The Master Sniper (18 page)

Leets tore into the pilot’s prosaic account of his adventures: two fighter-bombers, angling toward the marshaling yards at Munich for a dawn strike, find themselves above a lit field in the middle of what is on the maps pure wilderness. In it German soldiers scurry about. They peel off for one run, after which the lights go away.

“Can we track this?”

“Those numbers—that’s the pilot’s estimated position,” Roger said.

“Thirty-two min southeast Saar, one eighty-six?”

“Thirty-two minutes southeast of the Saarbrücken Initial Point, on a compass heading of one eighty-six degrees.”

“Can we get pictures?”

“Well, sir, I’m no expert but—”

“I can have an RAF photo Spitfire in an hour,” said Tony.

“Roger, get over to R and D and pick up those mock-ups of Anlage Elf they were building, okay?”

“Check,” said Roger.

“Jesus,” said Leets. “If this is—”

“Big if, chum.”

“Yeah, but
if
, if we can get a positive ID, we can …” He let the sentence trail off.

“Yes, of course,” said Tony. “But first, the Spit. You’ll see the Jew. He’ll be important in this too, of course. He’ll have to come in at some point. He’s necessary.”

“Yes, I’ll see him.”

“Then I’m off,” Tony said.

“Hey,” wondered Roger, disappointed that his brief instant in the spotlight had so soon vanished, “what are you guys talking about?”

Leets didn’t seem to hear him. He looked strangely excited, and he was muttering distractedly to himself. He rubbed his lips, which had dried in the excitement, and for just one second Roger had the impression the captain was near breakdown, madly muttering to himself, full of private visions and prophecies.

“Sir,” Roger repeated, louder, “what’s going to happen now?”

“Well,” said Leets, “I guess we have to close them down. Put some people in there.”

People, thought Roger, swallowing dryly. He had to stop himself from asking,
Me too?

The Gentile women treated him like some dreadful little wog, foreign and stinky, that they were helping out of great pity. In return they expected his love and when he would not give it they were enraged. They resented the private room when down the hall their own boys, wounded gallantly in battle, lay festering in huge public bays. He was not truly hurt either; he insisted on heathen protocols, the removal of the crucifix, for example;
but most contemptibly of all, Somebody Important had an interest in him.

Shmuel lay back, alone. His head buzzed with pain. Luminous shapes entwined on the ceiling. A film of sweat covered him. He closed his eyes and saw smokestacks belching flame and human ash on the horizon, the glow orange and lurid. He opened them to an equally unsatisfactory reality: the English hospital room to which he’d been removed, a blank green chamber, pitiless, the odors of disinfectants rising. There were screams in the night. He knew people looked in on him at all hours. And the hospital merely symbolized a whole Western world he’d fled into—where else had there been to go, what other direction for a poor Jew? But in many ways it was as dreadful a place as the one from which he’d just escaped. There, at least, there were other Jews, a sense of community. Here, nobody cared, or would even listen. The Gentiles wanted him for something strange; he was not sure he trusted them.

It didn’t matter. He knew he was nearing the end of the journey and he didn’t mean the geographic journey from Warsaw to the death camp to Anlage Elf to the forest to London, but rather its inner representation—as though each step was a philosophical position that must be mastered, its truth grasped, before moving on. At last he was turning into one of the
Mussulmen
, the living dead who roamed the camps as pariahs, having accepted doom and therefore no longer suited for human contact. Death was no longer meaningful; it was mere biology, a final technical detail to be adjusted.

He accepted death; therefore he accepted the dead; therefore he preferred the dead.

For everyone was dead. Bruno Schulz was dead, killed in ’42, in Drohobicz. Janucz Korczak was dead; Auschwitz. Perle, Warsaw. Gebirtig, Cracow. Katzenelson, the Vittel camp. Glick, Vilna. Shaievitz, Lodz. Ulianover, also Lodz.

The list was longer of course, longer a million times.

The last Jew longed for a ghetto, kerosene lamps, crooked streets, difficult lessons.

Good night, electrified, arrogant world.

He walked gladly to the window.

He was four stories up.

Shmuel stood at the window in bedclothes, looking out. His features, even in the dim light, seemed remote.

“Nothing much to see, huh?” called Leets as he swept in.

