Winter Sniper: A World War II Novel

Chapter 1

Midnight.

Bruno Hess woke but did not move. Anyone watching would have seen only two pale eyes reflecting the starlight. He had learned a long time ago that moving too quickly meant death on a battlefield. In the distance he could hear the pop pop of gunfire, but nothing in his sector. Hess had slept all night with a pistol gripped in his right hand. He shook a thin layer of snow off his blanket and reached for his rifle the way some men might have felt in the darkness for their wives or lovers. It had been a long time since Hess had touched anything softer than the polished brass of a shell casing.

He stood up, safe in the knowledge that he was cloaked in midnight darkness. All around him, snow-covered blankets made lumps of sleeping soldiers. No one so much as stirred in their sleep and for a moment Hess wondered if they all might, in fact, be dead. It would not have been the first time that he had slept among dead men. Then a lump near him groaned and twitched as if from a bad dream. He did not know these particular men. As a sniper, he was free to roam the battlefield so long as he reported in once every few days. Hess would have preferred some solitary sleeping place, but in Stalingrad he had learned that there was safety in numbers at night, when the Russians crept out to kill whatever Germans they could.

Reassured now that he was not the only German soldier still alive in Stalingrad, Hess tilted up his canteen and took a long drink of vodka, feeling the greasy liquor burn down into his belly. He had given up carrying water because it froze in the winter air. When he was thirsty, Hess ate snow.

The Russian night was bone-cracking cold. And it wasn’t even deep winter, when horses froze to death standing up and wounded men became riveted to the ground by their own icy blood. When the snows came, the soldiers huddled together at night to keep from freezing. Hess worked his hands, clenching and unclenching them in the darkness as if he were gripping an imaginary throat. Then he pulled on wool gloves with the fingertips cut out so that he could work the bolt action of his sniper rifle. Finally, he tugged on mittens to keep his fingers from becoming frostbitten.

Time to hunt.

Hess favored the hours before dawn when Stalingrad lay blanketed in snow and it felt as if he had the Russian city to himself. In the starlight, the fresh white landscape and the quiet made the battleground seem pure and gentle, no more threatening than the winter woods at the Tiergarten in Berlin. In the gray Russian morning, the city revealed itself as nothing more than piles of rubble, burned cars and rusted trucks, barbed wire, red stains in the snow.

Dawn was always best for hunting. He had stalked wolves in Poland and elk in the Hartz mountains. The best shooting was always at first light when the animals were on the move. Hess had found that the same held true for war, where, as a sniper, he simply hunted another sort of prey. Men were groggy at dawn, reluctant to let go of their dreams and embrace a new day of war. They were careless. Since June 1941 he had shot three hundred and eighty-two Russian soldiers. As a general rule, he avoided shooting women and children, but in Russia, he had found that some of the best enemy snipers were those you might least expect to shoot back.

Hess quietly threaded his way through the tangle of barbed wire that formed the unit’s defensive line. His feet made no more noise than a cat’s and none of the sleeping men heard him go. He nodded at the sentry, making sure that the man got a good look at the rifle with its telescopic sight. He was acutely aware of how for a moment the muzzle of the sentry’s submachine gun lingered on him, then slid away. The number of deserters had increased with the cold, though Hess thought a man must be a fool to take his chances with the Russians.

“Kill some for me,” whispered the sentry, whose cheek was covered by a gauze bandage thick with crusted blood. “Kill as many of these Ivans as you can.”

Hess slipped into a trench, moving ever closer to Russian territory, confident that he could not be seen in the darkness. His heart beat faster, but not with fear. Hess sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with him, if that was why he found excitement where other men had the good sense to be afraid. Still, he was cautious, because the Ivans had their sentries and snipers, too. He reached the limit of the trench and settled himself as low as he could into the snow as he studied the frozen no-man’s-land before him.

