Donny had no idea. But then he did.
"If the treeline equals safety, then he"d go that way, wouldn"t he? To his right. He"d put himself closer to it, not closer to Dodge City."
"But maybe that"s how he"d figure we"d think, so he"d figure it the other way?"
"s.h.i.t," said Donny.
"No," said Bob. "No, you"re right. Because he"s on his belly, remember? This whole thing"s gonna play out on bellies. And what he"s looking at is an hour of crawling in the hot sun versus two hours. And being a half hour from the treeline is a h.e.l.l of a lot better than being three hours from it. He"d have to go to the west, right?" He sounded as if he had to convince himself.
"It would take a lot of G.o.dd.a.m.n professional discipline," he continued, arguing with himself. "He"d have to make up his mind and cut free of his commitment to the only targets he"s got. Man, he"s got a set of nuts on him if he can make that decision."
He seemed to fight the obvious for a bit. Then he said, "Okay, Area One ain"t it no more. Designate Area Two on your map, being the coordinates of a five hundred by five hundred grid square one thousand yards left. His left. Make it north-northeast. Give me them coordinates."
Donny struggled to get the map out, then struggled with the arithmetic. He worked it out, coming up with a new fire mission, hoping the dancing numbers his eyes were conjuring up were correct, scrawling them in the margins of the map. He had the sinking sensation of failing a math test he"d never studied for.
"Call it in. Call it in now, so we don"t have to f.u.c.k with it later."
"Yeah."
Donny unleashed the aerial to vertical, then took the handset from its cradle, snapped on power, checking quickly to see that the PRC was still set on the right frequency.
"Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over."
"Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, send your immediate, over."
"Ah, Foxtrot, we"re going to go from Area One to new target, designated Area Two, over."
"Sierra, what the h.e.l.l, say again, over."
"Ah, Foxtrot, I say again, we think our bird has flown to another pea patch, which we are designating Area Two, over."
"Sierra, you have new coordinates, all after? Over."
"Correct, Foxtrot. New coordinates Bravo-November-two-two-three-two-two-seven at zero-one-three-five-Zulu-July-eight-five. Break over."
"Wilco, Romeo. I mark it," and Foxtrot read the numbers back to him.
"Roger, Foxtrot, on our fire mission request. Out."
"Copy here, and out, Sierra," said the radio.
Donny clicked it off.
"Good," said Bob, who"d been diddling with a compa.s.s. "I make a route about five hundred yards over there to a small b.u.mp. That"s where we"ll go. We should be on his flank then. a.s.suming he goes the way I figure he"s going."
"Got you."
"Get your weapon."
Donny grabbed his rifle, which was not an M14 or even an M16 or a grease gun. Instead, because of the short order in which the job was planned, it was the only scoped rifle that could be gotten quickly, an old fat-barreled M70 Winchester target rifle, with a rattly old Unertl Scope, in .30-06, left in the Da Nang armory since the mid-sixties.
"Let"s go," Bob said.
CHAPTER T TWENTY-TWO.
Only bright blue sky above, and swaying stalks of the gra.s.s. The Russian crawled by dead reckoning, trusting skills it had taken him years to develop. He moved steadily, the rifle pulling ever so gently on his back. It was 0730 according to the Cosmos watch on his wrist. He wasn"t thirsty, he wasn"t angry, he wasn"t scared. The only thing in his mind was this thing, right now, here. Get to elevation five hundred yards to the right. Look to the left for targets that in turn will be looking for targets to their front. Two of them: two men like himself, men used to living on their bellies, men who could crawl, who could wait through s.h.i.t and p.i.s.s and thirst and hunger and cold and wet. Snipers. Kill the snipers.
He came after a time to a small knoll. He had been counting as he moved: two thousand strokes. That is, two thousand half-yard pulls across the gra.s.s. His head hurt, his hands hurt, his belly hurt. He didn"t notice, he didn"t care. Two thousand strokes meant one thousand yards. He was there.
He shimmied up the knoll, really more of a k.n.o.b, not four feet high. He set himself up, very carefully, flat on the crest, well shielded in a tuft of gra.s.s. He checked the sun, saw that it was no longer directly in front of him and would not bounce off his lens. He brought the Dragunov up, slipped it through the gra.s.s close to his shoulder and his hand, a smooth second"s easy capture and grasp. Then he opened his binocular case and pulled out a pair of excellent West German 25X"s. He eased himself behind their eyepieces and began to examine a world twenty-five times as large as the one he left behind.
