Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

Indeed, the little fight became an argument of ballistics. Shooting the main battle rifle cartridge, the 7.92mm Mauser, the parachutists had the advantage of range and power, plus speed. If they could see it, they could hit it. The newer STG-44s, brought in because the FGs were getting harder to find, fired a shortened 7.92 round from an immense curved magazine and, if need be, could become real hosepipes; but at semi-auto they retained accuracy and a great deal of power. Too bad they were so goddamn big and heavy. The Ivans, on the other hand, had many of their tommy guns, and were able to put out enormous volume, but that was a pistol bullet, shaky on both range and accuracy. They could make a lot of noise, raise a lot of dust, crisscross the known world with strings of dust-puffs, but probably not hit unless lucky. So it was simple. Karl and his pals had to stay calm and cool and shoot well. No bursts, just well-aimed rifle fire, shooting at flashes and shadows and bringing people down. But mainly making it bad math on a cost-risk analysis basis to venture any closer.

Both the FG and the STG were a hundred years ahead of their time. For the FG, it took great discipline to master the fierce recoil of such a powerful cartridge in such a light-framed weapon, but its straight-line construction, ingenious spring-buffered stock unit, and muzzle brake helped enormously. Its signature was the weirdly radical angle of its handgrip, almost 60 degrees to the receiver, a cosmetic trope that made it an instant classic, but it was said to be engineered that way for shooting while descending. It looked cool as hell, out of Buck Rogers by way of art deco. It had pop-up sights, fiendishly clever in design, folding bayonet spike, a built-in bipod, and a horizontal magazine feed system located for perfect balance right above the grip. Someone once called it a seven-pound MG-42. Fired at full rip it was a brutal beast to control, but the parachutists mostly operated it on semi-automatic, where its rifle round could be used for maximum accuracy and high rate of fire. The Green Devils had been using it for nearly a year and loved it dearly.

The poor fellows with the STGs were always trying to trade up to FGs, but their owners would not let them go, and kept them going with tender care and lots of Blu-Oil. The STGs were still very fine weapons, if hideous to look at by purists’ standards, with stamped metal and crude finish and aggressively ergonomic design principles turning them into the sort of ugly/beautiful construction that was entirely mystifying. Their issue was the difficulty one had firing from prone with that immense magazine, as well as the temptation of the selective fire, which could turn them into ammo-gobbling beasts and leave the poor parachutist empty of rounds in a minute if he didn’t exercise fire discipline.

Meanwhile, across the river all the other parachutists joined in, again the game being sustained by accurate singles, not magazine-eating bursts. Then someone had the intelligence to gather up the Degtyaryov and swing it into action. Whoever he was, he arched pan after pan of 7.62 x 54 over the advance guard and along the buildings and through the windows. He could afford to burn ammo because he had no plans to carry the damned thing out with him.

“Hurry up, goddammit!” Karl yelled, but he couldn’t really complain, for the guys digging the hole were wide open to fire, whacking away with shovels at a desperate pace, while all around them bullets struck and screamed off the bridge’s stone walls or off its roadway, unleashing gallons of energized dust. They had better things to do than listen to him.

He ran dry, carefully made the effort to return a used magazine to its pouch—also protocol, since the mags were increasingly hard to come by—and was inserting a new twenty when he saw it coming around the corner.

It was a T-34, Soviet main battle tank.

“What the fuck is that guy doing here?” Karl said.

The Museum

Kolomiya

THE PRESENT

The last hall was lighter than the others, as a skylight let the sun’s illumination pour in through the roof. Swagger quickly saw why. It was an exhibition of paintings, grandly realistic things that seemed from afar compositions depicting various highlights in partisan battles against the Germans. He went to the first, called Our Fellows at the Bridge over the Ravokokov, and examined it.

It looked like a scene from an extremely expensive movie, everything in perfect focus whether it was ten feet from the painter or a thousand. In the center, a bridge split in two as a fiery blot of explosive took its center and it deposited into midair a German locomotive and several armored cars. Screaming German soldiers fell off of it, sure to die when they hit the rocks below. In the foreground a partisan dynamiter exulted as he looked at what he had wrought, having just plunged the handle on a detonating mechanism; around him, handsome men with Red tommy guns leaped and smiled in celebration at the defeat and destruction of the train.

“They call it socialist realism,” said Reilly. “Very big under Stalin. Art was for the purpose of celebrating and advancing the state. Many of the big moments are commemorated in artworks.”

“The guy sure was careful,” said Bob. “There’s four cooling slots in the sleeve of a PPSh-41, and damned if he hasn’t got all four of ’em. Also, he’s got the bolt back, which is how they’d carry it for fast shooting, and that opens the ejection port on the top for the empties to fly out, and dammit, he’s got the bolt back and the port open. He may have been a tommy gunner himself.”

“I’m sure the Ministry of Culture and Moral Improvement provided him with one to copy. They may have even blown up a bridge and crashed a locomotive so he could get it right.”

Swagger walked on, encountering dozens of perfect little war scenarios as depicted by state-sponsored artists of the day. Each one boasted the same immaculate research, the absolute perfection in equipment—T34Rs, not T34Cs, when appropriate—and the same crew of happy, handsome partisans celebrating this or that triumph over the German beast. The artists—it all looked like it was painted by the same very busy guy, but indeed there were at least a dozen in this hall—had the same range of attributes: a good mechanical draftsman’s sense of machinery, weapon, aircraft, structure, and vehicle, and a good feel for weather. Skies were mottled with storm clouds, snow scythed down horizontally so that you could feel the ice pellets stinging your face, the wind was cruel and cutting. The illusion broke down slightly at the humans, who seemed to share pretty much the same face and posture. Hands good, particularly when gripping weapons, torsos a bit awkward, as if he didn’t quite understand the underlying struts of the body, legs seeming to get in the way.

There was no fear, no squalor, no fatigue, no filth, no sweat, no despair, all common to Swagger’s experience of war. Also the snow was pristine where depicted, and since Russia was a wintry sort of hell, there was a lot of it depicted. No dogs or men had pissed in it, there wasn’t a sense of the eternal stench of war, which was a miasma of burned powder, blood, shit, sweat, and various kinds of rot and decomposition. No blood was seen anyplace, nor were any blasted bodies, nor grievous wounds to face or head or limb or gut.

“It’s all kind of phony to you, I suppose,” she said.

“Yeah, but I get it. You don’t want to tell people how it was but how they wanted it to be. Maybe the kid got a bayonet in the guts and it pulled his entrails out and he died three hours later. You don’t want to tell his folks that. So you tell them he got it clean between the eyes as he led the squad up the hill. The kid don’t care. It’s for the parents, to ease their pain, so I think it’s okay in the long run.”