The Master Sniper

including 103 names identified as Totenkopfdivision—Nibelungen.

But still piles and piles of material remained to be gone through. Leets’s frustration took the form of a headache, and it increased as that afternoon wore on. At one point, late, he looked up and around the Documents Center and took no pleasure from what he saw: they were alone in the place, the CIC clerks having taken off for the day, and all around there seemed to be stacks and cartons of German documents. It reminded Leets much of the office back in London where, months ago, this had all begun. From this similarity he extrapolated a single message: they had not made any progress, any real progress, into the middle of the thing.

His frustration was amplified by news that Roger had brought from the outside — that the war seemed finally to be winding down. It was certainly in its last phase, and this made Leets uncomfortable. He had decided that Repp’s strike was tied to the end of things, somehow, in some form; it was a part of the process of the death of the Reich. The Russians were now said to be in Berlin — Berlin! — and German forces had capitulated up north, in Holland, northeast Germany and Denmark. Meanwhile Patton’s sweep had carried him all the way into Czechoslovakia — Pilsen, the last reports said.

Everybody was doing so well; he was doing lousy.

He slammed down the sheet he had, some nonsense on Nibelungen-coded mess receipts. Mess receipts! Damn it, the Reich should have ground to a halt back in ’43, its gears jammed tight on the tons of paper it produced. The Germans should have dropped paper bombs which killed by sheer weight with as much effectiveness as high explosives. They recorded everything in triplicate and the more they recorded, the more evidence accumulated, but the harder it was to put one’s hand on anything specific.

“Damn it, this just isn’t getting us anywhere,” he complained.

Tony, similarly immersed in documents at another table, looked up and said, “You’d rather be perched on a roadblock somewhere? Or knocking on doors with the boys in the trench coats?”

Of course not, Leets told himself. But more manpower would have been some help, to prowl these acres of paper. And even then, would that have done it? It was clear now that Nibelungen was built, maintained and controlled out of Dachau; all the documents pointed to it. But that was it: they pointed to Anlage Elf and Leets already had Anlage Elf. What he needed was another direction, another step in the chain, higher up on the ladder. To Berlin, perhaps. To WVHA headquarters at Unter den Eichen but the Russians were there. Would they cooperate? How long would it take? What shape were the WVHA files in anyway?

“Aspirin?” he asked.

“Huh? Oh, I got some in my bag, just a sec,” Roger said. “What’s a Schusswunde? Gunshot wound, right?”

“Yes,” Leets said, but then noted the folder Roger was reading. “Hey, what the hell is that?” he barked.

It was marked Der Versuch.

“Uh, file I picked up.”

Der Versuch meant experiment.

It was at last too much. Leets’s headache would not go away and Roger was pouring time down the drain, and Susan was even more unreachable than before and Shmuel was dead and Repp was closer to his target.

“Goddamn it, you little son of a bitch, I ought to kick your rich little ass to Toledo. That has nothing to do with our stuff. What the fuck, kid, you think this is some kind of reading room, some fucking Harvard library or something?” he spat out venomously.

Roger looked up in horror. Even Tony was shaken by the black rage in Leets’s words.

“Jesus, Captain, I’m sorry,” said Roger. “I was just—”

“Listen, we’re all running without a lot of sleep and these last days have been unpleasant ones,” Tony pointed out. “Perhaps we’d best close down the shop for today.”

“Suits me,” said Roger sullenly.

“Ah,” Leets snorted, but saw at once that Outhwaithe was right.

Roger stood and gathered up his materials wearily and began to stuff them into a drawer.

But then he paused. “Look, this is pretty funny here, if I’m reading it right.”

Nobody paid any attention. Leets still hadn’t taken any aspirin and Tony was consumed in tidying up. Tony was a tidy sort, always had been.

Roger lurched on. “Funny-ugly,” he said. “They used this Dachau as headquarters for a lot of testing. Block Five, it was called. All kinds of terrible—”

“Get to the point,” Leets said coldly.

“Okay,” and Roger held up the bulky file. “Full of freezing, pressure-chamber stuff, gas, injections, water— deaths I’m talking about. How people die. How long it takes, what the signs are, what their brains look like afterward, pictures, stuff like that. And this—”

He pulled a folder out.

“It’s not like the others. Different forms entirely. Didn’t come out of Block Five. It’s a report on Schusswunde—gunshot wounds, twenty-five of them, complete with autopsy pictures, the works. It’s been sent down to a Dr. Rauscher — the head SS doctor here. Sent down for his collection on how people die. It’s dated — this is how it caught my eye — it’s dated the eighth of March. A couple of days after Shmuel made his breakout.”

“Let’s see,” said Leets.

The folder consisted of several typewritten pages of wound descriptions and several grisly pictures, shot with too much flash, of naked scrawny men on slabs with great orifices in their chests or portions of their heads blown away, eyes slotted and blank, feet dirty, joints knobby. Leets looked away.

“Maybe it is them,” he said. “No way to tell. Shmuel could tell. But even if it is, so what? The way I make it is they must have autopsied the corpses Repp hit at Anlage Elf. Wanted to see what that fat slug does, more data to help him in the shooting. Then they ship those data back to — back to we don’t know where. WVHA, I guess. Or SS HQ, someplace, Berlin. Then”—he sighed, weary with the effort, for he could see the approach of another dead end—“someone up there sends it on down to this Dr. Rauscher. For his collection. And you find it. Looking where you’re not supposed to be. But it doesn’t mean a thing. We know they’ve got a big, special gun. We know—”

“Yet it’s not Nibelungen-coded,” Tony said.

“Well, it had really nothing to do with the guts of the mission. It was just an extra curiosity they’d dug up and thought to send somewhere it might do some good. Their idea of ‘good.’”

“You miss the point,” Tony said. He’d ceased tidying and was over at Roger’s, pushing his way through the papers. “If it hasn’t gone out under the code, then it’s not top secret. It’s not Geheime Kommandosache. That means it hasn’t been combed, scrubbed free of connections, examined closely from the security point of view. It’s pure.”

Leets wasn’t sure what he was getting so excited about.

“Big deal, nothing there to be top secret. We don’t even know if those are the same twenty-five guys. They could be twenty-five guys from any of the camps.”

“Hey,” said Roger, off in a corner with one of the sheets. “There’s a tag here. I didn’t see it. It’s some kind of—”

Leets had it, and took it into the light.

“It’s a file report, that’s all,” he said. “It says these came from some guy’s file, some guy in some department, Amt Four-B-four, some guy I never heard of. Jesus, this is nothing, goddamn it, I’m getting tired of all this—”

“Shut up,” said Tony.

“Look, Major, this is—”

“Shut up,” Tony said. He looked hard at the tag. Then he looked at Leets, then to Roger, then back to Leets.

“Remember your German, Captain. In German, the word Eich?”

“Huh?”

“It’s oak. Oak!”

Tony said, “Remember: it wasn’t Shmuel who heard of the Man of Oak, but someone else, a shtetl Jew, who spoke Yiddish. He knew some German words, the common ones, but he was scared and didn’t listen carefully. He heard ‘Man of Oak.’ Mann. And Eich.”