Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Nikki turned back and saw her mother, standing on the edge of the porch, wrapped in a great parka over her immobilizing cast, her hand shielding her eyes from the snippets of snow the wind occasionally caught and flung.

“Nikki! Come back.”

Her mother stood there.

Is it her?

Goddammit, is it her?

The woman stood rooted to the front of the porch. Against his finger, the trigger was a tease.

The mil-dot had her centered perfectly, and no tremor came to his arm. His position was superb. Adductor magnus was firm, anchoring him to the earth. He was four pounds away from the end of the war. No cold, no fear, no tremor, no doubt, no hesitation.

But … is it her?

He had only seen her through his scope at 722 meters for one second: he couldn’t tell. She was wrapped in a coat, and one hand held it secured. Possibly that meant the other hand was immobilized in a cast; possibly it meant nothing. That’s how you wore a coat if you didn’t want to put it on and button it. Any person would wear it that way.

The woman ducked back. She was gone.

He exhaled.

“Wheeeeeeeeeeee!” came the far-off sound of the child.

“Wheeeeeeeeeeee!”

It was so far away, light, dry, just the smallest of things. Maybe a freak twist of wind blew it up to him or the kindness of God.

But there it was: my child .

He’d know it anywhere — the throaty timbre, the vitality, the heroism. Spirit. Goddamn, did that girl have some spunk. Got it from her granddad; now there was a man with spunk!

She was to the left somewhere, very far away. In that direction he could see nothing except rougher ground.

Fuck it, he thought.

He unslung the rifle and with a swift open-and-shut cocked it, jacking one of Federal’s primo .308s into the spout.

He ran. He ran. He ran.

He dashed through the rocks, building momentum, his legs fighting the splash of snow that each one’s energy unleashed. It ate at his heart and lungs, all the work, and his breath came in dry spurts, wrapped in a sheath of pain. Still, he pressed, he ran, and when he came out of the rocks, the slope dropped off closer to vertical and he had to slow up to keep from falling, almost leaping down through the snow, his momentum again building, right on the tippy edge of control.

Then suddenly he was out of it.

The day lightened as the cloud disappeared and before him stretched a valley filled with snow, like a vast bowl of off-color vanilla ice cream, still only gray in the rising illumination. He saw a house, telephone poles signaling a road, a corral with only the tips of the posts visible in the blanket of white, a barn itself laden with the stuff, all pretty as a greeting card — and his child.

She was a few yards in front of the porch, dancing.

“Wheeeeeeeeeee!” she screamed again, her voice powerful and ringing.

Bob saw that he was on a ridge to the far side of the horseshoe of elevation that surrounded the place on three sides.

He saw lights in the house, a warm slash of brilliance from an open door and, on the porch now, something else moved and came out.

He saw her, standing on the steps, a parka wrapped about her, his wife. Nikki threw a snowball at her and she ducked and there was just a moment when her coat fell open and slipped and he could see the cast on her left arm.

He turned and flopped to the ground, finding prone, building the position, trying to slow the pounding of his heart.

The sniper. Find the sniper .

It was her. She ducked, the coat came open, then she shuddered it back onto her shoulders. But her left arm was immobilized in plaster.

Yes. Now .

He squirmed, making minute corrections. He didn’t rush. What was the point of rushing?

There was nothing in the world except the woman standing there in her coat.

Five hundred fifty-seven meters.

Hold two dots below the reticle, that is, two dots high, to account for the bullet’s drop over the long flight and the subtle effects of gravity over the downward trajectory.

Concentrate .

It’s just another soft target, he thought, in a world full of soft targets.

He expelled a half breath, held the rest in his lungs. His body was a monument, Adductor magnus tight. The mil-dots didn’t move: they were on her like death itself. The rifle was a chastised lover, so still and obedient. His mind emptied. Only the trigger stood between himself and the end of the war. It was a four-and-a-half-pound trigger, and four pounds were already gone.

Bob scanned the ridge as it curved away from him, knowing his man would set up to the east to keep the sun to his back. The scope was 10X, which was big enough to give him a little width of vision. God, why didn’t he have binoculars? Binoculars would—

There he was.

Not him, not the man, but the rifle barrel, black against the white snow, sheltered near a boulder. The rifle was still, braced on one hand in a steady, perfect prone. In the lee of the rock, Bob knew Solaratov was making his last-second corrections, nursing his concentration to the highest point.

Long shot. Oh, such a long shot.

He steadied, prayed, for he knew the man was ready to fire.

It was close to a thousand meters. With a rifle he’d never zeroed, whose trigger was unknown to him.

But only a second remained, and his crosshairs found the rifle barrel, then rose above it based on his instinctive guesstimate of the range.

Is it right? Is this it?

Oh shit, he thought.

Time to hunt, he thought, and fired.

Bonson felt a huge blast of utter, scalding frustration shudder through him. Agh! Ugh! Umf! This is where your major strokes came from: some little fritz in the brain and, in the blink of an eye, you’re fried. His blood pressure felt dangerously high. He wished he had somebody to smack or kill. His muscles tightened into brick; redness flashed in his mind. His teeth ground against one another.

He spoke again into the microphone.

“Bob One, Bob One, this is Bob Control, come in, come in, goddammit , come in!”

“He isn’t there, sir,” said the tech sergeant, who was in the radio bay with him. “We’ve lost him.”

Or the fucking cowboy’s on his own, Bonson thought.

“Okay, switch me through to the larger net.”

The sergeant dialed the new frequency on the console of the radio.

“Ah, Hill, this is Bonson, are you there?”

“Yes, sir,” spoke his second in command from Mountain Home Air Force Base. “The whole team is in. We’re in good shape.”

“You’ve liaised with the state police?”

“Yes, sir. I have a Major Hendrikson on standby.”

“Okay, here’s the deal. We’ve lost contact with our asset. Tell this major to get state police helicopters in there as soon as possible. Sooner, if possible.”

“Yes, sir, but the word I’m getting is that nobody’s flying into those mountains until at least ten A.M. There’s still real bad weather. And these guys are spread pretty thin.”

“Shit.”

“I did talk to Air Force. We can get some low-level radars set up on three surrounding mountains by 1200, assuming they can move in by 1000, and we can get good position on any incoming helos. If this Russian plans to exit by helo, we’ll nab him.”

“This guy’s the best in the world at escape and evasion. He’s worked mountains before. Swagger knew that. If Swagger doesn’t get him, he’s gone. It’s that simple.”

The man on the other end was silent.

“Goddamn, I hate to be beat by him! I hate it,” said Bonson to nobody in particular. He ripped off his earphones and threw them against the fuselage of the plane; the plastic on one of them cracked and a piece spun off and landed at his feet. He stomped it into the floor, grunting mightily.