The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
But he again began to feel restless and uncomfortable. You didn’t want to stand in a man’s room uninvited. Perhaps he should slip out, wait by the door. Ah, what a dilemma. He did not want to do the wrong thing. He turned to stride out, but his sudden spin sent a spurt of commotion into the still air, and a single paper, as though magically, peeled itself off the desk and zigzagged dramatically to the floor. Vollmerhausen hurried over and picked it up to replace it.
It was hotly uncomfortable in the room. A fire blazed in Repp’s stove and the smell of his Russian cigarettes filled the air. Vollmerhausen’s eyes hooked on the GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE stamped haphazardly across the page top. The title read “NIBELUNGEN,” the exotic spacing for emphasis, and beneath the subtitle “LATEST INTELLIGENCE SITUATION 27 APR 45.”
He read the first line. The language of the report was military, dry, rather abstract, ostentatiously formal. He had trouble understanding exactly what they were saying.
Vollmerhausen was completely lost. Nuns? A convent? He couldn’t make it out. His heart was pounding so hard he was having trouble focusing. So damned hot in here. Sweat oozed from his hairline. He knew he must put the report down instantly, but he could not. He read on, the last paragraph.
He felt a growth of pain in his stomach. I am part of this? How? Why?
Repp asked, “Find it interesting?”
Vollmerhausen turned. He was not even surprised.
“You simply can’t. We don’t make war on—”
“We make war on our enemies,” said Repp, “wherever we find them. In whatever form. The East would make you strong for such a thing.”
“You could bring yourself to do this?” Vollmerhausen wanted to cry. He was afraid he was going to be sick.
“With honor,” Repp said. He stood there in the dirty tunic of a private soldier, hatless.
“You can’t,” Vollmerhausen said. It seemed to him a most cogent argument.
Repp brought up the Walther P-38 and shot him beneath the left eye. The bullet kicked the engineer’s head back violently. Most of the face was knocked in. He fell onto Repp’s desk, crashing with it to the floor.
Repp put the automatic back into the shoulder holster under the tunic. He didn’t look at the body. He picked the report up from the floor—it had fluttered free from Vollmerhausen’s fingers at the moment of death—and walked to the small stove. He opened the door, inserted it and watched the flames consume it.
He heard a machine pistol. Schaeffer and his people were bumping off Vollmerhausen’s staff.
It occurred to Repp after several seconds that Schaeffer was doing the job quite poorly. He would have to speak to the man. The firing had not let up.
A bullet fractured one of Repp’s windows. Firing leapt up from a dozen points on the perimeter. Repp had an impression of tracers floating in.
Repp hit the floor, for he knew in that second that the Americans had come.
14
Roger played hard to get at first, demanding wooing, but after five minutes Leets was ready to woo him with a fist, and Roger shifted gears fast. Now it was a production, starring himself, directed by himself, produced by himself, the Orson Welles, tyro genius, of American Intelligence.
“Get on with it, man,” said Outhwaithe.
“Okay, okay.” He smiled smugly, and then wiped it off, leaving a smirk, like a child’s moustache of milk.
“Simple. In two words. You’ll kick yourself.” A grin split his pleasant young face. “The planes.”
“Uh—”
“Yeah,” he amplified. “So much on the route he took, so much on tracing it back, following it back to its source—all wrong. He said he thought he heard planes. Or maybe trucks or motorcycles. But maybe planes. Now—” he paused dramatically, letting an imitation of wisdom, solemn, furrow-browed, surface on his face, “I give this Air Corps guy lessons, colonel in Fighter Ops, once a week, little walking-around money. Anyway, I asked him if some guys bounced some weird kind of night action—under lights, middle of wilderness—say in March sometime, maybe late February, any chance you’d have it on paper?”
Leets was struck by the simple brilliance of it.
“That’s really good, Roger,” he said, at the same time thinking that he himself ought to be shot for not coming up with it.
