to
leave. He had, in fact, the look of a loner, the boy who's ever so
rarely at the center but prefers to blur through the margins of any
situation, is uncomfortable with eye contact or attempts at intimacy,
and will lose himself readily enough in the arcane, be it quantum
physics, Dungeons & Dragons or sniper warfare.
It was a quality of melancholy.
Bob intercepted him.
"Say there," he said, "just wanted to tell you that was a damned nice
little talk you gave there."
The boy was not so mature that he didn't appreciate a compliment, so an
unguarded smile crossed his face.
"Thanks," he said.
"What's next for you?"
"Oh, the prize thing is an automatic year at Oxford as a research
fellow. I leave for England tomorrow. Very exciting. They have a
good department, lots of provocative
TIME TO HUNT 453
people. I'm looking forward to it. Say--excuse me, I didn't catch
your name."
"Swagger," Bob said.
"Oh, well, it's nice to talk to you, Mr. Swagger. I've, uh, got to be
going now. Thanks again, I--" "Actually, it's not just coincidence, me
running into you. It took some digging to find you."
The young man's eyes narrowed with hostility.
"I don't give interviews if this is some press thing. I have nothing
to say."
"Well, see, the funny thing is, I ain't here about you.
I'm here about your dad."
The boy nodded, swallowed involuntarily.
"My father's been dead since 1971."
"I know that," said Bob.
"What is this? Are you a cop or anything?"
"Not at all."
"A writer? Listen, I'm sorry, the last two times I gave interviews to
writers, they didn't even use the stuff, so why should I waste my--"
"No, I ain't a writer. Fact is, I pretty much hate writers.
They always get it wrong. I never encountered a profession that got
more wrong than being a writer. Anyhow, I'm just a former Marine. And
your dad's death is mixed up in some business that just won't go
away."
"More on the great Trig Carter, eh? The great Trig Carter, hero of the
left, who sacrificed his life to stop the war in Vietnam? Everybody
remembers him. There'll probably be a movie one of these days. This
fucking country, how can they worship a prick like him? He was a
killer. He blew my father to little pieces, and crushed him under a
hundred tons of rubble. And nobody gives a fuck.
They think Trig is the big hero, the victim, the martyr, because he
came from a long line of Protestant swine and sold out to anybody that
would have him."
But then his bitterness vanished.
"Look, this isn't doing any good. I never knew my 454 STEPHEN
HUNTER
father; I was less than a year old when he was killed. What difference
does it make?"
"Well," said Swagger, "maybe it still makes a little.
See, I was struck by the same thing as I looked into this.
There ain't nothing about your father nowhere. Excuse my grammar, I
never had a fancy education."
"Overrated, believe me."
"I do believe you on that one. Anyhow, he's the mystery man in this
affair. Nobody wants to know, nobody's interested."
"Why is this of interest to you? Who cares?"
"I care. Maybe your father wasn't the poor guy in the wrong place at
the wrong time, like everybody says.
Maybe he was more important than people think. That's a possibility
I'm looking at. And maybe the folks who pulled the strings are still
around. And maybe I'm interested in looking into this and maybe I'm
the only man who cares about your dad--" "My mother was a saint, by the
way. She taught, tutored, worked like hell to give me the chances I
had.
She died my freshman year at Harvard."
"I'm very sorry. You were a lucky young man, though, who had parents
who cared and sacrificed."
"Yes, I was. So you think--you have some conspiracy theory about my
father? Do you have a radio show or something?"
"No, sir. I'm not in this for the money. I'm just a Marine trying to
get some old business straightened out.
Believe it or not, it connects with the death of still another member
of that generation, a boy who died in Vietnam.
That was another great loss for his family and our country."
"Who are you?"
"I was with that boy when he died. May seventh, 1972.
He bled out in my arms. This is something I been working on a long
time."
"Urn," said the boy.
"Look, I know you're busy. You must be. But I was
TIME TO HUNT 455
hoping you'd have a cup of coffee with me. I'd like to talk about your
dad. I want to know about him."
"He was quite a guy," the boy said.
"Or so I hear." He looked at his watch.
"Hell, why not? I have nothing else to do."
chapter forty-three
Bonson was debriefing the team in the Rossyin safe house. It was not a
happy time.
"I warned you he was good. You people were supposed to be the best.
What the hell went on?"
"He was good. He was professional. He read us, burned us and turned
us when it suited him," came the answer.
"Sometimes people are just too good and they can do that to you. That's
all."
"All right, let's go through it again, very carefully."
For what seemed the tenth time, the team narrated their one day of
adventures with Bob Lee Swagger, where he'd been, what they'd learned,
how indifferent to them he seemed, how swiftly and effectively he had
slipped them.
Bonson listened carefully.
"Usually there's a moment," one of the ex-FBI agents said, "when you
can tell you've been burned. There was nothing like that this time. He
just disappeared."
"I figure he made it out back, cut through the neighborhood behind us
and called a cab from another little shopping center about a mile away.
Or maybe he went up to the roof and waited until nightfall and slipped
away."
"You didn't see him interact with anybody?"
"Nobody."
"He had no contacts?"
"He made those phone calls."
"We did get that, sir."
The agents had written down the numbers of the phone booths and through
them tracked the destinations of the calls, which turned out to be the
American embassy in London, first the general number, and the next day
the office of the Marine NCOIC of the embassy guard.
"We could have inquiries made."
TIME TO HUNT 457
"No, no, I know what he was asking about. He's very smart, this guy.
He looks like Clint Eastwood and talks like Gomer Pyle and yet he's got
a natural gift for this sort of thing. He's very--" It was at this
time an earnest young man entered the room.
"Commander Bonson," he said, "Sierra-Bravo-Four is on the phone."
Bonson looked about himself, stunned, then took the phone and waited
for the switchboard to route it to him.
"Bonson."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four here," he heard Swagger's voice.
"Where the hell are you?"
"You didn't tell me about the baby-sitters."
"It's for your own good."
"I work alone. I made that clear, Bonson."
"We don't do it that way anymore. You have to come in. You have to
come under control. It's the only way I can help you."
"I need some questions answered."
"Where are you? I can have you picked up in an hour."
There was a pause.
"I'm outside, asshole."
"What?"
"I said, I'm outside, with a cellular I picked up at the Kmart a few
minutes ago."
"How did--" There was a clang as something hit the window.
"I just threw a rock at your window, asshole. Good thing it wasn't an
RPG; you wouldn't last long in a war, asshole. I rented another car
and followed the baby-sitters you had staking out my car back to your
place. Now, let me in and let's start talking."
Swagger came in, past the team whom he had so adroitly out managed
"All right, people, get out of here. I'll talk to him."
458 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Do you need security, Commander?" said an ex-state cop, correctly
reading the anger in Bob's body.
"No. He'll see reason. He knows this isn't a pissing contest between
him and this team, right. Swagger?"
"You just answer my questions and we'll see what's what."
The men and women he had vanquished slid out of the room and then
Bonson took him into another one, neatly set up as an operational HQ
with computer terminals and phone banks. A few technicians worked the
consoles.
"Okay, everybody on break," Bonson called.
They too left. Bob and Bonson sat down on a beat-up sofa.
"I got the name of your Russian."
"All right," said Bonson.
"His name was Robert Fitzpatrick; he was affiliated with GRU, according
to the Brits. But they don't have nothing on him, what he was up
to."
"Swagger, good. Damn, you are an operator. I'm impressed.
So what did you do with this? Where did you go?"
"You'll find out when I put it all together, which I ain't done yet,
but I have some ideas. What have y'all got on this guy? I need to
find out who he was or is, what became of him, what this is all about.
He had the Brits buffaloed.
They only found out he was operating in their country after he was long
gone."
"Fitzpatrick," said Bonson.
"Fitzpatrick was a recruiter.
That was his specialty. He was one of those seductive, smooth
presences who just gulled people into doing what he wanted, and they
never, ever knew he was persuading them. You see, that's what's
interesting about him. I don't think Trig was his only project. I
think he may have recruited others, and whatever his business with Trig
was, it wasn't the main reason he came to the United States."
"What was he doing?"
"He was recruiting a mole."
TIME TO HUNT 459
"Man," said Bob, "this shit is getting fucked up.
Secret-agent crap, like some paperback novel. I do not want to be a
part of this shit. My mind don't work that way."
"Nevertheless, that was his great gift, his special talent.
We know a little more about him than the Brits--and the timing works
out right."
"What do you mean?"
"For the past twenty years, the Agency has been in a curious down
cycle. It seems to have had an enormous fund of bad luck. Every once
in a while we smoke somebody out. In the early eighties, there was a
guy named Yost Ver Steeg. A little later there was Robert Howard.
Early in the nineties, we finally caught onto Aldrich Ames. And we
think, well, that's it, we're clean at last. But somehow it never
quite pans out that way. It never does.
We're always a little behind, a little slow, a little off.
They're always a little ahead of us. Even after the breakup, they've
stayed strangely ahead of us. I'm convinced he's here. I can feel
him. I can smell him. He's someone you'd never believe, someone
totally secure.
He's not in it for the money; he's not so active he's obvious.
But he's here, I know it, goddammit, and I will catch him. And I know
this goddamn "Fitzpatrick' recruited him in the year 1971 when he was
in this country. And, goddammit, I just missed him that year. I was a
couple of hours slow, because your pal Fenn wouldn't roll over for
me."
"So what happened to Fitzpatrick?"
"Disappeared. Gone. We have no idea. He was never serviced out of an
embassy, never had a cut-out, any of the classic ploys of the craft. We
never cut into his phone network. He was entirely a singleton. We
don't know who serviced him. We don't even know what he looks like. We
never got a photo. But it is provocative that suddenly all this is
active again. Why would that be? Your picture goes in the paper and
suddenly they're out to kill you?"
"But my picture has been in the paper before. It's
460 STEPHEN HUNTER
been on the cover of Time and Newsweek. They couldn't miss that. So
what's different this time?"
"That's a great question, Sergeant. I can't answer it. I even have a
team of analysts working on it back at Langley and so far they have
come up with nothing. It makes no sense. And to make it more
complicated, Fitzpatrick may not even be working for the Russians, or
for the old Soviet communist regime, which is still there, believe
me.
He may be working against it now. It's a tough call, I'll tell you,
but I guarantee it's simple underneath. Mole. Penetration of the
Agency. The notification of your existence, something coming active
over there, your elimination to prevent--what? I don't know."
Something didn't quite add up. There was some little thing here that
didn't connect.
"You look puzzled," said Bonson.
"I can't figure it out," said Bob.
"I'm getting a little alarm. Don't know what it is. Something you
said--" Photograph.
"You don't know what Fitzpatrick looks like?"
"No. No photos. That's how good he was."
What is wrong?
"Why aren't there any photos?"
"We never got close enough. We were never there. We were always
behind him. It took too long, I told you. I was trying to set up a--"
Photograph.
"There is a photograph."
"I don't--" "The FBI has a photograph. The FBI was there."
"We're not on the same page. The FBI was where?"
"At the farm. The farm in Germantown in 1971. Trig had told Donny
where it was. My wife went out there with Donny the night he was
trying to decide whether or not to give up Crowe. He was looking for
Trig for guidance. She saw Fitzpatrick. She said the FBI was there,
and when she and Donny left, they got their picture. They were on the
hill above the farm. They were about to bust Trig."
TIME TO HUNT 461
"The FBI was not there. The FBI was back in Washington with Lieutenant
Commander Bonson trying to figure out where the hell everybody had gone
to," "There were agents there. They got a picture of Donny and Julie
leaving the farm. She told me that less than a week ago."
"It wasn't the FBI."
"Could it have been some other security agency, moving in on Trig,
unaware of the--" "No. It didn't work that way. We were together."
"Who was there?"
"Call your wife. Find out."
He pushed the phone toward Bob, who took out the small piece of paper
on which he had written the number of the ranch house in Custer
County.
He dialed, listened as the phone rang. It was midafternoon out
there.
After three rings, he heard, "Hello?"
"Sally?"
"Oh, the husband. The missing husband. Where the hell have you been!
She is in great discomfort and you have not called in days."
"I'm sorry, I've been involved in some stuff."
"Bob, this is your family. Don't you understand that?"
"I understand that. I'm just about to come home and spell you and
everything will be happy. She did separate from me, you remember."
"You still have responsibilities," she said.
"You are not on vacation."
"I am trying to take care of things. How's Nikki?"
"She's fine. It's snowing. They say there's going to be a bad
snowfall, one of those late spring things."
"It's June, for God's sake."
"They do things by their own rules in Idaho."
"I guess so. Is Julie able to come to the phone? It's important."
"I'll see if she's awake."
He waited and the minutes passed.
462 STEPHEN HUNTER
At last another extension clicked on, and his wife said, "Bob?"
"Yes. How are you?"
"I'm all right. I'm still in a cast, but at least I'm out of that
awful traction."
"Traction sucks."
"Where are you?"
"I'm in Washington right now, working on this thing."
"God, Bob. No wonder my lawyer couldn't find you."
"I'll be home soon. I just have this thing to deal with."
She was silent.
"I had to ask you something."
"What?"
"You told me that when you and Donny left that farm, you were
photographed, right? Some guys were in the hills, monitoring the
situation, and they got a photo."
"Yes."
"You're sure?"
"Of course I'm sure. Why would I make something like that up?"
"Well, you might have it mixed up with something else."
"It was very straightforward. Donny knew where the farm was; we drove
out there. We found Trig and some big blond guy he said was Irish. We
left after Donny talked to Trig. We got to our car, got in, and this
guy came out of nowhere and took our picture. That's it."
"Hmmm," he said. He put the phone down.
"She says yes, definitely, there was a picture taken."
"What did the guy look like?"
Bob asked her.
"Guy in a suit. Heavy-set, blunt, I guess. I didn't get a good look.
It was dark, remember? Cops. FBI agents."
"Just cops," Bob said.
"Don't you see," said Bonson.
"Some kind of Soviet security team. Covering for Fitzpatrick."
Yes, Bob thought. That made sense.
TIME TO HUNT 463
"And that was everybody that was out there?" he asked.
"Well .. . Peter, Peter Farris."
"Peter?" Bob asked. Peter? Something rang in his head from far
away.
"I don't know that he was there."
"Who was Peter?" he asked, struggling to remember.
He thought he could recall Donny mentioning a Peter somewhere some time
or other and had a bad feeling.
"He was one of my friends in the movement. He thought he was in love
with me. He may have followed us out there."
"You don't know?"
"He disappeared that night. His body was found several months later. I
wrote Donny about it."
"Okay," said Bob, "I'll call you as soon as I get back, and we can work
this out however you want. You're safe in all this snow?"
"We may be snowed in for a few days, it's so isolated.
But that's okay; we have plenty of food and fuel. Sally's here. It's
not a problem. I feel very safe."
"Okay," he said.
"Good-bye," she said.
"That was a dead end," he said, after hanging up.
Peter, he thought. Peter is dead. Peter disappeared that night. Yet
something taunted him. He remembered other words, spoken directly to
him: It's not about you this time.
"Well, it's another good bit of circumstantial that the Russians had
committed to a major operation, and they were running high-level
security on it."
Then a thought just sort of fluttered through Bob's mind.
"It is odd," he noted, "that of all the people that went to that
farm--Trig, a kid named Peter Farris, Donny-they're all dead. In fact,
they all died within a few months of that night."
"Everybody except your wife."
464 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Yeah. And--" Except my wife, he thought.
Except my wife.
Bob stopped, caught up suddenly. Something snapped into perfect focus.
It wasn't there, then it was; there was no coming into being, no sense
of emergence: it was just indisputably there, big as life.
"You know--" started Bonson.
"Shut up," said Bob.
He was silent another second.
"I get it," he said.
"The picture, the timing, the target."
"What are you talking about?"
"They killed everyone except Julie. They didn't know who Julie was but
they had a picture of her. The picture they got that night. But Donny
never officially recorded his marriage with the Marine Corps. So there
were no records of who she was. She was a mystery to them. Then, when
my picture was on Time's cover over that business in New Orleans, it
didn't matter, it meant nothing. I didn't even know Julie yet. But
two months ago, my picture runs again in Time. And the National Star,
when I'm famous again for a weekend. It was snapped by a tabloid
photographer as we were coming out of church, Julie and I. It's not my
picture they're interested in, or even me. That story told how I had
married the widow of my spotter in Vietnam."
He turned to Bonson.
"It's Julie. They're trying to kill Julie. They have to kill everyone
who was at that farm and saw Fitzpatrick with Trig loading that truck.
This whole thing isn't about killing me. It's about killing Julie. He
fired at what he thought was me first in the mountains because I was
armed. He had to take the armed man first. But she was the target."
Bonson nodded.
Bob picked up the phone, dialed quickly. But the line was out.
chapter forty-four
The snow didn't scare Solaratov. He had seen snow before. He had
lived and hunted in snow. He had trekked the mountains of Afghanistan
above the snowline with a SPETSNAZ team hunting for mujahideen
leadership cadres. The snow was the sniper's ally. It drove security
forces under cover, it grounded air cover and, best of all, it covered
tracks. The sniper loved snow.
It fell in huge, lofty feathers, a wet, lush snow from a dark mountain
sky. It adhered and quickly covered the earth and drove most people to
shelter. The weatherman said it would snow all night, a last blast of
winter, unusual but not unheard of. Twelve, maybe twenty inches of it,
endless and silent.
He drove through already thinning traffic and had no trouble finding
the Idaho Bell outstation that had been the F-1--primary distribution
point--for the phone calls from remote rural Custer County to Nick
Memphis's New Orleans address. It was a low, bleak building, built to
modern American standards without windows. The happy Bell sign stood
outside; inside, it was dark, presumably working entirely by robotics.
To one side stood a phalanx of transformers, fenced off and marked with
fierce danger signs, which produced a nexus of wires that rose to poles
to shunt the miracle of communication around Custer County. A small
parking lot was empty. Out back, a cyclone fence sealed off what
appeared to be a sort of motor pool, where six vans with idaho bell
emblazoned on them were parked next to what looked like a sheetmetal
maintenance garage. But it was dark too. Even better, the building
was far from downtown, such as "downtown" was, along a country road
that would now not be much traveled.
Still, he did not dare park in the lot, for that lone car
466 STEPHEN HUNTER
on a dark night could attract some attention. He drove several hundred
yards into a small development of houses, where some cars were parked
along the street, and pulled in, turning the engine off. He waited in
darkness, as the snow fell silently on the hood of the car, soon
veiling the windshield. He opened the door, got out, slipped it shut
without a slam, for the noise would have seemed even louder in the
quiet.
It was an easy walk, between two dark houses, across a field, and then
next to the Cyclone fence. He looked for sign of an alarm or
electrification or notice of a dog.
There was none. Taking a pair of wire cutters from the pocket of his
parka, he used the massive strength in his forearms to cut the cyclone
and bend back an entrance to the wire. He slithered through. He
slipped between vans, around the garage, and felt his way along the
back of the phone building until he found a metal door. He looked
about for signs of an alarm and, finding none, took from his pocket a
leather envelope of lock picks. The lock was a simple but solid pin
tumbler; he took the two tools he would need, the tension tool and the
feeler pick, and set to work. He inserted the tension tool. It was a
matter of delicate feel, the tension tool holding the pins down, the
feeler tool locating them one by one along the shear line of the
cylinder and pushing them back until he felt a slight thump, signifying
that he'd gotten all the pins aligned.
The cylinder turned; the door sprang open.
He stepped inside, pulled out a pair of glasses with a small, powerful
flashlight mounted to them and began to explore the building.
It didn't take long. He found a map on the wall in what appeared to be
the bullpen for the Bell linemen and took it down. It seemed to be
Custer County as broken down into phone zones. Indeed, as he searched
it in the illumination of the flashlight, he quickly noted small
circles denoted along the roads that were numbered in integer sequences
similar to the one he'd uncovered in New Or TIME TO HUNT 467
leans. These would be the secondary distribution points for the calls,
the F-2s.
He had a powerful impulse just to flee with the map, but it was stiff
and large, and carrying it across the field back to the car would be
very difficult. Instead, he began a patient search, zone by zone, of
the chart, searching for the magic numbers 459912. Again, it took some
time, but at last, along a mountain road high in the Lost River range,
he found the pole; it stood in a valley near a rectangle that clearly
denoted a ranch house. From the crush of elevation contours close by,
he understood that it stood under the mountains, giving him a perfect
angle for a killing shot. He carefully copied the map onto a sheet of
paper, which he would later compare with the exhaustive maps he had
already acquired as he set up his approach to the target area.
He had the map hung on the wall again when he heard sounds. He fought
the urge to panic and slipped down the wall until he found a desk
behind which he could hide. He switched off his light, and took a
Glock 19 out of his shoulder holster under the heavy parka.
The lights came on at that moment, and he heard the sound of a man
walking to a desk, sitting down and fiddling with papers, sighing with
the approach of a night's duty. The man picked up the phone and dialed
a number.
"Bobby? Yeah, I want the guys in. Grace is already on the way. The
state cops told me they got downed lines near Sunbeam Dam and I want
somebody to check the meadow there at Arco; those suckers always go
down. I'll start calling the A-line, you start calling the B's. Yeah,
I know, I'm pissed too. This late. Oh, well, buddy, you wanted to be
in management, that means long nights and no overtime. But free
coffee, Bobby."
The man hung up.
Solaratov faced reality. In minutes the room would fill up with
linemen come in to work the unexpected weather emergency. He was in a
tenuous situation as it was, only undiscovered because the supervisor
was so focused on
468 STEPHEN HUNTER
his labors. When the others arrived, he would soon be discovered; even
if he could hide, he'd be pinned for hours as the long night's repair
effort was coordinated and executed.
"Mrs. Bellamy? This is Walter Fish at work. Is Gene there? Yes,
ma'am, we're recalling the workforce; please wake him. That's right,
ma'am. Thanks very much."
Walter Fish bent over his phones and was making another call when the
shadow of Solaratov fell across him.
He looked up; a bafflement fell across his features that transfigured
almost instantaneously into a reflexive Western smile, and then became
a mask of panic.
Solaratov shot him in the face, below the left eye, with a 147-grain
Federal Hydra-Shock. The gun popped in his hand, cycled, spitting a
shell across the room. Fish jerked backward as if in a different, a
faster, time sequence. His brain tissue sprayed the wall behind him,
and a small gouge of plaster blew out where the bullet exited the skull
and plunked into the wall.
Solaratov turned and looked for the ejected shell; he spied it across
the room, under a desk, and went quickly to pick it up. When he arose,
he faced a woman in the doorway, with a thermos in one hand, still
wrapped up babushka like against the weather. Her features became
unglued at the horror she saw and her eyes opened like quarters.
Solaratov shot her in the chest but missed the heart. She staggered
backward, spun and began to stagger down the hall, screaming, "No, no,
no, no, no, no!"
He stepped into the hall, locked the Glock in both hands, acquired the
nightlit front sight and shot her in the base of the spine. She went
down, her hand reaching convulsively back to touch the wound itself.
Why did they do that? They always did that. He walked to her; she
still moved. He bent, put the muzzle to the back of her head and fired
again. The muzzle flash ignited her hair. It blazed with an acrid,
chemical stench, then extinguished itself, producing a vapor of smoke,
and Solaratov realized she'd been wearing a wig of some artificial
substance.
TIME TO HUNT 469
Now there was no time to pick up shells. He walked swiftly down the
corridor, found the door and slipped out the back. Thank God it was
still snowing heavily; in seconds, minutes at the most, his tracks
would be gone.
He went across the field, the pistol still hot in his hand.
He had no sense of shame or doubt or pain; he was the professional and
he did what was necessary, the hard thing always, and kept going. But
it shook him nevertheless:
the look on the poor man's face in the second before the bullet blew
through his cheekbone; and the woman who could only scream "No, no, no,
no" as she rushed along the corridor.
It seemed to put a curse on his enterprise. He was not superstitious
and he was too experienced by far to consider such nontechnical
elements as having any meaning;
still, it didn't feel right.
chapter forty-five
Bonson had promised Bob that he could surprise him with how much he
could do and how quickly, and now he made good on that statement.
He picked up the phone and dialed a certain number and said, very
calmly, "Duty officer, this is Deputy Director Bonson, authenticating
code Alpha-Actual-Two-Five-Nine, do you acknowledge?"
