Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

After a time, Huu Co realized where they were going: unmistakably, they headed for the People’s Revolutionary Airfield, north of Hanoi, passed through its wire defenses and guard posts with the wave of passes of the highest clearance, and sped not to the main building but to an out-of-the-way compound, which was heavily guarded by white men with automatic weapons, in the combat uniforms of SPETSNAZ, the hotshots who got all the sexy assignments and handled training for NVA cadre on certain dark, arcane secret arts.

The Zil parked, debarking its men, who escorted Huu Co inside, to discover an extremely comfortable little chunk of Russia, complete with televisions, a bar, elaborate Western furniture and the like. Also, many Playboy magazines lay about, and empty beer bottles, and the walls were festooned with pictures of blond women with large, gravity-defying breasts and no pubic hair.

Russians, thought Huu Co.

After a time, the little party went out to the tarmac, parked at the obscure end of a runway and awaited the arrival of someone designated Solaratov, whether a real name or a trade name, Huu Co was not informed. No rank, either; no first name. Just Solaratov, as if the name itself conveyed quite enough information, thank you.

Again, it was chilly, though no rain. The hot season was hard on them, but it had not arrived yet. In the emerging gray light, Huu Co stood a little apart from the crowd of bawdy, laughing Russian intelligence and SPETSNAZ people, himself the solitary man, not a part of their camaraderie and unsure why his presence was required. Yet clearly, they wanted him here: he was seeing things possibly no North Vietnamese below the Politburo level had seen. Why? What was the meaning of it all?

The sound of a jet airplane asserted itself, low but insistent, coming in from the east, out of the sun. The plane flashed overhead, glinting in the rising light, revealing itself to be a Tupolev Tu-16, code-named by the Americans “Badger,” a twin-engine, three-man bombing craft with a bubble canopy and sparkle of plastic at the nose. It wore combat drab, and its red stars stood out boldly against green camouflage. Its flaps were down and it peeled to the west, found a landing vector and set down on the main runway. It taxied for a distance, then began to head over toward the little party standing by itself on the runway.

The plane halted and its jet engines screamed a final time, then died; a hatch door opened beneath the nose, just behind the forward tire of the tricycle landing gear, and almost immediately two aviators descended, waved to the crowd, then got aboard a little car that had come for them, while Russian ground crew attended to the airplane.

“Oh, he’ll make us wait, of course,” one of the Russians said.

“The bastard. Nobody hurries him. He’d make the party secretary wait if it suited his fucking purpose!”

There was some laughter, but after a while, another figure descended from the aircraft, climbing slowly down, then landing on the tarmac. He wore an aviator’s black jumpsuit, but he was no aviator. He carried with him something awkward, a long, flat case; a musical instrument or something?

He turned to look at the greeters and his face instantly silenced them.

He was a wintry little man, late thirties, with a stubble of gray hair and a thick, short bull neck. His eyes were blue beads in a leather mask that was his grim face. He had immense hands and Huu Co saw that he was quite muscular for so short a fellow, with a broad chest and a spring of power to his movements.

No salutes were offered, no exchange of military courtesies. If he knew any of the Russians, he hid the information. There seemed nothing emotional about him at all, no sense of ceremony.

A man rushed to him to take the package he carried.

The little fellow silenced him with a vicious glare and made it apparent that he would carry the case, the severity of his response driving the man back into humiliated confusion.

“Solaratov,” said the Russian intelligence chief, “how was the flight?”

“Cramped,” said Solaratov. “I should tell them I only fly first class.”

There was nervous laughter.

Solaratov walked by the colonel without noticing him, surrounded by sycophants and bootlickers. He actually reminded Huu Co of a figure that had been pointed out to him back in the late forties, in Paris, another man of glacial isolation whose glare quieted the masses, who nevertheless — or perhaps for that reason, indeed — attracted sycophants in the legions but who paid them no attention at all, whose reputation was like the cloud of blue ice that seemed to surround him. That one was named Sartre.

Vietnam leaped up at him as if out of a dream: green, endless, crusted with mountains, voluptuous, violent, ugly, beautiful all at once. The Land of Bad Things. But also, in some way, the Land of Good Things.

Where I went to war, Donny thought. Where I fought with Bob Lee Swagger.

It wasn’t a dream; it never had been. It was the real McCoy, as glimpsed through the dirty plastic of an aircraft dipping toward that destination from Okinawa, where grunts headed to the ’Nam touched down on the way back from R&R. Monkey Mountain loomed ahead on the crazed peninsula above China Beach, and beyond that, like downtown Dayton, the multiservice base and airstrip at Da Nang displayed itself in a checkerboard of buildings, streets and airstrips. Hills 364, 268 and 327 stood like dusty warts beyond it.

The C-130 oriented itself off the coastline, dropped through the low clouds and slid through tropic haze until it touched down at the ghost town that had once been one of the most populous cities of the world, the capital of the Marine country of I Corps, home of the ruling body of the Marine war, the III Marine Amphibious Force.

The palms still blew in the breeze, and around it the mountains still rose in green tropic splendor, but the place was largely empty now, its mainside structure shrunken to a few tempo buildings, an empty or at least Vietnamized metropolis. A few offices were still staffed, a few barracks still lived in, but the techies and the staffs and the experts who’d run the war in Vietnam were home safe except for the odd laggard unit, like the boys of Firebase Dodge City and a few others in the haphazard distribution of late-leavers across I Corps.

The plane finally stopped taxiing. Its four props ended their mission with a turbine-powered whine as their fuel was cut off. The plane shuddered mightily, paused like a giant beast and went still. In seconds the rear door descended, and Donny and the cargo of twenty-odd short-timers and reluctant warriors felt the furnace blast of heat and the stench of burning shit that announced they were back.

He stepped into the radiance, felt it slam him.

“This fuckin’ place will git me yet,” said a black old salt, with a dozen or so stripes on his sleeve, and enough wound ribbons to have bled out a platoon.

“Ain’t you short?” someone asked.

“I ain’t as short as the lance corporal,” he said, winking at Donny, with whom he’d struck up a bantering relationship on the flight over from Kadena Air Force Base on Okie. “If I was as short as him, I’d twist an ankle and head straight for sick bay.”

“He’s a hero,” the other lifer said. “He ain’t going in no sick bay.”

The old black sarge pulled him aside.

“Don’t you be takin’ no bad-ass chances in the bush, you hear?” the man said. “Two and days, Fenn? Shit, don’t git busted up. It ain’t worth it. This shit-hole place ain’t worth a thing if you ain’t a career sucker gittin’ the ticket punched one more time. Don’t let the Man git you.”

“I copy.”

“Now git over to reception and git your grunt ass squared away.”