Bob Lee Swagger 2 - A Time to Hunt by Hunter Stephen

Author:Hunter, Stephen
Language: eng
Format: epub

Bob Lee Swagger 2 - A Time to Hunt

Chapter Twenty-four

The sandbags were the hardest. He had grown almost superstitious aboutthem. He would let no one touch them, for fear of somehow shifting thesand they concealed and altering irrevocably their inner dynamics.

“The Human Noodle has gone insane,” someone said.

“No, brother,” his comrade responded.

“He has always been insane. We are only noticing it now.”

The sandbags were packed with the care of rare, crucial medicines, andtransported back to the tunnel complex in the treeline, with the HumanNoodle watching them with the concentration of a hawk. He literallynever let them out of his sight; the rifle and its scope, strappedinside a gun case and more or less suspended and shock-​proofed by foamrubber pellets taken from American installations, bothered him muchless than the sandbags.

That held true for his gradual setup as well. He began with thesandbags, examining them minutely for leaks, for some alteration oftheir density. Finding none, he convinced himself he was satisfied,and made the sappers delicately transport them to the treeline. Therehe had rigged a kind of harness, a flat piece of wood to be tied to hisback when he was prone, upon which the sandbags themselves were to betied.

“I hope he isn’t crushed,” said Huu Co, genuinely alarmed.

“He could suffocate,” said his sergeant.

Ever so delicately, weighted down under the nearly one hundred poundsof sand–two forty-​pound bags and a ten-​pound bag–the Russian beganhis long crawl to the shooting position, which was a good two thousandyards from the tunnel complex far from the burned zone. It took sixhours–six back-​breaking, degrading hours of slow, steady crawl throughthe grass, suffering not merely from back pain but from the crushing fear of his utter helplessness. Aman under a hundred pounds of sand, crawling into enemy territory. Whatcould be more ridiculous, more pathetic, more poignant? Any idiot witha rifle could have killed him. He had no energy, his senses weredulled by the pain in his back and the breathless smash of the hugebags on his back. He crawled, he crawled, he crawled, seeminglyforever.

He made it, somehow, and crawled back, just before the first light ofdawn, looking more dead than alive. He slept all day, and all the nextday, because his back still ached.

On the third day, again he crawled, this time with the rifle and abatch of his specially constructed cartridges. It was much easier. Hemade it to the small hill well before dawn and had plenty of time toset up.

He loaded the rifle, tried to find some sense of relaxation, tried towill himself into the sort of trance he knew he needed. But he nevercould quite relax. He felt tense, twitchy. Twice, noises startledhim. His imagination began to play tricks on him: he saw the greatblack plane hovering overhead, and felt the earth open up as it fired.He remembered crawling desperately, his mind livid with fear, as theworld literally exploded behind him. You could not crawl through suchmadness; there was no “through.” He crawled and crawled, theexplosions ringing in his ears, dumbstruck that he had chosen to crawlin the right direction.

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