Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/v02lhp/my_first_and_only_snipe_hunt/
The phone rang. This wasn’t unusual, this was what phones were meant to do—this was when cell phones were just starting to become popular but not everybody could afford them or wanted them.
Nobody called me except salespeople, but this time when the phone rang, I could feel it was going to be something consequential, something profoundly inconvenient.
Before texting and being able to screen your calls, the landline ringing at different times could foreshadow the news you were about to hear: evening phone calls were friends calling each other, calls after midnight meant someone was hurt or dying, calls before 7am meant an older relative who was on the verge of dying didn’t make it through the night. They wanted to tell you as soon as possible, but didn’t want to wake you up at 4am with news you couldn’t do anything about.
But at 2:47pm on this particular Tuesday, the phone was ringing.
Why did I have a black rotary phone twenty years after they stopped being a thing? I couldn’t tell you. I think it was my grandma’s phone and I just ended up with it. I didn’t make or receive enough phone calls to bother with buying a cordless, and between my real job as a night-shift registrar at a psych hospital and my side hustle hunting snipes for a secretive para-governmental agency, phones were more of an inconvenience than a necessity.
I’ve been told I have a bad habit of burying the lede, where I drop a piece of interesting information between a few mundane details, so maybe what I just said needs some clarification: I spent five years working in a psychiatric hospital during college. I wasn’t hurting for tuition money, but I couldn’t stand being by myself at night and when there weren’t patients I had enough downtime and was just bored enough to force myself to do homework.
One time a beautiful pre-med student was having a psychotic break, talking gibberish and pirouetting across the waiting room, occasionally striking a ballet pose using a chair or the wall as balance. I was having a conversation with a co-worker as she danced up to me and draped an arm over my shoulder and whispered lightly in my year:
“Do you see them? The beautiful little people who hide behind the flowers?”
Another time, I was having a patient sign his intake paperwork and he leapt across the desk with the pen to stab me. Several things happened at once—he screamed something incoherent about my mother as he leapt up to strike, the door to the room flew open, and two safety guards ran in and knocked him on his ass. For legal reasons we had to let them sign papers in a small room separated from the main Psych ER, but the safety guys watched everything on cameras.
But I got off-topic. The phone was ringing ominously. I let it ring—I didn’t have an answering machine.
Five rings, six rings. Maybe they’d give up. I waited as the rings continued.
On the eleventh ring, I answered, resigning myself to bad news.
It was a woman’s voice.
“Is this J____?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“This is Angela. I know I said we would never call you, but something has happened and there’s no time to go through the normal protocols. This isn’t a snipe hunt—it’s something else. You need to pack a bag and be waiting outside your apartment building in ten minutes. A blue Nissan Altima will pick you up.”
And then she hung up.
She was right, they’d never called before. The usual method of communication was a postcard with a coded message giving me information about the target and the location. I’d go on a vacation to Mexico, to Italy, to Alabama, and fix a problem. When I got home, there would be an envelope with a few winning scratch-off lottery tickets in my mailbox totaling tens of thousands of dollars.
I threw some clothes and other essentials into a backpack and as soon as I got out my front door I saw the car parked and waiting.
The driver was Middle-Eastern. He looked me over and as I prepared to open the rear door he waved his hand and pointed at the passenger-side door.
“Where are we going?” I asked as I closed the door.
He didn’t answer, just gave me a dismissive glance as we sped off.
He wasn’t running lights and cutting people off, but he was driving with a purpose, with a dark efficiency I appreciated.
In fifteen minutes we were out of the city, whipping around curves on hilly roads through forests, heading west. I had my backpack between my legs and the sharp turns banged my knees against the door and the glovebox.
He skidded to a stop in the parking lot of what looked like an abandoned warehouse. The only other vehicle in the lot was a white Econoline van, the kind you’d expect to see a creepy man driving with an arm out the window holding a candy bar.
But the driver’s seat was empty. My driver pointed at the van and as I got out, one of its rear doors opened. I stepped into the back of to find a group of strangers staring at me, seated on two benches running along the left and right of the cab.
Two of them wore military garb of a branch I couldn’t recognize—cargo pants and fatigues with digital camo in different shades of dark gray, black waffle-stompers, both of them clutching automatic rifles. The other three looked like civilians: a wiry, older man in jeans wearing a white T-shirt with a pack of cigarettes in the chest pocket, a middle-aged woman who looked like she might be a gym teacher, and finally, a young man wearing sunglasses who looked like he just stepped off of Wall Street.
“This is everyone,” one of the soldiers said to the other one, who then stood up and climbed into the driver’s seat.
We pulled away as something on the old man’s belt caught my eye: a carabiner with a keychain attached to it by a braid of dark hair. The woman was wearing a fanny pack, its zipper adorned with a similar braid of hair, but it was white.
“You’re snipe hunters?” I asked.
The old man nodded. The woman smiled.
“Any idea why we’re here?”
The old man took out his cigarette pack and shook one loose. Neither the woman nor the soldiers had any reaction as he lit his square and took a drag.
“The sergeant here has not been forthcoming with details,” he said.
The sergeant turned to us as if having been switched on.
“In approximately two hours we will arrive at our destination in Doddridge County, West Virginia, at which point I will brief you on the details of the mission.”
The woman turned to the old man, “Do you think something happened to expose the program and they’re getting rid of us?”
Neither soldier showed any reaction to the question, but the old man shrugged.
“I doubt it. It’s the type of thing a news editor would laugh away for being too outlandish and a senator would be too cagey to react to. They probably have black budget items ten times more exciting than what we’re doing.”
The young man with the glasses took a drink from a bottle of water and wiped his mouth.
“The three of you are here as consultants. We need your unique expertise to deal with a situation which has arisen in one of our facilities.”
“The bigfoots have broken out of their cage at the CIA zoo and you need us to help you round them up?” the old man asked, wryly.
“We can’t give you any more information until we arrive,” the sergeant chimed in.
“Is it…common for snipe hunters to be roped into missions?” I asked them.
The old man shook his head. “I knew there were others but I’ve never met another one. And I didn’t realize there were lady snipe hunters.”
“You don’t think girls can handle the ‘rigorous demands’ of the job?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“In a real fight, I’d take one of you over ten of him,” he said, pointing at the young man.
“Where’d you do your hunt?” the old man asked me.
“Northern Canada…is there anywhere else?”
“Everglades, in ’87. Damn gators were more trouble than the snipes.”
The woman laughed. “Tibet, four years ago. A group of them attacked our climbing team. I was the only survivor. Managed to take one of them down and the others fled. I took the head back to base camp because I didn’t think anyone would believe me. Some Chinese government officials showed up and took the head and made all kinds of threats to keep my mouth shut about what happened, but I had hidden away some fur samples. When I got back to the ‘States, they approached me about joining the program. You can call me Linda, by the way.”
“And I’m Tom,” the old man said.
I told them my name.
For the next few hours, nobody said anything. The sergeant stared blankly into space, Tom nodded off, and Linda had a magazine. The young man had climbed into the passenger seat and was talking to someone on a cell phone but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
I had a book in my bag, a book of Guy de Maupassant short stories. I was halfway through a story about a man who goes crazy thinking there’s a malevolent spirit living in his house and drinking his water when—
“We’re here,” the sergeant said.