Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

But contemplating the bipod got him going in another direction: What’s he see? Bob wondered. What’s he see from up here?

So he went to the prone and took up a position indexed to the marks in the dust. From there he had a good, straight-on view of Dade’s position, yes; and the shot — with the stable rifle, the sun behind you, the wind calm as it was at that point in the day — it was just a matter of concentrating on the crosshairs, trusting the rig, squeezing the trigger and presto, instant kill. You threw the bolt, and no more than a few seconds later you had the woman.

He now saw how truly heroic Julie had been. Nine-hundred-ninety-nine out of a thousand inexperienced people just freeze on the spot. Sniper cocks, pivots a degree or so, and he has a second kill. But bless her brilliant soul, she reacted on the dime when Dade went down, and off she went with Nikki. He had to track her.

Bob had a thought here. What happens if the point where she was hit wasn’t within pivot range of this spot? What happens if there’s some impediment? But there wasn’t. It was an easy crank, an arc of about forty degrees, nothing in the way, you just track her, lead her a bit and pull the trigger.

Why did he miss?

Bob thought he had it.

He probably didn’t keep the rifle moving as he pulled the trigger . That’s why he hits her behind the line of her spine, he’s centered on her, but he stops when he fires, and the bullet, arriving a tenth of a second later, drills her trailing collarbone.

That made a sort of sense, though usually when you were tracking a bird or a clay with a shotgun and you stopped the gun, you missed the whole sucker, not just hit behind on it. Maybe the birds moved faster. On the other hand, the range was a lot farther than any wing or clay shooting. On the third hand, the velocity of the rifle bullet was much faster.

There were so many goddamned variables.

He sat back.

Used to be pretty goddamned good at this stuff, he thought. Used to have a real talent for understanding the dynamics of a two- or three-second interval when the guns were in play.

None of this made any goddamned sense, not really, and he had no way of figuring it out and his head ached and it was about to rain and destroy the physical evidence forever and Junior nickered again, bored.

Okay, he thought, rising, troubled, facing the fact that he had not really made any progress. He turned to go back to the horse and his empty house and his unopened bottle of Jim Beam and—

Then he saw the footprint.

Yeah, the cops missed a footprint, that’s likely.

He looked more closely and saw in a second that it was his own footprint, a Tony Lama boot, size 11, the one he was wearing, yes, it was his goddamned own. A little hard to ID because he’d turned and sort of stretched it out and—

That was it.

There it was.

He turned back, quickly, and stared at the bipod imprints.

If he has to pivot the bipod, the bipod marks would be distorted. They’d be rounded from the fast, forceful pivot as he followed her, and one would inscribe an arc through the dust. But these bipod marks were squared off, perfectly.

Bob looked at them closely.

Yes: round, perfect, the mark of the bipod resting in the dust until the rain came and washed it away.

He saw it now: this was a classic phony hide. This hide was built to suggest the possibility that a screwball did the shooting. But our boy didn’t shoot from here. He shot from somewhere else, a lot farther out.

Bob looked at the sky. It looked like rain.

He rode the ridgeline for what seemed like hours, the wind increasing, the clouds screaming in from the west, taking the mountains away. It felt like fog, damp to the skin. Up here, the weather could change just like that. It could kill you just like that.

But death wasn’t on his mind. Rather, his own depression was. The chances of finding the real hide were remote, if traces remained at all. When the rain came, they would be gone forever. Again he thought: nicely thought out. Not only does the phony hide send the investigation off in the wrong direction, it also prevents anyone from seeing the real hide until it is obliterated by the changing weather. So if he does miss something, the weather takes it out.

Bob was beginning to feel the other’s mind. Extremely thorough. A man who thinks of everything, will have rehearsed it in his mind a hundred times, has been through this time and time again. He knows how to do it, knows the arcane logic of the process. It isn’t just pure autistic shooting skill, it’s also a sense of tactical craft, a sense of the numbers that underlie everything and the confidence to crunch them fast under great pressure, then rely on the crunching and make it happen in the real world. Also: stamina, courage, the guts of a burglar, the patience of a great hunter.

He knew we came this way. But some mornings we did not. He may have had to wait. He was calm and confident and able to flatten his brain out, and wait for the exact morning. That was the hardest skill, the skill that so few men really had. But you have it, don’t you, brother?

A sprinkle of rain fell against his face. It would start pounding soon and the evidence would be gone forever.

Why didn’t I think this through yesterday? I’d have had him, or some part of him. But now, no, it would be gone. He’s won again.

He searched for hides, looking down from the trail into the rough rocks beneath. Every so often there’d be a spot flat enough to conceal a prone man, but upon investigation, each spot was empty of sign. And as he rode, of course, he got farther out. And from not everywhere on the ridge was the shelf of land visible where both Dade and Julie could be hit in the same sweep.

So on he went, feeling the dampness rise and his sense of futility rise with it. He must have missed it, he thought, or it’s already gone. Damn, he was a long way out. He was a long way out . He was getting beyond the probable into the realm of the merely possible. Yet still no sign, and Junior drifted along the ridge, over the small trail, tense at the coming rain, Bob himself chilled to the bone and close to giving up.

He couldn’t be out this far!

He rode on even farther. No sign yet. He stopped, turned back. The target zone was miniature. It was far distant. It was—

Bob dismounted, let Junior cook in his own nervousness. He’d thought he’d seen a little point under the edge of the ridge, nothing much, just a possibility. He eased down, peeking this way and that, convinced that, no, he was too far out, he had to go back and look for something he had missed.

But then he saw something just the slightest bit odd. It was a tuft of dried brush, caught halfway down the ridge. Wind damage? But no other tufts lay about. What had dislodged it? Probably some freak accident of nature … but on the other hand, a man wiping away marks of his presence in the dust, he might just have used a piece of brush to do it, then tossed the brush down into the gap. But it caught, and as it dried out over the two days, it turned brown enough so a man looking for the tiniest of anomalies might notice it.

Bob figured the wind always ran north to northwest through this little channel in the mountains. If the wind carried it, it would have come off the cliff just a bit farther back. He turned and began to pick his way back in that direction and had already missed it when, looking back to orient himself to the tuft of bush, he noticed a crevice and, peering into it, he looked down to see just the tiniest, coffin-sized flatness in the earth, where a man could lie unobserved and have a good view of the target zone.

He eased down, oriented himself to where Dade had died and Julie fell. He was careful not to disturb the earth, in case any scuff marks remained, but he could see none. At last he turned to get his best and first look at the killing zone from the shooting site.