The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
“They must be blowing ’em out of that last pillbox,” one hurt boy said to another.
Then a soldier came for him.
“Sir, Captain Leets wants you.”
“Ah,” said Shmuel, embarrassed to be so clean among the dirty bleeding soldiers.
But soon his discomfort replaced itself with a sensation of befuddlement. He found it hard to relate what he encountered to what he remembered. He was appalled at the destruction. He saw a world literally eviscerated, ruin, smoky timbers, gouged earth, bullet-riddled buildings, all the more unbelievable for the small scenes of domestic tranquillity enacted against it by surviving American soldiers, lying about in the sun, cigarettes lazy in their mouths, writing letters, reading Westerns, eating cold breakfasts.
His guide took him to a pit, where the German dead lay in rows, flies collecting busily in black clouds on them. He’d seen corpses before, but a corpse was a certain thing: first, it was Jewish, but more importantly it was very skinny, white, shrunken, its terror contained in the fact that it looked so unreal, a puppet or chunk of wood. Here, reality was inescapable: bones and brains and guts, blue-black, black-red, green-yellow, ripe and full of gore. Shmuel could think only of meat shops and the ritual slaughterers on the days before holidays—hanging slabs of beef, steamy piles of vitals, tripe white and cold. Yet in the butcher shops there was neatness, order, purpose: this was all spillage, sloppy and accidental.
“Not pretty. Even when it’s them,” said Leets, standing glumly on the brink. “These are the soldiers, the Totenkopfdivision people. All of them, or what’s left of them. Sorry. But it’s time to go looking.”
“Of course. How else?” said Shmuel.
He walked the ranks. Dead, the Germans were only their flesh: hard to hate. He felt nothing but his own discomfort at the revolting details of violent death; the odor of emptying colons and the swarming flies. It became easy after a while, walking among them. They were arrayed in their brightly vivid camouflage jackets, the pattern precise and inappropriately colorful, gay almost, brown-green dappling dun. Soon he saw an old friend.
Hello, Pipe Smoker. You’ve a hole the size of a bucket mouth at your center and you don’t look happy about it. This is how the Gentiles kill: completely, totally. A serious business, the manufacture of death. Us, they starve, or gas, saving bullets. They tried bullets on us, but considered the practice wasteful. Their own they kill with bullets and explosives, Pipe Smoker, spend millions.
Next came the boy who’d struck him in the storeroom. You were a mean one, called me Jew-shit, kicked me. The boy lay blue and halved on the ground, legs, trunk missing. What could have done such a dreadful thing? He was surely the most mutilated. You struck me, boy, and in that instant if this scene could have been projected to you, Shmuel the Jew in an American uniform, all warm and whole, standing dumbly over only half your body, you’d have thought it a joke, a laugh. Yet there you are and here I am and by the furious way your eyes stare, I believe you know. Ah, and Schaeffer, Hauptsturmführer Schaeffer, almost untouched, certainly unmussed, did you die of fright there in your crisp and bright camouflage coat; no, there’s a tiny black hole drilled into your upper lip.
“No,” he said, after the last, “he’s not here.”
Leets nodded and then took him to the bullet-riddled hulk of barrack that had once housed Vollmerhausen’s researchers. The door was off its hinges and the roof had fallen in at one end, but Shmuel could see the bodies in the blood-soaked sheets in the cots.
“The civilians,” Shmuel said. “A shame you had to kill them.”
“It wasn’t us,” Leets said. “And it wasn’t by accident either.” He bent to the floor and came up with a handful of empty shells.
“These are all over the place in there. Nine-millimeter. MP-forty cases. The SS did it. The ultimate security. Now, one more stop. This way, please.”
They walked across the compound, avoiding shell craters and piles of rubble, to the SS barrack. It still smoldered and had fallen in on itself sometime after sunrise. But one end stood. Leets led him to the side and pointed through a window that had been shot out.
“Can you see? On the floor. He’s burned and most of his face is gone. He’s in a bathrobe. That’s not Repp, is it?”
