Time to Hunt (58 page)

“It doesn’t matter,” said Bob. “If he runs into cops or rangers, he’ll just kill them too and go on about his business. It’s not a problem for him. These guys have no idea what they’re up against. He can take them out, take out my wife, then escape and evade for weeks until pickup. That’s how good he is. That’s what his whole life has been about.”

“Sir, with all due respect,” said the young analyst, “I’d like to make a point which I’d be more comfortable making in private. But I have to make it here and now, so I hope Sergeant Swagger will understand that it’s not about personalities, it’s about responsibilities.”

“Go ahead,” said Swagger. “Speak freely. Say what has to be said.”

“Well, sir,” said the young analyst, “I have to think that it might be wise to concede the Russian his mission. We ought to be thinking about contingency plans for taking
him down on the out route. He’s an incredible asset. The information he has! Our first priority ought to be to take him alive and absorb the casualties—”

“No!”
boomed Bonson, like Odin throwing thunderbolts. “Sergeant Swagger’s wife is obviously in possession of valuable knowledge. You’d let that go? They think she’s important enough to run this high-risk, maximum-effort mission, and you’re going to let them get her? And you’re saying to Sergeant Swagger here, we’re just going to let your wife die? It’s more important that we get some information on old ops? We’ll just let him do his little thing, then we’ll pick him up in the afternoon?”

“Sir, I’m trying to be realistic. I’m sorry, Sergeant Swagger. I get paid to call them as I see them.”

“I understand,” said Bob. “It ain’t a problem.”

“How fast could we get FBI HRT in there, or Idaho State Police SWAT?” asked Bonson again.

“It’s a no-go for stopping the shot,” said the analyst. “It just can’t happen. We can’t get people in there fast enough. Man, this guy’s really caught some breaks!”

Bonson turned to him.

“I am not willing to concede him his mission. I absolutely am not. Will one of you bright young geniuses solve this problem? That also is what you’re paid for.”

“I’m just thinking out loud, but you could target the sniper’s likely location with cruise missiles,” someone said. “They’re very accurate. You’d have a pretty good chance of—”

“No, no,” someone else said, “the cruises are low-altitude slow-movers, with not a lot of wing to give them much maneuverability. They’d never get through the inclement weather. Plus, they have to read landforms to navigate and we don’t have time to program them. Finally, the nearest cruises are on a nuclear missile frigate in San Diego. There’s no mission sustainability in the time frame.”

“Could we smart bomb?”

“The infrared could see through the clouds, but the
landforms in the mountains are so goddamned confusing that I don’t see how he could pinpoint the target area.”

“No, but that’s promising,” said Bonson. “All right, Wigler, I want you to run a feasibility study, and I mean instantaneously.”

Wigler nodded, grabbed his coffee and raced out.

It was quiet. Bob looked at his watch. Midnight. Solaratov was well on his way. Six, maybe seven hours till daylight out there. He’d take his shot, Julie would join Donny and Trig and Peter Farris, and whatever secret she had would be gone forever. Maybe they could take Solaratov alive. But that was an illusion too. He’d have an L-pill. He was a professional. There was no way to stop him or take him. He was going to win. Again.

Then Bob said, “There is one way.”

T
he banks of the creek shielded the shallow lick of water and Solaratov built a good rhythm as he plunged along, as if on a sidewalk that led to the mountains. He wore night-vision goggles, which lit the way for him as he walked through green-tinted whiteness, following the course of the creek bed as it wound along the flats. The wind howled; the snow cut down diagonally, gathering quickly or swirling.

But he felt good. He wore a Gore-Tex parka over a down vest, mountain boots, mountain pants, long underwear, a black wool knit cap. The boots, expensive American ones by Danner, were as comfortable as any he’d ever worn, much nicer than the old Soviet military issue. He had a canteen, a compass, forty rounds of hand-loaded ammunition, the 7mm Remington, the Leica range-finding binoculars, his night-vision goggles, and the Glock 19 in its shoulder holster with a reloaded fifteen-round magazine, and two other fifteen-rounders hanging under his other shoulder. He’d improvised a snow cape from the motel room sheets.

