The Master Sniper (12 page)

Yet killing
anyone
would not seem to gain them much, except some hollow vengeance. Sure, kill Churchill, kill Stalin. But it wouldn’t change the outcome of the war.
Kill the two houses of Parliament, the Congress and the Senate, the Presidium and the Politburo: it wouldn’t change a thing. Germany would be squashed at the same rate. The big shots still rode the rope.

Yet, goddamn it, not only were they going to kill someone, the SS was going to an immense effort, an effort that must have strained every resource in these desperate days, to kill a few more.

What could it matter? Millions were already dead, already wasted. Who did they hate enough to kill even as they were dying?

Who were they trying to reach out of the grave to get?

And that is where Shmuel’s information left them. Except for one thing.

Leets was alone in the office, working late into the night. That day’s work with the Jew had not gone well. He was beginning to balk. He did not seem to care for his new allies. He was a grim little mutt, grumpy, short of temper, looking absurd in new American clothes. He’d been returned to the hospital now, and Tony was off in conference and Rog was hitting balls against a wall and Leets sat there, nursing the ache in his leg amid crumpled-up balls of paper, books, junk, photos, maps, and tried not to think of Susan. He knew one thing that could drive Susan from his mind.

Leets opened the drawer and drew out a file. It was marked “
REPP
, first name ?, German SS officer, Le Paradis suspect,” and though its contents were necessarily sketchy, it did contain one
bona fide
treasure. Leets opened it and there, staring back at him through lightless eyes, was this Repp. It was a blow-up of a 1936
newspaper photo: a long young face, not in any way extraordinary, hair dark and close-cropped, cheekbones high.

The Master Sniper, the Jew had called him.

Leets rationed himself in looking at the picture. He didn’t want to stare it into banality, become overfamiliar with it. He wanted to feel a rush of breath every time he saw it, never take it for granted. To take this guy for granted, Leets knew, would be to make a big mistake.

They’d showed the picture to Shmuel.

He’d looked at it, given it back.

“Yes. It’s him.”

“Repp?”

“Yes. Younger, of course.”

“We think he was involved in a war-crimes action against British prisoners in 1940 in France,” explained Outhwaithe, who’d brought the file by. “A wounded survivor gave two names. Repp was one of them. A researcher then went through the British Museum’s back files and came up with this. It’s from the sporting-news section of
Illustrierter Beobachter
, the pre-war Nazi picture rag. It seems this young fellow was a member of the German small-bore rifle team. The survivor identified him from it. So we’ve a long-standing interest in Herr Repp.”

“I hope you arrest him, or whatever,” Shmuel had said. He had to be pressed into pursuing the topic of Repp, but finally said only, “A soldier. Rather calm man, quite in control of himself and others. I have no insights into him. Jews have never understood that sort. I can’t begin to imagine what he’s like, how his mind
works, how he sees the world. He frightens me. Then. And now, in this room. He has no grief.”

Though Shmuel had no interest in knowing Repp, that was now Leets’s job. He stared hard at the photo. Its caption simply said, “Kadett Repp, one of our exemplary German sportsmen, has a fine future in shooting competitions.”

Another day passed, another interrogation spun itself listlessly out. Leets felt especially sluggish, having spent so much time the night previous with the picture of the German. Another researcher had been dispatched at Tony’s behest through the back issues of all German periodicals at the British Museum; perhaps something new would surface there. Whatever, that aspect had passed momentarily out of Leets’s hands; before him now, instead, sat the Jew, looking even worse than usual. He had rallied in his first days among the Allies, bloated with bland food, treated with unctuous enthusiasm; perhaps he’d even been flattered. But as the time wore on, Leets felt they were losing him. Lately he’d been a clam, talking in grunts, groans. Leets had heard he sometimes had nightmares and would scream in the night—“
Ost! Ost!”
east, east; and from this the American concluded things had been rough for him. But what the hell, he’d made it, hadn’t he? Leets hadn’t been raised to appreciate what he took to be moodiness. He had no patience for a tragic view of life and when he himself got to feeling low, it was with an intense accompanying sense of self-loathing.

Anyway, not only was the Jew somewhat hostile, he was sick. With a cold, no less.

“You look pretty awful,” said Rog, in a rare display of human sympathy, though on the subject of another man’s misfortune he was hardly convincing.

