Time to Hunt Part 29

"Yes, I know. Nor, frankly, do we. But you must have some small cache of American weapons, no? Your intelligence people would maintain an inventory? It's common for guerrillas to turn the enemy's weapons against himself."

"Yes."

"Now, I will give you a very specific type of American weapon. It must be found and delivered here within two weeks. It has to be this exact weapon; with no other would I have a chance."

"Yes."

"But that is not all. You must also contact the Soviet SPETSNAZ unit at the airfield; they will be required to acquire certain components from outside Asia. These are very specific also; no deviation can be allowed. There is a place where such a list can be filled out in just a few seconds, and they will have access to capabilities to do so."

"Yes, comrade. I-"

"You see, it's not merely the rifle. The rifle is only part of the system. It's also the ammunition. I have to construct ammunition capable of the task which I have in mind."

He handed over the list, which was in English. Huu Co did not recognize the rifle by type, nor the list of "ingredients," which appeared to be of a chemical or scientific nature. He did recognize one word, but it had no meaning to him: MatchKing.

The sniper worked with care. He studied the reconnaissance photos of the area, discussed the topography once again with Huu Co, trying to find the right combination of elements. He worked very, very carefully. After devising theories, he went to test them, exploring the area at night and spending his days hidden in the gra.s.s, trying to learn what there was to learn.

This time he never went near the base. He was acclimatizing himself to the very long shots, and hunting for a shooting position. He finally found one on a nameless hill that, by his judgment, was close to fourteen hundred yards from the base, but it offered the most generous angle into the encampment, with the least drop, the least exposure to wind pressure, the most favorable light in the early morning, when such a thing would take place, and it was also sited immediately to the north of the original ambush site, a gamble, but a calculated one. Solaratov reasoned that on general principle alone, the American sniper team would be reluctant to go out the same way as the one that had almost gotten them killed. But they would consider going out the opposite side too obvious. Therefore, on their missions they would either leave above, to the north, or below, to the south. He had a one-in-two chance of encountering them, and in the days that he waited, he saw them leave the post three times. Tiny dots, so far away. Hardly human.

Fourteen hundred yards. It was a h.e.l.laciously long shot. It was a shot n.o.body had any business trying to make. Beyond six hundred yards, the margin of error shrinks to nothing; the play of the elements increases exponentially. You would need more power than the Dragunov's 7.62 54 round; you would need more power than any round available under normal circ.u.mstances in either the North Vietnamese or the American inventory, because war had become a thing of light, fast-firing weapons that kill by firepower, not accuracy. He had contempt for such a philosophy. It was the philosophy of the common untrainable man, not of the elite professional who masters all the variables in his preparation and who has genius-level skill at his task. War nowadays no longer demanded special men but ordinary men-lots of them.

He lay on the hill, trying to will himself into the mental state necessary. He had to be calm, his eyesight perfect, his judgment secure. He had to dope the wind, the mirage, the temperature, the angle of travel of the targets, his bullet's trajectory, the time in flight, everything. At this range, it was not like rifle shooting; it was like naval gunfire, for the bullet would have to rise in high apogee and describe an arc across the sky, and float downward with perfect, perfect placement. There were not but a dozen men in the world who could take such a shot with confidence.

He watched, through binoculars: the Marines far off scuttled about behind their berm, making ready to depart, confident that for them the war was almost over. And for two of them, it was.

Finally: the rifle. It came almost at the end of the two-week period, and not without difficulty. It had been a trophy in the People's Museum of Great Struggle in downtown Hanoi; thousands of schoolchildren had looked upon it with great horror as part of their political education. It demonstrated the evil will of the colonialists and the capitalists, that they took such great pains to construct the devil's own tool. In this, it was very useful indeed, and it took Russian intervention at the highest levels to have it withdrawn from the permanent exhibit. A special sapper unit was ordered to transport it down the Trail of Ten Thousand Miles to Huu Co's little hidden post on the outskirts of the defoliated zone of Firebase Dodge City.

