The Master Sniper (4 page)

Two images revealed themselves in the gray sheen of the rubbed lead, one familiar, one not. The old friend read simply
WaPrüf 2
, which Leets knew to be the infantry weapons department of the
Heereswaffenamt Prüfwesson
, the Army testing office. These were the boys who’d cooked up the little surprises of late that had made his job so interesting: that junky little people’s machine pistol, the
Volksturmgewehr
, manufactured for a couple of dimes’ worth of junk metal, it fired 300 nine-mills a minute; and they also had an imitation Sten out, for behind-the-lines operations, or after the war; and a final dizziness, something called a Krummlauf modification, a barrel-deflection device mounted on the STG-44, which enabled it to fire around corners. The line on German engineering had always been that it was pedantic and thorough; but Leets didn’t think so. A wild strain of genius ran through it. They were miles ahead in most things, the rockets, the jets, the guns. It made him uneasy. If they could come up with stuff like that (a gun for shooting round corners!), who knew what else they were capable of?

Leets was by profession an intelligence officer; his specialty was German firearms. He ran an office—obscure to be sure, not found in any of the mighty eight-hundred-page histories—called the Small Weapons
Evaluation Team, which in turn was part of a larger outfit, a Joint Anglo-American Technical Intelligence Committee, sponsored in its American half by Leets’s OSS and in its Anglo half by Major Outhwaithe’s SOE. So SWET worked for JAATIC, and Leets for Outhwaithe. That was Leets’s war now: an office full of dusty blueprints. It was no-SWET, as Roger was so fond of pointing out (Leets’s joke actually; Roger was a great borrower).

But here was
WaPrüf 2
involved in a shipment of twelve rifles across Germany. Now what could be so fascinating about those particular twelve rifles? It bothered him, because it was so un-German. Twelveland, as the Brits called the place in their intelligence jargon, was a maze of intricacies: bureaus, departments—
Amts
, the Germans called them—desks, subdesks—not at all unlike London in this respect—but the place was in its way always tidy, ordered. Even with the bombs raining down, most of her cities wrecked, millions dead, Russian armies squeezing in from the East, American and British ones poised in the West, no food, no fuel, still the paper work moved like clockwork. Except, all of a sudden, here was this obscure little agency that nobody except himself probably and some two or three others in this town had ever even
heard
of, involved in some goofy business.

It bothered him; but what bothered him more was the other stamp he’d brought out: WVHA.

Now what the hell was WVHA?

Another bureau presumably, but one he’d never heard of; another tidy little office buried away in downtown Berlin.

An idea was beginning to grow in Leets’s mind, dangerously. He lit another cigarette. He knew somewhere in the files he had a real good breakdown on the STG-44. It was an ingenious weapon, a
Sturmgewehr
, assault rifle, cross between the best parts of a submachine gun, firepower and lightness, and a rifle, accuracy, range. He supposed he’d have to dig the goddamned stuff out himself; he remembered how when they’d gotten their hands on one they’d broken it down to the pins and put it together again, taken it out to the range and shot up a battalion of targets, and put together an absolutely brilliant technical profile which had been shipped up to JAATIC and routinely ignored.

Leets went over to the files and began to prowl. But just as he got the report out, another thought came flooding over him.

Serial numbers.

Goddamn, serial numbers.

He rushed back to the telex. Now where the hell was it?

A stab of panic but then he saw the yellow corner sticking out from under a dog-eared copy of Bill Fielding’s
Tournament Tennis and the Spin of the Ball—
Roger’s bible—and he knocked the book aside and seized the telex.

Serial numbers.

Serial numbers.

Leets stood at the window with the lights out, even though the blackout was officially over and London was now into a phase called dim-out. He looked over the skyline, drawn not long ago by the impact of a V-2.
Sometimes they burned, sometimes they didn’t. This one had come down to the north a half a mile or so, beyond, Leets hoped, the Hospital for Sick Children on Great Ormond Street, maybe as far off as Coram Fields. But there’d be nothing to burn if it went down in that rolling meadow and he could see a smudge—orange thumbprint—on the horizon; so clearly there was fire. Thing must have hit even farther out, beyond Gray’s Inn Road and the Royal Free Hospital. He’d have to walk out there sometime and see.