“No.”
“No. You’d never catch Repp in a bathrobe. It’s the engineer, isn’t it? Vollmerhausen?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s it then.”
“You missed him.”
“Yeah. He made it out. Somehow. The bastard.”
“And the trail ends.”
“Maybe. Maybe. We’ll see what we can dig out of the rubble. And there’s this.” He held something out to Shmuel.
“Do you know what it is?” he asked.
Shmuel looked at the small metal object in Leets’s upturned palm. He almost laughed.
“Yes, of course I know. But what—”
“We found it in there. Under Vollmerhausen. It must have been on the desk, which he seemed to hit on the way down. That’s Yiddish on it, isn’t it?”
“Hebrew,” Shmuel corrected. “It’s a toy. It’s called a draydel. A top, for spinning.” He’d done so a hundred, a thousand times himself when a boy. “It’s for children. You make small wagers, and spin the top. You gamble on which of the four letters will turn up. Played on Hanukkah chiefly.” It was like a die with an axis through the center, the inscribed letters almost rubbed out by so many small fingers. “It’s very old,” Shmuel said. “Possibly quite valuable. An heirloom at the very least.”
“I see. What is the significance of the letters?”
“They are the first letters of the words in a religious phrase.”
“Which is?”
“A Great Miracle Happened Here.”
15
Repp paused, hungry. Should he eat the bread now, or later? Well, why not now? He’d been moving hard half the night and most of the day, pushing himself, and soon he’d be out of forest and onto the Bavarian plain. Good progress, he reckoned, ahead of schedule even, a healthy sign considering the somewhat, ah, hasty mode of his departure.
He sat on a fallen log in a meadow. He was at last out of the coniferous zone, in a region of elm and poplars. Repp knew his trees, and poplars were a special favorite of his, especially on a fine spring afternoon such as this one, when the pale sun seemed to illuminate them in an almost magical way—they glowed in the lemon light, translucent, mystical against the darker tracings of the limbs which displayed them. The still, austere beauty of the day made the spectacle even more remarkable—a clean beauty, pure, untainted, uncontrived—and Repp smiled at it all, at the same time pleased that his own sensitivity to such matters hadn’t been blunted by the war. Repp appreciated nature; he felt it important to good health, soundness of body and clearness of mind. Nature was particularly meaningful to his higher instincts in hard times like these, though it was rare that such natural beauty could be savored in and of itself, without reference to more prosaic necessities, fields of fire, automatic weapons placement, minefield patterns and so forth.
He tore into the bread. Dry, tough, it still tasted delicious. A good thing it had been in the pack when the Americans had come. Time only to grab the pack, throw it on and head for the tunnel. He’d made it after a long crawl across the open ground, American fire snapping into the ground around him. He curled in a gully by the tunnel entrance.
There were, in fact, six of them. Repp had insisted. He was a careful man who thought hard about likelihoods, and he knew no place in Germany in the late spring of 1945 that might not be assaulted by enemy troops, and if such an assault came, he had no intention of being trapped in it. He removed the camouflaged cover and squirmed down into the narrow opening. He slithered along. The space was close, almost claustrophobic, room for one thin man. Dust showered down on him as his back scraped the roof and the darkness was impenetrable. A great loneliness fell over Repp. He knew that even for a brave man panic was an instant away in a sewe
He warned himself to be careful. Too much imagination could kill you just as quickly as enemy bullets. But Repp was used to working in the open, with great reaches beyond him. Here there was nothing except the dark. He could hold a hand to his face an inch in front of his eyes, and see nothing, absolute nothingness.
He pulled himself mechanically along, thinking this surely the worst moment in his long war, yet trying, desperately, to concentrate on the physical—the thrusts of his arms, the push of his legs, the slide of his torso. The roof pressed against his shoulders. At any moment it could come down. Repp wiggled along. Just a few more feet.
