Now Russ was alone. A great aching self-pity came over him. He did not want to be here, he did not want to be alone in the dark, with a world-class sniper with world-class gear hunting him. He looked up and down the creek bed, feeling the numbness of the cold eat into him, looking desperately for at least the energy to obey his meager instructions, which were only to position himself farther up the bed, wait for Bob to make his move, then slip away.
He moved tentatively along, discovering in his twenty-second well-fed year what every infantryman learns in his first week of duty: that crawling along the ground, particularly through mud and water, over rough stones with somebody trying to kill you, is quite unpleasant. It is in fact sheer misery.
Russ shivered as the water bubbled and frothed against his face. He slithered noisily through it, fighting for leverage, slipping occasionally. He scraped his numb fingers raw on the rocks. He was so cold!
At one point he lay, gasping for air. He looked back down the waterway and saw only the glint of the liquid and the claustrophobic walls of the creek bed. Ahead: more of the same. An immense depression came and sat upon his shoulders. He just wanted to curl up in a little ball and go to sleep. He wanted Mom and Dad and Jeff to tell him he was all right. He wanted to be in that beat-up little house on the outskirts of Lawton, with his fat old dad on the sofa watching football and drinking beer and his mother in the kitchen working like a dog and his brother just come in from hitting a home run, and he himself upstairs, reading Nietzsche or Mailer or Malamud or whomever, and feeling infinitely superior but also infinitely connected to them.
Fuck, he thought. I am turning into Dorothy. There’s no place like home.
He clicked his heels together three times but it didn’t work: he was still in the Oz of the Ouachitas, alone, with a wicked witch with a rifle trying to track and kill him.
He squirmed ahead another thirty or forty feet. Suddenly, he realized: I am out of creek bed. This is it. This is where I ought to be.
He gathered himself for a rush and someone spoke to him.
“Time for some cappuccino, motherfucker, heh, heh, heh.”
It was Jed Posey, with his shotgun.
Bob looked at his watch. The minutes hustled by. Three minutes thirty, three forty, three fifty.
From where he lay, half in and half out, he could see nothing, though to a sniper the dark itself has textures and may be read like a map. He knew where the hill was across the path because the black there was dense and impenetrable; there was enough illumination in the sky that he could read or sense the horizon at the top of the hill. To his left, the forest rolled away, essentially downhill, the path zigging off.
Bob knew he had about two hundred naked yards to go, uphill, then over the crest, moving through a screen of trees. It was too far. It was too damned far.
Fifty he might make, a hundred at the farthest reaches of luck. But two hundred to the point where he could fade into the forest past the crest and in its protection beeline north to intersect the logging road where the car was hidden: no, too far. Nobody would be that lucky.
Three fifty-five.
It was a lousy plan. It was a terrible plan. Why had he committed to it? He now saw it made better sense to go to hide right here, at this end. Then maybe, in the dawn, Preece or whoever would have to come and investigate. He might get into range with the .45 and Bob could take him.
But he hated that plan too. Preece would come at night, and he’d come with his black light blazing, and there was no place Bob or Russ could hide and he’d see them, cowering in the water, and from fifty yards out he’d do them both, easy as pie.
You have to move or you’ll die.
He tried to remember. Was he this scared in Vietnam? Was he this scared ever?
Everyone thought he was such a hero, such a cool hand in the insanity of a gun battle. He didn’t feel heroic. He felt like a little boy when Major Benteen comes and tells you your daddy is gone and the loss sits upon you and you face the universe totally alone.
I am alone, you think, and it scares you.
I am so alone, Bob thought: then he thought of his wife and his daughter.
I will get back! he thought, and with that he launched himself, screamed “Preece” loud as he could and started to run.
“You know what’d happen to you in prison, puppy? Them old cons’d use you like a gal. You’d be a gal, in prison.”
Russ cowered at his feet, still in the rushing water, freezing, trapped.
“Please don’t hurt me,” he begged. It wasn’t The Wizard of Oz anymore. It was Deliverance.
