Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Donny stirred in the tent of his poncho, got the Prick-77 up and on, knew its freak was preset accurately, and managed somehow, leaning it forward precariously, to let its four feet of whip antenna snap forward and out into the wet air.

He brought the phone to his ear up through his poncho and pushed the on-off toggle to ON. And, yes, a shivery blade of water sluiced down between his shoulder blades, underneath his jungle cammies. He shivered, said “Fuck” under his breath and continued to struggle with the radio.

The problem with the Pricks wasn’t only their limited range, their dense weight, their line-of-sight operational capabilities but, more critically, their short battery lives. Therefore grunts used them sparingly on preset skeds, contacting base for a fast sitrep. He pressed SEND.

“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?”

He pressed RECEIVE, and for his efforts got a crackly soup of noise. No big surprise, with the low clouds, the rain, and the terrain’s own vagaries at play; sometimes they got through and sometimes they didn’t.

He tried again.

“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you read? Is anybody there? Hello, knock, knock, please open the door, over?”

The response was the same.

“Maybe they’re all asleep,” he said.

“Naw,” said the sergeant, in his rich Southern drawl, slow and steady and funny as shit, “it’s too late to be stoned and too early to be drunk. This is the magic hour when them boys are probably alert. Keep trying.”

Donny hit the send button and repeated his message a couple more times without luck.

“I’m going to the backup freak,” he finally stated.

The sergeant nodded.

Donny spread the poncho so that he could get at the simple controls atop the unit. Two dials seemed to grin at him next to the two butterfly knobs that controlled them, one for megahertz, the other for kilohertz. He diddled, looking for 79.92, to which Dodge City sometimes defaulted if there was heavy radio traffic or atmospheric interference, and as he did, the radio prowled through the wave band of communications that was Vietnam in early 1972, propelled by the weird reality that it could receive from a far greater distance than it could send.

They heard a lost truck driver trying to get back to Highway 1, a pilot looking for his carrier, a commo clerk testing his gear, all of it crackly and fragmented as the signals in their varying strengths ebbed and flowed. Some of it was in Vietnamese, for the ARVN were on the same net; some of it was Army, for there were more soldiers than Marines left by fifty-odd thousand; some of it was Special Forces, as a few of the big A-camps still held out to the north or west; some of it was fire missions, permission to break off search, requests for more beer and beef.

Finally, Donny lit where he wanted.

“Ah, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you copy?”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six here; yes, we copy. What is your sitrep, over?”

“Tell ’em we’re drowning,” said the sergeant.

“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, we’re all wet. Nothing moving up here. Nothing living up here, Foxtrot, over.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, does Swagger want to call an abort? Over.”

“They want to know, do you want to call an abort?”

The hunter-killer mission was slated to go another twenty-four hours before air evac, but the sergeant himself appeared to be extremely low on the probability of contact at this time.

“Affirmative,” he said. “No bad guys anywhere. They’re too smart to go out in shit like this. Tell ’em to get us the hell out of here as soon as possible.”

“That’s an affirmative, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six. Request air evac, over.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, our birds are grounded. You’ll have to park it until we can get airborne again.”

“Shit, they’re souped in,” said Donny.

“Okay, tell ’em we’ll sit tight and wait for the weather to break, but we ain’t bringing home any scalps.”

Donny hit SEND.

“Foxtrot, we copy. We’ll sit tight and get back to you when the sun breaks through, over.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, roger that. Out.”

The radio crackled to silence.

“Okay,” said Donny, “that about ties that one up.”

“Yeah,” said the sergeant, with just a hint of a question in his voice.

“Pork,” he said after a second or two, “was you paying attention while you were going to the backup freak? You hear anything?”

The sergeant was like a cop who could understand and decipher the densest code or the most broken-up sound bits on the radio.

“No, I didn’t hear a thing,” said Donny. “The chatter, you know, the usual stuff.”

“Okay, do me a favor, Pork.”

He always called Donny “Pork.” He called all his spotters Pork. He’d had three spotters before Donny.

“Pork, you run through them freaks real slow and you concentrate. I thought I heard a syllable that sounded like ‘gent.’ ”

“Gent? As in gent- lemen prefer blondes?”

“You got a blonde, you should know. No, as in urgent.”

Donny’s fingers clicked slowly through the chatter on the double dials as a hundred different signals came and went in the same fractured militarese, made more incomprehensible by radio abbreviations, the tangle of codes and call signs, Alpha-Four-Delta, Delta-Six-Alpha, Whiskey-Foxtrot-Niner, Iron-Tree-Three, Rathole-Zulu-Six, Tan San Nhut control, on and on, Good morning, Vietnam, how are you today, it’s raining . It meant nothing.

But the sergeant leaned forward, his whole body tense with concentration, unshivery in the wet, hardly even human in his intensity. He was a thin stick of a man, twenty-six, with a blond crew cut, a sunburn so deep it had almost changed his race, cheekbones like bed knobs, squinty gray squirrel-shooter’s eyes, 100 percent American redneck with an accent that placed him in the backwoods of some underdeveloped principality far from sophisticated living, but with an odd grace and efficiency to him.

He had no dreams, not of desert, not of a farm or a city, not of home, not of hearth. He was total kick-ass professional Marine Corps lifer, and if he dreamed of anything, it was only of that harsh and bitter bitch Duty, whom he’d never once cheated on, whom he’d honored and served on two other tours, one as a platoon sergeant in sixty-five and another running long-range patrols up near the DMZ for SOG. If he had an inner life, he kept it to himself. They said he’d won some big civilian shooting tournament and they said his daddy was a Marine too, back in World War II, and won the Medal of Honor, but the sergeant never mentioned this and who would have the guts to ask? He had no family, he had no wife or girlfriend, he had no home, nothing except the Marine Corps and a sense that he had been produced by turbulent, hardscrabble times, of which he preferred not to speak and on whose agonies he would remain forever silent.

He was many other things, but only one of them mattered to Donny. He was the best. Man, he was good! He was so fucking good it made your head spin. If he fired, someone died, an enemy soldier always. He never shot if he didn’t see a weapon. But when he shot, he killed. Nobody told him otherwise, and nobody would fuck with him. He was supercool in action, the ice king, who just let it happen, kept his eyes and ears open and figured it out so fast it made you dizzy. Then he reacted, took out any moving bad guys, and went about his business. It was like being in Vietnam with Mick Jagger, or some other legendary star, because everybody knew who Bob the Nailer was, and if they didn’t love him, by God, they feared him, because he was also Death From Afar, the Marine Corps way. He was more rifle than man, and more man than anybody. Even the NVA knew who he was: it was said a 15,000-piastre bounty had been placed on his head. The sergeant thought this was pretty funny.