Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“Senior Colonel, who advised you to halt your progress and send units to deal with the American sniper?”

“Senior Colonel, are you infected with the typhus of ego? Do you not trust the Fatherland and its vessel, the party?”

“Senior Colonel, why did you waste time setting up mortars, when a small unit could have kept the Americans pinned, and you might have made your attack on the Camp Arizona before dawn?”

“Senior Colonel, did Political Commissar Phuc Bo argue with you as to the best course of action before his heroic death, and if so, why did you discount his advice? Do you not know he spoke with the authority of the party?”

The questions were endless, as was his pain.

They were also right in their implication: he had behaved unprofessionally, egged on by the demon of Western ego, whose poison was evidently deep in his soul, unpurged by years of rigor and asceticism. He had allowed it to become a personal duel between himself and the American who so bedeviled him. He had given up the mission to kill the American, and failed at both, if intelligence reports could be believed.

He was in disgrace. No meaningful future loomed before him. He had failed because his heart was weak and his character flawed. Everything they said about him was true, and the criticism he received was not nearly enough punishment. They could not punish him more than he punished himself. He deserved the fury of hell; he deserved oblivion. He was a cockroach who had—

But then the strangest thing happened. Even as he endured yet another session, feeling the unbending wills of the political officers crushing against the fragility of his own pitiful identity, the doors were flung open and two men from the Politburo rushed in, handed an envelope to the senior inquisitioner, which the man tore open and read nervously.

Then his face broke into a huge smile of love and compassion. He looked at Huu Co as if he were looking at the savior of the people, the great Uncle Ho himself.

“Oh, Colonel,” he brayed in the voice of such sugary sweetness it seemed nearly indecent, “oh, Colonel, you look so uncomfortable in that chair. Surely you would like a glass of tea? Tran, quickly, run to the kitchen, get the colonel a glass of tea. And some nice candy? Sugar beet? American chocolate? Hershey’s, we have Hershey’s, probably, if I do say so myself, with … almonds.”

“Almonds?” said the colonel, who, yes, far down, did in fact enjoy Hershey’s with almonds.

Tran, who had an instant before been upbraiding the colonel for his stupidity, rushed out with the furious urgency of a lackey, and returned in seconds with treats and drinks and almond-studded Hershey bars for the new celebrity. In very short time, the committee had gathered around their new great friend and revolutionary hero, the colonel, and even old Tran himself pushed the colonel to the automobile in his wheelchair, inquiring warmly about the colonel’s beautiful wife and his six wonderful children.

The committee waved good-bye merrily as the colonel was driven away in a shiny Citreon by the two Politburo officers, who said nothing, but offered him cigarettes and a thermos of tea and did everything to assure his comfort.

“Why am I suddenly rehabilitated?” he asked. “I am a class traitor and coward. I am a wrecker, an obstructionist, a deviationist, a secret Western spy.”

“Oh, Colonel,” the senior of the men said, laughing uncomfortably, “you joke. You are so funny! Is he not a funny one? The colonel’s wit is legendary!”

And Huu Co saw that this man, too, was terrified.

What on earth could be happening?

And then he knew. Only one presence in the Republic of North Vietnam could explain such a sea change: the Russians.

At their military compound, Soviet experts from GRU — Chief Intelligence Directorate — grilled him intently, though no effort was made to assign guilt. The men were remote and intense at once, in black SPETSNAZ combat uniforms without rank, though subtle distinctions on the team could be recognized. They never once mentioned politics or the revolution. He understood clearly: this wasn’t preparation for a trial, it was an intelligence operation.

They were very thorough in their Western way. He talked them through it slowly, working first from maps and then, after the first day, from a scale model of the valley before Kham Duc, quickly built and painted with surprising accuracy. The conversations were all in Russian.

“You were … ?”

“Here, when the first shots came.”

“How many?”

“He fired three times.”

“Semiauto?”

“No, bolt action. He never fired quickly enough for semiauto, though he was very, very good with that bolt. He may have been the fastest man with a bolt I’ve ever heard of.”

The Russians listened intently, but it wasn’t just the sniper that interested them; that was clear. No, it was the whole action, the loss of the sapper squad, the sounds of fire from the right flank, the presence of the flares. The flares, especially.

“The flares. You can describe them?”

“Well, yes, comrade. They appeared to be standard American combat flares, bright white, more powerful than our green Chinese equivalent. They hung in the air approximately two minutes and grew brighter as they descended.”

They listened, taking notes, keeping elaborate charts and timelines, trying to reconstruct the event in painstaking detail. It was even clear they had interviewed other participants of the Kham Duc battle.

They forced him to no conclusions: instead, they seemed his partner in a journey to understanding.

“Now, Colonel,” the team leader asked, a small, ratty man who smoked Marlboros, “based on what we’ve learned, I wonder if you’d venture a guess as to what happened. What is the significance of the flares, particularly given their location vis-à-vis the angle of most of the fire directed at you?”

“Clearly, there was another man. These American Marine sniper teams, they are almost always two-men operations.”

“Yes,” the team leader said. “Yes, that is what we think also. And interestingly enough, the ballistics bear you out. Some men were killed by 173-grain bullets, which is the American match target ammunition, which is the sniper’s round. But we also recovered bodies with 150-grain slugs, which is the standard combat load of the M14. So clearly, one of the rifles was the Remington bolt action and the other the M14. Of course, that’s different than the men killed by the forty-five-caliber submachine gun. We believe that was the sniper’s secondary weapon.”

The colonel was astounded: they had torn into this as if it were an autopsy, as if its last secrets must be exhumed. It was so important to them, as if their most precious asset were somehow at risk, and now they were committed totally to the destruction of the threat.

“Do you wish to know about these men?”

The colonel did, yes. But his own ego had to be conquered, for to learn about the men who had destroyed his battalion and his reputation and his future would be to further personalize the event and make it private, an obsession, an extension of his own life, as if its significance were him and not the cause.

“No, I think not. I care nothing for personality.”

“Well spoken. But alas, it is now a necessity. It is part of your new assignment.”

Well, wasn’t this interesting? A new assignment under Russian sponsorship. What possibly could it mean?

And so it was that he learned of his primary antagonist, a man called Swagger, a sergeant, who had once won a great shooting championship and had done much damage to the cause of the Fatherland in his three tours in Vietnam and was even now prowling the glades in hunt of yet more victims.