The man turned quickly, fixing a stare on Leets. He looked badly spooked.

“You okay?” Leets wanted to know.

He seemed to grab hold. He nodded.

Leets was running late. He knew he was coming on all wrong but he was nervous and he could never control how he acted when he was nervous. Also, he hated hospitals, even more now because they reminded him so of Susan.

“Well, good, it’s good you’re okay.”

He paused, stalling. Only one way to do this. Only one way to do anything. He kept having to remind himself: full out.

“Look, we need more help. Big help.”

He waited for the Jew to respond. The man just sat
on his bed and looked back. He seemed quite calm and disinterested. He looked tired also.

“Two days from now—it would be sooner, but the logistics are complex, forty-eight hours is the dead minimum—a battalion of American airborne troops is going into the Black Forest. We found it—Anlage Elf, Repp, the whole shooting gallery. We’ll go in a little after midnight. I’ll tag along with the airborne people; meanwhile Major Outhwaithe will come up on the ground in a column of tanks from a French armored division operating in the area.”

Leets paused.

“We’re going to try and kill Repp. That’s what it gets down to. But only one man has seen him. Sure, we’ve got that old picture. But we’ve got to be
sure
. So it would help if—if you came along.” He was troubled over all this.

“This is how I figure it. Nobody’s asking you to go into battle; you’re not a soldier, it’s what we get paid for. No, after we take the place, we’ll get a message out fast. You’ll be in a forward area with Roger, I suppose. We can get you in fast in a light plane, have you there in an hour or two. It’s our best shot at him, only way to be sure.” He paused again. “Well, that’s it. Your part will be risky, but a good, safe calculated risk. What do you think?” He looked up at Shmuel and had the discomfiting sensation the man hadn’t understood a word he’d said. “Are you all right? Do you have a fever or something?”

“You’ll jump out of an airplane? In a parachute, in the night? And attack the camp?” Shmuel asked.

“Yeah,” said Leets. “It’s not so hard as it sounds.
We’ve got some good pictures. We plan to go down on the target range, where you escaped. We make it three miles back to—” But again he saw Shmuel’s eyes glaze over, disinterested.

“Hey, you okay?” he said, and almost snapped his fingers.

“Take me,” Shmuel said suddenly.

“What? Take you? In the air—”

“You said you needed me there. Fine, I’ll go. With you. From the plane in the parachute. Yes, I’ll do it.”

“You got any idea what you’re letting yourself in for? I mean, there’ll be a
battle
, people getting
blown up.”

“I don’t care. That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“The point is—you’d never understand. But I must go. It’s either that or nothing. You’ve never understood. But I must go. It’s either that or nothing. You’ve got to do this for me. I’m clever, I can learn the techniques. Two days, you say? Plenty of time.”

Leets was all mixed up, tried to run through a dozen motives. Finally he just asked, “Why?”

“Old friends then. I’ll have the best chance to meet old friends.”

A screwy answer, Leets thought. But he said, not quite knowing why, “All right.”

The paratroopers all seemed husky boys in their teens, dumbly, crazily eager, full of bravado and violence. They worked hard at glamour and costumed themselves after lessons they’d learned in movie theaters. They blackened their faces with burnt cork until they gleamed like minstrels with mad white eyes and
pink tongues; they dangled junk from themselves until they clanked like men in armor, but not just any junk: pistols in shoulder holsters were first-prize items, symbols of special pizazz; another melodramatic improvisation was the knife and sheath taped upside down along the boot; then too pouches, grenades, tightly wound ropes, ammo packs, canteens beside the two lumpy chutes; and on their helmets most taped first-aid kits and many of them still wore, though non-regulation now, the D-Day American flag patch on their shoulders. A few of the really demented boasted Mohawk haircuts.

Leets, sitting mildly among them, felt he’d wandered into someone’s high school pep rally. The varsity was revving itself up before the game. As an ex-football player himself, ex-Wildcat, he could appreciate and almost savor that feeling of hate and fear and sheer shitthinning excitement that coursed savagely through these nervous boys. The paratroopers shoved and joshed, even sang now as they relaxed in the airfield staging area in these last minutes before embarkation. Earlier someone had even produced a football, and Leets had watched an exuberant game of touch unfold before his eyes. The officers had seemed not to mind this extravaganza of energy: they were slightly older men, but all had that same thick-wristed blunt athleticism that Leets recognized immediately, heavy bones and close-cropped hair and flat faces. And while all this was familiar to him, it was at the same time strange; for Leets associated war with lonely men climbing into Lysanders or huddling in empty bays of big British bombers, drinking coffee. That had been his war anyway, not this festival of the locker room.

