The War That Came Early: West and East (46 page)

“I’m the hunter. Uh-huh. Sure.” If Vaclav sounded distinctly unenthusiastic, the way he sounded reflected the way he felt. And he had his reasons. He picked up the helmet the German sniper had ventilated. “If I’m the hunter, how come he did this to me and I haven’t done a goddamn thing to him?”

“You weren’t wearing it.” Halévy looked on the bright side of things. He could afford to—the Nazi wasn’t trying to spill his brains out on the bottom of a trench.

“No shit!” Vaclav said. After a little while wearing a French model brain bucket, he’d got his hands on another Czech pot. This one didn’t fit as well as the older helmet had, but it didn’t have those two neat 7.92mm holes in it, either. He did like it better than the Adrian, which protected less of his head. Of course, nothing protected you from a direct hit by a rifle round. You’d need a helmet as thick as the side of a tank to do that. And you’d need a rhino’s neck muscles to wear it. He did think the Czech model was better than the Adrian for keeping shell fragments from needling through his skull.

Halévy made a small production out of lighting a cigarette. “Aren’t you happy, though?” he said after a couple of puffs. “Now the French officers are glad you carry that antitank rifle. They aren’t trying to get you to turn it in any more.”

“Terrific!” Jezek said. “That’s on account of the Fritz is punching their tickets for them, and they want me to make him quit.”

“Even French officers think they’re entitled to live.” Benjamin Halévy spread his hands, as if to say
What can you do?
“Poor bastards don’t know any better.”

Vaclav opened his mouth, then closed it again without saying anything. He had to work that through before he answered. After a moment, he tried again: “Only a Jew would come out with something that knotted-up.”

“Why, thank you!” Halévy said, without any irony Vaclav could hear. “Maybe I should wave my circumcised cock at the German. Then he’d want to kill me as much as he wants to get you.”

“I wish I could work out how he thinks,” Jezek said fretfully. “The other Nazi was easier.”

“He figured he’d get you because he was a German and you weren’t. This guy is better than that, anyway,” Halévy said.

“He’s a lot better than that, dammit,” Vaclav said. “Half the time, I don’t even think
he
knows where he’ll shoot from next.”

“How could he not?”

“Shit, for all I know he rolls dice or something. One he goes here, three he goes there, six he goes somewhere else. Wherever he goes, he nails people.”

“You’re doing the same thing to his side,” Halévy said.

“I know. But I haven’t got a glimpse of him.” Vaclav hardly heard his own reply. Rolling dice … He’d only been running his mouth when he said that. But it sure made sense now that it was out. How could you stalk a man if he had no pattern you could find? You couldn’t. Vaclav had a couple of yellowish ivories in his own pocket. He’d made a little money with them—lost a little, too. Maybe they had uses he hadn’t thought of before.

He had his favorite places from which to observe the German line, and from which to fire at the Fritzes when he found the chance. Now, knowing the Nazi sniper was on the prowl behind the barbed wire and shell holes separating the two sides, he gave up on those familiar places. He had the feeling that, if he put an eye up to one of his loopholes, a Mauser bullet would greet him an instant later. Maybe he was only being jumpy, but he didn’t believe in taking chances.

Of course, he was also taking chances in finding new spots from which to watch the enemy. One of the reasons his favorite places were favorites was that they were good places. He could watch the Germans and shoot at the careless ones with little risk to himself. When he went somewhere else, the Nazis had a better chance to spot him and knock him over.

But—he hoped—the sniper wouldn’t be looking for him in these new spots. He had a dirty green cloth he draped over his telescope so the German wouldn’t notice it, and to keep the lens from flashing in the sun.

Plenty of
Wehrmacht
men passed through his field of view. He wished he could kill them all, and more besides. He didn’t shoot at all of them, though, or even at very many. By the nature of things, a sniper had to pick and choose. He wouldn’t last long if he got greedy.

Some of the Germans had taken to twisting their shoulder straps so they covered up the pips and embroidery that marked higher ranks. Sometimes Vaclav noticed that. When he did, he tried to hit the men who’d got cute. How often he didn’t notice, of course, he couldn’t begin to guess.

Every so often, he saw Germans scrutinizing the lines the Czechs and French held against them. One of them was simply too brazen for belief. The way he stood head and shoulders above the parados, binoculars in hand, infuriated Vaclav. Did the son of a bitch think nobody would punch his ticket for him? He might as well have mailed out engraved invitations with
SHOOT ME!
on them.

