Donny pulled down the folding scissors legs on each mine, made sure that the front indeed faced the enemy, and set up the three of them about sixty feet apart, atop the hill. There was some little technical business to be done involving blasting caps, shipping plug priming adaptors, the detonator well, wire crimped and so on. Then the wire was fed backward, where he used his entrenching tool to dig a quick, low hole, though he knew that if he ever had to go to the mines, it meant there were enough zips coming at them that whether he survived the backblast or not was kind of a moot point.
He took a last swig on his canteen and tossed it away. He wished he had a C-rat left, but he’d left them back with most of his gear. Now, however, instead of the usual huge burden, he felt almost light-headed. He had no food, no canteen, no spotting scope, no Claymores. The only burden, beside his M14 magazines, was the goddamned PRC-77, tied tightly to his back by a couple of cruel straps. He even dared peel it off, and now felt really light. He felt like dancing. The freedom from the ache of going into battle with sixty pounds of gear and then twenty pounds of gear and now nothing was astonishing. He had trained himself to ignore the ache in his back; now it vanished. Cool, he thought, I get to die without a backache, first time in my career in the ’Nam.
Then the shot came, and Donny hastily pulled out his flare device, slipped a flare into the breech, screwed it shut and thrust it against the ground to fire. Like a tiny mortar, the flare popped out and hissed skyward, seeming to disappear. A second passed, then the night bloomed illumination as the flare lit, its ’chute opened and it began to float down into the valley, showering sparks and white. It was snowing light.
Bob was shooting now.
The last act had begun.
They were much closer than he anticipated. The scope was cranked down to three power so that he could get as clear and wide a view as possible. Still, they weren’t targets so much as possibilities, squirms of movement that in their rhythm seemed human against the stiller spectacle of the natural world, though it was all made stranger yet by the rushing shadows the swing of the flare created as it descended.
He saw, he fired. Something stopped moving, or just went down. He’d had eighty rounds; he was down to less than twenty. God, I killed some boys today. Jesus fucking Christ, I did some killing today. I was death today, I was the Marine Corps’s finest creation, the stone killer, destroying all that moved before me.
Something moved, he shot it, it stopped. Clearly the NVA couldn’t locate him, and he was so close, and now the bossman had made a decision — to keep going, to take casualties, to make the rallying point for the attack on Arizona, to march through the minefields, as a Russian general had put it.
It was as though he were saying to Bob: You can’t kill us all. We will defeat you through our willingness to absorb death. That is how we won this war; that is how we will win this battle.
He could hear sergeants screaming, “Bi! Bi! Bi!” meaning “go, go, go,” urging the troops onward, but they could not see him because of his flash hider, the panic, the fear. The troops did not want to go, clearly. He’d gotten into their heads: that was the sniper thing; that was what was so terrible about the sniper. He was intimate and personal in a way which nothing else that kills in war can be; his humanness preys on your humanness, and it was hardest for even the most disciplined of troops to face.
He jacked out a round into the breech, fired, watched someone die. He fired again, quickly, in the fading light; then another flare popped, the light renewed and he saw more targets, so close it was criminal murder to take them, but that was his job tonight: he took them, reloaded, fell back through the high grass, emerged when another flare fired off, and killed some more. He was gone totally in the red, screaming urgency of his own head, not a man anymore, but a total killing system, conscienceless, instinctive, his brain singing with blood lust. It was so easy.
Xo Nhoung was gone. The bullet snuffed his life out in a second, drilling him through the neck with the sound of an ax hitting a side of raw beef. Nhoung died on his feet, and hit the ground a corpse. His soul flew away to be with his ancestors.
“We are dying! He can see us! There is no hope!” a young soldier screamed.
“Shut up, you fool,” yelled Huu Co, yearning to reach to the sky and crush those blasphemous flares with his bare hands, then rip the skulls from the bodies of the sniper and his spotter.
“They’re on the left this time,” he screamed again, because he had seen the XO fall to the right, pushed by the impact of the bullet.
“On the left. Fire for effect, brothers, fire now, kill the demons!”
His troops began to open fire helter-skelter, without much thought, the lacy neon of the tracers jumping through the darkness like spiderwebs, ripping vaguely where they struck tree or vegetation, but the point of it was to calm them while he figured out what to do.
He stood. A flare lit over his head. He was in bold relief and the flare seemed to be falling directly toward him. The man next to him fell, stricken; the man behind him fell, stricken. He was in the cone of light; he was the target. It didn’t matter. His life didn’t matter.
“Number One assault platoon, advance one hundred meters to the left; Number Two assault platoon, provide covering fire during the movement; weapons platoon, set up mortar units to be ranged at 150 meters on the hill at 1000 hours to our front. Machine gun platoon, set up automatic weapons one hundred meters to the right.”
He waited for the sniper to kill him.
But instead, an astonishing thing happened. No bullet came at all. The sniper lit a torch and began waving at him, as if to say, Here I am. Come kill me. He could see the man, surprisingly close, waving the torch.
“There he is; kill him! You see him. Kill him,” Huu Co shouted.
As he came out of the grass, another flare popped, low this time, filling the night with white light. The spectacle was awesome through the scope, jacked up three times: he saw men run in panic, he saw the blind fire directed outward, he saw men in the center of the position yelling desperately.
Commanding officer, he thought.
Oh, baby, if I can do you, I can call this one a day!
Three men stood. The center of the scope found one and he pulled the trigger with—damn! — enough jerk so the shot went high and he knew he hit high, in the neck; in the perfect circle of the scope, his target sank backward, stiff and totaled. Bob cocked fast, but the flare died. He could hear nothing. The fire lashed outward pointlessly, unaimed, mere fireworks as if the terrified were trying to drive demons away.
Another flare popped: low and bright and harsh.
Bob blinked at the brightness of it, saw another man stand, fired, taking him down. As he pivoted slightly, he went past a second man to a third, fired quickly, hit him off center and put him down. Then he came back to the second man as he rushed through the bolt cycle.
Got you.
You’re it.
You’re the man.
He caught his breath, steadied himself. The flare seemed to be falling right toward this brave individual, and Bob saw that yes: this was him, whoever he was.
The officer alone stood, taking the full responsibility of the moment. He called directions so forcefully, Bob could hear the Vietnamese vowels through the noise of the fire. He was fortyish, small, tough, very professional looking, and on his green fatigues he wore the three stars of the senior colonel, visible only now because the light was so bright as the flare descended.