The Russian broke it down, for the first step to mastering a rifle is to master what makes it work. He studied the system, the cleverness of it, the robustness of it, the rise and fall of springs, the thrusting of rods, the gizmo of the trigger group. It was ingenious: overengineered in the American fashion, but ingenious. This one had been crudely accurized with flash hider, a fibergla.s.s bedding for the action in the stock, a wad of leather around the comb to provide a nest for the cheek in relation to the scope, which was a mere four-power and, Solaratov saw, the weakest element in the system, attached to the rifle parallel to but not above the barrel, creating problems in parallax that had to be mastered. But his main focus of interest was that trigger group, a mesh of springs and levers that could be pulled whole from the receiver group. He broke it down to the tiniest component, then carefully polished each engagement surface to give the piece a crisper let-off.

At this point, the box of "components" came from the Soviet intelligence service. They were the easiest mission requirements to acquire: a Soviet a.s.set had merely gone to a Southern California gun store and purchased them, for cash; they had been shipped to the Soviet Union via diplomatic pouch and to North Vietnam by the daily TU-16 flight. To look at them was to see nothing: these were actually reloading tools, which looked like steel chambers of mysterious purpose, and green boxes of bullets, cans of powder, DuPont IMR 4895, tools for resizing the case, pressing in new primers, reinserting the bullet. He knew that no military round could deliver the accuracy he needed and that it would take great attention to detail and consistency.

He took the entire rig for a day's march to the north, and there, out of the eyes of Westerners and Vietnamese alike except for a security team of sappers and the ever-curious Huu Co, he set up a fourteen-hundred-meter range, shooting at two close targets, white silhouettes that were easy to see and would not be moving like they would on the day of his attempt.

The scope was small and had an ancient, obsolete reticle: a post, like a knife point, rising above a single horizontal line. Additionally, it did not have enough elevation to enable him to hit out to fourteen hundred meters, close to three times the rifle's known efficiency, though well within the cartridge's lethal capability. He hand-filed shims from pieces of metal and inserted them within the scope rings to elevate the scope higher, and tightened the a.s.sembly with aircraft glue so that it would hold to a thousand-yard zero over the course of his testing.

He worked with infinite patience. He seemed lost in a world no one could penetrate. He seemed distracted to an absurd degree, almost catatonic. His nickname, "the Human Noodle," took on added comic meaning as he entered a zone of total vagueness that was actually total concentration. He seemed to see nothing.

Gradually, increment by increment, he managed to walk his shots into the target. Once he was on the target, he began hitting regularly, primarily through mastery of trigger control and breathing and finding the same solid position off a sandbag. The sandbag was the important feature: it had to be just so dense, packed so tight, and it had to support the rifle's forestock in just such a way. Infinitely patient micro-experimentation was gradually revealing the precise harmony among rifle and load and position and his own concentration that would make his success at least possible.

Finally, he took to having the sappers present the targets from over a berm, so that he could see them for just the second they'd be visible. He'd teach himself to shoot fast. It went slowly and he burned out the sappers with his patience, his insistence on recleaning the rifle painstakingly every sixteen rounds, his demand that all his ejected cartridges be located and preserved in the order that they were fired. All the time he kept a notebook of almost unreadable pedantry as he a.s.sembled his attempts.

"For a sniper, he is a very dreary fellow," the sergeant said to Huu Co.

"You want a romantic hero," said Huu Co. "He is a bureaucrat of the rifle, infinitely obsessed with micro-process. It's how his mind works."

"Only the Russians could create such a man."

"No, I believe the Americans could too."

Finally, the day came when the Russian hit his two targets in the kill zone twice in the same five seconds. Then he did it another day and then another, all at dawn, after lying the night through on his stomach.

"I am ready," he announced.

CHAPTER T TWENTY-FOUR.

The sandbags were the hardest. He had grown almost superst.i.tious about them. He would let no one touch them, for fear of somehow shifting the sand they concealed and altering irrevocably their inner dynamics.

