The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter
Leets unslung his Thompson. He could see he was in a meadow in a valley, ankle-deep in grass, low hills looming around. A quarter-mile or so away he thought he could see a building and a wall closing it off.
“This way,” he hissed at the still befuddled young sergeant, and began, in his slow and painful way, to run. He could not see Tony.
Tony ran. He seemed to be closing the distance fast. There was some pain, but not so much. He wasn’t sure about the gun, he’d lost that when he hit. Still, the place seemed a long way off.
He just kept running. Someone else in his body was breathing hard. He wanted to cough or stop. A footrace. Didn’t they realize a certain type of gent doesn’t run vulgarly and blindly across fields, almost to the point of vomiting, his own sweat burning hotly on his skin? A gentleman never sweats. The boots were impossibly heavy and the grass slowed him. He felt perfectly lucid.
Repp flicked on the scope and finally, last step, braced his free hand on the stock, just behind the receiver. He fit his shooting eye against the soft rubber cup of the scope.
The world according to Vampir was green and silent.
He felt very patient and helpful almost. He felt not that he was a part of history, but that he was History, a raw force, reaching out of the night to twist the present into the future. Savage, perhaps, in immediate application, but in a much longer run Good and Just and Fair.
A smear of light radiated across the scope as a trillion trillion swirling molecules spilled out the opening door.
Right on time for their appointment with destiny, Repp thought.
A blurry splotch of light jiggled out, barely recognizable as a human shape. And another.
Repp tracked it against the reticule of the sight, as other splotches paraded helpfully along behind.
“There, there, my babies, my fine babies, come to Papa,” Repp began to croon.
Leets was almost dead with exhaustion. He was no runner. He wanted to throw himself onto the grass and suck in great quarts of cool oxygen. Roger was running next to him. He’d caught up, all that idiotic tennis making him strong and fast, but Leets wouldn’t let him get beyond. Wasn’t that Tony ahead at the gate?
The gate!
A sick feeling burned through Leets, almost a sob.
How could they get through the gate?
Tony hit the door in the wall. It didn’t budge.
Repp had nineteen, now twenty.
Repp’s finger was on the trigger, taking the slack out.
Repp had twenty-one, twenty-two.
Leets tried to get there. He’d never make it. He had a terrible premonition of the next several seconds. “Tony!” someone screamed, himself.
Old Inverailor House gimmick, from the first days of SOE training up in Scotland. The man was an ex-Hong Kong police inspector, knew all kinds of tricks of the trade, of which this was but one:
“Now if you’ve got a lock in a door and you want in and you’re in a bit of a hurry, say Jerry’s coming along, take your revolver, just like a chap in a Hollywood cowboy picture, and shoot—but not into the lock, flicks are all wrong about that. You’ll just catch the slug on the bounce in your own middle. Rather, at an angle, into the wood, behind the bloody lock. That big four fifty-five makes a wonderful wrench.”
Funny how it came back, swimming up through five years of complicated past, just when he needed it.
Carefully, holding the Webley snout at an angle two inches from the ancient brass lock plate, Tony fired. The flash spurted white and blinding.
* * *
Repp had twenty-five. There was no slack in the trigger. But what was going on?
“Kinder,” yelled Tony, German perfect, “the bad man can see in the dark, the bad man can see in the dark.”
He could see their white faces stark in the night, and eyes white as they fled. They were apparitions. He heard the scuffle of panicked feet across the pavement. He heard squeals and yelps. He must have seemed a giant to them, a nightmare creation. They must have thought he was the bad man who could see in the dark, running through the yard, breathing hard, face blackened, gigantic pistol in one hand. Another irony for his collection.
How quickly they vanished. Several brushed against his leg in their flight and yet it seemed to take only a second. They scurried like small animals. He could not see them anymore.
A woman was crying. Terrified. She didn’t know.
We’re good fellows, madame, he wanted to explain.
He heard Leets yelling. What did the man want?
Repp fired.
Leets reached the gate. He heard them screaming and running. He fixed on fleeing figures that seemed to career through the darkness. Someone was crying. A woman’s voice, pitched high in uncontrollable fear, unfurled. “Bitte, bitte,” please, please.
“Go away, dearest God, go away.”
The bullet had taken most of Tony’s head. He was on the ground in the middle of the courtyard, in a dark pool spilling out across the pavement.
Then Repp shot him again.
PART THREE
Endlösung
(Final Solution)
Dawn, May 8, 1945
30
Leets finally stopped being insane near dawn. He’d really gone nuts there for a while, yelling up at the mountain after Repp shot Tony. Leets even fired off a magazine, spraying tracers hopelessly up to disappear into the dark bank of the hillside. Roger had hit Leets with his shoulder behind both knees, and Leets screamed at the blow and went down; then Roger pinned him flat in the arch of the open gate and, using every fiber of strength he had, dragged him back into the protection of the wall.
“Jesus,” Roger yelled in outrage, “tryin’ to get yourself killed!”
