The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
Shmuel did not appear to care. “I knew God had other worries that night,” he said.
“But the next time he shoots,” Leets said, “the guys on the other side of the scope won’t be so lucky.”
10
Vollmerhausen is visibly nervous, Repp noticed with irritation. Now why should that be? It won’t be his neck on the line out there, it’ll be mine.
It was still light enough to smoke, a pleasant twilight, mid-April. Repp lit one of his Siberias, shaggy Ivan cigarettes, loosely packed, twigs in them, and they sometimes popped when they burned, but it was a habit he’d picked up in the Demyansk encirclement.
“Smoke, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor?” he inquired.
“No. No. Never have. Thanks.”
“Certainly. The night will come soon.”
“Are you sure it’s safe here? I mean, what if—”
“Hard heart, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor, hard heart. All sorts of things can happen, and usually do. But not here, not tonight. There’ll only be a patrol, not a full attack. Not this late. These Americans are in no hurry to die.”
He smiled, looked through the glassless farm window at the tidy fields that offered no suggestion of war.
“But we are surrounded,” said Vollmerhausen. It was true. American elements were on all sides of them, though not aggressive. They were near the town of Alfeld, on the Swabian plain, in a last pocket of resistance.
“We got in, didn’t we? We’ll get back to our quiet little corner, don’t worry.” He chuckled.
An SS sergeant, in camouflage tunic, carrying an MP-40, came through the door.
“Herr Obersturmbannführer,” he said in great breathless respect, “Captain Weber sent me. The ambush team will be moving out in fifteen minutes.”
“Ah. Thank you, Sergeant,” said Repp affably. “Well,” turning to the engineer, “time to go, eh?”
But Vollmerhausen just stood there, peering through the window into the twilight. His face was drawn and he seemed colorless. The man had never been in a combat zone before.
Repp hoisted the electro-optical pack onto his back, struggling under the weight, and got the harness buckled. Vollmerhausen made no move to help. Repp lifted the rifle itself off its bipod—it rested on the table—and stepped into the sling, which had been rigged to take most of the weight, made an adjustment here and there and declared himself ready. He wore both pieces of camouflage gear tonight, the baggy tiger trousers along with the tunic, and the standard infantry harness with webbed belt and six canvas magazine pouches and, naturally, his squashed cap with the death’s-head.
“Care to come?” he asked lightly.
“Thanks, no,” said Vollmerhausen, uneasy at the jest, “it’s so damned cold.” He swallowed, clapped his hands around himself in pantomimed shiver.
“Cold? It’s in the forties. The tropics. This is spring. See you soon. Hope your gadget works.”
“Remember, Herr Obersturmbannführer, you’ve only got three minutes—”
“—in the on-phase. I remember. I shall make the most of them,” Repp replied.
Repp left the farmhouse and under his heavy load walked stiffly to a copse of trees where the others had gathered. Frankly, he felt ridiculous in this outlandish rig, the bulky box strapped to his back, the rifle linked to it by wire hose, the sighting apparatus itself bulky and absurd on top of the weapon, which itself was exaggerated with the extended magazine, the altered pistol grip and the bipod. But he knew they wouldn’t smirk at him.
Tonight it was Captain Weber’s show. It was his sector anyway, he knew the American patrol patterns. Repp was along merely to shoot, as if on safari.
“Sir,” said Weber. “Heil Hitler!”
“Heil, Schutzstaffel,” responded Repp, tossing up a flamboyantly casual salute. The young men of XII Panzergrenadierdivision “Hitlerjugend” jostled with respect, though the circumstances seemed to prevent more elaborate courtesies. This pleased Repp. He’d never been much for ceremony.
“Ah, Weber, hello. Boys,” nodding to them, common touch, nice, they could talk about it after the war.
“Sir,” one of the worshipers said, “that damned thing looks heavy. Do you need a man—”
It was heavy. Even with Vollmerhausen’s last stroke of genius, the one he’d been laboring on like a maniac these last few days, Vampir, the whole system, gun, rack, scope, light source, weighed in at over forty kilos, 41.2, to be exact, still 1.2 kilos over, but closer to the specs than Repp ever thought they’d get.
“Thanks, but no. That’s part of the test, you see, to see how well a fellow can do with one of these on his back. Even an old gent like me.”
Repp was thirty-one, but the others were younger; they laughed.
Repp grinned in the laughter: he liked to make them happy. After it had died, he said, “After you, Captain.”
There was a last-second ritual of equipment checks to be performed, MP-40 bolts dropped from safe into engagement, feeder tabs locked into the machine gun, harnesses shifted, helmet straps tightened; then, Weber leading, Repp somewhere in the center, they filed out, crouched low, into the fields.
