looking for men and guns, because you won’t see them and there’s no point. You’re looking for regular outlines. Nothing in nature is regular. If you see a straight line in the woods, you know something’s off. Got it? One hour. Then put the glasses down and just go to regular vision.”
“Where’ll you be?”
“I’m going to circle around and see if I cut any tracks in the woods. I want to know if parties of men have moved through here to that damned place. If it’s empty, and you haven’t seen anything, then we’ll go down.”
“Okay,” said Russ. “We’re not going to get out of here until after dark.”
“Don’t you worry about that, Donnie. You just eyeball the place.”
With that, he slid back and in seconds—the sniper’s gift—had disappeared.
Who the hell is Donnie? Russ wondered.
37
He loved the steady march of the numbers across the page, the semblance of order they brought to chaos, the inflow and outflow as his fortunes advanced. It answered some deeply felt need he had.
Battalion 316, Honduras Army
Salvadoran Treasury Police
Detroit SWAT
Baltimore County Quick Response
FBI Hostage Rescue
Atomic Energy Commission Security Teams
Library of Congress SWAT
Navy SEAL Team Six
It was amazing, really. Nobody had ever looked at it this way, but sniping was a growth industry. The explosion in terrorism in the seventies, its ugly reappearance in the nineties, the profusion of heavily armed drug cartels with paramilitary capacity, the specter of armed right-wing militias, the increasing liberal call for “sophisticated” (i.e., surgical or low-lethality) police operations, all added up to one thing: the precision rifleman and the gear and culture to equip and train him were a skyrocket for the nineties and the century beyond the millennium. He was surprised, come to think of it, that the
Every town, every city, every state, every agency, every country, needed the trained rifleman with the world-class equipment. Life was becoming psychotic. Rationality had broken down. Crushed and shattered by disappointment, political, domestic or economic, many men turned to violence. The workplace berserker, the family hostage taker, the organized criminal gang, the drug security goon squad, all heavily armed. Who would stop them? Not the patrol officer or the security dork, not enough training, not enough guts. No, it would be some replication of himself: a man with the coolness, the experience, essentially the will, to lie there in the dark and when the whole thing was going down, to do his duty. Trigger slack out, breathing controlled, absolute confidence in weapons system, not a hitch or a doubt or a twitch anywhere: the trigger goes back. A hundred yards away a small piece of metal driven at supersonic speeds enters the cranial vault, expands like a fist opening to hand, then spurts out the rear in a fog of pink mist. It’s over.
He, Jack Preece, had seen this earlier than anyone and was now prepared to ride the wave to a better, a safer tomorrow.
“General?”
It was Peck, long-boned and pale-eyed and trashy as death itself, in his deputy’s uniform, his gold badge shiny and bright.
“General,” he said, “it’s time. Signal just come through.”
“Give me a sitrep, please.”
“Huh?”
“Report on the situation, you idiot.”
“Oh. Yes sir. They’re there, they must be coming in. The old man got a good visual, else he wouldn’t have sent it.”
“Then let’s saddle up.”
Preece was already wearing his ghillie suit, a ghastly jumpsuit apparition painstakingly festooned with thousands of strips of camouflage cloth threaded through thousands of loops, giving him indoors the appearance of a great shaggy green dog that walked on two legs and had just stepped out of the swamp. But in the natural environment, it conferred an instant shapeless invisibility. He rose, feeling the swish of the strips, and quickly went to the bathroom. Before him on the sink were four wide paint sticks, black, brown, olive drab, jungle green. He hated the masks some of the boys wore: too hot, and limited peripheral vision. He worked quickly in applying the combat makeup, diagonal streaks an inch wide. The darkness of the jungle ate up the pink of his face like a lion swallowing a pie: it was gone, that pink, bland, square, handsome mug behind which he faced the world and hid his inner nature. A warrior gazed back, ancient and fearsome, his white eyes preternatural against the jungle tapestry that muted his flesh.
He grabbed his boonie hat—the original, worn in Nam for the two years he commanded Tigercat—and raced outside, pausing only to pick up the cocked and locked Browning Hi-Power that slid into a shoulder holster under the ghillie. Duane Peck had a four-wheeled ATV fired up and a long plastic case which packed the weapons system tied across the handlebars.
Jack Preece climbed aboard and with a spurt of the throttle Peck gunned ahead. They had not used the vehicle at all in previous recons of the area but had plotted a path through the trees that would in ten minutes bring Jack Preece within a half mile of one of the hills that overlooked the creek and the path. The little vehicle ate up the distance, though Peck kept the speed moderate so there was no wailing engine.
They reached the destination and Preece dismounted, took the case and opened it. The M-16 with its gigantic eye atop its gigantic tube mounted to the receiver was a black shadow in the decaying light. The suppressor protruded from the gun muzzle like an elegant snout, a sleek cylinder fully a foot long. The metal was all Teflon- coated, lusterless and somehow dead to the touch. He bent, quickly attached the miniature battery pack to his belt, lifted the rifle and locked in a twenty-round banana clip with only nineteen cartridges, always a sound precaution when working with magazine-fed weapons. With a snap, he pulled back and released the charging plunger, loading and cocking the weapon, and thumbed the safety to On. He threw the support harness around his shoulder, rose and lifted it: less than eighteen pounds total, quite easily done.
“Get out of here now, Peck. You meet me at the staging area at midnight; if I’m not there, check each hour.”
“Yes sir,” said Peck.
The general turned and headed up the slope, hearing the low buzz of the engine as Peck’s ATV lurched off and slowly faded away.
He walked for ten minutes and saw before him a broad, flat, needle-carpeted forest floor, broken by the vertical maze of the trees, lit at one edge by the setting sun on the other side of the clearing. He moved through it fluidly, advancing twenty or thirty feet at a time, then melting into the earth, and listening intently. He reached the edge and, placing himself beside a pine tree with the lowest possible profile, peered downward. He could see figures behind the window, speaking animatedly. It was hard to make out. Binoculars would bring them out, but the sun was just low enough to present the possibility of a reflection. Instead, he brought the rifle up and with a snap of his thumb first to light and then to scope, went to infrared.
The cabin, two hundred yards away, was a bit out of range for the reach of the searchlight, so he didn’t get great illumination. The lack of total dark also eroded illumination. But he got enough: in the murky green light, he could see three figures. They seemed animated. Details were lost; one appeared to be tall and thin and could match up easily with the Bob Lee Swagger who had visited him two weeks ago. Another was the boy.
Do them, he thought.
