Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 22

The Auntie Ju took off from the Luftwaffe airfield at Uzhgorod, flew low to the north, and banked east through a gap in the Carpathians at Tarnopol. She stayed low over the Ukraine flatlands as her pilots put her on course for Chortkiv, ten kilometers behind Red lines so that, when she reached the drop zone, she could climb to five hundred meters and let the boys out to do their jobs. She should make it fine, since there was no Soviet radar this far south of Moscow, the Red Air Force rarely flew at night, and even the anti-aircraft gunners, in this lull before the offensive everyone knew was coming, got some extra shut-eye.

What was left of Battlegroup Von Drehle fit into the one plane, though it was tight within the corrugated tin fuselage, all the boys knee to knee, facing each other in the cramped space. All wore the clipped Fallschirmjäger helmet, its flaring Teutonic rim removed so that it looked something like the leather hat the ridiculous Americans clapped to their heads when they played a game they insisted on calling football. All wore the faded “splinter” forest-pattern camo smocks, which the fellows sportingly called “bone bags,” knee pads, and lace-up boots, the latter mandatory if you didn’t want your shoes falling off while you floated down. All had combat harnesses and their FG-42s or STG-44s strapped across their bodies. All wore a collection of magazine pouches suspended horizontally on either side of their chests, on a kind of horse-collar shoulder harness, and in each pouch nested a box of twenty 7.92s or thirty 7.92 Kurzs. All wore RZ-20 parachutes, which made all uncomfortable, though if you were going to jump out of an airplane, you could put up with a little discomfort. All wore their parachute infantry emblems, a stylized plunging eagle in gold upon a silver wreath. All wore their seventy-five-engagement badges. All wore bread bags on slings, though loaded with M-24 grenades. All weighed a ton with all the junk on.

Some smoked, some just looked out disconsolately into the distance. Hard to read expressions, as all had smeared their faces with burnt cork, so they looked like a very bad minstrel show about to break into a lackadaisical “Old Man River.” It wasn’t really a group anymore, in the grand military meaning of that term, which conjured divisions and regiments and battalions, and was called one these days only as an administrative convenience. It was more of a squad, one officer, one noncommissioned officer, and thirteen men. But you couldn’t say “battlesquad,” as that sounded ridiculous, and these parachutists cared entirely too much about their damned dignity.

They were lean young men with the severe faces of mummies. Most had jumped into Crete with Von Drehle four years earlier. Most had served with him in Italy for a year. Most had been with him in Russia now for two. Most had been hit and come back, most had killed dozens if not hundreds of enemy soldiers, blown up every kind of structure imaginable, destroyed tanks and other armored vehicles, most could fieldstrip their FG-42s blindfolded in seven seconds, or throw an M24 through the door of a racing railway car forty yards away, or cut a man’s throat with a yank from the blade of a gravity knife, or rescue a dictator from mountaintop imprisonment. They were very, very good; they were the best, in fact, and they were all that was left of the 21st Parachute Battalion of 2-Fallschirmjäger, one of the storied airborne divisions of the Reich.

They were also sick to death of all this shit. Really, three and a half hard years of war, who wouldn’t be? One had been wounded six times, most between four and five. Von Drehle himself had been to the hospital four times, once on Crete, once in Italy, and twice in Russia.

He was not sure if he was a captain or a major, as the promotion had been promised but the paperwork possibly lost, though it was not that important. People usually called each other by first name in the Green Devils, and everybody knew who the bosses were. He also had a great many medals, although he couldn’t tell you what they were. He’d once been somebody’s idea of the ideal and had his pix in all the rags and was the closest thing the Germans came to an Errol Flynn, with appallingly handsome features, a ginger smudge of mustache, and wavy blond hair. The nose and the cheekbones seemed to have been designed by slide rule, and you could not take a bad picture of him. He was very pretty, but he could fight.

He was used to being famous, loved, and admired. Before the war he’d been a racing driver for Mercedes and had finished third in the Monaco Grand Prix in 1938, at the age of twenty-one, in his W154 “Silver Arrow,” a ballistically shaped high-velocity screamer of an automobile. He liked the thrill of speed, a perfect outlet for his excessive hand-eye coordination, his overbusy intellect, his quick-as-death reflexes, his extraordinary vision, and his insane bravery. He liked battle for exactly the same reasons, at least the first three years of it.

