Sniper's Honor(47)

She nodded somewhat glumly.

“Okay,” he said, “that was a downer, wasn’t it? Let’s get out of here and get back to the hometown. Have a nice dinner. Then tomorrow we can go mountain climbing.”

“You got it.”

They turned and walked out, and then Reilly said, “You know what? That sort of sniper queasiness you just mentioned, that’s late, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean nobody felt that way after World War II. That was a Vietnam thing.”

“I suppose. After Vietnam, I got drunk for fifteen years or so, so I don’t exactly recall.”

“Maybe the same thing happened here after Afghanistan. Before, ‘partisan sniper’ was a popular subgenre, but as a new generation came along, the authorities or whoever decided to downplay it.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Maybe there’s a room in this very museum full of sniper art.”

“Well,” said Bob, “let’s find somebody to ask.”





CHAPTER 24


Chortkiv


The Bridge


JULY 1944


The tank lumbered closer, impervious to the clangs and prangs and dings of the parachutist bullets, which glanced off, harming only the dull green paint job. The T-34 was a monster, a thirty-six-ton concoction of steel domes resting on immense treads, capable of crushing anything it chose to roll itself over. Yet it, too, was vulnerable, with a tendency to burst into flame if appropriately pricked. But nobody had told this tank sergeant.

His vehicle ground onward, devouring the earth beneath it, setting it to shiver. Its hull machine gun mounted to the left of the center of the frontal armor plate fired spastically, sending out a fan of high-velocity destruction, though without much accuracy. Another flaw: the gunner didn’t have a lot of visibility when the tank was all buttoned up. Though a huge battle beast capable of massive destruction, it was hampered by poor visibility in close-quarters combat; it could destroy enemy panzers but a few scampering rats like the Green Devils, not so much. It felt its way toward the bridge, making corrections in angle every few yards. It was like the blinded Cyclops trying to kill Odysseus’s men by feel. But still, it was getting closer; it would crush them or machine-gun them to death if they ran.

“PANZERSCHRECK!” yelled Von Drehle.

Poor Hubner. He had to dislodge himself from whichever safe borough he had dipped into, lug the heavy tube of anti-tank rocket launcher to the bridge, as well as his STG-44—which bounced painfully against his body, to which it was roped by sling—then sprint the whole way over the triple arches to the sandbag fortification, which contained Von Drehle and a boy named Neuhausen, all under fire.

Yet good Green Devil that he was, that was exactly what he did, amid a storm of enemy ordnance that raised dust in clouds through which he raced. He arrived out of breath, not so much halting at destination as falling wretchedly. Ouch, that must have hurt. He lay there on his back, gulping at oxygen, oblivious to the ruckus, trying to regain dignity, clarity, and composure.

“Too bad we’re out of medals, Paul,” said Karl. “That deserves two or three.”

“I’ll take a three-day pass instead of another Iron Cross,” gulped Hubner.

“Me, too,” said Neuhausen. “Who needs medals?”

“Are you able to shoot?” said Karl. “Hit anyplace?”

“I think I’m okay. But I don’t want to shoot it. I don’t know how. I was never trained. I thought my job was just to carry it.”

“Can you shoot it, Neuhausen?”

“Sure, I can shoot it. But I’ve never shot one, either, so God knows what I’ll hit. Have you shot it, sir?”

“Officers don’t shoot in the German army,” said Karl.

“But aren’t we in the air force?” said Neuhausen.

“Excellent point,” said Karl. “All right, I guess I’m nominated. Is it loaded?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean, ‘sort of’? I don’t like ‘sort of.’ ”

“The rocket is in, but the leads haven’t been connected. I’ll connect them when you get it on your shoulder.”

“I am full of confidence.”

Von Drehle somehow got the thing off the wheezing Hubner’s shoulder and transferred it to his own, settling in under it. It was not light, at twenty pounds, with a rocket inserted holding seven pounds of Cyclonite contained in an armor-piercing warhead. Its weight threw him off a bit, and he almost stumbled out of the protective lee of the sandbags. But then he had it.

He sensed Hubner behind him.

“All right, I think I did it,” said the man. “I think I got the right ones connected to the right things, whatever you call them.”