When the man on the other end did so, Bonson said, "I am hereby
declaring a Code Blue Critical Incident.
Please notify the Fifth Floor and set up a Domestic Crisis Team. I
want two senior analysts--Wigler and Marbella. I want my senior
analysts from Team Cowboy. I want some people from computer division.
I want to lay on air ASAP;
I'm at 2854 Arlington Avenue, in Rosslyn. We will make our way to the
USA Today building for pickup. I'd like that in the next five
minutes."
He waited, got the reply he wanted.
"I also want an FBI HRT unit put on alert and ready to coordinate with
our liaison ASAP. This may involve a shooting situation and I want the
best guys. Do you copy?"
Getting his last acknowledgment, he hung up.
"Okay," he said, turning to Bob, "we have to get a ride to the
newspaper building, and the chopper will pick us up. We'll be in
Langley inside fifteen minutes and put our best people to work in
twenty. I can have a security team on-site in four hours."
"Not if it's snowing," said Bob.
"What?"
"She said it was snowing. That's going to close the whole thing
down."
"Shit," said Bonson.
"It won't shut him down," said Bob.
"Not this boy.
TIME TO HUNT 471
He's been in the mountains. He hunted the mountains for years."
"It may be premature to worry," said Bonson.
"No, he'll go as soon as he can. He won't wait or goof around or take
a break. He's got a job to do. It's the way his mind works. He's
very thorough, very committed, very gifted, very patient, but when he
sees it, he'll go for it instantly. He's been hunting her as I've been
hunting him.
And he's much closer."
"Shit," said Bonson again.
"Call them back and get them working the area. We're going to need
maps, weather, satellite tracking, maybe.
It's Custer County, about five miles outside of Mackay, Idaho, in the
center of the state, in the Lost River Range.
It's north of Mackay, off Route Ninety-three, in the foothills of the
Lost River, as I understand it."
"That's good," said Bonson, and turned to make the call.
A half hour later they got the bad news.
"Sir," said a staff assistant with the grave face of a junior officer
carrying the news no one wanted to hear, "we got some real problems out
there."
"Go ahead," said Bonson, trailing along in Bob's wake into a room that
could have been any meeting room in any office building in America but
just happened to be in the headquarters of the Central Intelligence
Agency in Langley, Virginia.
"There's a freak front moving in from Canada across central Idaho. The
weather service people say it'll dump sixteen, eighteen inches on the
place. Nothing's moving there; the roads will be closed until they can
be plowed, and they can't be plowed until morning. Nothing's flying
either. That area is totally sealed off. Nobody's going anywhere."
"Shit," said Bonson.
"Notify FBI. Tell them to stand down."
"Yes, sir, but there's more."
472 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Go ahead."
"We have been in contact with Idaho State Police authorities.
Just to make things worse, there's been a double homicide at the phone
company. A supervisor and his secretary, coming on to run the snow
emergency shift, were shot and killed. Whoever did it got completely
away.
Nothing was stolen, nothing taken. Maybe it was domestic, but they say
it looked like a professional hit."
"It's him," said Bob.
"He's there. He probably had to get the final location out of the
phone company files or something. He got surprised by these two people
and he did what he had to do."
"Cold," said Bonson.
"Very cold."
"I'll tell you what we need real fast," said Swagger.
"We need an extremely good workup on the terrain there.
Let's figure out, given the time of the shootings, if he'd have a
chance at making it on foot to a shooting position.
Where would he dump his car, how far would he have to go, what kind of
speed could an experienced mountain operator be expected to make? Then
double that, and you'll know what this guy is doing. What time will he
make it there? Where would he likely set up? He'd want the sun behind
him, that I know."
"Get cracking," said Bonson.
-Nikki watched the snow.
"It's pretty," she said.
"But I never knew it could snow in June."
"That's the mountains," said Aunt Sally.
"It snows when it wants to."
"When we get back to Arizona," said her mother from the sofa, "you'll
never see snow again, I promise."
"I think I like snow," said Nikki, "even if you can't ride in it."
She watched in the fading light as the world whitened.
Outside, she could see a corral and beyond that the barn.
There were no animals way up here, so there was nothing to worry about.
The highway was about a half mile away,
TIME TO HUNT 473
and it was her job to follow the long dirt road each day and check the
solitary mailbox that stood where Upper Cedar Road, that high, lonely
ribbon of dirt which connected them to Route 93, passed by.
But the mountains dominated what she could see. The house was in a
high meadow, surrounded by them. Mount McCaleb was the closest, a huge
brute of a mountain; it loomed above them, now unseen in the driving
snow. Farther to the north was Leatherman Peak; farther to the south,
Invisible Mountain. These were the peaks of the Lost River Range,
dominated farther toward Challis by Mount Borah, the highest in Idaho.
There was the sense of their presence, even though they were invisible.
On an evening like this, it was much darker; you could feel them
through your bones, dark and solid, just beyond the veil of the seen.
"Brrrr," Nikki said.
"It looks so cold out."
"This snow'll be gone by the end of the week," Aunt Sally said.
"That's what they said on the radio. Unseasonable cold front from
Canada, but it'll be in the seventies by Monday. It'll melt away.
Maybe it'll cause some flooding.
It does feel like midwinter, doesn't it?"
"It does," said Nikki's mommy, who was at least ambulatory now. Her
left arm and collarbone were secured in a half-body cast, but the
abrasions and cuts had healed enough so that she could move about. She
wore a bathrobe over jeans. She looked thin, Nikki thought.
"You know what?" said Aunt Sally, who with her spunky personality and
Southern accent had quickly become Nikki's favorite person in the whole
wide world, "I think it's a soup night. Don't you girls? I mean,
snow, soup, what else goes together better? We'll do up some nice
Campbell's tomato with crackers, and then we'll settle down and watch a
video. Not Born Free, though. I cannot sit through that again."
"I love Born Free," said Nikki.
"Nikki, honey, let's let Aunt Sally pick the movie tonight.
She's a little tired of Born Free. So am I."
474 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Welllllll .. . ," Nikki considered.
"What about Singin' in the Rain?"
"That's a good one."
"What is it?" said Nikki.
"A musical. About these people who worked in old time movies and how
much fun they had. There's a lot of great singing and dancing."
"A man dances in the rain," said Sally.
"Ew," said Nikki.
"Why would he do that? It's stupid."
Solaratov worked the maps by comparing his crude drawing with the U.S.
Geologic Survey maps he had back in his motel room just north of
Mackay. He tried to work quickly because he knew it would be a matter
of time before the police began checking motels for strangers, and who
knew if anybody had seen him come in half an hour after the murders?
But at the same time, too much haste was no help at all. He tried to
find the zone: that smooth place in his mind where his reflexes were at
their best, his brain most efficient, his nerves calmest. He pushed
his brain against the whirling topographic patterns of the map, located
Route 93 and traced the path from his drawing to the map. He saw that
the ranch house site was farther out 93, at the Mackay Reservoir. But
there you turned right, drove across the flats and began to climb up
FRan "unimproved road," by the map symbol, which mounted the Lost
Rivers and penetrated them, following Upper Cedar Creek. There was a
natural fold in the rise of the mountains as the road went deeper, and
at the end of that stood the ranch, surrounded on three sides by Mount
McCaleb, Massacre Mountain and Leatherman Peak. The mountains were
represented on the map by dizzying twirls of elevation lines, and the
denser they were the more sheer the rise. He saw that the fast way in
would be along Route 93, but that would not work, for the road was now
officially closed, barely passable, and probably being monitored by the
police. Who else would be driving
TIME TO HUNT 475
through such a storm on such a night except a murderer fleeing the
scene of his crime?
But he was a mere few miles from the south slope of Mount McCaleb, and
the way was well marked, as it followed Lower Cedar Creek. The creek,
protected from drifting snow by the furrow it had cut in the earth,
would not be frozen this quickly, but it might be low, and no snow
would adhere to it. Therefore, it might be surprisingly easy walking,
even in the dark. When he got to McCaleb, he'd climb about two
thousand feet--the slope didn't turn sheer for another five thousand
feet--and could then just follow the ridge around and site himself
above the ranch house. Again, the drifting snow could make it
difficult, but he knew that on promontories, the snow doesn't drift or
collect; in fact, that way might be easy too. He calculated the trip
would take about six or seven hours; plenty of time to set up, lase the
range, and get to his soft target in the morning, when the sun was due
to break through. Then he could fall back, continue around McCaleb
toward Massacre Mountain deeper into the Lost River Range, call in his
helicopter, and be in another state by noon, leaving nothing but an
empty motel room and a truck rented under a pseudonym.
He picked up his cellular and called.
"Yes, hello," came the answer.
"Yes, I've located the target," he said, and gave them the position.
"I am moving out tonight to set up."
"Isn't it snowing, old man?"
"That's good. The snow doesn't mean a thing to me.
I've seen snow before."
"All right. What then?"
"I'll be completing the deal sometime tomorrow morning whenever the
client becomes visible. The husband isn't around. She'll be the one
whose arm is in the cast. I'll execute cleanly, then fall back through
the mountains about two miles and scale a foothill between McCaleb and
Massacre. You have the map? You are following me?"
476 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Yes, we have it."
"Your helicopter pilot can navigate to that point?"
"Of course. If the sun is out, he'll have no problem."
"I'll call when the deal is closed. He'll be flying from .. . ?"
"You don't need to know, old man. He's relocated close to your area.
We're in contact with him."
"Yes, I'll call when I reach the area of the pickup.
When I see him, I'll pop smoke. I have smoke. He can come in and take
me out--and then it's done."
"And then it's done, yes."
The working party met at 2330 with the best available intelligence. It
felt so familiar, like a battalion operations meeting: stern men with
dim but focused personalities, a sense of hierarchy and urgency, the
maps on the wall, too many Styrofoam cups of coffee on the table. It
reminded Bob of a similar meeting twenty-six years earlier, where the
CIA and Air Force and S-2 Brophy and CO Feamster had met with him and
Donny as they mapped their plans to nail Solaratov then.
"All right," said the map expert, "assuming he's located somewhere in
the greater Mackay area and the roads are closed and he's going to go
in overland, it's actually well within an experienced man's range, if
he knows where he's going, he has good harsh-weather gear and he's
determined."
"What time?"
"Oh, he can make it well before light. If he finds an exposed ridge,
he won't have much snow accumulation, given a fair amount of wind. If
he gets a tailwind, it could actually help him, though we don't have
the wind tendency dope in yet. He'd almost certainly make it before
light. He could set himself up without much difficulty.
I don't know where--" "He'll be to the east," Swagger said.
"He'll want the sun behind him. He won't want any chance of the light
hitting his lens and reflecting down into the target area."
TIME TO HUNT 477
"How soon can Idaho State Police or park rangers make it in?" asked
Bonson, who was running this show with glaring ferocity. He was
apparently something of a legend in these precincts, Bob could tell;
all the others deferred to him and at the same time were subtly eager
for his attention and his approval. Bob had seen it in staff briefings
a thousand times.
"Probably not till midmorning. They can't helicopter in; they can't
navigate with snow mobiles or tracked vehicles at night."
"Can't they walk in?" said Bonson.
"I mean, if Solaratov can walk, why can't they?"
"Well, sir," said the analyst, "don't forget they have a civil
emergency on their hands. They're going to have people stuck along
highways in snowdrifts for fifty miles each way, they're going to have
accidents, frostbite, wires down, messed-up communications,
hypothermia, the whole shebang of a public safety emergency. Sir, you
could call the governor and get him to divert some people;
that might work. But I don't know how it would play in--" "It doesn't
matter," said Bob.
"If he runs into cops or rangers, he'll just kill them too and go on
about his business.
It's not a problem for him. These guys have no idea what they're up
against. He can take them out, take out my wife, then escape and evade
for weeks until pickup.
That's how good he is. That's what his whole life has been about."
"Sir, with all due respect," said the young analyst, "I'd like to make
a point which I'd be more comfortable making in private. But I have to
make it here and now, so I hope Sergeant Swagger will understand that
it's not about personalities, it's about responsibilities."
"Go ahead," said Swagger.
"Speak freely. Say what has to be said."
"Well, sir," said the young analyst, "I have to think that it might be
wise to concede the Russian his mission.
We ought to be thinking about contingency plans for tak478 STEPHEN
HUNTER
ing him down on the out route. He's an incredible asset.
The information he has! Our first priority ought to be to take him
alive and absorb the casualties--" "No!" boomed Bonson, like Odin
throwing thunderbolts.
"Sergeant Swagger's wife is obviously in possession of valuable
knowledge. You'd let that go? They think she's important enough to
run this high-risk, maximum-effort mission, and you're going to let
them get her? And you're saying to Sergeant Swagger here, we're just
going to let your wife die? It's more important that we get some
information on old ops? We'll just let him do his little thing, then
we'll pick him up in the afternoon?"
"Sir, I'm trying to be realistic. I'm sorry, Sergeant Swagger. I get
paid to call them as I see them."
"I understand," said Bob.
"It ain't a problem."
"How fast could we get FBI HRT in there, or Idaho State Police SWAT?"
asked Bonson again.
"It's a no-go for stopping the shot," said the analyst.
"It just can't happen. We can't get people in there fast enough. Man,
this guy's really caught some breaks!"
Bonson turned to him.
"I am not willing to concede him his mission. I absolutely am not.
Will one of you bright young geniuses solve this problem? That also is
what you're paid for."
"I'm just thinking out loud, but you could target the sniper's likely
location with cruise missiles," someone said.
"They're very accurate. You'd have a pretty good chance of--" "No,
no," someone else said, "the cruises are low altitude slow-movers, with
not a lot of wing to give them much maneuverability. They'd never get
through the inclement weather. Plus, they have to read land forms to
navigate and we don't have time to program them. Finally, the nearest
cruises are on a nuclear missile frigate in San Diego. There's no
mission sustain ability in the time frame."
"Could we smart bomb?"
"The infrared could see through the clouds, but the
TIME TO HUNT 479
land forms in the mountains are so goddamned confusing that I don't see
how he could pinpoint the target area."
"No, but that's promising," said Bonson.
"All right, Wigler, I want you to run a feasibility study, and I mean
instantaneously."
Wigler nodded, grabbed his coffee and raced out.
It was quiet. Bob looked at his watch. Midnight. Solaratov was well
on his way. Six, maybe seven hours till daylight out there. He'd take
his shot, Julie would join Donny and Trig and Peter Farris, and
whatever secret she had would be gone forever. Maybe they could take
Solaratov alive. But that was an illusion too. He'd have an L-pill.
He was a professional. There was no way to stop him or take him. He
was going to win. Again.
Then Bob said, "There is one way."
1 he banks of the creek shielded the shallow lick of water and
Solaratov built a good rhythm as he plunged along, as if on a sidewalk
that led to the mountains. He wore nightvision goggles, which, lit the
way for him as he walked through green-tinted whiteness, following the
course of the creek bed as it wound along the flats. The wind howled;
the snow cut down diagonally, gathering quickly or swirling.
But he felt good. He wore a Gore-Tex parka over a down vest, mountain
boots, mountain pants, long underwear, a black wool knit cap. The
boots, expensive American ones by Danner, were as comfortable as any
he'd ever worn, much nicer than the old Soviet military issue. He had
a canteen, a compass, forty rounds of hand loaded ammunition, the 7mm
Remington, the Leica range finding binoculars, his night-vision
goggles, and the Glock 19 in its shoulder holster with a reloaded
fifteen-round magazine, and two other fifteen-rounders hanging under
his other shoulder. He'd improvised a snow cape from the motel room
sheets.
After two hours of steady pumping, he reached the place where the creek
bed petered out as it went under480 STEPHEN HUNTER
ground. Above him soared the lower heights of Mount McCaleb, barren
and swept with snow and light vegetation.
The mountains were too new, too arid to hold much life. He looked
upward at the hard scrabble escarpment.
Then he looked back across the flats into the center of the valley.
It was if the world had ended in snow. There was a foot of it
everywhere and it had closed down everything.
No lights, no sign of civilization or even human habitation stood
against the whiteness of the landscape and its hugeness and emptiness,
even in the green wash of the ambient light.
Solaratov had a brief moment of melancholy: this was the sniper's life,
was it not? This, always: loneliness, some mission that someone says
is important, the worst weather elements, the presence of fear, the
persistence of discomfort, the rush always of time.
He began to climb. The wind howled, the snow slashed. He climbed
through the emptiness.
I'll bet this is good," said Bonson.
"HALO," said Bob.
"HALO?" asked Bonson.
"He'd never make it," said the military analyst.
"He'd have no idea what the winds would do. The terrain is impossible;
the drop would probably kill him."
"I didn't say he," said Bob.
"I wouldn't ask another man to do it. But I'd do it."
"What the hell is HALO?" asked Bonson.
"High Altitude, Low Opening."
"It's an airborne insertion technique," said the young man.
"Highly trained airborne operators have tried it, with mixed success.
You go out very high. You fall very far. It's sort of like bungee
jumping, without the bungee.
You fall like hell, and in the last six hundred feet or so, the chute
deploys. You land hard. The point is to fall through radar. You're
falling so fast you don't make a parachute signature on radar. Most
Third World radars
TIME TO HUNT 481
can't even pick up a falling man. But I've never heard of anyone doing
it in the mountains in a blizzard at night.
The winds will play havoc all the way down; you have no idea where the
hell you'd wind up. You could be blown sideways into a face. SOG
tried it in "Nam. But it never worked there."
"I was in SOG," said Bob.
"It didn't work there because the problem was the linkup after the
drop. We never could figure out how to reassemble the team. But here
there ain't a team. There's only me."
"Sergeant, there's real low survivability on that one. I don't think
this dog hunts."
"I'm airborne qualified," said Bob.
"I did the jump course at Benning in sixty-six, when I was back from my
first tour."
"That was thirty years ago," someone pointed out.
"I've made twenty-five jumps. Now, you guys have terrific avionics for
night navigation. You got terrific computers.
You can pinpoint the drop location and you can get there easily enough
by flying above the storm. You can plot a drop point where the odds of
my landing in the appropriate area are very high. Right?"
The silence meant assent.
Then someone said, "Instead of a smart bomb, we send a smart guy."
"Here's the deal. You get me there, over the storm. I'll fall through
the blizzard. I can't chute through it, but I can cannonball through
it and my deviation won't be that bad.
I can open 'way low, to minimize wind drift, maybe as low as three
hundred feet. If you liaise up an Air Force jet and a good crew, you
can have me there in six hours. I can't think of another way to get a
counter sniper on the ground in that circumstance. When I'm on the
ground, you can triangulate me with a satellite and I can get an
accurate position and I can move overland and get there in time."
"Jesus," said Bonson.
"You owe me, Bonson."
"I suppose I do," said Bonson.
482 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Sergeant Swagger, there's not one man in a hundred who could survive
that."
"I been there before, sonny," said Swagger.
"Get Air Force," said Bonson.
"Get this thing set up."
Swagger had one more thing to say.
"I need a rifle. I need a good rifle."
chapter forty-six
Go down and shoot her, he thought.
Go down now, kick in the door, kill her and be out of here before the
sun is up. It's all over then. No risk, no difficulty.
But he could not.
He stood on a ridge, about five hundred yards from the ranch house,
which was dark and hardly visible through the whirling snow. Its
lights were out and it stood in the middle of a blank, drifted field of
white. It was a classical old cowboy place from the Westerns Solaratov
had seen in the Ukraine and Bengal and Smolensk and Budapest:
two-storied, many-gabled, clap boarded with a Victorian look to it. A
wisp of smoke rose from the chimney, evidence of a dying fire.
He hunched, looked at his Brietling. It was 0550; the light would rise
in another few minutes and it would probably be light enough to shoot
by 0700, if the storm abated.
But what would bring them out? Why wouldn't they stay in there, cozy
and warm, drinking cocoa and waiting for time to pass? What would
bring them out?
The child would, the girl. She'd have to frolic in the snow. The two
women would come onto the porch and watch her. If she was as bold and
restless as he knew her to be--he'd seen her ride, after all--she'd be
up early and she'd have the whole house up.
Yet still a voice spoke to him: go down now, kill the woman, escape
deeper into the mountains and get out, go home.
But if he went down, he'd have to kill them all. There was no other
way. He'd have to shoot the child and the other woman.
Do it, he thought.
484 STEPHEN HUNTER
You have killed so many, what difference does it make?
Do it and be gone.
But he could not force himself to. That was not how his mind worked,
that was not how he had worked in the past; that, somehow, would bring
him unhappiness in the retirement that was so close and the escape from
his life.
Do it, the smart part of himself said.
Nyet, he answered in Russian. I cannot. He was tseini, which is a
very Russian term for a certain kind of personality.
It is a personality that is bold and aggressive and fearless of pain or
risk. But it is in some way one piece, or seamless: it has no other
parts, no flexibility, no other textures. He was committed to a
certain life and as stubborn in the mastering of it as a man could be;
he could not change now. It was impossible.
I cannot do it, he thought.
Instead, as he moved along the ridge, he at last located the spot he
wanted, where he could see onto the porch yet was still far enough to
the east that the sun would be behind him, and would not pick up on his
lens. He squatted, took off the Leica ranging binoculars and bounced a
laser shot off the house to read the range. It was 560 meters. Using
a 7mm Remington Magnum at a velocity of 3010 feet per second and a
175-grain Sierra Spitzer Boattail bullet developing muzzle energy of
over two thousand foot-pounds would drop about forty-five inches at
that range, a fantastic load-velocity combination, untouchable by any
.308 in the world. But he knew that to compensate, he'd still have to
hold high, that is, to aim not with the cross hair but the second
mil-dot beneath it in the reticle.
That would put him nearly dead on, though he might have to correct
laterally for windage. But it was usually calm after a blizzard, the
wind spent and gone. Remember, he cautioned himself: account for the
downward angle in your hold.
He visualized, a helpful exercise for shooters. See the woman. See
her standing there. See the second mil-dot covering her chest, how
rock steady it is, how perfect is
TIME TO HUNT 485
the range, how easy the shooting platform. Feel the trigger with the
tip of your finger, but don't think about it.
Don't think about anything. Your breathing has stopped, you've willed
your body to near-death stillness, there's no wind, you put your whole
being into that mil-dot on the chest, you don't even feel the rifle
recoil.
The bullet will reach her before the sound of it. It'll take her in
the chest, a massive, totally destructive shot-still over eighteen
hundred pounds of energy--that explodes her heart and lungs, breaks her
spine, shorts out her central nervous system. She'll feel nothing. The
secrets locked into her brain will be locked there forever.
And that's it. It's so easy, then. You fall back, about four miles,
and you call in the helicopter on the cellular.
He'll be on you in twenty minutes for evacuation. No police or civil
authority will reach this place until midafternoon at the earliest, and
you'll be far gone by that time.
He slipped down behind a rock to take himself out of the gusting wind.
He settled in to nurse himself through the coldness that lay ahead. But
it would not be a problem, he knew. He had beaten that one a long time
ago.
The dark of the plane was serene, cocoon like Swagger was geared up.
He wore jump boots, some kind of super tight jumpsuit and was
struggling to get his chute straps tightened. He was quite calm. It
was Bonson who was nervous.
"We're getting close," Bonson said.
"Altitude is thirty-six thousand feet. The computers have pinpointed a
dropping point that should put you down in the flat just northwest of
the Mackay Reservoir, about a mile or so from the location of the
house. If you carry farther you'll go into the Lost River Mountains,
see, here."
He pointed to the map, which clearly showed the Thousand Springs Valley
that ran northwest by southeast through central Idaho, cut by the Big
Lost River between the Lost River range and the White Knob Mountains.
"The chute will deploy at five hundred feet and you
486 STEPHEN HUNTER
should land softly enough. You'll just have to make it across the
flatlands under the cover of dark, get into the house, warn the
targets, and if you have to, engage him."
"If I get the shot, I'll take it."
"That's fine. Our priority here is your wife. She's the target of
this mission, so thwarting him is what counts. As soon as it's
flyable, I've got a squad of air policemen heloing in from Mountain
Home to set up a defensive perimeter, and park rangers and Idaho State
Policemen ready to go into the mountains after this guy. If you get
the shot, take it. But, man, if we could get him alive and her alive,
we'd have--" "Forget it," Swagger said.
"He's a professional. He killed two people already. He won't be taken
alive. The rest of his life in a federal prison is no life for this
guy.
He'd take the L-pill, laughing at you as he checked out."
