The Bullet Garden

CHAPTER 64 Young Guy

They met at 1700 at the 9th Infantry HQ, about a mile behind the lines. There were about thirty of them, highest rank a second lieutenant, the rest sergeants and corporals, from 4th and 9th Infantry Divisions, that is, VII Corps. They were either BAR men or assistants or patrol leaders designated for the evening’s work.

They sat, ragged and G.I.-tired, in their folds and swoops of ill-fitting olive drab twill, all of it the same, all of it different. Most wore the M41 field jacket, some wore paratrooper boots, some wore boondockers, all wore the canvas leggings laced tight. Straps ran across, around, and off them at various angles and looped over various appendages running in various directions over their torsos. Some had grenades, some had bayonets, some had .45s, one had a Luger in a shoulder holster. Some had day-old beards, some week-old beards. Pants were bloused or not, depending on nothing. Since various contractors had various ideas about the meanings of olive drab and Shade No. 2, the variety of hues of the largely improvised khaki universe tended to devolve into a cascade. It looked like an explosion in a khaki factory. Add wear, distress, patching, multiple washings in lye soap, and it became clinically insane. Whoever heard of an army where nothing matched? Wasn’t “matching” in some sense the point of an army?

But the guys so costumed had acquired, to the last of them, the languid beauty of men who lived close to and worked with danger, even if it never occurred to them. They self-segregated by unit but were not hostile to each other. They’d all been through too much shit for hostility and suspected the forecast for tonight was more shit, heavy at times.

At 1705, six officers entered, more or less similarly dressed, though cleaner. Some creases were even observed, and fresh shaves. No ties, of course, no decorations, nothing but the foreman’s watchful look.

“TEN-hut!” came a call, and the infantries cranked to, but before getting fully upright, a younger fellow said, “At ease. Sit down, men, relax. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. Remember to peel your butts.”

He went to the head of the room, while behind him the other five found wooden chairs.

“My name is Collins,” he said. “You work for me. I work for General Bradley. He works for General Eisenhower, who works for President Roosevelt, who works for the American people. I wouldn’t be here and you wouldn’t be here if those bosses didn’t think it important. I for one think it is so goddamned important, I drove myself in a jeep through a rainstorm to get here. Are we square?”

A murmur of assent swept the audience as it dawned on them they were looking at one of the stars of The War, their corps commander (youngest in history), Major General “Lightning Joe” Collins. The general’s presence itself carried the message of: Do not fuck this up. They therefore resolved to not fuck this up.

“I’ll be short. You’re about to be briefed on an operation by Major Swagger of Intelligence. He was on Guadalcanal same time I was. They’re still talking about his work there, all over the Pacific. You listen to what he says. I think it’s a terrific plan. It’ll get us back in the war and pave the way for getting the hell out of the bullet garden. Major Swagger?”

Swagger stood.

“Thank you, sir,” he said.

He turned to face the men.

“Tonight, we’re going to kill some snipers.”

CHAPTER 65 News of the World

The bulletin arrived, as usual, at 1600, teletyped from First Army. She opened it, read it quickly, understood therefore where Leets had vanished to, and set to work.

“Sir,” she said over the intercom, “the 1600 is here. It seems to contain information about our missing boys.”

Colonel Bruce came out and quickly looked at it.

“I fear we’ve lost them,” he said. “They’re now a part of First Army. They’re not even reporting to me anymore.”

“Maybe this happened so fast they didn’t have time. You know what they say, hurry up—”

“And wait. Except this time it’s wait, wait, wait and then suddenly ‘Hurry up.’ I also suspect that Major Swagger’s usual paranoia is at play here. The fellow simply does not want anyone looking over his shoulder.”

“As I said, Lieutenant Leets says he’s very capable.”

“I hear the same. I feel like the father of the star football player who has no idea what football is! Well, get it mimeoed and distributed and we’ll see how it turns out.”

“Yes, sir.”

She inserted a mimeo paper into her Underwood, scrolled to find the right starting spot, and began to type.

Taptaptap.

The same as usual: broken down and summarized by Corps sector of responsibility, the news of the day on the European Theater of Operations, same as it had been since a little after D-Day.

Stasis at the front but for incremental progress as the troops were regrouping after the long-awaited capture of Saint-Lô, with German counterattacks expected. Enemy activity, beginning with the usual question: Where was the elusive SS Das Reich? Otherwise, unconfirmed sightings of panzer divisions moving here or there, coming and going, combining and recombining like amoeba on a microscope slide. First Army activity: same for American units as designation of corps and then division meant less and less while maneuvers made regrouping mandatory. Units, it seemed, were liquid, and they squirted and puddled this way and that, sometimes by design, sometimes by accident. You could wake up and find the guys the next bivouac over were completely different today. Update on deployment of Sherman tanks with improvised “bocage busters” engineered to their snouts to crush through the medieval barricades with minimal loss of life. Bad news on the artillery shell shortage: no quick end in sight. Reports on Army Air Forces attacks on enemy bridgeheads and supply depots, which, the USAAF claimed, were going fantastically, although they always said they were doing a fantastic job. Combat reports: routine, except for a larger-than-usual counterattack near Saint-Lô, resulting in heavier-than-usual casualties. An 88 barrage near another French town, casualty figures unusually high. Shoptalk: command changes and then finally updates from the four corps, three of which declared: NO ACTIVITY PLANNED. But not so for one of them.

Night patrol activities to resume in frontal sectors, in and around St. Gilles. 4th and 9th INFDIV units will patrol in strength night of 22/23 to ascertain enemy artillery strength and panzer relocations.

Taptaptaptap.

CHAPTER 66 The Sergeant

Archer sat in the fourth row. He was now a buck sergeant and would be leading his people on the deal tonight, because, after all, he knew the territory. He’d learned it the hard way.

He sat, listening, as Major Swagger, still a war god to him even if Gary wasn’t around to share such amusing trifles, briefed the guys on what would be going on, called Operation Toto. It seemed easy enough and he liked the way it ended.

“Okay,” said Swagger, “that’s it. Questions?”

Of course a silence, and then somebody said, “Sir, just curious. Seen a lot of operation names, usually places, but nothing like Toto. Is there some story there?”

“Archer,” said Swagger, who seemingly hadn’t noticed him, “tell them.”

“A few weeks back, Private Gary Goldberg went with us on a patrol to develop intelligence for tonight. On the way back, he blew up a tank. But he always had a wisecrack, and when he raised his head to say a gag line, one of these guys we’re after nailed him coming over the line. Gary was a good man. Very good man. He was quoting Judy from Oz: ‘Toto, there’s no place like—’ and that’s when he got nailed. The idea is to salute him. He earned it.”

“Any others?”

A hand went up.

“Go,” said Swagger.

“Prisoners, sir?”

“I’ll take that, Major,” said General Collins. “I don’t want any reports, official or otherwise, of prisoner executions. That’s not our policy, never has been, never will be. At the same time, the point here isn’t to take prisoners, it’s to kill snipers. If you have the shot on the German, you must take it. No one should die, nor should any extra effort be made to acquire prisoners. If they are taken, it’s by-product, not product. That’s on patrol leadership. You NCOs, keep control of your men.”

Another hand.

“Sir, I’ve been on the BAR since North Africa, first as an assistant gunner and now I’m the gunner. Have done a lot of shooting with it. I love it. I may marry it.”

