Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

His life flashed and fled, dissolved in a blur, went away and came back.

He thought: I’m gone.

He wondered if he had the strength to gather the rifle, find a position and wait for the man until he bled to death, but the man would not be foolish.

He thought next of how the mission had redefined itself.

To kill the man who had killed him meant nothing. There was no escape. The only option left was: failure or success.

He pulled himself up, saw the house five hundred yards away through the snowy trees and felt he could make it. He could make it, for the shooter would now lay low, unsure as to whether or not the sniper was dead.

He could make it to the house, get in, and with that little Glock pistol finish the job that had killed him.

That would be his legacy in the world: he finished the last job. He did it. He was successful.

Finding the strength somewhere, amazed at how clear it all seemed, he headed off, bleeding, in a winter wonderland.

Swagger lay close to the rock for a minute or so, recalling the sight picture: the reticle, swollen in the intensity of his focus so that it was big and bold as a fist, held low on the covering tree because you hold low when shooting downward, so that the bullet would hit center chest, a nice big target. But it’s tricky: the rifle was zeroed for five hundred yards, according to his shooter’s instructions, but maybe the man who zeroed it held it slightly differently than he did; maybe there was a twig, a branch slightly unresolved in the 10X power of the scope. Maybe there was a wind he didn’t feel, a sierra blowing around the contour of the mountain.

But the sight picture was as perfect as it could be. It was held where it should be held, and if he had to call the shot, he’d call it a hit.

He edged around the right, squinting out. He tried to find the shooting site of his enemy, but it was much harder to see from this angle. Instead, he scanned back and forth in what he determined was the proper sector, and saw nothing, no movement, no anything. He finally found the fallen tree he was convinced had supported his enemy, but there was no sign of him, there was no sign of disturbance in the snow. A spot, a little farther back, could have been blood, but it was impossible to tell. It could also have been a black stone, a broken limb.

He lowered the rifle, slipped down the nightscope lenses and watched in the murk for a while. It stayed green, uncut by the flick of a laser.

Did I hit him?

Is he dead?

How much time should I give him?

A dozen scenarios instantly occurred to him. Maybe Solaratov had moved to a fallback position. Maybe he had moved laterally. Maybe he was even advancing on him. He might even be headed now toward the house, certain he had Bob trapped.

That last seemed the most logical. After all, the job was to hit the woman, not Swagger. Swagger’s death had no real meaning; Julie’s had all the meaning.

And if he were seen, he’d kill witnesses too.

Bob took a deep breath.

Then he pushed himself up, scuttled down a few yards, turned angles obliquely, dodged, jumped, found cover. He tried to make himself difficult to hit, knowing he could not make himself impossible to hit.

But no shot came.

From his new cover his angle was lower, so his view of the valley was less distinct. He could only see a bit of the flatland through the snowy trees, and could see nothing moving on it, approaching the house. But his target would be camouflaged, moving at angles, dropping, easily evading him.

His heart was beating rapidly. There was no breath left in his lungs. The planet seemed scorched dry of oxygen.

He pulled himself out and moved at the assault again.

He fell twice in the snow and almost blacked out the second time. And when he looked up, the house seemed no closer.

His mind raced; it would not stay where he put it. He thought of sight pictures, of men going limp against reticles, of long stalks in mountains and jungles and cities. He had hunted in them all and been victorious in them all.

He thought of the crawl with the sandbag, the long, slow crawl outside the American fort and the earlier moment when they had him, and then the large black plane, like a vulture, hung in the air for just a split second before its guns pulverized the universe.

He thought of the times he’d been hit: over the years, it amounted to no less than twenty-two wounds, though two were blade wounds, one inflicted by an Angolan, one by a mujahideen woman. He thought of thirst, fear, hunger, discomfort. He thought of rifles. He thought of the past and the future, which was running out quickly.

He rose the last time, and stumbled through the snow, which fought him. It was not cold. The snow still fell, harder now, in swirls and pinwheels, dancing in the wind, the heavy damp flakes of Eastern European cities.

Where am I?

What has happened?

Why has it happened?

But then he was at the house.

All was silent.

He bent to the storm cellar door, pulled hard, even as he reached inside his coat and drew out the Glock pistol.

A nail seemed to hold him back. He felt the door want to yield but hang up. He pulled harder, finding strength somewhere in the backwash of his mind, and with a crack, the nail gave and he pulled the door open. It revealed three cement steps down into a dark entrance that looked jammed with clutter.

He slid by the door and stepped down into the darkness, aware only marginally that he had made it. He felt clear-eyed, suddenly, recommitted to his purpose, certain of what he must do.

He kicked his way through the impediments: a saw-horse, a bicycle, bed springs, boxes of old newspapers, and as he got through he felt the door slam shut behind him, sealing him off in the darkness. He took another step, kicking things aside, looking and waiting for his vision to clear. He smelled moisture, mildew, rot, old leather and paper, decaying material, ancient wood.

Then he could see them.

They were over against the far wall, huddled under the steps, two women and a girl clutching each other, crying.

Swagger made it into the treeline. This is where he needed a pistol, a short, handy, fast-firing weapon with a lot of firepower. But the Beretta was somewhere up the mountain, buried under a ton of snow.

He carried the rifle like a submachine gun in the low assault position, poking through the woods as he closed from the flank on the sniper’s hide.

He paused, waiting, listening. There was no sound, no sense of life at all in the haunted place. Branches and bushes distended by heavy, moist, fresh snow stood out in extravagant shapes like a display of modern art. Through the gray, the snow fell, swirling.

Bob’s breath rose above him, then parted. He advanced slowly. If the sniper was here, he was well hidden, completely disciplined.

He could see the fallen tree, and then made out the disturbance in the snow where the man had supported himself while shooting upward.

Bob slid as silently as he could on the oblique through the heavy trees, trying to shake no snow loose, and at last came to the site, paused a second, then stepped behind the cover to put his rifle muzzle on the man. But nobody was there. He heard only his own harsh breath heaving in the cold.

The blood told the story.

Solaratov had been hit bad. His rifle lay in the snow; the ranging binoculars were there too. A raspberry sherbet marked where he’d bled most profusely, driven to the ground by the impact of the .308.

Got him! Bob thought, but the moment of exultation never fully developed, for in the next seconds he read the tracks and the blood trail and saw that the man, seriously wounded but nothing like dead, had moved back through the trees toward the house.