The rockets were a curious phenomenon for Leets. They were big bullets really; even the Germans acknowledged this. The V-2, technical designation A4, was a Wehrmacht project, administered by the SS, interpreted as artillery. A bullet, in other words. The doodles, V-1’s, were Luftwaffe, aircraft.

Consider: a bullet as big as a building fired from a rifle in Holland or Twelveland itself at a target in London. Jesus; Leets felt a shiver run through him. It
was
different from being bombed or shelled randomly; some fucking Kraut sniper was scoping in on you through the dark and the distance, this feeling of
being watched
, strange; a weirdness traveled his spine, a chill, but he realized that it was only a draft and a split second later that the door had been opened.

“Should have knocked, sorry,” said Tony.

“I wanted to see where they parked their freight tonight. Looked like it went down near the hospital, the one for kids.”

“Actually, it went down much farther out, in Islington. Could we, chum, do you mind?” Gesturing Close-the-curtains while he turned on the switch.

“You’re early,” said Leets. It was half past seven.

“Bit ahead of schedule, yes.”

“Okay,” Leets said, taking his seat and pulling out the telex and assorted other items, “this is funny.”

“Make me laugh.”

“They’re shipping a special consignment of rifles across Germany. Now our best estimate is that maybe eighty thousand of the things have been built since Hitler gave ’em the green light in ’43. Most of the eighty thousand came off the Haenel line at Suhl, although the Mauser works at Oberndorf did a run of ten thousand before we bombed out the line. The markings are different, and the plastic in the grip was cheaper, chipped more easily.”

Outhwaithe, in Burberry, collar upturned, hair slicked wetly back, face calm, eyes dead-fish cold, studied him in a way his class of Briton had been perfecting for seven hundred years.

Leets absorbed the glare unshaken, and went on. “The serial numbers run eight digits, plus the manufacturing designation. Do you follow?”

“Perfectly, dear fellow.”

“Now they always use two dummy numbers. So you’ve got two dummy numbers, then the five viable ones which indicate which part of the run it was, then another dummy, then the manufacturing code. The point of the dummy integers is to make us think they’re manufacturing them in the millions. They do it on all their small stuff, it’s so stupid. Are you with me? Am I going too fast?”

“I’m making a manful effort to stay abreast.”

“According to this order”—he held up the telex—
“here you’ve got no digits at all. The serial-number blank has been crossed out.”

“If that is supposed to be a Major Intelligence Breakthrough, I’m afraid I rather miss the thrust of it.”

“The Germans keep records. Always. I can show you orders on stuff going back to the Franco-Prussian War. The whole stamping process is built into their manufacturing system, in their assembly lines. You see it everywhere, Krupp, Mauser, ERMA, Walther, Haenel. It’s part of their mentality, the way they organize the world.”

“Yes, I quite agree. But you were going to explain to me the significance of all this.” Tony did not at all look impressed.

“These twelve rifles: they’re handmade. There is no serial number. Or at least the barrel and breech, the key components, the numbered parts.”

“Which means?”

“For a production-line piece, the forty-four is great. Best gun in the war. Can cut a horse in two at four hundred meters. In Russia you could get three PPSH’s for a forty-four. But because it’s a production-line piece, you can’t get a real tight group. You’re shooting a small seven-point-nine-two-millimeter bullet,
kurz
, their word for short. It’s not a rifle that offers a great deal in the way of precision.”

“Until now.”

“Until now. Taking into consideration this is a high-priority project, taking into consideration
WaPrüf 2
is cooperating with this outfit WVHA that I’ve never heard of, and taking into consideration they’re shipping
the guns to some secret location down south, this Anlage Elf, I would say it’s obvious.”

“I see,” said Tony, but Leets could tell his presentation was not having the desired effect.

He played his trump card.

“They’re going to try and kill
someone
. Someone big, I’d say. They’re going to snipe him.”

But Tony, once again, topped him.

“Rubbish,” he said.

S
hmuel was totally of the forest now. He was part of it, a sly, filthy animal, nocturnal, quick to panic, impelled into motion by ravenous hunger, shivering himself to sleep each morning in small caves, tufts of brush, against rocks. He ate roots and berries and wandered almost helplessly through the deep stillness, guided by only a primitive sense of direction. His journey was bounded by mountains. He was terrified of their bare slopes. What would he do up there on those rounded humps, except die? So he skirted them, threading his way through the densely wooded highlands at their base. Ten days now, twelve, maybe two weeks.