“Karl, how long you figure?” asked his oberfeldwebel, or staff sergeant, Wili Bober.

Von Drehle flipped his wrist to look at the Italian frogman watch he wore, on the theory that if it operated underwater, it would probably operate in battle.

“I have 0115,” he said. “Didn’t Von Bink say the jump estimate was around 0130?”

“I can’t remember,” said Wili. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“I wasn’t paying attention, either. Is this one a bridge or a railhead?”

“Hmmm,” said Wili Bober, “maybe I’d better ask one of the fellows.”

They laughed. It was a game between them to see who could affect the sloppiest nonchalance about the mission. Sometimes senior officers overheard and misunderstood; Von Drehle once had to go to a general to get Bober off charges.

Of course they knew. At Chortkiv, a three-arch stone bridge over the River Seret had served to funnel Soviet elements up to the line for the offensive for a week now, though at a typical niggardly Russian pace. There was no Luftwaffe except beat-to-shit transport buggies like this Auntie Ju here, so it couldn’t be bombed, and it was out of artillery range. Now the 2nd Ukraine Guards Army had been ordered into the area, and it was known to have six armored divisions, about six hundred T34s and tank destroyers, all ready to go. The four hundred tanks on this side of the river could be turned back by Von Bink’s 14th Panzergrenadiers and Muntz’s 12th SS Panzer, but not a thousand. Ergo, someone had to blow up the bridge.

Bober removed his water bottle, unscrewed the cap. “Schnapps. Very good. From some girl, last leave, a thousand years ago. Somehow it got through,” he said, offering it to Von Drehle.

“Ah. The blur. Most helpful. What a superb soldier you are, Wili.” He took the jug and sent a fiery splash down the throat. Yes, the mallet hit him hard, easing his nerves, slightly defracting the low lights of the aircraft interior, softening the vibrations of Auntie Ju’s three engines.

“When we finish this one, we’ll kill the whole bottle.”

The cabin door opened and the copilot leaned out and shouted over the roar of the engines, “Karl, we’re on our final run and will be climbing to altitude in about three minutes.”

“Got it,” said Karl. He turned to Wili. “It’s time.”

Wili nodded. “I’ll tell the fellows,” he said.

Wili was the wise elder of Battlegroup Von Drehle. He’d been there from the start, done all, seen all, survived all. He was the one with six wound stripes. He was twenty-four.

He stood against the sway and vibe of the plane, oriented himself, and grabbed the rail that ran down the top center of the fuselage.

It was enough signal. The young men tossed out cigarettes; a few crossed themselves or at least looked skyward under the impression that the Almighty still had a rooting interest in the fate of the last Fallschirmjäger in South Russia; all clambered heavily to feet, bearing their load of clanking equipment. All secured themselves by grip to the ceiling rail and hooked up.

There was too much noise and vibration for Von Drehle to give any kind of speech, even if he’d had the pep, but as he slid down to the front of the line, he tapped each of the fellows on the shoulder and gave him a wink or a nudge. They seemed to like that, though how could anyone really tell with the darkened, greasy faces?

He arrived at the jump hatch far down the fuselage, where a crewmember had already placed himself to pull it open on the green light. This boy looked about thirteen. God, were they raiding kindergartens these days? At least this one had gotten a fairly cushy job in the Luftwaffe and wasn’t perched on some penal battalion PAK 8.8 waiting for the arrival of several hundred 34s, plus an entire army of drunken peasants with bayonets.

Cinching his static line to the rail, Von Drehle looked back and saw fourteen pairs of eyes, no features, fourteen helmet silhouettes, fourteen fists locked around the rail, fourteen plumes of breath. He also saw the tube of a Panzerschreck, the German version of the American bazooka, useful to open Red sardine cans but a pain in the ass to carry. It weighed a ton, and some poor bastard had to jump with it. Who was on it this time? It seemed like it was Hubner’s turn.

“Green Devils, one-eyed Wotan himself salutes you!” he shouted, putting a fist to his plunging eagle badge and saluting, a tradition, and though nobody could hear him, they shouted back, in unison, the same imprecation; he couldn’t hear them, either.

The plane suddenly seemed to lift, the pilots got it to altitude in just a few seconds, the light went green, the young man pulled mightily and got the hatch open against the suction of the wind.

