Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Repp grabbed the professor savagely and pulled him close.

“Come on! Now’s the time. Stay close and you might live.”

He flung him back and slithered over the edge of the trench and began to crawl toward the bridge. The shooting mounted and he could hear the sergeant arguing with it, yelling, “Goddamn, you fools, cease firing!”

In the confusion Repp made it to the barricade, feeling the professor scuttling along behind him. He stood boldly and stepped between a Kübel and a cycle out onto the bridge itself.

The firing died.

“Who fired? Who fired? Oh, Christ, that was Major Buchner,” yelled the sergeant up front. “Goddamn, I’ll kill all of you pigs if you don’t tell me!”

Repp gestured “Come on” with his head and strode forward, bold as the Reichsführer himself.

A trooper materialized out of the dark, rifle leveled at Repp’s middle.

“Where are you going, friend?” he asked.

Repp hit him with the shaft of his Panzerfaust , a murderous blow against the side of the head, just under the helmet. The jolt sent vibrations through his arm, and the trooper fell heavily to one side, his equipment jangling on the bridge.

“Run,” Repp whispered, grabbing the professor and half hurling him down the bridge. “Hurry!”

The professor took off in lumbering panic and seemed to gain distance.

“There he is! There he is!” Repp shouted.

By that time several others had seen him and the firing started almost immediately.

As the blizzard of lead seemed to tear apart the world through which the professor fled, Repp eased down the incline under the bridge and made it to river’s edge.

He found the raft the demolitions detail had left tied to one of the piles, and threw in the pack and helmet, and then slipped into the icy water and began to drift through the blackness, clinging to the raft. He was almost across when the Americans arrived and the battle began, and by the time he got out of the water, shivering and exhausted, the Ami tanks had gotten the range and began to blow apart the barricade in earnest.

Repp crawled up the bank. Behind him, multiple small suns descended in a pinkish haze and tracers flicked across the water. But he knew he was out of range.

And that he was still on schedule.

“What are you doing here?” was all he could think to say.

“I work here. I’m with the field hospital.”

“Oh, God, Susan. Then you’ve seen it, seen it all.”

“You forget: I knew it all.”

“We never believed.”

“Now of course it’s too late.”

“I suppose. How did you end up here?”

“A punishment. I made waves. I made real waves. I got publicly identified with the Zionists. Then Fischelson died and the Center died and the British made a stink, and they sent me to a field unit in a DP camp. British influence. It was said I didn’t appreciate London. And when I heard about Belsen, I tried to get there. But it was in the British zone and they wouldn’t have me. Then came Dachau, American. And my doc at the DP camp did think highly of me, and he knew how important it was to me. So he got me the orders. See? Easy, if you have the right connections.”

“It’s very bad, isn’t it.”

“Bad . That’s not a terribly eloquent word. But, yes, it is bad . And Dachau is nothing compared to Belsen. And Belsen is nothing compared to Sobibór. And Sobibór is nothing compared to Treblinka. And Treblinka is nothing compared to Auschwitz.”

They were strange names to Leets.

“Haven’t heard of them. Haven’t been reading the papers, I guess.”

“I guess not.”

“Did you see Shmuel? He’s with us. He’s still fine. I told you he’d be fine.”

“I heard. An OSS detachment. With a Jew in an American uniform. That’s how I knew.”

“We’re still after him. After that German. That’s what we’re here for.”

“One German?”

“Yeah. A special guy. With a special—”

“Jim, there were thousands of them. Thousands. What’s one more or less?”

“No, this one’s different.”

“No. They’re all the same.”

But Tony was not filing a report to JAATIC. He was writing a letter to his older brother, in response to a letter that had finally caught up with him earlier.

“Dear Randolph,” he wrote.

It was of course splendid to hear from you. I am glad Lisbon is interesting and that Priscilla is well.

Please do not believe any of the rumors, and do not let them upset you. I realize my behavior has been difficult to fathom of late and that it must be the subject of much discussion in certain circles. I have not surrendered to the Americans. I do not flee my own kind. I do not think myself Robert Graves. I am not insane, though that was not a question in your note; I still sensed it beneath your Foreign Office diction.

I am quite well off. I am totally recovered. No, I do not see women. Perhaps I should, but I do not. I do not see old friends either. They are rather too kind for my somewhat peculiar tastes. I am among Americans by choice: because, fools all of them, they talk only of themselves. Children: they prattle incessantly about self and city, country, past, future, manufacturing noise from every orifice. They have no curiosity beyond their own skin. I do not have to make explanations. I do not get long, sad stares of sympathy. No one inquires solicitously how I’m getting along In The Aftermath….

Dearest Randolph, others lost children and wives in the bombings. Jennifer and Tim are quite gone now; I’ve accepted it and hardly think of it. I do not, as you suggest, still blame myself. Things are quite chipper here. We are hunting down a dreadful Jerry. It’s great fun, most fun I’ve had in the war….

But Tony stopped writing. He felt himself about to begin to cry again. He crushed the document up into a ball, and hurled it across the room. He sat back, and pinched the bridge of his nose. The pain would not go away. He doubted if it would, ever. He wished he had a nip of something. But he didn’t. He thought he might try and get some sleep. Where was Leets? Should he head back to the office, where the two Jews were? He had to do something, he knew that for sure.

The old man slept. Shmuel watched him. He lay on the cot, stirring now and again—the jab of an interior pain. His breath came shallow and dry, a rattle, and a bubble of drool inflated in one corner of his slack mouth. His skin was milky and loose and spotted, shot with a network of subtle blue veins. He’d pulled the blanket around him like a prayer shawl, though in doing so a foot fell free and it dangled off the cot. Somehow this old creature had survived, another freak like Shmuel, a meaningless exception whose only function was to provide a scale for the larger numbers of extinction.

Why couldn’t the Americans have captured some nice plump SS officer? An eager collaborator, a cynic, a traitor? Or why couldn’t they have arrived just a day earlier, before the warehouses had been looted? No—again, this Repp had been lucky. He’d left nothing behind, leaving them to hunt through the pale, pained memories of Eisner the tailor.

“Remember: the records,” Leets had said.

But instead he remembered his own first interrogation with Leets and Outhwaithe: two hard, glossy Gentiles, eyes blank, faces impassive. Men in uniforms: was there a difference? Hard men, with guns and jobs to do, no time to let human feelings get in the way. The whole world was wearing a uniform, except for the Jews. No, the Jews had a uniform too: blue and white stripes, a jagged, dirty star clipped over the heart. That was old Eisner’s uniform, that was the uniform Shmuel preferred, not this—