There was some laughter.

“If you maintain it, you won’t get a Dear John from it,” Swagger said, to more laughter.

“Yes, sir. But shooting it at night always involves more or less guessing where the rounds go. Tracers help, but still we have to walk the fire into the target. That takes time. If these guys are as salted up as you say, they won’t panic but they could easily roll behind or drop into cover they’re sure to have found. If we miss ’em, we scare ’em, but since they’re professional, they’ll just be back tomorrow night.”

“Good question,” said Swagger. “BAR men, raise your hands.”

Twelve hands came up.

“Lieutenant Leets.”

Leets rose and with a briefcase went to the audience and gave each gunner two objects.

“You’ve just been handed a brand-new G.I. wristwatch and a one-ounce bottle of LePage’s glue. The watch isn’t a souvenir. The Army doesn’t give souvenirs. You’ll have to steal those on your own. When you get back to your outfit, you take a bayonet and you very carefully break the crystal and shake out all the fragments. Then you take the LePage’s and you squirt a dab of it onto your BAR front sight. Then very carefully — you may need tweezers for this — you peel off the minute hand of the watch and you plant it in the LePage’s, exactly tracing the front sight. The hands of the watch are painted in radium by the young ladies of the Waterbury Clock Company of Connecticut. The hands glow in the dark.

“What that means is that you’ll always have your front sight marked. You put the marked sight on your target and you dump your mag of tracers. Shouldn’t take but a second or two, depending on the breaks. Your assistant gunner hands you another mag and you dump another twenty. You let the .30 tracer do its work.”

“Anything else?”

No. Questions answered.

“Okay,” said Swagger. “Just remember the key principle here: They think they’re hunting us. We’re hunting them.”

CHAPTER 67 The Stalk

The Americans were loud tonight. Perhaps it was that they were so out of practice, as Sturmgruppe Tausend had been so effective it had all but closed down night activities.

Matthias could hear them coming, he could hear them going. Six, in pot helmets — sometimes they went in knit caps, like socks — with the usual sound of a parade. Jingle jingle jangle, clank clunk crank, bing bang bong — it seemed like every piece of equipment they had crashed into every other piece, all the time, every step. Plus, they sighed, grunted, groaned, cursed, even chided each other. It was a clown show.

That was fine with the young Swede. Truth was, like many of his age, he’d gotten bored with this whole thing some weeks ago. It was fun through June, sure, and when you knocked one down, it felt like you’d done something more or less important. But still: it was an army, even if it was a Swedish distillation of a German actuality, and while he appreciated that Brix kept the actual German soldiers away and out of everyone’s hair, it was still an army. He had to write up a report for each kill. He had to locate it on a map. He had to clean his rifle, again and again. He had to keep his laundry in rotation. He had to watch his drinking, and while moderate in his appetites, the fact that a real blowout with aquavit was forbidden had made it so attractive.

And Brix. You think this was the pinnacle of his life, but the man’s responsibilities seemed to be wearing him down. So charming, so vivacious, so charismatic — but here, week six of summer camp in the middle of a world war — he’d been ground down out of anxiety, overwork, pressure to maneuver with or against the Germans, fears of some kind of big American counterattack, which all knew had to be coming but not when or where. All of that had crushed the man whom everybody loved.

“I’d say Brix needs a vacation,” he’d said to Brendt that afternoon before they set out for the sector.

“I’d say I need a vacation,” said Brendt. “Why don’t we just disappear now and head back along the path that we found out of here.”

“Brix would tell your pappa. Your pappa would be so disappointed. This was to teach you discipline without actually having to be in a real army. It was a fabulous opportunity.”

“But a few more Americans? What difference could it make?”

“You’d never know. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of—”

“I’ve heard that so many times, I may get ill.”

“Well, that’s the official line and it’s not without its wisdom.”

“Tomorrow, thank God, we leave. Not soon enough.”

“I’m with you there, brother.”

Now he let the Americans build a good lead, perhaps a quarter of a mile. He moved silently in their wake, on the balls of his feet. At his age, strong and lithe, with his superb vision and coordination, it was quite easy. He didn’t understand why the Americans were so bad at it. What of red Indians, all those silent creepers from the two-reelers that made it to Stockholm on a regular basis. Nothing at all like that. Instead, big, stupid men, always seemed to be complaining. He spoke English and he’d hear snatches of conversation.

“Bring it up, god dammit.”

“No, compass says we turn left here, by the stream.”

“I don’t care what the map says.”

“I told you to change your socks, god dammit. Now you get a blister.”

“Okay, light ’em up, but stay low.”

“Jefferson, you take the point. When we get to the sunken road, we’ll take a break and a map check.”

Such imbeciles. He’d been to Africa twice and had killed nine buff and six elephants. That hunting was so much harder than this. It was as if these elephants had gotten drunk, so they could be counted on to do stupid things, get lost, meander in circles. Sometimes they actually never went anywhere. They just got a mile outside their lines and hunkered down for the night, figuring it wasn’t worth the effort to get any closer to the German lines.

And when you culled one of them, they panicked like children. Not so in Africa. Even the herds stayed together after a cull. In fact, generally they paid it no attention and went about their business while the boys took the ivory and what meat they could for the campfire, leaving the rest for the hyenas that moved in the shadows, waiting for the safety of dark so they could close on the carcass for the evening meal.

Americans scattered, running like ninnies or little children through the night, bumping and tripping and whining. Twice, soldiers had run so close to him he could smell their perspiration as they lumbered by, more or less in the direction of their own lines.

But he knew that, for them, the night was a terror, an ordeal. For him, it was a bounty of possibility, never truly dark but just a melody of darker tones. You could always see enough; the stars or a moon made that certain. It was almost too easy. What could go wrong?

He told them to bumble, but these guys bumbled even more than they had to. They sounded like a silent film comedy with a soundtrack.

“Too much noise, Lieutenant?” asked Sergeant McKinney.

“I guess there’s no such thing as too much noise. Not tonight,” said Leets.

“I’m going to have to rest them soon.”

“Of course. But in the rest we revoke to discipline. No smoking, no noise, no moving around. Disperse ’em. We don’t want this guy shooting until we’re set up.”

“Got it, sir.”

McKinney gave them hand signals, close enough to see, and the clown parade suddenly acquired some professional style, halted, and melted to earth. No cigarettes were lit, nobody complained about the CO or how stupid this shit was. They got it.

Leets scooted back along the column of hunched and hard-breathing G.I.s, all tensed up, eyes outward and alert. He got to the end, where the BAR man and his assistant gunner crouched.

“You guys all set?” he asked.

“No problem, sir,” said the corporal on the BAR.

“How’s that radium working out on the front sight? Still in place?”

“Looking good, sir,” said the man. He lifted the big rifle, and Leets could see at the end of the barrel just a whisker of illumination. It was enough to get a good sight picture.

“You square, Private?” he asked the assistant.

“Yes, sir. Got the tracer mags on the left and the straight ball on the right. Won’t mix ’em up.”

“Okay, when we set up, you know you go to bipod. We want the gun secure and to hold the shots into a tight area.”

“I put the bipod back on this afternoon,” said the corporal. “Good thing I could find it.”