After what seemed years in the underground, he’d at last come to the end. He pulled himself the remaining few feet, but here the panic flappity-flapped through him; he thought of it as an owl, its wings unfurling frenziedly. The cool air came like a maddening perfume, rich and sensuous. The temptation to crash from the hole and dance for glee was enormous; he fought it. He edged back to the surface cautiously, without sudden movements. He emerged a few feet beyond the tree line. The fight still raged, mostly indistinct light and sound from here, but Repp hadn’t time to consider it. He continued his crawl through the trees, dragging the pack and rifle with him. Once or twice he froze, sensing human activity nearby. When he was finally certain he was alone, he pulled himself up. He quickly consulted the compass and set off.
His route took him past the firing range. He skirted it, unwilling to risk its openness even though it was still dark. A voice came suddenly, brazen and American. He dived back instantly and lay breathing hard. Americans? This far out?
He pushed back the brush and stared into the dark. He saw men moving vaguely. Must be some kind of patrol, an extra security measure way out here. But his eyes began to adjust and he could see the men gathering up long white shrouds. He had trouble making sense out of this and—
Parachutes.
He knew then that this was not some accident of war, an American reconnaissance in force blundering into his perimeter.
The parachutists had come after a specific objective.
They had come after him.
Repp knew he was being hunted. He felt a weight in his stomach. If it were just shooting, his skill against theirs, that would be one thing. But this business was far more complex and his own path only one route to the center. In at least a thousand other ways he was vulnerable. He could move perfectly, do all things brilliantly, and still fail.
He was ahead of them, but by what margin? What did they know? What remained in the ruins of Anlage Elf? Had they seen the documents from Financial Section? Had they learned the secret of the meaning of Nibelungen, the Reichsführer’s pet name, the joke he delighted in?
The worst possibility of all was that they had come across Nibelungen’s other half—the Spanish Jew, for whom all these arrangements had been made.
He stuffed what was left of the bread back into his pack, and walked on.
16
Leets was a man with problems. He had no Repp and not one idea in hell where the German was headed; worse, he had no idea where he himself was headed. His archeological expedition through the ruins of Anlage had come up bust—nothing but burnt files and shattered, blackened equipment. And corpses. In all this there was not one shard of pottery, not one scrap, one flake of debris that pointed to another step. The trail was stone cold.
Now he was reduced to hoping for luck. He sat by himself in front of an improvised table within the installation compound. Before him were what remained of several thousand 7.92-mm Kurz cases he’d had the paratroopers collect before they’d moved out.
Leets picked one up, and examined it with a sublimely ridiculous Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass. The shell in his huge grimy fingers glinted like the purest gold; Leets revolved it, studying its bland, flecked surface. He was looking for a gouge, a fracture mark, indicative of reloading, which in turn would be indicative of modification into one of the hand-tooled long-range custom jobs Repp had taken the patrol with. If he can find one, he can prove at least to himself Repp was here; he is not going insane. But nope, this shell holds no secrets; disgustedly, he tossed it into the pile at his feet, and plucked up another. He’d been at it now for hours, not exactly the sort of thing Army officers are expected to do at all, but what the hell, somebody’s got to do it.
At first it was Roger’s job, but the kid began wandering off. Roger had returned with special orders and presented them to Leets without one shred of embarrassment. The great Bill Fielding is putting on an exhibition in Paris ostensibly for the wounded boys, a morale builder, and Roger’d wangled his way into it. The OSS Harvard faction was keen to have the outfit represented, and Roger’d been anointed champion. He’d be taking off soon, and now he wasn’t worth a damn, off screwing around somewhere with his racquets.
But that left Leets alone with the headache and a tableful of shells and a sinking conviction he was getting nowhere. It was spring, full spring now, almost May. The Black Forest was turning green, and the air was pleasant, even if still heavy with the tang of ash. Leets returned to another shell. He was working slowly, because he wasn’t sure what the hell he’d do when he got finished.
A shadow fled across the table, then returned and paused, and Leets looked up from his collection and saw the Jew, Shmuel.
