Time to Hunt

CHAPTER NINE

The rain fell in torrents in I Corps. It was the end of the rainy season and no rainier season is rainier than the one in the Republic of South Vietnam. Da Nang, the capital of this dying empire, was wet, but some further hundred klicks out, wetter still, lay the fortified fire base a few of the Marines left in the Land of Bad Things called Dodge City, a ramshackle slum of sandbags, 105mm howitzers, S-shops, bunkers, barbed wire and filthy, open four-holers. It was the tail end of a lost war and nobody wanted to get wasted before the orders were cut that got these sad boys home.

But there were Marines even beyond Dodge City, out in Indian Country. There, in a tangle of scrub trees near the top of a hill identified on maps only by its height in meters — Hill 519 — two of them cowered in the downpour, watching the drops accumulate on the rims of their boonie caps, gather and finally drop off, while the rain beat a cold tattoo against the ponchos that covered both of them and their gear.

One of them dreamed of home. It was Lance Corporal Donny Fenn, and he was getting very short. In May, his four-year enlistment was up; he was home free. He knew his DEROS by heart, as did every man in the ’Nam, the ones who first came in 1965, the ones who were still there: Date of Estimated Return from Overseas Service. Donny’s was 07 May 1972. He was a two-tour guy, with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, and though he no longer believed in the war, he did believe, passionately, that he was going to make it. He had to.

On this wet morning, Donny dreamed of dry pleasures. He dreamed of the desert, from where he’d come, Pima County, Arizona, the town of Ajo, and the hot dry air that pulsed down from the Sonoras out of Mexico, dry as the devil’s breath. He dreamed of baking in such a place, going back to college, on to law school. He dreamed of a house, of a family, a job. Most of all, he dreamed of his young wife, who had just written him, and the words were inscribed in his mind now as he sat in the downpour: “You keep your spirits high, Marine! I know you’ll make it and I pray for that day. You are the best thing that ever happened to me and I cannot live without you, so if you get killed, I am going to be plenty angry! I might never talk to you again, I would be so mad.”

He had written her back just before this boonie jaunt: “Oh, you sweet thang, I do miss you so. Things are fine here. I didn’t know spiders could get big as lobsters or that it could rain for three solid months, but these are useful facts and will come in ever so handy back in the world. But the Sarge will keep me alive, because he’s the smartest Marine that ever lived or breathed and he said if I got wasted, who the hell would he pick on and that would be no fun at all!”

Rolled into his hatband, swaddled in cellophane, was a picture of Julie, now out of her hippie phase, though she worked at the Tucson Veterans Hospital among the wounded from another war and was even talking of a nursing career now. In the picture, Julie’s beauty was like a beam in the night for a man lost and starving.

A shiver rose through Donny’s spine, a deep and relentless cold. The world had liquified: it was mud, fog or rain; no other elements existed. It was an almost incandescent world, whose low lights yielded no hint to time of day. The vapors simply floated in gray murk, a kind of universal declamation of misery.

Under his poncho he felt the coldness of one of the few M14s left in Vietnam, with a twenty-round magazine leaning into his leg, ready for instant deployment if Sierra-Bravo-Four were bounced, but that would never happen because the sergeant was so skilled at picking hides.

He carried two canteens, a 782-pack full of C-rats, mostly barbecued pork, four M26 grenades, a Colt .45 automatic, an M-49 spotting scope, a black phosphate-bladed K-Bar, ten extra twenty-round 7.62 NATO mags, three Claymore mine bandoleers, one M57 electrical firing device, a canvas bag full of flares and a flare launcher, and, enemy of his life, bane of his existence, most hated of all objects on the face of the earth, a PRC-77 radio, fourteen pounds of lifeline to Dodge.

“Commo check,” said the sergeant, who sat a few feet from Donny, gazing at the same rain-blasted, foliage-dense landscape, the plains and paddies and jungles and low, mean hills. “Get on the horn, Pork.”

“Shit,” said Donny, for deploying the radio meant moving, moving meant breaking the steamy seal the poncho had formed around his neck, which meant cold water would cascade down his neck into the sweaty warmth of his body. There was no colder place than Vietnam, but that was okay, because there was no hotter place, either.

Donny stirred in the tent of his poncho, got the Prick-77 up and on, knew its freak was preset accurately, and managed somehow, leaning it forward precariously, to let its four feet of whip antenna snap forward and out into the wet air.

He brought the phone to his ear up through his poncho and pushed the on-off toggle to ON. And, yes, a shivery blade of water sluiced down between his shoulder blades, underneath his jungle cammies. He shivered, said “Fuck” under his breath and continued to struggle with the radio.

The problem with the Pricks wasn’t only their limited range, their dense weight, their line-of-sight operational capabilities but, more critically, their short battery lives. Therefore grunts used them sparingly on preset skeds, contacting base for a fast sitrep. He pressed SEND.

“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?”

He pressed RECEIVE, and for his efforts got a crackly soup of noise. No big surprise, with the low clouds, the rain, and the terrain’s own vagaries at play; sometimes they got through and sometimes they didn’t.

He tried again.

“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you read? Is anybody there? Hello, knock, knock, please open the door, over?”

The response was the same.

“Maybe they’re all asleep,” he said.

“Naw,” said the sergeant, in his rich Southern drawl, slow and steady and funny as shit, “it’s too late to be stoned and too early to be drunk. This is the magic hour when them boys are probably alert. Keep trying.”

Donny hit the send button and repeated his message a couple more times without luck.

“I’m going to the backup freak,” he finally stated.

The sergeant nodded.

Donny spread the poncho so that he could get at the simple controls atop the unit. Two dials seemed to grin at him next to the two butterfly knobs that controlled them, one for megahertz, the other for kilohertz. He diddled, looking for 79.92, to which Dodge City sometimes defaulted if there was heavy radio traffic or atmospheric interference, and as he did, the radio prowled through the wave band of communications that was Vietnam in early 1972, propelled by the weird reality that it could receive from a far greater distance than it could send.

They heard a lost truck driver trying to get back to Highway 1, a pilot looking for his carrier, a commo clerk testing his gear, all of it crackly and fragmented as the signals in their varying strengths ebbed and flowed. Some of it was in Vietnamese, for the ARVN were on the same net; some of it was Army, for there were more soldiers than Marines left by fifty-odd thousand; some of it was Special Forces, as a few of the big A-camps still held out to the north or west; some of it was fire missions, permission to break off search, requests for more beer and beef.

Finally, Donny lit where he wanted.

“Ah, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, do you copy?”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six here; yes, we copy. What is your sitrep, over?”

“Tell ’em we’re drowning,” said the sergeant.

“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, we’re all wet. Nothing moving up here. Nothing living up here, Foxtrot, over.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, does Swagger want to call an abort? Over.”

“They want to know, do you want to call an abort?”

The hunter-killer mission was slated to go another twenty-four hours before air evac, but the sergeant himself appeared to be extremely low on the probability of contact at this time.

“Affirmative,” he said. “No bad guys anywhere. They’re too smart to go out in shit like this. Tell ’em to get us the hell out of here as soon as possible.”

“That’s an affirmative, Foxtrot-Sandman-Six. Request air evac, over.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, our birds are grounded. You’ll have to park it until we can get airborne again.”

“Shit, they’re souped in,” said Donny.

“Okay, tell ’em we’ll sit tight and wait for the weather to break, but we ain’t bringing home any scalps.”

Donny hit SEND.

“Foxtrot, we copy. We’ll sit tight and get back to you when the sun breaks through, over.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, roger that. Out.”

The radio crackled to silence.

“Okay,” said Donny, “that about ties that one up.”

“Yeah,” said the sergeant, with just a hint of a question in his voice.

“Pork,” he said after a second or two, “was you paying attention while you were going to the backup freak? You hear anything?”

The sergeant was like a cop who could understand and decipher the densest code or the most broken-up sound bits on the radio.

“No, I didn’t hear a thing,” said Donny. “The chatter, you know, the usual stuff.”

“Okay, do me a favor, Pork.”

He always called Donny “Pork.” He called all his spotters Pork. He’d had three spotters before Donny.

“Pork, you run through them freaks real slow and you concentrate. I thought I heard a syllable that sounded like ‘gent.’ ”

“Gent? As in gent-lemen prefer blondes?”

“You got a blonde, you should know. No, as in urgent.”

Donny’s fingers clicked slowly through the chatter on the double dials as a hundred different signals came and went in the same fractured militarese, made more incomprehensible by radio abbreviations, the tangle of codes and call signs, Alpha-Four-Delta, Delta-Six-Alpha, Whiskey-Foxtrot-Niner, Iron-Tree-Three, Rathole-Zulu-Six, Tan San Nhut control, on and on, Good morning, Vietnam, how are you today, it’s raining. It meant nothing.

But the sergeant leaned forward, his whole body tense with concentration, unshivery in the wet, hardly even human in his intensity. He was a thin stick of a man, twenty-six, with a blond crew cut, a sunburn so deep it had almost changed his race, cheekbones like bed knobs, squinty gray squirrel-shooter’s eyes, 100 percent American redneck with an accent that placed him in the backwoods of some underdeveloped principality far from sophisticated living, but with an odd grace and efficiency to him.

He had no dreams, not of desert, not of a farm or a city, not of home, not of hearth. He was total kick-ass professional Marine Corps lifer, and if he dreamed of anything, it was only of that harsh and bitter bitch Duty, whom he’d never once cheated on, whom he’d honored and served on two other tours, one as a platoon sergeant in sixty-five and another running long-range patrols up near the DMZ for SOG. If he had an inner life, he kept it to himself. They said he’d won some big civilian shooting tournament and they said his daddy was a Marine too, back in World War II, and won the Medal of Honor, but the sergeant never mentioned this and who would have the guts to ask? He had no family, he had no wife or girlfriend, he had no home, nothing except the Marine Corps and a sense that he had been produced by turbulent, hardscrabble times, of which he preferred not to speak and on whose agonies he would remain forever silent.

He was many other things, but only one of them mattered to Donny. He was the best. Man, he was good! He was so fucking good it made your head spin. If he fired, someone died, an enemy soldier always. He never shot if he didn’t see a weapon. But when he shot, he killed. Nobody told him otherwise, and nobody would fuck with him. He was supercool in action, the ice king, who just let it happen, kept his eyes and ears open and figured it out so fast it made you dizzy. Then he reacted, took out any moving bad guys, and went about his business. It was like being in Vietnam with Mick Jagger, or some other legendary star, because everybody knew who Bob the Nailer was, and if they didn’t love him, by God, they feared him, because he was also Death From Afar, the Marine Corps way. He was more rifle than man, and more man than anybody. Even the NVA knew who he was: it was said a 15,000-piastre bounty had been placed on his head. The sergeant thought this was pretty funny.

But in the end, it would kill him, Donny thought. The war would eat him up in the end. He would try one more brave and desperate thing, eager somehow to keep it going, to press himself even further, and it would, in the end, kill his heroic ass. He’d never hit his DEROS. For boys like this, there was no such thing as DEROS. Vietnam was forever.

He reminded Donny of someone but Donny hadn’t figured it out. There was something about him, however, oddly familiar, oddly resonant. This had struck him before but he could never quite nail it down. Was it a teacher somewhere? Was it a relative, a Marine from his earlier tour or his time at Eighth and I? For a time, he’d thought it was Ray Case, his furious platoon sergeant there, but as he got to know Bob, that connection vaporized. Case was a good, tough, professional Marine, but Bob was a great Marine. They didn’t make many of them like Bob Lee Swagger.

But who was he like? Why did he seem so familiar?

Donny shook the confusion out of his head.

Swagger sat under the poncho, the water dripping off his boonie hat, his eyes almost blank as he listened to the crackly tapestry of radio. He was as equally laden as Donny: the taped bull barrel of his M40 sniper rifle — really just a Remington 700 .308 Varmint with a Redfield 9X scope aboard — poked out from the neck of his poncho as he did what he could to keep the action and the wood, which would swell with moisture, dry. He also carried four M26 grenades, two Claymore bandoleers, an M57 electrical firing device, a .45 automatic, two canteens and a 782-pack full of C-rats (preferred poison: ham and powdered eggs), and seventy-two rounds of M118 Lake City Arsenal Match ammo, the 173-grain load used by Army and Marine high-powered shooters at Camp Perry. But he was a man who traveled well prepared; he had a Randall Survivor knife with a sawtooth blade, a Colt .380 baby hammerless in an aviator’s shoulder holster under his camo utilities and, strapped to his back, an M3 grease gun and five thirty-round magazines.

“There,” he said. “You hear it? Swear to Christ I heard something.”

Donny had heard nothing in the murk of chatter; still, he slowed his diddling and redialed, watching the little numbers on the face crackle through the gap as he shifted them. Finally he lit on something so soft you could miss it entirely, and he only received it because it seemed to be right on the cusp of the megahertz click to another freak; if he took the tension off the knob, the signal disappeared.

But, raspy and distant, they did hear it, and the words seemed to define themselves out of the murk until they became distinct.

“Anyone on this net? Anyone on this net? How you read me? Over? Urgent, goddammit, over!”

There was no answer.

“This is Arizona-Six-Zulu. I have beaucoup bad guys all over the goddamn place. Anyone on this net? Charlie-Charlie-November, you there, over?”

“He’s way out of our range,” Donny said. “And who the hell is Arizona-Six-Zulu?” Donny wondered.

“He’s got to be one of the Special Forces camps to the west. They use states as call signs. They call ’em FOBs, forward operating bases. He’s trying to reach Charlie-Charlie-November, which is SOG Command and Control North at Da Nang.”

But Arizona-Six-Zulu got a callback.

“Arizona-Six-Zulu, this is Lima-Niner-Mike at Outpost Hickory. Is that you, Puller? Can hardly read your signal, over.”

“Lima-Niner-Mike, my big rig took a hit and I’m on the Prick-77. I have big trouble. I have bad guys all over the place hitting me frontally and I hear from scouts a main force unit is moving in to take my base camp out. I need air or arty, over.”

“Arizona-Six-Zulu, neg on the air. We are souped in and everything has been grounded. Let me check on arty, over.”

“I am Team Arizona base camp, grid square Whiskey Delta 5120-1802. I need Hotel Echo in the worst possible way, over.”

“Shit, neg to that, Arizona-Six-Zulu. I have no, repeat no, fire support bases close enough to get shells to your area. They closed down Mary Jane and Suzie Q last week, and the Marines at Dodge are too far, over.”

“Over, Lima-Niner-Mike, I am out here on my lonesome with eleven Americans and four hundred indigs and we are in heavy shit and I am running down on ammo, food, and water. I need support ASAP, over.”

“I have your coordinates, Arizona-Six-Zulu, but I have no artillery fire bases operational within range. I will go to Navy to see if we can get naval gunfire in range and I will call up tac air ASAP when weather clears. You must hang on until weather breaks, Arizona-Six-Zulu, over.”

“Lima-Niner-Mike, if that main force unit gets here before the weather breaks, I am dog food, over.”

“Hang tight, Arizona-Six-Zulu, the weather is supposed to break by noon tomorrow. I will get through to Charlie-Charlie-November and we will get Phantoms airborne fastest then, over.”

“Roger, Lima-Niner-Mike,” said Arizona-Six-Zulu, “and out.”

“God bless and good luck, Arizona-Six-Zulu, out,” said Lima, and the freak crackled into nothingness.

“Man, those guys are going to get roasted,” said Donny. “This weather ain’t lifting for days.”

“You got that map case?” said Swagger. “Let me see that thing. What were those coordinates?”

“Shit, I don’t remember,” said Donny.

“Well, then,” said Bob, “it’s a good thing I do.”

He opened the case that Donny shoved over, went through the plastic-wrapped sheaves of operational territory 1:50,000s, and at last came to the one he wanted. He studied hard, then looked over.

“You know, goddamn, if I ain’t a fool at map reading, I do believe you and I are the closest unit to them Special Forces fellows. They are west of us, at Kham Duc, ten klicks out of Laos. We are in grid square Whiskey Charlie 155-005; they are up in Whiskey Delta 5120-1802. As I make it, that’s about twenty klicks to the west.”

Donny squinted. His sergeant indeed had located the proper square, and the Special Forces camp would therefore have been, yes, about twenty klicks. But — there were foothills, a wide brown snake of river and a mountain range between here and there, all of it Indian Territory.

“I’m figuring,” Bob said, “one man, moving fast, he might just make it before the main force unit. And those boys would have to move up through this here An Loc valley. You got into those hills, you’d have a hell of a lot of targets.”

“Christ,” said Donny.

“You just might slow ’em up enough so that air could make it in when the weather broke.”

A cold drop of rain deposited itself on Donny’s neck and plummeted down his back. A shiver rose from his bones.

“Raise Dodge again, Pork. Tell ’em I’m going on a little trip.”

“I’m going too,” said Donny.

Bob paused. Then he said, “My ass you are. I won’t have no short-timer with me. You hunker here, call in extraction when the weather clears. Don’t you worry none about me. I’ll get into that camp and extract with Arizona.”

“Bob, I—”

“No! You’re too short. You’d be too worried about getting whacked with three and days till DEROS. And if you weren’t, I would be. Plus, I can move a lot faster on my own. This is a one-man job or it’s no job at all. That’s an order.”

“Sergeant, I—”

“No, goddammit. I told you. This ain’t no goddamned game. I can’t be worrying about you.”

“Goddammit, I’m not sitting here in the fucking rain waiting for extract. You made us a team. You shoot, I spot targets, I handle security. Suppose you have to work at night? Who throws flares? Suppose it’s hot and somebody has to call in air? Who works the map for the coordinates and the radio? Suppose you’re bounced from behind? Who takes out the fast movers? Who rigs the Claymores?”

“You are fixing to git yourself killed, Lance Corporal. And, much worse, you are pissing me off beaucoup.”

“I am not bugging out. I will not bug out!”

Bob’s eyes narrowed. He suspected all heroism and self-sacrifice because his own survival wasn’t based on any sense of them, but rather on shrewd professional combat skills, even shrewder calculation of odds and, shrewdest of all, a sense that to be aggressive in battle was the key to coming out alive on the other side.

“What are you trying to prove, kid? You been a hard-ass to prove something ever since I teamed with you.”

“I’m not trying to prove anything. I want no slack, that’s all. Zero fucking slack. I go all the way, that’s all there is. When I get back to the world, maybe then it’s different. But out here, goddamn it, I go all the way.”

His fierceness softened Swagger, who’d coaxed many a boy through bad times with shit coming in, who’d gotten the grunts moving when the last thing they wanted to do was move, who never lost a spotter to a body bag and lost a hell of a lot fewer young Marines than some could say. But this stubborn boy perplexed him all the way, all the time. Only one of ’em who got up earlier than he did, and who never once made a mistake on the premission equipment checks.

“Donny, ain’t nobody going to ever say you bugged out. I’m trying to cut you some room, boy. No sense dying on this one. This is a Bob show. This is what old Bob was put here to do. It ain’t no college football game.”

“I’m going. Goddamn, we are Sierra-Bravo-Four, and I am going.”

“Man, you sure you were born in the right generation? You belong in the old breed, you salty bastard, with my dead old man. Okay, let’s gear up. Call it in. I’m going to shoot us a goddamn compass reading to that grid square, and when we’re done I’ll buy you a steak and a case of Jack Daniel’s.”

Donny took the moment to peel off his boonie cap and pull out the cellophane-wrapped photo of Julie.

He stared at it as the raindrops collected on the plastic. She looked so dry and far away, and he ached for her. Three and days till DEROS. He would come home. Donny would come marching home again, hurrah, hurrah.

Oh, baby, he said to himself, oh baby, I hope you’re with me on this one. Every step of the way.

“Let’s go, Pork,” sang Bob the Nailer.

CHAPTER TEN

After a time, Donny stopped hurting. He was beyond pain. He was also, ever so briefly, beyond fear. They traveled from landmark to landmark along Swagger’s charted compass readings over the slippery terrain, the rain so harsh some time you could hardly breathe. At one moment he was somewhat stunned to discover himself on the crest of a low hill. When had they climbed it? He had no memory of the ascent. He just had the sense of the man ahead of him pulling him forward, urging him on, oblivious to both of their pains, oblivious also to fear and to mud and to changes in the elevation.

After a while they came to a valley, to discover the classical Vietnam terrain of rice paddies separated by paddy dikes. The dikes were muddy as shit, and in a few minutes, the going on them proved slow and treacherous. Swagger didn’t even bother to tell him, he just lifted his rifle over his head, stepped off the break and started to fight through the water, churning up mud as he went. What difference could it make? They were so wet it didn’t matter, but the water was thick and muddy and at each step the muddy bottom seemed to suck at Donny’s boots. His feet grew heavier. The rain fell faster. He was wetter, colder, more fatigued, more desperate, more lonely.

At any moment, some lucky kid with a carbine and a yen to impress his local cadre could have greased them. But the rain fell so hard it drove even the VC and the main force NVA units to cover. They moved across a landscape devoid of human occupation. The fog coiled and rolled. Once, from afar, the vapors parted and they saw a village a klick away down a hill, and Donny imagined what was going on in the warm little huts: the boiling soup with its floating sheaves of bible tripe and brisket sliced thin and fish heads floating in it, and the thought of hot food almost made him keel over.

This is nothing, he told himself. Think of football. Think of two-a-days in August. No, no, think of games. Think of … Think of … Think of making the catch against Gilman High; think of third and twelve, we’ve never beaten them, but for some odd reason late in this game we’re close but now we’ve stalled. Think of setting up at tight end instead of running back because you have the best hands on the team. Think of Julie, a cheerleader in those days, the concern on her face.

Think of the silliness of it all! It all seemed so important! Beating Gilman! Why was that so important? It was so silly! Then Donny remembered why it was important. Because it was so silly. It meant so little that it meant so much.

Think of going off the set, faking inside, then breaking on a slant for the sidelines as Vercolone, the quarterback, broke from his disintegrating pocket and began to rotate toward him, curling around, his arm cocked then uncocked as he released the ball. Think of the ball in the air. Think of seeing it float toward you, Vercolone had led you too much, the ball was way out of reach, there was no noise, there was no sensation, there was only the ball sliding past. But think of how you went airborne.

That was the strange thing. He did not ever remember leaping. It just happened, one of those instinct things, as the computer in your head took over your body and off you went.

He remembered straining in the air and, with his one hand stretched out to the horizon, the slap of contact as the ball glanced off his longest fingers, popped into the air and seemed to pause forever as he slid through the air by it, now about to miss it, but somehow he actually pivoted in air, got his chest out to snare it as it fell, then clasped his other hand against it, pinning it to him as he thudded to the ground and by the grace of a God who must love jocks, it did not pop out, he had caught it for a first down, and three plays later they scored and won the game, beating an ancient enemy for the first time in living memory.

Oh, that was so very good! That was so very good.

The warmth of that moment came flooding back across him, its meaningless glory warming and giving him just the slightest tingle of energy. Maybe he would make it.

But then he went down, floundering, feeling the water flood into his lungs, and he struggled, coughing out buffalo shit and a million paramecium. A harsh grip pulled him out and he shook like a wet dog. It was Swagger, of course.

“Come on,” Swagger yelled through the din of pounding rain. “We’re almost out of the paddies. Then all we got is another set of hills, a river and a goddamn mountain. Damn, ain’t this fun?”

Water. According to the map, the river was called Ia Trang. It bore no other name and on the paper was a squiggly black line, its secrets unrevealed. As it lay before them in reality, however, it was swollen brown and wide, overspilling its banks, and was a swift, deadly current. The rain smashed against its turbulent surface like machine gun fire.

“Guess what?” said Swagger. “You just got a new job.”

“Huh?”

“You just got a new job. You’re now the lifeguard.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I cain’t swim a lick,” he said, with a broad smile.

“Great,” said Donny. “I can’t either.”

“Oh, this one’s going to be a pisser. Damn, why’d you insist on this trip?”

“I was momentarily deluded into thinking I was important.”

“That kind of thinkin’ll git you killed every damn time. Now, let’s see if we can find some wood or something.”

They ranged the dangerous bank of the river and in time came to a bombed-out village. The gunships and Phantoms had worked it over pretty well; nothing could have survived the hell of that recent day. No structure stood: only timbers, piles of ash liquified to gunk in the pounding rain, craters everywhere, a long smear of burned vegetation where the napalm splashed through, killing everything it touched. A cooking pot lay on its side, speared by a machine gun bullet, so that it blossomed outward in jagged petals. The stench of the burning still clung to the ground, despite the rain. There were no bodies, but just out of the kill zone a batch of newly dug graves with now-dead Buddhist incense reeds in cheap black jars had been etched into the ground. Two were very, very small.

“I hope they were bad guys,” said Donny, looking at the new cemetery.

“If we run this fucking war right,” Swagger said, “we’d have known they was bad, because we’d have people on the ground, up close. Not this shit. Not just hosing the place down with firepower. Nobody should have to die because he’s in the wrong place at the wrong time and some squid pilot’s got some ordnance left and don’t want to land on no carrier with it.”

Donny looked at him. In five months of extreme togetherness, Bob had never said a thing about the way the war was waged, what it cost, who it killed, why it happened. His, instead, was the practical craft of mission and its close pal survival: how to do this thing, where to hide, how to track, what to shoot, how to kill, how to get the job done and come back alive.

“Well, nobody’ll ever know, that’s for goddamn sure,” said Bob. “Unless you get out of this shit hole and you tell ’em. You got that, Pork? That’s your new MOS: witness. You got that?”

Familiar again. Where was this from? What did this mean? What sounded so right about it, the same melody, slightly different instrument?

“I’ll tell ‘em.”

“ ’Cause I’m too dumb to tell ’em. They’ll never listen to a hillbilly like me. They’ll listen to you, boy, ’cause you looked the goddamn elephant in the eye and came back to talk about it. Got that?”

“Got it.”

“Good. Now let’s scare up some wood and build us Noah’s ark.”

They scrounged in the ruins and came up after a bit with seven decent pieces of wood, which Bob rigged together in some clever Boy Scout way with a coil of black rope he carried. He lashed his and Donny’s rifles, the two 782-packs and harnesses, all the grenades, the map case, the canteens, the PRC-77, the flares and flare gun, and the pistols to it.

“Okay, you really can’t swim?”

“I can sort of.”

“Well, I can a bit, too. The deal is, you cling hard to this thing and you kick hard. I’ll be on the other side. Keep your face out of the water and keep on fighting, no matter what. And don’t let go. The current’ll take you and you’ll be one dead puppy dog and nobody’ll remember your name till they inscribe it on some monument and the pigeons come shit on it. Ain’t that a pretty thought?”

“Very pretty.”

“So let’s do it, Pork. You just became a submariner.”

The water was intensely cold and stronger than Zeus. In the first second Donny panicked, floundered, almost pulled the rickety raft over and only Bob’s strength on the other side kept them afloat. The raft floated diagonally across and the swiftness and anger of the river had it in an instant, and Donny, clinging with both desperate hands to the rope lashings Bob had jury-rigged, felt swept away, taken by it, the coldness everywhere. His feet flailed, touched nothing. He sank a bit and it gushed down his throat and he coughed and leaped like a seal, freeing himself.

It was all water, above and beneath, his chin in the stuff, his eyes and face pelted by it as it fell from the gray sky at a brutal velocity.

“Kick, goddammit!” he heard Bob scream, and with his legs he began a kind of strangely rhythmic breast-stroke. The craft seemed to spurt ahead just a bit.

But there came a moment when it was all gone. Fog obscured the land and he felt he was thrashing across an ocean, the English Channel at the very least, a voyage that had forgotten its beginning and couldn’t imagine its ending. The water lured him downward to its black numbness; he could feel it sucking at him, fighting toward his throat and his lungs, and it stank of napalm, gunpowder, aviation fuel, buffalo shit, peasants who sold you a Coke by day and cut your throat by night, dead kids in ditches, flaming villes, friendly-fire casualties, the whole fucking unstoppable momentum of the last eight years, and who was he to fight it, just another grunt, a lance corporal and former corporal with a shaky past, it seemed so huge, so vast, it seemed like history itself.

“Fight it, goddammit,” came Swagger’s call from the other side, and then he knew who Bob was.

Bob was Trig’s brother.

Bob and Trig were almost the same man, somehow. Despite their differing backgrounds, they were the aristocrats of the actual, singled out by DNA to do things others couldn’t, to be heroes in the causes they gave their lives to, to be always and forever remembered. They were Odin and Zeus. They were dangerously special, they got things done, they had an incredible vitality and life force. The war would kill them. That’s why both had commanded him to be the witness, he now saw. It was his job to survive and sing the story of the two mad brothers, Bob and Trig, consumed in, devoured by, killed in the war.

Trig was dead. Trig had blown himself up at the University of Wisconsin along with some pitiful graduate assistant who happened to be working late that night. They found Trig’s body, smashed and ruptured by the explosive.

It made him famous, briefly, a freak of headlines: HARVARD GRAD DIES IN BLAST; CARTER FAMILY SCION KILLS SELF IN BOMB BLAST; TRIG CARTER, THE GENTLE AVIAN PAINTER TURNED MARTYR TO THE CAUSE OF PEACE.

It had killed Trig, as Trig had known it would. That’s what Trig was telling him that last night; now he understood. He had to make it back, to tell the story of Trig and his mad brother Bob, eaten, each in his own way, by the war. Would it ever be over?

Someone had him. He swallowed and looked, and Swagger was yanking him from the water to the shore, where he collapsed, heaving with exhaustion.

“Now hear this. The smoking light is now lit,” said Bob.

From the wet river through the wet rain they finally reached the mountain. It wasn’t a great mountain. Donny had seen greater mountains in his time in the desert; he’d even climbed some. Swagger said he was from mountain country too, but Donny had never heard of mountains in the South, or Oklahoma or Arkansas or whatever mysterious backwoods the sniper hailed from.

The mountain was dense with foliage over hard rock, wide open to observation from hundreds of meters out. Pick your poison.

“Oh, Christ,” said Donny, looking at the steep slope. Time had no meaning. It seemed to be twilight but it could have been dawn. He looked upward and the water pelted him in the face.

“I want to get halfway up in the next two hours,” Bob said.

“I don’t think I can,” gulped Donny.

“I don’t think I can either,” said Bob. “And, what’s worse, if that goddamn main force battalion is in the area heading on that base camp, they’re sure to have security out, just the thing to keep boys like us out of their hair.”

“I can’t do it,” Donny said.

“I cain’t do it neither,” said Swagger. “But it’s gotta be done and I don’t see no two other boys here, do you? If I saw two others, believe me, I’d send them, yessirree.”

“Oh, shit,” Donny said.

“Well, look at it this way. We only got where we got ’cause we came through full monsoon. We go back, when the rains dry up Victor C. gonna come out. He’s gonna find us. He’s gonna kill us. We weren’t invited into his goddamn yard, and he’s gonna be plenty pissed. So we gotta make that Special Forces base camp or we are going to die out here for sure. That’s just about the size of that piece of shit and that’s all there is to it!”

He smiled, not out of happiness or glee but possibly because he was too exhausted to do anything else.

“Wish I had a Dexedrine,” he said. “But I don’t believe in that shit. Came back from my second tour with a monkey the size of a ape on my butt. Had to work like hell to kill that furry bastard, too. Now, that wasn’t much fun at all.”

The man wasn’t in Vietnam; in some sense he was Vietnam. He’d done it all: sniped, raided, taken hills, led recons, worked intel, advised ARVN units, run interrogations, done analysis, fought in a thousand firefights, killed who knew how many, visited hospitals, talked to generals. He was one part of his whole goddamned generation rolled into one. This was entirely new, but unsurprising: he’d been a speed freak. Maybe he’d done heroin, maybe he’d caught the clap, maybe he’d been tattooed, maybe he’d murdered prisoners. He was Trig, at least in the way that he’d done everything to win the war that Trig had done in his parallel universe to end it, a furious, relentless crusade, presaged on the obsolete notion that one man could make a difference.

“You remind me of a guy,” Donny said.

“Oh, yeah. Some hillbilly on the radio. Lum or the other one, Abner? They come from my hometown.”

“No, believe it or not, a peacenik.”

“Oh, a commie. He has long hair and looked like Jesus. His shit didn’t stink, I bet. Mine does, but good, Pork.”

“No. He was like you, a hero. He was bigger than the rest of us. He was a legend.”

“To be a legend, don’t you have to be dead? Ain’t that part of the job description?”

“He is dead.”

“He managed to get his ass wasted demonstrating against the war? Now, that do take some kind of genius level intelligence. And I remind you of him? Son, you must have the fever bad.”

“He just wouldn’t quit. There wasn’t any quit in him.”

“Yeah, well, there’s plenty of quit in me, Pork. One more job, then I am going to quit for the rest of my life. Now, let’s just git a move on.”

“Which way?”

“We go up the switchbacks, they’ll bounce us. Only one way. Straight up.”

“Christ.”

“We’ll eat. Picnic time. It’ll be the last meal you git till this is over or you get killed and you get a nice steak in heaven. Dump your C-rats and your canteens and your 782. Use your entrenching tool. Set it at the angle. We going to use it to pull our way up, you got that?”

“I don’t—”

“Sure you do. Watch me.”

Quickly and expertly, he shed himself of most of his gear; only the weapons remained. He fished a C-rat out of his dumped pack, and quickly used his can opener to whip up cold eggs and ham, which he gobbled quickly.

“Go on, chow time. Eat something.”

Donny set out to do the same and in a few seconds was pulling down the barbecued pork, cold but flavorful.

“When we’re done, you gimme the radio. I ain’t carrying as much weight.”

“I’ll take your rifle.”

“The hell you will. Nobody touches the rifle but me.”

Of course. The basic rule. He remembered when Swagger had come looking for him, sitting forlornly on outpost duty at a forward observation post his third week at Dodge City.

“You Fenn?”

“Uh, yeah. Uh, Sergeant— ?”

“Swagger. Name’s Swagger. I’m the sniper.”

Donny had a momentary intake of breath. In the dark, he could hardly see him: just a fierce wraith of a man sheathed in darkness, speaking in a dense Southern accent. Bob the Nailer, the one with the 15,000-piastre bounty on his head and over thirty kills. Donny had the sense that all was quiet, that the other men had just willed themselves to nothingness out of fear or respect for Bob the Nailer. Though he could not see the sniper’s eyes, Donny knew they burned at him, and ate him up.