At twilight the night before, he had studied this territory and now, under the starlight, he could pick out a few landmarks. Nearly one hundred meters away, he saw the bomb crater where he would hide near the shattered hulk of an Opel sedan that must have served as a staff car. He slung the rifle securely across his back. He slid onto his belly in the snow like a swimmer setting out across a frozen sea and began to crawl toward the car. He moved slowly, stopping to listen and watch before creeping a few more centimeters toward the truck. The cold seeped up through the earth to embrace him. Hess ignored it and kept moving. Any sudden movement might give him away, even at night, and invite a Russian sniper to put a bullet in him. The damned Ivans were always watching, cunning as feral dogs. The danger increased the closer he came to the Russian lines. Hess pressed himself harder against the frozen mud and thin snow as he slithered ahead. When he came to the bomb crater he had chosen in the last of the daylight last evening, he slid down into the icy bottom. Hess unslung his rifle and settled down to wait.

He dared not sleep. In this cold, he might never wake up again. Instead, he took a pull of vodka from time to time to keep his blood from turning to sludge. He worried that his tracks in the snow might give away his hiding place, or that the battle might sweep over him during the day, leaving him stranded like those crabs one sometimes found on their backs above the high tide line. His trick with the pipe and string would work just once. Would it be enough? Hess felt better when it clouded over and began to snow again, hiding him like a seed in the earth. He wrapped the muzzle in a white rag and waited for dawn.

The Russians closest to Hess would be too wary to show themselves. Maybe a foolish boy would pop his head above a trench, but that was too much to hope. He knew the Russians farther back from the fighting wouldn’t be so careful.

As the light grew in the east, Hess spotted what he was looking for through the powerful Leopold telescopic sight mounted on his rifle. A Russian officer in a gray-green greatcoat and red shoulder boards that flashed like a bird’s plumage stepped out of a doorway and brought his hand to his face as if lighting a morning cigarette. At this range it was hard to tell. The Russian was nearly one thousand meters from where Bruno Hess had hidden himself.

It was an ungodly long way to shoot a rifle.

Hess carried a Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle that had an accurate range of five hundred meters. Beyond that, it became hard to see the target, let alone hit it. But even at five hundred meters, a good marksman could put ten shots within an area of two feet square.

Hess could cover his grouping at that distance with his hand.

But Hess wasn’t just good. He was gifted with a rifle. His father had taught him to shoot when he was barely old enough to hold the old single-shot rifle. When they hunted, Hess had to prop the rifle on a rock or in the fork of a tree. He had learned a hunter’s patience as a boy.

At the SS sniper school outside Einbeck he had shot the highest scores of anyone before or since. He might even have stayed on as an instructor or at least have returned there to teach after a few months of combat. But even during his training there was a coldness about Hess that other men found unsettling. He sensed that he made the others uneasy. “You were made for killing,” one of his instructors at the academy had said, a touch of envy in his voice. “Not for teaching. You see it yourself, don’t you, Hess?”

After Poland and then Russia, it was hard for him to remember when he hadn’t been a killer.

Now, staring across nearly a thousand meters of battlefield that resembled a scene from a frozen hell, Hess felt himself slipping into his sniper’s trance. Long-range shooting was an uncertain proposition at best, even for the likes of Hess. A tremor of the hand, a breath of wind, even an imperfection in the bullet was enough to send the shot off target. He ignored the winter chill that crept into him from the ground and the brittle morning air. His body settled deeper into the crater, letting the Russian soil hug him and steady his arms. A shot like this required the steadiness of the earth.

The rifle barrel rested atop a scrap of blanket. He had positioned himself so that not even the muzzle protruded from his sniper’s den. Only a small opening allowed him to canvass the battlefield with the telescopic sight, giving him a limited range of vision. It would be enough. In Stalingrad, he had learned that the only way to stay alive as a sniper was to hide yourself well and limit your exposure as much as possible.

His world was reduced to the magnified field of the scope. He could see the Russian officer stalking back and forth. It was impossible at this distance to determine the man’s rank, but he could see red shoulder boards flashing like the bright plumage of a bird. Only a fool would wear those on the battlefield. A fool — or an officer of some importance.

