The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
In one such he himself seized a moment for rest. He was alone in the trees. He could hear his own breathing, ragged and forced, in the gloom. He was uncomfortably warm. He still hadn’t reached pines. Nothing seemed familiar; it was like no forest he knew and he knew plenty of forests. He actually wished he’d hear a bird hoot or an animal cry: sign of some animate thing. His eyes scanned ahead: only massed-together trunks, white or gray scars of rocks standing out among them, some mossy and dull, and utter silence. The rifle sling was taut against his shoulder and the straps from the pack knifed deeply into him. He ignored a dozen or so other small agonies—scratches, a twisted ankle, sore joints, the beginnings of a cramp—but the straps really bothered him. Yet he knew to fuss with the damned thing now would be a mistake. He bent and tried to get the thing higher on him, so as to carry it more with body than with shoulders. Painful as it was, he took some sustenance in remembering how close they’d been to going operational at over fifty kilos. Under those conditions he’d be exhausted now. That strange little geek Hans the Kike really got the job done: the man deserved a medal. Right now Hans the Kike was a bigger hero to Repp than any of them. Thank God the Germans could produce men like him.
Wearily, he began his march again. The rocks had become quite troublesome by now, and he had to pick his way through defiles and up sudden smooth slopes. At one point he came even with a break in the trees and could see out: in the far distance a kind of blue haze. Actually, since he was facing north, and visibility was good, it might actually be Germany he could see. But what difference did it make? He pushed himself on. Ahead, nothing but the steady rise of the mountain, blanketed in trees and dead leaves and scrawny bracken and thistles. No pines yet, not easy travel. He feared he was losing time. He didn’t even want to stop for water, though his throat was parched. His boots occasionally slipped in the treacherous footing and once he went down, badly banging a knee on a stone. It throbbed steadily. He felt also as though he had a fever. He felt unnaturally hot. He’d imagined it would be much cooler up here. Why was it so warm?
Where was he going? Did he even know? Yes, he knew. Wir fahren nach Polen um Juden zu verschlen. He was going to Poland to beat up the Jews. He’d seen it chalked on the sides of the troop trains in 1939, next to grotesque profiles of heavy kike faces, beaked nose, primitive jaws, almost fishlike: a horrible image. He was going to Switzerland to beat up the Jews: it was the same thing, the same process, the same war. He was going to beat up Jews.
The pain in his shoulders increased. He ought to slow or even rest, but he knew he couldn’t. He was obsessed with failing light. If he didn’t get there before dark he was lost.
He was going to beat up some Jews.
Jews.
You killed them. Messy, disturbing work. No one liked it, and in Berlin they were wise enough to see that those few who did should not have been on the firing line. It was a responsibility, a trust, a commitment to the future.
Repp had asked for the special duty.
He’d been wounded after Demyansk and though the wound wasn’t serious—a crease across the thigh, healing quickly—his blood count was so low, they had wanted to put him on less rigorous duty. But Repp wanted to be a part of the other business, the other war. It was simple duty: no one forced him, and he did not enjoy it. It was simply part of the job, a bad part, but one had to get through the bad parts too.
The day that swam to his mind now was in October, 1942, at Dubno Airport in Volhynian Province in the Generalgouvernement. Why this day? It was not so terribly different from most days. Perhaps it was the cigarette and the girl, or more precisely the odd congruence of the cigarette and the girl.
It was a Siberia. It tasted wonderful, filling his head with a most pleasant buzz. He was only then learning of the joys of these fierce Russian things that tasted like burning villages and left him just a bit dizzy. He sat at the edge of a pit on a cool sunny day. Everybody was being very kind, because the business could get messy and difficult and hard on everyone. But today things were going quite nicely. A lot of people were around, civilians, relaxing soldiers, some with cameras, smiling, security policemen.
