'Night Hag, should be sufficient, good work. Foxtrot, you there, over?'
'Sierra, this is Foxtrot.'
'Foxtrot, let's move the teams out. I think we got him.
I think we nailed him.'
'Sierra-Bravo-Four, Wilco and good job. Out.'
Huu Co, senior colonel, and the sappers watched the airplane hunt the sniper from the relative safety of the treeline. It was quite a spectacle: the huge plane wheeling, the thunderous streams of fire it brought to the defoliated zone, the rending of the earth where the bullets struck.
'Oh, the Human Noodle will be turned to the human sieve by that thing,' one of the men said.
'Only the Americans would hunt a single man with an airplane,' said another.
'They would send an airplane to fix a toilet,' someone else shouted, to the laughter of some others.
But Huu Co understood that the sniper was dead, that the outlaw Swagger had once again prevailed. No man could withstand the barrage, and what came later, when, in the immediate aftermath of the airplane, when its dust still hung in the air, five jeeps suddenly burst from the fort and came crashing across the field, stopping right where two American snipers suddenly emerged from hiding a little to the east of the devastated area.
The men began to work methodically with flamethrowers.
The squirts of flame spurted out, and where they touched, they lit the grass. The flames rose and spread, and burned furiously, as black, oily smoke rolled upward.
'The Human Noodle has now been roasted,' someone said.
The flames burned for hours, out of control, rolling across the prairie of the defoliated zone, blazing vividly, as more and more men from the post came out in patrols, set up a line, and began to follow the flames. Soon enough, a flight of helicopters flew in from the east and began to hover over the field. They were hunting for a body.
'They will probably eat him if they can find him.'
'There won't be enough left. They could put him in soup.'
Though the Russian was a chilly little number, Huu Co still had a moment's melancholy over his fate. The airplane made war so totally, it was the most feared weapon in the American arsenal of super weapons How horrible to be hunted by such a flying beast and to feel the world disintegrating around you as the shells exploded. He shivered a bit.
The Americans picked through the blasted field for some time, until nearly nightfall, at one time finding something that excited them very much--Huu Co watched through his binoculars, but could not make it out--until finally retreating.
'Brother Colonel, shall we retreat?' his sergeant wished to know.
'There is clearly nothing left for us here.'
'No,' said the colonel.
'We wait. I don't know for how long, but we wait.'
It was a lance corporal from First Squad who found the Dragunov.
'Whooie!' he shouted.
'Lookie here. Gook sniper rifle.'
'Corporal, bring that over here,' called Brophy.
'Good work.'
The man, pleased to be singled out, came over with his trophy and turned it over to Brophy.
'There's your rifle,' Bob said to the CIA man, Nichols.
The command team crowded around the new weapon, something no one had seen before. Like a kid unwrapping a Christmas present, Nichols wrapped the camouflage tape off the weapon.
'The legendary SVD. That's the first one we've recovered,' said Nichols.
'Congratulations, Swagger. That's not a small thing.'
Donny just looked at it, feeling nothing, his head pounding from the stench of the gasoline and the oily smoke. It was a crude-looking thing, not at all sleek and well machined.
'Looks like an AK got stuck in a tractor pull,' Bob said. He handled the weapon, looked it over, worked the action a few times, looked through the scope, then became bored with it and passed it on to other, more eager hands.
He moved away from the crowd, and watched with narrowed eyes and utter stillness as the Marines probed the burn zone while others set up flank security, under the CO's direction. Meanwhile Hueys and Cobra gunships hovered about the perimeter.
'Do you think he got away?' Donny finally asked him.
'Don't know. Them flames could have burned him up.
Six or seven twenty-mm shells could have blown him to pieces, and the flames charred what meat was left off the bone. He could be indistinguishable from the landscape, I suppose. I just don't know. I didn't see any blood trails.'
'Wouldn't the flames have burned the blood?'
