Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

His guide took him to a pit, where the German dead lay in rows, flies collecting busily in black clouds on them. He’d seen corpses before, but a corpse was a certain thing: first, it was Jewish, but more importantly it was very skinny, white, shrunken, its terror contained in the fact that it looked so unreal, a puppet or chunk of wood. Here, reality was inescapable: bones and brains and guts, blue-black, black-red, green-yellow, ripe and full of gore. Shmuel could think only of meat shops and the ritual slaughterers on the days before holidays—hanging slabs of beef, steamy piles of vitals, tripe white and cold. Yet in the butcher shops there was neatness, order, purpose: this was all spillage, sloppy and accidental.

“Not pretty. Even when it’s them,” said Leets, standing glumly on the brink. “These are the soldiers, the Totenkopfdivision people. All of them, or what’s left of them. Sorry. But it’s time to go looking.”

“Of course. How else?” said Shmuel.

He walked the ranks. Dead, the Germans were only their flesh: hard to hate. He felt nothing but his own discomfort at the revolting details of violent death; the odor of emptying colons and the swarming flies. It became easy after a while, walking among them. They were arrayed in their brightly vivid camouflage jackets, the pattern precise and inappropriately colorful, gay almost, brown-green dappling dun. Soon he saw an old friend.

Hello, Pipe Smoker. You’ve a hole the size of a bucket mouth at your center and you don’t look happy about it. This is how the Gentiles kill: completely, totally. A serious business, the manufacture of death. Us, they starve, or gas, saving bullets. They tried bullets on us, but considered the practice wasteful. Their own they kill with bullets and explosives, Pipe Smoker, spend millions.

Next came the boy who’d struck him in the storeroom. You were a mean one, called me Jew-shit, kicked me. The boy lay blue and halved on the ground, legs, trunk missing. What could have done such a dreadful thing? He was surely the most mutilated. You struck me, boy, and in that instant if this scene could have been projected to you, Shmuel the Jew in an American uniform, all warm and whole, standing dumbly over only half your body, you’d have thought it a joke, a laugh. Yet there you are and here I am and by the furious way your eyes stare, I believe you know. Ah, and Schaeffer, Hauptsturmführer Schaeffer, almost untouched, certainly unmussed, did you die of fright there in your crisp and bright camouflage coat; no, there’s a tiny black hole drilled into your upper lip.

“No,” he said, after the last, “he’s not here.”

Leets nodded and then took him to the bullet-riddled hulk of barrack that had once housed Vollmerhausen’s researchers. The door was off its hinges and the roof had fallen in at one end, but Shmuel could see the bodies in the blood-soaked sheets in the cots.

“The civilians,” Shmuel said. “A shame you had to kill them.”

“It wasn’t us,” Leets said. “And it wasn’t by accident either.” He bent to the floor and came up with a handful of empty shells.

“These are all over the place in there. Nine-millimeter. MP-forty cases. The SS did it. The ultimate security. Now, one more stop. This way, please.”

They walked across the compound, avoiding shell craters and piles of rubble, to the SS barrack. It still smoldered and had fallen in on itself sometime after sunrise. But one end stood. Leets led him to the side and pointed through a window that had been shot out.

“Can you see? On the floor. He’s burned and most of his face is gone. He’s in a bathrobe. That’s not Repp, is it?”

“No.”

“No. You’d never catch Repp in a bathrobe. It’s the engineer, isn’t it? Vollmerhausen?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s it then.”

“You missed him.”

“Yeah. He made it out. Somehow. The bastard.”

“And the trail ends.”

“Maybe. Maybe. We’ll see what we can dig out of the rubble. And there’s this.” He held something out to Shmuel.

“Do you know what it is?” he asked.

Shmuel looked at the small metal object in Leets’s upturned palm. He almost laughed.

“Yes, of course I know. But what—”

“We found it in there. Under Vollmerhausen. It must have been on the desk, which he seemed to hit on the way down. That’s Yiddish on it, isn’t it?”

“Hebrew,” Shmuel corrected. “It’s a toy. It’s called a draydel . A top, for spinning.” He’d done so a hundred, a thousand times himself when a boy. “It’s for children. You make small wagers, and spin the top. You gamble on which of the four letters will turn up. Played on Hanukkah chiefly.” It was like a die with an axis through the center, the inscribed letters almost rubbed out by so many small fingers. “It’s very old,” Shmuel said. “Possibly quite valuable. An heirloom at the very least.”

“I see. What is the significance of the letters?”

“They are the first letters of the words in a religious phrase.”

“Which is?”

“A Great Miracle Happened Here.”

Repp paused, hungry. Should he eat the bread now, or later? Well, why not now? He’d been moving hard half the night and most of the day, pushing himself, and soon he’d be out of forest and onto the Bavarian plain. Good progress, he reckoned, ahead of schedule even, a healthy sign considering the somewhat, ah, hasty mode of his departure.

He sat on a fallen log in a meadow. He was at last out of the coniferous zone, in a region of elm and poplars. Repp knew his trees, and poplars were a special favorite of his, especially on a fine spring afternoon such as this one, when the pale sun seemed to illuminate them in an almost magical way—they glowed in the lemon light, translucent, mystical against the darker tracings of the limbs which displayed them. The still, austere beauty of the day made the spectacle even more remarkable—a clean beauty, pure, untainted, uncontrived—and Repp smiled at it all, at the same time pleased that his own sensitivity to such matters hadn’t been blunted by the war. Repp appreciated nature; he felt it important to good health, soundness of body and clearness of mind. Nature was particularly meaningful to his higher instincts in hard times like these, though it was rare that such natural beauty could be savored in and of itself, without reference to more prosaic necessities, fields of fire, automatic weapons placement, minefield patterns and so forth.

He tore into the bread. Dry, tough, it still tasted delicious. A good thing it had been in the pack when the Americans had come. Time only to grab the pack, throw it on and head for the tunnel. He’d made it after a long crawl across the open ground, American fire snapping into the ground around him. He curled in a gully by the tunnel entrance.

There were, in fact, six of them. Repp had insisted. He was a careful man who thought hard about likelihoods, and he knew no place in Germany in the late spring of 1945 that might not be assaulted by enemy troops, and if such an assault came, he had no intention of being trapped in it. He removed the camouflaged cover and squirmed down into the narrow opening. He slithered along. The space was close, almost claustrophobic, room for one thin man. Dust showered down on him as his back scraped the roof and the darkness was impenetrable. A great loneliness fell over Repp. He knew that even for a brave man panic was an instant away in a sewer like this. And who knew what creatures might be using it to nest in? It was damp and smelled of clay. Vile place: a grave. The world of the corpse.

He warned himself to be careful. Too much imagination could kill you just as quickly as enemy bullets. But Repp was used to working in the open, with great reaches beyond him. Here there was nothing except the dark. He could hold a hand to his face an inch in front of his eyes, and see nothing, absolute nothingness.