Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

He was tired. He climbed into the rack early, pulling clean, newly issued sheets around him, feeling the springiness of the cot beneath. The air conditioner churned with a low hum, pumping out gallons of dry, cold air. Donny shivered, pulled the sheets closer about him.

There were no alerts that night, no incoming. There hadn’t been incoming in months. At 0100 he was awakened by the drunken kids returning from the 1-2-3 Club. But when he stirred, they quieted down fast.

Donny lay in the dark as the others slipped in, listening to the roar of the air conditioner.

I have it made, he told himself.

I am out of here .

I am the original DEROS kid .

I am made in the shade, I am the milk-run boy .

He dreamed of Pima County, of Julie, of an ordered, becalmed and rational life. He dreamed of love and duty. He dreamed of sex; he dreamed of children and the good life all Americans have an absolute right to if they work hard enough for it.

At 0-dark-30, he arose quietly, showered in the dark, pulled on his bush utilities and gathered up his 782 gear and headed out to the chopper strip. It was a long walk in the predawn. Above him, mute piles and piles of stars were humped up tall and deep like a mountain range. Now and then, from somewhere in this dark land, came the far-off, artificial sound of gunfire. Once some flares lit the horizon. Somewhere something exploded.

The choppers were warming up. He ducked into the operations shack, chatted with another lance corporal, then jogged to the Marine-green Huey, its rotors already whirring on the tarmac. He leaned in, and the crew chief looked at him.

“This is Whiskey-Romeo-Fourteen?”

“That’s us.”

“You’re the bus to Dodge City?”

“Yeah. You’re Fenn, right? We took you outta here two weeks back. Great job at Kham Duc, Fenn.”

“Can you hump me back to the City? It’s time to go home.”

“Climb aboard, son. We are homeward bound.”

“You will crawl all night,” Huu Co explained to the Russian. “If you do not make it, they will see you in the morning and kill you.”

If he expected the man to react, once again, he was wrong. The Russian responded to nothing. He seemed, in some respects, hardly human. Or at least he had no need for some of the things humans needed: rest, community, conversation, humanity even. He never spoke. He appeared phlegmatic to the point of being almost vegetable. Yet at the same time he never complained, he would not wear out, he applied no formal sense of will against Huu Co and the elite commandos of the 45th Sapper Battalion on their long Journey of Ten Thousand Miles, down the trail from the North. He never showed fear, longing, thirst, discomfort, humor, anger or compassion. He seemed not to notice much and hardly ever talked, and then only in grunts.

He was squat, isolated, perhaps desolated. In his army, Huu Co’s heroes were designated “Brother Ten” when they distinguished themselves by killing ten Americans: this man, Huu Co realized, was Brother Five Hundred, or some such number. He had no ideology, no enthusiasms; he simply was. Solaratov: solitary. The lone man. It suited him well.

The Russian looked across the fifteen hundred yards of flattened land to the Marine base the enemy called Dodge City, studying it. There was no approach, no visible approach, except on one’s belly, the long, long way.

“Could you hit him from this range?”

The Russian considered.

“I could hit a man from this range, yes,” he finally said. “But how would I know it was the right man? I cannot see a face from this distance. I have to hit the right man; that is the point.”

The argument was well made.

“So then … you must crawl.”

“I can crawl.”

“If you hit him, how will you get out?”

“This time I’m only looking. But when I hit him, I’ll wait till dark, then come out the same way I came in.”

“They’ll call in mortars, artillery, napalm even. It is their way.”

“Yes, I may die.”

“In napalm? Not pleasant. I’ve heard many scream as it ate the flesh from their bones. It’s over in an instant, but I had the impression it was a long instant.”

The Russian merely glared at him, no recognition in his eyes at all, even though they’d lived in close proximity for a week and had for days before that pored over the photos and the mock-up of Dodge City.

“My advice, comrade brother,” said Huu Co, “is that you follow the depression in the earth three hundred meters. You move at dark, in maximum camouflage. They have nightscopes and they will be hunting. But the scopes aren’t one hundred percent reliable. It’ll be a long stalk, a terrible stalk. I can only hope you are up to it and that your heart is strong and pure.”

“I have no heart,” said the solitary man. “I am the sniper.”

For the first recon, Solaratov did not take his case, which by now all considered a rifle sheath. He carried no weapons except a SPETSNAZ dagger, black and thin and wicked.

He left at nightfall, dappled in camouflage, looking more like an ambulatory swamp than a man. Behind his back, the sappers called him not the Solitary Man or the Russian but, with the eternal insouciance of soldiers, the Human Noodle, because the stalks were stiff like unboiled noodles. In seconds, as he slithered off through the elephant grass, he was invisible.

Huu Co noted that his technique was extraordinary, a mastery of the self. This was the ultimate slow. He moved with delicacy, one limb at a time, a pace so slow and deliberate it almost didn’t exist. Who would have patience for such a journey?

“He is mad,” one of the sappers said to another.

“All Russians are mad,” said the other. “You can see it in their eyes.”

“But this one is really mad. He’s nuts!”

The sappers waited quietly underground, in elaborate tunnels built in the Year of the Snake, 1965. They cooked meals, enjoyed jury-rigged showers and treated the event almost like a furlough. It was a happy time for men who had fought hard, been wounded many times. At least six of them were Brothers Ten. They were shrewd, experienced professionals.

For his time, Huu Co studied the photographs or waited up top, hidden in the grass, using up his eyestrain to stare at the strange fort fifteen hundred yards off, which looked so artificial cut into the earth of his beloved country by men from across the sea with a different sensibility and no sense of history.

He waited, staring at the sea of grass. His arm hurt. He could hardly close his hand. When he grew bored, he snatched a book from his tunic, in English. It was Lord of the Rings , by J.R.R. Tolkein, very amusing. It took him away from this world but always, when Frodo’s adventures vanished, he had to return to Firebase Dodge City and his deepest question: when would the sniper return?

The fire ants were only the first of his many ordeals. Attracted to his sweat, they came and crawled into the folds of his neck, tasting his blood, crawling, biting, feasting. He was a banquet for the insect world. After the ants, others were drawn. Mosquitoes big as American helicopters buzzed around his ears, lit on his face, stung him gently and departed, bloated. What else? Spiders, mites, ticks, dragonflies, the whole phyla drawn to the miasma of decay a sweating man produces in the tropics on a hot morning. But not maggots. Maggots are for the dead, and perhaps in some way the maggots respected him. He was not dead and, moreover, he fed the maggots much in his time on earth. They left him alone.

It wasn’t that Solaratov was beyond feeling such things. He felt them, all right. He felt every sting, bite, prick or tweak; his aches and swellings and blotches and throbbings were the same as any man’s. He had just somehow managed to disconnect the feeling part of his body from the registering part of his brain. It can be learned, and at the upper reaches of the performance envelope, among those who are not merely brave, willful or dedicated but truly among the best in the world, extraordinary things are routine.