“I know they’re a pain in the ass and mostly useless, but tonight it’s mandatory.”

“We’re locked in, sir.”

Leets checked his watch. It was about 0615, a quiet night in the middle of a battle. All was still, nothing was bright. Stars above, indifferent, a cool wind pressing its nose through the branches.

He clapped the gunner on the shoulder.

“We’ll move soon. Another hour of trampling. Then time to go to work.”

He was surprised how hearty this bunch was. They usually went to break about every twenty minutes, exhausted and spent. You could always hear them breathe, the heavy in-out of the lungs, the occasional squeak as some air was expelled through a dry, twisted pipe, the tinkle of urination — and the jokes about urination. They thought it was so funny. Don’t spill! Watch your aim! Write your initials! He’d heard a hundred variations on the piss joke. Americans! Babies!

But soon dawn would crack and he’d have his magic minutes of seeing clearly when they could still see nothing. That was optimum shooting time and it worked so much better if the boys set themselves down then. He didn’t want to be moving himself, shooting a moving target. If it had to be done, it had to be done, but it was so much better if everyone cooperated. Better even for the cull, for that meant the Bell shot, straight through the head, and for him it wasn’t even like death, it was just a sudden cessation of all sensation. No pain, no regret, no contemplation of how a life had been spent, no human baggage; just sheer animal death, total and in its way merciful.

He checked his watch. Its radium hands, ever loyal, ever accurate, declared the time to be 0643 and still the Americans plunged ahead, louder than a parade of fire engines. They had to give up soon. It wasn’t in them to make the kind of crazed physical effort that took them to the edge of collapse. He wondered if—

Oh! Sudden silence ahead. They had halted. He heard clanking and bonging as their pieces of metal banged against each other when they went down.

He saw they’d cut through some trees — not a forest, really; more a gathering, with plenty of room between the spindly trunks. He could make out shapes squatting, some comically collapsing backwards, having chosen a slight depression that sloped down to a stream. A match signified a cigarette being lit, then two or three more snapped briefly to light. He was too far to see the glow of the burning tobacco, but it didn’t take long for the odor of it to reach him. Americans and their cigarettes.

He was in open ground, about 140 meters behind them. He went flat, squirmed this way and that in the grass, found a comfortable prone off of which to build his position. Looked at his Luftwaffe Fliegler watch: 0707.15. Two minutes until the sun cracked the horizon, turning the night to gray-blue-indigo as it took its sweet time rolling on toward the brighter colors in the spectrum.

The rifle came up, he looped himself into the sling, cranked it tight, slid behind the butt. He had in seconds constructed a superb platform, steady as a boulder. He closed his eyes, tried to will his heartbeat to settle.

He looked again at his watch. Less than a minute. He checked conditions: no wind, no humidity, temperature about 60, all quiet on the Western Front. He sunk stock against shoulder, manipulated his arms so that the rifle rested on bone, not muscle, with a thumb clicked off the Mauser safety, a milled flange at the end of the bolt. He found his cheek weld, took a calming breath, opened his right eye. At four-power the scope magnified the world fourfold, and the men went from blurs to shapes, recognizably human. They were at leisure and would now begin their journey homeward, having happily run into no Tiger tanks or Stuka airfields.

The reticle through which he viewed the domesticity of the American patrol was steady. It was basically three inward pointing bars at 3, 6, and 9 o’clock, almost but not quite intersecting dead center, allowing a gap that defined the hit. Superb optics, German, Ajack, the best, absorbed every last photon of light available and held it in perfect clarity.

He watched as a man rose, turned left and right as if to address his followers, then turned to lead them out. The light broke. Nothing dramatic, as if by cinema lamp magic, just a sudden sense of something halfway between blue and indigo descending smoothly on violet, massaging its hold on detail, defining the image to crispness and precision, and at last there was perfection, the man turned away, the others not yet back in the war, some not even done smoking, yes, perfection. As always, his finger made the decision, not his brain, and the rifle reported and jacked back into his shoulder, though neither phenomenon was particularly overwhelming, and in the return of the rifle to position he saw the head in tatters, and only confetti swirled about.

This is not as it should be, he thought.

In the thin woods, Leets watched as the squad set to work. Two two-by-fours, one four feet long and one two feet long, were screwed together in pre-drilled holes. A G.I. M41 field coat was tossed around the shorter span, scarecrow-like and buttoned tight, while a G.I. sock cap, crammed with newspapers, was taped to the shorter upper strut. Someone placed his helmet atop and the thing was ready to do its duty, if it only had a brain. Fortunately, the men who’d lift it had brains.

Leets low-crawled back to the gunner. He was prone behind the BAR, had the rifle stock hard in his shoulder. The gun was supported by two metal legs at the muzzle that held it solidly in place parallel to the earth. Over the smear of green at its snout, the dark world of trees and fields loomed, where, somewhere, a man hid, waiting to kill.

Leets whispered, “Okay here?”

Nods arrived signifying the affirmative.

“Eyes open. Look hard. Corporal, this works best if you see the flash yourself. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Dunn, sir. Pennsylvania.”

“Okay, Corporal Dunn, let’s make this work.”

The corporal was into the part. His eyes peered hard at the blankness before, knowing that at a certain moment, for just a splinter of a second, the unburned powder of the sniper’s cartridge would blossom in flame beyond the muzzle, yielding a plumage of billowing, shapeless radiance. Then it would be gone.

Leets checked his watch.

He let the second hand rotate through 0709.15.

16.

17.

18.

God let there be light — a little, at any rate. If you looked in a certain direction, you’d see the edge of blaze as a piercing announcement of day arriving, but nobody looked in that direction.

19.

20.

“Raise it,” said Leets, and ten yards behind him two G.I.s hoisted the crucified dummy upward, held him steady at the zero-degree angle, though not absolutely still. His movement, in the blur of the scope, would signify life.

The bullet arrived before the sound, but only by a fraction of a second. It hit under the lip up the helmet and smashed into what should have been pure brain but was instead a cluster of wadded paper held in by knit wool. Still, it exploded, the helmet flying one way, the paper clumps blown outward in chunks like giant tufts, a vibration of velocity buzzing through the construction.

All three of the spotters saw the flash spurt in the night, and by the time Leets and the assistant would have issued instructions, Corporal Dunn had already pivoted the automatic rifle onto it, by virtue of the radium minute hand broadcasting guidance.

He dumped the mag.

The BAR — Browning automatic rifle — was the infantry’s squad automatic weapon, one of the last weapons designed by John M. Browning himself. It was solid, heavy, reliable, powerful, and accurate, like all the other machine guns the old Mormon imagined. Nobody wanted to carry it, but when the lead started flying, everyone wanted it in the fight. Nobody argued with it, as the Germans twice and the Japanese once discovered, and neither of them had a gun in the inventory that brought so much death off so much portability.

The tracers flew like neon arrows to the target exactly, and nowhere else so skilled was Dunn’s gun hand. They rushed outward, streaks of sheer incandescence.

Leets could see them arc explicitly into the target area and dissolve it into a smear of generic, detail-free destruction, which was whipped dust, frags of vegetable matter, grass mowed hard, bits of rock and mud, a symphony of destruction by velocity and energy in a small area.

The gun ran dry.

The gunner had the dead mag out and the fresh one in in about two-tenths of a second.

