Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

And there was someone else.

He was by himself, a graceful young man, also amused by the manhood convention here on the shores of the Gitche Gumee or wherever it was, and it took her a while to figure out who he was, and then at last she knew it was Trig.

She’d seen him twice, no, three times. She’d seen him that night when Peter had dragged her to that party in Georgetown and he lived in that funny little place with all the bird paintings, and she’d seen him when he’d driven Donny out in the red Triumph to find her at West Potomac Park just before the last big May Day demonstration, and she saw him again, three nights later, at the farm in Germantown, where he and that Irishman were loading bags of fertilizer into the truck.

Trig: another of the lost boys of the Vietnam War. All of them were linked in some terrible chain, forever changed, forever mutilated. Nobody ever came back from that one. No one got home free. Donny, dead on DEROS. Peter, smashed, somehow, and found with a broken spine months later. Trig, blown to pieces in Madison, Wisconsin. And Bob, the only survivor but maybe the most hurting of them all, with his black-dog moods and his lost years and his self-hatred and his need to test himself against gunfire again and again and again, as if to finally earn the death he yearned for so intently and join his friends. Death or DEROS: which would come to Bob Lee Swagger first?

“Mommy?” her daughter asked her.

“Oh, honey,” she said, but it was not in the dream, it was here in the dark, warm bedroom.

Julie blinked and came out of it. No, it wasn’t a dream. It couldn’t have been a dream. It was too real to be a dream.

“Mommy, please, I want to go ride the sled.”

“Oh, Lord, honey, it’s—”

“Please, Mommy.”

She turned and looked at the clock. It was close to seven. Outside, just the faintest hint of light pressed through the margins of the shade.

“Oh, baby,” she said, “it’s so early . The snow’s going to be around for a long, long time.”

The deep ache in her body was there and the awkwardness conferred by the arm cast. She hadn’t taken a painkiller since last night, halfway through Singin’ in the Rain when her baby girl had fallen asleep on her lap.

“Please, Mommy. I’ll go get Aunt Sally.”

“Don’t you dare wake Aunt Sally. God bless her, she’s earned her escape from the Swaggers and all their problems. I’ll get up, baby. Just give me a moment or two.”

“Yes, Mommy. I’ll go get dressed.”

The child ran out.

So early, thought Julie. So damned early.

He tried the GPS receiver. Nothing happened. Eventually it lit up but the LCD produced a rattle of red digitized gibberish. Evidently it had banged too hard when the bag hit the ground and was out of whack. He turned on the radio, and heard through his earphones, “Bob One, Bob One, where are you, we have lost contact; goddammit, Swagger, where are you?”

He spoke: “Bob Control, this is Bob One, do you copy?”

“Bob One, Bob One, we have lost contact. Bob One, where are you?”

“Do you copy, Bob Control, do you copy? I am sending, does anybody hear me?”

“Bob One, Bob One, please notify control, we have lost contact.”

Shit!

He ripped the thing off and threw it in the snow. The next thing to check was the rifle. He opened the case, gave it a once-over, saw that it seemed okay, but he doubted it. The same harsh impact that had screwed the electronics might have knocked the scope out of zero. There was no way to know except in the shooting. He couldn’t shoot now so there wasn’t a thing to do except hope that Unertl built the scope real nice and tight and that it would stand up where the other stuff didn’t.

He stood. Pain rocked him, and he had a flash where he thought he might lose it, faint, and die under the snow. They’d find him next year. It would be in all the newspapers.

Fuck me if I can’t take a joke, he thought.

He looked about. In one direction lay only an endless sea of snowy mountains. That couldn’t be the way, and by God, yes, beyond the mountains at the horizon was just the faintest smear of light, signifying the east.

He appeared to be on the highest one. He knew the overflight went on a northwest-southeast access, aiming to put him into the flats below the mountains and the ranch. If he had overshot his mark, the deviation was longitudinal, not latitudinal; that would put him on Mount McCaleb, theoretically on its northwest slope. Down below, say six thousand feet, that would be where the ranch was. He couldn’t see; the valley in that direction was lost in a strata of cloud, which closed it off like a lost world. He could see only peaks across a gap that he took to be a valley.

He slung the rifle over his shoulder, checked his compass and set off down the slope.

The land was barren, without vegetation, as if in some recent time a nuclear bomb had cleaned out all the life. The snow lay in undulating forms, sometimes thick and difficult, other times surprisingly light. Twice he tripped on rocks unseen under the smooth white crust.

Flakes still fell, stinging his eyes. But the fierce wind had died and no snow devils whirled up to defy him. He couldn’t even hear the wind. He went downhill at an angle, almost galloping, feeling the boots bite into the stuff, trying to find a rhythm, a balance between speed and care. He was breathing hard and inside his parka began to sweat. He came to a rock outcropping and detoured around it.

Occasionally, he’d stop, flip down the night-vision goggles, and see — nothing. Ahead and below, the clouds lingered like a solid wall, impenetrable. The goggles resolved the cloud mass as green, only partially distinct from the green of the snow up here, and amplified the light so much that distinctions could hardly be made, and no valley could yet be seen through them: only an infinity of green, cut now and then by a black scut of rock.

It occurred to him that he might have completely mis-figured. He could be anywhere, just heading foolishly down to some empty, remote valley where there would be no highway, no ranch, no Julie, no Sally, no Nikki. Just empty Western space, as Jeremiah Johnson had found it.

Then what?

Then nothing.

Then it’s over. He’d wander, maybe hunting a little. He’d live, certainly, but in three days or a week, under a growth of beard, he’d emerge to find a different world, without a wife, with a bitter, orphaned daughter, with everything he’d worked for gone, all his achievements gone. Solaratov gone back to Moscow for blintz and borscht, with a nice reward in his pocket.

Just go, he thought.

Just push it out, think it through and do it .

He looked over his shoulder and got more bad news: it was getting lighter.

He raced the day downhill.

Alight came on. Upstairs.

Solaratov stirred.

He was not cold at all. He rolled over, cracking fingers and joints, fighting the general numbness that his body had picked up in its long stay on the ground.

A shawl of snow cracked on his back as he moved, splitting and falling from him. He’d picked up the last inch. That was all right, he knew. A man can actually last in snow much longer than a rifle can.

The rifle was more problematical. Lubrication can solidify in the cold, turn to gum, destroy the trigger pull, catch in the next cycle of the bolt. The gasses don’t burn as hot, so the bullet flies to a new point of impact, unpredictable. The scope stiffens somehow, comes out of zero. His breath could fog on it, obscuring his vision. Nothing works quite as well. There were a hundred reasons why a good shot could go bad.

He opened the Remington’s bolt, slid it backward. No impediment marked the smoothness of the glide: no, the oil had not gummed in any way.