Linnett’s men were looking like spectral figures, white zombies in a white landscape. If he was having trouble, so was the Afghan. There was only one explanation for the no-image scenario: the Afghan had taken shelter in a cave or snow hole. The overhang would mask the escaping heat. So Linnett was closing on him. The skis were sliding easily across the shoulder of the mountain, and there was more forest up ahead. The Spectre fixed his position to within a yard. Twelve miles to the Canadian border. Five hours to dawn, or for what passed for dawn in this land of snow, peaks, rocks and trees.
Linnett gave it another hour. The Spectre circled and watched but saw nothing to report.
“Check again,” asked Captain Linnett. He was beginning to think something had gone wrong. Had the Afghan died up here? Possible, and that would explain the absence of a heat signature. Crouching in a cave? Possible, but he would die in there or come out and run. And then…
Izmat Khan, urging the feisty but tired pony off the scree and into the forest, had actually lengthened his lead. The compass told him he was still going north, the angle of the pony beneath him that he was climbing. “I am scanning an arc subtending ninety degrees with you at the point,” said the imager operator. “Right up to the border. In that arc, I can see eight animals. Four deer; two black bear, who are very faint because they are hibernating under deep cover; what looks like a marauding mountain lion; and a single moose ambling north. About four miles ahead of you.”
The surgeon’s arctic clothing was simply too good. The pony was sweating as it neared exhaustion and showed up clearly, but the man on top of it, leaning forward along its neck to urge it onward, was so well muffled he blended with the animal.
“Sir,” said one of the engineer sergeants, “I’m from Minnesota.”
“Save your problems for the chaplain,” snapped Linnett. “What I mean, sir,” said the snow-caked face beside him, “is that moose do not move up into the mountains in weather like this. They come down to the valley to forage for lichen. It can’t be a moose.”
Linnett called a halt. It was welcomed. He stared at the falling snow ahead. He had not the faintest idea how the man had done it. Another isolated cabin, maybe, with an overwintering idiot with a stable. Somehow, the Afghan had gotten himself a pony and was riding away from him.
Four miles ahead, back in deep forest, Izmat Khan, who had ambushed Lemuel Wilson, was himself ambushed. The mountain lion was old, a bit slow for deer, but cunning and very hungry. It came down from a ledge between two trees, and the pony would have smelled it but for its own exhaustion. The first thing the Afghan knew, something fast and tawny had hit the pony, and the pony was going down sideways. The rider had time to grab Wilson ’s rifle from the sleeve alongside the pommel and go backward over the rump. He landed, turned, aimed and fired.
He had been lucky the mountain lion had gone for the pony and not himself, but he had lost his mount. The animal was still alive, but ripped round the head and shoulders by claws with 135 pounds of angry muscle behind them. The pony was not going to get up. He used a second bullet to finish its misery. The pony crumpled, lying half across the body of the mountain lion. It did not matter to the Afghan, but the torso and front legs of the mountain lion were under the pony.
He unhitched the snowshoes from behind the saddle, fitted them over his boots, shouldered the rifle, checked the compass and moved forward. A hundred yards ahead of him was a large rock overhang. He paused under it for a brief respite from the snow. He did not know it but it masked his escaping heat. “Take out the moose,” said Captain Linnett. “I think it’s a horse with the fugitive on it.”
The operator studied his image again.
“You’re right,” he said. “I can see six legs. He’s paused for a rest. Next circuit, down he goes.”
The “destroy” part of the Spectre’s role is provided by three systems. Heaviest is the 105mm M102 howitzer, which is so powerful that using it on a single human being would be a tad excessive.
Next comes the 40mm Bofors cannon, derived, long ago, from the Swedish antiaircraft weapon, a fast repeater with enough muscle to rip buildings or tanks to fragments. The Spectre crew, told their target was a man on a horse, chose the GAU-12/U Gatling gun. This horror fires eighteen hundred rounds per minute, and each round is a 25mm-one-inch diameter-slug, one of which will pull a human body apart. So intense is the fire of the rotating five-barrel gun that if used on a football field for thirty seconds, nothing much bigger than a mouse would be left alive. And that mouse will die of shock. The maximum altitude for the GAU-I2/U is twelve thousand feet, so the circling Spectre dropped to ten thousand feet, locked on its target and fired for ten seconds, loosing off three hundred rounds at the body of the pony in the forest. “There’s nothing left,” remarked the imager operator. “Man and beast, both gone.”
