Within five seconds of the second shot, fifty wasps were on Trusov, and within fifteen seconds three hundred more. Then five hundred and more.
Gray knew where he was. The Russian dared not move from that spot. The wasps covered Trusov's face in a wriggling black and brown mask, working their stingers repeatedly. His shirt and hands were also soon covered with the insects. So many wasps crawled angrily over Trusov that his form seemed molten.
His face was bunched against the pain, but he could do nothing against the wasps lest Gray's third bullet find him. So he lay there, and he lay there. His eyelids were stung, and his lips and ears, every square millimeter of his forehead, stung and stung again. Wasps crawled partway into his nostrils to sting him there. All along his neck, all over his face. After several moments the wasps began to calm and to lift away from him. The mask dissolved and the squirming shirt dissipated. Trusov had been stung hundreds of times. The inhuman effort not to move or to scream seemed to have stilled Trusov, because when it was time to search for a safe way out from under Gray's rifle, the Russian did not move. A moment passed before he opened his eyes.
Or he tried to. His face had begun to swell. His eyelids and nose puffed up. His bony face began to lose its contours and the skin bloated with the wasps' poison. His hands inflated to resemble mittens.
Four hundred yards down the slope and east, Owen Gray was exhausted, desperate, and pain-racked. But he grinned.
Then he moved out, this little encouragement helping him walk in the direction of the wasps' nest, under brush and alongside pine, carrying his rifle, trying not to let it drag on the ground. Progress was slow. Each yard was marked by pain, but he traveled toward Trusov, one tree at a time, keeping himself covered. He came to the shattered wasps' nest. The insects still patrolled, but they paid no attention to Gray.
He lowered himself to his knees and began following Trusov's trail. Perhaps the Russian had been in too much pain to disguise his obvious trail. But after fifty yards it became less so, as if Trusov was slowly gaining control of himself. Then even less so.
Gray had noticed in Vietnam that when he was on a mission — stalking, low to the earth, rapt with the danger — he was incapable of contemplation that took him more than eight inches above the ground. He might lie on his belly for two days waiting for the mark, and in all that time he would be unable to think of his parents or the Sawtooths or the nurse he had met at the division hospital. No daydreaming, no escape. His mental horizon was the dirt two inches in front of his nose, but it was a focused horizon. He missed nothing, absorbing every tiny crease in the land and every minuscule facet of the flora. The smallest irregularity — a drop of blood, a shallow footprint, a shell casing, a few grains of spilled rice, the scent of human urine — was made plain and portentous by his closeness to the ground. Now, despite his wounds, and revived by his small success with the wasps, he believed he was missing nothing.
So it was that when Gray had gone a hundred yards from the wasps' nest he was brought up by a slight resistance, a negligible increase in friction of the ground. He froze, at first unaware where the irregularity was, then determined it was from his left arm, his wrist, maybe a finger. He did not breathe, he did not swallow, he did not incline his head even a fraction of an inch. He moved only his eyeballs, and even them slowly. His gaze coursed along his arm to his left wrist, which was ahead of him on the ground, partly hidden by grass. He could see nothing wrong. Sweat trickled into his eyes. He was utterly motionless, and he could hear and see and feel nothing irregular, yet he was certain that at the end of his left arm was a vast peril.
The rifle was in his right hand. He let it slip slowly from his grip, its stock and trigger guard and swivel pin settling on the ground with no more force than a tuft of airborne thistledown. He moved his right hand slowly forward, sliding up the rifle barrel so he could see his right hand in front of him. With the tip of one finger of his right hand he parted grass stalks. The finger worked its way into the grass, nudging aside the brittle stems until he saw a glint of reflected green light, a slight foreign spark three inches above the ground.
A length of fishing line. The little finger of Gray's left hand had caught it and pulled it an inch out of its taut north — south line. It was the trip wire of a spring gun hidden to Gray's left or right. Set by Trusov. Gray willed his mind to work. Some lethal devices, such as the Claymore mine, relied not on pressure but on the release of that pressure. As long as the infantryman stood on the mine he was safe. Gray tried to recall snare techniques that used back pressure. He knew of none. He pressed his cheek against the ground and slowly pulled back his left hand from the fishing line. The spring gun was silent.
When his hand was under his chin, he brought his head up. He looked left up the slope. At first he saw only horseweed and cheat grass among the pine trees. Then he detected the two menacing black holes eight feet to his left, the dark eyes of a double-barrel shotgun. To his right the line was tied to the branch of a Scotch broom. The weapon had been placed here to cut down anyone on Gray's route. Which meant that Nikolai Trusov felt he could not cover this approach.
Gray quelled a rising sense of triumph, fought it back as useless and premature. This trap was not a warning or a feint. The shotgun was well hidden and the trip wire detectable virtually only by intuition. His right hand found his Winchester. He rose to his knees and crossed over the trip wire one limb at a time, moving like a cloud on a calm day, soundless, his eyes ever on the fishing line. When his trailing foot slipped over the line, Gray again lowered himself to his stomach. He slithered forward again.
He came to a short whitebark pine, more a shrub than a tree, with a twisted and irregular trunk. On the ground beneath it was a blanket of thick scales from the tree's cones that had been torn apart by chipmunks and nutcrackers for the seeds. The whitebark offered a rising cover. Gray lifted his head, ducking branches, twisting his body to insert it up between the boughs without jiggling them. He brought up the binoculars. Nothing ahead. Yet Trusov had to be there. The spring gun meant Trusov was protecting this passage to his hide.
Just as he was about to return to the ground, the slightest of motions, as insignificant as it was out of place in the high country, caught the corner of his eye. Gray trusted his peripheral vision. Its best use was at dusk when objects that couldn't be seen directly might be observed at the edge of the eye. In daylight, side vision would pick up an oddity, some angle or motion that did not fit into the wilderness pattern that might be missed if viewed straight on. Gray slowly brought his head around to face the irregularity.
A moment passed before he located it. A rifle barrel. Even at a hundred and fifty yards, the barrel, so true and purposeful, seemed a violation of the mountains. Only eighteen inches of the barrel appeared above a fallen log, but when the bush behind it, perhaps a grouseberry, wafted gently in the slight breeze, the barrel stayed fixed in position. Then the barrel moved on its own, stark against the soft grouseberry background. He could not tell if Trusov was facing him or another direction. He could not see the Russian's head. Moving as slowly as if in a barrel of molasses, Gray lifted the Winchester.
He found the Russian's rifle barrel through the Unertl scope. He could see its blued front sight and bore. Gray lowered his rifle a hair. In the scope now was a brown wool cap. Only the top few inches of the cap, but enough.
Gray was acutely aware he might be pulling down on a dummy position, an artful trap left by the enemy that would cause the shooter to reveal his position. Nikolai Trusov's father had used this ruse at Stalingrad. But Gray could not wait. He was at the end of his resources.