Vaclav took care of that for him. The antitank rifle thundered and slammed hard against his right shoulder. As soon as he fired, he ducked, a habit he’d acquired not long after he started sniping. You could see what you did later, and from somewhere else. After you’d taken your shot, you couldn’t change anything anyway.

A split second after he lowered his head, a bullet cracked through the space where it had been. “Hello!” he said, and didn’t come up again, the way he might have otherwise.

“Somebody’s laying for you,” Benjamin Halévy remarked.

“Thanks a bunch. I never would have guessed without you,” Vaclav said. The Jew laughed. Vaclav didn’t. “God damn it to hell, that bastard was just standing there asking for it. I know I got him. Not even the Nazis would waste a man of their own for the sake of killing me … would they?” He heard the doubt in his own voice. Who could guess exactly how ruthless the Germans were?

“I’ll have a look.” Halévy did, cautiously, from ten meters down the trench. “I don’t find him now.”

“I wonder who he was. He acted like an officer, and a dumb officer to boot,” Vaclav said. “You wouldn’t see an enlisted man standing there giving that kind of target. The guys who really fight know better.”

“Maybe he was from the General Staff,” Sergeant Halévy said. “If half of what you hear about them is true, the Nazis with red stripes on their pants don’t know shit about the real world.”

“Easy to say that,” Jezek answered. “They’re here in France. They’re in
Poland. They’re all over Czechoslovakia, fuck ’em up the ass. I don’t see anybody else’s soldiers in Germany. Do you?”

“Well, no,” Halévy admitted. “But—” Before he could say anything more, German artillery came to thunderous life. He and Vaclav both dove for cover. Were the Fritzes shelling like that to avenge the
Dummkopf
Vaclav had knocked over? They did things like that. If the
Dummkopf
was an important
Dummkopf
, the Czech had accomplished something worth doing. He consoled himself with that—and hoped the Nazis’ vengeance wouldn’t come down on him now.

WILLI DERNEN EXAMINED
what was left of the head from the department-store dummy
Oberfeldwebel
Puttkamer had kitted out in German helmet and tunic. Even less was left of the dummy’s noggin than of the other sniper’s head. Willi let out a low, respectful whistle. “That piece packs a fuck of a wallop,” he said.

“What makes you think so, Sherlock Holmes?” Puttkamer enquired. Willi’s ears felt incandescent. The senior noncom went on, “He knows the tricks, damn him. He was down again before I could fire. I’m sure of it.”

“Too bad,” Willi said.

“You’d better believe it,” Marcus Puttkamer said. “He’s still out there. He’s still learning. He’s still got his goddamn peashooter, too. I slip up even a little, he’s gonna smash my skull just like the shitass dummy’s.” He considered Willi the way an entomologist considered a beetle before sticking a pin through it. “Or maybe yours.”

“Thanks a lot,
Feld,”
Willi said. He’d thought about that possibility before agreeing to become the sniper’s number two, but not too much. Getting out from under Awful Arno counted for more. Well, he’d done that. But everything you got in this world came with a price tag attached. Part of the price here was drawing the notice of a sharpshooter who carried a gun that could kill you out to a couple of thousand meters. Next to that, even Awful Arno seemed … not quite so awful, anyhow. Willi glanced toward the enemy’s lines—but made sure he didn’t raise his head above the parapet to do it. “What do we try now?”

Puttkamer lit a Gitane. Like Willi, he liked French tobacco better than the hay-and-horseshit smokes the
Reich
cranked out these days. After a moment’s pause, the
Oberfeldwebel
offered Willi the pack. With a nod of thanks, Willi took a smoke from it and leaned toward Puttkamer for a light. The first drag made him want to cough. Yeah, this was the real stuff, all right—no ersatz here.

“I don’t know what to try right this minute,” Puttkamer answered, snorting smoke out his nostrils like a puzzled dragon. “He’s good, sure as hell. Oh, and you’re right—screw me if he wasn’t wearing a Czech helmet again.” His stubbled cheeks hollowed as he inhaled.

“Wunderbar,”
Willi muttered.

“How about that?” the
Oberfeldwebel
said with an acid chuckle. “What I’ve got to do is, I’ve got to get him to make a mistake. If I’m there when he does it, he’ll never make another one.”

