Donny edged back a bit and the second shot blasted the earth just a few inches from his face. Ow! The dirt blossomed as if a cherry bomb had detonated, and a hundred tiny flecks of grit bit him; he blinked, slid back even farther. He could hear Bob screaming but he couldn’t make the words out. He thought: the radio. Call air. Get air.
But then Bob fired, fired again, and it filled Donny with courage. He squirmed up over the other side of the hummock, going to a left-handed shooting position. He couldn’t throw the bolt from here, not easily, but a lot less of him stuck out, and that pleased him.
Where is he? Where are you, motherfucker?
Through the scope, he saw nothing, just dust hanging in the air, the slow wobble of grass signifying recent commotion but nothing to shoot at all.
He scanned left and right a few yards, didn’t see a damned thing. He had this idea that he, not Bob, would be the one who brought the Russian down. Images from a forgotten boyhood book played suddenly through his mind: that would be like Lieutenant May getting the Red Baron instead of salty old pro Roy Brown. A gush of excitement came to him and a spurt of intense pleasure.
Where was he?
We can take him under fire from two sources, he realized. We can take this motherfucker.
“Air!” he heard Bob scream.
Yes, air. Get the Night Hag in here, smoke this fucker, blow him to—
On a wide scan, he saw him, much farther back, crawling away desperately.
Got you!
He put the crosshairs on the bobbing head, not a shape so much as a suggestion in the blur of his vision. He tried to find the center, quartered it with the scope, felt in supreme control, felt the trigger rock against his finger, stack up just a tiny bit and then surprise the hell out of him when the shot occurred.
The man’s rifle leaped, his hat popped off and he rolled over into the grass, still.
“I got him!” he screamed. “I hit him!”
“Air,” Bob screamed. “Get us air!”
Donny let the rifle slide away, drew the PRC off his back and hit the on switch.
“Foxtrot, this is Sierra-Bravo, flash, I say again, flash, flash. We have contact, over.”
“Sierra-Bravo, what are your needs? Are you calling air, Sierra-Bravo?”
Suddenly Bob was next to him, snatching the handset from him.
“Foxtrot, get us Night Hag superfast. I’m designating Area Two for the strike, bring in Night Hag, I say again, immediate, Area Two, Area Two.”
“She is coming in, Sierra-Bravo; watch your butt, over.”
“I got him!” Donny said.
“I am popping smoke to designate my position for Night Hag, over,” said Bob. He grabbed a smoker off his belt, yanked the pin and tossed it. It spun and hissed and torrents of green smoke began to pour out of it.
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Night Hag, I eyeball green smoke, over,” a new voice on the net declared, even as they heard the roar of engines rising.
“That is correct, Night Hag, we are buttoning up, out.”
Bob pulled Donny down and close to the hummock.
A shadow passed over them and Donny looked up and saw the great plane as it flashed overhead, began to bank. It seemed huge and predatory, its engines beating at the air. It was pitch black, an angel of death, and it banked to the right, raising a wing, presenting the side of its fuselage to the earth it was about to devastate.
The eight mini-guns fired simultaneously, tongues of gobbling flame streaking from the black flank, the sound not of guns firing quickly, but just a steady, screaming roar.
“Jesus,” said Donny. He thought of worlds ending, of the end of civilization, of Hiroshima. This sucker brought heat. He couldn’t imagine it.
The thousands of rounds poured from the guns to the earth, each fifth one a tracer, and the guns fired so fast it seemed they fired nothing but tracers. The bullets didn’t strike the earth so much as disintegrate it. They pulverized, raising clouds of destruction and debris. The air filled with darkness as if the weather itself had turned to gunfire. It was a locust plague of lead that devoured that upon which it settled. Earlier versions of this baby had been called Puff the Magic Dragon, but they only had one gun. With eight, Night Hag could put a mythological hurt on the world. She just ate up Area 2 for what seemed like years but was in reality just a few seconds. She had only thirty seconds worth of shooting time, she ate so fast.
The plane pivoted as if tethered, the roar of its engines huge as it curled above them, then again its eight guns fired and again the ground shook and a blizzard of debris flew from the earth. Then it straightened out, climbed slightly and began to describe a holding pattern.
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, that’s my best trick, over.”
“Night Hag, should be sufficient, good work. Foxtrot, you there, over?”
“Sierra, this is Foxtrot.”
“Foxtrot, let’s move the teams out. I think we got him. I think we nailed him.”
“Sierra-Bravo-Four, Wilco and good job. Out.”
Huu Co, senior colonel, and the sappers watched the airplane hunt the sniper from the relative safety of the treeline. It was quite a spectacle: the huge plane wheeling, the thunderous streams of fire it brought to the defoliated zone, the rending of the earth where the bullets struck.
“Oh, the Human Noodle will be turned to the human sieve by that thing,” one of the men said.
“Only the Americans would hunt a single man with an airplane,” said another.
“They would send an airplane to fix a toilet,” someone else shouted, to the laughter of some others.
But Huu Co understood that the sniper was dead, that the outlaw Swagger had once again prevailed. No man could withstand the barrage, and what came later, when, in the immediate aftermath of the airplane, when its dust still hung in the air, five jeeps suddenly burst from the fort and came crashing across the field, stopping right where two American snipers suddenly emerged from hiding a little to the east of the devastated area.
The men began to work methodically with flamethrowers. The squirts of flame spurted out, and where they touched, they lit the grass. The flames rose and spread, and burned furiously, as black, oily smoke rolled upward.
“The Human Noodle has now been roasted,” someone said.
The flames burned for hours, out of control, rolling across the prairie of the defoliated zone, blazing vividly, as more and more men from the post came out in patrols, set up a line, and began to follow the flames. Soon enough, a flight of helicopters flew in from the east and began to hover over the field. They were hunting for a body.
“They will probably eat him if they can find him.”
“There won’t be enough left. They could put him in soup.”
Though the Russian was a chilly little number, Huu Co still had a moment’s melancholy over his fate. The airplane made war so totally; it was the most feared weapon in the American arsenal of superweapons. How horrible to be hunted by such a flying beast and to feel the world disintegrating around you as the shells exploded. He shivered a bit.
The Americans picked through the blasted field for some time, until nearly nightfall, at one time finding something that excited them very much — Huu Co watched through his binoculars, but could not make it out — until finally retreating.
“Brother Colonel, shall we retreat?” his sergeant wished to know. “There is clearly nothing left for us here.”
“No,” said the colonel. “We wait. I don’t know for how long, but we wait.”