Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

At the end of a long road through the trees sat the castle. Even the American military vehicles parked around it, dingy green with peeling, muddy stars, could not detract from its eighteenth-century purity.

“Willya look at that,” Roger suggested, dumb-founded.

Leets preferred not to, though the thing was impressive: a fantasy, an elegant stone pastry, foolish, insanely overelaborate, but proud in its mad grandeur.

Leets and Outhwaithe hurried into the place after Roger stopped, and found themselves in a theatrical stairwell four stories tall, embellished with arcaded galleries, stone nude boys holding lanterns, wide steps of marble that could have led to heaven, all under a painted ceiling.

Their boots crunched dryly across the tile toward a PFC orderly. MP’s with automatic weapons stood at each of the many doors leading off this area.

“Leets. Office of Strategic Services.” He fished for some ID. “This is Major Outhwaithe, SOE. A Major Miller of Seventh Army CIC said he’d call down and set up a chat with a guest you’ve got here.”

“Yes, sir. The Eichmann thing.”

“That’s it.”

A phone call was placed; a captain, in Class A’s, appeared. He looked them over.

“Eichmann, eh?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know why. Doesn’t know a thing. Most of them are talking like canaries. Trying out for new jobs. This guy’s the sphinx.”

“He’ll talk for me,” Leets said.

The captain took them up to the second level and down a hall. Tapestries and portraits of men and women three hundred years dead in outlandish outfits with fat glossy German faces hung on the walls. Finally, they reached doors at the end of the hall and stepped through. The room except for table and three chairs was empty.

“He’s in the detention wing. He’ll be here soon. Look, Miller’s a buddy of mine, I know this thing’s kind of unofficial. Glad to help out, no problem, no sweat. But we don’t go for any rough stuff, you know. I mean, Leets, it bothered me what you just said.”

“I won’t harm a hair on his head,” Leets said. “Neither will the major.”

“We British are quite gentle, hadn’t you heard?” Tony asked.

A roar rose suddenly; the windows rattled as it mounted.

After it died, the captain said, “That’s the fifth one in the last half an hour. Those guys are really feeling their oats today. There’s an airfield at Nuremberg, not too far. Mosquito squadron there too, Major, not just our boys going goofy.”

“Glad to hear it,” Tony said. “We try and do our bit.”

The door opened. Two MP’s with grease guns and helmet liners brought a third man in between them. Leets was immediately impressed at how unimpressed he was: a wormy little squirt, pale, watery eyes, thinning hair, late thirties. Glasses askew, lips thin and dry. Scrawny body lost in huge American prison fatigues.

“Gentlemen,” said the captain, “I give you Obersturmbannführer Karl Adolf Eichmann, late of Amt Four-B-four, Gestapo, Number One Sixteen, Kurfürstenstrasse, Berlin. Herr Eichmann”—the captain switched to perfect brilliant German—“these fellows need a few moments of your time.”

The Man of Oak sat down across from them. He looked straight ahead and smelled faintly unpleasant.

“Cigarette, Herr Obersturmbannführer?” Leets asked.

The German shook his head almost imperceptibly, clasped his hands before him on the table. Leets noted he had big hands, and that the backs of them were spotted with freckles.

Leets lit up.

“I understand, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” he said, speaking in his slow German, “you’ve been uncooperative with our people.”

“My duties were routine. I followed them explicitly. I did nothing except my job. That is all I have to say,” the German said.

Leets reached into his pocket, and removed something. With a flick of his fingers, he set the draydel to spinning across the surface of the table. Impelled by its own momentum, it described a lazy progress over the wood. Leets watched the man’s eyes follow it.

“Your colleague Herr Repp left that for me at Anlage Elf. Now, dear friend, you are going to tell me about Operation Nibelungen. When it started, where it’s headed, who its target is. You’re going to tell me the last secret. Or I’ll find it out myself, and I’ll find Repp. And when I find Repp, I’ll tell him only a little fib: I’ll say, Eichmann betrayed you, and let him go. Then, Herr Obersturmbannführer, as well you know, you are a very dead man from that second on. Herr Repp guarantees it.”

Roger leaned against the fender of the Jeep out in front of the castle— castle? it was more like a big, fancy house!—enjoying the freedom of the moment. No fun, the ride down, two raw nerves in back for cargo. They’d jumped the Jeep while it was still rolling and headed straight for the great doors, as if there were free money inside, instead of some Kraut.

He popped a piece of spearmint into his mouth. He had no dreams of the future and no memories of the past; he was determined to extract the maximum pleasure of that exact instant. He worked the gum into something soft. Sure was a nice day out. He assumed a Continental grip on an imaginary racquet and slow-motioned through a dozen topspin approach shots to the background corner. The trick was to keep your head down and follow through high. It was a shot he’d need to own , lock, stock and barrel, if he hoped to stay with the Frank Bensons of the world in the years to come.

And then he saw a woman.

She was just a silhouette preserved momentarily between the window through which he glimpsed her and what must have been another window or set of doors behind her. Just a profile, blurred, moving down a corridor between wings of the castle, gone in a second.

Women! Here? It had been weeks since he’d pulled out of London and that mix-up in Paris hadn’t amounted to anything. Women. He explored facets of the problem. Now what would women be doing here? Wasn’t this some kind of prison or something?

Still, that had definitely been—

Jesus Christ!

The roar seemed to flatten him. He fell back in momentary confusion, looking for the source of this outrage, to see a P-47 maybe fifty feet above him flash past, more shadow than substance at over 400 miles an hour. He could see its prop wash suck at the trees, pulling a cloud of leaves off them in its wake. It rolled majestically as it yanked its nose up—crazy bastard, he was going to get in real trouble that way, Roger thought—and he followed the fighter-bomber as it climbed.

He was dumb struck. The sky was jammed with planes. He’d noticed contrails earlier, but the sky was always full of contrails on the rare, clear European days. Now, staring, he saw them jumbled, tangled, knotted even, tracing corkscrews and barrels and loops and Immelmanns and stall-outs. He could make out the planes themselves, fighters mostly, specks at the head of each furry, swooping track. Must have been fifty, sixty. What a show.

One last giant dogfight? Maybe the Germans had saved up for an aerial Bulge, a last go, all their stuff in the air, jets, rockets, ME’s, Focke-Wulfs, and a Stuka or two if any were left, and all the experimental stuff everybody said they were working on. One last shoot-out at 25,000 feet: all guns blazing, take on the entire Eighth Air Force, some kind of Götterdämmerung , or maybe a crazy kamikaze thing, like Japs, just crashing into their targets?

But if this were a battle, wouldn’t there be puffs of flame up there, and long jags of smoke from crashing ships, and wouldn’t there be other columns of smoke on the horizon from planes that had already gone down?

Yes, there would.

This was— fun!