“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 TWENTY-FOUR
The sandbags were the hardest. He had grown almost superstitious 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 prone, 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 grass, 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,” 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 butt 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 crappy 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 ass 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.”
“Shit,” 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 fuck was Swagger up to?
It ate at him. What deal was this?
It bothered him.
He can’t go out. He promised.
Shit.
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 hell are you doing here? You should be checking your gear to turn in to supply tomorrow,” said Feamster.
“Is something going on with Sierra-Bravo-Four?”
“Sierra-Bravo-Four is going back to the world; that’s what’s going on with Sierra-Bravo-Four,” said Bob.
“Looks like a mission briefing to me.”
“It ain’t nothing that concerns you.”
“That’s a map. I see route markers pinned on it and coordinates penciled in. You going on a job, Sierra-Bravo?”
“Negative,” said Bob.
“You are too,” said Donny.
“It ain’t a goddamn thing. Now, you git your young ass out of here, got that? You got work you should be doing. This ain’t no time for screwing off, even if you’re down to a day and a wake-up.”
“What is it?” Donny said.
“Nothing. No big deal.”
“Sir?”
“Sergeant,” said Feamster, “you ought to tell him.”
“It’s a rinky-dink recon, that’s all, a one-man thing. We haven’t covered the north in a couple of weeks. They could have infiltrated in, gone through the trees and have set up in the north, a few klicks out. I’m just going to mosey out to see if I cut tracks to the north. A couple klicks out, a couple klicks in. I’ll be back by nightfall.”
“I’m going.”
“My ass, you are. You have to spend tomorrow processing out. Nobody goes into the field on the last day.”
“That’s right, Fenn,” said Captain Feamster. “Company policy.”
“Sir, I can process out in an hour. Just this one last mission.”
“Christ,” said Swagger.
“I’ll worry about it all the way back.”
“Man, can’t you take no slack at all? Nobody goes out with just a wake-up left. It’s a Marine Corps policy.”
“It is, my ass. It’s the same deal, a guy to spot, a guy to talk on the radio. A guy to work security if it comes to that.”
“Christ,” said Swagger. He looked over at Feamster and Brophy.
“It really is a two-man job,” said Brophy.
“If we go, we go. Full field packs, Claymores, cocked and locked. I would hate to get caught short on the last day.”
“Cocked and locked, rock and roll, the whole goddamn nine yards,” Donny said.
“When did you take over this outfit?”
“I’m only doing my job.”
“You are a stubborn crazy bastard and I hope that poor girl knows what a hardhead she’s looped up with.”
At 0-dark-30, Donny rose and found Bob already up. He slipped into his camouflages for the last time, pulled the pack on. Canteens ready. Claymores ready. Grenades ready. He painted his face jungle green and brown. Last time, he told himself in the mirror. He smiled, showing white teeth against the earthy colors.
He checked his weapons: .45, three mags, M14, eight mags. There was a ritual here, a natural order, checking one thing then the next, then checking it all again. It was all ready.
He crawled from his hootch, went to the S-2 bunker, where Bob, similarly accoutred except that he had the Remington rifle instead of an M14, waited, sipping coffee, talking quietly with Brophy over the map.
“You don’t have to go, Fenn,” said Bob, looking over to him.
“I’m going,” said Donny.
“Check your weapons, then do a commo check.”
Donny examined his M14, pulling the bolt to seat a round in the chamber, then letting it fly forward. He put the safety on, then took out the .45, ascertained that the mag was full but the chamber empty, as Swagger had instructed him to carry the piece. He ran the quick commo check, and all systems were functioning.
“Okay,” said Bob, “last briefing. Up here, toward Hoi An. We go a straight northward course, through heavy bush, across a paddy dike. We should hit Hill 840 by 1000 hours. We’ll set up there, glass the paddies below in the valley for a couple of hours, and head back by 1400 hours. We’ll be in by 1800 at the latest. We’ll stay in PRC range the whole time.”
