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 schussfest, 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 Unertl, 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.