Time to Hunt Part 1

Time to Hunt.

by Stephen Hunter.

PROLOGUE.

We are in the presence of a master sniper.

He lies, almost preternaturally still, on hard stone. The air is thin, still cold; he doesn't shake or tremble.

The sun is soon to rise, pushing the chill from the mountains. As its light spreads, it reveals fabulous beauty. High peaks, shrouded in snow; a pristine sky that will be the color of a pure blue diamond; far mountain pastures of a green so intense it rarely exists in nature; brooks snaking down through pines that carpet the mountainsides.

The sniper notices none of this. If you pointed it out to him, he wouldn't respond. Beauty, in nature or women or even rifles, isn't a concept he would recognize, not after where he's been and what he's done. He simply doesn't care; his mind doesn't work that way.

Instead, he sees nothingness. He feels a great cool numbness. No idea has any meaning to him at this point. His mind is almost empty, as though he's in a trance.

He's a short-necked man, as so many great shooters are; his blue eyes, though gifted with an almost freakish 20/10 acuity, appear dull, signifying a level of mental activity almost startlingly blank. His pulse rate hardly exists. He has some oddities, again freakish in some men but weirdly perfect for a shooter. He has extremely well developed fast-twitch forearm muscles, still supple and defined at his age, which is beyond fifty. His hands are large and strong. His stamina is off the charts, as are his reflexes and his pain tolerance. He's strong, flexible, as charged with energy as any other world-cla.s.s athlete. He has both a technical and a creative mind and a will as directed as a laser.

But none of this really explains him, any more than such a.n.a.lysis would explain a Williams or a DiMaggio: he simply has an internal genius, possibly autistic, that gives him extraordinary control over body and mind, hand and eye, infinite patience, a shrewd gift for the tactical, and, most of all, total commitment to his arcane art, which in turn forms the core of his ident.i.ty and has granted him a life that few could imagine.

But for now, nothing: nothing: not his past, not his future, not the pain of lying so still in the cold through a long night, not the excitement of knowing this could be the day. No antic.i.p.ation, no regret: just nothing. not his past, not his future, not the pain of lying so still in the cold through a long night, not the excitement of knowing this could be the day. No antic.i.p.ation, no regret: just nothing.

Before him is the tool of his trade, lying askew on a hard sandbag. He knows it intimately, having worked with it a great deal in preparation for the thirty seconds that will come today or tomorrow or the day after.

It's a Remington 700, with an H-S Precision fibergla.s.s stock and a Leupold 10X scope. It's been tricked up by a custom riflesmith to realize the last tenth of a percent of its potential: the action trued and honed, and bolted into the metal block at the center of the stock at maximum torque; a new Krieger barrel free-floated after cryogenic treatment. The trigger, a Jewell, lets off at four pounds with the crisp snap of a gla.s.s rod breaking.

The sniper has run several weeks' worth of load experimentation through the rifle, finding the exact harmony that will produce maximum results: the perfect balance between the weight of a bullet, the depth of its seating, the selection and amount, to the tenth grain, hand measured, of the powder. Nothing has been left to chance: the case necks have been turned and annealed, the primer hole deburred, the primer depth perfected, the primer itself selected for consistency. The rifle muzzle wears the latest hot lick, a Browning Ballistic Optimizing System, which is a kind of screw-on nozzle that can be micro-tuned to generate the best vibrational characteristics for accuracy.

The caliber isn't military but civilian, the 7mm Remington Magnum, once the flavor of the month in international hunting circles, capable of dropping a ram or a whitetail at amazing distances. Though surpa.s.sed by some flashier loads, it's still a flat-shooting, hard-hitting cartridge that holds its velocity as it flies through the thin air, delivering close to two thousand foot-pounds of energy beyond five hundred yards.

But of all this data, the sniper doesn't care, or no longer cares. He knew it at one time; he has forgotten it now. The point of the endless ballistic experimentation was simple: to bring the rifle and its load to complete perfection so that it could be forgotten. That was one principle of great shooting-arrange for the best, then forget all about it.

When the sound comes, it doesn't shock or surprise him. He knew it had to come, sooner or later. It doesn't fill him with doubt or regret or anything. It simply means the obvious: time to work.

It's a peal of laughter, girlish and bright, giddy with excitement. It bounces off the stone walls of the canyon, from the shadow of a draw onto this high shelf from close to a thousand yards off, whizzing through the thin air.

