Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

His stroke of inspiration—it took the form of the blisterlike dial welded to the scope, no, not pretty at all—was a solar unit. No less a power than the sun itself would provide Vampir with its energy; not an inexhaustible supply, but enough for a few minutes of artificial, invisible daylight at high midnight. Vollmerhausen could not totally abandon a battery, of course; one was still needed to provide juice for the cathode ray tube, but not nearly so much juice, for the phosphors in the chamber had been selected for their special property to absorb energy from sunlight and then, when bombarded by infrared rays, to release it. Thus instead of a 10-kilo 30-volt battery, Vampir could make do with a 1.3-kilo 3-volt battery, a net savings of 8.7 kilos while maintaining the intensity and brilliance of image within the specified limits. But not for long: for the phosphors had a very brief life in their charged state, and once exposed to the infrared lost their powers quickly. But for a good three minutes, Repp could peer through the eyepiece and there, wobbling greenly before him, magnified tenfold by a specially ground Opticotechna lens, undulated targets, visible, distinct, available, 400 meters out.

Vollmerhausen had checked his watch, snapped the face of the solar disk closed.

“There. It’s done. You’ve got your power now, until midnight.”

“Just like a fairy tale,” Repp had said merrily.

“And you’ve got the special ammunition?”

“Of course, of course,” and he had clapped the magazine pouch on his belt.

Now, in the farmhouse, Vollmerhausen looked out into a darkness that was total. Repp was somewhere out there, in his element. The night belonged to him.

I gave it to him , Vollmerhausen thought.

Repp slid into position behind the rifle, which rested on its bipod. His shoulders and arms ached, and the strap had cut deeply across his collarbone. The damned thing was heavy, and he’d come but three or four kilometers, not the twenty-three kilometers he’d be traveling the day of Nibelungen. He felt his breath coming unevenly, in sobs and gasps, and fought to control it. Calm was the sniper’s great ally, you had to will yourself into a serenity, a wholeness of spirit and task. He tried hard to relax.

Four hundred meters beyond him the tidy fields fell away into a stream bed, where a stand of trees and thicker vegetation grew, and here the land delivered up a kind of fold, a natural funnel that men moving over unfamiliar territory, scared probably, wishing themselves elsewhere, would be surely drawn to.

“There, Herr Obersturmbannführer, do you see it?” asked Weber, crouching beside him in the darkness.

“Yes. Fine.”

“Four nights out of five they come through there.”

“Fine.”

Weber was nervous in the great man’s presence, talked too much.

“We could move closer.”

“I make it four hundred meters, about right.”

“Now we’ve flares if you—”

“Captain, no flares.”

“I’ve the machine-gun team over on the right for suppressing fire if you need it, and my squad leader, a sound man, is on the left with the rest of the patrol.”

“I can see you learned your trade in the East.”

“Yes, sir.” The young captain’s face, like Repp’s own, was dabbed with oily combat paint. His eyes shone whitely in the starlight.

“They usually come about eleven, a few hours off. They think this is the great weakness in our lines. We’ve let them through.”

“Tomorrow they’ll stay away!” Repp laughed. “Now tell your fellows to hold still. No firing. My operation, all right?”

“Yes, sir.” He was gone.

Good, so much the better. Repp liked to spend these moments alone, if possible. He considered them very much his own minutes, a time for clearing the head and loosening the muscles and indulging in a dozen semiconscious eccentricities that got him feeling in touch with the rifle and his targets and himself.

Repp lay very still and warm, feeling the wind, the rifle against his hands, studying the dark landscape before him. He felt rather good, at the same time remembering that things had not always been so pleasant. A frozen February’s memory floated up before him, a desperate month of a desperate year, ’42.

Totenkopfdivision had been pushed into a few square miles of a pulverized city named Demyansk, in the Valdai Hills between Lake Ilmen and Lake Seliger in northern Russia—the Winter War, they later called it. In the city, all rudiments of military organization had broken down: the battle had become one huge alley fight, a small-unit action repeated on a vast scale, as groups of men stalked each other through the ruins. Young Repp, a Hauptsturmführer , as the Waffen SS designated its captains, was the champion stalker. With his Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5-millimeter mounting the 10X Unertl scope, he wandered from gunfight to gunfight, dropping five, ten, fifteen men at a throw. He was a brilliant shot, and about to become famous.

The morning of the twenty-third found him squatting wearily in the ruins of a factory, the Red Tractor Plant, sipping tepid ersatz, listening to the soldiers around him grouse. He didn’t blame them. The night had been one long fruitless countersniper operation: the Popovs were curiously silent. He was tired, tired down to his fingers; his eyes were swollen and they ached. As he examined the thin swirl of liquid in the tin cup, it was not hard for him to imagine other places he’d rather be.

Yawning, he glanced around the interior of the factory, a maze of wreckage, twisted girders, heaps of brick, a skeletal outline showing against a gray sky that promised more snow; the damned stuff had fallen again yesterday, must be six feet of it now, and all about the factory fresh white piles of it gleamed brightly against the blackened walls, giving the place a strange purity. It was cold, below zero; but Repp was past caring of cold. He’d gotten used to it. He wanted sleep, that was all.

The firing opened gradually. Shots always rattled around the city as patrols bumped into each other in alleyways; one grew accustomed and did not even hear them, or the explosions either, but as the intensity seemed to mount after several minutes, when contact might ordinarily be measured in seconds, some of the men around him perked up out of their whiny conversations.

“Ivan’s knocking again,” someone said.

“Shit. The bastards. Don’t they sleep?”

“Don’t get excited,” someone cautioned, “probably some kid with an automatic.”

“That’s more than one automatic,” another said. And indeed it was, Repp could tell too, for the firing then churned like a thunderstorm.

“All right, people,” said a calm sergeant, “let’s cut the shit and wait for the officers.” He hadn’t seen Repp, who continued to lie there.

After several minutes a lieutenant came in, fast, looked about for the sergeant.

“Let’s get them out, huh? A big one, I’m afraid,” he said laconically. Then he saw Repp, was taken aback by another officer.

“Oh? Say, what the hell, who the hell are—”

“Repp,” said Repp. “Damn! I needed sleep bad. How many? Big, you say.”

“It’s not clear yet. Too much smoke and dust at the end of Groski Prospekt. But it sounds big.”

“All right,” said Repp, “these are your boys, you know what to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

Repp picked himself up wearily. He flicked the ersatz out and paused for a moment. Men scurried by, clapping helmets on, drawing parkas tighter, throwing Kar ’98 bolts, rushing into the street. Repp checked the pocket of his snow smock, then tightened it. He was loaded with ammo, not having fired a round the night before. The Mannlicher-Schoenauer fired from a clever spool magazine, almost like the cylinder of a revolver, and Repp had a pouchful of the things.