Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

The total mounted. A hundred scraps of information providing for the creation and nurture of Operation Nibelungen, GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE!!! highest Reich secrecy order and priority.

“It was higher than the rocket program even. My God,” said Leets.

Roaming through the CIC Documents Center, a clearinghouse the Army investigative unit had established at Dachau, Leets and Outhwaithe in one frantic day seemed to succeed wherever they touched. The files here were jumbled, immense, confusing stacks and tiers of paper; yet always, on the buff folders, one stamped word, whatever the category: NIBELUNGEN.

“We were so lucky,” Leets said. “If Shmuel hadn’t gotten to the old man. And if he hadn’t written it down. And if I hadn’t picked up—”

“We’ve been lucky all the way through. And yet we’re still no closer. I find that quite a bothersome thing.”

Leets scored. “Here,” he hooted, “under ‘Construction and Supply,’ the original site preparation order. Sixteenth of November ’44, orders here for a construction battalion to prepare a site for experimental purposes. In the Schwarzwald. Code name Nibelungen. Chalked off to WVHA. And a list of specs, required equipment.”

“Special transportation orders, these. Moving some solid-state testing gear down from Kummersdorf, the WaPrüf 2 testing facility up near Berlin. These instructions mandate special care to be taken with the delicate instrumentation. Date fourth of January, the very beginning of the thing.”

“We’re really cooking,” Leets crowed. “Goddamn, now we’re getting somewhere.”

Leets’s fingers pawed through the drawers and vaults of the files. He worked quickly, but with thoroughness, and did not stop for lunch or dinner. He would have stayed busy late into the night on his prowl through the paper labyrinths of the Third Reich but there came a moment when a shadow fell across the face of the document he was examining and in that same second a mousy voice, full of self-recrimination and humility, spoke up.

“Uh, sir. Captain Leets. Sir?”

Leets looked up through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“Gad, he’s back,” said Outhwaithe.

Roger stood shyly before him.

And Roger was some help, this time. He would not talk of Paris, or explain; he was not full of his match or himself. He even, for a day or so, worked hard as they continued their hunt through the paper work. And he came up with some possibly pertinent material: a Nibelungen-coded requisition for wind-tunnel data on projectile performance from the Luftfahrt Forschungsanstal , the Air Force research establishment at Braunschweig; and a record of marks for enlisted personnel taking part in the Dachau antitank course in mid-March, including 103 names identified as Totenkopfdivision —Nibelungen.

But still piles and piles of material remained to be gone through. Leets’s frustration took the form of a headache, and it increased as that afternoon wore on. At one point, late, he looked up and around the Documents Center and took no pleasure from what he saw: they were alone in the place, the CIC clerks having taken off for the day, and all around there seemed to be stacks and cartons of German documents. It reminded Leets much of the office back in London where, months ago, this had all begun. From this similarity he extrapolated a single message: they had not made any progress, any real progress, into the middle of the thing.

His frustration was amplified by news that Roger had brought from the outside—that the war seemed finally to be winding down. It was certainly in its last phase, and this made Leets uncomfortable. He had decided that Repp’s strike was tied to the end of things, somehow, in some form; it was a part of the process of the death of the Reich. The Russians were now said to be in Berlin—Berlin!—and German forces had capitulated up north, in Holland, northeast Germany and Denmark. Meanwhile Patton’s sweep had carried him all the way into Czechoslovakia—Pilsen, the last reports said.

Everybody was doing so well; he was doing lousy .

He slammed down the sheet he had, some nonsense on Nibelungen-coded mess receipts. Mess receipts! Damn it, the Reich should have ground to a halt back in ’43, its gears jammed tight on the tons of paper it produced. The Germans should have dropped paper bombs which killed by sheer weight with as much effectiveness as high explosives. They recorded everything in triplicate and the more they recorded, the more evidence accumulated, but the harder it was to put one’s hand on anything specific.

“Damn it, this just isn’t getting us anywhere,” he complained.

Tony, similarly immersed in documents at another table, looked up and said, “You’d rather be perched on a roadblock somewhere? Or knocking on doors with the boys in the trench coats?”

Of course not, Leets told himself. But more manpower would have been some help, to prowl these acres of paper. And even then, would that have done it? It was clear now that Nibelungen was built, maintained and controlled out of Dachau; all the documents pointed to it. But that was it: they pointed to Anlage Elf and Leets already had Anlage Elf. What he needed was another direction, another step in the chain, higher up on the ladder. To Berlin, perhaps. To WVHA headquarters at Unter den Eichen but the Russians were there. Would they cooperate? How long would it take? What shape were the WVHA files in anyway?

“Aspirin?” he asked.

“Huh? Oh, I got some in my bag, just a sec,” Roger said. “What’s a Schusswunde? Gunshot wound, right?”

“Yes,” Leets said, but then noted the folder Roger was reading. “Hey, what the hell is that?” he barked.

It was marked Der Versuch .

“Uh, file I picked up.”

Der Versuch meant experiment.

It was at last too much. Leets’s headache would not go away and Roger was pouring time down the drain, and Susan was even more unreachable than before and Shmuel was dead and Repp was closer to his target.

“Goddamn it, you little son of a bitch, I ought to kick your rich little ass to Toledo. That has nothing to do with our stuff. What the fuck, kid, you think this is some kind of reading room, some fucking Harvard library or something?” he spat out venomously.

Roger looked up in horror. Even Tony was shaken by the black rage in Leets’s words.

“Jesus, Captain, I’m sorry,” said Roger. “I was just—”

“Listen, we’re all running without a lot of sleep and these last days have been unpleasant ones,” Tony pointed out. “Perhaps we’d best close down the shop for today.”

“Suits me,” said Roger sullenly.

“Ah,” Leets snorted, but saw at once that Outhwaithe was right.

Roger stood and gathered up his materials wearily and began to stuff them into a drawer.

But then he paused. “Look, this is pretty funny here, if I’m reading it right.”

Nobody paid any attention. Leets still hadn’t taken any aspirin and Tony was consumed in tidying up. Tony was a tidy sort, always had been.

Roger lurched on. “Funny-ugly,” he said. “They used this Dachau as headquarters for a lot of testing. Block Five, it was called. All kinds of terrible—”

“Get to the point,” Leets said coldly.

“Okay,” and Roger held up the bulky file. “Full of freezing, pressure-chamber stuff, gas, injections, water— deaths I’m talking about. How people die. How long it takes, what the signs are, what their brains look like afterward, pictures, stuff like that. And this—”

He pulled a folder out.

“It’s not like the others. Different forms entirely. Didn’t come out of Block Five. It’s a report on Schusswunde —gunshot wounds, twenty-five of them, complete with autopsy pictures, the works. It’s been sent down to a Dr. Rauscher—the head SS doctor here. Sent down for his collection on how people die. It’s dated—this is how it caught my eye—it’s dated the eighth of March. A couple of days after Shmuel made his breakout.”