Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 42

So what are you doing with a British container of guns and bombs?” she asked as they shambled along.

The Teacher told her. He finished with: “We received three C-containers full of weapons and sabotage explosives, dropped nearby from a low-flying bomber during the night. Bak did not want any one man to know where all three were hidden. I took one team, he another, and one of his lieutenants the other.”

They’d come to an illuminated section of the path where an unblocked sun shone more brightly, as on either side of the path, no giant pines sealed off the sky, no juniper or snowball clotted the pathways between the trees. On the upward slope, some force had torn down a swath of forest, revealing a strip of barren ground — small trees had begun to reassert themselves but were not tall enough to be counted as trees — littered with boulders and scrub. This gash climbed the severe slope of the mountain until the raw stone broke from the swaddling of green earth a thousand yards or so up, then rose, raw and barren, even higher, to snowcaps.

“It’s called a scree field,” said the Teacher. “I think this is the place. We came in from above, so it was not so bad. Now we climb.”

A thousand rough yards later they achieved a little shelf where they could sit and rest a bit. The Teacher said, “All right, here we are.” It took him a few minutes to locate, semi-hidden behind a large juniper brush, the entrance to the cave, not nearly as grand as the one that had shielded them the past few weeks.

They slid in through the small opening, blinked as the light disappeared, coughed as the dust from their slither rose to their noses, then lay still, the three of them, waiting for the dust to settle and their eyes to adjust. It was larger inside than the entryway promised, and in a bit of time, the shaft of light from the entrance permitted their eyes to find details.

“Here,” said the Teacher. He pulled and yanked something into the sunlight: a heavy metallic case, about five feet long, two wide, and three deep. A latched lid encapsulated it. He bent, unlatched the three fixtures, and then rotated the lid back on hinges placed along the length. Opened, the case revealed manna from heaven, accompanied by the odor of gun oil: five pipelike objects, dully gray, wedged into the notches of a wooden frame.

She recognized a Sten gun, the cheap, crude, but effective British submachine gun. Steel pipe, a few screws, all the welds messy, stamped-out parts; the whole thing seemed improvised in a cellar workshop.

He pulled another piece of magic from the lid: a crenellated egg, with a lever tracing its oval curve from a central mechanism at the long end, in which a linchpin sporting a steel ring had been inserted to hold the thing together. It was a Mills bomb, the British pineapple grenade.

“The rifle,” said Petrova. “You said a rifle.”

He reached back in and struggled for a second to pry open another long box within the container, then pulled out, with some effort, a four-foot object wrapped in oilcloth, which he yanked off.

She took it, feeling its density, complexity, solidity, intensity. It was shorter than her Mosin-Nagant, yet weightier. She took it into the light, recognizing the common parts of the rifle, the trigger, the magazine just forward of the trigger, the bolt, the encasement of the long barrel in wood. It featured a kind of face rest, a sculpted form of wood screwed into the top of the stock, where her chin and face could rest when she was locked behind the scope. But it was the scope — or rather, the overengineered mechanism that clamped the scope to the rifle — that seemed so bizarre, even eccentrically English. It looked like something out of the Victorian Age, a railroad trestle over a deep gorge, with struts and turning knobs and screws and rivets enmeshed in a pattern too complex to be believed, to secure the black steel optical tube to the rifle by stout rings clamped tight. The scope was a whimsical gizmo with adjustment turrets indexed to ranges, screws everywhere to keep it from popping apart.

“It looks like it was designed by Lewis Carroll,” said the Teacher.

She slithered out the cave’s entrance with the rifle and assumed a prone firing position. The two men inside could hear the action working, the bolt closing, and the click of the trigger being pulled as she acquainted herself with it.

She came back in. “Now we have to zero it.”

“Zero?” asked the Teacher.

“You don’t just mount a telescope on a rifle and shoot a man at a thousand yards. No, I have to test it very carefully at that range and adjust the sight so the sight points exactly to the bullet strike. So when I fire at the real target, I am confident the bullet will go where I aim.”

“Excuse me, are you mad? You cannot do a shooting program up here. Yes, the Germans are gone, but for how long, and how many men have they left behind? With every shot you fire, they become more aware of where you are. Perhaps they have men up here, waiting for just that situation. Perhaps they’ve made arrangements with the Luftwaffe to send Stukas when they think they’ve isolated the site and dive-bomb it. Perhaps it just riles them up and they execute another two hundred or so hostages on general principle. You get one shot, and that is at the worm Groedl.”

“I only tell you the reality. You need a thousand yards, not one less,” said Petrova. “Do you see any thousand yards around here?”

They were silent.

The Peasant asked the Teacher to explain, which he did, and the Peasant listened and then responded.

“He says you could shoot from inside the cave here. That would dampen the noise. You could shoot downhill across the scree field at a boulder a thousand yards away.”

“As usual,” said Mili, “the Peasant is smarter than the intellectual.”