The Master Sniper

as the light faded to twilight and then darkness, the soft English fields beyond the air base perimeter growing hazier. The men were Second Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, a part of the more widely known 82d Airborne Division. Tough boys with drops in Italy and Normandy, a long bad spell in the Bulge and most recently — March — an op named Varsity in which they’d jumped beyond the Rhine behind them. They’d been off the line a month, growing fat and sluggish here at the rest camp in southern England, and when Tony Outhwaithe had convinced the right parties that a batch of hellraisers was needed for a night of close-in dirty work in south Twelveland, Second of the 501st got the word.

It was cold in the airplane. Shmuel sat in the chill, his back against the slope of the fuselage, shivering. Yet he felt quite wonderful. His journey was finally nearing its completion. A matter of hours now. He was one of two dozen men in the underlit darkness of the airplane, and he was as isolated from any of them as they were from each other, cut off by the noise from the engines that made human contact, now that they needed it most, impossible. Shmuel could sense the tension, especially in Captain Leets, and he pitied him for it. A Mussulman need feel nothing. A Mussulman was cut off from human sensation, complete within himself. Yet he looked over at Leets and saw him hunched and absorbed, filthy face glowing orangely over the tip of a cigarette. The layer of cork had dried crustily on his skin, making the features abstract, unreadable. But the eyes, staring blankly at nothing, had a message: fear.

Yet it was a fear Shmuel refused to accept. He was all through with fear, he had discovered a new territory. Having accepted and even welcomed his death, nothing mattered, not even preposterous things like the half-a-day session at the American parachute school with the boy Evans, performing feats of athleticism, jumping off of ten- foot platforms into sawdust pits, rolling when he hit; or hanging fifty feet up from risers, the straps nipping into his limbs while someone yelled at him about adjustments he didn’t understand and the ground rushed up to hit him.

“You’ll be all right,” Evans had said. “The static line’ll pull the chute open for you. Really, it’s easy. When you hit the ground, the captain’ll come by for you. He’ll take good care of you.” The boy had grinned optimistically. He could afford optimism because he wasn’t going.

Then they took him to a supply depot and issued him equipment. It occurred to him that he’d never been so well dressed though he felt like an impostor. The clothes were all big, but looking around he saw that bagginess was the American style. It seemed to symbolize their wealth, huge flapping garments made from endless bolts of material. In the warehouse they peeled these items off from huge piles, piles of pants that reached the sky! The crowning monstrosity was the helmet, shaped like a Moscow dome, weighing six tons, pulling him left or right unless he fought against it.

He examined himself. Third uniform of the war and what a peculiar journey they charted: inmate’s ticking to Wehrmacht flannels to thick crinkly American cotton, crowned in steel like a bell.

Now, sitting in the airplane that drew ever closer to Germany, Shmuel had to wonder at the jokes of fate.

I had to find a special way to die, the ovens weren’t good enough for me, no, I had to jump out of an airplane with teen-age cowboys and Indians and gangsters from America.

He glanced over at Leets, and noticed the way he was sitting, one leg pushed out straight, his face tight, eyes still distant, whole being focused on deriving maximum pleasure from the cigarette.

Leets saw the ready light come on. He smashed out his cigarette with the foot of his good leg. The bad one ached dully. Motionless, stretched, stiff in the cold plane, it had cramped on him. He massaged it, kneading it nervously with his fingers, working some life back into it. A touch to the knee came back wet. Leakage.

You fucker, he thought.

Just when I need you.

He thought of his first jump, first real jump, that is, with live Germans and guns and real bullets down below: completely different. A Lancaster, though bigger, felt less solid than a C-47, and there was a sense of actual loneliness in the big bomber’s bay, with just the three of them besides the sullen jumpmaster. Here, a crowd, two whole football teams and change. And a door, a wonderful American door, triumph of Yank ingenuity. The Brits leaped out of a hatch in the bomber floor for some absurd reason, a public school sort of ordeal that had to be got through like a cold bath or fagging for the older boys. Leets focused all his terrors on getting through without breaking his head. For some baffling reason, Yanks had a peculiar tendency to look down as they stepped out, see where they were headed, and catch a faceful of hatch. Leets had seen it happen at one of the British secret training schools where he’d learned to jump Brit-style preparatory for going to war for the OSS. There was a saying at the place: you could always tell a Yank by the broken jaw.

Another light flicked on, red. Three minutes. Time to hook up.

Shmuel was standing now in the aisle. It reminded him of a crowded Warsaw trolley, the one that traveled Glinka Street, near the jewelry shops. He even had a strap to hang onto in the closeness and he could feel other men’s breath washing over him. A moment of unexpected terror had just passed: the plane had yawed to the left; Shmuel, awkward in all the new gear, almost fell. He felt his balance and, with it, his control draining away. Nothing to grab for; he surrendered to the fall; then Leets had him.

“Easy,” he muttered. A breeze pummeled through the corridor of the airplane, fresh and savage. A glint of natural light, not much, illuminated the end of the darkness. Door opened.

Then, like a theater queue at last admitted to the big show, the line began to move. It moved with great swiftness, almost as if some reasonable destination lay ahead.

Shmuel faced sky. An American strapped by the doorway hit him in the shoulder without warning and, surprised at his own lack of respect, he snarled at the man, a stranger, and as if to insult him, stepped out.

Gravity sucked the dignity from his limbs and he flapped like a scrawny shtetl chicken. The face of the tailplane, rivets and all, sailed by a few inches beyond him. He fell, screaming, in the great cold dark silence, the engines now mercifully gone, the noise too, only himself, beginning to tumble until— Ah! Oh! something snapped him hard and he found himself floating under a great white parasol. He looked about and noticed first that the sky was full of apparitions — jellyfish, moving with underwater slowness, silky petticoats under a young girl’s skirts, pillowcases and sheets billowing on a wash line — and secondly that for all the majesty of the spectacle the ground was coming up fast. He’d expected a serene descent, thinking himself thousands of feet up. Of course they’d jump at minimum height, less time in the air, less time to scatter, and already Shmuel felt below the horizon. The ground, huge and black, smashed up at him. Wasn’t he supposed to be doing something? He didn’t care. He saw in the rushing wall of darkness, coming now like an express train, his fate. He reached to embrace it, expecting no pain, only release, and he hit with stunning impact, knocking a bolt of light through his head and all his sense out of him.

I’m dead, he thought with relief.

But then a sergeant stood over him, cursing hotly in English. “C’mon, Jack, off yer butt, move it,” and sprinted on.

Shmuel got up, feeling sore in a dozen places but broken in none. His legs wobbled under his weight, his brain still resonated with echoes of the landing. Gradually he realized the field was very busy. Men rushed about, seemingly without order. Shmuel tried to figure out what to do and it occurred to him that he was supposed to free himself from the chute harness. Suddenly a man materialized next to him.

“You okay? Nothing busted?”

“What? Ah. No. No. What a sensation.”

“Great.”

Shmuel tugged feebly with the harness, couldn’t get his fingers to work and wasn’t exactly sure what it was he was supposed to do, and then felt Leets grab the heavy clip that seemed to be the nexus of the network of straps that held him, and in the next second the straps unleashed him.

Shmuel took a quick look around. He made out men scattered across the dark field, and, beyond, a looming bank of pines. All was silence under the towers of stars. It was so different now. He looked for landmarks, for clues, for help. He felt suddenly useless.

“This way, c’mon,” hissed Leets, unlimbering his automatic gun, trotting off. Shmuel ran after.

Yes, yes, it really was the firing range. The shed bobbed up ahead, and he reached the concrete walkway.