After two hours of steady pumping, he reached the place where the creek bed petered out as it went underground.
Above him soared the lower heights of Mount McCaleb, barren and swept with snow and light vegetation. The mountains were too new, too arid to hold much life. He looked upward at the hardscrabble escarpment. Then he looked back across the flats into the center of the valley.

It was if the world had ended in snow. There was a foot of it everywhere and it had closed down everything. No lights, no sign of civilization or even human habitation stood against the whiteness of the landscape and its hugeness and emptiness, even in the green wash of the ambient light.

Solaratov had a brief moment of melancholy: this was the sniper’s life, was it not? This, always: loneliness, some mission that someone says is important, the worst weather elements, the presence of fear, the persistence of discomfort, the rush always of time.

He began to climb. The wind howled, the snow slashed. He climbed through the emptiness.

“I
’ll bet this is good,” said Bonson.

“HALO,” said Bob.

“HALO?” asked Bonson.

“He’d never make it,” said the military analyst. “He’d have no idea what the winds would do. The terrain is impossible; the drop would probably kill him.”

“I didn’t say
he,”
said Bob. “I wouldn’t ask another man to do it. But I’d do it.”

“What the hell is HALO?” asked Bonson.

“High Altitude, Low Opening.”

“It’s an airborne insertion technique,” said the young man. “Highly trained airborne operators have tried it, with mixed success. You go out very high. You fall very far. It’s sort of like bungee jumping, without the bungee. You fall like hell, and in the last six hundred feet or so, the chute deploys. You land hard. The point is to fall through radar. You’re falling so fast you don’t make a parachute signature on radar. Most Third World radars
can’t even pick up a falling man. But I’ve never heard of anyone doing it in the mountains in a blizzard at night. The winds will play havoc all the way down; you have no idea where the hell you’d wind up. You could be blown sideways into a face. SOG tried it in ’Nam. But it never worked there.”

“I was in SOG,” said Bob. “It didn’t work there because the problem was the linkup after the drop. We never could figure out how to reassemble the team. But here there ain’t a team. There’s only me.”

“Sergeant, there’s real low survivability on that one. I don’t think this dog hunts.”

“I’m airborne qualified,” said Bob. “I did the jump course at Benning in sixty-six, when I was back from my first tour.”

“That was thirty years ago,” someone pointed out.

“I’ve made twenty-five jumps. Now, you guys have terrific avionics for night navigation. You got terrific computers. You can pinpoint the drop location and you can get there easily enough by flying above the storm. You can plot a drop point where the odds of my landing in the appropriate area are very high. Right?”

The silence meant assent.

Then someone said, “Instead of a smart bomb, we send a smart guy.”

“Here’s the deal. You get me there, over the storm. I’ll fall through the blizzard. I can’t chute through it, but I can cannonball through it and my deviation won’t be that bad. I can open ’way low, to minimize wind drift, maybe as low as three hundred feet. If you liaise up an Air Force jet and a good crew, you can have me there in six hours. I can’t think of another way to get a countersniper on the ground in that circumstance. When I’m on the ground, you can triangulate me with a satellite and I can get an accurate position and I can move overland and get there in time.”

“Jesus,” said Bonson.

“You owe me, Bonson.”

“I suppose I do,” said Bonson.

“Sergeant Swagger, there’s not one man in a hundred who could survive that.”

“I been
there
before, sonny,” said Swagger.

“Get Air Force,” said Bonson. “Get this thing set up.”

Swagger had one more thing to say.

“I need a rifle. I need a
good
rifle.”

G
o down and shoot her, he thought.

Go down now, kick in the door, kill her and be out of here before the sun is up. It’s all over then. No risk, no difficulty
.

But he could not.

He stood on a ridge, about five hundred yards from the ranch house, which was dark and hardly visible through the whirling snow. Its lights were out and it stood in the middle of a blank, drifted field of white. It was a classical old cowboy place from the Westerns Solaratov had seen in the Ukraine and Bengal and Smolensk and Budapest: two-storied, many-gabled, clapboarded, with a Victorian look to it. A wisp of smoke rose from the chimney, evidence of a dying fire.

