Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

The silence meant assent.

Then someone said, “Instead of a smart bomb, we send a smart guy.”

“Here’s the deal. You get me there, over the storm. I’ll fall through the blizzard. I can’t chute through it, but I can cannonball through it and my deviation won’t be that bad. I can open ’way low, to minimize wind drift, maybe as low as three hundred feet. If you liaise up an Air Force jet and a good crew, you can have me there in six hours. I can’t think of another way to get a countersniper on the ground in that circumstance. When I’m on the ground, you can triangulate me with a satellite and I can get an accurate position and I can move overland and get there in time.”

“Jesus,” said Bonson.

“You owe me, Bonson.”

“I suppose I do,” said Bonson.

“Sergeant Swagger, there’s not one man in a hundred who could survive that.”

“I been there before, sonny,” said Swagger.

“Get Air Force,” said Bonson. “Get this thing set up.”

Swagger had one more thing to say.

“I need a rifle. I need a good rifle.”

Go down and shoot her, he thought.

Go down now, kick in the door, kill her and be out of here before the sun is up. It’s all over then. No risk, no difficulty .

But he could not.

He stood on a ridge, about five hundred yards from the ranch house, which was dark and hardly visible through the whirling snow. Its lights were out and it stood in the middle of a blank, drifted field of white. It was a classical old cowboy place from the Westerns Solaratov had seen in the Ukraine and Bengal and Smolensk and Budapest: two-storied, many-gabled, clapboarded, with a Victorian look to it. A wisp of smoke rose from the chimney, evidence of a dying fire.

He hunched, looked at his Brietling. It was 0550; the light would rise in another few minutes and it would probably be light enough to shoot by 0700, if the storm abated. But what would bring them out? Why wouldn’t they stay in there, cozy and warm, drinking cocoa and waiting for time to pass? What would bring them out?

The child would, the girl. She’d have to frolic in the snow. The two women would come onto the porch and watch her. If she was as bold and restless as he knew her to be — he’d seen her ride, after all — she’d be up early and she’d have the whole house up.

Yet still a voice spoke to him: go down now, kill the woman, escape deeper into the mountains and get out, go home .

But if he went down, he’d have to kill them all. There was no other way. He’d have to shoot the child and the other woman.

Do it, he thought.

You have killed so many, what difference does it make? Do it and be gone .

But he could not force himself to. That was not how his mind worked, that was not how he had worked in the past; that, somehow, would bring him unhappiness in the retirement that was so close and the escape from his life.

Do it, the smart part of himself said.

Nyet , he answered in Russian. I cannot . He was tselni , which is a very Russian term for a certain kind of personality. It is a personality that is bold and aggressive and fearless of pain or risk. But it is in some way one piece, or seamless: it has no other parts, no flexibility, no other textures. He was committed to a certain life and as stubborn in the mastering of it as a man could be; he could not change now. It was impossible.

I cannot do it, he thought.

Instead, as he moved along the ridge, he at last located the spot he wanted, where he could see onto the porch yet was still far enough to the east that the sun would be behind him, and would not pick up on his lens. He squatted, took off the Leica ranging binoculars and bounced a laser shot off the house to read the range. It was 560 meters. Using a 7mm Remington Magnum at a velocity of 3010 feet per second and a 175-grain Sierra Spitzer Boat-tail bullet developing muzzle energy of over two thousand foot-pounds would drop about forty-five inches at that range, a fantastic load-velocity combination, untouchable by any .308 in the world. But he knew that to compensate, he’d still have to hold high, that is, to aim not with the crosshair but the second mil-dot beneath it in the reticle. That would put him nearly dead on, though he might have to correct laterally for windage. But it was usually calm after a blizzard, the wind spent and gone. Remember, he cautioned himself: account for the downward angle in your hold.

He visualized, a helpful exercise for shooters. See the woman. See her standing there. See the second mil-dot covering her chest, how rock steady it is, how perfect is the range, how easy the shooting platform. Feel the trigger with the tip of your finger, but don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything. Your breathing has stopped, you’ve willed your body to near-death stillness, there’s no wind, you put your whole being into that mil-dot on the chest, you don’t even feel the rifle recoil.

The bullet will reach her before the sound of it. It’ll take her in the chest, a massive, totally destructive shot — still over eighteen hundred pounds of energy — that explodes her heart and lungs, breaks her spine, shorts out her central nervous system. She’ll feel nothing. The secrets locked into her brain will be locked there forever.

And that’s it. It’s so easy, then. You fall back, about four miles, and you call in the helicopter on the cellular. He’ll be on you in twenty minutes for evacuation. No police or civil authority will reach this place until midafternoon at the earliest, and you’ll be far gone by that time.

He slipped down behind a rock to take himself out of the gusting wind. He settled in to nurse himself through the coldness that lay ahead. But it would not be a problem, he knew. He had beaten that one a long time ago.

The dark of the plane was serene, cocoonlike. Swagger was geared up. He wore jump boots, some kind of super-tight jumpsuit and was struggling to get his chute straps tightened. He was quite calm. It was Bonson who was nervous.

“We’re getting close,” Bonson said. “Altitude is thirty-six thousand feet. The computers have pinpointed a dropping point that should put you down in the flat just northwest of the Mackay Reservoir, about a mile or so from the location of the house. If you carry farther you’ll go into the Lost River Mountains, see, here.”

He pointed to the map, which clearly showed the Thousand Springs Valley that ran northwest by southeast through central Idaho, cut by the Big Lost River between the Lost River range and the White Knob Mountains.

“The chute will deploy at five hundred feet and you should land softly enough. You’ll just have to make it across the flatlands under the cover of dark, get into the house, warn the targets, and if you have to, engage him.”

“If I get the shot, I’ll take it.”

“That’s fine. Our priority here is your wife. She’s the target of this mission, so thwarting him is what counts. As soon as it’s flyable, I’ve got a squad of air policemen heloing in from Mountain Home to set up a defensive perimeter, and park rangers and Idaho State Policemen ready to go into the mountains after this guy. If you get the shot, take it. But, man, if we could get him alive and her alive, we’d have—”

“Forget it,” Swagger said. “He’s a professional. He killed two people already. He won’t be taken alive. The rest of his life in a federal prison is no life for this guy. He’d take the L-pill, laughing at you as he checked out.”

“Maybe so,” said Bonson.

Swagger finished with the parachute; it seemed okay, with the preset altitude-sensitive deployment device.

That was the tricky part. The altitude sensor read altitude from a predetermined height above sea level so that it was set to pop the chute five hundred feet over the flatland; if he drifted into the mountains, the chute might not pop at all before he hit some gigantic vertical chunk of planet. The Air Force people had explained this to him, and told him that, more than anything, was why this was so foolhardy. The computers could read the wind tendencies, compute his weight, the math of his acceleration, add in the C-130’s airspeed and determine a spot where the trajectory would be right, navigate the bird to that spot and tell him when it was time to go. But the jump wouldn’t be in a computer, it would be in the real world, unpredictable and unknowable; a gust of tailwind, some tiny imperfection, and he’d be dead and what good would that do?