The Master Sniper

by Stephen Hunter

  At the top he found himself in a clock tower of some kind, shot out, of course, nothing up there but snow and old timbers, bricks, half a wall blown away, other gaps from rogue artillery rounds. Yet one large hole opened up a marvelous view of the Groski Prospekt—a canyon of ragged walls buried in smoke. Even as he scanned this landscape of devastation, it seemed to come alive before him. He could see them, swarming now, Popovs, in those white snowsuits, domed brown helmets, carrying submachine guns.

  Repp delicately brought the rifle to his shoulder and braced it on a ledge of brick. The scope yielded a Russian, scurrying ratlike from obstacle to obstacle. He lifted his head warily and flicked his eyes about and Repp shot him in the throat, a spew of crimson foaming down across his front in the split second before he dropped. The man was about 400 meters out. Repp tossed the bolt—a butterknife handle, not knobby like the Kar ’98—through the Mannlicher’s split bridge, keeping his eye pinned against the cup of the absurd Unertl ten-power scope, which threw up images big and clear as a Berlin cinema. Its reticule was three converging lines, from left, right and bottom, which almost but did not quite meet, creating a tiny circle of space. Repp’s trick was to keep the circle filled; he laid it now against another Red, an officer. He killed him.

  He was shooting faster, there seemed to be so many of them. He was wedged into the bricks of the tower, rather comfortably, and at each shot, the rifle reported sharply with a slight jar, not like the bone-bruising buck of the Kar ’98, but gentle and dry. When he hit them, they slid into the rubble, stained but not shattered. A 6.5-millimeter killed with velocity, not impact; it drilled them and, failing deflection at bone or spine, flew on. Repp was even convinced they felt no pain from the way they relaxed. He didn’t even have to move the rifle much, he could just leave it where it was, they were swarming so thickly. He’d fired five magazines now, twenty-five rounds. He’d killed twenty-five men. Some looked stupefied when he took them; others angry; still others oblivious. Repp shot for the chest. He took no chances. Nothing fancy.

  They had spotted him of course. Their bullets thunked and cracked around him, chipping at the bricks, filling the air with fine dust or snow, but he felt magical. He kept dropping them. The white bodies were piling up.

  Behind him now sprang a noise, and Repp whirled. A boy crouched at the head of the stairs with a pack.

  “Your kit, sir. You left it down below.”

  “Ah.” Yes, someone’d thought to bring it to him. It was packed with ammunition, six more boxes, in each fifty specially loaded rounds, 180 grains behind a nickle-tip slug. Berdan primers—the best—with twin flash holes.

  “Can you load those for me? It works same as with your rifle, off the charger,” Repp said mildly as a Degtyarev tracer winked through and buried itself in the wall. He pointed to the litter of empty spool magazines lying amid spent shells at his boots. “But stay low, those fellows are really angry now.”

  Repp fired all that morning. The Russian attack had broken down, bottled up at Groski Prospekt. He’d killed all their officers and was quite sure that had been a colonel he’d put down just an instant ago. He thought he’d killed almost a hundred. Nineteen magazines, and three rounds left in this one; he’d killed, so far, ninety-eight men in just over two hours. The rifle had grown hot, and he’d stopped once or twice to squirt a drop or so of oil down its barrel. In one two-minute period, he ran his ramrod with patch vigorously in the barrel and the patch came up black with gunk. The boy crouched at his feet, and every time an empty spool dropped out, he picked it up and carefully threaded the brass cartridges in.

  The Popovs were now coming from other directions; evidently, they’d sent flanking parties around. But these men ran into heavy fire from down below, and those that survived, Repp took. Still, the volume of fire against the Red Tractor Plant was building; Repp could sense the battle rising again in pitch. These things had their melodies too, and he fancied he could hear it.

  The grimy lieutenant from that morning appeared in the stairwell.

  “You still alive?” Repp asked.

  But the fellow was in no mood for Repp’s jokes. “They’re breaking through. We haven’t the firepower to hold them off much longer. They’re already in a wing of the factory. Come on, get out, Repp. There’s still a chance to make it out on foot.”

