Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

“He said No?”

“He said Yes. I think. So drunk he could hardly speak, the music was quite loud. But there’ll be a Mosquito on the field at ten at Grossreuth Flughafen. God.” He stood.

Leets and Outhwaithe pushed their way through the celebrants, and out into the night, where Roger waited with the Jeep and the Thompson submachine guns.

Repp, at 400 meters out, had an angle of about 30 degrees to the target zone. It was his best compromise, close enough to put his rounds in with authority, yet high enough to clear the wall. He half crouched now behind an outcrop of rock. The Vampir rifle lay before him on the stone, on its bipod, the bulky optics skewing it to one side. Repp had removed the pack and set it next to the rifle so that its weight wouldn’t pull his shooting off.

Enough light lingered to let him examine the buildings beneath and beyond him. Built five hundred years ago by fierce Jesuits, the buildings had been walled and somewhat modernized early in the century when the order of Mother Teresa took them over as a convent. It looked like a prison. The chapel, the oldest building, was not impressive, certainly nothing on the scale of the Frauenkirche in Munich, a true monument to papism; it was a utilitarian stone thing with a steeply pitched roof, two domed steeples with grim little crosses atop them. But Repp steadied his binoculars against the other, larger edifice, the living quarters of the order that fronted on a courtyard. Patiently in the fading light he explored it until he found, not far from the main entrance with stairway and imposing arches, an obscure wooden door, heavily bolted. The children would spring from there.

There would be twenty-six of them, and he had to take them all: twenty-four, twenty-five even, simply wasn’t good enough. The SD report said they came out every night at midnight and played in the yard for about forty minutes. Repp calculated that they’d be bunched in the killing zone, that is, outside the door but not yet dispersed enough to prevent a clean sweep of the job, for about five seconds. He’d take them when the last one had stepped out the door. Fantastic shooting, to be sure, but well within his—and Vampir’s—capabilities.

And what if twenty-seven targets came out, or twenty-eight, or twenty-nine, meaning a nun or a novitiate or two had come along to watch and help? It was entirely possible, even probable. In Berlin they’d been vague and half-apologetic. Perhaps even the Reichsführer , who’d sent millions East, felt queasy about ordering him to shoot a Swiss nun. Yet they chose Repp for his strength as well as his skill and he’d resolved to make the difficult decisions. If a nun had to die in the cause of making the world Judenrein , clean of Jews, then so be it. He’d kill everything on the scope.

Repp laid down the binoculars as the last of the light died. He clapped his hands, and pulled his jacket tighter. He was cold and afraid of fatigue, which could take his edge. And he was strangely uneasy about all this: so simple, everything had whirred into place. He knew enough to distrust such ease. He shifted an arm and looked at his watch. Almost nine.

Three more hours.

It was almost nine. The drunken lieutenant was explaining but his words kept dissolving into giggles. He was under the impression Roger was an officer and he seemed to think the more he giggled the more trouble he was in, which meant that he giggled even harder.

“The tank carrier, sir, uh, he stripped his gears trying to get her outta the mud, uh, or he thought he would, uh, sir, he put her in reverse and she jumped the road and—” The remainder of the communiqué was lost in a seethe of giggles. The lieutenant was trying to explain why the flatbed truck, designed to transport tanks, lay angled across the road ahead, garish in the light of a dozen purple flares. Around it clustered a group of Americans—they’d drawn duty on VE night and someone had a bottle and whatever they were supposed to do just wasn’t going to get done.

It had been like this most of the way since Schloss Pommersfelden. Nuremberg still lay somewhere in the distance, mythical like Camelot, and to get there they’d have to pass through more of what they’d already seen: drunken joyous men of all nationalities, accidents, honking horns, flares, small-arms fire. And women. In the small town of Forchheim—“Fuck-him,” in GI argot—through which they’d just pushed their way, the nonfraternization law had broken down totally, and young officers were the most audacious offenders. College boys mostly, with no real military careers on the line, they’d turned the town into a fraternity party or prom night. The Jeep had been laid up at a corner behind a column of stalled vehicles before Leets, in a frenzy of rage, had gone forward to find two staff cars hung up on each other in a minor crash, and in the back seat of each a couple necking hotly while around them MP’s argued and screamed. Leets went back and they’d pulled out of line to try an alternate route, but almost ended up in the Regnitz River and did in fact become lost until a studiously inebriated British major of the Guards, elaborately polite, had pointed them back in the right direction.

“Well, Jesus, how long, Lieutenant?” Leets demanded, leaning across Roger. Something in his voice must have startled the youngster. He stepped back abruptly and began to speak in an oppressive imitation of sobriety. “There’s a maintenance vehicle from the motor pool in Nuremberg on the way, uh, sir.”

“Christ,” said Leets in disgust.

He climbed out of the Jeep and pushed by the lieutenant to the truck. The fucking thing was hopelessly locked in, its double-axled set of rear tires having slipped off the roadway into a culvert, hooking there, and as the driver had pulled to free himself, he’d actually twisted the huge flatbed up and out into the air; it looked like a drawbridge stuck halfway, blocking the road completely. It would take a heavy tow truck or perhaps a crane to move the thing.

Up ahead loud voices clashed off one another. Leets looked into the circle of vivid pink light from the flare and saw two men facing each other. They were about to begin throwing punches.

“Hey, what’s going on here?” he yelled.

“Asshole here dumped his fucking truck in the middle of the road, now he won’t move it so I’m gonna move him,” said one.

“You just go on and try it, sucker,” said the other.

“Knock it off, goddamn it,” Leets ordered.

“There’s broads up in that Fuck-him place,” said the first man, “and goddamn I mean to get a piece of ass tonight.”

“All right,” said Leets.

This son of a bitch and his fuckin’ tru—”

“Knock it off, goddamn it!” Leets shouted.

“Captain,” said Roger.

“Shut up, Roger, goddamn it, I got enough—”

“Captain. Let them have our Jeep. We’ll take their car. Everybody’s happy.”

“What are you driving?” Leets asked.

“Ford staff car,” the man said sullenly. “I’m General Taplow’s driver. But, hey, I can’t let anything happen to that car.”

“More pussy in Fuck-him than you ever saw in one place in your life,” said Roger. “Some of them German women are walking around bare-tit.”

“Oh, Christ,” said the man weakly.

“Harry, you’re gonna get us all in a lot of trouble.”

“Bare-tit?”

“Some of ’em even have these little pasty things on.”

“Oh, Jesus. That I gotta see.”

“Harry.”

“Look, you’ll take real good care of that car, won’t you?”

“You know where the Nuremberg airport is, Grossreuth Flughafen?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“That’s where the car’ll be. All locked up.”