The Master Sniper (3 page)

It is here. The night has come, Shmuel thought.
Nacht, nacht
, pressing in, claiming him. He always knew it would come and now it was here. He knew it would be better to close his eyes but could not.

A man ran until a bullet found him and punched him to the ground. A man on his knees had the top of his head blown off. Drops landed wet and hot on Shmuel.

He alone was standing. He looked around. Someone was moaning. He thought he heard some breathing. It had taken less than thirty seconds. The shooting was all over now.

He stood in the middle of the field, surrounded by corpses. Now he was really alone.

A shape in the dark moved. Then others. Shmuel could see soldiers picking their way toward him in the darkness. He stood very still. The Germans began to kneel at the bodies.

“Right in the heart!”

“This one in the head. That Repp fellow really can shoot, eh?”

“Hold that noise down, damn you,” cried a voice Shmuel recognized as the pipe smoker’s. “The officers will be out here soon.”

A soldier was standing six feet from him.

“What? Say, who’s that?” the man said in bewilderment.

“Hauser, I said keep the noise down. The offi—”

“He’s alive!”
bellowed the soldier, and began to tear at his gun.

Shmuel willed himself to run. But he couldn’t.

Then he was fleeing blindly across the field.

“Damn, I saw a prisoner.”

“Where?”

“Stop that fellow. Stop that man.”

“Shoot him. Shoot him.”

“Where, I don’t see a damned thing.”

Other voices mingled in confusion. A shot rang out, loud because it was so close. More shouts.

Shmuel had just made it into the trees when the lights came on. The Germans were pinned in a harsh, white glare, losing more seconds. Shmuel caught a glimpse of the Shoemaker moving fast into the light, automatic gun in one hand. A whistle shrilled. More lights flickered on. There was a siren.

It was at this moment, as he seized a moment’s rest, that a revelation hit him. A moment of perfect, shimmering lucidity enveloped him and a truth that had these many months been just beyond knowing at last stood revealed. His heart tripped in excitement.

But no time now. He turned and lurched into the
forest. He began to run. Branches cut at him like sabers. Once he tripped. He could hear Germans behind him, much commotion and light; the glare of heavy arc lamps filled the sky. He thought he heard airplanes too, at any rate some kind of heavy engine, trucks perhaps or motorcycles.

Then the lights were out, or gone. He was utterly confused and quite frightened. How long had he been gone and how far had he traveled? And where was he going? And, would he be caught? Miraculously, his feet seemed to have found a path in the heavy undergrowth. He wanted badly to rest but knew he couldn’t. Thank God the food and labor had given him strength for all this, and the coat the warmth. He was a lucky fellow. He plunged on.

The sun was just up when Shmuel finally lay down in the silence of the great forest. He lay shuddering convulsively. He seemed to have come to a vault in the trees, a cathedral of space formed by interlocking branches. The silence was thunderous in here; he interrupted it only with his breathing. He felt himself at last escaping into sleep.

His final thought was not for his deliverance—who could question such caprices?—but for his discovery.

Meisterschuster
, master shoemaker, he heard, or thought he’d heard. But the boy was a North German, he spoke fast and clipped and the circumstances of the moment were intense. Now Shmuel realized the fellow had said something just a syllable shy of
Meisterschuster
. He’d said
der Meisterschütze
.

The Master Sniper.

C
aparisoned in elegant damp Burberry, imperially slim, impossibily dapper, with just the faintest smudge of ginger moustache to set off his boyish though firm features, a British major named Antony Outhwaithe bore down on a large target that hunched behind a typewriter in an upper-story office.

“Hello, chum,” called the major, knowing the American hated the chum business, which by now, winter of ’45, had in London become quite tiresome, “greetings from Twelveland.”

The American looked up; a bafflement fell across his open features, just the merest foreboding of confusion.

His name was Leets and he was a captain in the Office of Strategic Services. He wore olive drab wool and silver bars and looked unhappy. His crew cut had grown out thatchily and his face had accumulated pockets and wattles of fat. He had just been typing the final draft of what was certain to be the most unread document in London that month, a report on the new grip configuration of the
Falschirmjaeger-42
, the German short-stroke paratroop carbine.

