Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

And then they were beyond and then they had stopped. But feeling the Jeep bump to a halt, he looked up.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked.

“Welcome to KZ Dachau,” said Shmuel.

Seemed to be outside a yard of some sort. A wall of barbed wire closed it off, filthy place, heaps of garbage strewn all over, smelled to the heavens. Had some toilets backed up? He couldn’t figure it out. The Germans were usually so tidy.

A rail yard, was that it? Yes, tracks and boxcars and flatcars standing idle, abandoned, their contents probably looted, tufts of hay and straw and the cars seemed full of… what, he couldn’t tell. Logs? Pieces of wood perhaps? The thought of puppets came suddenly to mind, for in a peculiar way some of the forms seemed almost shaped like small humans.

He finally recognized it. In the picture Susan had forced him to look at in London so long ago, it had all been blurred, out of focus. Here, nothing was out of focus. Most of them were naked and hideously gaunt, but modesty and nutrition were merely the first and least of the laws of civilization violated in the rail yard. The corpses seemed endless, they spilled everywhere, tangled and knitted together in a great fabric. The food spasmed up Leets’s throat and he fought against the gag reflex that choked him at that instant. An overwhelming odor, decomposition shot with excretion, those two great components of the Teutonic imagination—death and shit—blurred the air.

“You think you’ve seen it all,” said Tony.

The driver was out vomiting by the tire of the Jeep. He was sobbing.

Leets tried to soothe him. “Okay, okay, you’ll be okay.”

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” said the boy.

“That’s okay,” Leets said. But he felt like crying himself. Now he’d seen what they were doing. You could look at it in pictures and then look away and it was all gone. But here you could not look away.

Leets in the tailor’s shop reached out and touched the black uniform. It was only cloth.

“Jim?”

He turned.

It was Susan.

Repp awoke when the sun struck his eyes. The sudden dazzle decreed into his head an edict of confusion: all he could feel was the raw scratch of straw against his skin. As he moved a leg experimentally, a high-pitched piping protested; he felt the scurry of something warm and living nestled in close to him.

Rat.

He coiled in disgust, rolling away. The rat had gotten under him, attracted by the warmth, and worked its way into his pack. He stared at it. A bold droll creature, cosmopolitan and fearless, it stood its ground, climbing even to its haunches, eyes peeping with glittery intelligence, whiskers absorbing information from the air, pink tongue animate and ceaseless. There had been rats in Russia, huge things, big as cows; but this sophisticated creature was Swabian and sly and mocking. Repp threw his rifle at it, missing, but the clatter sent the rat scampering deeper into the barn.

Repp pulled himself out of the straw and collected his equipment. The rat had gnawed through the canvas and gotten to the bread. A chunk was left, moist and germy, but Repp could not bring himself to put it to his lips. Revolted, he tossed it into the shadows of the barn.

He’d come upon this place late last night, an empty farm, fields fallow, house deserted and stripped, livestock vanished. Yet it had not been burned—no scorched earth in the path of the advancing Americans—and, desperately tired, he’d chosen the barn for refuge.

Repp had decided to move across country these days, avoiding the roads until he was as far from the site of the unpleasantness with the “Das Reich” Field Police as possible. In the desolate countryside, along muddy farm lanes, there was less chance of apprehension—either by SS or, worse, by the Americans.

Yet now, thinking of them, he became nervous. How close were they, how long had he slept? He checked his watch: not yet seven. Looking outside, he saw nothing but a quiet rural landscape. He’d heard cannon and seen flashes last night after dark: the bastards had to be close.

In the barnyard, Repp took a compass reading, and set himself a southward course. He knew he was already below Haigerloch, but just how far he wasn’t sure. But south would take him to the great natural obstacle of the Danube, and he thought he’d cross at the little industrial town of Tuttlingen. Though the prospect of a bridge frightened him as well: for bridges were the natural site for the SS to establish checkpoints.

The fields were deserted under a bright sun, though it remained chilly. No planting had been done and the careful plots of farmland in the rolling land lay before him dark and muddy. He strode on, alone in the world, though keeping alert. At one point he made out two fast-moving low shapes off the horizon and got into some trees before they saw him, two big American fighter-bombers, out hunting this spring morning. Their white stars flashed as they roared overhead and not long afterward he heard them pounce, some miles off to the east. Presently a lazy stain of smoke rose to mark their success.

But Repp moved on, uncurious, and did not see another human form until late that afternoon. He came suddenly to a concrete road that headed south. He paused for a moment, wishing he had a map. There were no road signs. The landscape was flat and empty. He vacillated, fearing he hadn’t made enough distance on his slog through the mud. Either way, the road looked deserted. Finally, he decided to risk it for a few miles, ready to drop off and disappear at the first sign of danger.

This damned job is making a coward of me, he thought.

The freedom of the road filled him with a kind of liberation: after the mud that sucked at his boots, clotting heavily, this firm-packed surface seemed a paradise. He plunged on at a furious pace.

He heard the Kübelwagen before he saw it; turning, he was astonished at how close the small dun-colored car was.

Now where did that bastard come from? he wondered.

The damned thing was too close for him to hide from; they’d seen him but the first thing he noticed as the car drew closer was that it was jammed with a pack of sorry-looking regulars, as gray in the face as in their greatcoats.

The car didn’t even slow up for him. It barreled by, its sullen cargo uninterested in one more fleeing soldier. Repp, emboldened, hurried on. Several more vehicles passed, some even with officers, but all jammed with men. There wasn’t room for him if they’d tried—and they were all regulars too, no SS men.

One of them slowed.

“Better get a move on, brother. Americans aren’t too far behind.”

“I’m fine, thanks,” Repp said.

“Sure. You’ve got surrender written all over you. Well, good luck, all’s lost anyway.”

The car sped up and soon was gone.

Just at sunset Repp came upon some old friends. Sergeant Gerngoss and the whiner Lenz and the others of the engineer platoon waited by the road.

They hung neatly from branches in a copse of trees. Gerngoss looked especially apoplectic, outraged, his immense form bowing the limb almost to the snapping point. His face was purple and white spittle ringed his lips. Eyes open, booming out of the fat face. The sign on him read: “THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO SCUM.” Lenz, nearby, was merely melancholy.

The spectacle had drawn a small crowd of other stragglers. They stood in awe of the bodies.

“The SS did it to ’em,” somebody explained. “The fat one there really put up a fight. The SS boys said they’d shot some of their pals up near Haigerloch.”

“The SS shits only knew it was an engineer platoon, and here was an engineer platoon.”

Repp slipped away; he was working on the next problem: the bridge. The Danube here was young, formed not fifty kilometers to the west at Donaueschingen, from two converging Schwarzwald streams, the Breg and Brigach, but still it moved with considerable force through a picturesque but enclosed defile of steep cliffs. He could not swim it this time of year, for it was swollen with winter meltings; he didn’t think he had time to hunt up a boat. He walked on down the road and went around the few houses—an unnamed hamlet—that stood on this side of the Danube from Tuttlingen. Cutting through backyards and over stone walls, he came soon to a road and beyond it a stand of trees. He penetrated this growth and found himself staring shortly into yawning space. He was at cliff’s edge. He wished he had binoculars.