Sniper's Honor(45)
No targets. Nothing. All quiet in Chortkiv. Now, if the guys would get the hole dug, the shit planted, they could trip the fuse, snatch a truck, and get the hell out of—
Where did the first shot come from? It was unclear and would never be known. It hit in the roadway, lifted a geyser of debris. The next thing, it seemed the air filled with light. The Reds were firing tracers, mostly, from the sound, out of their tommy guns, and a latticework of incandescence seemed to replace the weather, or rather, became the weather, and everywhere bullets struck they stirred a pulse of disturbance, blurring the air with their grit and whirl.
“Fuck,” Karl said. “Fire when you have targets,” he yelled, although pointlessly.
At the far end of the street, a brave Ivan tried to run to a truck and two Green Devils fired simultaneously, knocking him down. The return fire became general. By protocol, the FGs and STGs were only fired semi-auto unless in close-up assault or street battle. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be fired fast and accurately, a parachutist specialty.
Indeed, the little fight became an argument of ballistics. Shooting the main battle rifle cartridge, the 7.92mm Mauser, the parachutists had the advantage of range and power, plus speed. If they could see it, they could hit it. The newer STG-44s, brought in because the FGs were getting harder to find, fired a shortened 7.92 round from an immense curved magazine and, if need be, could become real hosepipes; but at semi-auto they retained accuracy and a great deal of power. Too bad they were so goddamn big and heavy. The Ivans, on the other hand, had many of their tommy guns, and were able to put out enormous volume, but that was a pistol bullet, shaky on both range and accuracy. They could make a lot of noise, raise a lot of dust, crisscross the known world with strings of dust-puffs, but probably not hit unless lucky. So it was simple. Karl and his pals had to stay calm and cool and shoot well. No bursts, just well-aimed rifle fire, shooting at flashes and shadows and bringing people down. But mainly making it bad math on a cost-risk analysis basis to venture any closer.
Both the FG and the STG were a hundred years ahead of their time. For the FG, it took great discipline to master the fierce recoil of such a powerful cartridge in such a light-framed weapon, but its straight-line construction, ingenious spring-buffered stock unit, and muzzle brake helped enormously. Its signature was the weirdly radical angle of its handgrip, almost 60 degrees to the receiver, a cosmetic trope that made it an instant classic, but it was said to be engineered that way for shooting while descending. It looked cool as hell, out of Buck Rogers by way of art deco. It had pop-up sights, fiendishly clever in design, folding bayonet spike, a built-in bipod, and a horizontal magazine feed system located for perfect balance right above the grip. Someone once called it a seven-pound MG-42. Fired at full rip it was a brutal beast to control, but the parachutists mostly operated it on semi-automatic, where its rifle round could be used for maximum accuracy and high rate of fire. The Green Devils had been using it for nearly a year and loved it dearly.
The poor fellows with the STGs were always trying to trade up to FGs, but their owners would not let them go, and kept them going with tender care and lots of Blu-Oil. The STGs were still very fine weapons, if hideous to look at by purists’ standards, with stamped metal and crude finish and aggressively ergonomic design principles turning them into the sort of ugly/beautiful construction that was entirely mystifying. Their issue was the difficulty one had firing from prone with that immense magazine, as well as the temptation of the selective fire, which could turn them into ammo-gobbling beasts and leave the poor parachutist empty of rounds in a minute if he didn’t exercise fire discipline.
Meanwhile, across the river all the other parachutists joined in, again the game being sustained by accurate singles, not magazine-eating bursts. Then someone had the intelligence to gather up the Degtyaryov and swing it into action. Whoever he was, he arched pan after pan of 7.62 x 54 over the advance guard and along the buildings and through the windows. He could afford to burn ammo because he had no plans to carry the damned thing out with him.
“Hurry up, goddammit!” Karl yelled, but he couldn’t really complain, for the guys digging the hole were wide open to fire, whacking away with shovels at a desperate pace, while all around them bullets struck and screamed off the bridge’s stone walls or off its roadway, unleashing gallons of energized dust. They had better things to do than listen to him.
He ran dry, carefully made the effort to return a used magazine to its pouch—also protocol, since the mags were increasingly hard to come by—and was inserting a new twenty when he saw it coming around the corner.