Conspiracy by Stephen Coonts Page A

carefully. Phuc Dinh was not among them. Dean let them pass.
    Not more than five minutes later, another villager appeared. It was Phuc Dinh.
    Dean knew it was. He saw Phuc Dinh’s face, and the scar. And he was moving quickly, confidently. Probably the four men who had passed first were a security team, making sure the path was clear.
    Phuc Dinh had a pistol in his belt but no other weapon. Dean stared through the scope of the bolt rifle, steadying his breathing. Phuc Dinh’s head moved toward the crosshairs. The wind was 3 miles an hour.
    Just as Dean’s finger started to pressure the trigger, shots rang out up the trail behind him. The shots were from an AK-47—years later, Dean would still remember the distinctive stutter the 7.62mm bullets made as they left the barrel, the sound partly echoing against the rocks, partly muffled by the jungle.
    There was no way that the shots could have warned Phuc Dinh in time. Dean was already pressing the trigger. And yet for some reason Phuc Dinh had already begun to dive away.
    Maybe Dean rushed the shot. Maybe the wind kicked up incredibly. Maybe the fact that the weapon wasn’t his—even though he’d fired it before—messed him up. Maybe Phuc Dinh had seen a flash of light from Dean’s scope, or realized he was vulnerable, or just had an itch to move. Maybe this was just the one time out of ten thousand that a sniper missed a shot.
    In any event, Dean’s shot went wide left, hitting PhucDinh’s arm rather than his chest as he fell or threw himself off the side of the trail.
    Dean immediately corrected and took another shot. He struck the only part of Phuc Dinh that was exposed, his right leg. As that shot hit home, Phuc Dinh bounced farther down, completely out of Dean’s view.
    In the meantime, the automatic-weapons fire behind Dean continued. The gunfire wasn’t meant as a warning, and it wasn’t being fired at Dean. The men had obviously come across Longbow.
    Dean ignored the other gunfire. His job was to take out Phuc Dinh. Only when that was done could Dean help his friend. Dean climbed up out of his “hide” or sniper’s nest and began circling to the west across the ridge for a shot. He had to go about ten yards before he could see into the spot where Phuc Dinh had dropped.
    He wasn’t there.
    Dean took a long, slow breath. The important thing, he told himself, was not to make a mistake. He knew he’d gotten Phuc Dinh in the leg and, while that wasn’t fatal, it would slow him considerably. Most likely he’d moved back down the trail into the jungle. All Dean had to do was track him.
    As Dean started down the rocks, he heard the gunfire in the distance intensify.
    There was no question that he had to stay with his target until he was dead. Longbow would have done the same. The fact that the Vietnamese were firing so many shots was a good thing; it meant that they probably didn’t have a real target, and they were giving their positions away besides.
    And yet Dean did feel a tug as he moved down the hillside, low to the ground, snaking toward the edge of the jungle, hunting his prey.
    It couldn’t have taken Dean more than five minutes to get to a spot in the trail that he calculated would have been far enough behind Phuc Dinh that he could cut him off. But after Dean reached it, he spotted a few drops of blood, making it clear that the target had already slipped by.
    Dean began to follow the trail, aware that he might be the hunted rather than the hunter. After about two hundred yards, he realized he wasn’t seeing the blood anymore. He stopped, listening, but heard nothing. He moved into the brush and began paralleling the trail.
    By now the sun was almost directly overhead, and while the trees provided shade, the heat steamed through him. He was thirsty. Dean told himself that Phuc Dinh had to be tiring as well and that, wounded, he’d be slower and less careful. Dean pushed