Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

The cellar smelled of mold and faded material, and spring floods that had soaked everything some years back. It was dirty and dark, only meager light coming through snow-covered windows.

There was one other door, to the outside, one of those slanted wood things that led down three steps to them. Sally had piled up more impediments to that passageway, but there was no way of really locking the doors. They could only forestall things.

“I wish we had a gun,” said Nikki.

“I wish we did too,” said Sally.

“I wish Daddy was here,” said Nikki.

Bob had a rare moment of visual freedom, a long, clean look into the stunted snow-covered trees at the base of the mountain. But he could see nothing, no movement, no hint of disturbance.

Then a bullet sang off the rock an inch beyond his face, kicking a puff of granite spray into his eye. He fell back, stifling a yell, and felt the telltale numbness that indicated some kind of trauma. But only for a second; then it lit into raw, harsh but meaningless pain, and he winced, driving more pain into the eye.

Goddamn him!

Solaratov had seen just the faintest portion of head exposed and he was on it that fast, putting a bullet an inch shy of the target. An inch at six hundred-odd meters. Could that son of a bitch shoot or what?

Swagger felt his eye puff, his lid flare, and he closed it, sensing the throb of pain. He touched the wounded sector of his face: blood, lots of it, from the stone spray, but nothing quite serious. He blinked, opened the eye, and saw hazily out of it. Not blind. Trapped but not blind, not yet.

The guy was so good.

No ranging shots; he got the range right every single time, had Bob pinned and eyeballed.

No goddamn ranging shots.

Solaratov had an odd gift, a perfect gift for estimating distance. It made the package complete. Some men had it, some didn’t. Some could learn it with experience, some couldn’t. It was in fact the weakest part of Swagger’s own game, his ability to estimate range. It had cost him a few shots over the years because he lacked the natural inclination to read distances while possessing in spades all the shooter’s other natural gifts.

Donny had a gift for it; Donny could look and tell you automatically. But Bob was so lame at it, he’d once spent a fortune on an old Barr & Stroud naval gunfire range finder, a complex, ancient optical instrument that with its many lenses and calibration gizmos could eventually work the farthest unknown distance into a recognizable quantity.

“Some day they’ll make ’em real small,” he remembered telling Donny at one lost moment or other.

“Then you won’t need a go-fer like me,” Donny had said with a laugh, “and I can sit the next war out.”

“Yes, you can,” Bob had said. “One war is enough.”

An idea flirted with him. From where? From Donny? Well, from somewhere over the long years. But it wasn’t solid yet: he just felt it beyond the screen of his consciousness, unformed, like a little bit of as-yet-unrecognizable melody.

This guy is so good. How can he be so good?

Donny had the answer. Donny wanted to tell him. Donny knew up in heaven or wherever he was, and Donny yearned somehow to tell him.

Tell me! he demanded.

But Donny was silent.

And down below Solaratov waited, scoping the rocks, waiting for just a bit of a sliver of a body part to show so he could nail it, and then get on with business.

He is so good.

He made great shots.

He hit Dade Fellows dead on, he hit Julie riding at an oblique angle flat out at over eight hundred meters, he was just the—

That scene replayed in his mind.

What was odd about it, he now saw, was how featureless it had been. A ridge on a mountain, with a wall of rock behind it, very little vegetation. It had been almost plain, almost abstract.

So?

So how did he range it?

There were no guidelines, no visual data, no known objects visible to make a range estimate, only the woman on the horse getting smaller as she got farther away on the oblique.

How did he know where to hold, when her range changed so radically after the first shot?

He must be a genius. He must just have the gift, the ability to somehow, by the freakish mechanics of the brain, to just know. Donny had that. Maybe it’s not so rare.

But then he knew. Or rather Donny told him, reaching across the years.

“You idiot,” Donny whispered hoarsely in his ear, “don’t you see it yet? Why he’s so good? It’s so obvious.”

Bob knew then why the man had shot at him as he fell but missed. The range had changed; he estimated the lead and got it slightly wrong and just missed. But once his target was still, he knew exactly the range. And that’s how he could hit Julie. He knew exactly . He solved the distance equation, and knew how far she was and where to hold to take her down.

He has a range finder, Bob thought. The son of a bitch has a range finder.

Solaratov looked at his watch. It was just past 0700. The light was now gray approaching white, a kind of sealed-off pewter kind of weather. The snow was falling harder and a little breeze had kicked up, tossing and twisting the flakes, pummeling as they rotated down. The wind got under the crack of his hood, where his flesh was sweaty, and cut him like a scythe. A little chill ran up his spine.

How long can I wait? he wondered.

Nobody was flying in for yet another few hours, but maybe they could get in with snowmobiles or plow the highway and get in that way.

A sudden, uncharacteristic uneasiness settled over him.

He made a list:

1.) Kill the sniper.

2.) Kill the woman.

3.) Kill the witnesses.

4.) Escape into the mountains.

5.) Contact the helo.

6.) Rendezvous.

An hour’s worth of work, he thought, possibly two.

He kept on the scope, the rifle cocked, his finger riding the curve of the trigger, his mind clear, his concentration intense.

How long can I stay at this level?

When do I have to blink, look away, yawn, piss, think of warmth, food, a woman?

He pivoted on the fulcrum of the log, running the scope along the ridge of rocks, looking for target indicators. More breath? A shadow out of place? Some disturbed snow? A regular line? A trace of movement? It would happen, it had to, for Swagger wouldn’t be content to wait. His nature would compel action and then compel doom.

He can’t see me.

He doesn’t know where I am.

It’s just a matter of time.

He tried to figure out a range finder. How do the goddamn things work? His old Barr & Stroud was mechanical, like a surveyor’s piece of equipment, with gears and lenses. That’s why it was so heavy. It was a combination binocular and adding machine: completely impractical.

But no modern shooter would have such a device: too old, too heavy, too delicate.

Laser. It has to work off a laser. It has to shoot a laser to an object, measure the time and make a sure, swift calculation off of that.

Lasers were everywhere. They used them to guide bombs, aim guns, operate on the eye, remove tattoos, imitate fireworks. But what kind of laser was this one?

Off the visible spectrum, since it projected no beam, no red dot.

Ultraviolet?

Infrared?

How could it be brought into the visible spectrum?

It’s a kind of light. How do I see it?

One idea: light being heat, if he could get Solaratov to project it through an ice mist, its heat would burn tracks in the snow. Then he could shoot back down the tracks and…

But that was absurd. Besides involving setting up some complex linkage of actions, any one of which could catch him a 7mm Magnum through the lungs, he didn’t even know if it would work.