Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“Trig, I—”

But this Trig laid a hand on Jerry’s chest and fixed him with a glare hot enough to melt most things on earth, and Jerry stepped back, swallowed and looked at his pals.

“Fuck it,” he finally said. “We were splitting anyhow.”

And the three of them turned and stormed out.

Suddenly the music started again — Stones, “Satisfaction” — and the party came back to life.

“Hey, thanks,” said Donny. “The last thing I need is a fight.”

“That’s okay,” said his new friend. “I’m Trig Carter, by the way.” He put out a hand.

Trig had one of those long, grave faces, where the bones showed through the tight skin and the eyes seemed to be both moist and hot at the same moment. He really looked a lot like Jesus in a movie. There was something radiant in the way he fixed you with his eyes. He had something rare: immediate likability.

“Howdy,” Donny said, surprised the grip was so strong in a man so thin. “My name’s Fenn, Donny Fenn.”

“I know. You’re Crowe’s secret hero. The Bravo.”

“Oh, Christ. I can’t be a hero to him. I’m in it till my hitch ends, then I’m gone forever back to the land of the cacti and the Navajo.”

“I’ve been there. Mourning doves, right? Little white birds, dart through the arroyos and the brush, really hard to spot, really fast?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Donny. “My dad and I used to hunt them. You’ve got to use a real light shot, you know, an eight or a nine. Even then, it’s a tough shot.”

“Sounds like fun,” said Trig. “But in my case I don’t shoot ’em with a gun but with a camera. Then I paint them.”

“Paint them?” This made no sense to Donny.

“You know,” Trig said. “Pictures . I’m actually an avian painter. Really, I’ve traveled the world painting pictures of birds.”

“Wow!” said Donny. “Does it pay?”

“A little. I illustrated my uncle’s book. He’s Roger Prentiss Fuller, Birds of North America . The Yale zoologist?”

“Er, can’t say I heard of him.”

“He was a hunter once. He went on safari in the early fifties with Elmer Keith.”

This did impress Donny. Keith was a famous Idaho shooter who wrote books like Elmer Keith’s Book of the Sixgun and Elmer Keith on Big Game Rifles .

“Wow,” he said. “Elmer Keith.”

“Roger says Keith was a tiny, bitter little man. He had a terrible burn as a kid and he was always compensating for it. They had a falling out. Elmer just wanted to shoot and shoot. He couldn’t see any sense to a limit. Roger doesn’t shoot anymore.”

“Well, after ’Nam, I don’t think I will either,” Donny said.

“You sound okay for a Marine, Donny. Crowe was right about you. Maybe you’ll join us when you get out.” He smiled, his eyes lighting like a movie star’s.

“Well…” Donny said, provisionally. Himself a peacenik, smoking dope, long hair, carrying those cards, chanting “Hell, no, we won’t go”? He laughed at the notion.

“Trig! When did you get here?” It was Crowe and his crowd, now with girls in tow, all leading what seemed to be a kind of electric ripple toward Trig.

And in seconds, Trig was gone, borne away on currents of some sort of celebrityhood that Donny didn’t understand.

He turned to a girl standing nearby.

“Hey, excuse me,” he said. “Who is this Trig?”

She looked at him in astonishment.

“Man, what planet are you from?” she demanded, then ran after Trig, her eyes beaming love.

“Trig Carter!” Commander Bonson exclaimed.

“Yeah, that was it, I couldn’t quite remember the last name,” said Donny, who could remember the name very well but couldn’t quite bring himself to say it out loud. “Seemed like a very nice guy.”

Bonson’s office was an undistinguished chamber in a World War II-era tempo still standing in the Washington Navy Yard about a half mile from Eighth and I, where by dim pretext Donny had been sent the next day for his debriefing on his first day as spy hunter.

“You saw Trig Carter and Crowe together. Is that right?”

