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Posted: 7/1/2015 8:08:03 AM EDT
Anybody here think Stephen Hunter should retire BLS? Just finished Snipers Honor. Story seemed tired. That's All.
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The movie was fantasyland! I've seen a few, 'wooden' performances in my time; but Marky Mark pretending to know what he's doing with a gun in his hands would have been laughable if it weren't so sad. He actually seemed befuddled whenever he tried to talk ballistics.
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There's still a lot to be mined from a younger Bob Lee.
There's his first two tours in Vietnam, one with SOG. There's also his "lost decade" when the bottle took him. There's been mention of Bob Lee's grandfather, a man described as a near monster??? Earl is pretty well time limited. There's only so much time between his leaving the Corps at the end of WWII and getting killed in the corn field. However, there is WWII and some good stories there. Bob Lee is just too old to go on much longer and his son is sort of a failed story line to me. I can proudly state that I never watched the movie. When I saw that Danny Glover was in it, that was it for me. |
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There's still a lot to be mined from a younger Bob Lee. There's his first two tours in Vietnam, one with SOG. There's also his "lost decade" when the bottle took him. There's been mention of Bob Lee's grandfather, a man described as a near monster??? Earl is pretty well time limited. There's only so much time between his leaving the Corps at the end of WWII and getting killed in the corn field. However, there is WWII and some good stories there. Bob Lee is just too old to go on much longer and his son is sort of a failed story line to me. I can proudly state that I never watched the movie. When I saw that Danny Glover was in it, that was it for me. View Quote I don't remember mention of SOG. Bob Lee Swager was a Marine sniper in Vietnam. I don't remember Marines falling under SOG. I thought only Army was. What book was it mentioned in? I think there is a lot that Hunter could write about with Bob Lee Swager being in Vietnam and the years before and after. Also his father Earl I agree could be some good story line's with him being WWII and just a few years after. The grandfather might be a good storyline too. I think Hunter may be is rushing his work. The first books were the best. |
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Bob Lee's serving in SOG was mentioned in several books.
SOG, contrary to popular belief used people from most of the services in one capacity or another. Many people never knew they were in SOG it was so secret. |
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Bob Lee's serving in SOG was mentioned in several books. SOG, contrary to popular belief used people from most of the services in one capacity or another. Many people never knew they were in SOG it was so secret. View Quote That is interesting. I have read a lot and didn't know that SOG used everyone. I always wondered why they didn't use other troops. Man Hunter should explore doing a whole series on Vietnam and bring SOG into it. |
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SOG used Army Special Forces, LRP-LRRP-Rangers, Navy SEALs, Airforce pilots, Army helicopter pilots, and Marine Force Recon.
Casualties were astronomical, and reportedly EVERYONE who was on the ground and many in the air got Purple Hearts for wounds. SOG needed a lot of people and got them wherever they could, with the preference being Army SF. Lots of support people had no idea they were in SOG. |
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SOG used Army Special Forces, LRP-LRRP-Rangers, Navy SEALs, Airforce pilots, Army helicopter pilots, and Marine Force Recon. Casualties were astronomical, and reportedly EVERYONE who was on the ground and many in the air got Purple Hearts for wounds. SOG needed a lot of people and got them wherever they could, with the preference being Army SF. Lots of support people had no idea they were in SOG. View Quote Yeah, Stephen Hunter should really dig into Bob's time in Vietnam. I know that if he went back to his style of writing like it was with the first three books those would be great! |
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The good thing about getting old and your memory not being so sharp anymore is that you can go back and read books you read 10+ years ago and it seems like the first time. -- I've got all of Hunter's books sitting on a shelf to read again.
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There's still a lot to be mined from a younger Bob Lee. There's his first two tours in Vietnam, one with SOG. There's also his "lost decade" when the bottle took him. There's been mention of Bob Lee's grandfather, a man described as a near monster??? Earl is pretty well time limited. There's only so much time between his leaving the Corps at the end of WWII and getting killed in the corn field. However, there is WWII and some good stories there. View Quote I was going to point out that none of the Swagger books were books about the wars that produced their protagonists, but rather the wars were in there to give some background on why these guys were hardasses and super-capable when it came to martial matters (aside from the opening of that one book, I think it was Time To Hunt?) But then I realized that straying from the formula might just be what Hunter needs to mix it up and freshen the series. The opening from Time to Hunt was pretty good, and an entire book of that would be pretty entertaining. |
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I was thinking Hunter should write some stand alone stories. Give BLS a rest. The sitting in the rocker with the bad hip, and than called into action is getting stale.