Your pride is your destruction, Ivan.

Hess liked to imagine that his bullets struck like a lightning bolt from some Teutonic god. He enjoyed the idea of his rifle being a divine instrument, striking flesh with a sound like a butcher’s cleaver.

Too much thinking. He forced his mind to go blank. His breathing slowed and nearly stopped. In the last few moments before he fired, he wouldn’t breathe at all. His heartbeat began to slow like the winding down of a watch, until there was scarcely a flutter in his chest.

The Russian officer stopped and appeared to be staring right at Hess, although he knew it was impossible for the man to see him at that distance. It was a trick of the telescopic sight. In a space between his own gentle heartbeats, Hess let his finger take up the last fraction of tension in the trigger.

The rifle fired.

It took a full second for the bullet to cover one thousand meters. In that instant the Russian officer might move or some stray wisp of wind might alter the bullet’s course. But Hess watched through the telescope, he saw the Russian collapse. Several aides rushed toward him while others brandished pistols at the rooftops. The body at their feet twitched once, twice, then lay still.

One thousand meters. That would give those Ivans something to think about.

He worked the bolt action and swept the sight over the Russian lines closest to him.

Sure enough, a head appeared. Curious about the sound of a gunshot. The telescope made it seem as if the Russian was just a few feet away. He was a very young man with blond hair poking out from under a knit cap. Hess drove a bullet between the boy’s eyes.

Before noon, he had shot six more Russians. Hess felt no emotion after shooting, only a sort of hollowness, much as he felt after being with a woman. He wondered sometimes if there was something wrong with him; worse, that some sign of his pleasure showed on his face when he was done shooting. Perhaps that was why he was not on the staff at the SS sniper school.

He welcomed the emptiness, savoring the fact that it meant he was still alive. In war, that was all that mattered. He put the Mosin-Nagant aside and finished the vodka in his canteen.

When darkness fell, Hess left his lair and crawled with painstaking care toward the German lines.

A new sentry was on duty.

“We knew you were out there,” the soldier said. “We were watching through binoculars. You had the Ivans scurrying like ants.”

The sniper grunted a reply.

“I know you now,” the sentry said. “You’re Hess. I’ve heard about you.”

“The Russian snipers will be looking for me here tomorrow,” Hess said. “They’ll shoot anything that moves. Keep your head down if you want to stay alive.”

“What news from the Eastern Front?” asked Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler by way of greeting the tall colonel who swept into his office and gave the Nazi salute.

Colonel Hurst Brock took his time peeling off the leather gloves he wore before answering. Himmler noticed that Brock immediately went to the huge fireplace at one end of the office and stood in front of the feeble flames to soak up what warmth there was. Winter was coming on in Berlin; in Russia the snow was already getting deep.

“It is not good, Herr Reichsfuhrer,” the colonel finally admitted. He seemed to weigh each word carefully. “The Russians have us surrounded at Stalingrad. We are short on supplies. Our soldiers are hungry. They are running out of ammunition. Men freeze to death every night.”

Himmler nodded, a gesture that made his eyeglasses flash daggers of reflected light at Brock. The reichsfuhrer was of average height with narrow shoulders, but he always stood so straight that he appeared taller. He had a square mustache that seemed an imitation of Hitler’s and an unflattering haircut that left his pale scalp showing high above his ears; the hair on top of his head was so short that it stood straight up. Somewhat idly, the colonel considered that as a schoolboy, Himmler would have been just the sort of boy the colonel and his friends picked on. Himmler had a weak chin and a square of wispy mustache that made the top part of his face seem heavier. The eyes, however, were shrewd, and his mouth was set in a permanent scowl. He seemed to study people with the same professional interest that a butcher appraised a side of beef, cleaver in hand. The colonel resumed standing at attention, his back to the fire, Himmler’s silence making him wonder if he had been too honest about conditions on the Eastern Front.

