The Master Sniper

bothered me what you just said.”

“I won’t harm a hair on his head,” Leets said. “Neither will the major.”

“We British are quite gentle, hadn’t you heard?” Tony asked.

A roar rose suddenly; the windows rattled as it mounted.

After it died, the captain said, “That’s the fifth one in the last half an hour. Those guys are really feeling their oats today. There’s an airfield at Nuremberg, not too far. Mosquito squadron there too, Major, not just our boys going goofy.”

“Glad to hear it,” Tony said. “We try and do our bit.”

The door opened. Two MP’s with grease guns and helmet liners brought a third man in between them. Leets was immediately impressed at how unimpressed he was: a wormy little squirt, pale, watery eyes, thinning hair, late thirties. Glasses askew, lips thin and dry. Scrawny body lost in huge American prison fatigues.

“Gentlemen,” said the captain, “I give you Obersturmbannfuhrer Karl Adolf Eichmann, late of Amt Four-B- four, Gestapo, Number One Sixteen, Kurfurstenstrasse, Berlin. Herr Eichmann”—the captain switched to perfect brilliant German—“these fellows need a few moments of your time.”

The Man of Oak sat down across from them. He looked straight ahead and smelled faintly unpleasant.

“Cigarette, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer?” Leets asked.

The German shook his head almost imperceptibly, clasped his hands before him on the table. Leets noted he had big hands, and that the backs of them were spotted with freckles.

Leets lit up.

“I understand, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer,” he said, speaking in his slow German, “you’ve been uncooperative with our people.”

“My duties were routine. I followed them explicitly. I did nothing except my job. That is all I have to say,” the German said.

Leets reached into his pocket, and removed something. With a flick of his fingers, he set the draydel to spinning across the surface of the table. Impelled by its own momentum, it described a lazy progress over the wood. Leets watched the man’s eyes follow it.

“Your colleague Herr Repp left that for me at Anlage Elf. Now, dear friend, you are going to tell me about Operation Nibelungen. When it started, where it’s headed, who its target is. You’re going to tell me the last secret. Or I’ll find it out myself, and I’ll find Repp. And when I find Repp, I’ll tell him only a little fib: I’ll say, Eichmann betrayed you, and let him go. Then, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer, as well you know, you are a very dead man from that second on. Herr Repp guarantees it.”

Roger leaned against the fender of the Jeep out in front of the castle—castle? it was more like a big, fancy house! — enjoying the freedom of the moment. No fun, the ride down, two raw nerves in back for cargo. They’d jumped the Jeep while it was still rolling and headed straight for the great doors, as if there were free money inside, instead of some Kraut.

He popped a piece of spearmint into his mouth. He had no dreams of the future and no memories of the past; he was determined to extract the maximum pleasure of that exact instant. He worked the gum into something soft. Sure was a nice day out. He assumed a Continental grip on an imaginary racquet and slow-motioned through a dozen topspin approach shots to the background corner. The trick was to keep your head down and follow through high. It was a shot he’d need to own, lock, stock and barrel, if he hoped to stay with the Frank Bensons of the world in the years to come.

And then he saw a woman.

She was just a silhouette preserved momentarily between the window through which he glimpsed her and what must have been another window or set of doors behind her. Just a profile, blurred, moving down a corridor between wings of the castle, gone in a second.

Women! Here? It had been weeks since he’d pulled out of London and that mix-up in Paris hadn’t amounted to anything. Women. He explored facets of the problem. Now what would women be doing here? Wasn’t this some kind of prison or something?

Still, that had definitely been—

Jesus Christ!

The roar seemed to flatten him. He fell back in momentary confusion, looking for the source of this outrage, to see a P-47 maybe fifty feet above him flash past, more shadow than substance at over 400 miles an hour. He could see its prop wash suck at the trees, pulling a cloud of leaves off them in its wake. It rolled majestically as it yanked its nose up — crazy bastard, he was going to get in real trouble that way, Roger thought — and he followed the fighter-bomber as it climbed.

He was dumb struck. The sky was jammed with planes. He’d noticed contrails earlier, but the sky was always full of contrails on the rare, clear European days. Now, staring, he saw them jumbled, tangled, knotted even, tracing corkscrews and barrels and loops and Immelmanns and stall-outs. He could make out the planes themselves, fighters mostly, specks at the head of each furry, swooping track. Must have been fifty, sixty. What a show.

One last giant dogfight? Maybe the Germans had saved up for an aerial Bulge, a last go, all their stuff in the air, jets, rockets, ME’s, Focke-Wulfs, and a Stuka or two if any were left, and all the experimental stuff everybody said they were working on. One last shoot-out at 25,000 feet: all guns blazing, take on the entire Eighth Air Force, some kind of Gotterdammerung, or maybe a crazy kamikaze thing, like Japs, just crashing into their targets?

But if this were a battle, wouldn’t there be puffs of flame up there, and long jags of smoke from crashing ships, and wouldn’t there be other columns of smoke on the horizon from planes that had already gone down?

Yes, there would.

This was—fun!

Another plane, a two-engine British job, howled overhead, slightly higher than the Jug but just as loud. He ducked.

What the hell’s going on? Rog wondered.

He looked about and saw nobody in the house. No guards, no officers, nothing. He did notice a path off to one side in the trees and thought to head out back, dig somebody up. The path turned quickly into a kind of sidewalk, though of fine, tiny pebbles set between metal rails of some sort. Very fancy, it reminded him of the kind of arrangements he’d seen in Newport. He followed it through some tricky turns, and at last found himself in some sort of garden, low hedges arranged like a geometry problem around flower beds that were beginning to show signs of waking up. Beyond lay a vast rolling carpet of grass and behind, though shielded by a screen of tall, thin trees, was the castle. But Roger picked up something more interesting immediately: standing on the grass, by a bench of some sort, back turned, looking up at the aerial circus, was a girl. A WAC or something.

He advanced warily, unsure whether she was an officer. She was in some kind of uniform all right, but not an officer, for there was no gleam at her collar. He stepped forward.

“Uh, pardon me, have you got any idea what’s going on, miss?”

The girl turned. One of those clear, guileless Midwestern faces organized around big eyes, blue, a pert nose and even freckles. A kind of strawberry complexion, hues of pinkness, and it all made him think of freshness, a kind of innocence.

Hey, would I like to pork that! he decided.

Then he noticed she was crying.

“Gee, what’s wrong? Bad news, huh?”

She came into his arms — he could not believe his famous luck again — and began to sob against his shoulder. He held her close and tight, muttering, “Now, now,” stroking her hair.

She looked up, soft and blurred, and he thought she wanted a kiss and so he pressed his lips into hers.

* * *

At last Eichmann spoke.

“What guarantees can you offer? Repp is very dangerous. You insist that I betray him, or you’ll let it be known I betrayed him. Yet without a guarantee, the first possibility does not exist.”

“We have a way of remembering our friends. We’ve that reputation, don’t we? Give us a chance to live up to it. That’s all I can say.”