“‘Please don’t hurt me,’” laughed Posey.
“I never did anything,” whimpered Russ.
“Damn, ain’t that the way it always happens?” said Posey, scrofulous and old, so rancid of odor that Russ could smell him even now.
“Bye, bye, Maryjane,” said Posey, lifting the shotgun. “Here comes both bar—”
An interesting thing happened. As he was speaking, the upper half of Posey’s head, that is, from the nose up, simply vaporized into a cloud of mist, as if it had been somehow squirted away by a giant atomizer. There was no sound, there was no agony or death spasm, it was simply that in a nanosecond a living man became a totally dead one, the instant rag doll, as Jed Posey imploded like one of those poetically rigged buildings where the explosives knock out all the weight-bearing girders and the thing dissolves downward into its own rubble.
So it was with Posey, who melted downward (“I’m melting,” Russ thought incongruously, returning to Oz), spun and in a second had fallen with such loose-limbed thunder that when his crownless skull hit the ground, it sent a spray of brain gobbets and plasma spattering into Russ’s face. It was raining brains!
Ycccch!
He bolted backwards and puked for several seconds.
Then he cowered in the water.
No way he was going anywhere.
Preece knew from Nam what it looks like on the green scope when you hit. He saw the exact second the shot hit the brain and blew it out, noted the instant of utter stillness that came across a body from which life has just been ripped. A white, glowing spume expelled from the stricken skull; the body fought the inevitable for a split second, then yielded to death and collapsed into the creek bed.
One down.
Bob?
Probably the boy.
At that moment came the call “Preece” from the other end of the creek bed and Preece cursed, recognizing Bob’s tone in it, and pivoted swiftly to track the man down. But Bob was outside of the field of fire of the hide—dammit!—and Preece lost a valuable second deciding what to do and another one or two in the actual doing of it; with a stout elbow, he punched aside the plastic roof of the hide and sat upright, dragging the rifle with him. It took still more seconds to reorient as his target now lurked in the range of forest and slope just beyond the hill.
He brought the rifle to his shoulder and the scope to his eye and through its lens began to scan. He pivoted back and forth, in and out, listening intently, waiting for the device to yield a treasure, for surely Bob was out there, running crazily outward, toward the crest of the next low ridge.
Damn! Nothing.
He blinked, wiped his eye, reset the rifle and began again to pivot, now cursing that he had active IR instead of ambient-light or passive IR technology, for it made him dependent on the range of the IR searchlight atop his scope. He looked for indicators: wavering bushes, crushed undergrowth, dust in the air, all of which might signify that the man had come through.
Then he had him. Bob was zigzagging toward the crest, near it, but Preece had him, could see him, nearly two hundred yards out and at the ragged edge of the black light’s ability to illuminate. He laid the crosshairs on the man, waited to take the tremble out of the sight picture until the reticle sat perfectly astride the shoulder blades and pressed the trigger.
Bob ran like a crazed man, zigging this way and that, trending north toward the crest of a ridge. He ran
blindly through the dark trees, beyond caring what came at him. Branches cut his face, slashed at his arms, snarly roots tried to bring him down, sending him spinning at one point nearly out of control. He ran in darkness, and all his wounds screamed at him. He ran in fear, and all his doubts began to yell at him.
He could not will his imagination to cease: he saw it, a man in a ghillie suit with a big, silenced rifle, superbly accurate, drawing a bead, taking the slack out of the trigger, sending a bullet through him. The sniper sniping the sniper. Something enraged him about this: he was the man on that end of the rifle, and now he was the man being sniped.
Oxygen debt clawed at him; shrapnel from an old wound seemed to have worked its way free; loose glass ground and clicked in his stomach.
He could see the crest line just a few yards ahead but the trees thinned and he hated his nakedness, his gunlessness, his terrible vulnerability. Just a little bit more and yet as he moved from the trees to the open area just at the crest, the huge weight of intuition clamped down on him.
If Preece was going to shoot, this is when he’d do it.
Involuntarily, Bob went to the earth.
