Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

The sergeant happened to look away at precisely that moment, as the navigator came back to get some coffee from the thermos in the radio bay, and the two aviators locked eyes. The sergeant rolled his eyes, pointed his finger at his head and rotated it quickly, communicating in the universal language of human gesture a single idea: screwball.

The navigator nodded.

Julie knew at once it was a shot. The supersonic crack was sharp and trailed a wake of echo as it bounced off the sheltering hills.

“Nikki! Get in here! Now!” she screamed.

The little girl turned, paused in confusion, and then there was another one, like the snap of a whip, and Nikki ran toward her. Both recognized it from the time they’d been shot at so recently.

“Come on, come on!” yelled Julie, and she grabbed her daughter, pulled her into the house, locked the door.

She heard another shot, from a different location; an answering shot.

Men were trying to kill each other nearby.

“Get downstairs,” she said to her daughter. “Now! And don’t come up, no matter what, until you hear the police.”

The girl ran into the cellar. Julie grabbed a phone, and found at once there was no dial tone. It was dead.

She looked outside and could see nothing except the hugeness of the snow, now lightening as full dawn approached. She heard no more shots.

She ran upstairs, and found Sally groggily wandering down the hall.

“Did you—?”

“Someone’s shooting,” Julie yelled.

“Jesus,” Sally said. “Did you call the police?”

“The line’s down or dead or something.”

“Who—?”

“I don’t know. There’s two of them. Come on, we have to get into the basement.”

The two women ran down the stairs, found the door into the cellar and descended into near darkness.

The cellar windows had been snowed in and only diffuse light showed through them. It was cold.

“Mommy,” said Nikki. “I’m scared.”

“I’m scared too,” said Julie.

“I wish Daddy was here.”

“I do too,” said Julie.

“Now, you get in the corner,” said Sally. “I’ll figure out some way to block the door, just in case. I’m sure it’s just hunters or something.”

“No,” said Julie. “They were shooting at each other. They’re not hunters. They’re snipers.”

“I wish Daddy were here,” said Nikki again.

Snow showered across Solaratov and his mind came out of its deep pool of concentration to recognize the familiar cloud of debris a high-velocity round delivers when it strikes, and the next split second the whipsong of the rifle crack reached him as it shattered the sound barrier.

Under fire.

The left.

The left.

Another detonation spewed snow into the sky.

Under fire.

He tore himself from the scope, looked to the left to see nothing, because of the shielding rock. But he knew from the sound that the man had to be on the rim of the ridge.

He looked back into the valley to just catch the little girl as she dipped under the porch roof, and in another split second heard the door slam.

Damn!

They were gone.

Who was shooting at him?

He realized now he was invisible to the shooter, else he’d be dead. The shooter could not see him behind his rock.

He knew too the man now had the rock zeroed, knowing full well that Solaratov would have to come around it to return fire.

He felt no fear. He felt no curiosity. He felt no disappointment, he felt no surprise. His mind did not work that way. Only: Problem? Process. And, solution!

Instead of rising to come around the rock, he backed, low as a lizard, through the snow, trusting that the man’s scope would be so powerful that its field of view would be narrow and that the whiteness of his camouflage would also shield him from recognition.

He squirmed backward as low in the snow as a man could be, sliding through the stuff as if he were some kind of arctic snake. He canted his head as he backed, and as he slid out from behind the rock, he saw his antagonist, a disturbance ever so slight along the line of the ridge that could only be a man hunched over a rifle, desperately looking for a target. He studied and was sure he saw it move or squirm or something.

What was the distance? He pivoted on the ground, finding a good angle to the target, splaying his legs, coming into that good, solid prone. Adductor magnus . In the scope, yes, a man, possibly. In white. Another sniper. Low on the ridge. He watched his crosshairs settle, telling himself not to hurry, not to rush, not to jerk. He couldn’t get a clear sight picture and he didn’t have time to shoot a laser at the target to get its distance. He pivoted slightly, found a bush coned in snow, which he took to be of three feet girth. By covering it in the scope with mil-dots and racking through the math — the black mass covered two dots; multiply the assumed one meter in height by one thousand and divide by two to get the approximation of a thousand yards: say, less than a thousand but more than nine hundred yards he held four dots high. With greater concentration and less art, he steadied himself, pivoted to find the disturbance that had to be the man but was not really clear, felt his finger on the trigger but did not think about it, and let it decide itself, as if it had a brain, what to do next, and then it fired.

Ageyser of snow erupted seven feet to the right of Bob, followed by the whipcrack of sound. Windage. The Russian had the range but there was some crosswind and the 7mm hadn’t quite the weight to stand up to it. It had drifted ever so slightly. But how could Solaratov have read wind if he were shooting across the raw space of the valley? He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

But quickly he’d understand that, cock again and shoot.

Bob squirmed back, feeling himself sliding a little off the edge of the ridge, and in the next split second, another eruption blew a hole in the surface of the planet, a big spout of flung snow and rock frags. It hit exactly where he’d been but just barely was no longer.

Oh, this motherfucker is so good. This motherfucker won’t make another mistake .

Bob slid back farther.

No shots had gone toward the house. For a little while, at least, his wife was safe. He knew she’d have the sense to head to the cellar with Nikki and Sally and lock up and wait.

Meanwhile he had but one choice. That was to low-crawl along the ridge and hope that its tiny incline was enough to shield him from Solaratov’s vision. Solaratov would realize he couldn’t go up or down, he’d never go toward him; he could only fall back around the mountain until he disappeared around it, and could then get up and move to cover and set up an ambush. Solaratov would go up; elevation was power in this engagement. Whoever reigned on high, reigned, because he’d have the angle into a target where the other man would have nothing.

That was the plan: to get out of this area of dangerous vulnerability, move like hell when safe and find a good hide. Solaratov would have to come around the mountain to get him, but he’d come around high. Bob knew he’d get a good shot, maybe only one, but he knew he could make it.

He tried to calculate the differences between his .308 168-grain round and the Russian’s 7mm Remington Magnum. The Magnum flew four hundred feet per second faster with almost a thousand pounds more muzzle energy; it shot so much flatter. The Russian, if he were under five hundred yards, could hold just a bit over him and pull the trigger, not worrying about drop. So he’d have to stay at least five hundred yards ahead, because the slight drop, plus the windage, would be his best defense.

He turned back, squirmed to the lip of the ridge, but could see nothing except the quiet house far below and the ridgeline running around the base of the mountain.