Chapter 1

When he was a small boy, Steiner loved to play "Soldiers" with the other boys in his neighborhood. He excelled at the game and usually managed to wipe out most of the "enemy" before the game was finished. None of the boys had ever actually touched a real gun because after the War, most households did not have a firearm hidden away for emergency. One of the stipulations of the Treaty was that most of the guns were to be melted down into molten metal for use in industrial production in the new post-war factories.

His two older brothers were both killed in a gas attack that backfired on their own lines. He had seen the cripples who had survived the gassings but he was not impressed with their suffering. It seemed like a case of bad luck to him for them to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The oldsters missing limbs didn't affect him at all either. Most of that stuff was from long range artillery and bombs so it was not like they were shot by a sniper or an enemy soldier. He was really enthusiastic about the variety of medals the veterans wore on their Sunday best and was able to identify each and every one even from a distance.

It bothered him that the girls were allowed to participate in the Soldier game because everyone knew they didn't know the first thing about killing the enemy or hand to hand combat. The boys his age tended to go with the girls that were five to ten years older than themselves because those girls didn't have any boys to play with.

When Karl Steiner was eighteen, his girlfriend was Heidi Marie, the baker's daughter. She was a full eight years older than him and had been his older brother Willie's fiancée until the gas got him. Heidi Marie was always a bit overweight but Karl liked the fact that she was able to take his hard testing of her stamina and endurance in the bedroom. He loved watching her big bottom working hard to accept his offerings and her squeals of delight when he gave it to her good.

She was a good German woman ready to give pleasure to her man even if he was eight years younger than her.

Karl was not a very good student and he was ashamed of his lack of interest that caused him to drop out of the school system at an early age. The trade school was exactly what he wanted and soon he was learning how to repair motorcars and motorcycles using the improvised tools and equipment they received from the government agency. It was his friend Mr. Krump that got him the job with the testing factory that purported to fabricate sewing machines and hair dryers. He discovered the first day that their real product was small arms ranging from small pistols to long-barreled rifles produced from new designs drawn up by master craftsmen trained in wartime. His specialty was the placement and testing of the iron sighting systems that improved with each new upgrade to the new firearms consigned to secret armories unknown to the general public.

He was able to even design a peep sight system of his own that was easy to adjust and simple to teach to even the dullest of student shooters. A separate building housed the munitions storage of millions of rounds of ammunition to be used in the case of emergency sometime in the future.

It was mostly females that worked in the munitions building and he became friends with a young girl of eighteen who often begged him for one of his cigarettes. It was expressly forbidden to smoke any cigarettes within a hundred meters of the munitions building so they hunkered down on the old rail platform behind the storage warehouse. He was able to convince the girl whose name was Hilda to drop her work pants and let him have his way with her bottom while she was smoking one of his cigarettes. It was most strange to see the canary yellow skin on her backside and legs and he noticed that she had covered it with cosmetics on her face and hands. When he asked her if she was sick, she just laughed and told him that all the girls in the munitions factory were tinted like that because of the constant handling of explosive materials.

She jokingly told him not to pound her too hard for fear of "setting her off".

The following summer, Karl was informed that he had been accepted into the special organization of soldiers that reported directly to the government and not the Wehrmacht high command. He was given the rank of Corporal and told that he would be training the young recruits to function as snipers to allow their followers to control the many street protests that were slowly reshaping the country into the mold of greater glory. The elite group numbered less than a hundred true believers and his section only contained eight members including him.

The first thing he did was to select the weapons for the team.

Steiner choose the Sniper Gewehr 98 with a modified raised Zeiss scope still legal under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. The ammo came from a factory in Dusseldorf which used a new process to beef up the impact velocity of the rounds when they hit the target. He managed to procure twelve crates of the modified weapons that contained four rifles in each box. The beauty of the Zeiss optics was that it seldom shifted even when the rifle was banged around in a tense situation. There was never a need to calibrate the scopes except in rare situations when the equipment was dropped from a high distance. The re-settings were simple and simply not a challenge for the average marksman.

Karl's biggest problem was to get the men to breath properly. Eventually, after a great deal of practice even he had to admit every one of his team was able to hit the mark consistently with little chance of a miss.

The only other unit with these weapons was the equally elite "Death's Head" contingent of bodyguards for the supreme leader. They were a standoffish bunch with no sense of humor at all.

Chapter 2 »