Stephen Hunter: The Master Sniper

Swell, Leets thought. But he had nothing to do anyway.

“Okay, let me dig out the specs on the thing and—” But he was talking to air. Outhwaithe had vanished.

Leets slowly drew out a Lucky, lit it off his Zippo and went to work.

Leets was a biggish man, not slobby fat, but ample, with a pleasantly open American face. He was far into his twenties, which was old for the rank of captain he wore in two bars on his collar, especially in a war in which twenty-two-year-old brigadier generals led thousands of airplanes deep into enemy territory.

He looked like a studious athlete or an athletic scholar and now that he limped, compliments of the Third Reich, and occasionally went white as the pain flashed unexpectedly across him, he’d acquired a grave, almost desperate air. His many nervous habits—unpleasant ones, licking his lips, muttering, gesturing overtheatrically, blinking constantly—half suggested dissipation or indolence, though by nature he was an austere man, a Midwesterner, not given to moodiness or mopery. Yet lately, as the war roared by him, someone else’s invention, he’d been both moody and mopey.

Now, alone in the office—another source of bitterness, for he’d been assigned a sergeant, but the kid, an energetic young beast, had a tendency to disappear on him at key moments such as this one—he brought the telex close to his eyes in an unselfconscious parody of bookish intellectual and, squinting melodramatically, attempted to master its secrets.

It was a pale carbon of a shipping order out of the Reich Rail Office, a part of the Wehrmacht Transport Command, authorizing the G. K. Haenel Fabrik, or factory, near Suhl, in northern Germany, to ship a batch of twelve Sturmgewehr -44’s, formerly called Maschinenpistole -44’s, cross-country to something called, if Leets understood the nomenclature of the form, Anlage Elf , or Installation 11. The 44 was a hot assault rifle, tested in Russia, that had lately been turning up on the Western front in the hands of Waffen SS troops, paratroopers, armored-vehicle commanders—glory boys, hard cores, professionals. Leets had a memory of the thing too—he’d lain in high grass on a ridge above a burning tank convoy while Waffen SS kids from an armored division called “Das Reich” had poured heavy STG-44 fire into the area. He could still hear the cracks as the slugs broke the sound barrier just above his head. It fired a smaller bullet than the standard rifle—it hadn’t the range—but at higher velocity; and it was lighter and tougher and could pump out rounds at full automatic. Leets shivered in the memory: lying there, his leg bleeding like sin all over the place, the men near him dead or dying, the smell of burning gas and summer flowers heavy in his nose and the thatchy figures of the camouflaged SS men moving up the slope, firing as they came. His throat was dry.

Leets lit a butt. He had one going, but what the hell? It was another habit gone totally out of control.

Okay, where was I?

Curious, yes, quite curious. STG-44’s went out from Haenel all the time, but in larger quantities. They came off the assembly line in the hundreds, the thousands, but distribution was always through normal channels, ultimately in the hands of local commanders. Why bother to make a big deal of shipping rifles across a Germany whose railway network was one huge target of opportunity for fighter-bombers? What’s more, he realized that the form had the top rail priority, DE , and Geheime Stadatten , top secret, and the magenta eagle of state secrecy pounded onto it.

Wasn’t that an odd one?

They were cranking these things out by the thousands—that was one of the charms of the 44, for unlike the MP-40 or the Gew -41, it could be quickly assembled from prestamped parts, without any time-consuming milling. Their ease of manufacture was part of their appeal. So all of a sudden they were top secret? Goddamnedest thing.

Leets drew back from the yellow sheet and squirmed at the effort of trying to apply his thoughts to these matters. It was a big mistake, because a chip of German metal deep in the core of his leg rubbed the wrong way, flicking against a nerve.

Pain jacked up through his body.

Leets rocketed out of his seat and yelped. He felt free to let it take him because he was alone. Among others, he simply clenched and clammed up, whitening, looking at his feet.

The pain finally passed, as it always did. He limped back to his chair and gingerly reclaimed it. But his concentration had been seriously damaged, more and more of a problem these recent days, and he knew if he didn’t act fast the whole fucked-up scenario of that one battle would unreel before his eyes. It was no favorite of his.

So Leets grabbed back into his mind for something to put between himself and the day Jedburgh Team Casey caught it. He came up with football, which he’d played at Northwestern, ’38, ’39 and ’40. He had been an end, and ends didn’t do much except knock people down, a task made significantly easier because he’d played next to NU’s all-American tackle Roy Reed, and Reed, in the ’40 season, had picked up the nickname “Nazi” after the Blitzkrieg of the spring, because of the way he crashed through and laid people out. But Leets had once caught a touchdown pass—perhaps the happiest moment of his life—and now he resurrected the glory of that moment as a shield against the panic of this one.

He remembered an object coming wobbling out of the dusk of a Dyche Stadium afternoon; it was way off the true, a lumbering, ungainly thing that seemed far gone if it could reach him at all through the gauntlet of flailing arms he saw it must travel. The only reason the ball was coming at Leets was that a hand-off to the right halfback who was supposed to follow Reed into the end zone for a winning touchdown had somehow missed connections, and the quarterback, a big, stupid boy named Lindemeyer, a Phi Delt, had taken his only available option, which was to toss the thing to the first guy in purple he saw.

Leets saw it bending toward the earth, miraculously untouched by the half a dozen hands that had had a shot at it, and he had no memory of catching, only the sensation of clasping it to his chest while people jumped on him. Later, he’d figured that he must have been in midair when he made the grab, defying gravity, and that his normally unwilling fingers, clumsy, blunt things, had acquired in the urgency of the instant a physical genius almost beyond his imagination. But in the exultation, none of this was clear: only sensation, as joy flooded through him, and people pounded him on the back.

Leets took another stab on the Lucky. He readjusted his reading lamp—he must have knocked it askew when he popped up—and looked for an ashtray amid a clutter of pencils, curling German weapons instruction charts, sticks of gum, assorted breech parts, cups of cold tea, and cough drops—Roger, his sergeant, had had a cold a few weeks back. What was I looking for? Ashtray, ashtray. He slid it out from the pile that had absorbed it just as a worm of ash on the end of his cigarette toppled off into gray haze and settled across the table.

The office was on the upper floor of an undistinguished building on Ford’s Place near Bloomsbury Square, a cold-water flat converted to commercial use sometime in the Twenties by knocking down most of the interior walls and adding an elevator—lift, lift, lift! , he was always forgetting—which never worked anyway. The roof leaked. There was no central heating and Roger never remembered to keep the coal heater stoked so it was always cold, and every time a V-2 or a doodle touched down anywhere within ten square miles, which was frequent these days, a pall of dust drifted down to coat everything.