The Master Sniper (11 page)

“Miss,” the leader said, “please. You are supposed to be in uniform. The regulations. Now I haven’t taken any names. We’ve been quite pleasant. Best advice is to go away, take the old man, get him some tea, and put him to bed. Forget all this. It’s a government matter. Now I
haven’t taken any names. Please, miss, let go. I don’t want to take any names.”

He stood back. He was ill at ease, a big, strong type, with police or military written all over him. He was trying to be kind. It was a distasteful business for him.

“Who can I see?” she said. “Jesus, tell me who I can see?”

The man took a nervous look around. Outside, a horn honked. Quickly, his hand dipped into his coat, came out with a paper. He unfolded it, looked it over.

“See a Captain Leets,” he said. “American, like you. Or a Major Outhwaithe. They’re behind it all.” And he was gone.

“The Jews,” Dr. Fischelson was saying, over on the chair, looking bleakly at nothing, “who’ll tell about the Jews? Who’ll witness the fate of the Jews?”

But Susan knew nobody cared about the Jews.

Leets, alone in the office, waited for her. He knew she’d come. He felt nervous. He smoked. His leg ached. He’d sent Roger out on errands, for now there was much to do; and once Tony had called, urgent with a dozen ideas, with several subsidiary leads from the first great windfall. But Leets had pushed him off.

“I have to get through the business with Susan.”

Tony’s voice turned cold. “There is no business with Susan. You owe her nothing. You owe the Jews nothing. You owe the operation everything.”

“I have to try and explain it,” he said, knowing this would never do for a man of Tony’s hardness.

“Then get it over with quick, chum, and be ready for
business tomorrow. It’s first day on the new job, all right?”

Leets envied the major: war was simple for the Brits—they waged it flat out, and counted costs later.

He heard something in the hall. Susan? No, something in this ancient building settling with a groan.

But presently the door opened, and she came in.

He could see her in the shadows.

“I thought you’d be out celebrating,” she said.

“It’s not a triumph. It’s a beginning.”

“Can we have some light, please, goddamn it.”

He snapped on his desk lamp, a brass fixture with an opaque green cowl.

Because he knew he was dead to her, she seemed very beautiful. He could feel his cock tighten and grow. He felt a desperate need to return to the past: before all this business, when the Jews were little people in the background whom she went to see occasionally, and his job was simple, meaningless, and London a party. For just a second he felt he’d do anything to have all that back, but mainly what he wanted back was her. Just her. He wanted to know her again, all of her—skin, her hands and legs. Her mouth. Her laugh. Her breasts, cunt.

She wore full uniform, as if at a review. Army brown, which turned most women shapeless and sexless, made Susan wonderful. Her brass buttons shone in the flickery English light. A few ribbons were pinned across the left breast of her jacket. A bar glittered on her lapels, and a SHAEF patch, a sword, upthrust, stood out on her shoulder. One of those little caps tilted across her hair. She was carrying a purse or something.

“I tried to stop you, you know,” she said. “I tried. I went to see people. People I know. Officers I’d met in the wards. Generals even. I even tried to see Hemingway, but he’s gone. That’s how desperate I was.”

“But you didn’t get anywhere?”

“No. Of course not.”

“It’s very big. Or, we think it’s big. You can’t stop it. Ike himself couldn’t stop it.”

“You bastard.”

“Do you want a cigarette?”

“No.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I was there when they came and took him. ‘Special Branch.’ There was nothing we could do.”

“I know. I read the report. Sorry. I didn’t know it would work out that way.”

“Would it have made any difference?”

“No,” Leets said. “No, it wouldn’t have, Susan.”

“You filthy bastard.”

She seemed almost about to break down. But her eyes, which had for just a flash welled with tears, returned quickly to their hard brilliance.

“Susan—”

“Where is he?”

“In another hospital. A British one. He’ll be fine there. He’ll be all right. If it’s a matter of worrying about him, then please don’t. We’ll take good care of him. He’s quite important.”

“You have no idea what that man’s been through.”

