at the valley he'd left behind.
Nothing.
No sign of Solaratov. The house lay undisturbed far below, in a huge field of undisturbed snow. The rock along the ridgeline where the Russian had set up now appeared deserted.
Bob picked up the rifle and used its scope to scan the mountain above. If he were Solaratov, that's what he would have done: climbed, worked around, always trying to get the elevation.
But he saw nothing, there was no snow in the air, no sign of disturbance. Putting the scope down, he tried to will himself into a kind of blankness, by which his subconscious, peripheral vision might note something his front on focused eyes might not, and send him a signal of warning. But he saw nothing, no movement registered on the slopes before him or the flatness beneath. He drew back.
Had Solaratov gone low, tried to get to the house and finish the job? Doubtful, he'd be exposed too long, and at any moment a shot could take him. He rethought it: yes, he has to come after me. His first priority is to eliminate the threat, because he is not on a kamikaze mission, he's no zealot. He's a professional. It only makes sense for him if he can escape, that means he's got an escape route, a fallback route, everything.
He will come.
He will hunt me.
Bob looked up. The slope of the mountain increased until it disappeared into fog, which was really cloud. Solaratov would get up there, come down by some magic and shoot down upon him.
He backed around, looking for a place to set up a hide.
The news was not good.
The ridge on which he perched, like a shelf that traced the jagged contours of the mountain, gave out 250 yards ahead, or, rather, it ran into a ravine, where a gash had been cut in the mountain, a long, ragged scar left by some ancient natural cataclysm. Now it was full of vegetation and rocks, all pristine with snow. But beyond the gap, there was nothing. The mountain slope was smooth and bare, offering no protection at all.
He looked up. It was too steep to climb at this point, though maybe beyond the gap he could engineer some elevation.
He looked down into a sector of valley. The floor was covered with snow-humped trees and brush, all bent into extravagant postures and made smooth under the weight of their white burden. It was a sculpture garden, a winter wonderland, a theme park, beautiful and grotesque and delicate at once, the frail tracery of the lesser branches all bearing their inch of white stuff. It looked quite poetic from six hundred yards up, but if you got caught down there, you'd never be able to move out.
There was really no choice. He had to get to the gash and take up a position in the rocks. He'd get one good shot at Solaratov, who would probably work his way down from above. Solaratov would have the advantage of elevation, but he wouldn't know where to look. He'd have to scout and he'd have to expose himself when he looked.
That's when I get him, Bob thought, wishing he believed it.
Then he noticed: it had begun to snow. Flakes cascaded down again, fluting and canting in the wind, a screen of them, dense and unyielding.
Visibility closed in.
Bob didn't like this a bit.
It was snowing. Solaratov, breathing hard, found a trail inside the scruffy vegetation that edged the mountain, where the overhanging leaves had cut down on snow accumulation.
He almost ran, skirting the flat of the valley, staying off its exposure, staying away from the house for now. He knew that Bob could not see him from any elevation, through the snow-bearing branches. He probably wouldn't even look in the right direction.
Solaratov came around a curve of the valley, edged to the treeline and went hunched behind a fallen log that was somehow suspended by its branches. The snow fell gently around him out of the gray light. There was no sound at all in the world.
He read the land, looking for natural hides where an experienced man would go to ground. It was not a difficult problem, for the mountainside was largely featureless there, with only sparse vegetation to distract the eye. In fact the whole little war between them had been distilled to its most nearly abstract: two men in white in a white, cold world in white mountains of extreme elevation, hunting each other, going for whatever little edge of experience and luck they could find. Whoever read the problem better would win: it had nothing to do with courage or, really, even marksmanship. It would come down to this one thing: who was the better practitioner of the sniper's skills?
He could see a kind of gash in the mountainside ahead of him and realized that his quarry, coming around the edge, would have no choice but to seek refuge at its top.
He picked up his binoculars and scanned. He could see nothing but the rocks under their packing of snow.
Visibility was not bad, though blurred by the falling snow.
He's up there. He's got to be.
He triggered a laser to the top of the gash, bounced it off a rock, and read the range in the readout: 654 meters.
Known distance. Upward. He did the math quickly and knew where to hold, computing in the uphill angle. He'd shoot from the center of the third mil-dot, that would put him there, crudely but close enough. And he felt his nearness to the mountain would shield the bullet from the predations of the wind, it wouldn't drift laterally.
He hunted patiently, looking for target indicators, for some implication that his prey was alive and hiding, and had not circled behind him. The rocks were everywhere, a kind of garden of stone humped in snow. He looked for disturbances in the snow, for sign of a man who'd crawled, upending the crust of white. But he could not see that for the angle.