The gun across his legs was a Steyr-Solothurn, designated an MP-34. It was a wonderful old weapon, beautifully crafted though quite heavy. It had a fine wood stock and a perforated barrel and a horizontal magazine feed system. Repp loved it: the Mercedes-Benz of machine pistols, too elegant and precise for wartime production. The barrel had finally cooled. He nodded to a black-uniformed security policeman. The man disappeared behind a bulwark of earth that had been gouged out to form the pit, and Repp for just a second was alone with his morning’s work: there must have been five hundred of them by that time, filling half the excavation, most of them lifeless, though a cry would now and then rise. They did not look so bad; he’d seen many worse bodies on the Eastern front, their guts blown out, shit and legs and shattered skulls all over the place; these people were neatly slumbering, though there was a great deal of blood.
The policemen got another group into the pit. An old man with a child, a mother and father and several young children. The mother was crooning to them, but the father did not seem to be much help. He looked terribly scared and could hardly walk. The children were confused. They were talking that infernal language of theirs, almost a German dialect, yet hideously deformed, like so many things German they touched. Yet Repp could not hate them, naked women and men and children, walking daintily into the mud, as though they wanted to keep their feet clean. There were several other women, the last of them a girl in her twenties, young and dark and quite pretty.
As Repp wearily stood, hoisting the gun up with him, he heard the young girl say, to no one in particular, “Twenty-three years old.”
What a remarkable thing to say! He thought about it later. Curious: what had she meant? I’m too young to die? Well, everybody’s too young to die, miss.
Repp engaged the bolt, braced the weapon tightly against his ribs, and fired. The bullets thudded neatly across the bare backs and they fell quivering. They lay, one or two convulsing. It was odd: you never saw the bullets hit or the blood spurt and yet before they were still they seemed doused with it, red, thin, pouring from every orifice. A child moved again, moaned. Repp fingered the selection switch back to single shot and fired, once, into the skull, which broke apart.
Then he changed magazines.
Everybody was happy when Repp did the shooting. He was quick and efficient. He didn’t make mistakes or become morose after a while as so many of the others did. He even came to believe that it was best for the Jews too. “Better me,” he said later that day, drinking coffee, “than some butcher.”
Repp saw light ahead. At that same moment a new sensation became apparent to him. He was moving without trouble, through clean, flat forest floor. He’d reached the high virgin forest. He rushed on to the light. He stood at the crest, amid pine and fir, in cool air. He looked about, his eyes tracing the ridge he was on to a peak, stony and remote. Across the way, he could see other mountains, their shapes softened in trees, and beyond that the true Alps, snowy and heroic.
But Repp’s vision was drawn downward. His eyes followed the carpet of forest sliding away for thousands of feet down the slope of the mountain, until finally it gave way to cultivated land, checkerboarded, but much of it green, the Sitter Valley in the Canton of Appenzell. He could not see the town—it was in another leg of the valley—but there was the convent, a medieval church, high-roofed with two domed steeples and a jumble of other subsidiary buildings, walled off from the world. He could see the courtyard from here too.
He knelt swiftly and peeled the rifle from his shoulder. He braced it on the bipod and stood for just a moment, freed at last from a part of the burden, though of course the bulky pack on his shoulders still hurt. But then he was back down, sliding the hatch off the opaque face of the Vampir apparatus. He saw the light strike it. Did it glitter, seem to come alive; or was that his imagination?
Whatever, Obe
29
“He’s already there,” said Tony. “On the mountain. Over the convent. With Vampir.”
“Yeah,” said Leets, tiredly. He sat back, put his feet up on the table and with two fingers pinched the bridge of his nose. “Christ, I’ve got a headache,” he said.
Beyond, music lifted, American, popular, from off the Armed Forces net. He could hear laughter, the sound of women’s voices. Women? Here? Laying it on a bit thick, weren’t they?
“We could call the Swiss police,” said Roger brightly. “They could get some people out there and warn the—”
“No lines,” said Tony, “not in the middle of a war. End of a war. Whatever. You can’t just ring up the operator, eh?”
“Okay, okay,” said Roger quickly, “here’s what, I got it, I got it, we’ll radio OSS in Bern or Zurich. They could get in contact with the Swiss police. There’s just a chance that—”
“There’s no chance at all,” said Leets. “We are now in the middle of the biggest celebration in three thousand-odd years of European history. They knew all along.”
