Stephen Hunter - Time to Hunt

“Go on, goddammit. You are pissing me off.”

“Fenn. Yes, I used Fenn.”

“How?”

“We had a bad apple named Crowe. Crowe, we knew, had contacts within the peace movement, through a young man named Trig Carter, a kind of Mick Jagger type, very popular, connected, highly thought of.”

The name sounded familiar.

“Trig was bisexual. He had sex with boys. Not always, not frequently, but occasionally, late at night, after drinks or drugs. The FBI had a good workup on him. I needed someone who fit the pattern. He liked the strong, farmboy type, the football hero, blond, Western. That’s why I picked Fenn.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“It worked, too. Fenn started hanging out with Crowe and in a few nights, Carter had glommed onto him. He was an artist, by the way, Carter.”

Bob remembered a far-off moment when Donny showed him a drawing of himself and Julie on heavy paper. It was just after they got Solaratov, or so they thought. But maybe not. It all ran together. But he remembered how the picture thrummed with life. There was some lust in it, as Bonson suggested. It was so long ago.

“Carter had a very brilliant mind, one of those fancy, well-born boys who sees through everything,” Bonson continued. “But he was just another run-of-the-mill amateur revolutionary, if I recall, until 1970 and 1971, when he burned out on the protests and took a year in England. Oxford. That’s where we think it happened. Why not? Classical spy-hunting ground.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We believed that the peace movement had been penetrated by Soviet Intelligence. We had a code intercept that suggested they were active at Oxford. We even knew he was an Irishman. Except he wasn’t an Irishman. He only played one on TV.”

He smiled at his little joke.

“We think this guy was sent to Oxford to recruit Trig Carter. Not recruit; it wasn’t done that crudely. No, it would have been subtler. Whoever he was, he was straight Soviet professional, one of their very best. Smart, tough, funny, a natural gift for languages, the nerves of a burglar. He was the Lawrence of Arabia of the Soviet Union. Man, he would have been a prize! Oh, Lord, he would have been a prize!”

“You never got him?”

“No. No, he got away. We never got a name on him or anything. We don’t know what his objective was. We don’t know what the operation was all about. It was my call; I fucked up. We had him somewhere in the DC area. But we never quite got him. Fenn was supposed to give us Crowe, who’d give us Carter, who’d give us the Russian. Classic domino theory! A Soviet agent working the peace movement beat! God, what a thing that would have been! That would have been the goddamed white buffalo.”

“How did he get away?”

“We lost time with Fenn; the case against Crowe wouldn’t stand. We lost a day, we never nabbed Trig. We almost had him at a farm in Germantown, but by the time we found it, there was nobody there. We missed him at his mother’s outside Baltimore; she wouldn’t tell us a thing. He was gone, disappeared. The next thing—”

“Trig was killed. I remember Donny mentioning it. He was killed in a bomb blast.”

“Under the math lab at the University of Wisconsin. Yes, he was. And we never found hide nor hair of anybody else. Whoever he was, he got away clean.”

“If he existed.”

“I still believe he existed.”

“What a waste!”

“Yes, and some poor graduate student working late on algorhythms got wasted too. Two dead.”

“Three dead. Donny.”

“Donny. I didn’t send him to ’Nam to die, Swagger. I sent him to ’Nam because it was my duty. We were fighting a clever, subtle, brilliant enemy. We had to enforce discipline in our troops. You were an NCO; you know the responsibility. My war was much subtler, much harder, much more stressful.”

“You don’t look like you done so bad.”

“Well, it ruined my Navy career. I was passed over. I read the writing on the wall, went to law school. I was a corporate lawyer on my way to a partnership and high six figures. But the agency took an interest in me and decided it had to have me, and so in 1979, I took an offer. I haven’t looked back since. I’m still fighting the war, Swagger. I’ve lost a few more Donny Fenns along the way, but that’s the price you pay. You’re out of it, I’m still in it.”

“All right, Bonson.”

“What is this all about?”

“We always heard the man who made the shot on me — on us — was a Russian.”

“So? They had advisers over there in all the branches. Nothing remarkable.”

“It was said this guy flew in special. Your own people were involved, because they wanted the rifle he had, an SVD Dragunov. We didn’t have one until then.”

“I suppose. That’s not my area. I can check records. What does this have to do with today?”

“Okay, so four days ago, someone makes a great shot on an old cowboy in Idaho. Blows him so far out of the saddle hardly nothing left. Seven hundred-odd meters, crosswind. He wings a woman with him.”

“So?”

“So,” Bob said, “the woman was my wife. The old man should have been me. Luckily, it wasn’t. But … he was trying for me. I examined the shooting site. I don’t know much, but I know shooting, and I’ll tell you this Johnny was world-class and he employed Soviet shooting doctrine, which I recognize. Maybe it’s not, but it sure seems like the same guy is on my track now as was on it then.”

Bonson listened carefully, his eyes narrowing.

“What do you make of this?” he said.

“Donny knew something. Or they thought he did. Same difference. So they have to take him out. They think the war will do it, but he’s a good Marine and it looks like he’s going to come out all right. So they have to take him. They send in this special man, mount this special operation—”

“Weren’t you some kind of hero? Weren’t you especially targeted?”

“I can only think what I done in Kham Duc alerted them to Donny’s whereabouts. It made good cover, too. The Russians wouldn’t care a shit about how many NVA some hillbilly dusted in a war that was already won. We always thought they requested the sniper; no, now I think the Russians insisted on the sniper.”

“Hmmm,” said Bonson. “That’s very interesting.”

“Then a little while ago, I got famous.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I thought you might.”

“Go on.”

“I get famous and they get to worrying. Whatever it was he knew, maybe he would have told me. So … they have to get me. It’s that simple.”

“Hmmm,” said Bonson again. His face seemed to reassemble itself into a different configuration. His eyes narrowed and focused on something far away as behind them, his mind whirred through possibilities. Then he looked back to Swagger.

“And you don’t know what it is?”

“No idea. Nothing.”

“Hmmmmm,” said Bonson again.

“But what I don’t get — there is no more Soviet Union. There is no more KGB. They’re gone, they’re finished. So what the fuck does it matter now? I mean, the regime that tried to kill me and did kill Donny, it’s gone.”

Bonson nodded.

“Well,” he finally said, “the truth is, we really don’t know what’s going on in Russia. But don’t think the old Soviet KGB apparatus has just gone away. It’s still there, calling itself Russian now instead of Soviet, and still representing a state with twenty-thousand nuclear weapons and the delivery systems to blow the world to hell and gone. What is going on is a political tussle over who makes the decisions — the old-line Soviets, the secret communists? Or a new nationalist party, called PAMYAT, run by a guy named Evgeny Pashin. There’s an election coming, by the way.”