Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

He came after a time to a small knoll. He had been counting as he moved: two thousand strokes. That is, two thousand half-yard pulls across the grass. His head hurt, his hands hurt, his belly hurt. He didn’t notice, he didn’t care. Two thousand strokes meant one thousand yards. He was there.

He shimmied up the knoll, really more of a knob, not four feet high. He set himself up, very carefully, flat on the crest, well shielded in a tuft of grass. He checked the sun, saw that it was no longer directly in front of him and would not bounce off his lens. He brought the Dragunov up, slipped it through the grass close to his shoulder and his hand, a smooth second’s easy capture and grasp. Then he opened his binocular case and pulled out a pair of excellent West German 25X’s. He eased himself behind their eyepieces and began to examine a world twenty-five times as large as the one he left behind.

The day was bright and, owing to the peculiarity of the vegetation in the defoliated zone and the oddities in the rise and fall of the land, he saw nothing but an ocean of yellow elephant grass, some high, some low and threadbare, marked here and there by a rill of earth. He felt as if he were alone on a raft in the Pacific: endless undulation and ripple, endless dapple of shadow, endless subtle play of color, endless, endless.

He hunted methodically, never leaping ahead, never listening to hunches or obeying impulses. His instinct and brain told him the Marines would be five hundred yards ahead of him, on an oblique. They would seek elevation; their rifle barrels would be hard and flat and perfect against the vertical organization of the world. He found the low ridge where by all rights they should have been sited, and began to explore it slowly. The 25X lenses resolved the world beautifully; he could see every twig, every buried stone, every stunted tree, every stump that had survived the chemical agent all those years ago, every small hill. Everything except Marines.

He put the glasses down. A little flicker of panic licked through him.

Not there. They are not there. Where are they, then? Why aren’t they there?

He considered falling back, trying another day. It was becoming an uncontrollable situation.

No, he told himself. No, just stay still, stay patient. They think you are over there, and you are over here. After a bit their curiosity will get the best of them. They are Americans: hardy, active people with active minds, attracted to sensations, actions, that sort of thing. They haven’t the long-term commitment to a cause.

He will move, he thought. He was looking for me, I was not there, he will move.

Blackness.

Somewhere in his peripheral, a flash of black.

Solaratov did not turn to stare. No, he kept his eyes where they were, fighting the temptation to crank them around and refocus. Let his unconscious mind, far more effective in these matters, scan for them.

Blackness again.

He had it.

To the right, almost three hundred yards away. Of course. He’s flanking me to my right .

Slowly, he turned his head; slowly, he brought up the binoculars.

Nothing. Movement. Nothing. Movement.

He struggled with the focus.

The unnatural blackness was a face. The Marine sniper had blackened it at night, for his long crawl into position; he’d shed his black clothes, and now wore combat dapple camouflage, but he had made a mistake . He had forgotten to take off his face paint. Now, black against the dun and yellow of the elephant grass, it stood out just the slightest bit.

Solaratov watched, fascinated. The man low-crawled two strokes, then froze. He waited a second or two, then low-crawled another two. His face, its features masked by the paint, was a study in warrior’s concentration: tense, drawn, almost cracked with intensity. His rifle was on his back, wearing a tangle of strips for its own camouflage.

He tried to deny it, but Solaratov felt a flare of pleasure as intense as anything in his life.

He laid the binoculars down, and raised the rifle to his shoulder, finding the right position, rifle to bone to earth, finding the grip, finding the trigger, finding the eyepiece.

Swagger crawled through his scope. The crosshairs quartered his head. The Russian’s thumb took the safety off and he expelled half a breath. His finger began its slow squeeze of the trigger.

“Goddamn,” Bob said.

“What is it?” Donny said behind him.

“It’s thinned out here. Goddamn. Less cover.”

Donny could see nothing. He was lost in elephant grass; it was in his ears, his nose, in the folds of his flesh. The ants were feasting on him. He heard the dry buzz of flies drawn to the delicious odor of his sweat and blood — he’d been cut a hundred or so times by the blades of the grass.

Ahead of him were the two soles of Bob’s jungle boots.

“Shit,” Bob said. “I don’t like this one goddamn bit.”

“We could just call in the Night Hag. She’d chew the shit out of all this. We’d pop smoke so she wouldn’t whack us up.”

“And if he ain’t here, he knows we got him, and he’s double careful or he don’t come back at all and we never know why he came and we don’t git us a Dragunov. Nah.”

He paused.

“You still got that Model Seventy?”

“I do.”

“All right. I want you to reorient yourself to the right. You squirt on ahead; see that little hummock or something?”

“Yeah.”

“You set up on that, you scope it out for me. If you say it’s okay, I’m going to shimmy on over there, to where it’s thick again. I’ll set up over there and cover for you. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” said Donny. He squirmed around, took a deep breath and wiggled ahead.

“Damn, boy, I hope he ain’t in earshot. You’re grunting louder than a goddamn pig.”

“This is hard work,” Donny said, and it was.

He got up to the hummock, peered over it. He saw nothing.

“Go to the M49?”

“Nah. Don’t got time. Just check it with your Unertl.”

Donny slipped his eye behind the scope, which was a long, thin piece of metal tubing suspended in an odd frame. When you zeroed this old thing, it had external controls, which meant the whole scope moved, propelled this way and that by screws for windage and elevation. It had been assembled sometime back in the early forties, but rumor said it had killed more than its share of Japs, North Koreans and VC. It wasn’t even a 7.62mm NATO but the old Springfield cartridge, the long .30-06.

The optics were great. He scanned the grass as far as he could see, and saw no sign of human presence. But the blur had not gone away. He was aware he was missing fine detail. He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers, and nothing improved. No, nothing out there, nothing that he could see.

“It looks clear.”

“I didn’t ask how it looked. I asked how it was.”

“Clear, clear.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “You keep eyeballing.”

The sergeant began to creep outward, this time at an even slower rate than before. He crawled slowly, ever so slowly, halting each two pulls forward, going still.

Donny returned to his scope. Back and forth, he swept the likely shooting spots, seeing nothing. It was clear. This was beginning to seem ridiculous. Maybe they were out here in the middle of nothing, acting like complete idiots. The bees buzzed, the flies ate, the dragonflies skittered. He couldn’t keep his eye behind the scope for very long because it fell completely out of focus. He had to blink, look away. When would the call come from Bob that he was all right?

The trigger rocked back, stacked up and was on the very cusp of firing.

Where is the other one?

His finger came off the trigger.