Vaclav Jezek hadn’t known what summer heat was like till he came to Spain. The Czech had thought he did, but now he owned he’d been just a beginner. The sun northwest of Madrid beat down on his head as if out of a blue enamel bowl that focused all its heat right there.
He lay in a shell hole in the no-man’s-land between the Republicans’ barbed wire and the stuff the Fascists strung. He had branches and bits of greenery on his helmet and here and there on his uniform. They didn’t block the heat. They weren’t supposed to. They did help break up his outline, to make it harder for Marshal Sanjurjo’s men to spot him out here.
His antitank rifle also had its long, straight barrel bedecked with leaves and twigs. The damn thing wasn’t much shorter than he was. It weighed a tonne. The French had made it to fire a slug as wide as a man’s thumb through a tank’s armor. It could do that … to any tank made in the 1930s. It was as powerful a rifle as one man could carry and fire. Even with a muzzle brake and a padded stock, it kicked harder than any mule ever born.
No matter how powerful it was, it couldn’t kill the bigger, heavier modern tanks the war had spawned. To the logical French, if it couldn’t do the job for which it was made, it was useless.
French logic, though, reached only so far. The antitank rifle fired a very heavy bullet with a very high muzzle velocity. The round flew fast and far and flat. It might not be able to cope with a Panzer IV, but it could knock over a man at a couple of kilometers. It was, in other words, a perfect sniper’s rifle.
In France, Vaclav had killed German officers who made the fatal mistake of thinking they were too far behind the line to worry about keeping their heads down. When France hopped into Hitler’s arms for a while, she generously allowed the Czechs who fought for their government-in-exile to cross the border into Spain and take service with the Republic. Vaclav brought the antitank rifle with him. By then, he would have killed anybody who tried to take it away from him.
After a couple of years here, he knew enough Spanish to get fed. He knew enough to get drunk. He knew enough to get laid. He could cuss some, too. He had the essentials, in other words. Anything past the essentials, no. He spoke pretty good German-a lot of Czechs did-which helped him with the men of the International Brigades but not with the Republicans. Most of the Spaniards who could Deutsch sprechen fought on Sanjurjo’s side.
Like the rest of the Czechs, he’d made himself useful here. He’d actually used the rifle on enemy tanks. Sanjurjo’s men tried sending some old Italian tankettes against the Internationals. They had enough armor to laugh at ordinary small-arms fire. Not at what his overmuscled elephant gun could do, though.
And he’d killed General Franco with the antitank rifle. Not as good as blowing off Sanjurjo’s jowly head, but the next best thing. He’d got a medal for that, and a wad of pesetas to go with it that gave him one hell of a spree in Madrid.
Marshal Sanjurjo had an even bigger price on his head than his late general had. If the marshal ever decided to inspect these lines and came within 2,000 meters of wherever the Czech happened to be hiding, Vaclav vowed that he was one dead bigwig.
Meanwhile … Meanwhile, he waited. He spied on the Nationalists’ lines with a pair of binoculars wrapped in burlap. He’d stuck cardboard above their objective lenses so no untimely reflections would give him away. And he’d taken the same precaution with the objective on the rifle’s telescopic sight.
Careless snipers had short careers. He wanted to go back to Czechoslovakia after the war ended … if the war ever ended, and if there was any Czechoslovakia to go back to once it did. Dying in France fighting against the Nazis, he would at least have been playing against the first team. Making a mistake that let some Spaniard in a diarrhea-yellow uniform plug him would just be embarrassing.
No, not just embarrassing. Painful, too.
Not much was going on now on either side of the line. Here and there, a rifleman would take a shot at somebody in the wrong uniform who was rash enough to put himself on display. Most of the time, the would-be assassin was a crappy shot and missed. His attempted victim would dive for cover.
Vaclav was anything but a crappy shot. He’d been good when the Czechoslovakian Army drafted him. Plenty of practice in the years since left him a hell of a lot better than good. He could have killed plenty of careless Nationalists at the front line.
But that would have been like spending a hundred English pounds for a glass of beer. Ordinary privates and noncoms weren’t worth killing with an antitank rifle. If he yielded to temptation and let the air out of one of those bastards, he’d have to find a new hiding place. Shooting twice in a row from the same spot was more dangerous than lighting three on a match. You were telling the enemy right where you were. You were telling him you were stupid enough to stay there, too.
So he ignored the jerks who stuck their brainless heads up over the parapet for a look around. He scanned farther back, to the places where most of the time you wouldn’t need to worry about getting shot. Nationalist officers wore much fancier uniforms and headgear than the men they led. Killing a colonel might do more for the Republican cause than exterminating a company’s worth of ordinary soldiers.
For the moment, though, nobody worth shooting was showing himself. So Vaclav brought down the glasses and surveyed the shattered ground ahead of where he lay. Every once in a while, Sanjurjo’s men sneaked out to hunt snipers. He’d blown big holes in a couple of those guys. He was ruthless about keeping himself in one piece.
And the Spanish Fascists sent snipers of their own out into no-man’s-land. They didn’t have anybody with a monster gun like his. But a good shot with a good rifle could kill a man a kilometer away-not every time, maybe, but often enough to be dangerous. Vaclav knew what the ground was supposed to look like from here. He knew what it was supposed to look like from almost every centimeter in front of the stretch of trench the Czechs held. Knowing such things was like a life-insurance policy. Any little change might-probably would-mark trouble.
He didn’t see any little changes, though. The heat made everybody move at half speed. Let the sun kill the bastards on the other side, the thought seemed to be. Shooting them was too much trouble for soldiers.
After a while, it got to be too much trouble for Jezek. He ate brown bread and crumbly Spanish sausage full of fennel. It could give you the runs, but it tasted good. To kill some germs, he washed it down with sharp white wine from the canteen on his belt. He would rather have drunk beer-he was a Czech, all right. But most Spanish beer tasted like piss, and smelled like it, too. Wine was also easier to come by here.
He wanted a cigarette. He didn’t light one. Smoke could give you away. He wouldn’t get too jittery before he went back inside the barbed wire among his friends and countrymen. He’d puff away once he did.
Some days went by without his firing a shot. If he didn’t see anything worth firing at, he just stayed where he was till it got dark. Let the Nationalists think they’d finally killed him while they were shelling no-man’s-land. It might make them careless. Then they’d give him better targets.
What was this? A truck coming up toward the Fascists’ lines. Canvas tied down over hoops covered the rear compartment. When the truck stopped, soldiers got out. A man hopped down from the passenger side of the front seat, too. That and his uniform told Jezek he was an officer.
Nothing much had happened yet today. So … why not? The officer gestured, getting his men ready to do whatever they were going to do. Vaclav took careful aim. Not much wind. Range about 1,100 meters. You might even do this with a Mauser, though you’d need a little luck as well as skill. Luck never hurt, of course. But with this much gun, skill alone could turn the trick.