'They'll call in mortars, artillery, napalm even. It is their way.'
'Yes, I may die.'
'In napalm? Not pleasant. I've heard many scream as it ate the flesh from their bones. It's over in an instant, but I had the impression it was a long instant.'
The Russian merely glared at him, no recognition in his eyes at all, even though they'd lived in close proximity for a week and had for days before that pored over the photos and the mock-up of Dodge City.
'My advice, comrade brother,' said Huu Co, 'is that you follow the depression in the earth three hundred meters.
You move at dark, in maximum camouflage. They have night scopes and they will be hunting. But the scopes aren't one hundred percent reliable. It'll be a long stalk, a terrible stalk. I can only hope you are up to it and that your heart is strong and pure.'
'I have no heart,' said the solitary man.
'I am the sniper.'
For the first recon, Solaratov did not take his case, which by now all considered a rifle sheath. He carried no weapons except a SPETSNAZ dagger, black and thin and wicked.
He left at nightfall, dappled in camouflage, looking more like an ambulatory swamp than a man. Behind his back, the sappers called him not the Solitary Man or the Russian but, with the eternal insouciance of soldiers, the Human Noodle, because the stalks were stiff like unboiled noodles. In seconds, as he slithered off through the elephant grass, he was invisible.
Huu Co noted that his technique was extraordinary, a mastery of the self. This was the ultimate slow. He moved with delicacy, one limb at a time, a pace so slow and deliberate it almost didn't exist. Who would have patience for such a journey?
'He is mad,' one of the sappers said to another.
'All Russians are mad,' said the other.
'You can see it in their eyes.'
'But this one is really mad. He's nuts!'
The sappers waited quietly underground, in elaborate tunnels built in the Year of the Snake, 1965. They cooked meals, enjoyed jury-rigged showers and treated the event almost like a furlough. It was a happy time for men who had fought hard, been wounded many times. At least six of them were Brothers Ten. They were shrewd, experienced professionals.
For his time, Huu Co studied the photographs or waited up top, hidden in the grass, using up his eyestrain to stare at the strange fort fifteen hundred yards off, which looked so artificial cut into the earth of his beloved country by men from across the sea with a different sensibility and no sense of history.
He waited, staring at the sea of grass. His arm hurt. He could hardly close his hand. When he grew bored, he snatched a book from his tunic, in English. It was Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkein, very amusing. It took him away from this world but always, when Frodo's adventures vanished, he had to return to Firebase Dodge City and his deepest question: when would the sniper return?
The fire ants were only the first of his many ordeals.
Attracted to his sweat, they came and crawled into the folds of his neck, tasting his blood, crawling, biting, feasting.
He was a banquet for the insect world. After the ants, others were drawn. Mosquitoes big as American helicopters buzzed around his ears, lit on his face, stung him gently and departed, bloated. What else? Spiders, mites, ticks, dragonflies, the whole phyla drawn to the miasma of decay a sweating man produces in the tropics on a hot morning. But not maggots. Maggots are for the dead, and perhaps in some way the maggots respected him. He was not dead and, moreover, he fed the maggots much in his time on earth. They left him alone.
It wasn't that Solaratov was beyond feeling such things. He felt them, all right. He felt every sting, bite, prick or tweak, his aches and swellings and blotches and throbbings were the same as any man's. He had just some.
how managed to disconnect the feeling part of his body from the registering part of his brain. It can be learned, and at the upper reaches of the performance envelope, among those who are not merely brave, willful or dedicated but truly among the best in the world, extraordinary things are routine.
He lay now in the elephant grass, approximately one hundred yards from the sandbag perimeter of Firebase Dodge City, just outside the double strands of concertina wire. He could see Claymore mines facing him from a dozen angles, and the half-buried detonators of other, larger mines. But he could also hear American rock and roll bellowing out of the transistor radios all the young Marines seemed to carry, and listening to it was his only pleasure.
'I can't get no satisfaction,' someone sang with a loud raspy voice, and Solaratov understood: he could get no satisfaction either.
The Marines were unbearably sloppy. He had seen the Israelis from extremely close range in some of his ops and the British SAS and even the fabled American Green Berets, all were sound troops. These boys thought the war was over for them, they were worse than Cubans or Angolans.
They lounged around sunbathing, played touch football or baseball or basketball, sneaked out to smoke hemp, got in fights or got drunk. Their sentries slept at night. The officers didn't bother to shave. Nobody dressed in anything resembling a uniform, and most spent the days in shorts, undershirts (or shirtless) and shower shoes.
Even when they went on combat patrol, they were loud and stupid. The point men paid no attention, the flank security drifted in toward the column, the machine gunner had his belts tangled around him, and his assistant, with other belts, fell too far behind him to do him any good in a fight. Clearly they had not been in a fight in months, if ever, clearly they expected no such thing to occur as they waited for the order to leave the country.
Once, a patrol stumbled right over him. Five men, hustling through the elephant grass on the way out for a