“I just put my spotter on a medevac back to the world with a hole in his leg,” said the sniper. “I’m looking for a replacement. You shot expert. You have the highest GCT at Dodge. You have twenty-ten vision. You done a tour, won a medal, so you been shot at some and won’t panic. All that don’t mean shit. You was at Eighth and I. That means you done the ceremonial stuff, which means you have a patience for detail work and a willingness to be an unnoticed part of a bigger team. I need that. You interested?”

“Me? I—”

“Good perks. I’ll get you steak and all the bourbon you can drink. When we’re in, we live like kings. I’ll keep you off crap like night watch and ambush patrols and forward observation and shit-burning details. I’ll get you R&R anywhere you want. Bad shit: A) You don’t touch the rifle. Nobody touches the rifle. B) You don’t do drugs. I catch you with a buzz on, I ship you home under guard and you’ll spend two years in Portsmouth. C) You don’t call nobody gook, dink, slope or zip. These are the very finest soldiers in the world. They are winning and they will win. We kill them, but by God, we kill them with respect. Those are the only three rules, but they ain’t to be bent or even breathed hard on. Or, you can sit here in this shit hole waiting for someone to drop a mortar shell on your head. And somehow I got a feeling every shit detail, every shit patrol, every piece-of-crap garbage job that comes up, you’re number one on the fuck list. I hope you like the stink of burning shit because you’re going to smell a lot of it.”

“Back in the world, I had some problems,” said Donny. “I got a bad rap. I wouldn’t ‘cooperate.’ ”

“I figured it from your jacket. Some kind of infraction of orders? You lost your rating. Hey, kid, this ain’t the world. This is the ’Nam, have you noticed? It don’t mean shit to me, you got that? You do the jobs I give you one hundred percent and I’ll back you one hundred percent. You may get killed, you will work hard, but you will have fun. Killing people is lots of fun. Now, you want in or what?”

“I guess I’m in.”

Within thirty minutes, Donny had been relieved of duty and moved into the scout-sniper squad bay with S/Sgt. Swagger NCOIC — or, as some called him, NCGIC, Non-Commissioned God in Charge — and the only man whose word mattered anywhere in the world.

He had never broken one of the rules until now. He had weighed each M118 round Swagger carried against the one-in-a-million chance of an off-charge at Lake City; he had cleaned Bob’s .45, .380 and grease gun and his own M14 and .45; he shined and dried the jungle boots; he laid out and assembled the gear before each mission; he polished the lens of the spotting scope; he checked the pins on the grenades, the plastic canteens for mildew; he hand-enameled the brass on the 872 gear dead black; he did laundry; he learned elevation, windage and range estimation; he kept range cards; he filled out after-action reports; he studied the operating area maps like a sacred text; he handled flank security and once killed two NVC who were infiltrating around Bob’s position; he learned PRC-77 protocol and maintenance. He worked like hell, and he had never broken one of the rules.

Only Bob touched the rifle. Bob broke it down after each mission, cleaned it to the tiniest crevice, scrubbed it dry, rezeroed it, treated it like a baby or a mistress. He and only he could touch or carry the rifle.

“It ain’t I don’t trust you. It ain’t you drop it and it gets knocked out of zero and you don’t tell me and I miss a shot and somebody, probably me, gets killed. It’s just that the bedrock here is simple, clear, powerful and helps us both: nobody touches the rifle but me. Good fences make good neighbors. Ever hear that one?”

“I think so.”

“Well, the rifle rule is my fence. Got that?”

“I do. Entirely, Sergeant.”

“You call me sergeant around the lifers here in Dodge. In the field, you call me Bob or Swagger or whatever the hell you want. Don’t call me sergeant in the field. One of them boys might be listening and he might decide to kill me because he heard you call me sergeant. Got that, Pork?”

“I do.”

And he had never forgotten that rule or any of the rules, until now.

“I forgot,” he said in the rain to Swagger. “About the rifle.”

“Damn, Fenn, I was just getting to like you, too. I thought you’se going to work out,” Bob said, needling him ever so gently. But then it was back to mission: “Okay, you done eating? You got your shit wired in tight? This is it. Over this hill, through their security and then sleep a bit. Comes morning we get to do some shooting.”

Bob went first, down to soaked tiger camos and boonie cap, his rifle slung upside down on his back. He carried the M3 grease gun in one hand and the entrenching tool in the other, and he used the tool as a kind of hook, to sink into roots of trees or the tangles of vegetation to get himself up the steep incline a few more feet. He moved with slow, almost calm deliberation. The rain fell still in torrents in the darkening gloom, and it rattled off the leaves and against the mud. How could it rain so hard so long? Was God ending the world, washing away Vietnam and its sins, its atrocities, its arrogances and follies? It seemed that way.

Donny was fifty yards to the left, doing the same trick, but behind Swagger and working carefully not to get ahead. Bob was the eyes up front to the right; Donny’s responsibility was behind and to the left, the flank he was on.

But he saw nothing, just felt the chill of the biting rain, and felt the weight of the M14, one of the last few left in the ’Nam. For this job, really, the plastic M16 would have been more ideally suited, but Bob hated the things, calling them poodle shooters, and wouldn’t let a man in his unit carry them.

Every now and then Bob would halt them with a raised right hand, and both men would drop low to the ground, hidden in the foliage, waiting, clinging desperately against the incline. But each time whatever Bob had noticed proved to be nothing, a false alarm, and they continued their steady, slow climb.

Twice they crossed paths, switchbacks etched into the vegetation, and Bob waited for five minutes before allowing them out on the open ground even for the seconds or so that it exposed them.

The darkness was falling. It was harder and harder to see. The jungle, far from relaxing as they climbed, actually seemed to be getting denser. There was a time when Donny felt himself cut off entirely from Bob, and a shot of panic came to him. What if he got lost? What would he do? He would wander these ghostly mountains until they caught him and killed him, or he wore down and starved.

You boys ain’t so tough, he heard from somewhere, and realized it was a mocking memory of a football coach somewhere back in his complicated athletic career.

No, we ain’t so tough, he thought. We never said we were. We just tried to do our job, that was all.

But then he came out of the rubbery-smelling thorns that had swallowed him, and saw a figure to the right and recognized it for its caution and precision of movement to be Bob.

He started to rise—

No, no—

Bob’s hand was up urgently, signaling him still and back. He froze and dropped on his belly low to the ground, even as Bob himself did the same.

He waited.

Nothing. No, just the sound of the rain, some occasional thunder, now and then a streak of distant lightning. It seemed so—

The next thing, he was aware of motion on his left. He did not move, he did not breathe.

How had Swagger seen them? How did he know? What gave them away? Another step and it was all over, but somehow, out of some trick of instinct or predator’s preternatural nerve endings, Bob had stunned him into silence and motionlessness a second before they arrived.

Before him the men passed by, no more than ten feet away, sliding effortlessly through the foliage and the undergrowth. He could smell them before he could see them. They had the odor of fish and rice, for that was what they ate. They were small, bandy-legged guys, the pros of the army of the Republic of North Vietnam, a point man, a squad leader, a squad in file picking its way carefully through the jungle high above the last path, twelve of them. They were bent forward under beige rain capes and wore regulation dark green uniforms, those absurd pith helmets, and carried AK47s and complete combat gear — packs, canteens and bayonets. Three or four of them wore RPG-40s, the hellish rocket grenades, strapped to their backs.

He had never been so close to the actual enemy; they seemed almost magical, or mythological, somehow, the phantoms of so many nightmares at last given flesh. They terrified him. If he moved or coughed, it was over: they’d turn and fire, whole minutes before he could get his M14 into action. He had a bad thought of himself dying up here at the hands of these tough little monkey-men sliding so confidently through the rain and the jungle that were exhausting him.

Almost as if one were talking to him, he heard the silence breaking a few feet away.

“Ăhn ỏi, mủa nhiêu qúa?”

“Phâi roi, chăc không có ngủỏi mỹ dêm naỳ,” came the buddy’s bitter answer, both voices propelled by the explosive lung energy of Vietnamese, so foreign to American ears and which sounded almost like belches.

“Bíhn sĩ ôi, dung nôi, nghê,” came a sharp cry from the head of the unit, a sergeant, the same the world over and whatever the army, clamping down on his naughty grunts.

The patrol moved slowly along in the dying light and the falling rain, then slowly disappeared around a bend in the slope. But Bob held Donny still for a good ten minutes before giving the okay, excruciating seconds of deathlike stillness in the cold and wet, which cramped the muscles and hurt the brain. But at last Bob motioned, and he slowly uncoiled and began to move up again.

Gradually Bob navigated his way over.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. How the hell did you see them?”

“The point man’s canteen jingled against his bayonet. I heard it, that’s all. Luck, man; it’s better to be lucky than good.”

“Who were they?”

“That’s flank security from a main force battalion. That means we’re getting close. They put out security teams when they move a big unit through, same as us. The sergeant had flashes for the Number Three Battalion. I don’t know what regiment or nothing, but I think the biggest unit up this ways was the 324th Infantry Division. Man, they close down that Special Forces camp tomorrow, the rain stays bad, they could get to Dodge City the day or so after tomorrow.”

“Is this some big offensive?”

“There’s several newly Vietnamized units there; it’d do ’em a lot of good to kick all that ARVN ass.”

“Great. I wonder what they were saying.”

“The first one says, Man, it’s raining like shit, and his buddy says, Ain’t no Americans coming out in this, and the sarge yells back, Hey, you guys, shut up and keep moving.”

“You speak Vietnamese?” Donny said in wonderment.

“Picked up a little. Not much, but I can get by. Come on, let’s get out of here. We got to rest. Big day tomorrow. We kick butt and take names. You bet on it, Marine.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FOB Arizona was in bad trouble. Puller had lost nineteen men already and the VC had gotten mortars up close over to the west, and were pounding the shit out of them so that he couldn’t maneuver, and that main force unit would be in tomorrow at the latest. But worse: he’d sent out Matthews with a four-man assault unit to take out the mortars and Matthews hadn’t come back. Jim Matthews! Three tours, M/Sgt. Jim Matthews, Benning, the Zone, one of the old guys who dated all the way back to Korea, had done everything — gone!

The rage of it flared deep in Major Puller’s angry, angry brain.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Goddamn them, this wasn’t supposed to be happening.

Kham Duc was way out on its lonesome, near Laos, where it had fed in cross-border recon teams for years, but was largely invulnerable because of the umbrella or air power, so the NVA didn’t even bother with main force units close by. Where had this one come from? He was feeling very Custerlike, that sick moment when he suddenly realized he was up against hundreds, maybe thousands. And where the hell had this weather come from and how fast could this big-ass, tough-as-shit battalion get down here?

Oh, he wants us. He smells our blood; he wants us.

Puller’s antagonist was a slick operator named Huu Co Thahn, a senior colonel, commanding, No. 3 Battalion, 803rd Infantry Regiment, 324th Infantry Division, Fifth People’s Shock Army. Puller had seen his picture, knew his résumé: from a wealthy, sophisticated Indo-French family and even a graduate of the École Militaire in Paris before deserting to the North in sixty-one after revulsion at the excesses of the Diem regime, he had become one of their most able field grade military commanders, a sure general.

A mortar shell fell outside, close by, and dust shook from the rafters of the command post.

“Anybody hit?” he called.

“No, sir,” came his sergeant’s reply. “The bastards missed.”

“Any word from Matthews?”

“No, sir.”

Major Richard W. Puller pulled on his boonie cap and slithered out the dugout door to the trench and looked around at his shaky empire. He was a lean, desperate man with a thatch of gray hair, and had been in Fifth Special Forces since 1958, including a tour in the British Special Air Service Regiment, even seeing some counterinsurgency action in Malaysia. He’d been to all the right schools: Airborne, Ranger, Jungle, National War College, Command and Staff at Leavenworth. He could fly a chopper, speak Vietnamese, repair a radio or fire an RPG. This was not his first siege. He had been encircled at Pleiku in 1965 for more than a month, under serious bombardment. He’d been hit then: a Chinese .51-caliber machine gun bullet, which would kill most men.

He hated the war, but he loved it. He feared it would kill him but a part of him wanted it never to end. He loved his wife but had had a string of Chinese and Eurasian mistresses. He loved the Army but hated it also, the former for its guts and professionalism, the latter for its stubbornness, its insistence always of fighting the next war by the tactics of the old.

But what he hated most of all was that he had fucked up. He had really fucked up, gambling the lives of his team and all his indigs that the NVA couldn’t get him during his window of vulnerability. He was responsible for it all; it was happening to them because it was happening to him. And nobody could save his ass.

The main gate was down, and where his ammo dump had been, smoke still boiled from the ground, rising to mingle with the low clouds that hung everywhere. The S-shops were a shambles as were most of the squad hootches, but a unit of VC sappers that had gotten into the compound the night before and actually taken over the Third Squad staging area and what remained of the commo shack had been finally dislodged in hand-to-hand with the dawn. No structure remained; most of the wire still stood, but for now, that was the mortar objective: to pound avenues into his defenses so that when Huu Co and his battalion got here, they wouldn’t get hung up in the shit as they came over him, backed by their own mortars and a complement of crew-served weapons.

Puller looked up and caught rain in the eye and felt the chill of the mist. Night was falling. Would they come at night? They’d move at night, but probably not attack. At least not in force: they’d send probers, draw fire, try and get Arizona to use up its low supplies of ammo on bad or unseen targets, but mainly work to keep the defenders rattled and sleepless for the No. 3 Battalion.

Would the weather break? On the Armed Forces Net, the meteorological forecasts were not promising, but Puller knew they’d try like hell, and if they could get birds up, they’d get ’em up. But maybe the pilots were reluctant: who’d want to fly into heavy small-arms fire to drop napalm on a few more dinks when the war was so close to being over? Who’d want to die now, at the very tag end of the thing, after all the years and all the futility? He didn’t know the answer to that one himself.

Puller looked down his front to the valley. He could see nothing in the gloom, of course, but it was a highway, and Huu Co would be barreling down it at the double time like a fat cat in a limousine, knowing they ran no danger from the Phantoms or the gunships.

“Major Puller, Major Puller! You ought to come see this, quick.”

It was Sergeant Blas, one of his master sergeants who worked with the Montagnards, a tough little Guamese who had seen a lot of action on too many tours and also didn’t deserve to get caught in a shit hole like FOB Arizona so late in a lost and fruitless war.

Bias led him through the trenches to the west side of the perimeter, crouching now and then when a new mortar shell came whistling their way, but at last they reached the parapet, and a Montagnard with a carbine handed Puller a pair of binocs.

Puller used them to peer over the sandbags, and saw in the treeline three hundred meters out something that was at first indecipherable but at last assembled itself into a pattern and then some details.

It was a stick and on the stick was Jim Matthews’s head.

Three quicks and one slow. Three strongs. That was the rhythm, the slow steady pace of accomplishment over the long years and the long bleeding. Now, he was under pressure, great pressure, for one last quick. Far off, the diplomats were talking. There would be a peace soon, and the more they controlled when that peace was signed, the more they would retain afterward and the more they could build upon for a future, he knew, he would never see, but his children might.

He knew he would not survive. His children would be his monument. He would leave a new world behind for them, having done his part in destroying the terrible old one. That was enough for any father, and his life did not particularly matter; he had given himself up to struggle, to tomorrow, to the ten rules of the soldier’s life:

1) Defend the Fatherland; fight and sacrifice myself for the People’s Revolution.

2) Obey the orders received and carry out the mission of the soldier.

3) Strive to improve the virtues of a Revolutionary Soldier.

4) Study to improve myself and build up a powerful Revolutionary Army.

5) Carry out other missions of the Army.

6) Help consolidate internal unity.

8) Preserve and save public properties.

9) Work for the solidarity between the Army and the People.

10) Maintain the Quality and Honor of the Revolutionary Soldier.

All that remained was this last job, the American Green Beret camp at Kham Duc, at the end of the An Loc Valley, which must be eliminated in order to take more land before documents were signed.

Three quicks, one slow, three strongs.

Slow plan.

Quick advance.

Strong fight.

Strong assault.

Strong pursuit.

Quick clearance.

Quick withdrawal.

He had developed the plan over three years of operations, gaining constant intelligence on the E5 sector of administrative division MR-7, knowing that as the war wound down, it would do, it was explained to him by higher headquarters and as he himself understood, to make an example of one of the camps.

Quick advance. That is where No. 3 Battalion was now. The men were seasoned, toughened campaigners with long battle experience. They moved quickly from their sanctuary in Laos and were now less than twenty kilometers from the target, which was already under assault by local Viet Cong infrastructure under specific orders from Hanoi, and from whom he got combat intelligence over the radio.

The column moved in the classical structure of an army on the quick, derived not entirely from the great Giap, father of the Army, but also from the French genius Napoleon, who understood, when no one in history since Alexander had, the importance of quickness, and who slashed across the world on that principle.

So Huu Co, senior colonel, had elements of his best troops, his sappers, running security on each flank a mile out in two twelve-men units per flank; he had his second best people, also sappers, at the point in a diamond formation, all armed with automatic weapons and RPGs, setting the pace, ready to deliver grenades and withering fire at any obstacles. His other companies moved in column by fours at the double time, rotating the weight of the heavy mortars among them by platoons so that no unit was more fatigued than any other.

Fortunately, it was cool; the rain was no impediment. The men, superbly trained, shorn of slackers and wreckers by long years of struggle, were the most dedicated. Moreover, they were excited because the weather was holding; low clouds, fog everywhere, their most feared and hated enemy, the American airplanes, nowhere in sight. That was the key: to move freely, almost as if in the last century, without the fear of Phantoms or Skyhawks screaming in and dropping their napalm and white phosphorous. That is why he hated the Americans so much: they fought with flame. It meant nothing to them to burn his people like grasshoppers plaguing a harvest. Yet those who stood against the flame, as he had, became hardened beyond imagination. He who has stood against flame fears nothing.

Huu Co, senior colonel, was forty-four years old. Sometimes, memories of the old life floated up before him: Paris in the late forties and early fifties, when his decadent father had turned him over to the French, under whose auspices he studied hard. But Paris: the pleasures of Paris. Who could forget such a place? That was a revolutionary city and it was there he first smoked Gauloise, read Marx and Engels and Proust and Sartre and Nietzsche and Apollinaire; it was there his commitment to the old world, the world of his father, began to crumble, at first in small, almost meaningless ways. Did the French have to be so nasty to their yellow guests? Did they have to take such pleasure in their whiteness, while preaching the oneness of man under the eye of God? Did they have to take such pleasure in rescuing bright Indochinese like himself from their yellowness?

But even still, he wondered now, Would I have followed this course had I known how hard it would be?

Huu Co, senior colonel, fought in seven battles and three campaigns with the French in the first Indochinese War. He loved the French soldiers: tough, hardened men, brave beyond words, who truly believed theirs was the right to master the land they had colonized. They could understand no other way; he lay in the mud with them at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, eighteen years ago, praying for the Americans to come and rescue them with their mighty airpower.

Huu Co, senior colonel, learned the Catholic God from them, moved south and fought for the Diem brothers in building a bulwark against the godless Uncle Ho. In 1955, he led an infantry platoon against the Binh Xuyen in violent street fighting, then later against the Hoa Hao cult in the Mekong and was present at the execution of the cult’s leader, Ba Cut, in 1956. Much of the killing he saw was of Indochinese by Indochinese. It sickened him.

Saigon was no Paris either, though it had cafes and nightclubs and beautiful women; it was a city of corruption, of prostitutes, gambling, crime, narcotics, which the Diems not only encouraged but also from which they profited. How could he love the Diems if they loved silk, perfume, their own power and pomp more than the people they ruled, whom they yet felt themselves removed from and immensely superior to? His father counseled him to forgive them their arrogances and to use them as a vessel for carrying God’s will. But his father never saw the politics, the corruption, the terrible way they abused the peasants, the remove from the people.

Huu Co went north in 1961, when the Diems’ corruption had begun to resemble that of a city destroyed in the Bible. He renounced his Catholicism, his inherited wealth and his father, whom he would never see again. He knew the South would sink into treachery and profiteering and would bring flame and retribution upon itself, as it had.

He was a humble private in the People’s Revolutionary Army, he who had sat in cafes and once met the great Sartre and de Beauvoir at the Deux Maggots in the Fourteenth Arrondisement; he, a major in the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam, became a lowly private carrying an SKS and wanting to do nothing but his duty to the fatherland and the future and seek purification, but his gifts always betrayed him.

He was always the best soldier among them, and he rose effortlessly, though now without ambition: he was a student officer after two years, and his passage in the west and in the south, after six months’ strenuous reeducation in a camp outside Hanoi, where he withstood the most barbarous pressures and purified himself for the revolutionary struggle, only toughened him for the decade of war that was to follow.

Now he was tired. He had been at war since 1950, twenty-two years of war. It was almost over. Really, all that remained was the camp called Arizona, and between himself and it, there stood nothing, no unit, no aircraft, no artillery. He would crush it. Nothing could stop him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

In the dream, he had caught a touchdown pass, a slant outside, and as he broke downfield all the blockers hit their men perfectly, and the defense went down like tenpins opening lanes toward the end zone. It was geometry, somehow, or at least a physical problem reduced to the abstract, very pleasing, and far from the reality which was that you ran on instinct and hardly ever remembered things exactly. He got into the end zone: people cheered, it was so very warm, Julie hugged him. His dad was there, weeping for joy. Trig was there also, among them, jumping up and down, and so was Sergeant Bob Lee Swagger, the sniper god, a figure of preposterous joy as he pirouetted crazily, laden with firearms and dappled in a war face of camouflage.

It was such a good dream. It was the best, the happiest, the finest dream he ever had, and it went away, as such things do, to the steady pressure of someone rocking his arm and the sudden baffling awareness that he was not there but here.

“Huh?”

“Time to work, Pork.”

Donny blinked and smelled the wet odor of jungle, the wet odor of rain, and felt the wet cold. Swagger had already turned from him and was off making his arcane preps.

The dawn came as a blur of light, just the faintest smear of incandescence to the east, over the mountains on the other side of the valley.

In its way, it was quite beautiful in that low 0500 light: vapors of fog clung to the wet earth everywhere, in valleys and hollows and gulches, nestled thickly in the trees, and though it wasn’t at present raining, surely it would rain soon, for the low clouds still rolled over, heavy with moisture. Still, so quiet, so calm, so pristine.

“Come on,” whispered Swagger into Donny Fenn’s ear.

Donny shook sleep from his eyes and put his dreams of Julie aside and reconfirmed his existence. He was on a hillside in heavy foliage above the An Loc Valley, near Kham Duc and Laos. It would be another wet day, and the weather had not broken, so there would be no air.

“We got to get lower,” said Bob. “I can’t hit nothing from up here.”

The sergeant now wore the M3 grease gun on his back and in his hands carried the M40 sniper rifle, a dull pewter Remington with a thick bull barrel and a dull brown wooden stock. It carried a Redfield scope, and a Marine Corps armorer had labored over it, free floating the barrel, truing up the bolt to the chamber, glass-bedding the action to the wood, torquing the screws tight, but it was still far from an elegant weapon, built merely for effectiveness, never beauty.

Bob had smeared the jungle grease paint on his face, and under the crinkled brow of the boonie cap his visage looked primitive; he seemed a creature sprung from someone’s worst dreams, some kind of atavistic war creature totally of the jungle, festooned with pistols and grenades, all smeared with the colors of nature, even his eyes gone to nothing.

“Here. Paint up and we’ll get going,” he said, holding the stick of camo paint out to Donny, who quickly blurred his own features. Donny gathered his M14 and the impossibly heavy PRC-77, his real enemy in all this, and began to ease his way down the slope with Bob.

It seemed they were lowering themselves into the clouds, like angels returning to earth. The fog would not break; it clung to the floor of the valley as if it had been enameled there. No sun would burn it away, not today at any rate.

Now and then some jungle bird would call, now and then some animal shudder would ripple from the undergrowth, but there was no sense of human presence, nothing metallic or regular to the eye. Donny scanned left, Bob scanned right. They moved ever so slowly, frustratingly slowly, picking their way down, until at last they were nearly to the valley floor and a field of waist-high grass, in the center of which a worn track had been beaten, by men or buffaloes or elephants or whatever.

From far away, at last, came some kind of unnatural noise. Donny couldn’t identify it and then he could; it was the noise of men, somehow — nothing distinct, not breaking talk discipline — somehow become a herd, a living, breathing thing. It was No. 3 Battalion, still a few hundred yards away, gearing up for the last six or so klicks of quick march to the staging area for their assault.

Bob halted him with a hand.

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s how we do it. You got the map coords?”

Donny did; he had memorized them.

“Grid square Whiskey-Delta 5120-1802.”

“Good. If the sky clears and the birds come, you’ll have line of sight to them and you can go to the Air Force freak and you talk ’em in. They won’t have good visuals. You talk ’em down into the valley and have ’em plaster the floor.”

“What about you? You’ll be—”

“Don’t you worry about that. No squid Phantom jock is flaming me. I can take care of myself. Now listen up: that is your goddamn job. You talk to ’em on the horn. You’re the eyes. Don’t you be coming down after me, you got that? You may hear fighting, you may hear small arms; don’t you fret a bit. That’s my job. Yours is to stay up here and talk to the air. After the air moves out, you should be able to git to that snake-eater camp. You call them, tell them you’re coming in, pop smoke, and come in from the smoke so they know it’s you and not some NVA hero. Got that? You should be okay if I can hold these bad boys up for a bit.”

“What about security? I’m security. My job is to help you, to cover your ass. What the hell good am I going to do parked up here?”

“Listen, Pork, I’ll fire my first three shots when I get visuals. Then I’ll move back to the right, maybe two hundred yards, because they’ll bring heavy shit down. I’ll try and do two, three, maybe four more from there. Here’s how the game works. I pull down on a couple, then I move back. But guess what? After the third string, I ain’t moving back, I’m moving forward. That’s why I want you right here. I’ll never be too far from this area. I don’t want ’em to know how many guys I am, and they’ll flank me, and I don’t want ’em coming around on me. I guarantee you, they will have good, tough, fast-moving flank people out, so you go to ground about twenty minutes after I first hit them. They may be right close to you; that’s all right. You dig in and sink into the ground, and you’ll be all right. Just watch out for the patrols I know they’ll call in. Them boys we saw last night. They’ll be back, that I guarantee.”

“You will get killed. You will get killed, I’m telling you, you cannot—”

“I’m giving you a straight order; you follow it. Don’t give me no little-boy shit. I’m telling you what you have to do, and by God, you will do it, and that’s all there is to it, or I will be one pissed-off motherfucker, Lance Corporal Fenn.”

“I—”

“You do it! Goddammit, Fenn, you do it, and that’s all there is to it. Or I will have you up on charges and instead of going home, you’ll go to Portsmouth.”

This was bullshit, of course, and Donny saw through it in a second. It was all bullshit, because if Swagger went into the valley without security, he was not coming back. He simply was not. That’s what the physics of firepower decreed, and the physics of firepower were the iron realities of war. There was no appeal.

He was throwing his life away for some strangers in a camp he’d never see. He knew it, had known it all along.

It was his way. More like Trig: hungry to die, as if the war were so inside him he knew he could not live without it; there would be no life to go home to. He had kept himself hard and pure just for this one mad moment when he could take on a battalion with a rifle, and if he could not live, it was also clear that he would fight to the very end. It was as if he knew there would be no place for warriors in any other world, and so he may as well embrace his fate, not dodge it.

“Jesus, Bob—”

“You got it square?”

“Yes.”

“You are a good kid. You go back to the world and that beautiful girl. You go to her and you put all this bad bullshit behind you, do you copy?”

“Roger.”

“Roger. Time to hunt. Sierra-Bravo-Four, last transmission, and out.”

And, with the sniper’s gift for subtle, swift movement, Bob then seemed to vanish. He slithered off down the hill to the low fog without looking back.

Bob worked down through the foliage, aware that he was clicking into the zone. He had to put it all behind him. There could be nothing in his head except mission, no other memories or doubts, no tremor of hesitation to play across the nerves of his shooting. He tried to get into his war face, to become, in some way, war. It was a gift his people had; his father had won the Medal of Honor in the big one against the Japs, messy business on Iwo Jima, and then come home to get the blue ribbon from Harry Truman and get blowed out of his socks ten years later by a no-account piece of trash in a cornfield. There were other soldiers in the line too: hard, proud men, true sons of Arkansas, who had two gifts: to shoot and see something die, and to work like hogs the long hot day. It wasn’t much; it’s what they had. But there was also a cloud of melancholy attached to the clan — off and on, over the Swagger generations back to that strange fellow and his wife who’d shown up in Tennessee in 1786 from who knew where, they’d been a line of killers and lonely boys, exiles. There was a blackness in them. He’d seen it in his father, who never spoke of war, and was as beloved as a man in a backwater like Blue Eye, Arkansas, could be, even more so than Sam Vincent, the county prosecutor, or Harry Etheridge, the famous congressman. But his father would have black dog days: he could hardly talk or stir; he’d sit in the dark, and just stare out at nothing. What was dogging him? The war? Some sense of his own luck? A feeling for the fragility of it? Memories of all the bullets that had been fired at him, and the shells, and how nothing had hit him in his vitals? That kind of luck had to run out, and Daddy knew it, but he went out anyway, and it killed him.

What could save you?

Nothing. If it was in the cards, by God, it was in the cards, and Daddy knew that, and faced up to it like a man, looked it in the eyes and spat in its black-cat face, until at last it reared up and bit him in a cornfield on the Polk County line.

Nothing could save you. Bob pressed on, sliding deeper into the fog. Odd how it clung, like clouds of wet wool; he’d never seen anything like it in the ’Nam, and this here was his third tour.

The fear began to eat at him, as it always did. Some fools said he had no fear, he was such a hero, but that only proved how little they knew. The fear was like a cold lump of bacon grease in his stomach, hard and wet and slick, that he could taste and feel at all times. You could not make it go away, you could not ignore it, and anybody who said you could was the worst damned kind of fool. Go on, be scared, he ordered himself. Let it rip. This may be it. But the one thing that scared him most of all wasn’t dying, not really; it was the idea of not doing the job. That was something to fear in the heart. He would do the job, by God; that he would.

Trees. He slid through them, tree to tree, his eyes working, testing, looking for possibilities. A hide? A fallback? A line of movement not under fire? A good field of fire? Damn this fog, could he even see them? Could he read ranges, gauge the drop on the long shots? Cover or just concealment? Where was the sun? Nope, didn’t matter, no sun.

A thin, cold rain had begun to fall. How would that affect the trajectory? What was the wind, the humidity? How wet was the stock of the rifle? Had it bloated and was now some little swollen knot rubbing secretly against the barrel, fucking up his point of impact? Had the scope sprung a leak, and was now a tube of fog, worthless, leaving him with nothing?

Or: were there NVA ahead? Had they heard him coming? Were they laughing as he bumbled closer? Were they drawing a bead even as he considered the possibility? He tried to exile the fear as he had exiled his own past and future, and concentrate on the mechanical, the aspect of craft that lay before him, how he would reload fast enough if it came to that, since the Remingtons didn’t have no stripper clips and the M118 had to be threaded in one round at a time. Should he set up his two Claymores to cover his flanks? He didn’t think he had time.

Help me, he prayed to a God he wasn’t sure existed, maybe some old gunny up there above the clouds, just watching out for bad boys like him on desperate jobs for people who didn’t even know his name.

He halted. He was in trees, had good tree cover, and good fog, a fallback to a hilltop, and then he could cut back the other direction. Professionally, he saw that this was it. A perfect choke point, with targets in the open, fog to cover him, a rare opportunity to get at the NVA in the open, lots of ammunition.

If this is it, by God, then this is it, he thought, settling in behind a fallen tree, literally slipping into a bush, as he squirmed to find a good position. He found his prone, and although he couldn’t get one leg flat on the ground for the gouge of a rock or a stump, he got most of his body down, drawing stability from the earth itself. The rifle was back and in, left grip lightly on the forearm, sling tight as it ran from the wood, lashed around that forearm and headed tautly to the stock. Right hand on the small of the stock, finger still off the trigger. Breathing easy, trying to stay cool. Another day at the office. He was situated so no light would reflect off his lens. The trees around him would muffle and defuse the sound of the shots. In the first minutes, anyhow, no one would be able to figure out where the shots were coming from.

He slid his eye behind the scope, finding the proper three inches of relief. Nothing. It was like peering into a bowl of cream. Drifting whiteness, the outline of two or three scrub trees, no sense of the hills forming the other side of the valley, a slight downward angle into vertigo. Nothing stood out from which to estimate range.

He checked his watch: 0700 hours. They would be along soon, not moving quite so quickly because of the fog, but confident that it hid them and that in hours they’d be in possession of Arizona.

So come on, you bastards.

What are you waiting for?

Then he saw one. It was the hunter’s thrill after the long stalk, that magical moment when the connection between hunter and hunted, fragile as a china horse, first establishes itself. Blood rushed through him: old buck fever. Everybody gets it when they see the beast they will kill and eat; that’s how primordial it is.

I will not eat you, he thought, but by God I will kill you.

More emerged. Jesus Christ … the first thin line of sappers in cloth hats with foliage attached, rifles at the high port, eyes strained, at maximum alertness; more tightly bunched, an infantry platoon, battle ready, caped and pith-helmeted, chest web gear, green Bata boots and AKs, Type 56, and no other identifying insignia; the platoon leaders at the front; behind them in a tight little knot the staff, their ranks unrecognizable in the muddy uniforms.

You never saw this. A North Vietnamese infantry battalion moving at the half-trot through a choke point in tight formation, not spread out for four thousand meters or broken down and moving in cells to reassemble under dark. The pilots never saw it, the photos never got it. The NVA, goddamn their cold, professional souls, were too quick, too subtle, too disciplined, too smart for such movement. They moved at night, in small units, then reassembled; or they moved through tunnels, or in bomb-free Cambo or Laos, always careful, risking nothing, knowing surely that the longer they bled the American beast, the better their chances became. Possibly no American had seen such a thing.

The CO was pushing them hard, gambling that he could beat the weather, whack out Arizona and be gone. Speed was his greatest ally, the bleak weather his next. The rain fell harder, pelting the ground, but it did not stop the North Vietnamese, who seemed not to notice. Onward they came.

