Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Feet came so close.

He saw canvas boots, and a pair of shower clogs.

They won this fucking war in shower clogs!

The two pairs of feet sloughed through the grass, each vivid in the perfection of its detail. The man in shower clogs had small, dirty, tough feet. The clogs were probably just an afterthought; he could fight barefoot in snow or on gravel. The other’s boots were holey, torn, taped together, a hobo’s comic footwear, something Red Skelton’s Clem Kadiddlehopper might wear. But then the boots marched on, passing by, and Bob scooted ahead, slithering through the grass until he came to a fold in the earth. He rose, checked around, and saw nothing in the mist, and then raced off to the right, down the fold, toward the column, which had probably resumed its movement toward Arizona.

Then he crashed into the soldier.

NVA.

The two looked at each other for one stupid moment, Bob and this obvious straggler, the idiot who’d wandered away. The man’s mouth opened as if to scream even as he fumbled to bring his AK to bear, but Bob launched at him in an animal spring of pure evil brutality, smashing him in the mouth with his skull, and driving downward on him, pinning the assault rifle to his chest under his own dense weight. He got his left hand about the man’s throat, crushing it, applying the full pinning weight of his body while at the same time reaching for his Randall knife.

The man squirmed and bucked spastically, his own hands beating at Bob’s neck and head. Then one hand dipped, also for a knife, presumably, but Bob rolled slightly to the left and drew his knee up and drove it into the man’s testicles with all the force he could muster. He heard the intake of breath as the concussion folded his enemy.

Then he had the knife, and no impulse halted him. He drove it forward into the belly, turned it sideways so the cutting edge sliced into entrails, and drew it to the left. The man spasmed, fighting the pain, his hand flying to Bob’s wrist, gagging sounds leaking from a constricted throat. Bob yanked the knife out and stabbed upward, feeling the blade sink into throat. He fought for leverage over the dying soldier, got himself upright and astride the heaving chest and drove the blade two or three more times into the torso, the man arching with each stroke.

He sat back. He looked about, saw the Remington a few feet away. He wiped the Randall blade on his camouflaged trousers, and slipped it back into the upside-down sheath on his chest. He checked quickly: two pistols, a canteen. He picked up the Remington but had no time to look for his hat, which had fallen off in the struggle. A lick of salty blood ran down from the point on his crown where he’d head-butted the North Vietnamese, and it arrived at the corner of his mouth, shocking him. He turned, looked at the man.

Why had it been so easy? Why was the man so weak?

The answer was obvious: the soldier was about fourteen. He’d never shaved in his life. In death, his face was dirty, but essentially undisturbed. His eyes were open and bright but blank. His teeth were white. He had acne.

Bob looked at the bloody package that had been a boy. A feeling of revulsion came over him. He bent, retched up a few gobs of undigested C-rat, gathered his breath, wiped the blood off his hands, and turned back to the path that lay ahead of him, which led to the column.

I am war, he thought; this is what I do.

Huu Co’s political officer Phuc Bo was adamant. A stocky little man who’d been to Russian staff school, Phuc Bo had the blunt force of a party apparatchik, a man who lived and breathed the party and was a master of dialectics.

“Brother Colonel, you must move, despite the cost. To waste more time is to lose our precious advantage. How many can a single man kill? Can he kill more than forty, possibly fifty? That is well under a twenty percent casualty rate; that is entirely acceptable to the Party. Sometimes, the fighters’ lives must be spent to accomplish the mission.”

Huu Co nodded solemnly. Up ahead, sporadic fire broke out, but the column had bogged down again. There was no word from the flanking patrol and no word from the sappers who’d been recalled. Still, the American assailed them with well-aimed shots, cadre his particular specialty.

How did he know? Cadre wore no rank pins, carried few symbols of the ego of leadership such as riding crops, swords or funny hats. Leaders were indistinguishable from fighters, both in party theory and in actual practice. Yet this American had some instinct for command, and when he fired, he brought down leaders, not always but in high enough percentage to be disruptive.

“He is hitting our cadre, brother Political Officer. And what if we push on, and he robs us over the kilometers of our leadership? And we get to the objective and no leaders come forth and our attacks fail? What will the party say then? Whose ears will ring the most loudly with criticism?”

“Our fighters can produce leaders from amongst themselves. That is our strength. That is our power.”

“But our leaders must be trained, and to squander them for nothing but the ego of a political officer who seeks the glory of seeing his column destroy an American fort late in an already victorious war may itself be a decision that is commented upon.”

“I wonder, dear brother Colonel, if indeed there are not vestiges of Western humanitarianism, the sick decadence of a doomed society, still within your soul? You worry too much about such things as the petty lives of individuals when it is the movement of the masses and the forces of history and our objective that should be your concern.”

“I am humble before my brother’s excellent and perceptive critique,” said the colonel. “I still believe in patience over the long journey, and that in patience lies virtue.”

“Dearest Colonel,” said the man, his face lighting with fire, “I have sworn to the commissar that the American fort shall fall. I therefore demand that you give the order to move forward without regard to—”

Phuc Bo stopped talking. It was difficult to continue without a lower jaw and a tongue. He stepped backward, the blood foaming brightly across his chest and gurgling from the hole that had been his mouth. Odd arguments came from him, so arcane and densely constructed they could not be followed. His eyes turned the color of an old two-franc coin and he died on his feet, falling backward into the high grass amid a splash of muddy water that flew up when he hit the wet ground.

Around the senior colonel, men dived for cover, but the senior colonel knew the American would not fire. He realized that he would be spared. In his way, the American was like a psychiatrist as much as a sniper, and he operated on the body of the people to remove the self-important, the vain, the overbearing. Political Officer Phuc Bo was an angry man and had been addressing his senior colonel aggressively, with brisk and dramatic hand movements and a loud voice, in the gestural vocabulary of superiority. Examining them, the American had assumed that it was he who was in command, it was he who was dressing down a naughty inferior. Thus the senior colonel’s total lack of ego and presence had rendered him effectively invisible in the sniper’s scope.

There was another shot; down the column, a sergeant fell, screaming.

The senior colonel turned, one man standing among many cowering men, and said conversationally to his XO, “Send out another platoon; I fear our antagonist has evaded the first. And keep the men low in the grass. We need not die for party vanity or some American’s hunt for glory.”

The order was sent.

The senior colonel turned back to the hills, where the American still hunted them.

You, sir, he thought in the language of his youth, forgotten all these years, you, sir, are très formidable .