Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Bob had smeared the jungle grease paint on his face, and under the crinkled brow of the boonie cap his visage looked primitive; he seemed a creature sprung from someone’s worst dreams, some kind of atavistic war creature totally of the jungle, festooned with pistols and grenades, all smeared with the colors of nature, even his eyes gone to nothing.

“Here. Paint up and we’ll get going,” he said, holding the stick of camo paint out to Donny, who quickly blurred his own features. Donny gathered his M14 and the impossibly heavy PRC-77, his real enemy in all this, and began to ease his way down the slope with Bob.

It seemed they were lowering themselves into the clouds, like angels returning to earth. The fog would not break; it clung to the floor of the valley as if it had been enameled there. No sun would burn it away, not today at any rate.

Now and then some jungle bird would call, now and then some animal shudder would ripple from the undergrowth, but there was no sense of human presence, nothing metallic or regular to the eye. Donny scanned left, Bob scanned right. They moved ever so slowly, frustratingly slowly, picking their way down, until at last they were nearly to the valley floor and a field of waist-high grass, in the center of which a worn track had been beaten, by men or buffaloes or elephants or whatever.

From far away, at last, came some kind of unnatural noise. Donny couldn’t identify it and then he could; it was the noise of men, somehow — nothing distinct, not breaking talk discipline — somehow become a herd, a living, breathing thing. It was No. 3 Battalion, still a few hundred yards away, gearing up for the last six or so klicks of quick march to the staging area for their assault.

Bob halted him with a hand.

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s how we do it. You got the map coords?”

Donny did; he had memorized them.

“Grid square Whiskey-Delta 5120-1802.”

“Good. If the sky clears and the birds come, you’ll have line of sight to them and you can go to the Air Force freak and you talk ’em in. They won’t have good visuals. You talk ’em down into the valley and have ’em plaster the floor.”

“What about you? You’ll be—”

“Don’t you worry about that. No squid Phantom jock is flaming me. I can take care of myself. Now listen up: that is your goddamn job. You talk to ’em on the horn. You’re the eyes. Don’t you be coming down after me, you got that? You may hear fighting, you may hear small arms; don’t you fret a bit. That’s my job. Yours is to stay up here and talk to the air. After the air moves out, you should be able to git to that snake-eater camp. You call them, tell them you’re coming in, pop smoke, and come in from the smoke so they know it’s you and not some NVA hero. Got that? You should be okay if I can hold these bad boys up for a bit.”

“What about security? I’m security. My job is to help you, to cover your ass. What the hell good am I going to do parked up here?”

“Listen, Pork, I’ll fire my first three shots when I get visuals. Then I’ll move back to the right, maybe two hundred yards, because they’ll bring heavy shit down. I’ll try and do two, three, maybe four more from there. Here’s how the game works. I pull down on a couple, then I move back. But guess what? After the third string, I ain’t moving back, I’m moving forward. That’s why I want you right here. I’ll never be too far from this area. I don’t want ’em to know how many guys I am, and they’ll flank me, and I don’t want ’em coming around on me. I guarantee you, they will have good, tough, fast-moving flank people out, so you go to ground about twenty minutes after I first hit them. They may be right close to you; that’s all right. You dig in and sink into the ground, and you’ll be all right. Just watch out for the patrols I know they’ll call in. Them boys we saw last night. They’ll be back, that I guarantee.”

“You will get killed. You will get killed, I’m telling you, you cannot—”

“I’m giving you a straight order; you follow it. Don’t give me no little-boy shit. I’m telling you what you have to do, and by God, you will do it, and that’s all there is to it, or I will be one pissed-off motherfucker, Lance Corporal Fenn.”

“I—”

“You do it! Goddammit, Fenn, you do it, and that’s all there is to it. Or I will have you up on charges and instead of going home, you’ll go to Portsmouth.”

This was bullshit, of course, and Donny saw through it in a second. It was all bullshit, because if Swagger went into the valley without security, he was not coming back. He simply was not. That’s what the physics of firepower decreed, and the physics of firepower were the iron realities of war. There was no appeal.

He was throwing his life away for some strangers in a camp he’d never see. He knew it, had known it all along.

It was his way. More like Trig: hungry to die, as if the war were so inside him he knew he could not live without it; there would be no life to go home to. He had kept himself hard and pure just for this one mad moment when he could take on a battalion with a rifle, and if he could not live, it was also clear that he would fight to the very end. It was as if he knew there would be no place for warriors in any other world, and so he may as well embrace his fate, not dodge it.

“Jesus, Bob—”

“You got it square?”

“Yes.”

“You are a good kid. You go back to the world and that beautiful girl. You go to her and you put all this bad bullshit behind you, do you copy?”

“Roger.”

“Roger. Time to hunt. Sierra-Bravo-Four, last transmission, and out.”

And, with the sniper’s gift for subtle, swift movement, Bob then seemed to vanish. He slithered off down the hill to the low fog without looking back.

Bob worked down through the foliage, aware that he was clicking into the zone. He had to put it all behind him. There could be nothing in his head except mission, no other memories or doubts, no tremor of hesitation to play across the nerves of his shooting. He tried to get into his war face, to become , in some way, war. It was a gift his people had; his father had won the Medal of Honor in the big one against the Japs, messy business on Iwo Jima, and then come home to get the blue ribbon from Harry Truman and get blowed out of his socks ten years later by a no-account piece of trash in a cornfield. There were other soldiers in the line too: hard, proud men, true sons of Arkansas, who had two gifts: to shoot and see something die, and to work like hogs the long hot day. It wasn’t much; it’s what they had. But there was also a cloud of melancholy attached to the clan — off and on, over the Swagger generations back to that strange fellow and his wife who’d shown up in Tennessee in 1786 from who knew where, they’d been a line of killers and lonely boys, exiles. There was a blackness in them. He’d seen it in his father, who never spoke of war, and was as beloved as a man in a backwater like Blue Eye, Arkansas, could be, even more so than Sam Vincent, the county prosecutor, or Harry Etheridge, the famous congressman. But his father would have black dog days: he could hardly talk or stir; he’d sit in the dark, and just stare out at nothing. What was dogging him? The war? Some sense of his own luck? A feeling for the fragility of it? Memories of all the bullets that had been fired at him, and the shells, and how nothing had hit him in his vitals? That kind of luck had to run out, and Daddy knew it, but he went out anyway, and it killed him.

What could save you?

Nothing. If it was in the cards, by God, it was in the cards, and Daddy knew that, and faced up to it like a man, looked it in the eyes and spat in its black-cat face, until at last it reared up and bit him in a cornfield on the Polk County line.