his right. “We gotta get up the hill and not keep those folks a waitin’.”
Burke stood and crammed the empty tin cans back in the small square C-ration box, “Gunny, you mind getting the trash tonight 7”
“No problem, John. You two keep your heads down.”
“We will,” Hathcock said, waving at Wilson.
Hathcock would not see the gunnery sergeant for a month.
The two snipers walked to a cluster of tents and sandbagged positions where they met their captain walking away from the tent that looked like it housed the operations complex.
“Hathcock, you and Burke follow me. A chopper is turning right now, waiting for us.”
“What’s the word, Sir,” Burke asked, as he walked hurriedly behind the captain. Hathcock, too, stretched his legs at the rapid pace. Something big was happening, and they were about to become the star performers of whatever it was.
“I don’t have all the details yet. But they want us to kill a man. A special man. And he needs to be killed now. Once we get to the departure point, they will give us more information.”
Adrenalin suddenly pumped through Hathcock’s heart and left him light-headed with the urgency and importance of what he was about to do. He knew that it had to be something that only a trained sniper could accomplish. That left him somewhat frightened, yet overwhelmingly gratified and impatient to taste this adventure.
A jeep met the helicopter on the small pad and rushed the three Marines to a complex of buildings and radio towers. Hathcock had no idea where he was or whom he was about to meet.
Inside a green structure that appeared similar to the Quon—set huts in which Hathcock lived at boot camp, a colonel greeted them. He shook Land’s hand and asked, “These the men?”
“Yes, Sir. Sergeant Hathcock is one of the best long-range shooters in the United States. Lance Corporal Burke is one of the best people in the bush whom I’ve ever known. The two of them are the best sniper team in the country today,” Land said, sensing that it did not impress this Marine.
“Sergeant Hathcock. I need you to kill me a man. What do you say to that?”
“Yes, Sir. Who?”
“A white man.”
“Sir?”
“A white man. He’s helping the enemy, and it is extremely important that we stop him immediately.”
“Can’t the Vietnamese government just arrest him?”
“No,” he said, quietly sizing up the sniper who stood in front of him. “This man,” he continued, “is a Frenchman in his early fifties, slightly bald, with shaggy hair. He’s six feet tall and heavyset. He usually wears khaki trousers and a white bush shirt—you know the type with the patch pockets on the chest and on the waist. He will be walking up a trail near his house, early tomorrow morning. You will shoot him at a clearing that he will cross. After you kill him, leave. Don’t engage anyone. Don’t waste any time. Just run.”
“Why do you want him dead, Sir?”
“You don’t need to know, Sergeant,” the colonel replied. “We will fly into that area before daylight. You will move into your hide and be there before it gets light.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Hathcock responded, snapping to attention.
The three snipers turned to depart and the colonel called to Land. “Captain, you stay back. I have to speak with you some more on this.”
At three-thirty the next morning, the three men were up and ready. A tall, slim captain led them to a Huey helicopter. Land, speaking to Hathcock and Burke, said, “This bird will take us to an LZ,* where you two will walk a little less than five klicks to the hide. I will remain at an observation point with a recon team, who is up there. Once you shoot, leave. Hurry back to the LZ, and the chopper will bring you back here.”
Both the snipers wondered why it was so necessary to kill the man immediately, and Burke was only putting their draughts to words when he turned to Land and said, “Vfe’re stopping this guy from doing something, aren’t we. Otherwise, they would be killing him a whole lot differently.”
Land looked at the lance corporal and offered no response. He himself knew little more of the mission, other than the two snipers must depart the area immediately after the assassination. He would wait and catch a second helicopter to a debrief sight.
“Perhaps there,” Land thought, “I’ll find out what’s so special about this man.”
Skimming the treetops and hugging the terrain’s contour, the single-engine helicopter beat its way across miles of dark jungle, rushing the snipers to their ambush site. The moonless, black sky merged imperceptibly with the treetops and ridges, and Carlos wondered how the pilot kept from crashing into them. Unobtrusively, he bowed his head and prayed.
The flight lasted less than half an hour, giving Hathcock and Burke an hour and a half to steal their way five kilometers, unseen, and hide in a position that would allow a clear, five hundred-yard shot.
Carlos had no idea where he was. His captain had marked the route to the hide on a small, plastic-covered map that someone had cut from a larger section. It made him feel uncomfortable, not knowing which direction he should retreat toward should things go sour. If something happened, he hoped that the Huey would stay long enough for him to get aboard.
The moonless night left the jungle so black that the two snipers had to feel their way down the gentle slope from the landing zone to a small stream that flowed down a long, wooded draw, or gully, that would lead them to their hide. It was a simple route, but the darkness made it a dangerous one. Charlie could be hiding, waiting.
Neither Marine spoke. Every move they made was slow and deliberate; every action, thought out and mentally rehearsed. “Where’s Charlie?” Carlos silently asked himself. “Where do we escape if he discovers us now.” Every night sound seemed amplified in the darkness. The air. The moisture. The taste and smell. All became part of Carlos’s world as he moved silently-one step, then the next.
At 5:30 A.M., the sky began to show the orange streaks of sunrise. The two snipers crawled on their stomachs as they left the cover of the trees and ferns growing along the stream and moved toward a hump of earth covered with tall grass. It was their objective, and beyond it the wooded draw opened into a grassy valley.
A trail, easily visible from the hide, crossed the clearing. Here, Hathcock thought, this Frenchman on a morning stroll would meet his end. What had he done? How had he helped Charlie? What act closed his account with life?
The wait began.
On a hilltop two kilometers away, Captain Land joined a cluster of cammy-clad men who sat in an outcropping of rocks, peering through binoculars, watching the clearing and the trail.
A man with a bushy mustache and long sideburns, wearing tigerstriped camouflage utilities typically worn by ARVN soldiers, sat with his ranger hat’s brim turned up in Gabby Hayes fashion and concentrated his vigil on one spot of the valley far below him.
“Either your man is real good, or dead, back in the woods. I never saw a sign of life from the time it was light enough to see down there. He’s well hidden or not there,” the man said in a cold tone.
“He’s there,” Land said. “When that Frenchman heads down that path, you’ll see. The bastard’s good as dead.”
“You better hope so. Otherwise a couple of pilots will be wishing they were dead.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This Frenchman. He’s a professional interrogator for Charlie. One of the best. I think he’s a little funny too. You know, sadistic sex, likes little boys. They say the bastard gets his rocks off fuckin’ up people.”
“Where you get all this?”
“Just take my word for it. That son-of-a-bitch is bad. Charlie has a couple of our pilots down there waitin’ to meet ole Jacques. We don’t want ole Jacques to get there—he knows too much about these guys.”
“Why don’t you go in and take them? You know where they arc?”
“Can’t. Your man is the key to this. He has to kill the cat.”
“Spooks,” Land thought to himself. The sun turned the countryside yellow as it now cleared the hilltops. Hathcock rested on his stomach, his heart beating rhythmically against the earth causing his rifle to pulse with each surge of blood that pumped through him. Burke hid to the right and trained his watch to their rear, looking at the jungle’s edge and the slopes that surrounded their escape route.
