David Healey: Red Sniper

“Ready?” Vaccaro asked.

“Yep.” He drew in a breath, held it. Kept the rifle scope focused on the barn window.

The rifle was a Springfield Model M1903A4 in .30/06 caliber. Cole knew its lines and curves intimately, and the stock fit against his shoulder and jawline like a part of his own body.

He sensed the movement in his peripheral vision as Vaccaro slithered a few feet away and popped the helmet above the wall. The trick was to do it fast, before the sniper had time to think. You just wanted him to react and shoot before he figured out that he was firing at a decoy. Along with very little experience, the sniper in the barn was bound to have an itchy trigger finger.

“Here goes nothin’,” Vaccaro muttered, and popped the helmet above the wall.

Right on cue, the German in the barn fired, his bullet smacking into the helmet and shelter half with enough force to knock it out of Vaccaro’s grip. Vaccaro muttered a curse.

There. Deep back in the darkness of the barn, Cole spotted the enemy sniper’s muzzle flash, no brighter than a firefly on a July night. Locking his crosshairs on the spot where he had seen the flash, he touched the trigger at the same instant and the rifle pounded into his shoulder.

He slid down behind the stone wall next to Vaccaro. “Got him,” he said.

Cole could not say exactly how he knew that. It was as if he could feel the bullet hitting home.

Vaccaro was more cautious. He insisted on giving the helmet-above-the-wall trick one more try, although it would be a sorry sniper who fell for the same trick twice. Maybe a kid with a rifle would. This time, no shot came.

Vaccaro looked at him.

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Cole said.

“In that case, you go first.”

“On three.” With Vaccaro covering him, Cole slid over the wall and ran in a crouch toward the barn. Vaccaro came right behind him. Cole poked the muzzle of the rifle into the barn and held his breath, listening for some sign that the sniper might still be alive. Most of the time, he could sense a person hiding in a building. It was like their body gave off vibrations.

Now, there was only a deathly stillness. He went on in, rifle at the ready.

They found the sniper on the floor of the hay loft. He lay with the slack pose of the dead. Cole’s bullet had hit him in the chest. The sniper’s face was untouched, the blue eyes gazing sightlessly out from the rim of his stahlhelm . This sniper couldn’t have been much more than seventeen or eighteen. Blond peach fuzz on his upper lip.

“I am so sick of this shit,” Vaccaro muttered, looking down at the dead boy’s face. Vaccaro was always playing the smart aleck when he wasn’t playing the macho Italian guy from Brooklyn, but there was nothing macho about his expression at that moment. He looked deflated, like someone had punched him in the gut.

Cole grunted. He didn’t like killing kids, either. But the fact remained that this young sniper had shot two Americans on the road below. Cole thought it was a lousy place to die—not that he had seen many good places, come to think of it.

This kid had killed them, and there was a price to pay for that.

Maybe you couldn’t entirely blame this dead kid, considering that he’d been brainwashed since childhood, having come of age in Nazi Germany. That didn’t change the fact that were now three dead men on this nameless stretch of road.

Some dust had stuck to his rifle barrel, just in front of the action. Cole rubbed it away with his thumb. There was something reassuring about the tangible feel of the metal, still warm from the bullet he had fired a minute before. The smell of gunpowder filled his nostrils. He hefted the familiar weight of the rifle in his hands. He pushed whatever regrets he had about killing the young enemy sniper to the back of his mind and locked them away.

He would never have told this to Vaccaro or to anyone else, but he was not sick of this at all. He dreaded seeing it end. It was not because he enjoyed the killing, but he did like the way that being on the hunt—even being hunted—made him feel so alive.

There wasn’t a damned thing he could do after the war that would come close. Other men had lives and families to go back to. What did he have but a crowded shack in the mountains and a few dozen rusty beaver traps to set in Gashey’s Creek? Was he going to set up a still and drink most of what he made, like his pa had?

It wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to look forward to. Cole wondered if maybe there was something wrong with him, because he wouldn’t mind if the war went on a while longer.

“Come on,” he said gruffly to Vaccaro, turning away from the young sniper’s body. “We’ve still got a few hours of daylight. Let’s see if we can make it to the next town before dark.”

Yegor Barkov had seen his share of bad situations, and he didn’t like this one at all. He stood on the marshy plain just west of the Oder River, looking up at the high ground beyond, where masses of German troops were dug in to make their last stand on what was known as the Sellow Heights.

His commander had once pointed out that Barkov was an imaginative man, so it was not surprising that when studying the German fortifications before him, he had the passing thought that this was how the hammer must look to the nail.

He clutched his Mosin-Nagant sniper’s rifle in his big, rough hands and tried instinctively to get the lay of the land so that he could put that rifle to use.

“At least it isn’t Stalingrad,” said Oleg Tarasyuk beside him. The little man hawked and spat to further illustrate his opinion of Stalingrad. He was also a sniper, and the two had been together through thick and thin during these long years of the war. Where Barkov was massive as a bull, Tarasyuk gave the impression of some small, quick animal that was fond of baring its sharp teeth. He had earned the nickname norka , which was Russian for mink, a furbearer often made into sleek coats but that had a nasty disposition in the wild.

“What do you want to bet that these stupid generals want us to march right into those German guns?”

“Yegor,” the Mink cautioned, ever mindful that one of the political officers might overhear. Like a mink, he lived by his wits.

Barkov hadn’t needed to say it; they both knew well enough that marching right into the guns was just what was going to happen. Marshal Zhukov had lined up his army across from the Germans entrenched on Sellow Heights. It was the nature of the Soviet army that generals were expected to out-do one another, and Zhukov could sense the other generals snapping at his heels. Stalin encouraged competition over cooperation. It was better to have the generals at each other’s throats, after all, than at his own.

Stalin wanted Berlin so badly that he could taste it, and he did not care how many men it took to overwhelm the German defenses. Lives meant nothing to him. By default, Marshal Zukov could place no value on the lives needed to sweep aside the Germans. The problem was that the Germans did not want to be swept.

Barkov and Oleg had been fighting Germans nearly every inch of the way from Stalingrad, pushing the Germans back, again and again. It was clear by now that the Germans were not simply giving up, so now here they were at Seelow Heights.

Marshal Zhukov had Stalin himself breathing down his neck to make some progress. Hourly telephone calls from Stalin were not unusual. Stalin wanted immediate results, so Marshal Zhukov had developed a brilliant strategy for a full-on frontal assault. If this was going to fail, in Zhukov’s eyes it was best to do so spectacularly. Artillery was being moved in to soften up the German positions first.