The Master Sniper

1

The guards in the new camp were kinder.

No, Shmuel thought, not kinder. Be precise. Even after many years of rough treatment he took pride in the exactness of his insights. The guards were not kinder, they were merely indifferent. Unlike the pigs in the East, these fellows were blank and efficient. They wore their uniforms with more pride and stood straighter and were cleaner. Scum, but proud scum; a higher form of scum.

In the East, the guards had been grotesque. It was a death factory, lurid, unbelievable, even now eroding into fantastic nightmare. It manufactured extermination, the sky above it blazed orange in the night for the burning of corpses in the thousands. You breathed your brothers. And if not selected out in the first minutes, you were kept caked in your own filth. You were Untermensch, subhuman. He had survived in that place for over a year and a half and if a large part of his survival was luck, a large part also was not.

Shmuel came by the skills of survival naturally, without prior training. He had not lived a hardy physical life in the time he thought of as Before. He had in fact been a literary type, full of words and ideas, a poet, and believed someday he would write a novel. He had written bold commentaries for Nasz Przeglad, Warsaw’s most influential Yiddish newspaper. He’d been the friend of some real dazzlers too, Mendl Elkin, Peretz Hirschbein, the radical Zionist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, Melekn Ravitch, to name but a few. They were great fellows, talkers, laughers, great lovers of women, and they were probably all dead now.

Shmuel had not thought of literature since 1939. He rarely thought at all of Before, knowing it the first sign of surrender. There was only now, today. Perhaps tomorrow as well, but one could never be too sure. But he persisted in his literary habits in just one way: he insisted on looking into the center of things. And he’d been puzzling over this strange new place for days now, ever since he’d arrived.

They’d been trucked in; that in itself was an astonishment, for the German way was to herd Jews through forests and if some—or many—died along the way, well, that was too bad. But a truck had bounced them in cold darkness for hours, and Shmuel and the others had sat, huddled and patient, until it halted and the canvas blanketing its back was ripped off.

“Out, Jews, out! Fast, fast, boys!”

They spilled into snowy glare. Shmuel, blinking in the whiteness of it, saw immediately he was at no Konzentrationslager. He knew no German word for what he saw: a desolate forest setting, walls of pine and fir, sheathed in snow, looming beyond the wire; and within the compound just three or four low wooden buildings around a larger one of concrete. There were no dogs or watchtowers either, just laconic SS boys dressed in some kind of forester’s outfit, dappled in the patterns and shadows of deep trees, with automatic guns.

More curiosities became evident shortly and if the other prisoners cared merely for the ample bread, the soup, the occasional piece of sausage that it had become their incredible good fortune to enjoy, Shmuel at least would keep track.

In fact he and his comrades, he quickly came to realize, were still another oddity of the place. Why had the Germans bothered to gather such a shabby crew of victims? What do we have in common, Shmuel often wondered, we Jews and Russians and Slavic types? There were twenty-five others and in looking at them he saw only the outer aspects of himself in reflection: small, wiry men, youngsters many of them, with that furtive look that living on the edge of extinction seems to confer. Though now it was a fact they lived as well as any German soldier. Besides the food, the barrack was warm. Other small privileges were granted: they were allowed to wash, to use latrines. They were given the field gray flannels of old Wehrmacht uniforms to wear and even issued the great woolen field coats from the Russian front. Here Shmuel experienced his first setback. He had the bad fortune to receive one that had been hacked with a bayonet. Its lining was ripped out. Until he solved this problem, he’d be cold.

And then the labor. Shmuel had had the SS for an employer before at the I. G. Farben synthetic fuel factory—the rule was double-time or die. Here, by contrast, the work was mostly listless digging of defensive positions and the excavation of foundations for concrete blockhouses under the less-than-attentive eye of a pipe-smoking SS sergeant, an amiable sort who didn’t seem to care if they progressed or not, just as long as he had his tobacco and a warm coat and no officers yelling at him. Once a prisoner had dropped his shovel in a fit of coughing. The sergeant looked at him, bent over and picked it up. He didn’t even shoot him.

One day, as the group fussed in the snow, a young corporal came out to the detail.

“Got two strong ones for me? Some heavy business in Shed Four,” Shmuel heard the young man ask. “Hans the Kike.”

The sergeant sucked reflectively on his pipe, belched out an aromatic cloud of smoke, and said, “Take the two on the end. The Russian works like a horse and the little Jew keeps moving to stay warm.” And he laughed.

Shmuel was surprised to discover himself “the little Jew.”

They were taken over to some kind of warehouse or supply shed just beyond the main building. Boxes were everywhere, vials, cans. A laboratory? wondered Shmuel uneasily. A small man in civilian clothes was already there. He did not glance at them at all, but turned to the corporal and said, “Here, those, have them load them up and get them over to the Main Center at once.”

“Yes, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” said the corporal, and when the civilian fellow left, the corporal turned to Shmuel and said quite conversationally, “Another Jew, you know. They’ll come for him one day.” Then he took them to the corner of the room, where two wooden crates were stacked, and with a wave of the hand indicated to the prisoners to load them onto a dolly.

Each crate weighed around seventy-five kilos and the prisoners strained to get them down and across the room to the dolly. Shmuel had the impression of liquid sloshing weightily as he and the Russian crab-walked the first one over, yet there was nothing loose about the contents. The twin runes of the SS flashed melodramatically in stencil across the lid, and next to them, also stamped, was the mighty German eagle, clutching a swastika. The designation WVHA also stood out on the wood and Shmuel wondered what it could mean, but he should not have been wondering, he should have been carrying, for the heel of his boot slipped and he felt the crate begin to tear loose from his fingers. He groped in panic, but it really got away from him and his eyes met the Russian’s in terror as the box fell.

It hit the cement floor with a thud and broke apart. The Russian dropped to his knees and began to weep piteously. Shmuel stood in fear. The room blurred in the urgency of his situation. Askew on the cement, a great fluffy pile of excelsior spewing out of it like guts, the box lay broken on the floor. An evil-smelling fluid spread smoothly into a puddle.

The civilian returned swiftly.

“You idiots,” he said to them. “And where were you while these fools were destroying valuable chemicals? Snoozing in the corner?”

“No, sir, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” lied the young corporal. “I was watching closely. But these Eastern Jews are shifty. I just wasn’t fast enough to prevent—”

The civilian cut him off with a laugh. “That’s all I get from the Waffen SS is excuses. Have them clean it up and try not to drop the other crates, all right?”

“Yes, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. My apologies for failing at—”

“All right, all right,” said the civilian disgustedly, turning.

When the civilian left, the SS corporal hit Shmuel across the neck, just above the shoulder, with his fist, a downward blow. It drove him to the floor. The boy kicked him, hard, in the ribs. He knew he was in a desperately dangerous situation. He’d seen a KZ guard in ’44 knock down an elderly rabbi in much the same way. The man, baffled, glasses twisted, raised his hands to ward off other blows; this insolence so enraged the stupid young soldier that he snatched out his pistol and shot the man through the forehead. The body lay in the square for three days, head split apart, until they’d removed it with tongs.

“You stinking kike pig,” screamed the boy. He kicked Shmuel again. He was almost out of control. “You piece of Jew shit.” Shmuel could hear him sobbing in anger. He bent over and grabbed Shmuel by the throat, twisting him upward so that their faces were inches apart.

“Surprises ahead for you, Jew-shit. Der Meisterschuster, the Master Shoemaker, has a nice candy delight for you.” His face livid and contorted, he drew back. “That’s right, Jew-shit, a real surprise for you.” He spoke in a clipped Prussian accent hard and quick, that Shmuel, whose basic Yiddish was a derivation of the more languid Bavarian German, had difficulty understanding when spoken so quickly.

The corporal backed off, color returning to his face.

“All right, up! Up!” he shouted.

Shmuel climbed up quickly. He was trembling badly.

“Now get this mess cleaned up.”

Shmuel and the Russian gathered the excelsior into a wad of newspaper and mopped the floor dry. They also retrieved the broken glass and then, carefully, finished loading the cart.

“Bravo! Fine! What heroes!” said the boy sarcastically. “Now get your asses out of here before I kick them again!”

Shmuel had been playing for this second for quite some time. He’d seen it from the very first moments. He’d thought about how he’d do it and resolved to act quickly and with courage. He took a deep breath, reached down and picked up the wad of newspaper and stuffed it into his coat.

With the bundle pressing against his stomach, he stepped into the cold. He waited for a call to return; it didn’t come. Keeping his eyes straight ahead, he rejoined the labor detail.

