Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Yet killing anyone would not seem to gain them much, except some hollow vengeance. Sure, kill Churchill, kill Stalin. But it wouldn’t change the outcome of the war. Kill the two houses of Parliament, the Congress and the Senate, the Presidium and the Politburo: it wouldn’t change a thing. Germany would be squashed at the same rate. The big shots still rode the rope.

Yet, goddamn it, not only were they going to kill someone, the SS was going to an immense effort, an effort that must have strained every resource in these desperate days, to kill a few more.

What could it matter? Millions were already dead, already wasted. Who did they hate enough to kill even as they were dying?

Who were they trying to reach out of the grave to get?

And that is where Shmuel’s information left them. Except for one thing.

Leets was alone in the office, working late into the night. That day’s work with the Jew had not gone well. He was beginning to balk. He did not seem to care for his new allies. He was a grim little mutt, grumpy, short of temper, looking absurd in new American clothes. He’d been returned to the hospital now, and Tony was off in conference and Rog was hitting balls against a wall and Leets sat there, nursing the ache in his leg amid crumpled-up balls of paper, books, junk, photos, maps, and tried not to think of Susan. He knew one thing that could drive Susan from his mind.

Leets opened the drawer and drew out a file. It was marked “REPP, first name ?, German SS officer, Le Paradis suspect,” and though its contents were necessarily sketchy, it did contain one bona fide treasure. Leets opened it and there, staring back at him through lightless eyes, was this Repp. It was a blow-up of a 1936 newspaper photo: a long young face, not in any way extraordinary, hair dark and close-cropped, cheekbones high.

The Master Sniper, the Jew had called him.

Leets rationed himself in looking at the picture. He didn’t want to stare it into banality, become overfamiliar with it. He wanted to feel a rush of breath every time he saw it, never take it for granted. To take this guy for granted, Leets knew, would be to make a big mistake.

They’d showed the picture to Shmuel.

He’d looked at it, given it back.

“Yes. It’s him.”

“Repp?”

“Yes. Younger, of course.”

“We think he was involved in a war-crimes action against British prisoners in 1940 in France,” explained Outhwaithe, who’d brought the file by. “A wounded survivor gave two names. Repp was one of them. A researcher then went through the British Museum’s back files and came up with this. It’s from the sporting-news section of Illustrierter Beobachter , the pre-war Nazi picture rag. It seems this young fellow was a member of the German small-bore rifle team. The survivor identified him from it. So we’ve a long-standing interest in Herr Repp.”

“I hope you arrest him, or whatever,” Shmuel had said. He had to be pressed into pursuing the topic of Repp, but finally said only, “A soldier. Rather calm man, quite in control of himself and others. I have no insights into him. Jews have never understood that sort. I can’t begin to imagine what he’s like, how his mind works, how he sees the world. He frightens me. Then. And now, in this room. He has no grief.”

Though Shmuel had no interest in knowing Repp, that was now Leets’s job. He stared hard at the photo. Its caption simply said, “Kadett Repp, one of our exemplary German sportsmen, has a fine future in shooting competitions.”

Another day passed, another interrogation spun itself listlessly out. Leets felt especially sluggish, having spent so much time the night previous with the picture of the German. Another researcher had been dispatched at Tony’s behest through the back issues of all German periodicals at the British Museum; perhaps something new would surface there. Whatever, that aspect had passed momentarily out of Leets’s hands; before him now, instead, sat the Jew, looking even worse than usual. He had rallied in his first days among the Allies, bloated with bland food, treated with unctuous enthusiasm; perhaps he’d even been flattered. But as the time wore on, Leets felt they were losing him. Lately he’d been a clam, talking in grunts, groans. Leets had heard he sometimes had nightmares and would scream in the night—“ Ost! Ost!” east, east; and from this the American concluded things had been rough for him. But what the hell, he’d made it, hadn’t he? Leets hadn’t been raised to appreciate what he took to be moodiness. He had no patience for a tragic view of life and when he himself got to feeling low, it was with an intense accompanying sense of self-loathing.

Anyway, not only was the Jew somewhat hostile, he was sick. With a cold, no less.

“You look pretty awful,” said Rog, in a rare display of human sympathy, though on the subject of another man’s misfortune he was hardly convincing.

“The English keep their rooms so chilly,” the man said.

“Roger, stoke the heater,” Leets said irritably, anxious to return to the matter at hand, which this day was another runaround on the topic of the Man of Oak.

Roger muttered something and moped over to the heater, giving it a rattle.

“A hundred and two in here,” he said to nobody.

Shmuel sniffled again, emptied his sinuses through enflamed nostrils into a tissue, and tossed it into a wastebasket.

“I wish I had my coat. The German thing. They make them warm at least. The wind gets through this.” He yanked on his American jacket.

“That old thing? Smelled like a chem lab,” Roger said.

“Now,” Leets said, “could there be some double meaning in this Oak business? A pun, a symbol, something out of Teutonic mythology—”

Leets halted.

“Hey,” he said, turning rudely, “what did you mean, chem lab?”

“Uh.” Roger looked up in surprise.

“I said, what did you mean—”

“I heard what you said. I meant, it smelled like a chem lab.” It was as close as he could get. “I had a year of organic in high school, that’s all.”

“Where is it?”

“Um,” Roger grunted. “It was just an old Kraut coat. How was I to know it was anything special? I uh… I threw it out.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Leets. “Where?”

“Hey, Captain, it was just this crappy old—”

“Where, Sergeant, where?”

Leets usually didn’t use that tone with him, and Rog didn’t like it a bit.

“In the can, for Christ’s sake. Behind the hospital. After we got him his new clothes. I mean I—”

“All right,” said Leets, trying to remain calm. “When?”

“About a week ago.”

“Oh, hell.” He tried to think. “We’ve got to get that thing back.” And he picked up the phone and began to search for whoever was in charge of garbage pickup from American installations in London.

The coat was found in a pit near St. Saviour’s Dock on the far side of the Thames from the Tower of London. It was found by Roger and it did smell—of paint, toast, used rubbers, burnt papers, paste, rust, oil, wood shavings and a dozen other substances with which it had lain intimately.

“And lead sulfide,” Leets said, reading the report from the OSS Research and Development office the next day.

“What the hell is that?” Roger wanted to know. Shmuel did not appear to care.

“It’s a stuff out of which infrared components are built. It’s how they could see, how Repp could see. I find out now we’re working hard on it in ultra secrecy, and the English as well. But this would tend to suggest the Germans are at the head of the class. They’ve got a field model ready, which means they’re years ahead of us. See, the thing converts heat energy to light energy: it sees heat . A man is a certain temperature. Repp’s gadget was set in that range. He could see the heat and shoot into it. He could see them all. Except—” he paused—“for him.”