The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
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.
Another light flicked on, red. Three minutes. Time to hook up.
Shmuel was standing now in the aisle. It reminded him of a crowded Warsaw trolley, the one that traveled Glinka Street, near the jewelry shops. He even had a strap to hang onto in the closeness and he could feel other men’s breath washing over him. A moment of unexpected terror had just passed: the plane had yawed to the left; Shmuel, awkward in all the new gear, almost fell. He felt his balance and, with it, his control draining away. Nothing to grab for; he surrendered to the fall; then Leets had him.
“Easy,” he muttered. A breeze pummeled through the corridor of the airplane, fresh and savage. A glint of natural light, not much, illuminated the end of the darkness. Door opened.
Then, like a theater queue at last admitted to the big show, the line began to move. It moved with great swiftness, almost as if some reasonable destination lay ahead.
Shmuel faced sky. An American strapped by the doorway hit him in the shoulder without warning and, surprised at his own lack of respect, he snarled at the man, a stranger, and as if to insult him, stepped out.
Gravity sucked the dignity from his limbs and he flapped like a scrawny shtetl chicken. The face of the tailplane, rivets and all, sailed by a few inches beyond him. He fell, screaming, in the great cold dark silence, the engines now mercifully gone, the noise too, only himself, beginning to tumble until—Ah! Oh! something snapped him hard and he found himself floating under a great white parasol. He looked about and noticed first that the sky was full of apparitions—jellyfish, moving with underwater slowness, silky petticoats under a young girl’s skirts, pillowcases and sheets billowing on a wash line—and secondly that for all the majesty of the spectacle the ground was coming up fast. He’d expected a serene descent, thinking himself thousands of feet up. Of course they’d jump at minimum height, less time in the air, less time to scatter, and already Shmuel felt below the horizon. The ground, huge and black, smashed up at him. Wasn’t he supposed to be doing something? He didn’t care. He saw in the rushing wall of darkness, coming now like an express train, his fate. He reached to embrace it, expecting no pain, only release, and he hit with stunning impact, knocking a bolt of light through his head and all his sense out of him.
I’m dead, he thought with relief.
But then a sergeant stood over him, cursing hotly in English. “C’mon, Jack, off yer butt, move it,” and sprinted on.
Shmuel got up, feeling sore in a dozen places but broken in none. His legs wobbled under his weight, his brain still resonated with echoes of the landing. Gradually he realized the field was very busy. Men rushed about, seemingly without order. Shmuel tried to figure out what to do and it occurred to him that he was supposed to free himself from the chute harness. Suddenly a man materialized next to him.
“You okay? Nothing busted?”
“What? Ah. No. No. What a sensation.”
“Great.”
Shmuel tugged feebly with the harness, couldn’t get his fingers to work and wasn’t exactly sure what it was he was supposed to do, and then felt Leets grab the heavy clip that seemed to be the nexus of the network of straps that held him, and in the next second the straps unleashed him.
Shmuel took a quick look around. He made out men scattered across the dark field, and, beyond, a looming bank of pines. All was silence under the towers of stars. It was so different now. He looked for landmarks, for clues, for help. He felt suddenly useless.
“This way, c’mon,” hissed Leets, unlimbering his automatic gun, trotting off. Shmuel ran after.
Yes, yes, it really was the firing range. The shed bobbed up ahead, and he reached the concrete walkway. Then he saw the lamps in the trees; he remembered: they’d almost killed him.
Leets joined a crowd of whispering men, while Shmuel stood off to one side. Other shapes rushed by. Groups were forming up, leaders gesturing to unattached people. Shmuel could hear guns being checked and cocked, equipment adjusted.
Then Leets returned.
“You feel okay?”
“It’s so strange,” Shmuel said. A half-smile creased his face.
“You stick with me. Don’t get separated. Don’t wander off or anything.”
“Of course not.”
“Any shooting, down you go, flat. Got it?”
“Yes, Mr. Leets.”
“Okay, we’re moving out.”
The soldiers began to move down the road.
It looked familiar, like something luminous from childhood that, seen finally through an adult’s eyes, revealed itself tawdry, fraudulent. A spring camouflage pattern had been added to the buildings so that now they showed the s
He was amazed more at the stillness of the composition than the composition itself: hard to believe those dark trees that circled the place concealed hundreds of squirming men.
Leets, beside him, whispered, “Research? The big one in the middle?”
“Yes.”
“And SS to the left?”
“Yes.” Shmuel realized Leets knew all this, they’d gone over it a hundred times; Leets was talking out of his own nervous energy or excitement.
“Any second now,” Leets said, looking at his watch.
Shmuel guessed that meant any second till a circle was closed around the place, like a noose. All exits cut off, all guns in place.
Leets was rubbing his hands in excitement, peering into the dark. Shmuel could see the fellow fight hard to restrain himself.
The report of the first shot was so abrupt that it shocked Shmuel. He flinched at it. Or was it a shot? It sounded muffled and indistinct. Yes, shot, for Leets’s intake of breath was sudden and almost painful, pulled in, the air held. Then came a clatter of reports, more shots. They all seemed to come from inside Anlage and Shmuel did not see why. Glancing around at the others in the trees, he made out baffled faces, men searching each other’s eyes for answers. Curses rose, and someone whispered hoarsely, “Hold it, hold—!” cut by a loud krak! from nearby. “Goddamn it, hold your—” someone shouted, but the voice was lost in the tide of fire that rose.
All wrong. Even Shmuel, not by furthest reach of imagination a military man, could tell: volley all ragged and patchy, tentative. Bullets just streaking out into the dark, unaimed.
Yet it was beautiful. He was dazzled by the beauty in it. In the dark, the gunflashes unfolded like exotic orchids, more precious for their briefness at the moment of blossom. They danced and flickered in the trees and as they rose in intensity, pulling a roar from the ground itself, the air seemed to fill with a sleet of light, free-floating streaks of sheer color that wobbled and splashed through the night. He felt his mouth hang dumbly open in wonder.
Leets turned to him. “All fucked up,” he said darkly. “Some bastard let go too early.”
Nearby, an older man shouted into a telephone, “Crank ’em up, all sections, get those people in the assault teams in there!”
Shmuel understood that the battle had prematurely begun, and reached its moment of equipoise in the very first seconds.
Leets turned to him again.
“I’m going in there. Stay here. Wait for Tony.”
The American raced off, into the blizzard.
Leets rushed in, not out of courage so much as to escape the rage and frustration. He ran out of sheer physical need because in not running there was more pain, because the neat surgical operation that he had envisioned as the fitting end to this drama, to Anlage Elf, to Repp, to the Man of Oak, was now lost forever, dissolving into a pell-mell of indiscriminate fire. Susan had wished him dead; he’d risk it then, her curse echoing in his mind.
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 tal
“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.