Vollmerhausen watched them go, silent line of the ambush team edging cautiously into the dark. He wondered how long he’d have to wait until Repp returned with the happy news that it had gone well and they could leave. Hours probably. It had already been a terrible day; first the terrifying flight in from Anlage Elf in the Stork, bobbing and skimming, over the trees. Then the long time among the soldiers, the desultory shellings, and the worry about the weather.
Would the sun hold till twilight?
If it didn’t they’d have to stay another day. And another. And another….
But it had held.
“There, see: your prayers have been answered, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” Repp had chided him.
Vollmerhausen smiled weakly. Yes, he had prayed.
Displaying a dexterity that might have astounded his many detractors, Hans the Kike had prepared Vampir for its field test. He quickly mounted the scope and the energy conversion unit with its parabola-shaped infrared lamp to the modified STG receiver, using a special wrench and screwdriver. He locked in the power line and checked the connections. Intact. He opened the box and gave it a quick rundown, tracing the complex circuitry for faulty wiring, loose connections, foreign objects.
“Best hurry,” Repp said, leaning intently over the engineer’s shoulder, watching and recording his rundown, “we’re losing it.”
Vollmerhausen explained for what must have been the thousandth time, “The later we charge, the later it lasts.”
Finally, he was finished. Sun remained, in traces: not a fiery noontime’s blaze—of furnaces or battles—but a fleeting late-afternoon’s version, pale and low and thin, but enough.
“It’s not the heat, it’s the light,” he pointed out.
Vollmerhausen yanked a metal slide off a thick metal disk spot-welded crudely to the top of the cathode chamber, revealing a glass face, opaque and dense. Its facets sparkled in the sunlight.
“Fifteen minutes is all we need; that gives us eight hours of potency for an on-phase of three minutes,” he said, as if he were convincing himself.
The problem with infrared rays, Vollmerhausen had tried to explain to Repp, was that they were lower in energy than visible light—how then could they be made to emit light rays of a higher value, so that images might be identified and, in this case, fired upon? Dr. Kutzcher had found a part of the answer at the University of Berlin those many years ago: by feeding high-tension electricity across a cathode tube, he’d caused the desired rise in energy level, producing the requisite visibility. But Vollmerhausen, improvising desperately at Anlage, had not the latitude of Kutzcher. His problem was narrowly military—he was limited by weight, the amount a man could carry efficiently on his back over rough terrain. When all the skimming and paring and snipping was done, he found himself a full ten kilos distant from that optimum weight; no further reduction was possible without radica
His stroke of inspiration—it took the form of the blisterlike dial welded to the scope, no, not pretty at all—was a solar unit. No less a power than the sun itself would provide Vampir with its energy; not an inexhaustible supply, but enough for a few minutes of artificial, invisible daylight at high midnight. Vollmerhausen could not totally abandon a battery, of course; one was still needed to provide juice for the cathode ray tube, but not nearly so much juice, for the phosphors in the chamber had been selected for their special property to absorb energy from sunlight and then, when bombarded by infrared rays, to release it. Thus instead of a 10-kilo 30-volt battery, Vampir could make do with a 1.3-kilo 3-volt battery, a net savings of 8.7 kilos while maintaining the intensity and brilliance of image within the specified limits. But not for long: for the phosphors had a very brief life in their charged state, and once exposed to the infrared lost their powers quickly. But for a good three minutes, Repp could peer through the eyepiece and there, wobbling greenly before him, magnified tenfold by a specially ground Opticotechna lens, undulated targets, visible, distinct, available, 400 meters out.
Vollmerhausen had checked his watch, snapped the face of the solar disk closed.
“There. It’s done. You’ve got your power now, until midnight.”
“Just like a fairy tale,” Repp had said merrily.
“And you’ve got the special ammunition?”
“Of course, of course,” and he had clapped the magazine pouch on his belt.
Now, in the farmhouse, Vollmerhausen looked out into a darkness that was total. Repp was somewhere out there, in his element. The night belonged to him.
I gave it to him, Vollmerhausen thought.
Repp slid into position behind the rifle, which rested on its bipod. His shoulders and arms ached, and the strap had cut deeply across his collarbone. The damned thing was heavy, and he’d come but three or four kilometers, not the twenty-three kilometers he’d be traveling the day of Nibelungen. He felt his breath coming unevenly, in sobs and gasps, and fought to control it. Calm was the sniper’s great ally, you had to will yourself into a serenity, a wholeness of spirit and task. He tried hard to relax.
Four hundred meters beyond him the tidy fields fell away into a stream bed, where a stand of trees and thicker vegetation grew, and here the land delivered up a kind of fold, a natural funnel that men moving over unfamiliar territory, scared probably, wishing themselves elsewhere, would be surely drawn to.
