Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

Threading the cartridges through the lips—rather sharp, actually—so that they nested against the follower or the round against a spring pressure that grew only as the amount of rounds pushing it down grew, too, increasing the compression rate, was not fun. It put a hurt in the fingers and wrists. But it was also easy to fuck up, as in putting a round in backward or at the wrong angle, and he didn’t want to take a chance on that happening, so he pushed on.

“Okay, I’m done here. I’m giving you one Sten gun and three magazines. I want you to stay here. I will run the ambush. I will throw the grenades. I will do the killing. You stay here and shoot anything that doesn’t look like a Swagger, got that?”

“I got it,” she said. “Except I’m not doing it. I will fight and shoot and do what’s necessary.”

“Reilly, this ain’t your kind of work.”

“That premise is no longer operative. You’re fighting for your reasons. You’re in love with Mili, you old coot, don’t say you’re not, and it’s the best fight you ever had. Well, I’m fighting for mine, which is that no asshole comes along and says, ‘Sweetie, do us a favor and don’t write the story.’ I will write the story, if I have to be Mili Petrova to do it. Nobody tells me to go away like a good little girl. I was never a good little girl. Good little girls don’t become reporters. Besides, the story’s already on the budget.”

The Carpathians

Above Yaremche

JULY 1944

She built her position carefully. It’s all about solidity of structure, so that at the instant of firing, bone supports bone, buttressed by the earth, unhampered by the flutter of breath. To shoot like a machine, you must become a machine.

She chose sitting, at a slight cant that rested her body against the trunk of the tree. The rifle was before her, its weight borne not by her muscles but by the thickness of the branch on which it rested. Actually it didn’t rest on the branch, but on a carefully folded wad of glove, so that it nestled in, and the possibility of it slipping as she torqued through the trigger pull was eliminated. The cheek rest was helpful in supporting her face, as it rested in precisely the correct position to place her eye four inches behind and directly centered on what the British designated a No. 32 telescopic sighting device. At this point she breathed easily, naturally.

Beside her crouched the Teacher, a spotter without a scope who was of no use except psychological support. “I see them,” he said. “Do you see them?”

Of course she saw them. The optics were superb, far better than her own PU scope. To her, through the glass, Herr Obergruppenführer Groedl was but 333 yards away. She saw a pudgy man, by looks one of the meek who would never inherit the earth. A faintly comical quality to him, expressed in the vividness of his spats, the formality of his suit, the daintiness of his walk. He had stepped out of an operetta. He seemed in earnest conversation with Salid, the other monster, as they moved in a phalanx of SS troopers down the central street of Yaremche. Salid pointed out interesting sights, as if there could be an interesting sight in such a degraded place where nobody had ever gotten beyond hay as a roofing material, and while Salid was quite animated, the face of her target remained dull and uninterested.

“Unless he has an interest in medieval Russian agronomy, this is all fraudulent. No doubt they mean to trap us.”

“They think they’re so clever,” said the Teacher.

She broke eye contact with the scope, as she didn’t want to develop any strain; her muscles relaxed, no need to apply them forcefully to the rifle yet, as it would wear her out, and the more fatigued she was, the more the chance of a tremble or a rogue yip arriving perfectly to destroy the shot.

She closed her eyes, gathering strength. She had clicked the trigger a thousand times in the cave after the zeroing, to learn the nuances of its release. It could have been better, but it could have been worse. A slight grit as she pushed straight back, maybe two rough bits of metal grinding against each other inside; but then it stacked up nicely at the penultimate location, and it took just the slightest effort, almost magical in its responsiveness, to slide the sear from its engaging restraint and set the whole thing in motion in micro time as hammer lunged forward, drove firing pin forward with exactly the right energy to detonate the primer, which led to…

She knew what it led to.

The issue was, to some degree, the scope. Though clear and robust, it was also quite crude. It had zeroing capabilities out to a thousand yards, though they’d proved difficult to achieve, and the Teacher had to help her with the mechanical manipulations to scope. But it was zeroed now. One last problem: the aiming point was the tip of a blunt, conical projection thrusting up from six o’clock, which at this range covered too much of the tiny target. She would settle the tip of the cone on the man’s head, then slowly press—

“All right, he’s still.”

She went back to the scope. There he was, at the magnified range of 333 yards, standing in the center of the bridge, isolated with no man within three feet of him on either side. His face was dull, his body posture unimposing, and it seemed his companions had drifted off as if to grant him solitude for his contemplations. If he had any. He looked bored.

She took a breath, then willed half of it out, and waited for a space between her heartbeats as her finger brought the trigger back to its staging point and she thought of shooter’s imprecations that, by rote memory and instinct, she always recited at this moment: Press straight back. Do not rush but do not loaf. Master the rifle. Be strong, confident. Follow through, keeping eye to scope, pinning the trigger.

The rifle obeyed her unstated directives and, by itself, surprised her as it broke the shot.

Data. Data. Data.

The 174-grain spitzer bullet, lead-cored but streamlined behind a thin gilding of copper, exited the muzzle at approximately 2,400 feet per second, in a parabolic arc that was calculated to drop 120 inches at 1,000 yards and had thus been aimed via scope adjustment at a point exactly 120 inches above the target. At 500 yards, the velocity had dropped to 1,578 feet per second, the muzzle energy 962 foot-pounds. It had fallen 31 inches, as determined by both gravity and air resistance, equally stern masters whose mandates could not be ignored, and continued tracing a rainbow across the sky with no deviations left or right because this early (0922 hours Soviet war time) there was no wind, and no tremor or hesitation had marred the trigger pull, thus deflecting the muzzle. If it wandered off course, by the nuance of its design and construction and the harmonics of the barrel that guided it on its track, it came back to exact trajectory beyond 600 yards and continued its descending flight. It struck squarely. When that occurred, after approximately 2.2 seconds time in flight, its velocity had degraded to 955 feet per second, its energy to 412 foot-pounds. And it had dropped the full 120 inches. Still, the combination retained enough surplus efficiency, particularly as Senior Group Leader Groedl had turned his neck slightly to the right, as if something had caught his attention. Perhaps it was the fluttering of death’s wings.

The bullet struck him on a lateral transective angle approximately six inches below his left ear, that is, a bit lower than the root of his neck on the torso, a little in front of the medial line of the shoulder, issuing a sound that reminded those nearby of a crowbar slamming into a side of beef. It entered the corpus at an angle of 80 degrees as it was falling, not approaching on a flat line. The full impact of the energy caused him to shudder violently and his exquisitely cut but nevertheless rather fully draped suit to inflate with disturbed air from the bullet’s wake under the shock, while a puff of atomized blood, skin, and wool fiber rose in a spurt of pink mist.