The Master Sniper (20 page)

“I’m going to do some shooting,” he said. “How about one of you guys come and feed me the belt?”

They looked at him. Finally, a kid said. “Yeah, okay. But could I shoot it a little?”

“Sure,” Leets said.

They squirmed forward until they came against the lip of a ridge. Peering ahead, Leets saw the SS barrack looming like a ship. Flashes leapt out from it. Bullets whined above.

“There’s some still in there,” a sergeant said. “They pushed us out. I don’t have enough men or firepower to get back inside.”

“Isn’t there supposed to be a lieutenant around here?” Leets asked.

“He got it.”

“Oh. Okay, I’ve got a German gun here. I’m going to shoot the place up.”

“Go ahead. Goose ’em good. Really spray ’em.”

Leets pushed the gun on its bipod out beyond him, and drew it into his shoulder. He could feel the young soldier warm next to him.

“Don’t let the belt get tangled, now,” he said.

“I won’t. But you said I could shoot.”

“You can have the goddamn thing when I’m done. Okay?”

“Hey, super,” said the kid.

The building was a black bulk against a pinker sky.

“You in there, Repp? Repp, it’s me out here. I hope you’re in there. I’ve got five hundred rounds of 7.92 mill out here and I’m hoping one of them’s for you. And what about you, Man of Oak, you bastard?”

“Who are you talking to?” the kid wanted to know.

“Nobody,” said Leets. “I’m aiming.”

He fired. Each third round was a tracer. He saw them looping out, bending ever so slightly, sinking into the building. Occasionally one would jag off something hard, and prance into the sky. It seemed a neon jamboree, a curtain of dazzle, the chains of light rattling through the dark. Cordite rose to Leets’s nose as he kept feeding twenty-round bursts into the building and as the empty shells piled, they’d sometimes topple, cascades of used brass, warm and dirty, rolling down the slope, clinking.

“Goose it again,” said the sergeant.

Leets stitched another burst into the place. He had no trouble holding the rounds into the target. He took them from one end of the building to another, chest-high. The building accepted them stoically, until at last a tracer lit it off and it began to burn. A man inside waited until he ignited before coming out and Leets fired into him, cutting him in two. The flames were quite bright by that time, and there was not much more shooting.

* * *

Shmuel lay on his belly among strangers for the whole night. Nobody paid him any attention, but nearby the parachutists established their aid station, and besides the flashes of the battle, he’d seen the wounded drifting back, ones and twos, an occasional man carried by buddies who’d drop him and always return to the fighting. There was much screaming.

With dawn, fires arose from Anlage—Shmuel knew the buildings were burning. And then in the morning, the tanks had come down the road, clanking, sheathed in dust. The wounded cheered as best they could but the vehicles which looked so potent when first he glimpsed them seemed sad and beaten-up as they rumbled by. He could imagine better saviors than this ragged caravan of smoking creatures, leaking oil, scarred. Major Outhwaithe perched behind the turret of the first one, black and grimy, like a chimney sweep.

The tanks rolled into Anlage and Shmuel lost sight of them in the pall of smoke. Then explosions, fierce as any he’d heard.

“They must be blowing ’em out of that last pillbox,” one hurt boy said to another.

Then a soldier came for him.

“Sir, Captain Leets wants you.”

“Ah,” said Shmuel, embarrassed to be so clean among the dirty bleeding soldiers.

But soon his discomfort replaced itself with a sensation of befuddlement. He found it hard to relate what he encountered to what he remembered. He was appalled at the destruction. He saw a world literally eviscerated, ruin, smoky timbers, gouged earth, bullet-riddled buildings, all the more unbelievable for the small
scenes of domestic tranquillity enacted against it by surviving American soldiers, lying about in the sun, cigarettes lazy in their mouths, writing letters, reading Westerns, eating cold breakfasts.

His guide took him to a pit, where the German dead lay in rows, flies collecting busily in black clouds on them. He’d seen corpses before, but a corpse was a certain thing: first, it was Jewish, but more importantly it was very skinny, white, shrunken, its terror contained in the fact that it looked so unreal, a puppet or chunk of wood. Here, reality was inescapable: bones and brains and guts, blue-black, black-red, green-yellow, ripe and full of gore. Shmuel could think only of meat shops and the ritual slaughterers on the days before holidays—hanging slabs of beef, steamy piles of vitals, tripe white and cold. Yet in the butcher shops there was neatness, order, purpose: this was all spillage, sloppy and accidental.

