Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

His cell rang.

He pulled up on Horse, fetched the thing from his jeans pocket, slid it on, and saw a strange number come up. Who the hell? Only a very few people knew his number, and none of them ever had a number like that.

“Swagger,” he said noncommitally.

“Bob!” It was Reilly.

“Where the hell are you?”

She was laughing. “I’m in Australia.”

“Australia! What are you doing there?”

“I’ll tell you. But where are you?”

“I’m a cowboy, remember? I’m on a horse in the middle of nowhere. That’s what cowboys do.”

“Well, get off the horse.”

“Why? What is—”

“Trust me, Swagger. Get off the damn horse.”

“Okay, just a sec.”

He unlimbered from Horse, let the reins go. The gelding was well trained and would not go far.

“This better be good.”

“Oh, it’s good, all right.”

“Let’s have it.”

“The story isn’t over. There’s one more chapter.”

The Carpathians

Ginger’s Womb

JULY 28, 1944

As Karl walked away from the woman, Wili joined him. “Nice shooting,” he said.

“I thought so,” said Karl.

“You missed her by what, two, three feet?”

“Hmmm,” said Karl. “Was it that obvious?”

“Yes. What’s the point, may I ask?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What is your motivation, may I inquire?”

“No motivation at all. It just turned out I couldn’t do it. I told her to drop when I fired. She did.”

“She’s a much better actress than you are an actor. Her fall looked quite authentic. On the other hand, every single thing about your performance was insincere. I would stick to race cars after the war. Forget about the movies.”

“Do the fellows know?”

“I’m sure they do.”

Karl yelled at the first two Green Devils he saw peering over the rear of the trench at him. “Get a shelter half and pick up the dead woman and move her to the trench.”

“Suppose she wants to walk, Karl?”

“I’m sure she’ll cooperate.”

“Sure, Karl.”

And off they went.

“I know you have a plan,” said Wili.

“Not exactly.”

“What do you intend to do?”

“Improvise, I suppose. I improvise brilliantly.”

“No, you don’t. You have no gift for improvisation at all. I’m the improviser. All the good ideas come from me. You’re just the symbol.”

“All right. Can you come up with something?”

“It would help if you’d alerted me earlier.”

“I didn’t know earlier.”

“First problem: what do we do with these assholes?”

He gestured, and Karl turned, looking down the road. All three SS Sd. Kfz 251s, mud spattering their dappled forest camouflage, their treads grinding through the soft earth, their MG-42s ominously scanning the horizon, lumbered toward them. In the first, recognizable even at two hundred meters, stood Captain Salid, like a statue above the rim of the armored driver’s compartment.

“He looks like Nelson at Trafalgar,” said Wili. “Resolute, heroic, triumphant, rolling toward his date with destiny, his triumph.”

“I see now I am not going to give him the woman,” said Karl. “He is going to be extremely irritated. Wili, tell the guys to be ready for anything. I don’t trust these characters, especially Sinbad the Sailor there.”

He reached down and unsnapped the flap covering the Browning pistol on his hip. His thumb lingered inside, found the knurled spur of the hammer, and eased it back until it cocked.

“Okay, Karl, I’m going to nonchalantly mosey away as if nothing has happened. But I’m on you the whole way. We’ll play it as it breaks.”

“First to hairpin takes the flag,” said Karl.

Salid ordered himself to be calm as his vehicle lurched along the road to the canyon. As they came into range, he could see the parachute officer standing alone in his baglike camouflage smock and ludicrous helmet, complex chin straps unconnected, waiting with a somewhat disinterested look on his face. These bastards weren’t impressed by anything. They had to let you know in every single way they could think of how much better than you they were.

Salid did not see the woman. Presumably she was tied up in the trench complex they had built to the right of the road, a little nest of canvas-roofed machine-gun positions behind sandbags, barbed wire stretched on wooden struts, and other camouflaged men in those stupid helmets bent over their weapons. But even he could see there weren’t very many of them. What did they expect to do against a Soviet army?

He leaned over to his radio operator, seated before the transmitter. “Signalman, connect me to the Luftwaffe base at Uzhgorod.”

“Yes sir.”

The signalman consulted his codebook, diddled through channel finding, reached up to turn the diamond-shaped aerial to a more propitious angle, made his contact, and turned the microphone and headset over to Salid.

“Elephant, Elephant, this is Zeppelin Leader, are you there?”

“Hello, hello, this is Elephant, yes, Zeppelin Leader, acknowledging your call.”

“I am about to pick up the package. I want the aircraft ready to fly. This is high-priority SS, as per instructions of Lieutenant General–SS Muntz, area commander, and RHSA, Berlin, do you understand?”

“Zeppelin Leader, you are acknowledged, the aircraft is on the runway.”

“I worry that when the Russians get here, with artillery, we might be in range. Berlin demands this shipment, so please accommodate.”

“Zeppelin Leader, we are briefed and prepped at this end for immediate takeoff.”

“Very good, Elephant. Zeppelin Leader, end transmit.”

“End transmit,” said the Luftwaffe operator, and Salid handed the earphones and speaker back.

He looked, saw they were even closer, and turned to Ackov. “I’ll get out to talk to him. I want you on the gun, covering me. On him, so he feels it. I want the men in this track and the other two ready to deploy. These bastards have it in for us. And remember, we’ve got the vehicles out of here and the Condor waiting to fly us to Berlin. They’ve got to stay and hold this pass until no more Germans are coming, then blow it. They could be hit by Reds at any time.”

“Yes sir,” said Ackov, and got on the radio transmitter to instruct the other two vehicles to assume combat readiness. Then he said, “Captain, are you anticipating a firefight?”

“With these arrogant bastards, you don’t know what might happen. If it happens, I want to be ready with maximum firepower. If they fuck with us, we’ll destroy them. They’re basically traitors anyway.”

The three panzerwagens pulled into the clearing just before Ginger’s Womb, and Karl watched carefully, noting a gunner at each MG-42 mounted in each cab. He saw that the men in each vehicle wore helmets, and no gun muzzles were visible over the rim of the armored beast, signifying that the troopers inside carried their weapons unslung in hand, ready for action.

He heard the clank of the heavy door opening on the far side, and a second later, Captain Salid, his eyes burning with intensity under the rim of his helmet, his SS camouflage tunic bright with dots and flecks of forest coloration, as if he’d washed it last night for a ceremonial function, stepped around the big vehicle. He carried a Luger in his right hand. That was not a good sign.

As he approached, the gunner in his command wagon pivoted the machine gun onto Karl and jacked the cocking handle, pulling a round into the chamber. The man was not visible behind the double gun-shields.