Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Solaratov shot him in the face, below the left eye, with a 147-grain Federal Hydra-Shock. The gun popped in his hand, cycled, spitting a shell across the room. Fish jerked backward as if in a different, a faster, time sequence. His brain tissue sprayed the wall behind him, and a small gouge of plaster blew out where the bullet exited the skull and plunked into the wall.

Solaratov turned and looked for the ejected shell; he spied it across the room, under a desk, and went quickly to pick it up. When he arose, he faced a woman in the doorway, with a thermos in one hand, still wrapped up babushkalike against the weather. Her features became unglued at the horror she saw and her eyes opened like quarters. Solaratov shot her in the chest but missed the heart. She staggered backward, spun and began to stagger down the hall, screaming, “No, no, no, no, no, no!”

He stepped into the hall, locked the Glock in both hands, acquired the nightlit front sight and shot her in the base of the spine. She went down, her hand reaching convulsively back to touch the wound itself. Why did they do that? They always did that. He walked to her; she still moved. He bent, put the muzzle to the back of her head and fired again. The muzzle flash ignited her hair. It blazed with an acrid, chemical stench, then extinguished itself, producing a vapor of smoke, and Solaratov realized she’d been wearing a wig of some artificial substance.

Now there was no time to pick up shells. He walked swiftly down the corridor, found the door and slipped out the back. Thank God it was still snowing heavily; in seconds, minutes at the most, his tracks would be gone.

He went across the field, the pistol still hot in his hand. He had no sense of shame or doubt or pain; he was the professional and he did what was necessary, (he hard thing always, and kept going. But it shook him nevertheless: the look on the poor man’s face in the second before the bullet blew through his cheekbone; and the woman who could only scream “No, no, no, no” as she rushed along the corridor.

It seemed to put a curse on his enterprise. He was not superstitious and he was too experienced by far to consider such nontechnical elements as having any meaning; still, it didn’t feel right.

Bonson had promised Bob that he could surprise him with how much he could do and how quickly, and now he made good on that statement.

He picked up the phone and dialed a certain number and said, very calmly, “Duty officer, this is Deputy Director Bonson, authenticating code Alpha-Actual-Two-Five-Nine, do you acknowledge?”

When the man on the other end did so, Bonson said, “I am hearby declaring a Code Blue Critical Incident. Please notify the Fifth Floor and set up a Domestic Crisis Team. I want two senior analysts — Wigler and Marbella. I want my senior analysts from Team Cowboy. I want some people from computer division. I want to lay on air ASAP; I’m at 2854 Arlington Avenue, in Rosslyn. We will make our way to the USA Today building for pickup. I’d like that in the next five minutes.”

He waited, got the reply he wanted.

“I also want an FBI HRT unit put on alert and ready to coordinate with our liaison ASAP. This may involve a shooting situation and I want the best guys. Do you copy?”

Getting his last acknowledgment, he hung up.

“Okay,” he said, turning to Bob, “we have to get a ride to the newspaper building, and the chopper will pick us up. We’ll be in Langley inside fifteen minutes and put our best people to work in twenty. I can have a security team on-site in four hours.”

“Not if it’s snowing,” said Bob.

“What?”

“She said it was snowing. That’s going to close the whole thing down.”

“Shit,” said Bonson.

“It won’t shut him down,” said Bob. “Not this boy. He’s been in the mountains. He hunted the mountains for years.”

“It may be premature to worry,” said Bonson.

“No, he’ll go as soon as he can. He won’t wait or goof around or take a break. He’s got a job to do. It’s the way his mind works. He’s very thorough, very committed, very gifted, very patient, but when he sees it, he’ll go for it instantly. He’s been hunting her as I’ve been hunting him. And he’s much closer.”

“Shit,” said Bonson again.

“Call them back and get them working the area. We’re going to need maps, weather, satellite tracking, maybe. It’s Custer County, about five miles outside of Mackay, Idaho, in the center of the state, in the Lost River Range. It’s north of Mackay, off Route Ninety-three, in the foothills of the Lost River, as I understand it.”

“That’s good,” said Bonson, and turned to make the call.

Ahalf hour later they got the bad news.

“Sir,” said a staff assistant with the grave face of a junior officer carrying the news no one wanted to hear, “we got some real problems out there.”

“Go ahead,” said Bonson, trailing along in Bob’s wake into a room that could have been any meeting room in any office building in America but just happened to be in the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

“There’s a freak front moving in from Canada across central Idaho. The weather service people say it’ll dump sixteen, eighteen inches on the place. Nothing’s moving there; the roads will be closed until they can be plowed, and they can’t be plowed until morning. Nothing’s flying either. That area is totally sealed off. Nobody’s going anywhere.”

“Shit,” said Bonson. “Notify FBI. Tell them to stand down.”

“Yes, sir, but there’s more.”

“Go ahead.”

“We have been in contact with Idaho State Police authorities. Just to make things worse, there’s been a double homicide at the phone company. A supervisor and his secretary, coming on to run the snow emergency shift, were shot and killed. Whoever did it got completely away. Nothing was stolen, nothing taken. Maybe it was domestic, but they say it looked like a professional hit.”

“It’s him,” said Bob. “He’s there. He probably had to get the final location out of the phone company files or something. He got surprised by these two people and he did what he had to do.”

“Cold,” said Bonson. “Very cold.”

“I’ll tell you what we need real fast,” said Swagger. “We need an extremely good workup on the terrain there. Let’s figure out, given the time of the shootings, if he’d have a chance at making it on foot to a shooting position. Where would he dump his car, how far would he have to go, what kind of speed could an experienced mountain operator be expected to make? Then double that, and you’ll know what this guy is doing. What time will he make it there? Where would he likely set up? He’d want the sun behind him, that I know.”

“Get cracking,” said Bonson.

Nikki watched the snow.

“It’s pretty,” she said. “But I never knew it could snow in June.”

“That’s the mountains,” said Aunt Sally. “It snows when it wants to.”

“When we get back to Arizona,” said her mother from the sofa, “you’ll never see snow again, I promise.”

“I think I like snow,” said Nikki, “even if you can’t ride in it.”

She watched in the fading light as the world whitened. Outside, she could see a corral and beyond that the barn. There were no animals way up here, so there was nothing to worry about. The highway was about a half mile away, and it was her job to follow the long dirt road each day and check the solitary mailbox that stood where Upper Cedar Road, that high, lonely ribbon of dirt which connected them to Route 93, passed by.

But the mountains dominated what she could see. The house was in a high meadow, surrounded by them. Mount McCaleb was the closest, a huge brute of a mountain; it loomed above them, now unseen in the driving snow. Farther to the north was Leatherman Peak; farther to the south, Invisible Mountain. These were the peaks of the Lost River Range, dominated farther toward Challis by Mount Borah, the highest in Idaho. There was the sense of their presence, even though they were invisible. On an evening like this, it was much darker; you could feel them through your bones, dark and solid, just beyond the veil of the seen.