Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Idea two: get Solaratov to shoot the laser through a piece of ice. It would bend, and send back some faulty reading. He would over- or undercompensate, miss and…

Insane. Unworkable.

Think! Think, Goddammit. How do I see it?

And then it occurred to him.

Would I see it on night vision? Would I see it in my goggles? Would they register it?

He picked them up where they lay, half in, half out of the snow, slid the harness over his skull, pulled the goggles down and snapped them on. They yielded a green dense landscape, as if the world had ended in water. The seas had risen. Green was everywhere. Nothing else was clear.

How can I get him to lase me again? He knew. He had to move one more time, change the range.

Solaratov would go to his laser range finder.

If it works, it’ll be like a neon sign in the green, saying I AM THE SNIPER.

Now something was happening.

He saw puffs of breath rising above a certain accumulation of boulders, signifying some kind of physical exertion. He watched and one of the rocks seemed somehow to tremble.

Is he moving the rock?

Why would he move the rock?

But in the same second, as he steadied himself, as the rock wobbled truly erratically, seemed to pause, and then tumbled ever so majestically forward, pulling a score of smaller rocks with it, uncurling a shroud of snow as it fell, he knew.

He’s trying to bury me, Solaratov thought.

He’s trying to start an avalanche, to send tons of snow down the mountain and bury me.

But it wasn’t going to work. Avalanche snow, Solaratov knew, was old snow, its structure eroded by melt, its moisture mostly evaporated, so that it was dry and treacherous, a network of unsafe stresses and fault lines. Then and only then could a single fracture cut out its underpinnings and send it crashing down. This avalanche would never go anywhere. The snow was too wet and new; it might fly a bit, but it wouldn’t build. It would peter out a few hundred yards down.

On top of that, clearly the man didn’t even know where he was. Even now, as the rocks and their screen of snow tumbled abortively down the hill, not picking up energy but losing it, they were on no course toward himself, but more or less to the right about one hundred yards. The falling snow simply could not reach him.

He almost chuckled at the futility of it, remembering that his quarry was a jungle fighter, not a man of the mountains.

The rocks tumbled, trailing snow, but down the slope where the angle flattened, they lost their energy and rolled to a halt.

Solaratov watched them tumble, then brought the rifle back to bear on the original line of rocks. As he was shifting it upward, he thought he made out a white shape sloshing desperately through the snow.

He rose above it, came back, could not quite find it and then did track it quickly, but never quite got the fraction of line between third and fourth mil-dots precisely on it.

He saw that Swagger had moved, literally floundering his way downhill to this new position. So? He was a few dozen meters closer? Now he had less maneuverability. What possible difference did it make? He had made his last mistake.

The game, Solaratov thought, is almost over.

He put down his rifle, picked up the binoculars and prepared to shoot a laser, just to verify the distance to the new position.

Bob came to the halted rocks and hit them with a whack, but couldn’t stop to acknowledge the pain. Instead he pulled himself up, put his head and shoulders over the top, flicked the night-vision goggles down as he snapped them on and peered desperately into the void. He knew he was violating every rule in U.S. Marine Corps Sniping FMFM1-3B , which tells snipers never, ever to look over an obstacle, for that makes you too obvious to counterfire; no, you drop to your haunches and look around it. But he didn’t have the time.

There was no definition in the green murk, no shape, no depth, nothing but flat, vaguely phosphorescent green. He scanned, registered this nothingness, but was too intense to feel much in the way of despair, even if he knew he was hung out over the lip of the rock and that Solaratov could take him in an instant.

He waited. A second, then another, finally a third yanked by like trains slowed by the sludgy blood his heart pumped.

Nothing.

Maybe the laser wasn’t visible in the spectrum of the goggles. Who knew of such stuff? Maybe the laser ranging device was part of some advanced scope he knew nothing about, and it would announce itself, but be followed in another nanosecond by close to 1,500 foot-pounds of Remington 7mm Magnum arriving to erase him from the earth.

Maybe he’s not there. Maybe he’s moved, he’s working his way up another slope, he’s flanked me, and now he’s just taking his time.

Two more seconds dribbled by, each encapsulating a lifetime, until Bob knew he could wait no longer, and as he began to duck back into a world of zero possibility, here it came, at last.

The yellow streak was like a crack in the wall of the universe. It pinged right at him from nothingness and lasted but an instant, but there it was, a straight line as the shooter below measured the distance to the shooter above.

Bob locked the source of the brief beam into his muscle memory and his sense of time and space. He could not move a muscle, an atom; he could not disturb the rigidity of his body, for it all depended on holding that invisible point before himself in the infinity of his mind as he brought the rifle up in one smooth, whipping motion and in to his shoulder and did not move his head to find the scope but moved the scope to that precise lock of his vision.

The scope flew before him and he saw nothing, even as his hands locked around the pistol grip and his finger found the curve of the trigger, caressed its delicacy, felt and loved its tension and sought to be one with it. He felt no tension, not now: here was the rest of his life; here was everything.

And as he flung away the goggles with a toss of his head, here was his ancient enemy. Bob saw the sniper, swaddled behind a horizontal trunk, his shape barely recognizable in the swirl of pewter-to-white dappling of the snow and his arctic warfare camouflaging, only the line of the rifle rising as it came toward Bob, hard and regular.

So many years, he thought, as he closed his focus down until he saw only the harsh cruciform of the reticle, made a slight correction to shoot lower to compensate for the downward angle, and then, without willing it as the reticle became such a statement of clarity it seemed to fill the whole universe, the trigger went and he fired.

You never hear the one that gets you.

Solaratov was on his target, racing through the excitement of knowing that at long last he had him, but he hesitated for just a second to compute the new range. And then he realized that the man above was aimed — incredibly — at him.

He felt no pain, only shock.

He seemed to be in the center of an explosion. Then time stopped, he was briefly removed from the universe, and when he was reinserted into it, he was not an armed man with a rifle boring in on a target but a supine man in the cold snow, amid a splatter of blood. His own breath spurted out raggedly, white cloud and red spray sending broken signals upward.

Someone was drunkenly playing a broken accordion or a damaged pipe organ nearby. The music had no melody, was only a whine with a slight edge or buzz to it. Sucking chest wound. Left side, left lung gone, blood pouring out both exit and entrance wounds. Blood everywhere.

Internal damage total. Death near. Death coming. Death at last, his old friend, come to pick him up.

He blinked, disbelieving, and wondered at the alchemy by which such a result could have been engineered.