But it was a losing proposition and he knew it. He lost too much each day and the disgusting stuff he made himself eat could never replace it. He was running down, the fat and fiber and muscle he’d picked up in the camp melting away. The forest would win. He’d known it always. He’d pass out from weakness, die in wet leaves next to an obscure German stream.

His clothes had shredded, though into German tatters, not Jewish ones. The boots had disintegrated partially. The trousers were frayed and shiny. The coat was the only thing left. Stuffed with excelsior, it kept enough
of the cold out and enough of the wet off. It forestalled sickness. Sickness was death. If you were too weak to move, you died. Motion was life, that was the lesson here. You kept moving. God would show you no pity.

One night rain came, a full storm. Shmuel cowered and could not move. Lightning bounded across the horizon behind the screen of trees, and the thunder was mighty, a roar that rose and fell and never went wholly away.

The next day, and the next, he smelled a tang to the air, sulfurous almost. And once he came upon an opening in the trees, where the open space seemed to fill with light; but this abundance of perspective filled him with horror and he lurched ahead, deeper into the wet trees.

I hope it doesn’t freeze, he thought. If it freezes I die. If I run into soldiers, I die. If I sleep too long, I die.

There were many, many ways to die, and he could not think of a single one to survive.

Several times he crossed roads and once he found himself on the grounds of some hotel or inn or something, but the thought of a caretaker or soldiers terrified him, and again he ran deeper into the forest.

But his strength was fleeing quickly now. It had held for so long, augmented by berries and roots and lichens, but in the last day or two his weakness seemed to have increased enormously.

Finally he crawled from sleep knowing he was doomed. He was too weak. There’d been no food he could hold down, the forest here was a thicket of old bones, clacking in the wind. Leafless trees white and knuckled like gripping hands, millions of them.

I am the last, he thought, the last Jew.

The ground here was matted with dead leaves into a kind of cold scum; it was not even dirt.

He lay on his back and looked up into the trees. Through the canopy he could make out chinks of blue. He tried to crawl, but could not.

At last they got me. How long did I last? Almost three weeks. I’ll bet that German would never have thought I could last three weeks. I must have come nearly a hundred kilometers. He tried to think of a death prayer to say, but he had not said prayers in years and could think of none. He tried to think of some poetry to recite. This was a monumental occasion, was it not? Certainly a poem was called for. But his mind was empty of words. Words were no good, that was their trouble. He knew lots of words, how to string them together and make them do all kinds of fancy tricks, and they had not done him one bit of good since 1939 and now, when he needed them most, they let him down.

He was at last
in extremis
, a matter of great curiosity to all writers. It was said that if you had the answers to certain questions posed by these final moments, you could write a great book. Conrad for one had tried; no surprise it was a Polish specialty. But Shmuel did not find his own imminent destruction particularly interesting. As a phenomenon it lacked resonance. The sensations, though extreme, proved predictable; almost anybody could imagine them. A great melancholy, chiefly; and pain, much pain, though not so bad now as earlier, pushing ahead though hungry and exhausted. Indeed, this last aspect of the ritual was proving quite pleasant. He at last began to feel warm, though perhaps it was
rather more numb. It occurred to him that the body died in degrees, limbs first, mind last; and how horrible to lie alive in brain but dead in body for days and days. But the mind would be kind; it would fog and blur, sink into a kind of haze. He’d seen it at the camps.

He began to hallucinate.

He saw a man of oak, giant, sprouts and twigs and green fronds springing from a wooden face, old and desiccated. Something pagan, loamy, fairy-tale quality. The fantastic was everywhere. Imps and goblins whirred about. And he saw the head German, the big shot, the Master Sniper: yet it was any face, tired, altogether uninteresting. He tried to conjure up his own past, but lacked the energy. What of the people he loved? They were gone anyway; if he regretted his death, it was only that their memories would no longer live. But certain things could not be helped. He thought maybe God had had a purpose in sparing him by miracle back there in the black field when the shooting happened. But this was another jest.