by Dan Simmons
Dar hoped that there would be no shooting—that he would just lie low in his duck blind while the Russians waited for him to come out of the cabin—until the FBI helicopters roared in with the real professionals. But if he was detected, he was ready to return fire and at least keep the Russians occupied until the cavalry arrived. His position was almost as strong defensively as the reactor at Dalat had been so many years ago—moated by the ravine, impossible to approach unseen from the west or south in the direction of the road and cabin, and difficult to climb to from the east. Dar had brought along his ghillie suit so that if the Russians’ “return fire” got too nasty—and Dar considered any return fire nasty—he would slip into the camouflage suit and head for the fields below the tree line to the east. By the time the Russians reached this side of the ravine, Dar should be all but invisible below and the FBI should have arrived in force.
I’m absolutely paranoid, thought Dar, soon after beginning his post-midnight vigil. Why the hell would the Russians come after me again?
But in his heart, he knew why. Both Gregor Yaponchik and Pavel Zuker had been trained and had operated as snipers. Dar knew that of all the soldiers on earth, only snipers are specifically trained to stalk another individual. Marines and Army grunts might end up with small units stalking small units, or even a single enemy, but only the sniper is trained to use stealth, concealment, and ambush at long range to kill another specific individual. And always first on the sniper’s kill list was the most dangerous threat—the enemy sniper.
Dar did not know if the Russians or their American employers had access to his Marine file, but he could not risk assuming they did not know he had been a sniper once. More than that, Yaponchik and Zuker had been tasked to kill him three times, and three times they had failed. If Dar knew anything about a sniper’s mentality—and he did—he knew that someone like Yaponchik would have an intense feeling of frustration at leaving this particular job unfinished.
Dar remembered a cartoon he’d once seen of a king sitting on his throne. I’m paranoid, the king had thought. But am I paranoid enough?
The night passed slowly. Making sure that there was no glow to reveal him, Dar switched the monitor from video camera to video camera, using the night lenses for the outdoor cameras. No movement on the road. No movement—or at least none detectable—in the broad fields down the hill from the cabin. No one at the sniper’s nests three hundred yards opposite him. No uninvited guests in the cabin.
Dar found one channel of his brain mulling things over. He allowed it to mull as long as it did not disrupt his focus.
He thought about his years reading the Stoic philosophers. He knew that the average person thought of the Stoics—if he thought of them at all—as proponents of a “stiff upper lip” and “don’t whine” philosophy. But the average person, Dar knew, was only half a bubble off moron-center.
He and Syd had talked about it. She understood the complexity of the Stoics’ writings—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. She understood dividing life between those things that one had no control over—and where the maximum courage was called for—and those elements that one could and should control, and in which caution was prudent. This had been part of Dar’s life and thinking for so many years that he found it surprising that he was reviewing and critiquing it on this night of all nights.
No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such, wrote Marcus Aurelius. Dar had tried to live this maxim.
What else had Marcus Aurelius taught? Dar’s nearly photographic memory brought back a passage. Let this always be plain to thee, that this piece of land is like any other; and that all things here are the same with things on the top of a mountain, or on the seashore, or wherever thou choosest to be. For thou wilt find just what Plato says, Dwelling within the walls of a city as in a shepherd’s fold on a mountain.
Well, here he was dwelling literally within a fold on a mountain. But now he thought of the sentiment behind the statements—both Plato’s and Marcus Aurelius’s—and he knew in his heart that he did not agree with the core of it. After Barbara and the baby’s death, Dar could no longer live in Colorado. It had taken a while to accept, but soon enough it had become that simple. This place—this mountain, this place near the seashore—had been a new beginning for Dar.
And now it had been violated. The Russians had tried to kill Syd and him not far from here, and they had taken pictures of him at this very place.
