The Master Sniper

Should he move or stay put? Leets hadn’t said. He’d said wait, wait, but he hadn’t said anything about if there was no shot. He probably ought to still wait. But Leets hadn’t said a thing. Repp was probably gone. What the hell would he be hanging around for? He was no dope. He was a tough, shrewd guy.

On the other hand, why would he have taken off when he held all the aces in the dark?

Roger didn’t have any idea what to do.

Leets had gotten well into the trees, deep into the gloom. He rested for a moment, crouching behind a trunk. The slope here was gentle, but he could see that ahead it reared up. The footing would be treacherous.

Squatting, he tried to peer through the trees. His vision seemed to end a few dozen feet up: just trees woven together, trees and slope, a few rocks.

He hoped Roger had the sense to stay put. Surely he’d see that the game hadn’t changed, that it was still up to Leets to draw fire.

Don’t blow it, Roger.

He’ll kill you.

Leets gathered his strength again. He wasn’t sure there’d be any left, but he did locate some somewhere. He began to move up the slope, tree to tree, rock to rock, dashing, duck-walking, slithering, making more noise than he ought to.

Roger looked around. A few shafts of sunlight cut through the overhanging canopy. He felt like he was in an old church or something, and light was slipping in the chinks in the roof. He still couldn’t see anything. He imagined Repp sitting in a café in Buenos Aires.

Meanwhile, here I sit, breaking a sweat.

If only I could see!

If only someone would tell me what to do!

Cautiously, he began to edge his way up.

The other American was perhaps 150 meters down-slope, rising from behind a swell in the ground, half obscured in shadow. But the movement had caught Repp’s experienced eye.

He felt no elation, merely lifted the rifle and replanted it on its bipod and drew it quickly to him.

The American was just a boy—even from this distance, Repp could make out the callow, unformed features, the face tawny with youth. He rose like a nervous young lizard, eyes flicking about, motions tentative, deeply frightened.

Repp knew the big man would be up the slope in seconds. He even thought he could hear him battering through the brush. Too bad they hadn’t climbed closer together, so that he could take them in the same arc of the bipod, not having to move it at all.

Repp pressed the blade of the front sight, on the young man’s chest. The boy bobbed down.

Damn!

Only seconds till the big one was in range.

Come on, boy, come on, damn you.

Should he move the gun for the big one?

Come on, boy. Come on!

Helpfully the boy appeared again, cupping his hands to shade his eyes, his face a stupid scowl of concentration. He rose right into the already planted blade of the sight, his chest seeming to disappear behind the blurred wedge of metal.

Repp fired.

A split second may have passed between the sound of the shot and Leets’s identification of it: he rose then, hauling the Thompson to his shoulder, and had an image of Roger—Roger hit—and fired.

Fire again, you idiot, he told himself.

He burned through the clip. The weapon pumped and he held the rounds into that sector of the forest his ears told him Repp’s shot had come from. He could see the burst kicking up the dust where it hit.

Gun empty, he dropped back fast to the forest floor, hands shaking, heart thumping, still hearing the gun’s roar, and fumbled through a magazine change. Dust or smoke—something heavy and seething—seemed to fill the air, drifting in clouds. But he could see nothing human in the confusion.

Leets knew he had to attack, press on under the cover of his own fire. He scrambled upward, pausing only to waste a five-round burst up the slope on stupid instinct, and twice he slipped in the loose ground cover, dried pine needles woven with sprigs of dead fern, but he stayed low and kept moving.

A burst of automatic fire broke through the limbs over his head, and he flattened as the bullets tore through, spraying him with chips and splinters. Again bringing his submachine gun up, he fired a short burst at the sound, then rolled daintily to the right, fast for a big man, as the German, firing also at sound and flash, sent a spurt of fire pecking through the dust. Leets thought he saw flash and threw the gun back to his shoulder but before he could fire it vanished.

Then seconds later, to the left and above, his eyes caught just the barest flicker of human motion behind a tangle of interfering pines, and he brought the gun to bear, but it too vanished and he found himself staring over his barrel at nothing but space and green light and dust in the air.

But he’d seen him. At last, he’d seen the sniper.

Repp changed magazines quickly. He was breathing hard and had fallen in his dash. Blood ran down the side of his face; one of the machine-pistol slugs had fragmented on a stone near him and something—a tiny piece of lead, a pebble, a stone chip—had stung him badly above the eye.

Now he knew safety lay in distance. The machine pistol had an effective range of 100 meters, his STG 400. It would be ridiculous to blaze away at close range like a gangster. Too many things could happen, too many twists of luck, freaks of chance, a bullet careening off a rock. Repp thought for just a second of the Jewish toy he’d played with back at Anlage Elf: you set it spi

He’d get higher and take the man from afar.

The sniper climbed.

Leets too knew the importance of distance. He pushed his way through the trees, forcing himself on. In close he had a chance. He knew the Vampire outfit had to be heavy and Repp would have no easy time of it going uphill fast. He’d stay as close as he could to the sniper, hoping for a clear shot. If he hung back, he knew Repp would execute him at leisure.

The incline had steepened considerably. He drove himself forward, pawing at the trees with his free hand. Loose glass clattered in his stomach and he could feel the sweat washing off him in torrents. Dust seemed to have been pasted over his lips and his leg hurt a lot. Several times he dropped to peer up under the canopy of the forest, hoping to see the sniper, but nothing moved before him except the undulating green of the trees.

* * *

Vampir was impossibly heavy. If he’d had the time, Repp would have peeled the thing off his back and flung it away. But it would take minutes to get the scope unhitched from the rifle, minutes he didn’t have.

He paused in his climb, looked back.

Nothing.

Where was the man?

Who’d have thought he could come on like that? Must be an athlete to press ahead like that.

Repp looked up. It was quite steep here. He wished he had some water. He was breathing hard and the straps pinched the feeling out of the upper part of his body.

He and this other fellow, alone on a mountain in Switzerland.

It occurred to him for the first time that he might die.

Goddamn it, goddamn it, why hadn’t he ditched Vampir? To hell with Vampir. To hell with them all, the Reichsführer, the Führer himself, the little Jew babies, all the Jews he’d killed, all the Russians, the Americans, the English, the Poles. To hell with them all. He pushed himself on, breathing hard.

A stone outcrop loomed ahead. Leets paused as he came to it. It looked dangerous. He peeped over it, upward. Nothing. Go on, go on.