“Area fire now,” said Leets. “Soak it.”

To Matthias, it seemed the wall of hell had sprung a leak, so dense was the incoming rush of flame. For each of his sins a point of light roared Matthias-ward, a cluster of livid destruction, sparks of death. Then, on the power of visual association and at a speed that had no place in time, he thought of Christmas candles, of Sweden in December, crisp and cold, of Pappa and Muti and his laughing siblings in the big house in the woods outside Stockholm. He thought he’d live there forever.

He was wrong.

CHAPTER 68 Nutmeg

The first call over the SCR-300 came into Operation HQ — the 60th Regiment, 2nd Battalion G-2 tent at 9th Division Headquarters at 0755.

“Nutmeg Leader, this is Nutmeg Two George One, do you read?”

The voice arrived over the blocky receiver in a soup of fogging static and blur, with odd squeaks from the atmosphere or screeches from random radio demons, yet they galvanized the crew of operators, the clerks standing by, and Colonel McBain, running the op.

A tech sergeant responded, “Nutmeg Two George One, we have you. Proceed, over.”

“Nutmeg Leader, we have a good kill. Repeat, we have a good kill.”

Cheers broke out; everyone there knew what was going on and that the reports of successes or failures would now be coming in.

“Ask him to summarize,” said McBain.

“Nutmeg One, can you give specifics, over?”

“Nutmeg Leader, worked like a charm. He took his shot at the dummy, our BAR team nailed him hard. I’m standing over him now. About thirty-five, blond guy, SS camo, all messed up by the fire.”

“Rifle recovered?” said McBain, and the message was repeated.

“Nutmeg Leader, affirmative. Nice scoped piece, but not German. Will bring in.”

McBain took the microphone.

“Good work, Nutmeg One, now get your people back here.”

“Sir, that’s one,” said the radio operator. “Do you want me to relay to Notorious, Jayhawk, or Master?” meaning division, corps, or army.

“Let’s wait on that and see if—”

But another radio crackled to life, this one from another 9th component, “This is Nudge Fox Two, over.”

“Go ahead Fox Two, over.”

“Nutmeg Leader, we got one. Still alive, shot up pretty bad. Rifle all busted to hell. Don’t know how much longer he’ll last. Bring him in or let him bleed out? Over.”

“Tell ’em to make every attempt to get the guy in,” said the colonel, even as still another call came through.

It went so fast. All the 9th Division Ns reporting success to Nutmeg, all with kills or captures. On its own set of SCR-300s, the 4th Infantry Division patrols called in similar successes.

“Sir, relay?”

“Yes, yes, do it,” said the colonel, so the word went up as well as out, to Notorious, then to Jayhawk, Master and from Master to Liberty, which was SHAEF itself: “Operation Toto reports eight SS snipers killed, two wounded and in captivity, though there’s no optimism on one of the wounded.”

“Casualties?”

“None, sir.”

“Tell the boys: well done,” someone very important said.

“We will, sir.”

But one patrol hadn’t reported. It was Red King Three.

Major Swagger.

CHAPTER 69 Red King Three

What wasn’t right?

Something? Many things? One thing? What, what? What?

He felt like the crazy man on the Norwegian Munch’s bridge, hands to ears and head, a scream of dread exploding from his lips in a blue world under an orange sky, the point being the pointlessness of it all. Why should it matter? It’s only me. Who am I?

The answer, of course, was: I am I.

He could see the officer’s head in the tiny space defined by the three near-intercepting posts as gray light washed across the scene, increment by increment, yielding details, such as the rakish tilt of the helmet, the stiffness of carriage, the slight apprehension expressed in the backward and forward twists of torso.

Based on the size of the man, the range was 175 meters.

No wind, little (though increasing) light, his finger on this trigger, the reticle crucifying the officer as steady as a brick in mortar.

His finger caressed the trigger, yearned to trip it and send another — his last — to hell. Not this chap himself, nothing personal, but all, all of them, the rich ones, the suave ones, the condescending ones, the ones who loved him but not quite enough, the ones who were not man enough to keep their wives out of his bed. Fuck them all, he thought, and fired.

Except he didn’t. His finger would not let him.

Look again, it commanded.

And so he looked again and saw how the officer was not merely stiff through the neck but also the torso, and when he rotated — the light just revealed this last, saving detail — the jacket did not twist and stretch, it rotated exactly with him.

Nobody moves like that.

It’s a trick, he realized.

Somebody — whoever — was onto him.

Swagger, next to the gun crew, used every last morsel of concentration as he peered into the dark. Nothing. Just varying shades and tones of night, perhaps a blackness here suggesting a bush, a mellower wave suggesting a tuft of grass, some verticals suggesting the trunks of the thin trees, and, farther back, the line of a hedgerow, effectively limiting the known universe.

He lifted his watch up into his line of vision.

Sunset seven seconds past, now eight, another with each snap of the second hand as it rotated around the dial, onto ten, then fifteen.

“He’s not biting,” he said. “This son of a bitch is smart. He saw something.” He thought a second. Then he said, “Gunner, on my tracer, short bursts.”

He stood and his eyes prowled through the darkness, looking for probable hides. A density of tone had to be a knot of brush and he peered through the peep on the Thompson and put five into it, the tracers flicking out to that place, perhaps devastating it. Then came the follow-up from the automatic rifle, its reports deafening in the otherwise silent night, its tracers moving faster and straighter, hitting, kicking up clouds of earth, one or two striking rock and vectoring off. But by that time Swagger had moved on to find another possible hide and marked it, to then be purified by the Browning gun.

They worked through both mags of BAR tracer that way, then hunched. Archer came up to them from behind.

“He never fired at the dummy,” he said, perturbed.

“He saw through the game,” said Leets. “He’s probably halfway to Stockholm by now. But maybe we got him on the area fire. He couldn’t have moved far. The son of a bitch.”

“Shall we go after him?”

“Wait a bit,” said Swagger. “If he’s alive, he’s got the advantage, both in longer reach and vision capabilities. We have firepower and manpower. But I don’t want to lose any of your people stupidly, for nothing. We’ll let it get brighter, then move out in two elements and see if we can pick up the trail — if there is one.”

The world exploded. Had he not already decided it was a trap, he would not have rolled right as a burst of automatic fire, leaking blaze, struck into the earth he had so recently occupied, doing to it as it would have done to him. The stings of pellets of dirt, rock, organic matter made supersonic, sprayed him. Abruptly, pain announced itself from two vague places on his body.

The firing went on for quite some time. It lit the world, and where it pounced, it ruptured. Enough tracer bounced off rock to turn the spectacle incoherent, with zips of flame spinning or rushing this way or that amid the rising torrents of dust and the falling torrents of green fragment.

Then, just as abruptly, it stopped.

They know I’m here. They just don’t know where. They fired where I could have been and only by the grace of a second’s realization was I not where I should have been to meet my death. Now: Can I escape?

This, however, was not only a question of will, strength, and luck. It was a question of wounds. Broken bones meant he’d stay where he was and go into some kind of last-stand effort. Maybe take a few with him. But if he could move, it became a different world.

He willed his senses to settle down so that he could isolate the pain. Yes, thigh, deep and painful. But when he put hand to it, no blood, no puncture in the material of the SS camouflage. This meant a ricochet, probably, part of a broken bullet whizzing insanely through space, still packing massive energy but not quite in the killing range. No broken bone.