Imho. |
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I was thinking Hunter should write some stand alone stories. Give BLS a rest. The sitting in the rocker with the bad hip, and than called into action is getting stale. Imho. View Quote I agree. He needs to break out of his formula. I've enjoyed a fair number of his books, and been less than impressed with a few of them. What I've noticed is that in the books when he writes about a Swagger, whether it's Bob Lee or Earl, he's essentially writing about the same character, and eventually it gets old. Personally, one of my favorite books by Hunter is Dirty White Boys, which was a stand alone (more or less, there were some tie-ins with other books). |
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There's still a lot to be mined from a younger Bob Lee. There's his first two tours in Vietnam, one with SOG. There's also his "lost decade" when the bottle took him. There's been mention of Bob Lee's grandfather, a man described as a near monster??? Earl is pretty well time limited. There's only so much time between his leaving the Corps at the end of WWII and getting killed in the corn field. However, there is WWII and some good stories there. Bob Lee is just too old to go on much longer and his son is sort of a failed story line to me. I can proudly state that I never watched the movie. When I saw that Danny Glover was in it, that was it for me. View Quote The two best things in the movie is the initial scene with Kate Mara. |
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Haven't read it yet, but it's something totally different.
http://www.amazon.com/I-Ripper-Novel-Stephen-Hunter/dp/1476764859/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1437326791&sr=8-1&keywords=stephen+hunter&pebp=1437326796317&perid=1X94V54JM9AT36JVGP95 |
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I was so excited about the "New"(it hadn't come out yet) Bob Lee book "47th samurai". I read until he got attacked at the house in Japan and couldn't read any more. I think I had read all of Hunter's books up to that point, and loved them, but something about that one was not right. I never finished it, and haven't read any of his books since.
And they didn't do a good job on the move "shooter" it lost something when Bob wasn't an older guy. |
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Paul Chardy and Frenchy Short are both SOG or Phoenix characters in the Bob Lee Swagger universe.
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I've read every book Stephen Hunter has written. Of them all, I like Earl Swagger stories the best. I lost faith in Bob Lee when he became a Samurai Warrior.
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Hunter said that he was probably going to put BLS out to pasture, that he was getting long in the tooth.
I wish he would write about BLS in Vietnam. |
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Hunter said that he was probably going to put BLS out to pasture, that he was getting long in the tooth. I wish he would write about BLS in Vietnam. View Quote I agree it would be great to have stories of him in Vietnam doing missions and what not. I think there could be at least three if not four books just on that alone. Maybe we should write Hunters publisher and Hunter himself and get the ball rolling. |
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I think Time to Hunt was really his last great boot, as much as it sucks to admit. The story was brilliant and FINALLY filled in what happened in Vietnam as far as his legendary valley battle. But I also liked the tie in with the Fenns and the peace movement.
I think Hunter is just getting old and trying to continue cranking material out without much concern for the story anymore. I'd have to agree that digging into Bob Lee in Vietnam (show him as the scared FNG turning into a badass sergeant) or even Earl in the Banana Wars or China. He really did do a great job setting up a bunch of possible story lines, but hasn't really followed any of them. One quirk I've picked up on in his recent books (it's almost one of those things where I read to see if this will finally be another great one) is that he tends to find a term or phrase and latch on like it's going out of style. I, Sniper with the two constantly calling each other "Sniper" and on into other terms in other books. |
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Haven't read it yet, but it's something totally different. http://www.amazon.com/I-Ripper-Novel-Stephen-Hunter/dp/1476764859/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1437326791&sr=8-1&keywords=stephen+hunter&pebp=1437326796317&perid=1X94V54JM9AT36JVGP95 View Quote Finally got around to reading it. Pretty good. |
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I agree. He needs to break out of his formula. I've enjoyed a fair number of his books, and been less than impressed with a few of them. What I've noticed is that in the books when he writes about a Swagger, whether it's Bob Lee or Earl, he's essentially writing about the same character, and eventually it gets old. Personally, one of my favorite books by Hunter is Dirty White Boys, which was a stand alone (more or less, there were some tie-ins with other books). View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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I was thinking Hunter should write some stand alone stories. Give BLS a rest. The sitting in the rocker with the bad hip, and than called into action is getting stale. Imho. I agree. He needs to break out of his formula. I've enjoyed a fair number of his books, and been less than impressed with a few of them. What I've noticed is that in the books when he writes about a Swagger, whether it's Bob Lee or Earl, he's essentially writing about the same character, and eventually it gets old. Personally, one of my favorite books by Hunter is Dirty White Boys, which was a stand alone (more or less, there were some tie-ins with other books). The first of his books I read was in 89 or 90, The day before midnight. |
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I grew up in the '80s. All the badasses were former Vietnam. The A-Team. The Punisher. Every movie badass. It was almost as if at the time just saying a guy was in Vietnam was a lot quicker than trying to spend time as an author/screenwriter trying to establish a guy's badass cred elsewhere in the narrative.
