Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

Finally Swagger said, “Okay, let’s take a rest.” He sat down against a boulder, breathed heavily.

“You’re the expert,” she said, “but don’t you think if we rest, we get killed?”

“Good point,” he said. “But a thought just came to me.”

“Go ahead. We’ve got nothing but time.”

“She’s got to zero the rifle. Right?”

Reilly couldn’t help but issue a dry little spurt of a laugh. “As if I’d know? I don’t even know what ‘zero’ means. It’s all secret code to me.”

“Zero the rifle. Adjust the scope so that it’s indexed to the point of impact at the range you’ll be shooting at.”

“Is this the right time for a ballistics lecture?”

“Stay with me a sec. See, she’s got to zero at a thousand. How do you find a thousand clear yards in a forest? Do you just wander until it’s there? But maybe it’s never there.”

“Look,” she said, “it can’t be that hard.”

She pointed up the steep rock-strewn slope. “There, there’s one, right there.”

Indeed, a gap in the trees inclined upward from where they had come to rest. Here and there tall trees interrupted it, but basically there was too much stone on the ground to permit complete forest growth. It was like a scar ripped in the mountainside, as obvious as a nose on a face. How could he have missed it? And then she realized he hadn’t.

“All right,” Reilly said, “what gives? What game are you playing, Swagger?”

“She’s got a rifle. She has to zero it. She needs a thousand yards. This is a thousand yards, right?”

“All right.”

“This is what’s called a scree field. Meaning at some time in the past, a rock slide poured down the side of the mountain and ripped the forest up. Some trees grew back, as you can see, but imagine the place seventy years ago. It’s wide open.”

“So?”

“I was her, I’d be up there.” He pointed. “I’d shoot at a target down here. Maybe there’s a cave up there, she could shoot from inside, cutting down on noise. I’d track my shots and walk ’em into the target. A great shot, she wouldn’t need that many. I’d smear some color on one of these boulder faces about the size of a man’s chest. I’d keep adjusting until I could not only hit the chest at a thousand but put three into it inside ten inches.”

“So your idea is that we should stop fleeing men who are trying to kill us and look for a target? And if we find the target, what then?”

Swagger pointed to the boulder against which he was leaning. There was discoloration of some sort, roughly the shape of a man’s chest. It was faded and peeled, but it was there, definitely.

“Blood, I’m guessing. She or somebody with her killed a rabbit. They cut it open right here, drained its blood on the rock. Like paint. It dried, it stayed. Here it is. See any holes?”

She looked. Three pockmarks were etched in the stone face in the blood zone, two four inches apart and a third perhaps six inches from them but still in the target.

“She or someone with her knew where there was a British C-container with a No. 4 T, five Sten guns, twenty-five grenades, and two thousand or so rounds of ammunition. My guess is, it’s up there. A thousand yards up that scree field in some kind of cave or other.”

“So we have to climb—”

“I’m afraid so. But as you say, we ain’t going to make it outrunning them. Up there is the one thing that’s going to get us out of this jam.”

“And that would be?”

“Same thing that got Mili out of her jam. Same ones, in fact. Guns.”

Stanislav

The Town Hall

JULY 1944

“It’s quite humorous, actually,” pointed out Senior Group Leader Groedl in his office late that evening with Sturmbannführer Salid, “here I’m the one trying to talk you into it, and you’re the one trying to talk me out of it! Don’t you see? It should be reversed.”

But the humor was theoretical rather than actual, and neither man laughed.

They sat on the leather sofa in Groedl’s office. Before them was a Mouton Rothschild from 1927, which the senior group leader was in the process of finishing while the young Sturmbannführer was merely sniffing occasionally. That meant they were equally drunk. Dr. Groedl had even loosened his tie.

“It’s just that the senior group leader is so inspirational,” said Salid, “has touched so many with his passion and his logic, has reached across generations, it terrifies me that he risks himself in such a way.”

“War is risk, Yusef.”

“But certain risks are a part of making war, such as attacking a hill or dropping a bomb or being under artillery fire. This one you assume is arbitrary. It has no meaning in the war. It puts you in great danger for no gain at all.”

“Immense gain. For reasons I should not divulge to you, the White Witch is enormously important. She may not even understand her value, though perhaps she does. Without realizing it, she has it in her power to reveal the identity of a certain agent within Stalin’s inner circle. Oh, I shouldn’t be telling you this. My wife watches my drinking, but you come here with a fine bottle, and two glasses into it, I’m talking my head off! Yusef, you must swear to me. I will tell you more on only one condition. That is, if you swear on that desert god of yours that you will not be taken alive. This is too precious a secret to be spent stupidly. Save the last Luger cartridge for yourself, do you understand?”

“By Allah, I swear,” said Yusef.

“Then hear me and understand. I owe a particular debt to this man. And his intelligence is very valuable. It wasn’t in the manner of brigade movements and timetables. That material is much overrated. No, no, he was with us in our other war, our war, Yusef, working not for military intelligence or the high command or anything like that, but working for and reporting directly to IV-B4, RSHA. He was their agent. His reports went directly to Müller and were turned to action by Eichmann. He was their own private intelligence network against the Jews of the Soviet Union. How do you think we knew when we got to a Soviet city where the Jewish quarter was? How do you think we knew who the Jewish leaders in that city were, who the intelligentsia were, who the merchants were? How were we able to round them up on the first night and see that they got what they deserved? Those long lists of names and addresses, Yusef, that guided your actions when you were a part of Einsatzgruppen D in the early years, and all the other Einsatzgruppen actions, A, B, and C as well, and took the thousands to the pits and buried them there. Not only because they were Jews but because they were leaders. We had to cut the head off the Jewish beast, Yusef, that was the key to the whole thing, and that will be our legacy that the world, which holds us in contempt now, will recognize later.”

“This man provided all that?”

“Yes, he fought the real war.” Groedl laughed giddily. “Not the business of generals and tanks but the far more important business of racial purity, of cleansing the pollutants and the toxins from the human strain. When you look at Russia, you and I both see a vast carnival of German death. The millions! Think of the boys from Heidelberg and Hamburg and Dresden and Munich and little farm towns you never heard of, who came to Russia to find their bitter end under the snow, in the rubble, in the wheat fields. Those millions of German dead must have some meaning, or life is not worth living or clinging to. And that is what has made the sacrifice worthwhile and made our legacy worth building upon.”

“I see,” said Salid, taking another delicious whiff of the Mouton Rothschild, its subtleties pressing the hairs of his nostrils.