He hunched, looked at his Brietling. It was 0550; the light would rise in another few minutes and it would probably be light enough to shoot by 0700, if the storm abated. But what would bring them out? Why wouldn’t they stay in there, cozy and warm, drinking cocoa and waiting for time to pass? What would bring them out?

The child would, the girl. She’d have to frolic in the snow. The two women would come onto the porch and watch her. If she was as bold and restless as he knew her to be—he’d seen her ride, after all—she’d be up early and she’d have the whole house up.

Yet still a voice spoke to him:
go down now, kill the woman, escape deeper into the mountains and get out, go home
.

But if he went down, he’d have to kill them all. There was no other way. He’d have to shoot the child and the other woman.

Do it, he thought.

You have killed so many, what difference does it make? Do it and be gone
.

But he could not force himself to. That was not how his mind worked, that was not how he had worked in the past; that, somehow, would bring him unhappiness in the retirement that was so close and the escape from his life.

Do it, the smart part of himself said.

Nyet
, he answered in Russian. I
cannot
. He was
tselni
, which is a very Russian term for a certain kind of personality. It is a personality that is bold and aggressive and fearless of pain or risk. But it is in some way one piece, or seamless: it has no other parts, no flexibility, no other textures. He was committed to a certain life and as stubborn in the mastering of it as a man could be; he could not change now. It was impossible.

I cannot do it, he thought.

Instead, as he moved along the ridge, he at last located the spot he wanted, where he could see onto the porch yet was still far enough to the east that the sun would be behind him, and would not pick up on his lens. He squatted, took off the Leica ranging binoculars and bounced a laser shot off the house to read the range. It was 560 meters. Using a 7mm Remington Magnum at a velocity of 3010 feet per second and a 175-grain Sierra Spitzer Boat-tail bullet developing muzzle energy of over two thousand foot-pounds would drop about forty-five inches at that range, a fantastic load-velocity combination, untouchable by any .308 in the world. But he knew that to compensate, he’d still have to hold high, that is, to aim not with the crosshair but the second mil-dot beneath it in the reticle. That would put him nearly dead on, though he might have to correct laterally for windage. But it was usually calm after a blizzard, the wind spent and gone. Remember, he cautioned himself: account for the downward angle in your hold.

He visualized, a helpful exercise for shooters. See the woman. See her standing there. See the second mil-dot covering her chest, how rock steady it is, how perfect is
the range, how easy the shooting platform. Feel the trigger with the tip of your finger, but don’t think about it. Don’t think about anything. Your breathing has stopped, you’ve willed your body to near-death stillness, there’s no wind, you put your whole being into that mil-dot on the chest, you don’t even feel the rifle recoil.

The bullet will reach her before the sound of it. It’ll take her in the chest, a massive, totally destructive shot—still over eighteen hundred pounds of energy—that explodes her heart and lungs, breaks her spine, shorts out her central nervous system. She’ll feel nothing. The secrets locked into her brain will be locked there forever.

And that’s it. It’s so easy, then. You fall back, about four miles, and you call in the helicopter on the cellular. He’ll be on you in twenty minutes for evacuation. No police or civil authority will reach this place until midafternoon at the earliest, and you’ll be far gone by that time.

He slipped down behind a rock to take himself out of the gusting wind. He settled in to nurse himself through the coldness that lay ahead. But it would not be a problem, he knew. He had beaten that one a long time ago.

T
he dark of the plane was serene, cocoonlike. Swagger was geared up. He wore jump boots, some kind of super-tight jumpsuit and was struggling to get his chute straps tightened. He was quite calm. It was Bonson who was nervous.

“We’re getting close,” Bonson said. “Altitude is thirty-six thousand feet. The computers have pinpointed a dropping point that should put you down in the flat just northwest of the Mackay Reservoir, about a mile or so from the location of the house. If you carry farther you’ll go into the Lost River Mountains, see,
here.”

He pointed to the map, which clearly showed the Thousand Springs Valley that ran northwest by southeast through central Idaho, cut by the Big Lost River between the Lost River range and the White Knob Mountains.

“The chute will deploy at five hundred feet and you
should land softly enough. You’ll just have to make it across the flatlands under the cover of dark, get into the house, warn the targets, and if you have to, engage him.”