He snicked off the safety, and through the scope hunted for an officer, a radio operator, an ammunition bearer with RPGs, an NCO, a machine-gun team leader. The targets drifted before him, floating through the crucifer of the crosshairs. That he was about to kill never occurred to him; the way his mind worked, he thought only that he was about to shoot.

Finally: you, little brother. An officer, youngish, with the three stars of a captain lieutenant, at the head of an infantry platoon. He would go first; then, back swiftly, to a radio operator; then, swing left as you run the bolt, and go for the guy with the Chicom RPD 56, put him down, then fall back. That was the plan, and any plan was better than no plan.

The reticle of the Redfield scope wobbled downward, bouncing ever so slightly, tracking the first mark, staying with him as the shooter took his long breath, hissed a half of it out, found bone to lock under the rifle, told himself again to keep the gun moving as he fired, prayed to God for mercy for all snipers, and felt the trigger break cleanly.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Gooooooood morning, Vietnam,” said the guy on Captain Taney’s portable, “and hello to all you guys out there in the rain. Well, fellas, I’ve got some bad news. Looks like that old Mr. Sun is still AWOL. That’s UA, for you leathernecks. Nobody’s gonna stop the rain today. But it’ll be great for the flowers, and maybe Mr. Victor Charles will stay indoors himself today, because his mommy won’t let him outside to play.”

“What a moron,” said Captain Taney, Arizona’s XO.

“The weather should break tonight, as a high pressure zone over the Sea of Japan looks like it’s making a beeline for—”

“Shit,” said Puller.

Why did he put himself through this? It would break when it would break.

Standing in the parapet outside his command bunker, he glanced around in the low light, watching the floating mist as it seethed through the valley that lay beyond.

Should he put an OP out there, so they’d know when the 803rd was getting close?

But he no longer controlled the hills, so putting an OP out there would just get its people all killed.

The rain began to fall, thin and cold. Vietnam! Why was it so cold? He had spent so many days in country over the past eight years but never had felt it this biting before.

“Not good, sir,” said Taney.

“No, it isn’t, Taney.”

“Any idea when they’ll get here?”

“You mean Huu Co? He’s already here. He pushed ’em hard through the night and the rain. He’s no dummy. He wants us busted before our air can get up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You have that ammo report ready, Captain?”

“Yes, sir. Mayhorne just finished it. We have twelve thousand rounds of 5.56 left, and a couple more thousand .30 carbine rounds. We’re way low on frags, seventy-nine rounds and belted 7.62. Not a Claymore in the camp.”

“Christ.”

“I’ve got Mayhorne distributing the belted 7.62, but we’re down to five guns and I can’t cover any approach completely. We can set up a unit of quickmovers with one of the guns to jump to the assault sector, but if he hits us more than one place at once, we screw the pooch.”

“He will,” said Puller bleakly. “That’s how he operates. The pooch is screwed.”

“You know, sir, some of these ’Yards have family here in the compound. I was thinking—”

“No,” said Puller. “If you surrender, Huu Co will kill them all. That’s how he operates. We hang on, pray for a break in the weather, and if we have to, go hand to hand in the trenches with the motherfuckers.”

“Was it ever this bad in sixty-five, sir?”

Puller looked at Taney, who was about twenty-five, a good young Spec Forces captain with a tour behind him. But in sixty-five he’d been a high school hotshot; what could you tell him? Who could even remember?

“It was never this bad, because we always had air and there were plenty of firebases around. I’ve never felt so fucking on my own. That’s what trying to be the last man out gets you, Captain. Let it be a lesson. Get out, get your people out. Copy?”

“I copy, sir.”

“Okay, get the platoon leaders and the machine gun team leaders to my command post in fifteen and—”

They both heard it.

“What was that?”

“It sounded like a—”

Then another one came. A solitary rifle shot, heavy, obviously .308, echoing back and forth across the valley.

“Who the fuck is that?” Taney said.

“That’s a sniper,” said Puller.

They waited. It was silent. Then the third shot and Puller could read the signature of the weapon.

“He’s not firing fast enough for an M14. He’s shooting a bolt gun, and that means he’s a Marine.”

“A Marine? Way the hell out here in Indian Territory?”

“I don’t know who this guy is, but he sounds like he’s doing some good.”

Then came a wild barrage of full automatic fire, the lighter, crisper sound of the Chicom 7.62×39mm the AKs fired.

Then the gunfire fell silent.

“Shit,” said Taney. “Sounds like they got him.”

The sniper fired again.

“Let’s run the PRC-77 and see if we can pick up enemy radio intelligence,” Puller said. “They must be buzzing about this like crazy.”

Puller and his XO and Sergeant Blas and Y Dok, the ’Yard chieftain, all went down into the bunker.

“Cameron,” Puller said to his commo NCO, “you think you’ve got any juice left in the PRC-77?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let’s do a quick scan. See if you can get me enemy freaks. They ought to be close enough to pick up.”

“Yes, sir. Sir, if air comes and we need to talk ’em in—”

“Air isn’t coming today, Cameron. Not today. But maybe someone else has.”

Cameron fiddled with the radio mast on the PRC-77, snapping a cord so that it flew free above the wood and dirt of the roof, then clicked it on, and began to diddle with the frequency dials.

“They like to operate in the twelve hundreds,” he said. He pulled through the nets, not bringing anything up except static, the fucking United States Navy bellowing about beating the Air Force Academy in a basketball game and—

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” said Puller, leaning forward. “Can’t you get us in a little tighter?”

“It’s them, isn’t it, sir?” asked Taney.

“Oh, yes, yessy, yessy, yessy,” said the head man Y Dok, who wore the uniform of a major in the ARVN, except for the red tribal scarf around his neck, “yep, is dem, yep, is dem!” He was a merry little man with blackened teeth and an inexhaustible lust for war, afraid, literally, of nothing.

“Dok, can you follow?” asked Puller, whose Vietnamese was good but not great. He was getting odd words — attack, dead, halt — and he couldn’t follow the verb tenses; they seemed to be describing a world he couldn’t imagine.

“Oh, he say they under assault on right by platoon strength of marksmen. Snipers. The snipers come for them. Ma my, ’merican ghosts. He says most officers dead, and most machine gun team leaders also — oh! Oh, now he dead too. Y Dok hear bullet hit him as he talk. Good shit, I tell you, Major Puller, got good deaths going, oh, so very many good deaths.”

“A platoon?” said Taney. “The nearest Marine firebase is nearly forty klicks away, if it hasn’t rotated out. How could they get a platoon over here? And why would they send a platoon?”

“It’s not a platoon,” said Puller. “They couldn’t — no, not overland, across that terrain, not without being bounced. But a team.”

“A team?”

“Marine sniper teams are two-men shows. They can move like hell if they have to. Jesus, Taney, listen to this and be aware of the privilege you’ve been accorded. What you are hearing is one man with a rifle taking on a battalion-strength unit of about three hundred men.”

“Dey say dey got him,” said Y Dok.

“Shit,” said Taney.

“God bless him,” said Puller. “He put up a hell of a fight.”

“Dey say, ’merican is dead and head man say, You fellas get going, you got to push on to the end of the valley and de officer say, Yes, yes, he going to — oh. Oh ho ho ho!” He laughed, showing his blackened little teeth.

“No. No, no, no, no. He got dem! Oh, yes, he just killed man on radio. I hear scream. Oh, he is a man who knows the warrior’s walk, dot I know. He got the good deaths, very many, going on.”

“You can say that again,” said Puller.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When the trigger broke, the North Vietnamese captain lieutenant turned as if to look at Bob just once before he died. All the details were frozen for a second: he was a small man, even by NVA standards, with binoculars and a pistol. An instant ago, he had been full of life and zeal. When the bullet struck him, it sucked everything from him and he stood with grave solemnity, colorless, as all the hopes and dreams departed him. If he had a soul, this would be where it fled to whatever version of heaven sustained him. Then it was over: with the almost stiff dignity of formal ceremony, he toppled forward.

Bob threw his bolt fast, tossing out the spent shell, but never breaking his eye relief with the scope, a good trick it only took a lifetime to master. In the perfect circle of nine magnifications, he saw the men who were his targets looking at one another in utter confusion. There was no inscrutability in their expression: they were dumbfounded, because this was not supposed to happen, not in the rain, in the fog, in the perfect freedom of their attack, not after their long night march, their good discipline, their toughness, their belief. They had no immediate theory to explain it. No, this was not possible.

Bob pivoted the rifle just a bit, found a new target, and felt the jolt as the rifle fired. Two hundred yards out and two tenths of a second later, the 173-grain bullet arrived at 2,300 odd feet per second. The tables say that at that range and velocity, it will pack close to two thousand foot-pounds of energy, and it hit this man, a machine gun team leader standing near his now dead commanding officer, low in his stomach, literally turning him inside out. That was what such a big bullet did: it operated on him, opening his intimate biological secrets to those around him, not a killing shot, but one that would bleed him out in minutes.

Quickly Bob found another and within the time it takes to blink an eyelash, fired for the third time and set that one down, too.

The North Vietnamese did not panic, though they could not hope to pick out Bob in the fog, and the muzzle blast was diffused; they only knew he was on the right somewhere. Someone calmly issued orders; the men dropped and began to look for a target. A squad formed to flank off to the right and come around. It was standard operating procedure for a unit with much experience and professionalism.

But Bob slithered away quickly, and when he felt the fog overwhelm him, he stood and ran ahead, knowing he had but a few seconds to relocate. Would they take the casualties and continue to march? Would they send out flanking parties; would they take the time to set up mortars? What will they do? he wondered.

He ran one hundred yards fast, slipping three new cartridges into the breech as he jounced along, because he didn’t want to waste time loading when he had targets. That was shooting time, precious. He slipped down off the incline onto the valley floor and crouched as he moved through the elephant grass, an odd nowhere place sealed off by vapors. He came at last to the center of the track, and got a good visual without the grass: he was now three hundred yards away and saw only the dimmest of shapes in the fog. Sinking to a quick, rice-paddy squat, he put the glass to them, put the crosshairs on one, quartering them high to account for a little drop at that distance, and squeezed the trigger. Maybe he was shooting at a stump. But the blob fell, and when he quartered another, it fell too. He did that twice more, and then the blobs disappeared; they’d dropped into the grass or had withdrawn, he couldn’t tell.

Now what?

Now back.

The flankers will come, but slowly, thinking possibly they’re up against a larger force.

Not even bothering to crouch, he ran again, full force through the mist. Suddenly the NVA opened up and he dropped. But the sleet of firepower did not come his way and seemed more of a probing effort, a theoretical thing meant to hit him where, by calculation, he should be. He watched as tracers hunted him a good hundred yards back, liquid splashes of neon through the fog, so quick and gossamer they seemed like optical illusions. When they struck the earth, they ripped it up, a blizzard of splashy commotion. Then the firing stopped.

He dropped, squirmed ahead and came to a crook in a tree. Quickly he slipped four more rounds into the M40’s breech, throwing the last one home and locking the bolt downward with the sensation of a vault door closing.

The rifle came up to him, and he seemed to have lucked into a thinner spot in the veil of fog, where suddenly they were quite visible. An officer was talking on the radio phone as around him men fanned out. Bob killed the officer, killed two of the men. Then he got a good shot at a man with four RPGs on his back squirming for cover, put the crosshairs onto a warhead and fired once. Force multiplier: the quadruple detonation ripped a huge gout in the earth, possibly driving others back, possibly killing some of them.

He didn’t wait to count casualties, or even take a quick look at his results. He crawled again through the high elephant grass, the sweat pouring off him. He crawled for what seemed like the longest time. Tracer rounds floated aimlessly overhead, clipping the grass, making the odd whup sound a bullet fighting wind will make. Once, when the firing stopped, he thought he sensed men around him and froze, but nothing happened. When at last he found some trees so that he could go back to work, he discovered he was much farther back in the column. Before him, as the vapors drifted and seethed, were some men who seemed less soldiers than beasts of burden, so laden were they with their equipment. This was simple murder; he took no pleasure in it, but neither did he consider it deeply. Targets? Take them down, eliminate them, take them out. Numbly he did the necessary.

Huu Co, senior colonel, had a problem. It wasn’t the firepower; there wasn’t much firepower. It was the accuracy.

“When he shoots, brother Colonel,” his officer told him, “he hits us. He is like a phantom. The men are losing their spirit.”

Huu Co fumed silently, but he understood. In a frontal attack his men would stand and fight or charge into guns: that was battle. This was something else: the terrible fog, the mysterious bullets singing out of it with unerring accuracy, seeking officers and leaders, killing them, then … silence.

“Maybe there are more than one,” someone said.

“I believe there are at least ten,” someone else said.

“No,” said Huu Co. “There is only one and he has only one rifle. It is a bolt-action rifle, so therefore he is an American Marine, because their army no longer uses bolt actions. One can tell from the time between the rounds, the lack of double shots or bursts. You must be calm. He preys on your fear. That is how he works.”

“He can see through the fog.”

“No, he cannot see through the fog. He is in the hills to the right, clearly, and as he moves, he encounters disparities in the density of the mist. When it is thin, he can see to shoot. Get the men down into the grass; if they stand they will be killed.”

“Brother Colonel, should we continue to march? How many can he kill? Our duty lies at the end of the valley, not here.”

It was a legitimate point, raised by Commissar Tien Phuc Bo, the political officer. Indeed, under certain circumstances, duty demanded that officers and men simply accept a high rate of casualty in payment for the importance of the mission. Rule No. 1: Defend the Fatherland; fight and sacrifice myself for the People’s Revolution.

“But this is different,” said Huu Co. “The fog makes it different, and his accuracy. Indiscriminate fire may be sustained as fair battle loss. The sniper presents a different proposition, both philosophically and tactically. If the individual soldier feels himself being targeted, that has disproportionate meaning to him and erodes his confidence. In the West they call it ‘paranoia,’ a very useful term, meaning overimaginative fear for the self. He will give himself up to a cause or a mission, in the abstract, but he will not give himself up to a man. It’s too personal, too intimate.”

“Huu Co is right,” argued his executive officer, Nhoung. “We may not simply accept losses as we travel, for the weight becomes immense and when we reach our goal, the men are too dispirited. What then have we accomplished?”

“As you decide,” said Phuc Bo. “But you may be criticized later and it will sting for many, many years.”

Huu Co accepted the rebuke; he had been criticized in a reeducation camp in 1963 for nine long months, and to be criticized, in the Vietnamese meaning of the term, was excruciating.

Bravely, he thrust ahead.

“A man like this can inflict a surprisingly high number of casualties, particularly upon officers and noncommissioned officers, the heart of the Army. Without leadership, the men are lost. He can attrit our officer staff if we do not deal with him now and immediately. I want Second Platoon on the right, supported by a machine gun team on each end for suppressive fire. They are to maneuver on a sweeping movement, while the rest of the unit holds up in the high grass. I want radio contact with Company Number Two sappers, and recall them and assign them in the blocking role. They must move quickly. Latest reports say the weather will not break. We have some time and I prefer by far to maintain unit integrity than to push on at this time. We will take him in good time. Patience in all things; that is our way. Communicate with your leaders and the fighters. Now is not the time for rash action; this is a test of discipline and spirit.”

“That is understood, sir.”

“Then let’s do our duties, brothers. I anticipate success within the hour and I know you will not let me down.”

Donny lay in the high grass, working the spotting scope. But the range was too far, a good four hundred meters, and in the valley he just saw the drifting mist, and heard the gunfire.

He took his right eye away from the scope and looked out with both of them. Again, nothing. The shooting rose and fell, rose and fell, punctuated now and then by two or three heavy rifle cracks, Bob’s shots. At one point some kind of multiple blast came. Had Bob fired a Claymore? He didn’t know but he didn’t think the sniper would have time, as he’d been moving this way and that through the hills.

He was well situated, half buried in a clump of vegetation, halfway up a hill, a little above the fog. He could see far to the right and far to the left, but he didn’t think anybody could get the drop on him. He had a good compass heading to the Special Forces camp at Kham Duc and knew if he had to he could make it in two or three hard hours. He drank a little water from his one remaining canteen. He was all right. All he had to do was sit there, wait for air, direct the air, then get the hell out of there. If no air came, then he was to move under cover of nightfall. He was not to go into the valley.

He thought of a familiar remark scrawled in Magic Marker on Marine helmets and flak jackets: “Yea, though I walk in the Valley of Death, I shall fear no harm, because I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley!” Bravado, sheer, thumping bravado, chanted like an incantation, to keep the Reaper away.

I’m not going into the Valley of Death, he thought. Those aren’t my orders. I followed my orders, I did everything I was told, I was specifically ordered not to go into the Valley of Death.

He accepted that as both a moral and a tactical proposition as ordered by a senior staff NCO. No man could challenge that, nor would one want to or try to.

I am fine, he told himself. I am short, I am fine, I am three and days till DEROS. I have my whole goddamned life in front of me and no man can say I shirked or ducked or dodged. No one can ever wonder if my beliefs were founded on moral logic or my own cowardice. I have to prove nothing.

Then why do I feel so shitty?

It was true. He felt truly sick, angry at himself, almost to the point of revulsion. Down there Swagger was probably giving away his life and Donny had somehow missed the show. Everybody cared about him. Trig, too, had cared about him. What was so special about him that he had to survive? He had no writer’s gift, he was not conversational or charismatic — no one could listen to him, he could be no witness.

Why me?

What’s so special about my ass?

He heard them before he saw them. It was the thup-thup-thup of men running, coming at the oblique. He didn’t jerk or move quickly and in an instant was glad he hadn’t, for sudden moves like that get you spotted.

They passed about twenty-five meters ahead of him, in single file, fastmovers, stripped of helmets and packs and canteens, racing toward duty and combat. It was the twelve-man flanking patrol, recalled by radio to move on the sniper from behind.

He could see how it would work. They’d form a line and flankers would drive Bob into them, or they’d come upon him from the rear. In either event, Bob was finished.

If Donny’d had the grease gun he might have gotten all twelve in a single burst. But probably not; that was very tricky shooting. If he had a Claymore set up, he might have gotten them too. But he didn’t. He had nothing but his M14.

He watched them go and they pounded along with grace, economy and authority. They disappeared into the fog.

I have my orders, he thought.

My job is the air, he thought.

Then he thought, Fuck it!, and got up to take them from behind.

They came as he thought they would, good, trained men, willing to take casualties, a platoon strength unit fanning through the high grass. Bob could make them out in the mist, dark shapes filing through the weaving fronds; he thought of a deer he’d once seen in a foggy cornfield back in Arkansas, and Old Sam Vincent, who’d tried to be a father to him after his own had passed, telling him to fight the buck fever, to be calm, to be cool.

He heard Sam now.

“Be cool, boy. Don’t rush it. You rush it, it’s over and you can’t never get it back.”

And so he was calm, he was death, he was the kind hunter who shot for clean kills and no blood trails, who was a part of nature himself.

But he wasn’t.

He was war, at its cruelest.

He had never had this feeling before. It scared him, but it excited him also.

I am war, he thought. I take them all. I make their mothers cry. I have no mercy. I am war.

It was an odd thought, just fluttering through a mind far gone into battle intensity, but it could not be denied.

The platoon leader will be to the left, not in the lead, he’ll be talking to his men, holding them together.

He hunted for a talking man and when he found him, he shot him through the mouth and ceased his talking forever.

I am war, he thought.

He shifted quickly to the man who’d run to the fallen officer and almost took him, but instead held a second, and waited for another to join him, grab him, take command, and turn himself to issue orders. Senior NCO.

I am war.

He took the NCO.

The men looked at each other, dead targets in his eyes, and in a moment of utter panic did exactly the right thing.

They charged at him.

He couldn’t possibly take them all or even half of them; he couldn’t escape or evade. There was only one thing to do.

He stood, war-crazed, face green-black with paint, eyes bulged in rage, and screamed, “Come on you fuckers, I want to fight some more! Come on and fight me!”

They saw him standing atop the rise, and almost en masse pivoted toward him. They froze, confronting him, a mad scarecrow with a dangerous rifle atop a hill of grass, unafraid of them. For some insane reason, they did not think to fire.

The moment lingered, all craziness loose in the air, a moment of exquisite insanity.

Then they ran at him.

He dropped and slithered the one way they would not expect.

Right at them.

He slithered ahead desperately, snaking through the grass, until they began to fire.

They paused a few feet from him, fired their weapons from the hip as if in some terrified human ceremony aimed at slaying the devil. The rounds scorched out, ripping the stalks above his head to land somewhere behind. It was a ritual of destruction. They fired and fired, reloading new mags, sending their bullets out to kill him, literally obliterating the crest of the hill.

He crawled ahead, until he could see feet and spent brass landing in heaps.

The firing stopped.

He heard in Vietnamese the shouts:

“Brothers, the American is dead. Go find his body, comrades.”

“You go find his body.”

“He is dead, I tell you. No man could live through that. If he were alive, he would be firing at us even now.”

“Fine, go and cut his head off and bring it to us.”

“Father Ho wants me to stay here. Somebody must direct.”

“I’ll stay, brother. Allow me to give you the privilege of examining the body.”

“You fools, we’ll all go. Reload, make ready, shoot at anything that moves. Kill the American demon.”

“Kill the demon, my brothers!”

He watched as the feet began to move toward him.

Get small, he told himself. Be very, very small!

He went into a fetal position, willing himself into a stillness so total it was almost a replication of genuine animal death. It was a gift he had, the hunter’s gift, to make his body of the earth, not upon it. He worried only about the smell of his sweat, rich with American fats, that could alert the wisest of them.

Feet came so close.

He saw canvas boots, and a pair of shower clogs.

They won this fucking war in shower clogs!

The two pairs of feet sloughed through the grass, each vivid in the perfection of its detail. The man in shower clogs had small, dirty, tough feet. The clogs were probably just an afterthought; he could fight barefoot in snow or on gravel. The other’s boots were holey, torn, taped together, a hobo’s comic footwear, something Red Skelton’s Clem Kadiddlehopper might wear. But then the boots marched on, passing by, and Bob scooted ahead, slithering through the grass until he came to a fold in the earth. He rose, checked around, and saw nothing in the mist, and then raced off to the right, down the fold, toward the column, which had probably resumed its movement toward Arizona.

Then he crashed into the soldier.

NVA.

The two looked at each other for one stupid moment, Bob and this obvious straggler, the idiot who’d wandered away. The man’s mouth opened as if to scream even as he fumbled to bring his AK to bear, but Bob launched at him in an animal spring of pure evil brutality, smashing him in the mouth with his skull, and driving downward on him, pinning the assault rifle to his chest under his own dense weight. He got his left hand about the man’s throat, crushing it, applying the full pinning weight of his body while at the same time reaching for his Randall knife.

The man squirmed and bucked spastically, his own hands beating at Bob’s neck and head. Then one hand dipped, also for a knife, presumably, but Bob rolled slightly to the left and drew his knee up and drove it into the man’s testicles with all the force he could muster. He heard the intake of breath as the concussion folded his enemy.

Then he had the knife, and no impulse halted him. He drove it forward into the belly, turned it sideways so the cutting edge sliced into entrails, and drew it to the left. The man spasmed, fighting the pain, his hand flying to Bob’s wrist, gagging sounds leaking from a constricted throat. Bob yanked the knife out and stabbed upward, feeling the blade sink into throat. He fought for leverage over the dying soldier, got himself upright and astride the heaving chest and drove the blade two or three more times into the torso, the man arching with each stroke.

He sat back. He looked about, saw the Remington a few feet away. He wiped the Randall blade on his camouflaged trousers, and slipped it back into the upside-down sheath on his chest. He checked quickly: two pistols, a canteen. He picked up the Remington but had no time to look for his hat, which had fallen off in the struggle. A lick of salty blood ran down from the point on his crown where he’d head-butted the North Vietnamese, and it arrived at the corner of his mouth, shocking him. He turned, looked at the man.

Why had it been so easy? Why was the man so weak?

The answer was obvious: the soldier was about fourteen. He’d never shaved in his life. In death, his face was dirty, but essentially undisturbed. His eyes were open and bright but blank. His teeth were white. He had acne.

Bob looked at the bloody package that had been a boy. A feeling of revulsion came over him. He bent, retched up a few gobs of undigested C-rat, gathered his breath, wiped the blood off his hands, and turned back to the path that lay ahead of him, which led to the column.

I am war, he thought; this is what I do.

Huu Co’s political officer Phuc Bo was adamant. A stocky little man who’d been to Russian staff school, Phuc Bo had the blunt force of a party apparatchik, a man who lived and breathed the party and was a master of dialectics.

“Brother Colonel, you must move, despite the cost. To waste more time is to lose our precious advantage. How many can a single man kill? Can he kill more than forty, possibly fifty? That is well under a twenty percent casualty rate; that is entirely acceptable to the Party. Sometimes, the fighters’ lives must be spent to accomplish the mission.”

Huu Co nodded solemnly. Up ahead, sporadic fire broke out, but the column had bogged down again. There was no word from the flanking patrol and no word from the sappers who’d been recalled. Still, the American assailed them with well-aimed shots, cadre his particular specialty.

How did he know? Cadre wore no rank pins, carried few symbols of the ego of leadership such as riding crops, swords or funny hats. Leaders were indistinguishable from fighters, both in party theory and in actual practice. Yet this American had some instinct for command, and when he fired, he brought down leaders, not always but in high enough percentage to be disruptive.

“He is hitting our cadre, brother Political Officer. And what if we push on, and he robs us over the kilometers of our leadership? And we get to the objective and no leaders come forth and our attacks fail? What will the party say then? Whose ears will ring the most loudly with criticism?”

“Our fighters can produce leaders from amongst themselves. That is our strength. That is our power.”

“But our leaders must be trained, and to squander them for nothing but the ego of a political officer who seeks the glory of seeing his column destroy an American fort late in an already victorious war may itself be a decision that is commented upon.”

“I wonder, dear brother Colonel, if indeed there are not vestiges of Western humanitarianism, the sick decadence of a doomed society, still within your soul? You worry too much about such things as the petty lives of individuals when it is the movement of the masses and the forces of history and our objective that should be your concern.”

“I am humble before my brother’s excellent and perceptive critique,” said the colonel. “I still believe in patience over the long journey, and that in patience lies virtue.”

“Dearest Colonel,” said the man, his face lighting with fire, “I have sworn to the commissar that the American fort shall fall. I therefore demand that you give the order to move forward without regard to—”

Phuc Bo stopped talking. It was difficult to continue without a lower jaw and a tongue. He stepped backward, the blood foaming brightly across his chest and gurgling from the hole that had been his mouth. Odd arguments came from him, so arcane and densely constructed they could not be followed. His eyes turned the color of an old two-franc coin and he died on his feet, falling backward into the high grass amid a splash of muddy water that flew up when he hit the wet ground.

Around the senior colonel, men dived for cover, but the senior colonel knew the American would not fire. He realized that he would be spared. In his way, the American was like a psychiatrist as much as a sniper, and he operated on the body of the people to remove the self-important, the vain, the overbearing. Political Officer Phuc Bo was an angry man and had been addressing his senior colonel aggressively, with brisk and dramatic hand movements and a loud voice, in the gestural vocabulary of superiority. Examining them, the American had assumed that it was he who was in command, it was he who was dressing down a naughty inferior. Thus the senior colonel’s total lack of ego and presence had rendered him effectively invisible in the sniper’s scope.

There was another shot; down the column, a sergeant fell, screaming.

The senior colonel turned, one man standing among many cowering men, and said conversationally to his XO, “Send out another platoon; I fear our antagonist has evaded the first. And keep the men low in the grass. We need not die for party vanity or some American’s hunt for glory.”

The order was sent.

The senior colonel turned back to the hills, where the American still hunted them.

You, sir, he thought in the language of his youth, forgotten all these years, you, sir, are très formidable.

Then he went back to considering how to kill the man.

Puller cursed the clouds. They were low, wet, dense, thicker than the blood on the floor of the triage tent, and they rewarded his anger with a burst of rain, which fell like gunfire slopping through the mud.

No air.

Not today, not with these low motherfuckers choking the earth. He looked back to his shabby empire of mud and slatternly bunkers and smashed squad hootches and blown latrines. A ragged curl of smoke still rose from where the dump had been blown yesterday. Tribesmen and cadre huddled behind parapets or ran from place to place, risking rifle fire. The mud smelled of buffalo shit and blood and the acrid tang of burned powder.

A mortar shell detonated nearby, and he dropped behind his own parapet, as a scream went up, “Medic! Goddammit, medic!” But there was no medic; Jack Deems, who’d been with him since sixty-five and was cross-trained both as a medic and a demolitions expert, a very good professional soldier indeed, was hit yesterday. Shot in the chest. Bled out screaming the names of his children.

Puller shivered.

Another mortar shell hit. Thank God the VC units only had 60-mms, which lofted a grenade-sized bit of explosive into Arizona, and could take out a man only if they scored a lucky, direct hit or they got him in the open and took him down with shrapnel. But when Senior Colonel Huu Co and his bad boys showed up, they’d have a weapons platoon with Chicom Type 53s in 82-mm, and those suckers were bad news. If they chose not to go for the direct kill, they could batter Arizona to pieces with that much throw-load, then move in and shoot the wounded. That would be it; then they’d fade into the hills. The whole front would go: it was exquisitely planned, just as American strength was ebbing but ARVN confidence not high enough, the temptation too huge to deny and therefore getting them out of their normal defensive posture for the first time since sixty-eight.

Puller looked again down the valley, which was shrouded in mist, and felt the bone-chilling rain on the back of his neck. He stared, as if he could penetrate that drifting, seething but altogether blank nothingness. But he could not.

Now and then a shot or two sounded, the heavy smack of the Marine’s .308; it was always answered with a fusillade. That Marine was still at it.

Man, you are a tiger, he thought. Don’t know you, brother, but you are one fucking tiger. You are the only thing between us and a complete screwing of the pooch.

“They no get him,” said Y Dok.

“No,” said Puller, wishing he could break a team out to bring in the sniper, but knowing he couldn’t, and that it would be evil waste to try. “No, but they will, goddamn them.”

Now they had him.

They were going to get him, but it was a question of when: early or late?

Where had these guys come from?

Then he knew.

They had to be the sapper unit out on flank security, brought back fast from out there. Probably Huu Co’s best troops, real pros.

Bob lay on his belly on the crest of a small knoll, still as death, breathing in unmeasurable increments. Underneath him he was wedded to the Remington sniper rifle, whose bolt now gouged him cruelly in the stomach. He could see through the wavering scope and watched as they came for him.

Somehow, they knew this was his hill: it was some hunter’s very good instinct. Then he realized: they found the dead soldier in the gully and tracked me. As he had moved through the wet elephant grass, he’d probably left a pattern of disturbance, where the grass was wiped clean, where the turf was trampled. Good men could follow much less.

Now they had him on this goddamned hill; it would be over in a few minutes. Oh, these guys were good.

They had spread out, and were moving up very methodically, two three-men elements of movement, two of cover. No more than three men, too widely spaced for three shots, were visible at any one moment, and then only for seconds. They were willing to give up one of the three to find him and take him out. Soldiers.

He knew he had to get to his grease gun; if they got close, and he was stuck with the Remington with one cartridge in the spout and a bolt-throw away from another shot, he was done.

Now it was his turn to move, ever so slowly, ever so noiselessly.

Learn from them, he instructed himself. Learn their lessons: patience, caution, calmness, freedom from fear, but above all the discipline of the slow move. He had a complicated thing before him: without making a sound, he had to reach back under his rain cape, release the sling of the M3, draw it forward around his body, ease open the ejection port cover and fingerhole the bolt back. Then and only then would he have a chance, but that destination was long minutes away.

The rain fell in torrents now, disguising his noise just a bit. But these were sharp, trained men: their ears would hear the sound of canvas rubbing on leather or metal sliding across flesh; or they would smell his fear, acrid and penetrating; or they would see his movement irregular against the steadier rhythms of nature.

Ever so slowly, he eased over to his side from his belly, an inch at a time, shifting his hand back over the crest of his body. Now he could hear them calling to each other: they spoke the language of birds.

“Coo! Coo!” came the call of a dove in a part of the south where there were no doves.

“Coo!” came the response, from the right.

“Coo!” came another one, clearly from behind. Now they knew he was here, for the trail had led up the hill but had not led down it; they had not cut across it. He was thoroughly cooked.

His fingers touched metal. They crawled up the grip of the grease gun, pawed, climbed up to the tubular receiver and found the sling threaded through its latch. His fingers struggled against the snap on the sling.

Oh, come on, he prayed.

These little fuckers could be tough; they could rust shut or simply be tightly fitted and need too much leverage to free up.

Why didn’t you check it?

Agh!

Asshole!

He ordered himself to check the sling snap a thousand times if he ever got out of this fix, so that he would never, ever again forget.

Come on, baby. Please, come on.

With his fingers pulling, his thumb pushing, he battled the thing. It was so small, so absurd: twelve men were twenty-five yards away hunting him, and he was hung up on the cold, wet ground trying to get a fucking little—

Ah!

It popped, with a metallic click that he believed could be heard all the way to China.

But nobody cooed and he wasn’t jumped and gutted on the spot.

The gun slid free and down his back, but he captured it quickly with his hand, and now withdrew it, very slowly, bringing it around, drawing it close to him, like a woman to treasure for the rest of his life. He smelled its oily magnificence, felt its tinny greatness. A reliable, ugly piece of World War II improvisation, it probably cost a buck fifty to manufacture from hubcaps and sleds and bikes picked up in scrap-metal drives in the forties. That’s why it had such a cheap, toylike, rattly feel to it. With his fingers he deftly sprung the latch on the ejection port, then inserted a finger into the bolt hole that he had just revealed. With the finger he pushed back, felt the bolt lock, then let it come forward. He dropped down and drew the gun up to him.

“Coo! Coo!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The message came by radio to the hasty command post dug into the side of a hill. It was from the sapper patrol on the right flank.

“Brother Colonel,” gasped Sergeant Van Trang, “we have the American trapped on a hill half a kilometer to the west. We are closing on him even now. He will be eliminated within the quarter hour.”

Huu Co nodded. Van Trang was a banty little north countryman with the heart of a lion. If he said such a thing was about to happen, then indeed it would happen.

“Excellent,” said the colonel. “Out.”

“There are no shots,” his XO told him. “Not since the unfortunate Phuc Bo was martyred.”