The other, however, did in fact bleed. It was a groove gouged down his arm, from elbow to shoulder on the pure horizontal, at which point the bullet and the body parted company. Too severe to be called a graze, too deep to be called a flesh wound, yet too far from important organs to be called a fatal. Moreover, no bone broken and, judging from the quantity of the blood, no veins or arteries sundered. But it would bleed continuously until swaddled and pressured into stillness. It was, fortunately, his left arm, not the limb that was the core of his shooting. He knew when he had time he could pull gauze from his med pack, wrap it tight, and recover possibly even without stitches. It would make an interesting scar to show around the safari fire in years to come. It would become part of his legend.

So on to the next: Would they come after him?

His thought was yes. They’d gone to so much trouble to kill him, they must be very disappointed that he hadn’t fired and brought their little charade to a proper conclusion. Of course they’d come, if only to see if blood suggested wound, which suggested trail, at which point they’d pursue.

Next question: How would they pursue, since pursue they would? If they came en masse, they’d make too much noise. As well, the Germans, having heard the ruckus, might send their own troops to inspect, and a firefight that nobody particularly wanted would take place over stakes that nobody particularly cared about.

He concluded that only one man would pursue, if he found a blood trail. That would be whoever had worked this ploy out. Sharp fellow. Hunter himself, had to be, or at least blooded by much action. Interesting to chat with such a fellow. Surely one of Brix’s few peers in this game. That teased Brix, and in his mind a plan began to form.

It was superb! It was wonderful! It played on the hunter’s mind! It turned the hunter’s instinct against him. It would be so much fun!

This is what I came for! he thought.

Now all I have to find is a rabbit.

“Blood, Major,” someone yelled, and Swagger went to the call.

There it was: not an ocean’s worth, but not a scratch’s either. The dust was scuffled from where the man had rolled, risen, and started off, wounded badly or not, in what dark was left.

Where would he go?

Swagger looked up to the landscape. It was Norman to the bone, the rolling meadow, the scruffy, occasional spurts of scrawny trees, the random clots of bush, the array of gullies where a millennium of rains had forced the land to yield, the far hedgerows, a row of larger trees perhaps signifying a creek or a sunken road, and finally a patch of wood.

“He’ll go there,” he said, pointing to the woods.

A sniper needed cover but he also needed escape. He was not Japanese. There was a point to survival, not a shame. All the smaller knots of vegetation or the gullies that gave the seemingly flat land the complexity of a rolling sea offered no escape. He could shoot from any, but men would come at him from all points of the compass and there’d be no way out. Killing him would be a mess, but kill him they would.

The forest, in contrast, offered a continual process. Shoot, move, fall back, shoot again. He could maneuver under cover, from trunk to trunk, bush to bush, gully to gully. He could take a few, maybe more than a few, and the longer he held out and the more shooting there was, the more likely a German patrol would arrive.

Swagger knelt, pulled off his rucksack, and opened it. He took out the two halves, each wrapped in towel, of the Holland & Holland rifle. Almost too beautiful for words, its highly figured wood a symphonic complexity of tone and texture, its blue metal finished to silky blue perfection, it was meant for rich men; it would now serve in the infantry, the poor man’s ultimate destiny in wartime, in a world of mud and crawling. Hence: military necessity, which in wartime trumped all, from humanitarian love of your fellow man to simple sentimentality to the beauty and singularity of the instrument. It was the creed of all soldiers.

He linked the two halves, pivoted them, felt them glide together over expertly machined and polished metal joinery, twisted tightly to align the one to the other, then threw two latches that completed the operation and made whole and potent the Hollands’ African stalker in its scorching .240 Apex version. Above that, undisturbed by all the take-apart and put-together, ran the high tube of the scope, 4x, the finest German glass in the world as amplified by British engineering, which, as the Spitfire proved, yielded to none.

“Okay,” he said to Archer, threading Kynoch’s .240 cartridges into the magazine, “get your people out of here. If we all go after him, he kills at least half of us. Meanwhile, the Krauts will figure out there’s a game on a thousand yards from their lines and send a patrol out to investigate. You guys could have a nice little gunfight, but what’s the point? It would mean nothing, not with a big attack coming on soon. Get ’em out of here. I’ll go after this bastard.”

“Sir,” said Archer, “you need another gun.”

“Sergeant, I said get ’em out of here.”

“He needs to be played between two men. He has the advantage of concealment, accuracy, and patience; we’re the bumbling pursuers. If he thinks there’s only one, that’s what gives the other guy a chance.”

“I wouldn’t ask any man to draw fire for me,” said Swagger.

“Sir, you are not asking. I am volunteering. We both know this is how it has to happen. Corporal Blikowicz can get the patrol back. I’ll go with you. I’ll make the noise. When he shoots, you’ll see the flash, and you can put one of those fast-movers through his eye.”

“At the expense of your life.”

“Maybe he’ll miss. It has to happen.”

“Hasn’t happened yet.”

“You know it’s the right move, sir.”

Swagger paused. The reality: Archer was right. Chances for success went up exponentially with a two-man team. However, chances of the sergeant catching one also went up exponentially.

He handed his Thompson to the nearest kid.

“You keep that grease gun handy,” he said to Archer. Then, “Blikowicz, get these boys back fast. We’ll be in when we’re done.”

With his keen eyes and keener experience, Brix had no trouble finding them. In fact, he found four. But finding them wasn’t enough. It couldn’t be just any hole but a fat old guy’s, the beast who was too jaded to dig deep for protection, who no longer had any kits and dams to protect, who had learned, over long years of survival, that just a few feet was enough — usually.

Brix plunged his hand in, was immediately bitten, drove forward despite the pain, got his hands around the buck’s throat, and extracted him. People think bunnies are so cute and cuddly, for little girls to love. Not so. They are, as animals, quite savage by nature, and death fits easily into their worldview, either on the receiving or giving end of it. This old buck was huge for his species, clearly a warrior, and the scars he bore about his head and face marked him as the victor in many a fight to the death with the younger chaps for access to the old man’s does.

The creature went about six pounds, was strong, his thighs muscled and his paws well equipped with ripping claws, as many a younger buck had learned to his regret. His two front teeth were yellow stalactites, engineered for pure chomping of animal, vegetable, or mineral. In Brix’s strong grip, he squirmed powerfully, tried to bring either teeth or claws into play, meaning to rip his aggressor profoundly. In normal circumstances, any man so encumbered would have dropped the battling warrior, letting him scamper off. Brix did not have that luxury.

Instead, he adjusted his grip slightly for leverage, then, holding the thing entirely by its head, snapped it hard two or three times. Rabbits have committed many sins, but loquaciousness is not one of them. The neck went with a dry click, the animal died in the silence by which it had lived, and it hung from Brix’s hand, dead meat.

He stuffed it into his shirt, feeling still the warmth that would remain in its body for an hour or so. That essential task completed, he turned to consider and saw that he was nearly a hundred yards deep in the Norman wood. It calmed him. He’d grown up in forests. He’d hunted in forests. He’d stalked elephants in forests, as well as buff and rhino and lion, all of them wounded and desperate. He’d spent a lot of his life in dangerous forests, where death was a whisper away and the careless were always invited to dinner — of themselves.