"Maybe so," said Bonson.
Swagger finished with the parachute; it seemed okay, with the preset
altitude-sensitive deployment device.
That was the tricky part. The altitude sensor read altitude from ,a
predetermined height above sea level so that it was set to pop the
chute five hundred feet over the flatland; if he drifted into the
mountains, the chute might not pop at all before he hit some gigantic
vertical chunk of planet. The Air Force people had explained this to
him, and told him that, more than anything, was why this was so
foolhardy. The computers could read the wind tendencies, compute his
weight, the math of his acceleration, add in the C-130's airspeed and
determine a spot where the trajectory would be right, navigate the bird
to that spot and tell him when it was time to go. But the jump
wouldn't be in a computer, it would be in the real world, unpredictable
and unknowable; a gust of tailwind, some tiny imperfection, and he'd be
dead and what good would that do?
The plane was making about 320 miles an hour, after a government Lear
jet had zoomed them from Andrews to Mountain Home in less than five
hours, during which time
TIME TO HUNT 487
he and Bonson had been on the radio with various experts trying to work
out the details.
They landed at Mountain Home and were airborne again in ten minutes.
Bob checked his electronics and other gear, all secured in a jump bag
that was tethered to his ankle. In it, a cold weather arctic-pattern
camouflaged Gore-Tex parka and leggings had been folded. He also had a
new Motorola radio, MTX-810 Dual Mode portable, with microprocessor and
digitized, a tenth the weight of the old PRC-77 and with three times
the range, which would keep him in contact with a network; it was
linked to his belt, and secured to his head by a throat mike,
sound-sensitive, so all he had to do was talk and he was on the net. He
also had a Magellan uplink device to read the Global Positioning System
satellites, which orbited overhead broadcasting a mesh of
ultra-accurate signals, similarly digitized and microprocessor-driven,
which could enable him to chart his position in milliseconds if he
should wander off track.
He had night-vision gear, the latest things; M912A nightvision goggles
from Litton with two 18mm Gen II Plus image-intensifier assemblies,
which provided three times the system gain of the standard AN/PVS-5A.
He had a Beretta 92 in a shoulder holster under his left arm, a 9mm
mouse gun shooting a lot (sixteen) of little cartridges not worth a
damn, but nobody had .45s anymore, goddamn their souls.
And he had a rifle.
Taken from the Agency's sterile weapons inventory, it appeared to be
some Third World assassination kit of which the rifle was but one part.
The rifle lay encased in a foam-lined aluminum case, the Remington
M40A1, Marine-issue, in .308, with its fiberglass stock, its free
floated barrel, its Unerti 10X scope. It would shoot an inch at one
hundred yards, no problem; and two boxes of Federal Premium 168-grain
Match King boat tailed hollowpoints.
488 STEPHEN HUNTER
He'd examined it closely and saw that the proprietary shooter had taped
a legend to the butt stock.
"Zeroed at 100 Yards," it said. And under that: "200 yards: 9 klicks
up; 300 yards: 12 klicks up; 400 yards: 35 klicks up; 500 yards: 53
klicks up."
"Okay," said Bonson, leaning close, "let's check commo."
"Just a goddamn second," said Bob, trying to guess the range he'd be
shooting at.
What the fuck, he thought, and started clicking, fifty three times.
"Come on, let's check commo," said Bonson again.
Clearly the tools of the trade at this basic level did not much
interest Bonson; they may even have frightened him. But there were
other devices cut into the padded foam of the case; one was an SOG
knife in a kydex sheath, a dark and deadly thing; another was leather
encased sap, just the thing for thumping sentries as you got to your
hide; and still another, so discreet in its green canvas M7 bandoleer
and therefore complete with firing device and wiring, was the M18A1
anti-personnel mine known as the Claymore, so familiar from Vietnam and
just the thing for flank security on some kind of assassination mission
outside Djakarta.
He had a moment when he wondered if he should have junked all this
shit, but as it was all going into the para pack and would be tethered
to his leg, he decided not to worry about it. He locked the case up.
"Come on," said Bonson for a third time, "let's check commo."
"We just checked commo."
"Yeah, I'm nervous. You okay?"
"I'm fine, Commander."
"Okay, I'm going to run up to the cockpit and check with the pilots."
"Got you."
He turned and walked up the big ship's dark bay to the cabin, cracked a
door and leaned in.
TIME TO HUNT 489
Back here it was dark, with a few red safety lamps lit, and the subtle
roar of the big engines chewing through air on the other side of the
fuselage. It felt very World War II, very we-jump-tonight, strangely
melodramatic.
Here I am again, he thought.
Here I go. Face some other motherfucker with a rifle.
Been here before.
But he did not feel lucky tonight. He felt scared, tense, rattled,
keeping it hidden only because poor Bonson was so much more rattled.
He looked at the end of the bay, where the big ramp was cranked up. In
a few minutes, it would yawn open into a platform and he would get a
signal and he would step out, and gravity would take him. He'd fall
for two minutes. Maybe the chute would work and maybe it wouldn't. He
wouldn't know until it happened.
He tried to exile his feelings. If you get mad, you get excited, you
get careless, you get dead. Don't think about all that shit. You just
do what has to be done, calmly, professionally, with a commitment to
mission and survival.
Don't think about the other man. It's what has to be done. It's the
only thing that makes sense.
He tried not to think of Julie or of the man who'd come across time and
space to kill her for what she didn't even know she knew. He tried not
to think of his ancient enemy and all the things that had been taken
from him by the man. He tried not to think of larger meanings, of the
geopolitics of it all, of the systems opposed to each other, and
himself and the other, as mere surrogates. He exiled all that.
"Sarge?"
He turned; it was a young air crewman, a tech sarge who looked about
fifteen.
"Yeah?"
"You got your parachute on upside down."
"Oh, Christ," said Bob.
"You haven't been to jump school, have you?"
490 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Saw a guy parachute in a movie once. Ain't it the same thing?"
The kid smiled.
"Not quite. Here, let me help you."
It took just a few seconds for the young NCO to have him geared up
correctly.
Yeah, that made sense. It felt much better; now it fit right, it was
okay.
"You need oxygen, too, you know. There's no air to breathe this
high."
"Yeah, they told me."
The kid had a helmet for him, a jet pilot thing with a plastic face
shield, an oxygen mask and a small green tank. The tank was yet
another weight on the belt over his jumpsuit, and the tube ran up to
the helmet, which fit close around his skull and supported it in
plastic webbing.
"I feel like a goddamned astronaut," Swagger said.
It was nearly time.
Bonson came back.
Behind them, with a shriek of frigid wind, the ramp door of the
Hercules opened. It settled downward with an electrical grind, and
outside the dark sky swirled by.
Bonson hooked himself up to a guy wire so he wouldn't be sucked out.
The tech sarge gave Bob a last go-round, pronounced him fit and wished
him well. With the ramp down, there was no oxygen and so they were all
on oxygen. He felt the gush of air into his lungs from the clammy
rubber mask around his mouth, under the face plate. He tasted
rubber.
Bob and Bonson edged down the walkway to the yawning rear of the
aircraft. The wind rose, howled and buffeted them; the temperature
dropped. Bob felt the straps of the chute, the weight of the jump bag
tethered to his ankle, the warmth of the jump helmet. Outside he could
see nothingness with a sense of commotion.
"You cool?" said Bonson over the radio.
Bob nodded. He was too old for this. He felt weighed
TIME TO HUNT 491
down with the rifle, the optics gear, the boots, the helmet, the
parachute, all of it too much, all of it pulling on him.
"You got it? You just cannonball when you go out. You fall, you fall,
you fall, then the thing opens up automatically.
You can stabilize with the risers on the left or the right of the
chute. I don't need to tell you. You've done it before."
Again, Bob nodded, as Bonson went ahead nervously into his own
microphone.
"No problem. You get there, you save the women, you'll be all right.
And we get Solaratov, no problem.
We've got it all set up. As soon as the weather breaks, another team
goes in; it's all taken care of."
Another nod.
"Okay, they're saying thirty seconds now."
"Let's go."
Bob moved slowly toward the gap in the rear of the plane. There was no
sense of anything; just blackness beyond the ramp.
"Okay, get ready," said Bonson.
Bob paused in the buffeting torrent of black air. He was scared.
"Go!" said Bonson, and Bob stepped forward and off, into
nothingness.
-Nikki awoke early, before first light. It was a habit she could not
break, partially because of her own pulsating energies but also because
she had for so long awakened then to feed the horses.
Today, there were no horses to feed, but there was a whole new world of
snow to explore.
She threw a bathrobe on over her pajamas and stepped into her moccasins
and went downstairs. The fire was sleepy, so she threw a log onto it,
and amid a spray of sparks, it began to stir to life. Then she went to
the doorway, cracked it open. A wintry blast howled through, and yes,
it was still snowing, but not as hard. She got the door
492 STEPHEN HUNTER
open and crept out on the porch, pulling her bathrobe tight.
The world was lost in snow. Its natural shapes were blurred and
softened. It was everywhere; on the fences, drifting over them; in
strange hills that had been bushes;
mounded on the roof of the barn and on the woodpile.
She had never seen so much snow in her life.
The children who had once lived here had a sled; she'd seen it in the
barn. She knew where she'd go, too. Off to the left, not too far,
there was a slope, not a steep one but just enough to get up some good
momentum.
She looked through the darkness to the mountains of the east, invisible
in the slanting, falling snow. But she could feel a change coming
somehow. She couldn't wait for daylight. She couldn't wait!
Solaratov watched the child through his night-vision goggles, a far-off
figure in a field of green in the bottom of the aquarium that was the
world of electronically amplified ambient light. Excited by the
temptations of snow, she'd come early and stood, outside on the porch,
a little green blob. Then she reached down and cupped a clutch of snow
into a neat little ball, and threw it out into the yard.
The waiting was at last over. He pushed up the NV goggles, and took up
the Leica range finder. He put the ranging dot on her and pressed the
button, sending an invisible spurt of laser out to bounce off her and
back, trailing its logo of data. Five hundred fifty-seven, it said in
the display superimposed on the right of the image.
Five hundred fifty-seven meters. He thought for a second, computing
drift and drop, and then lifted the rifle to place the mil-dot beneath
the crosshairs on her. It felt obscene to target a child like this,
but he had to familiarize himself with the sensations.
The dot blotted out her heroic little chest. His muscles, though
stiff, remained hard, and he locked the rifle under a bridge of bone to
the earth, and held the dot
TIME TO HUNT 493
there with the professional shooter's discipline. No wobble, no
tremble, nothing to betray fear or doubt. His finger touched the
trigger. Were he to will it, four and a half pounds of pressure and
she would leave the earth forever.
He put the rifle down, glad that he still had energy.
Clearly now, it was just a matter of time.
He knew something was wrong immediately.
Instead of curling his body into a cannonball, he flailed, feeling
panic and fear. He had never fallen before, and the sense of no
control completely stunned him. It was no question of courage, just
his limbic system; he was suddenly unmanned by the sense of utter
helplessness.
The wind hammered at him like fists; his body planed and fluttered and
he tried to bring his ankles up to his wrists but he could get nothing
to work against the power of the air rushing up at him at hundreds of
miles an hour.
He screamed but there was no sound, because he screamed into an oxygen
mask. But it was a scream, nevertheless, mad and ripped from his lungs
like a physical thing, like an animal. He heard it rattling around in
his helmet.
He had never screamed before in a hundred or a thousand fights. He had
never screamed at Parris Island or any of the places where he'd had to
kill or die. He had never screamed on the nights before action, in
contemplation of what might happen on the next day, and he never
screamed the day after, in contemplation of the horrors that he had
seen or caused or had just missed him. He'd never screamed in grief or
rage.
He screamed.
The scream was pure fury boiling out of his soul, unstoppable but lost
in the hugeness of the air pressure.
He fell through darkness, feeling lost and powerless and, above all,
vulnerable.
Don't let me die, he thought, all commitment to mission, all dedication
to justice, all sense of fatherhood gone. He fell screaming in
complete treason to everything
494 STEPHEN HUNTER
he thought he believed in, his arms clawing at the air, his legs
pumping, the sense of weightlessness almost rendering him useless.
Don't let me die, he thought, feeling tears on his face under the
Plexiglas of the helmet, gasping for breath. Please don't let-The
parachute shuddered open with a bang; he could simply sense it mutating
strangely on his back, and the next split second, he was slammed into
something that felt like a wall but was only air as the chute filled
and grabbed him from doom. He could see nothing in the blackness, but
he knew the ground was close and then, far before it should have
happened, he whacked into it and felt his head fill with stars and
concussion and confusion, as his body went hard against the ground. He
staggered to his feet, trying to find the release lever for the chute
in case it filled with air and pulled him away. He could not; it
puffed and began to drag him, and the Plexiglas before him splintered;
his face began to sting and bleed. His arm was numb. The equipment
bag banged over the rocks as he slid along and seemed to rack his leg a
couple of extra inches. He clawed at the harness, and then it popped
open and the harness somehow rid itself of him, as if he were unwanted
baggage, and deposited him in the snow as it went its merry way.
Oh, Christ, he thought, blinking, feeling pain everywhere.
He looked around and saw nothing at all recognizable.
He struggled to pop off his helmet, and felt just a second's worth of
air until the air turned frozen. He pulled a white watch cap from his
pocket and yanked a snow mask down from its folds. He pulled the
equipment bag over, opened it and got the parka and the leggings on.
The warmth comforted him. Then he yanked out the night-vision goggles,
fiddled for the switch and looked around.
Oh, Christ, he thought.
Nothing was as it seemed. He was on a slope, not a
TIME TO HUNT 495
flat; there was no ranch house ahead because in the most obvious
possible way there was no ahead.
There was only down, barren and remote.
He was way up.
He was lost in the mountains.
chapter forty-seven
Julie was dreaming. In the dream she and Bob and Donny were at a
picnic somewhere in the green mountains by a lake. It felt very real,
but was still clearly a dream. Everybody was so happy, much happier
than they'd ever been in their conscious lives. Bob and Donny were
drinking beer and laughing. Her father was there, too, and Bob's
father, Earl, who'd been killed way back in 1955, and she was cooking
hamburgers on a grill and all the men were drinking beer and laughing
and tossing a ball around and flirting with Nikki.
Maybe it wasn't a dream. Maybe it had begun as a dream, something spun
out of her subconscious, but now she was aware that she was controlling
it, and somehow trying to keep it alive, to make it last longer as she
hung in a gray zone just between wakefulness and sleep. Peter was
there too. Earnest, decent, dedicated Peter Farris, who'd loved her
so, his ardency poignant. He looked strange because Bob and Donny were
so Marine-straight with their short, neat hair and Peter was the
complete hippie, with a splotchy purple tie-dyed T-shirt, a headband,
his hair a mess, a sad little Jesus beard. Peter's feelings got very
hurt because he felt so powerless next to the two stronger men, and
that somehow made him more poignant.
He loved her so! Donny apologized, because it wasn't in him to hurt
anybody's feelings. Bob was just watching them, Mr. Southern Cracker
Alpha Male, amused by their silly youthfulness, and his dad and her dad
were having a good laugh, though what a state trooper and a heart
surgeon, one dead in 1955, the other in 1983, would have had to talk
about was anybody's guess.
And there was someone else.
He was by himself, a graceful young man, also amused
TIME TO HUNT 497
by the manhood convention here on the shores of the Gitche Gumee or
wherever it was, and it took her a while to figure out who he was, and
then at last she knew it was Trig.
She'd seen him twice, no, three times. She'd seen him that night when
Peter had dragged her to that party in Georgetown and he lived in that
funny little place with all the bird paintings, and she'd seen him when
he'd driven Donny out in the red Triumph to find her at West Potomac
Park just before the last big May Day demonstration, and she saw him
again, three nights later, at the farm in Germantown, where he and that
Irishman were loading bags of fertilizer into the truck.
Trig: another of the lost boys of the Vietnam War. All of them were
linked in some terrible chain, forever changed, forever mutilated.
Nobody ever came back from that one. No one got home free. Donny,
dead on DEROS. Peter, smashed, somehow, and found with a broken spine
months later. Trig, blown to pieces in Madison, Wisconsin. And Bob,
the only survivor but maybe the most hurting of them all, with his
black-dog moods and his lost years and his self-hatred and his need to
test himself against gunfire again and again and again, as if to
finally earn the death he yearned for so intently and join his friends.
Death or DEROS: which would come to Bob Lee Swagger first?
"Mommy?" her daughter asked her.
"Oh, honey," she said, but it was not in the dream, it was here in the
dark, warm bedroom.
Julie blinked and came out of it. No, it wasn't a dream.
It couldn't have been a dream. It was too real to be a dream.
"Mommy, please, I want to go ride the sled."
"Oh, Lord, honey, it's--" "Please, Mommy."
She turned and looked at the clock. It was close to seven. Outside,
just the faintest hint of light pressed through the margins of the
shade.
498 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Oh, baby," she said, "it's so early. The snow's going to be around
for a long, long time."
The deep ache in her body was there and the awkwardness conferred by
the arm cast. She hadn't taken a painkiller since last night, halfway
through Singin' in the Rain when her baby girl had fallen asleep on her
lap.
"Please, Mommy. I'll go get Aunt Sally."
"Don't you dare wake Aunt Sally. God bless her, she's earned her
escape from the Swaggers and all their problems.
I'll get up, baby. Just give me a moment or two."
"Yes, Mommy. I'll go get dressed."
The child ran out.
So early, thought Julie. So damned early.
He tried the GPS receiver. Nothing happened. Eventually it lit up but
the LCD produced a rattle of red digitized gibberish. Evidently it had
banged too hard when the bag hit the ground and was out of whack. He
turned on the radio, and heard through his earphones, "Bob One, Bob
One, where are you, we have lost contact; goddammit, Swagger, where are
you?"
He spoke: "Bob Control, this is Bob One, do you copy?"
"Bob One, Bob One, we have lost contact. Bob One, where are you?"
"Do you copy, Bob Control, do you copy? I am sending, does anybody
hear me?"
"Bob One, Bob One, please notify control, we have lost contact."
Shit!
He ripped the thing off and threw it in the snow. The next thing to
check was the rifle. He opened the case, gave it a once-over, saw that
it seemed okay, but he doubted it. The same harsh impact that had
screwed the electronics might have knocked the scope out of zero. There
was no way to know except in the shooting. He couldn't shoot now so
there wasn't a thing to do except hope that Unerti
TIME TO HUNT 499
built the scope real nice and tight and that it would stand up where
the other stuff didn't.
He stood. Pain rocked him, and he had a flash where he thought he
might lose it, faint, and die under the snow.
They'd find him next year. It would be in all the newspapers.
Fuck me if I can't take a joke, he thought.
He looked about. In one direction lay only an endless sea of snowy
mountains. That couldn't be the way, and by God, yes, beyond the
mountains at the horizon was just the faintest smear of light,
signifying the east.
He appeared to be on the highest one. He knew the overflight went on a
northwest-southeast access, aiming to put him into the flats below the
mountains and the ranch.
If he had overshot his mark, the deviation was longitudinal, not
latitudinal; that would put him on Mount Me Caleb theoretically on its
northwest slope. Down below, say six thousand feet, that would be
where the ranch was.
He couldn't see; the valley in that direction was lost in a strata of
cloud, which closed it off like a lost world. He could see only peaks
across a gap that he took to be a valley.
He slung the rifle over his shoulder, checked his compass and set off
down the slope.
The land was barren, without vegetation, as if in some recent time a
nuclear bomb had cleaned out all the life.
The snow lay in undulating forms, sometimes thick and difficult, other
times surprisingly light. Twice he tripped on rocks unseen under the
smooth white crust.
Flakes still fell, stinging his eyes. But the fierce wind had died and
no snow devils whirled up to defy him. He couldn't even hear the wind.
He went downhill at an angle, almost galloping, feeling the boots bite
into the stuff, trying to find a rhythm, a balance between speed and
care.
He was breathing hard and inside his parka began to sweat. He came to
a rock outcropping and detoured around it.
Occasionally, he'd stop, flip down the night-vision 500 STEPHEN
HUNTER
goggles, and see--nothing. Ahead and below, the clouds lingered like a
solid wall, impenetrable. The goggles resolved the cloud mass as
green, only partially distinct from the green of the snow up here, and
amplified the light so much that distinctions could hardly be made, and
no valley could yet be seen through them: only an infinity of green,
cut now and then by a black scut of rock.
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,
TIME TO HUNT 501
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.
502 STEPHEN HUNTER
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
TIME TO HUNT 503
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?
504 STEPHEN HUNTER
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, particularly 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,
TIME TO HUNT 505
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
506 STEPHEN HUNTER
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 TIME TO HUNT 507
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.
508 STEPHEN HUNTER
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,
510 STEPHEN HUNTER
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.
"Nikki! Get in here! Now!" she screamed.
The little girl turned, paused in confusion, and then there was another
one, like the snap of a whip, and Nikki ran toward her. Both
recognized it from the time they'd been shot at so recently.
"Come on, come on!" yelled Julie, and she grabbed her daughter, pulled
her into the house, locked the door.
She heard another shot, from a different location; an answering shot.
Men were trying to kill each other nearby.
"Get downstairs," she said to her daughter.
"Now!
And don't come up, no matter what, until you hear the police."
TIME TO HUNT 511
The girl ran into the cellar. Julie grabbed a phone, and found at once
there was no dial tone. It was dead.
She looked outside and could see nothing except the hugeness of the
snow, now lightening as full dawn approached.
She heard no more shots.
She ran upstairs, and found Sally groggily wandering down the hall.
"Did you--?"
"Someone's shooting," Julie yelled.
"Jesus," Sally said.
"Did you call the police?"
"The line's down or dead or something."
"Who--?"
"I don't know. There's two of them. Come on, we have to get into the
basement."
The two women ran down the stairs, found the door into the cellar and
descended into near darkness.
The cellar windows had been snowed in and only diffuse light showed
through them. It was cold.
"Mommy," said Nikki.
"I'm scared."
"I'm scared too," said Julie.
"I wish Daddy was here."
"I do too," said Julie.
"Now, you get in the corner," said Sally.
"I'll figure out some way to block the door, just in case. I'm sure
it's just hunters or something."
"No," said Julie.
"They were shooting at each other.
They're not hunters. They're snipers."
"I wish Daddy were here," said Nikki again.
Snow showered across Solaratov and his mind came out of its deep pool
of concentration to recognize the familiar cloud of debris a
high-velocity round delivers when it strikes, and the next split second
the whip song of the rifle crack reached him as it shattered the sound
barrier.
Under fire.
The left.
The left.
Another detonation spewed snow into the sky.
512 STEPHEN HUNTER
Under fire.
He tore himself from the scope, looked to the left to see nothing,
because of the shielding rock. But he knew from the sound that the man
had to be on the rim of the ridge.
He looked back into the valley to just catch the little girl as she
dipped under the porch roof, and in another split second heard the door
slam.
Damn!
They were gone.
Who was shooting at him?
He realized now he was invisible to the shooter, else he'd be dead. The
shooter could not see him behind his rock.
He knew too the man now had the rock zeroed, knowing full well that
Solaratov would have to come around it to return fire.
He felt no fear. He felt no curiosity. He felt no disappointment, he
felt no surprise. His mind did not work that way. Only: Problem?
Process. And, solution!
Instead of rising to come around the rock, he backed, low as a lizard,
through the snow, trusting that the man's scope would be so powerful
that its field of view would be narrow and that the whiteness of his
camouflage would also shield him from recognition.
He squirmed backward as low in the snow as a man could be, sliding
through the stuff as if he were some kind of arctic snake. He canted
his head as he backed, and as he slid out from behind the rock, he saw
his antagonist, a disturbance ever so slight along the line of the
ridge that could only be a man hunched over a rifle, desperately
looking for a target. He studied and was sure he saw it move or squirm
or something.
What was the distance? He pivoted on the ground, finding a good angle
to the target, splaying his legs, coming into that good, solid prone.
Adductor magnus. In the scope, yes, a man, possibly. In white.