The sniper wiggles his fingers, finds the warmth in them. His concentration cranks up a notch or so. He pulls the rifle to him in a fluid motion, well practiced from hundreds of thousands of shots in practice or on missions. Its stock rises naturally to his cheek as he pulls it in, and as one hand flies to the wrist, the other sets up beneath the forearm, taking the weight of his slightly lifted body, building a bone bridge to the stone below. It rests on a densely packed sandbag. He finds the spot weld, the one placement of cheek to stock where the scope relief will be perfect and the circle of the scope will throw up its image as brightly as a movie screen. His adductor magnus adductor magnus, a tube of muscle running through his deep thigh, tenses as he splays his right foot ever so slightly.

Above, a hawk rides a thermal, gliding through the blue morning sky.

A mountain trout leaps.

A bear looks about for something to eat.

A deer scampers through the brush.

The sniper notices none of it. He doesn't care.

"Mommy," shouts eight-year-old Nikki Swagger. "Come on." on."

Nikki rides better than either of her parents; she's been almost literally raised on horseback, as her father, a retired Marine staff NCO with an agricultural background, had decided to go into the business of horse care at his own lay-up barn in Arizona, where Nikki was born.

Nikki's mother, a handsome woman named Julie Fenn Swagger, trails behind. Julie doesn't have the natural grace of her daughter, but she grew up in Arizona, where horses were a way of life, and has been riding since childhood. Her husband rode as an Arkansas farmboy, then didn't for decades, then came back to the animals and now loves them so, in their integrity and loyalty, that he has almost single-mindedly willed himself into becoming an accomplished saddleman. That is one of his gifts.

"Okay, okay," she calls, "be careful, sweetie," though she knows that careful is the last thing Nikki will ever be, for hers is a hero's personality, built from a willingness to risk all to gain all and a seeming absence of fear. She's like an Indian in that way, and like her father, too, who was once a war hero.

She turns.

"Come on," on," she calls, replicating her daughter's rhythms. "You want to see the valley as the sun races across it, don't you?" she calls, replicating her daughter's rhythms. "You want to see the valley as the sun races across it, don't you?"

"Yep," comes the call from the rider still unseen in the shadows of the draw.

Nikki bounds ahead, out of the shadows and into the bright light. Her horse, named Calypso, is a four-year-old thoroughbred gelding, quite a beast, but Nikki handles it with nonchalance. She is actually riding English, because it is part of her mother's dream for her that she will go east to college, and the skills that are the hallmarks of equestrian sophistication will take her a lot farther than the rowdy ability to ride like a cowboy. Her father does not care for the English saddle, which seems hardly enough to protect the girl from the muscles of the animal beneath, and at horse shows he thinks those puffy jodhpurs and that little velveteen jacket with its froth of lace at the throat are sublimely ridiculous.

Calypso bounds over the rocky path, his cleverness as evident as his fearlessness. To watch the slight girl maneuver the ma.s.sive horse is one of the great joys of her father's life: she never seems so alive as when on horseback, or so happy, or so in command. Now, Nikki's voice trills with pleasure as the horse at last breaks out onto a shelf of rock. Before them is the most beautiful view within riding distance and she races to the edge, seemingly out of control, but actually very much in control.

"Honey," cries Julie as her daughter careens merrily toward disaster, "be careful."

The child. The woman. The man.

The child comes first, the best rider, bold and adventurous. She emerges from the shadow of the draw, letting her horse run, and the animal thunders across the gra.s.s to the edge of the precipice, halts, then spins and begins to twitch with antic.i.p.ation. The girl holds him tightly, laughing.

The woman is next. Not so gifted a rider, she still rides easily, with loping strides, comfortable in the saddle. The sniper can see her straw hair, her muscularity under the jeans and work shirt, the way the sun has browned her face. Her horse is a big chestnut, a stout, working cowboy's horse, not sleek like the daughter's.

And finally: the man.

He is lean and watchful and there is a rifle in the scabbard under his saddle. He looks dangerous, like a special man who would never panic, react fast and shoot straight, which is exactly what he is. He rides like a gifted athlete, almost one with the animal, controlling it unconsciously with his thighs. Relaxed in the saddle, he is still obviously alert.

He would not see the sniper. The sniper is too far out, the hide too carefully camouflaged, the spot chosen to put the sun in the victim's eyes at this hour so that he'll see only dazzle and blur if he looks.

