David Healey - Winter Sniper

“Hey lady, are you gonna use that phone?”

“Don’t touch me!” Eva snarled.

The young man was surprised and no wonder — the old coat and hat did not go with the lovely face, contorted now in anger. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and backed away. “I can wait.”

Getting control of herself, Eva walked off, her heart hammering so hard in her chest that all she could hear was the thump, thump of blood in her ears. She hurried away, leaving the chastised soldier staring after her.

To Eva’s great relief, the taxi was still waiting where she had left it outside the station. She practically dove into the back seat.

“You ain’t meeting nobody?” the taxi driver wondered.

“Go,” Eva fairly shouted, then added a line straight out of the movies. “And step on it!”

They had left him alone. Keller realized he was shaking and forced himself to stop. After a while, a uniformed soldier took him down the hall to the bathroom but told Keller he would have to leave the door open. It took Keller a long time to urinate with the soldier watching him, but he finally succeeded. He had never felt so undignified and small. His knees nearly buckled when he saw that he was urinating blood. The ache in the small of his back told him that the blood was from those kidney punches. When he was finished, the soldier came into the bathroom to get a look at the blood in the toilet bowl. “Goddamn,” he said.

Keller felt sick to his stomach.

He was left alone in the interrogation room. He realized two things about himself then. The first was that they would wear him down. They might not torture him, exactly, at least nothing like the Iron Maiden method from medieval days, but it would be enough. The other two he might be able to hold off for a long time, but not that colonel. He took too much pleasure in causing pain.

The second realization was that he wouldn’t let them get at the truth. No way was he going to let himself be forced to implicate Eva as a spy. They could go to hell.

His mind made up, he sat in the chair, gathering his strength and thinking about how to go about it. Earlier, he had noticed how the exposed heating pipe ran near the wall, a foot or so below the ceiling. Like a lot of things, if you told yourself it was all just theoretical, it made going through the motions much easier. Keller dragged a chair over, just to see if he could reach the pipe. It was still too high up. He took off his new tie, now spotted with blood, and then found his old tie still in his coat pocket. That still wasn’t long enough, so he took off his shoelaces and knotted everything together. He was able to throw one end over the pipe, knot it with a slipknot, and pull it tight. He considered the dangling shoelace at the end of his makeshift rope. How did one make a noose, exactly? He didn’t need anything fancy.

He had chosen the shoelace end because — theoretically , he reminded himself — the waxed string would choke him quickly as a garrote whereas the thick tie might prove to be too padded. He tried not to think too hard about what he was really doing.

Keller knotted the shoelace around his neck and then tugged at the pipe, testing everything. If he failed, he would look like a fool. His hands shook as he worked the shoelace tightly around his windpipe. He had no great final thoughts, convincing himself that he wasn’t really hanging himself but was just going to see if it might work.

And then he stepped off the chair, making sure to kick it away so that there was no chance of saving himself. If the chair made much of a clatter going over, Keller never heard.

Hess stayed awake until after midnight, then bundled himself in a work coat, knit cap and gloves. He left his rifle hidden overhead on the barn beam but slipped the Luger into his coat pocket. Zumwald snored nearby and the lights in the farmhouse had long since winked out. The farm dogs had grown friendly toward them in the last couple of days and one of them — a big brindled beast — lifted its head and wagged as Hess stepped around him.

The night was bitterly cold — it rasped at his throat and burned his lungs. So cold and dry it reminded him of Russia. Good weather for hunting. The moon was nearly full so that its glow obscured the stars. So bright it almost hurt his eyes reflecting off the snow. There was a hazy ring around the moon — the old farmers back home would have said that meant there would be more snow soon. The stuff that was already on the ground had thawed in the sun yesterday and then refrozen so that his boots crunched through an icy crust wherever there was unbroken snow. He moved as quietly as possible, keeping an eye on the farmhouse. The farmer had been unusually tight-lipped — not that he was ever talkative — when he brought them their supper that night and had come into their corner of the barn and wandered around, almost as if he was looking for something.

Hess walked down the farm lane to the main road. It would have been faster to cut across country, but he wanted to avoid leaving any footprints. Using the road meant taking a chance that he might be seen, but he was counting on the fact that there would be little if any traffic at this hour.

The Greenbrier Resort was not far. He knew there would be sentries at the drive, so he swung off the road and into the trees, picking his way easily in the moonlight, moving roughly parallel to the resort driveway. He came across a trail for cross county skiers and walked along it — the going was much easier than crunching through the snow, plus the trail hid his own tracks. After about half a mile the ski trail veered close to the main resort building and Hess took to the woods again.

Through the trees, he could see a few lights burning in the windows of the resort building. If it had been earlier, he was close enough that he might have heard music or even the sound of laughter drift out. But all was quiet in the midnight hour, although he did see someone come out of the grand main entrance and then the brief flare of a match as the man lit a cigarette. Perhaps a clerk from the lobby braving the cold or maybe a guest who couldn’t sleep.

Hess moved closer, working his way through the woods until he had a clear view of that main entrance. It would only be a matter of time before General Eisenhower himself came through those doors. He knew the general had been an athlete in his youth and still liked to be active — Eisenhower would emerge to take a walk or else venture out on one of the ski trails. And when he did come out, Hess would be waiting for him.

Hess looked around, the glow from the moon on the snow making the woods around him appear otherworldly. Despite the brightness, he was not much worried about being seen. He was too far from the resort, and even if someone were scanning the woods with high-power binoculars they would have been hard pressed to see him among the trees.

The woods made the perfect sniper’s cover. He felt at home in these trees rather than the buildings and rubble of Stalingrad. He considered climbing into a tree to take his shot — height always worked to a sniper’s advantage — but he would be too exposed in the barren branches. Instead, he walked until he found a huge log that had succumbed to some forgotten storm. Resting on its broken limbs, the log did not quite touch the frozen ground. He crawled into the space beneath the log and found he still had a clear view of the resort. He almost regretted not bringing his rifle along, but he had not known what to expect and was not yet prepared to make another attempt. That was all right. He had found his sniper’s nest. He would return with his rifle tomorrow. He worried about his tracks in the snow, but that could not be helped.