Dar felt no fury, no approaching katalepsis. He had damped his feelings down for so many years—turning to the humor found only in irony for his salvation—that he felt no anger controlling him now. But as he lay on the mountainside waiting—he had to admit that his hope was that the Russians might come for him. Despite all logic to the contrary, the hope burned in him like a cold fire.
Every time Dar had ever visited an accident scene, he had thought of Epictetus. Tell me where I can escape death: discover for me the country, show me the men to whom I must go, whom death does not visit. Discover to me a charm against death. If I have not one, what do you wish me to do? I cannot escape from death, but shall I die lamenting and trembling?… Therefore if I am able to change externals according to my wish, I change them: but if I cannot, I am ready to tear the eyes out of him who hinders me.
Epictetus might have scorned the impulse, but Dar had to admit that he was quite ready to tear the eyes out of the Russians if they came at him again. Thinking this, he felt the long K-Bar knife in its sheath on his belt. He had spent an hour honing that knife the previous evening and another hour spraying and coating it, even though the thought of sliding cold steel into another human being’s body made him want to throw up on the spot.
Some person asked, “How then shall every man among us perceive what is suitable to his character?” How, he replied, does the bull alone, when the lion has attacked, discover his own powers and put himself forward in defense of the whole herd?
Damn Epictetus anyway. Dar did not consider himself a brave man…nor a bull. And he had no herd to protect from the lion.
Syd, came the thought, unbidden. But he had to smile at that. Even as he lay here, hiding in his nook in the rocks in the middle of the night, forty miles from the city and danger, Syd was preparing to assault the bad guys. It was she who was protecting the herd from the lion.
Dar spent the hours shifting to get comfortable, keeping watch through his goggles and monitor, listening to the breeze stir the pines (while instinctively estimating the wind velocity), and generally deconstructing the philosophy upon which he had based his entire life.
Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse, Epictetus had taught. Having seen so many fresh corpses in his life, Dar could hardly argue. But during the last few weeks—during the moments with Syd—he had not felt so much the corpse animated by only a little spark of soul. He had to admit to himself…he had felt alive.
By 5:00 A.M., tired and sore but still wide-awake, Dar had reviewed all of his ontological and epistemological underpinnings and realized that he was an idiot.
Be like the promontory against which the waves continually break, Epictetus had taught, but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.
Well, fuck that, thought Dar. Didn’t Epictetus ever go to the seashore? Didn’t he know that sooner or later every promontory gets battered down and washed away? Probably the Aegean did not have waves like the ones Dar watched every week at the edge of the Pacific. The sea always wins. Gravity always wins.
After more than ten years of trying to be a promontory, Dar was tired of it.
Predawn light crept over the hillside. Dar put away his night-vision goggles but kept toggling the camera views. The access road was empty. The cabin was empty. The field below was empty. The sniper sites were empty.
By 7:00 A.M., Dar felt a surge of relief mixed with a strange disappointment. The raids were all scheduled to have begun by now—Syd had told him that much—and he understood that the Russians were to be rounded
up before the American civilians.
By 7:30 A.M., Dar was tempted to say the hell with it and just hike down the hill, prepare himself a big breakfast, call Syd, and get a few hours’ sleep. He decided to wait a bit longer. Syd would still be busy now.
At 7:35 A.M., Camera One showed movement on the driveway. A huge, black Suburban with tinted windows moved slowly past the camera position, stopped, and then backed into the slight turnout across from the surveillance tree.
Five Russians got out. They all wore black sweaters and slacks, but Dar recognized Yaponchik and Zuker at once. The older Russian—he still reminded Dar of Max von Sydow—seemed almost sad as he handed out the weapons to the others. The three younger men headed down the road and out of immediate camera range carrying their AK-47 assault rifles. Even on the small video screen, Dar could see that they were also armed with knives and semiautomatic pistols on their belts.
Yaponchik and Zuker also had holstered sidearms, but they were the last to pull their weapons from the back of the van, two Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova—sniper rifles of the type that had killed Tom Santana and the three FBI agents.
