Stephen Hunter - Black Light

What came out next was a longer gun case, and when he got it out and opened, he saw a Ruger Mini-14, a kind of shrunken version of the old M-14, almost delicate-looking, light and handy. He seized the weapon, threw the bolt and clicked the trigger against an empty chamber. It was a carbine-style semiauto, capable of firing a 5.56mm cartridge that could chew through metal or men, depending. It looked fine too, though oily after three years underground. The film of oil and the packs of desiccant strewn about the tube had done their job.

He pulled out a last trophy, a canvas sack, and looked inside: four Mini-14 magazines, one of them an oversize forty-rounder, the Galco holster for the Commander, six boxes of .45 Federal Hydrashocks, five boxes of hardball 5.56mm and five boxes of M-196 tracer.

He sat back, then turned.

“Whyn’t you come on down and fill in this hole for me?” he called.

Silence.

“Russ, you don’t know enough how to move through the woods quietly. Come on out.”

The boy came out sheepishly.

“I saw you go. I followed you. I heard the sounds of your digging.”

“You shouldn’t sneak around on an armed man.”

“You weren’t armed when you left.”

“Well, I am now.”

“What the hell is going on? You have to tell me. You owe me.”

“What is going on is I want you to go home. This thing may get hairy. I was meaning to speak to you on it. Yesterday, I realized. I should have realized earlier.”

“Bob, I’m not going. This was my idea from the beginning. I have to stay.”

“I don’t want to have to call your father and say, ‘I got your boy killed for nothing.’”

“It doesn’t matter about my father.”

“Your mother, then. It would kill her.”

“She’s been killed before.”

Bob said nothing.

Russ came over and started shoveling the dirt into the hole.

“I’m not giving you a gun,” Bob said. “I don’t have time to train you and I won’t be around an untrained man. If there’s shooting, boy, you just hit the deck and pray for the best.”

“I will.”

“Well, we’ll see how it goes. I’m sending you home at the first sign of heavy weather. This ain’t a picnic. Ask your father. He’ll tell you. It’s about as goddamned scary as it gets. Now let’s move out. You carry the ammo. It’s the heaviest.”

They walked down the path. It was a fine morning, with the sun now up and blazing through the pines; between the shafts, Russ could see the green heights of the Ouachitas dominating the horizon. It was a quality of his mind that he was highly irony-conscious. Thus it provoked him that the scene was so innocent and sylvan, such an emerald-green panorama of natural goodness, and here he was walking with a heavily armed and very dangerous man, setting off on a mission that this man suddenly thought could end in violence. He shook his head. He was a writer! What was he doing here?

“Something funny?” Bob asked.

“It’s just ridiculous,” said Russ.

“Whatever it is, it ain’t ridiculous,” said Bob. “It may be dirty, it may be ugly, it may be evil. It ain’t ridiculous and the people who put it together ain’t funny. They’re professionals.”

“The sniper who killed your father?”

“He’s just a little piece of it. He’s working for someone else. Someone called the shot, someone laid it out, someone put it together very tight and solid.”

“How do you even know there was a sniper?” Russ finally asked.

“It started with the bullet weights,” said Bob darkly, as though he hated to explain to an idiot. “They recovered three bullets from my father. Two were 130 grains. One was 110 grains. The 130-grainers were clearly from Jimmy’s .38 Super. But the 110? It’s possible a third 130-grainer hit him and broke apart and only 110 grains’ worth was recovered, but the goddamned list didn’t say nothing about that. So that gets me thinking: where the hell does a 110-grain bullet come from? And what is a 110-grain bullet? Do you know?”

“No.”

“Your father would.”

“Fuck him.”

“It’s a carbine bullet. M-1 carbine, handy little job they used in World War II. Underpowered, but sweet-handling.”

“Okay. So? What would the significance of that be?”

“I’ll tell you when I’m ready. The next thing was the grocery store job. Forget why. Don’t worry about why. Just look at the job: too clever. The right grocery store, the right time of day, very professional. Jimmy was a small-potatoes car thief. How’d he figure on that so quickly?”

Russ said nothing.

“Then the getaway. Even you got that one. How’d they get sixty miles south, through all them roadblocks? You could write it off to luck, I suppose, unless you looked at it carefully. They had a lot of other luck that day too. How’d they get so damned lucky? On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a thing to load that car in a semi and haul it down here. You’d sail through. Trucks sail through all the time.”

Russ said nothing.

“The .38 Super. It’s a pro’s gun, a criminal’s gun. It’s a man-killer. Bank boys love them, mob hitters, that kind of thing. Seems very goddamned odd the best man-shooter in the world just happens to show up in Jimmy Pye’s hands the day he gits out of jail.”

Russ nodded.

“Then the shooting site,” Bob said. “I’m a professional shooter. I kill people for a living, or at least I did. And if I’m setting up a shot, that’s how I’d do it. You have to be high, because the corn gets in the way of a level shot. He’s in the trees, maybe a hundred yards away, in a stand. His job is to watch. The setup is to have Jimmy Pye kill my father with the .38 Super. But whoever’s pulling the strings, he has to worry if Jimmy’s quite the man for the job. And Jimmy wasn’t. So there has to be another guy there, just in case. Shooting slightly downhill at a sitting target on a windless night. It was an easy shot,” said Bob.

“It was at night. It was at night!!” shouted Russ. “Could he see in the dark?”

“Yes, he could,” said Bob. “That’s why he was using the carbine and not a ballistically better weapon. Remember the rattlesnake?”

“The snake?” Why did this strike a note of familiarity with Russ? Who had spoken of snakes? But then, yes, he remembered. The old man had mentioned somebody named Mac Jimson shooting a snake on the road. He said he’d never seen anything like it.

“Snakes are cold-blooded night hunters, but they have some advantages,” Bob explained. “They’re sensitive to heat. That’s how they hunt. They’re sensitive to infrared radiation, in other words.”

“I don’t—”

“ Infrared ,” Bob said. “Black light.”

Russ swallowed. Infrared? Black light?

“Infra is light below the visible spectrum, the light of heat. It has certain military applications. If you radiate heat, you radiate light in that wavelength and you have an electronic device that can amplify it, you can see in the dark. Or you can put out a beam in that wavelength and you can see it in such a device. Ours was called the M-3 sniperscope, pretty much state-of-the-art in 1955. It was a scope and an infrared spotlight mounted on a carbine. Worked best on clear, dark nights. He puts out a beam. He watches my daddy in that beam. My daddy never knows a thing. One shot. Only the snake knew. It felt the heat; it has pit organs in its skin, heat receptors, and when the light came onto it, it stirred, rattled. Then it did what a hunter would do. It went toward the source of the infrared. That’s why it crossed the road, no matter all the cops. It was hunting the sniper.”

“But you can’t know ,” said Russ. “It’s all abstract theory. There’s no real proof.”