Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

“Let’s see,” said Leets.

The folder consisted of several typewritten pages of wound descriptions and several grisly pictures, shot with too much flash, of naked scrawny men on slabs with great orifices in their chests or portions of their heads blown away, eyes slotted and blank, feet dirty, joints knobby. Leets looked away.

“Maybe it is them,” he said. “No way to tell. Shmuel could tell. But even if it is, so what? The way I make it is they must have autopsied the corpses Repp hit at Anlage Elf. Wanted to see what that fat slug does, more data to help him in the shooting. Then they ship those data back to—back to we don’t know where. WVHA, I guess. Or SS HQ, someplace, Berlin. Then”—he sighed, weary with the effort, for he could see the approach of another dead end—“someone up there sends it on down to this Dr. Rauscher. For his collection. And you find it. Looking where you’re not supposed to be. But it doesn’t mean a thing. We know they’ve got a big, special gun. We know—”

“Yet it’s not Nibelungen-coded,” Tony said.

“Well, it had really nothing to do with the guts of the mission. It was just an extra curiosity they’d dug up and thought to send somewhere it might do some good. Their idea of ‘good.’”

“You miss the point,” Tony said. He’d ceased tidying and was over at Roger’s, pushing his way through the papers. “If it hasn’t gone out under the code, then it’s not top secret. It’s not Geheime Kommandosache . That means it hasn’t been combed, scrubbed free of connections, examined closely from the security point of view. It’s pure.”

Leets wasn’t sure what he was getting so excited about.

“Big deal, nothing there to be top secret. We don’t even know if those are the same twenty-five guys. They could be twenty-five guys from any of the camps.”

“Hey,” said Roger, off in a corner with one of the sheets. “There’s a tag here. I didn’t see it. It’s some kind of—”

Leets had it, and took it into the light.

“It’s a file report, that’s all,” he said. “It says these came from some guy’s file, some guy in some department, Amt Four-B-four, some guy I never heard of. Jesus, this is nothing, goddamn it, I’m getting tired of all this—”

“Shut up,” said Tony.

“Look, Major, this is—”

“Shut up,” Tony said. He looked hard at the tag. Then he looked at Leets, then to Roger, then back to Leets.

“Remember your German, Captain. In German, the word Eich?”

“Huh?”

“It’s oak. Oak!”

Tony said, “Remember: it wasn’t Shmuel who heard of the Man of Oak, but someone else, a shtetl Jew, who spoke Yiddish. He knew some German words, the common ones, but he was scared and didn’t listen carefully. He heard ‘Man of Oak.’ Mann . And Eich.”

Tony continued, “It has nothing to do with Unterden-Eichen, Under the Oaks. We were wrong. We stopped short. We didn’t follow it hard enough. The Jew was right. It was Man of Oak.”

Leets looked at the name.

“There’s your bloody Man of Oak,” said Tony.

The tag said, “Originals on file Amt IV-B-4, Obersturmbannführer Eichmann.”

“Repp?” He hadn’t heard her come in. “Repp? Where are you?”

“Here,” he said feebly. “What the hell took you so long?”

She came up the stairs and into the room. Today she wore a smart blue suit and a hat with a veil.

“My God,” she said. “You look ill. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Do you want something? Brandy? I have some brandy.”

“No, no. Stop it, please. Tell me what I sent you out to find.”

“I have a surprise for you.”

“Margareta. I have a headache. I don’t have time for—”

She held out an unopened pack of Siberias. “Surprise,” she said.

“Where on earth did you get those?”

“From a boy. I smiled at him. He was charmed to give them to me. He’d been in the East, I guess.”

Repp opened the pack greedily, and extracted one of the cigarettes. The paper had begun to turn brown from age and, lighting it quickly, he realized how stale the thing was. Still: delicious.

“French, incidentally,” she said.

“Eh? I’m not sure what—”

“It’s the French. The French who’ve occupied us. In American uniforms with American equipment. But the French.”

“Well, it’s the same. Maybe worse. We never took America. We took France in ’40.”

“They seem very benign. They sit in the square and whistle at the women. They drink. The officers are all in the café.”

“What about ours?”

“Our boys handed in their rifles and were marched away. It was almost a ceremony, like a changing of the guard. It was all very cheerful. No shots were fired. The guns weren’t even loaded.”

“Tell me what I sent you out for. How many are there? What are the security arrangements? How are they monitoring civilian traffic? Have they set up border checkpoints? Is there a list that you know of?”

“List?”

“Yes. Of criminals. Am I on it?”

“I don’t know anything of any list. I certainly didn’t see one. There are not so many of them. They have put up signs. Regulations. All remaining German soldiers and military personnel must turn themselves in by tomorrow noon on the Münsterplatz. All party uniforms, banners, flags, standards, regalia, knives—anything with the swastika on it has been collected and dumped in a big pile. Denazification they call it, but it’s souvenirs they want.”

“The border. The border.”

“All right. I went there too. Nothing. Some bored men, sitting in a small open car. They haven’t even occupied the blockhouse, though I do know they removed our Frontier Police detachment. I think the fence is patrolled too.”

“I see. But it’s not—”

“Repp, the border is not their central concern right now. Sitting in the sun, looking at women, thinking about what to do when the war’s over: those are their central concerns.”

“What travel regulations have they posted?”

“None, yet.”

“What about—”

“Repp, nothing’s changed. Some French soldiers are now sitting around the Münsterplatz, where yesterday it was our boys. Our boys will be back soon. You’ll see. It’s almost finished. It won’t last much longer.”

He sat back.

“Very good,” he said. “You know they offered me an Amt Six-A woman, a professional. But I insisted on you. I’m glad. It was too late for strangers. This is too important for strangers. I’m so glad they convinced you to help.”

“It’s difficult for a German to say No to the SS.”

“It’s difficult for a German to say No to duty.”

“Repp, I have something I’d like to discuss, please.”

“What?”

“A wonderful idea really. It came to me while I was out.”

She did seem happier than yesterday. She wasn’t so tired for one thing and she looked better, though maybe he had only grown used to the imperfectly joined face.

“What?”

“It’s simple. I see it now. I knew there was a design in all this. Don’t go.”

“What?”

“Don’t do it. Whatever it is, don’t do it. It can’t matter. Now, so late. Stay here.” She paused. “With me.”

“Stay?” A stupid thing to say. But she had astonished him.

“Yes. Remember Berlin, ’42, after Demyansk, how good it was? All the parties, the operas. Remember, we went riding in the Tiergarten, it was spring, just like it is now. You were so heroic, I was beautiful. Berlin was beautiful. Well, it can be like that again. I was thinking. It can be just like that, here. Or not far from here, in Zurich. There’s money, you have no idea how much. You’ve got your passport. I can get across, I know I can, somehow. All sorts of things are possible, if you’d only—”