Dar had to smile. Even with all their money, the Russians stuck with the weapons they knew best. Sentimental, he thought, feeling the wood stock of his own antediluvian sniper rifle. Dar saw that both weapons had ten-round detachable magazines and a combination flash suppressor and compensator to reduce muzzle jump and flash. He had noticed that the other three Russians’ AK-47s were also fitted with suppressors. Evidently this group wanted to stop by, kill Dar Minor silently, and get on their way.
Dar knew that the SVD had some serious limitations as a sniper rifle. It was accurate enough out to a maximum range of six hundred meters, but at eight hundred meters, it had only a 50 percent chance of hitting a stationary, man-sized target. Theoretically, this gave Dar’s longer-range M40 a great advantage. But unfortunately, it was only three hundred yards to the cabin and less than that between the two sniper roosts—his and the one Yaponchik and Zuker seemed headed for.
Dar used the cameras to watch the Russians deploy. One of the men with a submachine gun appeared on the southern slope below the cabin, crawling through the high grass. Two entered the woods above the cabin. Yaponchik and Zuker came into camera range high up on the hill…paused…and then selected the less obvious of the two sniper positions. Dar’s video camera had a perfect view as the two older Russians settled into the tiny redoubt and ranged in their weapons and spotting gear.
Dar’s heart was pounding wildly. Time to call in the cavalry, he thought. He pulled out his cell phone, checked that the charge was good—he had brought an extra battery—and lifted his thumb to punch Special Agent Warren’s preprogrammed emergency number. That was when more movement on the video screen caught his eye.
Dar had set the monitor to cycle through the five camera positions. Now he could see Syd Olson’s Taurus driving past the parked Suburban, pausing, and then driving on to the cabin. Right toward the waiting Russians.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“X IS FOR TERMINATE”
DAR IMMEDIATELY TAPPED the preprogrammed number for Syd’s cell phone. She did not answer. He let it keep ringing while he slid forward and studied the area around the cabin with the gyro-stabilized Leica DBII glasses.
There she was.
Syd had gotten out of the Taurus with a Heckler & Koch submachine gun raised and ready, her shoulder bag slung behind her. She was approaching the cabin stealthily, and Dar guessed that she had muted her phone or turned the damned thing off. She was still wearing a Kevlar vest from the FBI raid, but the black body armor was hanging loose, not tightened by the side Velcro. A perfect through-the-ribs heart shot at this range.
Dar felt his pulse racing and his mind going blank. He had lost track of the two Russians with their assault weapons—they were somewhere in the woods not far from Syd—and he could think of no way to warn her.
Concentrate, goddammit. Dar struggled to get his breathing and pulse rate under control. Syd was fifty feet from the cabin door now, visible through the trees for a second, and then obscured, and still he could not find the Russian gunners.
Dar popped his head up long enough to use the binoculars on Yaponchik and Zuker’s sniper’s position three hundred yards west of him. He could just see the top of Zuker’s head and the barrel of Yaponchik’s SVD. Zuker was spotting with binoculars. Dar had memorized the field of fire from both of those positions and knew that Syd would be visible and within perfect range in just a few more steps. Before Dar dropped back into his ledge slot, he saw Zuker whispering into a radio.
Shit. The Russians could communicate and Dar could not.
Syd came into the open, her attention focused on the cabin. She looked confused, as if she expected a different situation. She took a careful step, the H&K submachine gun with its diopter sight raised and ready, swiveling to look first at the wooded hillside to her left and then at the cabin door ahead and to her right.
It’s locked, thought Dar, trying to send the information through the sheer force of will. No extra key out there. It’s locked, Syd.
Dar pulled the M40 Sniper Rifle to him, started to peer through the scope in preparation of sending a warning shot in her direction, and then had a better idea. He lifted the binoculars instead.
Syd started toward the cabin door. If he had left the cabin unlocked, the Russians might have let her enter before coming in after her, trying to bag both of them. But once she tried the door and found it locked—once they realized that he was not inside—Dar had no doubt that they would cut her to ribbons.
