Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Should he put an OP out there, so they’d know when the 803rd was getting close?

But he no longer controlled the hills, so putting an OP out there would just get its people all killed.

The rain began to fall, thin and cold. Vietnam! Why was it so cold? He had spent so many days in country over the past eight years but never had felt it this biting before.

“Not good, sir,” said Taney.

“No, it isn’t, Taney.”

“Any idea when they’ll get here?”

“You mean Huu Co? He’s already here. He pushed ’em hard through the night and the rain. He’s no dummy. He wants us busted before our air can get up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have that ammo report ready, Captain?”

“Yes, sir. Mayhorne just finished it. We have twelve thousand rounds of 5.56 left, and a couple more thousand .30 carbine rounds. We’re way low on frags, seventy-nine rounds and belted 7.62. Not a Claymore in the camp.”

“Christ.”

“I’ve got Mayhorne distributing the belted 7.62, but we’re down to five guns and I can’t cover any approach completely. We can set up a unit of quickmovers with one of the guns to jump to the assault sector, but if he hits us more than one place at once, we screw the pooch.”

“He will,” said Puller bleakly. “That’s how he operates. The pooch is screwed.”

“You know, sir, some of these ’Yards have family here in the compound. I was thinking—”

“No,” said Puller. “If you surrender, Huu Co will kill them all. That’s how he operates. We hang on, pray for a break in the weather, and if we have to, go hand to hand in the trenches with the motherfuckers.”

“Was it ever this bad in sixty-five, sir?”

Puller looked at Taney, who was about twenty-five, a good young Spec Forces captain with a tour behind him. But in sixty-five he’d been a high school hotshot; what could you tell him? Who could even remember?

“It was never this bad, because we always had air and there were plenty of firebases around. I’ve never felt so fucking on my own. That’s what trying to be the last man out gets you, Captain. Let it be a lesson. Get out, get your people out. Copy?”

“I copy, sir.”

“Okay, get the platoon leaders and the machine gun team leaders to my command post in fifteen and—”

They both heard it.

“What was that?”

“It sounded like a—”

Then another one came. A solitary rifle shot, heavy, obviously .308, echoing back and forth across the valley.

“Who the fuck is that?” Taney said.

“That’s a sniper,” said Puller.

They waited. It was silent. Then the third shot and Puller could read the signature of the weapon.

“He’s not firing fast enough for an M14. He’s shooting a bolt gun, and that means he’s a Marine.”

“A Marine? Way the hell out here in Indian Territory?”

“I don’t know who this guy is, but he sounds like he’s doing some good.”

Then came a wild barrage of full automatic fire, the lighter, crisper sound of the Chicom 7.62×39mm the AKs fired.

Then the gunfire fell silent.

“Shit,” said Taney. “Sounds like they got him.”

The sniper fired again.

“Let’s run the PRC-77 and see if we can pick up enemy radio intelligence,” Puller said. “They must be buzzing about this like crazy.”

Puller and his XO and Sergeant Blas and Y Dok, the ’Yard chieftain, all went down into the bunker.

“Cameron,” Puller said to his commo NCO, “you think you’ve got any juice left in the PRC-77?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let’s do a quick scan. See if you can get me enemy freaks. They ought to be close enough to pick up.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, if air comes and we need to talk ’em in—”

“Air isn’t coming today, Cameron. Not today. But maybe someone else has.”

Cameron fiddled with the radio mast on the PRC-77, snapping a cord so that it flew free above the wood and dirt of the roof, then clicked it on, and began to diddle with the frequency dials.

“They like to operate in the twelve hundreds,” he said. He pulled through the nets, not bringing anything up except static, the fucking United States Navy bellowing about beating the Air Force Academy in a basketball game and—

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” said Puller, leaning forward. “Can’t you get us in a little tighter?”

“It’s them, isn’t it, sir?” asked Taney.

“Oh, yes, yessy, yessy, yessy,” said the head man Y Dok, who wore the uniform of a major in the ARVN, except for the red tribal scarf around his neck, “yep, is dem, yep, is dem!” He was a merry little man with blackened teeth and an inexhaustible lust for war, afraid, literally, of nothing.

“Dok, can you follow?” asked Puller, whose Vietnamese was good but not great. He was getting odd words — attack, dead, halt — and he couldn’t follow the verb tenses; they seemed to be describing a world he couldn’t imagine.

“Oh, he say they under assault on right by platoon strength of marksmen. Snipers. The snipers come for them. Ma my , ’merican ghosts. He says most officers dead, and most machine gun team leaders also — oh! Oh, now he dead too. Y Dok hear bullet hit him as he talk. Good shit, I tell you, Major Puller, got good deaths going, oh, so very many good deaths.”

“A platoon?” said Taney. “The nearest Marine firebase is nearly forty klicks away, if it hasn’t rotated out. How could they get a platoon over here? And why would they send a platoon?”

“It’s not a platoon,” said Puller. “They couldn’t — no, not overland, across that terrain, not without being bounced. But a team.”

“A team?”

“Marine sniper teams are two-men shows. They can move like hell if they have to. Jesus, Taney, listen to this and be aware of the privilege you’ve been accorded. What you are hearing is one man with a rifle taking on a battalion-strength unit of about three hundred men.”

“Dey say dey got him,” said Y Dok.

“Shit,” said Taney.

“God bless him,” said Puller. “He put up a hell of a fight.”

“Dey say, ’merican is dead and head man say, You fellas get going, you got to push on to the end of the valley and de officer say, Yes, yes, he going to — oh. Oh ho ho ho!” He laughed, showing his blackened little teeth.

“No. No, no, no, no. He got dem! Oh, yes, he just killed man on radio. I hear scream. Oh, he is a man who knows the warrior’s walk, dot I know. He got the good deaths, very many, going on.”

“You can say that again,” said Puller.

When the trigger broke, the North Vietnamese captain lieutenant turned as if to look at Bob just once before he died. All the details were frozen for a second: he was a small man, even by NVA standards, with binoculars and a pistol. An instant ago, he had been full of life and zeal. When the bullet struck him, it sucked everything from him and he stood with grave solemnity, colorless, as all the hopes and dreams departed him. If he had a soul, this would be where it fled to whatever version of heaven sustained him. Then it was over: with the almost stiff dignity of formal ceremony, he toppled forward.

Bob threw his bolt fast, tossing out the spent shell, but never breaking his eye relief with the scope, a good trick it only took a lifetime to master. In the perfect circle of nine magnifications, he saw the men who were his targets looking at one another in utter confusion. There was no inscrutability in their expression: they were dumbfounded, because this was not supposed to happen, not in the rain, in the fog, in the perfect freedom of their attack, not after their long night march, their good discipline, their toughness, their belief. They had no immediate theory to explain it. No, this was not possible.