Not until late that night did Shmuel risk examining his treasure. He could hear steady, heavy breathing; at last he felt safe. You never knew who’d sell you for a cigarette, a sliver of cheese. In the darkness, he opened the paper carefully, trying to keep it from rattling. Inside, now matted and balled, the clump of excelsior was still damp from the fluid. The stuff was like mattress ticking, or horsehair, thick and knotted. Eagerly, his fingers pulled tufts out and kneaded them, until he could feel the individual strands.

There was no question of knitting; he had no loom and no skill. But he spread it out and, working quietly and quickly in the dark, began to thread it into the lining of the greatcoat. He kept at it until nearly dawn, inserting the bunches of packing into the coat. When at last there was no more, he examined what he had made. It was lumpy and uneven, no masterpiece; but what did that matter? It was, he knew, significantly warmer.

Shmuel lay back and felt a curious thing move through his body, a feeling long dead to his bones. At first he thought he might be coming down with a sickness and the feeling might be fever spreading through his body. But then he recognized it: pleasure.

For the first time in years he began to think he might beat them. But when he slept, his nightmares had a new demon in them: a master shoemaker, driving hobnails into his flesh.

A week or so later, he was in the trench, digging, when he heard voices above him. Obeying an exceedingly stupid impulse, he looked up.

Standing on the edge, their features blanked out by the winter sun, two officers chatted. A younger one was familiar, a somewhat older one not. Or was he? Shmuel had been dreaming all these nights of the Master Shoemaker and his candy delight. This man? No, ridiculous, not this bland fellow standing easily with a cigarette, discussing technical matters. He wore the same faded camouflage jackets they all had, and baggy green trousers, boots with leggings and a squashed cap with a skull on it. Quickly Shmuel turned back to his shovel, but as he dropped his face, he felt the man’s eyes snap onto him.

“Einer Jud?” Shmuel heard the man ask.

The younger fellow called to the sergeant. The sergeant answered Yes.

Now I’m in for it, Shmuel thought.

“Bring him up,” said the officer.

Strong hands clapped onto Shmuel instantly. He was dragged out of the trench and made to stand before the officer. He grabbed his hat and looked at his feet, waiting for the worst.

“Look at me,” said the officer.

Shmuel looked up. He had the impression of pale eyes in a weathered face which, beneath the imprint of great strain, was far younger than he expected.

“You are one of the chosen people?”

“Y-yes, sir, your excellency.”

“From out East?”

“Warsaw, your excellency.”

“You are an intellectual. A lawyer, a teacher?”

“A writer, most honored sir.”

“Well, you’ll have plenty to write about after the war, won’t you?” The other Germans laughed.

“Yes, sir. Y-yes, sir.”

“But for now, you’re not used to this hard work?”

“N-no, sir,” he replied. He could not stop stuttering. His heart pounded in his chest. He’d never been so close to a German big shot before.

“Everybody must work here. That is the German way.” He had lightless eyes. He didn’t look as if he’d ever cried.

“Yes, most honored sir.”

“All right,” the officer said. “Put him back. I just wanted the novel experience of taking one of them out of a pit.”

After the laughter, the sergeant said, “Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” and he knocked Shmuel sprawling into the trench. “Back to work, Jew. Hurry, hurry.”

The officer was gone quickly, moving off with the younger chap. Shmuel stole a glimpse of the man striding off, calm and full of decisiveness. Could this simple soldier be the Master Shoemaker? The face: not remotely unusual, a trifle long, the eyes quick but drab, the nose bony, the lips thin. The overall aspect perfunctorily military. Not, Shmuel concluded, an unusual fellow to find in the middle of a war.

And yet because he seemed so easily in command and it was so clear that the others deferred to him, Shmuel took to thinking of the man as the Shoemaker.

Then a day came when the Germans did not fetch them for work. Shmuel awoke at his leisure, in light. As he blinked in it, he was filled with dread. The prisoners lived so much by routine that a single variation terrified them. The others felt it too.

Finally the sergeant came by.

“Stay inside today, boys, take a holiday. The Reich is rewarding you for your loyal service.” He grinned at his joke. “Important people crawling about today.” And then he was gone.

Late in the afternoon, two heavy trucks pulled into the yard. They halted next to the concrete building and hard-looking men with automatic guns dismounted and deployed around the entrance. Shmuel caught a glimpse and stepped away from the window. He’d seen their type before: police commandos who shot Jews in pits.

“Look,” said a Pole, in wonder. “A big boss.”

Shmuel looked again, and saw a large black sedan parked next to the truck; pennants hung off it limply; it was spotted with mud, yet shiny and huge.

A prisoner said, “I heard who it is. I heard them talking. They were very nervous, very excited.”

“Hitler himself?”

“Not that big. But a big one still.”

“Who, damn you? Tell.”

“The Man of Oak.”

“What? What did you say?”

“Man of Oak. I heard him say it. And the other—”

“It’s crazy. You misunderstood.”

“It’s the truth.”

“You shtetl Jews. You’ll believe anything. Go on, get out of here. Leave me in peace.”

The car and the police commandos remained until after dark, and later that night, a crackling rang in the distance.

“Somebody’s shooting,” said a man.

“Look! A battle.”

In the distance, light sprayed through the night. Flames glowed. The reports came in the hundreds. It didn’t look like a battle to Shmuel. He recalled the sky over the crematorium, shot with sparks and licks of flame. The SS was feeding the Hungarian Jews into the ovens. The smell of ash and shit filled the sky. No bird would fly through it.

Abruptly the shooting stopped.

In the morning the fancy vehicles were gone. But things did not return to normal. The prisoners were formed into a column and marched off along a heavily rutted road through the forest. It was February now, and much of the snow had melted, but patches of it remained; in the meantime there had been rain, and the road was mud which congealed on Shmuel’s boots. The woods on either side of the road loomed up, dense and chilly. To Shmuel they were the woods of an ugly German Märchen, full of trolls and dwarves and witches, into which children disappeared. He shivered, colder than he should have been. These people loved their dark forests, the shadows, the intricate webs of dark and light.

A mile or so away, the woods yielded to a broad field, yellow and scaly with snow. At one end of it, the earth mounted into a wall and at the other, the nearer, a concrete walkway lay and a few huts huddled in the trees.

“Boys,” said the sergeant, “we had a little show out here last night for our visitor and we’d like your help in cleaning up.”

The guards handed out wooden crates and directed the prisoners to harvest the bits of brass that showed in the mud alongside the walkway. Shmuel, prying the grimy things out—they were, it turned out, used cartridge cases—felt his knees beginning to go numb in the cold, his fingers beginning to sting. He noted the Gothic printing running across the box in his hand. Again, the melodramatic bird and the double flashes of the SS. He wondered idly what the next gibberish meant: “7.92mm X 33 (Kurz)” read one line; under it “G. C. HAENEL, SUHL,” and under it still a third, “STG-44.” The Germans were rationalists in everything; they wanted to stick a designation on every object in the universe. Maybe that’s why he’d walked around marked JUD the last year or so.

“He certainly fired enough of the stuff,” said the pipe smoker to one of the other guards.

“We could have used some at Kursk,” said another man bitterly. “Now they shoot it off for big shots. It’s crazy. No wonder the Americans are on the Rhine.”

This exercise was repeated several times in the next few weeks. Once, several prisoners were jerked from their sleep and marched out. The story they told the next morning was an interesting one. After they’d picked up the spent shells, the Germans had been especially hearty to them, treated them like comrades. A bottle had even been passed around to them.

“German stuff.”

“Schnapps?”

“That’s it. Fiery. An instant overcoat. Takes the chill out of your bones.”

The Big Boss—Shmuel knew it was the Shoemaker—was there too, the man said. He’d walked among them, asking them if they were getting enough to eat. He handed out cigarettes, Russian ones, and chocolates.

“Friendly fellow, not like some I’ve seen,” said the man. “Looked me square in the eye too.”

But Shmuel wondered why they’d need the shells back in the night.

A week, perhaps two, passed, though without reference to clock or calendar it was hard to tell. Rain, sun, a little snow one night. Was there more activity around the concrete building? More night firings? The Shoemaker seemed everywhere, almost always with the young officer. Shmuel had never seen the civilian—the one they said was a kike—again. Had he been taken away like the boy said? And he began to worry about this “Man of Oak.” What could it mean? Shmuel started to feel especially uneasy, if only because the others were so pleased with the way things were going.

“Plenty to eat, work’s not so bad, and one day, you’ll see, the Americans’ll show up and it’ll be all over.”

But Shmuel began to worry. He trusted his feelings. He worried especially about the night. It was the night that frightened him. Bad things happened in the night, especially to Jews. The night held special terrors for Jews; the Germans were drawn to it unhealthily. What was their phrase? Nacht und Nebel. Night and fog, the components of obliteration.

