Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Leets couldn’t afford anger and anyway wasn’t sure he had the strength; and he knew the Brits hated scenes. It’s what they hated most about Americans. And what he needed he’d have to get from Tony Outhwaithe sooner or later, one way or the other, for in this town Tony knew all the right ears to whisper into. If Tony’d frozen him, then only Tony could unfreeze him.

“Major Outhwaithe,” Leets began again, in a voice he imagined was sweet with reason, “I’d merely like an opportunity to locate additional intelligence. I need more evidence than a Wehrmacht Transpo Command order, even a damned strange one. I need access to other sources, other distributions. The archives, the reading lists. Your technical people. The—”

“Leets, old man, I’m quite busy. We all are, except you. You’re becoming dreadful, you and that bratty boy of yours. You’re turning into Jews, with your own private patch of persecution, as though the war was a special theater for you and you alone. Who chose you, old man? Eh? Who chose you?”

Leets had no answer. The British major glared at him, ginger moustache bristling. The eyes were cold as dead glass.

“Be off!” He flicked insolently with his wrist, Noel Coward in the khaki of King and country, and brushed Leets, the bug, out.

Leets found himself exiled into the streets, disappointed. He stood a second on the pavement in front of the Baker Street headquarters, a nondescript joint called St. Michael House, No. 82. He was one American among crowds of the brutes on the sidewalks of the old city, all of them healthy, shoving, yakky types, many squiring girls. It was chilly and gray—typical London midwinter—but the fresh American flesh seemed to warm the old city’s streets and fill them with human color and motion. Next to the ruddy Yanks, the Brits were pale and thin, but not too many of them were in evidence. Whose city was this, anyway? Leets felt as if he were lost in a football crowd—Homecoming perhaps, some kind of rite. Everybody seemed happy, pink, party-bound. London was a party if you were American, had reasonable chances at survival and pounds in your pocket.

Triumph was in the air, self-congratulation. The soon-to-come victory would be moral as well as tactical. A way of life, a civilization, had been tested and vindicated. Looking about, Leets saw how glad these guys all were to be American, and how glad, in turn, the pale girls were to have latched onto them. The war was almost all gone. It was feeble and far off. Only the bomber crews, by their paradoxical youth, called it up. They were all over the place now, Eighth Air Force teen-agers, in for a desperate day or two between missions, recognizable by their three gunner’s chevrons on their Air Corps sleeves, unable yet to shave, toting guidebooks and cameras and asking stupid questions in loud voices. They were too young to be scared, Leets thought.

He shivered, pulling his coat tighter. Not a Chicago winter, but cold, just the same. It had the subsidiary effect of drying out London’s normally damp air and this in turn seemed to prevent his wound from suppurating painfully.

He went down Baker Street until it became Orchard Street—crazy Brit streets, they just turned into other streets on the next block without warning and if you had to ask you were dumb—and took a left up Oxford Street toward Bloomsbury. He walked with no particular hurry, knowing nothing urgent awaited him in the office. It did occur to him he was just a block or two off Grosvenor Square—all he had to do was follow Duke Street, upcoming here—where the OSS headquarters were. A fleeting thought sped through his head of crashing the place, making a scene, demanding to see Somebody Important. It was said Donovan bought anything presented with enthusiasm; he could sell Wild Bill Donovan. But more likely he’d run into the patrician colonel who ran the place, the OSS head of London Station, prime Eastern snoot, or one of his neckless, nameless Brit-licking assistant heads of Station, sure conspirators with Tony O.

Leets reached Oxford Circus, way past Duke Street, and realized he’d given up on Somebody Important. Not his style, after all.

At the Circus, the traffic whirled about, small, strange black cars, like planets out of control, headed for doom. Shouts, honks, the bleat of motors, blue fumes from their exhaust pipes, rose and enveloped him. Where’d they get the fuel? In the mechanical whirligig he insisted on seeing a metaphor of futility: all the metal going round and round and nowhere.

Forget it, okay?

They’re right.

You’re wrong.

An American sergeant—B-17 gunner, probably—walked by drunkenly, throwing him a wobbly salute.

“Sir.” The boy grinned brokenly. His arm lay across the shoulder of a tart, a shriveled, frizzy, titless, tough-looking girl; quite a picture, the two of them.

Leets answered the kid’s salute with one equally limp and watched him and his cutie stagger away. Night was falling. Leets felt none of the triumph of the streets. These crowds of corn-fed heroes, of whom the boy and girl were prime examples, so sure, so full of life, so ready for the next day. Heroes.

Yet the Germans were going to kill one of them. Leets knew it. There was a man, perhaps in this city, who right now, four hundred miles to the east, in a shattered Germany, sinister minds were planning to kill. He alone knew it.

Who would the Germans kill? And why was it so different? A V-2 might land that second and turn out the lights on three hundred: pure random stroke, an accident, a function of applying so much industrial power to such and such a technological problem.

The sniping was different. They knew a man, a special man, so vile to them, such an insult to their imaginations, that even as they were themselves about to become extinct, they would kill.

Churchill? Had the speeches angered them so much? Ike? That smiling Kansas face, bland and seemingly guileless. Patton, for beating the Panzer geniuses at their own game? Montgomery, who was as ruthless as any of them?

Leets knew it didn’t add up. Maybe Tony was right: maybe the freeze was good and just.

He felt drained of energy. A soft dark had fallen on Oxford Circus. There was not so much traffic, and now the cars moved more slowly. What am I going to do? he wondered.

He wished he weren’t so far from his office or billet; he wished he weren’t so tired; he wished there was a little piece of the war left over for him; he wished he could get somebody to listen to him. But chiefly he wished he could park his ass someplace soft, hoist a mug of that thin stuff the Brits called beer, and forget 1945 for a while.

Even as he walked through the anonymous maze of the city in the deepening dark, he knew he’d secretly changed course several blocks back, though he’d lied to himself, refused to acknowledge it at the moment of decision.

But when he reached the flats in which she was quartered, he was unable to maintain the fiction of coincidence. He was going to see Susan.

She was not there, of course; Mildred, one of the roommates, was vague but remotely optimistic about her return, and so Leets sat idiotically in the living room and waited, passing the time with Mildred’s date for the evening, a B-24 pilot, another captain, while Mildred made ready in the john.

The pilot was not so friendly.

“One of my buddies got killed in some crazy OSS thing,” he told Leets.

“Sorry,” Leets said mildly, hoping to end the conversation there.

“Low-level agent drop, nobody came back at all,” the pilot declared, fixing Leets in the black light of a glare.

And what about all the agents spread to hell and gone by panicked pilots who dumped them like freight twenty miles off the drop zone? His own operational jump had been handled by a British crew, who’d been in the business since 1941; they’d put him and his two companions right on the mark. But he’d heard horror stories of poor guys coming down in enemy territory miles from their contacts, to wander about stupidly until nabbed.