Rendezvous by Nelson DeMille, 2012

“I saw her in my field glasses. It was a woman.” I added, “They make good snipers.”

Remember the alien that haunted and hunted a US special forces team in the jungles of Central America in Predator, where only the head of the commando unit survives in the end? Cut back to the Vietnam War and imagine a sniper eliminating an elite reconnaissance patrol, where again only the leader of the detachment lives to tell the tale. Except, in Nelson DeMille’s Rendezvous, the sniper is neither man nor alien. It’s a young woman who is as deadly with a long-range Russian-make Draganov rifle as she is sensuous bathing naked under a waterfall, in full view of the lieutenant whose men she is taking down one by one.

The female sniper, clad in black silk pajamas, plays mind games with the ten-man recon patrol which, in spite of being entrenched in the dark and treacherous jungles of Vietnam, has nowhere to run or hide. They are lost and confused and are sitting ducks for the “bitch,” and DeMille shows them no mercy in this crisply written story.

The sniper torments the nameless lieutenant by killing all his men and then mocks him by sparing his life, so that he can go back and tell everyone about her, and thus create the legend of the female sniper. Her trophies should not go in vain.

Rendezvous is entertaining with an element of unintended humour, and it moves at a brisk pace. I don’t know if there were female snipers in the Viet Cong that fought the carpet-bombing Americans, but there were highly-trained insurgents whose guerrilla tactics often won the battle against the enemy.

Rendezvous is the second of Nelson DeMille's Kindle Single; his first was The Book Case (2012), a delightful story about a murder in a bookstore, which I reviewed a couple of years ago. I recommend both the novellas.