Stephen Hunter: The Master Sniper

“I’m making a manful effort to stay abreast.”

“According to this order”—he held up the telex—“here you’ve got no digits at all. The serial-number blank has been crossed out.”

“If that is supposed to be a Major Intelligence Breakthrough, I’m afraid I rather miss the thrust of it.”

“The Germans keep records. Always. I can show you orders on stuff going back to the Franco-Prussian War. The whole stamping process is built into their manufacturing system, in their assembly lines. You see it everywhere, Krupp, Mauser, ERMA, Walther, Haenel. It’s part of their mentality, the way they organize the world.”

“Yes, I quite agree. But you were going to explain to me the significance of all this.” Tony did not at all look impressed.

“These twelve rifles: they’re handmade. There is no serial number. Or at least the barrel and breech, the key components, the numbered parts.”

“Which means?”

“For a production-line piece, the forty-four is great. Best gun in the war. Can cut a horse in two at four hundred meters. In Russia you could get three PPSH’s for a forty-four. But because it’s a production-line piece, you can’t get a real tight group. You’re shooting a small seven-point-nine-two-millimeter bullet, kurz , their word for short. It’s not a rifle that offers a great deal in the way of precision.”

“Until now.”

“Until now. Taking into consideration this is a high-priority project, taking into consideration WaPrüf 2 is cooperating with this outfit WVHA that I’ve never heard of, and taking into consideration they’re shipping the guns to some secret location down south, this Anlage Elf, I would say it’s obvious.”

“I see,” said Tony, but Leets could tell his presentation was not having the desired effect.

He played his trump card.

“They’re going to try and kill someone . Someone big, I’d say. They’re going to snipe him.”

But Tony, once again, topped him.

“Rubbish,” he said.

Shmuel was totally of the forest now. He was part of it, a sly, filthy animal, nocturnal, quick to panic, impelled into motion by ravenous hunger, shivering himself to sleep each morning in small caves, tufts of brush, against rocks. He ate roots and berries and wandered almost helplessly through the deep stillness, guided by only a primitive sense of direction. His journey was bounded by mountains. He was terrified of their bare slopes. What would he do up there on those rounded humps, except die? So he skirted them, threading his way through the densely wooded highlands at their base. Ten days now, twelve, maybe two weeks.

But it was a losing proposition and he knew it. He lost too much each day and the disgusting stuff he made himself eat could never replace it. He was running down, the fat and fiber and muscle he’d picked up in the camp melting away. The forest would win. He’d known it always. He’d pass out from weakness, die in wet leaves next to an obscure German stream.

His clothes had shredded, though into German tatters, not Jewish ones. The boots had disintegrated partially. The trousers were frayed and shiny. The coat was the only thing left. Stuffed with excelsior, it kept enough of the cold out and enough of the wet off. It forestalled sickness. Sickness was death. If you were too weak to move, you died. Motion was life, that was the lesson here. You kept moving. God would show you no pity.

One night rain came, a full storm. Shmuel cowered and could not move. Lightning bounded across the horizon behind the screen of trees, and the thunder was mighty, a roar that rose and fell and never went wholly away.

The next day, and the next, he smelled a tang to the air, sulfurous almost. And once he came upon an opening in the trees, where the open space seemed to fill with light; but this abundance of perspective filled him with horror and he lurched ahead, deeper into the wet trees.

I hope it doesn’t freeze, he thought. If it freezes I die. If I run into soldiers, I die. If I sleep too long, I die.

There were many, many ways to die, and he could not think of a single one to survive.

Several times he crossed roads and once he found himself on the grounds of some hotel or inn or something, but the thought of a caretaker or soldiers terrified him, and again he ran deeper into the forest.

But his strength was fleeing quickly now. It had held for so long, augmented by berries and roots and lichens, but in the last day or two his weakness seemed to have increased enormously.

Finally he crawled from sleep knowing he was doomed. He was too weak. There’d been no food he could hold down, the forest here was a thicket of old bones, clacking in the wind. Leafless trees white and knuckled like gripping hands, millions of them.

I am the last, he thought, the last Jew.

The ground here was matted with dead leaves into a kind of cold scum; it was not even dirt.

He lay on his back and looked up into the trees. Through the canopy he could make out chinks of blue. He tried to crawl, but could not.

At last they got me. How long did I last? Almost three weeks. I’ll bet that German would never have thought I could last three weeks. I must have come nearly a hundred kilometers. He tried to think of a death prayer to say, but he had not said prayers in years and could think of none. He tried to think of some poetry to recite. This was a monumental occasion, was it not? Certainly a poem was called for. But his mind was empty of words. Words were no good, that was their trouble. He knew lots of words, how to string them together and make them do all kinds of fancy tricks, and they had not done him one bit of good since 1939 and now, when he needed them most, they let him down.

He was at last in extremis , a matter of great curiosity to all writers. It was said that if you had the answers to certain questions posed by these final moments, you could write a great book. Conrad for one had tried; no surprise it was a Polish specialty. But Shmuel did not find his own imminent destruction particularly interesting. As a phenomenon it lacked resonance. The sensations, though extreme, proved predictable; almost anybody could imagine them. A great melancholy, chiefly; and pain, much pain, though not so bad now as earlier, pushing ahead though hungry and exhausted. Indeed, this last aspect of the ritual was proving quite pleasant. He at last began to feel warm, though perhaps it was rather more numb. It occurred to him that the body died in degrees, limbs first, mind last; and how horrible to lie alive in brain but dead in body for days and days. But the mind would be kind; it would fog and blur, sink into a kind of haze. He’d seen it at the camps.

He began to hallucinate.

He saw a man of oak, giant, sprouts and twigs and green fronds springing from a wooden face, old and desiccated. Something pagan, loamy, fairy-tale quality. The fantastic was everywhere. Imps and goblins whirred about. And he saw the head German, the big shot, the Master Sniper: yet it was any face, tired, altogether uninteresting. He tried to conjure up his own past, but lacked the energy. What of the people he loved? They were gone anyway; if he regretted his death, it was only that their memories would no longer live. But certain things could not be helped. He thought maybe God had had a purpose in sparing him by miracle back there in the black field when the shooting happened. But this was another jest.

As if to drive home this idea, the last seconds of the scene of the death he should have had began to unreel before his eyes. He could almost see soldiers moving toward him, out of the shadows. They came with great caution, without rush.

An image filled the sky above him.

A man stood with a rifle.