Another sniper. Low on the ridge. He watched his crosshairs settle,
telling him TIME TO HUNT 513
self not to hurry, not to rush, not to jerk. He couldn't get a clear
sight picture and he didn't have time to shoot a laser at the target to
get its distance. He pivoted slightly, found a bush coned in snow,
which he took to be of three feet girth. By covering it in the scope
with mil-dots and racking through the math--the black mass covered two
dots; multiply the assumed one meter in height by one thousand and
divide by two to get the approximation of a thousand yards: say, less
than a thousand but more than nine hundred yards he held four dots
high. With greater concentration and less art, he steadied himself,
pivoted to find the disturbance that had to be the man but was not
really clear, felt his finger on the trigger but did not think about
it, and let it decide itself, as if it had a brain, what to do next,
and then it fired.
A geyser of snow erupted seven feet to the right of Bob, followed by
the whip-crack of sound. Windage. The Russian had the range but there
was some crosswind and the 7mm hadn't quite the weight to stand up to
it. It had drifted ever so slightly. But how could Solaratov have
read wind if he were shooting across the raw space of the valley? He
wouldn't make that mistake again.
But quickly he'd understand that, cock again and shoot.
Bob squirmed back, feeling himself sliding a little off the edge of the
ridge, and in the next split second, another eruption blew a hole in
the surface of the planet, a big spout of flung snow and rock frags. It
hit exactly where he'd been but just barely was no longer.
Oh, this motherfucker is so good. This motherfucker won't make another
mistake.
Bob slid back farther.
No shots had gone toward the house. For a little while, at least, his
wife was safe. He knew she'd have the sense to head to the cellar with
Nikki and Sally and lock up and wait.
Meanwhile he had but one choice. That was to low514 STEPHEN HUNTER
crawl along the ridge and hope that its tiny incline was enough to
shield him from Solaratov's vision. Solaratov would realize he
couldn't go up or down, he'd never go toward him; he could only fall
back around the mountain until he disappeared around it, and could then
get up and move to cover and set up an ambush. Solaratov would go up;
elevation was power in this engagement. Whoever reigned on high,
reigned, because he'd have the angle into a target where the other man
would have nothing.
That was the plan: to get out of this area of dangerous vulnerability,
move like hell when safe and find a good hide. Solaratov would have to
come around the mountain to get him, but he'd come around high. Bob
knew he'd get a good shot, maybe only one, but he knew he could make
it.
He tried to calculate the differences between his .308 168-grain round
and the Russian's 7mm Remington Magnum.
The Magnum flew four hundred feet per second faster with almost a
thousand pounds more muzzle energy;
it shot so much flatter. The Russian, if he were under five hundred
yards, could hold just a bit over him and pull the trigger, not
worrying about drop. So he'd have to stay at least five hundred yards
ahead, because the slight drop, plus the windage, would be his best
defense.
He turned back, squirmed to the lip of the ridge, but could see nothing
except the quiet house far below and the ridgeline running around the
base of the mountain.
But he was coming. The Russian was coming. The Russian was hunting
him.
Solaratov studied the situation. He looked across the horseshoe
through his Leica binoculars at the ridge where he'd spotted the other
shooter and understood the man couldn't go up or down, for both would
expose him and he'd be dead in a second. He could only crawl
desperately away, round the flank of the mountain, and try and set up
in the mountain's next cove, waiting for a shot.
He shot a laser over and the readout told him the
TIME TO HUNT 515
range was about 987 meters. He calculated the drop to be about
forty-two inches from his five hundred-yard zero, which was four dots
high on the mil-dot reticle. Now that he'd solved the distance, he
felt confident. But there was one other thing left to do.
He pulled the rifle down, and quickly unscrewed the BOSS nozzle, which
controlled barrel vibrations. He reached inside his jacket and removed
an AWC suppressor.
It was a long black tube of anodized aluminum packed with "baffles,"
sound-absorbent material, like steel wool, and washers called "wipes";
it would reduce the 460-dB level of the gas exploding out of his muzzle
by trapping it and bleeding it off, down to under a hundred db's,
approximately the sound of a BB gun. From long distance, in the cone
of the suppressor's pattern, that sound would be not merely
significantly quieter but also more diffuse. There'd be no signature
to reveal his position.
Anyone on the receiving end would hear only the crack of the bullet as
it broke the sound barrier, but nothing from the rifle's muzzle that
could pinpoint a location.
That meant he could shoot at his antagonist but his antagonist could
not locate him by sound to shoot back. The downside: it changed his
zero somewhat. How much?
He'd have to reckon visually and make adjustments as he fired. He
still felt that with the range finder, the suppressor gave him
significant tactical advantage. He carefully screwed the suppressor
tight to the muzzle.
He knew one other thing, because he had studied the topographical maps:
that once his antagonist got around the mountain, he would be in for a
surprise. The elevation was much steeper. There were no ridges as
there were here fronting the valley. He'd have no place to hide. He'd
be in the open.
Solaratov knew the wise move would be to scamper upward to gain further
advantage of height. As he had the initiative at this point, he
probably had a good four- or five-minute window of time where he could
ascend, slide
516 STEPHEN HUNTER
over one of the lesser hills of Mount McCaleb, and then shoot down upon
his antagonist.
But he also knew that is exactly how the man's mind would work; that's
how he'd figure it and he himself, once under shelter, would ascend
quickly to try and prevent the Russian from gaining the height
advantage.
But none of this mattered. The objective was the woman. The higher
Solaratov got, the farther from the woman he got. It wasn't about some
man-on-man thing, some sniper duel, some engagement of vanity. That
was his advantage. The other man--it had to be Swagger-meant nothing
to him. Solaratov's ego was uninvested;
what had happened all those years back in Vietnam was totally
disconnected from today, and that itself was a significant advantage.
Thus Solaratov made his plan: he would drop back a few yards behind the
shield of an enfilade and then descend in freedom to the valley floor.
He'd have a dangerous period of vulnerability as he went across the
valley floor, but with his snow skills and his understanding of the
other man's fear, he knew the other man would be busy setting up a hide
in the next fold for a man he thought would ascend to fight.
Instead, the Russian would work from the ground and shoot uphill. He'd
find cover in a treeline or behind rocks, he'd scope the distance, and
he'd put his silent shots onto the antagonist, precise and perfect.
Swagger would not even know where the shots came from. He'd hear
nothing. He'd be driven back until he was out of cover, and then he'd
die.
Then, thought Solaratov, I'll backtrack, get into the house and do the
women. Witnesses. I'll have to kill them all.
Bob squirmed in a last desperate burst of energy and came around the
mountain. There is no lower or more degrading mode of transportation
than the low crawl, and he had crawled enough in his time. His elbows
and knees
TIME TO HUNT 517
ached from the endless banging against the rock. Snow had gotten into
his mouth and down his neck. Now at last:
some kind of safety.
He paused, breathing hard, feeling wet with sweat. At least Solaratov
had not gotten above him to fire down on him as he crawled.
His mouth was dry, his body heaved for oxygen that he could not
replenish fast enough. His heart hammered like a drum beaten by a
madman. His focus rolled in and out.
But with a surge of will, he settled down. He pulled himself up the
mountain and peeked back over some rocks at the valley he'd left
behind.
Nothing.
No sign of Solaratov. The house lay undisturbed far below, in a huge
field of undisturbed snow. The rock along the ridgeline where the
Russian had set up now appeared deserted.
Bob picked up the rifle and used its scope to scan the mountain above.
If he were Solaratov, that's what he would have done: climbed, worked
around, always trying to get the elevation.
But he saw nothing; there was no snow in the air, no sign of
disturbance. Putting the scope down, he tried to will himself into a
kind of blankness, by which his subconscious, peripheral vision might
note something his front on focused eyes might not, and send him a
signal of warning. But he saw nothing; no movement registered on the
slopes before him or the flatness beneath. He drew back.
Had Solaratov gone low, tried to get to the house and finish the job?
Doubtful; he'd be exposed too long, and at any moment a shot could take
him. He rethought it: yes, he has to come after me. His first
priority is to eliminate the threat, because he is not on a kamikaze
mission, he's no zealot. He's a professional. It only makes sense for
him if he can escape; that means he's got an escape route, a fallback
route, everything.
He will come.
518 STEPHEN HUNTER
He will hunt me.
Bob looked up. The slope of the mountain increased until it
disappeared into fog, which was really cloud. Solaratov would get up
there, come down by some magic and shoot down upon him.
He backed around, looking for a place to set up a hide.
The news was not good.
The ridge on which he perched, like a shelf that traced the jagged
contours of the mountain, gave out 250 yards ahead; or, rather, it ran
into a ravine, where a gash had been cut in the mountain, a long,
ragged scar left by some ancient natural cataclysm. Now it was full of
vegetation and rocks, all pristine with snow. But beyond the gap,
there was nothing. The mountain slope was smooth and bare, offering no
protection at all.
He looked up. It was too steep to climb at this point, though maybe
beyond the gap he could engineer some elevation.
He looked down into a sector of valley. The floor was covered with
snow-humped trees and brush, all bent into extravagant postures and
made smooth under the weight of their white burden. It was a sculpture
garden, a winter wonderland, a theme park, beautiful and grotesque and
delicate at once, the frail tracery of the lesser branches all bearing
their inch of white stuff. It looked quite poetic from six hundred
yards up, but if you got caught down there, you'd never be able to move
out.
There was really no choice. He had to get to the gash and take up a
position in the rocks. He'd get one good shot at Solaratov, who would
probably work his way down from above. Solaratov would have the
advantage of elevation, but he wouldn't know where to look. He'd have
to scout and he'd have to expose himself when he looked.
That's when I get him, Bob thought, wishing he believed it.
Then he noticed: it had begun to snow. Flakes cascaded down again,
fluting and canting in the wind, a screen of them, dense and
unyielding.
TIME TO HUNT 519
Visibility closed in.
Bob didn't like this a bit.
It was snowing. Solaratov, breathing hard, found a trail inside the
scruffy vegetation that edged the mountain, where the overhanging
leaves had cut down on snow accumulation.
He almost ran, skirting the flat of the valley, staying off its
exposure, staying away from the house for now. He knew that Bob could
not see him from any elevation, through the snow-bearing branches. He
probably wouldn't even look in the right direction.
Solaratov came around a curve of the valley, edged to the treeline and
went hunched behind a fallen log that was somehow suspended by its
branches. The snow fell gently around him out of the gray light. There
was no sound at all in the world.
He read the land, looking for natural hides where an experienced man
would go to ground. It was not a difficult problem, for the
mountainside was largely featureless there, with only sparse vegetation
to distract the eye. In fact the whole little war between them had
been distilled to its most nearly abstract: two men in white in a
white, cold world in white mountains of extreme elevation, hunting each
other, going for whatever little edge of experience and luck they could
find. Whoever read the problem better would win: it had nothing to do
with courage or, really, even marksmanship. It would come down to this
one thing: who was the better practitioner of the sniper's skills?
He could see a kind of gash in the mountainside ahead of him and
realized that his quarry, coming around the edge, would have no choice
but to seek refuge at its top.
He picked up his binoculars and scanned. He could see nothing but the
rocks under their packing of snow.
Visibility was not bad, though blurred by the falling snow.
He's up there. He's got to be.
He triggered a laser to the top of the gash, bounced it off a rock, and
read the range in the readout: 654 meters.
520 STEPHEN HUNTER
Known distance. Upward. He did the math quickly and knew where to
hold, computing in the uphill angle. He'd shoot from the center of the
third mil-dot; that would put him there, crudely but close enough. And
he felt his nearness to the mountain would shield the bullet from the
predations of the wind; it wouldn't drift laterally.
He hunted patiently, looking for target indicators, for some
implication that his prey was alive and hiding, and had not circled
behind him. The rocks were everywhere, a kind of garden of stone
humped in snow. He looked for disturbances in the snow, for sign of a
man who'd crawled, upending the crust of white. But he could not see
that for the angle.
What is his sign?
What is the sign?
Then he knew: the man's breath. It will rise like fog, maybe just a
vapor, but it will show. It has to show. He has to breathe.
It was the slightest thing. Was it really there, or an optical
illusion? But no, there it was: a slight curl through the snow, the
suggestion of atmospheric density. It could be a man's breath leaking
out as he huddled motionlessly in the rocks, awaiting his prey as he
scanned upward.
Yes, my friend. There you are, he thought, slowly picking out the
pattern of the arctic warfare camouflage, snow dappled with a little
dead brown vegetation.
The man was on his belly, nestled behind rocks, in a little collection
of them at the very top of the gash. He lay with the sniper's
professional patience, totally engaged, totally calm. Solaratov could
not see the rifle, but he saw the man.
There you are, he thought. There you are.
He again fired a laser at him: exactly 658 meters. He had the
target.
He fixed markers in his mind's eye--a stand of snow laden pines--put
the binoculars down, raised the rifle and went to the scope. Of course
it was not nearly so powerful as the binocs, and its field of vision
was much smaller. But
TIME TO HUNT 521
he found the pines, tracked down, waited, and yes, found the little
trail of vapor that marked his prey.
He settled in, looking for the target. He could see just a half an
inch of camouflaged parka above the rock, probably the upper surface of
the prone back. He settled on this target, centering it on the third
dot.
Should I fire?
I may not quite have enough of him visible to drive into the
blood-bearing inner organs. I might just wound him.
My zero might be way off.
But then: so what? I have a suppressor.
He will not know where I am shooting from.
He will have to move as I bring him under fire.
He won't know if I'm above him or below him.
He'll have to move; I can chase him across the ravine.
He'll run out of rocks. I'll have him.
He exhaled his breath, commanded his senses, felt the slow tick and
twitch of his body as he made minute corrections, waited until the
total rightness of it all fell across him.
The trigger broke, and with its odd, tiny sound, the rifle fired.
Bob lay quietly in the rocks. Above him a screen of snowy pines
shielded him somewhat but left him with a good view of the direction
he'd come. With the most discipline his body could invent, he scanned
three zones: the first was the ridge, right where it came around the
mountain;
the next was a crop of rocks perhaps sixty meters above that; and the
next was a notch in the mountain, perhaps two hundred meters up, that
swam into and out of visibility as the cloud permitted. Solaratov
would appear at one of those places as he came high around the
mountain, with the idea of shooting downward.
Methodically he moved his eyes between them, the first, the second, the
third, waiting.
Well, I did it, he tried to tell himself. I got him away
522 STEPHEN HUNTER
from my wife. In a little while they'll be here. He'll come, I'll get
my shot, it'll be over then.
But he did not feel particularly good about it all.
There was no sense of anything except unfinished business and that now,
all these years later, it was his time.
/ die today, came the message, insistent and powerful.
This is the day I die.
He'd finally run up against a man who was smarter, a better shot, had
more guts. Couldn't be many in the world, but by God, this was one.
The snow was falling more heavily now. It pirouetted downward from the
low gray sky, and as he looked back to the house, still barely visible,
he could hardly see it. It looked like it would snow for hours. That
was not good.
The longer it snowed, the longer it would take for help to arrive. He
was on his own. He, and his ancient enemy.
Where is he?
It was making him nuts.
Where is-A tremendous pain came across his back, as though someone had
stood over him and whacked him, hard, with a fireplace poker.
Bob curled in the pain and knew instantly that he'd been hit. But no
shock poured through him and took him out of his brain as it had when
he'd been hit before. Instead a powerful spasm of fury kicked through
him, and he knew in a second that he wasn't hit seriously.
He drew his legs up and at that moment the odd BEOWWWWWW!
of a bullet singing off a rock exploded just to his right, an inch
above his skull.
He's got me, he thought, listening as the crack of the bullet snapping
the sound barrier arrived.
But where was the muzzle blast?
There was no muzzle blast.
Suppressor, he thought. The motherfucker has a suppressor.
The sniper could be anywhere. Bob lay behind his rack of stones,
waiting. No other shot came. Clearly he was
TIME TO HUNT 523
completely zeroed but not quite visible enough for a good body or head
shot.
Bob was almost paralyzed. No place to run, zeroed, completely
outfoxed. Completely faked out.
He tried to run through the possibilities. Clearly Solaratov was not
at one of the three places that Bob had determined. He'd gotten around
somehow, and Bob believed him to be below, given the one shot that had
ricocheted off the stone that shielded his head. The round had struck
from downslope. If Solaratov were above him, it would be all over. The
Russian had out thought him by descending into the valley and was now
shooting upward.
Bob tried to remember what was down there, and recalled a little patch
of snow-packed forest. Somewhere the sniper was down there, but
without a sound signature to locate him, he was effectively
invisible.
Do something.
Sure: but what?
Move, crawl.
He has you.
If you move he kills you.
Checkmate. No moves possible. Caught in the rocks, trapped.
Then he realized that the Russian was but a few hundred yards from the
house where the undefended women hid. After he killed Bob, it would
take him five minutes to finish the job. Since it would be close-range
work, he could leave no witnesses.
It was almost over now.
The Russian could see the man cowering behind the rocks and could sense
his fear and rage and the closing in of his possibilities.
He filled with confidence. He had not fired twice but three times. The
first shot landed about four feet above his target. That was the new
zero. Swagger had not even noticed it. Quickly he dialed in the
correction, fired again.
524 STEPHEN HUNTER
He hit him! The next shot barely missed him. But he knew: he had
him!
It occurred to him to move ever so slightly, find a better shooting
position and try and drive the killing shot home. But he had such an
advantage now, why worry about it? Why move, not be able to shoot,
just when the man is so helpless, has already been hit, is presumably
leaking blood and in great pain.
The rifle rested on the tree trunk; he was comfortable behind it, sure
that he was invisible from the ridge. The reticle was steady; he knew
the range. It was merely a matter of time, of so little time.
What can he do?
He can do nothing.
Bob tried to clear the rattle from his head.
In the field, what would I do?
Call in artillery.
Call in smoke.
No artillery.
No smoke.
Throw a grenade.
No grenade.
Fire the Claymore.
No Claymore. The Claymore was in the case three thousand feet up the
mountain. He wished he had it now.
Call in a chopper.
No chopper.
Call in tactical air.
No tactical air.
But a word caught somewhere in his mind.
Smoke.
No smoke.
It would not go away.
Smoke.
You move under smoke. Under smoke he cannot see you.
There is no smoke.
TIME TO HUNT 525
Why would the word not leave his head? Why would it not go away?
Smoke.
What is smoke: gaseous chemicals producing a blur of atmospheric
disturbance.
There is no smoke.
Smoke.
There is no-But there was snow.
Snow, agitated, could hang in the air like smoke.
Plenty of snow. Snow all around.
He turned to his right to face a wall of snow. Above him, on a
precipice, more snow. The snow that had fallen silently through the
night and even now glided down from the heavens.
Solaratov loves snow. He knows snow.
But Bob saw now that above him, several hundred pounds of the stuff
rested on the branches of a pine, which had turned it into some kind of
upside-down vanilla cone. In fact, several of the trees were above
him. The snow fell and caught on them in the gray mountain light.
He could almost feel them groaning, yearning for some kind of
freedom.
He reached out with his rifle barrel but could touch none of it.
But then the plan formed in his mind.
He edged to his side, making certain to keep his body profile low
behind the rocks, so that Solaratov would not get the last shot free.
His right hand crept across the parka, unzipped it, and he reached
inside and removed the Beretta.
He steeled himself.
It was instinct shooting, unaimed fire, but his reflexes at this arcane
pistol skill had always been quite good. He threaded his other wrist
through the sling of the Remington M40, to secure it for his move.
He thumbed back the hammer. He looked at each of his targets.
He took a deep breath.
526 STEPHEN HUNTER
So do it, he thought. So do it!
[Something was happening.
A series of dry popping cracks reached Solaratov's ears, far away, but
definitely coming off the mountain.
What?
He looked hard through the scope, not daring to take it from the
trapped man. He thought he saw a flash, the flight of something small
through the air, a disturbance in the snow, and quickly came up with
the idea of an automatic pistol, but what was he doing, trying to
signal men in the area? Who could be in the area?
But in the next second his question was answered. He was shooting into
the snow-laden pines above him, striking their trunks and driving the
impact vibrations out their limbs, shooting fast so that the vibrations
accumulated in their effect, and almost astonishingly, the snow loads
of four pines yielded and slid down the mountain toward the supine man,
where they hit and exploded into a fine blast of powder, a sheet of
density that momentarily took his sight picture away from him.
Where is he?
He put the scope down because he could never find the man in the narrow
width of vision, and saw him, rolling down the mountain a good fifty
feet from the commotion he'd stirred.
Solaratov brought the rifle up fast, but couldn't find the man, he was
moving so quickly. At last he located him and saw that he had gotten a
full fifty meters down the hill.
He picked up the good moving sight picture, fired quickly, remembering
to lead on the moving target, but the bullet impacted behind the
target, kicking up a huge geyser of snow.
Of course! The range had changed subtly; he was still holding for 654
meters, and the range was probably down to six hundred or so.
TIME TO HUNT 527
By the time he figured this out, the man had come to rest in the rocks
below, and was now much better situated behind them, having picked up
some maneuverability and the position to shoot back.
Goddamn him! he thought.
With a thud he caught on something, taking his breath away. He had
come to rest in a new nest of rocks fifty meters downslope. The snow
still hung in the air, and in his desperate fall-run, it had gotten
into his parka and down his neck. But in the complete un coordination
of the moment, he made certain he was behind cover. He breathed hard.
He hurt everywhere, but felt warmth pouring down the side of his face,
and reached up to touch blood.
Had he been hit?
No: the fucking night-vision goggles, totally worthless but forgotten
in the crisis, had slipped down his head crookedly, and one strap cut a
wicked gash in his ear. The cut stung. He grabbed the things and had
an impulse to toss them away. What was the point now?
But maybe Solaratov wasn't sure where he was now, nestled behind a
slightly wider screen of rocks. He looked and saw he had a little more
room to move from rock to rock.
Maybe he could even get a shot off.
But at what?
And then he saw that the slope dropped off intensely and, worse, the
rocks had run out.
This is it, he thought.
This is as far as I go.
What did I get out of it?
Nothing.
His ear stung.
They've moved," Sally said.
"Now they're behind the house. You can hear the shots are over
there."
"Are we going to be all right?" asked Nikki.
528 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Yes, baby," Julie said, holding her daughter close.
The three were in the cellar of the house, and Sally had spent the past
few minutes jamming old chairs, trunks and boxes against the door at
the head of the steps, just in case someone came looking for them with
bad intentions.
The cellar smelled of mold and faded material, and spring floods that
had soaked everything some years back.
It was dirty and dark, only meager light coming through snow-covered
windows.
There was one other door, to the outside, one of those slanted wood
things that led down three steps to them.
Sally had piled up more impediments to that passageway, but there was
no way of really locking the doors. They could only forestall
things.
"I wish we had a gun," said Nikki.
"I wish we did too," said Sally.
"I wish Daddy was here," said Nikki.
Bob had a rare moment of visual freedom, a long, clean look into the
stunted snow-covered trees at the base of the mountain. But he could
see nothing, no movement, no hint of disturbance.
Then a bullet sang off the rock an inch beyond his face, kicking a puff
of granite spray into his eye. He fell back, stifling a yell, and felt
the telltale numbness that indicated some kind of trauma. But only for
a second;
then it lit into raw, harsh but meaningless pain, and he winced,
driving more pain into the eye.
Goddamn him!
Solaratov had seen just the faintest portion of head exposed and he was
on it that fast, putting a bullet an inch shy of the target. An inch
at six hundred-odd meters.
Could that son of a bitch shoot or what?
Swagger felt his eye puff, his lid flare, and he closed it, sensing the
throb of pain. He touched the wounded sector of his face: blood, lots
of it, from the stone spray, but nothing quite serious. He blinked,
opened the eye, and
TIME TO HUNT 529
saw hazily out of it. Not blind. Trapped but not blind, not yet.
The guy was so good.
No ranging shots; he got the range right every single time, had Bob
pinned and eyeballed.
No goddamn ranging shots.
Solaratov had an odd gift, a perfect gift for estimating distance. It
made the package complete. Some men had it, some didn't. Some could
learn it with experience, some couldn't. It was in fact the weakest
part of Swagger's own game, his ability to estimate range. It had cost
him a few shots over the years because he lacked the natural
inclination to read distances while possessing in spades all the
shooter's other natural gifts.
Donny had a gift for it; Donny could look and tell you automatically.
But Bob was so lame at it, he'd once spent a fortune on an old Barr &
Stroud naval gunfire range finder, a complex, ancient optical
instrument that with its many lenses and calibration gizmos could
eventually work the farthest unknown distance into a recognizable
quantity.
"Some day they'll make 'em real small," he remembered telling Donny at
one lost moment or other.
