Sniper's Honor(98)
He went on and on in his civil, slightly amused informational voice, revealing these sacred truths, as they reached the bridge across the water to the second but equally unimpressive half of the village. They separated, feeling the bridge sway slightly under them, and headed across single-file. At the center, Groedl came to a halt.
“Not too close, Salid.” He turned to Sergeant Roffler, the SS NCO in command of the 12th SS Panzer detachment. “Spread your boys out, Sergeant. We want to give the White Witch a nice clear shot at me. It’s no good if we don’t tempt her.”
CHAPTER 47
The Carpathians
THE PRESENT
You talk, I’ll load.”
They were in a glade off the northern trail up to the cave, just north of the scree field. Swagger had before him ten seventy-year-old Sten magazines which he was busy loading with thirty seventy-year-old His Majesty’s 9mm ammunition. Mili’s sniper rifle lay to one side, as did ten No. 36 Mills bombs, pineapples full of TNT.
“How do you know it will work?” she asked.
“It should. It was in waterproof containment in a cave that by all indications was dry. No rust, no corrosion anywhere on the guns or on the container. No corrosion on the ammo. It should be okay.”
“Swagger, I’m scared.”
“To be expected. Get your mind off it. Make phone calls. Check your e-mail. Give me your latest. Do you have any long shots? You only scare yourself into ineffectiveness if your mind goes empty or numb. So just fill it with little shit, and you’ll be all right.”
Threading the cartridges through the lips—rather sharp, actually—so that they nested against the follower or the round against a spring pressure that grew only as the amount of rounds pushing it down grew, too, increasing the compression rate, was not fun. It put a hurt in the fingers and wrists. But it was also easy to fuck up, as in putting a round in backward or at the wrong angle, and he didn’t want to take a chance on that happening, so he pushed on.
“Okay, I’m done here. I’m giving you one Sten gun and three magazines. I want you to stay here. I will run the ambush. I will throw the grenades. I will do the killing. You stay here and shoot anything that doesn’t look like a Swagger, got that?”
“I got it,” she said. “Except I’m not doing it. I will fight and shoot and do what’s necessary.”
“Reilly, this ain’t your kind of work.”
“That premise is no longer operative. You’re fighting for your reasons. You’re in love with Mili, you old coot, don’t say you’re not, and it’s the best fight you ever had. Well, I’m fighting for mine, which is that no asshole comes along and says, ‘Sweetie, do us a favor and don’t write the story.’ I will write the story, if I have to be Mili Petrova to do it. Nobody tells me to go away like a good little girl. I was never a good little girl. Good little girls don’t become reporters. Besides, the story’s already on the budget.”
CHAPTER 48
The Carpathians
Above Yaremche
JULY 1944
She built her position carefully. It’s all about solidity of structure, so that at the instant of firing, bone supports bone, buttressed by the earth, unhampered by the flutter of breath. To shoot like a machine, you must become a machine.
She chose sitting, at a slight cant that rested her body against the trunk of the tree. The rifle was before her, its weight borne not by her muscles but by the thickness of the branch on which it rested. Actually it didn’t rest on the branch, but on a carefully folded wad of glove, so that it nestled in, and the possibility of it slipping as she torqued through the trigger pull was eliminated. The cheek rest was helpful in supporting her face, as it rested in precisely the correct position to place her eye four inches behind and directly centered on what the British designated a No. 32 telescopic sighting device. At this point she breathed easily, naturally.
Beside her crouched the Teacher, a spotter without a scope who was of no use except psychological support. “I see them,” he said. “Do you see them?”
Of course she saw them. The optics were superb, far better than her own PU scope. To her, through the glass, Herr Obergruppenführer Groedl was but 333 yards away. She saw a pudgy man, by looks one of the meek who would never inherit the earth. A faintly comical quality to him, expressed in the vividness of his spats, the formality of his suit, the daintiness of his walk. He had stepped out of an operetta. He seemed in earnest conversation with Salid, the other monster, as they moved in a phalanx of SS troopers down the central street of Yaremche. Salid pointed out interesting sights, as if there could be an interesting sight in such a degraded place where nobody had ever gotten beyond hay as a roofing material, and while Salid was quite animated, the face of her target remained dull and uninterested.