Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Leets, sitting mildly among them, felt he’d wandered into someone’s high school pep rally. The varsity was revving itself up before the game. As an ex-football player himself, ex-Wildcat, he could appreciate and almost savor that feeling of hate and fear and sheer shitthinning excitement that coursed savagely through these nervous boys. The paratroopers shoved and joshed, even sang now as they relaxed in the airfield staging area in these last minutes before embarkation. Earlier someone had even produced a football, and Leets had watched an exuberant game of touch unfold before his eyes. The officers had seemed not to mind this extravaganza of energy: they were slightly older men, but all had that same thick-wristed blunt athleticism that Leets recognized immediately, heavy bones and close-cropped hair and flat faces. And while all this was familiar to him, it was at the same time strange; for Leets associated war with lonely men climbing into Lysanders or huddling in empty bays of big British bombers, drinking coffee. That had been his war anyway, not this festival of the locker room.

He turned his wrist over. Twenty-two hundred hours, his Bulova announced in iridescent hands. Another fifteen, twenty minutes to go. He snapped out and lit a Lucky, and did another—about the fiftieth—rundown on his own collection of junk. Canteen for thirst, compass for direction, shovel for digging, chute for jumping and the rest for killing: three fragmentation grenades, a bayonet, ten 30-round magazines in pouches on a belt stiffly around his middle and, thrust at an awkward diagonal down across his belly under the reserve chute, a Thompson submachine gun, the Army model designated M-1, standard issue for a paratroop officer. He must have weighed five hundred pounds; perhaps like a medieval knight he’d need a crane to get him off his ass when, so shortly now, the jousting hour arrived.

Leets ran his tongue over dry lips. If I’m scared, he wondered, what about him?

Shmuel lounged on the grass next to him, similarly encumbered, yet lacking weapons, which he did not know how to operate anyway and which by principle he would not have, though Leets had tried to argue him into carrying at least a pistol.

Yet Shmuel seemed strangely composed.

“How are you doing?” Leets inquired, with effort, for all the stuff pressing into his gut.

No expression showed beneath the blackface; he could have been any other paratrooper, counting out the final quiet minutes of the night, eyes showing white against the darkness of face, mouth grim, nostrils flaring slightly in the effort of breathing.

He nodded briskly in reply to the question. “I’m fine,” he said.

“Good, good,” Leets said, wishing he could make the same claim. He himself was exhausted, while at the same confusing time churning with energy and dread. A most curious state; it had the one benefit of quieting his leg, which with fatigue tended to throb and leak. A man leaned over, too dark to recognize, and said, “Sir, Colonel says planes’ll be cranking up in five, we’ll be loading in ten.”

“Gotcha, thanks,” said Leets, and the trooper was gone.

Leets looked nervously around him. It was warm and dark and the men were lying about on the grass of the airfield, though they’d been organized into their Dakota groups three hours ago. Those three hours had dragged by, as the light faded to twilight and then darkness, the soft English fields beyond the air base perimeter growing hazier. The men were Second Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, a part of the more widely known 82d Airborne Division. Tough boys with drops in Italy and Normandy, a long bad spell in the Bulge and most recently—March—an op named Varsity in which they’d jumped beyond the Rhine behind them. They’d been off the line a month, growing fat and sluggish here at the rest camp in southern England, and when Tony Outhwaithe had convinced the right parties that a batch of hellraisers was needed for a night of close-in dirty work in south Twelveland, Second of the 501st got the word.

It was cold in the airplane. Shmuel sat in the chill, his back against the slope of the fuselage, shivering. Yet he felt quite wonderful. His journey was finally nearing its completion. A matter of hours now. He was one of two dozen men in the underlit darkness of the airplane, and he was as isolated from any of them as they were from each other, cut off by the noise from the engines that made human contact, now that they needed it most, impossible. Shmuel could sense the tension, especially in Captain Leets, and he pitied him for it. A Mussulman need feel nothing. A Mussulman was cut off from human sensation, complete within himself. Yet he looked over at Leets and saw him hunched and absorbed, filthy face glowing orangely over the tip of a cigarette. The layer of cork had dried crustily on his skin, making the features abstract, unreadable. But the eyes, staring blankly at nothing, had a message: fear.

Yet it was a fear Shmuel refused to accept. He was all through with fear, he had discovered a new territory. Having accepted and even welcomed his death, nothing mattered, not even preposterous things like the half-a-day session at the American parachute school with the boy Evans, performing feats of athleticism, jumping off of ten-foot platforms into sawdust pits, rolling when he hit; or hanging fifty feet up from risers, the straps nipping into his limbs while someone yelled at him about adjustments he didn’t understand and the ground rushed up to hit him.

“You’ll be all right,” Evans had said. “The static line’ll pull the chute open for you. Really, it’s easy. When you hit the ground, the captain’ll come by for you. He’ll take good care of you.” The boy had grinned optimistically. He could afford optimism because he wasn’t going.

Then they took him to a supply depot and issued him equipment. It occurred to him that he’d never been so well dressed though he felt like an impostor. The clothes were all big, but looking around he saw that bagginess was the American style. It seemed to symbolize their wealth, huge flapping garments made from endless bolts of material. In the warehouse they peeled these items off from huge piles, piles of pants that reached the sky! The crowning monstrosity was the helmet, shaped like a Moscow dome, weighing six tons, pulling him left or right unless he fought against it.

He examined himself. Third uniform of the war and what a peculiar journey they charted: inmate’s ticking to Wehrmacht flannels to thick crinkly American cotton, crowned in steel like a bell.

Now, sitting in the airplane that drew ever closer to Germany, Shmuel had to wonder at the jokes of fate.

I had to find a special way to die, the ovens weren’t good enough for me, no, I had to jump out of an airplane with teen-age cowboys and Indians and gangsters from America.

He glanced over at Leets, and noticed the way he was sitting, one leg pushed out straight, his face tight, eyes still distant, whole being focused on deriving maximum pleasure from the cigarette.

Leets saw the ready light come on. He smashed out his cigarette with the foot of his good leg. The bad one ached dully. Motionless, stretched, stiff in the cold plane, it had cramped on him. He massaged it, kneading it nervously with his fingers, working some life back into it. A touch to the knee came back wet. Leakage.

You fucker, he thought.

Just when I need you.

He thought of his first jump, first real jump, that is, with live Germans and guns and real bullets down below: completely different. A Lancaster, though bigger, felt less solid than a C-47, and there was a sense of actual loneliness in the big bomber’s bay, with just the three of them besides the sullen jumpmaster. Here, a crowd, two whole football teams and change. And a door, a wonderful American door, triumph of Yank ingenuity. The Brits leaped out of a hatch in the bomber floor for some absurd reason, a public school sort of ordeal that had to be got through like a cold bath or fagging for the older boys. Leets focused all his terrors on getting through without breaking his head. For some baffling reason, Yanks had a peculiar tendency to look down as they stepped out, see where they were headed, and catch a faceful of hatch. Leets had seen it happen at one of the British secret training schools where he’d learned to jump Brit-style preparatory for going to war for the OSS. There was a saying at the place: you could always tell a Yank by the broken jaw.