The day was bright and, owing to the peculiarity of the vegetation in the defoliated zone and the oddities in the rise and fall of the land, he saw nothing but an ocean of yellow elephant gra.s.s, some high, some low and threadbare, marked here and there by a rill of earth. He felt as if he were alone on a raft in the Pacific: endless undulation and ripple, endless dapple of shadow, endless subtle play of color, endless, endless.
He hunted methodically, never leaping ahead, never listening to hunches or obeying impulses. His instinct and brain told him the Marines would be five hundred yards ahead of him, on an oblique. They would seek elevation; their rifle barrels would be hard and flat and perfect against the vertical organization of the world. He found the low ridge where by all rights they should have been sited, and began to explore it slowly. The 25X lenses resolved the world beautifully; he could see every twig, every buried stone, every stunted tree, every stump that had survived the chemical agent all those years ago, every small hill. Everything except Marines.
He put the gla.s.ses down. A little flicker of panic licked through him.
Not there. They are not there. Where are they, then? Why aren"t they there?
He considered falling back, trying another day. It was becoming an uncontrollable situation.
No, he told himself. No, just stay still, stay patient. They think you are over there, and you are over here. After a bit their curiosity will get the best of them. They are Americans: hardy, active people with active minds, attracted to sensations, actions, that sort of thing. They haven"t the long-term commitment to a cause.
He will move, he thought. He was looking for me, I was not there, he will move.
Blackness.
Somewhere in his peripheral, a flash of black.
Solaratov did not turn to stare. No, he kept his eyes where they were, fighting the temptation to crank them around and refocus. Let his unconscious mind, far more effective in these matters, scan for them.
Blackness again.
He had it.
To the right, almost three hundred yards away. Of course. He"s flanking me to my right Of course. He"s flanking me to my right.
Slowly, he turned his head; slowly, he brought up the binoculars.
Nothing. Movement. Nothing. Movement.
He struggled with the focus.
The unnatural blackness was a face. The Marine sniper had blackened it at night, for his long crawl into position; he"d shed his black clothes, and now wore combat dapple camouflage, but he had made a mistake he had made a mistake. He had forgotten to take off his face paint. Now, black against the dun and yellow of the elephant gra.s.s, it stood out just the slightest bit.
Solaratov watched, fascinated. The man low-crawled two strokes, then froze. He waited a second or two, then low-crawled another two. His face, its features masked by the paint, was a study in warrior"s concentration: tense, drawn, almost cracked with intensity. His rifle was on his back, wearing a tangle of strips for its own camouflage.
He tried to deny it, but Solaratov felt a flare of pleasure as intense as anything in his life.
He laid the binoculars down, and raised the rifle to his shoulder, finding the right position, rifle to bone to earth, finding the grip, finding the trigger, finding the eyepiece.
Swagger crawled through his scope. The crosshairs quartered his head. The Russian"s thumb took the safety off and he expelled half a breath. His finger began its slow squeeze of the trigger.
"G.o.dd.a.m.n," Bob said.
"What is it?" Donny said behind him.
"It"s thinned out here. G.o.dd.a.m.n. Less cover."
Donny could see nothing. He was lost in elephant gra.s.s; it was in his ears, his nose, in the folds of his flesh. The ants were feasting on him. He heard the dry buzz of flies drawn to the delicious odor of his sweat and blood-he"d been cut a hundred or so times by the blades of the gra.s.s.
Ahead of him were the two soles of Bob"s jungle boots.
"s.h.i.t," Bob said. "I don"t like this one G.o.dd.a.m.n bit."
"We could just call in the Night Hag. She"d chew the s.h.i.t out of all this. We"d pop smoke so she wouldn"t whack us up."
"And if he ain"t here, he knows we got him, and he"s double careful or he don"t come back at all and we never know why he came and we don"t git us a Dragunov. Nah."
He paused.
"You still got that Model Seventy?"
"I do."
"All right. I want you to reorient yourself to the right. You squirt on ahead; see that little hummock or something?"
"Yeah."