Dar laid the M40 next to him—glanced at the monitor where camera three showed the third Russian closer on the south slope, less than thirty yards from the porch—and then sighted through the binoculars again.
The Leica was equipped with a Class One laser, but the device was meant for range-finding flashes, not for projecting a constant beam. Nonetheless, by tapping the red button atop the binoculars as quickly as he could, Dar sent a red laser dot flicking and dancing almost at Syd’s feet.
She looked down in a long second of confusion. Dar hoped that none of the Russians could see the winking red spot on the pine needles. Just as Syd realized what she was looking at, he aimed the binoculars at her chest and continued tapping the red button. The range kept flashing in the digital display to one side of the viewfinder—264 yards, 263 yards, 262 yards—but Dar ignored it and kept the red dot winking on the black body armor directly above Syd’s left breast.
She dropped and rolled as if a trapdoor had opened up to swallow her. There were soft coughs from the forest, a slight noise from the ridge above, and bullets began to rip at the spot where Syd had been standing a second before. He held her in the binoculars long enough to see her roll behind a fallen Douglas fir trunk and then splinters and chunks of rotten wood were flying everywhere as the unseen gunmen in the woods continued firing with their suppressed AK-47s.
The lack of noise made the firefight seem unreal. A second later, reality reasserted itself as Syd lifted her H&K MP-10 above the level of the fallen tree and sprayed bullets at random into the woods. That noise was quite audible. The effect was negligible.
Move! Move! Don’t stay in that spot. Yaponchik can fire through that rotten tree!
This time the telepathy seemed to work. Dar saw Syd roll just as the DVD bullets—the Russian sniper weapon could fire at semiautomatic rate—tore through the thirty-inch trunk as if it were made of papier mâché.
Dar decided that it was time to get in the fight. He rolled to the Barrett Light Fifty, sighted into the stand of pines, firs, and birch just uphill from Syd, and opened up. The noise was terrific. Dar had almost forgotten that the first five magazines he had laid out were loaded with SLAP rounds—saboted light armor penetrators—capable of punching through nineteen millimeters of steel plate at a range of twelve hundred meters. The effect on some of the trees was dramatic. One entire young ponderosa pine was clipped off about twelve fee
t above the ground and came to earth with a crash. A giant Douglas fir absorbed a heavy round, but the entire 200 feet of tree rocked back and forth as if in a high wind, while wood chips and sap flew everywhere.
The rapid fire did not throw off Dar’s aim, although there was precious little to aim at. I’m killing a lot of trees, thought Dar. The automatically ejected brass, rattling and rolling on the slab next to Dar, offended his sniper sensibilities—he had been trained to police all his cartridges—but he ignored the aesthetics of the situation, slapped in a second magazine—regular 12.7-by-99mm rounds this time, firing standard 709-grain bullets—and blasted away into the woods, trying to sense movement or muzzle flashes.
The heavy fire from above must have rattled the Russians; their firing stopped. Syd appeared to have run out of ammunition. For a second, all was silence except for the ringing in Dar’s ears.
I fucked up, he realized, too late. Totally fucked up.
Dar swiveled the Barrett .50-caliber until the cabin’s doorway filled the sight. He slapped in another magazine of SLAP rounds. The first shot tore a five-inch hole in the wood above the door handle. The second shot blew the lock to bits. The third shot blasted the door open and half off its hinges.
Go, go, go, he thought toward Syd, and then did something that should have been fatal: he went to his knees swinging the heavy Barrett 82A1 Light Fifty toward Yaponchik and Zuker, propping the long weapon on the rock. If they had already sighted and ranged him, Dar knew, he would die instantly.
He caught a glimpse of Zuker’s head, binoculars trained twenty yards or so to Dar’s right, still hunting, and then he loosed off the seven shots left in the magazine.