Light flashed through the barrack. Shmuel, dazed out of his sleep, saw torch beams in the darkness, and shadows. The SS men got them awake roughly.

“Boys,” the pipe smoker crooned in the dark, “work to do. Have to earn our bread. It’s the German way.”

Shmuel pulled the field coat around him and filed out with the others. His pupils were slow in adjusting and he had trouble making out what was occurring. The guards trudged them through the mud. They had left the compound. Guards with automatic guns prowled on either side of the column. Shmuel peered up through the fir canopy. Cold light from dead stars reached his eyes. The dark was satiny, alluring, the stars abundant. A wind howled. He pulled the coat tighter. Thank God for it.

They reached the firing range. Fellows were all about, a crowd. Everybody was there. Shmuel could sense their warmth, hear them breathing. All the SS boys; the Shoemaker himself, smoking a cigarette. Shmuel thought he saw the civilian too, standing a little apart with two or three other men.

“This way, lads,” said the sergeant, leading them into the field. “Brass all over the place. Can’t leave it here, the General Staff’d kick our ass for sure. Hot coffee, schnapps, cigarettes for all when the job’s done, just like before.”

There was no moon. The night was dark and pure, pressing down. The prisoners spread out in a line and faced back toward the Germans.

“It’s in front of you boys, brass, tons of it. Have to get it up before the snow.”

Snow? It was clear tonight.

Shmuel obediently worked his fingers over the frozen ground, found a shell. He found another. It was so cold out. He looked around. The guards had left. The prisoners were alone in the field. The trees were a dark blur in the far distance. Stars towered above them, dust and freezing gas and spinning firewheels. Far off, unreachable. The field was another infinity. It seemed to stretch forever. They were all alone.

“Hey, he’s sleeping,” said someone, laughing.

Another man slid himself carefully on the ground, shoulders flat to the earth.

“You jokers are going to get us all in trouble.” The same voice laughed.

Another lay down.

Another.

They fell relaxed, turned in slightly, tucking the knees under, seeming to pause at the waist then gently lurching forward.

Shmuel stood.

“They’re shooting us,” somebody said quite prosaically. “They’re shoo—” The sentence stopped on a bullet.

Prayers disturbed the night; there was no other sound.

A bullet struck the man closest to him in the throat, driving him backward. Another, slumping, began to gurgle and gasp as his lungs flooded. But most perished quickly and silently, struck dead center, brain or heart.

It is here. The night has come, Shmuel thought. Nacht, nacht, pressing in, claiming him. He always knew it would come and now it was here. He knew it would be better to close his eyes but could not.

A man ran until a bullet found him and punched him to the ground. A man on his knees had the top of his head blown off. Drops landed wet and hot on Shmuel.

He alone was standing. He looked around. Someone was moaning. He thought he heard some breathing. It had taken less than thirty seconds. The shooting was all over now.

He stood in the middle of the field, surrounded by corpses. Now he was really alone.

A shape in the dark moved. Then others. Shmuel could see soldiers picking their way toward him in the darkness. He stood very still. The Germans began to kneel at the bodies.

“Right in the heart!”

“This one in the head. That Repp fellow really can shoot, eh?”

“Hold that noise down, damn you,” cried a voice Shmuel recognized as the pipe smoker’s. “The officers will be out here soon.”

A soldier was standing six feet from him.

“What? Say, who’s that?” the man said in bewilderment.

“Hauser, I said keep the noise down. The offi—”

“He’s alive!” bellowed the soldier, and began to tear at his gun.

Shmuel willed himself to run. But he couldn’t.

Then he was fleeing blindly across the field.

“Damn, I saw a prisoner.”

“Where?”

“Stop that fellow. Stop that man.”

“Shoot him. Shoot him.”

“Where, I don’t see a damned thing.”

Other voices mingled in confusion. A shot rang out, loud because it was so close. More shouts.

Shmuel had just made it into the trees when the lights came on. The Germans were pinned in a harsh, white glare, losing more seconds. Shmuel caught a glimpse of the Shoemaker moving fast into the light, automatic gun in one hand. A whistle shrilled. More lights flickered on. There was a siren.

It was at this moment, as he seized a moment’s rest, that a revelation hit him. A moment of perfect, shimmering lucidity enveloped him and a truth that had these many months been just beyond knowing at last stood revealed. His heart tripped in excitement.

But no time now. He turned and lurched into the forest. He began to run. Branches cut at him like sabers. Once he tripped. He could hear Germans behind him, much commotion and light; the glare of heavy arc lamps filled the sky. He thought he heard airplanes too, at any rate some kind of heavy engine, trucks perhaps or motorcycles.

Then the lights were out, or gone. He was utterly confused and quite frightened. How long had he been gone and how far had he traveled? And where was he going? And, would he be caught? Miraculously, his feet seemed to have found a path in the heavy undergrowth. He wanted badly to rest but knew he couldn’t. Thank God the food and labor had given him strength for all this, and the coat the warmth. He was a lucky fellow. He plunged on.

The sun was just up when Shmuel finally lay down in the silence of the great forest. He lay shuddering convulsively. He seemed to have come to a vault in the trees, a cathedral of space formed by interlocking branches. The silence was thunderous in here; he interrupted it only with his breathing. He felt himself at last escaping into sleep.

His final thought was not for his deliverance—who could question such caprices?—but for his discovery.

Meisterschuster, master shoemaker, he heard, or thought he’d heard. But the boy was a North German, he spoke fast and clipped and the circumstances of the moment were intense. Now Shmuel realized the fellow had said something just a syllable shy of Meisterschuster. He’d said der Meisterschütze.

The Master Sniper.

2

Caparisoned in elegant damp Burberry, imperially slim, impossibily dapper, with just the faintest smudge of ginger moustache to set off his boyish though firm features, a British major named Antony Outhwaithe bore down on a large target that hunched behind a typewriter in an upper-story office.

“Hello, chum,” called the major, knowing the American hated the chum business, which by now, winter of ’45, had in London become quite tiresome, “greetings from Twelveland.”

The American looked up; a bafflement fell across his open features, just the merest foreboding of confusion.

His name was Leets and he was a captain in the Office of Strategic Services. He wore olive drab wool and silver bars and looked unhappy. His crew cut had grown out thatchily and his face had accumulated pockets and wattles of fat. He had just been typing the final draft of what was certain to be the most unread document in London that month, a report on the new grip configuration of the Falschirmjaeger-42, the German short-stroke paratroop carbine.

“Something right up your alley,” the major sang out gleefully, and without fear of retribution. He enjoyed considerable advantage over the bloke: he was smaller and a few years older to begin with, cut on roughly half the scale. He was quicker, wittier, more ironic, better connected. His employers, the Special Operation Executive of MI-6, were a better bunch than Leets’s; and finally, he’d once upon a time saved the American’s life. That was back in the shooting war, in June of ’44.

Leets, a beat behind already, queried in his reedy Midwestern voice, “Small arms, you mean?”

“That is what you do in the war, is it not?” asked Tony.

Leets ignored the sarcasm and received from Tony’s briefcase a tatty-looking scrap of yellow paper, almost the texture of parchment, as though it had passed through many hands.

“Been around, huh?” Leets said.

“Yes, lots of chaps have seen it. It’s not terribly interesting. Still, since it is guns and bullets, I thought you might care to have a look.”

“Thanks. Looks like a—”

“It’s a telex.”

“Yeah, some kind of shipping order or something.” He scanned the thing. “Haenel, eh? Funny. STG forty-fours.”

“Funny, yes. But significant? Or not? You’ll give us your evaluation, of course.”

“I may have some things to say about it.”

“Good.”

“How fast?”

“No rush, chum. By eight tonight.”

Swell, Leets thought. But he had nothing to do anyway.

“Okay, let me dig out the specs on the thing and—” But he was talking to air. Outhwaithe had vanished.

Leets slowly drew out a Lucky, lit it off his Zippo and went to work.

Leets was a biggish man, not slobby fat, but ample, with a pleasantly open American face. He was far into his twenties, which was old for the rank of captain he wore in two bars on his collar, especially in a war in which twenty-two-year-old brigadier generals led thousands of airplanes deep into enemy territory.

He looked like a studious athlete or an athletic scholar and now that he limped, compliments of the Third Reich, and occasionally went white as the pain flashed unexpectedly across him, he’d acquired a grave, almost desperate air. His many nervous habits—unpleasant ones, licking his lips, muttering, gesturing overtheatrically, blinking constantly—half suggested dissipation or indolence, though by nature he was an austere man, a Midwesterner, not given to moodiness or mopery. Yet lately, as the war roared by him, someone else’s invention, he’d been both moody and mopey.

