Time to Hunt (19 page)

“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
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 5120–1802.”

“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.”

“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.

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.

B
ob 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
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.

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 M118 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
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 platoon
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.