Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

It was inevitable that Groedl would recall Salid. When he needed a group of specialists for the delicate mission before him, it took a great deal of wrangling to get Police Battalion, which was acquiring a spectacular record under Salid in the Serbian mountains, transferred en masse to the 12th SS Panzer Division, the umbrella unit for all SS operations in the West Ukraine–Stanislav area, although the connection was for paper-pushers only, and SS-13 Police Battalion Scimitar reported directly to and worked completely for Senior Group Leader–SS Groedl.

Salid estimated the bandit column to consist of at least fifty men and women, all heavily armed, all well experienced, most mounted on the sturdy-legged Carpathian ponies that made operations in the mountains feasible. He himself had only twenty-five, the best, from Police Battalion’s larger pool of mountain anti-bandit fighters. He knew a larger formation on horseback could not move silently through the forest and mountain; he knew they would leave sign and disturbance; this one had to be done with great precision. He also specified ammunition double loads and made certain each of his fighters was armed not with the slow bolt-action KAR-98k rifle but with the MP-40 submachine gun and a P-38 or a Luger pistol. Each man carried three M24 grenades, “potato mashers,” in the parlance. The point was to unleash maximum firepower when the column entered the kill zone. It had to be a single overpowering blast, because the targets were wily, would not panic, would return fire, and would quickly form maneuver elements and locate an egress and engineer some form of escape. Their ponies would give them mobility. But there could be no escapees. All must die: no prisoners, no worries, no regrets.

Hauptsturmführer—that is, Captain—Salid put his first MG-42, settled on a tripod for steadiness, thirty meters off the line of march, giving it a good sweeping angle laterally along the length of the column. He placed his second down the line, the only weapon on the left side of the ambush axis, also on a tripod. It would work the back end of the column, with a fire cutoff point established so that it did not leak bursts onto the Serbs on the other side of the path. His submachine gunners and grenadiers were concentrated in the jag of the L and, after the first magazine expenditure, would move on to targets of opportunity. The key was a group of extremely brave men who would be sequestered along the march line. They would wait two minutes, then emerge, there within the confines of the column, and begin to shoot the wounded. It was important that the phases of the ambush—opening ambuscade, suppressive fire, and individual liquidations—happen promptly, without hesitation. It would go so fast that there would be no time for command direction; the fellows would have to do it as they had been instructed, by second nature.

The unit had been afield for three days. It had moved only on foot, only at night. No cooking fires, no latrine pits, no sleeping positions. The men during the day simply melted into the forest and went supine for the entire daylight hours. They carried meager rations and water and were instructed to leave no traces, an impossibility but an ideal toward which to strive.

After ambush, it would take an hour for the armored Sd Kfz 251 Schützenpanzerwagens to arrive, grinding through thick brush under the power of their tracks, while being steered adroitly by their front tires. Each half-track carried an MG-42, so once they were on site, the firepower would be sufficient to stand off an army. But until then, that would be the tensest time, for who knew what of Bak’s units were afoot in the forest tonight? Perhaps another was closer than expected and would come to the sound of the gunfire, to find Police Battalion low on ammunition and exhausted from the rigors of the ordeal. It was a gamble, but it was a gamble that had to be taken.

A cricket chirped. The cricket was a Serbian scout, ahead of the ambush site by one hundred meters. That meant the partisans—excuse, excuse, bandits !—were approaching down the path. Salid crouched, drawing his MP toward him. His would be the opening volley. He scanned again, saw nothing but stillness under the weaving of brush in the breeze, heard nothing but silence along the darkened forest path. Perhaps to his left he heard the squirming of the machine-gun team setting itself on the edge, rising behind the heavy gun with its endless belt of 7.92mm ammunition, but there were no clicks as guns were cocked or came off safe, for his good, trained Police Battalion fighters carried their weapons hot and ready to fire, to save tenths of seconds when it counted most.

Was it a dream or a fantasy? It had to be a fantasy. Dreams follow their own mad course, welling from an underneath of surrealism, grotesquery, twisted images, strange colors, weird angles. Her dreams were nightmares, all set in ruined cities of dead children. No, this was a fantasy, an indulgence claimed at the very edge of consciousness but still controlled by a rational mind full of aesthetic distinctions.

The scene always a meadow somewhere in an idealized Russia. The weather always late spring, the breeze always soft, the flowers always bright, their smell always sweet. It was a picnic of Petrova’s lost family. All had assembled.

Her father was there. That kind and decent man, with his earnest way, and his steadiness, and his intellectual integrity. He always wore a tweed suit in the English style and had round black glasses, possibly French in origin. He smoked his ever-present pipe. His high cheeks and sincere eyes and gentleness of nature were what she felt, what she remembered, what she missed so terribly.

He was sitting on a linen sheet, sipping tea, and making conversation.

“No, Mili,” he said. “I would stay with your court game. You have so much talent, and a girl as intelligent as you needs some kind of healthy outlet. Though you are correct in asserting that there is no direct application of the strength and suppleness you develop, I think that it will eat up your excess energy. Believe me, I have seen too many an intellectually gifted woman ruin herself on men, tobacco, and vodka when she goes to university, simply because all her excess energy demands some kind of release or expression. The tennis will save you.”

She laughed. He was so earnest. “Oh, Papa,” she said, “maybe I should take up the pipe, like you! All the time you fiddle with that pipe, all the cutting, the trimming, the stuffing, the lighting, the inhaling. Is that how you handle your excess energy?”

“Mili with a pipe!” Her younger brother Gregori laughed. “Oh, that’s what would attract the boys. You’d end up married to an engineer or a doctor if you smoked a pipe!”

“Mili, Mili, Mili,” shouted the even younger Pavel and did a loose-limbed interpretation of Mili sucking hard on an imaginary Sherlock Holmes meerschaum, all curves, fifteen pounds weight, with an obstruction in the stem so that the effort of inhalation hollowed his cheeks and bulged his eyes.

Dimitri, as always, sprang to her rescue. “You boys, you go easier on your big sister! You’re so lucky to have a beauty like Mili—”

“You’re pretty lucky yourself, Dimitri!” shouted Gregori, and all of them fell to the warm earth, laughing at the hilarity of it all, even normally reserved Mama.

Gone, all gone. Her father, into the Soviet gulag, lost forever for disagreeing over Mendelian genetics with a Stalinist toady and bootlicker who called himself a scientist. Gregori, burning in his T-34 somewhere in the Caucasus. Pavel, pneumonia over the hard winter, picked up in the hospital where he’d been sent after a severe leg wound in infantry combat. Her mother, shell, Leningrad, second year of the great siege. And last of all, Dimitri, down in flames somewhere in his Yak, not quite an ace but one of the very best, whose luck had finally run out.