Now, alone in the office—another source of bitterness, for he’d been assigned a sergeant, but the kid, an energetic young beast, had a tendency to disappear on him at key moments such as this one—he brought the telex close to his eyes in an unselfconscious parody of bookish intellectual and, squinting melodramatically, attempted to master its secrets.

It was a pale carbon of a shipping order out of the Reich Rail Office, a part of the Wehrmacht Transport Command, authorizing the G. K. Haenel Fabrik, or factory, near Suhl, in northern Germany, to ship a batch of twelve Sturmgewehr-44’s, formerly called Maschinenpistole-44’s, cross-country to something called, if Leets understood the nomenclature of the form, Anlage Elf, or Installation 11. The 44 was a hot assault rifle, tested in Russia, that had lately been turning up on the Western front in the hands of Waffen SS troops, paratroopers, armored-vehicle commanders—glory boys, hard cores, professionals. Leets had a memory of the thing too—he’d lain in high grass on a ridge above a burning tank convoy while Waffen SS kids from an armored division called “Das Reich” had poured heavy STG-44 fire into the area. He could still hear the cracks as the slugs broke the sound barrier just above his head. It fired a smaller bullet than the standard rifle—it hadn’t the range—but at higher velocity; and it was lighter and tougher and could pump out rounds at full automatic. Leets shivered in the memory: lying there, his leg bleeding like sin all over the place, the men near him dead or dying, the smell of burning gas and summer flowers heavy in his nose and the thatchy figures of the camouflaged SS men moving up the slope, firing as they came. His throat was dry.

Leets lit a butt. He had one going, but what the hell? It was another habit gone totally out of control.

Okay, where was I?

Curious, yes, quite curious. STG-44’s went out from Haenel all the time, but in larger quantities. They came off the assembly line in the hundreds, the thousands, but distribution was always through normal channels, ultimately in the hands of local commanders. Why bother to make a big deal of shipping rifles across a Germany whose railway network was one huge target of opportunity for fighter-bombers? What’s more, he realized that the form had the top rail priority, DE, and Geheime Stadatten, top secret, and the magenta eagle of state secrecy pounded onto it.

Wasn’t that an odd one?

They were cranking these things out by the thousands—that was one of the charms of the 44, for unlike the MP-40 or the Gew-41, it could be quickly assembled from prestamped parts, without any time-consuming milling. Their ease of manufacture was part of their appeal. So all of a sudden they were top secret? Goddamnedest thing.

Leets drew back from the yellow sheet and squirmed at the effort of trying to apply his thoughts to these matters. It was a big mistake, because a chip of German metal deep in the core of his leg rubbed the wrong way, flicking against a nerve.

Pain jacked up through his body.

Leets rocketed out of his seat and yelped. He felt free to let it take him because he was alone. Among others, he simply clenched and clammed up, whitening, looking at his feet.

The pain finally passed, as it always did. He limped back to his chair and gingerly reclaimed it. But his concentration had been seriously damaged, more and more of a problem these recent days, and he knew if he didn’t act fast the whole fucked-up scenario of that one battle would unreel before his eyes. It was no favorite of his.

So Leets grabbed back into his mind for something to put between himself and the day Jedburgh Team Casey caught it. He came up with football, which he’d played at Northwestern, ’38, ’39 and ’40. He had been an end, and ends didn’t do much except knock people down, a task made significantly easier because he’d played next to NU’s all-American tackle Roy Reed, and Reed, in the ’40 season, had picked up the nickname “Nazi” after the Blitzkrieg of the spring, because of the way he crashed through and laid people out. But Leets had once caught a touchdown pass—perhaps the happiest moment of his life—and now he resurrected the glory of that moment as a shield against the panic of this one.

He remembered an object coming wobbling out of the dusk of a Dyche Stadium afternoon; it was way off the true, a lumbering, ungainly thing that seemed far gone if it could reach him at all through the gauntlet of flailing arms he saw it must travel. The only reason the ball was coming at Leets was that a hand-off to the right halfback who was supposed to follow Reed into the end zone for a winning touchdown had somehow missed connections, and the quarterback, a big, stupid boy named Lindemeyer, a Phi Delt, had taken his only available option, which was to toss the thing to the first guy in purple he saw.

Leets saw it bending toward the earth, miraculously untouched by the half a dozen hands that had had a shot at it, and he had no memory of catching, only the sensation of clasping it to his chest while people jumped on him. Later, he’d figured that he must have been in midair when he made the grab, defying gravity, and that his normally unwilling fingers, clumsy, blunt things, had acquired in the urgency of the instant a physical genius almost beyond his imagination. But in the exultation, none of this was clear: only sensation, as joy flooded through him, and people pounded him on the back.

Leets took another stab on the Lucky. He readjusted his reading lamp—he must have knocked it askew when he popped up—and looked for an ashtray amid a clutter of pencils, curling German weapons instruction charts, sticks of gum, assorted breech parts, cups of cold tea, and cough drops—Roger, his sergeant, had had a cold a few weeks back. What was I looking for? Ashtray, ashtray. He slid it out from the pile that had absorbed it just as a worm of ash on the end of his cigarette toppled off into gray haze and settled across the table.

The office was on the upper floor of an undistinguished building on Ford’s Place near Bloomsbury Square, a cold-water flat converted to commercial use sometime in the Twenties by knocking down most of the interior walls and adding an elevator—lift, lift, lift!, he was always forgetting—which never worked anyway. The roof leaked. There was no central heating and Roger never remembered to keep the coal heater stoked so it was always cold, and every time a V-2 or a doodle touched down anywhere within ten square miles, which was frequent these days, a pall of dust drifted down to coat everything.

Leets squinted again at the German document, as if drawing a bead on it. Its bland surface revealed nothing new. Or did it? Holding it at an angle into the light, he could make out two faint impressions on the paper. Someone had stamped the original with a great deal of zeal; down here on the bottom carbon only a trace of the stamper’s enthusiasm remained, fainter than a watermark. Surely the Brits would have some sort of Scotland Yard hocus-pocus for bringing up the impressions. Still, he laid the thing out and, remembering some Boy Scout stuff, ran the flat of a soft lead pencil across the ridges just as gently as he knew how, as if he were stroking the inside of a woman’s thigh. Susan’s thigh, to be exact, though thoughts of her were of no use now—but that was another problem.

Two images revealed themselves in the gray sheen of the rubbed lead, one familiar, one not. The old friend read simply WaPrüf 2, which Leets knew to be the infantry weapons department of the Heereswaffenamt Prüfwesson, the Army testing office. These were the boys who’d cooked up the little surprises of late that had made his job so interesting: that junky little people’s machine pistol, the Volksturmgewehr, manufactured for a couple of dimes’ worth of junk metal, it fired 300 nine-mills a minute; and they also had an imitation Sten out, for behind-the-lines operations, or after the war; and a final dizziness, something called a Krummlauf modification, a barrel-deflection device mounted on the STG-44, which enabled it to fire around corners. The line on German engineering had always been that it was pedantic and thorough; but Leets didn’t think so. A wild strain of genius ran through it. They were miles ahead in most things, the rockets, the jets, the guns. It made him uneasy. If they could come up with stuff like that (a gun for shooting round corners!), who knew what else they were capable of?

Leets was by profession an intelligence officer; his specialty was German firearms. He ran an office—obscure to be sure, not found in any of the mighty eight-hundred-page histories—called the Small Weapons Evaluation Team, which in turn was part of a larger outfit, a Joint Anglo-American Technical Intelligence Committee, sponsored in its American half by Leets’s OSS and in its Anglo half by Major Outhwaithe’s SOE. So SWET worked for JAATIC, and Leets for Outhwaithe. That was Leets’s war now: an office full of dusty blueprints. It was no-SWET, as Roger was so fond of pointing out (Leets’s joke actually; Roger was a great borrower).

But here was WaPrüf 2 involved in a shipment of twelve rifles across Germany. Now what could be so fascinating about those particular twelve rifles? It bothered him, because it was so un-German. Twelveland, as the Brits called the place in their intelligence jargon, was a maze of intricacies: bureaus, departments—Amts, the Germans called them—desks, subdesks—not at all unlike London in this respect—but the place was in its way always tidy, ordered. Even with the bombs raining down, most of her cities wrecked, millions dead, Russian armies squeezing in from the East, American and British ones poised in the West, no food, no fuel, still the paper work moved like clockwork. Except, all of a sudden, here was this obscure little agency that nobody except himself probably and some two or three others in this town had ever even heard of, involved in some goofy business.

It bothered him; but what bothered him more was the other stamp he’d brought out: WVHA.

Now what the hell was WVHA?

Another bureau presumably, but one he’d never heard of; another tidy little office buried away in downtown Berlin.

