The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
“Damn! Come on, friend. It’s death here for sure. That’s what they got us here for—to die. They don’t care a shit for us; in fact they never did. They just want to take a few more Ameri—”
But Repp was listening to the officer—Buchner? perhaps—as he said to the sergeant, “Get me a driver and a machine gunner. I’m going to take a Kübel up the hill and see what’s keeping our visitors.”
“Sir, I could get some of the fellows—”
“I’ll do it myself,” said Buchner, typically. Yes, it was Buchner. In the East he’d quickly picked up a reputation for exposing himself unnecessarily to fire.
“I’ll blink my lights when I’m coming in. Got it?”
“Yes, Herr Major.”
He was gone then, and Repp waited with the professor in the trench.
“We can’t wait until the fight begins. We’ll never get out then. We’ll just get the Amis good and mad and they’ll blow our brains out,” the professor said. “They smell that gold.”
Heavy firing broke out ahead. The American column must have run into some resistance in the hamlet. Repp could hear machine guns and tank cannon. Whoever was left up there was putting up quite a fight.
“We’re right in the zone of that gun,” Repp replied. “He’d just chop us down. He’d make sausage of us. There’s no point to it. Relax for now. Do you have a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke. I was hit in the throat and lost my taste for it.”
“Okay, you men,” the sergeant called out. “Be alert. Any minute the show begins.”
“I can’t see a goddamned thing,” said the professor. “They must really want that gold. They usually don’t like to advance in the dark.”
“Now don’t get excited, fellows,” crooned the sergeant from back at the vehicles, low and gentle, “just take it easy.”
“We don’t have any guns, you bastards,” someone yelled from nearby.
“Oh, we haven’t forgotten the Wehrmacht.”
Repp could hear MP-40 bolts snapping. A report almost made him flinch—one of the Panthers kicking into life so there’d be power for its turret. The other joined and the smell of exhaust floated down, and over the engine purr came a deeper moan as the turrets tracked, aligning their long 75-millimeter barrels down the approach.
A man suddenly leaned over the edge of their hole.
“Here,” he said, his breath billowing foggily in the cool, “ever use one of these rocket things? Line up the target through the rear sight against the pin on the warhead. Trigger’s up top, the lever, crank it back to arm it, jam forward to fire. She’ll go like hell and blow anything the Amis make to smithereens.”
“Jesus Christ,” moaned the professor, “that’s all you’re giving us, Panzerfausts?”
“Sorry, brother. I do what I’m told. Go for the tanks first, then the half-tracks. But watch them too, they’re more than just troop carriers. Some of them mount four half-inch machine guns on a kind of wire frame. Devilish things. And remember, no firing till the major gives the word.”
He was gone into another hole.
“We’re cooked,” said the professor. “This is suicide.” He held up the Panzerfaust, a thirty-two-inch tube with a swollen five-inch bulb at one end. “One shot and it’s all over.”
The firing up ahead picked up in pitch. Light flashed through the night.
“Goddamn. I didn’t want to end up in a goddamn hole with American tanks in front and SS tanks in back. Goddamn, not after what I’ve been through.” He began very softly to pry, and put his head against his arm at the edge of the trench.
The firing stopped.
“All right,” Repp said quietly. “Here they come. Get ready, old friend.”
The professor leaned back in the trench. Repp could see the wet track of tears running down his face, but he’d come to some arrangement with himself and looked at least resigned.
“We should have at least tried,” he said. “Just to die like this, for nothing, that’s what’s so shitty about all this.”
“I think I see them,” said Repp, peering ahead. He cranked back the arm on the trigger lever to arm his Panzerfaust, and put it over his shoulder. It was slightly front-heavy but he braced it through the notch in the rampart he’d built. The sight was a primitive thing, a metal ring that lined up with a pin up at the warhead.
“Here they come,” he said flatly.
“Jesus Christ, that’s the major. He just blinked.”
“Easy, men, the major’s coming in,” the sergeant yelled.
“Here they come,” said Repp. He was really concentrating. His two right fingers tightened on the trigger lever.
“Are you crazy?” the professor whispered harshly. “That’s the major.”
“Here they come,” said Repp. He could see the Kübelwagen clearly now, its pale-yellow-and-sand camouflage scheme lighter against the blackness, as it ripped along the road at them, trailing dust. Its lights blinked once again. Willi Buchner stood like a yachtsman in the cockpit of his craft, hands set on the windscreen frame, hair blowing against the breeze, a bored look on his face.
Repp fired.
The Kübelwagen ruptured into a flash, concussion instantaneous and enormous. The vehicle veered to rest on its side, flames tumbling out its gas tank.
“Jesus,” said the professor in the moment of silence that followed, “those poor—”
“Who the fuck fired, goddamn I’ll kill you!” bellowed the sergeant. But then everybody opened up. Two or three more Panzerfausts flashed out and detonated, a machine gun back on the barricade began to howl, rifles barked up and down the line, and in exclamation point the Panther 75 boomed, a long gout of flame flaring out from its barrel.
Repp grabbed the professor savagely and pulled him close.