“Sounds great, but didn’t you just say he was good?” Willi returned. “So how do you think you can make him screw up?”

“Best idea I’ve had so far is to keep murdering as many French officers as I can, as far back from the trench as my rifle reaches,” Puttkamer answered matter-of-factly. “That won’t put
his
wind up—too much to hope for. But if all his superiors start screaming at him to get rid of the horrible Nazi gunslinger … They might make him move too fast and get careless. Or they might not,
natürlich
. But I think it’s worth a try. If you’ve got a better notion, sing out. Believe me, I’ll listen.”

Dernen did believe him. Puttkamer wasn’t like Awful Arno, always sure he was right no matter what he said or did. Yeah, there were advantages to getting away from Baatz, sure as hell. “What can I do to help?” Willi asked. He felt like an assistant at a chess tournament. But they wouldn’t take pieces off the board. No, they’d take at least one body.

“You can help kill them, that’s what. Let’s go get you a proper rifle, one with a scope on it,” Puttkamer said. “That piece of yours … Well, the factories turn out worse, but they sure as hell turn out better, too.”

Having seen what the sniper could do with his special Mauser, Willi didn’t argue. He was used to his own weapon, but he felt no forsaking-all-others attachment to it. And even if he had, he couldn’t just mount a telescope
on it and start picking off French officers a kilometer and a half away. Snipers’ Mausers had a special downturned bolt: the telescope interfered with the travel of an ordinary one.

The quartermaster sergeant was as snotty as quartermaster sergeants usually were. “You want one for
him
?” the fellow exclaimed, as if Willi had a girlfriend prettier than the one a proper quartermaster would have issued him.

“That’s right.” Marcus Puttkamer left it there. Not only was he an
Oberfeldwebel
himself, he was also a sniper. Who wanted to argue with him? Nobody with any sense, not even a quartermaster sergeant.

And so Willi got his rifle. “Bolt will take some getting used to,” he said. “I reach for the wrong place.”

“I did, too. You won’t take as long to get it as you think,” the sniper said. “But do you feel how smooth the action is? Sniper rifles are made the way they’re supposed to be. Now you’d better take care of it. You don’t keep it clean, you don’t keep it greased, I’ll mount a bayonet on it and
then
I’ll shove it up your ass. Get me?”

“Jawohl, Feld,”
Willi answered. Every sergeant he’d ever served under growled about keeping your weapon clean. Willi was as good about it as anyone, better than most. He could see why it would be especially important for a sniper.

“I want you to spend the rest of the day practicing with the scope,” Puttkamer said. “Don’t look toward the French lines. They’ll see you, and somebody will stop your career before it gets going. Look at our trenches instead. If there’s somebody you wouldn’t mind seeing dead, find out what he looks like with crosshairs on him. But you’re such a sweet guy, you don’t have anybody like that, right?”

“Oh, sure,” Willi said innocently.

Puttkamer chuckled. “The other thing is, you have to be able to wait. The better you are at holding still, the more targets you’ll service. And that’s the idea, right?”

“Right,” Willi said. The veteran didn’t care to talk about killing people. He did it, but he didn’t like to talk about it straight on. That was interesting, in its own way.

“Practice,” the veteran sniper repeated. “When I think you’re ready,
we’ll go out to a hide at night, and you can start potting froggies. Pick ones well back of the line, if you can. They’re more apt to be careless back there, anyhow. And if you do that, they’ll think it was me, and they’ll go buggier than they would if you showed a different style.”

“I understand. But what I do if I spot the Czech asshole with the antipanzer rifle?” Willi asked.

“Dispose of him,” Puttkamer said at once. “You think I’ll be mad? You think I’ll be jealous? Not a chance, kid. I’ll get you promoted. I’ll get you a medal. I’ll get you so fucking drunk, you’ll still have a
Katzenjammer
three days later. That’s our number one piece of business right now—dealing with that son of a bitch. You hear?”

“I hear.” Willi not only heard, he believed. Awful Arno would have tried his hardest to grab the credit if Willi did anything worth noticing. If
Oberfeldwebel
Puttkamer wasn’t like that, more power to him.

Baatz watched and sneered and made rude comments as Willi got used to his new weapon. Willi ignored him for a while. Then, as if by accident, he did get the corporal in the crosshairs. He didn’t have a round chambered. His finger was nowhere near the trigger. Awful Arno found something else to do in a hurry even so.