Call in artillery.
Call in smoke.
No artillery.
No smoke.
Throw a grenade.
No grenade.
Fire the Claymore.
No Claymore. The Claymore was in the case three thousand feet up the mountain. He wished he had it now.
Call in a chopper.
No chopper.
Call in tactical air.
No tactical air.
But a word caught somewhere in his mind.
Smoke.
No smoke.
It would not go away.
Smoke.
You move under smoke. Under smoke he cannot see you.
There is no smoke.
Why would the word not leave his head? Why would it not go away? Smoke.
What is smoke: gaseous chemicals producing a blur of atmospheric disturbance.
There is no smoke.
Smoke.
There is no—
But there was snow.
Snow, agitated, could hang in the air like smoke. Plenty of snow. Snow all around.
He turned to his right to face a wall of snow. Above him, on a precipice, more snow. The snow that had fallen silently through the night and even now glided down from the heavens.
Solaratov loves snow. He knows snow.
But Bob saw now that above him, several hundred pounds of the stuff rested on the branches of a pine, which had turned it into some kind of upside-down vanilla cone. In fact, several of the trees were above him. The snow fell and caught on them in the gray mountain light. He could almost feel them groaning, yearning for some kind of freedom.
He reached out with his rifle barrel but could touch none of it.
But then the plan formed in his mind.
He edged to his side, making certain to keep his body profile low behind the rocks, so that Solaratov would not get the last shot free. His right hand crept across the parka, unzipped it, and he reached inside and removed the Beretta.
He steeled himself.
It was instinct shooting, unaimed fire, but his reflexes at this arcane pistol skill had always been quite good. He threaded his other wrist through the sling of the Remington M40, to secure it for his move.
He thumbed back the hammer. He looked at each of his targets.
He took a deep breath.
So do it, he thought.
So do it!
Something was happening.
A series of dry popping cracks reached Solaratov’s ears, far away, but definitely coming off the mountain.
What?
He looked hard through the scope, not daring to take it from the trapped man. He thought he saw a flash, the flight of something small through the air, a disturbance in the snow, and quickly came up with the idea of an automatic pistol, but what was he doing, trying to signal men in the area? Who could be in the area?
But in the next second his question was answered. He was shooting into the snow-laden pines above him, striking their trunks and driving the impact vibrations out their limbs, shooting fast so that the vibrations accumulated in their effect, and almost astonishingly, the snow loads of four pines yielded and slid down the mountain toward the supine man, where they hit and exploded into a fine blast of powder, a sheet of density that momentarily took his sight picture away from him.
Where is he?
He put the scope down because he could never find the man in the narrow width of vision, and saw him, rolling down the mountain a good fifty feet from the commotion he’d stirred.
Solaratov brought the rifle up fast, but couldn’t find the man, he was moving so quickly. At last he located him and saw that he had gotten a full fifty meters down the hill.
He picked up the good moving sight picture, fired quickly, remembering to lead on the moving target, but the bullet impacted behind the target, kicking up a huge geyser of snow.
Of course! The range had changed subtly; he was still holding for 654 meters, and the range was probably down to six hundred or so.
By the time he figured this out, the man had come to rest in the rocks below, and was now much better situated behind them, having picked up some maneuverability and the position to shoot back.
Goddamn him! he thought.
With a thud he caught on something, taking his breath away. He had come to rest in a new nest of rocks fifty meters downslope. The snow still hung in the air, and in his desperate fall-run, it had gotten into his parka and down his neck. But in the complete uncoordination of the moment, he made certain he was behind cover. He breathed hard. He hurt everywhere, but felt warmth pouring down the side of his face, and reached up to touch blood.
Had he been hit?
No: the fucking night-vision goggles, totally worthless but forgotten in the crisis, had slipped down his head crookedly, and one strap cut a wicked gash in his ear. The cut stung. He grabbed the things and had an impulse to toss them away. What was the point now?
But maybe Solaratov wasn’t sure where he was now, nestled behind a slightly wider screen of rocks. He looked and saw he had a little more room to move from rock to rock.
Maybe he could even get a shot off.
But at what?
And then he saw that the slope dropped off intensely and, worse, the rocks had run out.
This is it, he thought.
This is as far as I go.
What did I get out of it?
Nothing.
His ear stung.
“They’ve moved,” Sally said. “Now they’re behind the house. You can hear the shots are over there.”
“Are we going to be all right?” asked Nikki.
“Yes, baby,” Julie said, holding her daughter close.
The three were in the cellar of the house, and Sally had spent the past few minutes jamming old chairs, trunks and boxes against the door at the head of the steps, just in case someone came looking for them with bad intentions.
The cellar smelled of mold and faded material, and spring floods that had soaked everything some years back. It was dirty and dark, only meager light coming through snow-covered windows.
There was one other door, to the outside, one of those slanted wood things that led down three steps to them. Sally had piled up more impediments to that passageway, but there was no way of really locking the doors. They could only forestall things.
“I wish we had a gun,” said Nikki.
“I wish we did too,” said Sally.
“I wish Daddy was here,” said Nikki.