"Then you won't need a gofer like me," Donny had said with a laugh,
"and I can sit the next war out."
"Yes, you can," Bob had said.
"One war is enough."
An idea flirted with him. From where? From Donny?
Well, from somewhere over the long years. But it wasn't solid yet: he
just felt it beyond the screen of his consciousness, unformed, like a
little bit of as-yet-unrecognizable melody.
This guy is so good. How can he be so good?
Donny had the answer. Donny wanted to tell him.
Donny knew up in heaven or wherever he was, and Donny yearned somehow
to tell him.
Tell me! he demanded.
But Donny was silent.
And down below Solaratov waited, scoping the rocks,
530 STEPHEN HUNTER
waiting for just a bit of a sliver of a body part to show so he could
nail it, and then get on with business.
He is so good.
He made great shots.
He hit Dade Fellows dead on, he hit Julie riding at an oblique angle
flat out at over eight hundred meters, he was just the-That scene
replayed in his mind.
What was odd about it, he now saw, was how featureless it had been. A
ridge on a mountain, with a wall of rock behind it, very little
vegetation. It had been almost plain, almost abstract.
So?
So how did he range it?
There were no guidelines, no visual data, no known objects visible to
make a range estimate, only the woman on the horse getting smaller as
she got farther away on the oblique.
How did he know where to hold, when her range changed so radically
after the first shot?
He must be a genius. He must just have the gift, the ability to
somehow, by the freakish mechanics of the brain, to just know. Donny
had that. Maybe it's not so rare.
But then he knew. Or rather Donny told him, reaching across the
years.
"You idiot," Donny whispered hoarsely in his ear, "don't you see it
yet? Why he's so good? It's so obvious."
Bob knew then why the man had shot at him as he fell but missed. The
range had changed; he estimated the lead and got it slightly wrong and
just missed. But once his target was still, he knew exactly the range.
And that's how he could hit Julie. He knew exactly. He solved the
distance equation, and knew how far she was and where to hold to take
her down.
He has a range finder, Bob thought. The son of a bitch has a range
finder.
TIME TO HUNT 531
Solaratov looked at his watch. It was just past 0700. The light was
now gray approaching white, a kind of sealed-off pewter kind of
weather. The snow was falling harder and a little breeze had kicked
up, tossing and twisting the flakes, pummeling as they rotated down.
The wind got under the crack of his hood, where his flesh was sweaty,
and cut him like a scythe. A little chill ran up his spine.
How long can I wait? he wondered.
Nobody was flying in for yet another few hours, but maybe they could
get in with snowmobiles or plow the highway and get in that way.
A sudden, uncharacteristic uneasiness settled over him.
He made a list:
1.) Kill the sniper.
2.) Kill the woman.
3.) Kill the witnesses.
4.) Escape into the mountains.
5.) Contact the helo.
6.) Rendezvous.
An hour's worth of work, he thought, possibly two.
He kept on the scope, the rifle cocked, his finger riding the curve of
the trigger, his mind clear, his concentration intense.
How long can I stay at this level?
When do I have to blink, look away, yawn, piss, think of warmth, food,
a woman?
He pivoted on the fulcrum of the log, running the scope along the ridge
of rocks, looking for target indicators.
More breath? A shadow out of place? Some disturbed snow? A regular
line? A trace of movement? It would happen, it had to, for Swagger
wouldn't be content to wait. His nature would compel action and then
compel doom.
He can't see me.
532 STEPHEN HUNTER
He doesn't know where I am.
It's just a matter of time.
He tried to figure out a range finder. How do the goddamn things work?
His old Barr & Stroud was mechanical, like a surveyor's piece of
equipment, with gears and lenses. That's why it was so heavy. It was
a combination binocular and adding machine: completely impractical.
But no modern shooter would have such a device: too old, too heavy, too
delicate.
Laser. It has to work off a laser. It has to shoot a laser to an
object, measure the time and make a sure, swift calculation off of
that.
Lasers were everywhere. They used them to guide bombs, aim guns,
operate on the eye, remove tattoos, imitate fireworks. But what kind
of laser was this one?
Off the visible spectrum, since it projected no beam, no red dot.
Ultraviolet?
Infrared?
How could it be brought into the visible spectrum?
It's a kind of light. How do I see it?
One idea: light being heat, if he could get Solaratov to project it
through an ice mist, its heat would burn tracks in the snow. Then he
could shoot back down the tracks and .. .
But that was absurd. Besides involving setting up some complex linkage
of actions, any one of which could catch him a 7mm Magnum through the
lungs, he didn't even know if it would work.
Idea two: get Solaratov to shoot the laser through a piece of ice. It
would bend, and send back some faulty reading. He would over- or under
compensate miss and .. .
Insane. Unworkable.
Think! Think, Goddammit. How do I see it?
And then it occurred to him.
TIME TO HUNT 533
Would I see it on night vision? Would I see it in my goggles? Would
they register it?
He picked them up where they lay, half in, half out of the snow, slid
the harness over his skull, pulled the goggles down and snapped them
on. They yielded a green dense landscape, as if the world had ended in
water. The seas had risen. Green was everywhere. Nothing else was
clear.
How can I get him to lase me again?
He knew. He had to move one more time, change the range.
Solaratov would go to his laser range finder.
If it works, it'll be like a neon sign in the green, saying I AM THE
SNIPER.
Now something was happening.
He saw puffs of breath rising above a certain accumulation of boulders,
signifying some kind of physical exertion.
He watched and one of the rocks seemed somehow to tremble.
Is he moving the rock?
Why would he move the rock?
But in the same second, as he steadied himself, as the rock wobbled
truly erratically, seemed to pause, and then tumbled ever so
majestically forward, pulling a score of smaller rocks with it,
uncurling a shroud of snow as it fell, he knew.
He's trying to bury me, Solaratov thought.
He's trying to start an avalanche, to send tons of snow down the
mountain and bury me.
But it wasn't going to work. Avalanche snow, Solaratov knew, was old
snow, its structure eroded by melt, its moisture mostly evaporated, so
that it was dry and treacherous, a network of unsafe stresses and fault
lines. Then and only then could a single fracture cut out its
underpinnings and send it crashing down. This avalanche would never go
anywhere. The snow was too wet and new; it might fly a
534 STEPHEN HUNTER
bit, but it wouldn't build. It would peter out a few hundred yards
down.
On top of that, clearly the man didn't even know where he was. Even
now, as the rocks and their screen of snow tumbled abortively down the
hill, not picking up energy but losing it, they were on no course
toward himself, but more or less to the right about one hundred yards.
The falling snow simply could not reach him.
He almost chuckled at the futility of it, remembering that his quarry
was a jungle fighter, not a man of the mountains.
The rocks tumbled, trailing snow, but down the slope where the angle
flattened, they lost their energy and rolled to a halt.
Solaratov watched them tumble, then brought the rifle back to bear on
the original line of rocks. As he was shifting it upward, he thought
he made out a white shape sloshing desperately through the snow.
He rose above it, came back, could not quite find it and then did track
it quickly, but never quite got the fraction of line between third and
fourth mil-dots precisely on it- He saw that Swagger had moved,
literally floundering his way downhill to this new position. So? He
was a few dozen meters closer? Now he had less maneuverability.
What possible difference did it make? He had made his last mistake.
The game, Solaratov thought, is almost over.
He put down his rifle, picked up the binoculars and prepared to shoot a
laser, just to verify the distance to the new position.
Bob came to the halted rocks and hit them with a whack, but couldn't
stop to acknowledge the pain. Instead he pulled himself up, put his
head and shoulders over the top, flicked the night-vision goggles down
as he snapped them on and peered desperately into the void. He knew he
was violating every rule in U.S. Marine Corps Sniping
TIME TO HUNT 535
FMFM1-3B, which tells snipers never, ever to look over an obstacle, for
that makes you too obvious to counterfire;
no, you drop to your haunches and look around it. But he didn't have
the time.
There was no definition in the green murk, no shape, no depth, nothing
but flat, vaguely phosphorescent green.
He scanned, registered this nothingness, but was too intense to feel
much in the way of despair, even if he knew he was hung out over the
lip of the rock and that Solaratov could take him in an instant.
He waited. A second, then another, finally a third yanked by like
trains slowed by the sludgy blood his heart pumped.
Nothing.
Maybe the laser wasn't visible in the spectrum of the goggles. Who
knew of such stuff? Maybe the laser ranging device was part of some
advanced scope he knew nothing about, and it would announce itself, but
be followed in another nanosecond by close to 1,500 foot-pounds of
Remington 7mm Magnum arriving to erase him from the earth.
Maybe he's not there. Maybe he's moved, he's working his way up
another slope, he's flanked me, and now he's just taking his time.
Two more seconds dribbled by, each encapsulating a lifetime, until Bob
knew he could wait no longer, and as he began to duck back into a world
of zero possibility, here it came, at last.
The yellow streak was like a crack in the wall of the universe. It
pinged right at him from nothingness and lasted but an instant, but
there it was, a straight line as the shooter below measured the
distance to the shooter above.
Bob locked the source of the brief beam into his muscle memory and his
sense of time and space. He could not move a muscle, an atom; he could
not disturb the rigidity of his body, for it all depended on holding
that invisible point before himself in the infinity of his mind as he
536 STEPHEN HUNTER
brought the rifle up in one smooth, whipping motion and in to his
shoulder and did not move his head to find the scope but moved the
scope to that precise lock of his vision.
The scope flew before him and he saw nothing, even as his hands locked
around the pistol grip and his finger found the curve of the trigger,
caressed its delicacy, felt and loved its tension and sought to be one
with it. He felt no tension, not now: here was the rest of his life;
here was everything.
And as he flung away the goggles with a toss of his head, here was his
ancient enemy. Bob saw the sniper, swaddled behind a horizontal trunk,
his shape barely recognizable in the swirl of pewter-to-white dappling
of the snow and his arctic warfare camouflaging, only the line of the
rifle rising as it came toward Bob, hard and regular.
So many years, he thought, as he closed his focus down until he saw
only the harsh cruciform of the reticle, made a slight correction to
shoot lower to compensate for the downward angle, and then, without
willing it as the reticle became such a statement of clarity it seemed
to fill the whole universe, the trigger went and he fired.
You never hear the one that gets you.
Solaratov was on his target, racing through the excitement of knowing
that at long last he had him, but he hesitated for just a second to
compute the new range.
And then he realized that the man above was aimed-incredibly--at him.
He felt no pain, only shock.
He seemed to be in the center of an explosion. Then time stopped, he
was briefly removed from the universe, and when he was reinserted into
it, he was not an armed man with a rifle boring in on a target but a
supine man in the cold snow, amid a splatter of blood. His own breath
spurted out raggedly, white cloud and red spray sending broken signals
upward.
Someone was drunkenly playing a broken accordion or
TIME TO HUNT 537
a damaged pipe organ nearby. The music had no melody, was only a whine
with a slight edge or buzz to it. Sucking chest wound. Left side,
left lung gone, blood pouring out both exit and entrance wounds. Blood
everywhere.
Internal damage total. Death near. Death coming.
Death at last, his old friend, come to pick him up.
He blinked, disbelieving, and wondered at the alchemy by which such a
result could have been engineered.
His life flashed and fled, dissolved in a blur, went away and came
back.
He thought: I'm gone.
He wondered if he had the strength to gather the rifle, find a position
and wait for the man until he bled to death, but the man would not be
foolish.
He thought next of how the mission had redefined itself.
To kill the man who had killed him meant nothing.
There was no escape. The only option left was: failure or success.
He pulled himself up, saw the house five hundred yards away through the
snowy trees and felt he could make it. He could make it, for the
shooter would now lay low, unsure as to whether or not the sniper was
dead.
He could make it to the house, get in, and with that little Glock
pistol finish the job that had killed him.
That would be his legacy in the world: he finished the last job. He
did it. He was successful.
Finding the strength somewhere, amazed at how clear it all seemed, he
headed off, bleeding, in a winter wonderland.
Swagger lay close to the rock for a minute or so, recalling the sight
picture: the reticle, swollen in the intensity of his focus so that it
was big and bold as a fist, held low on the covering tree because you
hold low when shooting downward, so that the bullet would hit center
chest, a nice big target. But it's tricky: the rifle was zeroed for
five hundred yards, according to his shooter's instructions, but
maybe
538 STEPHEN HUNTER
the man who zeroed it held it slightly differently than he did; maybe
there was a twig, a branch slightly unresolved in the 10X power of the
scope. Maybe there was a wind he didn't feel, a sierra blowing around
the contour of the mountain.
But the sight picture was as perfect as it could be. It was held where
it should be held, and if he had to call the shot, he'd call it a
hit.
He edged around the right, squinting out. He tried to find the
shooting site of his enemy, but it was much harder to see from this
angle. Instead, he scanned back and forth in what he determined was
the proper sector, and saw nothing, no movement, no anything. He
finally found the fallen tree he was convinced had supported his enemy,
but there was no sign of him, there was no sign of disturbance in the
snow. A spot, a little farther back, could have been blood, but it was
impossible to tell. It could also have been a black stone, a broken
limb.
He lowered the rifle, slipped down the nightscope lenses and watched in
the murk for a while. It stayed green, uncut by the flick of a
laser.
Did I hit him?
Is he dead?
How much time should I give him?
A dozen scenarios instantly occurred to him. Maybe Solaratov had moved
to a fallback position. Maybe he had moved laterally. Maybe he was
even advancing on him. He might even be headed now toward the house,
certain he had Bob trapped.
That last seemed the most logical. After all, the job was to hit the
woman, not Swagger. Swagger's death had no real meaning; Julie's had
all the meaning.
And if he were seen, he'd kill witnesses too.
Bob took a deep breath.
Then he pushed himself up, scuttled down a few yards, turned angles
obliquely, dodged, jumped, found cover. He tried to make himself
difficult to hit, knowing he could not make himself impossible to
hit.
TIME TO HUNT 539
But no shot came.
From his new cover his angle was lower, so his view of the valley was
less distinct. He could only see a bit of the flatland through the
snowy trees, and could see nothing moving on it, approaching the house.
But his target would be camouflaged, moving at angles, dropping, easily
evading him.
His heart was beating rapidly. There was no breath left in his lungs.
The planet seemed scorched dry of oxygen.
He pulled himself out and moved at the assault again.
He fell twice in the snow and almost blacked out the second time. And
when he looked up, the house seemed no closer.
His mind raced; it would not stay where he put it. He thought of sight
pictures, of men going limp against reticles, of long stalks in
mountains and jungles and cities. He had hunted in them all and been
victorious in them all.
He thought of the crawl with the sandbag, the long, slow crawl outside
the American fort and the earlier moment when they had him, and then
the large black plane, like a vulture, hung in the air for just a split
second before its guns pulverized the universe.
He thought of the times he'd been hit: over the years, it amounted to
no less than twenty-two wounds, though two were blade wounds, one
inflicted by an Angolan, one by a mujahideen woman. He thought of
thirst, fear, hunger, discomfort. He thought of rifles. He thought of
the past and the future, which was running out quickly.
He rose the last time, and stumbled through the snow, which fought him.
It was not cold. The snow still fell, harder now, in swirls and
pinwheels, dancing in the wind, the heavy damp flakes of Eastern
European cities.
Where am I?
What has happened?
Why has it happened?
But then he was at the house.
All was silent.
540 STEPHEN HUNTER
He bent to the storm cellar door, pulled hard, even as he reached
inside his coat and drew out the Glock pistol.
A nail seemed to hold him back. He felt the door want to yield but
hang up. He pulled harder, finding strength somewhere in the backwash
of his mind, and with a crack, the nail gave and he pulled the door
open. It revealed three cement steps down into a dark entrance that
looked jammed with clutter.
He slid by the door and stepped down into the darkness, aware only
marginally that he had made it. He felt clear-eyed, suddenly,
recommitted to his purpose, certain of what he must do.
He kicked his way through the impediments: a sawhorse, a bicycle, bed
springs, boxes of old newspapers, and as he got through he felt the
door slam shut behind him, sealing him off in the darkness. He took
another step, kicking things aside, looking and waiting for his vision
to clear. He smelled moisture, mildew, rot, old leather and paper,
decaying material, ancient wood.
Then he could see them.
They were over against the far wall, huddled under the steps, two women
and a girl clutching each other, crying.
Swagger made it into the treeline. This is where he needed a pistol, a
short, handy, fast-firing weapon with a lot of firepower. But the
Beretta was somewhere up the mountain, buried under a ton of snow.
He carried the rifle like a submachine gun in the low assault position,
poking through the woods as he closed from the flank on the sniper's
hide.
He paused, waiting, listening. There was no sound, no sense of life at
all in the haunted place. Branches and bushes distended by heavy,
moist, fresh snow stood out in extravagant shapes like a display of
modern art. Through the gray, the snow fell, swirling.
Bob's breath rose above him, then parted. He advanced slowly. If the
sniper was here, he was well hidden, completely disciplined.
TIME TO HUNT 541
He could see the fallen tree, and then made out the disturbance in the
snow where the man had supported himself while shooting upward.
Bob slid as silently as he could on the oblique through the heavy
trees, trying to shake no snow loose, and at last came to the site,
paused a second, then stepped behind the cover to put his rifle muzzle
on the man. But nobody was there. He heard only his own harsh breath
heaving in the cold.
The blood told the story.
Solaratov had been hit bad. His rifle lay in the snow;
the ranging binoculars were there too. A raspberry sherbet marked
where he'd bled most profusely, driven to the ground by the impact of
the .308.
Got him! Bob thought, but the moment of exultation never fully
developed, for in the next seconds he read the tracks and the blood
trail and saw that the man, seriously wounded but nothing like dead,
had moved back through the trees toward the house.
At that moment he heard a bang, which could have been a shot, but it
wasn't. He turned and saw through the trees the house and a little
puff of flung snow. That helped identify the sound. It had been the
sound of a heavy cellar door closing, and when it had slammed shut, it
had vibrated free a cloud of snow.
He's in there with my family, Bob thought.
He had a rooted moment of terror. It felt like ice sliding down
through his body, smooth and unbearably cold, numbing all the organs it
brushed as it rushed through him.
But some part of his brain refused to panic, and he saw what he must
do.
He raced to pick up the Remington Magnum, for the three hundred extra
feet of velocity and the five hundred extra pounds of energy and,
throwing aside his parka, ran, ran like a fool on fire or in love, not
toward the house, which was too far, but for a good, straight-in angle
on the door.
542 STEPHEN HUNTER
1 hey heard the door creak as someone tried to pull on it.
"Oh, God," said Sally.
"Over here," instructed Julie.
She grabbed her daughter, and with the younger woman they fled to the
back of the cellar, but only as far as the brick wall. There was no
escape, for the stairwell up was jammed with junk to keep the same man
out.
They fell back and cowered when the door cracked open, then was yanked
wide, filling the dark space with light, destroying their adjusted
vision.
He lumbered wheezily down the steps, kicking the junk aside like an
enraged, drunken father home late from a night with the boys, come home
to beat his wife. It stirred something deep in Julie, a memory of
dread long buried, never examined. The cellar door slammed behind him,
and he kicked more stuff aside until he came into the center of the
room.
He blinked, waiting for his eyes to adjust, but he was everything they
could possibly fear: a muscular gray savage dressed in white, except
that a profuse smear of blood had irrigated a raggedy delta from a
source on his chest, leaking down to his trousers and his boots.
He had a gray, blunt face, a crew cut and wintry little eyes. He
smiled madly, and blood showed on his teeth. He coughed, and it
erupted from his mouth. He seemed barely conscious, seemed almost to
fall, but he stopped, caught himself and looked at them fiercely. He
was insane with pain, his eyes lit weirdly, his whole body trembling.
The gun muzzle played across them all.
She stepped out.
The killer laughed for some strange reason, and another spurt of blood
came from his mouth down to splash on his chest. His lungs were full
of blood. He was drowning in it. Why wouldn't he fall?
He lifted the pistol until it pointed into her face.
Julie heard her baby crying, heard the intake of Sally's breath and
thought of her husband and the man she'd
TIME TO HUNT 543
loved before, the only two men she could ever love. She closed her
eyes.
But he did not fire.
She opened them.
He had fallen halfway, but then he pulled himself up, and thrust the
gun at her, his eyes filling with mad determination.
Bob ran until he had a good angle into the door.
He'll stop. He has to wait for his eyes to adjust.
He saw it. The man would step into the darkness and pause as his eyes
adjusted. He'd be there, just beyond the door, for the length of time
it took his pupils to adjust.
With Solaratov, that interval would be a second or so.
He dropped to one knee, braced the rifle on his leg, found the good
shooting position. It was five hundred yards if it was an inch, but
that had to be the zero on the rifle, for Solaratov had come so close
to him so often.
Without thinking, he wrapped the sling tight about his left, supporting
arm as he slipped into a good Marine Corps position, feeling a bite of
pain from the opened wound, but leaning through it. He took three
breaths, building up his oxygen, and looked for his natural point of
aim as something in him screamed Faster! Faster! and another part
cooed Slower, slower. He laid the crosshairs dead-center on the door,
just a patch of gray wood smeared with snow, and prayed for the extra
oomph of the 7mm to do its thing.
He had one moment of clarity, and at the subliminal level willed all he
knew of shooting into the effort: the relaxation of the finger, trained
over the hard years; the discipline of the respiratory cycle, and the
rhythm of deeper and shallower exhalation; the cooperation of rods and
cones in the back wall of the eye, the orchestration of pupil, eye and
lens, and the overall guidance and wisdom of the retina; but most of
all, that deep, willed plunge into stillness, where the world is gray
and almost gone, yet at the same time sharp and clear.
544 STEPHEN HUNTER
Nothing matters, the man coached himself when things mattered most.
And then it was gone as the rifle fired, kicked against him, blowing
the sight picture to nothing but blur, and when he came back on target
he saw a mushroom of snow mist floating from the vibes where the bullet
had blasted through the wood.
1 he pistol settled down; she saw the hugeness of its bore just feet
away from her and then felt-Splatter in her face, a sense of mist or
fog suddenly filling the air, a meaty vapor.
Mixed into this sensation was a sound which was that of wood
splitting.
In it too was a grunt, almost involuntary, as if lungs gurgled, somehow
human.
She found herself wet with droplets that proved to be warm and heavy:
blood.
The sniper transfigured before her. What had been the upper quadrant
of his face had somehow been pulped, ripped open, revealing a terrible
wound of splintered bone and spurting blood. One eye looked dead as a
nickle; the other was gone in the mess. Even as these details were
fixing themselves in her memory, he fell sideways with a thump, his
head banging on the cement floor, exposing the ragged entry wound in
the corresponding rear quadrant of the skull, where the bones now
seemed broken and frail.
A single light beam came through the cellar door where the bullet had
passed.
She looked down, saw the stumpy little man fallen like a white angel
into a red pool, as his satiny blood spread ever wider from his ruined
face.
She turned to her daughter and her friend, who regarded her with mouths
agape, and horror, more than relief, registering in both their eyes.
Then she spoke with perfect deliberation:
"Daddy's home."
chapter forty-nine
He had not fired a second time because he had no more ammunition. But
in another second, the cellar door had been flung open and he
recognized Sally, leaping to signal him that it was over.
By the time Bob got to the house, three Air Force Hueys and a state
police helicopter had landed and more were on their way. Then another
Air Force job, a big Blackhawk, arrived and disgorged still more staff.
It almost looked like an advanced firebase when the war was at its
hottest, the way the choppers kept ferrying people in.
He got the news immediately: everybody was all right, though medics
were attending them. The sniper was dead.
His own wounds were tended: an emergency technician re sewed with
anesthetic, the gash in his thigh that had opened up under the pressure
of all the moving and jumping, and then picked stone and bullet
fragments out of his face and eye for half an hour, before
disinfecting, then covering the raw cuts with gauze. Nothing appeared
to have hit the eye proper; more shooter's luck.
There was little to be done about the back wound. It had penetrated
his camouflage and grazed the flesh of his back, scoring both burn and
bruise. But other than disinfectant, only time and painkillers would
make it go away.
A cop wanted to take a statement, but Bonson pulled rank and declared
the ranch a federal crime site, until corroborating FBI agents could
chopper in within the hour from Boise. In the cellar, a state police
crime team worked the body of the dead sniper, hit twice, once through
the left lung, once in the back of the head.
"Great shooting," said a cop.
"You want to take a look at your handiwork?"
