Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“Jesus,” said Donny. He thought of worlds ending, of the end of civilization, of Hiroshima. This sucker brought heat. He couldn’t imagine it.

The thousands of rounds poured from the guns to the earth, each fifth one a tracer, and the guns fired so fast it seemed they fired nothing but tracers. The bullets didn’t strike the earth so much as disintegrate it. They pulverized, raising clouds of destruction and debris. The air filled with darkness as if the weather itself had turned to gunfire. It was a locust plague of lead that devoured that upon which it settled. Earlier versions of this baby had been called Puff the Magic Dragon, but they only had one gun. With eight, Night Hag could put a mythological hurt on the world. She just ate up Area 2 for what seemed like years but was in reality just a few seconds. She had only thirty seconds worth of shooting time, she ate so fast.

The plane pivoted as if tethered, the roar of its engines huge as it curled above them, then again its eight guns fired and again the ground shook and a blizzard of debris flew from the earth. Then it straightened out, climbed slightly and began to describe a holding pattern.

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, that’s my best trick, over.”

“Night Hag, should be sufficient, good work. Foxtrot, you there, over?”

“Sierra, this is Foxtrot.”

“Foxtrot, let’s move the teams out. I think we got him. I think we nailed him.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, Wilco and good job. Out.”

Huu Co, senior colonel, and the sappers watched the airplane hunt the sniper from the relative safety of the treeline. It was quite a spectacle: the huge plane wheeling, the thunderous streams of fire it brought to the defoliated zone, the rending of the earth where the bullets struck.

“Oh, the Human Noodle will be turned to the human sieve by that thing,” one of the men said.

“Only the Americans would hunt a single man with an airplane,” said another.

“They would send an airplane to fix a toilet,” someone else shouted, to the laughter of some others.

But Huu Co understood that the sniper was dead, that the outlaw Swagger had once again prevailed. No man could withstand the barrage, and what came later, when, in the immediate aftermath of the airplane, when its dust still hung in the air, five jeeps suddenly burst from the fort and came crashing across the field, stopping right where two American snipers suddenly emerged from hiding a little to the east of the devastated area.

The men began to work methodically with flamethrowers. The squirts of flame spurted out, and where they touched, they lit the grass. The flames rose and spread, and burned furiously, as black, oily smoke rolled upward.

“The Human Noodle has now been roasted,” someone said.

The flames burned for hours, out of control, rolling across the prairie of the defoliated zone, blazing vividly, as more and more men from the post came out in patrols, set up a line, and began to follow the flames. Soon enough, a flight of helicopters flew in from the east and began to hover over the field. They were hunting for a body.

“They will probably eat him if they can find him.”

“There won’t be enough left. They could put him in soup.”

Though the Russian was a chilly little number, Huu Co still had a moment’s melancholy over his fate. The airplane made war so totally; i, was the most feared weapon in the American arsenal of superweapons. How horrible to be hunted by such a flying beast and to feel the world disintegrating around you as the shells exploded. He shivered a bit.

The Americans picked through the blasted field for some time, until nearly nightfall, at one time finding something that excited them very much — Huu Co watched through his binoculars, but could not make it out — until finally retreating.

“Brother Colonel, shall we retreat?” his sergeant wished to know. “There is clearly nothing left for us here.”

“No,” said the colonel. “We wait. I don’t know for how long, but we wait.”

It was a lance corporal from First Squad who found the Dragunov.

“Whooie!” he shouted. “Lookie here. Gook sniper rifle.”

“Corporal, bring that over here,” called Brophy. “Good work.”

The man, pleased to be singled out, came over with his trophy and turned it over to Brophy.

“There’s your rifle,” Bob said to the CIA man, Nichols.

The command team crowded around the new weapon, something no one had seen before. Like a kid unwrapping a Christmas present, Nichols wrapped the camouflage tape off the weapon.

“The legendary SVD. That’s the first one we’ve recovered,” said Nichols. “Congratulations, Swagger. That’s not a small thing.”

Donny just looked at it, feeling nothing, his head pounding from the stench of the gasoline and the oily smoke. It was a crude-looking thing, not at all sleek and well machined.

“Looks like an AK got stuck in a tractor pull,” Bob said. He handled the weapon, looked it over, worked the action a few times, looked through the scope, then became bored with it and passed it on to other, more eager hands.

He moved away from the crowd, and watched with narrowed eyes and utter stillness as the Marines probed the burn zone while others set up flank security, under the CO’s direction. Meanwhile Hueys and Cobra gunships hovered about the perimeter.

“Do you think he got away?” Donny finally asked him.

“Don’t know. Them flames could have burned him up. Six or seven twenty-mm shells could have blown him to pieces, and the flames charred what meat was left off the bone. He could be indistinguishable from the landscape, I suppose. I just don’t know. I didn’t see any blood trails.”

“Wouldn’t the flames have burned the blood?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I’m pretty sure I hit him.”

“I think you did too. Otherwise, I’d be a dead monkey. I’m going to put you in for another medal.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You saved my bacon,” said Bob. He seemed somehow genuinely shaken, as if he’d somehow learned today that he could die. Donny had never seen him quite like this.

“Man, I could use me a bottle of bourbon tonight,” the sergeant added. “I could use it real bad.”

Donny nodded. He had invested totally in the idea that he had shot the white sniper. He re-created it in his mind: the crosshairs on the head, the jerk of the trigger, the squirm of the man as if hit, the flying hat, the leap and twist of his rifle, then stillness. It felt like a hit, somehow. Everything about it felt good. But the rifle hadn’t been found in the rough area where memory told him the sniper had been when he’d taken his shot.

And, he had the terrifying feeling, unconfessed to anyone, that maybe in the blur of his concussion — gone now — he’d zeroed incorrectly and killed a phantasm, not the real thing. He couldn’t bring himself to express this, but it filled him with the blackest dread.

“I don’t see how he could have gotten away,” Donny said. “Nothing could stand up to it and nobody’s that lucky.”

“No way he could have stood up to it. If he was in the middle of it, he was wasted, no doubt about it at all. But — was he in the middle of it?”

That was the question and Donny had no answer. He and he alone had seen the sniper, but by the time the plane was done chewing the world up, and he looked again, that world had changed: it was tattered, eviscerated; the grass was flattened; dust hung in the air. Then the flamethrower teams worked it over, and it burned and burned. Hard to figure now exactly where he’d been, what he’d seen, where it had been.

“Well, we’ll see,” said Bob. “Meanwhile, you come by tonight and we’ll have us a drink or two.”