Why did Donny feel so sleazy about all this? He felt clammy, as if someone were listening. He looked around. President Nixon glowered down at him from the wall, enjoining him to do his duty for God and Country. A degree from the University of New Hampshire added to the solemnity of the occasion. A few ceremonial photos of Lieutenant Commander Bonson with various dignitaries completed the decor; the room was otherwise completely bereft of personality or even much sense of human occupation. It was preternaturally neat; even the paper clips in the little plastic box had been stacked, not dumped.

Lieutenant Commander Bonson bent forward, fixing Donny in his dark glare. He was a thin, dark man with a lot of whiskery shadow on his face and a sense of complete focus. There was something pilgrimlike about him; he should have been in a pulpit denouncing miniskirts and the Beatles.

“Yes, sir,” Donny finally said. “The two of them … and about one hundred other people.”

“Where was this again?”

“A party. Uh, on C Street, on the Hill. I didn’t get the address.”

“Three-forty-five C, Southeast,” said Ensign Weber.

“Did you check it out, Weber?”

“Yes, sir. It’s the home of one James K. Phillips, a clerk to Justice Douglas and a homosexual, according to the FBI.”

“Were most of the people there homosexuals, Fenn? Was it a homo thing?”

Donny didn’t know what to say. It just seemed like a party in Washington, like any party in Washington, with a lot of young people, some grass, some beer, music, and fun and hope in the air.

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

Bonson sat back, considering. The homosexual thing seemed to hang in his mind, clouding it for a time. But then he was back on the track.

“So you saw them together?”

“Well, sir, not together, really. In the same crowd. They knew each other, that was clear. But it didn’t seem anything out of the ordinary.”

“Could Crowe have given him any deployment intelligence?”

Donny almost laughed, but Bonson was so set in his glare that he knew to release the pressure he felt building in his chest would have been a big mistake.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not that I saw. I mean, does Crowe have any deployment intelligence? I don’t. How would he?”

But Bonson didn’t answer.

He turned to Weber.

“We’ve got to get closer,” he said. “We’ve got to get him inside the cell. Trig Carter. Imagine that.”

“A wire, sir? Could we wire him?” asked Weber.

Oh, Christ, thought Donny. I’m really not going anywhere with a tape recorder taped to my belly.

“No, not unless we could get time to set it up quickly. He’s got to stay fluid, flexible, quick on his feet. The wire won’t work, not under these circumstances.”

“It was just a suggestion, sir,” said Weber.

“Well, Fenn,” said Bonson, “you’ve made a fine start. But too many times we see fast starters are slow finishers. You’ve got to really press now. You’ve got to make Crowe your pal, your friend, do you see? He’s got to trust you; that’s how you’ll crack this thing. Trig Carter, Weber. Isn’t that the damndest thing you ever heard?”

“Sir, if I may ask, who is Trig Carter?”

“Show him, Weber.”

Weber looked into a file and slid something over to Donny. Donny recognized it at once: he’d seen it a thousand times probably, without really noticing it. It was just part of the living-room imagery of the war, the scenes that were unforgettable.

It was a cover of Time magazine late in the hot summer of 1968: Chicago, the Democratic National Convention, the “police riot” outside on the last night. There was Trig, in shirtsleeves, a gush of blood cascading down from an ugly welt in his short, neat hair. He was bent under the weight of another kid he was carrying out of the fog of tear gas and the blurs that were Chicago policemen pounding anything that could be pounded. Trig looked impossibly noble and heroic, impossibly courageous. His eyes were screwed up in the pain of the CS gas, he was bloody and sweaty, and the veins on his neck stood out from all the effort he had invested in carrying the dazed, bloody, traumatized boy out of the zone of violence. He looked like any of a dozen insanely heroic Corpsmen Donny had seen pull the same thing off amid not cops but tracer fire and grenades and Bettys over in the Land of Bad Things, none of whose pictures had ever ended up on the cover of Time magazine.