Stephen Hunter - Black Light

Two hundred yards below in a hollow by the stream sat the cabin. It was built of logs, low and primitive, with a woodpile, an outhouse, a feed trough for the pigs who scurried in a pen. A beat-up Chevy stood near it, rusted out, one fender gone to primer. Yet it had nothing of rustic Dogpatch, your quaint rural hamlet to it: instead it looked mean and squalid and impoverished.

“No phone lines,” Bob said. “No goddamned TV aerial. No electric wires.”

“Question,” said Russ. “If he’s just out of prison, how come the place looks so lived in?”

“He had a brother named Lum,” said Bob. “The brother had a son, who also lives here. It’s the son’s work you’re seeing, not old Jed’s.”

“Okay,” said Russ. “So let’s go see if he’ll talk to us.”

“No way,” said Bob. “You stay here. You eyeball the place. You got another hour. Then the sun’s too low to the west and it’ll reflect off the lenses. You got a watch?”

“Yes.”

“It’s two forty-five. You eyeball it till three forty-five. What are you looking for?”

“Uh, anything that’s out of the ordinary.”

“How do you look?”

“Uh—” Completely new question. Russ flubbed around.

“Hard,” he finally said.

“No, dummy. Divide it into quadrants. Thirty seconds a quadrant. Blink to black between, then move on. Follow the same pattern for ten minutes, then reverse it or change it around. Take frequent breaks and study the woods around. Use lens discipline. Never let them rise above the midpoint, you might throw a reflection. You’re not looking for men and guns, because you won’t see them and there’s no point. You’re looking for regular outlines. Nothing in nature is regular. If you see a straight line in the woods, you know something’s off. Got it? One hour. Then put the glasses down and just go to regular vision.”

“Where’ll you be?”

“I’m going to circle around and see if I cut any tracks in the woods. I want to know if parties of men have moved through here to that damned place. If it’s empty, and you haven’t seen anything, then we’ll go down.”

“Okay,” said Russ. “We’re not going to get out of here until after dark.”

“Don’t you worry about that, Donnie. You just eyeball the place.”

With that, he slid back and in seconds—the sniper’s gift—had disappeared.

Who the hell is Donnie? Russ wondered.

J ack Preece was working on budgetary projections for 1998, one of his most favorite things.

He loved the steady march of the numbers across the page, the semblance of order they brought to chaos, the inflow and outflow as his fortunes advanced. It answered some deeply felt need he had.

Battalion 316, Honduras Army

Salvadoran Treasury Police

Detroit SWAT

Baltimore County Quick Response

FBI Hostage Rescue

Atomic Energy Commission Security Teams

Library of Congress SWAT

Navy SEAL Team Six

It was amazing, really. Nobody had ever looked at it this way, but sniping was a growth industry. The explosion in terrorism in the seventies, its ugly reappearance in the nineties, the profusion of heavily armed drug cartels with paramilitary capacity, the specter of armed right-wing militias, the increasing liberal call for “sophisticated” (i.e., surgical or low-lethality) police operations, all added up to one thing: the precision rifleman and the gear and culture to equip and train him were a skyrocket for the nineties and the century beyond the millennium. He was surprised, come to think of it, that the Wall Street Journal hadn’t done a story yet.

Every town, every city, every state, every agency, every country, needed the trained rifleman with the world-class equipment. Life was becoming psychotic. Rationality had broken down. Crushed and shattered by disappointment, political, domestic or economic, many men turned to violence. The workplace berserker, the family hostage taker, the organized criminal gang, the drug security goon squad, all heavily armed. Who would stop them? Not the patrol officer or the security dork, not enough training, not enough guts. No, it would be some replication of himself: a man with the coolness, the experience, essentially the will, to lie there in the dark and when the whole thing was going down, to do his duty. Trigger slack out, breathing controlled, absolute confidence in weapons system, not a hitch or a doubt or a twitch anywhere: the trigger goes back. A hundred yards away a small piece of metal driven at supersonic speeds enters the cranial vault, expands like a fist opening to hand, then spurts out the rear in a fog of pink mist. It’s over.

He, Jack Preece, had seen this earlier than anyone and was now prepared to ride the wave to a better, a safer tomorrow.

“General?”

It was Peck, long-boned and pale-eyed and trashy as death itself, in his deputy’s uniform, his gold badge shiny and bright.

“General,” he said, “it’s time. Signal just come through.”

“Give me a sitrep, please.”

“Huh?”

“Report on the situation, you idiot.”

“Oh. Yes sir. They’re there, they must be coming in. The old man got a good visual, else he wouldn’t have sent it.”

“Then let’s saddle up.”

Preece was already wearing his ghillie suit, a ghastly jumpsuit apparition painstakingly festooned with thousands of strips of camouflage cloth threaded through thousands of loops, giving him indoors the appearance of a great shaggy green dog that walked on two legs and had just stepped out of the swamp. But in the natural environment, it conferred an instant shapeless invisibility. He rose, feeling the swish of the strips, and quickly went to the bathroom. Before him on the sink were four wide paint sticks, black, brown, olive drab, jungle green. He hated the masks some of the boys wore: too hot, and limited peripheral vision. He worked quickly in applying the combat makeup, diagonal streaks an inch wide. The darkness of the jungle ate up the pink of his face like a lion swallowing a pie: it was gone, that pink, bland, square, handsome mug behind which he faced the world and hid his inner nature. A warrior gazed back, ancient and fearsome, his white eyes preternatural against the jungle tapestry that muted his flesh.

He grabbed his boonie hat—the original, worn in Nam for the two years he commanded Tigercat—and raced outside, pausing only to pick up the cocked and locked Browning Hi-Power that slid into a shoulder holster under the ghillie. Duane Peck had a four-wheeled ATV fired up and a long plastic case which packed the weapons system tied across the handlebars.

Jack Preece climbed aboard and with a spurt of the throttle Peck gunned ahead. They had not used the vehicle at all in previous recons of the area but had plotted a path through the trees that would in ten minutes bring Jack Preece within a half mile of one of the hills that overlooked the creek and the path. The little vehicle ate up the distance, though Peck kept the speed moderate so there was no wailing engine.

They reached the destination and Preece dismounted, took the case and opened it. The M-16 with its gigantic eye atop its gigantic tube mounted to the receiver was a black shadow in the decaying light. The suppressor protruded from the gun muzzle like an elegant snout, a sleek cylinder fully a foot long. The metal was all Teflon-coated, lusterless and somehow dead to the touch. He bent, quickly attached the miniature battery pack to his belt, lifted the rifle and locked in a twenty-round banana clip with only nineteen cartridges, always a sound precaution when working with magazine-fed weapons. With a snap, he pulled back and released the charging plunger, loading and cocking the weapon, and thumbed the safety to On. He threw the support harness around his shoulder, rose and lifted it: less than eighteen pounds total, quite easily done.