An idea was beginning to grow in Leets’s mind, dangerously. He lit another cigarette. He knew somewhere in the files he had a real good breakdown on the STG-44. It was an ingenious weapon, a Sturmgewehr, assault rifle, cross between the best parts of a submachine gun, firepower and lightness, and a rifle, accuracy, range. He supposed he’d have to dig the goddamned stuff out himself; he remembered how when they’d gotten their hands on one they’d broken it down to the pins and put it together again, taken it out to the range and shot up a battalion of targets, and put together an absolutely brilliant technical profile which had been shipped up to JAATIC and routinely ignored.

Leets went over to the files and began to prowl. But just as he got the report out, another thought came flooding over him.

Serial numbers.

Goddamn, serial numbers.

He rushed back to the telex. Now where the hell was it?

A stab of panic but then he saw the yellow corner sticking out from under a dog-eared copy of Bill Fielding’s Tournament Tennis and the Spin of the Ball—Roger’s bible—and he knocked the book aside and seized the telex.

Serial numbers.

Serial numbers.

Leets stood at the window with the lights out, even though the blackout was officially over and London was now into a phase called dim-out. He looked over the skyline, drawn not long ago by the impact of a V-2. Sometimes they burned, sometimes they didn’t. This one had come down to the north a half a mile or so, beyond, Leets hoped, the Hospital for Sick Children on Great Ormond Street, maybe as far off as Coram Fields. But there’d be nothing to burn if it went down in that rolling meadow and he could see a smudge—orange thumbprint—on the horizon; so clearly there was fire. Thing must have hit even farther out, beyond Gray’s Inn Road and the Royal Free Hospital. He’d have to walk out there sometime and see.

The rockets were a curious phenomenon for Leets. They were big bullets really; even the Germans acknowledged this. The V-2, technical designation A4, was a Wehrmacht project, administered by the SS, interpreted as artillery. A bullet, in other words. The doodles, V-1’s, were Luftwaffe, aircraft.

Consider: a bullet as big as a building fired from a rifle in Holland or Twelveland itself at a target in London. Jesus; Leets felt a shiver run through him. It was different from being bombed or shelled randomly; some fucking Kraut sniper was scoping in on you through the dark and the distance, this feeling of being watched, strange; a weirdness traveled his spine, a chill, but he realized that it was only a draft and a split second later that the door had been opened.

“Should have knocked, sorry,” said Tony.

“I wanted to see where they parked their freight tonight. Looked like it went down near the hospital, the one for kids.”

“Actually, it went down much farther out, in Islington. Could we, chum, do you mind?” Gesturing Close-the-curtains while he turned on the switch.

“You’re early,” said Leets. It was half past seven.

“Bit ahead of schedule, yes.”

“Okay,” Leets said, taking his seat and pulling out the telex and assorted other items, “this is funny.”

“Make me laugh.”

“They’re shipping a special consignment of rifles across Germany. Now our best estimate is that maybe eighty thousand of the things have been built since Hitler gave ’em the green light in ’43. Most of the eighty thousand came off the Haenel line at Suhl, although the Mauser works at Oberndorf did a run of ten thousand before we bombed out the line. The markings are different, and the plastic in the grip was cheaper, chipped more easily.”

Outhwaithe, in Burberry, collar upturned, hair slicked wetly back, face calm, eyes dead-fish cold, studied him in a way his class of Briton had been perfecting for seven hundred years.

Leets absorbed the glare unshaken, and went on. “The serial numbers run eight digits, plus the manufacturing designation. Do you follow?”

“Perfectly, dear fellow.”

“Now they always use two dummy numbers. So you’ve got two dummy numbers, then the five viable ones which indicate which part of the run it was, then another dummy, then the manufacturing code. The point of the dummy integers is to make us think they’re manufacturing them in the millions. They do it on all their small stuff, it’s so stupid. Are you with me? Am I going too fast?”

“I’m making a manful effort to stay abreast.”

“According to this order”—he held up the telex—“here you’ve got no digits at all. The serial-number blank has been crossed out.”

“If that is supposed to be a Major Intelligence Breakthrough, I’m afraid I rather miss the thrust of it.”

“The Germans keep records. Always. I can show you orders on stuff going back to the Franco-Prussian War. The whole stamping process is built into their manufacturing system, in their assembly lines. You see it everywhere, Krupp, Mauser, ERMA, Walther, Haenel. It’s part of their mentality, the way they organize the world.”

“Yes, I quite agree. But you were going to explain to me the significance of all this.” Tony did not at all look impressed.

“These twelve rifles: they’re handmade. There is no serial number. Or at least the barrel and breech, the key components, the numbered parts.”

“Which means?”

“For a production-line piece, the forty-four is great. Best gun in the war. Can cut a horse in two at four hundred meters. In Russia you could get three PPSH’s for a forty-four. But because it’s a production-line piece, you can’t get a real tight group. You’re shooting a small seven-point-nine-two-millimeter bullet, kurz, their word for short. It’s not a rifle that offers a great deal in the way of precision.”

“Until now.”

“Until now. Taking into consideration this is a high-priority project, taking into consideration WaPrüf 2 is cooperating with this outfit WVHA that I’ve never heard of, and taking into consideration they’re shipping the guns to some secret location down south, this Anlage Elf, I would say it’s obvious.”

“I see,” said Tony, but Leets could tell his presentation was not having the desired effect.

He played his trump card.

“They’re going to try and kill someone. Someone big, I’d say. They’re going to snipe him.”

But Tony, once again, topped him.

“Rubbish,” he said.

3

Shmuel was totally of the forest now. He was part of it, a sly, filthy animal, nocturnal, quick to panic, impelled into motion by ravenous hunger, shivering himself to sleep each morning in small caves, tufts of brush, against rocks. He ate roots and berries and wandered almost helplessly through the deep stillness, guided by only a primitive sense of direction. His journey was bounded by mountains. He was terrified of their bare slopes. What would he do up there on those rounded humps, except die? So he skirted them, threading his way through the densely wooded highlands at their base. Ten days now, twelve, maybe two weeks.

But it was a losing proposition and he knew it. He lost too much each day and the disgusting stuff he made himself eat could never replace it. He was running down, the fat and fiber and muscle he’d picked up in the camp melting away. The forest would win. He’d known it always. He’d pass out from weakness, die in wet leaves next to an obscure German stream.

His clothes had shredded, though into German tatters, not Jewish ones. The boots had disintegrated partially. The trousers were frayed and shiny. The coat was the only thing left. Stuffed with excelsior, it kept enough of the cold out and enough of the wet off. It forestalled sickness. Sickness was death. If you were too weak to move, you died. Motion was life, that was the lesson here. You kept moving. God would show you no pity.

One night rain came, a full storm. Shmuel cowered and could not move. Lightning bounded across the horizon behind the screen of trees, and the thunder was mighty, a roar that rose and fell and never went wholly away.

The next day, and the next, he smelled a tang to the air, sulfurous almost. And once he came upon an opening in the trees, where the open space seemed to fill with light; but this abundance of perspective filled him with horror and he lurched ahead, deeper into the wet trees.

I hope it doesn’t freeze, he thought. If it freezes I die. If I run into soldiers, I die. If I sleep too long, I die.

There were many, many ways to die, and he could not think of a single one to survive.

Several times he crossed roads and once he found himself on the grounds of some hotel or inn or something, but the thought of a caretaker or soldiers terrified him, and again he ran deeper into the forest.

But his strength was fleeing quickly now. It had held for so long, augmented by berries and roots and lichens, but in the last day or two his weakness seemed to have increased enormously.

Finally he crawled from sleep knowing he was doomed. He was too weak. There’d been no food he could hold down, the forest here was a thicket of old bones, clacking in the wind. Leafless trees white and knuckled like gripping hands, millions of them.

I am the last, he thought, the last Jew.

The ground here was matted with dead leaves into a kind of cold scum; it was not even dirt.

He lay on his back and looked up into the trees. Through the canopy he could make out chinks of blue. He tried to crawl, but could not.

At last they got me. How long did I last? Almost three weeks. I’ll bet that German would never have thought I could last three weeks. I must have come nearly a hundred kilometers. He tried to think of a death prayer to say, but he had not said prayers in years and could think of none. He tried to think of some poetry to recite. This was a monumental occasion, was it not? Certainly a poem was called for. But his mind was empty of words. Words were no good, that was their trouble. He knew lots of words, how to string them together and make them do all kinds of fancy tricks, and they had not done him one bit of good since 1939 and now, when he needed them most, they let him down.