Von Drehle stepped into the cold air, went into the spread-eagle as the wind hit him, felt the rush of the fall as gravity claimed him and he had a giddy second of weightlessness — it still thrilled him — and the battering of the propwash against his face. The tail boom sailed by and his static line snatched the RZ-20 canopy from its packing and another second later he was jerked heavily as the canopy took on a full load of suspending atmosphere. Below him, dark and quiet, was Russia.

One of the boys got lost. He just never joined up with the main group in the target zone, a pasture seven kilometers of rural landscape from the bridge itself. Von Drehle hated to lose men. He had lost so many! He hated it! A certain part of him wanted to abort the job right there, send out search parties, find the soldier, and head straight back to his own lines. But he couldn’t do that.

“Maybe he’ll catch up to us,” Wili Bober said.

Everyone knew this to be unlikely. Dieter Schenker, lance corporal, veteran of Italy and Russia, three wounds, two Iron Crosses, was almost certainly hanging upside down in a tree with his neck or his back broken. If conscious, he would have taken out his gravity knife and cut his own wrists, to bleed out in quiet comfort. If the Russians found him, they might take some bayonet sport with him before killing him. That’s the kind of war it was.

The second thing that went wrong was the map. It took them on detours around two villages that brought them hard against infantry campgrounds, where Ivan had put some of his six billion or so soldiers to rest for the night before moving closer to the front lines for the big show upcoming.

Battlegroup Von Drehle had to detour from two detours, and that cost time. The point was to get to the bridge well before dawn, eliminate any sentries, rig the explosives and leave a timed fuse, and be some kilometers away when the fireworks went off. This fantasy disappeared almost instantly — old racing adage: no plan survives the first lap — and they didn’t get there until the sun began to flare over the edge of the world. So it would be a daylight job.

Fortunately there was foliage along the riverbank, and Ivan hadn’t seriously considered a bridge-blowing raid this far behind the lines. He was getting overconfident with his billions of men, millions of tanks, and thousands of shiny new American trucks to spare him bootleather. Well, that was his big mistake. The parachutists, moving stealthily through the heavy underbrush along the bank, were able to get themselves to the bridge. Now they gathered in its lee, could see the sandbags and K-wire Ivan had dumped and strung nonchalantly, more as ceremony than as tactical necessity.

Karl took a quick look and saw what he expected; across the river, the town of Chortkiv, mostly shabby buildings and muddy streets, deserted in the early morning, though Red Army trucks had been parked here and there and presumably their inhabitants had taken shelter in the buildings. Nothing stirred. On this side of the river would be more but less of Chortkiv, its “outskirts,” if you will, a couple of buildings of whatever agricultural purpose, maybe some of those typical Ukraine steep-pitched, thatch-roofed huts. Again quiet, a few Red trucks parked here and there.

And up above, on the bridge itself? Couldn’t be much in the sandbag nest Ivan had built as a sentry post, more a place for the guards to sit and doze a quiet night well out of the combat zone. So it would be just a few seconds of helter-skelter to reach the sentries and, at least in theory, dispatch them silently.

At this point, communication was mostly by hand gesture. No chatter, and all the boys knew the language.

Four men, Karl signaled, sentry elimination. He and — he pointed to three really good boys, but all were really good when you got down to it — as the designated throat cutters. Then he indicated that two of those four would cross underneath the bridge and come up on the other side for whatever was there. All four would push across the bridge, which didn’t appear to have a sentry post at the other end, and set up with their FG-42s or STG-44s. If assaulted from that direction, they would serve as the first line of defense.

He designated four more as demolition party, with the explosives genius Deneker calling the shots. Nothing fancy here, nobody was going over the side by rope and pulley to wire Cyclonite under the arches. Instead, the four would gouge into the bridge surface with their entrenching tools and excavate as deep a cavity as possible. They would pound the Cyclonite — which in demolition form was a kind of gloppy dough carried in two five-pound canvas sacks — into the cavity and leave a No. 8 blasting cap shoved into it, wired with det cord. The package would be wrapped in det cord, the cord then run back across the bridge to safety, where it was crimped into another No. 8. At go time, Deneker would light the safety fuse into the No. 8, which would go off like a firecracker, ignite the det cord — PETN explosive packed around a wire, going kaboom at twenty-one thousand feet per second — the det cord would burn to the main charge in a microsecond and light off that No. 8, which would make the big wad of Cyclonite vaporize the bridge. It had worked all over Russia and Italy, there was no reason why it wouldn’t work today. The ten pounds should do the job nicely.