My dad was in Vietnam, and granted he was there a couple of years before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was signed formally entering the US into the war, but he's old as fuck and on his best day just not falling over is an accomplishment. It's hard for me to picture the hardasses from Vietnam fucking up anyone anymore other than the occasional verbal assault on a waitress at their favorite coffee hangout. I stopped reading Bob Lee books about ten years ago when I could no longer suspend disbelief regarding Swagger's age in comparison with his deeds. Shame on me for my age discrimination. |
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I enjoyed The Third Bullet. I've been a JFK assassination buff for years so maybe I'm biased.
Give us the back story on Earl and Bob Lee in their respective wars. Grand Dad would be....Spanish American war or WWI....cool. If Hunter wants to branch out, just don't go the route Clive Cussler has taken. We don't need four different series of characters recycling the same plots your original hero's pulled off 35 years ago set in different periods of time. |
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I agree. He needs to break out of his formula. I've enjoyed a fair number of his books, and been less than impressed with a few of them. What I've noticed is that in the books when he writes about a Swagger, whether it's Bob Lee or Earl, he's essentially writing about the same character, and eventually it gets old. The first of his books I read was in 89 or 90, The day before midnight. I have never been grabbed by any of the Swagger books except for Point of Impact. Day Before Midnight was awesome, so tense on the first reading. I haven't liked any of his other books much, other than the short section in The Master Sniper where the German sniper Repp is "in the zone" for a day's battle in a Soviet city: Click To View Spoiler A frozen February's memory floated up before him, a desperate month of a desperate year, '42. Totenkopf division had been pushed into a few square miles of a pulverized city named Demyansk, in the Valdai Hills between Lake Ilmen and Lake Seliger in northern Russia--the Winter War, they later called it. In the city, all rudiments of military organization had broken down: the battle had become one huge alley fight, a small-unit action repeated on a vast scale, as groups of men stalked each other through the ruins. Young Repp, a Hauptsturmfrihrer, as the Waffen SS designated its captains, was the champion stalker. With his MannlicherSchoenauer 6.5-millimeter mounting the 10X Unerti scope, he wandered from gunfight to gunfight, dropping five, ten, fifteen men at a throw. He was a brilliant shot, and about to become famous. The morning of the twenty-third found him squatting wearily in the ruins of a factory, the Red Tractor Plant, sipping tepid ersatz, listening to the soldiers around him grouse. He didn't blame them. The night had been one long fruitless counter sniper operation: the Popovs were curiously silent. He was tired, tired down to his fingers; his eyes were swollen and they ached. As he examined the thin swirl of liquid in the tin cup, it was not hard for him to imagine other places he'd rather be. Yawning, he glanced around the interior of the factory, a maze of wreckage, twisted girders, heaps of brick, a skeletal outline showing against a gray sky that promised more snow; the damned stuff had fallen again yesterday, must be six feet of it now, and all about the factory fresh white piles of it gleamed brightly against the blackened walls, giving the place a strange purity. It was cold, below zero; but Repp was past caring of cold. He'd gotten used to it. He wanted sleep, that was all. The firing opened gradually. Shots always rattled around the city as patrols bumped into each other in alleyways; one grew accustomed and did not even hear them, or the explosions either, but as the intensity seemed to mount after several minutes, when contact might ordinarily be measured in seconds, some of the men around him perked up out of their whiny conversations. "Ivan's knocking again," someone said. "Shit. The bastards. Don't they sleep?" "Don't get excited," someone cautioned, "probably some kid with an automatic." "That's more than one automatic," another said. And indeed it was, Repp could tell too, for the firing then churned like a thunderstorm. "All right, people," said a calm sergeant, "let's cut the shit and wait for the officers." He hadn't seen Repp, who continued to lie there. After several minutes a lieutenant came in, fast, looked about for the sergeant. "Let's get them out, huh? A big one, I'm afraid," he said laconically. Then he saw Repp, was taken aback by another officer. "Oh? Say, what the hell, who the hell are--" "Repp," said Repp. "Damn! I needed sleep bad. How many? Big, you say." "It's