“Thank you. Echo-Foxtrot,” said Linnett. “We’ll take over now.”
The Spectre, mission accomplished, returned to McChord AFB. The snow stopped, the skis hissed over the new powder, making the sort of progress that skis ought to make with a skilled athlete on them, and the Alpha team came across the remains of the pony. Few fragments were bigger than a man’s arm, but they were definitely horse, not human. Except the bits with tawny fur. Linnett spent ten minutes looking for pieces of arctic clothing, boots, snowshoes, bowie knife, femurs, skull or beard. The skis were lying there, but one was broken. That had happened when the pony fell. There was a sheepskin sleeve but no rifle. No snowshoes. No Afghan. Two hours to dawn, and it had become a race. One man on snow-shoes, twelve on skis. All exhausted, all desperate. The Alpha team had their Global Positioning System, or GPS. As the sky lightened fractionally in the east, the team sergeant murmured, “Border half a mile.”
They arrived twenty minutes later on a bluff overlooking a valley that ran from their left to right. Below was a logging road that constituted the Canadian border. Right across from them was another bluff, with a clearing containing a cluster of log cabins, a facility for Canadian lumberjacks when the timber concessions resumed after the snows.
Linnett crouched, steadied his forearms and studied the landscape through binoculars. Nothing moved. The light increased. Unbidden, his snipers eased their weapons from the sleeves that had housed them throughout the mission, fixed their scopes, inserted one shell each and lay down to stare across the gulf through their scopes.
By the norms of soldiering, snipers are a strange breed. They never get near the men they kill, yet they see them with a clarity and an apparent proximity greater than anyone else. With hand-to-hand combat almost extinct, most men die not by the hand of the enemy but by his computer. They are blown away by a missile fired a continent away or from somewhere under the sea. They are destroyed by a smart bomb loosed by an aircraft so high they neither saw nor heard it. They died because someone fired a shell from two counties away. At the nearest, their killers, crouching behind a machine gun in a swooping helicopter, see them only as vague shapes, running, hiding, trying to fire back. But not as real humans.
The sniper sees the enemy like that. Lying in total silence, utterly immobile, he sees his target as a man with three days’ stubble, a man who stretches and yawns, who spoons beans out of a can, unzips his fly or simply stands and stares at a lens a mile away that he cannot see. And then he dies. Snipers are special-inside the head.
They also live in a private world. So total does the obsession with accuracy become that they lapse into a silence peopled only by the weights of projectile heads, the power of various powder loads, how much a bullet will wind-drift, how far it will drop over various distances, whether yet another tiny improvement can be made to the rifle.
Like all specialists, they have their passions for rival pieces of equipment. Some snipers like a really tiny bullet, like the Remington M700.308, a slug so small that it has to be sheathed in a detachable sleeve to go down the barrel at all.
Others stay with the M21, the sniper version of the M14 standard combat rifle. Heaviest of all is the Barrett “Light Fifty,” a monster that sends a bullet like a human forefinger over a mile with enough speed times weight to cause a human body to explode.
Lying prone at Captain Linnett’s feet was his leading sniper, Master Sergeant Peter Bearpaw He was a half- blood Santee Sioux with a Hispanic mother. He came from the slums of Detroit, and the Army was his life. He had high cheekbones, and eyes that sloped like a wolf’s. And he was the best marksman in the Green Berets.
What he cradled as he squinted across the valley was the.408 Cheyenne by CheyTac of Idaho. It was a more recent development than the others, but with over three thousand rounds on the range it had become his weapon of choice. It was a bolt-action rifle, which he appreciated because the total lockdown of a closed bolt gave that tiny
