Time to Hunt by Stephen Hunter

Back to Bob the Nailer after a week’s hiatus for Brian Haig’s latest.

If you saw Shooter, the Mark Walberg movie based on Hunter’s first Bob Lee Swagger book, Point of Impact, you would believe that Swagger’s spotter (Donny Fenn) was killed in an ambush somewhere in Africa. Wrong. That was Hollywood taking some artistic license for sake of that story.

Donny Fenn was a Marine stationed near DC during the Vietnam War running a platoon doing ceremonial burial duty. He was maybe a year from being discharged and looking forward to marrying Julie, his high school girlfriend from Arizona. Antiwar protests are looming in DC. Some Navy spooks think one of Donny’s platoon has been leaking info to antiwar protesters and squeezes Donny to do some spying to improve their case. Donny balks, but is told to sneak around or get sent back for a 2^nd tour of Vietnam. So he sneaks around and finds little to implicate the suspect, meeting only some high placed organizers, but the Navy spooks are going to go ahead and prosecute. Donny had better toe the Navy’s line or else. But Donny has a fit of conscious and tells the judge advocate the truth, that he saw nothing to suggest transfer of information and starts packing his bags for Vietnam, but not before secreting off to get married to Julie.

In Vietnam, Donny is paired with a sniper of note, known by the NVA as ‘The Nailer’ for his killing proficiency. While on patrol in treacherous rain, Donny and Swagger hear a wisp of a radio plea for help from stranded marines pinned down by a battalion of NVA. So Bob Lee and Donny ditch their planned patrol to see if they can help and with a lot of guile, luck, and savagery manage to hold off an entire battalion until the skies clear enough for air cover to eliminate the threat.

The NVA are pretty sure that ‘The Nailer’ was the cause of the failed attack and hash out a plot to get Bob Lee by using a legendary Russian sniper, but of course Bob Lee figures out what they are trying to do (it’s what he would do). On the eventful day, Bob Lee gets hit in the hip, Donny is killed (just days before his discharge) and the fire zone gets napalmed leaving only the Russian’s rifle.

Flash forward. It is now decades since Vietnam. Bob Lee has fought with the demon bottle and ends up marrying Donny’s widow and has a young daughter, Nikki. On a morning horseback ride in the Idaho mountains, shots ring out. Julie is wounded, a neighbor is killed, and Bob Lee just knows someone is after him for his sins in Vietnam. Time to Hunt.

From Idaho to New Orleans to DC to Baltimore, and back to snowy Idaho, Bob Lee tracks clues to the identity of the sniper and why he (Bob Lee) is being targeted. Hunter carefully leads the reader around an ingeniously plotted myriad of clues (and too many side plots to reveal here; some are too cool for a blog, so you’ll have to read this yourself, especially the last twist) that first suggests Vietnam, but eventually comes back to Donny, Julie, and those shady operatives Donny met back within the peace movement that are trying to clean up a mess meaning that Bob Lee really isn’t, and never was, the target. As Julie says, “it’s not always about you.’ The mother of a dead activist calls Swagger the ‘sacred killer’ needed by civilization. And in Time to Hunt, we learn just how sacred a killer Bob Lee (the Nailer) Swagger can be.

East Coast Don