Meat just muttered, “Holy shit.”
Stuart said, “But we aren’t shooting from here.” A pause. “Are we?”
“Why not?”
Jay got over his awe at the guide’s natural distance-calculating ability. “Look. It’s your job to get us within range, not just to within sight.”
The guide replied with annoyance, “I could hit him.”
Jay laughed now. “Well, you’re the fucking guide, so you’re supposed to be better than us. But since you didn’t even bother to bring a rifle, you can’t prove it, can you?”
Meat held his bolt action Winchester out. “You want to take a shot? I’d like to see you try it.”
The guide said, “Why not?” but he didn’t reach for the rifle. Instead he spit once more to the side, rolled forward from a seated position into a prone position, unzipped his camouflage jacket, and reached into the folds of his clothing. To the utter confusion of the three fraternity brothers in the grass next to him, he slowly drew a perfectly ordinary-looking black handgun.
Jay said, “You’re crazy.”
The guide did not speak. He just leveled the semiautomatic pistol out in front of him, holding it in his right hand and resting his right forearm on top of his left forearm, which he positioned perpendicular to his body on the ground.
Stuart said, “That’s an impossible shot with a handgun.”
The guide spoke now, but it sounded as if he was talking to himself. “Humidity’s got to be seventy percent. Four-point-five-inch barrel, forty-cal hollow point, it’s gonna be pretty draggy, but I’ve got a full-value five-mile wind to work with. I’d say I need about a twenty-four-foot holdover.”
Meat said, “Even if you could hit one of those hogs from here, you couldn’t possibly kill it. That bullet will go an inch into its hide and get stuck in the fat or the muscle.”
The guide nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off his pistol’s iron sights. “You’re right. Let’s do a twenty-five-and-a-half-foot holdover, go for the brain pan.”
The three boys sat there agog, staring at the big bearded man lying in the grass next to them. They saw the barrel of the black pistol rise just slightly.
“You are fucking nuts,” muttered Jay, but then he quickly brought his binoculars up to his eyes. The other two did the same, and they focused on the target.
A single gunshot pounded the air next to them. Jay jerked his binos away from his eyes with a flinch, but he got them recentered on the dark brown hog on the far hill. The animal just stood there, his snout rooting idly in the pine needles.
“You missed,” Jay said.
And then the hog shuddered, its head twitched, and it dropped snout-first into the shallow hole it had been digging. It fell on its side, its legs kicked out, and then it stilled.
Only then did all the other wild boar on the hillside begin running off in different directions. And seconds after that, the echo of the pistol’s report made its way from the far hillside to the four men.
Jay, Meat, and Stuart all moved as one. Eyes slowly lifted out of their binoculars and turned to the man next to them.
Mouths opened slightly, but no one spoke.
Zack Hightower rolled back up to a sitting position, reholstered his Glock 22 on his hip under his coat, and spit in the grass. He looked over to the three sissy college boys next to him. In a tone not quite as snide as he intended he said, “I’ll kill him for you, but I sure as shit am not going to go get him for you.”
Meat was the first of the three boys to speak. “One of the old dudes in the lodge said you were in the SEALs. We thought he was full of shit.”
Hightower sighed. “You aren’t ‘in the SEALs.’ You are in the navy. You are a SEAL.”
Jay said, “So… you were a SEAL?”
Hightower did not answer. Instead he cocked his head to the left and looked up to the sky.
“What is it?” Meat asked.
Zack kept looking around, trying to find the source of the engine noise he was hearing. After several seconds, he said, “Helo.”
A black helicopter appeared over the ridge on the other side of the valley, flew past the downed wild boar, and approached the four men.
“EC-130,” Zack added.
Jay asked, “What’s it doing here?”
Zack smiled a little now — he couldn’t help it — then he stood, grabbed his pack, and slung it over a shoulder. He brushed some of the mud and wet leaves off his clothing. “I do believe he’s here for me.”
The aircraft hovered above a rolling pasture, the flattest area on the hillside, just one hundred feet away from the hunters. It lowered down onto its skids and Zack started towards it.
Jay shouted after him. “Hey! Where the hell are you going?”
Zack turned back around and snapped his fingers, like he’d forgotten about the three boys sitting in the grass. He reached into his pocket, removed the keys to his pickup, and threw them overhand to Jay.
He said, “The truck is seven point five klicks east-southeast.”
Meat asked, “Which way is that? And what’s a klick?”
Jay stood now. “Wait! You can’t just leave us!”
Hightower turned around and headed for the helo. Over the sound of the Eurocopter’s engine he shouted back to them. “Call your dad. I hear he knows the old dude who owns the lodge.”
Zack Hightower climbed aboard the helicopter with a nod to the crew, nonchalant, like he’d been expecting it all day, and the helo lifted back off into the gray sky while the boys watched from below.
14
Catherine King didn’t always come in to the office on Sundays, but she was here today, preparing an investigative piece on a recent drone attack in Syria with a deadline of noon on Monday.
She had a corner cubicle area that wasn’t quite an office, but it was more than what most of the reporters at the Post got. A ten-by-ten space filled with books, magazines, newspapers, file folders, rolling duffels and backpacks, yoga mats and other fitness-related items, along with a few pictures pinned into the fabric of the wall of her cube.
Catherine had never married, never had children. She’d felt sure it would happen in her thirties, and when it hadn’t come to pass by her forties she felt sure she’d become too old and set in her ways to settle down. Now in her fifties, she threw herself into her only real loves: her work and her yoga practice.
This morning she’d come directly from her Sunday class at Georgetown Yoga, and she sat at her desk now in full loose-fitting exercise attire. She wasn’t concerned with her appearance, because the few people who worked in the office on Sunday afternoon had known her for years, and there was no one around she was out to impress.
Catherine focused on her article till a reflection in her computer monitor caused her to spin around in surprise. When she did she found a young man with thinning blond hair and a wispy mustache-goatee combo, a smile on his face and a backpack over his shoulder.
“Let me guess,” Catherine said as she stood and extended a hand. “You must be Andy Shoal.”
“A real pleasure to finally meet you.” He shook her hand eagerly. “I’ve followed your work since J-school. Before, even.”
“How nice.” Catherine forced a little smile at the comment, then she scooped a stack of manila shipping pouches off of one of the two extra chairs in her cubicle area and offered the seat to Andy. He plopped down and dropped his backpack on the floor, and she sat back down in front of her monitor, holding the pouches in her lap because she didn’t want to foul up her filing system by placing them on any other surface in the messy cubicle.
“Hope you don’t mind me dropping in unannounced,” Andy said, looking around at the mess while he spoke.