His face and hands were covered with brown and olive and green greasepaint. Some of his cohorts in Vietnam had worn loose clothing like the duelists of the last century, thinking an opponent would be deceived as to the location of the heart. But with bullets fired from a modern sniper rifle the precise spot the bullet entered the trunk was usually irrelevant. Gray wore a field uniform provided by Arlen Able that Gray had brought with him to the Sawtooths. Rawhide was tied around his pants legs at the ankles to keep the trousers from flapping. Several leafy twigs were stuck into buttonholes. On his feet were a pair of his father's buckskin moccasins that were almost as quiet as bare feet. He wore a regulation-issue Marine Corps utility cap. Gray had put several short syringa branches into the webbing, and the leaves bobbed against his head as he walked. He had cut flaps from the cap's sides, so pieces of cloth hung down on his ears and hair, breaking up the cap's lines along his temples. He had left his belt and wristwatch behind because of the danger of reflection. A length of rope secured his trousers. He wouldn't need to know the time.
A Marine sniper in Vietnam entered the field traveling light, but even so his pack outfitted for a three-day mission contained over forty items, including tactical maps, washcloths, C-4 plastic explosives, wire cutters, extra boot laces, water-purification tablets, BFI blood coagulant, toilet paper, a strobe light, foot powder, a transistor radio, Kool-Aid, a Turkish battle-axe, and more. Gray carried far less. In addition to the rifle and what snipers called the basic load — eighty-four rounds in a pouch — Gray had with him only a pair of binoculars, a Swiss Army knife with screwdrivers for adjustments to the scope, a canteen, a pen, and matchbooks. In his pocket was a small spiral notebook in which he hoped to record his kill. Gray would sanctify the Russian's death by entering it in his notebook just as he had done for ninety-six other kills. Gray had no doubt Trusov also carried pen and paper. And a red shell.
Gray suspected Nikolai Trusov had outfitted himself with almost the same load. The two men were now distillations of all that was known about the craft of the sniper, and this reduction made them identical. Everything Gray knew — every small stratagem, every trace of wisdom about fieldcraft — Trusov also knew. Their destinies had been intertwined since the day Gray fired at Trusov in Elephant Valley. Gray had been fated for this march along Black Bear Creek toward Shepherd's Bowl since then.
Gray pushed through spikes of elephant grass, the Russian's tracks still plain. He ducked under pine boughs. The stream narrowed as it neared its source, and to avoid impenetrable brush thickets Gray jumped across the creek and back several times. As he neared the bowl, he began using a technique his sniper school instructors had called scanning, moving the eyes in abrupt and irregular movements, stopping the eye for only an instant on any one thing. Scanning is unnatural. The eyes demand a rest. But the technique allows the viewer to review and catalogue the immense amount of information the wilderness offered. Scanning seeks not animals or men but disturbances.
He had suspected Trusov would head to Shepherd's Bowl. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. A sniper's instinct is to get the sun behind him, and the bowl was west of the cabin. Trusov would want Gray staring into the setting sun not just because it would impair Gray at the instant of the shot but also because gazing toward the sun is highly fatiguing, and with weariness come mistakes.
Shepherd's Bowl offered something else to the Russian — a closed horizon, a self-contained dueling field. The bowl would fit Trusov's sense of order and his fervent desire to play the game. The bowl would also limit the area Trusov had to scout.
Because Trusov had sent several shots into the Jeep, putting it out of action, Gray had used his belt as a tourniquet around Coates's shattered arm, and had left him at the fire tower. Gray had then taken two hours to hobble back to the cabin to find Adrian, and another hour had passed before an ambulance arrived for her, before he could leave her. A helicopter was on its way to the tower for Coates. So the Russian had been in the bowl several hours before Gray could get there, and in that time Trusov would have learned all there was to know about the area. Trusov might also have had maps of the area.
Gray jumped the creek again. The sky was narrowed by the valley walls and darkened by tall trees, but it was opening up ahead. Another five hundred yards would put Gray at the mouth of Shepherd's Bowl. His options now were to travel faster or slower, but not at a walking pace. Nothing in the wilderness — not a deer or a wolf or a snake or a bear — moves at a human's pace, and anything traveling four miles an hour is always a target. He slowed, coasting over the ground. His feet melted to the earth's contours. Gray let the wilderness soak him up. He might have been invisible.
The memory of Adrian tried to push itself into his mind, and only with effort could he dismiss it, his eyes scanning and scanning. He had left her in the care of a physician and ambulance attendants. She had worn on her face most of the blood she had spilled, and so looked worse than she was. She wouldn't need to stay overnight at the clinic in Ketchum. Still, she would require stitches near her shoulders and behind her ears. Butterfly bandages would be sufficient for her forehead. The doctor said she might have a slight concussion, but she had been asking Gray questions, as always. Gray had gently chided her. He was relieved when she laughed. Gray had peeled her hand from his, then taken up the rifle to begin his journey to Shepherd's Bowl.
Gray rushed up in shadows cast by the trees in front of him. He ducked left and right, left and right, to new shadows, always nearer to the bowl's mouth. Nikolai Trusov was within two miles of him, of that Gray was certain. The most dangerous thing in the field for a sniper is another sniper, because he knows what to look for. Those tactics of travel and camouflage that made Gray blend with the wilderness worked only up to a point with another sniper, who would see what others could not and expect what others would not. Gray stepped around a chokecherry. Through the trees he could see the bowl's west wall. The sun was lowering in the afternoon sky, sending out spokes of gold light that turned like a wagon wheel.
Black Bear Creek dwindled to rivulets winding between stones. Not far into the bowl was the small pool where the stream originated. As Gray moved forward, the valley grew in front of him until it filled his vision. He stood behind a lodgepole pine and pulled his binoculars from the pack. He held his hand above the objective lenses to guard against reflection.
Shepherd's Bowl was a study in shifting greens and browns. On Gray's right the north slope resembled a desert. Lower on the north slope were the muted dusty greens of sagebrush and bitterbrush and mountain heath and Scotch broom, with green leaves shading to yellow. Higher on the slope, brown and gray boulders were spotted by stonecrop with its tiny, waxy green pods.
Gray shifted the binoculars. The bowl's center was a mix of grasses that had dried to yellow. Lodgepole and yellow pine, mountain hemlock and mountain laurel, dotted the patches of grass. The trees were dense along the bowl's east — west crease.
On Gray's left was the south slope, the darker wall where the green of lodgepole pine was touched with the blue and black of shadows.
Gray moved the binoculars right to left again, looking for agitation in the underbrush, looking for a too-straight line, looking for the slightest of reflections, looking for color that was too lively, looking for anything white or black, looking for perturbed crows or jays, never focusing on one thing for too long. All he found was more green and brown.
Trusov's footprints went due west, entering the long swath of trees on the seam of the bowl along the creek. Following this long dell was the only way to enter the bowl unseen by anyone on the bowl's slopes, and this was the route of Trusov's prints. To follow the Russian's path would most likely mean walking into a trap.