Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Repp said he couldn’t. “Though they deserve everything they get. They started the whole thing.”

“I hope we did it. I hope it’s true. Then we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. We’ll have done some good for the world after all.”

“But there’s always more. No matter how many they got out East, there’s always more.”

“Attention. Berlin calling. Berlin calling,” a voice crackled through the radio. Repp fiddled with the dial to bring the signal in better, but it was never clear. “The heroic people of the Greater German Reich continue in their struggle against the monstrous forces of International Jewry which threaten on all sides. The Red armies have been driven back in flight to the Baltic by Army Group North. In Hungary, our loyal SS troops stand fast. Since the death of our leader, we have cont—”

Repp turned the radio off.

“He’s gone?”

“Yes. They announced it several days back. Where were you?”

Hiding in a barn. Shooting brave men dead. Murdering them. Blowing Willi Buchner up.

“I had a hectic time reaching here.”

“But it seems to go on. The war. It seems like it’s been here forever. Even now I can’t believe it’ll be over.”

He turned the radio up again. “—in the south, Munich is an inspiration to us all, while Vienna continues to—”

“Damn them!” he shouted angrily. “The Americans walked into Munich days ago. Why don’t they tell the truth?”

“The truth is dreadful,” Margareta said.

Another day passed. Repp stayed indoors, although he did go into the garden around noon. It was beautiful out, though still a bit chilly. May buds had begun to pop and the sun was bright. But he could take no joy in it. She’d told him the neighbors were harmless sorts, a retired grocer on one side and a widow on the other, but still he worried. Maybe one of them had seen the scruffy private come hobbling down the Neugasse to the Berlin lady’s. It was the sort of possibility that bothered him the most because he had absolutely no control over it. So many of the big problems had been mastered—begin with Vampir itself, but go on to the escape in the middle of the American attack, the dangerous hundred kilometers from Anlage Elf to Konstanz across a wild zone, the final linkup here, not half a kilometer from the Swiss border. It would be a crime now to fail on a tiny coincidence, the wagging tongue of a curious neighbor.

“You are like a tiger today,” she said. “You pace about as if caged. Can’t you relax?”

“It’s very difficult,” he said.

“Then let’s go out. We can go down to the Stadtgarten. It’s very pretty. They don’t rent boats anymore but the swans are back and so are the ducks. It’s May, it’s spring.”

“My pictures were in Signal and Das Schwarze Korps and Illustrierter Beobachter . Someone might recognize me.”

“It’s unlikely.”

“I don’t care if it’s unlikely. I cannot take the chance. Stop bothering me about this, do you understand?”

“Sorry.”

He went up to the bedroom. She was right about one thing. The waiting was making him crazy. Locked up in a shabby little house on the outskirts of Konstanz, his whole world a glimpse down a street from an upper story or a stroll through a tiny garden out back, and the radio, dying Berlin squawking from its ashes.

Repp was not used to being frightened; it suddenly occurred to him that he was. In war, in battle, he was always concerned, but never particularly scared. Now, with the entire heritage of the Waffen SS on his shoulders, he knew fear. He would not let them down, but it seemed so far away, so helplessly futile. I will not let you down, he thought, I swear it. The oath began, however, I swear to you, Adolf Hitler… yet Adolf Hitler was dead. What did that mean now? Was the oath mere words? Did it die with the man to whom it was addressed?

Repp knew it did not. He knew his thinking was bad for him. Doubts, worries, something other than the will to pure action began in self-indulgent thought. A man was what he did; a man was what he obeyed.

He went instead to the dresser, yanked open the drawer and pulled out the Swiss passport, painstakingly doctored, well worn, stamped a dozen times, identifying him as Dr. Erich Peters, of German-speaking Bern, a lawyer. All fine. The difficult thing was the story.

He’d rehearsed it like an actor, trying to get the accent right, a little softer, slower. “Yes, legal business in Tuttlingen, a client’s will named his half-brother executor and to gain power of attorney we needed the half-brother’s signature. He couldn’t come to me!” This had been designed as a joke, to lessen the tension of the confrontation with a smile. “Terrible, the bombing, the devastation, just terrible.”

It should work.

He looked at himself in the mirror, searching for one Herr Doktor Peters. The dark double-breasted suit certainly would help, as would the tie and the Homburg and the briefcase. Still, a haggard, desperate man looked back at him, cheeks sunken, hardly a lawyer who’d lived fat and smooth these past seven hard years. His eyes seemed lusterless, his skin pale. Perhaps he ought to give himself color and health with Margareta’s makeup when he tried the border.

And when would that be? When?

“Repp,” she said behind him, scared.

“Yes?” He looked around.

“They’re here.” She pointed to the window. He peered out. A small open vehicle moved slowly down the street, four wary infantrymen in it.

“Damn!” he said. “We thought they’d pass this place.”

For a third time, the Americans had arrived.

There was no time to mourn. But Leets insisted on something. He wanted to carve the name into the trunk of a tree, or engrave it on a stone.

“So that he won’t be anonymous. So that he’ll have his name, his identity. Repp couldn’t take that from him.” For Leets believed that Repp had done the killing—not literally, of course, but at least on the metaphorical level. It was a Repp operation: at long distance, in the dark.

An American doctor less prone to melodrama had another explanation: “Just before liberation, a few trapped SS men broke into the warehouses and put on prison jerseys. They tried to mingle with the inmates. But it didn’t work. Because of the faces. That thin, gaunt KZ face. They didn’t have it; they were recognized right away, and beaten to death. And your friend—well, he’d been among us. All that American meat and potatoes. He’d filled out. They saw him in the prison compound and took him for an SS man. Who do you blame? Just one of those terrible things.”

So Leets felt his own emotions sealed up inside himself. He could not let them escape. He stared at the corpse. The head had been smashed in, the teeth broken off. Bright blood lay in the dust of the Appellplatz where he was found.

“Go with him to the pit or something, if it makes you feel better,” Tony said coldly. “Take his hand. Touch him. He’s only dead, after all, and you’ve seen the dead before.”

Leets knelt by the body, feeling a little ridiculous now. In fact he did take the hand, which felt cold and hard.

He could feel Susan accusing him once again in the dark.

He turned back to the dead Jew.

What did you expect from us? What do you people want, anyway? We had a war to win, we had to worry about the big picture. I had no idea this would happen. I had no idea. I didn’t know. I didn’t kn—

Leets felt the piece of paper in the cold hand. He pried the fingers roughly apart. Something in Hebrew had been written in pencil on a scrap. He stuffed it into his pocket.

After a while, two conscripted Germans came by for the body. Leets would have liked to have hated them, but they were elderly civilians—a banker and a baker—and the weight of the body was nearly beyond them. They were apologetic with the stretcher—it was too heavy, they were too weak, it wasn’t their fault. Leets listened to their complaints impatiently, and then gestured them to get going. After much melancholy effort they got Shmuel over to the burial ground, a pit that had been bulldozed out, and there set him down. They would not look into the wide, shallow hole. The stench of decomposition, though somewhat controlled by great quantities of quicklime, still overpowered, an inescapable fact. Delicately the two old men coughed and averted their eyes from the hundreds of huddled forms resting under a veil of white on the pit’s floor. Leets felt like kicking their asses.