“To the cabin?”
“No! There’s nothing there but death. You back up into the woods and find someplace to go to ground. I don’t want you moving in the dark. He’ll find you. Remember: it’s alight. A black light, but a light. If you ain’t in the light, he don’t see you. Then, in daylight, that rifle is more of a problem than a help. Here.”
He gave Russ the compass.
“This’ll get you through the woods. After first light, you make good tracks. There’s a hill behind us, I don’t want you going up it. You cut back around it. Then you head due west by the compass, and soon enough, maybe fifteen miles, you pass Iron Fork Lake; five miles past that, you’ll come to 271. You call the cops, you tell ’em what’s happening. Meanwhile, I’ll try and make it back to the car and get my rifle. Then I’ll hunt this motherfucker down and fucking nail him.”
His face was a hard mask, set in stone and psychotic anger.
“He’ll kill you,” Russ said, the simple truth. “You don’t have a chance against his stuff.”
“It ain’t the gun, sonny. It’s the operator.”
Preece felt neither rage nor panic. He did not curse his luck or wonder what could possibly have alerted the two and caused them, in some incredible way, literally to disappear as his first brilliantly placed shot rocketed toward them. He recovered quickly, but they spilled into the creek bed exactly as he reacquired them and his next four rounds puffed against the far bank.
In the circle of the scope, in the cone of black light, it was bright as green noon. There was some verdure reflection but not much: it was like peering into a tinted photographic negative, a soupy, almost aquamarine world brilliantly illuminated by the infrared searchlight.
He scanned up and down the creek bed, knowing that Bob would realize that to stay put would be to die. Bob would have to make some kind of move: it was his nature. Now, how would he go? The creek bed was like a narrow trench about three hundred feet long at this point, and only deep enough to sustain cover for about one hundred feet. He could snake out either end, or he could go over the top, fading into the woods. But that would take him straight against the incline of the far hill; he’d be staked out against the rise like a butterfly on a pool table.
No, Bob would go out either one end or the other, and that was the problem with Preece’s system. It depended on a beam of invisible light, which gathered strength by focus. It was not powerful enough to illuminate both ends of the creek. Therefore, he had to scan continuously, covering the one, then the other—or figure out which one Bob would choose. It occurred to Preece to move lower down the slope to lessen the angle to the trench: in that way, he’d narrow the degree of muzzle arc he’d have to cover from one end to the other. But at the same time, suppose Bob moved when he himself was moving? Could he recover to shoot in time?
No. Stay put. Be patient. You have the great advantage. Do not squander it. Be strong, keep the heart hard. Keep scanning.
Then, at the far end of the trench, back toward the cabin, he saw a target. The cross hairs came onto him. Head shot, he thought. Very carefully, Preece began to take the slack out of the trigger.
Russ watched Bob slither away down the creek bed, totally animal now, feral, intense, driven. Bob was out of sight quickly in the dark, and he moved so expertly he made no noise. It was his gift: he vanished.
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.