Stephen Hunter: The Master Sniper

Leets squinted again at the German document, as if drawing a bead on it. Its bland surface revealed nothing new. Or did it? Holding it at an angle into the light, he could make out two faint impressions on the paper. Someone had stamped the original with a great deal of zeal; down here on the bottom carbon only a trace of the stamper’s enthusiasm remained, fainter than a watermark. Surely the Brits would have some sort of Scotland Yard hocus-pocus for bringing up the impressions. Still, he laid the thing out and, remembering some Boy Scout stuff, ran the flat of a soft lead pencil across the ridges just as gently as he knew how, as if he were stroking the inside of a woman’s thigh. Susan’s thigh, to be exact, though thoughts of her were of no use now—but that was another problem.

Two images revealed themselves in the gray sheen of the rubbed lead, one familiar, one not. The old friend read simply WaPrüf 2 , which Leets knew to be the infantry weapons department of the Heereswaffenamt Prüfwesson , the Army testing office. These were the boys who’d cooked up the little surprises of late that had made his job so interesting: that junky little people’s machine pistol, the Volksturmgewehr , manufactured for a couple of dimes’ worth of junk metal, it fired 300 nine-mills a minute; and they also had an imitation Sten out, for behind-the-lines operations, or after the war; and a final dizziness, something called a Krummlauf modification, a barrel-deflection device mounted on the STG-44, which enabled it to fire around corners. The line on German engineering had always been that it was pedantic and thorough; but Leets didn’t think so. A wild strain of genius ran through it. They were miles ahead in most things, the rockets, the jets, the guns. It made him uneasy. If they could come up with stuff like that (a gun for shooting round corners!), who knew what else they were capable of?

Leets was by profession an intelligence officer; his specialty was German firearms. He ran an office—obscure to be sure, not found in any of the mighty eight-hundred-page histories—called the Small Weapons Evaluation Team, which in turn was part of a larger outfit, a Joint Anglo-American Technical Intelligence Committee, sponsored in its American half by Leets’s OSS and in its Anglo half by Major Outhwaithe’s SOE. So SWET worked for JAATIC, and Leets for Outhwaithe. That was Leets’s war now: an office full of dusty blueprints. It was no-SWET, as Roger was so fond of pointing out (Leets’s joke actually; Roger was a great borrower).

But here was WaPrüf 2 involved in a shipment of twelve rifles across Germany. Now what could be so fascinating about those particular twelve rifles? It bothered him, because it was so un-German. Twelveland, as the Brits called the place in their intelligence jargon, was a maze of intricacies: bureaus, departments— Amts , the Germans called them—desks, subdesks—not at all unlike London in this respect—but the place was in its way always tidy, ordered. Even with the bombs raining down, most of her cities wrecked, millions dead, Russian armies squeezing in from the East, American and British ones poised in the West, no food, no fuel, still the paper work moved like clockwork. Except, all of a sudden, here was this obscure little agency that nobody except himself probably and some two or three others in this town had ever even heard of, involved in some goofy business.

It bothered him; but what bothered him more was the other stamp he’d brought out: WVHA.

Now what the hell was WVHA?

Another bureau presumably, but one he’d never heard of; another tidy little office buried away in downtown Berlin.

An idea was beginning to grow in Leets’s mind, dangerously. He lit another cigarette. He knew somewhere in the files he had a real good breakdown on the STG-44. It was an ingenious weapon, a Sturmgewehr , assault rifle, cross between the best parts of a submachine gun, firepower and lightness, and a rifle, accuracy, range. He supposed he’d have to dig the goddamned stuff out himself; he remembered how when they’d gotten their hands on one they’d broken it down to the pins and put it together again, taken it out to the range and shot up a battalion of targets, and put together an absolutely brilliant technical profile which had been shipped up to JAATIC and routinely ignored.

Leets went over to the files and began to prowl. But just as he got the report out, another thought came flooding over him.

Serial numbers.

Goddamn, serial numbers.

He rushed back to the telex. Now where the hell was it?

A stab of panic but then he saw the yellow corner sticking out from under a dog-eared copy of Bill Fielding’s Tournament Tennis and the Spin of the Ball— Roger’s bible—and he knocked the book aside and seized the telex.

Serial numbers.

Serial numbers.

Leets stood at the window with the lights out, even though the blackout was officially over and London was now into a phase called dim-out. He looked over the skyline, drawn not long ago by the impact of a V-2. Sometimes they burned, sometimes they didn’t. This one had come down to the north a half a mile or so, beyond, Leets hoped, the Hospital for Sick Children on Great Ormond Street, maybe as far off as Coram Fields. But there’d be nothing to burn if it went down in that rolling meadow and he could see a smudge—orange thumbprint—on the horizon; so clearly there was fire. Thing must have hit even farther out, beyond Gray’s Inn Road and the Royal Free Hospital. He’d have to walk out there sometime and see.

The rockets were a curious phenomenon for Leets. They were big bullets really; even the Germans acknowledged this. The V-2, technical designation A4, was a Wehrmacht project, administered by the SS, interpreted as artillery. A bullet, in other words. The doodles, V-1’s, were Luftwaffe, aircraft.

Consider: a bullet as big as a building fired from a rifle in Holland or Twelveland itself at a target in London. Jesus; Leets felt a shiver run through him. It was different from being bombed or shelled randomly; some fucking Kraut sniper was scoping in on you through the dark and the distance, this feeling of being watched , strange; a weirdness traveled his spine, a chill, but he realized that it was only a draft and a split second later that the door had been opened.

“Should have knocked, sorry,” said Tony.

“I wanted to see where they parked their freight tonight. Looked like it went down near the hospital, the one for kids.”

“Actually, it went down much farther out, in Islington. Could we, chum, do you mind?” Gesturing Close-the-curtains while he turned on the switch.

“You’re early,” said Leets. It was half past seven.

“Bit ahead of schedule, yes.”

“Okay,” Leets said, taking his seat and pulling out the telex and assorted other items, “this is funny.”

“Make me laugh.”

“They’re shipping a special consignment of rifles across Germany. Now our best estimate is that maybe eighty thousand of the things have been built since Hitler gave ’em the green light in ’43. Most of the eighty thousand came off the Haenel line at Suhl, although the Mauser works at Oberndorf did a run of ten thousand before we bombed out the line. The markings are different, and the plastic in the grip was cheaper, chipped more easily.”

Outhwaithe, in Burberry, collar upturned, hair slicked wetly back, face calm, eyes dead-fish cold, studied him in a way his class of Briton had been perfecting for seven hundred years.

Leets absorbed the glare unshaken, and went on. “The serial numbers run eight digits, plus the manufacturing designation. Do you follow?”

“Perfectly, dear fellow.”

“Now they always use two dummy numbers. So you’ve got two dummy numbers, then the five viable ones which indicate which part of the run it was, then another dummy, then the manufacturing code. The point of the dummy integers is to make us think they’re manufacturing them in the millions. They do it on all their small stuff, it’s so stupid. Are you with me? Am I going too fast?”