Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“It doesn’t matter,” said Bob. “If he runs into cops or rangers, he’ll just kill them too and go on about his business. It’s not a problem for him. These guys have no idea what they’re up against. He can take them out, take out my wife, then escape and evade for weeks until pickup. That’s how good he is. That’s what his whole life has been about.”

“Sir, with all due respect,” said the young analyst, “I’d like to make a point which I’d be more comfortable making in private. But I have to make it here and now, so I hope Sergeant Swagger will understand that it’s not about personalities, it’s about responsibilities.”

“Go ahead,” said Swagger. “Speak freely. Say what has to be said.”

“Well, sir,” said the young analyst, “I have to think that it might be wise to concede the Russian his mission. We ought to be thinking about contingency plans for taking him down on the out route. He’s an incredible asset. The information he has! Our first priority ought to be to take him alive and absorb the casualties—”

“No!” boomed Bonson, like Odin throwing thunderbolts. “Sergeant Swagger’s wife is obviously in possession of valuable knowledge. You’d let that go? They think she’s important enough to run this high-risk, maximum-effort mission, and you’re going to let them get her? And you’re saying to Sergeant Swagger here, we’re just going to let your wife die? It’s more important that we get some information on old ops? We’ll just let him do his little thing, then we’ll pick him up in the afternoon?”

“Sir, I’m trying to be realistic. I’m sorry, Sergeant Swagger. I get paid to call them as I see them.”

“I understand,” said Bob. “It ain’t a problem.”

“How fast could we get FBI HRT in there, or Idaho State Police SWAT?” asked Bonson again.

“It’s a no-go for stopping the shot,” said the analyst. “It just can’t happen. We can’t get people in there fast enough. Man, this guy’s really caught some breaks!”

Bonson turned to him.

“I am not willing to concede him his mission. I absolutely am not. Will one of you bright young geniuses solve this problem? That also is what you’re paid for.”

“I’m just thinking out loud, but you could target the sniper’s likely location with cruise missiles,” someone said. “They’re very accurate. You’d have a pretty good chance of—”

“No, no,” someone else said, “the cruises are low-altitude slow-movers, with not a lot of wing to give them much maneuverability. They’d never get through the inclement weather. Plus, they have to read landforms to navigate and we don’t have time to program them. Finally, the nearest cruises are on a nuclear missile frigate in San Diego. There’s no mission sustainability in the time frame.”

“Could we smart bomb?”

“The infrared could see through the clouds, but the landforms in the mountains are so goddamned confusing that I don’t see how he could pinpoint the target area.”

“No, but that’s promising,” said Bonson. “All right, Wigler, I want you to run a feasibility study, and I mean instantaneously.”

Wigler nodded, grabbed his coffee and raced out.

It was quiet. Bob looked at his watch. Midnight. Solaratov was well on his way. Six, maybe seven hours till daylight out there. He’d take his shot, Julie would join Donny and Trig and Peter Farris, and whatever secret she had would be gone forever. Maybe they could take Solaratov alive. But that was an illusion too. He’d have an L-pill. He was a professional. There was no way to stop him or take him. He was going to win. Again.

Then Bob said, “There is one way.”

The banks of the creek shielded the shallow lick of water and Solaratov built a good rhythm as he plunged along, as if on a sidewalk that led to the mountains. He wore night-vision goggles, which lit the way for him as he walked through green-tinted whiteness, following the course of the creek bed as it wound along the flats. The wind howled; the snow cut down diagonally, gathering quickly or swirling.

But he felt good. He wore a Gore-Tex parka over a down vest, mountain boots, mountain pants, long underwear, a black wool knit cap. The boots, expensive American ones by Danner, were as comfortable as any he’d ever worn, much nicer than the old Soviet military issue. He had a canteen, a compass, forty rounds of hand-loaded ammunition, the 7mm Remington, the Leica range-finding binoculars, his night-vision goggles, and the Glock 19 in its shoulder holster with a reloaded fifteen-round magazine, and two other fifteen-rounders hanging under his other shoulder. He’d improvised a snow cape from the motel room sheets.

After two hours of steady pumping, he reached the place where the creek bed petered out as it went underground. Above him soared the lower heights of Mount McCaleb, barren and swept with snow and light vegetation. The mountains were too new, too arid to hold much life. He looked upward at the hardscrabble escarpment. Then he looked back across the flats into the center of the valley.

It was if the world had ended in snow. There was a foot of it everywhere and it had closed down everything. No lights, no sign of civilization or even human habitation stood against the whiteness of the landscape and its hugeness and emptiness, even in the green wash of the ambient light.

Solaratov had a brief moment of melancholy: this was the sniper’s life, was it not? This, always: loneliness, some mission that someone says is important, the worst weather elements, the presence of fear, the persistence of discomfort, the rush always of time.

He began to climb. The wind howled, the snow slashed. He climbed through the emptiness.

“I’ll bet this is good,” said Bonson.

“HALO,” said Bob.

“HALO?” asked Bonson.

“He’d never make it,” said the military analyst. “He’d have no idea what the winds would do. The terrain is impossible; the drop would probably kill him.”

“I didn’t say he,” said Bob. “I wouldn’t ask another man to do it. But I’d do it.”

“What the hell is HALO?” asked Bonson.

“High Altitude, Low Opening.”

“It’s an airborne insertion technique,” said the young man. “Highly trained airborne operators have tried it, with mixed success. You go out very high. You fall very far. It’s sort of like bungee jumping, without the bungee. You fall like hell, and in the last six hundred feet or so, the chute deploys. You land hard. The point is to fall through radar. You’re falling so fast you don’t make a parachute signature on radar. Most Third World radars can’t even pick up a falling man. But I’ve never heard of anyone doing it in the mountains in a blizzard at night. The winds will play havoc all the way down; you have no idea where the hell you’d wind up. You could be blown sideways into a face. SOG tried it in ’Nam. But it never worked there.”

“I was in SOG,” said Bob. “It didn’t work there because the problem was the linkup after the drop. We never could figure out how to reassemble the team. But here there ain’t a team. There’s only me.”

“Sergeant, there’s real low survivability on that one. I don’t think this dog hunts.”

“I’m airborne qualified,” said Bob. “I did the jump course at Benning in sixty-six, when I was back from my first tour.”

“That was thirty years ago,” someone pointed out.

“I’ve made twenty-five jumps. Now, you guys have terrific avionics for night navigation. You got terrific computers. You can pinpoint the drop location and you can get there easily enough by flying above the storm. You can plot a drop point where the odds of my landing in the appropriate area are very high. Right?”