The crosshairs ride up to the man, and stay with him as he gallops along, finding the same rhythm in the cadences, finding the same up-down plunge of the animal. The shooter's finger caresses the trigger, feels absorbed by its softness, but he does not fire.

Moving target, transversing laterally left to right, but also moving up and down through a vertical plane: 753 meters. By no means an impossible shot, and many a man in his circ.u.mstances would have taken it. But experience tells the sniper to wait: a better shot will lie ahead, the best shot. With a man like Swagger, that's the one you take.

The man joins the woman, and the two chat, and what he says makes her smile. White teeth flash. A little tiny human part in the sniper aches for the woman's beauty and ease; he's had prost.i.tutes the world over, some quite expensive, but this little moment of intimacy is something that has evaded him completely. That's all right. He has chosen to work in exile from humanity.

Jesus Christ!

He curses himself. That's how shots are blown, that little fragment of lost concentration which takes you out of the operation. He briefly snaps his eyes shut, absorbs the darkness and clears his mind, then opens them again to what lies before him.

The man and the woman have reached the edge: 721 meters. Before them runs a valley, unfolding in the sunlight as the sun climbs even higher. But tactically what this means to the sniper is that at last his quarry has ceased to move. In the scope he sees a family portrait: man, woman and child, all at nearly the same level, because the child's horse is so big it makes her as tall as her parents. They chat, the girl laughs, points at a bird or something, seethes with motion. The woman stares into the distance. The man, still seeming watchful, relaxes just the tiniest bit.

The crosshairs bisect the square chest.

The master sniper expels a breath, seeks the stillness within himself, but wills nothing. He never decides or commits. It just happens.

The rifle bucks, and as it comes back in a fraction of a second, he sees the tall man's chest explode as the 7mm Remington Magnum tears through it.

PART I

THE PARADE DECKWashington, DC, AprilMay 1971

CHAPTER ONE.

It was unseasonably hot that spring, and Washington languished under the blazing sun. The gra.s.s was brown and l.u.s.terless, the traffic thick, the citizens surly and uncivil; even the marble monuments and the white government buildings seemed squalid. It was as though a torpor hung over the place, or a curse. n.o.body in official Washington went to parties anymore; it was a time of bitterness and recrimination.

And it was a time of siege. The city was in fact under attack. The process the president called "Vietnamization" wasn't happening fast enough for the armies of peace demonstrators who regularly a.s.sailed the city's parks and byways, shutting it down or letting it live, pretty much unchecked and pretty much as they saw fit. This month already, the Vietnam Veterans for Peace had commandeered the steps of the Capitol, showering them with a bitter rain of medals; more action was planned for the beginning of May, when the May Tribe of the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice had sworn to close down the city once again, this time for a whole week.

In all the town there was only one section of truly green gra.s.s. Some would look upon it and see in the green a last living symbol of American honor, a last best hope. Others would say the green was artificial, like so much of America: it was sustained by the immense labor of exploited workers, who had no choice in the matter. This is what we are changing, they would say.

The green gra.s.s was the parade ground, or in the patois of a service which holds fast to the conceit that all land structures are merely extensions of and metaphorical representations of the ships of the fleet, the "parade deck" of the Marine Barracks, at Eighth and I, Southeast. The young enlisted men labored over it as intensely as any cathedral gardeners, for, to the Jesuitical minds of the United States Marine Corps, at any rate, it was holy ground.

The barracks, built in 1801, was the oldest continuously occupied military installation in the United States. Even the British dared not burn it when they put the rest of the city to the torch in 1814. To look across the deck to the officers' houses on one side, the structures that housed three companies (Alpha, Bravo and Hotel, for headquarters) on the other, and the commandant's house at the far end of the quadrangle was to see, preserved, a pristine version of what service in the Corps and service to the country theoretically meant.

The ancient bricks were red and the architecture had sprung from an age in which design was pride in order. Conceived as a fort in a ruder and more violent age, it had taken on, with the maturity of its foliage and the replacement of its muddy lanes with cobblestone, the aspect of an old Ivy League campus. An unironic flag flew above it at the end of a high mast; red, white, blue, rippling in the wind, unashamed. It had a pa.s.sionate nineteenth century feel to it; it was somehow an encomium of manifest destiny, built on a little chunk of land that was almost an independent duchy of the United States Marine Corps, stuck a mile and a half from and on the same hill as the Capitol, where the unruly processes of democracy were currently being strained to the utmost.

