Stephen Hunter - Black Light

He faced the phone. It was nearly seven.

I can take it no more.

I have to know.

He dialed Duane Peck’s number. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and Red feared that catastrophe had occurred. His heart bucked in terror.

But on the fourth ring Peck answered.

“Yeah?”

“What’s happening, Peck?”

There was a pause that seemed to last an epoch in geological time as ice ages rolled down from the north, then retreated, whole species were created and evaporated, civilizations rose and fell, and then Peck said, “It’s over. Got ’em both.”

“Goddammit! Why didn’t you call me?”

“Ah—” began Duane.

“I told you to follow orders exactly . Don’t you get that?”

“Yes sir,” said Peck. “Sorry, I—”

“Is the general all right?”

“Yep.”

His heart soared in gratitude and intense pleasure.

“Bury the bodies, get the general home and disappear for a week. Call me next week. I want a full report.”

“Yes sir,” said Peck.

Red snapped off to the dial tone, the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.

R uss had an instant of clarity: he thought, I’ve finally done it. I’ve pissed him off so bad he’s going to beat the shit out of me.

For even as the snake’s rattle registered in his brain, Bob had turned and driven savagely into him, knocking stars into his brain behind his eyes, taking his breath from him, forcing him in a wild plunge to the precipice of the creek bed where he panicked at the instant surrender to gravity. Yet through his fear as he fell, literally in Bob’s arms, toward the black cold water, he heard one other thing.

This was the sound of a whip crack next to his car, for the air was full of buzz and fury, a sense of presence that Russ couldn’t identify, for it had no real antecedent in his life. And as he fell toward the water he also noted the appearance of explosions of some sort, on the far bank, geysers of earth spouted upward, filling the air with grit and dirt, but fastfastfastfast, so fast he couldn’t believe it and—

The water was cold. It knifed through him. He shivered like a dog, breathed some in (it tasted like cold nickels in his throat), and he fancied he saw black bubbles climbing until he broke free of Bob and started to rise, but Bob had him again and smashed him forward into the bank as three more silent blasts erupted into the dirt above and seemed to turn the darkness gray with haze and dust to the tune of three more whip cracks.

Russ had come to rest in the lee of the shallow bank. It was about a foot deep, a narrow gulch. The water cascaded over him, swift and numbing. He gasped for air and understanding.

“Sniper,” hissed Bob. “He’s up there on the elevation above the path. Infrared. The snake, Russ. I heard the snake.”

All was silent except for the rush of the cold, cold water over their limbs.

“Fuck,” said Bob. “Ain’t he a smart one, though.”

“Can you see him?”

“Russ, he’s got infrared . He can see us. We can’t see him.”

Russ rose as if to peer over the lip of the bank, but Bob pulled him back.

“He can shoot your eyes out. He can see you . You can’t see him.”

“It was so close.”

“What you heard was sonic boom. He has a silencer. You can’t hear his muzzle blast.”

It dawned on Russ where they were: no longer in the precincts of paranoia, where every living thing seemed a threat, but in the actual universe of hurt, where every living thing is a threat. This was it, then: the ultimate existential horror of the sniper’s world—to be hunted in a dark forest by an invisible antagonist who could see you when you couldn’t see him, who could fire without giving his position away and to be, yourself, unarmed.

Not unarmed: Bob had his .45 out.

“Can you get him?”

“Not likely. He don’t have to close. Fuck! Smart motherfucker.”

“Who is it?”

“What the fuck difference does it make?”

But then he knew.

“Preece. It’s his specialty. Goddamn . So smart.”

“Preece! How—”

“Don’t think about that now. Think about where we are, what we got.”

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Welcome to the club, sonny.”

In the dark, Bob’s features screwed tight in concentration. He looked both ways up the creek bed, threw himself into the problem, searching his mind to recall the terrain that lay between himself and the car, where he had a rifle.

“All right,” he said. “Here’s the deal. You work your way up the creek bed, about a hundred feet. You stay low, you stay in the water. He’s scanning right now. I’m going to work my way in the other direction. In four minutes, when you’re set, I’ll make my move and try and draw him away. When I go, loudly, you go softly, back—”

“To the cabin?”

“No! There’s nothing there but death. You back up into the woods and find someplace to go to ground. I don’t want you moving in the dark. He’ll find you. Remember: it’s alight . A black light, but a light. If you ain’t in the light, he don’t see you. Then, in daylight, that rifle is more of a problem than a help. Here.”

He gave Russ the compass.

“This’ll get you through the woods. After first light, you make good tracks. There’s a hill behind us, I don’t want you going up it. You cut back around it. Then you head due west by the compass, and soon enough, maybe fifteen miles, you pass Iron Fork Lake; five miles past that, you’ll come to 271. You call the cops, you tell ’em what’s happening. Meanwhile, I’ll try and make it back to the car and get my rifle. Then I’ll hunt this motherfucker down and fucking nail him.”

His face was a hard mask, set in stone and psychotic anger.

“He’ll kill you,” Russ said, the simple truth. “You don’t have a chance against his stuff.”

“It ain’t the gun, sonny. It’s the operator.”

Preece felt neither rage nor panic. He did not curse his luck or wonder what could possibly have alerted the two and caused them, in some incredible way, literally to disappear as his first brilliantly placed shot rocketed toward them. He recovered quickly, but they spilled into the creek bed exactly as he reacquired them and his next four rounds puffed against the far bank.

In the circle of the scope, in the cone of black light, it was bright as green noon. There was some verdure reflection but not much: it was like peering into a tinted photographic negative, a soupy, almost aquamarine world brilliantly illuminated by the infrared searchlight.

He scanned up and down the creek bed, knowing that Bob would realize that to stay put would be to die. Bob would have to make some kind of move: it was his nature. Now, how would he go? The creek bed was like a narrow trench about three hundred feet long at this point, and only deep enough to sustain cover for about one hundred feet. He could snake out either end, or he could go over the top, fading into the woods. But that would take him straight against the incline of the far hill; he’d be staked out against the rise like a butterfly on a pool table.

No, Bob would go out either one end or the other, and that was the problem with Preece’s system. It depended on a beam of invisible light, which gathered strength by focus. It was not powerful enough to illuminate both ends of the creek. Therefore, he had to scan continuously, covering the one, then the other—or figure out which one Bob would choose. It occurred to Preece to move lower down the slope to lessen the angle to the trench: in that way, he’d narrow the degree of muzzle arc he’d have to cover from one end to the other. But at the same time, suppose Bob moved when he himself was moving? Could he recover to shoot in time?