His thigh still signaled pain. It had betrayed him twice, giving out, tossing him to the ground. If anything, the pain had increased. The only thing that would help would be brandy and rest, neither immediately available and unlikely to be so for some time. The wound on his left arm still leaked blood — not in copious amounts but in spurts and squirts, too visible to miss. The Americans would have no trouble following such a trail, even if they were city-bred.

Trees closed the light off, to his benefit. He could see so much that others couldn’t. Moreover, even better, it didn’t look to be a bright day, with rain possibly moving through. He glanced at his watch, and it informed him that it was not yet 0700. Full light was still half an hour away, which gave him time to maneuver invisibly. He looked at the architecture of his little sector, searching for an arrangement of features that would best fit his plan.

Behind him, he saw what appeared to be a patch of light maybe two hundred meters out. That meant a clearing. Clearings were good. Most forest business finished in clearings, where one beast managed to lure another and settle up fast. That, then, would be the setting. To the clearing. To the quick finish. To the last shot. To the triumph.

This is what I was born for, he thought.

Swagger and Archer had reached the edge of the forest, but by different paths. Archer had come straight across the meadow, hunched low, dropping every few dozen yards. Swagger, meanwhile, had told him it was unlikely he’d get shot: the guy was too busy getting in deep and setting up. He wouldn’t be hasty or improvisational unless forced. Taking him at his word, yet still feeling a valve of fear installed in his guts, he advanced steadily, finally making it to his destination. Swagger was already there.

Swagger had taken a different route. He’d gone through — it cut, it hurt, it ripped, but so what? — a hedgerow and in the adjacent postage stamp had double-timed it to the same forest line, where, he’d guessed correctly, the hedgerow would abate. He reached it and slid over to the right, seeing Archer’s open field run. Had Archer played football like Leets?

Rejoined, the two conferred.

“There’ll be a path. Not a gateway, not a sidewalk, but enough room for a single man or a single-file column. It was invented by cows. It’s been there for six hundred years. You’ll see blood. Not a lot. This guy isn’t gut- or lung-shot but, from the blood, more likely winged in a limb. He’s mobile but not fast; that’s why he’s got to settle in, anticipate your approach, quell the hurt with concentration, and lay down one well-placed bullet. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s your play. Don’t rush or take stupid chances. I’ll be in deep cover maybe thirty feet inside the woods. I’ll move with you, but don’t be yelling to me. You’ll hear me more than see me. I’ll be there.”

“You can keep up with me?”

“I believe I can. You got the gist of the plan already. Your job is to draw his fire. When I see the flash, my job is to put one through his eye. I just won’t know how it’s going to play until I see the spot he’s picked.”

“Suppose you don’t see it?”

“Every July 22 for the rest of my life, I’ll think of the heroic — what was the name again?”

“Ha ha,” said Archer.

“I’m glad you got a promotion,” said Swagger. “This is sergeant’s work.”

Archer scooted the wood line and indeed quickly found a path. He peered into a dark tunnel, the ground worn barren, where countless herdsmen had trod to get their cattle home the quick way.

He knelt.

“Got it. Yeah, there’s blood here. Not much, a dribble. I only see it because it’s bright against the dark.”

“You only see it because he wants you to see it,” said Swagger, not far off, but invisible. “He’s got to recon before he takes a shot. He doesn’t yet know if it’s one guy or an entire mechanized infantry regiment on his tail. As I say, he’s settled in, has his shooting lane picked, is waiting for you to step in it. But he’ll be patient. Hunter’s nature, sniper’s nature.”

“Okay, I’m set.”

“Take a deep breath. Not too much longer now.”

“Got it.”

“All set?”

“All set.”

Archer began his slow, cautious trek into the woods.

It had worked so much better than he anticipated. Now he had made it to his shooting site and was well set, prone in undergrowth but with a clear line to the target area. All the parts of his plan were exactly as he had foreseen, all in perfect relation to each other, the distances precise and more than manageable. He had checked the rifle to see if any of the knock-about had upset it and found that it still held true, twenty-eight notches of elevation, at four notches per minute of angle precise on point of impact at about 140 meters. No wind to deflect or calculate against, the rifle alive and supple in his hands. No need to go to position yet, as he knew that positions only degraded over time. When his target emerged and he went to position and scope, he wanted those muscles full of strength and energy.

It wouldn’t be a blue day. Ripples of pewter and silver occluded the sky, low-hanging clouds sure to bring rain shortly. That was better. He’d conclude his business, then begin the limp back, sure to run into Germans from the 353rd Infantry checking on the disturbances. They could carry him back. Then he and the boys would unite at the jactstuga and depart by nightfall. It was almost ov—

He heard him.

Something of the dampness in the air amplified each sound. He heard the rattle of metal parts clanging — why did they make so much noise? Didn’t they learn? — and (possibly this was his imagination) some dry, heavy breathing. The man was scared, and why wouldn’t he be? But he was game, give him that. He would be their best man, of much experience.

Brix concentrated. Then he saw him moving along, still in shadow. That ridiculous helmet they wore, so round against a nature that never in a billion or so years had produced anything so round. The details gave themselves up to Brix’s hard eyes.

Khaki swaddles, nothing fitting, again so American. Too much equipment, all those things carried on straps and belts. Baggy pants. Some kind of Schmeisser-type submachine gun, presumably for spraying the suspected piece of sniper-infested forest; grenades, little checkered ovals calling up the baseball so important to the American imagination.

The rifle came up, and for just a second, before the target dropped and disappeared, he saw the young, rather handsome face. Square, earnest, duty-driven, so American. As if from a cookie factory; they all seemed to look alike. But he was all soldier, at least at this penultimate point of his life.

A lesser man than Brix would have fired, but there really wasn’t enough time for the certainty Brix demanded. To do so would mean a lunge at the trigger, sure to throw off the shot. Brix’s patience and utter trust in his gifts compelled him to rest, wait, relax.

Could there be more? He hadn’t seen or heard any. A patrol would have made much more noise. There was no sign of another man anywhere. No birds stirred in the forest, no low muffled sounds of passage arrived on the cool, moist air. No sign of anything except the boy, the passage into the clearing, the hesitancy.

Brix knew why he was hesitant. He had designed it as such. The boy perched on indecision, awkward, his jubilation at what he beheld in deep conflict with the sniper fear that no man at war ever overcomes. He could see the boy again. He’d taken his helmet off, held the submachine gun at the ready for fast use, its wire stock hard against his shoulder for stability. He was mustering courage. He was convincing himself. He was on the cusp of action.

Brix found his position. The world leaped into clarity, four times the size it had been, the details more exact. The boy had not shaven; he could not keep his left hand still on the submachine gun’s lengthy magazine as his fingers pressed the keys of an imaginary piano involuntarily, fearful of danger.

Brix knew what had to happen. It was willed in the perfection of his plan. Blut verrückt. Who could deny its allure, its call, its offer of salvation? Brix cranked right a bit, to the space the boy would soon occupy. He was ready.

The boy stood.

He was exactly in the intersection of the three posts of Brix’s scope.

Brix’s finger was faster than his mind. He fired, perfectly.

CHAPTER 70 SCR-300

Leets was on the SCR-300.

“Nutmeg Red Leader, this is Nutmeg Blue George One, over.”

