Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

“I’m an American officer,” she said, fumbling for identification. “For God’s sake, that man is ill. What is going on? Where are you taking that man?”

“Now, now, miss,” the leader soothed. It would have been easier to hate him if he hadn’t been quite so mild.

“He’s ill.”

The doctor was denouncing them in Polish. “Please don’t get excited,” the man said.

“Where is your authority?” she shouted, because it was the only thing she could think of.

“Sorry, miss. You’re a Yank, wouldn’t know, would you? Of course not. Special Branch. Don’t need an authority. Special Branch. That’s all.”

“He’s gone, mein Gott , is gone, is gone.” The doctor sat down.

Susan stared down the hall at the swinging doors through which they’d taken the Jew.

The leader turned to go, and Susan grabbed him.

“What is happening? My God, this is a nightmare. What are you doing, what is going on?” Her eyes felt big and she was terrified. They had merely come in and taken him and nothing on earth could stop them. There was nothing she could do. She and an old man alone in a corridor.

“Miss,” the leader said, “please. You are supposed to be in uniform. The regulations. Now I haven’t taken any names. We’ve been quite pleasant. Best advice is to go away, take the old man, get him some tea, and put him to bed. Forget all this. It’s a government matter. Now I haven’t taken any names. Please, miss, let go. I don’t want to take any names.”

He stood back. He was ill at ease, a big, strong type, with police or military written all over him. He was trying to be kind. It was a distasteful business for him.

“Who can I see?” she said. “Jesus, tell me who I can see?”

The man took a nervous look around. Outside, a horn honked. Quickly, his hand dipped into his coat, came out with a paper. He unfolded it, looked it over.

“See a Captain Leets,” he said. “American, like you. Or a Major Outhwaithe. They’re behind it all.” And he was gone.

“The Jews,” Dr. Fischelson was saying, over on the chair, looking bleakly at nothing, “who’ll tell about the Jews? Who’ll witness the fate of the Jews?”

But Susan knew nobody cared about the Jews.

Leets, alone in the office, waited for her. He knew she’d come. He felt nervous. He smoked. His leg ached. He’d sent Roger out on errands, for now there was much to do; and once Tony had called, urgent with a dozen ideas, with several subsidiary leads from the first great windfall. But Leets had pushed him off.

“I have to get through the business with Susan.”

Tony’s voice turned cold. “There is no business with Susan. You owe her nothing. You owe the Jews nothing. You owe the operation everything.”

“I have to try and explain it,” he said, knowing this would never do for a man of Tony’s hardness.

“Then get it over with quick, chum, and be ready for business tomorrow. It’s first day on the new job, all right?”

Leets envied the major: war was simple for the Brits—they waged it flat out, and counted costs later.

He heard something in the hall. Susan? No, something in this ancient building settling with a groan.

But presently the door opened, and she came in.

He could see her in the shadows.

“I thought you’d be out celebrating,” she said.

“It’s not a triumph. It’s a beginning.”

“Can we have some light, please, goddamn it.”

He snapped on his desk lamp, a brass fixture with an opaque green cowl.

Because he knew he was dead to her, she seemed very beautiful. He could feel his cock tighten and grow. He felt a desperate need to return to the past: before all this business, when the Jews were little people in the background whom she went to see occasionally, and his job was simple, meaningless, and London a party. For just a second he felt he’d do anything to have all that back, but mainly what he wanted back was her. Just her. He wanted to know her again, all of her—skin, her hands and legs. Her mouth. Her laugh. Her breasts, cunt.

She wore full uniform, as if at a review. Army brown, which turned most women shapeless and sexless, made Susan wonderful. Her brass buttons shone in the flickery English light. A few ribbons were pinned across the left breast of her jacket. A bar glittered on her lapels, and a SHAEF patch, a sword, upthrust, stood out on her shoulder. One of those little caps tilted across her hair. She was carrying a purse or something.

“I tried to stop you, you know,” she said. “I tried. I went to see people. People I know. Officers I’d met in the wards. Generals even. I even tried to see Hemingway, but he’s gone. That’s how desperate I was.”

“But you didn’t get anywhere?”

“No. Of course not.”

“It’s very big. Or, we think it’s big. You can’t stop it. Ike himself couldn’t stop it.”

“You bastard.”

“Do you want a cigarette?”

“No.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I was there when they came and took him. ‘Special Branch.’ There was nothing we could do.”

“I know. I read the report. Sorry. I didn’t know it would work out that way.”

“Would it have made any difference?”

“No,” Leets said. “No, it wouldn’t have, Susan.”

“You filthy bastard.”

She seemed almost about to break down. But her eyes, which had for just a flash welled with tears, returned quickly to their hard brilliance.

“Susan—”

“Where is he?”

“In another hospital. A British one. He’ll be fine there. He’ll be all right. If it’s a matter of worrying about him, then please don’t. We’ll take good care of him. He’s quite important.”

“You have no idea what that man’s been through.”

“I think perhaps I do. It’s been very rough on him, sure, we realize—”

“You have no idea, Jim. You can’t possibly begin to imagine. If you think you can, then you’re fooling yourself. Believe me.”

Leets said nothing.

“Why? For Christ’s sakes, why? You kidnap a poor Jew. Like Cossacks, you come in and just take him. Why?”

“He’s an intelligence source. An extraordinary one. We believe he’s the key to a high-priority German operation. We believe we can work backward from the information he gives us and track it down. And stop it.”

“You bastard. You have no idea of the stakes involved, of what he means to those people.”

“Susan, believe me: I had no choice. I was walking down a London street a few nights ago with a woman I love. All of a sudden she unreels a story that struck right at the heart of something I’d been working on since January. You needed a witness? Well, I needed one too. I had no way of knowing they’d turn out to be the same man.”

“You and that bastard Englishman. You were the officers that came by the clinic yesterday. I should have known. Dr. Fischelson said investigators. I thought of cops. But no, it was you and that Oxford creep. You’d do anything for them, won’t you, Jim? Anything! To get in with the Oxford boys, the Harvard boys. You’ve come a long way from Northwestern, goddamn you.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t send the Jew to Anlage Elf in the Schwarzwald. I didn’t set him among the Waffen SS and the Man of Oak and Obersturmbannführer Repp. The Germans did that. I’ve got to find out why.”

“You bastard.”

“Please. Be reasonable.”

“That’s what you people always say. That’s what we’ve been hearing since 1939. Be reasonable. Don’t exaggerate. Stay calm. Keep your voice down.”

“Yell then, if it makes you feel better.”

“You’re all the same. You and the Germans. You’re all—”

“Shut up, Susan. You’ve got no call to say that.”