Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“My favorite, the Enfield No. 4 (T) with the No. 32 scope. A classic.”

“Still working at it?”

“Chop chop, tap tap, got to keep churning them out, it’s what I do.”

“Can you verify any one-shot cold-bore hits with it at over a thousand yards?”

“Several times. In Italy, in northern France, and in Twelveland itself, near war’s end. The No. 4 (T) was the ace of sniper rifles.”

“Any other shots that long that you know of by other rifles?”

“Haven’t come across anything on record in Europe. The No. 4 (T) had a most helpful ballistic eccentricity. Out to 250 yards, it was quite ordinary. But British and Canadian snipers soon learned that there was something about the .303 Radford Arsenal 176-grain bullet, the No. 4 (T) as bedded and with scope mounted by the geniuses at Holland and Holland, and maybe the superb optics of the No. 32 telescopic sight, which, although it was only 3.5-power, had lenses that offered unusual clarity out to long distances. Somehow if the .303 deviated from trajectory, by a property to this day not understood, the in-flight bullets somehow adjusted, trimmed, I don’t know, ‘fixed’ themselves. So if they came back to the original trajectory and stayed spot-on, the result was unusually proficient long-range accuracy.”

“Is there any way one of those rifles could have showed up in the Carpathian Ukraine in July ’44? It don’t make no sense because we’re five hundred miles or so from the nearest British troops, which would probably be in Italy. Does it make any sense at all?”

“Not a lick,” said Jimmy. “Not a whisper. Which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I have the Holland and Holland records, I have the British army records, I even have some still-classified stuff from clandestine hugger-mugger done by something called the Special Operations Executive, whose charge was to set Europe ablaze. Possibly they could have set Ukraine ablaze while they were at it.”

“Can you check? Sooner would be better than later.”

“Yes, well, I’ve got the stuff here and I’ll get on it straight away. By the way, I’m doing a chum a favor, I’m hoping he’ll do one in response.”

“You got it. I’ll be at the match, when, October, was that it?”

“Swell! Yes, it would mean a lot to the boys. Okay, I’ll get cracking.”

Moscow

The Aquarium

The Krulov Investigation

Will sat on the floor of the KGB file depository on the ninth floor of the Lubyanka. The ordeal before him at least got his mind off the mysterious adventures his wife was having in Ukraine and his sense of longing for a nice quiet night in the apartment. Wearing a surgical mask and tight rubber gloves, plus a sweater because the room was kept so cold, he paged through the lengthy mass of Krulov papers, reading by flashlight because the light in the vast green room packed with files was so poor. He had to hurry, as Likov could guarantee him only six hours. Anything else and there could be trouble.

He paged through, scanning the well-typed onionskin, reading the Russian swiftly, and thanking his torturers at the Monterey Language School, who had beaten Russian into him and Kathy fifteen years ago. He confirmed much that he already knew about Basil Krulov: four years in Munich, ’29–’33, in Munich with references to NKVD file Archangel 78-B11256 (Arkady Krulov), presumably documentation on his father, who was the supposed trade representative of the Russian Export Ministry but was really coordinating with the German communists and trade unions as they were jockeying for power with the boys in the twisted-cross hats. The boy attended German Realschule , as they call it, vigorous German high school, very fine education. Learned German quickly, which is commensurate with a high IQ. Then he enrolled at University of Munich and was there for two years before Hitler came to power and kicked all the Reds out, even the diplomatic ones. God, NKVD was thorough: they even had his syllabus and grades at that university. Will guessed it was part of German pedantry; they never throw anything out, the syllabuses, the report cards, the notes to Mom about dunking Peggy Sue’s pigtails in the inkwell, the Dueling Society scars. Yes, the boy was brilliant, all 1’s, meaning A’s, and Will’s eyes ran quickly over the ancient information dredged out of a dead world. Then he noticed something that made him blink twice.

Jesus Christ!, he said to himself.

It was the first of what turned into a night of Jesus Christ! moments.

Yaremche

The River Prut

They awoke, took a hearty breakfast—the hotel’s specialty—and then drove to the waterfall site. They parked and moved quickly to the halfway point of the bridge.

He pointed over the faux village to a wooded slope golden in the sun. Its details were murky at the distance, at least a thousand yards, but he stared hard at it, finding it so provocative.

If she had fired from there, he thought, with a decent rifle—

“So what’s the plan?” Kathy asked.

“It would be better if I had a range finder, if I had a compass, if I had a pair of binocs, but I don’t. So I’ll just sort of mark some potential firing sites from here, and we’ll see if we can find them up there. Then I can satisfy myself as to what kind of rifle she had to have.”

“Oh, look,” she said. “Another American.”

She pointed. At the far end of the bridge, a young man stood, smiling at them, posing as if in a hip commercial for a soft drink. He was wearing a yellow Baltimore Ravens cap, a polo shirt, a pair of jeans, and some trendy hikers. He looked like any young dad in a mall. He wore wraparound tear-shaped sunglasses and a big smile. He walked over to them.

“Hi,” he said. “Jerry Renn. It’s a pleasure to meet Bob Lee Swagger, Bob the Nailer. You’ve been a hero of mine for a long time. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

The Carpathians

Yaremche

LATE JULY 1944

The fire defied him. It would not burn fast enough, even in the drought of late July. He willed it to consume its tinder, to race down the slope, to despoil the forest and reveal the raw flanks of earth to the world, so that no sniper could hide and have the pleasure of a slow and easy preparation on the shot.

Even with ten of the Flammenwerfer-41s spurting out their Flammoil-19 in arcs of bright flame, igniting all that they touched, the natural world would not consume itself quickly enough for Captain Salid.

Like all his men, he wore a gas mask, for the acrid smoke hung low and dense and no wind came to push it away. He watched the blackness that followed the wall of flame as it spread slowly down the slope, devouring the greenery; he heard the crackle and pop of the spruces and junipers snapping as they were oxidized into a new form of matter; he watched the low black fog scuttle this way and that.

So much to worry about. The big Russian offensive would jump off any day. Katyusha rockets, a blizzard of artillery, then tanks and tank riders with tommy guns in the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. How quickly would they slice through Von Bink’s shorthanded Panzer army and get here?

Another worry: when would the parachutists get into position? It meant nothing to run a sweep up through the mountains if there was no blocking force. It also meant nothing if the Russians attacked by air and the parachutists were wiped out and escape to Hungary was cut off. With his three panzerwagens, more valuable than their weight in gold, he could possibly get his men around the mountains to the wider road to the south and out that way. But without the woman, it was a failure; without the woman, he would not win his Iron Cross, he would not return home a hero. Without the fucking woman, he was nothing. Aggghhh. Frustration clotted his vision and assaulted his brow, and the air, though purified by the filters of the mask, tasted foul and rancid. He almost threw it off, and took a cigarette, and dreamed of a cool, shadowy oasis far from all this madness and—