The Master Sniper

30

Leets finally stopped being insane near dawn. He’d really gone nuts there for a while, yelling up at the mountain after Repp shot Tony. Leets even fired off a magazine, spraying tracers hopelessly up to disappear into the dark bank of the hillside. Roger had hit Leets with his shoulder behind both knees, and Leets screamed at the blow and went down; then Roger pi

“Jesus,” Roger yelled in outrage, “tryin’ to get yourself killed!”

Leets looked at him sullenly, but Roger saw a mad glint, the beam of secret insane conviction spark in his irises, werewolflike, and when Leets twisted savagely for the gun, Rog was ready and really hit him hard in the neck with his right forearm, his te

“Out there it’s death,” he bellowed, deeply offended.

Then Leets had insisted on recovering the body.

“We can’t leave him out there. We can’t leave him out there.”

“Forget it,” Roger said. “He doesn’t care. I don’t care. Those children don’t care. Repp doesn’t care. Listen, you need a vacation or something. Don’t you see? You won!”

No, Leets didn’t see. He looked across the courtyard to Outhwaithe. A hundred streams of blood ran out of him, across the stones of the yard, catching in cracks and hollows. His head and face were smashed, an eye blown out, entrails erupting with gas, spilling out. Repp, in uncharacteristic rage, had fired a whole magazine into him. Then he’d turned his weapon on inanimate things and in a spooky display of the power of Vampir he’d shredded the door through which some few of the children had disappeared, then methodically snapped out windows, sent a burst of automatic across a plaster saint in a niche in the church, and finally, in a moment of inspired symbolism, shot the crosses off the two domed steeples. A real screwball, thought Roger.

Now, hours later, a chilly edge of dawn had begun to show to the east. Leets had been still, resigned finally, Roger figured. He himself was quite pleased with his coolness under fire. His friend Ernest Hemingway would have been impressed. He’d even saved the captain’s life. You saved your CO, you got a medal or something, didn’t you? What’s a captain worth? A Silver Star? At least a Bronze Star. For sure a Bronze.

Roger was wondering which medal he’d get—which to ask for, actually—when Leets said, quite calmly, “Okay, Rog. Let’s take him.”

Repp would have to train himself to live with failure. It was another test of will, of commitment; and the way to win it was to close out, ruthlessly, the past. Put it all behind. Speculation as to how and why he had failed were clearly counterproductive.

He explained all this to himself in the dark sometime in the long hours of the night after the shooting. Still, he was bitter: it had been so close.

Repp had killed one, he knew. Now the question was, How many remained? And would they come after him? And other questions, nearly as intriguing. Who were they? Should he flee now?

He’d already rejected the last. His one advantage right now lay in Vampir. It had run out, but they didn’t know that. They only knew he could hit targets in the dark and they couldn’t. It would be foolish to surrender that advantage by racing off into the dark, up a steep incline, through rough forest with which he was unfamiliar. A misstep could be disastrous, even fatal.

They wouldn’t come, of course, in the dark. They’d come in the light, at dawn, when they could see him. They’d come when the odds were better.

If they came.

Would they? That was the real question. They’d won, after all, they’d stopped him, they’d saved the Jewish swineboy and the money and perhaps even the Jews, if there were any left. Sensible men, professionals, would most certainly not come. They’d be pleased in their victory and sit back against u

And that’s when he knew they’d come.

Repp felt himself smile in the dark. He felt happy. He’d reached the last step in his long stalk through the mind of his enemies; and he’d realized just how much now, when it was all over, all finished, when as a species the SS man was about to disappear from the earth, he realized how much he wanted to kill the American.

Roger blinked twice. His mouth felt parched dry.

“Now just a sec,” he said.

“We’ll never have a better chance. We can do it. I guarantee it.”

“Money back?” was all Roger could think to say.

“Money back.” Leets was dead serious.

“H-h-h-h-he’s long gone.” Damn the stutter.

“No. Not Repp. In the night he thinks he’s king.”

“I’m no hero,” Roger confessed. He felt a tremor flap through him.

“Who is?” Leets wanted to know. “Listen close, okay?”

Roger was silent.

“He can see in the dark, right?”

“Man, it’s daytime out there for him.”

“No. Wrong. Eichma

“Yeah.”

“He said it was some kind of solar-assist unit. The thing would take some of its power from the sun.”

“Yeah.”

“You see any sun around here?”

“No.”

“It’s run-down. It’s out of juice. It’s empty. He’s blind.”

Oh, Christ, thought Roger. “You want us to go out there and—”

“No.” Leets was very close, though Rog could not see him. But he could feel the heat. “I want you to go out there.”

Repp was blind now. These were rough hours; lesser men, alone in the night and silence, might have yielded to the temptations of flight.

He was thinking, marvelously alive, taking sustenance from the intricacies of the problem that now faced him.

The chief dilemma was Vampir itself. Now that it was dead, it was forty kilos of uselessness. In a fire fight, things happened fast. You needed to be able to move and shoot in fractions of seconds. Should he remove the device?

On the other hand, it was unique. It might be worth millions to the proper parties—perhaps even the Americans. It also might make a certain kind of future more feasible than others.

A ru

The decision then came down to his confidence.

He decided for Vampir.

“No, Roger,” the captain repeated. “You. You’re going out there.”

“I, uh—”

“Here’s how I’ve got it doped out. He doesn’t know how many we are. But mainly he doesn’t know we know Vampire’s out of juice. So he’s got to figure that if we come, we come at first light. So this is how I figure it. A two-step operation. Step one: Rog goes fast and hard for the mountain. You’ve got nearly an hour till light. Work your way up, keeping out of gullies, moving quietly. Nothing fancy. Just go up. His range at Anlage Elf was four hundred meters. So to get in range with your Thompson you’ve got to get at least two hundred, two hundred fifty meters up the slope. You got it?”

Roger couldn’t think of a thing to say.

“Step two: at seven-thirty A.M. on the fucking dot, I’m coming up the stairs. Wide open, flat out.”

Roger, for one second, stopped thinking about himself.