Time to Hunt by Stephen Hunter

Author:Stephen Hunter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Vietnam War, Assassins, Families, Family, Vietnamese Conflict, Idaho, Domestic fiction, Bob Lee (Fictitious character), Fiction, 1961-1975 - Veterans, Military, Espionage, Adventure stories, War & Military, Thrillers, 1961-1975, Swagger, Veterans, Ranch life, History
ISBN: 9780385480437
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1998-05-18T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The sandbags were the hardest. He had grown almost superstitious about them. He would let no one touch them, for fear of somehow shifting the sand 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, and transported back to the tunnel complex in the treeline, with the Human Noodle watching them with the concentration of a hawk. He literally never let them out of his sight; the rifle and its scope, strapped inside a gun case and more or less suspended and shock-proofed by foam rubber pellets taken from American installations, bothered him much less than the sandbags.

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

“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 pounds of sand—two forty-pound bags and a ten-pound bag—the Russian began his long crawl to the shooting position, which was a good two thousand yards from the tunnel complex far from the burned zone. It took six hours—six back-breaking, degrading hours of slow, steady crawl through the grass, suffering not merely from back pain but from the crushing fear of his utter helplessness. A man under a hundred pounds of sand, crawling into enemy territory. What could be more ridiculous, more pathetic, more poignant? Any idiot with a rifle could have killed him. He had no energy, his senses were dulled by the pain in his back and the breathless smash of the huge bags on his back. He crawled, he crawled, he crawled, seemingly forever.

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

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

He loaded the rifle, tried to find some sense of relaxation, tried to will himself into the sort of trance he knew he needed. But he never could quite relax. He felt tense, twitchy. Twice, noises startled him. His imagination began to play tricks on him: he saw the great black plane hovering overhead, and felt the earth open up as it fired. He remembered crawling desperately, his mind livid with fear, as the world literally exploded behind him.

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