Time to Hunt (59 page)

“If I get the shot, I’ll take it.”

“That’s fine. Our priority here is your wife. She’s the target of this mission, so thwarting him is what counts. As soon as it’s flyable, I’ve got a squad of air policemen heloing in from Mountain Home to set up a defensive perimeter, and park rangers and Idaho State Policemen ready to go into the mountains after this guy. If you get the shot, take it. But, man, if we could get him alive and her alive, we’d have—”

“Forget it,” Swagger said. “He’s a professional. He killed two people already. He won’t be taken alive. The rest of his life in a federal prison is no life for this guy. He’d take the L-pill, laughing at you as he checked out.”

“Maybe so,” said Bonson.

Swagger finished with the parachute; it seemed okay, with the preset altitude-sensitive deployment device.

That was the tricky part. The altitude sensor read altitude from a predetermined height above sea level so that it was set to pop the chute five hundred feet over the flatland; if he drifted into the mountains, the chute might not pop at all before he hit some gigantic vertical chunk of planet. The Air Force people had explained this to him, and told him that, more than anything, was why this was so foolhardy. The computers could read the wind tendencies, compute his weight, the math of his acceleration, add in the C-130’s airspeed and determine a spot where the trajectory would be right, navigate the bird to that spot and tell him when it was time to go. But the jump wouldn’t be in a computer, it would be in the real world, unpredictable and unknowable; a gust of tailwind, some tiny imperfection, and he’d be dead and what good would that do?

The plane was making about 320 miles an hour, after a government Lear jet had zoomed them from Andrews to Mountain Home in less than five hours, during which time
he and Bonson had been on the radio with various experts trying to work out the details.

They landed at Mountain Home and were airborne again in ten minutes.

Bob checked his electronics and other gear, all secured in a jump bag that was tethered to his ankle. In it, a cold-weather arctic-pattern camouflaged Gore-Tex parka and leggings had been folded. He also had a new Motorola radio, MTX-810 Dual Mode portable, with microprocessor and digitized, a tenth the weight of the old PRC-77 and with three times the range, which would keep him in contact with a network; it was linked to his belt, and secured to his head by a throat mike, sound-sensitive, so all he had to do was talk and he was on the net. He also had a Magellan uplink device to read the Global Positioning System satellites, which orbited overhead broadcasting a mesh of ultra-accurate signals, similarly digitized and microprocessor-driven, which could enable him to chart his position in milliseconds if he should wander off track. He had night-vision gear, the latest things; M912A night-vision goggles from Litton with two 18mm Gen II Plus image-intensifier assemblies, which provided three times the system gain of the standard AN/PVS-5A.

He had a Beretta 92 in a shoulder holster under his left arm, a 9mm mouse gun shooting a lot (sixteen) of little cartridges not worth a damn, but nobody had .45s anymore, goddamn their souls.

And he had a rifle.

Taken from the Agency’s sterile weapons inventory, it appeared to be some Third World assassination kit of which the rifle was but one part. The rifle lay encased in a foam-lined aluminum case, the Remington M40A1, Marine-issue, in .308, with its fiberglass stock, its free-floated barrel, its Unertl 10X scope. It would shoot an inch at one hundred yards, no problem; and two boxes of Federal Premium 168-grain MatchKing boattailed hollowpoints.

He’d examined it closely and saw that the proprietary shooter had taped a legend to the butt stock.

“Zeroed at 100 Yards,” it said. And under that: “200 yards: 9 klicks up; 300 yards: 12 klicks up; 400 yards: 35 klicks up; 500 yards: 53 klicks up.”

“Okay,” said Bonson, leaning close, “let’s check commo.”

“Just a goddamn second,” said Bob, trying to guess the range he’d be shooting at.

What the fuck, he thought, and started clicking, fifty-three times.

“Come on, let’s check commo,” said Bonson again. Clearly the tools of the trade at this basic level did not much interest Bonson; they may even have frightened him. But there were other devices cut into the padded foam of the case; one was an SOG knife in a kydex sheath, a dark and deadly thing; another was leather-encased sap, just the thing for thumping sentries as you got to your hide; and still another, so discreet in its green canvas M7 bandoleer and therefore complete with firing device and wiring, was the M18A1 anti-personnel mine known as the Claymore, so familiar from Vietnam and just the thing for flank security on some kind of assassination mission outside Djakarta.

