Red Sniper

“When you’re right, you’re right,” Cole said.

“In that case, you go first.”

“On three.” With Vaccaro covering him, Cole slid over the wall and ran in a crouch toward the barn. Vaccaro came right behind him. Cole poked the muzzle of the rifle into the barn and held his breath, listening for some sign that the sniper might still be alive. Most of the time, he could sense a person hiding in a building. It was like their body gave off vibrations.

Now, there was only a deathly stillness. He went on in, rifle at the ready.

They found the sniper on the floor of the hay loft. He lay with the slack pose of the dead. Cole’s bullet had hit him in the chest. The sniper’s face was untouched, the blue eyes gazing sightlessly out from the rim of his stahlhelm. This sniper couldn’t have been much more than seventeen or eighteen. Blond peach fuzz on his upper lip.

“I am so sick of this shit,” Vaccaro muttered, looking down at the dead boy’s face. Vaccaro was always playing the smart aleck when he wasn’t playing the macho Italian guy from Brooklyn, but there was nothing macho about his expression at that moment. He looked deflated, like someone had punched him in the gut.

Cole grunted. He didn’t like killing kids, either. But the fact remained that this young sniper had shot two Americans on the road below. Cole thought it was a lousy place to die—not that he had seen many good places, come to think of it.

This kid had killed them, and there was a price to pay for that.

Maybe you couldn’t entirely blame this dead kid, considering that he’d been brainwashed since childhood, having come of age in Nazi Germany. That didn’t change the fact that were now three dead men on this nameless stretch of road.

Some dust had stuck to his rifle barrel, just in front of the action. Cole rubbed it away with his thumb. There was something reassuring about the tangible feel of the metal, still warm from the bullet he had fired a minute before. The smell of gunpowder filled his nostrils. He hefted the familiar weight of the rifle in his hands. He pushed whatever regrets he had about killing the young enemy sniper to the back of his mind and locked them away.

He would never have told this to Vaccaro or to anyone else, but he was not sick of this at all. He dreaded seeing it end. It was not because he enjoyed the killing, but he did like the way that being on the hunt—even being hunted—made him feel so alive.

There wasn’t a damned thing he could do after the war that would come close. Other men had lives and families to go back to. What did he have but a crowded shack in the mountains and a few dozen rusty beaver traps to set in Gashey’s Creek? Was he going to set up a still and drink most of what he made, like his pa had?

It wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to look forward to. Cole wondered if maybe there was something wrong with him, because he wouldn’t mind if the war went on a while longer.

“Come on,” he said gruffly to Vaccaro, turning away from the young sniper’s body. “We’ve still got a few hours of daylight. Let’s see if we can make it to the next town before dark.”

CHAPTER 2

Yegor Barkov had seen his share of bad situations, and he didn’t like this one at all. He stood on the marshy plain just west of the Oder River, looking up at the high ground beyond, where masses of German troops were dug in to make their last stand on what was known as the Sellow Heights.

His commander had once pointed out that Barkov was an imaginative man, so it was not surprising that when studying the German fortifications before him, he had the passing thought that this was how the hammer must look to the nail.

He clutched his Mosin-Nagant sniper’s rifle in his big, rough hands and tried instinctively to get the lay of the land so that he could put that rifle to use.

“At least it isn’t Stalingrad,” said Oleg Tarasyuk beside him. The little man hawked and spat to further illustrate his opinion of Stalingrad. He was also a sniper, and the two had been together through thick and thin during these long years of the war. Where Barkov was massive as a bull, Tarasyuk gave the impression of some small, quick animal that was fond of baring its sharp teeth. He had earned the nickname norka, which was Russian for mink, a furbearer often made into sleek coats but that had a nasty disposition in the wild.

“What do you want to bet that these stupid generals want us to march right into those German guns?”

“Yegor,” the Mink cautioned, ever mindful that one of the political officers might overhear. Like a mink, he lived by his wits.