Huu Co nodded, considering.

Yes, now was the time. Even if he couldn’t get the whole battalion through the pass, he could get enough men through to overwhelm Arizona. But he had every confidence in Van Trang and his sappers. They were the most dedicated, the best trained, the most experienced. If they had the American trapped, the incident was over.

“All right,” he said. “Send runners to One, Two and Three companies. Let’s get the men out of the grass, get them going. Fast, fast, fast. Now is the time for speed. We have wasted enough time and energy on this American.”

The XO rapidly gave the orders.

Huu Co went outside. All around him, men rose from the grass, shook the accumulated moisture from their uniforms and formed up into loose company units. A whistle sounded from in front of the column. Behind Huu Co, with amazing swiftness, members of the combat support platoon broke down the hasty command post so that nothing remained, then they too went to their positions.

“Let’s go,” said Huu Co, and with a gaggle of support personnel around him, he too began to move at the half-trot, ahead through the mist and the rain, to the end of the valley where the Americans were under siege.

The long train of men moved quickly, bending back the grass. Overhead, the blessed clouds still hung, low and dense, to the surface of the earth. No airplanes would come. He would make Arizona by nightfall, give the men a few hours’ rest, then move them into position and, sometime after midnight, strike with everything he had, from three directions. It would be over.

From the right it came, at last: the sudden flurry of fire, the sound of grenade detonations, a few more shots and then silence.

“They got him,” the XO said to him.

“Excellent,” said Huu Co. “At last. We have triumphed. Frankly, between you and I, the American provided a great service.”

“The political officer, Brother Co? I agree, of course. He loved the party too much and the fighters not enough.”

“Such men are necessary,” said Huu Co. “Sometimes.”

“That American,” said the XO. “He was some kind of fighter himself. If they were all like that, our struggle would be nowhere near its conclusion. I wonder what motivates a man like that?”

Huu Co had known Americans in Paris in the early fifties and then in Saigon in the early sixties. They had seemed innocent, almost childish, full of wonder, incapable of deep thought.

“They are not a serious people,” he said. “But I suppose by the odds, every now and then you get one who is.”

“I suppose,” said the XO. “I’m glad we killed this one. I prefer the good ones dead.”

He lay very composed, trying not to listen to his heart or to his mind, or to any part of his body, which yearned to survive. Instead he listened to nothing and tried to plan.

They are tracking you. They will come right to you. If you let them carry the fight, you will die. You must shoot first, shoot to kill, attack decisively. If you are aggressive you may stun them. They will expect fear and terror. Aggression is the last thing they expect.

He tried to lay it all out, under the knowledge that any plan, even a bad plan, is better than no plan.

Shoot the visible ones; spray till the mag empties; throw grenades; fall away to the left; fall back into better cover in the trees. But most of all: get off this hill.

They were very close, cooing softly to one another, having converged. They were patient, calm, very steady. Oh, these were the best. They were so professional. No problems. Getting the job done.

One suddenly stood before him. The man was about thirty, very tough looking, his face a blank. He held an American carbine. He seemed to have some trouble believing what lay before him on the ground.

Bob fired a five-round burst into his body, sending him down. He pivoted, rising, and in the same second saw others turning toward him. He swept the grease gun across them, a long, thudding burst, watching the bullets chop through the grass in a blizzard of spray, ensnare his opponents and take them down. Spent shells poured spastically from the breech of the junky little piece as it rattled itself dry. In the silence that followed, he heard the ping of grenade pins being pulled and frantically threw himself backward, rolling through the grass, feeling it lash and whip at him as he went, so glad he’d left the pack behind. The first grenade detonated about ten yards away and he felt the pain as several pieces of shrapnel tore at his arm and the side of his body that was exposed. But still he rolled and another grenade detonated, this one still farther away.

He came to a stop, could hear some hustling around, and pulled a grenade from his belt, pried the pin out and lofted it in the general direction of his enemies. As it exploded — was that a scream he heard? — he got a new magazine into the submachine gun, and though he had no targets, lost himself in the madness of firing. He emptied the magazine stupidly in a sustained blast, the gun thudding, the bullets fanning out to splash through the grass, atomizing stalks they struck, ripping sheets of mud spray from the earth.

Then he rolled backward and continued to propel himself down the hill. In one moment of repose, he got another magazine into the gun, but before he could see targets he heard the soft crush of something heavy landing nearby, and he went flat as a grenade detonated, sending a spout of earth high into the sky and numbing his eardrums. Now he heard nothing: his hearing was momentarily gone and his vision blurred. The left arm hardly worked; it had numbed out and he saw that it was bleeding badly.

Oh, shit.

Fire came at him from three points, short, professional bursts from AK47s. They probed, sending the rounds skirmishing after him in three vectors. He assumed that a few more were working around behind him.

That’s it, he thought.

I buy it.

This is it.

Oh, fuck, I tried so hard. Don’t let me chicken out here at the end. Oh, please, let me be brave.

But he wasn’t brave. His anger melted. A profound sense of regret washed over him. So much he hadn’t done, so much he hadn’t seen. He felt the powerful pain of his own father’s death upon him, and how, now that he was gone, no one would be left alive to mourn and miss Earl Swagger.

God help me, Daddy, I tried so goddamned hard. I just didn’t make it.

A shot kicked up next to his face, stinging his neck with pricks of dirt. Another one buzzed by close. They were all shooting now, all of them that were left.

I ain’t no hero, he thought.

Oh, please, God, please don’t let me die here. Oh, I don’t want to die, please, please, please.

But nobody answered and nobody listened and it was all over, it was finished. Bullets cracked past or hit nearby, evicting gouts of angry earth and pelting spray. He willed himself back, shrinking to nothingness, but there was only so far he could go. His eyes were shut. They had him. The next round would—

Three fast booming cracks, heavy and powerful. Then two more.

Silence.

“Swagger? Bob Lee? You all right?”

Bob lifted his head; about forty yards away, a young Marine stepped out of the elephant grass. Donny’s boonie hat had fallen to his back and his hair was golden even in the gray light and the misty rain. He was an improbable black-and-green-faced angel with the instrument of his sergeant’s deliverance, the U.S. Rifle M14, 7.62 MM NATO.

“Stay down,” Bob called.

“I think I got ’em all.”

“Stay down!”

In that second, two men fired at Donny but missed, the bullets pulling big spouts from the valley floor. Bob turned to watch their shapes scuttle away in the grass, and he walked bursts over both of them, until they stopped moving. He crouched, waiting. Nothing. No noise, just the ringing in his ears, the pounding of his heart, the stench of the powder.

After a bit, he went to them; one was dead, his arms thrown out, the blood congealing blackly as it pooled to form a feast for ants. The other, a few yards away, was on his back, and still breathed. He had left his AK 30 feet away as he’d crawled after taking the hits. But now, exhausted, he looked up at Bob with beseeching eyes. His face and mouth were spotted with blood, and when he breathed heavily, Bob heard the blood bubble deep in his lungs.

The hand seemed to move. Maybe he had a grenade or a knife or a pistol; maybe he was begging for mercy or deliverance from pain. Bob would never know, nor did it matter. Three-round burst, center chest. It was over.

Donny came bounding over.

“We got ’em all. I didn’t think I could get here in time. Christ, I hit three guys in a second.”

“Great shooting, Marine. Jesus, you saved this old man’s fucking bacon,” Bob said, collapsing.

“You’re all right?”

“I’m fine. Dinged up a bit.” He held out his bloody left arm; his side also sang of minor penetration in a hundred or so places. Oddly, what hurt the most was his neck, where the impacting NVA round had blown a handful of nasty dirt into the flesh and hair of his scrubby beard, and for some reason it stung like a bastard.

“Oh, Christ, I thought I was cooked. I was finished. Wasted, greased. Man, I was a gone motherfucker.”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“You wait. I left the rifle up top. Just let me catch my breath.”

He sucked down a few gulps of the sweetest air he’d ever tasted, then ran up the hill. The M40 lay where he had dumped it, its muzzle spouting a crown of turf, its bolt half open and gummed also with turf.

He grabbed it and ran back to Donny.

“Map?”

Donny fished it out of the case, handed it over.

“All right,” Bob said, “he’s sure got that column moving again. We’ve got to move on, pass them, and jump them again.”

“There’s not much light left.”

Bob looked at his Seiko. Jesus, it was close to 1700 hours. Time flies when you’re having fun.

“Fuck,” he said.

He had a moment’s gloom. No light, no shoot. They were going to get close enough to stage an assault in the dark, and all the snipers in the world wouldn’t make a spit’s worth of difference.

“Shit,” he said.

But Bob’s mind was so fogged with delirium, adrenaline and fatigue it wasn’t processing properly. He had the vague sense of missing something, as if he’d left his IQ points up there on that ugly little hill. It was Donny who pulled another sack from around his waist, opened it, and out came what looked like a small tubular popgun and a handful of White Star illumination flares; the bag was heavy with the cartridges.

“Flares!” he said. “Can you shoot by flares?”

“If I can see it, I can hit it,” Bob said.

They moved swiftly through the gloom, amid small hills, in the elephant grass, ever mindful they were paralleling the movement of the enemy main force in the valley, ever mindful that there were still scouting units out in the area. If and when the NVA discovered their dead recon team, they might send still other men after them.

They moved at the half-jog, through a fog of fatigue and pain. Bob’s arm hurt desperately and he didn’t have any painkillers, not even aspirin. His head ached and his legs felt withered and shaky. They followed a compass heading, reshooting it each time they moved around a hill. The elephant grass was tall and concealing, but it cut at them mercilessly. There wasn’t much water left and even in the falling dark, Bob could see that the clouds hadn’t broken, still hung low and close. A wicked, pelting rain started, delivering syringes of cold where it struck them. Soon the trip became pure blind misery, two hungry, dead-tired, filthy men running on faith and hope toward a destination that might not even exist.

Bob’s mind slipped in and out; he tried to concentrate on the job ahead but it would not stay. At one point, he called a halt.

“I got to rest,” he said.

“We been pushing pretty hard,” Donny said.

Bob slipped down into the grass.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

“I’m okay. I only need a little rest.”

“I got some water. Here, take some water.”

“Then what’ll you drink?”

“I don’t need to shoot. I just fire flares. You need to shoot. You need the water.”

“You’d think, all this fucking rain, the last thing we’d be is thirsty.”

“I feel like I just played two football games without quarters or halftimes. Just two games straight through.”

“Oh, man,” Bob said, taking a big swig of Donny’s water, feeling its coolness rush down his flaming throat.

“After this, I’m going to sleep for a month,” said Donny.

“No, after this,” said Bob, “you are going on R&R to be with your wife, if I have to go to the goddamned general and ass-kick him myself.”

It was almost full dark. Somewhere birds were beginning to call; the jungle was close, just beyond the hill line. There was, however, nothing alive in view; once again, they seemed alone in the world, lost in the hills, stuck in a landscape of desolation.

Suddenly Bob’s mind sped to other possibilities.

“I got a idea,” he said. “You got tape? Don’t you carry tape? I think I told you to—”

Donny reached into a bellows pocket of his cammies, pulled out a roll of gray duct tape.

“This would be tape, no?”

“That would be tape, yes. Okay, now … goddamn … the spotting scope. Don’t tell me you dumped your spotting scope. You didn’t leave that back with your gear, did you?”

“Fuck,” said Donny, “I brought everything except a helicopter. Hmmm, sink, tent, Phantom jet, mess hall; oh, yeah, here…”

He pulled another piece of gear slung around his shoulder. It was a long, tubular green canvas carrying case, strapped at either end, which carried an M49 20X spotting scope, complete with a folded tripod. It was for glassing the really far targets.

He unslung it and handed it over.

“Now what?”

“Oh, just you watch.”

Greedily, Bob bent to the scope case, unscrewed it and reached out to remove a dull-green metal telescope, disjointed slightly, with a folding tripod underneath. It must have cost the Marine Corps a thousand bucks.

“Beautiful, ain’t it?” he asked. Then he rammed its delicate lens against Donny’s rifle muzzle, shattering it into a sheet of diamonds. He reamed the tube out on the rifle barrel, grinding circularly to take out all the glass and the delicate internal mechanisms for focus adjustment. He unscrewed and threw away the tripod. Then he seized the canvas case, took out his Randall Survivor and began to operate.

“What are you doing?” Donny asked.

“You never mind, but you get my rifle cleaned up. No rules today. Hurry, Pork, we gotta get a goddamned move on.”

Donny worked some rough maintenance on the gun, clearing the muzzle of mud and grass, scraping the dirt, and in a few minutes had it ready to shoot again. He looked back to see that Bob had sawed off one end of the scope case and cut a smaller hole through the other, giving him a green tube about twelve inches long.

Bob wedged the spotting scope tube back into the case.

“Here, you hold that goddamn muzzle up for me,” he commanded, and, working swiftly, commenced to wedge the scope case and scope on the muzzle, then wrap yards of tape around the case and the muzzle, securing the case so that it projected a good eight inches beyond the muzzle.

It looked like some kind of silencer but Donny knew it wasn’t a silencer.

“What is?”

“Field expedient flash suppressor,” said Bob. “Flash is just powder burning beyond the muzzle. If you can lengthen the cover on the barrel, it’ll burn up in there, not in the air, where it’ll light me up like a Christmas tree. It’s pretty flimsy and won’t hold much more than a few dozen shots, but by God, I don’t want them tracking my flash and hitting me with the goddamned kitchen sink. Now, let’s mount out.”

A last fast.

The troops were driven by duty and destiny. An extraordinary accomplishment, the long double-time march from Laos, the ordeal of the sniper in the valley, the victory over the man, and now, on to the Green Beret camp at Kham Duc. Battalion No. 3 was just a kilometer away from the staging point, maintaining good order, moving smartly.

Huu Co, senior colonel, glanced at his watch and saw that it was near midnight. They would be in place in another hour, and could use a little time to relax and gather themselves. Then the assault teams would stage and the weapons platoon would set up the 81mm Type 53s, and the last stage would commence. It would be over by dawn.

The weather wouldn’t matter.

Still, it was holding beautifully for him. Above there was a starless night, gray and dim, the clouds close to the earth. In his old mind, his Western mind, he could believe that God himself had willed the Americans from the earth. It was as if God were saying, “Enough, begone. Back to your land. Let these people be.”

In his new mind, he merely noted that his luck had held, and that luck is sometimes the reward for boldness. The Fatherland appreciated daring and skill; he had gambled and won, and the eventual fall of the Kham Duc camp would be his reward.

“It is good,” said the XO.

“Yes, it is,” said Huu Co. “When this is over, I will—”

But Nhoung’s face suddenly lit up. Huu Co turned to wonder about the source of illumination.

A single flare hung in the sky beneath a parachute, bringing light to the dark night. As it settled the light grew brighter, and there was one lucid moment in which the battalion, gathered as it plunged toward its study, seemed to stand out in perfect clarity. It was a beautiful moment too, suffused with white light, gentle and complete, exposing the people’s will as contained and expressed through its army, nestled between close hills, churning onward toward whatever tomorrow brought, unhesitatingly, heroic, stoic, self-sacrificing.

Then the shot rang out.

Puller dreamed of Chinh. His second tour. He hadn’t planned to, it just happened; she was Eurasian, lived in Cholon, he’d been in the field eleven months and, suffering from combat exhaustion, had been brought back to MACV in Saigon, given a staff job, just to save him from killing himself. It was a safe job back then, sixty-seven, a year before Tet, and Chinh was just there one day, the daughter of a French woman and a Vietnamese doctor, more beautiful than he could imagine. Was she a spy? There was that possibility, but there wasn’t much to know; it was brief, intense, pure pleasure, not a whisper of guilt. Her husband had been killed, she said, by the communists. Maybe it was so, maybe it was not. It didn’t matter. The communists killed her one night on the road in her Citreon after she’d spent hours making love with him. She ran through an ambush they’d prepped for an ARVN official: just blew her away.

He dreamed of his oldest daughter, Mary. She rode horses and had opinions. She hated the Army, watched her mother play the game, suck up all the way through in the shit posts like Gemstadt or Benning, always making a nice home, always sucking up to the CO’s wife.

“I won’t have it,” Mary said. “I won’t live like that. What does it get you?”

His wife had no answer. “It’s what we do,” she finally said. “Your father and me. We’re both in the Army. That’s how it works.”

“It won’t work that way for me,” she said.

He hoped it wouldn’t. She was too smart to end up married to some lifer, some mediocrity who would go nowhere and only married her because she was the daughter of the famous Dick Puller, the lion of Pleiku, who’d taken a Chicom .51 in the chest and wouldn’t even let himself be medevaced out and who died in the shitty little Forward Operations Base at Kham Duc a year after the war was lost, threw himself away for nothing that nobody could make any sense of.

Puller came awake. It was dark. He checked his watch. It would start soon, be over soon. He smelled wet sand from the soaked bags out of which the bunker was built, dirt and mud, gun oil, Chinese cooking, blood, the works, the complete total that was life in the field.

But he had an odd sensation: something was happening. He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. Time to get up and—

“Sir.”

It was young Captain Taney, who would probably also die tonight.

“Yeah?”

“It’s— ah— you won’t believe it.”

“What?”

“He’s still out there.”

“Who?” Puller thought instantly of Huu Co.

“Him. Him. That goddamned Marine sniper.”

“Does he have night vision?”

“No, sir. You can see it from the parapet. You can hear it. He’s got flares.”

He didn’t get good targets. Not enough light. But in the shimmering glow of the floating flares he got enough: movement, fast, frightened, scurrying, the occasional hero who would stand and try and mount a rally, the runner who was sent to the rear to report to command, the machine gun team that peeled off to try and flank him.

The flares fired with a dry, faraway pop, like nothing else in the ’Nam. They lit at about three hundred feet with a spurt of illumination; then the ’chute would open and grab the wind, and they’d begin to float downward, flickering, spitting sparks and ash. It was white. It turned the world white. The lower they got the brighter it got, but when they swung in the breeze, they turned the world to a riot of shadows chasing each other through the dimness of his scope.

But still, he’d get targets. He’d fire at what his instincts told him was human, what looked odd in the swinging light, the sparks, the glow that filled the world, the crowd of panicked men who now felt utterly naked to the sniper’s reach. The night belonged to Charlie, it was said. Not this night. It belonged to Bob.

They’d worked it right. No movement, not now. It was too dark to move and they’d get mixed up, get out of contact with one another and that would be that. Donny was on the hilltop, Bob halfway down. The bad guys were moving left to right beyond them, one hundred yards out, where the grass was shorter and there wasn’t any cover. It was a good killing zone, and the first element of the column was hung up, pinned in the grass, believing that if they moved they would die, which was correct.

Donny would fire a flare and move a hundred steps or so on the hilltop, while Bob waited for the flare to get low enough to see the movement. Bob would fire twice, maybe three times in the period of brightest light. Then he’d move too, the same one hundred steps, through the grass, and set up again.

Forward; then they’d move back. They couldn’t see one another, but they had the rhythm. They’d send people up after him, but not soon enough. They wouldn’t be sure where the flares were coming from, because, God bless the little fireworks, they didn’t trail illumination as they ascended.

Bob couldn’t even see the reticle. He just saw the movement and knew where the reticle would be because that’s where it always was, and he fired, the rifle cracking, its flash absorbed in the steel tube that surrounded the muzzle but would sooner or later have to give way. No one could yet see where the shots were coming from.

The flare floated, showering sparks. In its cone of light, Bob saw a man drop into vegetation and he put a bullet into him. He flicked the bolt fast, jacking out the spent case, and watched as another man came through the light to his fallen comrade, and he killed him too. The trick was the light; the flares had to be constant; there couldn’t be a dark moment when there was no light because these guys would move on him then, and they’d be too close, too fast and it would be over.

It lasted for ten minutes; then, having planned it, Donny stopped firing and Bob stopped firing. They both fell back, met at the far side of the hill, and took off on the dead run, leaving behind the confusion. They moved on, looking for another setup.

“That’ll slow ’em. It’ll take ’em ten minutes to figure out we’re gone. Then they’ll get moving again. We should be able to hit them again. I want to set up on that side now. You watch me.”

Donny had the M14 at high port, Bob’s rifle was slung and he carried the M3 in his hands, though he was down now to two magazines. Both his handguns were cocked and locked.

“Okay, you ready?”

“I think so.”

“You cover me if I take fire.”

“Gotcha.”

Bob stepped out of the grass onto the valley floor.

He felt so naked. He was all alone. The wind whistled, and once again it began to rain. The NVA must have been a half klick or so behind. Suddenly, the sky behind them lit up: an assault team had moved up to and taken the now empty hill on which they had situated. Grenade blasts rocked the night, and blades of the sheer light slashed from the concussion. Heavy automatic weapons fire followed: again, they were slaying the demon.

Bob got halfway across, then turned with his grease gun to cover, and called out for Donny to join him.

“Come on!” he shouted.

The boy came across the valley floor and passed Bob, and went to set up on the other side. Bob raced over. Quickly, they found another hill.

“You get on up there,” Bob said. “When you hear me shoot, you fire the first flare. I’m going to open up further out this time. Meanwhile, you set up Claymores. I’m down to about twenty rounds and I want a fallback. If we get bounced, we’ll counterbounce with the Claymores, then fall back. Set them up, and wait to pop flares. Password is … fuck, I don’t know; make up a password.”

“Ah— Julie.”

“Julie. As in ‘Julie is beautiful,’ roger that?”

“Roger that.”

“You hear movement coming to you and he don’t sing out ‘Julie is beautiful,’ you go to Claymores, use the confusion to fall back and find a hide, then you wait until tomorrow and call in a bird after a while. Okay? There’ll be a bird tomorrow. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“If I don’t make it back, same deal. Fall back, go to ground, call in a bird. They’ll be buzzing all over this zone tomorrow, no problem. Now, how many flares you got?”

Donny did a quick check on his bag.

“Looks like about ten.”

“Okay, when they’re gone, they’re gone. Then we’re out of business. Fall back, hide, bird. Okay?”

“Check,” said Donny.

“You all right? You sound kind of shaky.”

“I’m just beat. I’m tired. I’m scared.”

“Shit, you can’t be scared. I’m scared enough for both of us. I got all the fear in the whole fucking world.”

“I don’t—”

“Just this last bad thing, then we are the fuck out of here, and I’m going to make sure you get home in one piece, I give you my word. You done yours. Nobody can say, He didn’t do his. You done it all ten times over. You get to go home after this one, I swear to you.”

There was an odd throb in his own voice that Bob had never heard before. Where did it come from? He didn’t know. But somehow Bob had a blinding awareness that in some way, the life of the world now depended on getting Donny home in one piece. Donny was the world, somehow, and if he, Bob, got him killed out here for this shit, he would answer for all eternity. Very strange; nothing he’d ever felt before on any battlefield.

“I’m cool,” Donny said.

“See you in a bit, Sierra-Bravo-Four.”

Donny watched the sergeant go. The man was like some Mars or Achilles or something, so lost in the ecstasy of the battle that he somehow didn’t want it to end, didn’t want to come back. Once again, Donny had the odd feeling that he was destined to witness all this and tell it.

To whom?

Who would care? Who would listen? The idea of soldiers as heroes was completely gone. Now, they were baby killers or, if not that, they were fools, suckers, morons who hadn’t figured out how to beat the machine.

So maybe that was his job: to remember the Bob Lee Swaggers of the world and, when the times somehow changed, the story could be retrieved and told. How one crazy Arkansas sumbitch, mean as a snake, dry as a stick, brave as the mountains, took on and fucked up an entire battalion, for almost nothing, really, except so that nobody would ever say of him, He let us down.

What made such a man? His brutal, hardscrabble childhood? The Corps as his home, his love of fighting, his sense of country? Nothing explained it; it was beyond explanation. Why was he so meaninglessly brave? What compelled him to treat his life so cheaply?

Donny made it to the top of the hill. It was a queer little empire, much smaller than the last hill, a little hump that overlooked the larger valley before it. Here is where they would fight.

He unstrapped his three Claymores bandoleers and took the things out, your basic M18A1 Directional Mine. Jesus, were these nasty little packages. About eight inches across and four inches tall, they were little convexes of plastic-sheathed C-4, impregnated with about seven hundred pieces of buckshot apiece. You opened a compartment, pulled out about one hundred meters of wire, unspooled it to your safe hole, and there crimped it to the Electrical Firing Device M57, which came packed in the bandoleer and looked like a green plastic hand exerciser. When you clamped it, you jacked a goose of electricity through the wire to the detonator, the pound and a half of C-4 went kaboom, and the seven hundred steel balls went sailing through the air at about two thousand miles an hour. For a couple of hundred feet, anything in their way — man, beast, vegetable or mineral — got turned to instant spaghetti. Just the thing for human wave attacks, night ambushes, perimeter defense or those annoying staff meetings, though the Marine Corps thoughtfully added the message FRONT TOWARD ENEMY for its dimmer recruits, so they wouldn’t get mixed up in all the excitement and blow a nasty hole in their own lines.

Donny pulled down the folding scissors legs on each mine, made sure that the front indeed faced the enemy, and set up the three of them about sixty feet apart, atop the hill. There was some little technical business to be done involving blasting caps, shipping plug priming adaptors, the detonator well, wire crimped and so on. Then the wire was fed backward, where he used his entrenching tool to dig a quick, low hole, though he knew that if he ever had to go to the mines, it meant there were enough zips coming at them that whether he survived the backblast or not was kind of a moot point.

He took a last swig on his canteen and tossed it away. He wished he had a C-rat left, but he’d left them back with most of his gear. Now, however, instead of the usual huge burden, he felt almost light-headed. He had no food, no canteen, no spotting scope, no Claymores. The only burden, beside his M14 magazines, was the goddamned PRC-77, tied tightly to his back by a couple of cruel straps. He even dared peel it off, and now felt really light. He felt like dancing. The freedom from the ache of going into battle with sixty pounds of gear and then twenty pounds of gear and now nothing was astonishing. He had trained himself to ignore the ache in his back; now it vanished. Cool, he thought, I get to die without a backache, first time in my career in the ’Nam.

Then the shot came, and Donny hastily pulled out his flare device, slipped a flare into the breech, screwed it shut and thrust it against the ground to fire. Like a tiny mortar, the flare popped out and hissed skyward, seeming to disappear. A second passed, then the night bloomed illumination as the flare lit, its ’chute opened and it began to float down into the valley, showering sparks and white. It was snowing light.

Bob was shooting now.

The last act had begun.

They were much closer than he anticipated. The scope was cranked down to three power so that he could get as clear and wide a view as possible. Still, they weren’t targets so much as possibilities, squirms of movement that in their rhythm seemed human against the stiller spectacle of the natural world, though it was all made stranger yet by the rushing shadows the swing of the flare created as it descended.

He saw, he fired. Something stopped moving, or just went down. He’d had eighty rounds; he was down to less than twenty. God, I killed some boys today. Jesus fucking Christ, I did some killing today. I was death today, I was the Marine Corps’s finest creation, the stone killer, destroying all that moved before me.

Something moved, he shot it, it stopped. Clearly the NVA couldn’t locate him, and he was so close, and now the bossman had made a decision — to keep going, to take casualties, to make the rallying point for the attack on Arizona, to march through the minefields, as a Russian general had put it.

It was as though he were saying to Bob: You can’t kill us all. We will defeat you through our willingness to absorb death. That is how we won this war; that is how we will win this battle.

He could hear sergeants screaming, “Bi! Bi! Bi!” meaning “go, go, go,” urging the troops onward, but they could not see him because of his flash hider, the panic, the fear. The troops did not want to go, clearly. He’d gotten into their heads: that was the sniper thing; that was what was so terrible about the sniper. He was intimate and personal in a way which nothing else that kills in war can be; his humanness preys on your humanness, and it was hardest for even the most disciplined of troops to face.

He jacked out a round into the breech, fired, watched someone die. He fired again, quickly, in the fading light; then another flare popped, the light renewed and he saw more targets, so close it was criminal murder to take them, but that was his job tonight: he took them, reloaded, fell back through the high grass, emerged when another flare fired off, and killed some more. He was gone totally in the red, screaming urgency of his own head, not a man anymore, but a total killing system, conscienceless, instinctive, his brain singing with blood lust. It was so easy.

Xo Nhoung was gone. The bullet snuffed his life out in a second, drilling him through the neck with the sound of an ax hitting a side of raw beef. Nhoung died on his feet, and hit the ground a corpse. His soul flew away to be with his ancestors.

“We are dying! He can see us! There is no hope!” a young soldier screamed.

“Shut up, you fool,” yelled Huu Co, yearning to reach to the sky and crush those blasphemous flares with his bare hands, then rip the skulls from the bodies of the sniper and his spotter.

“They’re on the left this time,” he screamed again, because he had seen the XO fall to the right, pushed by the impact of the bullet.

“On the left. Fire for effect, brothers, fire now, kill the demons!”

His troops began to open fire helter-skelter, without much thought, the lacy neon of the tracers jumping through the darkness like spiderwebs, ripping vaguely where they struck tree or vegetation, but the point of it was to calm them while he figured out what to do.

He stood. A flare lit over his head. He was in bold relief and the flare seemed to be falling directly toward him. The man next to him fell, stricken; the man behind him fell, stricken. He was in the cone of light; he was the target. It didn’t matter. His life didn’t matter.

“Number One assault platoon, advance one hundred meters to the left; Number Two assault platoon, provide covering fire during the movement; weapons platoon, set up mortar units to be ranged at 150 meters on the hill at 1000 hours to our front. Machine gun platoon, set up automatic weapons one hundred meters to the right.”

He waited for the sniper to kill him.

But instead, an astonishing thing happened. No bullet came at all. The sniper lit a torch and began waving at him, as if to say, Here I am. Come kill me. He could see the man, surprisingly close, waving the torch.

“There he is; kill him! You see him. Kill him,” Huu Co shouted.

As he came out of the grass, another flare popped, low this time, filling the night with white light. The spectacle was awesome through the scope, jacked up three times: he saw men run in panic, he saw the blind fire directed outward, he saw men in the center of the position yelling desperately.

Commanding officer, he thought.

Oh, baby, if I can do you, I can call this one a day!

Three men stood. The center of the scope found one and he pulled the trigger with — damn! — enough jerk so the shot went high and he knew he hit high, in the neck; in the perfect circle of the scope, his target sank backward, stiff and totaled. Bob cocked fast, but the flare died. He could hear nothing. The fire lashed outward pointlessly, unaimed, mere fireworks as if the terrified were trying to drive demons away.

Another flare popped: low and bright and harsh.

Bob blinked at the brightness of it, saw another man stand, fired, taking him down. As he pivoted slightly, he went past a second man to a third, fired quickly, hit him off center and put him down. Then he came back to the second man as he rushed through the bolt cycle.

Got you.

You’re it.

You’re the man.

He caught his breath, steadied himself. The flare seemed to be falling right toward this brave individual, and Bob saw that yes: this was him, whoever he was.

The officer alone stood, taking the full responsibility of the moment. He called directions so forcefully, Bob could hear the Vietnamese vowels through the noise of the fire. He was fortyish, small, tough, very professional looking, and on his green fatigues he wore the three stars of the senior colonel, visible only now because the light was so bright as the flare descended.

Bob took a second’s worth of breath, noticing that in the brightness of the instant, the reticle had even materialized; the crosshairs stood out bold and merciless upon the colonel’s chest, and in that second Bob took the slack out and with the snap of a piece of balsa wood shattering, the trigger went, the rifle recoiled, death from afar was sent upon its way.

But something was wrong; instead of a sight picture, Bob saw bright lights, bouncing balls of sheer incandescence, his night vision shattering as he blinked to clear but the world had caught on fire. Flames ate the darkness. It made no sense.

Then he realized what had happened. The jury-rigged suppressor, sustained in its nest of tape, had finally yielded to the hammering of muzzle blast and flash, slipped down into the trajectory of the bullet, deflected it and, exposed directly to the detonation of flash, the canvas exploded into flame. The rifle had become a torch signaling his location. He stared at it for an oafish moment, realized it was his own death, and threw the whole mad blazing apparatus away.

Now there was nothing left except the remotest possibility of survival.

He turned to flee, as bullets clipped about, whacking through the stalks. He was hit hard, on the back, driven to the earth. The pain was excruciating.

He saw it very clearly: I am dead. I die now. This is it. But no life sprung before his eyes; he had no sense of wastage, loss, recrimination, only sharp and abiding pain.

He reached back to discover not hot blood but hot metal. A bullet aimed for his spine had instead hit the slung M3 grease gun, driving it savagely into him, but doing him no permanent harm. He shucked the disabled weapon, and began to slither maniacally through the grass as the world seemed to explode around him.

He didn’t know what direction; he just crawled, pathetically, a fool begging for life, so far from heroic it was ludicrous, thinking only one phrase like a mantra: I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.

He kept going, through his terror, and came at last to a little nest of trees, into which he dove and froze. Men moved around him in the darkness; shots were fired, but the action, after the longest time, seemed to die away, and he slipped in another direction.

He got so far when someone shouted, and then, goddamn them, the NVA fired their own flares. Theirs were green, less powerful, but they had more of them: the sky filled with multiple suns from a distant planet, sparky green, descending through green muck as if it were an aquarium.

In a moment of primeval fear, Bob simply turned and ran. He ran like a motherfucker. He ran crazily, insanely to escape the cone of light, but even as it promised to die, another blast of candlepower lit the night as another dozen or so green Chicóm flares popped.

This seemed to be the place. He ran upward, screaming madly, “Julie is beautiful, Julie is beautiful!,” saw Donny rise above him with his M14 in a good, solid standing offhand and begin to fire on his pursuing targets very professionally. Bob ran to the boy, feeling the armies of the night on his butt, and dove into Donny’s shallow hole.

“Claymores!” he screamed.

“They’re not close enough!” Donny responded. Bob rose: more flares came, and this time a whole company seemed to be rushing at them to destroy them.

“Now!” he screamed.

“No!” screamed Donny, who had the three firing devices. Where had this kid got this much cool? He held them, the shots cracking up the hill, tracers flicking by, the green flares floating down, the screams of the rushing men louder and louder until he fell back, smiled and squeezed the three firing devices simultaneously.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Donny had three M14 mags left, with twenty rounds each; Bob had seven rounds in his .45, one loaded magazine, and seven rounds in his .380 with no extra magazines. Donny had four grenades. Bob had his Randall Survivor. Donny had a bayonet.