not clear yet. Too much smoke and dust at the end of Groski Prospekt. But it sounds big." "All right," said Repp, "these are your boys, you know what to do." "Yes, sir." Repp picked himself up wearily. He nicked the ersatz out and paused for a moment. Men scurried by, clapping helmets on, drawing parkas tighter, throwing Kar '98 bolts, rushing into the street. Repp checked the pocket of his snow smock, then tightened it. He was loaded with ammo, not having fired a round the night before. The Mannlicher-Schoenauer fired from a clever spool magazine, almost like the cylinder of a revolver, and Repp had a pouchful of the things. He stepped into the street finally, with the rifle. Outside, the glare was fierce and the panic unleashed. He felt at storm center. At the end of Groski Prospekt an armored car blazed. Small-arms fire kicked up spurts of dust and snow along the pavement. The noise was ugly, careening. SS Panzergrenadiers came racing down the corridor from the wall of smoke, one of them dropping when a shot took him. As they fled by, Repp snagged one. "No use. No use. They've broken through. Hundreds, thousands, oh, Christ, only a block--" A blast drowned him out and a wall went down nearby, filling the air with smoke and dust. The panicked man squirmed away and disappeared. Repp saw the young lieutenant placing his men in the wreckage along the street. They all looked scared but somehow resigned. Totenkopfdivision had a reputation for staying put. Repp knew that reputation was to be tested again. Smoke shielded the end of the street from his eyes. Nothing down there but haze. "Herr Repp," someone yelled, for he already had a reputation, "kill a batch of the fuckers for us, it looks like we won't be around to do it ourselves." Repp laughed. Now that was a man with spirit. "Kill them yourself, sonny. I'm off duty." More laughter. Repp turned, headed back into the factory. He was tired of Ivans and wreckage and filth from blown-up sewers and rats the size of cats that prowled the ruins and crawled across your belly while you slept and he never expected to survive anyway, so why not go out today? It was as good as any day. A stairway left freakishly standing in one corner of the room caught his eye. He followed it up through the deserted upper floors of the factory. He heard men crashing in below. Totenkopf people, falling back on the factory. So that was it then, the Red Tractor Plant. He was twenty-eight years old and he'd never be another day older and he'd spend his last one here in a place where Bolshevik peasants built tractors and, more recently, tanks. Not the end he'd have picked, but as numbness settled over him, he began to feel it wouldn't be so bad at all. He was in a hurry to be done. At the top he found himself in a clock tower of some kind, shot out, of course, nothing up there but snow and old timbers, bricks, half a wall blown away, other gaps from rogue artillery rounds. Yet one large hole opened up a marvelous view of the Groski Prospekt--a canyon of ragged walls buried in smoke. Even as he scanned this landscape of devastation, it seemed to come alive before him. He could see them, swarming now, Popovs, in those white snowsuits, domed brown helmets, carrying submachine guns. Repp delicately brought the rifle to his shoulder and braced it on a ledge of brick. The scope yielded a Russian, scurrying ratlike from obstacle to obstacle. He lifted his head warily and nicked his eyes about and Repp shot him in the throat, a spew of crimson foaming down across his front in the split second before he dropped. The man was about 400 meters out. Repp tossed the bolt--a butter knife handle, not knobby like the Kar '98--through the Mannlicher's split bridge, keeping his eye pinned against the cup of the absurd Unerti ten-power scope, which threw up images big and clear as a Berlin cinema. Its reticule was three converging lines, from left, right and bottom, which almost but did not quite meet, creating a tiny circle of space. Repp's trick was to keep the circle filled; he laid it now against another Red, an officer. He killed him. He was shooting faster, there seemed to be so many of them. He was wedged into the bricks of the tower, rather comfortably, and at each shot, the rifle reported sharply with a slight jar, not like the bone-bruising buck of the Kar '98, but gentle and dry. When he hit them, they slid into the rubble, stained but not shattered. A 6.5-millimeter killed with velocity, not impact; it drilled them and, failing deflection at bone or spine, flew on. Repp was even convinced they felt no pain from the way they relaxed. He didn't even have to move the rifle much, he could just leave it where it was, they were swarming so thickly. He'd fired five magazines now, twenty-five rounds. He'd killed twenty-five men. Some looked stupefied when he took them; others