The Master Sniper

nerves tingling with joy. A great yearning had passed.

He set himself on his elbows, belly, loins pressing against the rock, legs splayed for support, and drew the rifle to him. He laid the butt-stock against his shoulder. He palmed the pistol grip; the metal and plastic, cold as bone, heated quickly in his hand.

He rocked the weapon on its bipod, feeling its quick response to his guidance. It seemed alive, obedient. Repp had a special feeling for weapons; in his hands they were animate, almost enchanted. With his other hand, he reached up and plucked the lens cap off Vampir. He clicked on the auxiliary battery. He let his trigger finger search the curve of the trigger; then, finding it, drop away.

Repp eased the bolt back. It slid through oily stiffness, making a show of resistance; then he felt it yield with a snap and he freed it to glide home, having taken the first of the subsonic rounds off the magazine and seated it in the firing chamber, simultaneously springing open the dust cover on the breech. A whole system orchestrated itself to Repp’s will — gas piston, operating rod and handle, bolt camming and locking units, pieces moving and adjusting within the weapon itself — and he took great pleasure in this, seeing the parts slide and click and lock. He checked the fire-control switch: semiautomatic. He thumbed off the safety.

A kind wind took Tony. Leets felt like he was descending in molasses and could see the Englishman a hundred feet below and three hundred feet away, his white canopy undulating in the wind, and he could see nothing else. The Mosquito drone was a memory. Leets fell in heavy silence, still a minute from touchdown when he saw Tony’s chute collapse as it hit the ground.

Leets landed in a bundle of pain. Lights flashed behind his eyes on impact and his leg began to throb. He’d tried to favor it, a mistake, throwing himself off, and he hit on his butt and shoulder and lay there for a second in confusion, senses shaken by the hit. He could make out Tony’s silk flapping loosely across the field, unconnected to any other thing. Climbing to his feet — leg hurt like hell but seemed to work okay — he popped his own harness toggle, and felt it fall away. He shook himself loose of it.

“Shit!” someone said close by, concurrent with the thud of meat and earth colliding. He looked and could see Roger scrambling up, struggling with his shrouds.

Leets unslung his Thompson. He could see he was in a meadow in a valley, ankle-deep in grass, low hills looming around. A quarter-mile or so away he thought he could see a building and a wall closing it off.

“This way,” he hissed at the still befuddled young sergeant, and began, in his slow and painful way, to run. He could not see Tony.

Tony ran. He seemed to be closing the distance fast. There was some pain, but not so much. He wasn’t sure about the gun, he’d lost that when he hit. Still, the place seemed a long way off.

He just kept running. Someone else in his body was breathing hard. He wanted to cough or stop. A footrace. Didn’t they realize a certain type of gent doesn’t run vulgarly and blindly across fields, almost to the point of vomiting, his own sweat burning hotly on his skin? A gentleman never sweats. The boots were impossibly heavy and the grass slowed him. He felt perfectly lucid.

Repp flicked on the scope and finally, last step, braced his free hand on the stock, just behind the receiver. He fit his shooting eye against the soft rubber cup of the scope.

The world according to Vampir was green and silent.

He felt very patient and helpful almost. He felt not that he was a part of history, but that he was History, a raw force, reaching out of the night to twist the present into the future. Savage, perhaps, in immediate application, but in a much longer run Good and Just and Fair.

A smear of light radiated across the scope as a trillion trillion swirling molecules spilled out the opening door.

Right on time for their appointment with destiny, Repp thought.

A blurry splotch of light jiggled out, barely recognizable as a human shape. And another.

Repp tracked it against the reticule of the sight, as other splotches paraded helpfully along behind.

“There, there, my babies, my fine babies, come to Papa,” Repp began to croon.

Leets was almost dead with exhaustion. He was no runner. He wanted to throw himself onto the grass and suck in great quarts of cool oxygen. Roger was running next to him. He’d caught up, all that idiotic tennis making him strong and fast, but Leets wouldn’t let him get beyond. Wasn’t that Tony ahead at the gate?

The gate!

A sick feeling burned through Leets, almost a sob.

How could they get through the gate?

Tony hit the door in the wall. It didn’t budge.

Repp had nineteen, now twenty.

Repp’s finger was on the trigger, taking the slack out.

Repp had twenty-one, twenty-two.

Leets tried to get there. He’d never make it. He had a terrible premonition of the next several seconds. “Tony!” someone screamed, himself.

Old Inverailor House gimmick, from the first days of SOE training up in Scotland. The man was an ex-Hong Kong police inspector, knew all kinds of tricks of the trade, of which this was but one:

“Now if you’ve got a lock in a door and you want in and you’re in a bit of a hurry, say Jerry’s coming along, take your revolver, just like a chap in a Hollywood cowboy picture, and shoot — but not into the lock, flicks are all wrong about that. You’ll just catch the slug on the bounce in your own middle. Rather, at an angle, into the wood, behind the bloody lock. That big four fifty-five makes a wonderful wrench.”

Funny how it came back, swimming up through five years of complicated past, just when he needed it.

Carefully, holding the Webley snout at an angle two inches from the ancient brass lock plate, Tony fired. The flash spurted white and blinding.

* * *

Repp had twenty-five. There was no slack in the trigger. But what was going on?

“Kinder,” yelled Tony, German perfect, “the bad man can see in the dark, the bad man can see in the dark.”

He could see their white faces stark in the night, and eyes white as they fled. They were apparitions. He heard the scuffle of panicked feet across the pavement. He heard squeals and yelps. He must have seemed a giant to them, a nightmare creation. They must have thought he was the bad man who could see in the dark, running through the yard, breathing hard, face blackened, gigantic pistol in one hand. Another irony for his collection.

How quickly they vanished. Several brushed against his leg in their flight and yet it seemed to take only a second. They scurried like small animals. He could not see them anymore.

A woman was crying. Terrified. She didn’t know.

We’re good fellows, madame, he wanted to explain.

He heard Leets yelling. What did the man want?

Repp fired.

Leets reached the gate. He heard them screaming and running. He fixed on fleeing figures that seemed to career through the darkness. Someone was crying. A woman’s voice, pitched high in uncontrollable fear, unfurled. “Bitte, bitte,” please, please.

“Go away, dearest God, go away.”

The bullet had taken most of Tony’s head. He was on the ground in the middle of the courtyard, in a dark