But Gunther felt safe. The Ivan snipers used a 3.5-power optic called a PU, which meant that even if his enemy were on him, the details would be so blurry that no sight picture could be made, not at 250 meters, which was about as far as the Mosin-Nagant with that scope was good for. So he felt invisible, even a little godlike. His higher degree of magnification gave him enough advantage.
He would wait a little while longer. That low sun would disappear and full dark would come. Both opponents, if there was another opponent, would wait until that happened and then gradually disengage and come back to fight tomorrow. But Gunther had decided to shoot. He’d been on this stand a week, and he convinced himself that he was seeing something new, having moved in at about three in the afternoon, and it could only be—
He closed his eyes. He counted to sixty.
“Not much time left, Gunther,” came the call from his Landser, leaning out of the stairwell behind him. “Need more hot water?”
“Shhh!” said Gunther.
“You’re going to shoot! Maybe we can get out of here early!”
Then the soldier disappeared, knowing further distraction was to nobody’s advantage. Gunther, meanwhile, prepared to fire. He carefully assembled his position behind the rifle, working methodically from toes to head, locking joints, finding angles for his limbs, making nuanced adjustments, building bone trusses under the seven-pound 7.92mm rifle resting on a sandbag, pushing the safety off, sliding his trigger finger out of the sheathing of the two gloves via a slot he’d cut in each. He felt the trigger’s coldness, felt his fingertip engage it, felt it move back, stacking slightly as it went, until it finally reached the precise edge between firing and not firing. At this point he committed fully by opening his eyes to acquire the picture through the glass of the Hensoldt Dialytan, four times larger than life, and settled the intersection of the crosswires on its center. He exhaled half his breath, put his weight against the trigger, feeling it just about to break, and then saw the flash.
The round hit him on a slightly downward angle at the midpoint of his right shoulder, breaking a whole network of bones, though missing any major arteries or blood-bearing organs. It was not fatal. In fact, it saved his life; his shoulder was so ruinously damaged that he was evacuated from Stalingrad that night, one of the last to escape the Cauldron, as it came to be called, full of Paulus’s unhappy men. Gunther lived to be eighty-nine years old, dying prosperous and well attended by grandchildren on his farm in Bavaria.
However, at the point of impact it felt like someone had unloaded a full-swing ten-kilo sledgeweight against him, lifting him, twisting him, depositing him. He was aware that he had fired in reaction to the trauma but knew full well that the shot, jerked and spastic, had no chance of reaching the target.
Dazzled by the shock, he recovered quickly and tried to cock the rifle but found of course that the arm attached to the now-destroyed shoulder no longer worked. Still, on instinct, his face returned to the stock, his eye returned to the scope, and it so happened that his opponent, having delivered the shot, had risen to depart just as one of those errant sunbeams pierced the interior of the room. As the figure rose and turned, the hood fell away and Gunther saw a cascade of yellow hair, bright as gold, reflect in the sunlight. Then the sniper was gone.
Men raced to him, tourniquets were supplied and applied, a stretcher was brought, but Gunther said to anybody who would listen, “Die weisse Hexe!”
The White Witch!
CHAPTER 1
He was an old man in a dry month. Swagger sat on his rocker on the porch, hard, stoic, isolate, unmelted. Nothing much engaged him these days. Indifferently, he watched sun and moon change, he watched the variations of the clouds, the flocks of birds, the far prairie dog, occasionally the antelope on the horizon. He watched the wind blow across the prairie, and saw the mountains in the distance. It meant nothing.
He drank the coffee his wife left brewed every morning. He played with his laptop until he got bored, and then he watched the wind in the grass until he got bored. He sat, he rocked. He was lonely.
Jen gone most of the day, one daughter a TV correspondent in Washington, D.C., the other at a summer riding program in Massachusetts where she would try to turn her western grace into eastern swank, his son the assistant director of the FBI sniper training school in Quantico, Virginia, Swagger spent most of his time on the porch in the company of ghosts and memories.
Dead friends, forgotten places, calls too close to call close, long shots paying off, luck by the ton, a lost wife, a found son, a murdered father, some justice here and there, all of it purchased with enough scars to carpet a house, the smell of fire and gun smoke eternally in his nostrils: it didn’t seem like anything that could be called an odyssey, just one mess after another.
“You are depressed,” said his wife.
“I got everything I ever wanted. I have friends, a fine wife, wonderful children. I survived several wars. Why would I be depressed?”
“Because you never cared about any of those things. Getting them is incidental and meaningless. You cared about something else. You cared about pleasing your goddamned father because he died before you could, and it has never left you. That is why you are depressed. You haven’t pleased him lately. You will never please him enough. You have issues. You need to see somebody.”
“I am fine. I ride every day, I don’t eat too much and never collected a gut, I can still put a bullet near anyplace I can see. Why would I be depressed?”
“You need a mission. Or a new young woman to fall in love with and never touch. I notice those things seem to come together. You need a war. You need someone to shoot at you, so you can shoot back. You need all those things, and as beautiful as this place is and as much as it’s everything a man could want, it’s not enough. For most, maybe. Not for Bob Lee Swagger, sheriff of dry gulches and high noons every day of the week.”
But then an e-mail had arrived that actually had been authored by a human being: J. F. Guthrie, an ex — British service armorer who had made a career writing books about sniper warfare through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and had approached Bob about telling the Bob story. Bob turned him down flat cold — he had no urge to refight old fights, since he visited them every night in his nightmares — but the man was so charming that a friendship had developed and the Internet allowed it to blossom.
Dear Swagger, wrote “Jimmy” Guthrie, thought I’d invite you to the British Gun Club’s annual WWII Sniper Match, to be held this coming October at the old British service range at Bisley. You’d have a fine time. The admirers and fan boys would know enough to keep their distance and you’d also meet some fellow tradesmen, Brit style, for a nice spot of shop talk. Everybody loves shop talk.
I’ll be shooting my treasured Enfield No. 4 (T), of course, and I’d be happy to loan you either a Garand M1D or a Springfield with Unertl for yourself from my collection. Or you could bring an M40 of your own, if you care to do a dance with our antiquated customs.
Know you’d get a cheer-up, know the real boys would love to rub shoulders with the Nailer himself. Details if you’re interested. Do consider.
Jimmy
It would be fun. It would be a goal, something to organize and prepare for. It would reengage him in the world, and prove to him that at sixty-eight, he still had some fuel left in the tank.
But: it would also put him into contact with people who were drawn to the killer. He knew, he understood. Certain folks, though they might never admit it, dreamed of killing and in some unsavory way were powerfully attracted to an artist of the craft, which Swagger certainly was. Not for sex, not for wisdom, not for fantasy or even, really, friendship; just in some soft-vampire way to feed on his aura. Maybe Jimmy himself was such a man; maybe if so, he hid it better. Swagger always felt a little debased by such transactions, not that there was any ill spirit in them, but they just felt wrong. They made too much of the killing, as if the killing itself were the point, when the truth was nobody could last in the profession for the killing alone. You had to believe in something bigger, and in service to that — duty, honor, country, the kid in the next foxhole, the will to survive, to win, something never clearly understood called the Big Picture, something never talked of called honor — you could persevere, even occasionally flourish. Whatever it was, it was not shared easily, particularly since he had made the big mistake of reading way too much on the subject and understood he possessed a dangerous amount of data that opened him up to the horror of self-knowledge.