Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

He entered a terrible world, its imagery made even keener by the gush of his own adrenaline. He ran into a riot of angry pulsing light and cruel sounds and hot gusts of air and needles of stirred dust. His lungs soon ached from the effort of breathing, he began to lose control of the visions that came his way: it was all pure sensation, overwhelming. It made no sense at all. Smoke billowed, tracers hopped insolently around, screams and thumps filled the air without revealing their sources. He felt as if he were in the middle of a panoramic vista of despair, a huge painting comprised of individual scenes each quite exact, yet overall meaningless in their pattern. He found himself hunching behind a coil of barbed wire, watching a German MG-42—that high, ripping sound as the double-feed pawls and rollers in the breech-lock mechanism really chewed through the belt—knock down Americans. They just fell, lazily, slumping sleepily to the ground; you had to concentrate to remember that death was at the end of the tumble. He became aware of the taste and texture of the dirt on his tongue and lips as he tried to press even closer into the loam, tracers pumping overhead. He saw running Germans flattened one-two-three by teen-agers with wild haircuts and tommy guns. Men in flames zigged in their own terrible light, frenzied, from a burning building. He crawled frantically over cratered terrain, sprawling comically in a pit for safety and there found another sanctum-seeker, half a grin spilling ludicrously across half a face. If this battle had a narrative, or a point of view, he was not a reader of it. In fact, he really didn’t take part in it. He hadn’t fired his weapon, the only Germans he saw close up were dead ones and nobody paid him any attention. Again, he was a visitor. For him it was mostly rolling around in the dirt, hoping he didn’t get killed. He did nothing especially brave, except not run.

At one point, after what seemed hours of aimless crawling, he found himself crouching with a group of shivering paratroopers in the shelter of a shot-out blockhouse. Fire clattered and jounced hotly off the wall, and from somewhere up ahead, an insane sergeant howled at them to come on up and do some shooting.

“You go,” a boy near him said.

“No, you go,” said his friend.

“Hey, lookit this neat German gun,” someone said.

“Hey, that’s worth some money.”

“Fuck, yes.”

Leets saw the man had an MG-42; he was crawling out of the blockhouse.

“Hey, it’s broke,” someone said.

“No,” Leets said. “That gun fires so fast they change barrels on it. They were in the middle of a change. That’s why it looks all fucked up.”

The barrel seemed to be hanging out of a vent in the side of the cooling sleeve.

“Go on back in. There ought to be a leather case around in there somewhere. About two feet long, with a big flap.”

The kid ducked in and came out again with it.

“Okay,” said Leets. He took the barrel pouch and drew a new barrel out.

“Gimme the gun,” he said. “I think I can fix it.”

Leets threaded the new barrel down the socket guides, and locked it. Then he closed the vent, heard the barrel snap into place. He turned the weapon over. Dirt jammed the breech. He pried the feed cover open, brushed the bigger curds out of the oily action.

“Are there any bullets?” he asked.

“Here,” someone said, handing over a bunched-up belt.

Leets fed it into the mechanism and closed the feed cover. Then he drew back the operating handle and shoved it forward.

“I’m going to do some shooting,” he said. “How about one of you guys come and feed me the belt?”

They looked at him. Finally, a kid said. “Yeah, okay. But could I shoot it a little?”

“Sure,” Leets said.

They squirmed forward until they came against the lip of a ridge. Peering ahead, Leets saw the SS barrack looming like a ship. Flashes leapt out from it. Bullets whined above.

“There’s some still in there,” a sergeant said. “They pushed us out. I don’t have enough men or firepower to get back inside.”

“Isn’t there supposed to be a lieutenant around here?” Leets asked.

“He got it.”

“Oh. Okay, I’ve got a German gun here. I’m going to shoot the place up.”

“Go ahead. Goose ’em good. Really spray ’em.”

Leets pushed the gun on its bipod out beyond him, and drew it into his shoulder. He could feel the young soldier warm next to him.

“Don’t let the belt get tangled, now,” he said.

“I won’t. But you said I could shoot.”

“You can have the goddamn thing when I’m done. Okay?”

“Hey, super,” said the kid.

The building was a black bulk against a pinker sky.

“You in there, Repp? Repp, it’s me out here. I hope you’re in there. I’ve got five hundred rounds of 7.92 mill out here and I’m hoping one of them’s for you. And what about you, Man of Oak, you bastard?”

“Who are you talking to?” the kid wanted to know.

“Nobody,” said Leets. “I’m aiming.”

He fired. Each third round was a tracer. He saw them looping out, bending ever so slightly, sinking into the building. Occasionally one would jag off something hard, and prance into the sky. It seemed a neon jamboree, a curtain of dazzle, the chains of light rattling through the dark. Cordite rose to Leets’s nose as he kept feeding twenty-round bursts into the building and as the empty shells piled, they’d sometimes topple, cascades of used brass, warm and dirty, rolling down the slope, clinking.

“Goose it again,” said the sergeant.

Leets stitched another burst into the place. He had no trouble holding the rounds into the target. He took them from one end of the building to another, chest-high. The building accepted them stoically, until at last a tracer lit it off and it began to burn. A man inside waited until he ignited before coming out and Leets fired into him, cutting him in two. The flames were quite bright by that time, and there was not much more shooting.

Shmuel lay on his belly among strangers for the whole night. Nobody paid him any attention, but nearby the parachutists established their aid station, and besides the flashes of the battle, he’d seen the wounded drifting back, ones and twos, an occasional man carried by buddies who’d drop him and always return to the fighting. There was much screaming.

With dawn, fires arose from Anlage—Shmuel knew the buildings were burning. And then in the morning, the tanks had come down the road, clanking, sheathed in dust. The wounded cheered as best they could but the vehicles which looked so potent when first he glimpsed them seemed sad and beaten-up as they rumbled by. He could imagine better saviors than this ragged caravan of smoking creatures, leaking oil, scarred. Major Outhwaithe perched behind the turret of the first one, black and grimy, like a chimney sweep.

The tanks rolled into Anlage and Shmuel lost sight of them in the pall of smoke. Then explosions, fierce as any he’d heard.

“They must be blowing ’em out of that last pillbox,” one hurt boy said to another.

Then a soldier came for him.

“Sir, Captain Leets wants you.”

“Ah,” said Shmuel, embarrassed to be so clean among the dirty bleeding soldiers.

But soon his discomfort replaced itself with a sensation of befuddlement. He found it hard to relate what he encountered to what he remembered. He was appalled at the destruction. He saw a world literally eviscerated, ruin, smoky timbers, gouged earth, bullet-riddled buildings, all the more unbelievable for the small scenes of domestic tranquillity enacted against it by surviving American soldiers, lying about in the sun, cigarettes lazy in their mouths, writing letters, reading Westerns, eating cold breakfasts.