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.'