He turned his wrist over. Twenty-two hundred hours, his Bulova announced in iridescent hands. Another fifteen, twenty minutes to go. He snapped out and lit a Lucky, and did another—about the fiftieth—rundown on his own collection of junk. Canteen for thirst, compass for direction, shovel for digging, chute for jumping and the rest for killing: three fragmentation grenades, a bayonet, ten 30-round magazines in pouches on a belt stiffly around his middle and, thrust at an awkward diagonal down across his belly under the reserve chute, a Thompson submachine gun, the Army model designated M-1, standard issue for a paratroop officer. He must have weighed five hundred pounds; perhaps like a medieval knight he’d need a crane to get him off his ass when, so shortly now, the jousting hour arrived.

Leets ran his tongue over dry lips. If I’m scared, he wondered, what about
him?

Shmuel lounged on the grass next to him, similarly encumbered, yet lacking weapons, which he did not know how to operate anyway and which by principle he would not have, though Leets had tried to argue him into carrying at least a pistol.

Yet Shmuel seemed strangely composed.

“How are you doing?” Leets inquired, with effort, for all the stuff pressing into his gut.

No expression showed beneath the blackface; he could have been any other paratrooper, counting out the final quiet minutes of the night, eyes showing white against the darkness of face, mouth grim, nostrils flaring slightly in the effort of breathing.

He nodded briskly in reply to the question. “I’m fine,” he said.

“Good, good,” Leets said, wishing he could make the same claim. He himself was exhausted, while at the same confusing time churning with energy and dread. A most curious state; it had the one benefit of quieting his leg, which with fatigue tended to throb and leak. A man leaned over, too dark to recognize, and said, “Sir, Colonel says planes’ll be cranking up in five, we’ll be loading in ten.”

“Gotcha, thanks,” said Leets, and the trooper was gone.

Leets looked nervously around him. It was warm and dark and the men were lying about on the grass of the airfield, though they’d been organized into their Dakota groups three hours ago. Those three hours had dragged by, as the light faded to twilight and then darkness, the soft English fields beyond the air base perimeter growing hazier. The men were Second Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, a part of the more widely known 82d Airborne Division. Tough boys with drops in Italy and Normandy, a long bad spell in the Bulge and most recently—March—an op named Varsity in which they’d jumped beyond the Rhine behind them. They’d been off the line a month, growing fat and sluggish here at the rest camp in southern England, and when Tony Outhwaithe had convinced the right parties that a batch of hellraisers was needed for a night of close-in dirty work in south Twelveland, Second of the 501st got the word.

It was cold in the airplane. Shmuel sat in the chill, his back against the slope of the fuselage, shivering. Yet he felt quite wonderful. His journey was finally nearing its
completion. A matter of hours now. He was one of two dozen men in the underlit darkness of the airplane, and he was as isolated from any of them as they were from each other, cut off by the noise from the engines that made human contact, now that they needed it most, impossible. Shmuel could sense the tension, especially in Captain Leets, and he pitied him for it. A
Mussulman
need feel nothing. A
Mussulman
was cut off from human sensation, complete within himself. Yet he looked over at Leets and saw him hunched and absorbed, filthy face glowing orangely over the tip of a cigarette. The layer of cork had dried crustily on his skin, making the features abstract, unreadable. But the eyes, staring blankly at nothing, had a message: fear.

Yet it was a fear Shmuel refused to accept. He was all through with fear, he had discovered a new territory. Having accepted and even welcomed his death, nothing mattered, not even preposterous things like the half-a-day session at the American parachute school with the boy Evans, performing feats of athleticism, jumping off of ten-foot platforms into sawdust pits, rolling when he hit; or hanging fifty feet up from risers, the straps nipping into his limbs while someone yelled at him about adjustments he didn’t understand and the ground rushed up to hit him.