“No, I believe the Americans could too.”
Finally, the day came when the Russian hit his two targets in the kill zone twice in the same five seconds. Then he did it another day and then another, all at dawn, after lying the night through on his stomach.
“I am ready,” he announced.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The sandbags were the hardest. He had grown almost superstitious about them. He would let no one touch them, for fear of somehow shifting the sand they concealed and altering irrevocably their inner dynamics.
“The Human Noodle has gone insane,” someone said.
“No, brother,” his comrade responded. “He has always been insane. We are only noticing it now.”
The sandbags were packed with the care of rare, crucial medicines, and transported back to the tunnel complex in the treeline, with the Human Noodle watching them with the concentration of a hawk. He literally never let them out of his sight; the rifle and its scope, strapped inside a gun case and more or less suspended and shock-proofed by foam rubber pellets taken from American installations, bothered him much less than the sandbags.
That held true for his gradual setup as well. He began with the sandbags, examining them minutely for leaks, for some alteration of their density. Finding none, he convinced himself he was satisfied, and made the sappers delicately transport them to the treeline. There he had rigged a kind of harness, a flat piece of wood to be tied to his back when he was prone, upon which the sandbags themselves were to be tied.
“I hope he isn’t crushed,” said Huu Co, genuinely alarmed.
“He could suffocate,” said his sergeant.
Ever so delicately, weighted down under the nearly one hundred pounds of sand — two forty-pound bags and a ten-pound bag — the Russian began his long crawl to the shooting position, which was a good two thousand yards from the tunnel complex far from the burned zone. It took six hours — six back-breaking, degrading hours of slow, steady crawl through the grass, suffering not merely from back pain but from the crushing fear of his utter helplessness. A man under a hundred pounds of sand, crawling into enemy territory. What could be more ridiculous, more pathetic, more poignant? Any idiot with a rifle could have killed him. He had no energy, his senses were dulled by the pain in his back and the breathless smash of the huge bags on his back. He crawled, he crawled, he crawled, seemingly forever.
He made it, somehow, and crawled back, just before the first light of dawn, looking more dead than alive. He slept all day, and all the next day, because his back still ached.
On the third day, again he crawled, this time with the rifle and a batch of his specially constructed cartridges. It was much easier. He made it to the small hill well before dawn and had plenty of time to set up.
He loaded the rifle, tried to find some sense of relaxation, tried to will himself into the sort of trance he knew he needed. But he never could quite relax. He felt tense, twitchy. Twice, noises startled him. His imagination began to play tricks on him: he saw the great black plane hovering overhead, and felt the earth open up as it fired. He remembered crawling desperately, his mind livid with fear, as the world literally exploded behind him. You could not crawl through such madness; there was no “through.” He crawled and crawled, the explosions ringing in his ears, dumbstruck that he had chosen to crawl in the right direction. And what was the right direction?
“If he’s out there, he’s dead now,” he heard one Marine say to another.
“Nothing could come through that,” said the other.
They were so close! They were ten feet away, chatting like workers on a lunch break!
Solaratov willed himself to nothingness. Like an animal he ceased to consciously exist. He may not even have been breathing, not as normal humans would define it, anyhow. His pulse nearly stopped; his body temp dropped; his eyes closed to slits. He gave himself up to the earth totally and let himself sink into it and would not let his body move a millimeter over the long day. Marines walked all around him, once so close he could see the jungle boots. He smelled the acrid stench of the burning gasoline when they used the flamethrowers and he sensed first their joy, when they recovered the rifle he had abandoned in panic, and then their irritation, when no body itself could be located. The body was right there, almost under their feet; it still breathed!
Movement!
The flash of movement recalled him from that day to this one. Through his binoculars he could see movement just behind the berm in the predawn light, though it was so far away. The rifle was set into the bags, firmly moored, sunk into sand so dense and unyielding it was almost concrete, the heel of its butt wedged just as tightly into the smaller bag. He squirmed behind it, felt himself pouring himself around the rifle, not moving it a hair, so perfectly was it placed. His eye went to the eyepiece.
Again, he saw movement: a face, peering out?
Up, down, then up again, then down.
His finger touched the trigger, his heart hammered.
Here, after so long, the long hunt was over.
No.
He watched them rise, the shooter, then the spotter, rolling over the sandbag berm so far away, gathering themselves in a gulch at its bottom, and then heading out.
Infinite regret poured through him.
You were afraid to shoot.
No, he told himself. You were not able today. You were not in the zone. You could not have made the shot.
It was true.
Better to let them go and gamble that sometime soon he’d have another opportunity than to rush and destroy all the work he’d invested and all the hopes and responsibilities riding on his shoulders.
No. You did the right thing.
Not months anymore. Not even days. Donny was down to a day.
One more day.
And he would spend it processing out. Then a wakeup, and the chopper would arrive at 0800 the day after tomorrow and at 0815 it would leave and he would be on it. He’d be back to Da Nang in an hour, processed out by 1600, on the freedom bird by nightfall, home eighteen hours later.
DEROS.
Date of estimated return from overseas. How many had dreamed of it, had fantasized about it? For his generation, the generation of men sent to do a duty they didn’t quite understand, and that made them especially hated in their own country, this was as good as it got. There would be no parades, no monuments, no magazine covers, no movies, no one waiting to call them heroes. You only got DEROS, your little piece of heaven. You earned it the hard way, and it wasn’t much, but that’s what you got.
What a feeling! He’d never felt anything quite like it before, so powerful and consuming. It went deep into his bones; it touched his soul. No joy was so pure. The last time, after getting hit, there’d been only the fear and the pain and the long months in a crappy hospital. No DEROS.
This time, within twenty-four hours: DEROS.
“Hey, Fenn?”
He looked up. It was Mahoney, the ringleader in the anti-Swagger mutiny, under whose auspices he’d gotten kicked in the head by somebody.
“Oh, yeah,” said Donny, rising from his cot.
“Hey, look, I wanted to come by and tell you I was sorry about that thing that happened. You’re an okay guy. It turned out all right. Shake my hand on it?”
“Yeah, sure,” said Donny, who always found it impossible to hold a grudge.
He took the other lance corporal’s hand, shook it.
“How’s Featherstone?”
“He’s cool. He’s down to one and days; he’ll rotate back to the world. Me, too. Well, two and days, then my ass is on the golden bird.”
“You may not even have to make it that far. I hear the ARVN are going to take over Dodge City, and you guys’ll be rotating out early. You won’t even have to see your DEROS.”