But Swagger had no desire to see the fallen man. What
546 STEPHEN HUNTER
good would it do? He felt nothing except that he'd seen enough
corpses.
"I'd rather see my daughter and my wife," he said.
"Well, your wife is being treated by our medical people.
We've got to debrief her as soon as possible. Mrs.
Memphis is with Nikki."
"Can I go?"
"They're in the kitchen."
He walked through a strange house full of strangers.
People talked on radios, and computers had been set up.
A squad of uninteresting young people hung about, talking shop, clearly
agitated at the prospect of a big treat. He remembered when Agency
people were all ex-FBI men, beefy cop types, who carried Swedish Ks and
liked to talk about "pegging gooks." These boys and girls looked like
they belonged in prep school, but they sure made themselves at home,
with the instant insouciance of the young.
He walked through them, and they parted, and he could feel their
wonder. What would they make of him:
his kind of war was so far from their kind it probably made no sense.
He found Sally in the kitchen, and next to her, there was his baby
girl. These were the moments worth living for. Now he knew why he
bothered to survive Vietnam.
"Hi, baby!"
"Oh, Daddy," she said, her eyes widening with deep pleasure. He felt a
warmth in his heart so intense he might melt. His child. Through it
all, after it all, his own:
flesh, blood, brains. She flew to him and he absorbed her tininess,
felt her vitality as he picked her up and hugged her passionately.
"Oh, you sweet thing!" he sang.
"You are the sweetest thing there is."
"Oh, Daddy. They say you shot the bad man!"
He laughed.
"You never mind that. How are you? How's Mommy?"
TIME TO HUNT 547
"I'm fine, I'm fine. It was scary. He came into the basement with a
gun."
"Well, he won't bother you no nevermore, all right?"
She clung to him. Sally fixed him with her usual gimlet eye.
"Bob Swagger," she said, "you are a mean and ornery piece of work, and
you aren't much of a husband or a father, but by God, you do have a
gift for the heroic."
"I can see you're still my biggest fan, Sally," he said.
"Well, anyhow, thanks for hanging around."
"It sure was interesting. How are you?"
"My back hurts," he said.
"So does my leg and my eye.
I am plenty hungry. And there're too goddamned many young people out
there. I hate young people. How is she?"
"She's fine. We're all fine. Nobody was hurt. But only just barely.
Another tenth of a second and he would have pulled that trigger."
"Well, to hell with him if he can't take a joke."
"I'll leave you two alone."
"See if you can get one of these Harvard kids to fix some coffee."
"They probably don't do coffee, and there isn't a Starbucks around, but
I'll see what I can manage."
And so he sat with his baby daughter in the kitchen and caught up on
the news and told her about the superficiality of his wounds and made a
promise he hoped he'd now be able to keep: to return with her and her
mother to Arizona, and resume the good life they had together.
In half an hour a young man came to him.
"Mr. Swagger?"
"Yes?"
"We're going to have to debrief your wife now. She's asked that you be
present."
"All right."
"She's very insistent. She won't talk unless you're there."
548 STEPHEN HUNTER
"Sure, she's spooked."
"This way, sir."
Sally came back to take care of Nikki.
"Sweetie," he said to his daughter, "I'm going to go with these people
to talk to Mommy. You stay here with Aunt Sally."
"Daddy!"
She gave him a last hug, and he now saw how deeply she'd been
traumatized. The war had come to her: she'd seen what few Americans
ever saw anymore--combat death, the power of the bullet on flesh.
"Sweetie, I'll be back. Then this'll be over. It'll be fine, you'll
see."
They took him upstairs. The Agency team had set up in a bedroom,
pushing aside the bed and dresser and installing a sofa from the living
room and a group of chairs.
Cleverly, they weren't arranged before the sofa, as if to seat an
audience, but rather in a semicircle, as if in a group counseling
session. Tape-recording equipment had been installed, and computer
terminals.
The room was crowded and hushed, but finally, he saw her. He walked
through the milling analysts and agents, and found her, sitting alone
on the sofa. She looked composed now, though her arm was still locked
in its cast.
She'd insisted on dressing and wore some jeans and a sweatshirt and her
boots. She had a can of Diet Coke.
"Well, hello there," he said. ' "Well, hello yourself," she said with
a smile.
"You're okay, they say."
"Well, it's a little bothersome when a Russian comes into your house
and points a gun at you and then your husband blows half his head away.
I'm damn lucky to have a husband who could do such a thing."
"Oh, I'm such a big hero. Sweetie, I just pulled a trigger."
"Oh, baby."
He held her tight and it was fine: his wife; he'd slept next to her for
years now, the same strong, tough beautiTIME TO HUNT 549
fill woman, about as good as they made them. Her smell was achingly
familiar. Strawberries, she smelled of strawberries always. He first
saw her in a picture wrapped in cellophane that came from a young
Marine's boonie hat.
The rain was falling. There was a war. He fell in love with her then
and never came close to falling out in all the years since.
"Where did you come from?" she said.
"How did you get here so fast?"
"They didn't tell you? Damn idiot me, I got me a new hobby. I
parachuted through the storm. Pretty exciting."
"Oh, Bob."
"I never been so scared in my life. If I'd had clean underwear, I'd
have pissed in the ones I was wearing.
Only, I didn't have no clean underwear."
"Oh, Bob--" "We'll talk about all that stuff. That's up ahead."
"What in hell is this all about?" she finally asked.
"He came for met That's what these people say."
"Yeah. It has to do with something that happened a long time ago. I
have it half figured. These geniuses think they know all the answers,
or they can figure them. You up to this?"
"Yes. I just want it over."
"Then we'll get it all straightened out, I swear to you."
"I know."
"Bonson?"
Bonson came over.
"She's ready."
"That's terrific, Mrs. Swagger. We'll try and make this as easy as
possible. Are you comfortable? Do you want anything? Another
Coke?"
"No, I'm fine. I want my husband here, that's all."
"That's fine."
"Okay, people," Bonson said in a louder voice, "we're all set. The
debriefing can begin."
He turned back to her.
"I have two lead analysts who'll run this. They're both
550 STEPHEN HUNTER
psychologists. Just relax, take your time. You're under no pressure
of any sort. This is not adversarial and it has no legal standing.
It's not an interrogation. In fact, we'll probably share things with
you that you are not security cleared to hear. But that's all right.
We want this to be easy for you, and for you not to sense reluctance or
authority or power or discretion on our part. If you can, try and
think of us as your friends, not your government."
"Should I salute?" she said.
Bonson laughed.
"No. Nor will we be playing the national anthem or waving any flags.
It's just a chat between friends. Now, let us set up things for you,
so you have some idea of a context in which this inquiry is taking
place, and why your information is so vital."
"Sure."
It began. The crowd settled, the kids obediently found chairs, and
Julie sat relaxed on the couch. There were no harsh lights. One of
the questioners cleared his throat, and began to speak.
"Mrs. Swagger, for reasons as yet unclear to us, factions within
Russia have sent an extremely competent professional assassin to this
country to kill you. That's extraordinarily venturesome, even for
them. You probably wonder why, and so do we. So in the past
seventy-two hours, we've been poring through old records, trying to
find something that you might know that would make your death important
to someone over there. May I begin by assuming you have no idea?"
"Nothing. I've never talked knowingly to a Russian in my life."
"Yes, ma'am. But we've put this into a larger pattern.
It seems that three other people in your circle in the year 1971 were
also killed under circumstances that suggest possible Soviet or Russian
involvement. One is your first husband--" Julie gasped
involuntarily.
"This may be painful," Bonson said.
TIME TO HUNT 551
Bob touched her shoulder.
"It's all right," she said.
The young man continued, "Your husband, Donny Fenn, killed in the
Republic of South Vietnam 6 May 1972. Another was a young man who was
active with you in the peace movement, named Peter Farris, discovered
dead with a broken neck, 6 October 1971, dead for several months at the
time. And the third was another peace demonstrator of some renown,
named Thomas Charles "Trig' Carter III, killed in a bomb blast at the
University of Wisconsin 9 May 1971."
"I knew Peter. He was so harmless. I only met Trig once .. . twice,
actually."
"Hmmmm. Can you think of a specific circumstance that united the four
of you? Marine, peace demonstrators, 1971?"
"We were all involved in one of the last big demonstrations, May Day of
that year. The three of us as demonstrators, Donny as a Marine."
"Julie," said Bonson, "we're thinking less of an ideological
unification here and more of a specific, geographic one. A time, a
place, not an idea. And a private place, too."
"The farm," she finally said.
There was no sound.
Finally, Bonson prompted her.
"The farm," he said.
"Donny was distraught over an assignment he'd been asked to do."
Bob looked at Bonson and saw nothing, just the face of a smooth,
professional actor in the role of concerned intelligence executive. No
flicker of emotion, grief, doubt, regrets: nothing. Bonson didn't even
blink, and Julie, remembering nothing of him and his role in what had
happened, went on.
"He believed this Trig, of whom he thought so highly, might have some
idea what he should do with his ethical dilemma. We went to Trig's
house in DC but he wasn't
552 STEPHEN HUNTER
there. Donny remembered that he was going out to a farm near
Germantown. I think Peter may have followed us.
Peter thought he was in love with me."
"What did you see on that farm?" asked the young analyst.
She laughed.
"Nothing. Nothing at all. What can have been so important about
it?"
"We'd like to know."
"There was a man. An Irishman named Fitzpatrick.
He and Trig were loading fertilizer into a van. It was very late at
night."
"How clearly did you see him?"
"Very. I was just out of the light, maybe fifteen, twenty-five feet
away. I don't think he ever saw me.
Donny, for some reason, wanted me to stay back. So he and Trig and
this Fitzpatrick talked for a few minutes.
Then Fitzpatrick left. Then Donny and Trig talked some more and
finally hugged. Then we left. There was some kind of agent in the
hills. He got our picture--Donny's and mine--as we drove away. Donny's
mostly. I was ducking.
And that's it."
"That's it."
"Do you remember Fitzpatrick?"
"I suppose."
"Do you think you'd be able to describe--" "No," said Bonson.
"Go straight to the pictures."
"Mrs. Swagger, we'd like to have you look at some pictures. They're
pictures of a variety of politicians, espionage agents, lawyers,
scientists, military, mostly in the old Eastern Bloc, but some are
genuinely Irish, some English, some French. They're all in their
forties or fifties, so you'll have to imagine them as they'd have been
in 1971."
"Yes," she said.
"Just take your time."
One of the kids walked across the room and handed her a sheaf of
photographs. She flipped through them slowly, stopping now and then to
sip on her Coke can.
TIME TO HUNT 553
"Could I have another Coke?" she asked at one time.
Somebody raced out.
Bob watched as the gray, firm faces slid by, men possibly his own age
or older, most of them dynamic in appearance, with square, ruddy faces,
lots of hair, the unmistakable imprint of success.
They were hunting for a mole, he realized. They thought that
somehow--was this Bonson's madness?-this Fitzpatrick had implanted
someone in the fabric of the West, prosperous and powerful, but that
his heart still belonged to the East, or what remained of it. If they
could solve the mystery of Fitzpatrick, they could solve the mystery of
the mole.
Bob felt an odd twist of bitterness. That war, the cold one, it really
had nothing to do with the little hot dirty one that had consumed so
many men he had known and so wantonly destroyed his generation. Who'll
stop the rain?
It wasn't even about the rain.
"No," she said.
"He's not here, I'm sorry."
"Okay, let's go to the citizens."
Another file of photos was provided.
"Take your time," said one of the de briefers
"Remember, he'll be heavier, balder, he may have facial hair, he--"
"Mel, I think Julie understands that," said Bonson.
Julie was quiet. She nipped through the pictures, now and then
pausing. But another pile disappeared without a moment of recognition.
Another pile was brought, this time designated "security nationals."
She had a possible, but paused, and then it too went to the discards,
though into a separate category of "almosts."
But then, finally, there were no more pictures.
"I'm sorry," she said.
The disappointment in the room was palpable.
"Okay," Bonson finally said.
"Let's knock off for a while. Julie, why don't you take a break? Maybe
a walk, stretch your legs. We'll have to do it the hard way."
554 STEPHEN HUNTER
"What does that mean?" she asked.
"Drugs? Torture?"
"No, we'll get you together with a forensic artist. He'll draft a
drawing from your instructions. We'll get our computers to run a much
wider comparison on a much wider database. Mel, be sure to get the
'almosts' too. Have Mr.
Jefferson factor those in too. That'll get us another bunch of
candidates. We've got food. Would you care for some lunch or a nap or
something?"
"I'm fine. I think I'd like to check on my daughter."
She and Bob walked downstairs and found Nikki-asleep. She was
stretched across Sally's lap, snoozing gently, pinning Sally with her
fragile weight.
"I can't even get up," said Sally.
"I'll take her."
"No, that's okay. These child geniuses got the cable running. The
remote even works now. It didn't. See."
She held up the little device and punched a few buttons and the picture
flicked across the channels: Lifetime, CNN, Idaho Public TV, HBO, the
Discovery Channel, ESPN, CNN Headline News-"My God," said Julie.
"Oh, my God."
"What?" Bob said, and from around the house, others looked in, came to
check.
"That's him," said Julie.
"My God, yes, fatter now, healthier; yes, that's him. That's
Fitzpatrick!" She was pointing at the television, where a powerful,
dynamic man was giving an impromptu news conference in a European
city.
"Jesus," said one of the kids, "that's Evgeny Pashin, the next
president of Russia."
1 he second meeting was smaller, more informal. It was after lunch,
prepared in an Air Force mess tent set up outside the house.
Surprisingly good, nourishing food, too. More to the point, someone
had come up with a nice batch of Disney
TIME TO HUNT 555
videos for Nikki, that is, when she got back from a sledding diversion
with three state troopers.
Now, Julie and Bob sat upstairs with a much smaller contingent, the
inner circle, as it were.
"Julie," said Bonson, "we're going to discuss the meaning of this right
here, before you and your husband.
That's because I want you on the inside now, not on the outside. I'm
drawing the two of you in. You're not civilians.
I want you to feel like you're part of the team. You will, in fact,
both be paid as agency consultants; we pay well, you'll see."
"Fine," she said.
"We could use the money."
"Now, I'm not even going to ask you if you're sure. I know you're
sure. But I have to say: this guy has been on TV a lot lately. Can
you explain why it's only now that you recognize him?"
"Mr. Bonson, have you ever been a mother?"
There was some laughter.
"No," he admitted.
"Have you ever been the wife to a somewhat melancholy yet incredibly
heroic man, particularly as he's feeling his life has been taken from
him by some unnecessary publicity and we had to move from one location
to another?"
"No, no, I haven't," said Bonson.
"Well, I was both, simultaneously. Does that suggest to you why I
wasn't watching much TV?"
"Yes, it does."
"Now, today, you take me back. You force me to think about faces. I
pick several faces that are somewhat similar in structure to his. I'm
working on re-creating that face in my own mind. Do you see?"
"Yes."
"The points are all well made," Bonson said.
"Well then, let's throw it open for general discussion. Can someone
tell me what possible meaning this has?"
"Sir, I think I can explain the sequencing."
"Go ahead," said Bonson.
556 STEPHEN HUNTER
"In 1971, four people saw Pashin operating undercover in this country
as this Fitzpatrick. That is, really interfaced with him in commission
of his duties. Three were eliminated quickly. But they had no ID on
the fourth, and as I recollect, according to official Marine Corps
records, Mrs. Swagger's first marriage to Donny Fenn was
unrecorded."
"That's right," said Julie.
"I received no benefits. It didn't matter to me. I didn't want
anything to do with the Marine Corps. Although I ended up marrying
it."
"But," continued the analyst, "they have a bad picture of her, the one
they got at the farm. They can't ID it. It haunts them over the
years. The decades pass. SovUn breaks up. Pashin is no longer GRU,
he's part of PAMYAT, the nationalist party. He begins his political
career. He's handsome, heroic, the brother of a martyred nationalist
hero, has lots of mafia backing; he's scaring the old-line commies,
he's within a few weeks of winning an election and control of twenty
thousand nukes. Then, two months ago, a picture of Bob Lee Swagger
appears in The National Star and subsequently in Time and Newsweek, who
call him "America's most violent man." If you recall: it was a picture
snapped by a Star photographer of Bob coming out of church in Arizona,
with his wife. Her picture appears in the national media. And it
contains the information that Bob is married to his spotter's widow.
Donny's widow, the woman who got away, who's been haunting them all
these years. The last survivor of that night on the farm. Suddenly,
it becomes clear to PAMYAT and all the interests betting on Pashin that
one witness from his undercover days still exists and can still put him
on that farm. All right? So ... from that point on, they have to take
her out, and her husband's gaudy past certainly provides a kind of
pretext."
"That's sequencing," said Bonson.
"Fine, good, it makes sense. It's a theory that fits. But still .. .
why?"
"Ah, he was involved with a famous peace demonstrator in blowing up a
building."
TIME TO HUNT 557
"So?"
"Well .. ."
Bonson argued savagely, trying to compel the young man to a next
leap.
"It's widely known he had an intelligence background. It's known in
some circumstances that the peace movement had some East Bloc
involvement.
Actually, that might help his candidacy in today's Russia. I don't
understand why the same security mandates would be operational
twenty-seven years later. They were protecting assets then. What can
they be protecting now?
Ideas, anybody?"
None of the senior people had any.
"Well, then, we're sort of stuck, aren't we?" said Bonson.
"It's very interesting, but we still don't--" "Should I explain it to
you now, or do you want to yammer on a bit?" asked Bob.
"You ain't got it yet, Bonson," said Bob.
"You still bought into the cover story. You still look at the cover
story and you don't see the real story. And all your smart boys,
too."
"Well, Sergeant," said Bonson evenly, "then go ahead.
You explain the real story."
"I will. You missed the big news. There was a bomb explosion at the
University of Wisconsin 9 May 1971 all right. A kid named Trig Carter
blew himself up protesting the war in Vietnam. Maybe most of you are
too young to remember it, but I do. He gave his life to peace. He was
a rich kid, could have had anything, but he gave his life up for his
ideals. They even wrote books about him. He may have been brave, too.
I don't know.
"But the one name you won't find in that book or in any other books
about the peace movement or the history of our country in 1971 is the
name Ralph Goldstein. Anybody here recognize it?"
There was silence in the room.
"That's the big story. Ralph Goldstein was the doctoral student who
was killed that night in the University of
558 STEPHEN HUNTER
Wisconsin Math Center. Jewish boy, twenty-seven, married, from Skokie,
Illinois. Went to the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus,
not a very impressive school compared to the fancy schools where Trig
Carter went. He didn't know nobody. He just did his work and tried to
get his degree and do his research. Smart as a whip, but very obscure.
Never went to no demonstrations, smoked no dope, got no free love, or
nothing. I did something nobody has yet done: I went and talked to his
son, now himself a very bright kid. I hope nobody don't blow him
up."
He could feel their eyes on him. He cracked a little smile. All the
pointy heads, listening to him.
"But Ralph Goldstein had published a paper in Duke Higher Mathematics
Quarterly, which he called "Certain Higher Algorhythmic Functions of
Topographical Form Reading in Orbital Applications." Don't mean a
thing to me. But guess what? We now got about 350 satellites in orbit
watching the world because Ralph Goldstein figured out the math of it.
He was only a grad student, and he himself didn't even know it, but
he'd been picked to join the staff at the Satellite Committee at the
Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Lab in Maryland, where they did all the
high-power number crunching that made the satellite program possible.
Okay, so what his death meant practically was it took us three extra
years to get terrain-recognition birds in the air. If it matters,
that's three years where the Sovs upgraded their own satellite program,
and closed a gap in the Cold War. That's three more years that kept
them in the race. Which one of you geniuses or experts can tell me
which part of Soviet staff was responsible for strategic warfare?"
"GRU," came the reply.
"That's right. And what was Pashin?"
"GRU."
"That's right. So guess what? His job wasn't to stop the war in
Vietnam. He didn't give a shit about the war in Vietnam, or about Trig
Carter or about nothing. It was to
TIME TO HUNT 559
kill a little Jewish guy in an office in Madison, Wisconsin, who was
just about to put the Americans way ahead in the Cold War. Kill him in
such a way that no one would ever, in a hundred years, think it had to
do with the Russians.
Kill him in such a way that no one would even think about his death but
only about the death of the man who killed him. To make him an extra
in his own murder. That was Pashin's mission: it was straight GRU wet
work, a murder job. Trig Carter and the peace movement were just part
of the props."
He could hear them breathing heavily in the room, but no one spoke.
"And don't you see the cynicism in it, the goddamned motherfucking
brilliance? They knew this country so goddamn well. They just knew
that when any of you Ivy League heroes looked at that data, you
couldn't see past Trig, because, no matter which side he was on, he was
one of you. That would be the tragedy, and the fog it would release in
your little pea fucking brains would keep you from ever figuring it
out. It takes an outsider, someone who ain't been to no college and
doesn't think the word Harvard or Yale means shit in this world. It
takes gutter trash rednecks who you all pay to do the dirty work with
the rifles so you can sit in your clubs and make ironic little jokes.
Or plan your little wars that the Swaggers and the Fenns and the
Goldsteins have to go fight."
The silence lasted for a long moment.
Then finally, Bonson spoke: "Class anger aside, does this make any
sense to you Skull and Bones boys?"
It took a while, but finally someone said, almost laconically, "Yeah,
it makes perfect sense. It even explains why it's happening now. It
puts them in a desperate situation.
They--that's PAMYAT, the old GRU security bunch hiding behind
nationalism and financed by mob money-have to keep this information
quiet. They couldn't take a chance that just as he's closing in on the
presidency, their man is revealed as a murderer of American nationals
on American soil. That would make it impossible for him to
560 STEPHEN HUNTER
work with any American president or with big American corporations.
That information has to be buried at all costs. Their lives, their
futures, their party depend on it.
They had to eliminate the last witness, particularly as Pashin's fame
is getting bigger and bigger."
"Sir," said someone else, "I think we could game out some very
interesting tactical deployment for this information.
We might have a hand ourselves in determining who their next president
is."
"Okay," said Bonson, "you game it out. But I want it going in one
direction. I want to kill this motherfucker."
PART IV
BACK TO THE WORLD
The Present
chapter fifty
The snow didn't last. It melted on the third day after it had fallen,
causing floods in the lowlands, closing roads, wrecking bridges,
creating mud slides. But on Upper Cedar Creek it was a serene day,
with blue skies, eastern zephyrs and creeks full of sparkling water.
The pines shed their cloak of snow; the grass began to emerge, green
and lush, and seemingly undamaged by the ordeal.
By now the excitement was over. Bonson had departed with a handshake
the previous morning, after ensuring that a quickly convened Custer
County grand jury found no culpability in the death by misadventure of
one Frank Vborny, of Cleveland, Ohio, as the fake identification
documents read in the dead sniper's pocket. Ballistics confirmed that
indeed Mr. Vbomy had shot and killed two innocent people in the Custer
County Idaho Bell substation in Mackay; obviously a berserker, he next
attacked a house that was luckily rented out by a gun owner, who was
able to defend himself. The gun owner's name was never published but
that was all right, and in Idaho most people took satisfaction from the
moral purity of the episode and its subtle endorsement of the great old
Second Amendment, a lesson most Westerners felt had been forgotten in
the East.
Up in the mountains, the state police had pulled out, the helicopters
and all the young men and women had gone back to wherever it was they
came from, and there was little sign that they'd been there.
Bob and Julie had a check, in the odd sum of $146,589.07, and had no
idea how that exact figure had been selected. It was from the
Department of the Treasury, and the invoice banally read,
"Consultancy," with the proper dates listed and his Social Security
number.
The last of the security team left, the rifle and 564 STEPHEN HUNTER
recovered Beretta were returned, the foam case with its cargo marked
officially as "operational loss," and Sally had taken Nikki for a walk
down to the mailbox on Route 93, when he at last had an opportunity to
talk to his wife.
"Well, howdy," he said.
"Hi," she said. Doctors had examined her after her ordeal; she was in
fine shape, her collarbone knitting properly. She seemed much stronger
now, and was able to get about better. Sally would soon be leaving.
"Well, I have some things to say. Care to have a listen?"
"Yes."
"You know we have some money now. I'd like to git on back to Arizona
and restart the business. Joe Lopez says they seem to miss me down
there. It was a good business and a good life."
