Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

She stared at him in black fury. He’d never seen so much rage on a human face. He swallowed uncomfortably, lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking.

“Here, I brought you something.” She reached into her purse. “Go ahead. Look. Go ahead, you’re brave. I insist.”

It was a selection of photographs. Blurry, pornographic things. Naked women in fields, standing among German soldiers. Pits jammed with corpses. One, particularly horrible, showed a German soldier in full combat gear, holding a rifle up against the head of a woman who held a child.

“It’s awful,” he said. “Jesus, of course it’s awful. What do you expect me to say? It’s awful, all of it. All right? Goddamn it, what do you want? I had a fucking job to do. I didn’t ask for it, it just came along. So get off my back, goddamn it.”

“Dr. Fischelson has an interesting theory. Would you like to hear it? It’s that the Gentiles are still punishing us for inventing the conscience five thousand years ago. But what they don’t realize is that when they kill us, they kill themselves.”

“Is that a theory or a curse?”

“If it’s a curse, Jim, I extend it to you. From the bottom of my heart, I hope this thing kills you. I hope it does. I hope it kills you.”

“I think you’d better go now. I’ve still got work to do.”

She left him, alone in the office. The pictures lay before him on the desk. After a while, he ripped them up and threw them into the wastebasket.

Early the next morning, before the interrogations began, Leets composed the following request and with Outhwaithe’s considerable juice got it priority circulation as an addendum to the weekly Intelligence Sitrep, which bucked it down as far as battalion-level G-2’s and their British counterparts ETO-wide.

JOINT ANGLO-AMERICAN TECHNICAL INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE PRIORITY ONE

REQUEST ALL-LEVEL G-2/CIC STAFFS FORWARD THIS HDQ ANY INFO IN RE FOLLOWING FASTEST REPEAT FASTEST FASTEST

1. UNUSUAL ENEMY SMALL ARMS PROFICIENCY, ESP INVOLVING WAFFEN SS UNITS

2. HEAVILY DEFENDED TEST INSTALLATIONS ENCOMPASSING FIRING RANGE FACILITIES

3. RUMORS, UNCONFIRMED STORIES, INVOLVING SAME

4. PW INTERROGATION REPORTS INVOLVING SAME

“Jesus, the crap we’re going to get out of that,” complained Roger.

It was clear the Jew was trying to accommodate them. He answered patiently their many questions, though he thought them stupid. They kept asking him the same ones again and again and each time he answered. But he could only tell them what he knew. He knew that Repp had killed twenty-five men at long distance—400 meters Leets had figured—in pitch dark, without sound. He knew that a mysterious Man of Oak had come to visit the project at one point or other during his time there. He knew that he’d been picked up near Karlsruhe, which meant he’d traveled the length of the Black Forest massif, a distance of one hundred or so kilometers, which would put the location of Anlage Elf at somewhere in that massive forest’s southern quadrant.

Beyond that, only details emerged. One day he identified the collar patches of the SS soldiers at the installation: they were from III Waffen SS Panzergrenadierdivision Totenkopf , the Death’s Head division, a group of men originally drawn from the pre-war concentration camp guard personnel that had since 1939 fought in Poland, France, Russia and was now thought to be in Hungary. Another day he identified the kind of automobile the mysterious Man of Oak had arrived in: a Mercedes-Benz twelve-cylinder limousine, thought to be issued only to Amt leaders, or department heads, in the SS bureaucracy. But as to the meaning or identity of this strange phantom, he had no idea. He did not even have much curiosity.

“He was a German. That’s all. A German big shot,” he said laconically in his oddly accented English.

Another day he correctly identified the STG-44 as the basic weapon of the Totenkopf complement. Another day he discussed the installation layout, fortifications and so forth. Another day he created to the best of his ability a word-picture of the unfortunate civilian called Hans the Kike, whose chemicals he’d tried to move.

Leets smiled at how far they’d come and how fast. From that first meeting in the hospital to now, no more than a week had passed. Yet a whole counter-espionage operation had been mounted. SWET effectively no longer existed; it had been given over entirely to the business of catching Repp… and he, Leets, would run the show, reporting only to Tony. He would have first priority in all matters of technical support: he could go anywhere anytime, spend any amount of money, as long as Tony didn’t scream too loud, and Tony wouldn’t scream at all. He had the highest security clearance. More people in this town knew of him than ever before, and he’d been asked to three parties. He had a car, though only Rog as driver. There was talk of a Majority. He knew he could get on the phone and call up anybody short of Ike; and maybe even Ike.

Yes, it was quite a lot.

But it was also very little.

“He can only get us so far. We are helpless until we find this place,” Tony said.

But Leets pressed ahead. It was his hope that somewhere in the Jew’s testimony a hidden clue would be uncovered, yielding up the secrets of Repp and his operation.

Black Forest? Then consult with botanists, hikers, foresters, geographers, vacationers. Look at recon photos. Check out library books— Tramping the German Forests , by Maj. H. W. O. Stovall (Ret.), D.F.C., Faber and Faber; The Shadowy World of the Deciduous Forest , by Dr. William Blinkall-Apney. And do not forget that trove of intelligence: Baedeker.

Man of Oak? Scan the British Intelligence files for German officers with wooden arms or legs or even jaws—it had happened to Freud, had it not? Check out reputations, rumors, absurd possibilities. Could a fellow walk stiffly? Could he be extremely orthodox? Very conservative? Slow-moving, losing his leaves, deep-rooted, dispensing acorns?

“It’s rather ridiculous,” Tony said. “It sounds like something out of one of your Red Indian movies.”

Leets grunted. Man-of-Oak? Jesus Christ, he moaned in disgust.

And what about equipment?

Hitting twenty-five targets dead center from 400 meters in the dark? Impossible. Yet here was the crucial element that had convinced Tony to call upstairs and make noise. For in a mob of dead Jews he could easily see dead generals or dead ministers or dead kings.

But ballistics people said it was impossible. No man could shoot so well without being able to see. There must have been some kind of secret illumination. Radar? Unlikely, for radar, though still primitive, worked best in the air, where it could see only airplanes and space. There was some kind of sound business the Navy had—sonar, someone said. Perhaps the Germans had worked out a way to hear the targets. Supersensitive microphones.

“Maybe the guy can just see in the dark,” Rog suggested.

“Thanks, Rog. You’re a big help,” Leets said.

But even if he could see, how could he hit? Four hundred meters was a long way . If he was going to hit at that range, he had to be putting out a high-velocity round. And when it sliced through the sound barrier, krak! Leets could himself remember. And he knew the guy was firing a very quick 7.92-millimeter round. Could they silence it? Sure, silence the gun, no problem; but not the bullet! The bullet made the noise.

How the hell were they doing it?

It terrified him.

Who was the target?

Now there was the big one. With the who, everything else would come unraveled. Leets’s guesses went only to one conclusion: it had to be a group. Else why would this Repp practice up on a group, and why would he use a weapon like the thirty-shot STG-44, as opposed to a nice five-shot Kar ’98 rifle, the bolt-action, long-range instrument the Germans had been building in the millions since the last century?