The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
But there seemed to be something …
It was happening so fast, there was dust, so much dust, he couldn’t …
Confusion. He’d never seen a battle before except in the movies, but in the movies everything was clear. That was the point of movies. Here nothing was clear, it was a helter-skelter, some new dance, a reinvention.
He heard them on the radio as it unfolded in mircrotime.
“Ah, no, goddamn—”
WHANG! the jarring bang of metal on metal.
“Jesus, what is—”
“Look out, he’s firing, he’s—”
“Oh, fuck, we’re on fire. Christ, we’re burning!”
“I’m hit, I’m hit, oh, shit, I’m hit—”
“The flames, the flames.”
BEOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
A high-pitched scream pierced Red’s ears as he banked around; he winced, shuddered, wondering what the hell that was, and when he saw the geyserlike surge of blazing gasoline, he knew the microphone had melted.
It was happening. The truck’s fender with its cyclopslike headlight was as big as a house falling on him, but at that second Russ slammed the gearshift, punched the pedal, and with a surprising giddy lightness, his own vehicle shot ahead and the oafish rammer missed, veered to correct, and jacked out of control, tumbling savagely backwards amid a sudden huge blast of dust. Bob’s left hand reached for the wheel and wrenched it to the left. With a tremendous jolt the pickup slammed into the follow car, rocked crazily, and continued to spin around, hauling up a shroud of dust as it fishtailed, then came to a rest, crazily canted to one side, half in and half out of the roadside gully.
Through it all, Russ had the ghastly sensation of ghosts, as faces lit up by rage and surprise floated by in the follow car, so close yet so far away. He felt that he was looking at men under ice, in a different world, their mouths working madly, their eyes swollen like his mother’s deviled eggs from so long ago. Then it all went to swirl and blur and vanished in the weird perspective of the canted windshield and the cloud of rolling dust.
He blinked.
Wasn’t he supposed to be doing something?
“Out, goddammit,” barked Bob, and Russ clawed at his safety belt, glad that he’d had it on, felt it fall away and began to slither across the seat after already-vanished Bob and out the door. He remembered the bag, and felt the loaded mags rattling around inside as he disengaged from the vehicle, slid fast down the front fender of the truck to the wheelwell, where Bob had already set up in a taut, hunched shooter’s position. Russ couldn’t dive for cover. He had to see.
When he looked over the hood, the spectacle stunned him.
Upside down, the black pickup had cantilevered onto the shoulder on the other side of the road in its own cloud of dust, cutting off that lane. The two cars following Bob and Russ had slewed to a halt behind it, just coming out of their own panic stops and skids. They appeared to have collided themselves, the rear one smashing into the front one.
The truck’s follower had also slewed to a halt to avoid smashing into the destroyed truck. It was almost directly across the road from Russ. There was a moment of horrified silence. Inside the cars, men fumbled in confusion, trying not to shoot each other, trying to locate their target which wasn’t where it should have been.
Then, from just behind Russ, Bob fired.
Even in the bright light of day the tracers leaked radiance to mark their passage as they flew across the narrow distance. They were like phenomena in a physics experiment, ropes of incandescence as straight as if drawn by a ruler, unbearably quick, quicker than a heartbeat or a blink, illusions possibly. Bob fired three rounds inside a second low into the car directly across from him; what was he shooting for? Not men, for he was shooting not into the passenger compartment but above the rear tire and Russ—
Then the car was gone in a huge flash as the tracers lit up its fuel tank. The noise was a thunderclap, throwing feathers of flame everywhere as it seemed for one delirious second it was raining flame. All around them the world caught fire, and a wave of crushing heat rolled against Russ. He heard screams in the roar, and a flaming phantasm ran at him but fell under the weight of its own destruction into the roadway.
Motion struck at Russ’s peripheral vision, and he saw that one of the follow cars had gunned from behind the tipsy-turvy truck.
“Coming around, coming around,” he screamed.
But Bob was shooting even as Russ yelled and the tracers flicked quick and nasty like a whipcrack and seemed to liquify the oncomer’s windshield; it dissolved into a sleet of jewels as the car lost control and went hard into the gully, kicking up a gout of dirt.