Leets looked at him sullenly, but Roger saw a mad glint, the beam of secret insane conviction spark in his irises, werewolflike, and when Leets twisted savagely for the gun, Rog was ready and really hit him hard in the neck with his right forearm, his tennis arm, big as an oak limb, stunning him.
“Out there it’s death,” he bellowed, deeply offended.
Then Leets had insisted on recovering the body.
“We can’t leave him out there. We can’t leave him out there.”
“Forget it,” Roger said. “He doesn’t care. I don’t care. Those children don’t care. Repp doesn’t care. Listen, you need a vacation or something. Don’t you see? You won!”
No, Leets didn’t see. He looked across the courtyard to Outhwaithe. A hundred streams of blood ran out of him, across the stones of the yard, catching in cracks and hollows. His head and face were smashed, an eye blown out, entrails erupting with gas, spilling out. Repp, in uncharacteristic rage, had fired a whole magazine into him. Then he’d turned his weapon on inanimate things and in a spooky display of the power of Vampir he’d shredded the door through which some few of the children had disappeared, then methodically snapped out windows, sent a burst of automatic across a plaster saint in a niche in the church, and finally, in a moment of inspired symbolism, shot the crosses off the two domed steeples. A real screwball, thought Roger.
Now, hours later, a chilly edge of dawn had begun to show to the east. Leets had been still, resigned finally, Roger figured. He himself was quite pleased with his coolness under fire. His friend Ernest Hemingway would have been impressed. He’d even saved the captain’s life. You saved your CO, you got a medal or something, didn’t you? What’s a captain worth? A Silver Star? At least a Bronze Star. For sure a Bronze.
Roger was wondering which medal he’d get—which to ask for, actually—when Leets said, quite calmly, “Okay, Rog. Let’s take him.”
Repp would have to train himself to live with failure. It was another test of will, of commitment; and the way to win it was to close out, ruthlessly, the past. Put it all behind. Speculation as to how and why he had failed were clearly counterproductive.
He explained all this to himself in the dark sometime in the long hours of the night after the shooting. Still, he was bitter: it had been
Repp had killed one, he knew. Now the question was, How many remained? And would they come after him? And other questions, nearly as intriguing. Who were they? Should he flee now?
He’d already rejected the last. His one advantage right now lay in Vampir. It had run out, but they didn’t know that. They only knew he could hit targets in the dark and they couldn’t. It would be foolish to surrender that advantage by racing off into the dark, up a steep incline, through rough forest with which he was unfamiliar. A misstep could be disastrous, even fatal.
They wouldn’t come, of course, in the dark. They’d come in the light, at dawn, when they could see him. They’d come when the odds were better.
If they came.
Would they? That was the real question. They’d won, after all, they’d stopped him, they’d saved the Jewish swineboy and the money and perhaps even the Jews, if there were any left. Sensible men, professionals, would most certainly not come. They’d be pleased in their victory and sit back against unnecessary risks. In their position, he’d make the same decision. Go up a strange mountain after a concealed marksman with one of the most sophisticated weapons in the world? Foolish. Ridiculous. Insane. Impractical.
And that’s when he knew they’d come.
Repp felt himself smile in the dark. He felt happy. He’d reached the last step in his long stalk through the mind of his enemies; and he’d realized just how much now, when it was all over, all finished, when as a species the SS man was about to disappear from the earth, he realized how much he wanted to kill the American.
Roger blinked twice. His mouth felt parched dry.
“Now just a sec,” he said.
“We’ll never have a better chance. We can do it. I guarantee it.”
“Money back?” was all Roger could think to say.
“Money back.” Leets was dead serious.
“H-h-h-h-he’s long gone.” Damn the stutter.
“No. Not Repp. In the night he thinks he’s king.”
“I’m no hero,” Roger confessed. He felt a tremor flap through him.
“Who is?” Leets wanted to know. “Listen close, okay?”
Roger was silent.
“He can see in the dark, right?”
“Man, it’s daytime out there for him.”
“No. Wrong. Eichmann said they thought they were trying to work out a way to make this Vampire gadget lighter. So Repp could carry it.”
“Yeah.”
“He said it was some kind of solar-assist unit. The thing would take some of its power from the sun.”
“Yeah.”
“You see any sun around here?”
“No.”
“It’s run-down. It’s out of juice. It’s empty. He’s blind.”
Oh, Christ, thought Roger. “You want us to go out there and—”
“No.” Leets was very close, though Rog could not see him. But he could feel the heat. “I want you to go out there.”
Repp was blind now. These were rough hours; lesser men, alone in the night and silence, might have yielded to the temptations of flight.
He was thinking, marvelously alive, taking sustenance from the intricacies of the problem that now faced him.
The chief dilemma was Vampir itself. Now that it was dead, it was forty kilos of uselessness. In a fire fight, things happened fast. You needed to be able to move and shoot in fractions of seconds. Should he remove the device?
On the other hand, it was unique. It might be worth millions to the proper parties—perhaps even the Americans. It also might make a certain kind of future more feasible than others.
A running gunfight, if such a thing were to occur in the next few hours, might push him all over the face of this mountain. If he dismounted Vampir and hid it, he might never find it again, or he might be hit and unable to get back to it.