“I suppose we can rationalize our failure,” said Tony. “We could argue that it’s really none of our business: one lone German criminal and some stateless Jews in neutral territory. We did give it a very good effort. Nobody can say we didn’t try.”
“Anybody got any aspirin?” Leets asked grumpily. “Jesus, it sounds like a goddamned party out there. I keep hearing women. Are there women out there, Roger?”
“Some Red Cross girls,” Roger said. “Look, another thing we could try is the legation. There’s bound to be a night duty officer. Now he could—”
“I sure could stand to get laid,” Leets said. “I haven’t gotten laid since—” he trailed off.
“And of course there’s a political dimension to be considered too,” said Tony. “All that money going to Zionists. It seems quite possible that some of those funds might be diverted into ends other than those best for King and country, eh? Let’s fold up here and go find ourselves a pint, and enjoy the celebration.”
“Captain, we—”
“All right, Roger.”
“Captain, we can’t just—”
“All right, Roger,” he said. “Boy, do I have a headache. I always knew this would happen. Right from the start. I could feel it, I knew it was in the cards. Goddamn it.”
“I suppose I did too,” said Tony, rising wearily. “It certainly has got dark fast, hasn’t it?”
“What’re you guys talking about?” Roger asked, fearing the answer.
“Roger, go get the Jeep,” said Tony. “And tell me please where the bloody phone is in this mausoleum.”
“Hey, what—”
“Roger,” Leets finally explained, “it’s come down to us. You, me, Tony. Only way. Go get the Jeep.”
“We can never drive there,” said Roger. “We’re hundreds of miles away. It’s almost eight. Not that far in so short—”
“We can probably make it to Nuremberg in two hours. Then, if we’re lucky, real lucky, we can promote an airplane. Then—”
“Jesus, what is this, dreamland? We’d have to get landing clearances, visas, stuff like that. Permission from the Swiss. Find another car on the ground. Drive to, what was it, Applewell or whatever, then find this place. Before midnight. That’s the craziest thing I—”
“No,” Leets said, “no cars, no visas, no maps. We jump in. Like Normandy, like Varsity, like Anlage Elf.”
“Where is that damned telephone?” said Tony.
Tony found his phone—a whole abandoned switchboard full of them, in fact—in the great monumental stairwell around which Schloss Pommersfelden was built. But the space began to fill with people, drawn out of offices and billets, or drawn off the road by the blazing lights. It was one of those rare nights when no one wanted to be alone; no one was moody or unhappy. A future had just opened up for them.
Women began to appear. From where? Wasn’t this place really a kind of prison? Red Cross girls, newspaper correspondents, WAC’s, a few British nurses, some German women even. The stairwell jammed up with flesh. Everybody was rubbing, grinding, bumping, stroking. Liquor, looted from somewhere in the castle, began to appear in heroic quantities. Nobody had time for glasses; one-hundred-year-old Rhine wines in black dusty bottles were sucked down like Cokes by GI’s. A radio provided music. Dog-faces and generals rubbed shoulders in crowded orbits around the girls. Leets thought he heard the German officers singing in the detention wing—something schmaltzy and sentimental in counterpoint to the Big Band jangle from the radio.
A girl kissed Leets. He could feel her tits squash flat against his chest. She put a boozy tongue in his ear and whispered something specific and began to tug at him, and then someone ripped her away.
Meanwhile, Tony worked the phone. Leets could not help but hear.
