Donny looked away.
He thought a bit, and finally decided to spit it out.
“All right, I’ll tell you. You can’t tell anyone. It’s between you and me.”
Swagger stared hard at him.
“I knew a guy named Trig. I mentioned him to you. Well, he was a star peacenik, but a real good guy. A hero, too. He was willing to give his life to stop the war. Well, I hate the war too. Not only for all the reasons everyone knows, but also because it’s killing people we can’t afford to lose. Like Trig. It’ll kill you, too, Sergeant Swagger. So I’m going to stop it. I will chain myself to the White House gate if I have to, I will throw my medals back on the Senate steps if I have to, I will blow myself up in a building. It’s so fucking evil, what we are doing to these people and to ourselves. But I cannot let anybody say I quit, I bugged out, I shortcut my duty. They can have no doubts about me. So I will fight the war full-bang dead out till the day I DEROS and then I will fight full-bang dead out against it!”
He was screaming, sweating, like an insane man. He’d flared up, big as life, larger than Bob, stronger than him, menacing him for the first time, inconceivable until it happened. He stepped back now, relaxing.
“Jesus,” said Swagger, “you think I give a fuck what you think about the war? I don’t give a shit about politics. I’m a Marine. That’s all I care about.”
He sat back.
“All right, I’ll tell you what’s going on, finally. You have earned that. I’ll tell you why I want you out of here. There’s somebody out there.”
“Huh? Out there? Out where?”
“There, in the bush, some new bird. That’s why I’ve been huddling with Brophy. It was bucked down from headquarters. There’s a guy out there, and he’s hunting for me. He’s a Russian, we think. The Israelis have a very good source in Moscow and they got a picture of a guy climbing into a TU-16 for the normal intel run to Hanoi. They knew him, because he’d trained Arab snipers in the Bekaa Valley and they tried to hit him a couple of times, but he was too goddamn smart. Our people think he worked Africa too, lots of stuff in Africa. He may have been in Cuba. Anywhere they got shit to be settled, he’s the one to settle it. Anyhow, his name has something to do with ‘Solitary’ or ‘Single,’ something like that. He may be a championship shooter named T. Solaratov, who won a gold medal in prone rifle at the sixty Olympics. Then NSA got a radio intercept a week or two back. One NVA regional commander talking to another, about this Ahn So Muoi, as they call it. They have this thing called Brother Ten, which is an award and a nickname they call someone who’s killed ten Americans. It’s as close in their language as they come to the word sniper. Anyhow, in this intercept, the officers were jawing about the ‘White Brother Ten’ moving down the trail to our province. White sniper, in other words. They got this special guy, this Russian, he’s coming after me and anybody I’m with.”
“Jesus,” said Donny, “you really pissed them off.”
“Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” Bob replied. “And here’s the new joke. I’m going to kill this guy. I’m going to nail him between the eyes and we’ll send the word back to them very simply: do not fuck with the United States Marine Corps.”
Donny suddenly said, “It’s a trap! It’s a trap!”
“That’s right. I’m going to play cat-and-mouse with him; only, he thinks he’s the cat, when he’s the mouse. We want this bird swollen with confidence, thinking he’s the cock of the walk. It’s all a big phony show so we can get him to hit me in a certain way, only, I ain’t gonna be there, I’m gonna be behind his sorry ass and I will drill him clean, and if I can’t drill him, I will call in gunships with so much smoke there won’t be nothing left but cinders. Now, that is dangerous work and it don’t seem to me it has one thing to do with being a grunt in Vietnam. That is why I want your young ass out of here. You ain’t getting killed in anything this personal. This is between me and this Solitary Man. That’s it.”
“No. I want in.”
“No way. You’re out of here. This ain’t your show. This is about me.”
“No, this is about the Kham Duc. I was at Kham Duc. He wants to take us for Kham Duc. Swell, then he wants to take me. I’ll go against him. I’m not afraid of him.”
“You are an idiot. I’m scared shitless.”
“No, we have the advantage.”
“Yeah, and what if he zeros me out in the bush, and you’re left alone? You against him, out in the bad, bad bush. The fact that you’re married, got a great future, had a great war, done your duty, won some medals, all that don’t mean shit. He don’t care. He just wants to ice you.”
“No, I will be there. Forget me. You need another man. Who are you taking, Brophy? Brophy isn’t good enough, no one here is good enough. I’m the best you got, and I’ll go with you and we’ll fight this goddamn thing to the end, and nobody can say about me, oh, he had connections, he got off easy, his sergeant got wasted but he got a cush job in the air-conditioning.”
“You are one screwed-up kid. What do I say to Julie if I get you wasted?”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re a sergeant. You can’t think like that. You only think of the mission, okay? That’s your job. Mine is to back you up. I’ll run the radio, back you up. We’ll get this asshole, then we’ll go home. It’s time to hunt.”
“You asshole kid. You think you want to meet this guy? Okay, you come with me. Come on, I’ll introduce you two boys.”
Swagger pulled him out of the S-2 bunker and out toward the perimeter.
“Come on, scream a little at me!”
“Huh?”
“Scream! So he notices us and gets an eyeful. I want him to know we’re back and tomorrow we’re going out again.”
“I don’t—”
“He’s out there. I guarantee you, he’s out there, in the grass, a hundred meters or so away, but don’t look at him.”
“He can—”
“He can’t do shit. If he shoots from this close, we’ll call in artillery and napalm. The squids’ll soak his ass in burning gas. And he knows it. He’s a sniper, not a kamikaze. The challenge ain’t just gunning me, no sir. It’s gunning me and going back to Hanoi to eat grilled pork, fuck a nice gal, and going home on the seven o’clock bus to Moscow. But he’s there, setting up, planning. He’s reading the land, getting ready for us, figuring how to do us, the motherfucker. But we’re going to bust his ass. Now, come on, yell.”
Donny got with the program.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Russian finally opened his case, quickly assembled the parts with an oily clacking sound, until he had built what appeared to be a rifle.
“The Dragon,” he said.
Huu Co thought: does he think I’m a peasant from the South, soaked in buffalo shit and rice water?
He of course recognized the weapon as a Dragunov, the new Soviet-bloc sniper weapon as yet unknown to Vietnam. It was a semiauto, in the old Mosin-Nagant 7.62 × 54 caliber, a ten-round magazine, a mechanism based on the AK47’s, though it had a long, elegant barrel. It wore a skeletal stock that extended from a pistol grip. A short, electrically illuminated four-power scope squatted atop the receiver.
The sniper inserted the match rounds into the magazine, then inserted the magazine into the rifle. With a snap, he threw the bolt, chambering a round, flicked the safety on, then set the rifle down. Then he set to wrap the rifle in a thick tape to obscure the glint of its steel and the precision of its outline. As he wound, Huu Co talked to him.
“You do not need to zero?”