Time to Hunt Read Online Free Page A

barracks. Your hitch is up when, Fenn?”
    “Sir, May seventy-two.”
    “Hate to see you leave, Fenn. The Corps needs good men like you.”
    “Yes, sir,” said Donny, wondering if this was some—no, no, it couldn’t be a recruiting pitch. NIS was the Navy and the Corps’s own, tinny version of the FBI: they investigated, they didn’t recruit. “I’m engaged to be married. I’ve already been accepted back at the University of Arizona.”
    “What will you study?” asked the commander.
    “Sir, pre-law, I think.”
    “You know, Fenn, you’ll probably get out a corporal. Rank is hard to come by in the Corps, because it’s so small and there just aren’t the positions available, no matter the talent and the commitment.”
    “Yes, sir,” said Donny.
    “Only about eight percent of four-year enlistees come out higher than corporal. That is, as a sergeant or higher.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Fenn, think how it would help your law career if you made sergeant. You’d be one of an incredibly small number of men to do so. You’d truly be in an elite.”
    “Ah—” Donny hardly knew what to say.
    “The officers have a tremendous opportunity for you, Fenn,” said Captain Dogwood. “You’d do well to hear them out.”
    “Yes, sir,” said Donny.
    “Corporal Fenn, we have a leak. A bad leak. We want you to plug it.”
    ———
    “A leak, sir?” said Donny.
    “Yes. You know we have sources into most of the major peace groups. And you’ve heard rumors that on May Day, they’re going to try to shut the city down and bring the war to a halt by destroying the head of the machine.”
    Rumors like that flew through the air. The Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, SNICC, they were going to close down Washington, levitate the Pentagon or bury it in rose petals, break into the armories and lead armed insurrection. It just meant that Bravo Company was always on alert status and nobody could get any serious liberty time.
    “I’ve heard.” His girlfriend was headed in for the May Day weekend. It would be great to see her, if he wasn’t stuck on alert or, worse, sleeping under a desk in some building near the White House.
    “Well, it’s true. May Day. The communist holiday. They have the biggest mobilization of the war planned. They really mean to close us down and keep us closed down.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Our job is simple,” said Lieutenant Commander Bonson. “It’s to stop them.”
    Such determination in the man’s voice, even a little tremble. His eyes seemed to burn with old-fashioned Iwo Jima–style zeal. At the same time, Donny couldn’t help notice the lack of an RSVN service ribbon on the khaki of his chest.
    “Remember November?” asked Bonson.
    “Yes, sir,” said Donny, and indeed he did. It stuck in his mind, not the whole thing, really, but one ludicrous moment.
    It was late, near 2400, midnight in the American soul, and the Marines of Bravo in full combat gear were filing into the Treasury Building, adjacent to the White House, for protective duties against the possibilities of the next morning in a city where 200,000 angry kids had campedon the mall. A bone-dry moon shone above; the weather was crisp but not yet brutal. The Marines debarked from their trucks, holding their M14s at the high port, bayonets fixed, but still wearing their metal scabbards.
    As Donny led his men downward toward the entrance, his eye was caught by light and he looked up. The abutment at the end of the ramp was brick and, being situated between the oh-so-white White House on the left and the oh-so-dark Treasury on the right, yielded a perspective on Pennsylvania Avenue, where the architects of the crusade for peace had organized a silent candlelight vigil.
    So one line of young Americans carried rifles into a government building, under tin pots and thirty-five pounds of gear, while twenty-odd feet above them, at a perfect right angle, another line of young Americans filed along the deserted street, cupping