But the next part was a little dicey. The fourteen parachutists — Schenker still missing — couldn’t fall straight back along the road on foot, as they’d be intercepted by infantry closing from the flanks. Even as stupid as the Russians were, they’d figure the way out would be to exfiltrate along the riverbank, but they could also run an intercept on that plan and bring fire from the opposite side of the river. The only feasible escape method was to commandeer one of the trucks, disable the others, drive like hell in the aftermath of the blast, ditch it somewhere unseen, and slip back by night across German lines. Some plan. Von Drehle knew it stank, but there wasn’t much he could do except refuse to do it, which would get him shot. Even Von Bink would have to shoot him.

Hmmm, too much sun already, though it was still unseen at the rim of the wheat fields in the distance, announcing its presence only by its penumbra.

He nodded. He and his three co-killers slipped off their rifles and put their helmets on the ground. Each removed a gravity knife from a pocket, and with the push of a lever and a flick of the wrist, each popped four inches of the best Sollingen steel—Rostfrei, it said on the blade — into the cool air of morning.

Each, as a matter of fact, hated knifework. It was awful. It was always intimate and messy and left regret and depression and self-loathing. It wasn’t worth going through for any nutcase paperhanger from Austria, that was for sure, but only out of duty to some other thing, variously defined as the Fatherland or Greater Germany but really just the other guys in the unit, whom you didn’t want to let down.

Karl gave a last-second nod to each man, then turned to the two headed under the bridge. He held up two hands, six fingers, made an O with one, meaning sixty seconds, and then nodded a final time, and off they scooted.

One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, and on and on he went, just waiting in the cool morning air, in the soft breeze, in the gray light, licking his lips a little. It was always like this before the flag dropped, a dry swallow, a feeling of dread and excitement, too and then—

— fifty-nine-one-thousand, sixty-one-thousand, and he was pulling himself up the slope, his limbs filling with energy and purpose, around the bridge wall, and into the sandbag construction, where his noise and energy alerted a man at least enough to turn to face the death approaching him. An older fellow with a pipe and an innocent farmer’s look, even if he had a rifle; he wore a bandolier and a khaki side cap with black infantry piping and a red star and the pullover khaki shirt. His mouth came open as this wild apparition, blond of hair but black of face, with a knife gleaming in the light, closed down on him, his pipe bobbled, and Karl stabbed him in the throat.

It was horrible. Karl heard the gurgle as the blood filled the larynx, drowning any outcry, and then was on him totally, forcing him into the sandbags, stabbing him again and again in the throat and neck while at the same time having jammed his other hand into the mouth, just in case. In and out, in and out, in a killing frenzy, shutting him down, die! die! die! damn you!, feeling the blade sink in, occasionally glance off fibrous internal structures, occasionally slice something gelid and viscous, until the struggle beneath became tremors and the tremors became shivers and the shivers became nothing. Too close, close enough to see the poor bastard’s face, feeling the hot blood pour out, sometimes a sundered artery forcing a little bit of squirt. You couldn’t do it without Russian blood getting everywhere. And the poor bastard always squealed, wept, pissed, and shat as he died. Karl pulled back, let the man fall, and turned exactly as his partner in the pit finished sentry number one, having made exactly the same kind of mess, having besmeared himself with blood across arms and wrist and hands. There was a Degtyaryov light machine gun resting on the sandbag wall and a few Russian pineapple grenades, mostly, Karl guessed, for show. The gun might come in useful.

By this time the other fellows were up next to him, and someone handed him his FG-42 and helmet. No words were spoken, and he made some sort of follow-me gesture, nothing dramatic, and began to sprint across the bridge, feeling his three companions behind him.

It was utterly still. From the top of the bridge’s arch he could see fog still clinging to the river and some reeds in the river ruffling, and down the way some crude Ivan river craft were moored — they looked prehistoric, hewn from logs by stone tools — drifting on their tethers. He felt his Fallschirmjäger helmet slop around on its straps, his grenades and rucksack jostle, his shoulder harness of magazine pouches vibrate, his Belgian Browning 9mm pistol jiggle in the holster, his heavy boots dig into the softness of the roadway. Then he reached the bridge end, slid behind a nest of sandbags buttressing the stone wall, found a shooting position, and hoisted the FG to his shoulder.

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.

It was a T-34, Soviet main battle tank.

“What the fuck is that guy doing here?” Karl said.