Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

Jesus Christ!

He was eight hundred, maybe a thousand meters out.

The killing zone was a tiny shelf far off at the oblique.

There were no features by which he could get an accurate distance-by-size estimation, and even on horseback, the targets would have been tiny. The scope wouldn’t have blown them up too much, either: too big a scope would have amplified the wobble effect until a sight picture was simply unobtainable and, worse, it would have had too small a breadth of vision at this range. If he lost contact with his targets, he might never have gotten them back in time. He had to be shooting a 10X, nothing bigger than a 12X, but probably a 10.

That’s some shooting. That’s beyond good; that’s in some other sphere. Careful, precise, deliberate, mathematical long-range shooting is very good shooting. Knowing instinctively how far to lead a moving target in the crux of the fraction of the second you’ve got, knowing it automatically, subconsciously … that is great shooting. Man, that is so far out there, it’s almost beyond belief. He knew of one man who could hit that shot, but he was dead, a bullet having exploded his head in the Ouachitas. There might be two or three others but—

He now saw too why the shooter had missed the kill on Julie.

He didn’t make a mistake: he had the shot perfectly. He was just betrayed by the physics of the issue, the bullet’s time in flight. When he fired, he had her dead to rights. But it takes a second for the bullet to travel that long arc, to float down on her; and there’s plenty of time, even in that limited period, for her to alter her body movement or direction enough to cause the miss. That’s why Dade is at least an easier shot. He’s not moving, to say nothing of at the oblique, on horseback galloping away as Julie was.

Bob sat back. His head ached; he felt dizzy; his heart beat wildly.

He thought of another man who might have done this. He’d buried the name and the memory so far it didn’t usually intrude, though sometimes, in the night, it would come from nowhere, or even in the daylight it would flash back upon him, that which he had tried to forget.

But he had to find out. There had to be a sign. Somehow, some way, the shooter would have left something that only another shooter could read.

Oh, you bastard. Come on, you bastard. Show me yourself. Let me see your face, this once.

He forced himself to concentrate on the hardscrabble dirt before him. He felt a raindrop, cold and absolute, against his face. Then another. The wind rose, howling. Junior, made restive, whinnied uncomfortably. The rain was moments away. He looked and he could see it, a gray blur hurtling down from the mountains. It would come and destroy. The sniper had planned for it. He was brilliant, well schooled in stratagems.

But who was he?

Bob leaned forward; he saw only dust. Then, no, no, yes, yes, he leaned forward even farther, and up front, where the dust had clearly been swept clean, he saw very small particulate residue. Tiny beads of it, tiny grains. White sand. White sand from a sandbag, because a great shooter will go off the bag, prone.

The rain began to slash. He pulled his jacket tight. If the sandbag was here — it had to be, to index the rifle to the killing zone — then the legs were splayed this way. He bent to where they’d have been, hoping for the indent of a knee, anything to leave a human mark of some sort. But it was all scratched out, and gone, and now the rain would take it forever.

The rain was cold and bitter. It was like the rain of Kham Duc. It would come and wipe anything away.

But then he went down farther, and amid the small and meaningless dunes, he at last found what he had yearned for. It was about two inches of a sharp cut in the dust, with notches for the thread holding sole to boot. Yes. It was an imprint of the shooter’s boot, the edge of the sole, the tiny strands of thread, the smoothness of the contour of the boot itself, all perfectly preserved in the dust. The shooter had splayed his foot sideways, to give him just the hint of muscular tension that would tighten his muscles up through his body. It was an adductor muscle, Adductor magnus . That was the core of the system, as isolated by a coach who’d gotten so far into it he’d worked out the precise muscles involved.

That was Russian. A shooting position developed by the coach A. Lozgachev prior to the fifty-two Olympics, where the Eastern Bloc shooters simply ran the field. In sixty, someone else had been coached by A. Lozgachev and his system of the magic Adductor magnus to win the gold in prone rifle.

T. Solaratov, the Sniper.

It was late at night. Outside, the wind still howled, and the rain still fell. It was going to be a three-day blow. The man was alone in a house that was not his own, halfway up a mountain in a state he hardly knew at all. His daughter was in town, close to her injured mother, in the care of a hired nurse until an FBI agent’s wife would arrive.

In the house, there was no sound. A fire burned in the fireplace, but it was not crackly or inviting. It was merely a fire and one that hadn’t been tended in a while.

The man sat in the living room, in somebody else’s chair, staring at something he had placed on the table before him. Everything in the room was somebody else’s; at fifty-two, he owned nothing, really; some property in Arizona that was now fallow, some property in Arkansas that was all but abandoned. He had a pension and his wife’s family had some money, but it wasn’t much to show for fifty-two years.

In fact, what he had to show for those fifty-two years was one thing, and it was before him on the table.

It was a quart bottle of bourbon: Jim Beam, white label, the very best. He had not tasted whiskey in many years. He knew that if he ever did, it might kill him: he could wash away on it so easily, because in its stupefying numbness there was some kind of relief from the things that he could not make go away in any other way.

Well, sir, he thought, tonight we drink the whiskey.

He had bought it in 1982 in Beaufort, South Carolina, just outside Parris Island. He had no idea why he was there: it seemed some drunken journey back to his roots, the basic training installation of the United States Marine Corps, as if nothing existed before or after. It was the end of an epic, seven-week drunk, the second week of which his first wife had fled for good. Not many memories of the time or place could be recalled, but he did remember staggering into a liquor store and putting down his ten-spot, getting the change and the bottle and going out, in the heat, to his car, where what remained of his belongings were dumped.

He sat there in the parking lot, hearing the cicadas sing and getting set to crack the seal and drown out his headache, his shakes, his flashbacks, his anger in a smooth brown tide. But that day, for some reason, he thought to himself: maybe I could wait just a bit before I open it up. Just a bit. See how far I can get.

He had gotten over twelve years out of it.

Well, yes, sir, tonight is the night I open it up .

Bob cracked the seal on the bottle. It fought him for just a second, then yielded with a dry snap, slid open with the feeling of cheap metal gliding on glass. He unscrewed the cap, put it on the table, then poured a couple of fingers’ worth into a glass. It settled, brown and stable, not creamy at all but thin, like water. He stared at it as if in staring at it he could recognize some meaning. But he saw the futility, and after a bit raised it to his lips.

The smell hit him first, like the sound of a lost brother calling his name, something he knew so well but had missed so long. It was infinitely familiar and beckoning, and it overpowered, for that was the way of whiskey: it took everything and made everything whiskey. That was its brilliance and its damnation too.