“I think perhaps I do. It’s been very rough on him, sure, we realize—”

“You have no idea, Jim. You can’t possibly begin to
imagine. If you think you can, then you’re fooling yourself. Believe me.”

Leets said nothing.

“Why? For Christ’s sakes,
why?
You kidnap a poor Jew. Like Cossacks, you come in and just take him. Why?”

“He’s an intelligence source. An extraordinary one. We believe he’s the key to a high-priority German operation. We believe we can work backward from the information he gives us and track it down. And stop it.”

“You bastard. You have no idea of the stakes involved, of what he means to those people.”

“Susan, believe me: I had no choice. I was walking down a London street a few nights ago with a woman I love. All of a sudden she unreels a story that struck right at the heart of something I’d been working on since January. You needed a witness? Well, I needed one too. I had no way of knowing they’d turn out to be the same man.”

“You and that bastard Englishman. You were the officers that came by the clinic yesterday. I should have known. Dr. Fischelson said investigators. I thought of cops. But no, it was you and that Oxford creep. You’d do anything for them, won’t you, Jim?
Anything!
To get in with the Oxford boys, the Harvard boys. You’ve come a long way from Northwestern, goddamn you.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t send the Jew to Anlage Elf in the Schwarzwald. I didn’t set him among the Waffen SS and the Man of Oak and Obersturmbannführer Repp. The Germans did that. I’ve got to find out why.”

“You bastard.”

“Please. Be reasonable.”

“That’s what you people always say. That’s what we’ve been hearing since 1939. Be reasonable. Don’t exaggerate. Stay calm. Keep your voice down.”

“Yell then, if it makes you feel better.”

“You’re all the same. You and the Germans. You’re all—”

“Shut up, Susan. You’ve got no call to say that.”

She stared at him in black fury. He’d never seen so much rage on a human face. He swallowed uncomfortably, lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking.

“Here, I brought you something.” She reached into her purse. “Go ahead. Look. Go ahead, you’re brave. I insist.”

It was a selection of photographs. Blurry, pornographic things. Naked women in fields, standing among German soldiers. Pits jammed with corpses. One, particularly horrible, showed a German soldier in full combat gear, holding a rifle up against the head of a woman who held a child.

“It’s awful,” he said. “Jesus, of course it’s awful. What do you expect me to say? It’s awful, all of it. All right? Goddamn it, what do you want? I had a fucking job to do. I didn’t ask for it, it just came along. So get off my back, goddamn it.”

“Dr. Fischelson has an interesting theory. Would you like to hear it? It’s that the Gentiles are still punishing us for inventing the conscience five thousand years ago. But what they don’t realize is that when they kill us, they kill themselves.”

“Is that a theory or a curse?”

“If it’s a curse, Jim, I extend it to you. From the bottom
of my heart, I hope this thing kills you. I hope it does. I hope it kills you.”

“I think you’d better go now. I’ve still got work to do.”

She left him, alone in the office. The pictures lay before him on the desk. After a while, he ripped them up and threw them into the wastebasket.

Early the next morning, before the interrogations began, Leets composed the following request and with Outhwaithe’s considerable juice got it priority circulation as an addendum to the weekly Intelligence Sitrep, which bucked it down as far as battalion-level G-2’s and their British counterparts ETO-wide.

“Jesus, the crap we’re going to get out of
that,”
complained Roger.

I
t was clear the Jew was trying to accommodate them. He answered patiently their many questions, though he thought them stupid. They kept asking him the same ones again and again and each time he answered. But he could only tell them what he knew. He knew that Repp had killed twenty-five men at long distance—400 meters Leets had figured—in pitch dark, without sound. He knew that a mysterious Man of Oak had come to visit the project at one point or other during his time there. He knew that he’d been picked up near Karlsruhe, which meant he’d traveled the length of the Black Forest massif, a distance of one hundred or so kilometers, which would put the location of Anlage Elf at somewhere in that massive forest’s southern quadrant.

