Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Well … it’s just a thing. You wouldn’t understand it. I’d say it to another sniper and to no one else. What I said to you earlier, that’s what’s important. He’s a fine man, a great officer.”

“You have to tell me. I can’t get through this if you don’t.”

Bob paused. He wondered if he had the skills to articulate what lay at his heart. Or the energy. Damn this kid, with his smart-ass ways and his penchant for always coming up with a question that was pretty damned good.

“If you do write a book, you cannot put this in it. Ever. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir.”

“I don’t want it said, Bob Lee Swagger, he had hard words for an American soldier who in good faith and out of duty and honor risked his life for his country. I won’t have that. That’s shit. That’s what’s killing the country.”

“I swear.”

“Then I tell you this now, and I will never hear of it again.”

“Yes sir.”

“It’s about killing.”

Russ said nothing.

“In war,” Bob said, “death comes in three forms. Usually, it comes from far off, delivered by men who never see the bodies they leave behind. That’s how we done most of our killing in Vietnam. The B-52s did the most, man, they’d turn that goddamn jungle into pulp and chew up everything for a square mile. And artillery. On the ground, the artillery does most of the killing. The king of battle, they call it. You may not like it, but that’s how it is.”

“Yes,” said Russ.

“Second is in hot blood. Firefight. You see forms moving, you fire. Some of them stop moving. You may never see them up close, you may never know if you got a hit or not. Or you may: you see the little fuck go down, you see the tracers cut him up, that sort of thing. What’s going on is really fighting. It’s you or him. You may not like it, but goddammit you do it, because if you don’t, you’re the one goes home in a bag.”

“Yes, I see.”

“The third and last form is cold-blooded killing. That’s what we do. We, being the snipers. We put a scope on a man from a half mile out and we pull a trigger and we watch him go still. Nothing pretty about it, but I would say it’s necessary. I believed it was necessary. I know it makes people nervous. You’re death. They call you Murder, Inc., and God knows what they say about you behind your back. They think you’re sick or nuts or something, that you enjoy it.”

“That’s what you did.”

“I did. But still, distinctions can be made. Somehow distinctions got to be made. I didn’t shoot women or children and I didn’t shoot anyone that wasn’t out to kill me. If someone has a hard time with that, well, tough shit. I was a hunter . It’s called fair chase. You go into the jungle or along the paddy breaks. You hunt your enemy and you try and find a position where he can’t get you. You take him down. You hit him, you get fire. We lost a lot of men. We had rewards on our heads. The VC put ten thousand piasters out for me and eventually a Russian bastard claimed it, but that’s a different story. What we did was war. Find and destroy the enemy. Shoot him. Try and go home. Finish the mission.

“Now, the army …”

He paused. Something in him recoiled at this; but he had to get it out.

“Different doctrine, developed first at this Project B LACKL IGHTand then deployed through Tigercat, the 7th Infantry Division Sniper School. What they’d do, they’d night-insert four-man teams into a zone, three security boys with poodle shooters and one sniper with a rifle. They liked to do it just after a sweep. So Charlie was out and about, and feeling safe. He thought he owned the night. The shooter had what they called their M-21, which was an M-14 7.62 NATO rifle—.30-caliber, Russ—worked over and accurized by the Army Marksmanship Unit. It carried a suppressor—since you been to the movies, you’d call it a silencer—and a night-vision device, an AN/PVS-2, called a Starlight scope. So these boys set up in the jungle and they just wait; the sniper’s on the scope, the other guys have night-vision binocs. They pick something up and the sniper moves into position. He puts the scope on them. It’s like they’re moving through green water, but he’s got them out to eight hundred yards. The gooks never knew what hit them. They couldn’t get a read on the sniper’s hide because there was no sound. They couldn’t believe he could see them, but through the scope, bright as daylight, he could put them down. Lots of kills. It was easy. One boy got a hundred fifteen kills in about five months. They was getting six, seven kills a night. Were they hitting soldiers? Hell, from eight hundred yards out on a Starlight, who the hell can tell? If they’re moving at night, I guess they’re soldiers, but maybe they were kids going to the john or families trying to move at night so they wouldn’t get bounced by our Tac Air. Who knew? Then, at 0700, a chopper evacs the team the fuck out of there and it’s back to base camp for pancakes and a good night at the body-count factory.”

“I see,” said Russ. “You don’t—it wasn’t—”

“I don’t know. I haven’t sorted it out yet. But it’s different.”

“It isn’t war,” said Russ, “and I’ll say it if you’re reluctant. It was straight execution work.”

“Yeah, well, you hide that. You got me? You hide that, and don’t be so quick to judge unless you walked in the man’s shoes. Now, this is how it’s going to work. I’m going to tell him how much we-all in the Marine Corps admired the army way of doing things. They got so many more kills than us. Damn, don’t that beat all. Get him to feeling all puffed up.”

“He’ll know you’re bullshitting.”

“Like hell he will. He’s a general, ain’t he? He’s used to being buttered up. He’ll want his place in history set straight. He’ll want to show us some hardware. Son, I was a sergeant in the Marine Corps for fourteen years. I know how these birds work.”

“There,” said the general. “There, do you see them?”

He did. The phantasms rose in the green gloom, two, three, then four, dancing ever so softly, their movements fired by incandescent phosphors in the tube of the device, which was a Magnavox thermal sniperscope. It was the latest thing, a lens that truly penetrated the darkness. No living thing could pass unnoticed in its view through the night.

The figures danced and one of them came at last to the red dot reticle in the center of the view.

“Go ahead,” said the general. “Take them.”

It was too easy. Bob was welded to the scope and felt the stock against him, his finger on the trigger. It was some kind of M-16, only swollen, enlarged. His hold was rock-solid and the weapon itself secured against the sandbags beneath it; he pressed the trigger and the rifle spoke once with a sound somewhere between a cough and a sneeze, or maybe a hiccup. There was no recoil, no sense of having fired, yet the action cycled and an empty shell was jettisoned and the first target went down. He moved the red dot ever so slightly and fired again: same thing. Twice more.

“End of mission,” said the general, snapping on the lights that filled a long shooting tunnel off of this sandbagged position. “Let’s see how you did.”

He turned to a computer terminal and punched in a command. The computer answered immediately.

“Superb shooting,” said the general. “Exactly as expected. You X’d the bull’s-eye on the first two cleanly, you broke a line on the third and you X’d the fourth again. Four kills. Elapsed time, 3.2 seconds. Recorded noise, ah, under one hundred decibels, about the sound intensity of someone firing a BB gun.”

The general reached over and hit a switch and the thermal scope died; Bob set the rifle, which looked oddly distended with the huge gunmetal-gray tube atop it, on the sandbags; he looked downrange at his targets and at the end of the tunnel, saw flattened metal silhouettes, clearly on some kind of uneven conveyer belt that gave them the lurching movement of human beings on patrol.