He was at last in extremis, a matter of great curiosity to all writers. It was said that if you had the answers to certain questions posed by these final moments, you could write a great book. Conrad for one had tried; no surprise it was a Polish specialty. But Shmuel did not find his own imminent destruction particularly interesting. As a phenomenon it lacked resonance. The sensations, though extreme, proved predictable; almost anybody could imagine them. A great melancholy, chiefly; and pain, much pain, though not so bad now as earlier, pushing ahead though hungry and exhausted. Indeed, this last aspect of the ritual was proving quite pleasant. He at last began to feel warm, though perhaps it was rather more numb. It occurred to him that the body died in degrees, limbs first, mind last; and how horrible to lie alive in brain but dead in body for days and days. But the mind would be kind; it would fog and blur, sink into a kind of haze. He’d seen it at the camps.

He began to hallucinate.

He saw a man of oak, giant, sprouts and twigs and green fronds springing from a wooden face, old and desiccated. Something pagan, loamy, fairy-tale quality. The fantastic was everywhere. Imps and goblins whirred about. And he saw the head German, the big shot, the Master Sniper: yet it was any face, tired, altogether uninteresting. He tried to conjure up his own past, but lacked the energy. What of the people he loved? They were gone anyway; if he regretted his death, it was only that their memories would no longer live. But certain things could not be helped. He thought maybe God had had a purpose in sparing him by miracle back there in the black field when the shooting happened. But this was another jest.

As if to drive home this idea, the last seconds of the scene of the death he should have had began to unreel before his eyes. He could almost see soldiers moving toward him, out of the shadows. They came with great caution, without rush.

An image filled the sky above him.

A man stood with a rifle.

Shmuel waited for the bullet.

Instead, he heard words in a language he knew: English.

“Freeze, fuckface.”

Other forms swirled above him.

“Jesus, pitiful,” somebody said.

“Hey, Lieutenant. Nelson caught the sorriest-looking Kraut I ever saw.”

And someone else said, “Another fucking mouth to feed.”

4

T-5 Roger Evans, Leets’s nominal assistant, counseled practicality.

“Forget it,” he advised. He was an insouciantly handsome teenager who quite naturally assumed arrogant postures and spoke in a voice cold with an authority he in no way possessed. The kid also knew how to dress: his shiny paratrooper boots rested against an edge of a table, propelling him outward, on the back two legs of a chair, delicately poised. His Ike jacket, cut tight, emphasized his athletic frame, and his service cap perched snidely on an angle down across his forehead. Leets had loathed him at once but in the months they’d worked together—“work” was an entirely inaccurate word, in Roger’s case—he’d come finally to accept the kid as basically harmless.

Rog threaded his hands together on the back of his neck, and continued in his instruction, bobbing all the while.

“That’s all, Captain. Forget it. No skin off your nose.” Nothing was ever skin off Roger’s nose. What Leets found especially irritating this midwinter morning was that Roger was probably right.

Leets said nothing. He fiddled with some papers at his desk: a field report on the double-magazine feed system WaPrüf 2 had improvised for the MP-40 submachine gun, giving it a sixty-round capacity, to match the Soviet PPSH’s seventy-one-round drum. Now these gadgets were showing up in the West.

What irked Leets was Tony Outhwaithe’s—and, by extension, all official London’s—rejection of his brainstorm.

“I do not think,” Tony had said imperially, “our analysts—yours, for that matter, although they are quite the junior at the game—will agree with you, chum. Frankly, it’s not the Nazi style. They tend to kill in larger numbers, and are quite proud of it.”

“We got Yamamoto in the Pacific, ’44,” Leets argued. “You guys sent some commandos after Rommel. There were rumors the Krauts had a mission on Roosevelt in Casablanca. And just a couple of months ago, when the Bulge started, that stuff about Skorzeny going after Eisenhower.”

“Exactly. An unpleasant rumor that caused a great deal of discomfort in all kinds of circles in this town. Which is precisely why we’ll not be calling up the guards on the basis of a scrap of paper. No, it’s this simple: you’re wrong.”

“Sir,” Leets had pulled himself to full attention, “may I respectfully—”

“No, you may not. Our intent in handing you this slight job was to take advantage of your somewhat specialized knowledge of German small arms technology. We thought you might provide some insight as to what pressures their industrial nut was undergoing. Instead you check in with a rather odd tale out of James Hadley Chase. Very disappointing.”

And he was dismissed.

But Leets let his enthusiasm get the best of him. In a frenzy of zeal, he dashed off a batch of memos one afternoon to various bodies whose support he hoped to enlist in his crusade—SHAEF, CIC, Army Intelligence, the OSS counterintelligence outfit called X-2, OSS German Desk over at Grosvenor Square, and so forth. The results were depressing.

“It’s ’cause I don’t know anybody. They’re all buddy-buddy, Eastern. Clubby. Harvard-Oxford-Yale,” he claimed.

Rog, old Harvard man at nineteen, tried to dissuade him from this concept.

“It’s not like that up at Harvard, Captain. It’s just a bunch of guys having a good time, like anywhere. Reason you’re not getting anywhere is simply that the clowns running the show don’t know what they’re doing, no matter what school they went to. This war’s the best thing they’ve got going; it sure beats working for a living. Once it’s over, they’re back jerking sodas.” Rog spoke with the brilliant assurance of a man who’d never jerk a soda in his life. His education entitled him to sit in the office with his paratroop boots on the table and dispense homilies of sociology to Leets.

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing something?” Leets said.

Airily, Roger continued with his analysis, now reaching cross-discipline into psychology. “I know what’s eating you, Jim. You want back in it.” He was genuinely amazed at this. “Boy, between us we got this war solved. Now why you’d want to—”

Leets knew in many ways he baffled the young tennis player. He of late had been baffling himself. Now why, all of a sudden, was he off on a crusade? Upstairs had said No; then No it would be.

But Leets kept thinking: Yes. It’s got to be Yes.

Several days later, Leets appeared at Tony’s office.

“Back again?” Tony asked.

“Yes,” Leets replied, unsmilingly.

“And so soon.”

“I was trying to sell it around town. No takers.”

“No. Thought not. Simply won’t wash, is why. Surely you can see that. No convincing dope.”

Leets concentrated on remaining pleasant. He explained politely, “The reason there’s no convincing dope is that I can’t get any. I can’t get any because the word’s out.”

“Whatever can you mean?”

Leets explained as if to a schoolboy: “Someone’s stamped me ‘Crank,’ ‘Nut.’ I dropped in on some of the other sections, thinking maybe I could round up some help, and suddenly I’m getting pitched in the street. You can tell from the way they look at you and whisper. You’re out, you’re dead.”

“I’m sure,” Tony said primly, “you exaggerate.”

“I figure it was you put the word out. Sir.”

Tony did not look away. There was not a fiber in his body capable of showing embarrassment. He looked at Leets evenly, his gaze richly amused, and said, “I’ll allow that’s a possibility. Even a probability.”

“I thought so,” said Leets.

“Nothing personal. I’m quite fond of you. You’re my favorite American. Unlike most of them, you are not madly obsessed with yourself. You do not tell me stories of growing up on a farm in Kansas and the name of your wife and children. Still, there are limits.”

“Major Outhwaithe.”

“Please. Tony is fine.”

“Major Outhwaithe, I’m asking you to take me out of the freezer.”

“Absolutely not.” He gazed calmly at him. Pity registered in his eyes; he was about to reveal a Major Truth, some elemental rule of the game that the thick Yank hadn’t caught on to. “Because you’ve got a real job to do. I know, I gave it to you. I’m responsible for it. I am exec officer of this little clown show JAATIC; directly under which is your little clown show, SWET. Not everybody can have a big job in the war, Captain Leets. Some of us—you, me—must do the little jobs, the boring jobs in safe offices five hundred miles from the front.”

Leets sighed. “Sir, it’s not a question of—”

“I shall tell you what it’s a question of. It’s a question of maturity. You had your time playing Indian, so did I. All over now. We’re desk chaps, you and I. See that attractive girl. Enjoy the flicks. Do your job. Thank God you didn’t get your nose or jaw shot off. Rejoice in the coming Triumph of Our Way of Life. The war’s almost over. Weeks, months perhaps. Unless a rocket lands on your skull, you’ve made it. See that girl. Her name—”

“Susan. I don’t. See her, that is. Anymore.”

“Pity. But the town’s full of them. Find another.”

“Sir. A few words from you and—”

“You mad fool. Go back to guns, to blueprints. Forget murder plots, assassinations. It’s London, February, 1945, not Chicago, 1926.”

Leets couldn’t afford anger and anyway wasn’t sure he had the strength; and he knew the Brits hated scenes. It’s what they hated most about Americans. And what he needed he’d have to get from Tony Outhwaithe sooner or later, one way or the other, for in this town Tony knew all the right ears to whisper into. If Tony’d frozen him, then only Tony could unfreeze him.

