Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

As she stood on shaky legs, on earth once again, hands reached to touch her, not sexually but as if in wonder.

“ Die weisse Hexe, ” came the call, the whisper, and all crowded close to see the famous sniper of Stalingrad, as known for her beauty as for her skill. Her hat came off and her hair tumbled free. She shook it, partly because her head was hot and itchy, partly because it was a gesture copied from the movies. It cascaded and, lit by torchlight, seemed to shiver; so blond, so silken, so dense. Her eyes narrowed and she turned to three-quarters profile to confront them and the weapon of her beauty hit them hard; they stumbled back. A man approached.

“I am Bak,” he said. “Welcome, Petrova. We are here to serve you in any way.”

Bak was the Ukrainian soldier who’d risen to partisan command by virtue of cunning and organizational ability. He had become totally a creature of forest ambuscade and slow night crawl. He was a general but mistrusted by Moscow, a man to watch, a man to fear.

The issue would always be: After the great victory, would he throw his forces against or to Stalin? Was he Nationalist or Communist? If the former, he could well earn nine lead grams from an NKVD agent’s pistol instead of a hero’s medal. So he carried himself with a certain doomed grace. The fallen lines of his face, she thought, seemed to say: This will end badly.

“I am honored, General.”

“Call me Bak. It’s enough. The ‘general’ is bullshit, that’s all.” He turned and yelled, “All right, get this crate turned around so it can get out of here and take this NKVD prick back to his bath.”

The men crowded to the tail of the light plane and managed to rotate it on its landing gear to face the wind while, at the same time, standing clear of the two whirling props. Petrova could see the white faces of the two young pilots behind their control panel, crouched over their steering mechanism, waiting as the plane was resituated. When that happened, they nodded, and the guerrillas faded back. The pitch of the engine rose to a shriek as one pushed a throttle, spitting flecks of grass and debris in the air as well as the stench of acceleration, and the plane began to move forward. With less cargo by the weight of a woman, it dipped, then rose and soon vanished.

“Petrova, come, we have a wagon.”

“I can walk. I am fine.”

“No walking here. We ride. Can you ride?”

“God, no,” she said. “I am a city girl, I’m terrified of horses.”

“The White Witch terrified of anything ? Now I see you have a sense of humor, and I really like you. The wagon, then.”

“It’ll have to be.”

“Good, and it’ll help you save your strength for your job. For now, rest, relax, a long journey, still not complete. Some vodka?”

“Excellent,” she said, and took a canteen from him. One shot hit her nicely.

“Now, into the wagon. Sleep if you can. It’s four hours through the forest to the camp, and we have to make it before light so the Germans don’t spot us. They’re patrolling all the time, as per the orders of that bastard Groedl, whose hash I hope you settle.”

Gripping her rifle, she said, “Get me a shot, Comrade Bak, and I won’t miss.”

The Train South

THE PRESENT

The train from Moscow was something out of an old detective novel, an Orient Express without an Orient for a destination or an express as a mode of operation. It was old and filthy, separated into compartments where wooden benches sat beneath wooden bunks, the whole car itself a collection of compartments, all the upholstery and curtaining faded red. It rattled along, never surpassing forty, the track itself somehow rough and improvised. It gave him a headache, as did the inefficient air-conditioning. Vodka, please. Oh wait, no, no vodka. On wagon. On train, on wagon.

He forced himself instead to reread in sobriety the only account of the fighting in West Ukraine in July 1944 in English (barely) as translated from the German, a book of intensely professional history called To the Bitter End: The Final Battles of Army Groups North Ukraine, A, Centre, Eastern Front 1944–45 . It was hardly a heroic poem, being restricted to the battalion-level maneuver, and somewhat distant and rational for a process as improvisational as war. There was no sense of “What the fuck do we do now?” that Bob knew so well.

Still, it provoked him. Who knew? Who knew anything about the East? He’d spent a few weeks reading every damn book Amazon had on the subject, most of them claiming to have found the real “turning point,” when the only turning point had to be June 21, 1941, the day Hitler sent his men off on an insane mission. It was like invading space. There was so much of it, endless, rolling, thousands of miles, millions of people. There was nothing but there there. Who could begin to understand it? Facts, sure: Stalingrad, Leningrad, Karkov, Kursk, each with a nice neat date, each charted on a neat construct called a map that showed arrows moving this way, opposed by arrows moving that way, superimposed on a tapestry decorated in unpronounceable names like Dnipropetrovs’k and Metschubecowka and Saparoshe, yielding now and then to vast emptiness where there were no names but only, by inference, grass or wheat. But there was so much more. Forgotten fights that were as big, really, as Normandy, where fleets of tanks threw themselves against each other and men in the thousands died in flames or were torn to shreds by explosions. Or perhaps even worse, the daily grind, a combat environment where men hunted men every fucking day of the year, 24/7/365, a million firefights fought, a billion shells launched, a trillion rounds fired. Over and over, year after year after year, the death toll incomprehensible. Those fights were too obscure to have names. There was a sadness to it. People should know about this stuff. People should care about the sacrifice, the pain, the death that convulsed the world; yet here was a whole huge piece of it so obscure that no one in the West had even acknowledged it. What place is this, where are we now? I am the grass, I cover all.

These ruminations did Swagger no good at all and, if anything, amplified his need for vodka.

He tried to get away from the big picture. So his new strategy was to concentrate on the small picture. Go to Mili, he told himself. Think only of Mili.

Mili, in the Carpathian Mountains, with an assignment to assassinate a German administrator who had murdered, by strokes of a pen or orders to dictationists, thousands, tens of thousands. What happened to her? He tried to imagine it. But he had no luck. His best gift was useless in a train, when he hadn’t seen the area he needed to understand. That was the gift of looking at land and reading it for truth. If he could see the ebb and flow of movement across a terrain, he could make some sense out of it. He’d know where the shooter would have had to place him- or herself to get the shot, and that determination would come from a confluence of factors: first, clean angle to the target; second, concealment, obviously, cover if possible (she would have to weigh cover against concealment very carefully, if it came to that); third, a sense of the play of the wind, because even at five hundred meters, her longest possible shot with a M-N 91, scope or not, the wind could wreak havoc on the shot so she’d be best to shoot in the early morning, when it tended to be still, and if heat and humidity were to factor, they’d also be at their least influential; and finally, escape route. But he could not begin to imagine this, not without a landscape to search for possibility against.

His mind went numb. Beside him, Reilly dozed quietly. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Mili’s escape route. If she had one. It occurred to him that in that war, given the losses, given the immensity of the sacrifice, given all the times the bosses had sent rows and rows of young men marching or driving into machine-gun fire and artillery, possibly the nihilism that was so pervasive had infected Mili, too, and so she passed on escape. Maybe she took the shot, saw that she had missed, watched as the SS troopers ran to her, pulled out her Tok, and shot herself in the head. Since she’d been shielded by the villagers—or the SS assumed she’d been shielded by villagers—they burned the place and the people in it. That was the way they operated.