Roger smiled at the compliment. “Anyway,” he said, handing over a photostatic copy of a document entitled “AFTER ACTION REPORT, Fighter Operations, 1033d Tactical Fighter Group, 8th Air Force, Chalois-sur-Marne.”
Leets tore into the pilot’s prosaic account of his adventures: two fighter-bombers, angling toward the marshaling yards at Munich for a dawn strike, find themselves above a lit field in the middle of what is on the maps pure wilderness. In it German soldiers scurry about. They peel off for one run, after which the lights go away.
“Can we track this?”
“Those numbers—that’s the pilot’s estimated position,” Roger said.
“Thirty-two min southeast Saar, one eighty-six?”
“Thirty-two minutes southeast of the Saarbrücken Initial Point, on a compass heading of one eighty-six degrees.”
“Can we get pictures?”
“Well, sir, I’m no expert but—”
“I can have an RAF photo Spitfire in an hour,” said Tony.
“Roger, get over to R and D and pick up those mock-ups of Anlage Elf they were building, okay?”
“Check,” said Roger.
“Jesus,” said Leets. “If this is—”
“Big if, chum.”
“Yeah, but if, if we can get a positive ID, we can …” He let the sentence trail off.
“Yes, of course,” said Tony. “But first, the Spit. You’ll see the Jew. He’ll be important in this too, of course. He’ll have to come in at some point. He’s necessary.”
“Yes, I’ll see him.”
“Then I’m off,” Tony said.
“Hey,” wondered Roger, disappointed that his brief instant in the spotlight had so soon vanished, “what are you guys talking about?”
Leets didn’t seem to hear him. He looked strangely excited, and he was muttering distractedly to himself. He rubbed his lips, which had dried in the excitement, and for just one second Roger had the impression the captain was near breakdown, madly muttering to himself, full of private visions and prophecies.
“Sir,” Roger repeated, louder, “what’s going to happen now?”
“Well,” said Leets, “I guess we have to close them down. Put some people in there.”
People, thought Roger, swallowing dryly. He had to stop himself from asking, Me too?
The Gentile women treated him like some dreadful little wog, foreign and stinky, that they were helping out of great pity. In return they expected his love and when he would not give it they were enraged. They resented the private room when down the hall their own boys, wounded gallantly in battle, lay festering in huge public bays. He was not truly hurt either; he insisted on heathen protocols, the removal of the crucifix, for example; but most contemptibly of all, Somebody Important had an interest in him.
Shmuel lay back, alone. His head buzzed with pain. Luminous shapes entwined on the ceiling. A film of sweat covered him. He closed his eyes and saw smokestacks belching flame and human ash on the horizon, the glow orange and lurid. He opened them to an equally unsatisfactory reality: the English hospital room to which he’d been removed, a blank green chamber, pitiless, the odors of disinfectants rising. There were screams in the night. He knew people looked in on him at all hours. And the hospital merely symbolized a whole Western world he’d fled into—where else had there been to go, what other direction for a poor Jew? But in many ways it was as dreadful a place as the one from which he’d just escaped. There, at least, there were other Jews, a sense of community. Here, nobody cared, or would even listen. The Gentiles wanted him for something strange; he was not sure he trusted them.
It didn’t matter. He knew he was nearing the end of the journey and he didn’t mean the geog
He accepted death; therefore he accepted the dead; therefore he preferred the dead.
For everyone was dead. Bruno Schulz was dead, killed in ’42, in Drohobicz. Janucz Korczak was dead; Auschwitz. Perle, Warsaw. Gebirtig, Cracow. Katzenelson, the Vittel camp. Glick, Vilna. Shaievitz, Lodz. Ulianover, also Lodz.
The list was longer of course, longer a million times.
The last Jew longed for a ghetto, kerosene lamps, crooked streets, difficult lessons.
Good night, electrified, arrogant world.
He walked gladly to the window.
He was four stories up.
Shmuel stood at the window in bedclothes, looking out. His features, even in the dim light, seemed remote.
“Nothing much to see, huh?” called Leets as he swept in.
