Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

“Yes, I’ll see him.”

“Then I’m off,” Tony said.

“Hey,” wondered Roger, disappointed that his brief instant in the spotlight had so soon vanished, “what are you guys talking about?”

Leets didn’t seem to hear him. He looked strangely excited, and he was muttering distractedly to himself. He rubbed his lips, which had dried in the excitement, and for just one second Roger had the impression the captain was near breakdown, madly muttering to himself, full of private visions and prophecies.

“Sir,” Roger repeated, louder, “what’s going to happen now?”

“Well,” said Leets, “I guess we have to close them down. Put some people in there.”

People, thought Roger, swallowing dryly. He had to stop himself from asking, Me too?

The Gentile women treated him like some dreadful little wog, foreign and stinky, that they were helping out of great pity. In return they expected his love and when he would not give it they were enraged. They resented the private room when down the hall their own boys, wounded gallantly in battle, lay festering in huge public bays. He was not truly hurt either; he insisted on heathen protocols, the removal of the crucifix, for example; but most contemptibly of all, Somebody Important had an interest in him.

Shmuel lay back, alone. His head buzzed with pain. Luminous shapes entwined on the ceiling. A film of sweat covered him. He closed his eyes and saw smokestacks belching flame and human ash on the horizon, the glow orange and lurid. He opened them to an equally unsatisfactory reality: the English hospital room to which he’d been removed, a blank green chamber, pitiless, the odors of disinfectants rising. There were screams in the night. He knew people looked in on him at all hours. And the hospital merely symbolized a whole Western world he’d fled into—where else had there been to go, what other direction for a poor Jew? But in many ways it was as dreadful a place as the one from which he’d just escaped. There, at least, there were other Jews, a sense of community. Here, nobody cared, or would even listen. The Gentiles wanted him for something strange; he was not sure he trusted them.

It didn’t matter. He knew he was nearing the end of the journey and he didn’t mean the geographic journey from Warsaw to the death camp to Anlage Elf to the forest to London, but rather its inner representation—as though each step was a philosophical position that must be mastered, its truth grasped, before moving on. At last he was turning into one of the Mussulmen , the living dead who roamed the camps as pariahs, having accepted doom and therefore no longer suited for human contact. Death was no longer meaningful; it was mere biology, a final technical detail to be adjusted.

He accepted death; therefore he accepted the dead; therefore he preferred the dead.

For everyone was dead. Bruno Schulz was dead, killed in ’42, in Drohobicz. Janucz Korczak was dead; Auschwitz. Perle, Warsaw. Gebirtig, Cracow. Katzenelson, the Vittel camp. Glick, Vilna. Shaievitz, Lodz. Ulianover, also Lodz.

The list was longer of course, longer a million times.

The last Jew longed for a ghetto, kerosene lamps, crooked streets, difficult lessons.

Good night, electrified, arrogant world.

He walked gladly to the window.

He was four stories up.

Shmuel stood at the window in bedclothes, looking out. His features, even in the dim light, seemed remote.

“Nothing much to see, huh?” called Leets as he swept in.

The man turned quickly, fixing a stare on Leets. He looked badly spooked.

“You okay?” Leets wanted to know.

He seemed to grab hold. He nodded.

Leets was running late. He knew he was coming on all wrong but he was nervous and he could never control how he acted when he was nervous. Also, he hated hospitals, even more now because they reminded him so of Susan.

“Well, good, it’s good you’re okay.”

He paused, stalling. Only one way to do this. Only one way to do anything. He kept having to remind himself: full out.

“Look, we need more help. Big help.”

He waited for the Jew to respond. The man just sat on his bed and looked back. He seemed quite calm and disinterested. He looked tired also.

“Two days from now—it would be sooner, but the logistics are complex, forty-eight hours is the dead minimum—a battalion of American airborne troops is going into the Black Forest. We found it—Anlage Elf, Repp, the whole shooting gallery. We’ll go in a little after midnight. I’ll tag along with the airborne people; meanwhile Major Outhwaithe will come up on the ground in a column of tanks from a French armored division operating in the area.”

Leets paused.

“We’re going to try and kill Repp. That’s what it gets down to. But only one man has seen him. Sure, we’ve got that old picture. But we’ve got to be sure . So it would help if—if you came along.” He was troubled over all this.

“This is how I figure it. Nobody’s asking you to go into battle; you’re not a soldier, it’s what we get paid for. No, after we take the place, we’ll get a message out fast. You’ll be in a forward area with Roger, I suppose. We can get you in fast in a light plane, have you there in an hour or two. It’s our best shot at him, only way to be sure.” He paused again. “Well, that’s it. Your part will be risky, but a good, safe calculated risk. What do you think?” He looked up at Shmuel and had the discomfiting sensation the man hadn’t understood a word he’d said. “Are you all right? Do you have a fever or something?”

“You’ll jump out of an airplane? In a parachute, in the night? And attack the camp?” Shmuel asked.

“Yeah,” said Leets. “It’s not so hard as it sounds. We’ve got some good pictures. We plan to go down on the target range, where you escaped. We make it three miles back to—” But again he saw Shmuel’s eyes glaze over, disinterested.

“Hey, you okay?” he said, and almost snapped his fingers.

“Take me,” Shmuel said suddenly.

“What? Take you? In the air—”

“You said you needed me there. Fine, I’ll go. With you. From the plane in the parachute. Yes, I’ll do it.”

“You got any idea what you’re letting yourself in for? I mean, there’ll be a battle , people getting blown up.”

“I don’t care. That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“The point is—you’d never understand. But I must go. It’s either that or nothing. You’ve never understood. But I must go. It’s either that or nothing. You’ve got to do this for me. I’m clever, I can learn the techniques. Two days, you say? Plenty of time.”

Leets was all mixed up, tried to run through a dozen motives. Finally he just asked, “Why?”

“Old friends then. I’ll have the best chance to meet old friends.”

A screwy answer, Leets thought. But he said, not quite knowing why, “All right.”

The paratroopers all seemed husky boys in their teens, dumbly, crazily eager, full of bravado and violence. They worked hard at glamour and costumed themselves after lessons they’d learned in movie theaters. They blackened their faces with burnt cork until they gleamed like minstrels with mad white eyes and pink tongues; they dangled junk from themselves until they clanked like men in armor, but not just any junk: pistols in shoulder holsters were first-prize items, symbols of special pizazz; another melodramatic improvisation was the knife and sheath taped upside down along the boot; then too pouches, grenades, tightly wound ropes, ammo packs, canteens beside the two lumpy chutes; and on their helmets most taped first-aid kits and many of them still wore, though non-regulation now, the D-Day American flag patch on their shoulders. A few of the really demented boasted Mohawk haircuts.