He had a moment when he wondered if he should have junked all this shit, but as it was all going into the parapack, and would be tethered to his leg, he decided not to worry about it. He locked the case up.

“Come on,” said Bonson for a third time, “let’s check commo.”

“We just checked commo.”

“Yeah, I’m nervous. You okay?”

“I’m fine, Commander.”

“Okay, I’m going to run up to the cockpit and check with the pilots.”

“Got you.”

He turned and walked up the big ship’s dark bay to the cabin, cracked a door and leaned in.

Back here it was dark, with a few red safety lamps lit, and the subtle roar of the big engines chewing through air on the other side of the fuselage. It felt very World War II, very we-jump-tonight, strangely melodramatic.

Here I am again, he thought.

Here I go. Face some other motherfucker with a rifle. Been here before
.

But he did not feel lucky tonight. He felt scared, tense, rattled, keeping it hidden only because poor Bonson was so much more rattled.

He looked at the end of the bay, where the big ramp was cranked up. In a few minutes, it would yawn open into a platform and he would get a signal and he would step out, and gravity would take him. He’d fall for two minutes. Maybe the chute would work and maybe it wouldn’t. He wouldn’t know until it happened.

He tried to exile his feelings. If you get mad, you get excited, you get careless, you get dead. Don’t think about all that shit. You just do what has to be done, calmly, professionally, with a commitment to mission and survival. Don’t think about the other man. It’s what has to be done. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

He tried not to think of Julie or of the man who’d come across time and space to kill her for what she didn’t even know she knew. He tried not to think of his ancient enemy and all the things that had been taken from him by the man. He tried not to think of larger meanings, of the geopolitics of it all, of the systems opposed to each other, and himself and the other, as mere surrogates. He exiled all that.

“Sarge?”

He turned; it was a young air crewman, a tech sarge who looked about fifteen.

“Yeah?”

“You got your parachute on upside down.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Bob.

“You haven’t been to jump school, have you?”

“Saw a guy parachute in a movie once. Ain’t it the same thing?”

The kid smiled.

“Not quite. Here, let me help you.”

It took just a few seconds for the young NCO to have him geared up correctly.

Yeah, that made sense. It felt much better; now it fit right, it was okay.

“You need oxygen, too, you know. There’s no air to breathe this high.”

“Yeah, they told me.”

The kid had a helmet for him, a jet pilot thing with a plastic face shield, an oxygen mask and a small green tank. The tank was yet another weight on the belt over his jumpsuit, and the tube ran up to the helmet, which fit close around his skull and supported it in plastic webbing.

“I feel like a goddamned astronaut,” Swagger said.

I
t was nearly time. Bonson came back.

Behind them, with a shriek of frigid wind, the ramp door of the Hercules opened. It settled downward with an electrical grind, and outside the dark sky swirled by.

Bonson hooked himself up to a guy wire so he wouldn’t be sucked out. The tech sarge gave Bob a last go-round, pronounced him fit and wished him well. With the ramp down, there was no oxygen and so they were all on oxygen. He felt the gush of air into his lungs from the clammy rubber mask around his mouth, under the face plate. He tasted rubber.

Bob and Bonson edged down the walkway to the yawning rear of the aircraft. The wind rose, howled and buffeted them; the temperature dropped. Bob felt the straps of the chute, the weight of the jump bag tethered to his ankle, the warmth of the jump helmet. Outside he could see nothingness with a sense of commotion.

“You cool?” said Bonson over the radio.

Bob nodded. He was too old for this. He felt weighed
down with the rifle, the optics gear, the boots, the helmet, the parachute, all of it too much, all of it pulling on him.

“You got it? You just cannonball when you go out. You fall, you fall, you fall, then the thing opens up automatically. You can stabilize with the risers on the left or the right of the chute. I don’t need to tell you. You’ve done it before.”

Again, Bob nodded, as Bonson went ahead nervously into his own microphone.

