Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

That’s when I get him, Bob thought, wishing he believed it.

Then he noticed: it had begun to snow. Flakes cascaded down again, fluting and canting in the wind, a screen of them, dense and unyielding.

Visibility closed in.

Bob didn’t like this a bit.

It was snowing. Solaratov, breathing hard, found a trail inside the scruffy vegetation that edged the mountain, where the overhanging leaves had cut down on snow accumulation. He almost ran, skirting the flat of the valley, staying off its exposure, staying away from the house for now. He knew that Bob could not see him from any elevation, through the snow-bearing branches. He probably wouldn’t even look in the right direction.

Solaratov came around a curve of the valley, edged to the treeline and went hunched behind a fallen log that was somehow suspended by its branches. The snow fell gently around him out of the gray light. There was no sound at all in the world.

He read the land, looking for natural hides where an experienced man would go to ground. It was not a difficult problem, for the mountainside was largely featureless there, with only sparse vegetation to distract the eye. In fact the whole little war between them had been distilled to its most nearly abstract: two men in white in a white, cold world in white mountains of extreme elevation, hunting each other, going for whatever little edge of experience and luck they could find. Whoever read the problem better would win: it had nothing to do with courage or, really, even marksmanship. It would come down to this one thing: who was the better practitioner of the sniper’s skills?

He could see a kind of gash in the mountainside ahead of him and realized that his quarry, coming around the edge, would have no choice but to seek refuge at its top.

He picked up his binoculars and scanned. He could see nothing but the rocks under their packing of snow. Visibility was not bad, though blurred by the falling snow.

He’s up there. He’s got to be .

He triggered a laser to the top of the gash, bounced it off a rock, and read the range in the readout: 654 meters. Known distance. Upward. He did the math quickly and knew where to hold, computing in the uphill angle. He’d shoot from the center of the third mil-dot; that would put him there, crudely but close enough. And he felt his nearness to the mountain would shield the bullet from the predations of the wind; it wouldn’t drift laterally.

He hunted patiently, looking for target indicators, for some implication that his prey was alive and hiding, and had not circled behind him. The rocks were everywhere, a kind of garden of stone humped in snow. He looked for disturbances in the snow, for sign of a man who’d crawled, upending the crust of white. But he could not see that for the angle.

What is his sign?

What is the sign?

Then he knew: the man’s breath. It will rise like fog, maybe just a vapor, but it will show. It has to show. He has to breathe.

It was the slightest thing. Was it really there, or an optical illusion? But no, there it was: a slight curl through the snow, the suggestion of atmospheric density. It could be a man’s breath leaking out as he huddled motionlessly in the rocks, awaiting his prey as he scanned upward.

Yes, my friend. There you are, he thought, slowly picking out the pattern of the arctic warfare camouflage, snow dappled with a little dead brown vegetation.

The man was on his belly, nestled behind rocks, in a little collection of them at the very top of the gash. He lay with the sniper’s professional patience, totally engaged, totally calm. Solaratov could not see the rifle, but he saw the man.

There you are, he thought. There you are.

He again fired a laser at him: exactly 658 meters. He had the target.

He fixed markers in his mind’s eye — a stand of snow-laden pines — put the binoculars down, raised the rifle and went to the scope. Of course it was not nearly so powerful as the binocs, and its field of vision was much smaller. But he found the pines, tracked down, waited, and yes, found the little trail of vapor that marked his prey.

He settled in, looking for the target. He could see just a half an inch of camouflaged parka above the rock, probably the upper surface of the prone back. He settled on this target, centering it on the third dot.

Should I fire?

I may not quite have enough of him visible to drive into the blood-bearing inner organs. I might just wound him.

My zero might be way off.

But then: so what? I have a suppressor.

He will not know where I am shooting from.

He will have to move as I bring him under fire.

He won’t know if I’m above him or below him.

He’ll have to move; I can chase him across the ravine. He’ll run out of rocks. I’ll have him.

He exhaled his breath, commanded his senses, felt the slow tick and twitch of his body as he made minute corrections, waited until the total rightness of it all fell across him.

The trigger broke, and with its odd, tiny sound, the rifle fired.

Bob lay quietly in the rocks. Above him a screen of snowy pines shielded him somewhat but left him with a good view of the direction he’d come. With the most discipline his body could invent, he scanned three zones: the first was the ridge, right where it came around the mountain; the next was a crop of rocks perhaps sixty meters above that; and the next was a notch in the mountain, perhaps two hundred meters up, that swam into and out of visibility as the cloud permitted. Solaratov would appear at one of those places as he came high around the mountain, with the idea of shooting downward.

Methodically he moved his eyes between them, the first, the second, the third, waiting.

Well, I did it, he tried to tell himself. I got him away from my wife. In a little while they’ll be here. He’ll come, I’ll get my shot, it’ll be over then.

But he did not feel particularly good about it all. There was no sense of anything except unfinished business and that now, all these years later, it was his time.

I die today , came the message, insistent and powerful.

This is the day I die .

He’d finally run up against a man who was smarter, a better shot, had more guts. Couldn’t be many in the world, but by God, this was one.

The snow was falling more heavily now. It pirouetted downward from the low gray sky, and as he looked back to the house, still barely visible, he could hardly see it. It looked like it would snow for hours. That was not good. The longer it snowed, the longer it would take for help to arrive. He was on his own. He, and his ancient enemy.

Where is he?

It was making him nuts.

Where is—

A tremendous pain came across his back, as though someone had stood over him and whacked him, hard, with a fireplace poker.

Bob curled in the pain and knew instantly that he’d been hit. But no shock poured through him and took him out of his brain as it had when he’d been hit before. Instead a powerful spasm of fury kicked through him, and he knew in a second that he wasn’t hit seriously.

He drew his legs up and at that moment the odd BEOWWWWWW! of a bullet singing off a rock exploded just to his right, an inch above his skull.

He’s got me, he thought, listening as the crack of the bullet snapping the sound barrier arrived.

But where was the muzzle blast?

There was no muzzle blast.

Suppressor, he thought. The motherfucker has a suppressor.

The sniper could be anywhere. Bob lay behind his rack of stones, waiting. No other shot came. Clearly he was completely zeroed but not quite visible enough for a good body or head shot.

Bob was almost paralyzed. No place to run, zeroed, completely outfoxed. Completely faked out.