Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“Can you make an identification?” Ackov asked as the Arab captain walked the line of bodies, attending them carefully.

Salid examined each dead face. He felt little but the responsibility of duty and command and the ambitions passed on to him by the One True Faith. The death masks themselves meant little to him; he’d seen thousands in his time, and learned early on in the days of Einsatzgruppen D that it made little sense to dwell on any one face.

At a certain point, he pulled a file out of his camo tunic to make comparisons. “I can’t tell about the women,” he said. “We’ll have to clean them up to make a more precise identification. As for Bak, I had hoped to nab him tonight. What a nice bonus that would be, and earn me a week in Berlin. But unless he’s one of the ones with face blown off, I don’t see him. Maybe he wasn’t here.”

The week in Berlin was purely command theater for the perpetually excited Serbs, who loved to rape as much as kill. Salid’s own personal tastes were aesthetic: given a week’s leave, he would return to his prayer rituals—a luxury quickly abandoned on the Eastern Front—five times a day, and dream of the severe beauty of his beloved Palestine with its groves of date and olive trees, its sun-bleached sandstone hills, its bounty concealed in its near abstraction, its warmth, its bright sun, its needful people.

“Intelligence predicted Bak would be here,” said Ackov.

“ ‘Predict’ is too scientific a word, Sergeant. They’re just guessing, like the rest of us. Under normal circumstances I would call this a most excellent operation. More bodies than Von Bink’s Panzergrenadiers have managed to collect in one place in over a year. But the operation was so special, I am not yet sure if we succeeded, and I am not yet sure what sort of report to make to Senior Group Leader Groedl.”

“Captain,” came a cry from nearby, and an excited man approached. He held a rifle, which he presented to Ackov, who presented it to Salid.

It was a Mosin-Nagant 91 with a PU scope sight and a complex shooter’s sling for mooring it to the body at three points.

“She was here,” said Ackov. “No doubt about it.”

Sniper’s luck: a cave.

Sniper’s luck: a cave without a bear, a wolf, a badger, some wild thing already in attendance, ready to fight her for squatter’s rights.

Sniper’s luck: a stream through which she could run for miles, leaving no tracks. More, when she finally exited it, she exited over rocks and climbed a rocky path to get up to stable, dry ground. Again, no tracks.

She huddled within, watching the sun filter its way through the Carpathian forest as it rose. All was still. The scene was exquisite if you had time to appreciate such things, the verticals of the seventy-foot-tall white pine trunks, the horizontals of the pine boughs, the harmony of green and brown, the falling away of the land, the green cloverlike undergrowth, the slanting rays of sun where it penetrated the forest. There was perfume in the air, the sweetness of the pines. So serene was the view that she had to wrench herself from it; it suggested that peace and security were possibilities when clearly they were not.

No Germans came her way, though her visibility was limited. At the same time, no partisans seemed to be searching for her, either. She had no rifle, she had no map, she had no idea where she was. It had happened so fast in that modern way, one moment you’re in one universe, on the edge of sleep, dreaming of your loved ones, and the next in another universe, everyone and everything trying to kill you with very loud violence.

Just about every part of her ached. The longer she lay, the more signals of pain came from various body parts as they realized they were no longer obligated to perform at maximum output but now had the leisure to report their discomfort. She had fallen, bruising and scraping a knee. The pine needles had cut her face and hands as she pushed her way through them. It seemed she’d pulled muscles along one rib, and that pull reported its agonies with some urgency. There was the lesser issue of a sprained ankle, but ankles had a way of loafing through the first day, then crying out loudly the next. A hundred scrapes, bumps, tears, pricks, cuts clamored for attention. Meanwhile, she was desperately hungry. How would she eat?

She was no forest dweller. She was a city girl. Her life before the war had been the cinemas and coffee shops of St. Petersburg; like many St. Petersburgers from old St. Petersburg families, she could never think of the place as Leningrad. It was a white city, beautiful in its pale northern light with its great churches and palaces, its abundant waterways and bridges. It was Dostoyevsky’s city, literature’s city, the most European city in Russia. Nothing about it had prepared her for this.

She knew she needed a plan. Her father, wise and wily, had already figured it out. She heard his voice. Wait another night here in the cave, then tomorrow at late afternoon begin to ease your way downhill. You will be lucky or not, running into peasants who may help or Germans who will kill. But you cannot simply lie here awaiting death.

Now assess. Use your brain. Papa said you were smart, all the teachers said you were smart. Figure this out.

Analyze, analyze, analyze. You must know the nature of the problem before you can solve it. This is as true in physics as it is in war, politics, medicine, or any advanced, refined human behavior. You must determine that which is true rather than that which you want to be true.

That was Papa’s truest belief. That was what killed him.

Her father was an agricultural biologist, and his task, like all those in his specialty, was to find some way to increase the wheat harvest. The motherland lived on her wheat; from wheat came bread, and from bread, life. Someone once said bread was the staff of life. Her father had laughed at that. No, he’d said, there’s no staff involved; bread is life.

But his education was founded on a stern belief in Father Mendel’s genetics. Alas, in Ukraine, a peasant genius named Trofim Lysenko believed in hybrid genetics. He had Stalin’s ear and, soon enough, power. It behooved him to enforce his theories, first with letters to the journals, then lectures of admonition by way of faculty supervisors, and then through visits from secret policemen.

But her father would not be still.

One could not alter a wheat stalk in the lab and expect those alterations to be carried on in subsequent generations. Father Mendel made that clear a hundred years ago. It was a truth that could not be denied, and to base Soviet agricultural policy on fraudulent theories of hybridization was to ensure failure and doom millions to starvation.

It wasn’t that Fyodor Petrova was a hero. Far from it. He was a mild, calm man, decent to all, a loving husband and father of three. But he was compelled to speak the truth, and he spoke it until he was disappeared. Over wheat!

Now she had fallen into her other trap: bitterness. She tried to exile from memory the night she learned he had been taken, the long months without hearing a thing, and finally an unofficial but not quite by chance encounter between her mother and one of her father’s university colleagues, who reported unofficially. “He said they heard that Papa died of tuberculosis in a prison in Siberia.”

And that was that. The ugliness of grief is not for words. Nor the grief to come: for two brothers, a mother, a husband. Even the great Dostoyevsky, with all his haunted, tormented mutterers, could not find the words to express it. Survive. Try to forget.

Papa again: Get your sniper brain back. Focus, concentrate, see, understand. Show nothing, hide your beautiful eyes and body and become the earth, the wind, the trees, become the sniper, and pay them back, pay them all back.