Beyond that, only details emerged. One day he identified the collar patches of the SS soldiers at the installation: they were from III Waffen SS
Panzergrenadierdivision Totenkopf
, the Death’s Head division, a group of men originally drawn from the pre-war concentration camp guard personnel that had since 1939 fought in Poland, France, Russia and was now thought to be in Hungary. Another day he identified the kind of automobile the mysterious Man of Oak had arrived in: a Mercedes-Benz
twelve-cylinder limousine, thought to be issued only to
Amt
leaders, or department heads, in the SS bureaucracy. But as to the meaning or identity of this strange phantom, he had no idea. He did not even have much curiosity.

“He was a German. That’s all. A German big shot,” he said laconically in his oddly accented English.

Another day he correctly identified the STG-44 as the basic weapon of the
Totenkopf
complement. Another day he discussed the installation layout, fortifications and so forth. Another day he created to the best of his ability a word-picture of the unfortunate civilian called Hans the Kike, whose chemicals he’d tried to move.

Leets smiled at how far they’d come and how fast. From that first meeting in the hospital to now, no more than a week had passed. Yet a whole counter-espionage operation had been mounted. SWET effectively no longer existed; it had been given over entirely to the business of catching Repp … and he, Leets, would run the show, reporting only to Tony. He would have first priority in all matters of technical support: he could go anywhere anytime, spend any amount of money, as long as Tony didn’t scream too loud, and Tony wouldn’t scream at all. He had the highest security clearance. More people in this town knew of him than ever before, and he’d been asked to three parties. He had a car, though only Rog as driver. There was talk of a Majority. He knew he could get on the phone and call up anybody short of Ike; and maybe even Ike.

Yes, it was quite a lot.

But it was also very little.

“He can only get us so far. We are helpless until we find this place,” Tony said.

But Leets pressed ahead. It was his hope that somewhere in the Jew’s testimony a hidden clue would be uncovered, yielding up the secrets of Repp and his operation.

Black Forest? Then consult with botanists, hikers, foresters, geographers, vacationers. Look at recon photos. Check out library books—
Tramping the German Forests
, by Maj. H. W. O. Stovall (Ret.), D.F.C., Faber and Faber;
The Shadowy World of the Deciduous Forest
, by Dr. William Blinkall-Apney. And do not forget that trove of intelligence: Baedeker.

Man of Oak? Scan the British Intelligence files for German officers with wooden arms or legs or even jaws—it had happened to Freud, had it not? Check out reputations, rumors, absurd possibilities. Could a fellow walk stiffly? Could he be extremely orthodox? Very conservative? Slow-moving, losing his leaves, deep-rooted, dispensing acorns?

“It’s rather ridiculous,” Tony said. “It sounds like something out of one of your Red Indian movies.”

Leets grunted. Man-of-Oak? Jesus Christ, he moaned in disgust.

And what about equipment?

Hitting twenty-five targets dead center from 400 meters in the dark? Impossible. Yet here was the crucial element that had convinced Tony to call upstairs and make noise. For in a mob of dead Jews he could easily see dead generals or dead ministers or dead kings.

But ballistics people said it was impossible. No man could shoot so well without being able to see. There
must have been some kind of secret illumination. Radar? Unlikely, for radar, though still primitive, worked best in the air, where it could see only airplanes and space. There was some kind of sound business the Navy had—sonar, someone said. Perhaps the Germans had worked out a way to hear the targets. Supersensitive microphones.

“Maybe the guy can just see in the dark,” Rog suggested.

“Thanks, Rog. You’re a big help,” Leets said.

But even if he could see, how could he hit? Four hundred meters was
a long way
. If he was going to hit at that range, he had to be putting out a high-velocity round. And when it sliced through the sound barrier,
krak!
Leets could himself remember. And he knew the guy was firing a very quick 7.92-millimeter round. Could they silence it? Sure, silence the gun, no problem;
but not the bullet!
The bullet made the noise.

How the hell were they doing it?

It terrified him.

Who was the target?

Now there was the big one. With the who, everything else would come unraveled. Leets’s guesses went only to one conclusion: it had to be a group. Else why would this Repp practice up on a group, and why would he use a weapon like the thirty-shot STG-44, as opposed to a nice five-shot Kar ’98 rifle, the bolt-action, long-range instrument the Germans had been building in the millions since the last century?