The Master Sniper

So that’s how they did it, Leets thought.

“Hey, Captain, you get a line on this gun, you let me know,” said the tech. “It sounds nice. I’d go a thousand for it.”

When they got back to Ryan’s shop to wait for the plane that would take them back to London, the major asked an innocent question.

“Hey,” he said, “by the way, what’s Anlage Elf?”

That got Leets’s attention. He yanked up, staring hard, feeling the breath sucked from him.

“Your CO,” said Ryan, baffled by the intense reaction, “he bumped a high-priority telex through. It’s just down from Division.”

“CO?” said Leets.

“Colonel Evans.”

That son of a—

“He wants you back fastest. He says he found Anlage Elf.”

PART TWO Gesamtlosung (General Solution) April — May 1945

13

Repp had a special request.

“Now, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor, if all goes well,” he said one morning, “all your inventions will work wonderfully. It’ll be like the tests, the targets out front, I’m shooting from a clear lane, protected. Eh? But suppose things get a little mixed up?”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Well, old friend, it’s possible”—Repp was smiling—“there’ll be some boys interested in stopping me. I might find myself in a ruckus with them, a close-in thing. Have you ever been in a fire fight?”

“No. Of course not,” said Vollmerhausen.

Again Repp smiled. “The weapon you’ve given me is superb for distance and dark. But fire fights take place where you can see the other fellow’s dental work, tell if he’s still got milk on his tongue from breakfast.”

Vollmerhausen saw immediately what Repp was driving at. Repp, equipped as no man ever had been for the special requirements of the mission, was in a more conventional engagement as good as unarmed. The heavy scope, with its cathode tube, energy converter and infrared light blocked out his view of the standard iron battle- sights.

“I can hit a germ at four hundred meters,” Repp said, “at midnight. Yet a man with a fowling piece has the advantage at fifty meters. Can you help me out? I’d hate to have all this end up in disappointment because of some accident.”

Vollmerhausen puzzled over the problem, and soon concluded that he could spot-weld still another piece, a tube or something, under Vampir, to serve crudely as a sight. It wouldn’t be on the weapon’s axis, however, but rather parallel to it, and thus it would have to be adjusted in its placement to account for this difference. He chose the carrying case of a K-43 scope, a nicely milled bit of tubing of acceptable weight and length; and he mounted at its rear rim a peephole just a trifle right of center and at its front rim a blade just a trifle left of center. Repp, his head a little out of position, would line the blade in the center of the peephole, and find himself locked into a target 100 meters out where the line of his vision intersected the flight of the bullet. Nothing fancy; crude in fact, and certainly ugly, grotesque.

The original outlines of the once sleek STG-44 were barely visible under the many modifications, the cluster of tubes up top, a reshaped pistol grip, the conical flash-hider, and the bipod.

“It’s truly an ugly thing,” said Repp finally, shaking his head.

“Or truly beautiful. The modern architects — not thought highly of by certain powerful people, I admit—” Vollmerhausen was taking a real risk but he felt his new kinship with Repp would allow such a radical statement —“say beauty is form following function. There’s nothing very pretty about Vampir, which makes it beautiful indeed. Not a wasted line, not an artificial embellishment.”

“Form follows function, you say. Tell me, a Jew said that, didn’t he?” He was fiddling again with that curious black thing, that little metal cube.

Vollmerhausen wasn’t really sure. “Probably,” he admitted.

“Yes, they are very clever. A clever race. That was their problem.”

It was not long after this unsettling conversation that another curious thing began to happen. Or rather: not to happen. Vollmerhausen began to realize with a distinct sensation of reluctance that he was done. Not merely done with this last modification, but done completely. Done with Vampir.

There was simply nothing to do until the team came for the gun.

In this involuntary holiday, Vollmerhausen took to strolling the compound or the nearby woods, while his staff fiddled away their time improving their quarters — technical people love to tinker, and they’d worked out a more efficient hot water system, bettered the ventilation in the canteen, turned their barrack into a two-star facility (a joke was making the rounds: after the war they’d open a spa here called Bad Anlage). Now that the pressure was off, their morale rose remarkably; the prospect of leaving filled them with joy, and Vollmerhausen himself planned to check with Repp as soon as possible about the evacuation. Once, in his strollings, he even passed his old antagonist Schaeffer, resplendent in the new camouflage tunic all the soldiers had brought back from a tank-warfare course they’d gone to for two days, but the SS captain hardly noticed him.

Meanwhile, rumors fluttered nervously through the air, some clearly ridiculous, some just logical enough to be true: the Fuhrer was dead, Berlin Red except for three blocks in the city center; the Americans and English would sign a separate peace with the Reich and together they would fight the Russians; Vienna had fallen, Munich was about to; fresh troops were collecting in the Alps for a final stand; the Reich would invade Switzerland and make a last stand there; a vast underground had been set up to wage war after surrender; all the Jews had been freed from the KZ’s, or all had been killed. Vollmerhausen had heard them all before, but now new ones reached him: of Repp. Repp would kill the Pope, for not granting the Fuhrer sanctuary in the Vatican. Absurd! Repp was after a special group that Himmler had singled out as having betrayed the SS. Repp would kill the English king in special retribution; or the Russian man of steel. Even more insane! Where could Repp get from here? Nowhere, except south, to the border. No, Vollmerhausen had no ideas. He’d given up wondering. He’d always known that curiosity is dangerous around the SS, and doubly dangerous around Repp. Repp was going to a mountain, that’s all he knew.

It occurred then to Vollmerhausen, with a sudden jolt of discomfort:

Berchtesgaden was on a mountain. And not far. Yet the Fuhrer was supposedly in Berlin. The reports all said he was in Berlin.

The engineer suddenly felt chilly. He vowed not to think on the topic again.

* * *

Vollmerhausen was out of the compound — a beautiful spring day, unseasonably warm, the forest swarming green, buzzing with life, the sky clear as diamond and just as rare, spruce and linden in the air — when the weapon team arrived. He did not see them, but upon his return noticed immediately the battered civilian Opel, pre-war, parked in front of Repp’s. Later he saw the men himself, from far off, civilians, but of a type: the overcoats, the frumpy hats, the calm, unimpressed faces concealing, but just barely, the tendency toward violence. He’d seen Gestapo before, or perhaps they were Ausland SD or any of a dozen other kinds of secret policemen; whatever, they had an ugly sort of weariness that frightened him.