“The English keep their rooms so chilly,” the man said.

“Roger, stoke the heater,” Leets said irritably, anxious to return to the matter at hand, which this day was another runaround on the topic of the Man of Oak.

Roger muttered something and moped over to the heater, giving it a rattle.

“A hundred and two in here,” he said to nobody.

Shmuel sniffled again, emptied his sinuses through enflamed nostrils into a tissue, and tossed it into a wastebasket.

“I wish I had my coat. The German thing. They make them warm at least. The wind gets through this.” He yanked on his American jacket.

“That old thing? Smelled like a chem lab,” Roger said.

“Now,” Leets said, “could there be some double meaning in this Oak business? A pun, a symbol, something out of Teutonic mythology—”

Leets halted.

“Hey,” he said, turning rudely, “what did you mean, chem lab?”

“Uh.” Roger looked up in surprise.

“I said, what did you mean—”

“I heard what you said. I meant, it smelled like a chem lab.” It was as close as he could get. “I had a year of organic in high school, that’s all.”

“Where is it?”

“Um,” Roger grunted. “It was just an old Kraut coat.
How was I to know it was anything special? I uh … I threw it out.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Leets. “Where?”

“Hey, Captain, it was just this crappy old—”

“Where, Sergeant,
where?”

Leets usually didn’t use that tone with him, and Rog didn’t like it a bit.

“In the can, for Christ’s sake. Behind the hospital. After we got him his new clothes. I mean I—”

“All right,” said Leets, trying to remain calm. “When?”

“About a week ago.”

“Oh, hell.” He tried to think. “We’ve got to get that thing back.” And he picked up the phone and began to search for whoever was in charge of garbage pickup from American installations in London.

The coat was found in a pit near St. Saviour’s Dock on the far side of the Thames from the Tower of London. It was found by Roger and it
did
smell—of paint, toast, used rubbers, burnt papers, paste, rust, oil, wood shavings and a dozen other substances with which it had lain intimately.

“And lead sulfide,” Leets said, reading the report from the OSS Research and Development office the next day.

“What the hell is that?” Roger wanted to know. Shmuel did not appear to care.

“It’s a stuff out of which infrared components are built. It’s how they could see, how Repp could see. I find out now we’re working hard on it in ultra secrecy, and the English as well. But this would tend to suggest the
Germans are at the head of the class. They’ve got a field model ready, which means they’re years ahead of us. See, the thing converts heat energy to light energy:
it sees heat
. A man is a certain temperature. Repp’s gadget was set in that range. He could see the heat and shoot into it. He could see them all. Except—” he paused—“for him.”

He turned to Shmuel.

“You were right,” he said. “God did not save you. It was no miracle at all. The stuff absorbs heat: that’s why it’s photo-conductive. And that’s why it’s such a great insulator. It’s why the thing kept you so warm, got you through the Schwarzwald. And why Repp couldn’t see you. You were just enough different in temperature from the others. You were invisible.”

Shmuel did not appear to care. “I knew God had other worries that night,” he said.

“But the next time he shoots,” Leets said, “the guys on the other side of the scope won’t be so lucky.”

V
ollmerhausen is visibly nervous, Repp noticed with irritation. Now why should that be? It won’t be his neck on the line out there, it’ll be mine.

It was still light enough to smoke, a pleasant twilight, mid-April. Repp lit one of his Siberias, shaggy Ivan cigarettes, loosely packed, twigs in them, and they sometimes popped when they burned, but it was a habit he’d picked up in the Demyansk encirclement.

“Smoke, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor?” he inquired.

“No. No. Never have. Thanks.”

“Certainly. The night will come soon.”

“Are you sure it’s safe here? I mean, what if—”

“Hard heart, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor, hard heart. All sorts of things can happen, and usually do. But not here, not tonight. There’ll only be a patrol, not a full attack. Not this late. These Americans are in no hurry to die.”

He smiled, looked through the glassless farm window at the tidy fields that offered no suggestion of war.

“But we are surrounded,” said Vollmerhausen. It was true. American elements were on all sides of them, though not aggressive. They were near the town of Alfeld, on the Swabian plain, in a last pocket of resistance.

“We got in, didn’t we? We’ll get back to our quiet little corner, don’t worry.” He chuckled.

An SS sergeant, in camouflage tunic, carrying an MP-40, came through the door.