“Receiving, George One, let me put Colonel on, over.”

Leets was in the G Company area HQ, a rude assemblage in the hobo army crossing France, well protected by sandbags, machine guns, and soldiers. He was just in. But so was someone else.

“Nutmeg George One, this is Six, over.”

“Yes, sir. We made it back, but I thought you should know: Red King Three just came in. That is, most of them. Swagger and Sergeant Archer are still out there.”

“What’s going on, George One?”

“Their guy didn’t bite, never took a shot. They area-fired on his proximate location, and found blood traces. Major Swagger and Sergeant Archer went after him. They sent the other guys in, worried they might get bounced by a Jerry patrol.”

“Christ,” said the colonel. “No need for that. Seven kills, two captures. We won. Another guy, who cares?”

“Swagger cares,” said Leets.

From far off, there came the dry, disassociated sound of a rifle shot.

CHAPTER 71 Blut Verrückt

Blood everywhere, red-black even in the feeble sun.

“We got him!” shouted Archer. His voice reverbed with ecstasy. “Sir, we killed him. I’m going to—”

“NO!” screamed Swagger. “You hold up there, Archer. You freeze, you go still, you don’t do a goddamn thing.”

“Sir, I—”

“Archer, you calm down, you hear? You just stay there, god dammit.”

“I… sir, it’s—”

“Archer, listen to me. What do you see?”

“I can see into the clearing. There’s lots of blood. Blood everywhere. He got hit in the area fire, he got a rag on it or something, he wrapped it, then he staggered out. He kept going for, what, a mile, but finally the rag slipped, he fainted or fell, he lost control, and it all came roaring out. Jesus, there’s blood everywhere. He got to the clearing, dying, he staggered, he fell. He’s there, he’s down, he’s dead. No man could lose that much blood and still be breathing. I’m going to—”

“Archer, it ain’t his blood.” It was the first grammatical mistake he had made in two months, not that he noticed, not that he cared.

“Major, I–I—No, he’s there, we hit him, it’s all over.”

“It ain’t even started, Archer. That’s a dog, a cat, I don’t know. Gutted, squeezed dry of blood. It’s supposed to make you crazy — it did make you crazy. The second you step into that clearing to check, he puts the bullet through your left nostril from two hundred meters out, then goes home to pork chops and beer.”

Archer said nothing. The great war had gotten very tiny.

“Here’s the game. I’m moving forward to the forest line, setting up. I’ll check the landscape and figure where he is. When I give you the okay, you come around. You come fast, looking for the body, the grease gun ready to put a mag into it. But one second later, you go hard, flat, prone. You cannot stand still but for one second. That’s as he eases the last bit of wiggle out of his sight picture, even as his finger is applying pressure against the break. If you’re late, he kills you. Got me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll zero on his flash.”

“Suppose he shoots when he sees me?”

“Not how his mind works. He’s already seen you. He knows you’re here, trying to figure it out. He wants you to see the animal carcass. He wants you to know he’s fooled you. He wants you to know he’s outhunted you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You hold tight now.”

Swagger eased forward, squirming through the rough brush as easily as possible, trying to squeeze around bushes, to slide by saplings, to move without alerting this little piece of Normandy that he was here. He made it within five feet of the sunlight and considered what he saw.

Clearing, yellowed thatch, not grass, more like a kind of ragweed cut here and there by clumps of wildflowers, patches of low brush. A stump lay off-center, a hundred years’ worth of raw, dead wood, now gone gray with age and rot. Beyond the forest, its nuances hidden in shadow, its color not really green but a riot of greens and shades and hues controlled not by rhythm but by nature’s need of nonsense. Murky areas were abundant in the forest line.

Which one?

And then Swagger knew.

Not across the clearing.

He was behind them.

He’d ripped the animal, he’d spread the blood, he’d backtracked and let Archer pass. He wanted to shoot from behind. He wanted the Bell shot, into the back of the head, his favorite, his professional elephant hunter’s signature of excellence.

Swagger rolled, squirmed to the left. Peered back along the trail that Archer had traveled. He found a pit of darkness 130 meters back. He eased this way, then that, finally finding a vantage under some bushes. He locked into his prone, the rifle so light and easy to manipulate, wanting, somehow, to come to his shoulder.

He squinted through the scope, finding the center of the darkness. Then he moved his eye up half an inch so that he looked over the tube.

“Archer, move into the clearing. Turn on that hard left as if looking for the body. Freeze. It’s an animal. One second. Then go down hard. Are you ready?”

“Yes, sir,” said Archer.

“Count three and go.”

Swagger counted three internally, heard the clank of metal as the boy raised himself, lurched into the field, turned.

The shot was a spasm of light, a fraction of a second’s worth, a nova that was born and died faster than a blink, from the low center of the pit of blackness, and fixing it in his vision, he raised the rifle, saw exactly the almost-intersection of the three posts at the vanished nova’s site, and his finger took the relay at light speed from his brain, bypassing consciousness altogether.

In the report he heard it, a kind of addendum to the months of effort, to the very long stalk: it was the punch of bullet in flesh. It was a smack, a slap, a snap. It was the meat shot.

CHAPTER 72 Bad News

She had never disappointed him before. She had been perfect, in all things and in all ways, and in fact he was in love with her, as were all men, and he so looked forward to their parties together. But not tonight.

“I’m so sorry, Colonel Bruce,” she said. “I have a friend in OWI. Her name is Zora; she’s big in pamphlets. She was involved with a flyer, a P-51 pilot. She learned today that he’d been shot down over Germany on bomber escort. She’s shattered.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Colonel Bruce. “When will it ever end?”

“I know we were supposed to go to Maltby’s tonight,” said Millie. “But I just can’t. I have to be with her. You understand.”

Actually, understood too well. Maltby was some horse’s ass big in MI6 via wealth, not brains or talent, and all the tribes would be gathering tonight to drink his whisky and laugh behind his back. Wives, girlfriends, probably some crazed beauties who were weirdly drawn to the spy world, that sort of thing. Possibly an actress or two. Vivien had a nose for such events; maybe she’d show up with that handsome dolt husband of hers.

Sir Colin had pushed the invitation on him, but the colonel was convinced it was only because Sir Colin, when he wasn’t dispatching cutthroats into Europe, had the woof-woof for Millie and, like so many others, knew her to be unobtainable, but nevertheless, even with his dreadnought of a wife, HMS Devastator, along, he yearned to look, to sniff, to brush, perchance to dream. So Sir Colin would be quite disappointed.

Such is war. They also serve who only dream of Millie but then go home to empty cots or possibly empty wives. Whoever said war is hell certainly knew what he was talking about.

“Would it be appropriate to send flowers?” he asked.

“She was so destroyed, I doubt she’d notice. But they’re quite liberal in that office, so I expect she’ll have no trouble taking time off to reassemble and go forth.”

“It occurs to me, my dear, you have never asked for a day off. And the pressure on you must be extraordinary. Would this be time for you to spend with your friend, who seems to need you more than I do today or the next three or four days, perhaps?”

“Oh, thank you, sir. But I’d prefer not to. When Lieutenant Leets gets back from the front, possibly then. We were thinking about going to Scotland for a weekend.”

