What does it get you?'
His wife had no answer.
'It's what we do,' she finally said.
'Your father and me. We're both in the Army. That's how it works.'
'It won't work that way for me,' she said.
He hoped it wouldn't. She was too smart to end up married to some lifer, some mediocrity who would go nowhere and only married her because she was the daughter of the famous Dick Puller, the lion of Pleiku, who'd taken a Chicom .51 in the chest and wouldn't even let himself be medevaced out and who died in the shitty little Forward Operations Base at Kham Due a year after the war was lost, threw himself away for nothing that nobody could make any sense of.
Puller came awake. It was dark. He checked his watch.
It would start soon, be over soon. He smelled wet sand from the soaked bags out of which the bunker was built, dirt and mud, gun oil, Chinese cooking, blood, the works, the complete total that was life in the field.
But he had an odd sensation: something was happening.
He looked at his watch and saw that it was nearly midnight. Time to get up and-'Sir.'
It was young Captain Taney, who would probably also die tonight.
'Yeah?'
'It's--ah--you won't believe it.'
'What?'
'He's still out there.'
'Who?' Puller thought instantly of Huu Co.
'Him. Him. That goddamned Marine sniper.'
'Does he have night vision?'
'No, sir. You can see it from the parapet. You can hear it. He's got flares.'
idle didn't get good targets. Not enough light. But in the shimmering glow of the floating flares he got enough: movement, fast, frightened, scurrying, the occasional hero who would stand and try and mount a rally, the runner who was sent to the rear to report to command, the machine gun team that peeled off to try and flank him.
The flares fired with a dry, faraway pop, like nothing else in the
'Nam. They lit at about three hundred feet with a spurt of illumination, then the 'chute would open and grab the wind, and they'd begin to float downward, flickering, spitting sparks and ash. It was white. It turned the world white. The lower they got the brighter it got, but when they swung in the breeze, they turned the world to a riot of shadows chasing each other through the dimness of his scope.
But still, he'd get targets. He'd fire at what his instincts told him was human, what looked odd in the swinging light, the sparks, the glow that filled the world, the crowd of panicked men who now felt utterly naked to the sniper's reach. The night belonged to Charlie, it was said.
Not this night. It belonged to Bob.
They'd worked it right. No movement, not now. It was too dark to move and they'd get mixed up, get out of contact with one another and that would be that. Donny was on the hilltop, Bob halfway down. The bad guys were moving left to right beyond them, one hundred yards out, where the grass was shorter and there wasn't any cover. It was a good killing zone, and the first element of the column was hung up, pinned in the grass, believing that if they moved they would die, which was correct.
Donny would fire a flare and move a hundred steps or so on the hilltop, while Bob waited for the flare to get low enough to see the movement. Bob would fire twice, maybe three times in the period of brightest light. Then he'd move too, the same one hundred steps, through the grass, and set up again.
Forward, then they'd move back. They couldn't see one another, but they had the rhythm. They'd send people up after him, but not soon enough. They wouldn't be sure where the flares were coming from, because, God bless the little fireworks, they didn't trail illumination as they ascended.
Bob couldn't even see the reticle. He just saw the movement and knew where the reticle would be because that's where it always was, and he fired, the rifle cracking, its flash absorbed in the steel tube that surrounded the muzzle but would sooner or later have to give way. No one could yet see where the shots were coming from.
The flare floated, showering sparks. In its cone of light, Bob saw a man drop into vegetation and he put a bullet into him. He flicked the bolt fast, jacking out the spent case, and watched as another man came through the light to his fallen comrade, and he killed him too. The trick was the light, the flares had to be constant, there couldn't be a dark moment when there was no light because these guys would move on him then, and they'd be too close, too fast and it would be over.
It lasted for ten minutes, then, having planned it, Donny stopped firing and Bob stopped firing. They both fell back, met at the far side of the hill, and took off on the dead run, leaving behind the confusion. They moved on, looking for another setup.
'That'll slow 'em. It'll take 'em ten minutes to figure out we're gone. Then they'll get moving again. We should be able to hit them again. I want to set up on that side now. You watch me.'
Donny had the M14 at high port. Bob's rifle was slung and he carried the M3 in his hands, though he was down now to two magazines. Both his handguns were cocked and locked.
'Okay, you ready?'
'I think so.'
