He had it.
To the right, almost three hundred yards away. Of course. He's flanking me to my right.
Slowly, he turned his head, slowly, he brought up the binoculars.
Nothing. Movement. Nothing. Movement.
He struggled with the focus.
The unnatural blackness was a face. The Marine sniper had blackened it at night, for his long crawl into position, he'd shed his black clothes, and now wore combat dapple camouflage, but he had made a mistake. He had forgotten to take off his face paint. Now, black against the dun and yellow of the elephant grass, it stood out just the slightest bit.
Solaratov watched, fascinated. The man low-crawled two strokes, then froze. He waited a second or two, then low-crawled another two. His face, its features masked by the paint, was a study in warrior's concentration: tense, drawn, almost cracked with intensity. His rifle was on his back, wearing a tangle of strips for its own camouflage.
He tried to deny it, but Solaratov felt a flare of pleasure as intense as anything in his life.
He laid the binoculars down, and raised the rifle to his shoulder, finding the right position, rifle to bone to earth, finding the grip, finding the trigger, finding the eyepiece.
Swagger crawled through his scope. The crosshairs quartered his head. The Russian's thumb took the safety off and he expelled half a breath. His finger began its slow squeeze of the trigger.
Goddamn,' Bob said.
'What is it?' Donny said behind him.
'It's thinned out here. Goddamn. Less cover.'
Donny could see nothing. He was lost in elephant grass, it was in his ears, his nose, in the folds of his flesh.
The ants were feasting on him. He heard the dry buzz of flies drawn to the delicious odor of his sweat and blood he'd been cut a hundred or so times by the blades of the grass.
Ahead of him were the two soles of Bob's jungle boots.
'Shit,' Bob said.
'I don't like this one goddamn bit.'
'We could just call in the Night Hag. She'd chew the shit out of all this. We'd pop smoke so she wouldn't whack us up.'
'And if he ain't here, he knows we got him, and he's double careful or he don't come back at all and we never know why he came and we don't git us a Dragunov. Nah.'
He paused.
'You still got that Model Seventy?'
'I do.'
'All right. I want you to reorient yourself to the right.
You squirt on ahead, see that little hummock or something?'
'Yeah.'
'You set up on that, you scope it out for me. If you say it's okay, I'm going to shimmy on over there, to where it's thick again. I'll set up over there and cover for you. Fair enough?'
'Fair enough,' said Donny. He squirmed around, took a deep breath and wiggled ahead.
'Damn, boy, I hope he ain't in earshot. You're grunting louder than a goddamn pig.'
'This is hard work,' Donny said, and it was.
He got up to the hummock, peered over it. He saw nothing.
'Go to the M49?'
'Nah. Don't got time. Just check it with your Unertl.'
Donny slipped his eye behind the scope, which was a long, thin piece of metal tubing suspended in an odd frame. When you zeroed this old thing, it had external controls, which meant the whole scope moved, propelled this way and that by screws for windage and elevation. It had been assembled sometime back in the early forties, but rumor said it had killed more than its share of Japs, North Koreans and VC. It wasn't even a 7.62mm NATO but the old Springfield cartridge, the long .3006.
The optics were great. He scanned the grass as far as he could see, and saw no sign of human presence. But the blur had not gone away. He was aware he was missing fine detail. He squeezed the bridge of his nose with his fingers, and nothing improved. No, nothing out there, nothing that he could see.
'It looks clear.'
'I didn't ask how it looked. I asked how it was.'
'Clear, clear.'
'Okay,' said Bob.
'You keep eyeballing.'