The man turned quickly, fixing a stare on Leets. He looked badly spooked.
“You okay?” Leets wanted to know.
He seemed to grab hold. He nodded.
Leets was running late. He knew he was coming on all wrong but he was nervous and he could never control how he acted when he was nervous. Also, he hated hospitals, even more now because they reminded him so of Susan.
“Well, good, it’s good you’re okay.”
He paused, stalling. Only one way to do this. Only one way to do anything. He kept having to remind himself: full out.
“Look, we need more help. Big help.”
He waited for the Jew to respond. The man just sat on his bed and looked back. He seemed quite calm and disinterested. He looked tired also.
“Two days from now—it would be sooner, but the logistics are complex, forty-eight hours is the dead minimum—a battalion of American airborne troops is going into the Black Forest. We found it—Anlage Elf, Repp, the whole shooting gallery. We’ll go in a little after midnight. I’ll tag along with the airborne people; meanwhile Major Outhwaithe will come up on the ground in a column of tanks from a French armored division operating in the area.”
Leets paused.
“We’re going to try and kill Repp. That’s what it gets down to. But only one man has seen him. Sure, we’ve got that old picture. But we’ve got to be sure. So it would help if—if you came along.” He was troubled over all this.
“This is how I figure it. Nobody’s asking you to go into battle; you’re not a soldier, it’s what we get paid for. No, after we take the place, we’ll get a message out fast. You’ll be in a forward area with Roger, I suppose. We can get you in fast in a light plane, have you there in an hour or two. It’s our best shot at him, only way to be sure.” He paused again. “Well, that’s it. Your part will be risky, but a good, safe calculated risk. What do you think?” He looked up at Shmuel and had the discomfiting sensation the man hadn’t understood a word he’d said. “Are you all right? Do you have a fever or something?”
“You’ll jump out of an airplane? In a parachute, in the night? And attack the camp?” Shmuel asked.
“Yeah,” said Leets. “It’s not so hard as it sounds. We’ve got some good pictures. We plan to go down on the target range, where you escaped. We make it three miles back to—” But again he saw Shmuel’s eyes glaze over, disinterested.
“Hey, you okay?” he said, and almost snapped his fingers.
“Take me,” Shmuel said suddenly.
“What? Take you? In the air—”
“You said you needed me there. Fine, I’ll go. With you. From the plane in the parachute. Yes, I’ll do it.”
“You got any idea what you’re letting yourself in for? I mean, there’ll be a battle, people getting blown up.”
“I don’t care. That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“The point is—you’d never understand. But I must go. It’s either that or nothing. You’ve never understood. But I must go. It’s either that or nothing. You’ve got to do this for me. I’m clever, I can learn the techniques. Two days, you say? Plenty of time.”
Leets was all mixed up, tried to run through a dozen motives. Finally he just asked, “Why?”
“Old friends then. I’ll have the best chance to meet old friends.”
A screwy answer, Leets thought. But he said, not quite knowing why, “All right.”
The paratroopers all seemed husky boys in their teens, dumbly, crazily eager, full of bravado and violence. They worked hard at glamour and costumed themselves after lessons they’d learned in movie theaters. They blackened their faces with burnt cork until they gleamed like minstrels with mad white eyes and pink tongues; they dangled junk from themselves until they clanked like men in armor, but not just any junk: pistols in shoulder holsters were first-prize items, symbols of special pizazz; another melodramatic improvisation was the knife and sheath taped upside down along the boot; then too pouches, grenades, tightly wound ropes, ammo packs, canteens beside the two lumpy chutes; and on their helmets most taped first-aid kits and many of them still wore, though non-regulation now, the D-Day American flag patch on their shoulders. A few of the really demented boasted Mohawk haircuts.