"It was a good life."
"I went a little crazy there. I put everybody through a lot. I wasn't
very grown-up about my troubles. That's all in the past now. And what
I learned was how important my family was. I want my family back.
That's the only thing I want. No more adventures, no more screwing
around.
That's all finished."
"It wasn't your fault," she said.
"It had nothing to do with you. It was all about me. How could I
blame you for anything? You saved all--" "Now, now," he said.
"No need for that. I thought all this out. I just want the old life
back. I want you to be my wife, I want my baby girl to be fine, I want
to work with the horses and take care of y'all. That's the best life
there is, the only life I've ever wanted. I get these bad moods.
Or I used to; I hope I'm over that. If I had some ghosts, they ain't
walking out of the cemetery no more. So ... well, what do you say?
Will you let me come back?"
"I already called the lawyer. He recalled the separation request."
"That's great."
"It'll be good," she said.
"I think we should use some
TIME TO HUNT 565
of that money and go on a nice vacation. We should close up the house
here, the house outside of Boise, but then go to some warm island for
two weeks. Then we can go back to Arizona. R&R."
"God, does that sound like a plan to me," he said with a smile.
"There's only one last little thing. Trig's mother.
She was very helpful and she told me that if I ever learned anything
about the way her son died, I should tell her. Tell her the truth. I
still feel that obligation. So in a couple of months or so, when all
this dies down, when we're back, I may take a bit of time and head back
there to Baltimore."
"Do you want us to come with you?"
"Oh, it ain't worth it. I'll just fly in, rent a car, fly back.
It'll be over quicker 'n' you can believe. No sense putting no trouble
to it or taking Nikki away from her riding.
Hell, I may drive instead of flying, save some money that way."
He smiled. For just a second she thought there might be something in
his eyes, some vagrant thought, some evidence of another idea, another
agenda; but no, not a thing could be seen. They were depthless and
gray and revealed nothing except the love he felt for her.
Little by little, life for the Swagger family reassembled itself toward
some model of normality. Even the big news of a spectacular murder in
Russia failed to make much of a stir. Bob just watched a little of it
on CNN, saw the burning Jeep Cherokee and the dead man in the back, and
when the hysterical analysts came on to explain it all, he changed
channels.
Sally stayed until they moved back to Boise, and then Bob drove her to
the airport.
"Once again," she said at the gate, "the great Bob Lee Swagger
triumphs. You killed your enemies, you got your wife and family back.
Can't keep a good man down."
"Sally, I got 'em all fooled but you, don't I? You see clean through
me."
"Bob, seriously. Pay attention to them this time. I
566 STEPHEN HUNTER
know it's easy to say, but you have to let the past go.
You're married, you have a wonderful, brave, strong wife and a
beautiful little girl. That's your focus."
"I know. It will be."
"There's no more old business."
"Is that a question or a statement?"
"Both. If there's one little thing left, let it go. It doesn't
matter. It can't matter."
"There's nothing left," he said.
"You are one ornery sumbitch," she said.
"I swear, I don't know what that woman sees in you."
"Well, I don't neither. But she's pretty smart, so maybe she knows
something you and I don't."
Sally smiled, and then turned to leave, good friend and soldier to the
very end. She winked at him, as if to say, "You are hopeless."
And he knew he was.
When the cast came off a little later, and Julie was back among the
supple, the family flew to St. John, in the U.S.
Virgins for two glorious weeks. They rented a villa just outside Cruz
Bay on the little island, and each morning took a taxi to the beautiful
Trunk Bay beach, where they snorkeled and lay in the sand and watched
the time pass ever so slowly as they turned browner and browner. They
were a handsome family, the natural aristocrats of nature:
the tall, grave man with gray eyes and abundant hair, and his wife,
every bit as handsome, her hair a mesh of honey and brown, her
cheekbones strong, her lips thin, her eyes powerful. She had been a
cheerleader years ago, but she was if anything more beautiful now than
ever. And the daughter, a total ball of fire, a complete kamikaze who
always had to be called in, who pushed the snorkeling to its maximum,
who begged her father to let her scuba or go water- or para-skiing.
"You got plenty of time to break your neck when you're older," he told
her.
"Your old mommy and I can't
TIME TO HUNT 567
keep up with such a thing. You have to give us a break.
This is our vacation, too."
"Oh, Daddy," she scolded, "you're such a chicken."
And when she said that, he did an imitation of a chicken that was
clearly based on a little real time in the barnyard, and they all
laughed, first at how funny it was but second at the idea that a man of
such reserve could at last find some way to let himself go, to be
silly. An astonishment.
At night, they went into town and ate at the restaurants there. Bob
never had a drink, didn't seem to want one. It was idyllic, really too
good. It reminded Julie just a bit of an R&R she'd had with Donny in
Hawaii, just before .. .
well, just before.
And Bob seemed to relax totally too. She'd never seen him so calm, so
at ease. The wariness that usually marked his passage in society--a
feeling for terrain and threat, a tendency to mark escape routes, to
look too carefully at strangers--disappeared. And he never had
nightmares.
Not once did he awake screaming, drenched in cold sweat, or with the
shakes, or with that hurt, hunted look that sometimes came into his
eyes. His scars almost seemed to disappear as he grew tanner and
tanner, but they were always there, the puckers of piebald flesh that
could only be bullet wounds: so many of them. One of the Virgin
Islanders stared at them once, then turned to say something to one of
his colleagues, in that musical, impenetrable English of theirs, so
fast and full of strange rhythms, but Julie heard the word "bombom
mon," which she took to mean "boom-boom man," which she in turn took to
be "gunman."
But Bob appeared not to notice. He was almost friendly, his natural
reserve blurred into something far more open and pleasant to the world.
She'd never quite seen him like this.
There was only one night when she awoke and realized he wasn't in bed
with her. She rose, walked through the dark living room, until she
found him on the deck, under
568 STEPHEN HUNTER
a tropic night, sitting quietly. Before them was a slope of trees, a
hill and then the sea, a serene sheet of glass throwing off tints of
moonlight. He sat with utter stillness, staring at a book, as if it
had some secret meaning to it.
"What is that?" she asked.
"This? Oh, it's called Birds of North America by Roger Prentiss
Fuller."
She came over and saw that he was gazing at a section on eagles.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
"Oh, nothing. This book has some pretty pictures. Kid who painted
them really knew his birds."
"Bob, it's so unlike you."
"I was just curious, that's all."
"Eagles?"
"Eagles," he said.
1 hey returned to Arizona and with the money, Bob was able to upgrade
the barn, hire two Mexican assistants, buy a new pickup and reintroduce
himself to the Pima County horsey set. In just a little bit of time,
they had patients-seven, eight, then ten horses in various states of
healing, all ministered to with tender care. His lay-up barn became a
thriving concern after a while, mostly on the basis of his own sweat,
but also because people trusted him.
Nikki went back to school but she rode every day, English style, and
would start showing on the circuit's junior level the next spring, her
coach insisted. Julie resumed working three days a week at the Navajo
reservation clinic, helping the strong young braves mend after fights
or drinking bouts, helping the rickety children, doing a surprising
amount of good in a small compass.
No reporters ever showed; no German TV crews set up in the barnyard; no
young men came by to request interviews for their books; no gun show
entrepreneurs offered him money to stand at a booth and sell
autographs;
no writers from the survivalist press wanted to write admiring
profiles. He and the war he represented seemed
TIME TO HUNT 569
once again to have disappeared. No part of it remained, its wounds
healed or at least scarred over.
One night, Bob sat down and wrote a letter to Trig Carter's mother. He
told her he was planning a trip east some time in weeks to come and, as
he said, he'd like to stop by and share with her what he had learned
about the death of her son.
She wrote back immediately, pleased to hear from him. She suggested a
time, and he called her and said that was fine, that's when she should
look for him.
He loaded his new pickup with gear and began the long trip back. He
drove up to Tucson, to the veterans cemetery there, and walked the
ranks of stones, white in the desert sun, until at last he came to:
Donny M. Fenn Lance Corporal
USMC.
Nothing set it apart. There were dozens of other stones from that and
other wars, the last years always signifying some violent eddy in
American history: 1968, 1952, 1944, 1918. A wind whistled out of the
mountains.
The day was so bright it hurt his eyes. He had no flowers, nothing to
offer the square of dry earth and the stone tablet.
He'd been in so many other cemeteries; this one felt no different at
all. He had nothing to say, for so much had been said. He just soaked
up the loss of Donny: Donny jumping over the berm, the vibration as the
bullet went through him, lifting the dust from his chest; Donny
falling, his eyes going blank and sightless, his hand grasping Bob's
arm, the blood in his mouth and foaming obscenely down his nose.
After a while--he had no idea how long--he left, got back in the truck
and settled in for a long pull across
570 STEPHEN HUNTER
Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and on to the East.
1 he last part of the trip took him to the Virginia suburbs of
Washington, DC, where once again he bunked with an old friend who had
become the Command Sergeant Major of the United States Marine Corps. As
a few months before, he fell in with cronies, both still on active duty
or recently retired, men of his own generation and stamp, leathery,
sinewy men who bore the career imprint of the Corps. There were a few
loud nights at the CSM's house in the suburbs, the whole thing slightly
more celebrative.
It was the next day that he called Mrs. Carter and told her he'd be up
the next night. She said she couldn't wait.
He hung up and waited on the line for the telltale click of a wiretap.
He didn't hear it, but he knew that meant nothing: there were other
methods of penetration.
Now, he thought, only this last thing.
chapter fifty-one
Bob drove carefully through the far reaches of Baltimore County, at
sunset. It was as he remembered, the beautiful houses of the rich and
propertied, of old families, of the original owners of America--people
who rode English. At last he turned down a lane and drove under the
overhanging elms until he found Trig's ancestral home.
He pulled in, once again momentarily humbled by the immensity of the
place, its suggestion of stability and propriety and what endured in
the world. At last he got out, adjusted his tie and went to the
door.
It was September now, turning coolish at night here in the East. The
leaves hadn't yet begun to redden but there was nevertheless a definite
edge in the air. Things would change soon: that was the message.
He knocked; the old black butler answered, as before.
He was led through the same halls of antiques, paintings of patriots,
exotic plants, dense Oriental rugs, damask curtains, lighting fixtures
configured to represent the flicker of candles. Since it was darker,
there wasn't quite the sense of the threadbare that had been so evident
his first time out here.
The old man led him into the study, where the woman waited. She stood
erect as the mast of a ship--the family had owned shipping once, of
course, as well as railroads, oil, coal and more. She was still stern,
still rigid, still had that iron-gray uplift to her hair. She was
demurely dressed in a conservative suit, and he could see, even more
now, that at one time she must have been a great beauty. Now an air of
tragic futility attended her. Or maybe it was his imagination. But
she'd lost a son and a husband to a war that the husband said was worth
fighting and the son said wasn't. It had broken her family apart, as
it had broken
572 STEPHEN HUNTER
apart so many families. No family was immune, that was the lesson: not
even this one, so protected by its wealth and property.
"Well, Sergeant Swagger, you look as if you've become a movie star."
"I've been working outdoors, ma'am."
"No, I don't mean the tan. I have sources still, I believe I told you.
There's some news afoot about your heroics in Idaho, how you
disconnected some terrible conspiracy. I'm sure I don't understand it,
but the information has even reached the society of doddering State
Department widows."
"They say we were able to get some good work done, yes, ma'am."
"Are you congenitally modest. Sergeant? For a man so powerful, you
are so unassuming you seem hardly to be there at all."
"Fm just a polite Southern boy, ma'am."
"Please sit down. I won't offer you a drink, since I know you no
longer drink. A club soda, a cup of coffee or tea, a soft drink,
something like that?"
"No, ma'am, I'm fine."
They sat across from each other, in the study. One of Trig's birds
observed them; it was a blue mallard.
"Well, then, I know you came here to tell me something.
I suppose I'm ready to hear it. Will I need a drink, Sergeant Swagger?
A great shot of vodka, perhaps?"
"No, ma'am, I don't believe so."
"Well, then, go ahead."
"Ma'am, I have satisfied myself on this one issue: I don't believe no
way your son would have killed another human being and I don't believe
he killed himself. I think he was duped by a professional Soviet
agent--rather, Soviet in those days. Your son was sort of charmed
into--" "What a quaint euphemism. But I have to tell you I'm aware of
my son's homosexual leanings. You believe it was a homosexual
thing?"
"I don't know, ma'am. That's not my department. I
TIME TO HUNT 573
only know the result, that somehow he was snookered into assisting in
what was represented as an act of symbolic violence as a way of re
energizing the peace movement.
But the Russian operator, he didn't give a tinker's dam about the peace
movement. He was only interested in your boy's fame and reputation as
a masking device for the mission's real target, Ralph Goldstein, who
was working on satellite topography-reading technologies and seemed on
the verge of a breakthrough the Russians felt would put them way behind
in the Cold War."
"It was only about murder, in the end. And some other boy was the
target?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"So my poor Trig wasn't even the star of his own murder?"
"No, ma'am."
"Well, he'd been the star of so many other things, I don't suppose it
matters."
"My guess is, he had begun to have doubts; perhaps he even tried to
back out, or go to the FBI or something.
Possibly there's some record of his doubts in his missing sketches. But
it appears I won't never see them. He was killed, probably with a judo
chop to the back of the neck.
That was their specialty in those days. In fact, everybody who saw
this agent was killed, at some effort, including another peace
demonstrator named Peter Fan-is, a Marine named Donny Fenn, and later
attempts were made on my wife, who had seen the agent with Trig. She
was married to Donny Fenn at the time. I believe Ralph Goldstein was
killed in the same way. Their bodies were put in the building and it
was detonated. It goes down into the books as a violent fool and a
math geek. But the books are always wrong. It was something entirely
different;
kids used by older, smarter, far more ruthless men, then thrown away
for a momentary strategic advantage. It was a war, but the cold one,
not the hot one."
"The one we won."
"I suppose we did."
574 STEPHEN HUNTER
"What happened to the Russian?"
"Well, our intelligence people found out a way to turn the information
against him. I don't know much about it, but he's dead. They had it
on CNN. You could see the burned bodies in the back of the Jeep."
"That nasty boy?"
"That one."
"And the man who was trying to kill you?"
"Well, he wasn't trying to kill me. He was trying to kill my wife. He
was stopped," Bob said.
"And he ain't never coming back."
"Were you responsible?"
Bob just nodded.
"Do you know what you are? Sergeant, you're a sacred killer. All
societies need them. All civilizations need them.
It is to the eternal shame and the current damnation of this country
that it refuses anymore to acknowledge them and thinks it can get by
without respecting them. So let an old bat speak a truth: you are the
necessary man. Without you it all goes away."
Bob said nothing. Speculation on his place in the nature of things was
not his style.
The old lady sensed this, and asked for an accounting of the politics
of the affair, the details of history. He gave it, succinctly
enough.
"Odd, isn't it? As you've explained it, after it's all counted up and
all the accounts are settled, the one party to it all that could be
said to benefit is the old Russian communist apparatus. It's kept them
from going under another few years. And who can tell what that'll
mean?
The cruel irony of history, I suppose."
"I wouldn't know about that, ma'am. They were very happy, the
intelligence people, that they were able to stop this fellow Pashin. He
was their real target. My wife was his, but he was ours, and we got
him first."
"Well, anyway: you've provided a measure of serenity to my life. My
son wasn't a fool; he was overmatched by
TIME TO HUNT 575
professionals, who've been punished. Justice isn't much, but it helps
the nights go easier."
"Yes, ma'am. I agree."
"Sometimes you don't even get that, so one must be very grateful for
what one does get."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Now ... I know you weren't working for me, you were never my employee.
But the one power I still have in the world is to satisfy myself
through my checkbook. I would very much enjoy getting it out now and
writing a nice big, fat one."
"Thank you," he said.
"That's not necessary."
"Are you sure?"
"I am."
"Soon there'll be college expenses."
"Not for a while. We're doing fine."
"Oh, I hope I haven't spoiled things by bringing up money."
"No, ma'am."
"Well, then--" "There is one thing, though."
"Name it."
"The painting."
"The painting?"
"The eagle after the fight. I don't know a thing about art and I don't
know a thing about birds, but I'd be honored to have that. It has some
meaning to me."
"You felt your breast stir when you saw it?"
"Well, something like that."
"Then you shall have it. Come with me, Sergeant Swagger."
She led him forthrightly out of the room, commanded the old butler to
get a "torch"--a flashlight--and led Bob in the butler's uncertain
illumination to the studio. Their breaths plumed in the frosty air.
She opened the door, found a switch and the birds flashed to life,
still and majestic.
"These are worth quite a lot of money to connoisseurs
576 STEPHEN HUNTER
of the macabre, I expect," she said.
"But the eagle .. .
it's so atypical, and also unsigned. Would you want a certificate of
authenticity? It might seem pointless now, but when your daughter goes
to school, it could mean the difference between buying one year at
Radcliffe or four years."
"No, ma'am," he said, walking to the painting.
"I just want it for what it is."
He stood before it, and felt its pain, its distraught, logy mind, its
survivor's despair.
"I wonder how he got so much into it," she said.
He unscrewed the painting from the easel, where it had been clamped
since May of 1971. It was unframed, but the canvas was tacked stoutly
to a wood backing.
"I hope you'll let me pay for the framing," said the old woman.
"That at least I can do."
"I'll send you the bill," he said.
He wrapped the painting carefully in some rags, making certain not to
disturb the elegant depth of the crusted pigment, and put the whole
package delicately under an arm.
"All set," he said.
"Sergeant Swagger, again, I can't thank you enough.
You've made my dotage appreciably better, to no real gain of your
own."
"Oh, I gained, Mrs. Carter. I gained."
The team watched him from far off, through night-vision binoculars. It
had been a long stakeout until he showed, longer still since he was in
there. Where had he been all afternoon? Still, it didn't matter. Now
it was going to happen.
Swagger turned his truck around, pulled out, drove down the lane, and
by the time he got back to Falls Road, the number-one van had moved
into position, not behind his turn, as amateurs will do, but before it,
letting him overtake them, and falling into position from behind that
way, without attracting notice.
TIME TO HUNT 577
Swagger pulled around the van, scooted ahead and settled into an
unhurried pace.
"Blue One, this is Blue Two," said the observer into his microphone.
"Ah, we have him picked up very nicely, no problems. I have Blue Three
behind me, you want to run this by management?"
"Blue Two, management just got here."
"You stay on him. Blue Two, but don't rush it," came the impatient
voice any of them knew as Bonson's.
"Play in the other van if you think you're in danger of being burned.
Don't be too aggressive. Give me an update--""Whoa, isn't this
interesting, Blue One. He didn't do the beltway. He just stayed on
Falls Road on the way into Baltimore."
"Doesn't that become Eighty-three?" asked Bonson.
"Yes, sir, it does. Goes straight downtown."
"But his motel is out at BW."
"That's the credit card data. He had something with him, some kind of
package. Maybe he's going to do something with it."
"Got you, Blue Two, you just stay on him."
They watched as Bob drove unconsciously into downtown Baltimore on the
limited access highway that plunges into that city's heart. He passed
Television Hill with its giant antennae, and the train station, then
the Sun, and finally the road drifted off its abutments to street level
and became a lesser boulevard called President Street just east of
downtown.
"He's turning left," said Blue Two.
"It's, uh, Fleet Street."
"The map says he's headed towards Fells Point."
"What the hell is he doing there? Is he starring in a John Waters
movie?"
"Cut the joking on the net," said Bonson.
"You stay with him. I'm coming in; be in town very shortly."
The men knew Bonson and his radio team were in a hangar at B-W Airport,
less than twenty minutes south of
578 STEPHEN HUNTER
town this time of night, assuming there was no backup at the tunnel.
Bob turned up Fleet, and the traffic grew a bit thicker.
He did not look around. He did not notice either the white or the
black vans that had been on him since the country.
He passed through Fells Point, jammed with cars, kids, scum and bars,
presumably the shady night town of the city, and kept on driving.
Another mile or two and he turned on the diagonal down a beat-up street
called Boston.
"Blue One, this is Blue Two. The traffic is thinning out. He's headed
out Boston toward the docks. I'm going to stay on Reet, run a
parallel, and let Blue Three close on him, just to be safe."
"Read you, Two," said the observer in the second van.
There was no way Swagger could tell, now that the van which had been
closest to him sped away down another road and the unseen secondary
vehicle closed the gap, that he was under surveillance. More
important, he exhibited nothing in his driving that demonstrated the
signature of a surveil lee who'd burned his trackers: he didn't dart in
and out of traffic, he didn't signal right, then turn left, he didn't
turn without signaling. He just drove blandly ahead, intent on his
destination.
But once he passed two large apartment buildings on the right, at the
harbor's edge, he began to slow down, as if he were looking for
something.
It was a kind of post-industrial zone, with ruined, deserted factories
everywhere; oil-holding facilities for offloading by tankers; huge,
weedy fields that served no apparent purpose at all but were
nevertheless Cyclonefenced.
There was little traffic and almost no pedestrian activity; it was a
blasted zone, where humans may have worked during the day, but deserted
almost totally at night.
The number-two van was a good three hundred feet behind him when he
turned right, down another street--it
TIME TO HUNT 579
was called South Clinton Street--that seemed to veer closer to the
docks. The van didn't turn; it went straight, after its observer
notified the first vehicle, which had run parallel down Boston, and
itself turned right on the street Bob had turned down.
"Two, I have him," said the observer.
"Cool. I'll roam a bit, then take up a tail position."
"That's good work," said Bonson, over the net.
"We're going to lose you now. We're going through the tunnel."
"I'll stay on him, Blue One."
"Catch you when we get out of the tunnel."
The first van maintained about a four hundred-foot gap between itself
and Swagger's truck, which now coursed down desolate South Clinton
Street. Off to the right, a giant naval vessel, under construction,
suddenly loomed, gray and arc-lit for drama and security. Bob passed
it, passed a bank, a few small working men's restaurants, then stopped
by the side of the road.
"Goddammit," said Two.
"Burned. Goddammit."
His own driver started to slow, but he was exceedingly professional.
"No, just keep driving. Just drive by him. Don't eyeball him as you
pass him, don't even think about it; he'll feel you paying attention.
I'm dropping out of sight."
The driver continued at the same speed, while the observer dropped into
the seat well, knowing that a single driver was much less of a giveaway
signature for a tail job.
And he hit the send button.
"Blue Three, do you read?"
"Yeah, I'm past the Boston-South Clinton Street exchange, just pulled
over."
"Okay, he's stopped. We're going to pass him; you come on by and pull
off a long way down. He's on the right. Don't use your lights. Go to
night vision and monitor his moves."
The lead vehicle sped around the curve, passed several mountains of
coal ready for loading on the right.
580 STEPHEN HUNTER
He pulled off when he was out of sight of the parked man.
"Two, this is Three. I'm in position and I've got him in my night
lenses. He's just sitting there, waiting. I think he's turned off his
engine. No, no, he's turned off his lights, now he's pulling ahead,
he's turning in--now I've lost him."
"Okay, he's gone to ground."
"Sitrep, people," came the voice of Bonson, who had just cleared the
tunnel and was now on this side of the harbor.
"Sir, he just pulled into a yard or something in the warehouse district
down by the docks. Just off Boston. We have him under observation."
"I'm right at Boston Street here. Do we go east or west off of
Ninety-five?"
"You go west. Go about a mile and turn left again, on South Clinton
Street. I'm off by the side of the road just around that turn, lights
off, left side of the road. Two is on the other side, around the
curve. We're both about a half mile away from where he's gone to
rest."
"Okay, let's meet one at a time in two-minute intervals two hundred
yards this side, my side, of the location. You go first, Three, then
you Two, from the other side, then I'll join you. Keep your lights on
in case he's looking out. If he saw unlit vehicles, he could go
ballistic."
"Sir, I honestly don't think he's seen a damned thing.
He was off in his own world. He wasn't even looking around when he
stopped. He's just looking for some deserted place."
"We'll know in a few minutes," said Bonson, just as his car turned left
and pulled in behind one of the vans.
Bob parked to the left of the silent, corrugated-metal building, as far
back and out of sight as he could. He paused, waiting. He heard no
sounds; there was no night watchman. The place was some kind of grain
storage facility, again for loading cargo ships, but no ship floated
in
TIME TO HUNT 581
the water. He could see the shimmering lights on the flat, calm water,
and beyond that the skyline of the city, spangled in illumination. But
here, there was nothing except the rush of cars from the tunnel exit
nearby, a separate world sealed off by concrete abutments.
