“You will get killed. You will get killed, I’m telling you, you cannot—”
“I’m giving you a straight order; you follow it. Don’t give me no little-boy shit. I’m telling you what you have to do, and by God, you will do it, and that’s all there is to it, or I will be one pissed-off motherfucker, Lance Corporal Fenn.”
“I—”
“You do it! Goddammit, Fenn, you do it, and that’s all there is to it. Or I will have you up on charges and instead of going home, you’ll go to Portsmouth.”
This was bullshit, of course, and Donny saw through it in a second. It was all bullshit, because if Swagger went into the valley without security, he was not coming back. He simply was not. That’s what the physics of firepower decreed, and the physics of firepower were the iron realities of war. There was no appeal.
He was throwing his life away for some strangers in a camp he’d never see. He knew it, had known it all along. It was his way. More like Trig: hungry to die, as if the war were so inside him he knew he could not live without it; there would be no life to go home to. He had kept himself hard and pure just for this one mad moment when he could take on a battalion with a rifle, and if he could not live, it was also clear that he would fight to the very end. It was as if he knew there would be no place for warriors in any other world, and so he may as well embrace his fate, not dodge it.
“Jesus, Bob—”
“You got it square?”
“Yes.”
“You are a good kid. You go back to the world and that beautiful girl. You go to her and you put all this bad bullshit behind you, do you copy?”
“Roger.”
“Roger. Time to hunt. Sierra-Bravo-Four, last transmission, and out.”
And, with the sniper’s gift for subtle, swift movement, Bob then seemed to vanish. He slithered off down the hill to the low fog without looking back.
Bob worked down through the foliage, aware that he was clicking into the zone. He had to put it all behind him. There could be nothing in his head except mission, no other memories or doubts, no tremor of hesitation to play across the nerves of his shooting. He tried to get into his war face, to become, in some way, war. It was a gift his people had; his father had won the Medal of Honor in the big one against the Japs, messy business on Iwo Jima, and then come home to get the blue ribbon from Harry Truman and get blowed out of his socks ten years later by a no-account piece of trash in a cornfield. There were other soldiers in the line too: hard, proud men, true sons of Arkansas, who had two gifts: to shoot and see something die, and to work like hogs the long hot day. It wasn’t much; it’s what they had. But there was also a cloud of melancholy attached to the clan — off and on, over the Swagger generations back to that strange fellow and his wife who’d shown up in Tennessee in 1786 from who knew where, they’d been a line of killers and lonely boys, exiles. There was a blackness in them. He’d seen it in his father, who never spoke of war, and was as beloved as a man in a backwater like Blue Eye, Arkansas, could be, even more so than Sam Vincent, the county prosecutor, or Harry Etheridge, the famous congressman. But his father would have black dog days: he could hardly talk or stir; he’d sit in the dark, and just stare out at nothing. What was dogging him? The war? Some sense of his own luck? A feeling for the fragility of it? Memories of all the bullets that had been fired at him, and the shells, and how nothing had hit him in his vitals? That kind of luck had to run out, and Daddy knew it, but he went out anyway, and it killed him.
What could save you?
Nothing. If it was in the cards, by God, it was in the cards, and Daddy knew that, and faced up to it like a man, looked it in the eyes and spat in its black-cat face, until at last it reared up and bit him in a cornfield on the Polk County line.
Nothing could save you. Bob pressed on, sliding deeper into the fog. Odd how it clung, like clouds of wet wool; he’d never seen anything like it in the ’Nam, and this here was his third tour.
The fear began to eat at him, as it always did. Some fools said he had no fear, he was such a hero, but that only proved how little they knew. The fear was like a cold lump of bacon grease in his stomach, hard and wet and slick, that he could taste and feel at all times. You could not make it go away, you could not ignore it, and anybody who said you could was the worst damned kind of fool. Go on, be scared, he ordered himself. Let it rip. This may be it. But the one thing that scared him most of all wasn’t dying, not really; it was the idea of not doing the job. That was something to fear in the heart. He would do the job, by God; that he would.
Trees. He slid through them, tree to tree, his eyes working, testing, looking for possibilities. A hide? A fallback? A line of movement not under fire? A good field of fire? Damn this fog, could he even see them? Could he read ranges, gauge the drop on the long shots? Cover or just concealment? Where was the sun? Nope, didn’t matter, no sun.
A thin, cold rain had begun to fall. How would that affect the trajectory? What was the wind, the humidity? How wet was the stock of the rifle? Had it bloated and was now some little swollen knot rubbing secretly against the barrel, fucking up his point of impact? Had the scope sprung a leak, and was now a tube of fog, worthless, leaving him with nothing?
Or: were there NVA ahead? Had they heard him coming? Were they laughing as he bumbled closer? Were they drawing a bead even as he considered the possibility? He tried to exile the fear as he had exiled his own past and future, and concentrate on the mechanical, the aspect of craft that lay before him, how he would reload fast enough if it came to that, since the Remingtons didn’t have no stripper clips and the M118 had to be threaded in one round at a time. Should he set up his two Claymores to cover his flanks? He didn’t think he had time.
Help me, he prayed to a God he wasn’t sure existed, maybe some old gunny up there above the clouds, just watching out for bad boys like him on desperate jobs for people who didn’t even know his name.
He halted. He was in trees, had good tree cover, and good fog, a fallback to a hilltop, and then he could cut back the other direction. Professionally, he saw that this was it. A perfect choke point, with targets in the open, fog to cover him, a rare opportunity to get at the NVA in the open, lots of ammunition.
If this is it, by God, then this is it, he thought, settling in behind a fallen tree, literally slipping into a bush, as he squirmed to find a good position. He found his prone, and although he couldn’t get one leg flat on the ground for the gouge of a rock or a stump, he got most of his body down, drawing stability from the earth itself. The rifle was back and in, left grip lightly on the forearm, sling tight as it ran from the wood, lashed around that forearm and headed tautly to the stock. Right hand on the small of the stock, finger still off the trigger. Breathing easy, trying to stay cool. Another day at the office. He was situated so no light would reflect off his lens. The trees around him would muffle and defuse the sound of the shots. In the first minutes, anyhow, no one would be able to figure out where the shots were coming from.
He slid his eye behind the scope, finding the proper three inches of relief. Nothing. It was like peering into a bowl of cream. Drifting whiteness, the outline of two or three scrub trees, no sense of the hills forming the other side of the valley, a slight downward angle into vertigo. Nothing stood out from which to estimate range.
He checked his watch: 0700 hours. They would be along soon, not moving quite so quickly because of the fog, but confident that it hid them and that in hours they’d be in possession of Arizona.