The Master Sniper Read online

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Man of Oak. I heard him say it. And the other—”

  “It’s crazy. You misunderstood.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “You shtetl Jews. You’ll believe anything. Go on, get out of here. Leave me in peace.”

  The car and the police commandos remained until after dark, and later that night, a crackling rang in the distance.

  “Somebody’s shooting,” said a man.

  “Look! A battle.”

  In the distance, light sprayed through the night. Flames glowed. The reports came in the hundreds. It didn’t look like a battle to Shmuel. He recalled the sky over the crematorium, shot with sparks and licks of flame. The SS was feeding the Hungarian Jews into the ovens. The smell of ash and shit filled the sky. No bird would fly through it.

  Abruptly the shooting stopped.

  * * *

  In the morning the fancy vehicles were gone. But things did not return to normal. The prisoners were formed into a column and marched off along a heavily rutted road through the forest. It was February now, and much of the snow had melted, but patches of it remained; in the meantime there had been rain, and the road was mud which congealed on Shmuel’s boots. The woods on either side of the road loomed up, dense and chilly. To Shmuel they were the woods of an ugly German Märchen, full of trolls and dwarves and witches, into which children disappeared. He shivered, colder than he should have been. These people loved their dark forests, the shadows, the intricate webs of dark and light.

  A mile or so away, the woods yielded to a broad field, yellow and scaly with snow. At one end of it, the earth mounted into a wall and at the other, the nearer, a concrete walkway lay and a few huts huddled in the trees.

  “Boys,” said the sergeant, “we had a little show out here last night for our visitor and we’d like your help in cleaning up.”

  The guards handed out wooden crates and directed the prisoners to harvest the bits of brass that showed in the mud alongside the walkway. Shmuel, prying the grimy things out—they were, it turned out, used cartridge cases—felt his knees beginning to go numb in the cold, his fingers beginning to sting. He noted the Gothic printing running across the box in his hand. Again, the melodramatic bird and the double flashes of the SS. He wondered idly what the next gibberish meant: “7.92mm X 33 (Kurz)” read one line; under it “G. C. HAENEL, SUHL,” and under it still a third, “STG-44.” The Germans were rationalists in everything; they wanted to stick a designation on every object in the universe. Maybe that’s why he’d walked around marked JUD the last year or so.

  “He certainly fired enough of the stuff,” said the pipe smoker to one of the other guards.

  “We could have used some at Kursk,” said another man bitterly. “Now they shoot it off for big shots. It’s crazy. No wonder the Americans are on the Rhine.”

  This exercise was repeated several times in the next few weeks. Once, several prisoners were jerked from their sleep and marched out. The story they told the next morning was an interesting one. After they’d picked up the spent shells, the Germans had been especially hearty to them, treated them like comrades. A bottle had even been passed around to them.

  “German stuff.”

  “Schnapps?”

  “That’s it. Fiery. An instant overcoat. Takes the chill out of your bones.”

  The Big Boss—Shmuel knew it was the Shoemaker—was there too, the man said. He’d walked among them, asking them if they were getting enough to eat. He handed out cigarettes, Russian ones, and chocolates.

  “Friendly fellow, not like some I’ve seen,” said the man. “Looked me square in the eye too.”

  But Shmuel wondered why they’d need the shells back in the night.

  A week, perhaps two, passed, though without reference to clock or calendar it was hard to tell. Rain, sun, a little snow one night. Was there more activity around the concrete building? More night firings? The Shoemaker seemed everywhere, almost always with the young officer. Shmuel had never seen the civilian—the one they said was a kike—again. Had he been taken away like the boy said? And he began to worry about this “Man of Oak.” What could it mean? Shmuel started to feel especially uneasy, if only because the others were so pleased with the way things were going.

  “Plenty to eat, work’s not so bad, and one day, you’ll see, the Americans’ll show up and it’ll be all over.”

  But Shmuel began to worry. He trusted his feelings. He worried especially about the night. It was the night that frightened him. Bad things happened in the night, especially to Jews. The night held special terrors for Jews; the Germans were drawn to it unhealthily. What was their phrase? Nacht und Nebel. Night and fog, the components of obliteration.

  Light flashed through the barrack. Shmuel, dazed out of his sleep, saw torch beams in the darkness, and shadows. The SS men got them awake roughly.

  “Boys,” the pipe smoker crooned in the dark, “work to do. Have to earn our bread. It’s the German way.”

  Shmuel pulled the field coat around him and filed out with the others. His pupils were slow in adjusting and he had trouble making out what was occurring. The guards trudged them through the mud. They had left the compound. Guards with automatic guns prowled on either side of the column. Shmuel peered up through the fir canopy. Cold light from dead stars reached his eyes. The dark was satiny, alluring, the stars abundant. A wind howled. He pulled the coat tighter. Thank God for it.

  They reached the firing range. Fellows were all about, a crowd. Everybody was there. Shmuel could sense their warmth, hear them breathing. All the SS boys; the Shoemaker himself, smoking a cigarette. Shmuel thought he saw the civilian too, standing a little apart with two or three other men.

  “This way, lads,” said the sergeant, leading them into the field. “Brass all over the place. Can’t leave it here, the General Staff’d kick our ass for sure. Hot coffee, schnapps, cigarettes for all when the job’s done, just like before.”

  There was no moon. The night was dark and pure, pressing down. The prisoners spread out in a line and faced back toward the Germans.

  “It’s in front of you boys, brass, tons of it. Have to get it up before the snow.”

  Snow? It was clear tonight.

  Shmuel obediently worked his fingers over the frozen ground, found a shell. He found another. It was so cold out. He looked around. The guards had left. The prisoners were alone in the field. The trees were a dark blur in the far distance. Stars towered above them, dust and freezing gas and spinning firewheels. Far off, unreachable. The field was another infinity. It seemed to stretch forever. They were all alone.

  “Hey, he’s sleeping,” said someone, laughing.

  Another man slid himself carefully on the ground, shoulders flat to the earth.

  “You jokers are going to get us all in trouble.” The same voice laughed.

  Another lay down.

  Another.

  They fell relaxed, turned in slightly, tucking the knees under, seeming to pause at the waist then gently lurching forward.

  Shmuel stood.

  “They’re shooting us,” somebody said quite prosaically. “They’re shoo—” The sentence stopped on a bullet.

  Prayers disturbed the night; there was no other sound.

  A bullet struck the man closest to him in the throat, driving him backward. Another, slumping, began to gurgle and gasp as his lungs flooded. But most perished quickly and silently, struck dead center, brain or heart.

  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.

  2

  Caparisoned 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 bu
llet 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.