“No problem. You get there, you save the women, you’ll be all right. And we get Solaratov, no problem. We’ve got it all set up. As soon as the weather breaks, another team goes in; it’s all taken care of.”

Another nod.

“Okay, they’re saying thirty seconds now.”

“Let’s go.”

Bob moved slowly toward the gap in the rear of the plane. There was no sense of anything; just blackness beyond the ramp.

“Okay, get ready,” said Bonson.

Bob paused in the buffeting torrent of black air. He was scared.

“Go!”
said Bonson, and Bob stepped forward and off, into nothingness.

N
ikki awoke early, before first light. It was a habit she could not break, partially because of her own pulsating energies but also because she had for so long awakened then to feed the horses.

Today, there were no horses to feed, but there was a whole new world of snow to explore.

She threw a bathrobe on over her pajamas and stepped into her moccasins and went downstairs. The fire was sleepy, so she threw a log onto it, and amid a spray of sparks, it began to stir to life. Then she went to the doorway, cracked it open. A wintry blast howled through, and yes, it was still snowing, but not as hard. She got the door
open and crept out on the porch, pulling her bathrobe tight.

The world was lost in snow. Its natural shapes were blurred and softened. It was everywhere; on the fences, drifting over them; in strange hills that had been bushes; mounded on the roof of the barn and on the woodpile. She had never seen so much snow in her life.

The children who had once lived here had a sled; she’d seen it in the barn. She knew where she’d go, too. Off to the left, not too far, there was a slope, not a steep one but just enough to get up some good momentum.

She looked through the darkness to the mountains of the east, invisible in the slanting, falling snow. But she could feel a change coming somehow. She couldn’t wait for daylight. She couldn’t wait!

S
olaratov watched the child through his night-vision goggles, a far-off figure in a field of green in the bottom of the aquarium that was the world of electronically amplified ambient light. Excited by the temptations of snow, she’d come early and stood, outside on the porch, a little green blob. Then she reached down and cupped a clutch of snow into a neat little ball, and threw it out into the yard.

The waiting was at last over. He pushed up the NV goggles, and took up the Leica range finder. He put the ranging dot on her and pressed the button, sending an invisible spurt of laser out to bounce off her and back, trailing its logo of data. Five hundred fifty-seven, it said in the display superimposed on the right of the image.

Five hundred fifty-seven meters. He thought for a second, computing drift and drop, and then lifted the rifle to place the mil-dot beneath the crosshairs on her. It felt obscene to target a child like this, but he had to familiarize himself with the sensations.

The dot blotted out her heroic little chest. His muscles, though stiff, remained hard, and he locked the rifle under a bridge of bone to the earth, and held the dot
there with the professional shooter’s discipline. No wobble, no tremble, nothing to betray fear or doubt. His finger touched the trigger. Were he to will it, four and a half pounds of pressure and she would leave the earth forever.

He put the rifle down, glad that he still had energy.

Clearly now, it was just a matter of time.

H
e knew something was wrong immediately.

Instead of curling his body into a cannonball, he flailed, feeling panic and fear. He had never fallen before, and the sense of no control completely stunned him. It was no question of courage, just his limbic system; he was suddenly unmanned by the sense of utter helplessness. The wind hammered at him like fists; his body planed and fluttered and he tried to bring his ankles up to his wrists but he could get nothing to work against the power of the air rushing up at him at hundreds of miles an hour.

He screamed but there was no sound, because he screamed into an oxygen mask. But it was a scream, nevertheless, mad and ripped from his lungs like a physical thing, like an animal. He heard it rattling around in his helmet.

He had never screamed before in a hundred or a thousand fights. He had never screamed at Parris Island or any of the places where he’d had to kill or die. He had never screamed on the nights before action, in contemplation of what might happen on the next day, and he never screamed the day after, in contemplation of the horrors that he had seen or caused or had just missed him. He’d never screamed in grief or rage.

He screamed.

The scream was pure fury boiling out of his soul, unstoppable but lost in the hugeness of the air pressure.

He fell through darkness, feeling lost and powerless and, above all, vulnerable.