angry; still others oblivious. Repp shot for the chest. He took no chances. Nothing fancy. They had spotted him of course. Their bullets thunked and cracked around him, chipping at the bricks, filling the air with fine dust or snow, but he felt magical. He kept dropping them. The white bodies were piling up. Behind him now sprang a noise, and Repp whirled. A boy crouched at the head of the stairs with a pack. "Your kit, sir. You left it down below." "Ah." Yes, someone'd thought to bring it to him. It was packed with ammunition, six more boxes, in each fifty specially loaded rounds, 180 grains behind a nickle-tip slug. Berdan primers--the best--with twin flash holes. "Can you load those for me? It works same as with your rifle, off the charger," Repp said mildly as a Degtyarev tracer winked through and buried itself in the wall. He pointed to the litter of empty spool magazines lying amid spent shells at his boots. "But stay low, those fellows are really angry now." Repp fired all that morning. The Russian attack had broken down, bottled up at Groski Prospekt. He'd killed all their officers and was quite sure that had been a colonel he'd put down just an instant ago. He thought he'd killed almost a hundred. Nineteen magazines, and three rounds left in this one; he'd killed, so far, ninety-eight men in just over two hours. The rifle had grown hot, and he'd stopped once or twice to squirt a drop or so of oil down its barrel. In one two-minute period, he ran his ramrod with patch vigorously in the barrel and the patch came up black with gunk. The boy crouched at his feet, and every time an empty spool dropped out, he picked it up and carefully threaded the brass cartridges in. The Popovs were now coming from other directions; evidently, they'd sent flanking parties around. But these men ran into heavy fire from down below, and those that survived, Repp took. Still, the volume of fire against the Red Tractor Plant was building; Repp could sense the battle rising again in pitch. These things had their melodies too, and he fancied he could hear it. The grimy lieutenant from that morning appeared in the stairwell. "You still alive?" Repp asked. But the fellow was in no mood for Repp's jokes. "They're breaking through. We haven't the firepower to hold them off much longer. They're already in a wing of the factory. Come on, get out, Repp. There's still a chance to make it out on foot." "Thanks, old man, think I'll stay," Repp said merrily. He felt schuss fest bulletproof, but with deeper resonations in the German, connoting magic, a charmed state. "Repp, there's nothing here but death." "Go on yourself," said Repp. "I'm having too much fun to leave." He was hitting at longer ranges now; through the drifting pall of smoke he made out small figures several blocks away. Magnified tenfold by the Unerti, two Russian officers conferred in a doorway over a map. The scene was astonishingly intimate, he could almost see the hair in their ears. Repp took one through the heart and the other, who turned away when his comrade was hit, as if in hiding his eyes he was protecting himself, through the neck. Repp killed a sniper seven blocks away. In another street Repp took the driver of a truck, splattering the windscreen into a galaxy of fractures. The vehicle bumped aimlessly against a rubble pile and men spilled out and scrambled for cover. Of seven he took three. Down below, grenades detonated in a cluster, machine pistols ripped in a closed space which caught and multiplied their noise. "I think they're in the building," Repp said. "I've loaded all the rounds left in the magazines now," the trooper said. "Nine of them. That's forty-five more bullets." "You'd best be getting on then. And thanks." The boy blushed sheepishly. Maybe eighteen or nineteen, handsome, thin face. "If I see you afterward, I'll write a nice note to your officer," Repp said, an absurdly civil moment in the heat of a great modern battle. Bullets were banging into the tower from all angles now, rattling and popping. The boy raced down the stairs. At the end of Groski Prospekt, the Ivans were organizing for another push before nightfall. Repp killed one who stupidly peeked out from behind the smoldering armored car. The rifle was hot as a stove and he had to be careful to keep his fingers off the metal of the barrel. He had touched it once and could feel a blister on his skin. But the rifle held to the true; those Austrians really could build them. It was from the Steyr works near Vienna, double trigger, scrollwork in the metal, something from the old Empire, hunting schlosses in the Tyrolean foothills, and woodsmen in green lederhosen and high socks who'd take you to the best bucks in the forest. Blobs of light floated up to smash him. Tracers uncoiled like flung ropes, drifting lazily. Some rounds trailed tendrils of smoke. The bullets went