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 sh
eaf 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.”