It was a lance corporal from First Squad who found the Dragunov.
“Whooie!” he shouted. “Lookie here. Gook sniper rifle.”
“Corporal, bring that over here,” called Brophy. “Good work.”
The man, pleased to be singled out, came over with his trophy and turned it over to Brophy.
“There’s your rifle,” Bob said to the CIA man, Nichols.
The command team crowded around the new weapon, something no one had seen before. Like a kid unwrapping a Christmas present, Nichols wrapped the camouflage tape off the weapon.
“The legendary SVD. That’s the first one we’ve recovered,” said Nichols. “Congratulations, Swagger. That’s not a small thing.”
Donny just looked at it, feeling nothing, his head pounding from the stench of the gasoline and the oily smoke. It was a crude-looking thing, not at all sleek and well machined.
“Looks like an AK got stuck in a tractor pull,” Bob said. He handled the weapon, looked it over, worked the action a few times, looked through the scope, then became bored with it and passed it on to other, more eager hands.
He moved away from the crowd, and watched with narrowed eyes and utter stillness as the Marines probed the burn zone while others set up flank security, under the CO’s direction. Meanwhile Hueys and Cobra gunships hovered about the perimeter.
“Do you think he got away?” Donny finally asked him.
“Don’t know. Them flames could have burned him up. Six or seven twenty-mm shells could have blown him to pieces, and the flames charred what meat was left off the bone. He could be indistinguishable from the landscape, I suppose. I just don’t know. I didn’t see any blood trails.”
“Wouldn’t the flames have burned the blood?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I’m pretty sure I hit him.”
“I think you did too. Otherwise, I’d be a dead monkey. I’m going to put you in for another medal.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You saved my bacon,” said Bob. He seemed somehow genuinely shaken, as if he’d somehow learned today that he could die. Donny had never seen him quite like this.
“Man, I could use me a bottle of bourbon tonight,” the sergeant added. “I could use it real bad.”
Donny nodded. He had invested totally in the idea that he had shot the white sniper. He re-created it in his mind: the crosshairs on the head, the jerk of the trigger, the squirm of the man as if hit, the flying hat, the leap and twist of his rifle, then stillness. It felt like a hit, somehow. Everything about it felt good. But the rifle hadn’t been found in the rough area where memory told him the sniper had been when he’d taken his shot.
And, he had the terrifying feeling, unconfessed to anyone, that maybe in the blur of his concussion — gone now — he’d zeroed incorrectly and killed a phantasm, not the real thing. He couldn’t bring himself to express this, but it filled him with the blackest dread.
“I don’t see how he could have gotten away,” Donny said. “Nothing could stand up to it and nobody’s that lucky.”
“No way he could have stood up to it. If he was in the middle of it, he was wasted, no doubt about it at all. But — was he in the middle of it?”
That was the question and Donny had no answer. He and he alone had seen the sniper, but by the time the plane was done chewing the world up, and he looked again, that world had changed: it was tattered, eviscerated; the grass was flattened; dust hung in the air. Then the flamethrower teams worked it over, and it burned and burned. Hard to figure now exactly where he’d been, what he’d seen, where it had been.
“Well, we’ll see,” said Bob. “Meanwhile, you come by tonight and we’ll have us a drink or two.”
Swagger was drunk. He was so drunk the world made no sense at all to him, and he liked it that way. The bourbon was like a nurse’s hand on his shoulder in the middle of the night, when he awoke screaming in the Philippines after having gotten hit on his first tour, really messed up through the upper lung. The nurse had touched him and said, “There, there, there.”
Now the bourbon said, “There, there, there.”
“Fucking good stuff,” Bob said. “The fucking-A best.”
“It is,” said Donny, smoking a giant cigar he’d gotten from somewhere. There were some others too: Brophy and Nichols of the CIA, Captain Feamster, the always mild XO, the company gunny — Firebase Dodge City’s inner circle, as it was, drunk as skunks in the intel bunker. Somewhere Mick Jagger was blaring out over an eight-track, the one about satisfaction.
“Well, we got some satisfaction today, goddamn,” said Feamster, an amiable professional who would never make bird colonel.
“We did, we did,” confirmed the XO, who would make brigadier, because he agreed with everything that was said by anybody above him in rank.
A couple of other sergeants made faces at the XO’s fawning, but only Swagger caught it.
“Goddamn right,” he said to make the officers go away, and after a bit they did.
He took another taste. Prairie fire. Crackling. The sense of merciful blur; the world again full of possibility.
Now it was Nichols’s turn to pay homage.
The CIA officer wandered over shyly, and said, “You know, it was a great day.”
“We didn’t get no head on the wall,” said Bob.
“Oh, the Russian’s dead, all right,” said Nichols. “Nobody could live through that. No, but what I’m talking about is the rifle.”
The rifle? thought Donny.
Oh, yeah. The rifle.
“You know how long we’ve been looking for that rifle?” Nichols turned and looked at Donny, who puffed on his cigar, took another swallow of bourbon and answered with a goofy smile.
“Well,” said Nichols, “we’ve been looking since 1958, when Evgenie Dragunov drew up the plans at the Izhevsk Machine Factory. Some of our analysts said it would revolutionize their capacities. But others said, no, it was nothing.”
“Looks like a piece of Russian crap to me,” said Bob. “I don’t think them guys know shit about building a precision rifle. They ain’t got no Townie Whelans or no Warren Pages or no P. O. Ackleys. They just got tractor drivers in monkey suits.”
Donny couldn’t tell if Swagger, out of some obscure sense of need, was putting on the earnest, ambitious intelligence officer or not.
“Well, whatever,” said Nichols. “Now we don’t have to wonder. Now we’ll be able to tell. And do you know what that means?”
“No.”
“Nothing here. This shit is over and it never meant shit to the Russians except as a way to bleed us dry. They wouldn’t even send Dragunovs to the ’Nam, that’s how low on the priority list it was. The Dragunov was a higher priority than Vietnam to them.”
This didn’t play well with Swagger, and a darkness came over his face, but the CIA man didn’t notice and kept on yapping.
“No, Russia’s interested in Europe. That’s where all the Russian divisions are. Now, with the Dragunovs coming down to platoon level in the next few years, and reaching the other Warsaw Bloc countries after that, what does that mean for our tactics? What level of precision fire can they bring against us if they move? Are they committing to sniper warfare in a big way? That’ll have a great deal to do with our dispositions, our troop strength, our alignments, our relationships to our allies and the general thrust of NATO policy over the next few years. Dammit, you gave it to us! No one could get one, no one could buy one, they were nowhere except under lock and key, and old Bob Lee Swagger goes out in the bad bush and brings one back alive. Goddamn, it was a good day!” His eyes were bright and happy. He wasn’t even drunk.