into the brick with an odd sound, a kind of clang. He knew it was a matter of time and that his survival this far, with every Russian gun in the city banging away, was a kind of statistical incredibility that was bound to end shortly. Did it matter? Perhaps this moment of pure sniper war was worth his life. He'd been able to hit, hit, hit for most of the day now, over three hundred times, from clear, protected shooting, four streets like channels to fire down, plenty of ammunition, a boy to load spools for him, targets everywhere, massing in the streets, crawling through the ruins, edging up the gutters, but if he could see them he could take them. Repp killed a man with a flamethrower on his back. Forty-four bullets. By thirty-six, it had become clear that the men below had either fallen back or been killed. He heard a lot of scuffling around below. The Russians must have crept through the sewers to get in; they certainly hadn't come down the street. Twenty-seven. Just a second before, someone at the foot of the stairs had emptied a seventy-one-round drum upward. Repp happened to be shielded, he was standing in a recess in the brick wall, but the slatted floor of the tower was ripped almost to slivers as the slugs jumped through it. Wood dust flew in the air. Repp had a grenade. He pulled the lanyard out the handle and tossed the thing into the stairwell, heard it bouncing down the steps. He was back on the scope when the blast and the screams came. Eighteen. Tanks. He saw one scuttle through a gap between buildings several blocks away. Why didn't they think of that earlier, save themselves trouble and people? Then he realized the Stalins had the same trouble the Panzers had had negotiating the wreckage-jammed streets. To get this far into the ruins at all, Russian engineers must have been working frantically, blowing a path through to him. Eleven. Repp heard voices below. They were trying to be silent but a stair gave. He stepped back, took out his P-38 and leaned into the stairwell. He killed them all. Five. One magazine. The first tank came into view, lurching from around the corner at the Groski intersection. Yes, hello. Big fellow, aren't you? A few soldiers crept behind it. Repp, very calm and steady, dropped one, missed one. He saw a man in a window, shot him, high in the throat. One of the men he'd dropped behind the tank attempted to crawl into cover. Repp finished him. One. The turret was revolving. Not a Stalin at all, a KV-1 with a 76-millimeter. He fixed with fascination on the monster, watching as the mouth of the gun lazed over, seeming almost to open wider as it drew toward him. They certainly were taking their time lining up the shot. The tank paused, gun set just right. Repp would have liked at least to get rid of his last bullet. He didn't feel particularly bad about all this. The hatch popped on the tank, someone inside wanted a better look, and the lid rose maybe an inch or two. Repp took him, center forehead, last bullet. There was nothing to do. He set the rifle down. This was an execution. As if by signal, Russian troops began to file down Groski Prospekt. Repp, firing since 0930, checked his watch. 1650. An eight-hour day, and not a bad one. He chalked up the score in the seconds left him. Three hundred and fifty rounds he had fired, couldn't have missed more than a few times. Make it ten, just to be fair. That was 340 men. Then the three on the stairway with the pistol. Perhaps two more in the grenade blast. Three hundred and forty-five kills, 345. Three hundred and fo--. The shell went into the tower forty feet below Repp. The Russians had gotten fancy, they wanted to bring the tower down with Repp inside it, poetic justice or some such melodramatic conceit. The universe tilted as the tower folded. The line of the horizon broke askew and dust rose chokingly. Repp grabbed something as gravity accelerated the drop. The tower toppled thunderously into Groski Prospekt in a storm of dust and snow. But its top caught on the roof of the building across the way and was sheared neatly off. Repp found himself in a capsule of broken brick deposited there, untouched, baffled. It was as if he'd walked away from a plane crash. He walked across the flat roof of the building, waiting to get nailed. Artillery started up but the shells landed beyond him. There was smoke everywhere but he was alone. Across the roof, a shell had blown open a hole. He looked down into almost a museum specimen of the Soviet Worker's apartment, and leapt down into it. He opened the door and headed down a dark hallway. Stairs. He climbed down them, and left through a front door. There were no Russians anywhere, though far off, he could make out small figures. Taking no chances, he headed down an alley. That night he had schnapps with a general. |
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