“Oh, wouldn’t that be fun,” he said, though the mention of Leets was somewhat depressing, since the whole Room 351 crew had vanished and he had no idea what they were up to. Or even where. The front? And then there was the fuss over their driver’s transfer. The name was… yes, Sebastian, Ozzie Sebastian’s boy, Deaf Sebastian’s nephew, wanting out so suddenly. Demanding it, pulling every string he had, and he had many strings! What could that have been about?

But he knew in all circumstances it was best never to acknowledge ignorance, so he made no mention of the situation. Did he know anybody at First Army who could straighten him out? Well, there was that Colonel McBain who— No, he’d gone to Europe too. Was anybody left at Bushy Park these days?

“Why don’t you go to her now, Millie. I’ll bumble through the Maltby thing on my own, though I’m sure the entire staff of MI6 will miss you deeply.”

“Thank you so much, sir,” she said, smiled one of those I’d-die-for-it Millie smiles, and left.

CHAPTER 73 Felled

Silence after the shot. The forest was empty. All life had gone mute to the particle level. The flowers dared not bud, the leaves not unfurl, the wind not whisper. No birds sang, nor peeped, nor hatched.

“Archer. Are you okay?”

He thought the boy must be. No sound of a hit affiliated with the sniper’s shot.

A stir, a rustle, a clank of canteen on steel buckle.

“Sort of.”

“Wounded?”

“No, sir. But I felt the cemetery wind as it passed. He wasn’t but two inches off. Did you get him?”

“Dead solid.”

“Yahoo!” said Archer.

“I’m moving in from the right. You move in from the left. Keep that gun ready. You may still have to dump a mag.”

“Got it.”

They rose and in awkward tandem approached the theoretical chamber of the theoretically dead sniper through the brush on either side of the path. Swagger took the lead, his rifle on sling. He had his .45 in his hand, cocked, unlocked.

Not a creature was stirring, not even a rabbit. Except for the random slosh of the leaves through which they passed, no noise. Swagger pushed ahead but was weary of being Blut verrückt himself and didn’t want to blow it now with an ill-considered rush into a waiting gun. This prick might still be alive.

He was. But just barely.

He had been hurt before. He’d been thrown three times by buff, breaking a total of seven ribs. His left arm had been chewed badly by a wounded leopard, which Robert had killed with a brain shot from 150 meters with a Mannlicher-Schönauer. One season a croc had broken his leg. Various husbands had socked him in the jaw at the bar of the Norfolk in Nairobi. Hemingway, one of those I-love-you-when-I’m-sober-I-hate-you-when-I’m-drunk chappies, had thrown a roundhouse; Brix had slipped it easily but gone arse-up on a lime twist on the floor — the hotel bar again — and thrown his back out. The next morning Hemingway apologized but his back wasn’t interested. It hurt for months.

Nothing like this. The bullet hit with the force of a sledge, blowing him back into the tree, off the tree, into the path, and quite unconscious. He awoke seven or so seconds later to find himself soaked in blood and already dead from the waist down.

The bullet had struck above and a little to the right of the heart, blowing through the left lung, exiting under the shoulder blade on the yaw, pulling mottled tablespoons of lung tissue through an exit three times larger than the entrance. Breathing, not easy but necessary, produced a broken-accordion effect as wind leaked from the wound, exciting odd vibrations that were somewhere between whistle and gargle. It was the sucking chest wound.

Instinctively he crawled, the rifle sling looped around his wrist. But quickly enough he saw how pointless that was and was realistic about his chances, which no longer existed. Death, a black leopard in a tree, watched him with yellow eyes.

Hello, old friend, he said. Gotten around to me, have you? Well, at least I gave you a run for the money.

He rolled over, freed of the rifle, and squirmed, dragging the dead cargo of the lower half of his body behind, to the trunk of a tree. Somehow he willed himself semi-upright, as if on a chaise lounge, and watched as two men, neither helmeted, emerged from the forest. The young soldier and, of course, the older bloke who’d bested him. He looked like he’d been alive five thousand years and fought at Troy, Marathon, Waterloo, and Ypres. Face the shade of lion leather on Swahili shields. His skin had the texture of the road up the hill to Thermopylae. Wrinkles twisted beyond mapping. What was it? Hemingway was always quoting it, hoping it would make him so, but it never did. The American, stoic, isolate, a killer. Something like that. No surprise flickered in this fine fellow’s eyes, which calmly studied the scene.

He dismissed the young soldier, holstered his pistol, and approached.

Swagger holstered his .45, then approached the dying man.

“I say,” Brix called in his Brit English, “got a cigarette?”

Swagger knelt to him, pulled a Camel from his pack, put it in the fellow’s blood-flecked lips, and lit it with his G.I. Zippo.

The Swede inhaled, drawing broadly, enjoying the flavor and the slight vibration of dizziness against his other sensations. Then he exhaled and a tiny column of smoke spiraled upward from the hole in his chest, syncopated to a slight whistle of a wheeze.

“Not exactly encouraging, is it?” he said.

“Doesn’t look too good,” said Swagger.

“Superb shot, old man.”

“H&H .240 Apex. I got it from your friend Wilson.”

“Ah, Robert. He’s had it in for me ever since he discovered I slept with his wife.”

“He didn’t mention it.”

“The Brits, you know. All buttoned-up. They do build beautiful rifles.”

“Don’t they, though? This one’s a beaut. I hate to give it back.”

“I don’t blame you. Say, old chap, sorry I’m taking so long on this bit. You really should be going. I’m sure Von Klumphumklopper or whatever his name was will be sending a crew of Bavarian pig farmers after you. A shame to see your celebration ruined.”

“I got time,” said Swagger.

“Professional courtesy. It’s rare in our profession. Alone on the hunt, alone at hunt’s end, that sort of thing. Appreciated.”

“Anything to convey?”

“Tell Karen — well, no, tell her nothing. God knows where you’d find her anyhow. Tell Ernest — no, he’d make it about himself. Tell Robert he was the best. If he mentions the wife, tell him to forgive her and that it was just the great Brix being Brix. Caught up in my own bloody legend. I think I had some other wives but I can’t remember their names. Tell four hundred Kikuyu maidens to remember me well as I remember them. Tell — oh, hell,” he said.

He looked upward at nothing, coughed slightly.

“Oh, hell,” he said again, and died.

Swagger made it in ten minutes after Archer. Much congratulation. Leets had come over to wait too and was exuberant. The Dog Company CO, Sergeant McKinney, Battalion G-2, with his rimless specs, all the patrollers, all the stay-behinds, they had a little party. No one knew how it happened, as Army regulations strictly prohibit such, but somehow a case of cold French beer was produced and all enjoyed. Even the Germans were polite enough to stay away.

“Shouldn’t you call it in, sir?” Leets asked. “They’re waiting.”

“You call it in, Lieutenant,” said Swagger, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, Brix’s M41 resting against the table.

Leets beckoned the radio guy over, took up the SCR-300 transceiver, clicked the transmit button twice.

“Blue Leader One, this is Red King Three, over.”

Snap, crackle, crackle, snap. Then, through the grit of the radio universe: “Receiving Red King Three, over.”

“Red King Three reporting mission accomplished, zero casualties, coming home, over.”

The colonel came on, too excited for radio protocol.

“Swagger got him?”

“Put him aboard the express to Valhalla,” said Leets.