“Good work,” said Brophy.
“You all set, Fenn?” Bob asked.
“Gung ho, Semper Fi and all that good shit,” said Donny, at last strapping the radio on, getting it set just right. He picked up his M14 and left the bunker. The light was beginning to seep over the horizon.
“I don’t want to go out the north,” said Bob. “Just in case. I want to break our pattern. We go out the east this time, just like we did before. We ain’t never repeated ourself; anybody tracking us couldn’t anticipate that.”
“He’s gone, he’s dead, you got him,” said Brophy,
“Yeah, well.”
They reached the parapet wall. A sentry came over from the guard post down the way.
“All clear?” Swagger asked.
“Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain’t nothing out there.”
Bob slipped his head over the sandbags, looked out into the defoliated zone, which was lightening in the rising sun. He couldn’t see much. The sun was directly in his eyes.
“Okay,” he said, “last day-time to hunt.”
He set his rifle on the sandbag berm, pulled himself over, gathered the rifle and rolled off. Donny made ready to follow.
How many days now? Four, five? He didn’t know. The canteen had bled its last drop of water into his throat yesterday before noon. He was so thirsty he thought he’d die. He hallucinated through the night: he saw men he had killed, he saw Sydney, where he won the gold, he saw women he had fucked, he saw his mother, he saw Africa, he saw Cuba, he saw China, he saw it all.
I am losing my mind, he thought.
Everything was etched in neon. His nerves fired, his stomach heaved, he had starvation fantasies. I should have brought more food. Something in his blood sugar made him twitch uncontrollably.
This would be the last day. He could stand it no more.
The days were the worst. There was no shield from the su
n and it had burned his body red in slivers, between the brim of his soft cap and his collar. The backs of his hands were now so swollen he could hardly close them.
But the nights were no better: it got cold at night and he shivered. He was afraid to sleep because he might miss the Americans on their way out. So he stayed awake at night and slept during the day, except that it was too hot to sleep well. The insects devoured him. He’d never leave this cursed chunk of bare ground in the most forgotten land in the world. He could smell his own physical squalor and knew he was living beyond the bounds of both civilization and sanitation. He was putting himself through the absolute worst for this job. Why was he here?
Then he remembered why he was here.
He looked at his watch: 0600. If they were going on a mission today, this was the time they’d go.
Wearily, he brought the binoculars to his eyes, and peered ahead. He had to struggle with the focus and he lacked the strength to hold it steady.
Why didn’t I take that shot when—
Movement.
He blinked, unbelieving, feeling the sense of miracle a hunter feels when after the long stalk he at last sees his game.
There was motion down there, though it was hard to make out in the low light. It looked like the movement of men from the bunkers toward the berm but he could not be sure.
He abandoned the binoculars, shifted left and squirmed behind the rifle, trying his hardest not to jar its placement. He poured himself around it, half mounting the sandbag into which the toe of its butt was jammed, his fingers finding the grip, his face swimming up toward the spot weld, feeling the jam of his thumb against his cheekbone.
He looked through it, saw nothing, but in a second his focus returned.
He could see motion behind the berm, a small gathering of men.
It was an unbearably long shot, he now saw, a shot no man had the right to take.
The wind, the temperature, the humidity, the distance, the light: it all said, You cannot take this shot.
Yet he felt a strange calm confidence now.
All his agonies vanished. Whatever it was inside him that made him the best was now fully engaged. He felt strong, purposeful. The world ceased to exist. It gradually bled away as he gave himself to the circle of light before him, his position perfect, the right leg cocked just to the right to put some tension in his body, tightening his Adductor magnus but not too much, his hands strong and steady on the rifle, the spot weld perfect, no parallax in the scope, the butt strong against his shoulder; it was all so perfect. He controlled his breath, exhaling most of it, holding just a trace of oxygen in his lungs.