Marine Sniper (31 page)

He walked down the hill beyond the bunkers and joined a group of Marines wearing helmets and flack jackets. Each man had two fragmentation grenades and several pouches full of ammunition, balanced by two full canteens hanging on their cartridge belts. Carlos had only his rifle, one canteen hooked to his belt and a KaBar knife. He reached in his pocket and touched the tube of camouflage greasepaint resting there. He was scared.

The walk to the landing zone did not take long, neither did the flight-due west and well into the high mountains that bordered Laos.

The Marine rifle squad moved quickly taking him to the departure point, and by noon Hathcock sat alone, his back against a tree, surrounded by heavy vegetation. He was preparing himself mentally for what he knew lay ahead. The fear that lay like a heavy animal inside his chest would need some calming.

DAY ONE

Carlos had calculated perfectly, as always in the past, and arrived at the tree line's edge just as the sun set. He covered his exposed skin with shades of light and dark green greasepaint from the tube that he carried in his pocket. Every buttonhole and strap on his uniform held various-shaped leaves and grass.

Here, at the edge of the open country, he saw the NVA's heavily guarded buildings with their camouflaging and their fortified gun positions. He had no idea where in Southeast Asia he was at the moment and had not wished to ask. The terrain map he had studied had had no place names. From their flight path and the distance covered, he would not have been surprised if he was in Laos or even North Vietnam.

Under the cover of darkness, Carlos retouched his camouflage paint and exchanged the forest's deep green leaves for the lighter green and straw-colored grass that now surrounded him and covered the vast open land ahead. He drew his canteen and poured a capful of water. He brought the lid to his lips and sipped, his eyes constantly shifting and looking for signs of movement, his nose testing the air for any smell of other men.

For the next hour, he continued preparing himself, drinking sips of water from his canteen lid and relaxing in the tree line's cover.

Finally, his every move fluid and slow like that of a clock's minute hand, he lay on his side and slipped into the open. His Winchester rifle was clutched tightly against his chest.

His body was in constant motion, but the motion was so slow that a man staring at him from ten feet away would in all probability have seen no movement. He traveled inches per minute and yards per hour. From now until he reached his goal, Hathcock would not eat or steep and he would drink rarely.

He had had no idea that he would have to move this slowly. The dry grass was about a foot above his head as he crawled slowly on. Hathcock noticed the stars in the clear night sky and prayed for rain. If it came he could move quickly, since the enemy's vision would be obscured and the shower's noise would cover his. Dampness would also soften the crackling dry grass and weeds.

The Marine sniper had crawled approximately thirty feet from the tree line when he heard the first enemy patrol approaching his position. His eyes strained to find them in the moonless dark. He knew they were closing in on him by each crunching footstep's increasing loudness. Hathcock held his breath. The patrol was very near. His lungs burned, and his heart pounded. Sweat gushed from every pore on his body. He was worried they would smell him. Absolutely motionless, he stared back at the trail of bent and broken grass that lay behind him.

Hathcock thought, "If they see me, then that's how. They'll see my trail." His lungs could take no more pain-he must have air. He felt like a pearl diver gone too deep, seeing the water's mirrored surface over him. Too much distance lay between him and the sweet air above. He remembered, as a boy, diving deep and swimming up, and how his lungs ached just as he reached the water's surface. Hathcock relaxed his lungs slowly-silently releasing the captive breath. He longed to gulp a replenishing surge of oxygen, but instead filled his lungs silently and very slowly with tiny puffs of air.

Movement near his feet nearly made him scream. A leg flashed by him. Another and another flickered past. The NVA patrol was now between him and the safety of the trees.

He heard one soldier clear his throat. Another whispered something in Vietnamese. Hathcock thought, "These guys are goofing off. They aren't even looking. They're safely in their own backyard and don't suspect a thing."

As the patrol passed, Hathcock watched them traipsing along beside the tree line, oblivious of his presence. "That looseness just might save my life," he thought. "Boy, will they be sorry," he told himself. A smile crossed his face, and his confidence soared. As soon as the enemy was out of earshot, he pushed on through the night.

DAY TWO

The hour before sunrise has a sleep-inducing effect. Nearly any soldier who has had to remain awake through the night will testify that the worst hour, when fighting sleep poses the greatest challenge, occurs when the night is darkest, coolest, and quietest-an hour or so before dawn.

Hathcock had to rest, but he could not afford risking sleep. In the past months, he had taught himself to nap, yet remain awake, his eyes wide open. He did not know what sort of self-hypnosis made it possible, but he always felt very rested following one of these ten-minute respites.

The flickering light from a small cooking fire caught his attention and brought him out of his catnap. "These dumb hamburgers!" he thought, "Another time and another place, and you would have been mine, Charlie."

An iron pot filled with boiling water and rice hung over the fire. Three NVA soldiers squatted nearby, sleepily waiting for their breakfast to finish cooking. They manned the "Quad-51" machine-gun position on the left flank of the compound. A narrow trail through the grass led from the compound, passed next to the machine-gun nest, made a sharp left turn, and then led arrow-straight to the trees. Lights shone through several windows of the main house. Carlos supposed that it had been a French plantation in years past.

