Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

“Good luck, Sergeant,” he said to Roger.

“Same to you, Chief,” said Roger.

Roger was an excellent tennis player, definite national-ranking material, and though he’d not played hard and regularly in the year he’d been in the Army, he’d worked to maintain his edge, drilling when he couldn’t find a partner, staying in shape, pursuing excellence in the limited ways available to him. But in the first seconds he knew he was seriously overmatched: it was the difference between skill and genius. Benson hit out at everything, fiery and hard: the white ball dipped violently as it neared the baseline and its spin caught up to and overpowered its velocity, pulling it down, making it come crazily off the court at him, faster than sin. Benson’s forehand especially was a killer, white smoke, but when Roger, learning that lesson fast, tried to attack the backhand, deep, Benson rammed slices by him. He felt immediately that he couldn’t stand and hit with the bastard from the backcourt and so at 1–1, after squeaking out a lucky win on his serve, which the Californian hadn’t pressed seriously, he decided to angle dinks wide to the corner—now they are called approach shots but the terminology then was “forcing shots”—and come in behind them. Catastrophe followed thereupon: he didn’t have enough punch on the ball to hold it deep and as he dashed in to net, Benson, anticipating beautifully, seemed to catch each shot as it dropped and hit some dead-run beauties that eluded Roger’s lunge to volley by a hair.

Roger stood after fifteen minutes at 3–3, only because his own serve had finally loosened and was ticking and because the toasty composition scoured the balls, fluffing them up heavy and dull, letting Rog reach two shots on big points he never would have under normal conditions, American conditions, and he put both away insolently for winners, his two best strokes of the match.

But this equilibrium could not last and no one knew it better than Roger, who sensed his confidence begin to slide away. He felt a tide of self-pity start to rise through him.

On serve, with new balls, he fell behind fast on two backhand returns that Benson blew by him like rockets. He was looking at love-30, felt his heart thundering in his ribs.

He served a fault, just long, ball sliced wickedly but just off the back line.

He glanced about, a bad sign, for it meant his concentration was evaporating. The ranks of soldiers seemed to be glaring at him. A pretty nurse looked viciously unimpressed. Fielding, on a lawn chair just behind the umpire’s seat, had a blank expression.

Roger felt the vise screwing in on the sides of his body. He could hardly breathe.

He double-faulted, going to add out, and quickly double-faulted again, down one, serve lost.

He sat on the bench during the change, toweling off, feeling sick. Humiliation lay ahead. He felt sick out there, knowing he’d quit. Dog, pig, skunk, jerk. He deserved to lose. Self-loathing raced through him like a drug, knocking the world to whirl and blur. He almost wanted to cry. Exhaustion crowded in.

Someone was near him. Roger couldn’t care less. The unfairness of it all was overwhelming. The stands, the court, the net all shimmered in his rage. But through this rage, there came a voice, low and insistent. At first he thought it was his conscience, Jiminy Cricket-style, but…

“Kid,” the voice whispered, “you don’t belong out there. I’m carrying you.”

Benson, close by, seemingly tightening his laces, was talking in a low voice, face down and hidden from the crowd.

“It ought to be done now, at love.”

Roger didn’t say anything. He stared bleakly ahead, letting the man mock him. He felt the sweat peel down his body inside his shirt. He knew it was the truth.

“But Christmas comes early this year,” Benson said.

The oblique statement, it turned out, referred to a present: the match.

Roger ran the next three games for the set, Benson holding them close, but crapping out at key points. He could hit it an inch outside the line as well as an inch inside. Then Roger ran five more into the second set until Benson, still playing the feeb, broke through, but Roger triumphed in the seventh game for the set and the match, and the noise of the crowd, their adoration, broke over him like a wave, though he knew it was a joke, a prank, that he was unworthy, and he felt curiously ashamed.

“Congratulations,” said Benson, his calm gray eyes full of malice and sarcasm. “Just stay out of California till you learn to volley”—with a most sincere , humble smile on his face—“and have fun with your new buddy.”

Eh? What could—?

Benson, eyes down, pushed his way past Fielding.

“Frankie, Frankie,” implored the old star.

Benson sat down disgustedly.

Fielding turned: his face was a mass of wrinkles beneath the lurid tan. He smiled broadly at Roger, eyes dancing, a leathery, horrible old lizard, with yellow eyes and greedy lips.

“My boy!” he said. “You did it. You did it.” He clapped an arm around Roger, squeezing so that Roger could feel each of the fingers press knowingly into the fibers of muscle under his skin, kneading, urging.

“You’ll be my champion,” said Fielding, “my star,” he whispered hoarsely into Roger’s ear.

Oh, Christ, thought Roger.

Shmuel led, for he was in his own territory.

There was only one way to penetrate the barbed wire and the moat that formed the perimeter, and that was through the guardhouse. This took them under a famous German slogan, ARBEIT MACHT FREI, work makes one free.

“The Germans like slogans,” Shmuel explained.

Once beyond the guardhouse, they arrived in the roll-call plaza, traversed it quickly and turned down the main camp road. On either side stood the barracks, fifteen of them, as well as additional structures such as the infirmary, the morgue and the penal blocks. Into each had been crammed two thousand men in the last days before the liberation. There had been corpses everywhere, and though they had now been gathered by the hygiene-minded American administrators, the smell remained awesome. Leets, with Shmuel and Tony, kept his eyes straight ahead as they walked the avenue. Prisoners milled about, the gaunt, skeletal almost-corpses in their rotten inmate’s ticking. Though massive amounts of food and medical supplies had been convoyed in, the aid had yet to make much impression on the prison population.

Finally, they reached their destination, the eleventh barrack on the right-hand side. In it, once near death but now much improved, was one Eisner. Shmuel had gone in alone the first day and found him. Eisner was important because Eisner was a tailor; Eisner had worked in the SS uniform workshops just beyond the prison compound. Eisner alone knew of the SS Tiger jackets; Eisner alone might help them penetrate the mysteries of the last shipment to Anlage Elf.

They went in and got the man. It was not at all pleasant. They took him from the foul-smelling barrack to an office outside the compound in one of the SS administrative buildings.

Eisner was somewhat better today. His body was beginning to hold a little weight and his gestures had lost that slow-motion vagueness. He was finding words again and was at last strong enough to talk.

However he was not much interested in Dachau, or Tiger coats, or the year 1945. He preferred Heidelberg, 1938, before Kristallnacht , where he’d had a wonderful shop and a wife and three children, all of whom had been sent Ost . East.

“That means dead, of course,” explained Shmuel.

Leets nodded. In all this he felt extremely dumb. This was their third day in the camp and he was getting a little bit more used to it. The first day had nearly wrecked him. He tried not to think about it.