Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

He stepped into the street finally, with the rifle. Outside, the glare was fierce and the panic unleashed. He felt at storm center. At the end of Groski Prospekt an armored car blazed. Small-arms fire kicked up spurts of dust and snow along the pavement. The noise was ugly, careening. SS Panzergrenadiers came racing down the corridor from the wall of smoke, one of them dropping when a shot took him. As they fled by, Repp snagged one.

“No use. No use. They’ve broken through. Hundreds, thousands, oh, Christ, only a block—”

A blast drowned him out and a wall went down nearby, filling the air with smoke and dust. The panicked man squirmed away and disappeared. Repp saw the young lieutenant placing his men in the wreckage along the street. They all looked scared but somehow resigned. Totenkopfdivision had a reputation for staying put. Repp knew that reputation was to be tested again. Smoke shielded the end of the street from his eyes. Nothing down there but haze.

“Herr Repp,” someone yelled, for he already had a reputation, “kill a batch of the fuckers for us, it looks like we won’t be around to do it ourselves.”

Repp laughed. Now that was a man with spirit. “Kill them yourself, sonny. I’m off duty.”

More laughter.

Repp turned, headed back into the factory. He was tired of Ivans and wreckage and filth from blown-up sewers and rats the size of cats that prowled the ruins and crawled across your belly while you slept and he never expected to survive anyway, so why not go out today? It was as good as any day. A stairway left freakishly standing in one corner of the room caught his eye. He followed it up through the deserted upper floors of the factory. He heard men crashing in below. Totenkopf people, falling back on the factory. So that was it then, the Red Tractor Plant. He was twenty-eight years old and he’d never be another day older and he’d spend his last one here in a place where Bolshevik peasants built tractors and, more recently, tanks. Not the end he’d have picked, but as numbness settled over him, he began to feel it wouldn’t be so bad at all. He was in a hurry to be done.

At the top he found himself in a clock tower of some kind, shot out, of course, nothing up there but snow and old timbers, bricks, half a wall blown away, other gaps from rogue artillery rounds. Yet one large hole opened up a marvelous view of the Groski Prospekt—a canyon of ragged walls buried in smoke. Even as he scanned this landscape of devastation, it seemed to come alive before him. He could see them, swarming now, Popovs, in those white snowsuits, domed brown helmets, carrying submachine guns.

Repp delicately brought the rifle to his shoulder and braced it on a ledge of brick. The scope yielded a Russian, scurrying ratlike from obstacle to obstacle. He lifted his head warily and flicked his eyes about and Repp shot him in the throat, a spew of crimson foaming down across his front in the split second before he dropped. The man was about 400 meters out. Repp tossed the bolt—a butterknife handle, not knobby like the Kar ’98—through the Mannlicher’s split bridge, keeping his eye pinned against the cup of the absurd Unertl ten-power scope, which threw up images big and clear as a Berlin cinema. Its reticule was three converging lines, from left, right and bottom, which almost but did not quite meet, creating a tiny circle of space. Repp’s trick was to keep the circle filled; he laid it now against another Red, an officer. He killed him.

He was shooting faster, there seemed to be so many of them. He was wedged into the bricks of the tower, rather comfortably, and at each shot, the rifle reported sharply with a slight jar, not like the bone-bruising buck of the Kar ’98, but gentle and dry. When he hit them, they slid into the rubble, stained but not shattered. A 6.5-millimeter killed with velocity, not impact; it drilled them and, failing deflection at bone or spine, flew on. Repp was even convinced they felt no pain from the way they relaxed. He didn’t even have to move the rifle much, he could just leave it where it was, they were swarming so thickly. He’d fired five magazines now, twenty-five rounds. He’d killed twenty-five men. Some looked stupefied when he took them; others angry; still others oblivious. Repp shot for the chest. He took no chances. Nothing fancy.

They had spotted him of course. Their bullets thunked and cracked around him, chipping at the bricks, filling the air with fine dust or snow, but he felt magical. He kept dropping them. The white bodies were piling up.

Behind him now sprang a noise, and Repp whirled. A boy crouched at the head of the stairs with a pack.

“Your kit, sir. You left it down below.”

“Ah.” Yes, someone’d thought to bring it to him. It was packed with ammunition, six more boxes, in each fifty specially loaded rounds, 180 grains behind a nickle-tip slug. Berdan primers—the best—with twin flash holes.

“Can you load those for me? It works same as with your rifle, off the charger,” Repp said mildly as a Degtyarev tracer winked through and buried itself in the wall. He pointed to the litter of empty spool magazines lying amid spent shells at his boots. “But stay low, those fellows are really angry now.”

Repp fired all that morning. The Russian attack had broken down, bottled up at Groski Prospekt. He’d killed all their officers and was quite sure that had been a colonel he’d put down just an instant ago. He thought he’d killed almost a hundred. Nineteen magazines, and three rounds left in this one; he’d killed, so far, ninety-eight men in just over two hours. The rifle had grown hot, and he’d stopped once or twice to squirt a drop or so of oil down its barrel. In one two-minute period, he ran his ramrod with patch vigorously in the barrel and the patch came up black with gunk. The boy crouched at his feet, and every time an empty spool dropped out, he picked it up and carefully threaded the brass cartridges in.

The Popovs were now coming from other directions; evidently, they’d sent flanking parties around. But these men ran into heavy fire from down below, and those that survived, Repp took. Still, the volume of fire against the Red Tractor Plant was building; Repp could sense the battle rising again in pitch. These things had their melodies too, and he fancied he could hear it.

The grimy lieutenant from that morning appeared in the stairwell.

“You still alive?” Repp asked.

But the fellow was in no mood for Repp’s jokes. “They’re breaking through. We haven’t the firepower to hold them off much longer. They’re already in a wing of the factory. Come on, get out, Repp. There’s still a chance to make it out on foot.”

“Thanks, old man, think I’ll stay,” Repp said merrily. He felt schussfest , bulletproof, but with deeper resonations in the German, connoting magic, a charmed state.

“Repp, there’s nothing here but death.”

“Go on yourself,” said Repp. “I’m having too much fun to leave.”

He was hitting at longer ranges now; through the drifting pall of smoke he made out small figures several blocks away. Magnified tenfold by the Unertl, two Russian officers conferred in a doorway over a map. The scene was astonishingly intimate, he could almost see the hair in their ears. Repp took one through the heart and the other, who turned away when his comrade was hit, as if in hiding his eyes he was protecting himself, through the neck.

Repp killed a sniper seven blocks away.

In another street Repp took the driver of a truck, splattering the windscreen into a galaxy of fractures. The vehicle bumped aimlessly against a rubble pile and men spilled out and scrambled for cover. Of seven he took three.

Down below, grenades detonated in a cluster, machine pistols ripped in a closed space which caught and multiplied their noise.