“Major Outhwaithe,” Leets began again, in a voice he imagined was sweet with reason, “I’d merely like an opportunity to locate additional intelligence. I need more evidence than a Wehrmacht Transpo Command order, even a damned strange one. I need access to other sources, other distributions. The archives, the reading lists. Your technical people. The—”

“Leets, old man, I’m quite busy. We all are, except you. You’re becoming dreadful, you and that bratty boy of yours. You’re turning into Jews, with your own private patch of persecution, as though the war was a special theater for you and you alone. Who chose you, old man? Eh? Who chose you?”

Leets had no answer. The British major glared at him, ginger moustache bristling. The eyes were cold as dead glass.

“Be off!” He flicked insolently with his wrist, Noel Coward in the khaki of King and country, and brushed Leets, the bug, out.

Leets found himself exiled into the streets, disappointed. He stood a second on the pavement in front of the Baker Street headquarters, a nondescript joint called St. Michael House, No. 82. He was one American among crowds of the brutes on the sidewalks of the old city, all of them healthy, shoving, yakky types, many squiring girls. It was chilly and gray—typical London midwinter—but the fresh American flesh seemed to warm the old city’s streets and fill them with human color and motion. Next to the ruddy Yanks, the Brits were pale and thin, but not too many of them were in evidence. Whose city was this, anyway? Leets felt as if he were lost in a football crowd—Homecoming perhaps, some kind of rite. Everybody seemed happy, pink, party-bound. London was a party if you were American, had reasonable chances at survival and pounds in your pocket.

Triumph was in the air, self-congratulation. The soon-to-come victory would be moral as well as tactical. A way of life, a civilization, had been tested and vindicated. Looking about, Leets saw how glad these guys all were to be American, and how glad, in turn, the pale girls were to have latched onto them. The war was almost all gone. It was feeble and far off. Only the bomber crews, by their paradoxical youth, called it up. They were all over the place now, Eighth Air Force teen-agers, in for a desperate day or two between missions, recognizable by their three gunner’s chevrons on their Air Corps sleeves, unable yet to shave, toting guidebooks and cameras and asking stupid questions in loud voices. They were too young to be scared, Leets thought.

He shivered, pulling his coat tighter. Not a Chicago winter, but cold, just the same. It had the subsidiary effect of drying out London’s normally damp air and this in turn seemed to prevent his wound from suppurating painfully.

He went down Baker Street until it became Orchard Street—crazy Brit streets, they just turned into other streets on the next block without warning and if you had to ask you were dumb—and took a left up Oxford Street toward Bloomsbury. He walked with no particular hurry, knowing nothing urgent awaited him in the office. It did occur to him he was just a block or two off Grosvenor Square—all he had to do was follow Duke Street, upcoming here—where the OSS headquarters were. A fleeting thought sped through his head of crashing the place, making a scene, demanding to see Somebody Important. It was said Donovan bought anything presented with enthusiasm; he could sell Wild Bill Donovan. But more likely he’d run into the patrician colonel who ran the place, the OSS head of London Station, prime Eastern snoot, or one of his neckless, nameless Brit-licking assistant heads of Station, sure conspirators with Tony O.

Leets reached Oxford Circus, way past Duke Street, and realized he’d given up on Somebody Important. Not his style, after all.

At the Circus, the traffic whirled about, small, strange black cars, like planets out of control, headed for doom. Shouts, honks, the bleat of motors, blue fumes from their exhaust pipes, rose and enveloped him. Where’d they get the fuel? In the mechanical whirligig he insisted on seeing a metaphor of futility: all the metal going round and round and nowhere.

Forget it, okay?

They’re right.

You’re wrong.

An American sergeant—B-17 gunner, probably—walked by drunkenly, throwing him a wobbly salute.

“Sir.” The boy grinned brokenly. His arm lay across the shoulder of a tart, a shriveled, frizzy, titless, tough-looking girl; quite a picture, the two of them.

Leets answered the kid’s salute with one equally limp and watched him and his cutie stagger away. Night was falling. Leets felt none of the triumph of the streets. These crowds of corn-fed heroes, of whom the boy and girl were prime examples, so sure, so full of life, so ready for the next day. Heroes.

Yet the Germans were going to kill one of them. Leets knew it. There was a man, perhaps in this city, who right now, four hundred miles to the east, in a shattered Germany, sinister minds were planning to kill. He alone knew it.

Who would the Germans kill? And why was it so different? A V-2 might land that second and turn out the lights on three hundred: pure random stroke, an accident, a function of applying so much industrial power to such and such a technological problem.

The sniping was different. They knew a man, a special man, so vile to them, such an insult to their imaginations, that even as they were themselves about to become extinct, they would kill.

Churchill? Had the speeches angered them so much? Ike? That smiling Kansas face, bland and seemingly guileless. Patton, for beating the Panzer geniuses at their own game? Montgomery, who was as ruthless as any of them?

Leets knew it didn’t add up. Maybe Tony was right: maybe the freeze was good and just.

He felt drained of energy. A soft dark had fallen on Oxford Circus. There was not so much traffic, and now the cars moved more slowly. What am I going to do? he wondered.

He wished he weren’t so far from his office or billet; he wished he weren’t so tired; he wished there was a little piece of the war left over for him; he wished he could get somebody to listen to him. But chiefly he wished he could park his ass someplace soft, hoist a mug of that thin stuff the Brits called beer, and forget 1945 for a while.

Even as he walked through the anonymous maze of the city in the deepening dark, he knew he’d secretly changed course several blocks back, though he’d lied to himself, refused to acknowledge it at the moment of decision.

But when he reached the flats in which she was quartered, he was unable to maintain the fiction of coincidence. He was going to see Susan.

She was not there, of course; Mildred, one of the roommates, was vague but remotely optimistic about her return, and so Leets sat idiotically in the living room and waited, passing the time with Mildred’s date for the evening, a B-24 pilot, another captain, while Mildred made ready in the john.

The pilot was not so friendly.

“One of my buddies got killed in some crazy OSS thing,” he told Leets.

“Sorry,” Leets said mildly, hoping to end the conversation there.

“Low-level agent drop, nobody came back at all,” the pilot declared, fixing Leets in the black light of a glare.

And what about all the agents spread to hell and gone by panicked pilots who dumped them like freight twenty miles off the drop zone? His own operational jump had been handled by a British crew, who’d been in the business since 1941; they’d put him and his two companions right on the mark. But he’d heard horror stories of poor guys coming down in enemy territory miles from their contacts, to wander about stupidly until nabbed.

“People get killed in a war,” Leets said. “Even Air Force pilots.”

“Yeah, sure, in the war,” the pilot said. “What I want to know, is that crazy stuff you do, is it part of the war? Or is it some game for rich kids? Is it real?”

An interesting question. Leets had no answer. He looked steadily at the other man and saw that the fellow wasn’t really angry with him but at the war and its waste and stupidity and ignorance.

“It varies,” he finally said, and as he spoke he heard the door opening in the hallway.

Mildred, coming out of the john, ran into her first.

“Suse, guess who’s back?”

“Oh, Christ,” Leets heard Susan say.

He felt himself rising as she came into the room.

Her starches were wilted and her hair was a mess. She held her white shoes in her hand. Her face was tired and plain.

“Well, here I am again, ha, ha,” Leets said, grinning sheepishly, uncomfortably aware of the hostile bomber pilot watching him.

“Suse, we’re going now,” Mildred called, as she and the grumpy pilot got ready to leave.

Susan still had not said anything. She looked him over, ruthlessly, as if he were another patient on the triage list. She was a first lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps, in plastic surgery; she was a pale, bright, pretty girl from Baltimore; Leets had known her forever, meaning from that magical period only remotely remembered as Before the War. She’d gone to Northwestern too, where she’d dated and, incidentally, married a friend of his who was now on a ship in the Pacific. Leets had run into her six months earlier in the hospital, where his leg had put him.

“Guess I can’t stay away,” he confessed. “I had my mind all made up; it was set. No more Susan. Best for her. Best for me. Best for Phil. But here I am again.”

“This must be the twentieth time you’ve pulled this routine. When you get it just right, you can do it on ‘Jack Benny.’”

“It is pretty funny, I admit.”

“You don’t look so hot,” she said.

“I’m not. You don’t have a date, or anything?”

“Date? I’m married, remember.”

“You know I do.”

“But I do have something later. I said I’d—”

“Still going?”

“Still.”

“They give the Nobel peace prize during a war? You deserve one.”

“How’s the leg, Jim?”

“I should love it; it brought us together.” He’d first seen her with his leg hanging on a line off the ceiling like a prize fish.

