Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

Analyze. Assess. Understand. God gave you a brain, use it.

What do you know?

I know that we were ambushed by Germans. Most of us died. I escaped by—

No, no. Do not waste time on the self. Who cares by what means the sniper escaped. She escaped. On to larger issues. Characterize the German effort.

Extremely skilled. They have the best warcraft in the world and routinely kill us five to one in any engagement. They have better equipment, smarter officers, more creative soldiers. We only beat them only by sheer force of numbers. If they kill us five to one, we come at them six to one or ten to one and, in the end, shall prevail because, all things being equal, we can outbleed them. We can outsacrifice them. We can outgrieve them. We clear minefields, after all, by marching through them.

But even with those truths, the effort of the night was outstanding. It was beyond anything she had encountered in her six months in Stalingrad, her day of killing at Kursk.

Especially considering there were fewer Germans.

There had to be. A large force could not maneuver and emplace so silently; it would leave sign. Bak’s partisans were masters of the forest; how could they have been fooled except by those who were more masterful yet?

A small, silent, elite force. A few men.

How few?

Two heavy guns. She recognized the heavier concussions of the 7.92 rounds spurting from the unmuzzle at unattackable speed. The rest machine pistols, their lighter, crisper burr gnawing away in counterpoint to the heavy guns. The automatic nature of the weapons made it seem as if thousands attacked when it could have been but few. She did not believe that she heard any K-98 Mausers. All were armed with automatic guns. All. That was rare for them. If all these men had machine pistols, special arrangements had been made. This was some kind of team, some kind of special unit, not just a line platoon wandering the Carpathians hoping for kills.

She thought about it more. Twenty, twenty-five men. Four on the 42s, the rest with machine pistols and grenades. First the heavy guns fire. Then the machine pistols and grenades, but no more than four grenades. Then, on signal or as if rehearsed, all those gunners go quiet and the executioners spring from nearby—so nearby!—and are quickly among the wounded, the hiding, the dying, firing at close range.

Think about those men. They lie still, making not a sound, while their comrades fire inches above their heads. Both elements know exactly the cutoff point; the execution squad has total trust in the gunners and leaps into action the very second the gunners cease fire. Not a split second is wasted.

Survivors? A freak of luck, maybe, a few out of fifty, herself among the lucky. But superb execution, perhaps rehearsed, so that each man knew his place and move. It didn’t feel like a serendipitous happening. These men knew . They had superb intelligence. They moved through partisan-controlled forest without a sound, they knew exactly the pathway, and they planned and executed beautifully. They were clearly of Waffen-SS caliber, maybe better. They represented—if she understood the situation here in the Carpathians, where a bitter kind of stalemate existed—the coming of a new energy via a new and specialized unit to the field.

What could it mean?

At that point, she was yanked from her concentration by a flash of motion. She looked sharply, dividing the visible world into sectors and examining each in its time, top to bottom, as methodically as a typist transcribes an interview.

Until she saw them.

Lviv

THE PRESENT

The Germans knew exactly where Bak’s unit would be, what time it’d arrive, they did it perfect, ” said Swagger. “But the point isn’t that it’s early. It’s what ‘early’ signifies: betrayal.”

“Someone snitched them out. Can we determine who it was?”

They sat in a pleasant twilight in the old town square of Lviv, at a sidewalk café called the Centaur. The city itself had that old Austro-Hungarian empire style going on; they could have been in Prague or Vienna. Swagger half expected hussars in brass breastplates over red jackets with swords at the half-cock to come trotting along the cobblestones at the head of some emperor’s entourage. It was so cheerful, it was hard to think of betrayal. One thought more of fairy princesses.

“Let’s look at the possibilities,” said Swagger. “First: tactical betrayal. It happened because of a natural consequence of combat operations. Say, a German Storch recon plane saw the Russian plane that had dropped Mili take off. It was able to shadow the movement of the column. The Storch team radios time, location, direction; again by coincidence there’s a Police Battalion counterbandit team near enough to get set up, and the bandits just walk into it.”

“That’s not really betrayal,” said Reilly. “That’s just ‘stuff happens.’ ”

“Fair enough. Okay, local betrayal. One of the partisans is really a German agent. Or maybe some SS major has his daughter hostage so he’s forced to turn on his people. He manages to get the news out before they leave to pick up Mili. That gives the Germans plenty of time to get the Police Battalion into play.”

“So it’s a coincidence of timing that this happened when Mili arrived? Hard to swallow.”

“Try this. Bak himself is the Nazi agent. They’re building him up to win a lot of battles so he’ll be a hero and be taken back to Moscow, and when he’s back in NKVD headquarters, he can really give them the crown jewels.”

“But they seem to have killed him. After all, he disappears from the story.”

“It was an accident. Night ambushes are terrible things. Nobody knows what’s happening. He’s trying to blow the deal to give up the Russian sniper to protect Obergruppenführer Groedl, and he zigs that way when the linchpin on the MG42 tripod vibrates free, and the gun rotates another few inches, and bye-bye, Bak.”

“But wouldn’t his death be recorded in the operational diaries of Twelfth Panzer, regardless? Like the rifles, he was booty.”

“It would,” said Swagger.

“Okay,” she said. “Interesting possibilities. They’re all wrong, but they’re very interesting. Tomorrow I’ll tell you who betrayed them.”

Somewhere in the Carpathians

MID-JULY 1944

Two of them. Not Germans, definitely not Germans. But partisans, survivors of the Bak column, as was she? Hard to tell.

A heavy one, a light one. In the heavy one, she recognized the dignity and stolidity of the eternal peasant. He had no partisan affectations, no babushka hat, no crossed bandoliers of ammunition, no potato mashers stuck in his belt, no Red tommy gun. He wore only a shapeless black peasant smock and equally shapeless trousers over the thick boots peasants had worn for centuries. He moved with deliberation; you knew in a second that patience would never be a problem with this one. He could outwait God or the devil if it came to that and, as a hobby, watch mud bricks dry. He would be the one who knew a lot more than you thought, and if he gave you his loyalty, he was giving you everything. Everything about him was big: feet, legs, arms, hands. He could put in a thousand hours behind a plow. He was the man who would plant and harvest the wheat her father had tried to protect for him. He would feed the masses; he was the masses.

The other was leaner, quicker, a lithe man with goatee and glasses, under a frost of prematurely gray hair, wiry and tight. He looked somehow more refined, and if he moved easily through the woods, it was not out of heritage but out of learning. He, too, was as unwarlike as could be imagined, in a well-worn black leather jacket, some kind of bluish shirt, and a pair of threadbare trousers.