“Something right up your alley,” the major sang out gleefully, and without fear of retribution. He enjoyed
considerable advantage over the bloke: he was smaller and a few years older to begin with, cut on roughly half the scale. He was quicker, wittier, more ironic, better connected. His employers, the Special Operation Executive of MI-6, were a better bunch than Leets’s; and finally, he’d once upon a time saved the American’s life. That was back in the shooting war, in June of ’44.

Leets, a beat behind already, queried in his reedy Midwestern voice, “Small arms, you mean?”

“That
is
what you do in the war, is it not?” asked Tony.

Leets ignored the sarcasm and received from Tony’s briefcase a tatty-looking scrap of yellow paper, almost the texture of parchment, as though it had passed through many hands.

“Been around, huh?” Leets said.

“Yes, lots of chaps have seen it. It’s not terribly interesting. Still, since it is guns and bullets, I thought you might care to have a look.”

“Thanks. Looks like a—”

“It’s a telex.”

“Yeah, some kind of shipping order or something.” He scanned the thing. “Haenel, eh? Funny. STG forty-fours.”

“Funny, yes. But significant? Or not? You’ll give us your evaluation, of course.”

“I may have some things to say about it.”

“Good.”

“How fast?”

“No rush, chum. By eight tonight.”

Swell, Leets thought. But he had nothing to do anyway.

“Okay, let me dig out the specs on the thing and—” But he was talking to air. Outhwaithe had vanished.

Leets slowly drew out a Lucky, lit it off his Zippo and went to work.

Leets was a biggish man, not slobby fat, but ample, with a pleasantly open American face. He was far into his twenties, which was old for the rank of captain he wore in two bars on his collar, especially in a war in which twenty-two-year-old brigadier generals led thousands of airplanes deep into enemy territory.

He looked like a studious athlete or an athletic scholar and now that he limped, compliments of the Third Reich, and occasionally went white as the pain flashed unexpectedly across him, he’d acquired a grave, almost desperate air. His many nervous habits—unpleasant ones, licking his lips, muttering, gesturing overtheatrically, blinking constantly—half suggested dissipation or indolence, though by nature he was an austere man, a Midwesterner, not given to moodiness or mopery. Yet lately, as the war roared by him, someone else’s invention, he’d been both moody and mopey.

Now, alone in the office—another source of bitterness, for he’d been assigned a sergeant, but the kid, an energetic young beast, had a tendency to disappear on him at key moments such as this one—he brought the telex close to his eyes in an unselfconscious parody of bookish intellectual and, squinting melodramatically, attempted to master its secrets.

It was a pale carbon of a shipping order out of the Reich Rail Office, a part of the Wehrmacht Transport Command, authorizing the G. K. Haenel Fabrik, or factory,
near Suhl, in northern Germany, to ship a batch of twelve
Sturmgewehr
-44’s, formerly called
Maschinenpistole
-44’s, cross-country to something called, if Leets understood the nomenclature of the form,
Anlage Elf
, or Installation 11. The 44 was a hot assault rifle, tested in Russia, that had lately been turning up on the Western front in the hands of Waffen SS troops, paratroopers, armored-vehicle commanders—glory boys, hard cores, professionals. Leets had a memory of the thing too—he’d lain in high grass on a ridge above a burning tank convoy while Waffen SS kids from an armored division called “Das Reich” had poured heavy STG-44 fire into the area. He could still hear the cracks as the slugs broke the sound barrier just above his head. It fired a smaller bullet than the standard rifle—it hadn’t the range—but at higher velocity; and it was lighter and tougher and could pump out rounds at full automatic. Leets shivered in the memory: lying there, his leg bleeding like sin all over the place, the men near him dead or dying, the smell of burning gas and summer flowers heavy in his nose and the thatchy figures of the camouflaged SS men moving up the slope, firing as they came. His throat was dry.

Leets lit a butt. He had one going, but what the hell? It was another habit gone totally out of control.

Okay, where was I?

Curious, yes, quite curious. STG-44’s went out from Haenel all the time, but in larger quantities. They came off the assembly line in the hundreds, the thousands, but distribution was always through normal channels, ultimately in the hands of local commanders. Why bother to make a big deal of
shipping
rifles across a
Germany whose railway network was one huge target of opportunity for fighter-bombers? What’s more, he realized that the form had the top rail priority,
DE
, and
Geheime Stadatten
, top secret, and the magenta eagle of state secrecy pounded onto it.