Now, on a particularly hot, bright April day, under that beating sun, young men drilled or loafed, as the authorities permitted.

In the shade at the corner of Troop Walk and the South Arcade, seven men-boys, actually-squatted and smoked. They wore the uniform called undressed blues, which consisted of blue trousers, a tan gabardine short-sleeved shirt open at the neck, and white hat-"cover," as the Corps called hats-pulled low over their eyes. The only oddity in their appearance, which to the casual eye separated them from other Marines, was their oxfords, which were not merely shined but spit-shined, and gleamed dazzlingly. The spit shine was a fetish in their culture. Now the young Marines were on a break and, naturally, PFC Crowe, the team comedian, was explaining the nature of things.

"See," he explained to his audience, as he sucked on a Marlboro, "it'll look great on a resume. I tell 'em, I was in this elite unit. I needed a top-secret security clearance. We trained and rehea.r.s.ed for our missions, and then when we went on them, in the hot, sweltering weather, men dropped all around me. But I kept going, G.o.ddammit. I was a hero, a G.o.dd.a.m.n hero. Of course what I don't don't tell them is, I'm talking about ... parades." tell them is, I'm talking about ... parades."

He was rewarded with appropriate blasts of laughter from his cohorts, who regarded him as an amusing and generally harmless character. He had an uncle who was a congressman's chief fund-raiser, which accounted for his presence in Company B, the body-bearer company, as opposed to more rigorous and dangerous duties in WES PAC, as the orders always called it, or what the young Marines had termed the Land of Bad Things. He had no overwhelming desire to go to the Republic of South Vietnam.

Indeed, in all of Second Casket Team, only one of the seven had seen service in RSVN. This was the noncommissioned officer in charge, Corporal Donny Fenn, twenty-two, of Ajo, Arizona. Donny, a large and almost freakishly handsome blond kid with a year of college behind him, had spent seven months in another B Company, 1/9 Bravo, attached to the III Marine Amphibious Force, in operations near and around An Hoa in I Corps. He had been shot at many times and hit once, in the lungs, for which he was hospitalized for six months. He also had something called, uh, he would mumble, uh, brnzstr brnzstr, and not look you in the eye.

But now Donny was short. That is, he had just under thirteen months left to serve and by rumor, at any rate, that meant the Corps would not in its infinite wisdom ship him back to the Land of Bad Things. This was not because the Corps loved his young a.s.s. No, it was because the tour of duty in 'Nam was thirteen calendar months, and if you sent anyone over with less than thirteen calendar months, it hopelessly muddied the tidiness of the records, so upsetting to the a.n.a.l-retentive minds of personnel clerks. So for all intents and purposes, Donny had made it safely through the central conflict of his age.

"All right," he said, checking his watch as its second hand hurtled toward 1100 to signify the end of break, "put 'em out and strip 'em. Put the filters in your pockets, that is if you're a f.a.ggot who smokes filtered cigarettes. If I see any b.u.t.ts out here, I'll PT your a.s.ses until morning muster."

The troops grunted, but obeyed. Of course they knew he didn't mean it; like them, he was no lifer. Like them, he'd go back to the world.

So as would any listless group of young men in so pitiless an inst.i.tution as the Marine Corps, they got with the program with something less than total enthusiasm. It was another day at Eighth and I, another day of operations on the parade deck when they weren't on alert or serving cemetery duty: up at 0-dark-30, an hour of PT at 0600, morning muster at 0700, chow at 0800, and by 0930, the beginning of long, sometimes endless hours of drill, either of the funeral variety or of the riot-control variety. Then the duty day was done: those who had a.s.signments did them, and otherwise the boys could secure (the married could live off base with wives; many of the unmarried shared unofficial cheap places available on Capitol Hill) or lounge about, playing pool, drinking 3.2 in the enlisted men's bar or going to the movies on the Washington PX circuit or even trying their luck with women in the bars of Capitol Hill.

But the luck was always bad, a source of much bitterness. This was only partially because Marines were thought of as baby killers. The real reason was hair: it was, in the outside world, the era of hair. Men wore their locks long and puffed up, usually overwhelming their ears in the process. The poor jarheads-and all the ceremonial troopers of the Military District of Washington-were expected to be acolytes to the temple of military discipline. Thus they offered nearly naked skulls to the world-white sidewalls, it was called-except for a permitted patch no more than three-quarters of an inch up top. Their ears stood out like radar bowls. Some of them looked like Howdy Doody, and no self-respecting hippie chick would deign spit at them, and since all American girls had become hippie chicks, they were, in Crowe's memorable term, s.h.i.t out of luck.

