Gray flinched and dug his head into the ground at the sound of a projectile soaring in at him and passing a few inches from his ear. He cursed himself. It was a hummingbird, curious and fearless, then bored and gone as quickly as it came.
He rose behind a pine, his back to the tree. He swung his gaze along the protective trees uphill from him on the south slope. Nothing visible amid all the trees and brush. Because he never looked around a tree unless his head was close to the ground, he lowered himself again. He turned toward the tree, pressing his cheek and temple against the coarse bark, then brought an eye around.
His view was of much of the bowl, from the mouth off to his right to the high banks of the north wall. He again brought out the binoculars. Nothing. Gray's mouth pulled down. The sound of a woodpecker's rapping came from the thick wedge of trees downhill at the bowl's center. The fire was burning itself out near the mouth of the bowl. The wind was slowly clearing the bowl of smoke.
Huckleberry and heath and sorrel offered low cover. Gray crawled from tree to tree, traveling a hundred yards, then another hundred, moving west farther into the bowl. Its snout forward, the Winchester urged him on.
Early in his sniper career Gray would stay up most of the night before a mission because it was thought that being tired reduced pressure. But on the mission Gray had found his concentration wandering, perhaps in search of sleep. Instead, as he learned more and more about his craft and recognized the nuances of the wilderness, he discovered that the sheer volume of information pushed aside the pressure and fear. Now it was the same. Leaning into the tree trunk, critical intelligence poured into Gray. The sun's position, humidity, wind, temperature, ground cover, sights and sounds, all were ever changing. Every few feet he journeyed he had to assess entirely new conditions. He looked for unusual movement, he searched for possible hides, he searched for untoward reflections, he listened for peculiar sounds. Gray knew that whoever could best marshal his mental resources and keep them honed the longest would leave Shepherd's Bowl that day. All Gray needed to do was concentrate.
He crawled over a mat of moss campion then through a spread of wheatgrass. Lodgepole pines marked his way on both sides. The tick was along for the ride. Gray could not pinch off its swollen body because its head would remain below the skin and might become infected. Later he would put a lighted match close to the tick's behind, and the insect would back out of Gray's skin on its own volition. This presumed there was a later for Gray.
He moved over the ground quickly and quietly. He should have been as comfortable crawling on all fours as a weasel, but his skin howled with every motion. He was thirsty and had no water, and he knew that thirst, magnified by pain, would alter his judgment. He would need water soon.
He brushed by gumweed that left a sticky resin on his arms and cocklebur that deposited green burrs on his pants. He crawled forward between a pine and a tree stump that was bracketed by gorse, a thick bush with vicious spikes on its stems. He could see through trees to the bowl's center. When he reached into his pack for the binoculars, his back and shoulders sent electric jolts of pain deeply into Gray. His hand trembled when he brought out the field glasses.
When he pressed the binoculars against his face, his hand jumped. He swatted at his face, knocking a paper wasp away from the corner of his eye. He had been stung at the lines near the corner of his left eye. Had his back and shoulders and leg not been in agony, Gray would have laughed. Fate had decided Gray just wasn't suffering enough yet, so it added a wasp sting and a tick bite to the mix. Gray touched the corner of his eye. The skin was already swelling. It should have smarted, but the pain was lost in the suffering of the burns. He looked skyward to find a nest the size of a basketball in the tree eight feet above the ground. A dozen wasps angrily patrolled near the nest's mouth. A wasp flitted down toward him. Gray resisted the instinct to swat at it because a sudden movement would alert Trusov if the Russian were surveying the area with field glasses. The wasp moved away. Gray returned the binoculars to his eyes.
Not for long. Pain altered perception, but Gray still trusted his ears, and they picked up a delicate sound, a wispy press of a leaf against another leaf. Other sounds reached Gray — the last crackling of the fire at the base of the bowl behind and below Gray, the brush of wind-tossed needles in the trees, the drone of the wasps overhead. But this slight crackle from the other side of Gray's pine tree was against the grain of the bowl's sounds. It stood out, however trifling. And Gray knew that whoever had made the little sound had not intended it to escape.
It came again, just barely penetrating the threshold of Gray's perception. A tiny crackle, there and gone, but closer, coming from the other side of the pine and gorse. A stalker, someone good at it, someone intent on Gray, coming to kill him, believing Gray was living his last seconds on this earth.
With a calm and slow and utterly quiet motion, Gray brought the rifle up so that its bore was above his head, aimed at the gorse to the left of the tree. He flicked off the safety and put his finger on the trigger.
This time the sound was so quiet, so professional, that Gray could only suspect he heard it. Coming from behind the tree, a little to its left. The nudging of a pine needle.
Gray shut down his systems. No breathing or blinking. He willed his heart to slow. So intent was he on the predator coming toward him that the pain from his burns subsided. The world and all that was in it was on the other side of the brush, coming for him.
Gray felt himself switch onto automatic. All discretion was gone. Gray's instincts and training would tell him when to move without Gray consciously making the decision.
A branch of the gorse wiggled unnaturally, a small flicker. The predator was four feet away with only a tree trunk intervening.
Gray waited three beats, then another and another.
He suddenly pushed himself left with his knees, a leap from behind the tree that took him left to the edge of the gorse for a view of the stalker, Gray's rifle ahead of him, the trigger beginning its short and lethal motion.
Gray was as startled as the bobcat.
The animal's stubby black-barred tail shot up. The bobcat seemed to inflate as the fur on its back and chest rose. It showed its fangs and hissed, a searing noise like steam escaping a locomotive. The bobcat's legs were striped, and its face was decorated with black lines that fanned out to its wide cheek ruff. The cat leaped straight up in fright, and landed in a dead run, back the way it had come, leaving Gray's breath in his throat.
"Goddamnit," he mouthed after a moment. "When this is done I'm coming back here and making mittens out of you."
Gray slowly rose to his feet and started west through the trees. So fearsome was the pain from his back and shoulders that they felt they were still on fire. With each step his skin pulled at itself, washing him with agony. His left leg from thigh to moccasin was burned down to the muscle, and was raw and seeping, and caked in mud and leaves. It rocked Gray with pain with each step.
He slowed, then slowed again. He was not gathering information like he should. The pain was diverting his attention, not letting him gather and filter all the bowl was offering. The pain was numbing his senses. In this arena the slightest disadvantage might be lethal.
An ancient tree stump — so old it was losing its shape as the wood rotted away — offered a spot where Gray could try to recoup. His life depended on pushing the pain away. When he neared the stump he saw a porcupine to one side, rocking back and forth. The animal was gurgling pitiably, and not until Gray reached the stump did he notice the trail of blood the porcupine had been leaving. The animal seemed indifferent to Gray, not moving away, only mewling terribly. Gray quickly surveyed the view of the north slope from the stump, saw nothing, then looked more closely at the porcupine.