Leets, sitting mildly among them, felt he’d wandered into someone’s high school pep rally. The varsity was revving itself up before the game. As an ex-football player himself, ex-Wildcat, he could appreciate and almost savor that feeling of hate and fear and sheer shitthinning excitement that coursed savagely through these nervous boys. The paratroopers shoved and joshed, even sang now as they relaxed in the airfield staging area in these last minutes before embarkation. Earlier someone had even produced a football, and Leets had watched an exuberant game of touch unfold before his eyes. The officers had seemed not to mind this extravaganza of energy: they were slightly older men, but all had that same thick-wristed blunt athleticism that Leets recognized immediately, heavy bones and close-cropped hair and flat faces. And while all this was familiar to him, it was at the same time strange; for Leets associated war with lonely men climbing into Lysanders or huddling in empty bays of big British bombers, drinking coffee. That had been his war anyway, not this festival of the locker room.
He turned his wrist over. Twenty-two hundred hours, his Bulova announced in iridescent hands. Another fifteen, twenty minutes to go. He snapped out and lit a Lucky, and did another—about the fiftieth—rundown on his own collection of junk. Canteen for thirst, compass for direction, shovel for digging, chute for jumping and the rest for killing: three fragmentation grenades, a bayonet, ten 30-round magazines in pouches on a belt stiffly around his middle and, thrust at an awkward diagonal down across his belly under the reserve chute, a Thompson submachine gun, the Army model designated M-1, standard issue for a paratroop officer. He must have weighed five hundred pounds; perhaps like a medieval knight he’d need a crane to get him off his ass when, so shortly now, the jousting hour arrived.
Leets ran his tongue over dry lips. If I’m scared, he wondered, what about him?
Shmuel lounged on the grass next to him, similarly encumbered, yet lacking weapons, which he did not know how to operate anyway and which by principle he would not have, though Leets had tried to argue him into carrying at least a pistol.
Yet Shmuel seemed strangely composed.
“How are you doing?” Leets inquired, with effort, for all the stuff pressing into his gut.
No expression showed beneath the blackface; he could have been any other paratrooper, counting out the final quiet minutes of the night, eyes showing white against the darkness of face, mouth grim, nostrils flaring slightly in the effort of breathing.
He nodded briskly in reply to the question. “I’m f
“Good, good,” Leets said, wishing he could make the same claim. He himself was exhausted, while at the same confusing time churning with energy and dread. A most curious state; it had the one benefit of quieting his leg, which with fatigue tended to throb and leak. A man leaned over, too dark to recognize, and said, “Sir, Colonel says planes’ll be cranking up in five, we’ll be loading in ten.”
“Gotcha, thanks,” said Leets, and the trooper was gone.
Leets looked nervously around him. It was warm and dark and the men were lying about on the grass of the airfield, though they’d been organized into their Dakota groups three hours ago. Those three hours had dragged by, as the light faded to twilight and then darkness, the soft English fields beyond the air base perimeter growing hazier. The men were Second Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, a part of the more widely known 82d Airborne Division. Tough boys with drops in Italy and Normandy, a long bad spell in the Bulge and most recently—March—an op named Varsity in which they’d jumped beyond the Rhine behind them. They’d been off the line a month, growing fat and sluggish here at the rest camp in southern England, and when Tony Outhwaithe had convinced the right parties that a batch of hellraisers was needed for a night of close-in dirty work in south Twelveland, Second of the 501st got the word.
It was cold in the airplane. Shmuel sat in the chill, his back against the slope of the fuselage, shivering. Yet he felt quite wonderful. His journey was finally nearing its completion. A matter of hours now. He was one of two dozen men in the underlit darkness of the airplane, and he was as isolated from any of them as they were from each other, cut off by the noise from the engines that made human contact, now that they needed it most, impossible. Shmuel could sense the tension, especially in Captain Leets, and he pitied him for it. A Mussulman need feel nothing. A Mussulman was cut off from human sensation, complete within himself. Yet he looked over at Leets and saw him hunched and absorbed, filthy face glowing orangely over the tip of a cigarette. The layer of cork had dried crustily on his skin, making the features abstract, unreadable. But the eyes, staring blankly at nothing, had a message: fear.