The Master Sniper

“We can never drive there,” said Roger. “We’re hundreds of miles away. It’s almost eight. Not that far in so short—”

“We can probably make it to Nuremberg in two hours. Then, if we’re lucky, real lucky, we can promote an airplane. Then—”

“Jesus, what is this, dreamland? We’d have to get landing clearances, visas, stuff like that. Permission from the Swiss. Find another car on the ground. Drive to, what was it, Applewell or whatever, then find this place. Before midnight. That’s the craziest thing I—”

“No,” Leets said, “no cars, no visas, no maps. We jump in. Like Normandy, like Varsity, like Anlage Elf.”

“Where is that damned telephone?” said Tony.

Tony found his phone—a whole abandoned switchboard full of them, in fact—in the great monumental stairwell around which Schloss Pommersfelden was built. But the space began to fill with people, drawn out of offices and billets, or drawn off the road by the blazing lights. It was one of those rare nights when no one wanted to be alone; no one was moody or unhappy. A future had just opened up for them.

Women began to appear. From where? Wasn’t this place really a kind of prison? Red Cross girls, newspaper correspondents, WAC’s, a few British nurses, some German women even. The stairwell jammed up with flesh. Everybody was rubbing, grinding, bumping, stroking. Liquor, looted from somewhere in the castle, began to appear in heroic quantities. Nobody had time for glasses; one-hundred-year-old Rhine wines in black dusty bottles were sucked down like Cokes by GI’s. A radio provided music. Dog-faces and generals rubbed shoulders in crowded orbits around the girls. Leets thought he heard the German officers singing in the detention wing—something schmaltzy and sentimental in counterpoint to the Big Band jangle from the radio.

A girl kissed Leets. He could feel her tits squash flat against his chest. She put a boozy tongue in his ear and whispered something specific and began to tug at him, and then someone ripped her away.

Meanwhile, Tony worked the phone. Leets could not help but hear.

“I say.” Tony especially the stage Englishman, David Niven, for Christ’s sake. “Major Outhwaithe here, his Majesty’s Royal Fusiliers, hello, hello, is this Nuremberg, Signal Corps, could you talk up, please, yes, much better, I’m told a British Mosquito squadron is about, at the airfield of course, can you possibly buzz me through, old fellow, must be an Air Officer Commanding about, no, no, English chap, fu

“He said No?”

“He said Yes. I think. So drunk he could hardly speak, the music was quite loud. But there’ll be a Mosquito on the field at ten at Grossreuth Flughafen. God.” He stood.

Leets and Outhwaithe pushed their way through the celebrants, and out into the night, where Roger waited with the Jeep and the Thompson submachine guns.

Repp, at 400 meters out, had an angle of about 30 degrees to the target zone. It was his best compromise, close enough to put his rounds in with authority, yet high enough to clear the wall. He half crouched now behind an outcrop of rock. The Vampir rifle lay before him on the stone, on its bipod, the bulky optics skewing it to one side. Repp had removed the pack and set it next to the rifle so that its weight wouldn’t pull his shooting off.

Enough light lingered to let him examine the buildings beneath and beyond him. Built five hundred years ago by fierce Jesuits, the buildings had been walled and somewhat modernized early in the century when the order of Mother Teresa took them over as a convent. It looked like a prison. The chapel, the oldest building, was not impressive, certainly nothing on the scale of the Frauenkirche in Munich, a true monument to papism; it was a utilitarian stone thing with a steeply pitched roof, two domed steeples with grim little crosses atop them. But Repp steadied his binoculars against the other, larger edifice, the living quarters of the order that fronted on a courtyard. Patiently in the fading light he explored it until he found, not far from the main entrance with stairway and imposing arches, an obscure wooden door, heavily bolted. The children would spring from there.

There would be twenty-six of them, and he had to take them all: twenty-four, twenty-five even, simply wasn’t good enough. The SD report said they came out every night at midnight and played in the yard for about forty minutes. Repp calculated that they’d be bunched in the killing zone, that is, outside the door but not yet dispersed enough to prevent a clean sweep of the job, for about five seconds. He’d take them when the last one had stepped out the door. Fantastic shooting, to be sure, but well within his—and Vampir’s—capabilities.