Bob had a rare moment of visual freedom, a long, clean look into the stunted snow-covered trees at the base of the mountain. But he could see nothing, no movement, no hint of disturbance.
Then a bullet sang off the rock an inch beyond his face, kicking a puff of granite spray into his eye. He fell back, stifling a yell, and felt the telltale numbness that indicated some kind of trauma. But only for a second; then it lit into raw, harsh but meaningless pain, and he winced, driving more pain into the eye.
Goddamn him!
Solaratov had seen just the faintest portion of head exposed and he was on it that fast, putting a bullet an inch shy of the target. An inch at six hundred-odd meters. Could that son of a bitch shoot or what?
Swagger felt his eye puff, his lid flare, and he closed it, sensing the throb of pain. He touched the wounded sector of his face: blood, lots of it, from the stone spray, but nothing quite serious. He blinked, opened the eye, and saw hazily out of it. Not blind. Trapped but not blind, not yet.
The guy was so good.
No ranging shots; he got the range right every single time, had Bob pinned and eyeballed.
No goddamn ranging shots.
Solaratov had an odd gift, a perfect gift for estimating distance. It made the package complete. Some men had it, some didn’t. Some could learn it with experience, some couldn’t. It was in fact the weakest part of Swagger’s own game, his ability to estimate range. It had cost him a few shots over the years because he lacked the natural inclination to
read distances while possessing in spades all the shooter’s other natural gifts.
Donny had a gift for it; Donny could look and tell you automatically. But Bob was so lame at it, he’d once spent a fortune on an old Barr & Stroud naval gunfire range finder, a complex, ancient optical instrument that with its many lenses and calibration gizmos could eventually work the farthest unknown distance into a recognizable quantity.
“Some day they’ll make ’em real small,” he remembered telling Donny at one lost moment or other.
“Then you won’t need a go-fer like me,” Donny had said with a laugh, “and I can sit the next war out.”
“Yes, you can,” Bob had said. “One war is enough.”
An idea flirted with him. From where? From Donny? Well, from somewhere over the long years. But it wasn’t solid yet: he just felt it beyond the screen of his consciousness, unformed, like a little bit of as-yet-unrecognizable melody.
This guy is so good. How can he be so good?
Donny had the answer. Donny wanted to tell him. Donny knew up in heaven or wherever he was, and Donny yearned somehow to tell him.
Tell me! he demanded.
But Donny was silent.
And down below Solaratov waited, scoping the rocks, waiting for just a bit of a sliver of a body part to show so he could nail it, and then get on with business.
He is so good.
He made great shots.
He hit Dade Fellows dead on, he hit Julie riding at an oblique angle flat out at over eight hundred meters, he was just the—
That scene replayed in his mind.
What was odd about it, he now saw, was how featureless it had been. A ridge on a mountain, with a wall of rock behind it, very little vegetation. It had been almost plain, almost abstract.
So?
So how did he range it?
There were no guidelines, no visual data, no known objects visible to make a range estimate, only the woman on the horse getting smaller as she got farther away on the oblique.
How did he know where to hold, when her range changed so radically after the first shot?
He must be a genius. He must just have the gift, the ability to somehow, by the freakish mechanics of the brain, to just know. Donny had that. Maybe it’s not so rare.
But then he knew. Or rather Donny told him, reaching across the years.
“You idiot,” Donny whispered hoarsely in his ear, “don’t you see it yet? Why he’s so good? It’s so obvious.”
Bob knew then why the man had shot at him as he fell but missed. The range had changed; he estimated the lead and got it slightly wrong and just missed. But once his target was still, he knew exactly the range. And that’s how he could hit Julie. He knew exactly. He solved the distance equation, and knew how far she was and where to hold to take her down.
He has a range finder, Bob thought. The son of a bitch has a range finder.
———
Solaratov looked at his watch. It was just past 0700. The light was now gray approaching white, a kind of sealed-off pewter kind of weather. The snow was falling harder and a little breeze had kicked up, tossing and twisting the flakes, pummeling as they rotated down. The wind got under the crack of his hood, where his flesh was sweaty, and cut him like a scythe. A little chill ran up his spine.
How long can I wait? he wondered.
Nobody was flying in for yet another few hours, but maybe they could get in with snowmobiles or plow the highway and get in that way.
A sudden, uncharacteristic uneasiness settled over him.
He made a list:
1.) Kill the sniper.
2.) Kill the woman.
3.) Kill the witnesses.
4.) Escape into the mountains.
5.) Contact the helo.
6.) Rendezvous.
An hour’s worth of work, he thought, possibly two.
He kept on the scope, the rifle cocked, his finger riding the curve of the trigger, his mind clear, his concentration intense.
How long can I stay at this level?
When do I have to blink, look away, yawn, piss, think of warmth, food, a woman?
He pivoted on the fulcrum of the log, running the scope along the ridge of rocks, looking for target indicators. More breath? A shadow out of place? Some disturbed snow? A regular line? A trace of movement? It would happen, it had to, for Swagger wouldn’t be content to wait. His nature would compel action and then compel doom.
