Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

“Not much to tell, sir,” he said, not knowing which of the four officers to address. “You can see if you’re careful.” He gestured.

Leets took off his borrowed helmet, and eased a dangerous half a head up over the wall. Germany, tidy and ripening in the spring, spilled away.

“Just to the left of those trees, sir.”

Leets saw a stand of poplars.

“We sent ’em out looking for iron,” explained Ryan, not bothering to explain that in the patois, iron meant armor. “‘Hitlerjugend’ is technically a Panzer division, though we’re not sure if they’ve got any operational stuff. We didn’t run into it on our trips over there, but who had time to look? I just didn’t want any Bulge-type surprises coming into the middle of my sector.”

“Sir,” the young sergeant continued. “Lieutenant Uckley, new guy, he took ’em down that hill, then across the field, long way to crawl. They were okay there, we found chewing gum wrappers. When they got to those trees, they went up that little draw.”

Leets could see a fold in the earth, a kind of gully between two vaguely rising landforms.

“But you didn’t hear anything? Or see anything?”

“No, sir. Nothing. They just didn’t come back.”

“Did you recover Third Squad’s bodies?” asked Outhwaithe.

“Yes, sir,” piped the lieutenant. “Next day. We called in smoke and heavy Willie Peter. Went out myself with another patrol. They’d been dropped in their tracks. Right in the ticker, every last one. Even the last guy. He didn’t have time to run, that’s how fast it was.”

Leets turned to Ryan. “The bodies. They’d be at Graves Registration?”

Ryan nodded. “If they haven’t been shipped out to cemeteries yet.”

“I think we ought to check it out.”

“Fine.”

“Sir,” asked the sergeant.

Leets turned. “Yeah.”

“What did he hit ’em with?”

“Some kind of night vision gear. It was broad daylight for him.”

“You’re looking for this guy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” said the sergeant, “I went looking for him too.” A tough kid, made his stripes at what, eighteen, nineteen? Good man in a fire fight, natural talent for it. “Had me a BAR and twenty clips.”

“But no luck,” said Leets.

“Nah, uh-uh.”

You did have luck, kid: you didn’t run into Repp; you’re still alive.

“I had friends in that squad, good people. When you catch this guy, burn him. Huh? Burn him.”

The Graves Registration section took the form of a forty-cot hospital tent some miles behind the front lines, and into this tent sane men seldom ventured. Leets, Outhwaithe, Major Ryan and an Army doctor stood in the dank space with the dead, rank on rank of them, in proper order, awaiting shipment, neatly pine-boxed. Everything possible had been done to make the location pleasant, yet everything had failed and the odor that had paused at Leets’s nostrils on the line hung here pungent and tangible, though one adjusted to it quickly.

“Thank God it’s still coolish,” said Outhwaithe.

The first boy was no good to them. Repp had hit him squarely in the sternum, that cup of bone shielding, however ineffectively, the heart, shattering it, heart behind and assorted other items, but also shattering, most probably, the bullet.

“Nah,” said the doc, “I’m not cracking this guy. You won’t find a thing in there except tiny flakes cutting every which way. Tell ’em to look some more.”

And so the Graves Registration clerks prowled again through the stacked corridors of the dead, hunting, by name off the list 45th Division HQ had provided, another candidate.

The second boy too disappointed. Repp was less precise in his placement, but the physician, looking into the opened body bag in the coffin, judged it no go.

“Nicked a rib; that’ll skew the thing off. No telling where it’ll end up—foot or hip. We don’t have time to play hide-and-seek.”

A success was finally achieved on a third try. The doctor, a stocky, blunt Dartmouth grad with thick clean hands and the mannerisms of an irritated bear, announced, “Jackpot—between the third and fourth ribs. This guy’s worth the effort.”

The box was dollied into the mortuary tent.

The doctor said, “Okay, now. We’re gonna take him out of the bag and cut him open. I can get an orderly over here in an hour or so. Or I can do it now, this minute. The catch is, if I do it now, somebody here’ll have to help. You’ve seen battle casualties before? You’ve seen nothing. This kid’s been in the bag a week. You won’t recognize him as human.”

The doctor looked briefly at each of them. He had hard eyes. How old? Leets’s age, twenty-seven maybe, but with a flinty glare to his face, pugnacious and challenging. Guy must be good, Leets thought, realizing the doctor was daring one of them to stay.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“Fine. Rest of you guys, out.” The others left. Leets and the doctor were alone with the bagged form in the box.

“You’d best put something on,” the doc said, “it’s going to be messy.”

Leets took his coat off and threw on a surgical gown.

“The mask. The mask is most important,” the doctor said.

He tied the green mask over his nose and mouth, thinking again of Susan. She lives in one of these things, he thought.

“Okay,” the doctor said, “let’s get him onto the mortuary table.”

They reached in and lifted the bagged thing to the table.

“Hang on,” the doctor said, “I’m opening it.”

He threw the bag open.

“You’ll note,” he said, “the characteristics of the cadaver in the advanced state of decomposition.”

Leets, in the mask, made a small, weak sound. No words formed in his brain. The cadaver lay in rotten splendor in its peeled-back body bag on the table.

“There it is. The hole. Nice and neat, like a rivet, just left of center chest.”

Swiftly, with sure strokes, the doctor inscribed a Y across the chest, from shoulder down to pit of stomach and then down to pubis. He cut through the subcutaneous tissue and the cartilage holding skin and ribs together. Then he lifted the central piece of the chest away and reflected the excess skin to reveal the contents.

“Clinically speaking,” the doctor said, looking into the neat arrangement, “the slug passed to the right of the sternum at a roughly seventy-five-degree angle, through the anterior aspect of the right lung”—he was sorting through the boy’s inner chest with his gloved fingers shiny—“through the pericardial sac, the heart, rupturing it, the aorta, the right pulmonary artery—right main-stem bronchus, to be exact—the esophagus, taking out the thoracic duct and finally—ah, here we are,” cheerful, reaching the end of his long shuffle, “reaching the vertebral column, transecting the spinal cord.”

“You got it?”

The doctor was deep inside the boy, going through the shattered organs. Leets, next to him, thought he was going to be sick. The smell rose through the mask to his nostrils, and pain bounded through his head. He felt he was hallucinating this: a fever dream of elemental gore.

“Here, Captain. Your souvenir.”

Leets’s treasure was a wad of mashed lead, caked with brown gristle. It looked like a fist.

“They usually open up like that?”

“Usually they break apart if they hit something, or they pass on through. What you’ve got there is a hollow nose or soft point or something like that. Something that inflates or expands inside, I think they’re illegal.”

The doctor wrapped the slug in a gauze patch and handed it over to Leets.

“There, Captain. I hope you can read the message in it.”

Eager now with his treasure, Leets insisted on adding one last stop to the tour of the combat zone. He’d learned from Ryan that the divisional weapons maintenance section had set up shop in the town of Alfeld proper, not far from Graves Registration, and they headed for it.