"The Human Noodle has gone insane," someone said.

"No, brother," his comrade responded. "He has always been insane. We are only noticing it now."

The sandbags were packed with the care of rare, crucial medicines, and transported back to the tunnel complex in the treeline, with the Human Noodle watching them with the concentration of a hawk. He literally never let them out of his sight; the rifle and its scope, strapped inside a gun case and more or less suspended and shock-proofed by foam rubber pellets taken from American installations, bothered him much less than the sandbags.

That held true for his gradual setup as well. He began with the sandbags, examining them minutely for leaks, for some alteration of their density. Finding none, he convinced himself he was satisfied, and made the sappers delicately transport them to the treeline. There he had rigged a kind of harness, a flat piece of wood to be tied to his back when he was p.r.o.ne, upon which the sandbags themselves were to be tied.

"I hope he isn't crushed," said Huu Co, genuinely alarmed.

"He could suffocate," said his sergeant.

Ever so delicately, weighted down under the nearly one hundred pounds of sand-two forty-pound bags and a ten-pound bag-the Russian began his long crawl to the shooting position, which was a good two thousand yards from the tunnel complex far from the burned zone. It took six hours-six back-breaking, degrading hours of slow, steady crawl through the gra.s.s, suffering not merely from back pain but from the crushing fear of his utter helplessness. A man under a hundred pounds of sand, crawling into enemy territory. What could be more ridiculous, more pathetic, more poignant? Any idiot with a rifle could have killed him. He had no energy, his senses were dulled by the pain in his back and the breathless smash of the huge bags on his back. He crawled, he crawled, he crawled, seemingly forever.

He made it, somehow, and crawled back, just before the first light of dawn, looking more dead than alive. He slept all day, and all the next day, because his back still ached.

On the third day, again he crawled, this time with the rifle and a batch of his specially constructed cartridges. It was much easier. He made it to the small hill well before dawn and had plenty of time to set up.

He loaded the rifle, tried to find some sense of relaxation, tried to will himself into the sort of trance he knew he needed. But he never could quite relax. He felt tense, twitchy. Twice, noises startled him. His imagination began to play tricks on him: he saw the great black plane hovering overhead, and felt the earth open up as it fired. He remembered crawling desperately, his mind livid with fear, as the world literally exploded behind him. You could not crawl through such madness; there was no "through." He crawled and crawled, the explosions ringing in his ears, dumbstruck that he had chosen to crawl in the right direction. And what was the right direction?

"If he's out there, he's dead now," he heard one Marine say to another.

"Nothing could come through that," that," said the other. said the other.

They were so close! They were ten feet away, chatting like workers on a lunch break!

Solaratov willed himself to nothingness. Like an animal he ceased to consciously exist. He may not even have been breathing, not as normal humans would define it, anyhow. His pulse nearly stopped; his body temp dropped; his eyes closed to slits. He gave himself up to the earth totally and let himself sink into it and would not let his body move a millimeter over the long day. Marines walked all around him, once so close he could see the jungle boots. He smelled the acrid stench of the burning gasoline when they used the flamethrowers and he sensed first their joy, when they recovered the rifle he had abandoned in panic, and then their irritation, when no body itself could be located. The body was right there, almost under their feet; it still breathed!

Movement!

The flash of movement recalled him from that day to this one. Through his binoculars he could see movement just behind the berm in the predawn light, though it was so far away. The rifle was set into the bags, firmly moored, sunk into sand so dense and unyielding it was almost concrete, the heel of its b.u.t.t wedged just as tightly into the smaller bag. He squirmed behind it, felt himself pouring himself around the rifle, not moving it a hair, so perfectly was it placed. His eye went to the eyepiece.

Again, he saw movement: a face, peering out?

Up, down, then up again, then down.

His finger touched the trigger, his heart hammered.

Here, after so long, the long hunt was over.

No.

He watched them rise, the shooter, then the spotter, rolling over the sandbag berm so far away, gathering themselves in a gulch at its bottom, and then heading out.

