Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

The flare floated, showering sparks. In its cone of light, Bob saw a man drop into vegetation and he put a bullet into him. He flicked the bolt fast, jacking out the spent case, and watched as another man came through the light to his fallen comrade, and he killed him too. The trick was the light; the flares had to be constant; there couldn’t be a dark moment when there was no light because these guys would move on him then, and they’d be too close, too fast and it would be over.

It lasted for ten minutes; then, having planned it, Donny stopped firing and Bob stopped firing. They both fell back, met at the far side of the hill, and took off on the dead run, leaving behind the confusion. They moved on, looking for another setup.

“That’ll slow ’em. It’ll take ’em ten minutes to figure out we’re gone. Then they’ll get moving again. We should be able to hit them again. I want to set up on that side now. You watch me.”

Donny had the M14 at high port, Bob’s rifle was slung and he carried the M3 in his hands, though he was down now to two magazines. Both his handguns were cocked and locked.

“Okay, you ready?”

“I think so.”

“You cover me if I take fire.”

“Gotcha.”

Bob stepped out of the grass onto the valley floor.

He felt so naked. He was all alone. The wind whistled, and once again it began to rain. The NVA must have been a half klick or so behind. Suddenly, the sky behind them lit up: an assault team had moved up to and taken the now empty hill on which they had situated. Grenade blasts rocked the night, and blades of the sheer light slashed from the concussion. Heavy automatic weapons fire followed: again, they were slaying the demon.

Bob got halfway across, then turned with his grease gun to cover, and called out for Donny to join him.

“Come on!” he shouted.

The boy came across the valley floor and passed Bob, and went to set up on the other side. Bob raced over. Quickly, they found another hill.

“You get on up there,” Bob said. “When you hear me shoot, you fire the first flare. I’m going to open up further out this time. Meanwhile, you set up Claymores. I’m down to about twenty rounds and I want a fallback. If we get bounced, we’ll counterbounce with the Claymores, then fall back. Set them up, and wait to pop flares. Password is … fuck, I don’t know; make up a password.”

“Ah— Julie.”

“Julie. As in ‘Julie is beautiful,’ roger that?”

“Roger that.”

“You hear movement coming to you and he don’t sing out ‘Julie is beautiful,’ you go to Claymores, use the confusion to fall back and find a hide, then you wait until tomorrow and call in a bird after a while. Okay? There’ll be a bird tomorrow. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“If I don’t make it back, same deal. Fall back, go to ground, call in a bird. They’ll be buzzing all over this zone tomorrow, no problem. Now, how many flares you got?”

Donny did a quick check on his bag.

“Looks like about ten.”

“Okay, when they’re gone, they’re gone. Then we’re out of business. Fall back, hide, bird. Okay?”

“Check,” said Donny.

“You all right? You sound kind of shaky.”

“I’m just beat. I’m tired. I’m scared.”

“Shit, you can’t be scared. I’m scared enough for both of us. I got all the fear in the whole fucking world.”

“I don’t—”

“Just this last bad thing, then we are the fuck out of here, and I’m going to make sure you get home in one piece, I give you my word. You done yours. Nobody can say, He didn’t do his. You done it all ten times over. You get to go home after this one, I swear to you.”

There was an odd throb in his own voice that Bob had never heard before. Where did it come from? He didn’t know. But somehow Bob had a blinding awareness that in some way, the life of the world now depended on getting Donny home in one piece. Donny was the world, somehow, and if he, Bob, got him killed out here for this shit, he would answer for all eternity. Very strange; nothing he’d ever felt before on any battlefield.

“I’m cool,” Donny said.

“See you in a bit, Sierra-Bravo-Four.”

Donny watched the sergeant go. The man was like some Mars or Achilles or something, so lost in the ecstasy of the battle that he somehow didn’t want it to end, didn’t want to come back. Once again, Donny had the odd feeling that he was destined to witness all this and tell it.

To whom?

Who would care? Who would listen? The idea of soldiers as heroes was completely gone. Now, they were baby killers or, if not that, they were fools, suckers, morons who hadn’t figured out how to beat the machine.

So maybe that was his job: to remember the Bob Lee Swaggers of the world and, when the times somehow changed, the story could be retrieved and told. How one crazy Arkansas sumbitch, mean as a snake, dry as a stick, brave as the mountains, took on and fucked up an entire battalion, for almost nothing, really, except so that nobody would ever say of him, He let us down.

What made such a man? His brutal, hardscrabble childhood? The Corps as his home, his love of fighting, his sense of country? Nothing explained it; it was beyond explanation. Why was he so meaninglessly brave? What compelled him to treat his life so cheaply?

Donny made it to the top of the hill. It was a queer little empire, much smaller than the last hill, a little hump that overlooked the larger valley before it. Here is where they would fight.

He unstrapped his three Claymores bandoleers and took the things out, your basic M18A1 Directional Mine. Jesus, were these nasty little packages. About eight inches across and four inches tall, they were little convexes of plastic-sheathed C-4, impregnated with about seven hundred pieces of buckshot apiece. You opened a compartment, pulled out about one hundred meters of wire, unspooled it to your safe hole, and there crimped it to the Electrical Firing Device M57, which came packed in the bandoleer and looked like a green plastic hand exerciser. When you clamped it, you jacked a goose of electricity through the wire to the detonator, the pound and a half of C-4 went kaboom, and the seven hundred steel balls went sailing through the air at about two thousand miles an hour. For a couple of hundred feet, anything in their way — man, beast, vegetable or mineral — got turned to instant spaghetti. Just the thing for human wave attacks, night ambushes, perimeter defense or those annoying staff meetings, though the Marine Corps thoughtfully added the message FRONT TOWARD ENEMY for its dimmer recruits, so they wouldn’t get mixed up in all the excitement and blow a nasty hole in their own lines.

Donny pulled down the folding scissors legs on each mine, made sure that the front indeed faced the enemy, and set up the three of them about sixty feet apart, atop the hill. There was some little technical business to be done involving blasting caps, shipping plug priming adaptors, the detonator well, wire crimped and so on. Then the wire was fed backward, where he used his entrenching tool to dig a quick, low hole, though he knew that if he ever had to go to the mines, it meant there were enough zips coming at them that whether he survived the backblast or not was kind of a moot point.

He took a last swig on his canteen and tossed it away. He wished he had a C-rat left, but he’d left them back with most of his gear. Now, however, instead of the usual huge burden, he felt almost light-headed. He had no food, no canteen, no spotting scope, no Claymores. The only burden, beside his M14 magazines, was the goddamned PRC-77, tied tightly to his back by a couple of cruel straps. He even dared peel it off, and now felt really light. He felt like dancing. The freedom from the ache of going into battle with sixty pounds of gear and then twenty pounds of gear and now nothing was astonishing. He had trained himself to ignore the ache in his back; now it vanished. Cool, he thought, I get to die without a backache, first time in my career in the ’Nam.