  “Thanks, old man, think I’ll stay,” Repp said merrily. He felt schussfest, bulletproof, but with deeper resonations in the German, connoting magic, a charmed state.

  “Repp, there’s nothing here but death.”

  “Go on yourself,” said Repp. “I’m having too much fun to leave.”

  He was hitting at longer ranges now; through the drifting pall of smoke he made out small figures several blocks away. Magnified tenfold by the Unertl, two Russian officers conferred in a doorway over a map. The scene was astonishingly intimate, he could almost see the hair in their ears. Repp took one through the heart and the other, who turned away when his comrade was hit, as if in hiding his eyes he was protecting himself, through the neck.

  Repp killed a sniper seven blocks away.

  In another street Repp took the driver of a truck, splattering the windscreen into a galaxy of fractures. The vehicle bumped aimlessly against a rubble pile and men spilled out and scrambled for cover. Of seven he took three.

  Down below, grenades detonated in a cluster, machine pistols ripped in a closed space which caught and multiplied their noise.

  “I think they’re in the building,” Repp said.

  “I’ve loaded all the rounds left in the magazines now,” the trooper said. “Nine of them. That’s forty-five more bullets.”

  “You’d best be getting on then. And thanks.”

  The boy blushed sheepishly. Maybe eighteen or nineteen, handsome, thin face.

  “If I see you afterward, I’ll write a nice note to your officer,” Repp said, an absurdly civil moment in the heat of a great modern battle. Bullets were banging into the tower from all angles now, rattling and popping. The boy raced down the stairs.

  At the end of Groski Prospekt, the Ivans were organizing for another push before nightfall. Repp killed one who stupidly peeked out from behind the smoldering armored car. The rifle was hot as a stove and he had to be careful to keep his fingers off the metal of the barrel. He had touched it once and could feel a blister on his skin. But the rifle held to the true; those Austrians really could build them. It was from the Steyr works near Vienna, double trigger, scrollwork in the metal, something from the old Empire, hunting schlosses in the Tyrolean foothills, and woodsmen in green lederhosen and high socks who’d take you to the best bucks in the forest.

  Blobs of light floated up to smash him. Tracers uncoiled like flung ropes, drifting lazily. Some rounds trailed tendrils of smoke. The bullets went into the brick with an odd sound, a kind of clang. He knew it was a matter of time and that his survival this far, with every Russian gun in the city banging away, was a kind of statistical incredibility that was bound to end shortly. Did it matter? Perhaps this moment of pure sniper war was worth his life. He’d been able to hit, hit, hit for most of the day now, over three hundred times, from clear, protected shooting, four streets like channels to fire down, plenty of ammunition, a boy to load spools for him, targets everywhere, massing in the streets, crawling through the ruins, edging up the gutters, but if he could see them he could take them.

  Repp killed a man with a flamethrower on his back.

  Forty-four bullets.

  By thirty-six, it had become clear that the men below had either fallen back or been killed. He heard a lot of scuffling around below. The Russians must have crept through the sewers to get in; they certainly hadn’t come down the street.

  Twenty-seven.

  Just a second before, someone at the foot of the stairs had emptied a seventy-one-round drum upward. Repp happened to be shielded, he was standing in a recess in the brick wall, but the slatted floor of the tower was ripped almost to slivers as the slugs jumped through it. Wood dust
flew in the air. Repp had a grenade. He pulled the lanyard out the handle and tossed the thing into the stairwell, heard it bouncing down the steps. He was back on the scope when the blast and the screams came.

  Eighteen.

  Tanks. He saw one scuttle through a gap between buildings several blocks away. Why didn’t they think of that earlier, save themselves trouble and people? Then he realized the Stalins had the same trouble the Panzers had had negotiating the wreckage-jammed streets. To get this far into the ruins at all, Russian engineers must have been working frantically, blowing a path through to him.

  Eleven.

  Repp heard voices below. They were trying to be silent but a stair gave. He stepped back, took out his P-38 and leaned into the stairwell. He killed them all.

  Five.

