Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

December 2021.

“You think this is cold?” Dare asked, though this was a rhetorical question requiring no answer. “Try going above the tree line. Air paper-thin and wind so fierce felt like a whip stinging your face, flaying your skin down to the bone. This is nothing, son. You want to be me, you need to handle extremes, battle your way through.”

“Uh-huh.” The boy Dare had known as his nephew trudged after. People who thought that Texas was hot and balmy only ever visited places like the Alamo and Brownsville. They went down to the Gulf or maybe Houston and Galveston but only in nice weather. Winters in west Texas could be fierce with ice storms that took down power lines and coated the limbs of live oaks with a thick layer of pure ice four or five inches thick. Sometimes, there was so much ice the trees bowed like old men with long, heavy beards. More often than not, a branch cracked off, falling in great, jagged spears of ice-caked wood. Although this had not been one of those days, marching through the woods with Dare back then to go ice-fishing in his lake, the boy John had been felt if he rubbed his nose too hard, it might crack off in his hands.

“Tell you an old trick of the trade,” Dare said as they passed through the last of the orphaned maples and live oak. “Old sniper trick.”

“A trick?” His ears pricked with interest. Now they were getting somewhere. What was the point of slogging through the woods on a day like this? He wanted Dare to teach him to shoot. He could care less about hanging out in the cold. But maybe this was what a man like Dare had to endure. He’d seen enough movies to know: a real soldier, a real man , kept going. “What trick?”

“Most people think the trick to being a good sniper is hitting the target. That’s true, but that’s only part of the equation. The other problem with being a sniper, any sniper, is you got to learn to hold yourself real still, still as death. Not just for a couple minutes, not just for a couple hours, but a lot of hours.” Shrugging out of his pack, Dare pulled out ice crampons. “The trick is learning how to become invisible. More to it than not moving.”

“But isn’t it just like being a rabbit?” Perching on a rock, he slipped a crampon over a boot. “Be still and wear the right camouflage for where you are?”

“Sure.” Dare cinched down a crampon then fetched up a second, the icy metal rattling and chattering and chiming. “Gotta be quiet, too. Make sure your scope doesn’t catch any light. But there’s still something else you have to remember about being out in the cold.”

“What’s that?”

“You tell me.”

“But I don’t know.”

“Half of what you learn in life, son, is what comes when you shut your mouth and watch and think. So, you just sit now, be as still as you can, and tell me how I still know you’re here. A dead giveaway, no matter if I’m standing, say, twenty, thirty feet away or looking through binos. How do I know you’re here ? Because, trust me, if I was all the way on the other side of the lake and you were as camouflaged as could be and let’s say, for grins and giggles, you’re behind a rock, I would still know. The answer isn’t magic either. So, tell me.” Dare cocked his head. “How will I find you? If I were a wolf and you were that snowshoe rabbit, going all still against a background as white as your pelt… Other than the wind changing and that wolf catching the scent of that rabbit, how would that wolf know you were there? What would give that rabbit away?”

Give a rabbit away? Give a sniper away? He sat, thinking about it, watching Dare watch him, the both of them still as statues…and then noticed the one thing that a statue does not do but a man must.

That was the moment he saw, precisely, the problem with invisibility.