“Captain Leets?” the man said, looking absurdly American in his uniform, a white spiffy triangle of cotton undershirt showing above the top button of his wool OD shirt. Leets didn’t have the heart to tell him he was wearing the undershirt backward.
“A thought came to me. Maybe a help for you. Maybe not.”
Shmuel had never volunteered before, except in that frantic moment in the hospital when he insisted on making the jump. But now he was calm and composed. Or maybe it was only the weight he’d picked up since chowing with the Americans these last weeks.
“So go ahead,” Leets said. He still wasn’t sure what to call the man.
“Do you remember the bodies? The SS men? Before they were shoveled into the pit?”
“Yes, I do,” Leets said. Hard to forget.
“Something then bothered me. Now I can say it. It came to me in a dream.”
“Yes,” Leets said.
“The jackets. The ones with the spots.”
“The Tiger coats. Standard SS issue. You see them all over Europe.”
“Yes. Here’s the curiosity. They were all new. Every single one of them. It’s what made the dead so vivid. In January the coats were ragged and faded. Patched.”
Leets took all day before cooking up a response. “So?” he finally asked, confessing, “You’ve lost me.”
“So, nothing. I don’t know. But it struck me—strikes me—as peculiar.”
“Yeah, well, the Krauts got a batch of new coats. How about that? Hmm.” He turned it over in his mind several times, slowly, looking past the Jew, looking hard at nothing as he picked at this curious bit of info. A truck-load of jackets, over one hundred of them: quite a chunk of weight. Hard to believe the Germans would haul it up from the plains, over that muddy road. Trucks must have come in there all the time, of course, keep the place supplied. But all those coats …
“Thanks,” he eventually said. “Something to think about, though I’m not just sure what the significance is.”
The more he thought about it the more fascinating it seemed. Here it was, late in the war, very very late, two minutes to midnight, the Reich shattered, the supply system, like all systems, broken down. Yet they were shipping clothes about.
No, a more likely situation would be that the reinforced Totenkopfdivision company went somewhere to pick up the coats, someplace where piles and piles of the things were available—these were the March, 1944, model now, coats, not tunics, camouflaged, the four-pocket model with the snap buttons and the sniper’s epaulets: a new item in their battle-dre
“Damnedest thing,” he said aloud.
The Jew still stood there. “I happen to know about these coats,” he said. “A little. Not a lot.”
“What?” Leets asked.
“One of the other prisoners told me he’d worked on them. In the factory as a laborer. He’d been a tailor and the SS sent him to work in their factory. In the plant. It’s a place where there’d be a lot of them. Not so far from here. No rail travel would be involved.”
“What place?” asked Leets.
“The SS Konzentrationlager Dachau,” said Shmuel.
17
In an otherwise quite pleasant ash tree, the deserter swayed heavily at the end of the rope, face blue, neck grotesquely twisted. He’d been stripped of gear and boots but boasted a sign: I’M A PIG WHO LEFT MY COMRADES!
“Poor devil,” said the man next to Repp. “Those SS bastards must have caught him.”
Repp grunted noncommittally. He’d picked up this platoon of drifting engineers a few miles back and with them he was making his way across the Bavarian plateau in the southern lee of the Swabian Jura.
“They get you and your papers are wrong and it’s—” Lenz made a comical imitation of a man choking in a noose.
Occasionally a vehicle would roll down the dusty road, a half-track once, a couple of Opel trucks, finally a staff car with two colonels in the back.
“They ride, we walk,” said Lenz. “As usual. They’ll get away, we’ll go to a PW camp. Or Siberia. That’s always the way it is. The little fellow catches—”
“Lenz, shut up,” called back Gerngoss, the fat Austrian platoon sergeant.
The platoon continued to move down the road, through an empty landscape. Ostensibly, they were headed for the town of Tuttlingen, several kilometers ahead, to blow up a bridge before the Americans arrived. But Repp knew this was a pretext; actually they were just moping around enough to pass the time until the Amis showed and they could surrender. They were not Totenkopfdivision boys, that was for sure.