Time to Hunt (36 page)

The sergeant lit a candle and the room flickered, then filled with low light.

It was the white sniper.

T
hey lay in the high grass, or in the hills under the scrubby trees and bamboo, watching and tracking but never shooting.

A VC squad moved into the zone of fire, four men with AKs, infiltrating farther south. Easy shots; he could have taken two and driven the other two into the high grass and waited them out and taken them, too. But farther south was only ARVN, and Bob figured it was a Vietnamese problem, and the ARVNs could handle it or they could handle the ARVNs, depending. Another time, a VC tax collector clearly blew his cover and was making his rounds. It was an easy shot, 140-odd yards into a soft target. But Bob said no. The war was over for them.

They lay concealed or they tracked, looking for sign of big bodies of men, of units moving into position for an assault on Firebase Dodge City, whose immediate environs they patrolled. There was nothing. It was as if a kind of enchantment had fallen over this little chunk of I Corps. The peasants came out and resumed work in their paddies, the farmers went back to furrowing the hills with their ox-pulled plows. The rainy season was over. Birds sang; now and then a bright butterfly would skitter about. Above, fewer contrails marred the high sky, and if you flicked across the FM bandwidths on the PRC-77, you could tell that the war had wound way down; nobody was shooting at anything.

Two weeks into it, orders came for Bob, assigning him TDY to Army Weapons Lab, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, Maryland. He was slated to leave the day after Donny’s DEROS. Feamster told him since he was so short and enemy activity so quiet and nothing coming down from Battalion S-2, he and Donny didn’t have to go out anymore, but the two said they’d do it anyway, looking
for signs of an assault but not for kills. Feamster may have gotten it; that was okay by him. He said that word of turning Dodge City over to ARVN forces was imminent—“Vietnamization,” they called it—and the whole unit would be DEROSed back to the States before the summer came, no matter where the guys were in their tours.

“This is pretty cool,” said Donny.

Bob just grunted and spat.

S
olaratov slept for two days solid and then rose and came to see Huu Co. The story of his escape went untold. He made no report. How he had survived, where he had gone, what he had suffered, all of it went unrecorded and no one dared ask him. A medic attended his burns, which were severe but not debilitating, and he never complained or winced. He seemed disconnected from the agonies of his body. He had one trophy. It was his SPETSNAZ field cap, a floppy, beige thing that looked like a deflated beret or an American sailor hat that had been run over by a tank. It had two holes in it on the left side of the crown, an entrance wound and an exit wound. How could his head have survived such a thing? He had no comment but liked to wiggle his fingers through the two holes at the sappers, who would dash away in confusion.

On the morning he came to Huu Co, he said, “These people are very good. Good craft, good tactics, very well-thought-out planning. I was impressed.”

“How did you possibly survive?”

“Not a remarkable story. Luck, guile, courage, the usual. Anyhow, I am not prepared to give up the mission.”

“What do you require of us?”

“I will never maneuver close enough, I see that now. Plus, of course, I lost my weapon, much to my embarrassment. I hope it perished in the flames or was destroyed by cannon fire.”

He frowned; failure in his profession was not an acceptable outcome.

“But, no matter. I have certain requirements for a new weapon. I will be shooting at over a thousand yards. I can do it no other way, that is, unless I want to die myself, and I prefer not to.”

“Our armorers are dedicated to their jobs, but I doubt we have a weapon capable of such accuracy.”

“Yes, I know. Nor, frankly, do we. But you must have some small cache of American weapons, no? Your intelligence people would maintain an inventory? It’s common for guerrillas to turn the enemy’s weapons against himself.”

“Yes.”

“Now, I will give you a very specific type of American weapon. It must be found and delivered here within two weeks. It has to be this exact weapon; with no other would I have a chance.”

“Yes.”

“But that is not all. You must also contact the Soviet SPETSNAZ unit at the airfield; they will be required to acquire certain components from outside Asia. These are very specific also; no deviation can be allowed. There is a place where such a list can be filled out in just a few seconds, and they will have access to capabilities to do so.”

“Yes, comrade. I—”

“You see, it’s not merely the rifle. The rifle is only part of the system. It’s also the ammunition. I have to construct ammunition capable of the task which I have in mind.”

He handed over the list, which was in English. Huu Co did not recognize the rifle by type, nor the list of “ingredients,” which appeared to be of a chemical or scientific nature. He did recognize one word, but it had no meaning to him: MatchKing.

T
he sniper worked with care. He studied the reconnaissance photos of the area, discussed the topography once again with Huu Co, trying to find the right combination of
elements. He worked very, very carefully. After devising theories, he went to test them, exploring the area at night and spending his days hidden in the grass, trying to learn what there was to learn.

This time he never went near the base. He was acclimatizing himself to the very long shots, and hunting for a shooting position. He finally found one on a nameless hill that, by his judgment, was close to fourteen hundred yards from the base, but it offered the most generous angle into the encampment, with the least drop, the least exposure to wind pressure, the most favorable light in the early morning, when such a thing would take place, and it was also sited immediately to the north of the original ambush site, a gamble, but a calculated one. Solaratov reasoned that on general principle alone, the American sniper team would be reluctant to go out the same way as the one that had almost gotten them killed. But they would consider going out the opposite side too obvious. Therefore, on their missions they would either leave above, to the north, or below, to the south. He had a one-in-two chance of encountering them, and in the days that he waited, he saw them leave the post three times. Tiny dots, so far away. Hardly human.