That was it.

“Shit,” said Donny.

“We’re cooked,” said Bob.

“Shit,” said Donny.

“I fucked up,” said Bob. “Sorry, Pork. I could have led them away from here. I didn’t have to come back up this hill. I wasn’t thinking.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Donny.

The NVA scurried around at the base of the hill. Presumably they’d carried off their dead and wounded, but it wasn’t clear yet what their next move would be. They hadn’t fired any flares recently, but they were maneuvering around the hill, Bob supposed, for the last push.

“They may think we have more Claymores,” he said. “But probably they don’t.”

It was dark. Donny had no flares. They crouched in the hole at the top of the hill, one facing east, the other west. The dead M57s with their firing wires lay in the hole too, getting in the way. The stench of C-4, oddly pungent, filled the air, even now, close to an hour after the blasts. Donny held his M14, Bob a pistol in each hand. They could see nothing. A cold wind whipped through the night.

“They’ll probably set up their 81s, zero us, and take us out that way. Why take more casualties? Then they can be on their way.”

“We tried,” said Donny.

“We fought a hell of a fight,” said Bob. “We hung ’em up a bit. Your old dad up in Ranger heaven would be proud of you.”

“I just hope they find the bodies, and my next of kin is notified.”

“You ever file that marriage report?”

“No. It didn’t seem important. No off-post living in the ’Nam.”

“Yeah, well, you want her to get the insurance benefits, don’t you?”

“Oh, she doesn’t need the money. They have money. My brothers could use it for school. It’s okay the way it is.”

Nothing much to say. They could hear movement at the base of the hill, the occasional secret muttering of NCOs to their squads.

“I lost the picture,” Donny said. “That’s what bothers me.”

“Julie’s picture?”

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Sometime in the night. No, the late afternoon, when I went after that flank security unit. I don’t remember. My hat fell off.”

“It was in your hat?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, tell you what, I can’t git you out of here and I can’t git you the Medal of Honor you deserve, but if I can git you your hat back, would you say I done okay by you?”

“You always did okay by me.”

“Yeah, well, guess what? Your hat fell off your head, all right, but you been so busy, and now you’re so tired you ain’t figured out that you was wearing a cord around the hat to pull it tight in the rain. It’s still there. It’s hanging off your neck, across your back.”

“Jesus!”

Donny reached around his neck and felt the cord; he drew it tight, pulled the hat up from around his back and removed it.

“Shit,” he said, because he could think of nothing else to say.

“Go on,” said Bob, “that’s your wife; look at her.”

Donny pulled at the lining of the hat and removed the cellophane package, unpeeled it and removed, a little curled and bent, slightly damp, the photograph.

He stared at it and could see nothing in the darkness, but nevertheless it helped.

In his mind, she was there. One more time. He wanted to cry. She was so sweet, and he remembered the three days they’d had. They got married in Warrenton, Virginia, and drove up to the Skyline Drive and rented a cabin in one of the parks. They spent each day going for long walks. That place had paths that ran along the sides of the mountains, and you could look down into the Shenandoahs or, if you were on the other side, into the Piedmont. It was green, rolling country, checkerboard farms, as far as you could see; beautiful, all right. Maybe it was his imagination, but the weather seemed perfect. It was early May, spring, and life was breaking from the crust of the earth with a vengeance, green buds everywhere. Sometimes it was just them alone in the world, high above the rest of the earth. Or was it just that all soldiers remember their last leave as special and beautiful?

“Here, look,” said Donny.

“It’s too dark.”

“Go on, look!” he commanded, the first time he had ever spoken sharply to his sergeant.

Swagger gave him a sad look, but took the picture.

He looked at Julie, but saw nothing. Still, he knew the picture. It was a snapshot taken in some spring forest, and the wind and the sun played in her hair. She wore a turtle-neck and had one of those smiles that made you melt with pain. She seemed clean, somehow, so very, very clean. Straw blond hair, straight white strong teeth, a tan face, an outdoorsy face. She was a beautiful girl, model or movie-star beautiful. Bob had a brief, broken moment when he contemplated the brute fact that no one nowhere loved him or would miss him or give a shit about his death. He had no one. A middle-aged lawyer in Arkansas might shed a tear or two, but he had his own kids and his own life and the old man would probably still miss Bob’s father more than he’d miss Bob. That was the way it went.

“She’s a great-looking young woman,” Bob said. “I can tell she loves you a lot.”

“Our honeymoon. Skyline Drive. My old captain gave me six hundred dollars to take her away when I got my orders cut. Emergency leave. He got me three days. He was a great guy. I tried to pay him back, but the letter came back, and it was stamped, saying he had left the service.”

“That’s too bad. He sounds like a good man.”

“They got him too.”

“Yeah, they get everyone in the end.”

“No, I don’t just mean ‘them, they.’ I mean a specific guy, with influence, who set about to purify the world. We were part of the purification process. I’d still like to look that guy up. Commander Bonson. Here’s to you, Commander Bonson, and your little victory. You won in the end. Your kind always does.”

Flare. Green, high. Then two or three more green suns descending.

“Git ready,” said Bob.

They could hear the ponk-ponk-ponk as a few hundred yards away, three 81mm mortar shells were dropped down their tubes. The shells climbed into the air behind a faint whistle, then reached apogee and began their downward flight.

“Get down!” screamed Bob. The two flattened into the mud of the shallow hole.

The three shells landed fifty meters away, exploding almost simultaneously. The noise split the air and the two Marines bounced from the ground.

“Ah, Christ!”

A minute passed.

Three more flares opened, green and almost wet, spraying sparks all over the place.

Bob wished he had targets, but what the hell difference did it make now? He lay facedown in the mud, feeling the texture of Vietnam in his face, smelling its smells, knowing he would never see another of its dawns.

Ponk-ponk-ponk.

The shells climbed, whispering of death and the end of possibilities, then descended.

Oh, Jesus, Bob prayed, oh, dear Jesus, let me live, please, let me live.

The shells detonated thirty meters away, triple concussions, loud as hell. Something in his shoulder began to sting even before he landed again in Vietnam, having been lifted by the force of the blast. Acrid Chinese smoke filled his eyes and nostrils.

He knew the drill. Somewhere a spotter was calling in corrections. Fifty back, right fifty, that should put you right on it.

Oh, it was so very near.

“I was a bad son,” Donny sobbed. “I’m so sorry I was a bad son. Oh, please, forgive me, I was a bad son. I couldn’t stand to visit my dad in the hospital, he looked so awful, oh, Daddy, I’m so sorry.”

“You were a good son,” Bob whispered fiercely. “Your daddy understood, don’t you worry about it none.”

Ponk-ponk-ponk.

Bob thought of his own daddy. He wished he’d been a better son too. He remembered his daddy pulling out in his state trooper cruiser that last night in the twilight. Who knew it was a last time? His mother wasn’t there. His daddy put his hand out to wave to Bob, then turned left, heading back to Blue Eye, and would there go on out U.S. 71 to his rendezvous with Jimmy Pye and his and Jimmy’s deaths in a cornfield that looked like any other cornfield in the world.

The explosions lifted them, and more parts of Bob seemed to go numb, then sting. This triple shot bracketed the position. This was it. They had them; they had merely to drop a few more shells down the tube and the direct hit would come out of statistical inevitability, and it would be all over. Fire for effect.

“I’m so sorry,” Donny was sobbing.

Bob held him close, felt his young animal fear, knew there was no glory in any of it, only an ending, a mercy, and who would know they lived or died or fought here on this hilltop?

“I’m so sorry,” Donny was sobbing.

“There, there,” Bob said.

Someone fired an orange flare over on the horizon. It was a big one, it hung there for the longest time, and only far past the moment when reasonable men would have caught on did it at last dawn on them that it wasn’t a flare at all, it was the sun.

And with the sun came the Phantoms.

The Phantoms came low, screaming in from the east, along the axis of the valley, their jet growls filling the air, almost splitting it. They dropped long tubes that rolled through the air into the valley beneath, and blossomed oranger than the sun, oranger and hotter than any sun, with the power of thousands of pounds of jellied gasoline.

“God!” screamed Bob. “Air! Air!”

They peeled off, almost in climbing victory rolls, and a second flight hammered down, filling the valley with its cleansing flame.

Then the gunships.

Cobras, not like snakes but like thrumming insects, thin and agile in the air: they roared in, their mini-guns screaming like chainsaws ripping through lumber, just eating up the valley.

“The radio,” Bob said.

Donny rolled over, thrust the PRC-77 at Bob, who swiftly got it on, searched for the preset band that was the air-ground freak.

“Hit eight, hit eight!” Donny was screaming, and Bob found it, turned it on to find people looking for him.

“—Bravo-Four, Sierra-Bravo-Four, come in, please, immediate. Where are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four? This is Yankee-Niner-Papa, Yankee-Niner-Papa. I am Army FAC at far end valley; I need your position immediate, over.”

“Yankee-Niner-Papa, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four. Goddamn, ain’t you boys a sight!”

“Where are you, Sierra-Bravo-Four, over?”

“I am on a hill approximately two klicks outside Arizona on the eastern side of the valley; uh, I don’t got no reading on it, I don’t got no map, I—”

“Drop smoke, Sierra-Bravo-Four, drop smoke.”

“Yankee-Niner-Papa, I drop smoke.”

Bob grabbed a smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it. Whirls of angry yellow fog spurted from the spinning, hissing grenade, and fluttered high and ragged against the dawn.

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, I eyeball your yellow smoke, over.”

“Yankee-Niner-Papa, that is correct. Uh, I have beaucoup bad guys all around the farm. I need help immediate. Can you clean out the barnyard for me, Yankee-Niner-Papa, over?”

“Wilco, Sierra-Bravo. Y’all hang tight while I direct immediate. Stay by your smoke, out.”

In seconds, the Cobras diverted to the little hill upon which Bob and Donny cowered. The mini-guns howled, the rockets screamed; then the gunships fell back and a squadron of Phantoms flashed by low and fast, and directly in front of Bob and Donny, the napalm bloomed hot and bright in tumbling flame. The smell of gasoline reached their noses.

Soon enough, it was quiet.

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Yankee-Zulu-Nineteen. I am coming in to get you.”

It was the bird, the Huey, Army OD, its rotors beating as if to force the devil down, as it settled over them, whipping up the dust and flattening the vegetation. Bob clapped Donny on the back of the neck and pushed him toward the bird; they ran the twenty-odd feet to the open hatch, where eager hands pulled them away from the Land of Bad Things. The chopper zoomed skyward, into the light.

“Hey,” Donny said over the roar, “it’s stopped raining.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Even in the hospital, Huu Co, Senior Colonel, was criticized. It was merciless. It was relentless. It went beyond cruelty. Each day, at 1000 hours, he was wheeled into the committee room, his burned left arm swaddled in bandages, his head dopey with painkillers, his brain ringing with revolutionary adages with which nurses and doctors alike pummeled him in all his waking hours.

He sat stiffly in the heat, waiting as the painkillers gradually diminished, facing faceless accusers from behind banks of lights.

“Senior Colonel, why did you not press on despite your casualties?”

“Senior Colonel, who advised you to halt your progress and send units to deal with the American sniper?”

“Senior Colonel, are you infected with the typhus of ego? Do you not trust the Fatherland and its vessel, the party?”

“Senior Colonel, why did you waste time setting up mortars, when a small unit could have kept the Americans pinned, and you might have made your attack on the Camp Arizona before dawn?”

“Senior Colonel, did Political Commissar Phuc Bo argue with you as to the best course of action before his heroic death, and if so, why did you discount his advice? Do you not know he spoke with the authority of the party?”

The questions were endless, as was his pain.

They were also right in their implication: he had behaved unprofessionally, egged on by the demon of Western ego, whose poison was evidently deep in his soul, unpurged by years of rigor and asceticism. He had allowed it to become a personal duel between himself and the American who so bedeviled him. He had given up the mission to kill the American, and failed at both, if intelligence reports could be believed.

He was in disgrace. No meaningful future loomed before him. He had failed because his heart was weak and his character flawed. Everything they said about him was true, and the criticism he received was not nearly enough punishment. They could not punish him more than he punished himself. He deserved the fury of hell; he deserved oblivion. He was a cockroach who had—

But then the strangest thing happened. Even as he endured yet another session, feeling the unbending wills of the political officers crushing against the fragility of his own pitiful identity, the doors were flung open and two men from the Politburo rushed in, handed an envelope to the senior inquisitioner, which the man tore open and read nervously.

Then his face broke into a huge smile of love and compassion. He looked at Huu Co as if he were looking at the savior of the people, the great Uncle Ho himself.

“Oh, Colonel,” he brayed in the voice of such sugary sweetness it seemed nearly indecent, “oh, Colonel, you look so uncomfortable in that chair. Surely you would like a glass of tea? Tran, quickly, run to the kitchen, get the colonel a glass of tea. And some nice candy? Sugar beet? American chocolate? Hershey’s, we have Hershey’s, probably, if I do say so myself, with … almonds.”

“Almonds?” said the colonel, who, yes, far down, did in fact enjoy Hershey’s with almonds.

Tran, who had an instant before been upbraiding the colonel for his stupidity, rushed out with the furious urgency of a lackey, and returned in seconds with treats and drinks and almond-studded Hershey bars for the new celebrity. In very short time, the committee had gathered around their new great friend and revolutionary hero, the colonel, and even old Tran himself pushed the colonel to the automobile in his wheelchair, inquiring warmly about the colonel’s beautiful wife and his six wonderful children.

The committee waved good-bye merrily as the colonel was driven away in a shiny Citreon by the two Politburo officers, who said nothing, but offered him cigarettes and a thermos of tea and did everything to assure his comfort.

“Why am I suddenly rehabilitated?” he asked. “I am a class traitor and coward. I am a wrecker, an obstructionist, a deviationist, a secret Western spy.”

“Oh, Colonel,” the senior of the men said, laughing uncomfortably, “you joke. You are so funny! Is he not a funny one? The colonel’s wit is legendary!”

And Huu Co saw that this man, too, was terrified.

What on earth could be happening?

And then he knew. Only one presence in the Republic of North Vietnam could explain such a sea change: the Russians.

At their military compound, Soviet experts from GRU — Chief Intelligence Directorate — grilled him intently, though no effort was made to assign guilt. The men were remote and intense at once, in black SPETSNAZ combat uniforms without rank, though subtle distinctions on the team could be recognized. They never once mentioned politics or the revolution. He understood clearly: this wasn’t preparation for a trial, it was an intelligence operation.

They were very thorough in their Western way. He talked them through it slowly, working first from maps and then, after the first day, from a scale model of the valley before Kham Duc, quickly built and painted with surprising accuracy. The conversations were all in Russian.

“You were … ?”

“Here, when the first shots came.”

“How many?”

“He fired three times.”

“Semiauto?”

“No, bolt action. He never fired quickly enough for semiauto, though he was very, very good with that bolt. He may have been the fastest man with a bolt I’ve ever heard of.”

The Russians listened intently, but it wasn’t just the sniper that interested them; that was clear. No, it was the whole action, the loss of the sapper squad, the sounds of fire from the right flank, the presence of the flares. The flares, especially.

“The flares. You can describe them?”

“Well, yes, comrade. They appeared to be standard American combat flares, bright white, more powerful than our green Chinese equivalent. They hung in the air approximately two minutes and grew brighter as they descended.”

They listened, taking notes, keeping elaborate charts and timelines, trying to reconstruct the event in painstaking detail. It was even clear they had interviewed other participants of the Kham Duc battle.

They forced him to no conclusions: instead, they seemed his partner in a journey to understanding.

“Now, Colonel,” the team leader asked, a small, ratty man who smoked Marlboros, “based on what we’ve learned, I wonder if you’d venture a guess as to what happened. What is the significance of the flares, particularly given their location vis-à-vis the angle of most of the fire directed at you?”

“Clearly, there was another man. These American Marine sniper teams, they are almost always two-men operations.”

“Yes,” the team leader said. “Yes, that is what we think also. And interestingly enough, the ballistics bear you out. Some men were killed by 173-grain bullets, which is the American match target ammunition, which is the sniper’s round. But we also recovered bodies with 150-grain slugs, which is the standard combat load of the M14. So clearly, one of the rifles was the Remington bolt action and the other the M14. Of course, that’s different than the men killed by the forty-five-caliber submachine gun. We believe that was the sniper’s secondary weapon.”

The colonel was astounded: they had torn into this as if it were an autopsy, as if its last secrets must be exhumed. It was so important to them, as if their most precious asset were somehow at risk, and now they were committed totally to the destruction of the threat.

“Do you wish to know about these men?”

The colonel did, yes. But his own ego had to be conquered, for to learn about the men who had destroyed his battalion and his reputation and his future would be to further personalize the event and make it private, an obsession, an extension of his own life, as if its significance were him and not the cause.

“No, I think not. I care nothing for personality.”

“Well spoken. But alas, it is now a necessity. It is part of your new assignment.”

Well, wasn’t this interesting? A new assignment under Russian sponsorship. What possibly could it mean?

And so it was that he learned of his primary antagonist, a man called Swagger, a sergeant, who had once won a great shooting championship and had done much damage to the cause of the Fatherland in his three tours in Vietnam and was even now prowling the glades in hunt of yet more victims.

They had a picture of him from something called Leatherneck magazine, and what he saw was what he expected. He knew Americans from Paris and from his time in Saigon with the puppets. This one was a type, perhaps exaggerated, but familiar. Thin, hard, resilient, braver even than the French, brave as any Germans in the Legion. Cunning, with that specially devious quality of mind that let him instinctively understand weakness and move decisively against it. Disciplined in a way the Americans almost never were. He would have made a brilliant party official, so tight and focused was his mind.

The picture simply showed a slit-eyed young man with prominent cheekbones, his leathery face lit with a grin. He held some ludicrous trophy thing in his arms; next to him was an older version of the same man, same slit eyes, close-cropped hair but with more vanity on his chest. “Sergeant Swagger accepts the congratulations of the Commandant after winning at Camp Perry,” read the caption, translated into the Vietnamese. It was warrior’s glee, the colonel knew; and he saw in those slit eyes the deaths of so many, and the remorselessness that had driven their executioner.

“For this one,” he said, “the war is not a cause. It is merely an excuse.”

“Possibly,” said the Russian intelligence chief. “Perhaps even the war releases him to find his greatness. But do you not think he has a certain discipline? He is not profligate, he is not one of their criminals, like the Calleys and the Medinas. He has never raped or murdered in combat. He has no sexual weaknesses, a pathology associated with psychopathy.”

“He is not a psychopath,” Huu Co said. “He is a hero, though the line between them is thin, possibly fragile. He needs a cause to find his true self, that is what I mean. He is the sort who must have a cause to live. He needs something to humble himself in front of. Take that from him and you take everything.”

“Very good. Here, here is more, here is what we have.”

It was more on Swagger, culled from various American public resources. The package included, unbelievably, Marine records, obviously from a very sensitive source.

“Yes.”

“Study this man. Study him well. Learn him. He is your new responsibility.”

“Yes, of course. I accept. And what is the ultimate arrival of this project?”

“Why … his death, of course. His death and the death of the other one, too. They both must die.”

He slept Swagger, he dreamed Swagger, he read Swagger, he ate Swagger. Swagger engaged and caused the rebirth of the Western part of his mind: he struggled to grasp principles like pride and honor and courage and how their existence sustained a corrupt bourgeoisie state. For such a state could not exist without the pure fire of such centurions as Swagger standing watch, ready to die, on the Rhines of its empires.

“Why me?” he asked the Russian. “Why not one of your own analysts?”

“What can our analysts know? You have been fighting these people since 1964.”

“You have been fighting them since 1917.”

“But ours is a distant fight, a theoretical fight. Yours is up close, close enough to smell blood and shit and piss. That’s experience hard bought and much respected.”

Then another day brought another surprise: reconnaissance photos, taken from a high-flying vehicle of some sort, of what appeared to be a Marine post in the jungles of some province of his own country.

“I Corps,” said the Russian. “About forty kilometers from Kham Duc. One of the last American combat posts left in the zone. They call it Firebase Dodge City. A Marine installation. It is from here the American Swagger and his spotter mount their missions.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, well, if we’re to take him, it’ll be on his territory. He’ll always have the advantage, unless, of course, we can learn the terrain as well as he knows it.”

“Surely local cadre…”

“Well, now, isn’t that an interesting situation? Local cadre have been extremely inactive in that region for some months. This man Swagger terrifies them. They call him, in your language, quan toi.”

“The Nailer.”

“The Nailer. Like a carpenter. The nailer. He nails them. At any rate, at the local cadre level, most combat operations have ceased. That is why Firebase Dodge City still exists, when so many other Marines have been shipped home. Because the Nailer has nailed so many people that nobody likes to operate in his area. What is the point? The war will be over soon, he will be recalled, that will be that. But we cannot let that be that, can we?”

But try as he might, Huu Co could not hate the American. It seemed pointless. The man was no architect of war, no policy designer; he clearly had no sadistic side to him, no tendency toward atrocity: he was merely an excellent professional soldier, of the sort all armies have relied upon for thousands of years. He had some extra gene for aggression, some extra gene for shooting ability, and that was it. He was a believer — or maybe not. The colonel remembered, from his other life, the Frenchman Camus, who said, “When men of action cease to believe in a cause, they believe only in action.”

It didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that he wondered what the delay was. Why were they not moving now, if this was so important? Why were they waiting, what were they waiting for? He applied himself to the problem, and set out to master the terrain in and around Firebase Dodge City.

It was situated on a hill, and the Americans had deforested for a thousand yards all around it with their Agent Orange. The camp was typical: he’d seen hundreds in his long years of war. Its tactical problems were typical, too. In many respects it was similar to the unfallen A-Camp Arizona. The doctrine was primitive, but usually effective: approach at night, rally in the dark, send in sappers to blow the wire, attack in strength. But for the killing of one sniper team, that was a different tactical problem. The team would probably exit at night, that is, if they weren’t helicopter extracted. The trick would then be understanding from which point from the perimeter they would leave, and what would be their typical passage across the open zone. One could therefore hope to intercept them if one knew the terrain and the way Swagger’s mind worked.

Studying the photos, Huu Co saw three natural paths away from the camp, through gulches, enfilades, natural depressions in the land, where men would travel to avoid being spotted. One would set an ambush at such points, yes. It would be possibly effective, a long stalk, luck playing the most likely role. But if for some reason, the Americans could be induced to leaving during the day, right, say, at first dawn, a good shooter might have a chance to hit them from a hill not quite fifteen hundred yards out. Oh, it was a long shot, a desperately long shot, but the right man might bring it off, much more effectively, say, than an ambush team, who’s luck might be on or off.

But where would such a man be found? He knew the North Vietnamese certainly didn’t have such a man. In fact, such a man, such a specialist might not exist, at least not effectively. Huu Co said nothing about his conclusions; the Russians did not ask him. And then one night, he was awakened roughly by SPETSNAZ troopers and informed that they had a journey to make.

He climbed into a shiny black Zil limousine in his dress uniform, among four or five Russians, all talking and laughing boisterously among themselves. They ignored him.

They drove into Hanoi, through darkened streets, down the broad but now empty boulevards, and by the ceremonial plazas where the American Phantoms were displayed. Banners flapped mightily in the wind: ONWARD TO VICTORY, BROTHERS and LONG LIVE THE FATHERLAND and LET US EMBRACE THE REVOLUTIONARY FUTURE. The Russians paid them no mind, and laughed, and talked of women and alcohol and smoked American cigarettes; they were like Americans in many ways, not an observant or respectful people, but men who took their own destiny so much for granted that they could be annoying.

After a time, Huu Co realized where they were going: unmistakably, they headed for the People’s Revolutionary Airfield, north of Hanoi, passed through its wire defenses and guard posts with the wave of passes of the highest clearance, and sped not to the main building but to an out-of-the-way compound, which was heavily guarded by white men with automatic weapons, in the combat uniforms of SPETSNAZ, the hotshots who got all the sexy assignments and handled training for NVA cadre on certain dark, arcane secret arts.

The Zil parked, debarking its men, who escorted Huu Co inside, to discover an extremely comfortable little chunk of Russia, complete with televisions, a bar, elaborate Western furniture and the like. Also, many Playboy magazines lay about, and empty beer bottles, and the walls were festooned with pictures of blond women with large, gravity-defying breasts and no pubic hair.

Russians, thought Huu Co.

After a time, the little party went out to the tarmac, parked at the obscure end of a runway and awaited the arrival of someone designated Solaratov, whether a real name or a trade name, Huu Co was not informed. No rank, either; no first name. Just Solaratov, as if the name itself conveyed quite enough information, thank you.

Again, it was chilly, though no rain. The hot season was hard on them, but it had not arrived yet. In the emerging gray light, Huu Co stood a little apart from the crowd of bawdy, laughing Russian intelligence and SPETSNAZ people, himself the solitary man, not a part of their camaraderie and unsure why his presence was required. Yet clearly, they wanted him here: he was seeing things possibly no North Vietnamese below the Politburo level had seen. Why? What was the meaning of it all?

The sound of a jet airplane asserted itself, low but insistent, coming in from the east, out of the sun. The plane flashed overhead, glinting in the rising light, revealing itself to be a Tupolev Tu-16, code-named by the Americans “Badger,” a twin-engine, three-man bombing craft with a bubble canopy and sparkle of plastic at the nose. It wore combat drab, and its red stars stood out boldly against green camouflage. Its flaps were down and it peeled to the west, found a landing vector and set down on the main runway. It taxied for a distance, then began to head over toward the little party standing by itself on the runway.

The plane halted and its jet engines screamed a final time, then died; a hatch door opened beneath the nose, just behind the forward tire of the tricycle landing gear, and almost immediately two aviators descended, waved to the crowd, then got aboard a little car that had come for them, while Russian ground crew attended to the airplane.

“Oh, he’ll make us wait, of course,” one of the Russians said.

“The bastard. Nobody hurries him. He’d make the party secretary wait if it suited his fucking purpose!”

There was some laughter, but after a while, another figure descended from the aircraft, climbing slowly down, then landing on the tarmac. He wore an aviator’s black jumpsuit, but he was no aviator. He carried with him something awkward, a long, flat case; a musical instrument or something?

He turned to look at the greeters and his face instantly silenced them.

He was a wintry little man, late thirties, with a stubble of gray hair and a thick, short bull neck. His eyes were blue beads in a leather mask that was his grim face. He had immense hands and Huu Co saw that he was quite muscular for so short a fellow, with a broad chest and a spring of power to his movements.

No salutes were offered, no exchange of military courtesies. If he knew any of the Russians, he hid the information. There seemed nothing emotional about him at all, no sense of ceremony.

A man rushed to him to take the package he carried.

The little fellow silenced him with a vicious glare and made it apparent that he would carry the case, the severity of his response driving the man back into humiliated confusion.

“Solaratov,” said the Russian intelligence chief, “how was the flight?”

“Cramped,” said Solaratov. “I should tell them I only fly first class.”

There was nervous laughter.

Solaratov walked by the colonel without noticing him, surrounded by sycophants and bootlickers. He actually reminded Huu Co of a figure that had been pointed out to him back in the late forties, in Paris, another man of glacial isolation whose glare quieted the masses, who nevertheless — or perhaps for that reason, indeed — attracted sycophants in the legions but who paid them no attention at all, whose reputation was like the cloud of blue ice that seemed to surround him. That one was named Sartre.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Vietnam leaped up at him as if out of a dream: green, endless, crusted with mountains, voluptuous, violent, ugly, beautiful all at once. The Land of Bad Things. But also, in some way, the Land of Good Things.

Where I went to war, Donny thought. Where I fought with Bob Lee Swagger.

It wasn’t a dream; it never had been. It was the real McCoy, as glimpsed through the dirty plastic of an aircraft dipping toward that destination from Okinawa, where grunts headed to the ’Nam touched down on the way back from R&R. Monkey Mountain loomed ahead on the crazed peninsula above China Beach, and beyond that, like downtown Dayton, the multiservice base and airstrip at Da Nang displayed itself in a checkerboard of buildings, streets and airstrips. Hills 364, 268 and 327 stood like dusty warts beyond it.

The C-130 oriented itself off the coastline, dropped through the low clouds and slid through tropic haze until it touched down at the ghost town that had once been one of the most populous cities of the world, the capital of the Marine country of I Corps, home of the ruling body of the Marine war, the III Marine Amphibious Force.

The palms still blew in the breeze, and around it the mountains still rose in green tropic splendor, but the place was largely empty now, its mainside structure shrunken to a few tempo buildings, an empty or at least Vietnamized metropolis. A few offices were still staffed, a few barracks still lived in, but the techies and the staffs and the experts who’d run the war in Vietnam were home safe except for the odd laggard unit, like the boys of Firebase Dodge City and a few others in the haphazard distribution of late-leavers across I Corps.

The plane finally stopped taxiing. Its four props ended their mission with a turbine-powered whine as their fuel was cut off. The plane shuddered mightily, paused like a giant beast and went still. In seconds the rear door descended, and Donny and the cargo of twenty-odd short-timers and reluctant warriors felt the furnace blast of heat and the stench of burning shit that announced they were back.

He stepped into the radiance, felt it slam him.

“This fuckin’ place will git me yet,” said a black old salt, with a dozen or so stripes on his sleeve, and enough wound ribbons to have bled out a platoon.

“Ain’t you short?” someone asked.

“I ain’t as short as the lance corporal,” he said, winking at Donny, with whom he’d struck up a bantering relationship on the flight over from Kadena Air Force Base on Okie. “If I was as short as him, I’d twist an ankle and head straight for sick bay.”

“He’s a hero,” the other lifer said. “He ain’t going in no sick bay.”

The old black sarge pulled him aside.

“Don’t you be takin’ no bad-ass chances in the bush, you hear?” the man said. “Two and days, Fenn? Shit, don’t git busted up. It ain’t worth it. This shit-hole place ain’t worth a thing if you ain’t a career sucker gittin’ the ticket punched one more time. Don’t let the Man git you.”

“I copy.”

“Now git over to reception and git your grunt ass squared away.”

“Peace,” said Donny, flashing the sign.

The sergeant looked around, saw no one close enough to overhear or overlook, and flashed the sign back.

“Peace and freedom and all that good shit, bro,” he said with a wink.

Donny hit reception with his sea bag, to arrange temporary quarters for the night and the soonest chopper hop back to Dodge City.

He felt … good. A week on Maui with Julie. Oh, Christ, who wouldn’t feel good? Could it have been any better? Swagger had slipped him an envelope as he’d choppered out after debriefing, and he’d been stunned to discover a thousand dollars cash, with instructions to bring none of it back. Why would Swagger do such a thing? It was so generous, so spontaneous — just a strange-ass way of doing things.

It was — well, a young man back from the war with his beautiful young wife, in the paradise of Hawaii, under a hot and purifying sun, flush with money and possibility and so short he could finally, after three years and nine months and days, see the end. See it.

I made it.

I’m out.

She said, “It’s almost too cruel. We could have this and then you could get killed.”

“No. That’s not how it works. The NVA fights twice a year, in the spring and fall. They fought their big spring offensive, and now they’re all stuck up in a siege around An Loc City, fighting the ARVN way down near Saigon. We’re out of it. Nothing will happen in our little area. We’re home free. It’s just a question of getting through the boredom, I swear to you.”

“I don’t think I could stand it.”

“There’s nothing to worry about.”

“You sound like the guy in the war movie who always gets killed.”

“They don’t make war movies anymore,” he said. “Nobody cares about war movies.”

Then they made love again, for what seemed like the 28,000th time. He found new plateaus from which to observe her, new angles into her, new sensations, tastes and ecstacies.

“It doesn’t get much better than this,” he finally said. “God, Hawaii. We’ll come back here on our fiftieth anniver—”

“No!” she said suddenly, as sweaty as he and just as flushed. “Don’t say that. It’s bad luck.”

“Sweetie, I don’t need luck. I have Bob Lee Swagger on my side. He is luck itself.”

That was then, this was now, and Donny stood at the bank of fluorescent-lit desks in a big green room that was reception until a buck sergeant finally noticed him, put down the phone and gestured him to the desk.

Donny sat, handed over his documents.

“Hi, I’m Fenn, 2-5-Hotel, back from R&R on sked. Here’s my paperwork. I need a billet for the night and then a jump out to Dodge City on the 0600.”

“Fenn?” said the sergeant, looking at the order. “All right, let me just check it out; looks okay. You’re one of the guys in the Kham Duc?”

He entered Donny’s return in the logbook, stamped the orders, adroitly forged his captain’s signature and slipped them back to Donny, all in a single motion.

“Yeah, that was me. My NCO pulled in some favors and got me R&R’d out for ten days.”

“You’ve been nominated for the Navy Cross.”

“Jesus.”

“You won’t get it, though. They’re not giving out big medals anymore.”

“Well, I really don’t care.”

“They’ll probably buck it down to a Star.”

“I have a Star.”

“No, a Silver.”

“Wow!”

“Hero. Too bad it don’t count for shit back in the world. In the old days, you could have been a movie star.”

“I just want to make it back in one piece. I can pay to see movies. That’s as close to movies as I want to get.”

“Well, then, I have good news for you, Fenn. You got new orders. Your transfer came through.”

Donny thought he misunderstood.

“What? I mean, there must be — What do you mean, transfer? I didn’t ask for a transfer. I don’t see what—”

“Here it is, Fenn. Your orders were cut three days ago. You been dumped in 1-3-Charlie, and assigned to battalion S-3. That’s us, here in Da Nang; we’re the administrative battalion for what’s left of Marine presence. My guess is, you’ll be running a PT program here in Da Nang for a couple of months before you DEROS out on the big freedom bird. Your days in the bush are over. Congratulations, grunt. You made it, unless you get hit by a truck on the way to the slop chute.”

“No, see, I don’t—”

“You go on over to battalion, check in with the duty NCO and he’ll get you squared away, show you your new quarters. You’re in luck. You won’t believe this. We closed down our barracks and moved into some the Air Force vacated, ’cause they were closer to the airstrip. Air-conditioning, Fenn. Air-conditioning!”

Donny just looked at him, as if the comment made no sense.

“Fenn, this is a milk run. You got it made in the shade. It’s a number-one job. You’ll be working for Gunny Bannister, a good man. Enjoy.”

