Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

Bob looked at the explanation, which was in three languages. He read the English one.

Counter-partisan soldier of SS-13th Mountain Division, Police Battalion, which was active in trans-Carpathian area in summer 1944. These men committed many atrocities and were especially feared and loathed by Ukraine citizenry.

“He’s our boy,” said Swagger. “He’s the guy who burned Yaremche and hunted Mili.”

“He’s scary,” she said.

“Mili knew how to deal with ’em. She did the hard work enough times. Great damn gal. Sniperwork, alone, taking fire. Still she’d put one center mass, and then he wouldn’t scare nobody no more. I’d put one right between his eyes,” Swagger said.

“It’s still a mystery, all these years later. These people, their adventure in death. What drove them? How did so many go insane?”

It was true. It wasn’t just partisan war, which can drive good men to do evil things. He knew that, had seen it. He thought: I’ve been on the wrong end of a partisan war. Unless you have, there’s no way you can feel the rage, the frustration, the fury that the straight-ahead soldier feels for an enemy who strikes at night, melts into the trees, and smiles at you and sells you a Coke the next day. When your buddies start showing up with their noses and dicks cut off, you tend toward peevishness. It’s a goddamn cesspool of bugs and leeches and rats and maggots, and it breeds atrocity, sure as hell.

This was something more. It wasn’t just frustration at taking casualties from the partisans. It was something darker, more troubling, a mass descent into the conviction of superiority along some bogus grounds that led them to believe they had the moral right to the slaughter. They had a butcher’s mandate. They had become death itself. After seeing so much blood, blood lost all meaning, and some limit had been broken and now there were no limits and one could kill and kill and kill. From the pits to the crushed villages to the camps, it was a melody in one dark tone.

Finally he said, “I’d like to pretend some of them didn’t fall for it. They didn’t all line ’em up and shoot ’em down, did they?”

“There may have been some good ones,” she said.

“We could use a good guy in this story. This poor girl lost in the land of the monsters. When does the hero show up?”

Chortkiv

Behind Russian Lines

JULY 1944

The Auntie Ju took off from the Luftwaffe airfield at Uzhgorod, flew low to the north, and banked east through a gap in the Carpathians at Tarnopol. She stayed low over the Ukraine flatlands as her pilots put her on course for Chortkiv, ten kilometers behind Red lines so that, when she reached the drop zone, she could climb to five hundred meters and let the boys out to do their jobs. She should make it fine, since there was no Soviet radar this far south of Moscow, the Red Air Force rarely flew at night, and even the anti-aircraft gunners, in this lull before the offensive everyone knew was coming, got some extra shut-eye.

What was left of Battlegroup Von Drehle fit into the one plane, though it was tight within the corrugated tin fuselage, all the boys knee to knee, facing each other in the cramped space. All wore the clipped Fallschirmjäger helmet, its flaring Teutonic rim removed so that it looked something like the leather hat the ridiculous Americans clapped to their heads when they played a game they insisted on calling football. All wore the faded “splinter” forest-pattern camo smocks, which the fellows sportingly called “bone bags,” knee pads, and lace-up boots, the latter mandatory if you didn’t want your shoes falling off while you floated down. All had combat harnesses and their FG-42s or STG-44s strapped across their bodies. All wore a collection of magazine pouches suspended horizontally on either side of their chests, on a kind of horse-collar shoulder harness, and in each pouch nested a box of twenty 7.92s or thirty 7.92 Kurzs. All wore RZ-20 parachutes, which made all uncomfortable, though if you were going to jump out of an airplane, you could put up with a little discomfort. All wore their parachute infantry emblems, a stylized plunging eagle in gold upon a silver wreath. All wore their seventy-five-engagement badges. All wore bread bags on slings, though loaded with M-24 grenades. All weighed a ton with all the junk on.

Some smoked, some just looked out disconsolately into the distance. Hard to read expressions, as all had smeared their faces with burnt cork, so they looked like a very bad minstrel show about to break into a lackadaisical “Old Man River.” It wasn’t really a group anymore, in the grand military meaning of that term, which conjured divisions and regiments and battalions, and was called one these days only as an administrative convenience. It was more of a squad, one officer, one noncommissioned officer, and thirteen men. But you couldn’t say “battlesquad,” as that sounded ridiculous, and these parachutists cared entirely too much about their damned dignity.

They were lean young men with the severe faces of mummies. Most had jumped into Crete with Von Drehle four years earlier. Most had served with him in Italy for a year. Most had been with him in Russia now for two. Most had been hit and come back, most had killed dozens if not hundreds of enemy soldiers, blown up every kind of structure imaginable, destroyed tanks and other armored vehicles, most could fieldstrip their FG-42s blindfolded in seven seconds, or throw an M24 through the door of a racing railway car forty yards away, or cut a man’s throat with a yank from the blade of a gravity knife, or rescue a dictator from mountaintop imprisonment. They were very, very good; they were the best, in fact, and they were all that was left of the 21st Parachute Battalion of 2-Fallschirmjäger, one of the storied airborne divisions of the Reich.

They were also sick to death of all this shit. Really, three and a half hard years of war, who wouldn’t be? One had been wounded six times, most between four and five. Von Drehle himself had been to the hospital four times, once on Crete, once in Italy, and twice in Russia.

He was not sure if he was a captain or a major, as the promotion had been promised but the paperwork possibly lost, though it was not that important. People usually called each other by first name in the Green Devils, and everybody knew who the bosses were. He also had a great many medals, although he couldn’t tell you what they were. He’d once been somebody’s idea of the ideal and had his pix in all the rags and was the closest thing the Germans came to an Errol Flynn, with appallingly handsome features, a ginger smudge of mustache, and wavy blond hair. The nose and the cheekbones seemed to have been designed by slide rule, and you could not take a bad picture of him. He was very pretty, but he could fight.

He was used to being famous, loved, and admired. Before the war he’d been a racing driver for Mercedes and had finished third in the Monaco Grand Prix in 1938, at the age of twenty-one, in his W154 “Silver Arrow,” a ballistically shaped high-velocity screamer of an automobile. He liked the thrill of speed, a perfect outlet for his excessive hand-eye coordination, his overbusy intellect, his quick-as-death reflexes, his extraordinary vision, and his insane bravery. He liked battle for exactly the same reasons, at least the first three years of it.

“Karl, how long you figure?” asked his oberfeldwebel, or staff sergeant, Wili Bober.

Von Drehle flipped his wrist to look at the Italian frogman watch he wore, on the theory that if it operated underwater, it would probably operate in battle.

“I have 0115,” he said. “Didn’t Von Bink say the jump estimate was around 0130?”