Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

But if Sam wasn’t around, who could he trust? The answer was, nobody. He had an FBI agent friend in New Orleans and a young writer still struggling with a book, but not yet having had any success. Who could he approach? The jackals of the press? No, thank you, ma’am. They turned him off beaucoup.

No, the “story” thing wasn’t any solution to his problems, not without the advice of somebody he trusted. That left shooting. He knew his name was worth something in that world — some fools considered him a hero, even, like his father, a blasphemy he couldn’t begin to even express — and the idea of making that pay somehow sickened him. But if he could pick up work at a shooting school, where they taught self-defense skills to cops and military personnel, maybe that could bring in some money and some contacts. He thought he knew some people to call. Maybe that would work. At least he’d be among men who’d been in the real world and knew what it meant to both put out and receive fire. He tried to imagine such a life.

The sound was clear and distinct, though far off. No man knew it better than he.

Rifle shot. Through the pass. High-velocity round, lots of echo, a big-bore son of a bitch.

He tensed, feeling the alarm blast through him, and had a moment of panic as he worked out that it was possible the shot had come from exactly where Julie and Nikki ought to be. In the next split second he realized he didn’t have a rifle himself and he felt broken and useless.

Then he heard a second shot.

He kicked Junior and the horse bolted ahead. He raced across the high desert toward the approaching mountains, his mind filling with fear. Hunters, who happened to get a good shot at a ram or an antelope in the vicinity of his women? Random shooters, plinkers? But not up this high. Maybe there was some trick of the atmosphere, which made the sound of the shots travel from miles away, up through the canyons, and it only now reached him and was meaningless. He didn’t like the second shot. A stupid hunter could shoot at something wrong, but then he wouldn’t shoot again. If he shot again, he was trying to kill what he was shooting at.

There was a third shot.

He kicked the horse, bucking a little extra speed out of it.

Then he heard the fourth shot.

Christ!

Now he was really panicked. He reached the darkness of the pass but had a moment’s clarity and realized the last thing he should do would be to race out there, in case someone was shooting.

As he slowed the animal down to a walk, he saw Nikki’s horse, its saddle empty, come limping toward him.

A stab of pain and panic shot through his heart. My baby? What has happened to my baby? Oh, Christ, what has happened to my baby?

A prayer, not one of which had passed his lips in Vietnam, came to him, and he said it briefly but passionately.

Let my daughter be all right .

Let my wife be all right .

“Daddy?”

There she was, huddled in the shadows, crying.

He ran to her, snatched her up, feeling her warmth and the strength of her young body. He kissed her feverishly.

“Oh, God, baby, oh, thank God, you’re all right, oh, sweetie, what happened, where’s Mommy?”

He knew his wild-eyed fear and near loss of control were not helping the girl at all, and she sobbed and shuddered.

“Oh, baby,” he said, “oh, my sweet, sweet baby,” soothing her, trying to get both himself and her calmed down, back in some kind of operational zone.

“Honey? Honey, you have to tell me. Where’s Mommy? What happened?”

“I don’t know where Mommy is. She was behind me and then she wasn’t.”

“What happened?”

“We were looking at the sunrise across the valley. Mr. Dade was there. Suddenly he blew up. Mommy screamed, the horses bucked, and we turned and rode for safety. Mommy was — oh, Daddy, she was right behind me. Where’s Mommy, Daddy? Oh, Daddy, what happened to Mommy?”

“Okay, sweetie, you have to be brave now and get a hold of yourself. We are going to have to ride out of here soon. You have to settle down and be calm. I’m going to go look for Mommy.”

“No, Daddy, no, please don’t go, he’ll kill you too!”

“Honey, now, you be calm. I will take a look-see. You stay here in the shadows. When you feel up to it, gather your horse and get Junior’s reins. We will be riding like hell out of here very shortly. All right?”

His daughter nodded solemnly through her tears.

Bob turned, whipped off his hat, and slithered along the wall of the pass toward the light. As he neared it, he slowed … way … down. Fast movement would attract the eye, draw another shot if the bad boy was still scoping. Swagger thought he wouldn’t be. Swagger thought he’d hit his primary and his secondary and the girl couldn’t figure in anything, and so he was beating it to higher elevations or his pickup or whatever. Who knew? That had to be figured out later. The issue now was Julie.

He edged ever so slowly toward the light, at last setting himself so that he had a good vantage point. Some dust still hung in the air, but the sun was bright now. He could see poor Dade about one hundred-odd yards away, right at the edge. From Dade’s broken posture alone it was clear the old man was finished, but a monstrous head wound testified to no possibility of survival. Bad work. Expanding bullet, presumably fired in through the eye or something, a cranial vault explosion, gobbets of brain and blood flung everywhere.

He looked about for a sign of his wife, but there was none. He saw her horse over in the shade, calm now, chewing on some vegetation. He looked about for a hide in case she had gotten to one, but there were no rocks or bushes thick enough to conceal or protect her. That left the edge; he tried to recall what lay beyond the edge, and built an image of a rough slope littered with scrub vegetation and rocks, down a few hundred feet to a dense mess of pines where the creek ran through. Was that right, or was it some other place?

He thought to call, but held back.

The sniper hadn’t seen him yet.

There really wasn’t a decision to be made. He knew what had to be done.

He slipped back to where Nikki, who had now collected herself, stood with the two horses.

“Do you have any sense of where the shots came from, sweetie? Did you hear them at all?”

“I only remember the last one. As I was riding and had reached the pass. It came from behind.”

“Okay,” he said. If the shot came from “behind,” that probably meant he was shooting from across the canyon, on the ridgeline that ran anywhere from two hundred meters to one thousand meters away. That jibed with the position of Dade’s body, too. Whatever, it meant the shooter was cut off from where they were by the gap between the mountains and wouldn’t be able to reach them from here on out, unless he came after them. But he wouldn’t come after them. He’d fall back, get to safe ground, hit his escape route and be out of here.

“All right,” he said, “we are getting the hell out of here and beelining straight for home, where we’ll call the sheriff and get him and his boys in here.”

She looked at him, stricken.

“But, Mommy — she’s out there.”

“I know she is, honey. But I can’t get her now. If I go out there, he may shoot me, and then what have we got?”

He didn’t think he would be. He had worked it out to the next logical step: whoever had done the shooting, his target was not Dade Fellows but Bob Lee Swagger. Someone had reconned him, planned the shot, knew his tendencies and lay in wait from a safe hide a long way off. It was a sniper, Bob felt, another professional.

“She might be hurt. She might need help bad.”

“Listen to me, honey. When you are shot, if it’s a bad hit, you die right away, like poor Mr. Dade. If it ain’t hit you seriously, you can last for several hours. I saw it in Vietnam; the body is very tough and it’ll fight on its own for a long time, and you know how tough Mommy is! So there’s no real advantage to going to Mommy right now. We can’t risk that. She’s either already dead or she’s going to pull through. There’s nothing in between.”