“I don’t want a transfer,” Donny said.

The sergeant looked up at him. He was a mild, patient man, sandy blond hair, professional-bureaucrat type of REMF, the sort of sandy-dry man who always makes the machine work cleanly.

He smiled dryly.

“Fenn,” he explained, “the Marine Corps really doesn’t care if you want a transfer or not. In its infinite military wisdom, it has decreed that you will teach a PT class to lard-ass rear-echelon motherfuckers like me until you go home. You won’t even see any more Vietnamese. You will sleep in an air-conditioned building, take a shower twice a day, wear your tropicals pressed, salute every shitbird officer that walks no matter how stupid, not work very hard, stay very drunk or high and have an excellent time. You’ll take beaucoup three-day weekends at China Beach. Those are your orders. They are better orders than some poor grunt’s stuck out on the DMZ or Hill 553, but they are your orders, nevertheless, and that is the name of that tune. Clear, Fenn?”

Donny took a deep breath.

“Where does this come from?”

“It comes straight from the top. Your CO and your NCOIC signed off on it.”

“No, who started it? Come on, I have to know.”

The sergeant looked at him.

“I have to know. I was Sierra-Bravo-Four. Sniper team. I don’t want to lose that job. It’s the best job there is.”

“Son, any job the Marine Corps gives you is the best job.”

“But you could find out? You could check. You could see where it comes from. I mean, it is unusual that a guy with bush time left suddenly gets rotated out of his firebase slot and stowed in some make-work pussy job, isn’t it, Sergeant?”

The sergeant sighed deeply, then picked up the phone.

He schmoozed with whomever was on the other end of the line, waited a bit, schmoozed some more, and finally nodded, thanked his co-conspirator and hung up.

“Swagger, that’s your NCO?”

“Yes.”

“Swagger choppered in here last week and went to see the CO. Not battalion but higher, the FMF PAC CO, the man with three stars on his collar. Your orders were cut the next day. He wants you out of there. Swagger don’t want you humping the bush with him no more.”

Donny checked in with the PFC on duty at 1-3-Charlie, got a bunk and a locker in the old Air Force barracks, which were more like a college dormitory, and spent an hour getting stowed away. Looking out the window, he could not see a single palm tree: just an ocean of tarmac, buildings, offices. It could have been Henderson Hall, back in Arlington, or Cameron Station, the multiservice PX out at Bailey’s Crossroads. No yellow people could be seen: just Americans doing their jobs.

Then he went to storage to pick up his stowed 782 gear and boonie duds, and lugged the sea bag to supply to return it, but learned supply was already closed for the day, so he lugged the stuff back to his locker. He checked back in at company headquarters to meet his new gunny and the CO; neither man could be found — both had gone back to quarters early. He went by the S-3 office — operations and training — to look for Bannister, the PT NCO, and found that office locked too, and Bannister long since retreated to the staff NCO club. He went back to the barracks, where some other kids were getting ready to go to the movies — Patton, already two years old, was the picture — and then to the 1-2-3 Club for a night of dowsing their sorrows in cheap PX Budweiser. They seemed like nice young guys and they clearly knew who Donny was and were hungry to get close to him, but he said no, for reasons he himself did not quite understand.

He was tired. He climbed into the rack early, pulling clean, newly issued sheets around him, feeling the springiness of the cot beneath. The air conditioner churned with a low hum, pumping out gallons of dry, cold air. Donny shivered, pulled the sheets closer about him.

There were no alerts that night, no incoming. There hadn’t been incoming in months. At 0100 he was awakened by the drunken kids returning from the 1-2-3 Club. But when he stirred, they quieted down fast.

Donny lay in the dark as the others slipped in, listening to the roar of the air conditioner.

I have it made, he told himself.

I am out of here.

I am the original DEROS kid.

I am made in the shade, I am the milk-run boy.

He dreamed of Pima County, of Julie, of an ordered, becalmed and rational life. He dreamed of love and duty. He dreamed of sex; he dreamed of children and the good life all Americans have an absolute right to if they work hard enough for it.

At 0-dark-30, he arose quietly, showered in the dark, pulled on his bush utilities and gathered up his 782 gear and headed out to the chopper strip. It was a long walk in the predawn. Above him, mute piles and piles of stars were humped up tall and deep like a mountain range. Now and then, from somewhere in this dark land, came the far-off, artificial sound of gunfire. Once some flares lit the horizon. Somewhere something exploded.

The choppers were warming up. He ducked into the operations shack, chatted with another lance corporal, then jogged to the Marine-green Huey, its rotors already whirring on the tarmac. He leaned in, and the crew chief looked at him.

“This is Whiskey-Romeo-Fourteen?”

“That’s us.”

“You’re the bus to Dodge City?”

“Yeah. You’re Fenn, right? We took you outta here two weeks back. Great job at Kham Duc, Fenn.”

“Can you hump me back to the City? It’s time to go home.”

“Climb aboard, son. We are homeward bound.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“You will crawl all night,” Huu Co explained to the Russian. “If you do not make it, they will see you in the morning and kill you.”

If he expected the man to react, once again, he was wrong. The Russian responded to nothing. He seemed, in some respects, hardly human. Or at least he had no need for some of the things humans needed: rest, community, conversation, humanity even. He never spoke. He appeared phlegmatic to the point of being almost vegetable. Yet at the same time he never complained, he would not wear out, he applied no formal sense of will against Huu Co and the elite commandos of the 45th Sapper Battalion on their long Journey of Ten Thousand Miles, down the trail from the North. He never showed fear, longing, thirst, discomfort, humor, anger or compassion. He seemed not to notice much and hardly ever talked, and then only in grunts.

He was squat, isolated, perhaps desolated. In his army, Huu Co’s heroes were designated “Brother Ten” when they distinguished themselves by killing ten Americans: this man, Huu Co realized, was Brother Five Hundred, or some such number. He had no ideology, no enthusiasms; he simply was. Solaratov: solitary. The lone man. It suited him well.

The Russian looked across the fifteen hundred yards of flattened land to the Marine base the enemy called Dodge City, studying it. There was no approach, no visible approach, except on one’s belly, the long, long way.

“Could you hit him from this range?”

The Russian considered.

“I could hit a man from this range, yes,” he finally said. “But how would I know it was the right man? I cannot see a face from this distance. I have to hit the right man; that is the point.”

The argument was well made.

“So then … you must crawl.”

“I can crawl.”

“If you hit him, how will you get out?”

“This time I’m only looking. But when I hit him, I’ll wait till dark, then come out the same way I came in.”

“They’ll call in mortars, artillery, napalm even. It is their way.”

“Yes, I may die.”

“In napalm? Not pleasant. I’ve heard many scream as it ate the flesh from their bones. It’s over in an instant, but I had the impression it was a long instant.”

The Russian merely glared at him, no recognition in his eyes at all, even though they’d lived in close proximity for a week and had for days before that pored over the photos and the mock-up of Dodge City.

“My advice, comrade brother,” said Huu Co, “is that you follow the depression in the earth three hundred meters. You move at dark, in maximum camouflage. They have nightscopes and they will be hunting. But the scopes aren’t one hundred percent reliable. It’ll be a long stalk, a terrible stalk. I can only hope you are up to it and that your heart is strong and pure.”

“I have no heart,” said the solitary man. “I am the sniper.”

For the first recon, Solaratov did not take his case, which by now all considered a rifle sheath. He carried no weapons except a SPETSNAZ dagger, black and thin and wicked.

He left at nightfall, dappled in camouflage, looking more like an ambulatory swamp than a man. Behind his back, the sappers called him not the Solitary Man or the Russian but, with the eternal insouciance of soldiers, the Human Noodle, because the stalks were stiff like unboiled noodles. In seconds, as he slithered off through the elephant grass, he was invisible.

Huu Co noted that his technique was extraordinary, a mastery of the self. This was the ultimate slow. He moved with delicacy, one limb at a time, a pace so slow and deliberate it almost didn’t exist. Who would have patience for such a journey?

“He is mad,” one of the sappers said to another.

“All Russians are mad,” said the other. “You can see it in their eyes.”

“But this one is really mad. He’s nuts!”

The sappers waited quietly underground, in elaborate tunnels built in the Year of the Snake, 1965. They cooked meals, enjoyed jury-rigged showers and treated the event almost like a furlough. It was a happy time for men who had fought hard, been wounded many times. At least six of them were Brothers Ten. They were shrewd, experienced professionals.

For his time, Huu Co studied the photographs or waited up top, hidden in the grass, using up his eyestrain to stare at the strange fort fifteen hundred yards off, which looked so artificial cut into the earth of his beloved country by men from across the sea with a different sensibility and no sense of history.

He waited, staring at the sea of grass. His arm hurt. He could hardly close his hand. When he grew bored, he snatched a book from his tunic, in English. It was Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkein, very amusing. It took him away from this world but always, when Frodo’s adventures vanished, he had to return to Firebase Dodge City and his deepest question: when would the sniper return?

The fire ants were only the first of his many ordeals. Attracted to his sweat, they came and crawled into the folds of his neck, tasting his blood, crawling, biting, feasting. He was a banquet for the insect world. After the ants, others were drawn. Mosquitoes big as American helicopters buzzed around his ears, lit on his face, stung him gently and departed, bloated. What else? Spiders, mites, ticks, dragonflies, the whole phyla drawn to the miasma of decay a sweating man produces in the tropics on a hot morning. But not maggots. Maggots are for the dead, and perhaps in some way the maggots respected him. He was not dead and, moreover, he fed the maggots much in his time on earth. They left him alone.

It wasn’t that Solaratov was beyond feeling such things. He felt them, all right. He felt every sting, bite, prick or tweak; his aches and swellings and blotches and throbbings were the same as any man’s. He had just somehow managed to disconnect the feeling part of his body from the registering part of his brain. It can be learned, and at the upper reaches of the performance envelope, among those who are not merely brave, willful or dedicated but truly among the best in the world, extraordinary things are routine.

He lay now in the elephant grass, approximately one hundred yards from the sandbag perimeter of Firebase Dodge City, just outside the double strands of concertina wire. He could see Claymore mines facing him from a dozen angles, and the half-buried detonators of other, larger mines. But he could also hear American rock and roll bellowing out of the transistor radios all the young Marines seemed to carry, and listening to it was his only pleasure.

“I can’t get no satisfaction,” someone sang with a loud raspy voice, and Solaratov understood: he could get no satisfaction either.

The Marines were unbearably sloppy. He had seen the Israelis from extremely close range in some of his ops and the British SAS and even the fabled American Green Berets; all were sound troops. These boys thought the war was over for them; they were worse than Cubans or Angolans. They lounged around sunbathing, played touch football or baseball or basketball, sneaked out to smoke hemp, got in fights or got drunk. Their sentries slept at night. The officers didn’t bother to shave. Nobody dressed in anything resembling a uniform, and most spent the days in shorts, undershirts (or shirtless) and shower shoes.

Even when they went on combat patrol, they were loud and stupid. The point men paid no attention, the flank security drifted in toward the column, the machine gunner had his belts tangled around him, and his assistant, with other belts, fell too far behind him to do him any good in a fight. Clearly they had not been in a fight in months, if ever; clearly they expected no such thing to occur as they waited for the order to leave the country.

Once, a patrol stumbled right over him. Five men, hustling through the elephant grass on the way out for a night ambush mission, walked so close to him that if any had been even remotely awake, they would have killed him easily. He saw their jungle boots, big as mountains, just inches from his face. But two of the men were listening to radios, one was clearly high, one so young and frightened he belonged in school, and the platoon leader, stuck with these silly boys, looked terrified. Solaratov knew exactly what would happen; the patrol would go out a thousand yards and the sergeant would hunker them down in some high grass, where they’d sit all night, smoking and talking and pretending they weren’t at war. In the morning the sergeant would bring them in and file a no-contact report. It was the kind of war fought by men who’d rather be anywhere except in the war.

Each night, Solaratov would relieve himself, hand-bury his feces, drink from his canteen and slowly, ever so slowly change position. He didn’t care what was in the encampment, but he had to know by what routes an experienced man would make an egress on the way to a hunting mission. How would Swagger take his spotter out? Which part of the sandbag berm would they go over and from what latitudes was it accessible to rifle fire?

He made careful notes, identifying eight or nine spots where there appeared to be a lane through the wire and the Claymores and the mines, where an experienced man would travel efficiently; of course, conversely, the other Marines would stay well clear of these areas. He read the land, looking for folds that led out of the camp to the treeline, or a progression of obstacles behind which two men, moving quickly, could transverse on the way to the job. They were the only two men still fighting the war; they were the only two men keeping this place alive. He wondered if the other soldiers knew it. Probably not.

Twice, he saw Swagger himself and felt the hot rush of excitement a hunter sees when his prey steps into the kill zone. But always, he cautioned himself to be slow, be sure, not to become excited; that caused mistakes.

From this vantage point, Swagger was a tall, thin, hard man, who always appeared parade-ground neat in his camouflaged tunic. Solaratov could read his contempt for the boys of Dodge City, but also his restraint, his disinterest, his commitment to his own duties that kept him apart from them. He was aloof, walking alone always: Solaratov knew this well — it was the sniper’s way. The Russian also noted that when Swagger walked through the compound, even the loudest and most disgruntled of the Marines grew quickly still and pretended to work. He worked silently, and moved with economy of motion and style. But he was not going on missions for now, and seemed to spend much of his time indoors, in a bunker that was probably intelligence or communications.

On the last day, he saw him again, from an even closer vantage point. Solaratov had worked up until he was but fifty meters from the complex of huts where Swagger seemed to spend most of his time, in hopes of getting a good look into the face of the man he proposed to kill. By this time he was quite bold, convinced that the Marines were too narcissistic to notice his presence even if he stood and announced it through a bullhorn.

It was after the daily helicopter flight. The Huey dipped in fast, landed at the firebase’s LZ, and a young man jumped out, even as the rotors still spun and kicked up a pall of dust; he disappeared into the complex but in time Solaratov saw him, this time with Swagger. It looked almost to be a fight. The two raged at each other, far from the others. If he were armed, it might have been a chance to take them both, but there was no escape and if he’d fired shots, even these childish troopers could have brought massive firepower to bear and gotten him. That wasn’t the point: he wasn’t on a suicide mission. He would never give himself up for an objective, unless there was no other way and the objective represented something that was his own passionate, deeply held conviction, not a job for another department, that he didn’t fully trust to begin with.

So he just listened and watched. The two had it out. It was like a final confrontation between a proud father and his disappointing son or an upright son and his disappointing father. He could hear the anger and the betrayal and the accusation in the voices.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” the older man kept screaming in the English that the Russian had studied for years.

“You cannot do this to me! You do not have the moral authority to do this to me!” the younger screamed back.

On and on it went, like a grand scene from Dostoyevsky. It was a mark of how each man was held in the respect of his comrades that no witnesses intruded, no officers interceded; their anger drove the young Marines, normally working hard on their suntans by this time, inside.

Finally, the two men reached some kind of rapprochement; they went back into the intelligence bunker, and after a while the young man left alone and went over to what must have been the living quarters, where he would bunk. He emerged an hour or so later, in full combat gear, with a rifle and a flack vest and went back to the intelligence bunker.

Solaratov knew: At last, the spotter is back.

There were no other sightings that day, and at nightfall, Solaratov finished his last canteen, rolled over and began the long crawl back to the tunnel complex in the treeline more than a thousand yards away.

“Senior Colonel, the Human Noodle is here!”

The call, from a sergeant, rocked Huu Co out of sleep. It was a good thing, too. As on most nights, he was reliving the moment when the American Phantoms came roaring down the valley and the napalm pods tumbled lazily from under their wings. They hit about fifty meters ahead of his forward position in the valley and bounced majestically, pulling a curtain of living flame behind them.

He arose swiftly and located the Russian, eating with gusto and lack of sophistication in the tunnel’s mess hall. The Russian devoured everything in sight, including noodles, fish head soup, chunks of raw cabbage, beef, pork, tripe. He ate with his fingers, which were now coated with grease; he ate with perfect clarity and concentration, pausing now and then for a satisfying belch, or to wipe a paw across his greasy mouth. He drank too, glass after glass of tea and water. Finally, when he was done, he asked for vodka, which was produced, a small Russian bottle. He finished it in a single draught.

At last, he turned and faced the senior colonel.

“Now I wash, then I sleep. Maybe forty-eight hours. Then, on the third day, I will move out.”

“You have a plan.”

“I know when and where he’ll leave, and how he’ll move. It’s in the land. If you can read the land, you can read the other man’s mind. I’ll kill them both three days from now.”

For the first time, he smiled.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Huey dipped low and landed in a swirl of dust. Quickly, the crew chief kicked off that run’s supplies — a couple of crates of belted 7.62mm NATO, a couple more of 5.56mm NATO for the M16s, package of medical provisions, an intelligence pouch, a command pouch — nothing major, just the routine deliveries of war — and Donny.

The chopper zoomed upward, leaving him standing there in the maelstrom, choking.

“Jesus, you’re back!”

It was a lance corporal in another platoon, a vague acquaintance.

“Yeah, they tried to fire me. But I love this place so much, I had to come back.”

“Jesus Christ, Fenn, you had it knocked. Nobody ever got out of here early. The Man sends you to the world and you come back to this shit hole, short as you are? Man, you are fucked in the head!”

“Yeah, well.”

“A hero,” the lance corporal spat derisively, threw the intel and command packs around his shoulders and headed out to deliver the mail. The ammo would sit until someone had the gumption to gather it in.

Donny blinked, and took a fraction of a second to reorient. He knew he wanted to stay away from the command bunker and the old man; officially he had no standing, and he didn’t want to face that shit until he faced Swagger. He went off to the scout-sniper platoon area, where Bob was king. But when he got there, two other NCOs told him Bob was now over in the intel bunker and he better get his young ass over there and get this squared away. One of them pointed out to him that he was officially UA from his new assignment in downtown Da Nang, and there’d be hell to pay.

Donny navigated through the S-shop area of the base, a warren of sandbagged bunkers with crudely stencilled signs, until at last he came to S-2, next to commo, a low structure from which flew an American flag. He ducked into it, feeling the temp drop a few degrees in the dark shadow, smelled the mildew of the rotting burlap bags that comprised the bunker’s walls, saw maps and photos hung on a bulletin board and two men hunched over a desk, one of whom was most definitely Swagger and the other of whom was a first lieutenant named Brophy, the company intelligence honcho and sniper employment officer.

Swagger looked up, down, then back in a hurry.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said fiercely.

“I’m back, ready for duty, thanks very much. I had a wonderful time. Now I’ve got a tour to finish and I’m here to finish it.”

“Lieutenant, this here boy is UA from Da Nang. He’d better get his young ass back there or he’ll finish up in the brig. You put him on report, or I will. I want him gone.”

Swagger almost never talked to officers this way, because of course like many NCOs he preferred to allow them the illusion that they had something to do with running the war. But he no longer cared for protocol, and the officer, a decent-enough guy but way overmatched against a legend, chose discretion over valor.

“You work it out with him, Sergeant,” he said, and beat a hasty advance to the rear.

“I want you out of here, Fenn,” growled Swagger.

“No damn way.”

“You are too goddamn short. You will be out there thinking about humping Suzie Q instead of humping I Corps and you will get your own and my ass greased. I’ve seen it a hundred times.”

“You recommended me for the Navy Cross! Now you’re firing me?”

“I had a heart-to-heart with my closest pal, Bob Lee Swagger, and he told me you are black poison in the field. I want you running a PT program somewhere. You go home, you git out of ’Nam. I fired you. You’re a Marine and you follow orders and those are your orders!”

“Why?”

“Because I say so, that’s why. I’m sniper team leader and NCOIC of scout-sniper platoon. It’s my call. It ain’t your call. I don’t need your permission.”

“Why?”

“Fenn, you are getting on my damn nerves.”

“I’m not going until you tell me why. Tell me why, goddammit. I earned that much.”

Swagger’s eyes narrowed-up, tight like coin slots in a Coke machine.

“What is with you?” he finally asked. “I’ve had three spotters before you, good boys all of them. But no one like you. You didn’t have no limits. You’d do anything I goddamned asked you to. I don’t like that. You don’t have no sense. If I had to think about it, I’d say you were trying to get yourself killed. Or trying to prove something, which amounts to the same goddamn thing. Now you come clean with me, goddammit. What’s going on in that head of yours? Why the hell are you out here?”

Donny looked away.

He thought a bit, and finally decided to spit it out.

“All right, I’ll tell you. You can’t tell anyone. It’s between you and me.”

Swagger stared hard at him.

“I knew a guy named Trig. I mentioned him to you. Well, he was a star peacenik, but a real good guy. A hero, too. He was willing to give his life to stop the war. Well, I hate the war too. Not only for all the reasons everyone knows, but also because it’s killing people we can’t afford to lose. Like Trig. It’ll kill you, too, Sergeant Swagger. So I’m going to stop it. I will chain myself to the White House gate if I have to, I will throw my medals back on the Senate steps if I have to, I will blow myself up in a building. It’s so fucking evil, what we are doing to these people and to ourselves. But I cannot let anybody say I quit, I bugged out, I shortcut my duty. They can have no doubts about me. So I will fight the war full-bang dead out till the day I DEROS and then I will fight full-bang dead out against it!”

He was screaming, sweating, like an insane man. He’d flared up, big as life, larger than Bob, stronger than him, menacing him for the first time, inconceivable until it happened. He stepped back now, relaxing.

“Jesus,” said Swagger, “you think I give a fuck what you think about the war? I don’t give a shit about politics. I’m a Marine. That’s all I care about.”

He sat back.

“All right, I’ll tell you what’s going on, finally. You have earned that. I’ll tell you why I want you out of here. There’s somebody out there.”

“Huh? Out there? Out where?”

“There, in the bush, some new bird. That’s why I’ve been huddling with Brophy. It was bucked down from headquarters. There’s a guy out there, and he’s hunting for me. He’s a Russian, we think. The Israelis have a very good source in Moscow and they got a picture of a guy climbing into a TU-16 for the normal intel run to Hanoi. They knew him, because he’d trained Arab snipers in the Bekaa Valley and they tried to hit him a couple of times, but he was too goddamn smart. Our people think he worked Africa too, lots of stuff in Africa. He may have been in Cuba. Anywhere they got shit to be settled, he’s the one to settle it. Anyhow, his name has something to do with ‘Solitary’ or ‘Single,’ something like that. He may be a championship shooter named T. Solaratov, who won a gold medal in prone rifle at the sixty Olympics. Then NSA got a radio intercept a week or two back. One NVA regional commander talking to another, about this Ahn So Muoi, as they call it. They have this thing called Brother Ten, which is an award and a nickname they call someone who’s killed ten Americans. It’s as close in their language as they come to the word sniper. Anyhow, in this intercept, the officers were jawing about the ‘White Brother Ten’ moving down the trail to our province. White sniper, in other words. They got this special guy, this Russian, he’s coming after me and anybody I’m with.”

“Jesus,” said Donny, “you really pissed them off.”

“Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” Bob replied. “And here’s the new joke. I’m going to kill this guy. I’m going to nail him between the eyes and we’ll send the word back to them very simply: do not fuck with the United States Marine Corps.”

Donny suddenly said, “It’s a trap! It’s a trap!”

“That’s right. I’m going to play cat-and-mouse with him; only, he thinks he’s the cat, when he’s the mouse. We want this bird swollen with confidence, thinking he’s the cock of the walk. It’s all a big phony show so we can get him to hit me in a certain way, only, I ain’t gonna be there, I’m gonna be behind his sorry ass and I will drill him clean, and if I can’t drill him, I will call in gunships with so much smoke there won’t be nothing left but cinders. Now, that is dangerous work and it don’t seem to me it has one thing to do with being a grunt in Vietnam. That is why I want your young ass out of here. You ain’t getting killed in anything this personal. This is between me and this Solitary Man. That’s it.”

“No. I want in.”

“No way. You’re out of here. This ain’t your show. This is about me.”

“No, this is about the Kham Duc. I was at Kham Duc. He wants to take us for Kham Duc. Swell, then he wants to take me. I’ll go against him. I’m not afraid of him.”

“You are an idiot. I’m scared shitless.”

“No, we have the advantage.”

“Yeah, and what if he zeros me out in the bush, and you’re left alone? You against him, out in the bad, bad bush. The fact that you’re married, got a great future, had a great war, done your duty, won some medals, all that don’t mean shit. He don’t care. He just wants to ice you.”

“No, I will be there. Forget me. You need another man. Who are you taking, Brophy? Brophy isn’t good enough, no one here is good enough. I’m the best you got, and I’ll go with you and we’ll fight this goddamn thing to the end, and nobody can say about me, oh, he had connections, he got off easy, his sergeant got wasted but he got a cush job in the air-conditioning.”

“You are one screwed-up kid. What do I say to Julie if I get you wasted?”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re a sergeant. You can’t think like that. You only think of the mission, okay? That’s your job. Mine is to back you up. I’ll run the radio, back you up. We’ll get this asshole, then we’ll go home. It’s time to hunt.”

“You asshole kid. You think you want to meet this guy? Okay, you come with me. Come on, I’ll introduce you two boys.”

Swagger pulled him out of the S-2 bunker and out toward the perimeter.

“Come on, scream a little at me!”

“Huh?”

“Scream! So he notices us and gets an eyeful. I want him to know we’re back and tomorrow we’re going out again.”

“I don’t—”

“He’s out there. I guarantee you, he’s out there, in the grass, a hundred meters or so away, but don’t look at him.”

“He can—”

“He can’t do shit. If he shoots from this close, we’ll call in artillery and napalm. The squids’ll soak his ass in burning gas. And he knows it. He’s a sniper, not a kamikaze. The challenge ain’t just gunning me, no sir. It’s gunning me and going back to Hanoi to eat grilled pork, fuck a nice gal, and going home on the seven o’clock bus to Moscow. But he’s there, setting up, planning. He’s reading the land, getting ready for us, figuring how to do us, the motherfucker. But we’re going to bust his ass. Now, come on, yell.”

Donny got with the program.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Russian finally opened his case, quickly assembled the parts with an oily clacking sound, until he had built what appeared to be a rifle.

“The Dragon,” he said.

Huu Co thought: does he think I’m a peasant from the South, soaked in buffalo shit and rice water?

He of course recognized the weapon as a Dragunov, the new Soviet-bloc sniper weapon as yet unknown to Vietnam. It was a semiauto, in the old Mosin-Nagant 7.62 × 54 caliber, a ten-round magazine, a mechanism based on the AK47’s, though it had a long, elegant barrel. It wore a skeletal stock that extended from a pistol grip. A short, electrically illuminated four-power scope squatted atop the receiver.

The sniper inserted the match rounds into the magazine, then inserted the magazine into the rifle. With a snap, he threw the bolt, chambering a round, flicked the safety on, then set the rifle down. Then he set to wrap the rifle in a thick tape to obscure the glint of its steel and the precision of its outline. As he wound, Huu Co talked to him.

“You do not need to zero?”

“The scope never left the receiver, so no, I don’t. In any event, it won’t be a long shot, as I have planned it. Possibly two hundred meters at the longest. The rifle holds to four inches at two hundred meters and I always shoot for the chest, never the head. The head shot is too difficult for a combat situation.”

He was fully dressed. He wore a ghillie suit of his own construction, and was well tufted with a matting of beige strips identical in color to the elephant grass. His hat was tufted too, and under it, he’d painted his face in combat colors, a smear of ochre and black and beige.

“Sundown,” came a cry from above.

“It’s time,” said Huu Co.

The sniper rose and threw a large pack over his back, the rifle strap diagonally over his shoulder, and with a soft swaying as of many different feathers, like some exotic bird, he walked to the ladder and climbed out of the tunnel.

He rose in the dusk, and Huu Co followed him. It was but a few hundred feet to the treeline and the long crawl down the valley toward the American firebase.

“You have this planned?” Huu Co asked. “I need to know for my report.”

“Well planned,” said the Russian. “They’ll go out just before sunrise, over their berm and through their wire. I can tell you exactly where, because it’s the one place where they’re higher; there aren’t any subtle rises in the ground. They’ll continue in the rising light on a north-northwest axis, then turn to the west. When the sun is full, they’ll have a last few hundred meters to go through the grass toward the north. I’ve examined their own after-action reports. Swagger runs his missions the same each time, but what varies is where he’ll operate. If he’s headed south, toward Kontum, he’ll go toward the Than Quit River. If he heads north, toward the Hai Van Peninsula, then he’ll go toward Hoi An. And so forth. In any event, that small rise out there, that’s his intersection. Which way will he turn from there? I’m betting tonight it’s toward the north, because he worked the west when he headed out toward Kham Duc. It’s the north’s turn. I’ll set up behind him; that is, between himself and the firebase. He’ll never expect shots from that direction. I’ll take them both when they come out from behind the hill. It’ll be over quickly; two quick rounds to the body, two more when they’re down. Nobody from the base camp can reach me by the time I’m back here, and I’ve got a good, clean escape route with two fallbacks, if need be.”

“Well thought out.”

“And so it is. That’s what I do.”

There was little left to say. The sappers gathered around the banty little Russian, clapped him on the back, embarrassing him. Night was coming quickly, all was silent, and in the far distance the firebase stood like a sore on the flank of a woman.

“For the Fatherland,” Huu Co said.

“For the Fatherland,” chimed the tough sappers.

“For survival,” said the sniper, who knew better.

The last briefing was at sundown. Donny faced himself. Or rather, the man who would be himself, a lance corporal named Featherstone, roughly his own size and coloring. Featherstone would wear Donny’s camouflaged utilities, carry his 782 gear complete to Claymores and M49 spotting scope, and the only M14 that could be found in the camp. Featherstone, and Brophy similarly tricked out as Bob Lee Swagger, were bait.

Featherstone, a large, slow boy, was not happy at this job; he had been volunteered for it by virtue of his similarity to Donny. Now he sat, looking very scared, in the S-2 bunker, amid a slew of officers and civilians in various uniforms. Everybody except Featherstone seemed very excited. There was a kind of partylike atmosphere, long absent from Firebase Dodge City.

Bob went to the front of the group, as they sat down, and addressed the primary players: Captain Feamster, who was CO here at Dodge City; an intelligence major who represented the Marine Corps’s higher interest, in from Da Nang; an army colonel who’d choppered in from MACV S-2; an Air Force liaison officer; and a civilian in a jumpsuit with a Swedish K submachine gun who radiated Agency from all his pores. A map of the immediate area had been rigged on a large sheet of cardboard, reducing the clearing around Dodge City to its contours and landforms and the base itself to a big X at the bottom.

“Okay, gentlemen,” Bob started, and no officer in the room felt it peculiar to be briefed by a staff sergeant, or at least this staff sergeant, “let’s run this through one more time to make sure everybody’s on the same page in the hymn book. The game starts at 2200, when Fenn and I, dressed in black and painted up like black whores, head out. It’s approximately thirteen hundred yards to what I’m designating Area 1. That’s where, based on my reading of the land and this guy’s operating procedure as the files from Washington reveal, I think he’s going to operate. Fenn and I will set up about three hundred yards from his most probable shooting zone. I don’t want to get too close; this bird has a nose for trouble. At 0500 Lieutenant Brophy and Lance Corporal Featherstone roll over the berm at the point designated Roger One.”

He pointed to it on the map.

“Why there, Sergeant?”

“This guy has eyeballed Dodge City, believe you me, and maybe from as close as this bunker. He’s been here. He knows where the best place to get quickly into this little dip here is” — he pointed — “which gives you close to half mile of nearly unobserved terrain.”

“Do you know that for a fact?” asked the leg colonel.

“No, sir, I do not. But before this problem came up, it’s where I took my teams out ninety percent of the time, unless we choppered somewhere. He’ll know that, too.”

“Carry on, Sergeant.”

“From there, the lieutenant and Featherstone follow the route I have indicated.” He addressed the two of them directly. “It’s very important you stay there. He can’t get a good shot at you, because he can’t get close enough, but he’ll know you’re there. He’ll start tracking you about five hundred yards out, but you’re still too far out to shoot. He don’t have a rifle that he can trust to make that far a shot; plus, he wants you out of sight of camp when he hits you, so that he’ll have time to make his get-out.”

“How do we know he just won’t take them out, then fade?” asked the Air Force major.

“Well, sir, again, we don’t. But I been all over that ground. I don’t think he can get a shot when they’re in the gulch. That’s why they have to be right careful to stay there, to move slowly. Now, about one thousand yards out, you got a little-bitty bit of hill. It’s Hill Fifty-two, meaning it ain’t but fifty-two meters high. It’s hardly a tit. You wouldn’t give it a squeeze on Saturday night.”

“I would,” said Captain Feamster, and everybody laughed. “I may go do it now, in fact!”

After they settled down, Bob continued.

“Sir, when y’all git behind that hill, you go flat. I mean, you dig in, you stay put. He’s going to watch you come, he’ll be set up on the other side, where you come out to high ground and make your decision which way you’re going to turn the mission. You stay put. Now, it may take some time. This bird’s patient. But, you disappearing suddenly, he’s going to get annoyed, then irritated. He’ll move. Maybe just a bit, but when he moves, we put the glass on him, I quarter him and waste his ass.”

“Sergeant Swagger?” It was Brophy.

“Sir?”

“Do you want us to move out in support after you engage him?”

“No, sir. I don’t want no other targets in the zone. If I see movement, I may have to shoot without ID. I’d hate it to be you or Featherstone. Y’all just go to earth once you get behind that hill, then move back under cover of the choppers, if we have to call in choppers.”

“Sounds good.”

“This sucks,” Featherstone whispered bitterly to Donny. “I’m going to get smoked, I know it. It isn’t fair. I didn’t sign up for this shit.”

“You’ll be okay,” Donny said to the shaky man. “You just walk, then dig in and wait for help. Swagger’s got it figured.”

Featherstone shot him a look of pure hatred.

“Anyhow,” continued Swagger at the front of the bunker, “I take him when he rises to move. If I don’t get a solid hit or if I get a miss, that’s when I signal Fenn, who’s sitting on the PRC-77. You’ve checked out the radio?”

“Of course,” said Donny.

“At that moment I signal, Fenn’s on the horn with you Air Force boys.”

It was the Air Force major’s turn.

