The wind stung his face as much as the frost pricked his fingertips. It was negative nine degrees. It was snowing. It was nighttime. And the breeze was angry enough to kill.

Negative nine?

He'd say negative twenty.

He'd been on this same hill, in this same position, for twenty-one hours, and he hadn't eaten in as long. He'd pissed, catheter, only once, and not defecated at all. The snow he'd been stuffing in his mouth every other hour tasted like lakewater, sweeter than water should be.

But the view made up for allllll of this.

No, that's sarcasm. The view was fucking horrible. He looked through the scratched glass of his scope at the Sowjetisch compound. The snow, lit by large parking-lot style lampposts, blinded him for a second. He cursed, squinted, almost dropped his gun. After forced contact, though, his eyes adjusted. Two runways; necessary control tower. Rows of buildings for Gott knows what, the hangars (four!), the barracks. And the men, always scuttling between them. His finger twitched as he crosshaired one of them, (this guy was unloading what could be his last crate of nine-millimeter ammunition) but he didn't squeeze. Exhaled instead, relaxing the twenty withering joints in his left hand. His index finger slid lazily from the trigger to the guard.

He wanted to fire one fucking shot. He hated any gunfighting, it shook him to his core, but he was so goddamned bored. And the Sowjetisch population as a whole had been de-empathized in his mind.

He was aware that he had been seduced, poisoned by propaganda. He didn't care. They told him they'd pay his fucking college, and he was a crack-shot with a rifle. He didn't sign up for this fucking snow, though. Fucking. Snow. Melts on you like frigid water, gets in your clothes like a colony of frozen wasps, stings your face like kicked dirt in a sandbox.

Doesn't, matter, at, all. He reminds himself of this, a mantra in his head. He'd maybe have to shoot like five men, they'd win, he'd go home, the end.

That was what he was thinking about when he saw a large flash across the mountain from him, followed by a violent explosion of snow directly in front of him. Ficken, what the ficken, how did they see him, how--

He cut the thought short. Needed to act. He knew he was shrouded in darkness; the only way this other sniper could have seen him was by the glint of his scope. He'd been covered in a literal mound of snow; had been given a wrap of white tape to wrap his gun in. The Kar98k went down immediately. He sidled awkwardly to the left.

Or.

He tried to sidle to the left. His ignorance, his negligence to his snowy, freezing conditions was what doomed him.

Presumably, the sniper across the compound's length readjusted his rifle towards where his enemy had been with the help of a landmark (just a bit over a quarter of a way between that pine tree and this lamppost head, you know, that sort of thing), because his aim was spot-on.

-----

Twenty minutes later, when the search party arrived, they discovered the dead German sniper trapped in a bodycast of frozen snow. He could have gotten out of it in seconds.

He wasn't afforded that time, obviously.

The party joked about how he'd trapped himself like an idiot; they congratulated the Soviet sniper who'd shot him. Several men offered a drink to the marksman, on them. One of them pointed out how beautiful the pink of his blood was as it melted into the snow.

His gun and body were dug up from the snow the next morning, shipped back to the homeland.

That gun had never seen one round fired on a battlefield.