Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“Donny?”

“Let me tell you about this thing.”

And so he told it: from his recruitment to his attempts to enter into a duplicitous friendship with Crowe to his arrival at the party to his strange behavior that night until, finally, the action on the bridge, Crowe’s arrest and tomorrow’s responsibilities.

“Oh, God, Donny, I’m so sorry. It’s so awful.” She went to him and in her warmth for just a second he lost all his problems and was Donny Fenn of Pima County all over again, the football hero, the big guy that everybody thought so highly of, who could do a 40 in four-seven, and bench press 250, yet take pride in his high SATs and the fact that he was decent to his high school’s lowliest creeps and toads and never was mean to anybody, because that wasn’t his way. But then he blinked, and he was back in the dark in the park, and it was only Julie, her warmth, her smell, her sweetness, and when he left her embrace, it was all back again.

“Donny, haven’t you done enough for them? I mean, you got shot, you lay in that horrible hospital for six months, you came back and did exactly what they said. When does it end?”

“It ends when you get out. I don’t hate the Corps. It’s not a Corps thing. It’s these Navy guys, these super-patriots, who have it all figured out.”

“Oh, Donny. It’s so awful.”

“I don’t work that way. I don’t like that stuff at all. That’s not me. Not any of it.”

“Can’t you talk to somebody? Can’t you talk to a chaplain or a lawyer or something? Do they even have the right to put you through that?”

“Well, as I understand it, it’s not an illegal order. It’s a legitimate order. It’s not like being asked to do something that’s technically wrong, like shoot kids in a ditch. I don’t know who I could talk to who wouldn’t say, Just do your duty.”

“And they’ll send you back to Vietnam if you don’t testify.”

“That’s the gist of it, yeah.”

“Oh, God,” she said.

She turned from him and walked a step or two away. Across the way, she could see the Potomac and the dark far shore that was Virginia. Above it, a tapestry of stars unscrolled, dense and deep.

“Donny,” she finally said, “there’s only one answer.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Go back. Do it. That’s what you have to do to save yourself.”

“But it’s not like I know he’s guilty. Maybe he doesn’t deserve to get his life ruined just because—”

“Donny. Just do it. You said yourself, this Crowe is not worth a single thing.”

“You’re right,” Donny finally said. “I’ll go back, I’ll do it, I’ll get it over. I’m eleven and days, I’ll get out inside a year with an early out, and we can have our life. That’s all there is to it. That’s fine, that’s cool. I’ve made up my mind.”

“No, you haven’t,” she said. “I can tell when you’re lying. You’re not lying to me; you never have. But you’re lying to yourself.”

“I should talk to someone. I need help on this one.”

“And I’m not good enough?”

“If you love me, and I hope and pray you do, then your judgment is clouded.”

“All right, who, then?”

Who, indeed?

There was only one answer, really. Not the chaplain or a JAG lawyer, not Platoon Sergeant Case or the first sergeant or the sergeant major or the colonel or even the Commandant, USMC.

“Trig. Trig will know. We’ll go see Trig.”

Bitterly, from afar, Peter watched them. They embraced, they talked, they appeared to fight. She broke away. He went after her. It killed him to sense the intimacy they shared. It was everything he hated in the world — the strong, the handsome, the blond, the confident, just taking what was theirs and leaving nothing behind.

He watched them, finally, go toward Donny’s old car and climb in, his mind raging with anger and counterplots, his energy unbearably high.

Without willing it, he raced to the VW Larry Frankel had lent him. He turned the key, jacked the car into gear and sped after them. He didn’t know why, he didn’t think it would matter, but he also knew he could not help but follow them.

Peter almost missed them. He had just cleared a crest when he saw the lights of the other car illuminate a hill and a dirt road beyond a gate, then flash off. His own lights were off, but there was enough moonlight to make out the road ahead. He pulled up to the gate and saw nothing that bore any signal of meaning, except a mailbox, painted white with the name WILSON scribbled on it in black. He was on Route 35, about five miles north of Germantown.

What the hell were they up to? What did they know? What was going on?

He decided to pull back a hundred yards, and just wait for a while. Suppose they ran in there, and turned around and collided with him on the road? That would be a total humiliation.

Instead, he decided just to watch and wait.

At the top of the hill, they turned the engine off. Below lay a farm of no particular distinction, a nondescript house, a yard, a barn. Propane tanks and old tractors, rusted out, lay in the yard; there was no sound of animals. The farm, in fact, looked like a Dust Bowl relic.

Yet something was going on.

Twin beams illuminated the yard, and Donny, with his unusually good eyesight, could make out a van with its lights on, a shroud of dust, and two men who were in the process of moving heavy packages of some sort out from the barn into the van by the light of the headlamps.

“I think that’s Trig,” Donny said. “I don’t know who the other guy is.”

“Shall we go down?”

Donny was suddenly unsure.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.”

“He’s helping his friend load up.”

“At this hour?”

“Well, he’s an irregular guy. The clock doesn’t mean much to him.”

That was true; Trig wasn’t your nine-to-fiver by any interpretation.

“All right,” said Donny. “We’ll walk down there. But you hang back. Let me check this out. Don’t let them see you until we figure what’s happening. I’ll call you in, okay? I’m just not feeling good about this, okay?”

“You sound a little paranoid.”

He did. Some hint of danger filled the air, but he wasn’t sure what it was, what it meant, where it came from. Possibly, it was the mere strangeness of everything, the way nothing really made any sense. Possibly it was his own fatigue, raw after the many hours on alert.

They headed down the hill, and Donny detoured them around the house, until at last they came upon the two men from the rear. Donny could see them better now, both working in jeans and denim shirts. They were loading by wheelbarrow immensely awkward sacks of fertilizer into the van, packing it very full, AMMONIUM NITRATE, the sacks said. Dust that the wheelbarrow tires ripped up from the ground filled the air, floating in large, shimmering clouds, which shifted through the beams of the truck lights and in the yellower light that blazed from the barn door. It lit wherever it could, coating the truck, the men, everything. Both Trig and the other man wore red bandannas around their faces.

Pushing Julie back into the dark, Donny stepped out and approached, coughing at the stuff in the air as it filled his mouth and throat with grit. He stepped farther; nobody noticed him.

“Trig?” he called.

Trig turned instantly at his name, but it was the other man who reacted much faster, turning exactly to Donny, his dark eyes devouring him. He had a full, tangled web of blond hair, much thicker than Trig’s, and was large and powerful next to Trig’s delicacy. They looked like a poet and a stevedore standing next to each other.