Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Bob lifted the bottle, took two deep swallows and handed the bottle to Donny.

“You’re a hero,” said Donny. “You’ll have a great life, too.”

“I am finished. When you opened up on that bird, it come to me: you don’t want to be here, you want to live. You gave me my life back, you son of a bitch. Goddamn, I owe no man not a thing. But I owe you beaucoup, partner.”

“You are drunk.”

“So I am. And I got one more thing for you. You come over here and listen to me, Pork, away from these lifer bastards.”

Donny was shocked. He had never heard the term “lifer” from Bob’s lips before.

Bob drew him outside.

“This ain’t the booze talking, okay? This is me, this is your friend, Bob Lee Swagger. This is Sierra-Bravo. You reading me clear, over?”

“I have you, Sierra, over.”

“Okay. Here it is. I have thought this out. Guess what? The war is over for us.”

“What?”

“It’s over. I’m telling you straight. We go out on three missions a week, see, but we don’t go nowhere. We go out into the treeline and we lay up for a couple of days. We don’t take no shots, we don’t go on no treks, no long wanders; we don’t set up no ambushes. No, sir, we lay up in the tall grass and relax, and come in, like all the other patrols. You think I don’t know that shit is going on? Nobody in this shit hole is fighting the war and nobody is fighting back in Da Nang. S-2 Da Nang don’t give a shit, Captain Feamster don’t give a shit, USMC HQ RSVN don’t give a shit, WES PAC don’t give a shit, USMC HQ Henderson Hall don’t give a shit. Nobody wants to die, that’s what it’s all about. It’s over, and if we get fucking wasted, we are just throwing our lives away. For nothing, you hear what I’m saying? We done our bit. It’s time to think about number one. You hear what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, you’ll do that till I DEROS out of here back to the world, then you’ll go out on your own, and get more kills and go back to your job. You’ll have to because by then the gooks will be getting very fucking bold and you’ll be afraid they’ll hit this place and take all these worthless assholes down, and you’ll get hosed for them, and if that isn’t the biggest waste there ever was, I don’t know what is.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Yeah, you will. I know you.”

“No way at all.”

“All right, I’ll do this on one condition.”

“I’m your goddamned sergeant. You can’t ‘one condition’ me.”

“On this one I can. That is: I go to Nichols, tell him you want on that Aberdeen team, but you got stuff to do first, and you can’t go till a certain date. On the date I DEROS, you go to Aberdeen. Is that fair? That’s fair! Goddamn, that’s fair, that’s what I want!”

“You young college smart-ass hippie bastard.”

“I’ll go get him now. Okay? I want to hear you make that statement to him, then I’ll do this.”

Bob’s eyes narrowed.

“You ain’t never outsmarted me before.”

“And maybe I won’t ever again, but by God, this is the night I do! Ha! Got you, Swagger! At last. Got you.”

Swagger spat into the dust, took a swallow. Then he looked at Donny and goddamn if the silliest goddamn thing didn’t happen. He smiled.

“Go get Mr. CIA,” he said.

“Wahoo!” shrieked Donny, and went off to find the man.

The days passed. The sappers relaxed and treated the mission as a leave, a time for restoring hard-pressed spirits, catching up on correspondence with loved ones, renewing acquaintanceship with political and patriotic principles that could be lost in the heat of combat. They lounged in the tunnel complex on the edge of the defoliated zone two thousand yards from Dodge City, enjoying the amenities.

At night, Huu Co sent them on probing patrols, nothing aggressive, just simply to make certain the Americans at Dodge City weren’t up to anything. He directed: no engagements, not at this time. So the tiny men in the dun-colored uniforms with the patience of biblical scholars simply waited and watched. Waited for what?

“Senior Colonel, the Human Noodle is not coming back. No man could survive that. We had best return to base camp and a new mission. The Fatherland needs us.”

“My instructions,” Huu Co told his sergeant, “are from the highest elements of the government, and they are to support and sustain our Russian comrade in any way possible. Until I determine that mission is no longer viable, we shall stay.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Long live the Fatherland.”

“Long live the Fatherland.”

But privately, he had grave doubts. It was true: no man could stand up to the intensity of the air attack with those fast-firing guns, and no man, particularly, could stand up to the flames from the American flamethrowers, a ghastly weapon that he believed they would never use against enemies of their own racial grouping.

And of course this: another failure.

Not his, surely, but failure has a way of spreading itself out and tainting all who are near it. He had led the mission, he had helped plan it, he had organized it. Was his heart not pure enough? Was he still infected with the virus of Western vanity? Was there some character defect that attended to him and him alone that caused him to continually misjudge, to make the wrong decision at the wrong time?

He rededicated himself to the study of Marxism and the principles of revolution. He read Mao’s book for the four hundredth time, and Lao-tzu’s for the thousandth. He buried his grief and fear in study. His eyes ate the hard little knots of words; his mind grappled with their deeper meanings, their subtexts, their contexts, their linkages to past and present. He was a hard taskmaster to himself. He gave himself no mercy, and refused to take painkillers for his crippled hand and its caul of burn. Only his dreams betrayed him. Only in his dreams was he a traitor.

He dreamed of Paris. He dreamed of red wine, the excitement of the world’s most beautiful city, his own youth, the hope and joy of a brilliant future. He dreamed of crooked streets, the smell of cheese and pastry, the taste of Gauloises and pommes frites; he dreamed of the imperial grandeur of the place, of its sense of empire, the confidence with which its monuments blazed.

It was on one such night, as he tossed on his pallet, his semiconscious mind rife with bright images out of Lautrec, that the hands of a whore imploring him to her bed became the hands of his sergeant, beckoning him from sleep.

He rose. It was dark; candles had burned low. The man led him from his chamber, down earthen tunnels, to the mess hall. There, in the dark, a squat figure sat hunched over a table, eating with unbelievable gusto.

The sergeant lit a candle and the room flickered, then filled with low light.

It was the white sniper.

They lay in the high grass, or in the hills under the scrubby trees and bamboo, watching and tracking but never shooting.

A VC squad moved into the zone of fire, four men with AKs, infiltrating farther south. Easy shots; he could have taken two and driven the other two into the high grass and waited them out and taken them, too. But farther south was only ARVN, and Bob figured it was a Vietnamese problem, and the ARVNs could handle it or they could handle the ARVNs, depending. Another time, a VC tax collector clearly blew his cover and was making his rounds. It was an easy shot, 140-odd yards into a soft target. But Bob said no. The war was over for them.

They lay concealed or they tracked, looking for sign of big bodies of men, of units moving into position for an assault on Firebase Dodge City, whose immediate environs they patrolled. There was nothing. It was as if a kind of enchantment had fallen over this little chunk of I Corps. The peasants came out and resumed work in their paddies, the farmers went back to furrowing the hills with their ox-pulled plows. The rainy season was over. Birds sang; now and then a bright butterfly would skitter about. Above, fewer contrails marred the high sky, and if you flicked across the FM bandwidths on the PRC-77, you could tell that the war had wound way down; nobody was shooting at anything.