Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“How do you know? Maybe the container is a mile away. She just carried the gun up here to get the thousand yards, shot it, zeroed it, and then walked the mile back.”

“This was a good place to hide ’em. If they dug a hole, they had to figure out some way to mark it and register it on a map. This place, easy to ID, being at the top of the scree, and if you’re a young partisan, instead of two broken-down old cripples, it’s easy to get to.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said.

I do, too, he thought.

She fell twice, cutting her knee badly the second time. She had gone from gray to ashen to something like the color of wax. He helped her over some of the rougher spots, but it disturbed him that her fingers were cold to the touch.

“How’s your hip?” she asked.

“It’s fine, no problem,” he lied. His hip hurt like hell. It hurt more than his lungs did, but it felt better than his throat did; he could feel the gunk of phlegm drying into something like pottery on his lips. Then there was his elbow, which was bleeding again. Goddamn that bastard’s sharp teeth! Then he thought, I am too old for this shit, for about the thousandth time.

“Maybe they’ll miss us,” she said. “Maybe they’ll keep going.”

“They won’t. They have a dog.”

“Oh, that’s right. That kid said so, didn’t he.”

“They think of everything,” Swagger said.

“Well, do me a favor.”

“Sure.”

“Please kill the dog,” she said.

“Ain’t the dog’s fault. He’s just trying to make a living.”

“Kill him anyway. On general principle.”

It was rocky and slippery, and the incline decided to get serious at a certain point and jutted more pugnaciously vertical. The new angle slowed them even more, but they never saw any pursuers. If there was a view—and there was—they didn’t see it. If there was beauty—and there was—they didn’t see it. If there was the same huge blue lake of Ukraine sky that overwhelmed the world out to the horizon anywhere you looked—and there was—they didn’t see it.

“Maybe they’re not following us?”

“Oh, they are. They won’t let us see them. They will have reached the edge of the scree, hung back, and got us marked by binoculars. They’ll come up through the trees on the right, out of sight. Tougher climbing because there ain’t no handholds and the footing is much less stable, but they’re young guys.”

They climbed, they climbed, they climbed. It ached, it hurt, it distracted, it disoriented, it robbed vision and imagination. Nearly everything hurt.

“I can’t go much farther.”

“You don’t have to go no farther. We’re here.”

Reilly lay against the incline, breathing hard, resting on what appeared to be the track of an old stony path, maybe centuries old, maybe trod by the original tribe of Russ a thousand years ago. She breathed, sucking in the air. She was covered in sweat and abraded in a dozen spots, all of which burned fiercely. But she looked and said, “I don’t see a cave.”

Swagger collapsed next to her.

“If there isn’t a cave here,” she said, “I’m just going to lie down until they come and shoot me. I can’t go another step.

“Your body won’t let you give up. You’re too tough.”

“I feel like a powder puff, I look like a homeless person, I hurt everywhere, and you tell me I’m tough.”

“I’ll put a gun in your hand. Then you’re tough as any man alive. That’s why they call it the Equalizer.”

“I don’t see any guns.”

He pointed at the path. “Look over there.”

About ten feet along its track, a groove had been cut into it, not more than six inches wide.

“So?”

“If she had to shoot downhill and wanted to do it from the cave, they’d have to do something about the path. See, it’s in the way of the line of sight to the boulder they shot at. So they somehow dug, cut, scraped that groove in it so she could get the angle downslope a thousand yards.”

“They?”

“Sure. She had friends. I don’t know who, I don’t know how. But someone had to know these rifles were here, someone had to guide her to them. Maybe another survivor of the ambush. We’ll never know, but someone got her up here, someone dug that groove. And I’m guessing someone went back down and called her shots for her as she zeroed. She’d shoot and someone would mark the spot. She’d adjust, shoot again, and he’d mark that spot. Until she was on. It was a team effort.”

“Someone who—”

“Someone who knew what he was doing, I’m beginning to feel. Come on, let’s see what we done dug up.”

He lifted himself, went to the spot where the groove was located, turned to the scrub vegetation clustered behind it, pulled out a scraggly bush, and started to kick at seventy years’ worth of dirt and sediment. Dust flew, both coughed, and it did their lungs no favors, but in a little while he had opened a man-sized hole.

“You’re a genius,” she said.

“Hardly,” he said. “I just show up and pay attention.”

The Carpathians

Above Yaremche

JULY 1944

Mili and the Teacher moved in by night, their faces darkened, festooned with pine boughs threaded through their clothes. They were dressed as assassins. They were assassins. It was a slow crawl, three forward, one back, pause, listen, three forward again. The British compass guiding them took them over rocks, through brush, around trees on a steady course toward an overlook on Yaremche, if one existed. The Peasant wasn’t there to set an ideal of indifference to pain. He was back at the cave, guarding—well, guarding nothing—with his Sten gun. The idea was that if he heard close-by gunfire, he would rush to the spot and intercede with machine carbide and Mills bombs to perhaps rescue the fleeing assassins, if it came to that. It probably wouldn’t, as these things never work out so neatly. Meanwhile, the ground was unrelenting in its urge to hurt Mili and the Teacher. It tore knees and scraped elbows. At least twice in the night, they thought they heard Germans close by and froze, but nothing came of it. Finally they were there, halfway down the slope, a thousand yards to the southwest of the bridge.

They appeared to have found a kind of promontory, a rock outcrop a thousand yards above the village, which was partially visible. Through a V-notch between two hills, she could see the river, the waterfall, and the bridge from this position; they were also a thousand yards from the burned slope where the Germans expected her.

“Does it work?” whispered the Teacher.

“Perhaps. In darkness I cannot tell if smaller branches interfere. Even a leaf can knock a bullet off its course, as too many snipers have found out the hard way. In the light, I’ll get a better view.”

“I hate to move when it’s light.”

“If we have to make adjustments, we make them in the morning.”

“All right, then. Try to get some sleep.”

Sleep! Yes, certainly, inside German lines, crouched with rifle, torn and bleeding from a long crawl, heart thumping. Exactly—get some sleep!

But she did. And when the light struck her eyes, she had a moment’s confusion, was all mixed up in now and then, who was alive, who wasn’t, what lay ahead. She blinked, and the forest registered, as did the flare of sun to the east. A bug hummed at her ear and she came to a fuller clarity. She blinked, feeling her eyes and limbs return to her control.

“You’re awake?” asked the Teacher.

“Yes.”

“Is this place okay?”

Not quite. Prone was out of the question, as too much undergrowth interfered. Sliding up the tree, she found a good hole in the pine boughs that yielded a tunnel that in turn allowed a good clear view of the bridge, but at that point the trunk was barren and she’d have no support for the rifle. It was too far by far to take the shot without support.