“We’ve laid on a C-130 Hercules call-signed Night-Hag-Three, holding in orbit about five klicks away, just off Than Nuc. We can have Night Hag there in less than thirty seconds. The Night Hag brings major pee: four side-mounted Vulcan twenty-mm mini-guns and four 7.62 NATO mini-guns. It can unload four thousand rounds in less than thirty seconds. It’ll turn anything in a thousand square yards to tenderized hamburger.”

“That’s better than napalm or Hotel Echo, sir?”

“Much better. More accurate, more responsive to ground direction. Plus, these guys are really good. They’ve been on these suppression missions for years. They can pinwheel over a zone just above stalling speed like a gull floating over the beach. Only, they’re pumping out lead all the while. They bring unbelievable smoke. The snake eaters love them. You know the napalm problem. It can go any way, and if the wind catches it and takes it in your direction, you got a problem.”

“Sounds good,” said Bob.

“Sergeant Swagger?”

It was the CIA man, who’d brought the Solaratov documents.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Nichols?”

“I’m just asking: is there any conceivable way you could take this man alive? He’d be an incomparable intelligence asset.”

“Sir, I should say, hell, yes, I’ll try my damndest, and we’ll share whatever we git with our friends who’ve cooperated with us. But this bastard’s tricky and dangerous as hell. If I get him in the scope, I have to take him out. If he gets away, we go to gunships. That’s all.”

“I respect your honesty, Sergeant. It’s your ass on the line. But let me tell you one thing. The Sovs have a new sniper rifle called the Dragunov, or SVD. He might have one.”

“I’ve heard of it, sir.”

“We’ve yet to shake it out. Even the Israelis haven’t uncovered one. Be very nice if you brought that out alive.”

“I’ll give it my best, sir.”

“Good man.”

Donny was supposed to get a last few hours of sleep before he geared up, but of course he couldn’t. So much ran through his mind, and he lay in the bunker, listening to music coming from the squad bays a few dozen meters away.

CCR was banging out something from last year on somebody’s tape deck. It sounded familiar. Donny listened.

Long as I remember, the rain been coming down,

Clouds of mystery falling, confusion on the ground,

Good men through the ages, trying to track the sun,

And I wonder, still I wonder, who’ll stop the rain?

It had some kind of anti-war meaning, he knew. The rain was war, or had become war. Some of these kids had known nothing but the war; it had started when they were fourteen and now they were twenty and over here and it was still going on. It was coming for them, they’d get caught in the rain, that’s why the song was so popular to them. Kids had picked it up in DC last year and it was everywhere. He knew Commander Bonson had heard it.

He thought of Bonson now.

Bonson came back to him. Navy guy, starchy, duty-haunted, rigid, black-and-white Bonson. In his khakis. His beard dark, his flesh taut and white, his eyes glaring, set in rectitude.

He remembered the look on Bonson’s face when he told him he wasn’t going to testify against Crowe. Man, that may have been worth it, that one moment, let Solaratov grease my ass, it was worth it, the way his jaw fell, the way confusion — no, clouds of mystery, confusion on the ground — came into his eyes. He could not process it. He could not accept that someone would turn his little plan over. Someone would actually tell him to go fuck off, derail his little train.

Donny had a nice dream of it all, the moment of soaring triumph he’d felt.

Oh, that’s just the beginning, he thought. I will get back to the world and we will see what became of Commander Bonson, what his crusade got him. What goes round, comes round. You put shit out in this world, somehow you get it back. Donny believed that.

Now, sleep was impossible. He rose, restless, bathed in sweat. He had another three hours to kill before they mounted out.

He rose, left the bunker and wandered for a bit, not sure where he was going, but then realizing he did in fact have a destination. He was in grunt city, among the line Marines, the proles of 2-5-Hotel, who really were Firebase Dodge City.

He saw a shadow.

“You know where Featherstone would be?”

“Two hootches back. Oh. You. The hero. Yeah, he’s back there, getting ready to get his ass wasted in the grass.”

The anger Donny felt surprised him. What the hell was this all about? Why was everybody so pissed at him? What had he done?

Donny walked back, dipped into the hootch. Four bunks, the fraternity squalor of young men living together, the stink of rotting burlap, the shine of various Playmates of the Month pinned to whatever surface would absorb a tack and, of course, the smell, sweet and dense, of marijuana.

Featherstone sat amid a dark circle of fellow martyrs, all stoned. He was so still and depressed he seemed almost dead. But it was clear he wasn’t the ringleader here; another Marine was doing all the talking, a bitter rant about “We don’t mean shit,” “It’s all a game,” “Fucking lifers just getting their tickets punched,” that sort of thing.

Donny butted in.

“Hey, Featherstone, you wanna go light on that stuff. You may have to move fast tomorrow; you don’t want that shit still in your head.”

Featherstone didn’t seem to hear him. He didn’t look up.

“He’s gonna be dead tomorrow. What difference does it make?” the smart guy said. “Who invited you here, anyhow?”

“I just came by to check on Featherstone,” said Donny. “He ought to pull himself out of this funk or he’s gonna get wasted, and if you guys claim to be his buds, you ought to help him.”

“He’s gonna get zapped tomorrow, no matter what. We who are not about to die salute him.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to him. He’s going to go for a walk, then hide in the bush. A plane will come and shoot the fuck out of a zone 250 yards ahead of him. He’ll probably get a Bronze Star out of it and go back to the world a hero.”

“Nobody cares about heroes back in the world.”

“Well, he just has to keep his head. That’s—”

“Do you even know what this is all about?”

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you. Classified.”

“No, not the shit about the Russian sniper. That’s just shit. You know what this is really about?”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s about the championship.”

“The what?”

“The championship,” said the man, fixing Donny in a bitter, dark gaze.

“Of what?”

“Of snipers.”

“What?”

“In 1967, a gunny named Carl Hitchcock went home with ninety-three kills. The most so far. Now along comes this guy Swagger. He’s in the fifties till that stunt you pulled off in the valley. They gave him credit for thirty-odd kills. I hear he’s up to eighty-seven in one whack. Now, he gets six more, he ties. He gets seven more, he’s the champ. It doesn’t mean shit to me and it doesn’t mean shit in the world, but for these lifers, let me tell you, something like that gets you noticed and you end up the fucking command sergeant major of the whole United States Marine Corps. So what if a couple of grunts get wasted to get you your last few kills? Who the fuck cares about that?”

“That’s shit,” said Donny. He looked at his antagonist’s name, saw that it was one Mahoney, and then recalled, yes, another college guy, Mahoney, always riding the line, dozens of Article 15s, angry and pissed off and just desperate to get out of there.

“It’s not shit. It’s how military cultures operate if you knew anything about it at all.”

“I’ve been with Swagger in the bush for six months. I’ve never, ever seen him claim credit for a kill. I record the kills in a book, as per regs. I have to do that; it’s the rule. The sniper employment officer writes up the kills. I just write down what I see. Swagger’s never asked me to claim kills for him. He doesn’t give a shit about that. On top of that, the number thirty-seven or whatever is completely made up; he had eighty rounds, he probably hit seventy-five of those, if he missed at all. The record doesn’t mean a thing. That’s a load of crap.”

“He just likes the killing. Man, he must like to squeeze that little trigger and watch some gook dot go still. It’s as close to being God as you can get. There’s something so psychotic about it, you—”

Donny hit him, left side of the face, hard. It was stupid. In seconds, he was down, pinned, and somebody kicked him in the head, and his eyes filled with stars. He squirmed and yelped, but more body blows came, and he felt the pressure of many hands pressing him down, and still more punches driving through. At last someone pulled his antagonists off him. Of course it was the pacifist Mahoney.

“Settle down, settle down,” Mahoney screamed. “Man, you’ll get lifers in here, and we are cooked!”

Donny’s head flared. Someone had really nailed him.

“You assholes,” he said. “You fucking crybaby assholes, you’re going to get your buddy wasted for nothing except your own sense of victimization. You have nothing to be sorry about. You made it. You’re golden.”

“All right, all right,” said Mahoney, holding the swelling that distended his face, “you hit me, they hit you, let’s call it even. No one on staff has to hear about this.”

“Man, my fucking head aches,” said Donny, climbing to his feet.

“You’re not going to tell on anyone, are you, Fenn? It was just tempers. We all get fucked if you tell.”

“Shit,” said Donny. “My goddamn head hurts.”

“Get him an aspirin. You want a beer? We have some Vietnamese shit, but I think there’s a couple of Buds left. Get him a Bud. Good, cold Bud.”

“No, I’m all right.”

He looked at them, saw only dark faces and glaring eyeballs.

“Look, let’s forget all about this shit, but just get him” — Featherstone, who still sat, zombielike, on the cot — “straight for tomorrow. Okay? He can’t be fucked up out there; he’ll get killed.”

“Yeah, sure, Fenn, no problem.”

“And let me tell you guys something, okay? You kicked the shit out of me, now you listen.”

Some eyes greeted his angrily in the low light, but most looked away. It was hot and rank with sweat and the odor of beer and marijuana.

“You guys may say Swagger is a psycho and he likes to kill and all that shit. Fine. But have you noticed how come we never get hit and our patrols don’t get ambushed? Have you noticed we haven’t had a KIA in months? Have you noticed our only wounded are booby traps, and they’re almost never fatal, and there’s almost no ambushes? Hasn’t been an ambush in months, maybe years. You know why that is? Is it because they love you? Is it because they know you’re all peaceniks and dope smokers and you flash the peace sign and all you are saying is give peace a chance? Is that why?”

No voices answered his. His head really hurt. He had been whacked good. His vision was blurry as shit.

“No. It has nothing to do with you. Nobody gives a fuck about you. No, it’s because of him. Of Swagger. Because the NVA and Victor Charles, they fear him. They are scared shitless of him. You say he’s psycho, but every time he drops one of them, you benefit. You live. You survive. You’re living on the goddamn time he buys for you by putting his ass in the grass. He’s your guardian angel. And he’ll always wear the curse of being the killer, the man with the gun, while you guys have the luxury of not getting your pretty little hands dirty. He’ll always be on the outside because of his kills. He takes the responsibility, he lives with it, and you guys, you worthless assholes, you’ll go back to the world on account of it, and all you can do is call him psycho. Man, have you ever heard of shame? You all ought to be ashamed.”

He turned and slipped out into the night.

The Russian lay motionless in the high grass, on a little crest maybe twelve hundred yards out from the firebase. In the dark, he could see nothing except the steady illumination of guard post flares, one fired every three or four minutes, and the occasional movement of the Marines from hootch to hootch in the night, as sentries changed. There was no sense whatsoever of anything wrong.

He was still tired from the nearly five hours of crawling, but felt himself beginning to rally as the energy flooded back into him. He looked at his watch. It was 0430. The Dragunov was before him in the grass; it was time.

Deftly, he rolled over a bit, unstrapped the pack, pulled it off his back and opened it. He took out a large cylindrical object, an optical device, mounted to an electronics housing. It was Soviet issue, PPV-5, a night-vision telescope, too clumsy to be mounted on a rifle but fine for stable observation. He set it into the earth before him, and his fingers found the switch. As a rule, he didn’t trust these things: too fragile, too awkward, too heavy; worse, one grew wedded to them, until they destroyed initiative and talent; worse still, one lost one’s night vision to them.

But this time, the device was the perfect solution to the tactical problem. He was concealed, but at great range; he had to know exactly when and if the sniper team left in the hour before dawn, so that he could move to his shooting position and take them as they emerged from behind the hill. If they didn’t come, he’d simply spend the day there, waiting patiently. He had enough water and food in the pack to last nearly a week, though of course each day he’d be weaker. But today, it felt good.

Through the green haze of the device, which crudely amplified the ambient light of the night, he saw the camp in surprising detail. He saw the lit cigarettes of smoking sentries, he saw them sneak out into the night for marijuana or to defecate in the latrine, or to drink something — beer, he guessed. But he knew where to look. At the sandbag berm nearest to the intelligence bunker, there was a crease at the base of the hill that led this way directly. He’d even been able to spot the zigzag in the concertina there, and the gap in the preset Claymore mines, and the prongs of the other anti-personal mines buried in the approach zone. It was a path, where men could move and get out of the camp. This is where it would come, if it would come at all.

The first signal was just a flick of bright light, as the flap on a bunker was momentarily pushed aside, letting the illumination inside escape to register on Solaratov’s lens. Solaratov took a deep breath, and in another second, another brief flash came. As he watched, two men, heavily laden, moved to the sandbag berm and paused.

He watched. He waited. If only he had a rifle capable of hitting at fifteen hundred yards! He could do it and be done. But no such weapon existed in his own or his host country’s inventory. Finally a man rose, peered over the edge of the berm, then pulled himself over it and fell the three-odd feet to the ground. He snaked down the dirt slope to a gully at the base. In time, another Marine duplicated the efforts, though he was a larger, more ponderous man. He too fell to the ground, but gracelessly; then he rolled down the dirt embankment and joined his leader.

The two hesitated in their next move, watching, waiting. The leader lifted his rifle — yes, it had a scope — and searched the horizon for sign of an ambush. Making none out, he lowered the weapon and spoke to the assistant. The assistant rose unsteadily from cover, and began to move ever so slowly through the mines and the Claymores, finding gaps in the wire exactly where they should be and slipping through them. His leader followed him, and when both were free of the approach zone, the leader stepped forward and, moving at a slow, steady, hunched pace, began to work his way down the draw. Solaratov watched them until they disappeared.

They come, he thought.

He flicked off the scope, and began to slither through the grass toward his shooting position.

Around 0630 the suns began to rise. There were two of them, both orange, both shimmery, both peering over the edges of the earths, just beyond the far trees. Donny blinked hard, blinked again. His head ached.

“You okay?” Swagger hissed, lying next to him.

“I’m fine,” he lied.

“You keep blinking. What the hell is going on?”

“I’m fine,” Donny insisted, but Swagger looked back into that patch of yellow grass and undulating earth he had designated Area 1.

Of course Donny wasn’t fine. He thought of a book he once read about bomber pilots in World War II and a soldier who saw everything twice. He was seeing everything twice. But he didn’t scream “I see everything twice” like that guy did.

He had a simple concussion, that was all, not enough to sickbay him or bellyache him out of any job in the Corps — except, of course, this one. The spotter was eyes, that was all he was.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“Huh?”

“What the hell happened to you. You’re swole up like a grapefruit. Someone bang you?”

“I fell. It’s nothing.”

“Goddamn you, Fenn, this is the one fucking day in your life when you cannot have goddamn fallen. Oh, Christ, you got double vision, you got pain, you got dead spots in your vision?”

“I am fine. I am roger to go.”

“Bullshit. Goddammit.”

Swagger turned back, furiously. He lay in blazing concentration on the ridge, his sniper rifle before him, gazing through a pair of binoculars, sweeping Area 1. Donny blinked, wished he had a goddamn aspirin and put his eye to the M49 spotting scope planted in the earth before him.

Using one eye resolved the double-image problem, but not the blur. It didn’t matter that he looked only with his best eye; there was still only a smear of visual information, like a television set without an aerial, getting mostly fuzz.

The right thing to do: say, Sarge, I have blurred vision. Sorry, I’m not worth shit out here. Let’s call an abort before they get into range and—

“Shit!” said Bob. “They are moving too fast, they have panicked, they gonna be here in ten seconds.”

Donny looked back and saw four — actually two — camo boonie hats just above the fold in the earth that took them out of sight. Something was wrong. They were moving too fast, almost running. The pressure of living a few seconds in a sniper’s scope had gotten to them. They were headed in a beeline like half-milers for the hill and the comfort it supposedly provided.

“He’ll know that ain’t me. Goddammit!”

“What do we do?” said Donny, sickly aware that the situation had passed beyond his meager ability to influence, and full of images of that scared Featherstone, called to be a hero by nothing more than freak physical similarity, running to stop the shit from dribbling out his ass and the poor lieutenant, unable to yell, stuck with him, trailing behind, knowing that if he let him get away, Solaratov would take him down in a second.

“Fuck,” said Bob, bitterly. “Get back on the scope. Maybe he’ll bite anyhow.”

Hmmmm The sniper considered.

Why are they moving so fast? They have a long journey ahead of them, and they know there is much less chance of being observed if they move slowly than if they run.

He watched them, now about five hundred yards out, rushing pell-mell along the gully, almost out of sight.

Possibly they want to get into the shelter of the trees before full daylight?

No, no, not possible: they’ve never operated like that before. Therefore there are two possibilities: A) they know a man is out here and they are scared or B) they are bait, they are pretenders, and the real sniper is already out here, looking in my direction for some kind of movement, at which point he sends a bullet crashing my way.

Of the two possibilities, he had no favorites. His preference was not to overinterpret data. It was always to pick the worst possibility, assume that it was correct and counterreact.

Therefore: I am being hunted.

Therefore: where would a man be to get a good shot at me?

He turned and to the east, about three hundred yards away, made out a low undulation in the shine of the rising sun, not much, really, but just enough elevation to give a shooter a peek into this sea of grass here in the defoliated zone.

He looked at the sun: he’d be behind the sun, because he’d not want its reflection on his lens. Therefore, yes, the ridge.

But if he turned in that direction and put his own glass upon it, then he’d clearly get the reflection and the bullet. Therefore, he had to move to the north or south to get a deflection shot into them.

Slowly, he began to move.

“No, goddammit,” said Bob.

“No, what?”

“No, he ain’t biting. Not at them two birds. Shit!”

He paused, considering. “Should we pull back?”

“Don’t you get it, goddammit? We ain’t hunting him no more. He’s hunting us!”

The information settled on Donny uncomfortably. He began to feel the ooze and trickle of sweat down his sides from his pits. He glanced about. The world, which had seemed so benign just a second ago, now seemed to seethe with menace. They were alone in a sea of grass. The sniper, if Bob no longer believed him to be in Area 1, could therefore be anywhere, closing in on them even now.

No, not yet. Because if he read the fake sniper team moving too fast, he would not have had enough time to react and get out of there. He would still be an hour by low crawl away.

“Shit,” said Bob. “Which way would he go?”

“Hmmmm,” bluffed Donny, with no real idea of an answer.

“If he figures them guys is fake, and he looks around, about the only place we could be to shoot at his ass would be here, on this little ridge.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, so to git a shot at our asses, how’s he going to move? He going to try and flank us to the left or the right? What do you think?”

Donny had no idea. But then he did.

“If the treeline equals safety, then he’d go that way, wouldn’t he? To his right. He’d put himself closer to it, not closer to Dodge City.”

“But maybe that’s how he’d figure we’d think, so he’d figure it the other way?”

“Shit,” said Donny.

“No,” said Bob. “No, you’re right. Because he’s on his belly, remember? This whole thing’s gonna play out on bellies. And what he’s looking at is an hour of crawling in the hot sun versus two hours. And being a half hour from the treeline is a hell of a lot better than being three hours from it. He’d have to go to the west, right?” He sounded as if he had to convince himself.

“It would take a lot of goddamn professional discipline,” he continued, arguing with himself. “He’d have to make up his mind and cut free of his commitment to the only targets he’s got. Man, he’s got a set of nuts on him if he can make that decision.”

He seemed to fight the obvious for a bit. Then he said, “Okay, Area One ain’t it no more. Designate Area Two on your map, being the coordinates of a five hundred by five hundred grid square one thousand yards left. His left. Make it north-northeast. Give me them coordinates.”

Donny struggled to get the map out, then struggled with the arithmetic. He worked it out, coming up with a new fire mission, hoping the dancing numbers his eyes were conjuring up were correct, scrawling them in the margins of the map. He had the sinking sensation of failing a math test he’d never studied for.

“Call it in. Call it in now, so we don’t have to fuck with it later.”

“Yeah.”

Donny unleashed the aerial to vertical, then took the handset from its cradle, snapped on power, checking quickly to see that the PRC was still set on the right frequency.

“Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, this is Sierra-Bravo-Four, over.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Foxtrot-Sandman-Six, send your immediate, over.”

“Ah, Foxtrot, we’re going to go from Area One to new target, designated Area Two, over.”

“Sierra, what the hell, say again, over.”

“Ah, Foxtrot, I say again, we think our bird has flown to another pea patch, which we are designating Area Two, over.”

“Sierra, you have new coordinates, all after? Over.”

“Correct, Foxtrot. New coordinates Bravo-November-two-two-three-two-two-seven at zero-one-three-five-Zulu-July-eight-five. Break over.”

“Wilco, Romeo. I mark it,” and Foxtrot read the numbers back to him.

“Roger, Foxtrot, on our fire mission request. Out.”

“Copy here, and out, Sierra,” said the radio.

Donny clicked it off.

“Good,” said Bob, who’d been diddling with a compass. “I make a route about five hundred yards over there to a small bump. That’s where we’ll go. We should be on his flank then. Assuming he goes the way I figure he’s going.”

“Got you.”

“Get your weapon.”

Donny grabbed his rifle, which was not an M14 or even an M16 or a grease gun. Instead, because of the short order in which the job was planned, it was the only scoped rifle that could be gotten quickly, an old fat-barreled M70 Winchester target rifle, with a rattly old Unertl Scope, in .30-06, left in the Da Nang armory since the mid-sixties.

“Let’s go,” Bob said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Only bright blue sky above, and swaying stalks of the grass. The Russian crawled by dead reckoning, trusting skills it had taken him years to develop. He moved steadily, the rifle pulling ever so gently on his back. It was 0730 according to the Cosmos watch on his wrist. He wasn’t thirsty, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t scared. The only thing in his mind was this thing, right now, here. Get to elevation five hundred yards to the right. Look to the left for targets that in turn will be looking for targets to their front. Two of them: two men like himself, men used to living on their bellies, men who could crawl, who could wait through shit and piss and thirst and hunger and cold and wet. Snipers. Kill the snipers.

He came after a time to a small knoll. He had been counting as he moved: two thousand strokes. That is, two thousand half-yard pulls across the grass. His head hurt, his hands hurt, his belly hurt. He didn’t notice, he didn’t care. Two thousand strokes meant one thousand yards. He was there.

He shimmied up the knoll, really more of a knob, not four feet high. He set himself up, very carefully, flat on the crest, well shielded in a tuft of grass. He checked the sun, saw that it was no longer directly in front of him and would not bounce off his lens. He brought the Dragunov up, slipped it through the grass close to his shoulder and his hand, a smooth second’s easy capture and grasp. Then he opened his binocular case and pulled out a pair of excellent West German 25X’s. He eased himself behind their eyepieces and began to examine a world twenty-five times as large as the one he left behind.

The day was bright and, owing to the peculiarity of the vegetation in the defoliated zone and the oddities in the rise and fall of the land, he saw nothing but an ocean of yellow elephant grass, some high, some low and threadbare, marked here and there by a rill of earth. He felt as if he were alone on a raft in the Pacific: endless undulation and ripple, endless dapple of shadow, endless subtle play of color, endless, endless.

He hunted methodically, never leaping ahead, never listening to hunches or obeying impulses. His instinct and brain told him the Marines would be five hundred yards ahead of him, on an oblique. They would seek elevation; their rifle barrels would be hard and flat and perfect against the vertical organization of the world. He found the low ridge where by all rights they should have been sited, and began to explore it slowly. The 25X lenses resolved the world beautifully; he could see every twig, every buried stone, every stunted tree, every stump that had survived the chemical agent all those years ago, every small hill. Everything except Marines.

He put the glasses down. A little flicker of panic licked through him.

Not there. They are not there. Where are they, then? Why aren’t they there?

He considered falling back, trying another day. It was becoming an uncontrollable situation.

No, he told himself. No, just stay still, stay patient. They think you are over there, and you are over here. After a bit their curiosity will get the best of them. They are Americans: hardy, active people with active minds, attracted to sensations, actions, that sort of thing. They haven’t the long-term commitment to a cause.

He will move, he thought. He was looking for me, I was not there, he will move.

Blackness.

Somewhere in his peripheral, a flash of black.

Solaratov did not turn to stare. No, he kept his eyes where they were, fighting the temptation to crank them around and refocus. Let his unconscious mind, far more effective in these matters, scan for them.

Blackness again.

He had it.

To the right, almost three hundred yards away. Of course. He’s flanking me to my right.

Slowly, he turned his head; slowly, he brought up the binoculars.

Nothing. Movement. Nothing. Movement.

He struggled with the focus.

The unnatural blackness was a face. The Marine sniper had blackened it at night, for his long crawl into position; he’d shed his black clothes, and now wore combat dapple camouflage, but he had made a mistake. He had forgotten to take off his face paint. Now, black against the dun and yellow of the elephant grass, it stood out just the slightest bit.

Solaratov watched, fascinated. The man low-crawled two strokes, then froze. He waited a second or two, then low-crawled another two. His face, its features masked by the paint, was a study in warrior’s concentration: tense, drawn, almost cracked with intensity. His rifle was on his back, wearing a tangle of strips for its own camouflage.

He tried to deny it, but Solaratov felt a flare of pleasure as intense as anything in his life.

He laid the binoculars down, and raised the rifle to his shoulder, finding the right position, rifle to bone to earth, finding the grip, finding the trigger, finding the eyepiece.

Swagger crawled through his scope. The crosshairs quartered his head. The Russian’s thumb took the safety off and he expelled half a breath. His finger began its slow squeeze of the trigger.

“Goddamn,” Bob said.

“What is it?” Donny said behind him.

“It’s thinned out here. Goddamn. Less cover.”

Donny could see nothing. He was lost in elephant grass; it was in his ears, his nose, in the folds of his flesh. The ants were feasting on him. He heard the dry buzz of flies drawn to the delicious odor of his sweat and blood — he’d been cut a hundred or so times by the blades of the grass.

Ahead of him were the two soles of Bob’s jungle boots.

“Shit,” Bob said. “I don’t like this one goddamn bit.”

“We could just call in the Night Hag. She’d chew the shit out of all this. We’d pop smoke so she wouldn’t whack us up.”

“And if he ain’t here, he knows we got him, and he’s double careful or he don’t come back at all and we never know why he came and we don’t git us a Dragunov. Nah.”

He paused.

“You still got that Model Seventy?”

“I do.”

“All right. I want you to reorient yourself to the right. You squirt on ahead; see that little hummock or something?”

“Yeah.”

“You set up on that, you scope it out for me. If you say it’s okay, I’m going to shimmy on over there, to where it’s thick again. I’ll set up over there and cover for you. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” said Donny. He squirmed around, took a deep breath and wiggled ahead.

“Damn, boy, I hope he ain’t in earshot. You’re grunting louder than a goddamn pig.”

“This is hard work,” Donny said, and it was.

He got up to the hummock, peered over it. He saw nothing.

“Go to the M49?”

“Nah. Don’t got time. Just check it with your Unertl.”

Donny slipped his eye behind the scope, which was a long, thin piece of metal tubing suspended in an odd frame. When you zeroed this old thing, it had external controls, which meant the whole scope moved, propelled this way and that by screws for windage and elevation. It had been assembled sometime back in the early forties, but rumor said it had killed more than its share of Japs, North Koreans and VC. It wasn’t even a 7.62mm NATO but the old Springfield cartridge, the long .30-06.

The optics were great. He scanned the grass as far as he could see, and saw no sign of human presence. But the blur had not gone away. He was aware he was missing fine detail. He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers, and nothing improved. No, nothing out there, nothing that he could see.

“It looks clear.”

“I didn’t ask how it looked. I asked how it was.”

“Clear, clear.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “You keep eyeballing.”

The sergeant began to creep outward, this time at an even slower rate than before. He crawled slowly, ever so slowly, halting each two pulls forward, going still.

Donny returned to his scope. Back and forth, he swept the likely shooting spots, seeing nothing. It was clear. This was beginning to seem ridiculous. Maybe they were out here in the middle of nothing, acting like complete idiots. The bees buzzed, the flies ate, the dragonflies skittered. He couldn’t keep his eye behind the scope for very long because it fell completely out of focus. He had to blink, look away. When would the call come from Bob that he was all right?

The trigger rocked back, stacked up and was on the very cusp of firing.

Where is the other one?

His finger came off the trigger.

There were two. He had to kill them both. If he fired, the other might take him or, seeing his partner with his head blown open, simply slide back farther into the grass and disappear. He’d call in air, possibly, and Solaratov would have to get out of the area.

Where was the other one?

He looked up from the scope. He realized he could see the sniper because for some odd reason, the grass was thinner there. The other one would be nearby, covering, as he was vulnerable. He would be vulnerable for only a few more seconds.

A plan formed in Solaratov’s mind: Find the spotter. Kill the spotter. Come back and kill the sniper. It was possible because of the semiautomatic nature of the weapon and the fact that the distance was under three hundred meters.

He returned to the scope and very carefully began to crank backward, looking for another black face against the dun and the tan of the vertical thickets of stalks. He came back a bit more, no, nothing, nothing … and there! An arm! The arm led to a body, which led to the form of another prone man hunched over a rifle — he took a gasp of air, a little spurt of pleasure — and then continued up the trunk to the torso to discover that it was indeed a man but he was not a spotter, he was another sniper, and his rifle was pointing exactly at him. At Solaratov.

The man fired.

Donny looked up from his scope. His head ached. When would the call come from Bob? God, he needed an aspirin. He glanced about, seeing nothing, only the endless grass.

A dragonfly flashed close by. It was odd how their wings somehow caught the sunlight and threw a reflection just like—

Donny went back to the scope.

He was so close!

The sniper was less than three hundred yards away — or rather, the snipers, for there was a smear of enemy, blurry in the haze of Donny’s concussion, well sunk in the grass. The man was bent into his rifle, moving slowly, tracking, and with a start, Donny realized he had located Swagger.

Kill him! he ordered himself. Shoot! Do it now!

The crosshairs seemed to quarter the head. He squeezed the trigger.

He lost his sight picture as the pressure increased. He squeezed harder. Nothing happened.

The safety, the safety. He reached for where it should have been, that nub in front of the trigger, but it wasn’t there. That’s where it was on an M14. On an M70, it was up on the bolt housing. He took his eye off the scope, looked for the flange that was the safety, and snapped it forward. He ducked to the scope, saw the man had turned and the rifle’s muzzle was coming … right at him.

He jerked at the trigger and the rifle fired.

Bob crawled forward. Only a few more yards and then he was into the higher grass and—

The shot, so unexpected, sounded like a drumbeat against his own ears. He froze — lost it, the great Bob Lee Swagger — and had a moment of twisted panic.

What? Huh? Oh, Christ!

Then he picked himself up, ran like a son of a bitch for the higher grass, waiting to get nailed and trying to sort it out.

“He’s there! I saw him!” Donny screamed, and instantly from three hundred yards out, an answering shot sounded. It struck near Donny, blowing a big puff of dirt into the air.

Donny fired back almost instantly and Bob looked, saw the puff of dust where his shot hit.

“Get down!” he screamed, now terrified that Donny would take a shot in the head. He dove into the brush, righted himself, squirmed until he could see the dusty bank.

He threw the rifle to his shoulder, put his eye to the glass and saw … nothing.

“He’s there!” Donny screamed again, but Bob could see nothing. Then a shot cracked out, seeming to come from the left, and he swung his rifle just a bit, saw some dust in the air from the disturbance of muzzle blast, and fired. He cycled, fired again, fast as he was able to, not seeing a target but hoping one was there.

“Get down!” he screamed again. “Get down and call Foxtrot for air!”

He worked the bolt, but could not see the sniper in the dust that floated in the grass in the area Donny had identified. Where was he? Where was he?

Donny edged back a bit and the second shot blasted the earth just a few inches from his face. Ow! The dirt blossomed as if a cherry bomb had detonated, and a hundred tiny flecks of grit bit him; he blinked, slid back even farther. He could hear Bob screaming but he couldn’t make the words out. He thought: the radio. Call air. Get air.

But then Bob fired, fired again, and it filled Donny with courage. He squirmed up over the other side of the hummock, going to a left-handed shooting position. He couldn’t throw the bolt from here, not easily, but a lot less of him stuck out, and that pleased him.

Where is he? Where are you, motherfucker?

Through the scope, he saw nothing, just dust hanging in the air, the slow wobble of grass signifying recent commotion but nothing to shoot at all.

He scanned left and right a few yards, didn’t see a damned thing. He had this idea that he, not Bob, would be the one who brought the Russian down. Images from a forgotten boyhood book played suddenly through his mind: that would be like Lieutenant May getting the Red Baron instead of salty old pro Roy Brown. A gush of excitement came to him and a spurt of intense pleasure.

Where was he?

We can take him under fire from two sources, he realized. We can take this motherfucker.

“Air!” he heard Bob scream.

Yes, air. Get the Night Hag in here, smoke this fucker, blow him to—

On a wide scan, he saw him, much farther back, crawling away desperately.

Got you!

He put the crosshairs on the bobbing head, not a shape so much as a suggestion in the blur of his vision. He tried to find the center, quartered it with the scope, felt in supreme control, felt the trigger rock against his finger, stack up just a tiny bit and then surprise the hell out of him when the shot occurred.

The man’s rifle leaped, his hat popped off and he rolled over into the grass, still.

“I got him!” he screamed. “I hit him!”

“Air,” Bob screamed. “Get us air!”

Donny let the rifle slide away, drew the PRC off his back and hit the on switch.

“Foxtrot, this is Sierra-Bravo, flash, I say again, flash, flash. We have contact, over.”

“Sierra-Bravo, what are your needs? Are you calling air, Sierra-Bravo?”

Suddenly Bob was next to him, snatching the handset from him.

“Foxtrot, get us Night Hag superfast. I’m designating Area Two for the strike, bring in Night Hag, I say again, immediate, Area Two, Area Two.”

“She is coming in, Sierra-Bravo; watch your butt, over.”

“I got him!” Donny said.

“I am popping smoke to designate my position for Night Hag, over,” said Bob. He grabbed a smoker off his belt, yanked the pin and tossed it. It spun and hissed and torrents of green smoke began to pour out of it.

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, this is Night Hag, I eyeball green smoke, over,” a new voice on the net declared, even as they heard the roar of engines rising.

“That is correct, Night Hag, we are buttoning up, out.”

Bob pulled Donny down and close to the hummock.

A shadow passed over them and Donny looked up and saw the great plane as it flashed overhead, began to bank. It seemed huge and predatory, its engines beating at the air. It was pitch black, an angel of death, and it banked to the right, raising a wing, presenting the side of its fuselage to the earth it was about to devastate.

