Silently, the two men moved out of their hide and followed the trail of broken stems and tread marks in the mud. The rain had washed the footprints to only faint impressions, which required a tracker’s skill to spot. Yet the combination of broken plants, skid marks, and faint footprints provided a clear trail.
“Burke,” Hathcock mouthed to his partner soundlessly.
Burke came close and Hathcock whispered in his ear. “This trail is too easy. If I was chasin’ some VC scout, I wouldn’t worry. But this is an NVA sniper—maybe even the best of them. He wouldn’t leave a clear trail by accident.”
Hathcock dropped to his knees, and Burke followed his lead, crouching low too. “From here on out,” he whispered to his partner, “we go worm style.”
Hathcock and Burke crawled up the trail. After each silent, precisely limited motion of an arm or leg, they paused to survey their surroundings.
Smelling the air, tasting it, searching for any scent that might give away another man, the two Marines scouted for a sign that would reveal their quarry. Hathcock’s eyes shifted quickly from corner to comer; he looked for anything out of place or changed by man. His ears followed the track that his eyes took.
He saw nothing but green stillness in the damp morning, smelled only the mildew and rot of the jungle, felt only the grit and slime as he crawled, sniffing, tasting and observing. The distant sound of jets followed the rumbling thunder of their bombs. He heard a fire fight in progress, far away on another hillside. The slow rhythmic chop of a .50-caliber machine gun echoed across the distance. Hill 55? Another sniping?
The thought passed as quickly as it came, and Hathcock continued his single-minded stalk. Slowly and deliberately he pushed forward, reading the trail, cautious that as he stalked this quarry, that quarry might, in fact, be a cunning hunter stalking him.
Near the top of the ridge and not yet visible to the two snipers, a small, hand-dug cave, lined with grass and covered with brush and vines, stood empty at the end of the trail. Inside it, a grass bed lay matted flat from the weight of a man sleeping there for a time. But no one had rested there for several days.
On the other side of a shallow gully, on a steep hill where thick vines and tangled brush covered the granite boulders that cropped out from the earth, a sniper hid. He watched a six-foot clearing that he had carefully hacked out in front of the cave at the end of the trail. And as he had done each time before, after killing a Marine on Hill 55, he patiently waited in ambush. He knew that it was only a matter of time before a Marine would pick up his trail and follow it to the small hole and the narrow clearing near it. The sniper hoped that the Marine who stalked him, and who slowly closed on his bait, would be the sniper who wore the white feather—Hathcock.
White rays of midday sun bore straight down on the jungle floor, raising steam from the damp mulch that covered the ground where the two Marine snipers slowly crawled. Several hours had passed since the mild morning sun’s orange beams had tilted at sharp angles through the forest’s canopy, waking the day.
Now as the tropical temperature rose in the January afternoon, Tiny flies and gnats swarmed in the greenhouse-humid air that hung in sweltering stillness beneath the trees. The hungry insects smelled the body fluids oozing from the two snipers’ pores and attacked them, biting and sucking sweat and blood. And as the tiny gnats and flies landed on the Marines’ wet necks and began to gnaw, they drowned in perspiration and collected in little black balls along the wrinkles on the men’s necks. They attacked the comers of the two snipers* eyes and crawled into the creases of their mouths. Hathcock and Burke ignored the discomfort and pushed up the hill.
Every few yards, Hathcock raised a pair of binoculars and scoured the ground ahead. He searched for trip wires or any sign indicating hidden pressure peddles that would release the explosive charge of a mine or booby- trap. He searched for alterations of the foliage that would allow his enemy a clear shot. The two snipers moved forward over thick ferns and wet, rotten leaves.
Hathcock suddenly froze. Raising his binoculars, he focused them on the small, grass-lined burrow twenty feet away. Burke lay still.
The afternoon sun shone brightly through the trees, sprinkling bright spots of light across the forest floor. Small saplings and twisted vines wound their way between the larger trees, filling every available area in which they could grow. Yet at the cave, the forest seemed almost garden-neat.