Wasn’t
that
an odd one?

They were cranking these things out by the thousands—that was one of the charms of the 44, for unlike the MP-40 or the
Gew
-41, it could be quickly assembled from prestamped parts, without any time-consuming milling. Their ease of manufacture was part of their appeal. So all of a sudden they were top secret? Goddamnedest thing.

Leets drew back from the yellow sheet and squirmed at the effort of trying to apply his thoughts to these matters. It was a big mistake, because a chip of German metal deep in the core of his leg rubbed the wrong way, flicking against a nerve.

Pain jacked up through his body.

Leets rocketed out of his seat and yelped. He felt free to let it take him because he was alone. Among others, he simply clenched and clammed up, whitening, looking at his feet.

The pain finally passed, as it always did. He limped back to his chair and gingerly reclaimed it. But his concentration had been seriously damaged, more and more of a problem these recent days, and he knew if he didn’t act fast the whole fucked-up scenario of that one battle would unreel before his eyes. It was no favorite of his.

So Leets grabbed back into his mind for something to put between himself and the day Jedburgh Team Casey caught it. He came up with football, which he’d played
at Northwestern, ’38, ’39 and ’40. He had been an end, and ends didn’t do much except knock people down, a task made significantly easier because he’d played next to NU’s all-American tackle Roy Reed, and Reed, in the ’40 season, had picked up the nickname “Nazi” after the
Blitzkrieg
of the spring, because of the way he crashed through and laid people out. But Leets had once caught a touchdown pass—perhaps the happiest moment of his life—and now he resurrected the glory of that moment as a shield against the panic of this one.

He remembered an object coming wobbling out of the dusk of a Dyche Stadium afternoon; it was way off the true, a lumbering, ungainly thing that seemed far gone if it could reach him at all through the gauntlet of flailing arms he saw it must travel. The only reason the ball was coming at Leets was that a hand-off to the right halfback who was supposed to follow Reed into the end zone for a winning touchdown had somehow missed connections, and the quarterback, a big, stupid boy named Lindemeyer, a Phi Delt, had taken his only available option, which was to toss the thing to the first guy in purple he saw.

Leets saw it bending toward the earth, miraculously untouched by the half a dozen hands that had had a shot at it, and he had no memory of catching, only the sensation of clasping it to his chest while people jumped on him. Later, he’d figured that he must have been in midair when he made the grab, defying gravity, and that his normally unwilling fingers, clumsy, blunt things, had acquired in the urgency of the instant a physical genius almost beyond his imagination. But in the exultation,
none of this was clear: only sensation, as joy flooded through him, and people pounded him on the back.

Leets took another stab on the Lucky. He readjusted his reading lamp—he must have knocked it askew when he popped up—and looked for an ashtray amid a clutter of pencils, curling German weapons instruction charts, sticks of gum, assorted breech parts, cups of cold tea, and cough drops—Roger, his sergeant, had had a cold a few weeks back. What was I looking for? Ashtray, ashtray. He slid it out from the pile that had absorbed it just as a worm of ash on the end of his cigarette toppled off into gray haze and settled across the table.

The office was on the upper floor of an undistinguished building on Ford’s Place near Bloomsbury Square, a cold-water flat converted to commercial use sometime in the Twenties by knocking down most of the interior walls and adding an elevator—lift, lift,
lift!
, he was always forgetting—which never worked anyway. The roof leaked. There was no central heating and Roger never remembered to keep the coal heater stoked so it was always cold, and every time a V-2 or a doodle touched down anywhere within ten square miles, which was frequent these days, a pall of dust drifted down to coat everything.

Leets squinted again at the German document, as if drawing a bead on it. Its bland surface revealed nothing new. Or did it? Holding it at an angle into the light, he could make out two faint impressions on the paper. Someone had stamped the original with a great deal of zeal; down here on the bottom carbon only a trace of the stamper’s enthusiasm remained, fainter than a watermark. Surely the Brits would have some sort of Scotland
Yard hocus-pocus for bringing up the impressions. Still, he laid the thing out and, remembering some Boy Scout stuff, ran the flat of a soft lead pencil across the ridges just as gently as he knew how, as if he were stroking the inside of a woman’s thigh. Susan’s thigh, to be exact, though thoughts of her were of no use now—but that was another problem.