Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)
Page 50
Fred Rasmussen, of my old paper The Baltimore Sun, is a railroad buff par excellence, and he plied me with details on the mythic trains of the ’40s, as well as with other railway details.
Some of Earl’s comments on fighting with guns are drawn from the wisdom of Clint Smith, the director of Thunder Ranch, the firearms training facility in Mountain Home, Texas. They are used with Clint’s permission.
I should mention some books, too. I helped myself with great enthusiasm and no permission whatsoever to the recollections of Shirley Abbott, whose wonderful memoir The Bookmaker’s Daughter is certainly the most colorful record of the Veterans’ Revolt and Hot Springs in the ’40s we have, though of course that is not its primary focus. Her father was the head oddsmaker at the Ohio Club. There were many other books I consulted, on and off, most of them purchased at Powell’s, the legendary bookstore in Portland, Oregon, where I was taken by Scott LePine of Doubleday, one of the best publisher’s reps in the business.
Another book that deserves special mention: Thompson: The American Legend, a compendium edited by Tracie L. Hill. It’s very expensive but every fan of these fabulous old beauties will get a great kick out of the sentimental journey into the gun’s times and culture.
Then there’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer, which was so enthusiastically recommended to me by Paul Richard of the Post. It’s an examination of the English roots of American culture, with a section on the Scotch-Irish borderers, who became the American Southerner, and ultimately, for my purpose, the Swaggers and the Grumleys.
In Hot Springs, Bobbie McClane, who runs the Garland County Historical Society, was unfailingly kind and helpful to me. So was Bill Lerz, who helped me find photos of those troubled days. On a less official note, Stormin’ Norman, who rents motorbikes at the train station, took me on a wholly more salubrious tour of the town, pointing out where all the whorehouses and the casinos had been. That’s something you can’t find out from the GCHS, and it was most useful.
In the publishing world, I have to thank my brilliant agent, Esther Newberg; my publisher, David Rosenthal; and my editor, the legendary Michael Korda, who nudged me toward the true form of this book in the early going and kept me on track the whole way.
And of course my great friend Jean Marbella, of The Baltimore Sun and the rest of my life, was there to pretend to listen patiently as I babbled about the cool new gunfight thing I’d thought up for Earl. As we say in Baltimore, thanks, hon.
Finally I should say that Mickey Rooney, whose presence in the upstairs of the Ohio Club was reported to me by a Hot Springs source, denies all connection with vice in the town. He says the only thing he remembers is the excellent barbecue.
Turn the page to read an excerpt from
She, Sniper
the next Bob Lee Swagger thriller by Stephen Hunter
“Bob Lee Swagger [is]…one of the finest series characters ever to grace the thriller genre, now and forever.”
—Jon Land, Providence Journal-Bulletin
Prologue
Ostfront
1943
It was a balmy February day in Stalingrad, fourteen below, twelve feet of snow, near blizzard conditions. Another twelve feet were expected soon, and tomorrow would be colder. At the intersection of Tauvinskaya and Smarkandskaya, near the petrol tanks, not far from the Barrikady factory, the streets were empty of pedestrian or vehicular traffic, though arms, legs, feet shod and unshod, hands gloved and ungloved, even a head or two, stuck out of the caked white banks that lined them. A dead dog could be seen here, a dead old lady there. The sky was low and gray, threatening; columns of smoke rose from various energetic encounters in the northern suburb of Spartaskovna a few miles away. A ruined Sd.Kfz 251, painted frosty white for camouflage, lay on its side, its visible track sheared, a splatter of steel wheels all over the street. Its crew had either escaped or been long-since devoured by feral dogs and rats. It was left over from the fall. Farther down, a T-34 without a turret rusted away, also a relic of warmer months, as was presumably its crew. On either side of either street, as far as the eye could see, the buildings had been reduced to devastation, and resembled a maze, a secret puzzle of shattered brick, twisted steel, blackened wall, ruptured vehicle. In this labyrinth, small groups of men hunted one another and now and then would spring an ambush, and a spasm of rifle or machine-gun fire would erupt, perhaps the blast of Russian or German grenade. Occasionally a plane would roar overhead, a Stuka, like a bird of prey looking for something to kill and eat.