He can’t see me.
He doesn’t know where I am.
It’s just a matter of time.
He tried to figure out a range finder. How do the goddamn things work? His old Barr & Stroud was mechanical, like a surveyor’s piece of equipment, with gears and lenses. That’s why it was so heavy. It was a combination binocular and adding machine: completely impractical.
But no modern shooter would have such a device: too old, too heavy, too delicate.
Laser. It has to work off a laser. It has to shoot a laser to an object, measure the time and make a sure, swift calculation off of that.
Lasers were everywhere. They used them to guide bombs, aim guns, operate on the eye, remove tattoos, imitate fireworks. But what kind of laser was this one?
Off the visible spectrum, since it projected no beam, no red dot.
Ultraviolet?
Infrared?
How could it be brought into the visible spectrum?
It’s a kind of light. How do I see it?
One idea: light being heat, if he could get Solaratov to project it through an ice mist, its heat would burn tracks in the snow. Then he could shoot back down the tracks and…
But that was absurd. Besides involving setting up some complex linkage of actions, any one of which could catch him a 7mm Magnum through the lungs, he didn’t even know if it would work.
Idea two: get Solaratov to shoot the laser through a piece of ice. It would bend, and send back some faulty reading. He would over- or undercompensate, miss and…
Insane. Unworkable.
Think! Think, Goddammit. How do I see it?
And then it occurred to him.
Would I see it on night vision? Would I see it in my goggles? Would they register it?
He picked them up where they lay, half in, half out of the snow, slid the harness over his skull, pulled the goggles down and snapped them on. They yielded a green dense landscape, as if the world had ended in water. The seas had risen. Green was everywhere. Nothing else was clear.
How can I get him to lase me again? He knew. He had to move one more time, change the range.
Solaratov would go to his laser range finder.
If it works, it’ll be like a neon sign in the green, saying I AM THE SNIPER.
Now something was happening.
He saw puffs of breath rising above a certain accumulation of boulders, signifying some kind of physical exertion. He watched and one of the rocks seemed somehow to tremble.
Is he moving the rock?
Why would he move the rock?
But in the same second, as he steadied himself, as the rock wobbled truly erratically, seemed to pause, and then tumbled ever so majestically forward, pulling a score of smaller rocks with it, uncurling a shroud of snow as it fell, he knew.
He’s trying to bury me, Solaratov thought.
He’s trying to start an avalanche, to send tons of snow down the mountain and bury me.
But it wasn’t going to work. Avalanche snow, Solaratov knew, was old snow, its structure eroded by melt, its moisture mostly evaporated, so that it was dry and treacherous, a network of unsafe stresses and fault lines. Then and only then could a single fracture cut out its underpinnings and send it crashing down. This avalanche would never go anywhere. The snow was too wet and new; it might fly a bit, but it wouldn’t build. It would peter out a few hundred yards down.
On top of that, clearly the man didn’t even know where he was. Even now, as the rocks and their screen of snow tumbled abortively down the hill, not picking up energy but losin
g it, they were on no course toward himself, but more or less to the right about one hundred yards. The falling snow simply could not reach him.
He almost chuckled at the futility of it, remembering that his quarry was a jungle fighter, not a man of the mountains.
The rocks tumbled, trailing snow, but down the slope where the angle flattened, they lost their energy and rolled to a halt.
Solaratov watched them tumble, then brought the rifle back to bear on the original line of rocks. As he was shifting it upward, he thought he made out a white shape sloshing desperately through the snow.
He rose above it, came back, could not quite find it and then did track it quickly, but never quite got the fraction of line between third and fourth mil-dots precisely on it.
He saw that Swagger had moved, literally floundering his way downhill to this new position. So? He was a few dozen meters closer? Now he had less maneuverability. What possible difference did it make? He had made his last mistake.
The game, Solaratov thought, is almost over.
He put down his rifle, picked up the binoculars and prepared to shoot a laser, just to verify the distance to the new position.
Bob came to the halted rocks and hit them with a whack, but couldn’t stop to acknowledge the pain. Instead he pulled himself up, put his head and shoulders over the top, flicked the night-vision goggles down as he snapped them on and peered desperately into the void. He knew he was violating every rule in U.S. Marine Corps Sniping FMFM1-3B, which tells snipers never, ever to look over an obstacle, for that makes you too obvious to counterfire; no, you drop to your haunches and look around it. But he didn’t have the time.
There was no definition in the green murk, no shape, no depth, nothing but flat, vaguely phosphorescent green. He scanned, registered this nothingness, but was too intense to feel much in the way of despair, even if he knew he was hung out over the lip of the rock and that Solaratov could take him in an instant.
He waited. A second, then another, finally a third yanked by like trains slowed by the sludgy blood his heart pumped.
Nothing.
Maybe the laser wasn’t visible in the spectrum of the goggles. Who knew of such stuff? Maybe the laser ranging device was part of some advanced scope he knew nothing about, and it would announce itself, but be followed in another nanosecond by close to 1,500 foot-pounds of Remington 7mm Magnum arriving to erase him from the earth.