Off the visible spectrum, since it projected no beam, no red dot.
Ultraviolet?
Infrared?
How could it be brought into the visible spectrum?
It's a kind of light. How do I see it?
One idea: light being heat, if he could get Solaratov to project it through an ice mist, its heat would burn tracks in the snow. Then he could shoot back down the tracks and .. .
But that was absurd. Besides involving setting up some complex linkage of actions, any one of which could catch him a 7mm Magnum through the lungs, he didn't even know if it would work.
Idea two: get Solaratov to shoot the laser through a piece of ice. It would bend, and send back some faulty reading. He would over- or under compensate miss and .. .
Insane. Unworkable.
Think! Think, Goddammit. How do I see it?
And then it occurred to him.
Would I see it on night vision? Would I see it in my goggles? Would they register it?
He picked them up where they lay, half in, half out of the snow, slid the harness over his skull, pulled the goggles down and snapped them on. They yielded a green dense landscape, as if the world had ended in water. The seas had risen. Green was everywhere. Nothing else was clear.
How can I get him to lase me again?
He knew. He had to move one more time, change the range.
Solaratov would go to his laser range finder.
If it works, it'll be like a neon sign in the green, saying I AM THE
SNIPER.
Now something was happening.
He saw puffs of breath rising above a certain accumulation of boulders, signifying some kind of physical exertion.
He watched and one of the rocks seemed somehow to tremble.
Is he moving the rock?
Why would he move the rock?
But in the same second, as he steadied himself, as the rock wobbled truly erratically, seemed to pause, and then tumbled ever so majestically forward, pulling a score of smaller rocks with it, uncurling a shroud of snow as it fell, he knew.
He's trying to bury me, Solaratov thought.
He's trying to start an avalanche, to send tons of snow down the mountain and bury me.
But it wasn't going to work. Avalanche snow, Solaratov knew, was old snow, its structure eroded by melt, its moisture mostly evaporated, so that it was dry and treacherous, a network of unsafe stresses and fault lines. Then and only then could a single fracture cut out its underpinnings and send it crashing down. This avalanche would never go anywhere. The snow was too wet and new, it might fly a bit, but it wouldn't build. It would peter out a few hundred yards down.
On top of that, clearly the man didn't even know where he was. Even now, as the rocks and their screen of snow tumbled abortively down the hill, not picking up energy but losing it, they were on no course toward himself, but more or less to the right about one hundred yards. The falling snow simply could not reach him.
He almost chuckled at the futility of it, remembering that his quarry was a jungle fighter, not a man of the mountains.
The rocks tumbled, trailing snow, but down the slope where the angle flattened, they lost their energy and rolled to a halt.
Solaratov watched them tumble, then brought the rifle back to bear on the original line of rocks. As he was shifting it upward, he thought he made out a white shape sloshing desperately through the snow.
He rose above it, came back, could not quite find it and then did track it quickly, but never quite got the fraction of line between third and fourth mil-dots precisely on it- He saw that Swagger had moved, literally floundering his way downhill to this new position. So? He was a few dozen meters closer? Now he had less maneuverability.
What possible difference did it make? He had made his last mistake.
The game, Solaratov thought, is almost over.
He put down his rifle, picked up the binoculars and prepared to shoot a laser, just to verify the distance to the new position.
Bob came to the halted rocks and hit them with a whack, but couldn't stop to acknowledge the pain. Instead he pulled himself up, put his head and shoulders over the top, flicked the night-vision goggles down as he snapped them on and peered desperately into the void. He knew he was violating every rule in U.S. Marine Corps Sniping FMFM1-3B, which tells snipers never, ever to look over an obstacle, for that makes you too obvious to counterfire, no, you drop to your haunches and look around it. But he didn't have the time.
There was no definition in the green murk, no shape, no depth, nothing but flat, vaguely phosphorescent green.
