Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

Once she’d committed the unpardonable sin, she could not stop. The plan was ill conceived because the visibility on the battlefield was so limited that scampering panzer crew could not be seen at all, but the dancing flamers, their garish ignition fluttering brilliantly through the drift of smoke and ash, were easy to spot. She shot them all. It didn’t matter.

She made a shot at five hundred yards, holding half a man high; she made one at fifty yards, drilling him as he leaped out of the half-track that already had turned into a bonfire. She shot not at men but at flames, for the men were largely indistinct in their cloaks of flaring brilliance. Russian, German, peasant, aristocrat, who knew? Their insane jerkiness contained their suffering; she could not abide it and she put them down into stillness.

It was almost ritual. When the rifle fired dry, she slid another stripper into the breach and thumbed five more cartridges into the magazine well, then tossed away the empty stripper and rammed the bolt home, and remounted the rifle against the tension of the strap. Through the circle of the optic, she saw it all, death at the apex of industrial application, but by now her ears were numb, so it was silent cinema, the same thirty feet of film over and over in an endless loop, the flamer clawing at the pulses of energy that consumed his flesh in agony and then the arrival of the message of mercy as his blazing body went slack and he tumbled down. Cock and look anew for a target. In the end, she killed more than fifty unrecorded men that day, only the first one without the flames.

It abated around five. The few surviving tanks limped back to their own lines. It was clear that while the Russians had lost far more, they had stopped the Germans. In fact, it was clear that the war was now technically over. Only a thousand miles of mopping up remained, and though that would be a hideous task and claim millions or more lives, the shattering of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps ended Hitler’s invasion. He would, he could, never be on the offense again.

If she knew this, it didn’t matter. She was exhausted and somehow ashamed. She felt no glory. Around her there lay a wilderness of dead machines, half of them burning, amid a stench of gas and blood, the occasional loud blast as a shell was lit off by flames, but nobody was shooting anymore. Everybody was too tired to shoot. The setting sun burned through the haze of smoke and ash in the air, and it went all red on the world, on this hunk of field outside Prokhorovka, as if to signify the shedding of so much blood. All was red in the light, the gray German tanks, the green Russian tanks, the dun-colored wheat, the green trees, the white flesh: all suffused in the red of blood.

She disengaged her water bottle, unscrewed the cap, and put it to her mouth. A warm swish of water cut through the phlegm of ash that encased her lips. She took off her hood, felt her hair cascade free. She looked around again.

Remember it, Petrova, she instructed herself. Infinite destruction. Ruin to the horizon and death everywhere. Stalingrad in the wheat fields without a ruined city to hide the ripe slaughter.

A whistle, loud and urgent, came from close by, jerking her from the field of ruin and death at Kursk to the German boot a few inches from her face. She heard him grunt as if cursing. He tamped his pipe against the receiver of his machine pistol. Burning tobacco from the emptied pipe fell to the ground a few inches ahead of her. His boots finally lurched forward. She heard a few shouts, the exchange of Serbian curse words, and some crude laughter. The boots vanished.

She raised her head just an inch or two and opened her eyes fully.

The German patrol had vanished in the woods.

Someone had recalled them—urgently.

She waited another half an hour, then picked herself up.

The boots. She remembered the boots. A thousand burned corpses lay about the flatness of Kursk, some licked by flame, some just blurred chars. Yet almost all had their boots still on, because for some reason, while the flesh burned, the leather didn’t. Everywhere she saw nothing but the boots of the dead.

The Carpathians

New Village of Yaremche

THE PRESENT

There’s not much to do in the Carpathians after the sun goes down.

“Get a good night’s rest,” Swagger said. “Tomorrow we’ll go up into the hills and I’ll see if I can find where she shot from. I want to see her angle from the edge of the burned zone and get a read on distance.”

He knew she had to shoot from beyond five hundred yards. She had to. She couldn’t be in the burned zone because she’d be wide open. But at the five-hundred-yard mark, where the trees offered cover, that’s where they’d put people. They’d have camouflaged guys there. They’d have dog teams nearby. That’s the trap, and they know they’ve got her, just as they know she has to go for it, because here he is, her target, this is the only opportunity she’ll get.

Swagger knew how a sniper’s mind worked. She’d shoot high to low, especially if she’s already high. How would she even get to low, the place is crawling with Germans? They built a real good trap. Groedl’s a smart piece of shit.

But it was the rifle that had him buffaloed. Not where she got it but why she did what she did. She could not have hit him with a Mosin, even with a scope. There was no record of a one-shot cold-bore kill at five hundred yards with a Mosin. If she fired, she was doomed. She was throwing away her life on a zero chance of probability. It was effectively a suicide, a sacrifice for the good of a tribe that denied it. But she had to do it. She had no choice.

He thought hard about the site. The bridge, the mist from the waterfall, the image of the shoot on the plate by some anonymous artist who probably hadn’t been there. The burned zone on the slope to the northwest, the only high space to shoot from. The slope barren to a five-hundred-yard line, and poor Petrova up there, as close as possible, taking the shot that would let the dogs out on her. Maybe she shot twice, took the one at the far-off Nazi, and then put the muzzle in her mouth and hit the trigger. No torture, no interrogation, just a case of the sniper giving all to duty. But then an image came into his head.

He first saw it as a golden wall. What the hell? It floated just beyond his knowing but close enough to tantalize him: a gold wall.

Then it came into focus. He recalled that beyond the hill whose slope overlooked the waterfall and whose foliage had been half burned away, to the southwest, there was the golden wall of another slope, so far off it was hazy in the distance.

It had to be a thousand yards out.

You could not hit a man at a thousand yards with a Mosin-Nagant.

You could only do it with a—

Bob had to laugh. Now, there was a funny idea. Somehow Petrova manages to get her hands on—

It was impossible.

Wasn’t it?

He thought a second and went to his e-mail on his iPhone. “You up? Need talk urgent. Can you call me at—” and he listed Reilly’s satellite number. A few seconds later, her phone rang. He took it. “Swagger.”

“Well, hello, chum. How’s the Yank?” It was his friend J. T. “Jimmy” Guthrie, the sniper historian from the UK.

“Hi, Jimmy, how’re you doing?”

“I’m swell. I assume you’re calling because you’re going to come to our Sniper Match at Bisley. The fellows will be so excited.”

“No, no, it’s something else. I need to rent your brain.”

“It’s yours for a penny. If you haven’t got a penny, then a ha’penny will do.”

“Last we talked, you were working on a book on the World War II British sniper rifle.”