Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

He turned to Shmuel.

“You were right,” he said. “God did not save you. It was no miracle at all. The stuff absorbs heat: that’s why it’s photo-conductive. And that’s why it’s such a great insulator. It’s why the thing kept you so warm, got you through the Schwarzwald. And why Repp couldn’t see you. You were just enough different in temperature from the others. You were invisible.”

Shmuel did not appear to care. “I knew God had other worries that night,” he said.

“But the next time he shoots,” Leets said, “the guys on the other side of the scope won’t be so lucky.”

Vollmerhausen is visibly nervous, Repp noticed with irritation. Now why should that be? It won’t be his neck on the line out there, it’ll be mine.

It was still light enough to smoke, a pleasant twilight, mid-April. Repp lit one of his Siberias, shaggy Ivan cigarettes, loosely packed, twigs in them, and they sometimes popped when they burned, but it was a habit he’d picked up in the Demyansk encirclement.

“Smoke, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor?” he inquired.

“No. No. Never have. Thanks.”

“Certainly. The night will come soon.”

“Are you sure it’s safe here? I mean, what if—”

“Hard heart, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor, hard heart. All sorts of things can happen, and usually do. But not here, not tonight. There’ll only be a patrol, not a full attack. Not this late. These Americans are in no hurry to die.”

He smiled, looked through the glassless farm window at the tidy fields that offered no suggestion of war.

“But we are surrounded,” said Vollmerhausen. It was true. American elements were on all sides of them, though not aggressive. They were near the town of Alfeld, on the Swabian plain, in a last pocket of resistance.

“We got in, didn’t we? We’ll get back to our quiet little corner, don’t worry.” He chuckled.

An SS sergeant, in camouflage tunic, carrying an MP-40, came through the door.

“Herr Obersturmbannführer,” he said in great breathless respect, “Captain Weber sent me. The ambush team will be moving out in fifteen minutes.”

“Ah. Thank you, Sergeant,” said Repp affably. “Well,” turning to the engineer, “time to go, eh?”

But Vollmerhausen just stood there, peering through the window into the twilight. His face was drawn and he seemed colorless. The man had never been in a combat zone before.

Repp hoisted the electro-optical pack onto his back, struggling under the weight, and got the harness buckled. Vollmerhausen made no move to help. Repp lifted the rifle itself off its bipod—it rested on the table—and stepped into the sling, which had been rigged to take most of the weight, made an adjustment here and there and declared himself ready. He wore both pieces of camouflage gear tonight, the baggy tiger trousers along with the tunic, and the standard infantry harness with webbed belt and six canvas magazine pouches and, naturally, his squashed cap with the death’s-head.

“Care to come?” he asked lightly.

“Thanks, no,” said Vollmerhausen, uneasy at the jest, “it’s so damned cold.” He swallowed, clapped his hands around himself in pantomimed shiver.

“Cold? It’s in the forties. The tropics. This is spring. See you soon. Hope your gadget works.”

“Remember, Herr Obersturmbannführer, you’ve only got three minutes—”

“—in the on-phase. I remember. I shall make the most of them,” Repp replied.

Repp left the farmhouse and under his heavy load walked stiffly to a copse of trees where the others had gathered. Frankly, he felt ridiculous in this outlandish rig, the bulky box strapped to his back, the rifle linked to it by wire hose, the sighting apparatus itself bulky and absurd on top of the weapon, which itself was exaggerated with the extended magazine, the altered pistol grip and the bipod. But he knew they wouldn’t smirk at him.

Tonight it was Captain Weber’s show. It was his sector anyway, he knew the American patrol patterns. Repp was along merely to shoot, as if on safari.

“Sir,” said Weber. “Heil Hitler!”

“Heil, Schutzstaffel,” responded Repp, tossing up a flamboyantly casual salute. The young men of XII Panzergrenadierdivision “Hitlerjugend” jostled with respect, though the circumstances seemed to prevent more elaborate courtesies. This pleased Repp. He’d never been much for ceremony.

“Ah, Weber, hello. Boys,” nodding to them, common touch, nice, they could talk about it after the war.

“Sir,” one of the worshipers said, “that damned thing looks heavy. Do you need a man—”

It was heavy. Even with Vollmerhausen’s last stroke of genius, the one he’d been laboring on like a maniac these last few days, Vampir, the whole system, gun, rack, scope, light source, weighed in at over forty kilos, 41.2, to be exact, still 1.2 kilos over, but closer to the specs than Repp ever thought they’d get.

“Thanks, but no. That’s part of the test, you see, to see how well a fellow can do with one of these on his back. Even an old gent like me.”

Repp was thirty-one, but the others were younger; they laughed.

Repp grinned in the laughter: he liked to make them happy. After it had died, he said, “After you, Captain.”

There was a last-second ritual of equipment checks to be performed, MP-40 bolts dropped from safe into engagement, feeder tabs locked into the machine gun, harnesses shifted, helmet straps tightened; then, Weber leading, Repp somewhere in the center, they filed out, crouched low, into the fields.

Vollmerhausen watched them go, silent line of the ambush team edging cautiously into the dark. He wondered how long he’d have to wait until Repp returned with the happy news that it had gone well and they could leave. Hours probably. It had already been a terrible day; first the terrifying flight in from Anlage Elf in the Stork, bobbing and skimming, over the trees. Then the long time among the soldiers, the desultory shellings, and the worry about the weather.

Would the sun hold till twilight?

If it didn’t they’d have to stay another day. And another. And another….

But it had held.

“There, see: your prayers have been answered, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” Repp had chided him.

Vollmerhausen smiled weakly. Yes, he had prayed.

Displaying a dexterity that might have astounded his many detractors, Hans the Kike had prepared Vampir for its field test. He quickly mounted the scope and the energy conversion unit with its parabola-shaped infrared lamp to the modified STG receiver, using a special wrench and screwdriver. He locked in the power line and checked the connections. Intact. He opened the box and gave it a quick rundown, tracing the complex circuitry for faulty wiring, loose connections, foreign objects.

“Best hurry,” Repp said, leaning intently over the engineer’s shoulder, watching and recording his rundown, “we’re losing it.”

Vollmerhausen explained for what must have been the thousandth time, “The later we charge, the later it lasts.”

Finally, he was finished. Sun remained, in traces: not a fiery noontime’s blaze—of furnaces or battles—but a fleeting late-afternoon’s version, pale and low and thin, but enough.

“It’s not the heat, it’s the light,” he pointed out.

Vollmerhausen yanked a metal slide off a thick metal disk spot-welded crudely to the top of the cathode chamber, revealing a glass face, opaque and dense. Its facets sparkled in the sunlight.

“Fifteen minutes is all we need; that gives us eight hours of potency for an on-phase of three minutes,” he said, as if he were convincing himself.

The problem with infrared rays, Vollmerhausen had tried to explain to Repp, was that they were lower in energy than visible light—how then could they be made to emit light rays of a higher value, so that images might be identified and, in this case, fired upon? Dr. Kutzcher had found a part of the answer at the University of Berlin those many years ago: by feeding high-tension electricity across a cathode tube, he’d caused the desired rise in energy level, producing the requisite visibility. But Vollmerhausen, improvising desperately at Anlage, had not the latitude of Kutzcher. His problem was narrowly military—he was limited by weight, the amount a man could carry efficiently on his back over rough terrain. When all the skimming and paring and snipping was done, he found himself a full ten kilos distant from that optimum weight; no further reduction was possible without radically compromising Vampir’s performance. And the mass of the unbudgeable ten kilos lay in the battery pack and its heavy shielding, the source of the high-tension electricity.