Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“Too bad there’s not one for Mili,” she said. “The White Witch Slays Obersturmbannführer Von Totenkopf in the Town Square at Stalingrad , something like that.”

“No snipers,” he said, “it ain’t that popular.” He was thinking, The truth is, after the war is over, people get sort of nervous about snipers. Unlike taking the hill or blowing up the tank, the sniper works in cold blood. It’s murder. Yeah, I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago, and I never allowed myself to think of it that way, because it’s just the kind of doubt that’ll get you killed in war, but still and all, I know, I face it, it’s real, it’s just cold-blooded killing.

She nodded somewhat glumly.

“Okay,” he said, “that was a downer, wasn’t it? Let’s get out of here and get back to the hometown. Have a nice dinner. Then tomorrow we can go mountain climbing.”

“You got it.”

They turned and walked out, and then Reilly said, “You know what? That sort of sniper queasiness you just mentioned, that’s late, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean nobody felt that way after World War II. That was a Vietnam thing.”

“I suppose. After Vietnam, I got drunk for fifteen years or so, so I don’t exactly recall.”

“Maybe the same thing happened here after Afghanistan. Before, ‘partisan sniper’ was a popular subgenre, but as a new generation came along, the authorities or whoever decided to downplay it.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Maybe there’s a room in this very museum full of sniper art.”

“Well,” said Bob, “let’s find somebody to ask.”

Chortkiv

The Bridge

JULY 1944

The tank lumbered closer, impervious to the clangs and prangs and dings of the parachutist bullets, which glanced off, harming only the dull green paint job. The T-34 was a monster, a thirty-six-ton concoction of steel domes resting on immense treads, capable of crushing anything it chose to roll itself over. Yet it, too, was vulnerable, with a tendency to burst into flame if appropriately pricked. But nobody had told this tank sergeant.

His vehicle ground onward, devouring the earth beneath it, setting it to shiver. Its hull machine gun mounted to the left of the center of the frontal armor plate fired spastically, sending out a fan of high-velocity destruction, though without much accuracy. Another flaw: the gunner didn’t have a lot of visibility when the tank was all buttoned up. Though a huge battle beast capable of massive destruction, it was hampered by poor visibility in close-quarters combat; it could destroy enemy panzers but a few scampering rats like the Green Devils, not so much. It felt its way toward the bridge, making corrections in angle every few yards. It was like the blinded Cyclops trying to kill Odysseus’s men by feel. But still, it was getting closer; it would crush them or machine-gun them to death if they ran.

“PANZERSCHRECK!” yelled Von Drehle.

Poor Hubner. He had to dislodge himself from whichever safe borough he had dipped into, lug the heavy tube of anti-tank rocket launcher to the bridge, as well as his STG-44—which bounced painfully against his body, to which it was roped by sling—then sprint the whole way over the triple arches to the sandbag fortification, which contained Von Drehle and a boy named Neuhausen, all under fire.

Yet good Green Devil that he was, that was exactly what he did, amid a storm of enemy ordnance that raised dust in clouds through which he raced. He arrived out of breath, not so much halting at destination as falling wretchedly. Ouch, that must have hurt. He lay there on his back, gulping at oxygen, oblivious to the ruckus, trying to regain dignity, clarity, and composure.

“Too bad we’re out of medals, Paul,” said Karl. “That deserves two or three.”

“I’ll take a three-day pass instead of another Iron Cross,” gulped Hubner.

“Me, too,” said Neuhausen. “Who needs medals?”

“Are you able to shoot?” said Karl. “Hit anyplace?”

“I think I’m okay. But I don’t want to shoot it. I don’t know how. I was never trained. I thought my job was just to carry it.”

“Can you shoot it, Neuhausen?”

“Sure, I can shoot it. But I’ve never shot one, either, so God knows what I’ll hit. Have you shot it, sir?”

“Officers don’t shoot in the German army,” said Karl.

“But aren’t we in the air force?” said Neuhausen.

“Excellent point,” said Karl. “All right, I guess I’m nominated. Is it loaded?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’? I don’t like ‘sort of.’ ”

“The rocket is in, but the leads haven’t been connected. I’ll connect them when you get it on your shoulder.”

“I am full of confidence.”

Von Drehle somehow got the thing off the wheezing Hubner’s shoulder and transferred it to his own, settling in under it. It was not light, at twenty pounds, with a rocket inserted holding seven pounds of Cyclonite contained in an armor-piercing warhead. Its weight threw him off a bit, and he almost stumbled out of the protective lee of the sandbags. But then he had it.

He sensed Hubner behind him.

“All right, I think I did it,” said the man. “I think I got the right ones connected to the right things, whatever you call them.”

“Watch out. You don’t want to be behind this stovepipe when I light it off.”

“No sir.”

“Ready?”

“All set.”

“Quick, quick, quick,” universal German army speak ( Hoppe, hoppe, hoppe ) for do it now, and the two men rose, FG and STG on full auto, and barked off twenty and thirty rounds apiece of suppressive. As they completed their magazines, Karl rose behind them, peering through the small opening in the blast shield appended to the muzzle of the Panzerschreck to keep the rocketeers from frying their faces off in the drama of the launch, put the crude sight on the front armor plate of the tank, which had gotten too fucking close, and squeezed the firing gap, a trigger-like device on the rear grip, which did something to a magneto—no one was sure what—with the result that an electrical current zipped through the wires to the rocket engine and set it off.

The engine was still burning as it drove the 88mm rocket from the tube, trailing a noxious spray of exhaust and flame that dilated roaringly—hence the blast shield—obscuring clarity, but the rocket hit the tank dead-on, detonated, and in a split second something inside the tank co-detonated. The explosion was tremendous, and the tank shivered as it went all Mickey Mouse on them. That is, the interior blast was so percussive that it blew the twin oval hatches of the 34 into the open position, where they stuck, giving the turret the profile of the famous cartoon rodent’s circular ears. Smoke and tornadoes of flame gushed from the open orifices that Mickey’s ears had revealed. It was best not to consider what was happening to the Ivans in the guts of what had become a crematorium.

“Set to blow!” came a scream from behind them.

Karl dumped the Panzerschreck, not caring whether Hubner bothered to save it, and yelled, “Fall back, fall back!”

By commander’s obligation, he felt the need to be the last across, so as his men peeled back, headed over the arches of the bridge and past the primed and set chunks of explosive buried in the roadway, he stood and fired three round bursts at the clumps of Ivans he could see moving toward the bridge through the city streets. Some he dropped, some he persuaded to think up another solution. When he ran dry, he quickly switched magazines, pulling a fresh one from the shoulder-harnessed line of pouches, even as he was moving backward step by step, aware that death whistled by and around at jet speed, protected only by the belief that God favors pretty boys. He almost made it. In fact, he had made it when something hit his water bottle hard and the shock transferred through his body, corkscrewing him down. His head hit hard against the bridge stone, and steel football helmet or not, the shock reached his brain, too. Instant headache, brief moment of where-the-fuck-am-I? confusion, the sensation of hot, thick syrup pouring through his system, making him stupid and slow. He groped, found his FG-42, meant to pull it toward him, and saw that three Ivans had made it to the bridge, seen their opportunity, and now dashed to finish him with their tommy guns.