Sonic booms filled the air. The sound clapped loud and when the rounds struck the ground, they yanked up huge gouts of dirt and he could hear the whine of ricochets spiraling away.
He’s shooting, goddamn him, thought Bob, low to the ground and squirming desperately through the vegetation.
He crawled like a madman, for surely Preece would be scoping the area where he had to be.
Preece couldn’t see him, but he could feel him.
Recon by fire.
Every three or four seconds, Preece put out a probing round. There was the close-by crack! and the earth suddenly erupted as a bullet tore into it.
Bob found cover behind a tree which might stop a bullet or might not. He crawled to his feet.
CRACKkkk.
A bullet struck nearby, filling the air with dust.
Behind him: CRACK. Another one.
Bob stood behind the tree, as still as he could hold himself.
WHACCCCKKKK
Preece put a bullet into the tree; it exited an inch in front of Bob’s face, spewing slivers of wood and bark as it blasted outward. He blinked blood away and saw lights flash as his optic nerves fired off. A tongue of pain licked through his brain.
Oh, Christ, Bob thought. He’s seen me.
He stood very still.
Would the sniper fire again? If he fired again, the bullet would go through the tree and hit him. Would it have enough velocity to kill him?
Nothing could be done.
You just stood there, your ass on the line. If he fired again into the tree, the bullet would hit Bob and, yes, would kill him.
Please, he prayed. Get me out of here.
WHACCCCCKKKKK!
Another round tore through the tree; something stung Bob in the arm and made him flinch furiously. The bullet had torn through the dead center of the tree but, as bullets will by the alchemy of velocity, terminal energy, rotation and target density, had somehow deviated off the true and deflected enough to tear a furrow in an arm. It must have missed his body by a half an inch.
Would he shoot again?
Run, he told himself. Run like hell, get away from here.
But he knew if he ran he was dead.
CRACKkkk.
A bullet tore into the ground ten yards behind him.
The sniper fired again, farther away still. He was probing another area.
Bob heard a last shot, maybe thirty yards away.
How big was the cone of his light? Maybe not that big. Without willing it, he broke for the crest.
CRACKkkkk.
The bullet broke the earth just to the right of him, kicking up a wicked spout. But he dove and launched himself, feeling achingly vulnerable, and landed beyond the crest as CRACKkkk, another round tore into the ground.
He was beyond the crest.
He was safe. He lay there, breathing hard.
Damn!
Preece thought possibly he’d hit him, but couldn’t count on it. The reticle had been dead center as the man leaped over the crest but he had a memory, a sensation, that his trigger finger may have rushed, just enough to pull the aim off.
Now what?
One down, now what?
A certain part said: Disengage. It’s over. You’ve lost the advantage. He knows you’re hunting him, he can hide a hundred places and ambush you.
But another part reminded him that Bob had yelled his name and figured out who was coming for him. He would come again.
Preece decided: move forward aggressively, set up on and scan the ridge. You still have the advantage in the dark. You can overtake him in his flight and still get the nice clean shot between the shoulder blades.
He stood, removed the magazine and reseated a fresh one with nineteen more 5.56s in it. Time to go to work.
He moved out, at the trot, and swiftly traversed the two hundred yards to the ridgeline, and set up again. Very carefully he scanned the two hundred yards ahead of him. He could see no sign of Bob, but on a far crest line, where it should have been still in the night, a bush still quivered as if something had brushed it in blind panic.
He’s on the run, thought Preece.
His past flared up before him, all his regrets, his mistakes, the terrible things he’d done, the shame he felt, his weaknesses, his failures, his rancid uglinesses. The forest was his own mind with all its crudities and barbarities, its insensitivities, its selfishness, its indulgences, its cruelties. He couldn’t stop running and he hated running; he’d never run before in his life and now he couldn’t stop.
Panic flared through him. He didn’t want to die. He had a wife, he had a daughter, he had a life: now, after three tours and the terrible business in ’92, now he was going to die.
Please don’t let me die, he thought, abject and broken.