The eight mini-guns fired simultaneously, tongues of gobbling flame streaking from the black flank, the sound not of guns firing quickly, but just a steady, screaming roar.

“Jesus,” said Donny. He thought of worlds ending, of the end of civilization, of Hiroshima. This sucker brought heat. He couldn’t imagine it.

The thousands of rounds poured from the guns to the earth, each fifth one a tracer, and the guns fired so fast it seemed they fired nothing but tracers. The bullets didn’t strike the earth so much as disintegrate it. They pulverized, raising clouds of destruction and debris. The air filled with darkness as if the weather itself had turned to gunfire. It was a locust plague of lead that devoured that upon which it settled. Earlier versions of this baby had been called Puff the Magic Dragon, but they only had one gun. With eight, Night Hag could put a mythological hurt on the world. She just ate up Area 2 for what seemed like years but was in reality just a few seconds. She had only thirty seconds worth of shooting time, she ate so fast.

The plane pivoted as if tethered, the roar of its engines huge as it curled above them, then again its eight guns fired and again the ground shook and a blizzard of debris flew from the earth. Then it straightened out, climbed slightly and began to describe a holding pattern.

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, that’s my best trick, over.”

“Night Hag, should be sufficient, good work. Foxtrot, you there, over?”

“Sierra, this is Foxtrot.”

“Foxtrot, let’s move the teams out. I think we got him. I think we nailed him.”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four, Wilco and good job. Out.”

Huu Co, senior colonel, and the sappers watched the airplane hunt the sniper from the relative safety of the treeline. It was quite a spectacle: the huge plane wheeling, the thunderous streams of fire it brought to the defoliated zone, the rending of the earth where the bullets struck.

“Oh, the Human Noodle will be turned to the human sieve by that thing,” one of the men said.

“Only the Americans would hunt a single man with an airplane,” said another.

“They would send an airplane to fix a toilet,” someone else shouted, to the laughter of some others.

But Huu Co understood that the sniper was dead, that the outlaw Swagger had once again prevailed. No man could withstand the barrage, and what came later, when, in the immediate aftermath of the airplane, when its dust still hung in the air, five jeeps suddenly burst from the fort and came crashing across the field, stopping right where two American snipers suddenly emerged from hiding a little to the east of the devastated area.

The men began to work methodically with flamethrowers. The squirts of flame spurted out, and where they touched, they lit the grass. The flames rose and spread, and burned furiously, as black, oily smoke rolled upward.

“The Human Noodle has now been roasted,” someone said.

The flames burned for hours, out of control, rolling across the prairie of the defoliated zone, blazing vividly, as more and more men from the post came out in patrols, set up a line, and began to follow the flames. Soon enough, a flight of helicopters flew in from the east and began to hover over the field. They were hunting for a body.

“They will probably eat him if they can find him.”

“There won’t be enough left. They could put him in soup.”

Though the Russian was a chilly little number, Huu Co still had a moment’s melancholy over his fate. The airplane made war so totally; i, was the most feared weapon in the American arsenal of superweapons. How horrible to be hunted by such a flying beast and to feel the world disintegrating around you as the shells exploded. He shivered a bit.

The Americans picked through the blasted field for some time, until nearly nightfall, at one time finding something that excited them very much — Huu Co watched through his binoculars, but could not make it out — until finally retreating.

“Brother Colonel, shall we retreat?” his sergeant wished to know. “There is clearly nothing left for us here.”

“No,” said the colonel. “We wait. I don’t know for how long, but we wait.”

It was a lance corporal from First Squad who found the Dragunov.

“Whooie!” he shouted. “Lookie here. Gook sniper rifle.”

“Corporal, bring that over here,” called Brophy. “Good work.”

The man, pleased to be singled out, came over with his trophy and turned it over to Brophy.

“There’s your rifle,” Bob said to the CIA man, Nichols.

The command team crowded around the new weapon, something no one had seen before. Like a kid unwrapping a Christmas present, Nichols wrapped the camouflage tape off the weapon.

“The legendary SVD. That’s the first one we’ve recovered,” said Nichols. “Congratulations, Swagger. That’s not a small thing.”

Donny just looked at it, feeling nothing, his head pounding from the stench of the gasoline and the oily smoke. It was a crude-looking thing, not at all sleek and well machined.

“Looks like an AK got stuck in a tractor pull,” Bob said. He handled the weapon, looked it over, worked the action a few times, looked through the scope, then became bored with it and passed it on to other, more eager hands.

He moved away from the crowd, and watched with narrowed eyes and utter stillness as the Marines probed the burn zone while others set up flank security, under the CO’s direction. Meanwhile Hueys and Cobra gunships hovered about the perimeter.

“Do you think he got away?” Donny finally asked him.

“Don’t know. Them flames could have burned him up. Six or seven twenty-mm shells could have blown him to pieces, and the flames charred what meat was left off the bone. He could be indistinguishable from the landscape, I suppose. I just don’t know. I didn’t see any blood trails.”

“Wouldn’t the flames have burned the blood?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I’m pretty sure I hit him.”

“I think you did too. Otherwise, I’d be a dead monkey. I’m going to put you in for another medal.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You saved my bacon,” said Bob. He seemed somehow genuinely shaken, as if he’d somehow learned today that he could die. Donny had never seen him quite like this.

“Man, I could use me a bottle of bourbon tonight,” the sergeant added. “I could use it real bad.”

Donny nodded. He had invested totally in the idea that he had shot the white sniper. He re-created it in his mind: the crosshairs on the head, the jerk of the trigger, the squirm of the man as if hit, the flying hat, the leap and twist of his rifle, then stillness. It felt like a hit, somehow. Everything about it felt good. But the rifle hadn’t been found in the rough area where memory told him the sniper had been when he’d taken his shot.

And, he had the terrifying feeling, unconfessed to anyone, that maybe in the blur of his concussion — gone now — he’d zeroed incorrectly and killed a phantasm, not the real thing. He couldn’t bring himself to express this, but it filled him with the blackest dread.

“I don’t see how he could have gotten away,” Donny said. “Nothing could stand up to it and nobody’s that lucky.”

“No way he could have stood up to it. If he was in the middle of it, he was wasted, no doubt about it at all. But — was he in the middle of it?”

That was the question and Donny had no answer. He and he alone had seen the sniper, but by the time the plane was done chewing the world up, and he looked again, that world had changed: it was tattered, eviscerated; the grass was flattened; dust hung in the air. Then the flamethrower teams worked it over, and it burned and burned. Hard to figure now exactly where he’d been, what he’d seen, where it had been.

“Well, we’ll see,” said Bob. “Meanwhile, you come by tonight and we’ll have us a drink or two.”

Swagger was drunk. He was so drunk the world made no sense at all to him, and he liked it that way. The bourbon was like a nurse’s hand on his shoulder in the middle of the night, when he awoke screaming in the Philippines after having gotten hit on his first tour, really messed up through the upper lung. The nurse had touched him and said, “There, there, there.”

Now the bourbon said, “There, there, there.”

“Fucking good stuff,” Bob said. “The fucking-A best.”

“It is,” said Donny, smoking a giant cigar he’d gotten from somewhere. There were some others too: Brophy and Nichols of the CIA, Captain Feamster, the always mild XO, the company gunny — Firebase Dodge City’s inner circle, as it was, drunk as skunks in the intel bunker. Somewhere Mick Jagger was blaring out over an eight-track, the one about satisfaction.

“Well, we got some satisfaction today, goddamn,” said Feamster, an amiable professional who would never make bird colonel.

“We did, we did,” confirmed the XO, who would make brigadier, because he agreed with everything that was said by anybody above him in rank.

A couple of other sergeants made faces at the XO’s fawning, but only Swagger caught it.

“Goddamn right,” he said to make the officers go away, and after a bit they did.

He took another taste. Prairie fire. Crackling. The sense of merciful blur; the world again full of possibility.

Now it was Nichols’s turn to pay homage.

The CIA officer wandered over shyly, and said, “You know, it was a great day.”

“We didn’t get no head on the wall,” said Bob.

“Oh, the Russian’s dead, all right,” said Nichols. “Nobody could live through that. No, but what I’m talking about is the rifle.”

The rifle? thought Donny.

Oh, yeah. The rifle.

“You know how long we’ve been looking for that rifle?” Nichols turned and looked at Donny, who puffed on his cigar, took another swallow of bourbon and answered with a goofy smile.

“Well,” said Nichols, “we’ve been looking since 1958, when Evgenie Dragunov drew up the plans at the Izhevsk Machine Factory. Some of our analysts said it would revolutionize their capacities. But others said, no, it was nothing.”

“Looks like a piece of Russian crap to me,” said Bob. “I don’t think them guys know shit about building a precision rifle. They ain’t got no Townie Whelans or no Warren Pages or no P. O. Ackleys. They just got tractor drivers in monkey suits.”

Donny couldn’t tell if Swagger, out of some obscure sense of need, was putting on the earnest, ambitious intelligence officer or not.

“Well, whatever,” said Nichols. “Now we don’t have to wonder. Now we’ll be able to tell. And do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“Nothing here. This shit is over and it never meant shit to the Russians except as a way to bleed us dry. They wouldn’t even send Dragunovs to the ’Nam, that’s how low on the priority list it was. The Dragunov was a higher priority than Vietnam to them.”

This didn’t play well with Swagger, and a darkness came over his face, but the CIA man didn’t notice and kept on yapping.

“No, Russia’s interested in Europe. That’s where all the Russian divisions are. Now, with the Dragunovs coming down to platoon level in the next few years, and reaching the other Warsaw Bloc countries after that, what does that mean for our tactics? What level of precision fire can they bring against us if they move? Are they committing to sniper warfare in a big way? That’ll have a great deal to do with our dispositions, our troop strength, our alignments, our relationships to our allies and the general thrust of NATO policy over the next few years. Dammit, you gave it to us! No one could get one, no one could buy one, they were nowhere except under lock and key, and old Bob Lee Swagger goes out in the bad bush and brings one back alive. Goddamn, it was a good day!” His eyes were bright and happy. He wasn’t even drunk.

“Right now, it’s been shipped priority flash to Aberdeen in Maryland for thorough testing at the Army Weapons Lab. They’ll wring it out like you won’t believe. They’ll make that rifle sing!”

“A real feather in your cap,” said Donny.

“A victory for our side. One of damn few of late. You did a hell of a job, Swagger. I’ll see this goes into your record. I’ll see phone calls are made, the right people are informed. You are a piece of action, my friend. But I will say one damned thing. You must have really pissed them off if they were willing to engage you with a Dragunov. Man, they want you all the ways there are. If you want, I can let it be known your expertise is invaluable and we can get you on the next flight to Aberdeen, Sergeant, on that team. No need to get iced, if they try again.”

“I got a few months yet till my DEROS, Mr. Nichols. It’s just fine, thanks.”

“Think it over. Chew on it in your mind. You could be TDY Aberdeen Proving Ground the day after tomorrow. Baltimore? The Block? Those beauties up there? Blaze Starr? A damn fine town, Baltimore. A man could have himself some fun there, you know. A hell of a lot finer than Dodge City, I Corps, RSV-fucking-N!”

“Mr. Nichols, I extended and I have a tour to serve. I got four months and days till DEROS.”

“You are hard-core, Swagger. The hardest. The old Corps, the hardest, the best. Well, thanks, and God bless. You are a piece of action!”

He wandered away.

“You should do that,” said Donny.

“Yeah, clap in Baltimore and hanging out with a bunch of soldiers with long hippie hair and unshined boots. No thanks. Not for me, goddammit.”

“Well, at least we’re heroes,” said Donny.

“Today. They’ll forget all about it in a few hours, when they sober up. That’s a headquarters man for you. Your basic REMF.”

He took another deep swallow of the bourbon.

“You sure you should be drinking that much?”

“I can hold my liquor. That’s something the Swagger boys was always good at.”

“Boy, I’ll say.”

“You know, I want to tell you something,” he finally said. “Your gal. She is, goddammit, the prettiest goddamn woman I ever saw. You are one lucky boy.”

“I am,” said Donny, grinning like a monkey, taking a great slug of bourbon, then a draught on the cigar, expelling the smoke like vapors of chemwar.

“Here, I got something I want to show you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’ve showed you the photo. Look at this.”

He reached into his pocket and drew out a folded sheaf of heavy paper and delicately unfolded it.

“It was that Trig guy. He was an artist. He did it.”

Bob looked at it unsteadily in the flickering light. It was a creamy piece of paper, very carefully torn along one edge. But it wasn’t the paper that caught Bob’s eyes, it was the drawing itself. Bob didn’t know a goddamned thing about art, but whoever this bird was, he had something. He really caught Donny in a few lines; it was as if he loved Donny. Somehow you could feel the attraction. The girl was next to him and the artist’s feelings toward her were more complex. She was beautiful, hopelessly beautiful. A girl in a million. He felt a little part of himself die, knowing he’d never have a woman like that; it just wasn’t in the cards. He’d be alone all his life, and maybe he preferred it that way.

“Hell of a nice picture,” said Bob, handing it back.

“It is. He really got her. I think he was in love with her too. Everybody who sees Julie falls in love with her. I am so lucky.”

“And you know what?” said Swagger.

“No, uh-uh.”

“She is a damned lucky woman, too. She’s got you. You are the best. You are going to have a happy, wonderful life back in the world.”

Bob lifted the bottle, took two deep swallows and handed the bottle to Donny.

“You’re a hero,” said Donny. “You’ll have a great life, too.”

“I am finished. When you opened up on that bird, it come to me: you don’t want to be here, you want to live. You gave me my life back, you son of a bitch. Goddamn, I owe no man not a thing. But I owe you beaucoup, partner.”

“You are drunk.”

“So I am. And I got one more thing for you. You come over here and listen to me, Pork, away from these lifer bastards.”

Donny was shocked. He had never heard the term “lifer” from Bob’s lips before.

Bob drew him outside.

“This ain’t the booze talking, okay? This is me, this is your friend, Bob Lee Swagger. This is Sierra-Bravo. You reading me clear, over?”

“I have you, Sierra, over.”

“Okay. Here it is. I have thought this out. Guess what? The war is over for us.”

“What?”

“It’s over. I’m telling you straight. We go out on three missions a week, see, but we don’t go nowhere. We go out into the treeline and we lay up for a couple of days. We don’t take no shots, we don’t go on no treks, no long wanders; we don’t set up no ambushes. No, sir, we lay up in the tall grass and relax, and come in, like all the other patrols. You think I don’t know that shit is going on? Nobody in this shit hole is fighting the war and nobody is fighting back in Da Nang. S-2 Da Nang don’t give a shit, Captain Feamster don’t give a shit, USMC HQ RSVN don’t give a shit, WES PAC don’t give a shit, USMC HQ Henderson Hall don’t give a shit. Nobody wants to die, that’s what it’s all about. It’s over, and if we get fucking wasted, we are just throwing our lives away. For nothing, you hear what I’m saying? We done our bit. It’s time to think about number one. You hear what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, you’ll do that till I DEROS out of here back to the world, then you’ll go out on your own, and get more kills and go back to your job. You’ll have to because by then the gooks will be getting very fucking bold and you’ll be afraid they’ll hit this place and take all these worthless assholes down, and you’ll get hosed for them, and if that isn’t the biggest waste there ever was, I don’t know what is.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Yeah, you will. I know you.”

“No way at all.”

“All right, I’ll do this on one condition.”

“I’m your goddamned sergeant. You can’t ‘one condition’ me.”

“On this one I can. That is: I go to Nichols, tell him you want on that Aberdeen team, but you got stuff to do first, and you can’t go till a certain date. On the date I DEROS, you go to Aberdeen. Is that fair? That’s fair! Goddamn, that’s fair, that’s what I want!”

“You young college smart-ass hippie bastard.”

“I’ll go get him now. Okay? I want to hear you make that statement to him, then I’ll do this.”

Bob’s eyes narrowed.

“You ain’t never outsmarted me before.”

“And maybe I won’t ever again, but by God, this is the night I do! Ha! Got you, Swagger! At last. Got you.”

Swagger spat into the dust, took a swallow. Then he looked at Donny and goddamn if the silliest goddamn thing didn’t happen. He smiled.

“Go get Mr. CIA,” he said.

“Wahoo!” shrieked Donny, and went off to find the man.

The days passed. The sappers relaxed and treated the mission as a leave, a time for restoring hard-pressed spirits, catching up on correspondence with loved ones, renewing acquaintanceship with political and patriotic principles that could be lost in the heat of combat. They lounged in the tunnel complex on the edge of the defoliated zone two thousand yards from Dodge City, enjoying the amenities.

At night, Huu Co sent them on probing patrols, nothing aggressive, just simply to make certain the Americans at Dodge City weren’t up to anything. He directed: no engagements, not at this time. So the tiny men in the dun-colored uniforms with the patience of biblical scholars simply waited and watched. Waited for what?

“Senior Colonel, the Human Noodle is not coming back. No man could survive that. We had best return to base camp and a new mission. The Fatherland needs us.”

“My instructions,” Huu Co told his sergeant, “are from the highest elements of the government, and they are to support and sustain our Russian comrade in any way possible. Until I determine that mission is no longer viable, we shall stay.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Long live the Fatherland.”

“Long live the Fatherland.”

But privately, he had grave doubts. It was true: no man could stand up to the intensity of the air attack with those fast-firing guns, and no man, particularly, could stand up to the flames from the American flamethrowers, a ghastly weapon that he believed they would never use against enemies of their own racial grouping.

And of course this: another failure.

Not his, surely, but failure has a way of spreading itself out and tainting all who are near it. He had led the mission, he had helped plan it, he had organized it. Was his heart not pure enough? Was he still infected with the virus of Western vanity? Was there some character defect that attended to him and him alone that caused him to continually misjudge, to make the wrong decision at the wrong time?

He rededicated himself to the study of Marxism and the principles of revolution. He read Mao’s book for the four hundredth time, and Lao-tzu’s for the thousandth. He buried his grief and fear in study. His eyes ate the hard little knots of words; his mind grappled with their deeper meanings, their subtexts, their contexts, their linkages to past and present. He was a hard taskmaster to himself. He gave himself no mercy, and refused to take painkillers for his crippled hand and its caul of burn. Only his dreams betrayed him. Only in his dreams was he a traitor.

He dreamed of Paris. He dreamed of red wine, the excitement of the world’s most beautiful city, his own youth, the hope and joy of a brilliant future. He dreamed of crooked streets, the smell of cheese and pastry, the taste of Gauloises and pommes frites; he dreamed of the imperial grandeur of the place, of its sense of empire, the confidence with which its monuments blazed.

It was on one such night, as he tossed on his pallet, his semiconscious mind rife with bright images out of Lautrec, that the hands of a whore imploring him to her bed became the hands of his sergeant, beckoning him from sleep.

He rose. It was dark; candles had burned low. The man led him from his chamber, down earthen tunnels, to the mess hall. There, in the dark, a squat figure sat hunched over a table, eating with unbelievable gusto.

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

It was the white sniper.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

They 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.

Solaratov 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.

The 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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The 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.

That held true for his gradual setup as well. He began with the sandbags, examining them minutely for leaks, for some alteration of their density. Finding none, he convinced himself he was satisfied, and made the sappers delicately transport them to the treeline. There he had rigged a kind of harness, a flat piece of wood to be tied to his back when he was prone, upon which the sandbags themselves were to be tied.

“I hope he isn’t crushed,” said Huu Co, genuinely alarmed.

“He could suffocate,” said his sergeant.

Ever so delicately, weighted down under the nearly one hundred pounds of sand — two forty-pound bags and a ten-pound bag — the Russian began his long crawl to the shooting position, which was a good two thousand yards from the tunnel complex far from the burned zone. It took six hours — six back-breaking, degrading hours of slow, steady crawl through the grass, suffering not merely from back pain but from the crushing fear of his utter helplessness. A man under a hundred pounds of sand, crawling into enemy territory. What could be more ridiculous, more pathetic, more poignant? Any idiot with a rifle could have killed him. He had no energy, his senses were dulled by the pain in his back and the breathless smash of the huge bags on his back. He crawled, he crawled, he crawled, seemingly forever.

He made it, somehow, and crawled back, just before the first light of dawn, looking more dead than alive. He slept all day, and all the next day, because his back still ached.

On the third day, again he crawled, this time with the rifle and a batch of his specially constructed cartridges. It was much easier. He made it to the small hill well before dawn and had plenty of time to set up.

He loaded the rifle, tried to find some sense of relaxation, tried to will himself into the sort of trance he knew he needed. But he never could quite relax. He felt tense, twitchy. Twice, noises startled him. His imagination began to play tricks on him: he saw the great black plane hovering overhead, and felt the earth open up as it fired. He remembered crawling desperately, his mind livid with fear, as the world literally exploded behind him. You could not crawl through such madness; there was no “through.” He crawled and crawled, the explosions ringing in his ears, dumbstruck that he had chosen to crawl in the right direction. And what was the right direction?

“If he’s out there, he’s dead now,” he heard one Marine say to another.

“Nothing could come through that,” said the other.

They were so close! They were ten feet away, chatting like workers on a lunch break!

Solaratov willed himself to nothingness. Like an animal he ceased to consciously exist. He may not even have been breathing, not as normal humans would define it, anyhow. His pulse nearly stopped; his body temp dropped; his eyes closed to slits. He gave himself up to the earth totally and let himself sink into it and would not let his body move a millimeter over the long day. Marines walked all around him, once so close he could see the jungle boots. He smelled the acrid stench of the burning gasoline when they used the flamethrowers and he sensed first their joy, when they recovered the rifle he had abandoned in panic, and then their irritation, when no body itself could be located. The body was right there, almost under their feet; it still breathed!

Movement!

The flash of movement recalled him from that day to this one. Through his binoculars he could see movement just behind the berm in the predawn light, though it was so far away. The rifle was set into the bags, firmly moored, sunk into sand so dense and unyielding it was almost concrete, the heel of its butt wedged just as tightly into the smaller bag. He squirmed behind it, felt himself pouring himself around the rifle, not moving it a hair, so perfectly was it placed. His eye went to the eyepiece.

Again, he saw movement: a face, peering out?

Up, down, then up again, then down.

His finger touched the trigger, his heart hammered.

Here, after so long, the long hunt was over.

No.

He watched them rise, the shooter, then the spotter, rolling over the sandbag berm so far away, gathering themselves in a gulch at its bottom, and then heading out.

Infinite regret poured through him.

You were afraid to shoot.

No, he told himself. You were not able today. You were not in the zone. You could not have made the shot.

It was true.

Better to let them go and gamble that sometime soon he’d have another opportunity than to rush and destroy all the work he’d invested and all the hopes and responsibilities riding on his shoulders.

No. You did the right thing.

Not months anymore. Not even days. Donny was down to a day.

One more day.

And he would spend it processing out. Then a wake-up, and the chopper would arrive at 0800 the day after tomorrow and at 0815 it would leave and he would be on it. He’d be back to Da Nang in an hour, processed out by 1600, on the freedom bird by nightfall, home eighteen hours later.

DEROS.

Date of estimated return from overseas. How many had dreamed of it, had fantasized about it? For his generation, the generation of men sent to do a duty they didn’t quite understand, and that made them especially hated in their own country, this was as good as it got. There would be no parades, no monuments, no magazine covers, no movies, no one waiting to call them heroes. You only got DEROS, your little piece of heaven. You earned it the hard way, and it wasn’t much, but that’s what you got.

What a feeling! He’d never felt anything quite like it before, so powerful and consuming. It went deep into his bones; it touched his soul. No joy was so pure. The last time, after getting hit, there’d been only the fear and the pain and the long months in a crappy hospital. No DEROS.

This time, within twenty-four hours: DEROS.

“Hey, Fenn?”

He looked up. It was Mahoney, the ringleader in the anti-Swagger mutiny, under whose auspices he’d gotten kicked in the head by somebody.

“Oh, yeah,” said Donny, rising from his cot.

“Hey, look, I wanted to come by and tell you I was sorry about that thing that happened. You’re an okay guy. It turned out all right. Shake my hand on it?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Donny, who always found it impossible to hold a grudge.

He took the other lance corporal’s hand, shook it.

“How’s Featherstone?”

“He’s cool. He’s down to one and days; he’ll rotate back to the world. Me, too. Well, two and days, then my ass is on the golden bird.”

“You may not even have to make it that far. I hear the ARVN are going to take over Dodge City, and you guys’ll be rotating out early. You won’t even have to see your DEROS.”

“Yeah, I heard that too, but I don’t want to count on anything the Marine Corps wants to give me. I’m still locked onto DEROS. I make DEROS and I’m home free. Back to city streets, NYC, the Big Apple.”

“Cool,” said Donny, “you’ll have a good time.”

“I’d ask you what it felt like to be so short and I’d buy you a beer, but I know you want to go to bed and make tomorrow come earlier. All that processing out.” It was company policy that no man went into the field on his last day.

“Well, sometime back in the world, you can buy me a beer and we’ll have a big laugh over this one.”

“We will. You’re staying in, right? You’re not going out with Swagger tomorrow.”

“Huh?”

“You’re not going out with Swagger tomorrow?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw him hunched up with Feamster and Brophy and a couple of the lifer NCOs in the S-2 bunker. Like he was going on a mission.”

“Shit,” said Donny.

“Hey, you sit tight. If they didn’t ask you, you don’t got to go. Just be cool. Time to take the golden bird back to the land of honeys and Milky Ways.”

“Yeah.”

“Go in peace, bro.”

“Peace,” said Donny, and Mahoney dipped out of the hootch.

Donny lay back. He checked his watch. It was 2200 hours. He tried to forget. He tried to relax. Everything was cool, everything was calm, he was home free.

But what the fuck was Swagger up to?

It ate at him. What deal was this?

It bothered him.

He can’t go out. He promised.

Shit.

He rose, slipped out the hootch and walked across the compound to the dark bunker of the S-2 shop, where he found Bob, Feamster and Brophy bent over maps.

“Sir, permission to enter,” he said, entering.

“Fenn, what the hell are you doing here? You should be checking your gear to turn in to supply tomorrow,” said Feamster.

“Is something going on with Sierra-Bravo-Four?”

“Sierra-Bravo-Four is going back to the world; that’s what’s going on with Sierra-Bravo-Four,” said Bob.

“Looks like a mission briefing to me.”

“It ain’t nothing that concerns you.”

“That’s a map. I see route markers pinned on it and coordinates penciled in. You going on a job, Sierra-Bravo?”

“Negative,” said Bob.

“You are too,” said Donny.

“It ain’t a goddamn thing. Now, you git your young ass out of here, got that? You got work you should be doing. This ain’t no time for screwing off, even if you’re down to a day and a wake-up.”

“What is it?” Donny said.

“Nothing. No big deal.”

“Sir?”

“Sergeant,” said Feamster, “you ought to tell him.”

“It’s a rinky-dink recon, that’s all, a one-man thing. We haven’t covered the north in a couple of weeks. They could have infiltrated in, gone through the trees and have set up in the north, a few klicks out. I’m just going to mosey out to see if I cut tracks to the north. A couple klicks out, a couple klicks in. I’ll be back by nightfall.”

“I’m going.”

“My ass, you are. You have to spend tomorrow processing out. Nobody goes into the field on the last day.”

“That’s right, Fenn,” said Captain Feamster. “Company policy.”

“Sir, I can process out in an hour. Just this one last mission.”

“Christ,” said Swagger.

“I’ll worry about it all the way back.”

“Man, can’t you take no slack at all? Nobody goes out with just a wake-up left. It’s a Marine Corps policy.”

“It is, my ass. It’s the same deal, a guy to spot, a guy to talk on the radio. A guy to work security if it comes to that.”

“Christ,” said Swagger. He looked over at Feamster and Brophy.

“It really is a two-man job,” said Brophy.

“If we go, we go. Full field packs, Claymores, cocked and locked. I would hate to get caught short on the last day.”

“Cocked and locked, rock and roll, the whole goddamn nine yards,” Donny said.

“When did you take over this outfit?”

“I’m only doing my job.”

“You are a stubborn crazy bastard and I hope that poor girl knows what a hardhead she’s looped up with.”

At 0-dark-30, Donny rose and found Bob already up. He slipped into his camouflages for the last time, pulled the pack on. Canteens ready. Claymores ready. Grenades ready. He painted his face jungle green and brown. Last time, he told himself in the mirror. He smiled, showing white teeth against the earthy colors.

He checked his weapons: .45, three mags, M14, eight mags. There was a ritual here, a natural order, checking one thing then the next, then checking it all again. It was all ready.

He crawled from his hootch, went to the S-2 bunker, where Bob, similarly accoutred except that he had the Remington rifle instead of an M14, waited, sipping coffee, talking quietly with Brophy over the map.

“You don’t have to go, Fenn,” said Bob, looking over to him.

“I’m going,” said Donny.

“Check your weapons, then do a commo check.”

Donny examined his M14, pulling the bolt to seat a round in the chamber, then letting it fly forward. He put the safety on, then took out the .45, ascertained that the mag was full but the chamber empty, as Swagger had instructed him to carry the piece. He ran the quick commo check, and all systems were functioning.

“Okay,” said Bob, “last briefing. Up here, toward Hoi An. We go a straight northward course, through heavy bush, across a paddy dike. We should hit Hill 840 by 1000 hours. We’ll set up there, glass the paddies below in the valley for a couple of hours, and head back by 1400 hours. We’ll be in by 1800 at the latest. We’ll stay in PRC range the whole time.”

“Good work,” said Brophy.

“You all set, Fenn?” Bob asked.

“Gung ho, Semper Fi and all that good shit,” said Donny, at last strapping the radio on, getting it set just right. He picked up his M14 and left the bunker. The light was beginning to seep over the horizon.

“I don’t want to go out the north,” said Bob. “Just in case. I want to break our pattern. We go out the east this time, just like we did before. We ain’t never repeated ourself; anybody tracking us couldn’t anticipate that.”

“He’s gone, he’s dead, you got him,” said Brophy,

“Yeah, well.”

They reached the parapet wall. A sentry came over from the guard post down the way.

“All clear?” Swagger asked.

“Sarge, I been working the night vision scope the past few hours. Ain’t nothing out there.”

Bob slipped his head over the sandbags, looked out into the defoliated zone, which was lightening in the rising sun. He couldn’t see much. The sun was directly in his eyes.

“Okay,” he said, “last day-time to hunt.”

He set his rifle on the sandbag berm, pulled himself over, gathered the rifle and rolled off. Donny made ready to follow.

How many days now? Four, five? He didn’t know. The canteen had bled its last drop of water into his throat yesterday before noon. He was so thirsty he thought he’d die. He hallucinated through the night: he saw men he had killed, he saw Sydney, where he won the gold, he saw women he had fucked, he saw his mother, he saw Africa, he saw Cuba, he saw China, he saw it all.

I am losing my mind, he thought.

Everything was etched in neon. His nerves fired, his stomach heaved, he had starvation fantasies. I should have brought more food. Something in his blood sugar made him twitch uncontrollably.

This would be the last day. He could stand it no more.

The days were the worst. There was no shield from the sun and it had burned his body red in slivers, between the brim of his soft cap and his collar. The backs of his hands were now so swollen he could hardly close them.

But the nights were no better: it got cold at night and he shivered. He was afraid to sleep because he might miss the Americans on their way out. So he stayed awake at night and slept during the day, except that it was too hot to sleep well. The insects devoured him. He’d never leave this cursed chunk of bare ground in the most forgotten land in the world. He could smell his own physical squalor and knew he was living beyond the bounds of both civilization and sanitation. He was putting himself through the absolute worst for this job. Why was he here?

Then he remembered why he was here.

He looked at his watch: 0600. If they were going on a mission today, this was the time they’d go.

Wearily, he brought the binoculars to his eyes, and peered ahead. He had to struggle with the focus and he lacked the strength to hold it steady.

Why didn’t I take that shot when—

Movement.

He blinked, unbelieving, feeling the sense of miracle a hunter feels when after the long stalk he at last sees his game.

There was motion down there, though it was hard to make out in the low light. It looked like the movement of men from the bunkers toward the berm but he could not be sure.

He abandoned the binoculars, shifted left and squirmed behind the rifle, trying his hardest not to jar its placement. He poured himself around it, half mounting the sandbag into which the toe of its butt was jammed, his fingers finding the grip, his face swimming up toward the spot weld, feeling the jam of his thumb against his cheekbone.

He looked through it, saw nothing, but in a second his focus returned.

He could see motion behind the berm, a small gathering of men.

It was an unbearably long shot, he now saw, a shot no man had the right to take.

The wind, the temperature, the humidity, the distance, the light: it all said, You cannot take this shot.

Yet he felt a strange calm confidence now.

All his agonies vanished. Whatever it was inside him that made him the best was now fully engaged. He felt strong, purposeful. The world ceased to exist. It gradually bled away as he gave himself to the circle of light before him, his position perfect, the right leg cocked just to the right to put some tension in his body, tightening his Adductor magnus but not too much, his hands strong and steady on the rifle, the spot weld perfect, no parallax in the scope, the butt strong against his shoulder; it was all so perfect. He controlled his breath, exhaling most of it, holding just a trace of oxygen in his lungs.

Reticle, he thought.

His focus went to the ancient reticle, to the dagger point that stood up just beyond the horizontal line that bisected the circle of light, and watched now, in amazement, as, like a phantasm springing from the very earth itself, a man came over the berm, dappled in camouflage, face painted, but even from this far, far distance recognizable as a member of his own rare species.

He did not command himself to fire; one cannot. One trusts the brain, which makes the computations; one trusts the nerves, which fire the processed information down their networks and circuits; one trusts that little patch of fingertip that alone on the still body must be responsive.

The rifle fired.

Time in flight: one full second. But the bullet would arrive far before the sound of it did.

The scope stirred, the rifle cycled lazily, called another cartridge into its chamber and settled back, all before, ever so lazily, the green man went down.

He knew the second would come fast and that to hit him he had to do the nearly unthinkable. Fire before he saw him. Fire on the sure knowledge that his love would propel him after his partner, just hit, the knowledge that the bullet must be on its way before the man himself had even decided what he must do.

But Solaratov knew his man.

He fired just a split second before the second man jumped into view, arms extended in urgent despair, and as the man climbed, the bullet traveled its long parabola, rode its arc, rising and falling as the man himself was squirming desperately over the berm, and when it fell, it met him exactly as he landed on the ground and lurched toward his partner and it took him down.