“There, Herr Obersturmbannführer, do you see it?” asked Weber, crouching beside him in the darkness.
“Yes. Fine.”
“Four nights out of five they come through there.”
“Fine.”
Weber was nervous in the great man’s presence, talked too much.
“We could move closer.”
“I make it four hundred meters, about right.”
“Now we’ve flares if you—”
“Captain, no flares.”
“I’ve the machine-gun team over on the right for suppressing fire if you need it, and my squad leader, a sound man, is on the left with the rest of the patrol.”
“I can see you learned your trade in the East.”
“Yes, sir.” The young captain’s face, like Repp’s own, was dabbed with oily combat paint. His eyes shone whitely in the starlight.
“They usually come about eleven, a few hours off. They think this is the great weakness in our lines. We’ve let them through.”
“Tomorrow they’ll stay away!” Repp laughed. “Now tell your fellows to hold still. No firing. My operation, all right?”
“Yes, sir.” He was gone.
Good, so much the better. Repp liked to spend these moments alone, if possible. He considered them very much his own minutes, a time for clearing the head and loosening the muscles and indulging in a dozen semiconscious eccentricities that got him feeling in touch with the rifle and his targets and himself.
Repp lay very still and warm, feeling the wind, the rifle against his hands, studying the dark landscape before him. He felt rather good, at the same time remembering that things had not always been so pleasant. A frozen February’s memory floated up before him, a desperate month of a desperate year, ’42.
Totenkopfdivision had been pushed into a few square miles of a pulverized city named Demyansk, in the Valdai Hills between Lake Ilmen and Lake Seliger in northern Russia—the Winter War, they later called it. In the city, all rudiments of military organization had broken down: the battle had become one huge alley fight, a small-unit action repeated on a vast scale, as groups of men stalked each other through the ruins. Young Repp, a Hauptsturmführer, as the Waffen SS designated its captains, was the champion stalker. With his Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5-millimeter mounting the 10X Unertl scope, he wandered from gunfight to gunfight, dropping five, ten, fifteen men at a throw. He was a brilliant shot, and about to become famous.
The morning of the twenty-third found him squatting wearily in the ruins of a factory, the Red Tractor Plant, sipping tepid ersatz, listening to the soldiers around him grouse. He didn’t blame them. The night had been one long fruitless countersniper operation: the Popovs were curiously silent. He was tired, tired down to his fingers; his eyes were swollen and they ached. As he examined the thin swirl of liquid in the tin cup, it was not hard for him to imagine other places he’d rather be.
Yawning, he glanced around the interior of the factory, a maze of wreckage, twisted girders, heaps of brick, a skeletal outline showing against a gray sky that promised more snow; the damned stuff had fallen again yesterday, must be six feet of it now, and all about the factory fresh white piles of it gleamed brightly against the blackened walls, giving the place a strange purity. It was cold, below zero; but Repp was past caring of cold. He’d gotten used to it. He wanted sleep, that was all.
The firing opened gradually. Shots always rattled around the city as patrols bumped into each other in alleyways; one grew accustomed and did not even hear them, or the explosions either, but as the intensity seemed to mount after several minutes, when contact might ordinarily be measured in seconds, some of the men around him perked up out of their whiny conversations.
“Ivan’s knocking again,” someone said.
“Shit. The bastards. Don’t they sleep?”
“Don’t get excited,” someone cautioned, “probably some kid with an automatic.”
“That’s more than one automatic,” another said. And indeed it was, Repp could tell too, for the firing then churned like a thunderstorm.
“All right, people,” said a calm sergeant, “let’s cut the shit and wait for the officers.” He hadn’t seen Repp, who continued to lie there.
After several minutes a lieutenant came in, fast, looked about for the sergeant.
“Let’s get them out, huh? A big one, I’m afraid,” he said laconically. Then he saw Repp, was taken aback by another officer.
“Oh? Say, what the hell, who the hell are—”
“Repp,” said Repp. “Damn! I needed sleep bad. How many? Big, you say.”
“It’s not clear yet. Too much smoke and dust at the end of Groski Prospekt. But it sounds big.”
“All right,” said Repp, “these are your boys, you know what to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
Repp picked himself up wearily. He flicked the ersatz out and paused for a moment. Men scurried by, clapping helmets on, drawing parkas tighter, throwing Kar ’98 bolts, rushing into the street. Repp checked the pocket of his snow smock, then tightened it. He was loaded with ammo, not having fired a round the night before. The Mannlicher-Schoenauer fired from a clever spool magazine, almost like the cylinder of a revolver, and Repp had a pouchful of the things.
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 Gros
“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.