He crossed a ridge, dropped for a second. Had he been running mindlessly? Was he lost? Could he just drop and wait for the dawn and come out in a few days? He could get out, get in the rental car and speed away for Arizona. He could forget all this. The hell with it. What was the point? No matter what happened it wouldn’t bring his father back.
He rose, ran again, directionless.
But no, not really: he knew he was trending due north, for that was the Dipper above and at its farthest point, the North Star, the lost man’s only and truest friend.
He ran farther, through dense shortleaf pines, through tangled scrub oaks and briers and vines, up ridges, at one point through a creek. He fell once too, stumbling on a root that pitched him forward, scraping his hand, ripping his knee. He lay there, on the edge of exhaustion, feeling as ancient and as doomed as the Egyptians.
I am fifty goddamned years old, he thought, and I ain’t going to make it.
But somehow he rose and kept going through the dark and dreamy forest, now up another ridge, now down another one. Ahead he saw a white, winding river, glowing ever so in the dark, and ran toward it, fled toward it, feeling the hot sweat race down his chest and neck, sensing his own hot smell rising, finding some kind of left-right rhythm that recalled the far-off cadences of a Parris Island drill field, and all the Jodie chants, how Jodie was fucking your girlfriend but he never had a girlfriend and how Jodie was the pride of your mama and your daddy, but both his mama and his daddy were dead. So who was Jodie anyhow, and why did he have it in so bad for poor marine recruits trying to master the intricacies of close-order drill on a pitiless South Carolina field, assaulted by men with leather lungs who tried to make them feel like maggots?
But Jodie came through here as then. Hating Jodie somehow liberated a last squirt of adrenaline from a secret gland store in his body, and he hit the river only to find it was a river of dust: it was the road.
He crossed it quickly, without a thought to security, suddenly realizing he was far enough ahead of his pursuer. He faded into the underbrush, following the road from twenty
feet off it, gathering strength and passion with each step.
At last he saw it: a little brown rented Chevy. Would they have set up here? Were there more than one? No, there couldn’t be. One man, a good man, hunted him, not a team.
He ran to the car, got the key out: opened the trunk.
He grabbed the Mini-14, flicked the scabbard away so that the gun itself was in his hands. Then he dug through the bag, thinking that he had one, yes, one more, and here it was, a last box of “Cartridge, 5.56mm, M-196 Tracer.” He broke the box open and quickly threaded the rounds into the forty-shot magazine, twenty of them. Then he broke open another box, “Cartridge, 5.56mm, M-193 Ball,” and slipped five in atop the twenty tracers.
He racked the bolt, felt a round feed. He was armed.
He knelt, put his fingers into the loam and came up with dirt, which he smeared abundantly on his face, to take the brightness off. There was a bandanna in the old bag too, and he tied it swiftly around his head, to keep the highlights of his still-blondish hair from glowing. He needed one more thing.
How do you fight infrared? What is infrared? It is heat. It sees heat. You have to fight it with heat. You have to fight its fire with your fire. At last he found the last thing: the gallon can of Coleman fluid for the lantern.
He picked it up, feeling its liquid-sloshing weight and terrible awkwardness, but that couldn’t be helped.
He slammed the trunk shut.
All right, he thought, time to hunt.
41
Peck sat in the forest, slouched atop the ATV in the dark. He was in the middle of a serious crisis of confidence.
His imagination soared with negative possibility; he felt himself growing shaky, testy, rancid. He kept looking at his watch, willing the numbers to melt more swiftly into other, later numbers. But they were stubborn boys: they’d hardly moved a notch since the last goddamned time he’d checked, three minutes ago. This was going to be a long night.
He rested in a hollow, a few hundred feet off the trail by which he’d brought the sniper into his territory. Around him towered huge trees that leaned gently in the breeze. But he could see exactly nothing and had no sense of space or distance. The nearby trees yielded merely to textureless black. He felt like he was hiding under a blanket and at any second someone could sneak up on him and put a bullet into him. He didn’t like it a bit.