“No, sir.”
“Well, if you had fractured your skull I guess we’d know it by now, mainly because you’d probably be dead from swelling on the brain.”
Ty felt a little sick to his stomach. His appetite was gone because he spent whole days feeling nauseous.
“How long will this last?”
The doctor took off his glasses and polished them with a corner of his white coat. “Anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months. Until then, best thing to do is get plenty of rest, avoid booze and cigarettes — and try not to get knocked in the head again.”
Leaving the doctor’s office, Ty almost laughed. Plenty of rest. That doctor had a sense of humor.
Two days after Hess and Zumwald arrived, the farmer drove into town in his old truck to pick up supplies, leaving them to work the farm alone. As soon as the old man’s truck was out of sight, Hess dropped the grain shovel he had been using to clean up after the cows and retrieved his rifle from its hiding place. Between being dropped and then used as a club, the weapon had taken an awful beating the night of the assassination attempt in Washington. Aside from a fresh nick or two in the stock, the Mosin-Nagant looked no worse for wear. But Hess wanted to make certain that the rifle still shot true. He would sight it in again before chancing a stray bullet during his second attempt on Eisenhower.
The farmer fed his hogs from a supply of half-rotten vegetables that had been caught by the frost. Hess picked out a pumpkin and a couple of round acorn squashes, then put them in a sack. With the rifle in one hand and the sack over his shoulder, he trudged off through the snow.
He crossed through the bare winter woods to an empty pasture out of sight of the house and barn. He guessed he had an hour or so at least before the farmer returned — should be plenty of time. At the edge of the pasture was a windfall. Hess set the pumpkin and squashes on the log so that they perched like birds on a wire, then walked to the woods on the opposite side of the pasture and found another log that he could lay the rifle across. He put the balled-up burlap sack under the stock first to cushion it.
The Mosin-Nagant looked more brutal than elegant. Compared to the finely machined adaptation of the Mauser Infanteriegewehr 98 issued to German snipers, the Russian weapon looked considerably more primitive, almost like a club. The heavy wooden stock, chosen for the straightness of the grain, was made of especially dense wood harvested from slow-growing trees in the Ural forests. This was wood that thrived on the cold. The sling was made of canvas webbing trimmed in leather. The heaviness of the rifle compared to the Mauser gave it more accuracy, plus the barrel was a good nine inches longer. With a rifle like that, a good sniper could regularly reach out to one thousand meters. Among the German snipers at Stalingrad, the Mosin-Nagant had become highly prized. If you shot a Russian sniper, it was worth risking your life to retrieve his rifle. There was even a saying among the German snipers at Stalingrad that you were issued a Mauser but you earned a Mosin-Nagant.
The only aspect of the rifle Hess did not like was the Type PU telescopic sight in 3.5 power. With its single-post sight, fixed focus eyepiece and simple adjustments, it was not nearly as expensive as the as the Busch Visar sight that came as standard issue with the Mauser. But there were always tradeoffs when it came to equipment. Hess was willing to live with the adequate Russian sight in exchange for the rifle’s improved range and accuracy.
Hess aligned the single-post sight on the center of the pumpkin and squeezed the trigger. The rifle gave a satisfying jolt against his shoulder and the roar of the shot echoed in the bowl of the mountain valley. The bullet kicked up snow far to the left of the pumpkin. Damn. The rifle was even more off kilter than he had thought.
He took out an American dime and used the edge to turn the windage screw on the side of the scope. His next bullet splintered the log just below the pumpkin. He turned the top windage screw one click. This time, the frozen pumpkin shattered. Hess smiled. He had to admit that the Russians had gotten something right. The Mosin-Nagant was a damn workhorse of a rifle.
Two bullets gone. In the sinking of U-351, Hess had lost most of his cartridges, leaving him with the five rounds in the magazine plus a handful he had stuffed into his pockets. He would need just one to finish Eisenhower. He put the sight on one of the gourds, a much smaller target. It exploded in a burst of bright yellow pulp. I have not lost my touch. Then Hess got up from behind the log and moved in front of it, spreading the burlap bag on the snowy ground. He sat down with his knees bent in front of him, one foot slightly farther out than the other, then put his elbows on his knees. He inhaled, let the post sight dance across the gourd until just the right moment, and then took up the slack in the trigger. The gourd disappeared in a spray of pulp.
Hess got up and retrieved two of the empty cartridges. The third was lost somewhere in the snow. No matter. From what the old farmer had told him, he knew this was hunting country. No one would think twice about a few rifle shots. He picked up the burlap sack and headed back toward the barn. He would try for a real target soon enough.
Chapter 20
Ty rode out to meet the small plane that had just buzzed overhead. His old friend Captain Grantham had sent a telegraph with the marksman’s name and expected date of arrival.
The drive to the airfield took about ten minutes, following a winding road through woods and past cornfields where last year’s stubble poked up through the snow. There was no landing strip at the resort, but this one had been built nearby to meet the wartime needs of the impromptu military R&R facility and hospital. In a way, White Sulphur Springs was an unusual choice of location. It was too far removed from any metropolitan area to be convenient. At the same time, the resort’s isolation gave the military all the privacy it needed. Besides, there wasn’t much demand for luxurious surroundings while American boys were fighting and dying in the Pacific and in Europe. The facilities were being put to good use until the war ended.
It was the opinion of Ike’s whip-cracking chief of staff, Joe Durham, that the general ought not to be bothered with the details of providing security during his visit to the resort. He simply assured the general that precautions were being taken. This did not mean Ty had a free hand. He had run the idea for bringing in a sniper of their own by Durham, who had approved. Durham was a man who appreciated initiative. “I’m going to hand security off to you,” Durham had said. He studied the gash on Ty’s cheek and the nasty purple bruise that bloomed across his cheekbone. “If you think you’re up to it.”
Ty had jumped at the chance. Durham had urged him to handle things quietly — there was no point in upsetting Mamie Eisenhower with a lot of extra guards.
It was only as Ty watched the plane descend that he understood the enormity of the task he had undertaken. The morning was clear and cold, and they arrived at the airstrip in time to see the plane descend from a blue sky that seemed to go on forever. A single passenger got out. The pilot helped him unload a duffel bag, which the passenger slung over his shoulder, stooping under the load. Ty and the driver stood by the car, waiting.
Ty was taken aback. He hadn’t been sure what to expect, but the man who had gotten out of the plan looked far from deadly. The soldier who approached, weighted down under the duffel bag, was no more than five-feet-eight and maybe one hundred and forty pounds. Yet up close he looked like some kind of knobby tree root that had been dug up and left to dry in the sun. His leathery skin seemed permanently tanned and from the crow’s feet around the man’s eyes Ty guessed he was mid-thirties or older — which might explain some of the attitude at running into a much younger officer. The driver stepped forward to take the sergeant’s duffel but he swung his shoulder away.