“I say.” Tony especially the stage Englishman, David Niven, for Christ’s sake. “Major Outhwaithe here, his Majesty’s Royal Fusiliers, hello, hello, is this Nuremberg, Signal Corps, could you talk up, please, yes, much better, I’m told a British Mosquito squadron is about, at the airfield of course, can you possibly buzz me through, old fellow, must be an Air Officer Commanding about, no, no, English chap, funny talker like me, right, Limey, at least a group captain, what you chaps would call a colonel, yes, it sounds like a lovely party, we’re having quite a one at this end ourselves, but do you think you could arouse Group Captain Manville? I see, yes, pity, then is it possible you could patch me through to that bunch then, yes, RAF, yes, hello, hello, are you there, Group Captain Manville? Yes, another Brit, Outhwaithe, of Mi-six, or SOE actually, you’re not Sara Finchley’s cousin, ah, yes, thought so, believe I laid eyes on you in ’37 at Henley, the regatta, you were the coxswain in the number-two boat, yes, bit of a hero, weren’t you, Magdalen man, eh? and didn’t you football as well, thought so, no, not Magdalen, Christ Church, ’30, languages, got me into this spy business, yes, cushy, I agree, a few times, France, scratches though, yes, wonderful it’s over, but I’ve heard Labour will win the next general, boot poor Winston out on his arse, yes, drinks awfully, heard the same myself, stay in? Good God, now? done my bit, time to get back though it’ll be all different, every little thing’ll have changed for the worse though I fancy in a year or so or ten or twenty, we’ll look back on all this and think it great fun, highlight of our days, though right now it seems bleak enough, yes, sad in a way that it’s over, they were mighty days, weren’t they? and how is dear Sara, really, that common little Welshman Jones, Ives, Ives, both legs, she’s marrying him anyway? why, how splendid, sounds like a novel, Arnhem, heard it was a throw of the dice all the way, Red Devil, those were brave lads, those were, make the rest of us look like sodders, quite a show, quite a show, Frost’s adjutant? and how is Johnny? glad to be free, I’ll bet, now, by the way, Group Captain, Tom, Tom is it? Tony here, yes, Antony, a major, they weren’t so generous with the rank in our backwash department of the war, hope it doesn’t hold me back after I’m demobbed, no telling how the records will count, yes, anyway, now, Tom, dear fellow, I’m in a bit of a pinch, yes, not a real bother, but time-consuming nevertheless, need an airplane, a Mosquito actually, yes, good ship, the Mossie—” Tony looked up at Leets, covered the speaker and said, “The beggar’s completely sozzled,” and returned without missing a beat. “—all wood, I know, I always wondered how they stood up to Jerry flak, flew between it, ho ho ho ho, very good, Tom, now, Tom, we’ve got to get to Switzerland in rather a dash, I know it’s the best party since Kitchener reached Khartoum and God knows we’ve all earned it, and it’s rather a chunk of a favor I’m asking, but it seems to be on the urgent side, a loose Jerry end we need to tie down, time’s a-wasting and I haven’t got time to call the right people upstairs, and of course the Yanks, as usual, would rather play
“He said No?”
“He said Yes. I think. So drunk he could hardly speak, the music was quite loud. But there’ll be a Mosquito on the field at ten at Grossreuth Flughafen. God.” He stood.
Leets and Outhwaithe pushed their way through the celebrants, and out into the night, where Roger waited with the Jeep and the Thompson submachine guns.
Repp, at 400 meters out, had an angle of about 30 degrees to the target zone. It was his best compromise, close enough to put his rounds in with authority, yet high enough to clear the wall. He half crouched now behind an outcrop of rock. The Vampir rifle lay before him on the stone, on its bipod, the bulky optics skewing it to one side. Repp had removed the pack and set it next to the rifle so that its weight wouldn’t pull his shooting off.
Enough light lingered to let him examine the buildings beneath and beyond him. Built five hundred years ago by fierce Jesuits, the buildings had been walled and somewhat modernized early in the century when the order of Mother Teresa took them over as a convent. It looked like a prison. The chapel, the oldest building, was not impressive, certainly nothing on the scale of the Frauenkirche in Munich, a true monument to papism; it was a utilitarian stone thing with a steeply pitched roof, two domed steeples with grim little crosses atop them. But Repp steadied his binoculars against the other, larger edifice, the living quarters of the order that fronted on a courtyard. Patiently in the fading light he explored it until he found, not far from the main entrance with stairway and imposing arches, an obscure wooden door, heavily bolted. The children would spring from there.