Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

Whatever he said next was lost as Syd shouted, “Get two FBI choppers with tac teams out to Dar’s cabin— now! ” and then flipped shut the phone, picked up her submachine gun, and ran full speed for her parked Taurus. She had no idea that her cell-phone transmission had been garbled and that Special Agent Warren had understood none of it.

It seemed like a long night to Dar. He told himself that perhaps this was because he was not used to lying on a cold stone ledge all night waiting for a group of strangers to come try to kill him. Nope, he reassured himself, that couldn’t be the reason.

The position he had chosen was a rocky outcrop on the east side of the wooded ravine. The slabs of rock on which he lay were about 260 yards above the cabin—with a clear view of the parking area and entrance through gaps in the trees—and even more important, at approximately the same elevation as the two sniper’s roosts he had identified to the west. The slab he had chosen—the very word slab disturbed him a bit—lay in a natural fissure in the rock with two shooting channels: one looking downhill toward the cabin and the parking area, and the other offering a small slot in the rocks that was perfect for direct fire against the sniper positions. The bad news was that the stones to the east and north of him were higher than his roost and angled downward, which would create a nasty ricochet problem if someone actually started shooting at him from either of the obvious sniper’s roosts to the west. He hoped that it would not come to that.

Dar had stored the Barrett .50-caliber in the rock niche under a waterproof tarp, and now he was lying on that tarp, wishing he’d brought a closed-cell foam pad. The twenty-five-pound bulletproof vest he was wearing over his blouse was thicker than a police-issue Kevlar vest. It was modern Marine-issue and incorporated a thick ceramic chest protector that could stop a 7.62mm rifle bullet at medium range, but that also made it extra stiff and uncomfortable. I’m getting old, he thought.

The Barrett Light Fifty was on its bipod on the slightly down-tilting slab, leaving room next to his position for extra ammo, the Leica range-finding binoculars, and the receiver/monitor. His old M40 Sniper Rifle lay under camo-cover and waterproof plastic in the other gap to his right, ready to be used in an instant if he had to fire on the other sniper positions.

Dar figured that if the Russians did not come that night, they would not be coming at all.

His plan was relatively simple and it did not include any real heroics. If, by any chance, the Russians showed up at his cabin before the FBI nabbed them, Dar had his cell phone charged and programmed with Special Agent Warren’s and Syd’s numbers. Dar always thought of his cabin as being at the edge of the world out here, but the line-of-sight cell phone reception was excellent. This was, after all, Southern California. None of the people who had built expensive cabins out here to get away from it all could afford to be out of touch for even an hour.

Dar hoped that there would be no shooting—that he would just lie low in his duck blind while the Russians waited for him to come out of the cabin—until the FBI helicopters roared in with the real professionals. But if he was detected, he was ready to return fire and at least keep the Russians occupied until the cavalry arrived. His position was almost as strong defensively as the reactor at Dalat had been so many years ago—moated by the ravine, impossible to approach unseen from the west or south in the direction of the road and cabin, and difficult to climb to from the east. Dar had brought along his ghillie suit so that if the Russians’ “return fire” got too nasty—and Dar considered any return fire nasty—he would slip into the camouflage suit and head for the fields below the tree line to the east. By the time the Russians reached this side of the ravine, Dar should be all but invisible below and the FBI should have arrived in force.

I’m absolutely paranoid, thought Dar, soon after beginning his post-midnight vigil. Why the hell would the Russians come after me again?

But in his heart, he knew why. Both Gregor Yaponchik and Pavel Zuker had been trained and had operated as snipers. Dar knew that of all the soldiers on earth, only snipers are specifically trained to stalk another individual. Marines and Army grunts might end up with small units stalking small units, or even a single enemy, but only the sniper is trained to use stealth, concealment, and ambush at long range to kill another specific individual. And always first on the sniper’s kill list was the most dangerous threat—the enemy sniper.

Dar did not know if the Russians or their American employers had access to his Marine file, but he could not risk assuming they did not know he had been a sniper once. More than that, Yaponchik and Zuker had been tasked to kill him three times, and three times they had failed. If Dar knew anything about a sniper’s mentality—and he did—he knew that someone like Yaponchik would have an intense feeling of frustration at leaving this particular job unfinished.

Dar remembered a cartoon he’d once seen of a king sitting on his throne. I’m paranoid, the king had thought. But am I paranoid enough?

The night passed slowly. Making sure that there was no glow to reveal him, Dar switched the monitor from video camera to video camera, using the night lenses for the outdoor cameras. No movement on the road. No movement—or at least none detectable—in the broad fields down the hill from the cabin. No one at the sniper’s nests three hundred yards opposite him. No uninvited guests in the cabin.

Dar found one channel of his brain mulling things over. He allowed it to mull as long as it did not disrupt his focus.

He thought about his years reading the Stoic philosophers. He knew that the average person thought of the Stoics—if he thought of them at all—as proponents of a “stiff upper lip” and “don’t whine” philosophy. But the average person, Dar knew, was only half a bubble off moron-center.

He and Syd had talked about it. She understood the complexity of the Stoics’ writings—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. She understood dividing life between those things that one had no control over—and where the maximum courage was called for—and those elements that one could and should control, and in which caution was prudent. This had been part of Dar’s life and thinking for so many years that he found it surprising that he was reviewing and critiquing it on this night of all nights.

No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such, wrote Marcus Aurelius. Dar had tried to live this maxim.

What else had Marcus Aurelius taught? Dar’s nearly photographic memory brought back a passage. Let this always be plain to thee, that this piece of land is like any other; and that all things here are the same with things on the top of a mountain, or on the seashore, or wherever thou choosest to be. For thou wilt find just what Plato says, Dwelling within the walls of a city as in a shepherd’s fold on a mountain.

Well, here he was dwelling literally within a fold on a mountain. But now he thought of the sentiment behind the statements—both Plato’s and Marcus Aurelius’s—and he knew in his heart that he did not agree with the core of it. After Barbara and the baby’s death, Dar could no longer live in Colorado. It had taken a while to accept, but soon enough it had become that simple. This place—this mountain, this place near the seashore—had been a new beginning for Dar.

And now it had been violated. The Russians had tried to kill Syd and him not far from here, and they had taken pictures of him at this very place.