“Come on! Now’s the time. Stay close and you might live.”
He flung him back and slithered over the edge of the trench and began to crawl toward the bridge. The shooting mounted and he could hear the sergeant arguing with it, yelling, “Goddamn, you fools, cease firing!”
In the confusion Repp made it to the barricade, feeling the professor scuttling along behind him. He stood boldly and stepped between a Kübel and a cycle out onto the bridge itself.
The firing died.
“Who fired? Who fired? Oh, Christ, that was Major Buchner,” yelled the sergeant up front. “Goddamn, I’ll kill all of you pigs if you don’t tell me!”
Repp gestured “Come on” with his head and strode forward, bold as the Reichsführer himself.
A trooper materialized out of the dark, rifle leveled at Repp’s middle.
“Where are you going, friend?” he asked.
Repp hit him with the shaft of his Panzerfaust, a murderous blow against the side of the head, just under the helmet. The jolt sent vibrations through his arm, and the trooper fell heavily to one side, his equipment jangling on the bridge.
“Run,” Repp whispered, grabbing the professor and half hurling him down the bridge. “Hurry!”
The professor took off in lumbering panic and seemed to gain distance.
“There he is! There he is!” Repp shouted.
By that time several others had seen him and the firing started almost immediately.
As the blizzard of lead seemed to tear apart the world through which the professor fled, Repp eased down the incline under the bridge and made it to river’s edge.
He found the raft the demolitions detail had left tied to one of the piles, and threw in the pack and helmet, and then slipped into the icy water and began to drift through the blackness, clinging to the raft. He was almost across when the Americans arrived and the battle began, and by the time he got out of the water, shivering and exhausted, the Ami tanks had gotten the range and began to blow apart the barricade in earnest.
Repp crawled up the bank. Behind him, multiple small suns descended in a pinkish haze and tracers flicked across the water. But he knew he was out of range.
And that he was still on sch
21
“What are you doing here?” was all he could think to say.
“I work here. I’m with the field hospital.”
“Oh, God, Susan. Then you’ve seen it, seen it all.”
“You forget: I knew it all.”
“We never believed.”
“Now of course it’s too late.”
“I suppose. How did you end up here?”
“A punishment. I made waves. I made real waves. I got publicly identified with the Zionists. Then Fischelson died and the Center died and the British made a stink, and they sent me to a field unit in a DP camp. British influence. It was said I didn’t appreciate London. And when I heard about Belsen, I tried to get there. But it was in the British zone and they wouldn’t have me. Then came Dachau, American. And my doc at the DP camp did think highly of me, and he knew how important it was to me. So he got me the orders. See? Easy, if you have the right connections.”
“It’s very bad, isn’t it.”
“Bad. That’s not a terribly eloquent word. But, yes, it is bad. And Dachau is nothing compared to Belsen. And Belsen is nothing compared to Sobibór. And Sobibór is nothing compared to Treblinka. And Treblinka is nothing compared to Auschwitz.”
They were strange names to Leets.
“Haven’t heard of them. Haven’t been reading the papers, I guess.”
“I guess not.”
“Did you see Shmuel? He’s with us. He’s still fine. I told you he’d be fine.”
“I heard. An OSS detachment. With a Jew in an American uniform. That’s how I knew.”
“We’re still after him. After that German. That’s what we’re here for.”
“One German?”
“Yeah. A special guy. With a special—”
“Jim, there were thousands of them. Thousands. What’s one more or less?”
“No, this one’s different.”
“No. They’re all the same.”
But Tony was not filing a report to JAATIC. He was writing a letter to his older brother, in response to a letter that had finally caught up with him earlier.
“Dear Randolph,” he wrote.
It was of course splendid to hear from you. I am glad Lisbon is interesting and that Priscilla is well.
Please do not believe any of the rumors, and do not let them upset you. I realize my behavior has been difficult to fathom of late and that it must be the subject of much discussion in certain circles. I have not surrendered to the Americans. I do not flee my own kind. I do not think myself Robert Graves. I am not insane, though that was not a question in your note; I still sensed it beneath your Foreign Office diction.
I am quite well off. I am totally recovered. No, I do not see women. Perhaps I should, but I do not. I do not see old friends either. They are rather too kind for my somewhat peculiar tastes. I am among Americans by choice: because, fools all of them, they talk only of themselves. Children: they prattle incessantly about self and city, country, past, future, manufacturing noise from every orifice. They have no curiosity beyond their own skin. I do not have to make explanations. I do not get long, sad stares of sympathy. No one inquires solicitously how I’m getting along In The Aftermath….
Dearest Randolph, others lost children and wives in the bombings. Jennifer and Tim are quite gone now; I’ve accepted it and hardly think of it. I do not, as you suggest, still blame myself. Things are quite chipper here. We are hunting down a dreadful Jerry. It’s great fun, most fun I’ve had in the war….
But Tony stopped writing. He felt himself about to begin to cry again. He crushed the document up into a ball, and hurled it across the room. He sat back, and pinched the bridge of his nose. The pain would not go away. He doubted if it would, ever. He wished he had a nip of something. But he didn’t. He thought he might try and get some sleep. Where was Leets? Should he head back to the office, where the two Jews were? He had to do something, he knew that for sure.
