Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Carefully, holding the Webley snout at an angle two inches from the ancient brass lock plate, Tony fired. The flash spurted white and blinding.

Repp had twenty-five. There was no slack in the trigger. But what was going on?

“Kinder,” yelled Tony, German perfect, “the bad man can see in the dark, the bad man can see in the dark.”

He could see their white faces stark in the night, and eyes white as they fled. They were apparitions. He heard the scuffle of panicked feet across the pavement. He heard squeals and yelps. He must have seemed a giant to them, a nightmare creation. They must have thought he was the bad man who could see in the dark, running through the yard, breathing hard, face blackened, gigantic pistol in one hand. Another irony for his collection.

How quickly they vanished. Several brushed against his leg in their flight and yet it seemed to take only a second. They scurried like small animals. He could not see them anymore.

A woman was crying. Terrified. She didn’t know.

We’re good fellows, madame, he wanted to explain.

He heard Leets yelling. What did the man want?

Repp fired.

Leets reached the gate. He heard them screaming and running. He fixed on fleeing figures that seemed to career through the darkness. Someone was crying. A woman’s voice, pitched high in uncontrollable fear, unfurled. “Bitte, bitte,” please, please.

“Go away, dearest God, go away.”

The bullet had taken most of Tony’s head. He was on the ground in the middle of the courtyard, in a dark pool spilling out across the pavement.

Then Repp shot him again.

Leets finally stopped being insane near dawn. He’d really gone nuts there for a while, yelling up at the mountain after Repp shot Tony. Leets even fired off a magazine, spraying tracers hopelessly up to disappear into the dark bank of the hillside. Roger had hit Leets with his shoulder behind both knees, and Leets screamed at the blow and went down; then Roger pinned him flat in the arch of the open gate and, using every fiber of strength he had, dragged him back into the protection of the wall.

“Jesus,” Roger yelled in outrage, “tryin’ to get yourself killed!”

Leets looked at him sullenly, but Roger saw a mad glint, the beam of secret insane conviction spark in his irises, werewolflike, and when Leets twisted savagely for the gun, Rog was ready and really hit him hard in the neck with his right forearm, his tennis arm, big as an oak limb, stunning him.

“Out there it’s death,” he bellowed, deeply offended.

Then Leets had insisted on recovering the body.

“We can’t leave him out there. We can’t leave him out there.”

“Forget it,” Roger said. “He doesn’t care. I don’t care. Those children don’t care. Repp doesn’t care. Listen, you need a vacation or something. Don’t you see? You won!”

No, Leets didn’t see. He looked across the courtyard to Outhwaithe. A hundred streams of blood ran out of him, across the stones of the yard, catching in cracks and hollows. His head and face were smashed, an eye blown out, entrails erupting with gas, spilling out. Repp, in uncharacteristic rage, had fired a whole magazine into him. Then he’d turned his weapon on inanimate things and in a spooky display of the power of Vampir he’d shredded the door through which some few of the children had disappeared, then methodically snapped out windows, sent a burst of automatic across a plaster saint in a niche in the church, and finally, in a moment of inspired symbolism, shot the crosses off the two domed steeples. A real screwball, thought Roger.

Now, hours later, a chilly edge of dawn had begun to show to the east. Leets had been still, resigned finally, Roger figured. He himself was quite pleased with his coolness under fire. His friend Ernest Hemingway would have been impressed. He’d even saved the captain’s life. You saved your CO, you got a medal or something, didn’t you? What’s a captain worth? A Silver Star? At least a Bronze Star. For sure a Bronze.

Roger was wondering which medal he’d get—which to ask for, actually—when Leets said, quite calmly, “Okay, Rog. Let’s take him.”

Repp would have to train himself to live with failure. It was another test of will, of commitment; and the way to win it was to close out, ruthlessly, the past. Put it all behind. Speculation as to how and why he had failed were clearly counterproductive.

He explained all this to himself in the dark sometime in the long hours of the night after the shooting. Still, he was bitter: it had been so close.

Repp had killed one, he knew. Now the question was, How many remained? And would they come after him? And other questions, nearly as intriguing. Who were they? Should he flee now?

He’d already rejected the last. His one advantage right now lay in Vampir. It had run out, but they didn’t know that. They only knew he could hit targets in the dark and they couldn’t. It would be foolish to surrender that advantage by racing off into the dark, up a steep incline, through rough forest with which he was unfamiliar. A misstep could be disastrous, even fatal.

They wouldn’t come, of course, in the dark. They’d come in the light, at dawn, when they could see him. They’d come when the odds were better.

If they came.

Would they? That was the real question. They’d won, after all, they’d stopped him, they’d saved the Jewish swineboy and the money and perhaps even the Jews, if there were any left. Sensible men, professionals, would most certainly not come. They’d be pleased in their victory and sit back against unnecessary risks. In their position, he’d make the same decision. Go up a strange mountain after a concealed marksman with one of the most sophisticated weapons in the world? Foolish. Ridiculous. Insane. Impractical.

And that’s when he knew they’d come.

Repp felt himself smile in the dark. He felt happy. He’d reached the last step in his long stalk through the mind of his enemies; and he’d realized just how much now, when it was all over, all finished, when as a species the SS man was about to disappear from the earth, he realized how much he wanted to kill the American.

Roger blinked twice. His mouth felt parched dry.

“Now just a sec,” he said.

“We’ll never have a better chance. We can do it. I guarantee it.”

“Money back?” was all Roger could think to say.

“Money back.” Leets was dead serious.

“H-h-h-h-he’s long gone.” Damn the stutter.

“No. Not Repp. In the night he thinks he’s king.”

“I’m no hero,” Roger confessed. He felt a tremor flap through him.

“Who is?” Leets wanted to know. “Listen close, okay?”

Roger was silent.

“He can see in the dark, right?”

“Man, it’s daytime out there for him.”

“No. Wrong. Eichmann said they thought they were trying to work out a way to make this Vampire gadget lighter. So Repp could carry it.”

“Yeah.”

“He said it was some kind of solar-assist unit. The thing would take some of its power from the sun.”

“Yeah.”

“You see any sun around here?”

“No.”

“It’s run-down. It’s out of juice. It’s empty. He’s blind.”

Oh, Christ, thought Roger. “You want us to go out there and—”

“No.” Leets was very close, though Rog could not see him. But he could feel the heat. “I want you to go out there.”