“Herr Obersturmbannführer,” he said in great breathless respect, “Captain Weber sent me. The ambush team will be moving out in fifteen minutes.”

“Ah. Thank you, Sergeant,” said Repp affably. “Well,” turning to the engineer, “time to go, eh?”

But Vollmerhausen just stood there, peering through the window into the twilight. His face was drawn and he seemed colorless. The man had never been in a combat zone before.

Repp hoisted the electro-optical pack onto his back, struggling under the weight, and got the harness buckled. Vollmerhausen made no move to help. Repp lifted the rifle itself off its bipod—it rested on the table—and stepped into the sling, which had been rigged to take most of the weight, made an adjustment here and there and declared himself ready. He wore both pieces of camouflage gear tonight, the baggy tiger trousers along with the tunic, and the standard infantry harness with webbed belt and six canvas magazine pouches and, naturally, his squashed cap with the death’s-head.

“Care to come?” he asked lightly.

“Thanks, no,” said Vollmerhausen, uneasy at the jest, “it’s so damned cold.” He swallowed, clapped his hands around himself in pantomimed shiver.

“Cold? It’s in the forties. The tropics. This is spring. See you soon. Hope your gadget works.”

“Remember, Herr Obersturmbannführer, you’ve only got three minutes—”

“—in the on-phase. I remember. I shall make the most of them,” Repp replied.

Repp left the farmhouse and under his heavy load walked stiffly to a copse of trees where the others had gathered. Frankly, he felt ridiculous in this outlandish rig, the bulky box strapped to his back, the rifle linked to it by wire hose, the sighting apparatus itself bulky and absurd on top of the weapon, which itself was exaggerated with the extended magazine, the altered pistol grip and the bipod. But he knew they wouldn’t smirk at him.

Tonight it was Captain Weber’s show. It was his sector anyway, he knew the American patrol patterns. Repp was along merely to shoot, as if on safari.

“Sir,” said Weber.
“Heil Hitler!”

“Heil, Schutzstaffel,”
responded Repp, tossing up a flamboyantly casual salute. The young men of XII
Panzergrenadierdivision
“Hitlerjugend” jostled with respect, though the circumstances seemed to prevent more elaborate courtesies. This pleased Repp. He’d never been much for ceremony.

“Ah, Weber, hello. Boys,” nodding to them, common touch, nice, they could talk about it after the war.

“Sir,” one of the worshipers said, “that damned thing looks heavy. Do you need a man—”

It was heavy. Even with Vollmerhausen’s last stroke of genius, the one he’d been laboring on like a maniac these last few days, Vampir, the whole system, gun, rack, scope, light source, weighed in at over forty kilos, 41.2, to be exact, still 1.2 kilos over, but closer to the specs than Repp ever thought they’d get.

“Thanks, but no. That’s part of the test, you see, to
see how well a fellow can do with one of these on his back. Even an old gent like me.”

Repp was thirty-one, but the others were younger; they laughed.

Repp grinned in the laughter: he liked to make them happy. After it had died, he said, “After you, Captain.”

There was a last-second ritual of equipment checks to be performed, MP-40 bolts dropped from safe into engagement, feeder tabs locked into the machine gun, harnesses shifted, helmet straps tightened; then, Weber leading, Repp somewhere in the center, they filed out, crouched low, into the fields.

Vollmerhausen watched them go, silent line of the ambush team edging cautiously into the dark. He wondered how long he’d have to wait until Repp returned with the happy news that it had gone well and they could leave. Hours probably. It had already been a terrible day; first the terrifying flight in from Anlage Elf in the Stork, bobbing and skimming, over the trees. Then the long time among the soldiers, the desultory shellings, and the worry about the weather.

Would the sun hold till twilight?

If it didn’t they’d have to stay another day. And another. And another….

But it had held.

“There, see: your prayers have been answered, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” Repp had chided him.

Vollmerhausen smiled weakly. Yes, he had prayed.

Displaying a dexterity that might have astounded his many detractors, Hans the Kike had prepared Vampir for its field test. He quickly mounted the scope and the
energy conversion unit with its parabola-shaped infrared lamp to the modified STG receiver, using a special wrench and screwdriver. He locked in the power line and checked the connections. Intact. He opened the box and gave it a quick rundown, tracing the complex circuitry for faulty wiring, loose connections, foreign objects.