Had the burrow’s resident cleared it away for his comfort? Hathcock carefully eased himself closer, trying to see how far the clearing extended laterally and how much exposure it offered. He could not tell for certain, but he did know that if he had made the burrow as a hide, he would have left the front yard piled with twisted growth. He would have made alternate escape routes from it, too. It seemed strange there was but one way in or out of this small hole.
“I don’t like it,” Hathcock thought to himself. He drew out a plastic-covered map that he had folded into a six-inch square, with this hill at its center. Tracing the hill with his finger, he found the slight hump near its crest where this cave lay and noticed the tiny draw at its right.
Lifting his binoculars, Hathcock tried to glimpse the ridge that faced the other side of the draw through the thick forest. “He’s over there,” he thought, although unable to clearly see the other side. “He’s bound to have a direct line of sight to that cave.”
Without a sound, motioning Burke to follow, Hathcock moved off the trail to his right and began to make a wide circle around the cave. He pushed through the tangle and thorns around the hide and over the hill’s top, where the draw came to a head.
Across the draw, the dark-faced sniper lay still, covered with ferns and vines, ready at his rifle. He sampled the air, sniffing and tasting, wary of the possibility that his enemy might detect the trap and sneak across the draw to where he hid.
By mid-afternoon, Hathcock and Burke had moved to the top of the draw where it flattened into a saddle on the ridge. As the two men pushed forward, they began to notice many birds pecking and scratching through the leaves. Above them, on lower branches, other birds sat and twittered. Below in the draw, more birds gathered. Hathcock took a closer look with his binoculars and saw what had attracted the many birds—rice. Someone had scattered rice throughout the saddle, and now birds and other forest creatures feasted on it, and by their presence created a natural early-warning system that would alert the Communist sniper to the arrival of an intruder.
The man deserved respect for his cunning. Hathcock knew that successfully stalking this enemy would require a change in strategy. The saddle and hilltop where the two Marines waited offered a clear vantage across the saddle and down the draw. From the place where die birds pecked for the rice, he could get a clear view of die draw below, as well as relatively clear fields of fire through a number of routes that his quarry might take. But Hathcock also knew that it would offer his enemy the same open field toward him as well.
The two Marines found a rest where a rock protruded up from die ground. To die right, a dead tree lay on its side, falling apart with rot.
Once positioned, Hathcock took a branch and tossed it into the flock of birds. The sudden stir of wings flying up to die higher branches in the forest echoed down the draw to where the small, brown man lay behind his MosuvNagant rifle, peering through its short 3.5-power scope. His eyes shifted sharply to his left. A wild pig or big cat might have sent die birds skyward, but another person might have done so, too. The sniper pushed his way over the vine-covered rocks and quietly headed toward the saddle.
He followed the sloping ridge to the draw’s head, but rather than moving across die saddle where Hathcock and Burke lay, he went down the far side of the hill and picked his way through a thicket of thorn bushes on the Marines right flank.
Hathcock lay quietly listening to die sounds of die forest, hearing a bird’s song carried on a breeze that quaked through the treetops and rustled the leaves. He could hear a slight wheeze in Burke’s lungs as his partner breathed in slow rhythm, two feet away. “The kids’s probably caught cold from sleepin’ in the rain,” Hathcock thought. And as his eyes shifted toward Burke, a sharp crack echoed through the brush to their right.
Without a word, both Marines shifted to their left. “He circled around us!” Burke whispered hoarsely, as he quickly pushed his way behind a tree.
“Shoot die gap, Burke!” Hathcock whispered back. “He’s closing right in on us.”
The two Marines scrambled down the saddle and into the thick cover that the draw offered. Once behind its shield of tangled stalks and vines, they dropped to their bellies and began to quietly crawl up the ridge where the enemy sniper had passed on his trek to their former hide.
The crack and thud of the two Marines scrambling into the draw told the NVA sniper that his quarry had flown. When his sleeve had snagged on the thorn bush and snapped its branch, he had known the chances were that they would hear. Still it was frustrating. He crept up the hill and examined the spot where the Americans had
