Стивен Хантер - Game of Snipers

TITLES BY STEPHEN HUNTER

THE BOB LEE SWAGGER SERIES

Game of Snipers

G-Man

Sniper’s Honor

The Third Bullet

Dead Zero

I, Sniper

Night of Thunder

The 47th Samurai

Time to Hunt

Black Light

Point of Impact

THE EARL SWAGGER SERIES

Havana

Pale Horse Coming

Hot Springs

THE RAY CRUZ SERIES

Soft Target

OTHER TITLES

I, Ripper

Dirty White Boys

The Day Before Midnight

Tapestry of Spies

The Second Saladin

The Master Sniper

Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Hunter

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Tracy Miller and all the other Gold Star Moms of the sandbox wars

I’ve noticed that I make people nervous.

— Repp, Obersturmbannführer, 3. SS-Panzerdivision “Totenkopf,” known as “Der Meisterschütze”

Somewhere

The present

He saw Katie amid the prairie flowers. She sat, legs crossed, while the wind played with her hair, and it gleamed in the sun. She smiled brightly. She always smiled. Four years old was the age of smiles. She looked so happy, and around her the grass fluttered in the breeze, and it must have pleased her, for she turned to face it, tilting her little nose up.

“Katie!” he called. “Katie, sweetie … Katie!”

She turned to his voice, and her blue eyes lit with love.

“Daddy,” she called. “Hi, Daddy!”

“Sweetie, I’m coming,” Paul yelled, and lunged to run to her, to hold her tight, to smother her in his arms and protect her from all. It’s what a father did.

But he could not make it.

He was handcuffed to a post. The sharpness of metal pulled hard against his wrists.

“Katie, I—”

“Daddy, I have to go.”

“No, Katie, no. I’ll be right there.”

But his wrists would not yield, and though he yanked hard enough to draw blood from his flesh, the cuffs would not give.

“Bye, Daddy,” said Katie, as she rose to run away. “I love you.”

And then she was gone, and he was aware that he was awake. Dream finished, he was awake. But the odd thing was that the binding of his wrists was no dream, and he yanked hard, the steel biting. He could feel a solid post threaded through his bound arms, mooring him upright as solidly as Joan of Arc had been for the fire.

He blinked, it did not go away.

Other oddities revealed themselves. For one, a gentle wind pushed the smell of prairie grass against his nostrils, and, two, he felt the radiance of a sun above him, welcoming him — or damning him — to wakefulness.

He did not smell his own piss and vomit. He did not feel the crusty ripple of long-uncleaned skin. He hadn’t shit his pants, or if he had, someone had cleaned up the mess for him.

He wasn’t wearing that pair of ragged chinos, fifteen years old, filched from some garbage can, or that old pair of Adidas, two sizes too big. He was in turquoise surgical scrubs and white socks.

Paul blinked himself more fully awake, opened his eyes fully, waited for them to focus, and examined the world in which he now found himself.

It was not the world he had left, which was the alley behind restaurant row, where he had unreliable memories of the effects of muscatel and methamphetamine, of his surrender to unconsciousness behind a dumpster a half block down from that Mexican restaurant in the alley where all the normals came to eat and drink and laugh every night and from whom he could occasionally cadge a buck or even a five-spot.

Where had it gone? What was happening?

Did I die? Am I in Heaven?

No, it was not Heaven, but it was definitely outside.

He saw grass, lots of it. The world was well lit. Details, vistas, landscapes dialed into focus. He saw vastness, mountains, pines. He saw a huge dome of sky, tendrils of wispy clouds spread across it, a sun that could have been hotter but not clearer, and green, green, everywhere, as he was confined to the floor of a valley that was bordered by forest, its pines rolling away to infinity mostly.

Confusion, not an unknown condition, took over his already murky mind, though for once, at least, the voices were quiet. He looked for human beings of any sort and soon saw them. A good fifty yards away, three men sat on deck chairs, coolly appraising him. One was holding a cell phone to his ear, talking to someone.

“Hey!” he called. “What is this? Who are you? Where am I?”

They did not respond to his calls, though the one on the phone glanced at him, then went back to his animated conversation.

More details: they seemed Mexican, from their hair (long) and wardrobe (cowboy hats, jeans, boots). Sunglasses, a certain macho languor in body postures of amused relaxation. Was he in Mexico?

Oddest detail of all: standing apart from the crew was a man in black. That is, all in black, from the toes of his boots to the crown of his hat, including a black mask that covered his face, with slits for his dark eyes. Of them all, only this one was watching Paul.

Paul tried to assemble a series of steps by which he somehow ended up chained to a post in Mexico, cleaned up to some degree and placed before the world like a specimen. But rigor was long missing from the working of his mind, and nothing made any sense. His will crumpled against the effort. He wanted a drink, he ached for the blur and smear of the muscatel that drove his furies away, at least temporarily.

He went dizzy, leaned against the post to utilize its support. That small effort exhausted him. He breathed heavily, already in oxygen debt.

“Help me please,” he shouted.

But now the postures of the Mexican steering committee had changed. The one on the phone seemed to be in charge, and he commanded the attention of the others. They joined the man in black in directing attention toward him, but not in empathy.

The moment seemed to elongate until it fell out of time. He heard an odd noise, not a blast or a burst, no sharpness to it, but it still carried sensations of destruction to it, as if something had struck in near silence against the earth itself. Immediately, the man on the phone began to speak.

Paul turned. About twenty-five yards out, a cloud of dust — debris from some sort of explosion, by the conical shape of it — hung gracelessly above the folds of scrub prairie, but was disorganizing in the breeze.

Again, he had no framework into which he could fit this puzzling event. It was just there, defying his attempts to classify and respond.

In the next second, another eruption occurred. The earth itself expressed the tremor of the released energy as a geyser suddenly spurted at the speed of light, easily ten feet of supersonic dust and dirt, roiling, climbing, disassembling in the breeze. It was much closer, and Paul felt the sting of pellet and grit.

He tried to place it, again seeking context, and rifled through the crazed index of his memories to find something and came to the conclusion that these were bullets striking the earth, delivering a violence of energy and purpose. He’d seen it in the movies a thousand times — at least, when he went to movies.