  One magazine. The first tank came into view, lurching from around the corner at the Groski intersection. Yes, hello. Big fellow, aren’t you? A few soldiers crept behind it. Repp, very calm and steady, dropped one, missed one. He saw a man in a window, shot him, high in the throat. One of the men he’d dropped behind the tank attempted to crawl into cover. Repp finished him.

  One.

  The turret was revolving. Not a Stalin at all, a KV-1 with a 76-millimeter. He fixed with fascination on the monster, watching as the mouth of the gun lazed over, seeming almost to open wider as it drew toward him. They certainly were taking their time lining up the shot. The tank paused, gun set just right. Repp would have liked at least to get rid of his last bullet. He didn’t feel particularly bad about all this. The hatch popped on the tank, someone inside wanted a better look, and the lid rose maybe an inch or two. Repp took him, center forehead, last bullet.

  There was nothing to do. He set the rifle down. This was an execution. As if by signal, Russian troops began to file down Groski Prospekt. Repp, firing since 0930, checked his watch. 1650. An eight-hour day, and not a bad one. He chalked up the score in the seconds left him. Three hundred and fifty rounds he had fired, couldn’t have missed more than a few times. Make it ten, just to be fair. That was 340 men. Then the three on the stairway with the pistol. Perhaps two more in the grenade blast. Three hundred and forty-five kills, 345. Three hundred and fo—.

  The shell went into the tower forty feet below Repp. The Russians had gotten fancy, they wanted to bring the tower down with Repp inside it, poetic justice or some such melodramatic conceit. The universe tilted as the tower folded. The line of the horizon broke askew and dust rose chokingly. Repp grabbed something as gravity accelerated the drop.

  The tower toppled thunderously into Groski Prospekt in a storm of dust and snow. But its top caught on the roof of the building across the way and was sheared neatly off. Repp found himself in a capsule of broken brick deposited there, untouched, baffled. It was as if he’d walked away from a plane crash.

  He walked across the flat roof of the building, waiting to get nailed. Artillery started up but the shells landed beyond him. There was smoke everywhere but he was alone. Across the roof, a shell had blown open a hole. He looked down into almost a museum specimen of the Soviet Worker’s apartment, and leapt down into it. He opened the door and headed down a dark hallway. Stairs. He climbed down them, and left through a front door. There were no Russians anywhere, though far off, he could make out small figures. Taking no chances, he headed down an alley.

  That night he had schnapps with a general.

  “The world,” the sentimental old man intoned, “will know you now.” Dr. Goebbels stood ready to make this dream come true.

  “Sir,” somebody whispered.

  “I see them,” said Repp.

  Scope on. The screen lights. He saw the first one, a wobbling man-shaped blotch of light, against green darkness. Then another, behind him, and still another.

  Germs, Repp thought. They are germs, bacilli, disease. They are filth.

  He drew back the bolt and squirmed the black cross of Vampir’s reticule against the first of the shapes.

  “Filth,” he repeated.

  He took them.

  11

  “Vampir did quite well, I thought,” said Repp. He abstractedly counted off the reasons for his pleasure, each to a finger. “No sight picture breakup, good distinct images, weight not a factor. In all, easy shooting.”

  Vollmerhausen was astonished. He certainly wasn’t expecting praise. Though he knew the shooting had gone well, for he’d heard two enlisted men chattering excitedly over it.

  But Repp was not yet finished. “In fact,” he elaborated, “you’ve performed extraordinarily well under great pressure. I wish it were possible to arrange for some kind of official recognition. But at least accept my congratulations.” He was toying with the blackened metal cube Vollmerhausen had noticed earlier, a charm or something. “A great miracle has happened here.” He smiled.

  “I—I am honored,” stuttered Hans the Kike. They were back at Anlage Elf, in the research facility, safe in the Schwarzwald after another harrowing flight.

  “But then sometimes the most important assignments are those nobody ever knows about, eh?” said Repp.

  Vollmerhausen felt this was a strange comment for a famous man, but merely nodded, for he was still stunned at Repp’s sudden burst of enthusiasm. And a sudden, still-resentful part of him wished that the asshead Schaeffer were here to listen to Der Meisterschütze himself heap on the praise. Yet, he acknowledged, he deserved it. Vampir represented an astonishing feat in so small a time, under such desperate pressure. Though even now it was hard to believe and take real pleasure in: he’d done it.