The decision then came down to his confidence.
He decided for Vampir.
“No, Roger,” the captain repeated. “You. You’re going out there.”
“I, uh—”
“Here’s how I’ve got it doped out. He doesn’t know how many we are. But mainly he doesn’t know we know Vampire’s out of juice. So he’s got to figure that if we come, we come at first light. So this is how I figure it. A two-step operation. Step one: Rog goes fast and hard for the mountain. You’ve got nearly an hour till light. Work your way up, keeping out of gullies, moving quietly. Nothing fancy. Just go up. His range at Anlage Elf was four hundred meters. So to get in range with your Thompson you’ve got to get at least two hundred, two hundred fifty meters up the slope. You got it?”
Roger couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“Step two: at seven-thirty A.M. on the fucking dot, I’m coming up the stairs. Wide open, flat out.”
Roger, for one second, stopped thinking about himself.
“You’re dead,” he said. “You’re flat cold dead. He’ll drill you after the first step.”
“Then you kill him, Rog. You’re close enough so when that subsonic round goes off you can get a fix on it. He doesn’t know you’re there. Now the key point in all this is wait. Wait! As long as you’re still, you’re fine. You start moving around and he’ll take you. It’s how these guys work, patience. After he fires, there’ll be at least half an hour, maybe an hour. It’ll be rough. But just wait him out. He’ll get up, Roger. You may be surprised at how close he is. He’ll probably be wearing one of those camouflage suits, spotted brown and green. Now, aim low, let the rise of the gun carry the rounds into him. Five-, six-round bursts, don’t risk a jam. Even when he’s down, keep shooting. When you use up that first magazine, put another in. Shoot him some more. Don’t fuck around. Try and get some slugs into the brains. Really blow them all over the place.”
Roger made a small noise.
Leets had taken the boy’s weapon and was checking it over. “You’ve fired a Thompson, I suppose? Okay, that’s a thirty-round mag in there. I’ve set it on full auto, but no round in the chamber. Now this is the M-one, the Army model. The bolt’s on the side, not on the top like the ones you see in the gangster movies. Just draw it back, it locks; you don’t have to let it go forward again, it fires off the open bolt.”
He handed the weapon back.
“Remember, wait him out. That’s the most important thing. And that shot of his, it won’t sound like a shot. It won’t be as loud, like a thud or something. But you’ll hear it. Then wait, goddamn it, how many times do I have to say this? Wait! Wait all day, if you’ve got to, okay?”
Roger stared at him, openmouthed.
“Your move, Rog. Match point coming up.”
He wants me to go out there? Roger thought in horror. The distance from the corner of the wall to the mountain seemed immense.
“Remember, Rog. It all starts happening at seven-thirty.”
Leets clapped the boy on his shoulder and whispered into his ear, “Now go!” and sent him on his way.
The light was growing. He could see the convent seem to solidify magically before and below him out of gray blur. Quiet down there, a body in the courtyard, otherwise empty.
Repp pressed the magazine release catch and a half-empty magazine slid out. He reached into his pouch, got out a full one, and eased it into the magazine housing.
He cocked the rifle and, leaning over it, peered down the slope through the trees. The light was rising now, increasing steadily; and birds were beginning to sing. Repp could smell the forest now, cool and moist.
The night was ending.
If there was a man, he would come soon.
Repp waited with great, calm patience.
Leets knew it was nearly his turn.
He crouched in the shadow of the wall of the convent, breathing uneasily, trying to conjure up new reasons for not going. It was quite light by now and the second hand of his Bulova persisted in its sweep, pulling the two larger hands along with it. Roger had made it but Leets couldn’t think about Roger. He was thinking about the long one hundred ya
He’d peeled off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, but he was still hot. He’d checked the laces and straps of his boots—tight—and tossed aside his cap and taken the bars off his collar. There wasn’t much else to do.
He checked his watch again. The seconds seemed to drain away. They seemed to fall off the Bulova and rattle to the grass. He tried to feel good about what would probably happen next. Instead he felt puke in the bottom of his throat. His breathing came hard and his legs were cold and stiff and his mouth was dry.
He glanced about and saw the day opening pleasantly, a pale sun beginning to show over the mountain, a pure sky. A few fleecy clouds unraveled overhead. He knew he could catalog natural phenomena until the year 1957 if he didn’t watch himself. Goddamn it, he was thirsty.
He looked at the Bulova again and it gave him the bad news: almost time to go. Seconds to go.
He eased his way up to a crouch, checking for the thousandth time the tommy gun: magazine locked, full auto, safety off, bolt back. The forest was a long way off.
Don’t blow it, Roger, goddamn you, he thought.
And he thought of Susan once again. “Everything you touch turns to death,” she’d said. Susan. Susan, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t mean it. He did not hate her. He wished she were here and he could talk to her.
And he thought of Repp, behind his rifle in the trees.
The Bulova said it was time and Leets ran.
Repp watched the American break from the wall. He’d picked him up minutes ago—the fool kept peering out, then withdrawing. He couldn’t make his mind up, or perhaps he was enchanted with the view.