“Not pretty. Even when it’s them,” said Leets, standing glumly on the brink. “These are the soldiers, the
Totenkopfdivision
people. All of them, or what’s left of them. Sorry. But it’s time to go looking.”

“Of course. How else?” said Shmuel.

He walked the ranks. Dead, the Germans were only their flesh: hard to hate. He felt nothing but his own discomfort at the revolting details of violent death; the odor of emptying colons and the swarming flies. It became easy after a while, walking among them. They were arrayed in their brightly vivid camouflage jackets, the pattern precise and inappropriately colorful, gay almost, brown-green dappling dun. Soon he saw an old friend.

Hello, Pipe Smoker. You’ve a hole the size of a bucket mouth at your center and you don’t look happy about it. This is how the Gentiles kill: completely, totally. A serious business, the manufacture of death. Us, they starve, or gas, saving bullets. They tried bullets on us, but considered the practice wasteful. Their own they kill with bullets and explosives, Pipe Smoker, spend millions.

Next came the boy who’d struck him in the storeroom. You were a mean one, called me Jew-shit, kicked me. The boy lay blue and halved on the ground, legs, trunk missing. What could have done such a dreadful thing? He was surely the most mutilated. You struck me, boy, and in that instant if this scene could have been projected to you, Shmuel the Jew in an American uniform, all warm and whole, standing dumbly over only half your body, you’d have thought it a joke, a laugh. Yet there you are and here I am and by the furious way your eyes stare, I believe you know. Ah, and Schaeffer, Hauptsturmführer Schaeffer, almost untouched, certainly unmussed, did you die of fright there in your crisp and bright camouflage coat; no, there’s a tiny black hole drilled into your upper lip.

“No,” he said, after the last, “he’s not here.”

Leets nodded and then took him to the bullet-riddled hulk of barrack that had once housed Vollmerhausen’s researchers. The door was off its hinges and the roof had fallen in at one end, but Shmuel could see the bodies in the blood-soaked sheets in the cots.

“The civilians,” Shmuel said. “A shame you had to kill them.”

“It wasn’t us,” Leets said. “And it wasn’t by accident
either.” He bent to the floor and came up with a handful of empty shells.

“These are all over the place in there. Nine-millimeter. MP-forty cases. The SS did it. The ultimate security. Now, one more stop. This way, please.”

They walked across the compound, avoiding shell craters and piles of rubble, to the SS barrack. It still smoldered and had fallen in on itself sometime after sunrise. But one end stood. Leets led him to the side and pointed through a window that had been shot out.

“Can you see? On the floor. He’s burned and most of his face is gone. He’s in a bathrobe. That’s not Repp, is it?”

“No.”

“No. You’d never catch Repp in a bathrobe. It’s the engineer, isn’t it? Vollmerhausen?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s it then.”

“You missed him.”

“Yeah. He made it out. Somehow. The bastard.”

“And the trail ends.”

“Maybe. Maybe. We’ll see what we can dig out of the rubble. And there’s this.” He held something out to Shmuel.

“Do you know what it is?” he asked.

Shmuel looked at the small metal object in Leets’s upturned palm. He almost laughed.

“Yes, of course I know. But what—”

“We found it in there. Under Vollmerhausen. It must have been on the desk, which he seemed to hit on the way down. That’s Yiddish on it, isn’t it?”

“Hebrew,” Shmuel corrected. “It’s a toy. It’s called a
draydel
. A top, for spinning.” He’d done so a hundred, a thousand times himself when a boy. “It’s for children. You make small wagers, and spin the top. You gamble on which of the four letters will turn up. Played on Hanukkah chiefly.” It was like a die with an axis through the center, the inscribed letters almost rubbed out by so many small fingers. “It’s very old,” Shmuel said. “Possibly quite valuable. An heirloom at the very least.”

“I see. What is the significance of the letters?”

“They are the first letters of the words in a religious phrase.”

“Which is?”

“A Great Miracle Happened Here.”