"Gloves on," Donny commanded, and his men, as they rose, pulled on their white gloves.

Donny started them through another long fifty minutes of casket drill. As body bearers, all were on the husky side. As body bearers, none could make a mistake. It seemed meaningless, but a few-Donny, for one-understood that they did in fact have an important job: to anesthetize the pain of death with stultifying ritual. They had to hide the actual fact-there was a boy in the box going into the ground of Arlington National Cemetery forever, years before his time, and to what end?-with pomp and precision. And Donny, though an easygoing guy in most respects, was determined that in this one aspect, they would be the best.

So the team turned to, under his guidance and soft but forcefully uttered commands: they walked through the precisely ch.o.r.eographed steps by which a flag-draped box of boy was smartly removed from the hea.r.s.e, which in the rehearsal was only a steel rack, aligned by its bearers, carried with utter calm dignity to the grave site, laid upon a bier. Next came the tricky flag folding: the flag was snapped off the box by six pairs of disciplined hands and, beginning with the man at the boot of the casket, broken into a triangle which grew thicker with each rigid fold as it pa.s.sed from man to man. If the folding went right, what was finally deposited in Corporal Fenn's hands was a perfect triangle, a tricorn, festooned on either side with stars, with no red stripe showing anywhere. This was not easy, and it took weeks for a good team to get it right and even longer to break in a new guy.

At this point, Corporal Fenn took the triangle of stars, marched with stiff precision to the seated mother or father or whoever, and in his white gloves presented it to her. An odd moment, always: some recipients were too stunned to respond. Some were too shattered to notice. Some were awkward, some even a little starstruck, for a Marine as good-looking as Donny, with a chestful of medals hanging heavily from his dress tunic, his hair gone, his hat as white as his gloves, his dignity impenetrable, his theater craft immaculate, is indeed an awesome sight-almost like a movie star-and that charisma frequently cut through the grief of the moment. One broken mom even took his picture with an Instamatic as he approached.

But on this run-through, the corporal was not pleased with the performance of his squad. Of course it was PFC Crowe, not the best man on the team.

"All right, Crowe," he said, after the sweat-soaked boys had stood down from the ritual, "I saw you. You were out of step on the walk-to and you were half a beat behind on the left face-out of the wagon."

"Ah," said Crowe, searching for a quip to memorialize the moment, "my d.a.m.n knee. It's the junk I picked up at Khe Sahn."

This did bring a chuckle, for as close as Crowe had come to Khe Sahn was reading about it in the New Haven Register New Haven Register.

"I forgot you were such a hero," Donny said. "So only drop and give me twenty-five, not fifty. Out of commemoration for your great sacrifice."

Crowe muttered darkly but harmlessly and the other team members drew back to give him room to perform his absolution. He peeled off his gloves, dropped to the p.r.o.ne and banged out twenty-five Marine-regulation push-ups. The last six were somewhat sloppy.

"Excellent," said Donny. "Maybe you're not a girl after all. All right, let's-"

But at this moment, the company commander's orderly, the bespectacled PFC Welch, suddenly appeared at Donny's right shoulder.

"Hey, Corporal," he whispered, "CO wants to see you."

s.h.i.t, thought Donny, what the h.e.l.l have I done now?

"Ohhh," somebody sang, "somebody's in trouble."

"Hey, Donny, maybe they're going to give you another medal."

"It's his Hollywood contract, it's finally come."

"You know what it's about?" asked Donny of Welch, who was a prime source of scuttleb.u.t.t.

"No idea. Some Navy guys, that's all I know. It's ASAP, though."

"I'm on my way. Bas...o...b.., you take over. Another twenty minutes. Focus on the face-out of the hea.r.s.e that seems to have Crowe so baffled. Then take 'em to chow. I'll catch up when I can."

"Yes, Corporal."

Donny straightened his starched shirt, adjusted the gig line, wondered if he had time to change shirts, decided he didn't, and took off.

He headed across the parade deck, pa.s.sing among other drilling Marines. The s...o...b..ats of Company A, the silent drill rifle team, were going through their elaborate pantomime; the color guard people were mastering the intricacies of flag work; another platoon had moved on to riot control and was stomping furiously down Troop Walk, bent double under combat gear.