Himmler had sent him to the front to observe the situation first-hand. Fortunately, the Luftwaffe still controlled the Russian skies so that a few planes got in and out of Stalingrad if they could dodge the anti-aircraft fire. But air power provided the Germans with an advantage, not victory. The battle of Stalingrad was being fought on the ground, one block, one street, one building at a time.

“The only hope is to break out and save what we can of the army,” Brock continued.

“The Fuhrer will not allow it,” Himmler said.

“Then we have lost Russia.”

Himmler had expected as much. He recalled those triumphant summer days of 1941 when the Wehrmacht rolled across Russia like boys on a spree. The dirt roads baked hard as concrete by the sun so that their Panzers moved on and on into Russia with almost nothing to stop them. Victory seemed within their grasp as the Wehrmacht reached the Moscow suburbs. But progress slowed as autumn came and the weather quickly grew bitter. The German spearhead came within ten miles of Moscow, then faltered. The roads turned to mud, then froze into rutted nightmares. Truck and tank engines locked up as oil thickened to sludge in the cold. Ill-equipped, the Wehrmacht shivered as the snow began to fall. Forced to retreat, the Germans made a last stand at Stalingrad. The fighting was now in its second winter. For the 200,000 German troops in Russia, Himmler knew there would be no spring.

He turned to Brock. “Did you bring my message to Admiral Canaris?”

“I delivered it personally, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

Himmler shuffled papers to hide his annoyance. It was just like Wilhelm Canaris to take his time responding. Whenever Himmler thought of the commander of German naval intelligence, a greyhound came to mind. Maybe it was those mutts Canaris took with him everywhere, two fat dachshunds that the admiral fed under the table. Or the admiral’s smug, aristocratic face. Canaris, however, was the sort of greyhound who had teeth. And was inclined to use them. Someday, Himmler hoped to be rid of Canaris, but for now, he had need of the admiral to help him carry out this plan.

He already had the full cooperation of Admiral Donitz, commander of the German Kriegsmarine. A U-boat had been assigned to the mission. Now it was just a matter of finding the right man for the task, which was the real reason Himmler had sent Colonel Brock to Stalingrad.

Once Stalingrad was lost, the Reich would be in desperate straits. Germany faced the possibility of losing an entire army of more than eight hundred thousand men.

Where once their enemies had been swept before the Fatherland’s legions, now the Russians, the Americans and even the English had shown they were resolved to fight until the end. Himmler believed that end was approaching faster than anyone in the Reichstag imagined. Allied bombers swept in waves toward Germany each night; on the Eastern Front, the Wehrmacht was stretched so thin that Himmler doubted they could withstand a direct assault if Stalin pressed the issue.

Yet it was the Americans that Himmler most feared because they held Germany’s fate in their hands. The United States had almost unlimited resources and what Himmler found to be an annoying attitude that they would win because God was on their side. And that was why he had come up with a plan that, while it would not win the war, might make the Americans doubt their superiority and buy Germany precious time to rebuild the army mauled by Russia. With renewed strength, Germany could meet the Americans on the battlefield. And triumph.

Himmler noticed that Brock huddled closer to the fireplace. “Are you cold, Herr Obersturmbahnfuhrer?”

“In Russia it snowed every day —”

Himmler cut him off. “I did not send you there for a weather report. Did you find the man I was looking for?”

“Yes, Herr Reichsfuhrer.” Brock gave a stiff smile as if his face might still be frozen from the Russian cold. “He hits whatever he can see.”

“Have him brought to Berlin. We must send the Americans a message and make them realize they are not invincible.”

“Does the Fuhrer know?”

“You let me worry about the Fuhrer,” Himmler replied icily. “And not a word of this to anyone.”

“Of course, Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

The colonel turned to go, but Himmler was not yet done.

“And Brock?

“Yes, Herr Reichmarshal?”

“Tell him to bring his rifle.”