But for now, the intersection was quiet, as if in one of those glass globes that encompasses a little Christmas scene, and like the globes when shaken by Papa, a riot of snowflakes floated downward, swirling in the wind, covering bloodstains, human entrails, fecal deposits, the screams of men who’d lost legs or testicles, the whole panoply of total, bitter war fought at very close quarters in frozen conditions under a gossamer surface of silky frost.
At the intersection, however, one man was quite warm and comfortable. He was prone-positioned under three blankets in what had been Apartment 32, No. 27 Smarkandskaya, a model Soviet worker’s building that now had no roof and few walls. His face was smeared with zinc ointment as a protection against frostbite, his hands were twice gloved, a white hood engulfing most of his head, and a scarf sheathed his mouth and nose so that only the eyes, dark behind snow goggles, were visible. Best of all, every half an hour, a private would slither up the stairs and slip a hot water bottle under the blankets, its contents freshly charged from a boiling pot two flights below.
The prone man was Gunter Ramke and he was a feldwebel—that is a sergeant—in the 3rd Battalion of the Second Regiment of the 44th Infantry Division in XI Corps in the Sixth Army under Paulus, facing the 13th Guards Rifle Division of the Soviet 62nd Army under Zhukov as the heavy fighting of Operation Uranus echoed in the distance. Zhukov was trying desperately to encircle Paulus as a preliminary to destroying him and his 300,000 colleagues. None of that mattered, however, to Feldwebel Ramke, who had no imagination for any kind of pictures save the one he saw through his Hensoldt Dialytan 4-power telescopic sight, set in a claw mount on his Mauser K 98k.
He was a sniper, he was hunting a sniper. That was all.
The Russian had moved in a few weeks ago, a very talented stalker and shooter, and had eliminated seven men, two of them SS officers, already. It was thought the fellow had worked the Barrikady Factory zone before that, and possibly Memomova Hill as well. He liked to kill SS. It wasn’t that Ramke had any particular investment in the SS, which struck him as ridiculous (he was farm-raised and thought the black costumes were something for the stage or cinema and additionally knew nothing of politics except that the Fatherland had been starved into submission in ’18, then gotten screwed by the Versailles treaty) but he was a good soldier, an excellent shot (twenty-nine kills), and he had an assignment and meant to bring it off. It would keep his captain happy, and life was better for everyone in the company, as in all armies that have ever existed anywhere in the world at any time, if the captain was happy.
He knew this game was of a dimension he had not yet encountered. Normally you stalk, you slither, you pop up or dip down, and sooner or later a fellow with a Mosin Nagant or a red tommy gun comes your way; you settle into position, hold your breath, steady the weapon on bones, not muscles, watch the crosshair ease toward centermass and squeeze. The fellow staggers and falls; or he steps back and falls; or he simply falls; but it always ends in the fall. Plop, to the ground, raising dust or snow, followed by the eternal stillness known only to the dead.
But the character on the other side of the street was too good. So the new rules were, you only moved a bit. Otherwise you emulated the recently deceased. You never looked up or about. Your field of vision was your battlefield, and it covered about 30 feet at 250 meters. You never moved fast. You stayed disciplined. The rifle was loaded and cocked so there was no ritual of bolt throw, with its bobbing head and flying
elbows, either of which could get you killed. The name of this game was patience. The opponent would come to you. It was a question of waiting. Thus Gunter was perfectly constituted for the job, having no imagination whatsoever, being only barely literate and lacking any ability to project himself in time or space. He was the ideal sniper: what was, was, and he had no need for speculation, delusion, curiosity, or fantasy.
He was set up to cover the fifth and sixth floors of a much battered apartment building across the street and the traffic circle that marked the intersection, with the knees of a statue of someone who had once been important to the Russians still standing on a pedestal. If the enemy sniper were in that tightly circumscribed universe, Gunter would make the kill. If he was a floor lower or higher, or a window to the left or right, they’d never encounter each other. Tricky business. Wait, wait, wait. But the Feldwebel was determined and felt the press not only of a responsibility to be the Good Soldier but also the ideal sniper.
And finally the ordeal seemed to be paying off. He was convinced that within the darkness of the rear of the apartment whose interior was defined by his sight picture lay a patch more intense and more shaped than had been there in previous hours. He convinced himself he saw movement. He just wasn’t quite sure, and if he fired and hit nothing, he would have given this position up, and he’d have to start anew tomorrow.