Infinite regret poured through him.

You were afraid to shoot.

No, he told himself. You were not able today. You were not in the zone. You could not have made the shot.

It was true.

Better to let them go and gamble that sometime soon he'd have another opportunity than to rush and destroy all the work he'd invested and all the hopes and responsibilities riding on his shoulders.

No. You did the right thing.

Not months anymore. Not even days. Donny was down to a day.

One more day.

And he would spend it processing out. Then a wake-up, and the chopper would arrive at 0800 the day after tomorrow and at 0815 it would leave and he would be on it. He'd be back to Da Nang in an hour, processed out by 1600, on the freedom bird by nightfall, home eighteen hours later.

DEROS.

Date of estimated return from overseas. How many had dreamed of it, had fantasized about it? For his generation, the generation of men sent to do a duty they didn't quite understand, and that made them especially hated in their own country, this was as good as it got. There would be no parades, no monuments, no magazine covers, no movies, no one waiting to call them heroes. You only got DEROS, your little piece of heaven. You earned it the hard way, and it wasn't much, but that's what you got.

What a feeling! He'd never felt anything quite like it before, so powerful and consuming. It went deep into his bones; it touched his soul. No joy was so pure. The last time, after getting hit, there'd been only the fear and the pain and the long months in a c.r.a.ppy hospital. No DEROS.

This time, within twenty-four hours: DEROS.

"Hey, Fenn?"

He looked up. It was Mahoney, the ringleader in the anti-Swagger mutiny, under whose auspices he'd gotten kicked in the head by somebody.

"Oh, yeah," said Donny, rising from his cot.

"Hey, look, I wanted to come by and tell you I was sorry about that thing that happened. You're an okay guy. It turned out all right. Shake my hand on it?"

"Yeah, sure," said Donny, who always found it impossible to hold a grudge.

He took the other lance corporal's hand, shook it.

"How's Featherstone?"

"He's cool. He's down to one and days; he'll rotate back to the world. Me, too. Well, two and days, then my a.s.s is on the golden bird."

"You may not even have to make it that far. I hear the ARVN are going to take over Dodge City, and you guys'll be rotating out early. You won't even have to see your DEROS."

"Yeah, I heard that too, but I don't want to count on anything the Marine Corps wants to give me. I'm still locked onto DEROS. I make DEROS and I'm home free. Back to city streets, NYC, the Big Apple."

"Cool," said Donny, "you'll have a good time."

"I'd ask you what it felt like to be so short and I'd buy you a beer, but I know you want to go to bed and make tomorrow come earlier. All that processing out." It was company policy that no man went into the field on his last day.

"Well, sometime back in the world, you can buy me a beer and we'll have a big laugh over this one."

"We will. You're staying in, right? You're not going out with Swagger tomorrow."

"Huh?"

"You're not going out with Swagger tomorrow?"

"What are you talking about?"

"I saw him hunched up with Feamster and Brophy and a couple of the lifer NCOs in the S-2 bunker. Like he was going on a mission."

"s.h.i.t," said Donny.

"Hey, you sit tight. If they didn't ask you, you don't got to go. Just be cool. Time to take the golden bird back to the land of honeys and Milky Ways."

"Yeah."

"Go in peace, bro."

"Peace," said Donny, and Mahoney dipped out of the hootch.

Donny lay back. He checked his watch. It was 2200 hours. He tried to forget. He tried to relax. Everything was cool, everything was calm, he was home free.

But what the f.u.c.k was Swagger up to?

It ate at him. What deal was this?

It bothered him.

He can't go out. He promised.

s.h.i.t.

He rose, slipped out the hootch and walked across the compound to the dark bunker of the S-2 shop, where he found Bob, Feamster and Brophy bent over maps.

"Sir, permission to enter," he said, entering.

"Fenn, what the h.e.l.l are you doing here? You should be checking your gear to turn in to supply tomorrow," said Feamster.