Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“He’s gone, he’s dead, you got him,” says Brophy, meaning, The white sniper is gone, there’s nobody out there, don’t worry about it. He should have been dead, too. We cooked his ass in 20mm and 7.62. The Night Hag sprayed him with lead. The flamethrower teams barbecued him to melted fat and bone ash. Who could live through that? We recovered his rifle. It was a great coup, waiting to be studied back at Aberdeen by none other than yours truly.

But — why did we believe he was dead? We didn’t find no body, we only found the rifle. But how could he have survived all that fire, and the follow-up with the flamethrowers and then the sweep with grunts? No one could have survived that. Then again, this was a terrifically efficient professional. He didn’t panic, he’d been under a lot of fire, he’d taken lots of people down. He kept his cool, he had great stamina.

“Yeah, well,” I tell the lieutenant.

We reach the eastern parapet wall. A sentry comes over from the guard post down the way.

“All clear?” I ask.

“Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain’t nothing out there.”

But how would he know? The night vision is only good for a few hundred yards. The night vision tells you nothing. It simply means there’s nobody up close, like a sapper platoon. Why didn’t I realize that?

He took another dark, long swallow. It was as if something hit him upside the head with a two-by-four, and his consciousness slipped a little; he felt his bourbon-powered mellowness battling the melancholy of his memory as it presented itself to him after all these years.

I slip my head over the sandbags, look out into the defoliated zone, which is lightening in the rising sun. I can’t see much. The sun is directly in my eyes. I can only see flatness, a slight undulation in the terrain, low vegetation, blackened stumps from the defoliant. No details, just a landscape of emptiness.

“Okay,” I say. “Last day: time to hunt.” I always say this. Why do I think it’s so cool? It’s stupid, really.

I set my rifle on the sandbag berm, pull myself over, gather the rifle and roll off.

I land, and there’s a moment there where everything is fine, and then there’s a moment when it isn’t. I’ve done this hundreds of times before over the past nineteen months, and this feels just like all those times. Then time stops. Then it starts again and when I try to account for the missing second, it seems a lot has happened. I’ve been punched backwards, come to rest against the berm itself. For some reason my right leg is up around my ears. I can make no sense of this until I look down and see my hip, pulped, smashed, pulsing my own blood like a broken faucet. Somewhere in here I hear the crack of the rifle shot, which arrives just a bit after I’m hit.

It makes no sense at all and I panic. Then I think: motherfuck, I’m going to die. This fills even my hard heart with terror. I don’t want to die. That’s all I’m thinking: I don’t want to die.

There’s blood everywhere, and I put my fingers on my wound to stanch it, but the blood squirts out between them. It’s like trying to carry dry sand; it slips away. I can see bone, shattered. I feel the wet. Again an odd second where there is no pain and then the pain is so heavy I think I’ll die from it alone. I’m thinking of nothing but myself now: there’s no one in the world but me. A single word forms in my head, and it’s morphine .

Bob looked into the amber bourbon, so still, so calm. The wind rushed outside, cold and harsh. He heard himself screaming, “I’m hit!” from across the years, and saw himself, hip smashed, blood pouring out. And he knew what happened next.

He took a swallow. It landed hard. He was quite drunk. The world wobbled and twisted, fell out of and back into focus a dozen times. He was crying now. He hadn’t cried then but he was crying now.

“No!” he screamed, but it was too late, for the boy had leaped over the berm too, to cover his sergeant, to inject morphine, to drag the wounded man to cover.

Donny lands and at that precise moment he is hit. The bullet excites such vibration from him as it crashes through that the dust seems to snap off his chest. There’s no geyser, no spurt, nothing; he just goes down, dead weight, his pupils slipping up into his head. From far off comes the crack of that rifle. Is there something familiar in it? Why does it now seem so familiar?

The sound of it played in his ears: crisp, echoless, far away, but clear. Familiar? Why familiar? Rifles and loads all have their signature, but this one, what was it? What about it? What information did it convey? What message did it carry?

“Donny!” I cry, as if my cry can bring him back, but he’s so gone there’s no reaching him. He collapses into the dust a foot or so from me with the crash of the uncaring, and how I do it I don’t know, but I somehow squirm to him and hold him close.

“Donny!” I scream, shaking him as if to drive the bullet out, but his eyes are glassy and unfocused, and blood is coming out of his mouth and nose. It’s also coming out of his chest, pouring out. No one ever gets how much blood there is: there’s lots of it, and it comes out like water, thin and sloppy and soaking.

His eyelids flutter but he’s not seeing anything. There’s a little sound in his throat, and somehow I have him in my arms and now I’m screaming, “Corpsman! Corpsman!”

I hear machine gun fire. Someone has jumped to the berm with an M60 and is throwing out suppressive fire, arcs and arcs of tracers that skip out across the field, lifting the dirt where they hit. A 57mm recoil-less rifle fires, big booming flash, that blows a mushroom cloud into the landscape to no particular point, and more and more men come to the berm, as if repulsing a human-wave attack.

Meanwhile, Brophy has jumped, and he’s on both of us, and there are three or four more grunts, pressing against us, firing out into the emptiness. Brophy hits me with morphine, then hits me again.

“Donny!” I scream, but as the morphine whacks me out, I feel his fingers loosening from my wrist, and I know that he is dead.

Bob hit the bottle again, this time dispensing with the glass. The fluid coursed down. His mind was now almost thoroughly wasted. He couldn’t remember Donny anymore. Donny was gone, Donny was lost, Donny was history, Donny was a name on a long black wall. Were there even any photos of him? He tried to recall Donny but his mind wouldn’t let him.

Gray face. Unfocused eyes staring at eternity. The sound of machine gun fire. The taste of dust and sand. Blood everywhere. Brophy jacking the morphine in. Its warmth and spreading, easing numbness. I won’t let go of Donny. I must hold him still. They’re trying to pull me away, over the berm. The blackness of the morphine taking me out.

I sleep.

I sleep.

Days pass, I’m lost in morphine.

I’m finally awakened by a corpsman. He’s shaving me. That is, my pubic region.

“Huh?” I say, so groggy I can hardly breathe. I feel inflated, creamy with grease, bound by weight.

“Surgery, Gunny,” he says. “You’re going to be operated on now.”

“Where am I?” I ask.

“The Philippines. Onstock Naval Hospital, Orthopedic Surgery Ward. They’ll fix you up good. You been out for a week.”

“Am I going to die?”

“Hell, no. You’ll be back in the Major Leagues next season.”

He shaves me. The light is gray. I can’t remember much, but somewhere underneath it there’s pain. Donny? Donny’s gone. Dodge City? What happened to Dodge City? Brophy, Feamster, the grunts. That little place out there all by itself.

“Dodge?”

“Dodge?” he asks. “You ain’t heard?”