Thus, when the first sound arrived, he went into denial. He convinced himself it didn’t come. He had heard nothing. It was some trick of nature, out to hornswoggle him. But then it came again, this time classifiable by direction: it was from the north and it was the sound of metal striking metal, familiar but still unidentifiable.
He fought a bit of panic: what was it? He tried to search through his memory and the only image that seemed to associate itself with the sound was ludicrously automotive. It sounded somehow like someone working with a car in some way, possibly opening a trunk, then throwing things around inside the trunk.
He waited, listening so hard he thought his brain would explode. How could there be a car nearby? And how nearby was “nearby”? Then he remembered the dirt road north of here, about half a mile. He knew that Bob and the boy would have come by car and would have parked somewhere before they moved into the forest.
He looked at his watch: 9:43 .
Could Swagger have made it all the way back to the car in that time? He waited for the sound of an engine, to signify that whoever it was, was moving out of the area, leaving him to his own mission.
But then he heard, louder than anything before, the solid crunch of metal locking into metal. He knew it instantly: a trunk lid being slammed.
Shit and goddamn.
He suddenly felt achingly vulnerable. The ATV was out of the question: he couldn’t be bopping around the woods on a four-wheeled motorcycle, generating noise and exhaust, easy meat for all and sundry. Instead, he dropped off the vehicle and quickly calculated the point where the noise originated and the point where the sniper hid and thought to intersect them. If Bob was moving around in the woods he would be hunting a sniper, not any old poor nobody-gives-a-shit-about-him Duane Peck, with a chance to make his way in the world.
He didn’t want to do it, but sometimes, as Duane well knew, wants don’t have nothing to do with it. He flipped off his hat and began to night-navigate through the woods. He drew his Glock, repeating to himself what that Neechee had said: that which does not kill you makes you strong.
Bob tried to recall the terrain. Why do you never pay attention to the things that become so goddamned important? But he willed himself to recollect, and had a memory of what he thought would work best if the plan he’d cooked up were to have a chance. Wasn’t there a place he’d noticed on the left, maybe half a mile in, where the trees thinned for a bit, opened to a clearing, possibly left over from a logging operation some years ago at the base of a ridge. Or was that from some goddamned dream? Would he just bumble around until he placed himself before the sights of the sniper, who would nail the Nailer?
He tried to press that out of his mind. He tried to think: What will Preece do? Will he follow me? Yes, he has to: but how aggressively? He’ll dawdle, scanning the woods, afraid to get too close for risk of an ambush, knowing that he’s got all the advantage if he doesn’t blow it with overaggressiveness.
That’s what I’d do.
Now: how to draw him toward me.
There was only one answer. He drew the Mini-14 to his shoulder, aimed it pointlessly into the dark and fired three times fast.
The gun cracked and flashed, spitting empty brass, lighting the vault of trees that curved overhead, kicking ever so slightly. The noise was loud, and in its echo a few sleeping birds screamed or flapped airborne, uncorking a sense that the night had been disturbed.
Bob wondered: is he close enough to see the flashes?
He didn’t know, but now he’d informed his antagonist that he was armed. On dead reckoning he started to move to the left, praying that up ahead, just where he dreamed it was, the clearing waited.
Preece heard the shots, three fast ones, much less than a mile away. Though they were flat taps, without texture or resonance, he knew by the whipping crack that followed in their wake that they were supersonic, and therefore rifle bullets, not pistol bullets.
It had to be Swagger. He’d gotten to his car, gotten a rifle. From the swiftness of the fire, a semiauto, not a full auto, for they weren’t quite fast enough and didn’t have the deadening mechanical regularity of a machine gun. It sounded like an M-16 or a Mini-14, nothing big like an ’06 or .308.
But more: Bob had panicked. He thought he saw something move and ventilated it. Now he cowered breathlessly, afraid that he’d missed, probably afraid to go forward. He’d move laterally, knowing that whoever was stalking him would move toward the sound. Or he’d fired deliberately, to attract whoever was hunting him.
Didn’t really matter: the solution was the same.
You move left or right of the source of the noise, then set up, anticipating a target to come to your new front. If he’s moved left, he comes right to you. If he’s moved right, he’ll come around you. But he’ll be making the noise.
Preece drew a compass from his pocket and shot an azimuth to a tree on a ridge two hundred yards away. He flicked on the scope and took a last scan of the area, looking for movement in the black light of the infrared. Nothing but the shimmer of vegetation.
He left his position and moved swiftly to the tree. Setting up on the ridge, he scanned again, this time for several minutes. Nothing. Ahead, through the trees, he saw another ridge. He shot another azimuth to another tree, and moved to it, not rushing, not making undue noise, feeling relaxed, confident and aggressive. He was the only one who could see in the dark.
At the ridge, he looked down: a clearing. The trees ended halfway down the slope and yielded to a kind of meadow or something, where perhaps once there’d been a forest fire or some logging operations. Hmmm. It scared him. In the forest, he was invisible, but out there, possibly an experienced man might read his darker textures against the texture of the grass and send a shot home, even without night vision.
This perplexed him. Maybe Bob was playing some extremely subtle game on him. Whatever, the trees cut off a good view of the ridge. After scanning for several minutes to convince himself that Bob wasn’t hiding on this side of the clearing, he moved stealthily over the ridgeline and, keeping trees between himself and the clearing, moved down toward the edge.
He was almost there when krak krak, two shots lit off across the clearing and he could see the vivid flash, not a hundred yards away. Was Bob shooting at him? But no rounds came whipping through the trees, and the supersonic whisssh-crack of bullets overhead didn’t sound. He dropped behind the tree, scooted back into a solid prone and quickly brought the rifle to his shoulder, simultaneously going to IR. The rifle rested on the girders of his bones, not the uncertain power of his muscles: it was solid, and the reticle didn’t drift or wander.
In the green scope he could see it alclass="underline" the high grass of the clearing, undulating in the breeze just like the corn, the blunt verticals that were tree trunks and … yes, there he was … the man.
Bob the Nailer. He was on the other side, about as close in as Preece was, moving back and forth, evidently trying to decide whether or not to move across the field.
Preece put the crosshairs on him.