He will move, he thought. He was looking for me, I was not there, he will move.
Blackness.
Somewhere in his peripheral, a flash of black.
Solaratov did not turn to stare. No, he kept his eyes where they were, fighting the temptation to crank them around and refocus. Let his unconscious mind, far more effective in these matters, scan for them.
Blackness again.
He had it.
To the right, almost three hundred yards away. Of course. He’s flanking me to my right.
Slowly, he turned his head; slowly, he brought up the binoculars.
Nothing. Movement. Nothing. Movement.
He struggled with the focus.
The unnatural blackness was a face. The Marine sniper had blackened it at night, for his long crawl into position; he’d shed his black clothes, and now wore combat dapple camouflage, but he had made a mistake. He had forgotten to take off his face paint. Now, black against the dun and yellow of the elephant grass, it stood out just the slightest bit.
Solaratov watched, fascinated. The man low-crawled two strokes, then froze. He waited a second or two, then low-crawled another two. His face, its features masked by the paint, was a study in warrior’s concentration: tense, drawn, almost cracked with intensity. His rifle was on his back, wearing a tangle of strips for its own camouflage.
He tried to deny it, but Solaratov felt a flare of pleasure as intense as anything in his life.
He laid the binoculars down, and raised the rifle to his shoulder, finding the right position, rifle to bone to earth, finding the grip, finding the trigger, finding the eyepiece.
Swagger crawled through his scope. The crosshairs quartered his head. The Russian’s thumb took the safety off and he expelled half a breath. His finger began its slow squeeze of the trigger.
oddamn,” Bob said.
“What is it?” Donny said behind him.
“It’s thinned out here. Goddamn. Less cover.”
Donny could see nothing. He was lost in elephant grass; it was in his ears, his nose, in the folds of his flesh. The ants were feasting on him. He heard the dry buzz of flies drawn to the delicious odor of his sweat and blood — he’d been cut a hundred or so times by the blades of the grass.
Ahead of him were the two soles of Bob’s jungle boots.
“Shit,” Bob said. “I don’t like this one goddamn bit.”
“We could just call in the Night Hag. She’d chew the shit out of all this. We’d pop smoke so she wouldn’t whack us up.”
“And if he ain’t here, he knows we got him, and he’s double careful or he don’t come back at all and we never know why he came and we don’t git us a Dragunov. Nah.”
He paused.
“You still got that Model Seventy?”
“I do.”
“All right. I want you to reorient yourself to the right. You squirt on ahead; see that little hummock or something?”
“Yeah.”
“You set up on that, you scope it out for me. If you say it’s okay, I’m going to shimmy on over there, to where it’s thick again. I’ll set up over there and cover for you. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” said Donny. He squirmed around, took a deep breath and wiggled ahead.
“Damn, boy, I hope he ain’t in earshot. You’re grunting louder than a goddamn pig.”
“This is hard work,” Donny said, and it was.
He got up to the hummock, peered over it. He saw nothing.
“Go to the M49?”
“Nah. Don’t got time. Just check it with your Unertl.”
Donny slipped his eye behind the scope, which was a long, thin piece of metal tubing suspended in an odd frame. When you zeroed this old thing, it had external controls, which meant the whole scope moved, propelled this way and that by screws for windage and elevation. It had been assembled sometime back in the early forties, but rumor said it had killed more than its share of Japs, North Koreans and VC. It wasn’t even a 7.62mm NATO but the old Springfield cartridge, the long .30-06.
The optics were great. He scanned the grass as far as he could see, and saw no sign of human presence. But the blur had not gone away. He was aware he was missing fine detail. He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers, and nothing improved. No, nothing out there, nothing that he could see.
“It looks clear.”
“I didn’t ask how it looked. I asked how it was.”
“Clear, clear.”
“Okay,” said Bob. “You keep eyeballing.”
The sergeant began to creep outward, this time at an even slower rate than before. He crawled slowly, ever so slowly, halting each two pulls forward, going still.
Donny returned to his scope. Back and forth, he swept the likely shooting spots, seeing nothing. It was clear. This was beginning to seem ridiculous. Maybe they were out here in the middle of nothing, acting like complete idiots. The bees buzzed, the flies ate, the dragonflies skittered. He couldn’t keep his eye behind the scope for very long because it fell completely out of focus. He had to blink, look away. When would the call come from Bob that he was all right?
he trigger rocked back, stacked up and was on the very cusp of firing.
Where is the other one?
His finger came off the trigger.
There were two. He had to kill them both. If he fired, the other might take him or, seeing his partner with his head blown open, simply slide back farther into the grass and disappear. He’d call in air, possibly, and Solaratov would have to get out of the area.
Where was the other one?
He looked up from the scope. He realized he could see the sniper because for some odd reason, the grass was thinner there. The other one would be nearby, covering, as he was vulnerable. He would be vulnerable for only a few more seconds.
A plan formed in Solaratov’s mind: Find the spotter. Kill the spotter. Come back and kill the sniper. It was possible because of the semiautomatic nature of the weapon and the fact that the distance was under three hundred meters.
He returned to the scope and very carefully began to crank backward, looking for another black face against the dun and the tan of the vertical thickets of stalks. He came back a bit more, no, nothing, nothing … and there! An arm! The arm led to a body, which led to the form of another prone man hunched over a rifle — he took a gasp of air, a little spurt of pleasure — and then continued up the trunk to the torso to discover that it was indeed a man but he was not a spotter, he was another sniper, and his rifle was pointing exactly at him. At Solaratov.
The man fired.
onny looked up from his scope. His head ached. When would the call come from Bob? God, he needed an aspirin. He glanced about, seeing nothing, only the endless grass.
A dragonfly flashed close by. It was odd how their wings somehow caught the sunlight and threw a reflection just like—
Donny went back to the scope.
He was so close!
The sniper was less than three hundred yards away — or rather, the snipers, for there was a smear of enemy, blurry in the haze of Donny’s concussion, well sunk in the grass. The man was bent into his rifle, moving slowly, tracking, and with a start, Donny realized he had located Swagger.
Kill him! he ordered himself. Shoot! Do it now!
The crosshairs seemed to quarter the head. He squeezed the trigger.
He lost his sight picture as the pressure increased. He squeezed harder. Nothing happened.