  Still, certain details and refinements remained to be mastered, as well as some after-mission checks and some maintenance, and it was this problem he now addressed, aware at the same time how modest he must have seemed. “May I ask, Herr Obersturmbannführer, how soon you expect to go operational? And what preparations will be necessary on my part?”

  “Of course,” Repp said smartly. “Certain aspects of the mission remain problematical. I’ve got to wait on intelligence reports: target confirmations, strategic developments, political considerations. I would say another week. Perhaps even more: a delicate job. It depends on factors even I can’t control.”

  “I see,” said Vollmerhausen.

  “I should tell you two things further. The weapon and I will leave separately. Vampir will be taken out of here by another team. They are responsible for delivery to target area. Good people, I’ve been assured.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you’ll have to prepare a travel kit. Boxes, a trunk, I don’t know. Everything should be lashed down and protected against jolts. It needn’t be fancy. After what you’ve handled, I shouldn’t think it would be a problem.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Now, secondly—look, relax. You look so stiff.”

  It was true. Though seated, Vollmerhausen had assumed the posture of a Prussian Kadett.

  “I’ve noticed that I make people nervous,” Repp said philosophically. “Why, I wonder? I’m no secret policeman. Just a soldier.”

  Vollmerhausen forced himself to relax.

  “Smoke, if you care to.”

  “I don’t.”

  “No, that’s right. I think I will.” He drew and lit one of the Russian things. He certainly was chipper this morning, all gaudy in his camouflages. “Now, may I be frank with you?” He toyed again with the black cube Vollmerhausen had noticed earlier.

  “Germany is going to lose the war. And soon too. It’s the third week in April now; certainly it’ll all be over by the middle of May. You’re not one of those fools who thinks victory is still possible. Go ahead, speak out.”

  Again, Repp had astonished him. He realized it showed on his face and hurriedly snapped his mouth shut.

  “Yes, I suppose. Deep down. We all know,” Vollmerhausen confirmed.

  “Of course. It’s quite obvious. They know in Berlin too, the smart ones. You’re a practical man, a realist, that’s why we chose you. But I tell you this because of the followi
ng: Operation Nibelungen proceeds. No matter what happens in Berlin. No matter that English commandos and American tanks are inside the wire here. In fact especially in those cases. You weren’t in Russia?”

  “No, I—”

  “No matter. That’s where the real war is. This business here with the Americans and the British, just a sideshow. Now, in Russia, four million fell. The figure is almost too vast to be believed. That’s sacrifice on a scale the world’s never seen before. That’s why the mission will go on. It’s all that generation will ever have. No statues, no monuments, no proud chapters in history books. Others will write the history; we will be its villains. Think of it, Vollmerhausen! Repp, a villain! Incredible, isn’t it?”

  He looked directly at the engineer.

  “Unbelievable,” said the engineer.

  Vollmerhausen realized Repp was not giving a speech. He had none of the orator’s gifts and little of his zeal; he spoke tiredly, laconically, only in facts, as if an engineer himself, reading off a blueprint.

  Another thought occurred to Vollmerhausen: the man is quite insane. He is out of his mind. It’s all over, still he talks of monuments, of consecrations. It’s not survival for him, as it is for me. There is no after-the-war for Repp; for Repp, there’ll always be a war. If not in a shell hole or on a front line, then in a park somewhere, at a pleasant crossroads, in a barn or an office building.

  “Y-yes, unbelievable,” Vollmerhausen repeated nervously, for he was just beginning to realize how dangerous Repp was.

  12

  “They’re calling him, even here, right afterward, der Meisterschütze, not, I say again, not der Scharfschütze, the technical German for sniper. Which of you brilliant Americans will now explain the significance of this?”

  Tony held in hand his scoop of the week: the March 5, 1942, issue of Das Schwarze Korps, the SS picture magazine, which the burrower who’d been sent to the British Museum’s collection of back-issue German periodicals had uncovered. Its lead story was Repp at Demyansk.