Time to Hunt (34 page)

The man fired.

D
onny 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.

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.

B
ob 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.

“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?

D
onny edged back a bit and the second shot blasted the earth just a few inches from his face.
Ow!
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
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.

“I got him!”
he screamed. “
I 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 superfast. 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.

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.”

H
uu 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.

“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; i, was the most feared weapon in the American arsenal of superweapons. 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
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.”

I
t 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
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, unconfessed 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
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.”