Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Shmuel waited for the bullet.

Instead, he heard words in a language he knew: English.

“Freeze, fuckface.”

Other forms swirled above him.

“Jesus, pitiful,” somebody said.

“Hey, Lieutenant. Nelson caught the sorriest-looking Kraut I ever saw.”

And someone else said, “Another fucking mouth to feed.”

T-5 Roger Evans, Leets’s nominal assistant, counseled practicality.

“Forget it,” he advised. He was an insouciantly handsome teenager who quite naturally assumed arrogant postures and spoke in a voice cold with an authority he in no way possessed. The kid also knew how to dress: his shiny paratrooper boots rested against an edge of a table, propelling him outward, on the back two legs of a chair, delicately poised. His Ike jacket, cut tight, emphasized his athletic frame, and his service cap perched snidely on an angle down across his forehead. Leets had loathed him at once but in the months they’d worked together—“work” was an entirely inaccurate word, in Roger’s case—he’d come finally to accept the kid as basically harmless.

Rog threaded his hands together on the back of his neck, and continued in his instruction, bobbing all the while.

“That’s all, Captain. Forget it. No skin off your nose.” Nothing was ever skin off Roger’s nose. What Leets found especially irritating this midwinter morning was that Roger was probably right.

Leets said nothing. He fiddled with some papers at his desk: a field report on the double-magazine feed system WaPrüf 2 had improvised for the MP-40 submachine gun, giving it a sixty-round capacity, to match the Soviet PPSH’s seventy-one-round drum. Now these gadgets were showing up in the West.

What irked Leets was Tony Outhwaithe’s—and, by extension, all official London’s—rejection of his brainstorm.

“I do not think,” Tony had said imperially, “our analysts—yours, for that matter, although they are quite the junior at the game—will agree with you, chum. Frankly, it’s not the Nazi style. They tend to kill in larger numbers, and are quite proud of it.”

“We got Yamamoto in the Pacific, ’44,” Leets argued. “You guys sent some commandos after Rommel. There were rumors the Krauts had a mission on Roosevelt in Casablanca. And just a couple of months ago, when the Bulge started, that stuff about Skorzeny going after Eisenhower.”

“Exactly. An unpleasant rumor that caused a great deal of discomfort in all kinds of circles in this town. Which is precisely why we’ll not be calling up the guards on the basis of a scrap of paper. No, it’s this simple: you’re wrong.”

“Sir,” Leets had pulled himself to full attention, “may I respectfully—”

“No, you may not. Our intent in handing you this slight job was to take advantage of your somewhat specialized knowledge of German small arms technology. We thought you might provide some insight as to what pressures their industrial nut was undergoing. Instead you check in with a rather odd tale out of James Hadley Chase. Very disappointing.”

And he was dismissed.

But Leets let his enthusiasm get the best of him. In a frenzy of zeal, he dashed off a batch of memos one afternoon to various bodies whose support he hoped to enlist in his crusade—SHAEF, CIC, Army Intelligence, the OSS counterintelligence outfit called X-2, OSS German Desk over at Grosvenor Square, and so forth. The results were depressing.

“It’s ’cause I don’t know anybody. They’re all buddy-buddy, Eastern. Clubby. Harvard-Oxford-Yale,” he claimed.

Rog, old Harvard man at nineteen, tried to dissuade him from this concept.

“It’s not like that up at Harvard, Captain. It’s just a bunch of guys having a good time, like anywhere. Reason you’re not getting anywhere is simply that the clowns running the show don’t know what they’re doing, no matter what school they went to. This war’s the best thing they’ve got going; it sure beats working for a living. Once it’s over, they’re back jerking sodas.” Rog spoke with the brilliant assurance of a man who’d never jerk a soda in his life. His education entitled him to sit in the office with his paratroop boots on the table and dispense homilies of sociology to Leets.

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing something?” Leets said.

Airily, Roger continued with his analysis, now reaching cross-discipline into psychology. “I know what’s eating you, Jim. You want back in it.” He was genuinely amazed at this. “Boy, between us we got this war solved . Now why you’d want to—”

Leets knew in many ways he baffled the young tennis player. He of late had been baffling himself. Now why, all of a sudden, was he off on a crusade? Upstairs had said No; then No it would be.

But Leets kept thinking: Yes. It’s got to be Yes.

Several days later, Leets appeared at Tony’s office.

“Back again?” Tony asked.

“Yes,” Leets replied, unsmilingly.

“And so soon.”

“I was trying to sell it around town. No takers.”

“No. Thought not. Simply won’t wash, is why. Surely you can see that. No convincing dope.”

Leets concentrated on remaining pleasant. He explained politely, “The reason there’s no convincing dope is that I can’t get any. I can’t get any because the word’s out.”

“Whatever can you mean?”

Leets explained as if to a schoolboy: “Someone’s stamped me ‘Crank,’ ‘Nut.’ I dropped in on some of the other sections, thinking maybe I could round up some help, and suddenly I’m getting pitched in the street. You can tell from the way they look at you and whisper. You’re out, you’re dead.”

“I’m sure,” Tony said primly, “you exaggerate.”

“I figure it was you put the word out. Sir.”

Tony did not look away. There was not a fiber in his body capable of showing embarrassment. He looked at Leets evenly, his gaze richly amused, and said, “I’ll allow that’s a possibility. Even a probability.”

“I thought so,” said Leets.

“Nothing personal. I’m quite fond of you. You’re my favorite American. Unlike most of them, you are not madly obsessed with yourself. You do not tell me stories of growing up on a farm in Kansas and the name of your wife and children. Still, there are limits.”

“Major Outhwaithe.”

“Please. Tony is fine.”

“Major Outhwaithe, I’m asking you to take me out of the freezer.”

“Absolutely not.” He gazed calmly at him. Pity registered in his eyes; he was about to reveal a Major Truth, some elemental rule of the game that the thick Yank hadn’t caught on to. “Because you’ve got a real job to do. I know, I gave it to you. I’m responsible for it. I am exec officer of this little clown show JAATIC; directly under which is your little clown show, SWET. Not everybody can have a big job in the war, Captain Leets. Some of us—you, me—must do the little jobs, the boring jobs in safe offices five hundred miles from the front.”

Leets sighed. “Sir, it’s not a question of—”

“I shall tell you what it’s a question of. It’s a question of maturity. You had your time playing Indian, so did I. All over now. We’re desk chaps, you and I. See that attractive girl. Enjoy the flicks. Do your job. Thank God you didn’t get your nose or jaw shot off. Rejoice in the coming Triumph of Our Way of Life. The war’s almost over. Weeks, months perhaps. Unless a rocket lands on your skull, you’ve made it. See that girl. Her name—”

“Susan. I don’t. See her, that is. Anymore.”

“Pity. But the town’s full of them. Find another.”

“Sir. A few words from you and—”

“You mad fool. Go back to guns, to blueprints. Forget murder plots, assassinations. It’s London, February, 1945, not Chicago, 1926.”