The two hesitated in their next move, watching, waiting. The leader lifted his rifle — yes, it had a scope — and searched the horizon for sign of an ambush. Making none out, he lowered the weapon and spoke to the assistant. The assistant rose unsteadily from cover, and began to move ever so slowly through the mines and the Claymores, finding gaps in the wire exactly where they should be and slipping through them. His leader followed him, and when both were free of the approach zone, the leader stepped forward and, moving at a slow, steady, hunched pace, began to work his way down the draw. Solaratov watched them until they disappeared.
They come, he thought.
He flicked off the scope, and began to slither through the grass toward his shooting position.
Around 0630 the suns began to rise. There were two of them, both orange, both shimmery, both peering over the edges of the earths, just beyond the far trees. Donny blinked hard, blinked again. His head ached.
“You okay?” Swagger hissed, lying next to him.
“I’m fine,” he lied.
“You keep blinking. What the hell is going on?”
“I’m fine,” Donny insisted, but Swagger looked back into that patch of yellow grass and undulating earth he had designated Area 1.
Of course Donny wasn’t fine. He thought of a book he once read about bomber pilots in World War II and a soldier who saw everything twice. He was seeing everything twice. But he didn’t scream “I see everything twice” like that guy did.
He had a simple concussion, that was all, not enough to sickbay him or bellyache him out of any job in the Corps — except, of course, this one. The spotter was eyes, that was all he was.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“Huh?”
“What the hell happened to you. You’re swole up like a grapefruit. Someone bang you?”
“I fell. It’s nothing.”
“Goddamn you, Fenn, this is the one fucking day in your life when you cannot have goddamn fallen. Oh, Christ, you got double vision, you got pain, you got dead spots in your vision?”
“I am fine. I am roger to go.”
“Bullshit. Goddammit.”
Swagger turned back, furiously. He lay in blazing concentration on the ridge, his sniper rifle before him, gazing through a pair of binoculars, sweeping Area 1. Donny blinked, wished he had a goddamn aspirin and put his eye to the M49 spotting scope planted in the earth before him.
Using one eye resolved the double-image problem, but not the blur. It didn’t matter that he looked only with his best eye; there was still only a smear of visual information, like a television set without an aerial, getting mostly fuzz.
The right thing to do: say, Sarge, I have blurred vision. Sorry, I’m not worth shit out here. Let’s call an abort before they get into range and—
“Shit!” said Bob. “They are moving too fast, they have panicked, they gonna be here in ten seconds.”
Donny looked back and saw four — actually two — camo boonie hats just above the fold in the earth that took them out of sight. Something was wrong. They were moving too fast, almost running. The pressure of living a few seconds in a sniper’s scope had gotten to them. They were headed in a beeline like half-milers for the hill and the comfort it supposedly provided.
“He’ll know that ain’t me. Goddammit!”
“What do we do?” said Donny, sickly aware that the situation had passed beyond his meager ability to influence, and full of images of that scared Featherstone, called to be a hero by nothing more than freak physical similarity, running to stop the shit from dribbling out his ass and the poor lieutenant, unable to yell, stuck with him, trailing behind, knowing that if he let him get away, Solaratov would take him down in a second.
“Fuck,” said Bob, bitterly. “Get back on the scope. Maybe he’ll bite anyhow.”
Hmmmm. The sniper considered.
Why are they moving so fast? They have a long journey ahead of them, and they know there is much less chance of being observed if they move slowly than if they run.
He watched them, now about five hundred yards out, rushing pell-mell along the gully, almost out of sight.
Possibly they want to get into the shelter of the trees before full daylight?
No, no, not possible: they’ve never operated like that before. Therefore there are two possibilities: A) they know a man is out here and they are scared or B) they are bait, they are pretenders, and the real sniper is already out here, looking in my direction for some kind of movement, at which point he sends a bullet crashing my way.
Of the two possibilities, he had no favorites. His preference was not to overinterpret data. It was always to pick the worst possibility, assume that it was correct and counterreact.
Therefore: I am being hunted.
Therefore: where would a man be to get a good shot at me?
He turned and to the east, about three hundred yards away, made out a low undulation in the shine of the rising sun, not much, really, but just enough elevation to give a shooter a peek into this sea of grass here in the defoliated zone.
He looked at the sun: he’d be behind the sun, because he’d not want its reflection on his lens. Therefore, yes, the ridge.
But if he turned in that direction and put his own glass upon it, then he’d clearly get the reflection and the bullet. Therefore, he had to move to the north or south to get a deflection shot into them.
Slowly, he began to move.
“No, goddammit,” said Bob.
“No, what?”
“No, he ain’t biting. Not at them two birds. Shit!”
He paused, considering.
“Should we pull back?”
“Don’t you get it, goddammit? We ain’t hunting him no more. He’s hunting us!”
The information settled on Donny uncomfortably. He began to feel the ooze and trickle of sweat down his sides from his pits. He glanced about. The world, which had seemed so benign just a second ago, now seemed to seethe with menace. They were alone in a sea of grass. The sniper, if Bob no longer believed him to be in Area 1, could therefore be anywhere, closing in on them even now.
No, not yet. Because if he read the fake sniper team moving too fast, he would not have had enough time to react and get out of there. He would still be an hour by low crawl away.
“Shit,” said Bob. “Which way would he go?”
“Hmmmm,” bluffed Donny, with no real idea of an answer.
“If he figures them guys is fake, and he looks around, about the only place we could be to shoot at his ass would be here, on this little ridge.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, so to git a shot at our asses, how’s he going to move? He going to try and flank us to the left or the right? What do you think?”
Donny had no idea. But then he did.
“If the treeline equals safety, then he’d go that way, wouldn’t he? To his right. He’d put himself closer to it, not closer to Dodge City.”
“But maybe that’s how he’d figure we’d think, so he’d figure it the other way?”
“Shit,” said Donny.
“No,” said Bob. “No, you’re right. Because he’s on his belly, remember? This whole thing’s gonna play out on bellies. And what he’s looking at is an hour of crawling in the hot sun versus two hours. And being a half hour from the treeline is a hell of a lot better than being three hours from it. He’d have to go to the west, right?” He sounded as if he had to convince himself.