Stephen Hunter - Black Light

Damn! Nothing.

He blinked, wiped his eye, reset the rifle and began again to pivot, now cursing that he had active IR instead of ambient-light or passive IR technology, for it made him dependent on the range of the IR searchlight atop his scope. He looked for indicators: wavering bushes, crushed undergrowth, dust in the air, all of which might signify that the man had come through.

Then he had him. Bob was zigzagging toward the crest, near it, but Preece had him, could see him, nearly two hundred yards out and at the ragged edge of the black light’s ability to illuminate. He laid the crosshairs on the man, waited to take the tremble out of the sight picture until the reticle sat perfectly astride the shoulder blades and pressed the trigger.

Bob ran like a crazed man, zigging this way and that, trending north toward the crest of a ridge. He ran blindly through the dark trees, beyond caring what came at him. Branches cut his face, slashed at his arms, snarly roots tried to bring him down, sending him spinning at one point nearly out of control. He ran in darkness, and all his wounds screamed at him. He ran in fear, and all his doubts began to yell at him.

He could not will his imagination to cease: he saw it, a man in a ghillie suit with a big, silenced rifle, superbly accurate, drawing a bead, taking the slack out of the trigger, sending a bullet through him. The sniper sniping the sniper. Something enraged him about this: he was the man on that end of the rifle, and now he was the man being sniped.

Oxygen debt clawed at him; shrapnel from an old wound seemed to have worked its way free; loose glass ground and clicked in his stomach.

He could see the crest line just a few yards ahead but the trees thinned and he hated his nakedness, his gunlessness, his terrible vulnerability. Just a little bit more and yet as he moved from the trees to the open area just at the crest, the huge weight of intuition clamped down on him.

If Preece was going to shoot, this is when he’d do it.

Involuntarily, Bob went to the earth.

Sonic booms filled the air. The sound clapped loud and when the rounds struck the ground, they yanked up huge gouts of dirt and he could hear the whine of ricochets spiraling away.

He’s shooting, goddamn him, thought Bob, low to the ground and squirming desperately through the vegetation.

He crawled like a madman, for surely Preece would be scoping the area where he had to be.

Preece couldn’t see him, but he could feel him.

Recon by fire.

Every three or four seconds, Preece put out a probing round. There was the close-by crack! and the earth suddenly erupted as a bullet tore into it.

Bob found cover behind a tree which might stop a bullet or might not. He crawled to his feet.

CRACKkkk .

A bullet struck nearby, filling the air with dust.

Behind him: CRACK . Another one.

Bob stood behind the tree, as still as he could hold himself.

WHACCCCKKKK

Preece put a bullet into the tree; it exited an inch in front of Bob’s face, spewing slivers of wood and bark as it blasted outward. He blinked blood away and saw lights flash as his optic nerves fired off. A tongue of pain licked through his brain.

Oh, Christ, Bob thought. He’s seen me.

He stood very still.

Would the sniper fire again? If he fired again, the bullet would go through the tree and hit him. Would it have enough velocity to kill him?

Nothing could be done.

You just stood there, your ass on the line. If he fired again into the tree, the bullet would hit Bob and, yes, would kill him.

Please, he prayed. Get me out of here.

WHACCCCCKKKKK!

Another round tore through the tree; something stung Bob in the arm and made him flinch furiously. The bullet had torn through the dead center of the tree but, as bullets will by the alchemy of velocity, terminal energy, rotation and target density, had somehow deviated off the true and deflected enough to tear a furrow in an arm. It must have missed his body by a half an inch.

Would he shoot again?

Run, he told himself. Run like hell, get away from here.

But he knew if he ran he was dead.

CRACKkkk .

A bullet tore into the ground ten yards behind him.

The sniper fired again, farther away still. He was probing another area.

Bob heard a last shot, maybe thirty yards away.

How big was the cone of his light? Maybe not that big. Without willing it, he broke for the crest.

CRACKkkkk .

The bullet broke the earth just to the right of him, kicking up a wicked spout. But he dove and launched himself, feeling achingly vulnerable, and landed beyond the crest as CRACKkkk , another round tore into the ground.

He was beyond the crest.

He was safe. He lay there, breathing hard.

Damn!

Preece thought possibly he’d hit him, but couldn’t count on it. The reticle had been dead center as the man leaped over the crest but he had a memory, a sensation, that his trigger finger may have rushed, just enough to pull the aim off.

Now what?

One down, now what?

A certain part said: Disengage. It’s over. You’ve lost the advantage. He knows you’re hunting him, he can hide a hundred places and ambush you.

But another part reminded him that Bob had yelled his name and figured out who was coming for him. He would come again.

Preece decided: move forward aggressively, set up on and scan the ridge. You still have the advantage in the dark. You can overtake him in his flight and still get the nice clean shot between the shoulder blades.

He stood, removed the magazine and reseated a fresh one with nineteen more 5.56s in it. Time to go to work.

He moved out, at the trot, and swiftly traversed the two hundred yards to the ridgeline, and set up again. Very carefully he scanned the two hundred yards ahead of him. He could see no sign of Bob, but on a far crest line, where it should have been still in the night, a bush still quivered as if something had brushed it in blind panic.

He’s on the run, thought Preece.

His past flared up before him, all his regrets, his mistakes, the terrible things he’d done, the shame he felt, his weaknesses, his failures, his rancid uglinesses. The forest was his own mind with all its crudities and barbarities, its insensitivities, its selfishness, its indulgences, its cruelties. He couldn’t stop running and he hated running; he’d never run before in his life and now he couldn’t stop.

Panic flared through him. He didn’t want to die. He had a wife, he had a daughter, he had a life: now, after three tours and the terrible business in ’92, now he was going to die.

Please don’t let me die, he thought, abject and broken.

He crossed a ridge, dropped for a second. Had he been running mindlessly? Was he lost? Could he just drop and wait for the dawn and come out in a few days? He could get out, get in the rental car and speed away for Arizona. He could forget all this. The hell with it. What was the point? No matter what happened it wouldn’t bring his father back.

He rose, ran again, directionless.

But no, not really: he knew he was trending due north, for that was the Dipper above and at its farthest point, the North Star, the lost man’s only and truest friend.

He ran farther, through dense shortleaf pines, through tangled scrub oaks and briers and vines, up ridges, at one point through a creek. He fell once too, stumbling on a root that pitched him forward, scraping his hand, ripping his knee. He lay there, on the edge of exhaustion, feeling as ancient and as doomed as the Egyptians.

I am fifty goddamned years old , he thought, and I ain’t going to make it .

But somehow he rose and kept going through the dark and dreamy forest, now up another ridge, now down another one. Ahead he saw a white, winding river, glowing ever so in the dark, and ran toward it, fled toward it, feeling the hot sweat race down his chest and neck, sensing his own hot smell rising, finding some kind of left-right rhythm that recalled the far-off cadences of a Parris Island drill field, and all the Jodie chants, how Jodie was fucking your girlfriend but he never had a girlfriend and how Jodie was the pride of your mama and your daddy, but both his mama and his daddy were dead. So who was Jodie anyhow, and why did he have it in so bad for poor marine recruits trying to master the intricacies of close-order drill on a pitiless South Carolina field, assaulted by men with leather lungs who tried to make them feel like maggots?