Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Another plane, a two-engine British job, howled overhead, slightly higher than the Jug but just as loud. He ducked.

What the hell’s going on? Rog wondered.

He looked about and saw nobody in the house. No guards, no officers, nothing. He did notice a path off to one side in the trees and thought to head out back, dig somebody up. The path turned quickly into a kind of sidewalk, though of fine, tiny pebbles set between metal rails of some sort. Very fancy, it reminded him of the kind of arrangements he’d seen in Newport. He followed it through some tricky turns, and at last found himself in some sort of garden, low hedges arranged like a geometry problem around flower beds that were beginning to show signs of waking up. Beyond lay a vast rolling carpet of grass and behind, though shielded by a screen of tall, thin trees, was the castle. But Roger picked up something more interesting immediately: standing on the grass, by a bench of some sort, back turned, looking up at the aerial circus, was a girl. A WAC or something.

He advanced warily, unsure whether she was an officer. She was in some kind of uniform all right, but not an officer, for there was no gleam at her collar. He stepped forward.

“Uh, pardon me, have you got any idea what’s going on, miss?”

The girl turned. One of those clear, guileless Midwestern faces organized around big eyes, blue, a pert nose and even freckles. A kind of strawberry complexion, hues of pinkness, and it all made him think of freshness, a kind of innocence.

Hey, would I like to pork that! he decided.

Then he noticed she was crying.

“Gee, what’s wrong? Bad news, huh?”

She came into his arms—he could not believe his famous luck again—and began to sob against his shoulder. He held her close and tight, muttering, “Now, now,” stroking her hair.

She looked up, soft and blurred, and he thought she wanted a kiss and so he pressed his lips into hers.

At last Eichmann spoke.

“What guarantees can you offer? Repp is very dangerous. You insist that I betray him, or you’ll let it be known I betrayed him. Yet without a guarantee, the first possibility does not exist.”

“We have a way of remembering our friends. We’ve that reputation, don’t we? Give us a chance to live up to it. That’s all I can say.”

“I’d need to disappear. Understand, it’s not the Americans who frighten me. It’s Repp.”

“I understand,” said Leets. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”

“A bargain then, Eichmann for Repp?”

“I said I’d see.”

“Eichmann for Repp. How that would sicken him.” He laughed.

“Herr Eichmann,” Tony said, in better German than Leets’s, “let us proceed with our business.”

The draydel had run out of energy, and sputtered to a stop, lurching spastically on the table. Eichmann picked it up in his blunt fingers—an anatomical oddity, hands so big on such a skinny man—and began to talk.

“Operation Nibelungen: I was in on it from the beginning. It was Pohl’s actually, Pohl, of the Economic and Financial Office, WVHA, but he brought me into it, and together we sold the Reichsführer . It was nothing personal, the business with the Jews, you understand that. It was just our way, our job. We had to do it. The policies were set from the very top. We only did what we were—”

“Get to the point,” Leets instructed.

“Operation Nibelungen. The point of Operation Nibelungen is a Special Action.”

“A ‘Special Action’?”

“With a rifle.”

“Special Action means murder.”

“Call it what you will. It can be justified morally from a World Historical perspective which—”

“Who?” said Leets, surprising even himself at how uninterested he sounded after so many months of sawing on the same question.

“You must realize. I am not against the Jews. I respect and understand them. I myself am a Zionist. I believe it would be best for them to have their own country. All this was forced upon us by our superiors—”

“Who? When?”

“When, I cannot say. I was taken off the project and sent to Hungary on special emergency assignment before the final planning took place. But soon. If not already.”

Leets said, “Who, Herr Obersturmbannführer Eichmann? For the last time, WHO?”

His yell seemed to startle the little man.

“No need to yell, Captain. I’m about to tell you.”

“Who?”

“A child,” Eichmann said. “A six-year-old boy. Named Michael Hirsczowicz. Now I think I might have one of those cigarettes.”

Roger put the tip of his tongue through the girl’s lips.

She smashed him in the face, open hand.

“What?” he said. “Hey, I don’t get it.”

“Fresh,” she said.

“You kissed me! I just walked around the corner and here’s these lips.”

“You made it dirty. You spoiled it.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” She was knocking him out. He was in love, or half in love at any rate.

“Look, I really didn’t mean anything bad. It was just a friendly gesture.”

“Tongues are more than just friends,” she said.

“Oh, well, you get carried away, is all. Heh, heh. My name’s Rog, Rog Evans. What’s yours?”

“Nora.”

“Well, Nora, how are you? Nice to meet you. Do you play tennis, by any chance? Where’d you go to school?”

“Prairie View.”

“Prairie View, yeah, think I heard of it. Women’s school out west, California, isn’t it? A real good school, I hear.”

“It’s a high school in Des Moines. I doubt if you’ve heard of it. I didn’t even go to a college yet.”

“Oh, yeah, well, college is pretty much a waste of time. Even Harvard, where I go, is not really for serious people. Are you a WAC?”

“The Red Cross Women’s Auxiliary.”

“A civilian?”

“Yeah. But we’re still supposed to call officers sir and all.”

“Must be real interesting,” he said.

“I hate it. It stinks. They watch you like a hawk. You never get to do anything.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the service. Speaking of doing something, I was wondering, you tied up or anything tonight?” Get the date first, then worry about dumping Leets and Outhwaithe. “See, I don’t know the area too well. I’m OSS—Office of Strategic Services… high-level intelligence, that sort of thing. Anywhere it’s hot, that’s where you’ll find us. But I was wondering if you could sort of—”

“How can you think of that on a day like this?”

“And what’s this day?” he finally asked her.

Eichmann smoked and explained.

“In the last days before the war, a wealthy, assimilated Warsaw Jew named Josef Hirsczowicz seemed to convert to Zionism. Naturally, there were ramifications.”

Leets thought of just one of them: the shabby little office in London, the old man Fischelson, and all the grim, dark, weeping women. And Susan Isaacson, American, from Baltimore, Maryland, who’d lost her soul there, or perhaps found it.

“We viewed this with some concern. First, we felt the Hirsczowicz fortune to be ours, by right of biological superiority. Second, an accumulation of capital such as this fellow’s is not without its influence. And that much money in the hands of Zionist agitators, anarchists, Socialists, Communists, what have you, could create considerable problems for us. Incidentally, Major, in this respect we are not so much different from your own government, which, in the Mideast at any rate, recognizes the World Jewish Conspir—”

“Get on with it,” Tony said.

“Thus it was imperative that the man Hirsczowicz and his family and heirs be added to the list of Warsaw intelligentsia marked for special handling. And so it happened.”Eichmann left to their imaginations the full meaning of the euphemism.