Fourteen hundred yards. It was a hellaciously long shot. It was a shot nobody had any business trying to make. Beyond six hundred yards, the margin of error shrinks to nothing; the play of the elements increases exponentially. You would need more power than the Dragunov’s 7.62 × 54 round; you would need more power than any round available under normal circumstances in either the North Vietnamese or the American inventory, because war had become a thing of light, fast-firing weapons that kill by firepower, not accuracy. He had contempt for such a philosophy. It was the philosophy of the common untrainable man, not of the elite professional who masters all the variables in his preparation and who has genius-level skill at his task. War nowadays no longer demanded special men but ordinary men—lots of them.

He lay on the hill, trying to will himself into the mental state necessary. He had to be calm, his eyesight perfect, his judgment secure. He had to dope the wind, the mirage, the temperature, the angle of travel of the targets, his bullet’s trajectory, the time in flight, everything. At this range, it was not like rifle shooting; it was like naval gunfire, for the bullet would have to rise in high apogee and describe an arc across the sky, and float downward with perfect, perfect placement. There were not but a dozen men in the world who could take such a shot with confidence.

He watched, through binoculars: the Marines far off scuttled about behind their berm, making ready to depart, confident that for them the war was almost over. And for two of them, it was.

Finally: the rifle. It came almost at the end of the two-week period, and not without difficulty. It had been a trophy in the People’s Museum of Great Struggle in downtown Hanoi; thousands of schoolchildren had looked upon it with great horror as part of their political education. It demonstrated the evil will of the colonialists and the capitalists, that they took such great pains to construct the devil’s own tool. In this, it was very useful indeed, and it took Russian intervention at the highest levels to have it withdrawn from the permanent exhibit. A special sapper unit was ordered to transport it down the Trail of Ten Thousand Miles to Huu Co’s little hidden post on the outskirts of the defoliated zone of Firebase Dodge City.

The Russian broke it down, for the first step to mastering a rifle is to master what makes it work. He studied the system, the cleverness of it, the robustness of it, the rise and fall of springs, the thrusting of rods, the gizmo of the trigger group. It was ingenious: overengineered in the American fashion, but ingenious. This one had been crudely accurized with flash hider, a fiberglass bedding for the action in the stock, a wad of leather around the comb
to provide a nest for the cheek in relation to the scope, which was a mere four-power and, Solaratov saw, the weakest element in the system, attached to the rifle parallel to but not above the barrel, creating problems in parallax that had to be mastered. But his main focus of interest was that trigger group, a mesh of springs and levers that could be pulled whole from the receiver group. He broke it down to the tiniest component, then carefully polished each engagement surface to give the piece a crisper let-off.

At this point, the box of “components” came from the Soviet intelligence service. They were the easiest mission requirements to acquire: a Soviet asset had merely gone to a Southern California gun store and purchased them, for cash; they had been shipped to the Soviet Union via diplomatic pouch and to North Vietnam by the daily TU-16 flight. To look at them was to see nothing: these were actually reloading tools, which looked like steel chambers of mysterious purpose, and green boxes of bullets, cans of powder, DuPont IMR 4895, tools for resizing the case, pressing in new primers, reinserting the bullet. He knew that no military round could deliver the accuracy he needed and that it would take great attention to detail and consistency.

He took the entire rig for a day’s march to the north, and there, out of the eyes of Westerners and Vietnamese alike except for a security team of sappers and the ever-curious Huu Co, he set up a fourteen-hundred-meter range, shooting at two close targets, white silhouettes that were easy to see and would not be moving like they would on the day of his attempt.

The scope was small and had an ancient, obsolete reticle: a post, like a knife point, rising above a single horizontal line. Additionally, it did not have enough elevation to enable him to hit out to fourteen hundred meters, close to three times the rifle’s known efficiency, though well within the cartridge’s lethal capability. He hand-filed
shims from pieces of metal and inserted them within the scope rings to elevate the scope higher, and tightened the assembly with aircraft glue so that it would hold to a thousand-yard zero over the course of his testing.

He worked with infinite patience. He seemed lost in a world no one could penetrate. He seemed distracted to an absurd degree, almost catatonic. His nickname, “the Human Noodle,” took on added comic meaning as he entered a zone of total vagueness that was actually total concentration. He seemed to see nothing.

Gradually, increment by increment, he managed to walk his shots into the target. Once he was on the target, he began hitting regularly, primarily through mastery of trigger control and breathing and finding the same solid position off a sandbag. The sandbag was the important feature: it had to be just so dense, packed so tight, and it had to support the rifle’s forestock in just such a way. Infinitely patient micro-experimentation was gradually revealing the precise harmony among rifle and load and position and his own concentration that would make his success at least possible.

Finally, he took to having the sappers present the targets from over a berm, so that he could see them for just the second they’d be visible. He’d teach himself to shoot fast. It went slowly and he burned out the sappers with his patience, his insistence on recleaning the rifle painstakingly every sixteen rounds, his demand that all his ejected cartridges be located and preserved in the order that they were fired. All the time he kept a notebook of almost unreadable pedantry as he assembled his attempts.

“For a sniper, he is a very dreary fellow,” the sergeant said to Huu Co.

“You want a romantic hero,” said Huu Co. “He is a bureaucrat of the rifle, infinitely obsessed with micro-process. It’s how his mind works.”

“Only the Russians could create such a man.”

“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.

T
he 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.