back. Even an old gent like me.”
Repp was thirty-one, but the others were younger; they laughed.
Repp grinned in the laughter: he liked to make them happy. After it had died, he said, “After you, Captain.”
There was a last-second ritual of equipment checks to be performed, MP-40 bolts dropped from safe into engagement, feeder tabs locked into the machine gun, harnesses shifted, helmet straps tightened; then, Weber leading, Repp somewhere in the center, they filed out, crouched low, into the fields.
Vollmerhausen watched them go, silent line of the ambush team edging cautiously into the dark. He wondered how long he’d have to wait until Repp returned with the happy news that it had gone well and they could leave. Hours probably. It had already been a terrible day; first the terrifying flight in from Anlage Elf in the Stork, bobbing and skimming, over the trees. Then the long time among the soldiers, the desultory shellings, and the worry about the weather.
Would the sun hold till twilight?
If it didn’t they’d have to stay another day. And another. And another….
But it had held.
“There, see: your prayers have been answered, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” Repp had chided him.
Vollmerhausen smiled weakly. Yes, he had prayed.
Displaying a dexterity that might have astounded his many detractors, Hans the Kike had prepared Vampir for its field test. He quickly mounted the scope and the energy conversion unit with its parabola-shaped infrared lamp to the modified STG receiver, using a special wrench and screwdriver. He locked in the power line and checked the connections. Intact. He opened the box and gave it a quick rundown, tracing the complex circuitry for faulty wiring, loose connections, foreign objects.
“Best hurry,” Repp said, leaning intently over the engineer’s shoulder, watching and recording his rundown, “we’re losing it.”
Vollmerhausen explained for what must have been the thousandth time, “The later we charge, the later it lasts.”
Finally, he was finished. Sun remained, in traces: not a fiery noontime’s blaze — of furnaces or battles — but a fleeting late-afternoon’s version, pale and low and thin, but enough.
“It’s not the heat, it’s the light,” he pointed out.
Vollmerhausen yanked a metal slide off a thick metal disk spot-welded crudely to the top of the cathode chamber, revealing a glass face, opaque and dense. Its facets sparkled in the sunlight.
“Fifteen minutes is all we need; that gives us eight hours of potency for an on-phase of three minutes,” he said, as if he were convincing himself.
The problem with infrared rays, Vollmerhausen had tried to explain to Repp, was that they were lower in energy than visible light — how then could they be made to emit light rays of a higher value, so that images might be identified and, in this case, fired upon? Dr. Kutzcher had found a part of the answer at the University of Berlin those many years ago: by feeding high-tension electricity across a cathode tube, he’d caused the desired rise in energy level, producing the requisite visibility. But Vollmerhausen, improvising desperately at Anlage, had not the latitude of Kutzcher. His problem was narrowly military — he was limited by weight, the amount a man could carry efficiently on his back over rough terrain. When all the skimming and paring and snipping was done, he found himself a full ten kilos distant from that optimum weight; no further reduction was possible without radically compromising Vampir’s performance. And the mass of the unbudgeable ten kilos lay in the battery pack and its heavy shielding, the source of the high-tension electricity.
His stroke of inspiration — it took the form of the blisterlike dial welded to the scope, no, not pretty at all — was a solar unit. No less a power than the sun itself would provide Vampir with its energy; not an inexhaustible supply, but enough for a few minutes of artificial, invisible daylight at high midnight. Vollmerhausen could not totally abandon a battery, of course; one was still needed to provide juice for the cathode ray tube, but not nearly so much juice, for the phosphors in the chamber had been selected for their special property to absorb energy from sunlight and then, when bombarded by infrared rays, to release it. Thus instead of a 10-kilo 30-volt battery, Vampir could make do with a 1.3-kilo 3-volt battery, a net savings of 8.7 kilos while maintaining the intensity and brilliance of image within the specified limits. But not for long: for the phosphors had a very brief life in their charged state, and once exposed to the infrared lost their powers quickly. But for a good three minutes, Repp could peer through the eyepiece and there, wobbling greenly before him, magnified tenfold by a specially ground Opticotechna lens, undulated targets, visible, distinct, available, 400 meters out.
Vollmerhausen had checked his watch, snapped the face of the solar disk closed.
“There. It’s done. You’ve got your power now, until midnight.”
“Just like a fairy tale,” Repp had said merrily.
“And you’ve got the special ammunition?”
“Of course, of course,” and he had clapped the magazine pouch on his belt.
Now, in the farmhouse, Vollmerhausen looked out into a darkness that was total. Repp was somewhere out there, in his element. The night belonged to him.
Repp slid into position behind the rifle, which rested on its bipod. His shoulders and arms ached, and the strap had cut deeply across his collarbone. The damned thing
Four hundred meters beyond him the tidy fields fell away into a stream bed, where a stand of trees and thicker vegetation grew, and here the land delivered up a kind of fold, a natural funnel that men moving over unfamiliar territory, scared probably, wishing themselves elsewhere, would be surely drawn to.
“There, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, do you see it?” asked Weber, crouching beside him in the darkness.
“Yes. Fine.”
“Four nights out of five they come through there.”
“Fine.”
Weber was nervous in the great man’s presence, talked too much.
“We could move closer.”
“I make it four hundred meters, about right.”
“Now we’ve flares if you—”
“Captain, no flares.”
“I’ve the machine-gun team over on the right for suppressing fire if you need it, and my squad leader, a sound man, is on the left with the rest of the patrol.”
“I can see you learned your trade in the East.”
“Yes, sir.” The young captain’s face, like Repp’s own, was dabbed with oily combat paint. His eyes shone whitely in the starlight.
“They usually come about eleven, a few hours off. They think this is the great weakness in our lines. We’ve let them through.”
“Tomorrow they’ll stay away!” Repp laughed. “Now tell your fellows to hold still. No firing. My operation, all right?”
“Yes, sir.” He was gone.
Good, so much the better. Repp liked to spend these moments alone, if possible. He considered them very much his own minutes, a time for clearing the head and loosening the muscles and indulging in a dozen semiconscious eccentricities that got him feeling in touch with the rifle and his targets and himself.
Repp lay very still and warm, feeling the wind, the rifle against his hands, studying the dark landscape before him. He felt rather good, at the same time remembering that things had not always been so pleasant. A frozen February’s memory floated up before him, a desperate month of a desperate year, ’42.