“Magazine! magazine!” Bob screamed, and Russ slapped a twenty-rounder, bullets outward, into his palm and he sunk it into the rifle, freed the bolt to slam forward just as the third car came around, bristling with guns. But Bob took it cleanly, riddling its windshield with a burst of ball ammunition, and then held fire, emptying what remained of the magazine into the windows and doors as the car went by. The car never deviated, but sped by furiously, more as if it hoped to get away than do them any harm, and a hundred yards down the road it noticed that its cargo was dead men and it veered into a gully, lurched out, surfing a wave of dirt and grass, and came to a broken ending amid splintered white oaks.
And suddenly it was quiet except for the dry cracking of the wind and the hiss of the flames.
“Jesus, you got them all,” Russ said in utter astonishment and devotion, but Bob was by him, .45 in hand. He’d seen something. Two men with submachine guns had extricated themselves from the wreckage in the gully just before them, and started up the little embankment. But Bob stood above them and got his pistol into play so fast, it was a blur. Did they see him yet? One did, and tried to get his weapon on target, but Bob fired so quickly, Russ thought for a second he had some kind of machine gun, floating six empties in the air and the two shooters went down like rag dolls. One was an immense man in an expensive jump suit with gold chains on. He lay flat, eyes blinkless and vacant as the blood turned his sweatshirt strawberry and an odd detail leaped out at Russ: He had a necklace of scar tissue as if someone had gone to work on his throat with a chain saw but got only halfway around before thinking the better of it.
Another moment of silence. Bob used it to change magazines.
Russ looked around.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. It reminded him of TV coverage of the Highway of Death out of Kuwait City after the Warthogs and the Blackhawks finished a good day’s killing. Four wrecked vehicles, one on its back, one boiling with black, oily flame of petroleum products oxidizing into the sky, bodies and blood pools and shards of glass and discarded weapons everywhere.
“What do you think of that, you motherfucker!” Bob suddenly shouted, and Russ saw that he was screaming at a white airplane a half mile out, low and banking away to the south.
“You got them all,” said Russ. “You must have killed twenty men.”
“More like ten. They were professionals. They took their chances. Now let’s see if we done bagged a trophy.”
Then he strode across the littered roadway to the ramming truck, upside down and half in the gully. The odor of gasoline was everywhere.
He opened the door and peered in. Russ looked over his shoulder.
Inside, in a posture of unbearable discomfort that signaled something important had broken, was a tough-looking Hispanic with creamy silver hair and an expensive suit over an open silk shirt. The angle of his neck suggested that it was broken. Pain lay across his handsome face like a blanket, turning him gray under the olive tones of his skin. His eyes were glazing and his breath was labored.
Bob pointed the .45.
The man laughed and his eyes came back into focus. He held a lighter in his left hand.
“Fuck you, man,” he said. “I’m already dead, you cracker motherfucker.” His voice was a little lilting with a Cubano accent, an odd play of chs through it. “I flick my Bic and we
“It won’t blow, partner, it’ll only burn.”
“Fuck you,” said the Cubano.
“Who’s the man in the plane?” Bob demanded.
The man laughed again; his teeth were blinding white. He made a little move with his free hand and Russ flinched, but Bob didn’t shoot. Instead, both watched as the hand reached his shirt and, pausing only once or twice in pain, ripped it open. The brown chest was latticed with extravagant tattoos.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bob said.
“I’m Marisol Cubano, you norteamericano cabrone. You puta! Fucking Castro couldn’t break me in his prisons, man, you think I’m going to talk to some hillbilly homeboy?” He laughed.
“You are one tough customer,” said Bob, “that I give you.”
He holstered the .45.
“Let’s go,” he said to Russ.
“Hey,” screamed the man in the truck. “I say this to you, motherfucker, you got some balls on you, my friend. You cubano? Maybe Desi Arnaz done fucked your mama when your daddy was out fucking the goats.”
“I don’t think so,” said Bob. “We didn’t have no TV.”
They turned and were back at their own truck when the Cubano ended his misery; the truck flared as it went and the heat reached Bob and Russ.
STEPHEN HUNTER, the author of the acclaimed novel Dirty White Boys, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1946. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1968, spent two years in the United States Army, and since 1971 has been on the staff of The Baltimore Sun, where he is now film critic. He is the father of two children, and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
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Copyright © 1980 by Stephen C. Hunter
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Stephen Hunter, The Master Sniper