"You set up on that, you scope it out for me. If you say it"s okay, I"m going to shimmy on over there, to where it"s thick again. I"ll set up over there and cover for you. Fair enough?"
"Fair enough," said Donny. He squirmed around, took a deep breath and wiggled ahead.
"d.a.m.n, boy, I hope he ain"t in earshot. You"re grunting louder than a G.o.dd.a.m.n pig."
"This is hard work," Donny said, and it was.
He got up to the hummock, peered over it. He saw nothing.
"Go to the M49?"
"Nah. Don"t got time. Just check it with your Unertl."
Donny slipped his eye behind the scope, which was a long, thin piece of metal tubing suspended in an odd frame. When you zeroed this old thing, it had external controls, which meant the whole scope moved, propelled this way and that by screws for windage and elevation. It had been a.s.sembled sometime back in the early forties, but rumor said it had killed more than its share of j.a.ps, North Koreans and VC. It wasn"t even a 7.62mm NATO but the old Springfield cartridge, the long .30-06.
The optics were great. He scanned the gra.s.s as far as he could see, and saw no sign of human presence. But the blur had not gone away. He was aware he was missing fine detail. He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers, and nothing improved. No, nothing out there, nothing that he could see.
"It looks clear."
"I didn"t ask how it looked. I asked how it was."
"Clear, clear."
"Okay," said Bob. "You keep eyeballing."
The sergeant began to creep outward, this time at an even slower rate than before. He crawled slowly, ever so slowly, halting each two pulls forward, going still.
Donny returned to his scope. Back and forth, he swept the likely shooting spots, seeing nothing. It was clear. This was beginning to seem ridiculous. Maybe they were out here in the middle of nothing, acting like complete idiots. The bees buzzed, the flies ate, the dragonflies skittered. He couldn"t keep his eye behind the scope for very long because it fell completely out of focus. He had to blink, look away. When would the call come from Bob that he was all right?
The trigger rocked back, stacked up and was on the very cusp of firing.
Where is the other one?
His finger came off the trigger.
There were two. He had to kill them both. If he fired, the other might take him or, seeing his partner with his head blown open, simply slide back farther into the gra.s.s and disappear. He"d call in air, possibly, and Solaratov would have to get out of the area.
Where was the other one?
He looked up from the scope. He realized he could see the sniper because for some odd reason, the gra.s.s was thinner there. The other one would be nearby, covering, as he was vulnerable. He would be vulnerable for only a few more seconds.
A plan formed in Solaratov"s mind: Find the spotter. Kill the spotter. Come back and kill the sniper. It was possible because of the semiautomatic nature of the weapon and the fact that the distance was under three hundred meters.
He returned to the scope and very carefully began to crank backward, looking for another black face against the dun and the tan of the vertical thickets of stalks. He came back a bit more, no, nothing, nothing ... and there! An arm! The arm led to a body, which led to the form of another p.r.o.ne man hunched over a rifle-he took a gasp of air, a little spurt of pleasure-and then continued up the trunk to the torso to discover that it was indeed a man but he was not a spotter, he was another sniper, and his rifle was pointing exactly at him. At Solaratov.
The man fired.
Donny looked up from his scope. His head ached. When would the call come from Bob? G.o.d, he needed an aspirin. He glanced about, seeing nothing, only the endless gra.s.s.
A dragonfly flashed close by. It was odd how their wings somehow caught the sunlight and threw a reflection just like- Donny went back to the scope.
He was so close!
The sniper was less than three hundred yards away-or rather, the snipers, for there was a smear of enemy, blurry in the haze of Donny"s concussion, well sunk in the gra.s.s. The man was bent into his rifle, moving slowly, tracking, and with a start, Donny realized he had located Swagger.
Kill him! he ordered himself. he ordered himself. Shoot! Do it now! Shoot! Do it now!
The crosshairs seemed to quarter the head. He squeezed the trigger.
He lost his sight picture as the pressure increased. He squeezed harder. Nothing happened.
The safety, the safety. He reached for where it should have been, that nub in front of the trigger, but it wasn"t there. That"s where it was on an M14. On an M70, it was up on the bolt housing. He took his eye off the scope, looked for the f.l.a.n.g.e that was the safety, and snapped it forward. He ducked to the scope, saw the man had turned and the rifle"s muzzle was coming ... right at him.