Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

He struggled to arm himself for the close-up gunfight, but his dull fingers couldn’t find enough purchase on the FG, so he diverted to the thirteen-round Browning Grand Puissance he carried in his holster. Again the sluggish fingers wouldn’t get the hasp off the holster flap.

Then suddenly the three Ivans went down, knocked asprawl from behind by a burst of fast pistol fire, and who should come hustling out of the smoke of battle, face smeared with sweat and blood, Luger with toggle locked back signifying empty magazine, but long-lost orphan of the storm Dieter Schenker, who raced to him and pulled him to his feet.

“Dieter, what are you doing on that side of the bridge?”

“I couldn’t remember which side we were attacking from. I guess I got it wrong.”

“Remind me to get you two or three more medals.”

“Come on, Karl, we’ll discuss it later. Aren’t they going to blow this thing?”

“I believe so.”

The two men hobbled across the bridge, sheathed by smoke from the burning T-34 and the heavy suppressive fire from the parachutists on the far side, who hammered every living thing they could see and by simple luck, which seemed always to favor the brave in war, except when it did not. At the same time, it was quite a long thirty seconds, proving the relativity of time, because to Karl it seemed like thirty years, and he was only twenty-six.

At last, more or less unscathed but for the ringing in his ears and a variety of soon-to-sting scrapes, bruises, and contusions, he made it to the bridge’s end and rolled clumsily to the left with Schenker all twisted up against him, both of them screaming, “Blow it! Blow it!”

Explosive genius Deneker lit the one-second fuse to pop the No. 8 cap, which in turn set off the det cord, which exploded its way to the ten pounds of Cyclonite wadded into the center arch of the bridge, and the world yielded to a grand clap of chaos and energy. The charisma of the explosion once again asserted itself as all fell back before the titanic rupture in the atmosphere, since when energy changes form, it’s not a good thing to be too close.

The geyser speared 250 feet into the air, at the same time sending a hard surf roaring along the surface of the River Seret to shake the boats moored in oily serenity. There was a bridge at Chortkiv, and in the next nanosecond there was no bridge at all, only a sheer gap of thirty feet in the center stone arch, while all around clumps of rock and timber floated down out of the cloud that had been raised and was itself, after having reached apogee, beginning to collapse.

“Karl, Karl, are you all right?” someone was yelling into his ear. It was Wili Bober.

“Who are you?” Karl asked.

“He’s concussed,” somebody said.

“Well, drag him along to the truck,” said Wili, “and the rest of you, disable the ones we don’t take. We’ve got to get out of here before Ivan figures out what’s happening.”

Two men more or less pulled the daffy Karl along, though in his brain fog, he had a tendency to wander off. He started noticing things of no consequence, like some placid chickens in some peasant yards, unperturbed by the human drama ongoing before them, with no comment on life, death, honor, courage, whatever; a deserted tractor, actually red, a half-hoed garden plot, a barn. Most of the grass and shrubbery needed trimming, though in summer, growth went wild. All of this was of no use to the parachutists, who ran to the four trucks parked haphazardly along the roadside, their crews having disappeared somewhere out of the free-fire zone. With no one really telling them to do so, a couple of the Green Devils ran to three of the trucks and fired a three-round burst into the engine blocks, then put a single shot through the rear tires on such an angle that it would proceed under power of its high velocity to the other tire and puncture it as well.

Someone shoved Karl into the cab of the remaining truck while talented Wili Bober cracked the plastic dashboard with his rifle butt, pulled out a wad of wires, did some diddling, and the truck shivered to life.

“Everybody aboard?” he hollered, and the truck bounced on its springs as the boys climbed on. “Wave good-bye to the nice Russian fellows,” said Wili, and cranked through the gears as the vehicle accelerated down the dust road out of Chortkiv and hurtled along through wheat fields at forty-five miles an hour. They were miles behind enemy lines, but the truth of military operations was that no land is ever completely suffused with troops. Instead, units are like amoebas sprawled across the landscape, taking up positions, intensifying in density as they get closer to the battle zone and the importance of logistics becomes paramount, with all the auxiliary units clustered close to the combat troops, but for huge amounts of area, there’s really no military presence at all. The truck roared through quiet rural zones and copses of trees, once passing a Soviet truck whose driver merrily waved, causing Wili to wave back. Two things were immediately clear: Ivan wasn’t quick enough to get airplanes into the air, and the Russian communications efficiency left much to be desired.

The Germans, for their part, had no idea the name of the road they were on and no idea specifically where they were headed, other than to some mythic west, defined by a line descending from around Tarnopol down to Kolomiya and even farther to Romania, that demarked the place where the two vast armies faced each other, known as a front. It might have looked coherent on the maps, but the maps were always delusionary: it was more like a random assortment of those amoebas slopped everywhere, and on any given day within the framework of operations the general east-to-west course of the war was not observed. No matter your affiliation, you might find yourself in the local theater fighting and withdrawing in any direction. In this vast zone of chaos, the parachutists were relatively unnoticed, though they knew at a certain point they’d have to get off the road, hide the truck, and find a soft place in the lines to get over to their own side. They’d done it enough times to know it could be done, even if it was never fun, because a bullet fired mistakenly by one of your own would kill you just as dead.

The key navigational instrument was the compass, which indicated the road traveled westward. That was good enough. It rolled down empty farm roads; always turning to the west and the mountains when faced with a decision, they’d be all right.

Around about now, an hour into the journey, Karl began to come out of his brain fog. “Ach,” he said with a little jerk. “Where are we?”

“Who knows,” said Wili. “No Ivans about, so wherever we are, it feels all right. How do you feel?”

“Like the hangover I had after the party in ’38,” he said. “I’ve got someone else’s head where mine used to be, and it’s stuffed with concrete.”

“I’ve always wanted to ask,” said Wili. “Did you actually sleep with Ginger Rogers?”

“A gentleman never tells,” Karl said. “I will say, though, I had a drink with her at a Monaco club and she was delightful, like all of them I suppose, somewhat more human in the flesh than on the screen. Got any Bayer?”

“In my kit. You’ll have to twist and dig to get it out. Wash it down with schnapps.”

“Excellent, Wili.”

Karl did exactly that as the truck gobbled up kilometers of emptiness in a universe largely of summer wheat under an immense Ukraine sky, though now and then they’d pass a farm or, more likely, some kind of Stalinist agricultural collective, and now and then a sullen peasant woman would watch them go, waving mildly to cheer them up. It was unclear if these poor souls thought they were German or Russian; more likely they didn’t care and just waved on the sound principle that, in a time of war, it was best to wave at any truckload of men with guns.