He got out, taking the wrapped painting, a powerful flashlight and a
heavy pair of wire cutters with him, and headed to the warehouse. It
was padlocked. But where the lock was strong, the metal fastener that
secured door to wall was not, and the wire cutters made quick work of
it. The lock fell, still secure, to the ground, wearing a little
necklace of sheared steel. He pulled the door open, stepped into a
space that in the darkness appeared to be cut by bins, now mostly
empty. The dust of grains--wheat mostly, though he smelled soya beans
too--filled the air.
He walked, his shoes echoing on the bricks, until at last he came to
the center of the room. He stopped by a pillar and a drain, then
turned on the light. The beam skipped across the empty building,
finding nothing of interest but more emptiness, dramatic shadows, fire
extinguishers, light switches, closets, crates. He went and got a
crate, pulled it into the center and set it down. Finally, he set the
light on the floor, aimed back toward where he had left the package. It
cast a cold white eye on the painting.
He walked over, and leaned into the circle of light.
Slowly, he peeled the rags away, until at last the painting stood
exposed. He examined it carefully, saw how the tacks held the canvas
to the backing. He took out his Case pocketknife, and very slowly used
its blade to scrape at the paint.
It was thick and cracked easily, falling to the ground in chunks and
strips. He scraped, destroying the image of the eagle, pulling at the
paint, watching it flake in colored chunks downward. In a minute or
so, he came to a ridge under the paint, and ran the knife blade along
it until he reached a corner. It was the top of a heavy piece of
paper, and it had been literally buried under the heavy oil
pigmentation of the image.
582 STEPHEN HUNTER
With the blade, he pried the corner loose enough to get a grip on, set
the knife down and very carefully pulled the sheet of paper free. It
cracked off the canvas. As he finally freed it, there was a kind of
soft, slipping sound:
paper, sliding loose, fluting down to land with a rattle on the dirty
floor. He set the backing down and bent there in the harsh light to
see what secrets he had unlocked.
It was the last few sketches from Trig's book. Bob began to shuffle
through them, finding images of a campus building in Madison,
Wisconsin, portraits of people at parties in Washington, crowd scenes
of big demonstrations.
There was a portrait of Donny. It must have been made about the time
he did the scene of Donny and Julie, which Bob had seen in Vietnam. He
brought those days vividly to life, and Bob began to feel his
passion--and his pain.
chapter fifty-two
One man had gone ahead and returned with a report.
"He's in there with a flashlight, reading some pages or something. I
can't figure it out."
"Okay," said Bonson.
"I think I know what he's got.
Let's finish this, once and for all."
The guns came out. The team consisted now of five men besides Bonson.
They were large men in crew cuts in their late forties. They were
tough-looking, exuding that alpha-male confidence that suggested no
difficulty in doing violence if necessary. They looked like large
policemen, soldiers, firemen, extremely well developed, extremely
competent. They drew the guns from under their jackets, and there was
a little ceremony of clicks and snaps, as safeties came off and slides
were eased back to check chambers, just in case. Then the suppressors
were screwed on.
Bonson led them along the road, into the lot and up to the old grain
warehouse. Above, stars pinwheeled and blinked. Water sounds filled
the night, the lapping of the tides against ancient docks. From
somewhere came a low, steady roar of automobiles. He reached the metal
door and through the gap between it and the building proper, he could
see Bob in the center of the room, sitting on a crate he'd gotten from
somewhere, reading by the light of a flashlight. The painting was on
the floor, somehow standing straight, as if on display, and Bob was
leaning against a thick pillar that supported the low ceiling. Bonson
could see that the image had somehow been destroyed, yielding a large
white square in its center.
What is wrong with this picture, he asked himself.
He studied it for a second.
No, nothing. The man is unaware. The man is lost.
584 STEPHEN HUNTER
The man is unprepared. The man is defenseless. The man is the
ultimate soft target.
He nodded.
"Okay," he whispered.
One of the men opened the door and he walked in.
Bob looked up to see them as their lights flashed on him.
"Howdy," he said.
"Lights," said Bonson.
One of the men walked away, found an electrical junction and the place
leaped into light, which showed the rawness of industrial space, a
gravel floor, the air filled with dust and agricultural vapors.
"Hello, Swagger," said Bonson.
"My, my, what's that?"
"It's the last sketches from Trig Carter's book. Real damn
interesting," said Bob, loudly.
"How'd you find it?"
"What?"
What was wrong with his ears?
"I said, "How did you find it?"
" "When I thought about his last painting, I figured it, pretty close.
The reason the painting was so different was his clue: his way of
saying to those who came after him, "Look this over." But no one ever
came. Not until me."
"Nice work," said Bonson.
"What's in it?"
"What?"
What was wrong with his ears?
"I said, "What's in it?"
" "Oh. Just what you'd expect," said Bob, still a bit loud.
"People, places, things he ran into as he began to prepare his symbolic
explosion of the math building. A couple of nice drawings of Donny."
"Trig Carter was a traitor," said Bonson.
"Yeah?" said Bob mildly.
"Do tell."
"Give it over here," said Bonson.
"You don't want to see the drawings, Bonson? They're pretty damned
interesting."
TIME TO HUNT 585
"We'll look at them. That's enough."
"Oh, it gits better. There's a nice drawing of this Fitzpatrick.
Damn, that boy could draw. It's Pashin; everybody will be able to
tell. That's quite a find, eh? That's proof, cold, solid dead-on
proof the peace movement was infiltrated by elements of Soviet
intelligence."
"So what?" said Bonson.
"That's all gone and forgotten.
It doesn't matter."
"Oh, no?" said Bob.
"See, there's someone else in the drawing. Poor Trig must have grown
extremely suspicious, so one day, late, right after the big May Day
mess, he followed Fitzpatrick. He watched him meet somebody.
He did. He watched them deep in conversation. And he recorded it."
Bob held it up, a folded piece of paper, the lines that were Pashin
brilliantly clear.
Bob unfolded the rest of the drawing.
"See, Bonson, here's the funny part," said Bob, loudly.
"There's someone else here. It's you."
There was a moment of silence. Bonson's eyes narrowed tightly, and
then he relaxed, turned to his team and smiled. He almost had to
laugh.
"Who are you, Bonson?" Swagger asked, more quietly now.
"Really, I'd like to know. I had some ideas. I just couldn't make no
sense of them. But just tell me. Who are you? What are you? Are you
a traitor? Are you a professional Soviet agent masquerading as an
American? Are you some kind of cynic playing the sides against each
other? Are you in it for the money? Who are you, Bonson?"
"Kill him?" asked one of the men on the team, holding up a suppressed
Beretta.
"No," said Bonson.
"No, not yet. I want to see how far he's gotten."
"Finally it makes sense," Bob said.
"The great CIA mole. The big one they've been hunting all these
years.
Who makes a better mole than the head mole hunter?
586 STEPHEN HUNTER
Pretty goddamned smart. But what's the deal? Why did no one ever
suspect you?"
He could sense that Bonson wanted to tell him. He had probably never
told anyone, had repressed his reality so deep and imposed such
discipline on himself that it was almost not real to him, except when
it needed to be. But now at last, he had a chance to explain.
"The reason I was never suspected," he said finally, "was because they
recruited me. I never went to them.
They offered me a job when I left the Navy, but I said no.
I went to law school, I spent three years on Wall Street, they came
after me three more times, and I always said no. Finally--God, it took
some discipline--finally I said yes."
"Why did they want you so much?"
"Because of the NIS prosecutions. That was the plan. I sent
fifty-seven young men to Vietnam, Marines, naval seaman, even a couple
of junior officers. I reported on dozens more that I turned up in the
other services, and many of them went, too. There was never a better
secret policeman anywhere, one with less mercy and more ambition.
They could see how fierce I was. I was so good. I was astonishing.
They wanted me so bad it almost killed them, and I played so hard to
get it still amazes me. But that was our plan from the beginning."
His face gleamed with vanity and pride. This was his great triumph,
the core of his life, what made him better than other men, his work of
art.
"Who are you, Bonson? Who the fuck are you?"
"The only time I ever came out on a wet operation was that one night
when that idiot Pashin showed up without a driver's license. You
needed a driver's license to buy that much ammonium nitrate, even in
Virginia! That idiot.
GRU begged the committee for help, and I had the best identity running,
so I drove down to Leesburg and bought it. I met him in the restaurant
to tell him where it was secured. He was a brilliant operator, but in
little practical things like that he was stupid."
TIME TO HUNT 587
"And you were unlucky. Trig the human camera had followed him."
"I always worried about that. That was my one moment of vulnerability.
But now, you've taken care of that for me."
"Who are you?" said Bob.
"You have to tell me that."
"I don't have to tell you anything. I can kill you and I'm forever
secure."
"In seventy-one, you were the source of deployment intelligence,
weren't you?"
"You bet I was," said Bonson.
"I invented chaos. It was the best professional penetration in
history, the way I orchestrated it."
"You killed the little girl on the bridge, right? Amy Rosenzweig,
seventeen. I looked it up. I saw how much trouble it caused."
"Oh, Swagger, goddamn, you are smart. We picked her up, shot her up
and dropped her into the crowd. It was a massive dose of LSD. She
never knew what hit her.
My friend Bill here"--he indicated a man on his team-"did it. She
freaked and went over. God, what a stink it caused; it almost wrecked
the credibility of the U.S. government in that one thing. The pressure
it caused."
"Those are your boys, aren't they, your security team? Which of 'em
killed poor Peter Fan-is?"
The five men in suits arrayed around Bonson glowered at him. They had
hard eyes, glittering with pure aggression, and taut, professional
faces. Their pistols were in their hands.
"That was Nick."
"Who got the picture of Donny and my wife?"
"That was Michael. You'd like them, Swagger. They're all ex-NCOs in
the Black Sea Marines and SPETSNAZ.
They've been with me for a long time."
"Who blew the building in Wisconsin?"
"That was a team job."
"And when you were running the mission against Solaratov, you were
really running it against PAMYAT.
588 STEPHEN HUNTER
Against Pashin, who was now a nationalist, and if he wins the
presidency it sets you guys back even farther. You always knew Pashin
was Fitzpatrick, but you had to find a way to get that information to
us without compromising your position. You turned everything inside
out, so that in the end, the American government was working in the
interests of the communist party. The Cold War never ended for you,
right?"
"It never will. History runs in cycles. We're in retreat now, largely
underground. But we've been underground before. We started
underground. We have to eliminate our enemies in Russia. First
Russia, then the world, as the great Stalin understood. We'll be back.
This great, rich, fat country of yours is about to explode at the
seams; it'll destroy itself and I'll help it. I should get the
directorship shortly. From there, politics. The very interesting part
of my plan is just about to start happening."
"Who are you?" boomed Bob.
Why was he talking so loud?
"I'll tell you. But first, you satisfy me: when did you know?"
"I began to suspect at the meeting when the kid wanted to let Solaratov
take out Julie and nab him on the way out. That was the smart move;
even I knew that. But you said no, you couldn't do that to me. Fuck
you, that was never you. You could send anybody down. I knew that
about you from what you done to Donny. So when you say you could never
do that, I knew you was lying. You had to stop Solaratov. That was
your first mission."
"Smart," said Bonson.
"Smart, smart, smart."
"It gets me thinking. In seventy-two, you guys must have been shitting
because you let the most important witness to Pashin and Trig get away.
You couldn't track him because a good officer gave him liberty and then
he was on his way back to Vietnam. He has to be killed, not only to
protect Pashin, but to protect you. So ... how do the goddamn Russians
know where he is and what he's doing in Vietnam? How can they target
him? That's a
TIME TO HUNT 589
very tough piece of info to come by, and their whole plan turns on it.
They had to have someone inside. Someone had to get into naval
personnel and figure out where the boy was. Somebody had to target
him. Solaratov was only the technician. You was the shooter."
Bonson stared at him.
"Funny, how when you make the breakthrough, it all kind of swings into
shape," Bob said.
"It all makes some kind of sense. Your last mistake: haw fast the
information got to Moscow, got to higher parties in PAMYAT, to destroy
Pashin's presidential thing. Man, that was fast work.
You're telling me the Agency is that fast? No way. Had to be some
inside thing, someone who just had to make a phone call. Damn! And
everybody keeps saying, "Ain't it funny the communist party really
benefits from all this?"
Yeah, the real joke is, through you, the communist party is running all
this. Who are you?"
"You are smart," said Bonson.
"You just weren't quick enough, were you?"
"Who are you?" repeated Bob.
"You'd never believe this, but I'm history. I'm the future.
I'm mankind. I'm hope. I'm the messiah of what must be."
He smiled again, a pure pilgrim of his own craziness.
"Not even Solaratov believed that shit," said Bob.
"All right, I'll tell you," said Bonson.
"And then I'll kill you. This is a great privilege for you."
"Who are you?"
"You'd know the original family name, or you could dig it up. It's in
some books. My parents were workingclass Americans and fervent members
of the American Communist Party. In 1938, the year I was born, they
were asked to drop out and go underground for the committee.
Of course they agreed. It was the greatest honor they'd ever been
paid. So they renounced the party, turned on all their friends and
spent the next fifteen years working as couriers, cut-outs, bag men for
the atom bomb spies. They serviced the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Klaus
Fuchs, the
590 STEPHEN HUNTER
whole brilliant thing we ran in this country. They were heroes. My
father was a great man. He was greater than your father, Swagger. He
was greater, braver, stronger, tougher, more resilient than your
father. He was the best and my mother was a saint."
Bonson's eyes shown with tears as he recalled the beauty of his
mother.
"You know the rest. NSA de crypts finally gave them away. My father
hung himself in a holding tank on Rikers Island. My mother got me out,
and then poisoned herself as the agents were coming up the stairs to
arrest her. They were heroes of the Soviet Union! They gave it all to
the revolution. Someone in the network got me out of the country, and
by the following Tuesday I was in Moscow. I was fourteen years old and
totally American, a Yankees and Giants fan, with an IQ of 160 and an
absolute commitment to bringing down the system that murdered my
parents. I was trained for six years. When I reinfiltrated I was
already a major in the KGB. I'm now a three-star general. I have more
decorations than you'll ever dream about. I am a hero of the Soviet
Union."
"You're a psychopath. And there ain't no Soviet Union," said Bob.
"Too bad you won't be around to see how wrong you are."
The two ancient enemies faced each other in silence.
Finally Bonson said, "All right. That's enough. Kill him."
The team raised their pistols. The suppressed 9mm bores looked at Bob.
There was complete silence.
"Any last words?" asked Bonson.
"Any message for the family?"
"Last words?" said Bob.
"Yeah, three of 'em: front toward enemy."
He turned his hand over to show them what it held and Bonson realized
in an instant why he had been speaking so loudly. Because he was
wearing earplugs. He held the M57 electrical firing device, the green
plastic clapper
TIME TO HUNT 591
with a wire running down to the painting, behind which stood on its
silly little set of tripods an M18A1 antipersonnel mine, better known
as a Claymore. One or two, the faster, may have tried to fire, but
Bob's reflexes were faster still as he triggered the demolition.
The one and a half pounds of plastic explosive encased in the mine
detonated instantly, and a nanosecond later the seven hundred ball
bearings, a blizzard of steel, arrived upon them at close to four
thousand feet per second.
The mine did what the mine was supposed to do: it took them out.
It literally dissolved them: their upper bodies were fragmented in one
instant of, maximum, total butchery.
They exploded as if they'd swallowed grenades and become part of the
atmosphere.
As for Bob, he saw none of this. The pillar, as planned, saved his
life by blocking the force of the concussion. The earplugs saved his
eardrums. But a pound and a half of plastic explosive is no small
thing. He felt himself pulled out of his body, and his soul went
sailing through the air until it struck something hard, and his mind
filled with a bright fog, an incandescent emptiness. He blacked out
for a minute or two.
No police arrived. The waterfront is a place of odd noises from
unspecified localities: freighters' horns, the rumble of trucks,
backfires and an almost total night emptiness of human life. The sound
of the blast was just another unexplained aural phenomenon in a city
full of unexplained aural phenomenon.
When Bob pulled himself out of his fog, he tasted blood. He smelled it
too. The blood he tasted was his own: his nose bled and both his ears
rang like fire bells despite the plugs. He felt pain. He thought he'd
broken his arm, but he hadn't, although he'd bruised it deeply. He
picked himself up, saw flashbulbs prance through the air as his
short-circuited optic nerves sputtered ineffectively.
He blinked, staggered, sat, pulled himself up, blinked again and then
beheld the horror.
592 STEPHEN HUNTER
The blood he smelled was theirs, and much of it, atomized, still
floated in waves in the air, lit by flickering lights.
There had been six of them: now there were three legs left standing,
though no two belonged to any one of the men.
What remained of Ward Bonson, deputy director of the CIA for
counter-intelligence. Wall Street lawyer, three star general in the
KGB and a hero of the Soviet Union, was applied to the punctured metal
of the wall behind him, mixed completely with the remains of the men
who'd served him so ably over the long years. No one would have the
heart--or the stomach--to separate them. It was a pure hose job.
Small fires burned everywhere in the smoky space. The sketches had
been scattered about. Slowly, Bob gathered them up, then went to the
largest of the fires.
He knelt, and one by one fed them into the hungry fire. It gobbled
them, and he watched them seized, then curl to delicacy as they were
blackened and devoured, then transfigure again into crispy ash, which
fragmented and floated away in the hot current.
In the way his mind worked, he thought he saw the souls of those three
lost boys, his friend Donny and Donny's friend Trig and Trig's victim,
Ralph, somehow released to rise and float free, DEROS at last.
He picked up the fingerprinted M57 and dropped it into his pocket for
later disposal, his last physical connection to the fate of Bonson and
his team. Then he rose and walked out, turning for one last glimpse at
the slaughterhouse he had created and the end of all complications of
his violent life.
He thought: Sierra-Bravo-Four. Last transmission. Out.
He walked into the night air, sucked in its freshness, headed to his
truck and, though he ached and bled, knew it would be best to start the
long drive west. It was time to rotate back to the world.
acknowledgments
The author would like to begin by making certain readers understand
that the foregoing in no way advances a claim for his own heroism,
which is, of course, nonexistent.
He was not a Marine sniper nor even a Marine; he never went to Vietnam
but served as the least efficient ceremonial soldier in the 1st
Battalion (Reinf.), Third Infantry, in Washington, DC, 1969-1970. His
own war story:
he was present at the occupation of the Treasury Building.
It was very boring. And once he cut his lip on some barb wire at Camp
A.P. Hill in Virginia.
Readers will also recognize that I've seized events from Vietnam,
fictionalized them and reinserted them in a bogus time frame for my own
dramatic purposes. That includes inventing an extra year of Marine
ground combat.
Most Marine units left RSVN in 1971; I was stuck with 1972 because I
chose that year without doing a lick of research when I was writing
Point of Impact, the first of the Bob Lee Swagger books, many years
back. In earlier books, I also set the action near An Loc, which turns
out to be close to Saigon, and nowhere near I Corps, where the Marines
served. So in a belated attempt at the illusion of accuracy, I've
deemphasized An Loc and moved the location of Bob and Donny's fight in
the rain up to I Corps, near the Special Forces camp at Kham Due.
I've also simplified the complicated events in Washington over the
first four days of May 1971 into a single night, put the massacre of
Firebase Mary Ann--my Dodge City--in a different year and ascribed it
to a different service, and invented my own "Nam jargon under the
license of telling stories, not writing history. In fact, one of the
few things recounted in this book that actually happened was the great
catch that Donny remembered making against Oilman High School. It was
made against
594 STEPHEN HUNTER
Oilman, a prep school not in Arizona but Baltimore, by my son Jake
Hunter, in Boys' Latin's victory over Oilman in 1995.
I should add that I've made a good-faith effort to reconcile events of
this book with events previously referred to in Point of Impact and
Black Light. Alas, far too many times events were irreconcilable, so
you'll simply have to trust my assertion that in other books things
happened that way, but in this book they happen this way..
But where I've made up much, I've also talked with many people who had
firsthand knowledge of the kind of events I describe. They're all good
men and deserve no blame for my inaccuracies or the ends to which I've
put information that they earned the hard way.
Ed De Carlo retired Army CSGT, and Alvin Guyton, retired Gy. Sgt,
USMC, both good buddies from On Target Shooting Range, where I spend
vast amounts of time and money, shared Vietnam memories and data with
me.
Ed was a radio operator and briefed me on the intricacies of the PRC-77
and map reading; Alvin, a recon Marine, lent me tons of reference
material and even loaned me copies of his orders to Vietnam on which to
base my version of Donny's, and tried to make me feel Marine culture
well enough to imagine it. Two of the usual suspects, Weyman Swagger
and John Feamster, offered their usual supplies of endless labor,
commentary and suggestion, each reading the manuscript with a great
deal of precision.
Lenne Miller, another Vietnam vet and an old college friend, was
equally generous with time and observation.
My brother Tim Hunter sent me a terrific letter of constructive
criticism. Jeff Weber not only lent me his name for one of the
characters but also read the manuscript and offered good advice. Bob
Lopez came up with a crucial idea at a crucial moment. J. D.
Considine, the pop-music critic of The Baltimore Sun, my old paper,
drew up a compilation tape of 1971 hits, to whose accompaniment this
book was written. Mike Hill was very helpful. Bill Phillips, an
ex-Marine officer, Vietnam vet and author of The Night
TIME TO HUNT 595
of Silver Stars, read the manuscript carefully and helped me sort out
Army jargon and replace it with Marine, but if I've called it a latrine
somewhere instead of a head, it's my fault, not Bill's. Tim Carpenter,
of Bushnell's, explained the subtleties of infrared ranging devices to
me.
Dave Lauck, of D&L Sports in Gillette, Wyoming, and author of The
Tactical Marksman, ran his fine professional eye over the manuscript,
to my great benefit. Kathy Lally and Will England, the Sun's Moscow
correspondents, gave me tips and data on that city for a chapter that
was ultimately cut. Warrant Officer Joe Boyer of the Marine Barracks
took me on a prowl through that installation and patiently answered my
questions. Jean Marbella, of my old paper and my new life, was her
usual fabulous self and listened to me prattle on about titles and
narrative issues late into the night. John Pancake, arts editor of my
new paper, The Washington Post, just smiled every time I told him I was
leaving early to work on the book. David Von Drehle, editor of the
Post's Style section, was equally generous in letting me disappear when
I deemed it necessary.
Steve Proctor, of the Sun, had instituted a similar policy in my many
years there, and he too should be recognized and thanked.
Former Green Beret Don Pugsley wrote to me at great length about
communications procedures from A camps.
Charles H. "Hap" Hazard, a Sun artist and former Army intelligence
enlisted man, translated a lot of stuff into Vietnamese for me, very
helpfully. Dr. Jim Fisher introduced me to Dr. Charlie Partjens, an
orthopedic surgeon, who discussed the physical realities of an old
bullet with me. Bill Ochs, former Army sergeant, discussed something
of far more intensity: the trauma of his own hip wound, acquired in
action in RSVN. I really appreciate his willingness to let a stranger
invade his privacy like that.
I should also thank authors who have come before me.
Peter R. Senich, the Thucydides of sniper warfare, came out with The
One-Shot War, a history of Marine sniper
596 STEPHEN HUNTER
operations in Vietnam, just as I was beginning. Then Michael Lee
Lanning and Dan Cragg published Inside the VC and the NVA, which was
very helpful for tough little Huu Co, senior colonel. Of course I've
drawn from Charles Henderson's Marine Sniper, and Joseph T. Ward's Dear
Mom: A Sniper's Vietnam, as well as the standard history texts. I
never spoke to any Marine snipers, however, because I needed to be free
to envision Bob Lee Swagger as I wanted him to be, warts and all.
Last, in the professional realm, I must thank my brilliant, wonderful
agent Esther Newberg of ICM and my great editor. Bill Thomas, of
Doubleday. And something finally for the book's dedicatee, John Burke,
who was the great Carlos Hathcock's spotter in Vietnam, and didn't make
it to DEROS. I never knew him but his story so moved me that I had to
find a way to cast it into a book, and he became my Donny Fenn. So in
a way this whole thing--this book and the three that proceeded it--all
came from his sacrifice. Thanks, Marine.