* * *
The old man slept. Shmuel watched him. He lay on the cot, stirring now and again—the jab of an interior pain. His breath came shallow and dry, a rattle, and a bubble of drool inflated in one corner of his slack mouth. His skin was milky and loose and spotted, shot with a network of subtle blue veins. He’d pulled the blanket around him like a prayer shawl, though in doing so a foot fell free and it dangled off the cot. Somehow this old creature had survived, another freak like Shmuel, a meaningless exception whose only function was to provide a scale for the larger numbers of extinction.
Why couldn’t the Americans have captured some nice plump SS officer? An eager collaborator, a cynic, a traitor? Or why couldn’t they have arrived just a day earlier, before the warehouses had been looted? No—again, this Repp had been lucky. He’d left nothing behind, leaving them to hunt through the pale, pained memories of Eisner the tailor.
“Remember: the records,” Leets had said.
But instead he remembered his own first interrogation with Leets and Outhwaithe: two hard, glossy Gentiles, eyes blank, faces impassive. Men in uniforms: was there a difference? Hard men, with guns and jobs to do, no time to let human feelings get in the way. The whole world was wearing a uniform, except for the Jews. No, the Jews had a uniform too: blue and white stripes, a jagged, dirty star clipped over the heart. That was old Eisner’s uniform, that was the uniform Shmuel preferred, not this—
Startled, he looked at his own clothes. He was wearing American boots, field pants and a wool OD shirt. To old Eisner he was an American, the language made no difference.
Eisner the tailor still slept fitfully on the cot as Shmuel slipped out. He did not have far to go. Of the warehouses there were two kinds: badly looted and heavily guarded. Soldiers marked the latter, smashed doors and a litter of debris the former. Shmuel immediately found the single exception to this rule, a brick building that was not guarded, and had not been looted.
He stepped inside. It smelled musty and the darkness clamped down on him. He stood, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Small chinks of light glittered in the roof, almost like stars, and slowly in the darkness shapes appeared. Pile and pile, rank on rank, neatly arranged after the Teutonic fashion, were blue-and-white prison uniforms.
“No. This guy is different. I don’t know why, but he is. He’s a curious combination of valor and evil. He’s very brave. He’s enormously brave. He’s much braver than I am. But he’s—” He paused, groping.
She would not help him.
“I can’t figure out how they turned out such men,” Leets said. “You see, we always expect them to be cowards. Or perverts. Or nuts, of some sort. What if they were just like us? What if some of them were better even? Braver? Tougher? What if some were heroes. Unbelievable heroes?”
“You melodramatize. I’ve seen their work. They were grim, seedy little killers, that’s all. Nothing glamorous in it at all. They killed in the millions. Men, women. The children, especially. At Auschwitz, at the end, they threw children living into the ovens.”
“I asked Tony about all this. He’s a very brilliant man, you realize. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘Don’t get too philosophical, chum. We’re merely here to kill the swine.’ But that’s not enough, don’t you see?”
“You’re obsessed with this guy, that’s all I see. And he’s nothing, he’s no concept, no symbol. He’s just a pig with a gun. It’s the gun that makes him special.”
Shmuel, back in the office, slipped quickly into the uniform. He felt nothing; it was only cloth, with a faintly musty smell, from long storage.
He smoked another cigarette while he waited for Eisner to awake or for Leets or Outhwaithe to return. He knew better than to jerk the tailor out of his sleep. Now where were Leets and Outhwaithe? Though perhaps it was best they were away for so long, it might give him a chance to finally make contact here.
As he waited, a curious thing began to happen. It occurred to him that there would in fact be a future. For the first time in years he allowed himself to think of it. In the camps as a
The old man stirred.
“You are feeling all right, Mr. Eisner, now?”
“Not so bad,” said Eisner. “It’s been worse.” Then he saw Shmuel. “A uniform? And whose is that?”
“Mine, believe it or not. I had one like it anyway. At the camp in the East. Called Auschwitz.”
“A terrible place, so I’ve heard. Still, it’s a surprise.”
“It’s true.”
“I thought you were with the Gentiles.”
“With, yes. Part of, no. But these fellows are decent, not like the Germans.”
“All Gentiles frighten me.”
“That’s why I’m here alone.”
“Still after the records? I should remember records, all I’ve been through. Listen, I’ll tell you, I know nothing of records. The civilian, Kohl, he kept the records. A German.”
“Kohl?” said Shmuel, writing it.
“Ferdinand Kohl. I’ll spell it if you like. It makes no difference though. He’s dead. Not a bad man, but that’s how it goes. The inmates caught him on liberation day and beat him to death. But there’s too many other sorrows in here”—heart—“to make room for him.”
“Mine’s crowded as well,” Shmuel said.
“But coats I remember. Battle coats. For the forest. Very fancy. We made them in the thousands.”
“When?”
“Over the years. For four years; then last year we changed the pattern. First, a kind of smock, a tunic. Then a real true coat.”