Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Get out of here now, Peck. You meet me at the staging area at midnight; if I’m not there, check each hour.”

“Yes sir,” said Peck.

The general turned and headed up the slope, hearing the low buzz of the engine as Peck’s ATV lurched off and slowly faded away.

He walked for ten minutes and saw before him a broad, flat, needle-carpeted forest floor, broken by the vertical maze of the trees, lit at one edge by the setting sun on the other side of the clearing. He moved through it fluidly, advancing twenty or thirty feet at a time, then melting into the earth, and listening intently. He reached the edge and, placing himself beside a pine tree with the lowest possible profile, peered downward. He could see figures behind the window, speaking animatedly. It was hard to make out. Binoculars would bring them out, but the sun was just low enough to present the possibility of a reflection. Instead, he brought the rifle up and with a snap of his thumb first to light and then to scope, went to infrared.

The cabin, two hundred yards away, was a bit out of range for the reach of the searchlight, so he didn’t get great illumination. The lack of total dark also eroded illumination. But he got enough: in the murky green light, he could see three figures. They seemed animated. Details were lost; one appeared to be tall and thin and could match up easily with the Bob Lee Swagger who had visited him two weeks ago. Another was the boy.

Do them, he thought.

Right now, why wait? Do them, be done with it. He could put nineteen rounds through the window in less than two seconds, and the .223, though not a powerfully heavy and accurate long-range round, was a true speed merchant and still offered more than 2,500 feet per second of velocity at that range. They’d be dead before they hit the ground.

But Jack was professional. You go by the plan, which you’ve rehearsed painstakingly. When you improvised, the law of unforeseen accident always took its toll.

He snapped the beam and the scope off and withdrew, snaking along the ground until he was lost in the trees. He stood then, and traced his way back along the ridgeline, making no noise, raising no dust. By the time he got to the hide, it was nearly full dark.

A thatch of plastic greenery which would never give itself over to dead brown and thereby reveal its position lay across it. Jack pulled it aside. The hide was not so much a conventional spider hole as a long narrow trench scooped out of the earth, deep enough to conceal a prone man, but easy enough to bail out of if the shit hit the fan. The dirt the digging had uprooted had been meticulously spread through the woods to attract no attention.

Preece slid into position, pulling the screen atop him. Quickly enough, he found a solid shooting position, bracing the weapon against the sandbag.

He went to infrared and instantly it all lit up before him in fishbowl green: the white winding ribbon of the path, the wavering wands of the vegetation, the lighter tonal quality of the rocks. The path passed before and below him a mere fifty yards away: that’s where he’d take them, putting the reticle on the taller figure’s chest, pumping one silent round out, then pivoting ever so slightly to the other figure. He’d done it a hundred times in practice.

He snapped the light off. It had a good eight hours’ worth of battery but he knew he’d hear them as they came up the path and there was no sense wasting power. You leave nothing to chance in this business and the one thing he could not control was the length of time it took for the two targets to get into range.

He settled back, slipping the camo band back to reveal the face of his watch: 7:10. He guessed another hour or so. But maybe longer and he had to stay alert.

Preece was really more a visionary, a leader, an administrator, a trainer and a coach than any real sniper. But even in Vietnam he believed a commander should endure and face the same chances that his men did, if only to understand their problems more fully. Thus he went on the missions on a weekly basis. Over his two years, he’d accumulated thirty-two kills, none officially recognized, of course, because officers were not supposed to do such things. Still, the thirty-two men were all unquestionably dead. One night, he even got four in about two minutes. Incredible occurrence, incredible sensation.

But they say you remember your first kill best of all and that was true with Jack Preece. And as he lay there in the hide in the intensifying darkness and the night forest was beginning to come to life all around him, he remembered perching in that deer stand in the dark of another Arkansas forest (not far from here, less than twenty miles as the crow flies). He hated the weapon: impossibly heavy, with a huge infrared spotlight bolted underneath the barrel and a huge scope atop, and a huge battery pack on his back, its straps cutting into him, all this for a puny .30-caliber 110-grain full metal jacket that hit with just a little more force than a .38 Special. It was the good rifle, of the three working M-3 sniperscope units, and he had it loaded with the most accurate lot of ammunition. And, as Frenchy Short had explained, he probably wouldn’t have to shoot. He was backup.

“Bubba, you got to do us a job,” Frenchy Short had said to him. “We got us a goddamned bad-ass state cop who’s acting as cutout to the Russians.”

“Huh?” said then-twenty-four-year-old First Lieutenant Preece, still an unformed boy whose celebrity as the author of “Night Sniper Operations: A Doctrinal Theory” in the Infantry Journal was beginning to fade.

When he thought about it later, Preece recognized what a load of bullshit the story Frenchy sold him had to be. But to a twenty-four-year-old infantry officer seething with anticommunist bacillus as inculcated by the political culture of the year 1955, who worshiped Joe McCarthy and had just—dammit!—missed Korea, it made a kind of sense. And part of it too was Frenchy, who had that weird psycho’s gift of utter conviction. Frenchy could sell Stalinism in the gulags. Frenchy had the odd chameleonlike ability of absorbing your personality, of becoming you , and so in effect entering your subconscious as he ground you down with furious and one-pointed eye contact, smothering, ass-kissing charm, and a bandit’s utter ruthlessness.

“We thought we’s years ahead of the Reds in IR,” Frenchy, who was originally from Pennsylvania, breathed in the assuring tonalities of Preece’s own South Georgia accent, “but goddamn, we’re gittin’ reports they got IR working on an experimental sniper rifle, combat-effective out to two hundred yards.”

“Shit,” the young man said.

“Now, you know they ain’t that good and I know they ain’t that good. How come they that good?”

“Spies,” said Preece.

“You got that right. Seems this old-boy state trooper got his ass in a little gambling trouble, so some old Red Army spymaster sniffs him out and makes his ass a proposition-he’s got to git inside B LACKL IGHTor he’ll go down. So this old boy arrests a corporal on a fag charge and threatens to destroy his life. But the cop’ll let him go if he supplies certain documents. CID got the kid’s statement and the kid in the hoosegow. Now we got to send the Reds a message: this is what happens when you go against the U.S. Army. We don’t take no prisoners.”

If Preece believed it, it was because he wanted to believe it and because it was, of course, well known that Red Army intelligence had penetrated the entire establishment, lurked everywhere and was capable of anything. As Frenchy pointed out many times, “Them boys don’t even b’lieve in God and once you give up your spiritual heritage you’re capable of doing anything.”