Sniper's Honor(100)

The senior group leader did not fall instantly. Instead, as his hydrostatic pressure decreased in the order of several magnitudes and his knees became the final destination of all 412-foot pounds of energy, he stepped laterally on his right foot. Some internal gyro, unaware that the body around it was already dead, performed its stabilization duty, and as he lurched, it corrected by pulling the remaining leg forward to reacquire balance. This had the effect of causing him to twist even more, so that he came to face Salid as he commenced to topple. He hit the rail of the bridge, which broke his fall, and slid sideways to the slats of the construction, and it shuddered slightly on its rope moorings.

His body was dead, his brain not quite. As he fell, his eyes communicated thought: perhaps disbelief, perhaps disappointment, perhaps even curiosity (how had she made that shot?) before, at the half-topple mark, they went all eight ball and lost the spark of life. He hit the slats hard, as no inhibitors were left electrical enough to issue corrections during the fall. There was a weird after-death reflex by which his legs and arms curled up.

Captain Salid was horrified to discover that an atomization of blood and skin and other cellular material adhered to his own clothes and face.

He looked at the dead man in shock, just as, finally, the far-off sound of a rifle shot reached his ears.





CHAPTER 49


The Carpathians


Scree Field


THE PRESENT


It should work. He had set her up with the gun, shown her how to use it, more or less, warned her about the safety notch, how to shift mags. Bullets facing OUT. Really, that’s it. Bullets facing out, into the housing till it snaps, pull the bolt back, and start shooting again. OUT. OUT. She didn’t have to learn the difference between “bullet” and “cartridge,” which was beyond the scope of all journalists, especially the ones who’d been to Harvard. Fortunately she had good education for this kind of work: she hadn’t been to Harvard.

Her job: when she heard him scream, “Go!,” she was to lean around a rock with the weapon locked under her arm at hip height, point the gun at the men as best as possible, and squeeze the trigger. It would fire thirty times in about four seconds. She should try and hold it low, fighting its need to rise, but not worry about targets. The point was to send a fusillade down the pathway so their trackers would leap off it into the brush, seeking cover, and consider their next move.

At that point, from behind them, Bob would pull five pins on five No. 36 Mills bombs and toss them exactly where the bad guys had gone to rest. Those whom five blasts and one thousand pieces of supersonic steel filling the air didn’t kill would be quite dazed. Moreover, a turmoil of dust and smoke would blur everything. Bob would step into it with his Sten and shoot anything that still moved.

“Get the dog,” she said.

“I can’t make no guarantees about the dog. But he will probably die.”

He thought the dog would probably be turned to Alpo by the blasts, but who knew? You can’t never outthink a dog.

So now he sat with his Sten and his No. 36s behind a rock a few yards farther down and a few yards off the path. It was just waiting.

“A lot of war is waiting,” he’d told her. “You go crazy waiting. Don’t go crazy. Think of something else.”

Swagger himself thought of weapons, those he wished he had and the lesser quality of those he did have. Each grenade was a classic olive-drab egg, cross-checked by grooves meant to facilitate fragmentation. It had a mechanism at one end that sustained a pin, and the pin locked down what some called a spoon and others a lever, just a junk prang of metal that would pop off under spring tension when the pin was removed and the thing thrown, as the hammer pivoted under spring power to smack a detonator that lit a fuse that, 4.5 seconds later, turned the thing to noise and death. Grenades were tricky. You did not take grenades for granted. Drop it at the wrong time and it killed you, not them. Another grenade problem: you tossed it, it hit an overhanging branch or limb and bounced back. Not pretty. Thus he had checked and made sure his throws would have free passage. He also made sure all pins were loose in their holes, easy to yank. Too many guys had died from grenade mistakes in Vietnam. Grenades were heavier than they looked, and although some men got quite good with them, it took practice, and Bob had not thrown one since 1966, first tour in ’Nam. He got through two more tours without any grenade work and counted himself lucky.

But these were seventy years old. Boom or no boom, that was the question. That was why he would throw five, because if only two went boom, he still ought to win the war. Or at least get to the Sten part.

No uglier gun existed. You could not love it unless it saved your life countless times, and even then it would take some willpower. It was just a variety of steel tubes welded together at 4:57 P.M. Friday, British summer war time, three minutes before the end of the shift. Blobs and smears of liquid weld, now hardened into little disfigurements, littered its ostensibly smooth surface. They looked like lumps of butter hardened and spray-painted. It was beyond nuance, as if designed at the kitchen table, and in fact, that was where it had been designed. It rattled, nothing in it fit well, all angles were sharp and punishing to the hand or body. It was just a tube with stuff sticking off it at weird angles. The magazine inserted horizontally so that it was infernally out of balance; its trigger guard appeared to have been engineered before anyone thought up the curve. It lacked elegance, streamline, grace, ergonomic concession, or solidity. It lacked a front sight; its rear sight was a small nubby projection with a hole in it, which was why nobody ever used them. It even had a stupid nomenclature; machine carbine. The only thing it did well was kill people.