Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“See, that’s way too far. A thousand yards. Not with any rifle she had could she have hit him from there. It has to be pretty close.”

He looked at the closer landforms. Surely the Germans controlled the banks of the river. They would have possibly crowded the villagers down there, on a little shelf of land just under the bridge, where Swagger had found the machine-gun shell.

He rotated 180 degrees, passing over the faux Ukraine village of souvenir booths where the old village itself had stood, and continued to examine the lay of the land. More riverbank, controlled by the Germans, and above it, on the left, a vast two-hundred-yard-tall slope of white pines that extended for another half mile from the bridge, perhaps half of it the chunk of land where the pines were somehow lighter, as they’d noticed before.

“She had to be there,” he said. “But I don’t see how they controlled it. She could get close enough over there to hit with any rifle. Wouldn’t need no scope. How’d they bluff her into shooting from so far out she had to miss?”

They stared at the slope rising above them.

“She had to be up there,” he said. “Notice anything?”

“Just a lot of mountain.”

“Look at the trees. The color, remember?”

In the sun, the demarcation between the lighter timber and the darker was clear.

“I’m getting something, I’ve got a feeling. Damn, nothing. But maybe—” He paused, thinking it over, and yes, it made solid sense.

“What is it?”

“The lighter green?”

“Yep.”

“It’s green because it’s new growth,” he said. “It’s been grown since 1944.”

“All right, new growth.”

“I think I know what they tried to do.”

Above Yaremche

The Carpathians

MID-JULY 1944

It happened rarely enough, but sometimes there was good, deep sleep, dreamless. It exiled her fear, her fatigue, her predicament. It was pure bliss. Deep in the cave, buried in leaves, she finally found nourishment in sleep. It seemed to last forever, velvety and seamless, the utter pleasure of deep sleep and—

“What? What?”

“You must see this. Come, really, you must look at this.”

It was the Teacher. His voice was so strained that she did not bother to argue. Whatever it was, she had to see it.

It was the hour before the dawn. The night sky was like her sleep, velvety, dark, without depth or luster. But to the east, there was a strange glare.

“What is that? What is going on?”

“Come, see, it’s amazing.”

She followed him down the dark path through the forest, feeling the trees swaying in some kind of breeze, hearing the rush of the pine needles moving against each other, hearing the creaking and groaning as the heavy limbs moved reluctantly.

“Is it the offensive? Has the Red Army arrived?”

“No, something else. I don’t know what to make of it.”

He brought her to a promontory looking down through a notch between two mountains, and she recognized the landforms from the maps she’d studied, and knew she was looking into Yaremche. But the back slope of one of the mountains that obscured the village issued a glow above its crest that filled the sky, and even this high, this far, the acrid residue of smoke reached them. More strangely still, every now and then a tongue of flame could be seen in the darkness, though where it landed was behind the back slope.

“They’re burning it,” said the Teacher.

“Flammenwerfer-41s,” she said. “I’ve seen them before. They used them against us in Stalingrad. They’re systematically burning the slope of that mountain over the village, clearing it. But why?”

“That is what I meant to ask you. To do that much work that fast, they must have had to bring in every flamethrower in the area. Why? What on earth can it mean to them? And why do they do it now, when they know our troops are about to jump off and those weapons can halt or slow advances all up and down the line? Yet they gather them here for this madness. It makes no sense, does it, Sergeant Petrova?”

“You’re the intelligence assistant, Teacher. You tell me.”

“I have no idea. Well, except—”

“Go on.”

“They fear you.”

“What?”

“They have not yet caught you, and it drives them mad with fear. They do not know if you have a new rifle. Thus, to be safe, they denude the mountain of its forest cover surrounding a town. The point is to deny the White Witch cover from which to fire. But why would she come to this town, in this zone?”

“I can think of only one reason.”

“And that is?”

“Groedl himself, for some reason, will soon be in this town.’ ”

“How close do you need to be?”

“With an infantry rifle, I’d need to be within two hundred yards, and there’s no way I’m going to walk down a barren slope of burned hillside with a nice long rifle to within two hundred yards.”

“No, they’ll massacre you.”

She tried to think of herself making a long shot without telescopic sights. It was—impossible. At over three hundred yards, he’d be a speck, a tiny dot. Worse, she’d have to hold over him, and he’d be gone, hidden behind the wedge of the front sight, and she’d have nothing to index to, unable to read the distance. The wind would play, the humidity would play, every tremble in every fiber in her body would play.

You have to do it anyway.

It’s madness. It’s death. It’s folly.

But she was caught. She felt the only way to prove to an NKVD that concealed a traitor that she was not herself a traitor was to make the kill. But the range was too far, the rifle not precise enough now that the Germans had scorched the earth.

“I have to shoot from the edge of the burned zone,” she said.

“It’s too far. I see, it’s a trap. That’s where they want you to shoot from. Men will be there.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t even have a rifle.”

“I will get a rifle. Tomorrow that is our mission.”

“No, tomorrow we scrounge for food, because if we don’t find it, the day after, we will be too weak to find a rifle.”

The next day they took a chance. They had to eat. She was a mile or so away from the cave, in a nondescript glade of trees given not so much to the high white pines but more to spruce and juniper and the groundcover called snowball. It was in precincts such as these where the fungus thrived, though it took a good eye to spot it nestled in shade in the undergrowth or at the base of trees away from sun. She looked for a brown thing with black edging and fins along its stalk called a honey mushroom, which the Peasant had told her was edible. She had a sample and rooted like a pig, probing and sniffing for the dead white flesh of the things. But in one second, the world changed.

She melted. She slid down and, on the ground, squirmed as gently as possible deeper in the tangles and the tendrils of the snowball. She felt her heart begin to hammer. It was… what? An odd sound, a wisp of odor, a peripheral clue that flew straight to her subconscious. She lay, still as death.

Slowly they emerged. No, they had not seen her. A roaming patrol, their own woodcraft exceedingly high, they were slipping through the white pines, hunting.

She had not seen SS men since Kursk. She lay motionless in the brush as the hunched, tense soldiers moved through. They were bent double, ready for action, camouflaged in the dapples of the summer forest, their weapons black and held easily in hand, unslung for fast action. She heard them shout to each other, though in Serbian, not German, and it was clear they were highly professional, good at quiet movement, men well experienced in the stealth of war.