R
epp paused, hungry. Should he eat the bread now, or later? Well, why not now? He’d been moving hard half the night and most of the day, pushing himself, and soon he’d be out of forest and onto the Bavarian plain. Good progress, he reckoned, ahead of schedule even, a healthy sign considering the somewhat, ah,
hasty
mode of his departure.

He sat on a fallen log in a meadow. He was at last out of the coniferous zone, in a region of elm and poplars. Repp knew his trees, and poplars were a special favorite of his, especially on a fine spring afternoon such as this one, when the pale sun seemed to illuminate them in an almost magical way—they glowed in the lemon light, translucent, mystical against the darker tracings of the limbs which displayed them. The still, austere beauty of the day made the spectacle even more remarkable—a clean beauty, pure, untainted, uncontrived—and Repp smiled at it all, at the same time pleased that his own sensitivity to such matters hadn’t been blunted by the war. Repp appreciated nature; he felt it important to good health, soundness of body and clearness of mind. Nature was particularly meaningful to his higher instincts in hard times like these, though it was rare that
such natural beauty could be savored in and of itself, without reference to more prosaic necessities, fields of fire, automatic weapons placement, minefield patterns and so forth.

He tore into the bread. Dry, tough, it still tasted delicious. A good thing it had been in the pack when the Americans had come. Time only to grab the pack, throw it on and head for the tunnel. He’d made it after a long crawl across the open ground, American fire snapping into the ground around him. He curled in a gully by the tunnel entrance.

There were, in fact, six of them. Repp had insisted. He was a careful man who thought hard about likelihoods, and he knew no place in Germany in the late spring of 1945 that might not be assaulted by enemy troops, and if such an assault came, he had no intention of being trapped in it. He removed the camouflaged cover and squirmed down into the narrow opening. He slithered along. The space was close, almost claustrophobic, room for one thin man. Dust showered down on him as his back scraped the roof and the darkness was impenetrable. A great loneliness fell over Repp. He knew that even for a brave man panic was an instant away in a sewer like this. And who knew what creatures might be using it to nest in? It was damp and smelled of clay. Vile place: a grave. The world of the corpse.

He warned himself to be careful. Too much imagination could kill you just as quickly as enemy bullets. But Repp was used to working in the open, with great reaches beyond him. Here there was nothing except the dark. He could hold a hand to his face an inch in front of his eyes, and see nothing, absolute nothingness.

He pulled himself mechanically along, thinking this surely the worst moment in his long war, yet trying, desperately, to concentrate on the physical—the thrusts of his arms, the push of his legs, the slide of his torso. The roof pressed against his shoulders. At any moment it could come down. Repp wiggled along. Just a few more feet.

After what seemed years in the underground, he’d at last come to the end. He pulled himself the remaining few feet, but here the panic flappity-flapped through him; he thought of it as an owl, its wings unfurling frenziedly. The cool air came like a maddening perfume, rich and sensuous. The temptation to crash from the hole and dance for glee was enormous; he fought it. He edged back to the surface cautiously, without sudden movements. He emerged a few feet beyond the tree line. The fight still raged, mostly indistinct light and sound from here, but Repp hadn’t time to consider it. He continued his crawl through the trees, dragging the pack and rifle with him. Once or twice he froze, sensing human activity nearby. When he was finally certain he was alone, he pulled himself up. He quickly consulted the compass and set off.

His route took him past the firing range. He skirted it, unwilling to risk its openness even though it was still dark. A voice came suddenly, brazen and American. He dived back instantly and lay breathing hard. Americans? This far out?

He pushed back the brush and stared into the dark. He saw men moving vaguely. Must be some kind of patrol, an extra security measure way out here. But his eyes began to adjust and he could see the men gathering
up long white shrouds. He had trouble making sense out of this and—

Parachutes.

He knew then that this was not some accident of war, an American reconnaissance in force blundering into his perimeter.

The parachutists had come after a specific objective.

They had come after him.

Repp knew he was being hunted. He felt a weight in his stomach. If it were just shooting, his skill against theirs, that would be one thing. But this business was far more complex and his own path only one route to the center. In at least a thousand other ways he was vulnerable. He could move perfectly, do all things brilliantly, and still fail.

He was ahead of them, but by what margin? What did they know? What remained in the ruins of Anlage Elf? Had they seen the documents from Financial Section? Had they learned the secret of the meaning of Nibelungen, the
Reichsführer
’s pet name, the joke he delighted in?