Inside, the short, graying general leaned over a porcelain bowl filled with cold water. A thin white undershirt covered his hairless, sagging chest and wrinkled belly. Baggy white shorts covered his bottom. He wore no shoes but stood on the glossy teak floor in his stocking feet. The old officer's brown uniform rested neatly on hangers hooked to a peg on the door. Gold clusters and braid shone on the uniform's wide, red shoulder-boards and on the broad red patches sewn on his collar.

In an adjoining room that had been made into an office, the general's aide-de-camp huddled over papers, shuffling them into order for the old man. They would inspect a battalion today. The day before, the general and his entourage had walked the perimeter, inspecting the security of his headquarters. He had found it satisfactory.

Hathcock had seen him, but the old man was too distant from the Marine sniper's firing point. Now the sun fully lit the new day. In the distance, Hathcock watched a white car pull away from the house, drive up the trail, and disappear into the tree line.

"Old man's gone for a while, I reckon," he told himself. "Good. That means that those guys will really slack off."

By late afternoon, Hathcock had put five hundred yards between himself and the tree line. More than twenty hours had passed since he had left the jungle's cover.

Just before sunset the white sedan drove up to the house and stopped. Carlos watched the indistinguishable figures walk toward the door. "Just keep it up, Homer-you and your hot dogs. I'll get you."

The evening security patrol began its first tour of the perimeter. Ten NVA soldiers fanned into a line and began closing toward Hathcock. He stopped his oozing wormlike slither and waited. He watched as the soldiers approached him in the dimming light. "It could have been worse," Hathcock thought, "They could have come before sunset."

After lying flat in the dirt for twenty-four hours, Carlos had attracted a following of ants. His body ached from hundreds of small lumps left by their bites. He wondered if enough ant bites could eventually kill a man. Sweat poured into his eyes as the enemy patrol came on. They were spread on-line with twenty- to thirty-feet wide gaps between them.

"Here I am, gettin* hell stung out of me," Hathcock thought, "my body crawlin* with critters, layin' here can't move-and here comes Homer and his friends. Hell, I'll probably crawl all the way up, never be seen, kill this old muckety-muck, and then when I try to leave, I'll die from all these critter bites. The ants will cart off my bones, and I'll wind up MIA forever."

Carlos watched the approaching patrol. He could see only three of the soldiers now, the remaining seven were on his blind, right-hand side. He watched the three NVA riflemen plod closer and closer.

"If the guy on my right don't step on me, I'll get by this one too," he reassured himself. But the soldiers were looking far ahead, toward the tree line, and they were oblivious to the sniper they had just passed.

DAY THREE

The sun found Carlos Hathcock twelve hundred yards from the compound's headquarters, its doorways and windows now clearly visible to him. He watched as the soldiers relieved and posted the guard. "It's as though they're back at Hanoi," he thought. Over everything hung the calm air of routine.

Throughout the day, he observed couriers filing in and out of the compound, reporting to the man with the red collar. The sniper kept to his steady pace. He could feel adrenalin surging at the thought that tonight he would halt and prepare to fire with dawn's first light.

He thought of how he had succeeded thus far. He also turned his attention to his escape. To the right of where Carlos would eventually lie, a small, almost imperceptible gully ran nearly to the tree line. Once he fired his shot, he planned to slide along the shallow and gently sloping gully and disappear through the trees.

"It's a good thing, Carlos," he told himself. "These hamburgers are so loose here, it'll take them half a day to figure out what happened."

Hathcock squirmed forward a few more inches and then, looking ahead of him, his confidence faded at the same time that his entire body stiffened.

The hunger, which had wrapped his stomach in knots for two days, vanished. The blood drained out of his face and the whole world took a violent spin. He wanted to jump up and run. He wanted to scream. He wanted to do anything rather than continue to lie there and look into the eye of a jade-green bamboo viper that lay coiled in the grass six inches from his face.

Panic ripped through every fiber of self-discipline that Carlos had ever been able to string together. He felt numb as his eyes focused on the deadly snake's emerald head, its ruby-colored eyes evilly slanted above head-sensing pits.

The snake was motionless but the sniper felt his own body shaking. "Gotta get hold here," he breathed slowly. "Oh Jesus! What if he bites me in the face! Control yourself! He ain't bit you yet." He knew this snake was neurotoxic like the cobra. One pop, even a little one, would kill him in minutes. "You've come too far to let a bamboo snake end it all," he told himself as he lay still and watched the viper flick its black, forked tongue from its yellow-rimmed mouth, testing the air.

Almost as though the shaken Marine had never existed, the glossy snake turned its head, whisked silently between broad stems of grass, and disappeared.

After Hathcock's heart slowed to its normal rhythm and the shaking effects of the adrenalin that sent his blood coursing through his temples had subsided, his nagging hunger returned, accompanied by a sudden thirst. "Where's the groceries!" he exclaimed to himself. "Where's the water!"

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.