Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

At last, he turned and faced the senior colonel.

“Now I wash, then I sleep. Maybe forty-eight hours. Then, on the third day, I will move out.”

“You have a plan.”

“I know when and where he’ll leave, and how he’ll move. It’s in the land. If you can read the land, you can read the other man’s mind. I’ll kill them both three days from now.”

For the first time, he smiled.

The Huey dipped low and landed in a swirl of dust. Quickly, the crew chief kicked off that run’s supplies — a couple of crates of belted 7.62mm NATO, a couple more of 5.56mm NATO for the M16s, package of medical provisions, an intelligence pouch, a command pouch — nothing major, just the routine deliveries of war — and Donny.

The chopper zoomed upward, leaving him standing there in the maelstrom, choking.

“Jesus, you’re back!”

It was a lance corporal in another platoon, a vague acquaintance.

“Yeah, they tried to fire me. But I love this place so much, I had to come back.”

“Jesus Christ, Fenn, you had it knocked . Nobody ever got out of here early. The Man sends you to the world and you come back to this shit hole, short as you are? Man, you are fucked in the head!”

“Yeah, well.”

“A hero,” the lance corporal spat derisively, threw the intel and command packs around his shoulders and headed out to deliver the mail. The ammo would sit until someone had the gumption to gather it in.

Donny blinked, and took a fraction of a second to reorient. He knew he wanted to stay away from the command bunker and the old man; officially he had no standing, and he didn’t want to face that shit until he faced Swagger. He went off to the scout-sniper platoon area, where Bob was king. But when he got there, two other NCOs told him Bob was now over in the intel bunker and he better get his young ass over there and get this squared away. One of them pointed out to him that he was officially UA from his new assignment in downtown Da Nang, and there’d be hell to pay.

Donny navigated through the S-shop area of the base, a warren of sandbagged bunkers with crudely stencilled signs, until at last he came to S-2, next to commo, a low structure from which flew an American flag. He ducked into it, feeling the temp drop a few degrees in the dark shadow, smelled the mildew of the rotting burlap bags that comprised the bunker’s walls, saw maps and photos hung on a bulletin board and two men hunched over a desk, one of whom was most definitely Swagger and the other of whom was a first lieutenant named Brophy, the company intelligence honcho and sniper employment officer.

Swagger looked up, down, then back in a hurry.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said fiercely.

“I’m back, ready for duty, thanks very much. I had a wonderful time. Now I’ve got a tour to finish and I’m here to finish it.”

“Lieutenant, this here boy is UA from Da Nang. He’d better get his young ass back there or he’ll finish up in the brig. You put him on report, or I will. I want him gone.”

Swagger almost never talked to officers this way, because of course like many NCOs he preferred to allow them the illusion that they had something to do with running the war. But he no longer cared for protocol, and the officer, a decent-enough guy but way overmatched against a legend, chose discretion over valor.

“You work it out with him, Sergeant,” he said, and beat a hasty advance to the rear.

“I want you out of here, Fenn,” growled Swagger.

“No damn way.”

“You are too goddamn short. You will be out there thinking about humping Suzie Q instead of humping I Corps and you will get your own and my ass greased. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”

“You recommended me for the Navy Cross! Now you’re firing me?”

“I had a heart-to-heart with my closest pal, Bob Lee Swagger, and he told me you are black poison in the field. I want you running a PT program somewhere. You go home, you git out of ’Nam. I fired you. You’re a Marine and you follow orders and those are your orders!”

“Why?”

“Because I say so, that’s why. I’m sniper team leader and NCOIC of scout-sniper platoon. It’s my call. It ain’t your call. I don’t need your permission.”

“Why?”

“Fenn, you are getting on my damn nerves.”

“I’m not going until you tell me why. Tell me why, goddammit. I earned that much.”

Swagger’s eyes narrowed-up, tight like coin slots in a Coke machine.

“What is with you?” he finally asked. “I’ve had three spotters before you, good boys all of them. But no one like you. You didn’t have no limits. You’d do anything I goddamned asked you to. I don’t like that. You don’t have no sense. If I had to think about it, I’d say you were trying to get yourself killed. Or trying to prove something, which amounts to the same goddamn thing. Now you come clean with me, goddammit. What’s going on in that head of yours? Why the hell are you out here?”

Donny looked away.

He thought a bit, and finally decided to spit it out.

“All right, I’ll tell you. You can’t tell anyone. It’s between you and me.”

Swagger stared hard at him.

“I knew a guy named Trig. I mentioned him to you. Well, he was a star peacenik, but a real good guy. A hero, too. He was willing to give his life to stop the war. Well, I hate the war too. Not only for all the reasons everyone knows, but also because it’s killing people we can’t afford to lose. Like Trig. It’ll kill you, too, Sergeant Swagger. So I’m going to stop it. I will chain myself to the White House gate if I have to, I will throw my medals back on the Senate steps if I have to, I will blow myself up in a building. It’s so fucking evil, what we are doing to these people and to ourselves. But I cannot let anybody say I quit, I bugged out, I shortcut my duty. They can have no doubts about me. So I will fight the war full-bang dead out till the day I DEROS and then I will fight full-bang dead out against it!”

He was screaming, sweating, like an insane man. He’d flared up, big as life, larger than Bob, stronger than him, menacing him for the first time, inconceivable until it happened. He stepped back now, relaxing.

“Jesus,” said Swagger, “you think I give a fuck what you think about the war? I don’t give a shit about politics. I’m a Marine. That’s all I care about.”

He sat back.

“All right, I’ll tell you what’s going on, finally. You have earned that. I’ll tell you why I want you out of here. There’s somebody out there.”

“Huh? Out there? Out where?”

“There, in the bush, some new bird. That’s why I’ve been huddling with Brophy. It was bucked down from headquarters. There’s a guy out there, and he’s hunting for me. He’s a Russian, we think. The Israelis have a very good source in Moscow and they got a picture of a guy climbing into a TU-16 for the normal intel run to Hanoi. They knew him, because he’d trained Arab snipers in the Bekaa Valley and they tried to hit him a couple of times, but he was too goddamn smart. Our people think he worked Africa too, lots of stuff in Africa. He may have been in Cuba. Anywhere they got shit to be settled, he’s the one to settle it. Anyhow, his name has something to do with ‘Solitary’ or ‘Single,’ something like that. He may be a championship shooter named T. Solaratov, who won a gold medal in prone rifle at the sixty Olympics. Then NSA got a radio intercept a week or two back. One NVA regional commander talking to another, about this Ahn So Muoi , as they call it. They have this thing called Brother Ten, which is an award and a nickname they call someone who’s killed ten Americans. It’s as close in their language as they come to the word sniper . Anyhow, in this intercept, the officers were jawing about the ‘White Brother Ten’ moving down the trail to our province. White sniper, in other words. They got this special guy, this Russian, he’s coming after me and anybody I’m with.”