He didn’t want to stare too hard through the glass. Eyestrain and fatigue led to hallucinatory visions, and if he let himself he’d see Joe Stalin himself sitting in there, eating a plate of sardines and wiping his filthy peasant hands on his tunic, though of course by any fair definition, Gunter was a filthy peasant himself. But realizing this as a trap, he closed his eyes every few seconds for some rest, so that he cut down on the pressure. But each time he opened them, he was certain there was a new shape in the shadow. It could have been a samovar on the floor or the frame of a chair that lost a fight with a mortar round, or even the body of the occupant, but it could also have been a man in prone, hunched similarly over a weapon, eye pressed similarly to the scope. It didn’t help that discriminations were made more difficult by reason of an occasional sunbeam, which would break through the clouds and throw a shaft of illumination into the room, just above the suspected enemy. When this happened, it broke Gunter’s concentration and ruined his vision, and he had to blink and look away and wait until the condition passed.
But Gunter felt safe. The Ivan snipers used a 3.5-power optic, called a PU, which meant that even if his enemy were on him, the details would be so blurry that no sight picture could be made, not at 250 meters, which was about as far as the Mosin Nagant with that scope was good for. So he felt invisible, even a little godlike. His higher degree of magnification gave him enough advantage.
He would wait a little while longer. That low sun would disappear and full dark would come. Both opponents, if there was another opponent, would wait until that happened and then gradually disengage and come back to fight tomorrow. But Gunter had decided to shoot. He’d been on this stand a week and he convinced himself that he was seeing something new, having moved in at about three in the afternoon, and it could only be …
He closed his eyes. He counted to sixty.
“Not much time left, Gunter,” came the call from his landser just leaning out of the stairwell behind him. “Need more hot water?”
“Shhh!” said Gunter.
“You’re going to shoot! Maybe we can get out of here early!”
Then the soldier disappeared, knowing further distraction was to nobody’s advantage. Gunter, meanwhile, prepared to fire. He carefully assembled his position behind the rifle, working methodically from toes to head, locking joints, finding angles for his limbs, making nuanced adjustments, building bone trusses under the seven pound 7.92 mm rifle, which rested on a sandbag, pushing the safety off, sliding his trigger finger out of the sheathing of the two gloves via a slot he’d cut in each. He felt the trigger’s coldness, felt his fingertip engage it, felt it move back, stacking slightly as it went, until it finally reached the precise edge between firing and not firing. At this point he committed fully by opening his eyes to acquire the picture through the glass of the Hensoldt Dialytan. Four times larger than life, he saw the dark shape 250 meters away, and settled the intersection of the crosshairs on its center. He exhaled half his breath, put his weight against the trigger, feeling it just about to break, and then saw the flash.
The round hit him on a slightly downward angle at the midpoint of his right shoulder, breaking a whole network of bones, though missing any major arteries or blood-bearing organs. It was not fatal. In fact it saved his life; his shoulder was so ruinously damaged, he was evacuated from Stalingrad that night, one of the last few to escape the Cauldron, as it came to be called, and lived to be eighty-nine years old, dying prosperous and well-attended by grandchildren on his farm in Bavaria.
However, at the point of impact it felt like someone had unloaded a full crescent blow of sledge weight against him, lifting him, twisting him, depositing him. He was aware that he had fired in reaction to the trauma but knew fully well that the shot, jerked and spastic, had no chance of reaching target.
Dazzled by the shock, he recovered quickly, tried to cock the rifle but found of course that the arm attached to the now-destroyed shoulder no longer worked. Still, on instinct, his face returned to the stock, his eye returned to the scope, and it so happened that his opponent, having delivered the shot, had risen to depart just as one of those errant sunbeams pierced the interior of the room, and as the figure rose and turned, the sniper’s hood fell away and Gunter saw a cascade of yellow hair, bright as gold, reflecting the sunlight. Then the sniper was gone.
Men raced to him, tourniquets were supplied and applied, a stretcher was brought, but Gunter said to anybody who would listen, “Die weisse Hexe!”
“The White Witch!”
BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
STEPHEN HUNTER has written sixteen novels. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work. He lives in Maryland.
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This book is a work of fiction. N
ames, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Cover design by Laywan Kwan
Photo of blood splatter by Shutterstock, photo of poker chips by istockphoto
ISBN 978-1-4516-2723-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-4070-3 (eBook)
Contents
Epigraph
Part One: Wet Heat
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two: Day Heat
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15