Stephen Hunter - Black Light

But Jodie came through here as then. Hating Jodie somehow liberated a last squirt of adrenaline from a secret gland store in his body, and he hit the river only to find it was a river of dust: it was the road.

He crossed it quickly, without a thought to security, suddenly realizing he was far enough ahead of his pursuer. He faded into the underbrush, following the road from twenty feet off it, gathering strength and passion with each step.

At last he saw it: a little brown rented Chevy. Would they have set up here? Were there more than one? No, there couldn’t be. One man, a good man, hunted him, not a team.

He ran to the car, got the key out: opened the trunk.

He grabbed the Mini-14, flicked the scabbard away so that the gun itself was in his hands. Then he dug through the bag, thinking that he had one, yes, one more, and here it was, a last box of “Cartridge, 5.56mm, M-196 Tracer.” He broke the box open and quickly threaded the rounds into the forty-shot magazine, twenty of them. Then he broke open another box, “Cartridge, 5.56mm, M-193 Ball,” and slipped five in atop the twenty tracers.

He racked the bolt, felt a round feed. He was armed.

He knelt, put his fingers into the loam and came up with dirt, which he smeared abundantly on his face, to take the brightness off. There was a bandanna in the old bag too, and he tied it swiftly around his head, to keep the highlights of his still-blondish hair from glowing. He needed one more thing.

How do you fight infrared? What is infrared? It is heat. It sees heat. You have to fight it with heat. You have to fight its fire with your fire. At last he found the last thing: the gallon can of Coleman fluid for the lantern.

He picked it up, feeling its liquid-sloshing weight and terrible awkwardness, but that couldn’t be helped.

He slammed the trunk shut.

All right, he thought, time to hunt .

P eck sat in the forest, slouched atop the ATV in the dark. He was in the middle of a serious crisis of confidence.

His imagination soared with negative possibility; he felt himself growing shaky, testy, rancid. He kept looking at his watch, willing the numbers to melt more swiftly into other, later numbers. But they were stubborn boys: they’d hardly moved a notch since the last goddamned time he’d checked, three minutes ago. This was going to be a long night.

He rested in a hollow, a few hundred feet off the trail by which he’d brought the sniper into his territory. Around him towered huge trees that leaned gently in the breeze. But he could see exactly nothing and had no sense of space or distance. The nearby trees yielded merely to textureless black. He felt like he was hiding under a blanket and at any second someone could sneak up on him and put a bullet into him. He didn’t like it a bit.

He spat a gob into the undergrowth. He listened. His only connection to what lurked around him was through his hearing. He knew: no news is good news. The sniper worked silently. If Peck started hearing things, happiness wasn’t just around the corner.

And so far, he had to admit, so good. He heard the whisper of air, now and then the scream of something small and furry dying before its time, the hoot of the occasional owl, but nothing metallic or mechanical. That was good. That was very good. He knew sound traveled miles in this place under these circumstances and his worst fear—Bob silently dispenses with the sniper and then comes hunting him—couldn’t come true.

He dreamed now of a simple pleasure: a world without this Bob Lee Swagger. That was the world he wanted, because in that world, with the patronage of Mr. Red Bama behind him, he at last had found his place, his niche. No redneck deputy with little education, gambling debts, dental bills, zero savings and an amphetamine habit. No sir: he would count . He could have a nice woman, a place . He’d be part of what he had always seen as “it,” meaning people who knew what to do, people with friends and possibilities, instead of, as he was now, a little man out on a limb all by his own lonesome, no one to catch him if he fell, no one to care. He was on nobody’s agenda: he was just an angry white man, and if he didn’t take care of himself, who would?

Thus, when the first sound arrived, he went into denial. He convinced himself it didn’t come. He had heard nothing. It was some trick of nature, out to hornswoggle him. But then it came again, this time classifiable by direction: it was from the north and it was the sound of metal striking metal, familiar but still unidentifiable.

He fought a bit of panic: what was it? He tried to search through his memory and the only image that seemed to associate itself with the sound was ludicrously automotive. It sounded somehow like someone working with a car in some way, possibly opening a trunk, then throwing things around inside the trunk.

He waited, listening so hard he thought his brain would explode. How could there be a car nearby? And how nearby was “nearby”? Then he remembered the dirt road north of here, about half a mile. He knew that Bob and the boy would have come by car and would have parked somewhere before they moved into the forest.

He looked at his watch: 9:43 P.M.

Could Swagger have made it all the way back to the car in that time? He waited for the sound of an engine, to signify that whoever it was, was moving out of the area, leaving him to his own mission.

But then he heard, louder than anything before, the solid crunch of metal locking into metal. He knew it instantly: a trunk lid being slammed.

Shit and goddamn.

He suddenly felt achingly vulnerable. The ATV was out of the question: he couldn’t be bopping around the woods on a four-wheeled motorcycle, generating noise and exhaust, easy meat for all and sundry. Instead, he dropped off the vehicle and quickly calculated the point where the noise originated and the point where the sniper hid and thought to intersect them. If Bob was moving around in the woods he would be hunting a sniper, not any old poor nobody-gives-a-shit-about-him Duane Peck, with a chance to make his way in the world.

He didn’t want to do it, but sometimes, as Duane well knew, wants don’t have nothing to do with it. He flipped off his hat and began to night-navigate through the woods. He drew his Glock, repeating to himself what that Neechee had said: that which does not kill you makes you strong.

Bob tried to recall the terrain. Why do you never pay attention to the things that become so goddamned important? But he willed himself to recollect, and had a memory of what he thought would work best if the plan he’d cooked up were to have a chance. Wasn’t there a place he’d noticed on the left, maybe half a mile in, where the trees thinned for a bit, opened to a clearing, possibly left over from a logging operation some years ago at the base of a ridge. Or was that from some goddamned dream? Would he just bumble around until he placed himself before the sights of the sniper, who would nail the Nailer?

He tried to press that out of his mind. He tried to think: What will Preece do? Will he follow me? Yes, he has to: but how aggressively? He’ll dawdle, scanning the woods, afraid to get too close for risk of an ambush, knowing that he’s got all the advantage if he doesn’t blow it with overaggressiveness.

That’s what I’d do.

Now: how to draw him toward me.

There was only one answer. He drew the Mini-14 to his shoulder, aimed it pointlessly into the dark and fired three times fast.

The gun cracked and flashed, spitting empty brass, lighting the vault of trees that curved overhead, kicking ever so slightly. The noise was loud, and in its echo a few sleeping birds screamed or flapped airborne, uncorking a sense that the night had been disturbed.