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
eck 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.
He spat a gob into the undergrowth. He listened. His only connection to what lurked around him was through his hearing. He knew: no news is good news. The sniper worked silently. If Peck started hearing things, happiness wasn’t just around the corner.
And so far, he had to admit, so good. He heard the whisper of air, now and then the scream of something small and furry dying before its time, the hoot of the occasional owl, but nothing metallic or mechanical. That was good. That was very good. He knew sound traveled miles in this place under these circumstances and his worst fear—Bob silently dispenses with the sniper and then comes hunting him—couldn’t come true.
He dreamed now of a simple pleasure: a world without this Bob Lee Swagger. That was the world he wanted, because in that world, with the patronage of Mr. Red Bama behind him, he at last had found his place, his niche. No redneck deputy with little education, gambling debts, dental bills, zero savings and an amphetamine habit. No sir: he would count. He could have a nice woman, a place. He’d be part of what he had always seen as “it,” meaning people who knew what to do, people with friends and possibilities, instead of, as he was now, a little man out on a limb all by his own lonesome, no one to catch him if he fell, no one to care. He was on nobody’s agenda: he was just an angry white man, and if he didn’t take care of himself, who would?