His hand found the canteen lid, and he began to carefully unscrew it from the flask. Half an hour later, he felt the wet relief of the now warm liquid soaking into his swollen tongue like water on a dry sponge.
Hathcock moved on, wincing with every inch he went. His hip, knee, and arm were covered with blisters from the three days of constant pushing. Shards of pain shot through his side. He had less than two hundred yards left to travel, and compromise began tempting him now.
“You can do it from here,” he considered. In all his years of marksmanship competition, his best scores came from the thousand-yard line. “It’s been all bull’s-eyes and Vs from this distance,” Carlos told himself. But in all his years of shooting, never had one shot been so critical.
A second voice told Carlos, “Stick to the plan. Don’t change things now. Survival depends on it. Survive.” Carlos always listened to that voice. It had kept him alive. “You thought out this plan when you were rested; now you’re tired. Gotta stick to the plan—got to.”
He pushed on toward where the slight depression came slicing through the grass. It was very much as he had estimated—almost precisely eight hundred yards from the target. Darkness fell and, as he drew near to his planned firing position, Hathcock’s anticipation mounted. He versed himself on everything in these surroundings that might affect his bullets flight. He was constantly aware of humidity, wind speed, and wind direction. The faint sound of men laughing caught his ear. He could imagine the North Vietnamese general and his officers drinking and toasting each other around a dining room table. “That general had better enjoy himself while he still can,” Hathcock thought.
The Marine sniper watched as the nightly patrol began another round. “They don’t even consider a ground attack,” he reflected. “They’re more worried about air assaults. Look at the bunkers and holes they’ve got around here. Everything’s covered.”
The last guard changed as Carlos Hathcock reached the shallow gully he had spotted on aerial photographs and that he had spent the last three days crawling toward. It was not even six inches deep, but it was wide enough for a man to lie in. The depression, which stretched fifteen hundred yards to the distant tree line, actually began here in the middle of the open field, and at its head there was a slight rise, on the back side of which Hathcock positioned his rifle. He unfolded a handkerchief-size cloth and laid it down beneath the weapon’s muzzle so that the gases the rifle expelled from the barrel when he fired it would not raise up dust from the ground and give away his position.
DAY FOUR
When the sun sent its first rays across the wide clearing, the Marine sniper’s eyes already blinked through the eight-power scope atop his rifle, searching for his target.
He had estimated the distance correctly—his experienced eyes verified eight hundred yards to the walkway. “I’ve got to get him standing still with either his face or his back toward me,” Carlos told himself. “Don’t compromise.” He watched for signs of wind-trees rustling, smoke drifting from the cooking fires next to sandbagged gun positions, the waving of the grass and weeds between him and his target. But more important than these, he watched the mirage, how it danced and boiled above the earth and tilted with the wind.
From that he could calculate the wind velocity by dividing the angle of the mirage by four. After determining that, he could multiply the velocity times eight, which represented this particular range in hundreds of yards, and then divide that again by four and have the number of “clicks” or half-minutes of angle he would need for windage.
The sun climbed higher and sweat trickled down the sniper’s cheeks. His eyes still fixed to the scope’s lens, he felt his neck bum from the overhead sun that baked the ground powder dry and left the grass wilting in its heat.
From somewhere behind the complex of bunkers came the sound of an automobile’s engine. The white sedan wheeled around the bunkers and stopped short of the walkway upon which Carlos held the rifle scope’s cross hairs. The driver waited with the motor running.
“Here we go,” Hathcock told himself. “Get a firm grip. Watch the cross hairs.” The general stepped through the doorway, and Hathcock centered the man’s profile in his scope. He waited for him to turn face-on. He did, but as the commander turned and walked toward the sniper’s sight, the general’s aide-de-camp stepped ahead of him. “Dummy! Don’t you know that aides always walk to the left of their generals? Get out of the way!”
At every moment since the sun rose Hathcock had refined his attunement to the environment with computer like detail and speed, judging the light, the humidity, the slight breeze that intermittently blew across his line of fire. He factored in the now-increasing heat and how the rise in temperature would elevate the mark of his bullet by causing the powder to burn more quickly when he fired. The air density and humidity would affect the velocity of his bullet, and the light would change the way his target appeared.
Based on his estimations, he decided to place his scope’s reticle on the general’s left breast, in case the breeze carried the round eight inches right. The bright sunlight warned the sniper to keep his aim high on the man’s chest, but not too high, in case the heat raised the bullet’s flight a few inches.
The group of officers walking out with the general departed toward the side of the house. It left only the old man and his youthful aide. Carlos waited. The young officer took his place at the left side of his superior. Hathcock said, “Now stop.” Both men did. The sniper’s cross hairs lay directly on the general’s heart.
Hathcock’s mind raced through all his marksmanship principles, “Good firm grip, watch the cross hairs, squeeze the trigger, wait for the recoil. Don’t hold your breath too long, breathe and relax, let it come to the natural pause, watch the cross hairs, squeeeeeeeeze.”
Recoil sent a jolt down his shoulder. He blinked and the general lay flat on his back. Blood gushed from the old officer’s chest and his lifeless eyes stared into the sun’s whiteness.
The general’s aide-de-camp dove to the ground and began crawling toward a sandbagged gun position. The other officers, who had only seconds earlier left their commander’s side, ran for cover.
The Marine sniper slid into the slight gully and, flat on his belly, began pulling himself stealthily along the ground with both arms. His rate of retreat seemed light-speed compared to his inbound time. Still smooth and deliberate, he traveled many feet of ground per minute. He now covered a distance, approximately equivalent to that which he had crawled across in three days, in four or five hours. The fact that no patrol approached him during his retreat told him that no one had seen his muzzle flash. In daylight, at eight hundred yards, that didn’t surprise him. The patrols would be out, but they would be searching hundreds of acres. Once he thought he heard one far to his left.
It was almost nightfall when he reached the jungle’s edge. Squirming past the outer layer of greenery, Hathcock lifted himself off his knees for the first time in three days. The pain was an excruciating counterpoint to his inner exhilaration. He hurried through the heavy forest. He was wary of mines and booby traps, but going as quickly as he dared, he covered the three kilometers to his preplanned pickup coordinate in a matter of a few hours.
There Carlos sat in a bush and waited, well aware that patrols might be scouring the jungle for his trail. His heart settled to a resting pulse. The songs of birds and other jungle creatures replaced the sound of heaving breath that had pounded in his ears. And as the hubbub settled to tranquillity, he thought of Arkansas and how similar this moment seemed to many childhood days behind his grandmother’s house, when he sat in the bushes there—the old Mauser across his lap and his Shetland collie dog panting at his side. He closed his eyes for the first time in four days.
“Sergeant Hathcock,” a voice whispered. “I thought you knew better than to doze off like that.” The Marine who led the squad that had left Hathcock four days earlier now knelt by the bush where the Marine sniper waited.
Hathcock smiled slowly, not even opening his eyes at first. “I knew you were there,” he said. “I heard your squad tramping up the ridge five minutes ago.”
“Let’s get going. Charlie’s crawling over these hills, and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover between here and the LZ,” the squad leader told him. “When we left the Hill, Charlie’s lines were burning up. I guess you got that general?”
“Well, he hit the ground mighty hard,” Hathcock said, pulling out his canteen and swallowing its last few