“But it’s not so good,” he said to her now, “the goddamn thing still leaks and when it leaks, it really aches.”

“There’s still metal in there, right?”

“Real small stuff.”

“Too small for the X-rays. And they keep infecting on you. They’ve got you on penicillin, right?”

“A ton a day.”

“Nobody’ll catch the clap from you, that’s for sure.”

“Hear from Phil?”

“His ship took one of those crazy Jap kamikazes in the bridge. Fifteen guys got killed. He’s all right. He made lieutenant commander.”

“Phil’ll do fine. I know he will. He’ll come out an admiral.”

“Hear from Reed?”

“No, but I got a note from Stan Carter. He’s still in Washington. He says Reed’s a major, shooting down Japs left and right. Major! Christ, and look at me.”

“You never were the ambitious one.”

“Say, let’s go get something to eat. I need something to cheer me up. Tough one at the office. They’ve all decided I’m a crank. The jerks. So anyway, okay?”

“Jim, I don’t have time. Really. Not tonight.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure, I see. Well, listen, I just stopped by to see how you were, you know, see if you’d heard from anybody.”

“Don’t go. Did I say go?”

“No, not in so many words. But—”

“Damn you. I wish you’d make up your goddamned mind.”

“Susan,” he said.

“Oh, Leets,” she said. “What are we going to do? What in hell are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. I really have no idea.”

She stood up and began to unbutton her uniform.

Later, in the dark, he lit a cigarette.

“Listen, darling, put that cigarette out. It’s time to go,” she said.

“The Center.”

“Yes. Walk me over, all right? It’s not far.”

“Okay. You sure know how to keep yourself depressed.”

“Somebody’s got to go. From our side, I mean. I promised my father—” She turned on the light.

“I know. I know all that. But it’s such a waste of time. They don’t own the war, you know. We get part of it too, you know.”

“I’m sure there’s enough to go around,” Susan said. Naked, she walked to the dresser. She was beautiful to him. Her hips were slim and he could see her ribs. She had small, fine breasts, with just enough a sense of density to them, roundness without bulk. He felt another erection begin to swell. The center of his body warmed. He reached and turned out the light.

“No,” she said, disinterestedly. “Not now. Please. Come on.”

He turned it on again, and climbed out of bed into his GI underwear. The Jews. The fucking Jews came first.

“They’re a pain in the ass,” he said. “The Jews.”

“Their part of the war is special.”

“Special! Listen, let me tell you something. Everybody who somebody’s trying to kill is special. When I was in France getting shot at, was I ever special!”

“No, it’s different. Please, let’s not go over this again, all right? We always come back to it. Always.”

She was right. They always did. Sooner or later.

He grunted, putting on his uniform. Susan, meanwhile, stepped into a civilian dress, a shapeless, flowered thing, dowdy. It made her look forty and domestic.

“Look,” he suddenly said, tightening his tie, “I’ll tell you who’s special. Who’s really special.”

“Who? Reed?”

“No. You. Divorce Phil. Marry me. All right?”

“No,” she said, trying to get a necklace fastened. “First, you don’t mean it. You’re just a lonely boy from the Midwest in a big European city. You think you love me. You love my—well, we both know what you love. Second, I don’t love you. I love Phil Isaacson, which is why I married him, even if he is six thousand miles away on a ship and I feel guilty as hell. Third, you’re what we call a Goy. No offense. It doesn’t mean inferior, but it means different. It would make all kinds of problems. All kinds. And fourth—well, I don’t remember number four.” She smiled. “But I’m sure it’s a great one.”

“They’re all great,” he said, smiling himself. “I ask you every time. When we started you had ten reasons. Then eight. Now it’s down to four, three really, because you don’t remember the last one. I feel like I’m making some kind of progress.” He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“Turn here?” Leets thought he remembered, even in the fog.

“Right. Good memory,” she said.

He’d been there once before and was not overwhelmed at the prospect of returning. He knew he didn’t belong.

“Funny the stuff that sticks in your mind. I remember the kid.”

“The kid?”

“The little boy. You know, the one in the picture they’ve got there.”

“Oh, yes. That’s Michael Hirsczowicz. At fifteen months. In pleasanter times. Warsaw, August, 1939. Just before it all began.”

“You’ll laugh at this. Tony called me a Jew today.”

“That’s not very funny.”

“No, I suppose it’s not. Here, right?”

“Yes.”

They turned in a dark doorway and began to climb some dim stairs.

“You don’t think of the Jews having a government in exile,” Leets said.

“It’s not a government in exile. It’s a refugee agency.”

“Everybody knows it’s political.”

“It’s powerless. How can that be political? It’s to try and keep people alive. How can that be political? It’s funded by little old ladies in Philadelphia. How can that be political?”

The sign on the door said something in that squiggly funny writing and beneath it ZIONIST RELEIF AGENCY.

“Jesus, they can’t even spell.”

“It is pitiful, isn’t it,” Susan said bitterly.

She’d been coming for months now, three, four nights a week. First it was a joke: her father had instructed her in a letter not to forget who she was, what she came from, and though she blithely said she was an American, from Baltimore, she dropped in that first time only because she recognized Yiddish on the door. But gradually, it began to get under her skin.

“What the hell do you get out of it?” Leets had wondered.

“Nothing,” she said.

Still, she kept it up, until it became almost obsessive.

But it wasn’t as if she could do any good, any real good. That was the bitter joke beneath it all, though for Leets it wasn’t a joke anymore, merely a bitterness. They were so pathetic: from the old man Fischelson on down, the girls in the office, all hysterics, scared, most of them. They needed so much help and Susan did what she could, with paper work, and telephones, small things like dealing with the landlord, making sure the place stayed heated, proof-reading the news releases, even in their fractured, East Side Yiddish-English. She knew all along that nobody was listening.

“It’s Communist, isn’t it?” he said.

“It’s Jewish. Not quite the same thing. Anyway, the man whose money started it was a rich, conservative land- and factory-owning aristocrat. A banker. What could be further from communism?”

Still, Leets had his doubts. “I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s his kid. In the hall. Josef Hirsczowicz: he’s the father. One of the richest men in Europe. That’s his child. Or was.”

“They’re dead?”

“They didn’t get out. That little boy, Jim. Think of that. The Germans killed him, because he’s Jewish.”

“They’re trying to kill a lot of little boys. They tried to kill this little boy. Religion has nothing—” but he stopped. He didn’t want to get back into it.

They reached the door at the end of the stairway.

“You’re wasting your time,” he cautioned.

“Of course I am,” she said. The Zionists hoped to communicate to the indifferent Western world what they maintained was happening in Occupied Europe. Susan had monstrous tales, of mass executions and death camps. Leets told her it was propaganda. She said she had proof. Pictures.

“Pictures don’t mean a thing,” he’d instructed her brutally weeks ago. “Pictures can be faked. You need a goddamned witness, someone who’s been there. That’s the only way you’ll get anybody to listen to your stuff. Listen, you’re going to get in trouble. You’re an officer in the United States Army. Now you’re hanging around with a group of—”

She’d put a finger to his lip, ending his sentence. But later she talked of it. Nobody would believe, she said. The Zionist leaders sat in the offices of great men in London, she explained with great bitterness, who’d listen earnestly, then shoo them out after a polite moment or two.

Now, standing in the outer office, about to lose her, Leets felt the beginning of a headache. The headaches always ended in rage.

Christ, what a hole! All that peeling paint and those blinky, low-watt bulbs that almost looked like candles. It smelled like a basement up here, and was always chilly, and all the other people seemed pallid and underfed and would not look at him in his uniform.

“Thanks for walking me over, Jim,” she said. “I appreciate it. I really do.” She smiled, and stepped away.

“Susan.” He grabbed her arm. “Susan, not tonight. Come on, we’ll do the town.”

“Thanks, Jim, but we had our fun.”

He didn’t mind losing her to Phil—he knew he would in the end anyway—but he hated losing her to this.

“Please,” he said.

“I can’t. I’ve got to go.”

“It’s just—”

“Just Jews, Leets,” she said. “Me too.” She smiled. “Believe it or not.”

“I believe, I believe,” he protested. But he did not believe. She was just an American girl, who’d invented her membership in this fossil race.

“No, you don’t,” she said. “But sometimes, I love you anyway.”

And she disappeared behind the door.

The next morning, in the office, Leets’s headache still banged away. He stood looking across the gray skyline.

And where was Roger? Late as usual, he came crashing in, uniform a mess.

“Had trouble finding a cab,” he said. He’d once pointed out that he was probably the only enlisted man in any army who took a cab to World War II each morning.

“Sorry,” he continued.

Leets said nothing. He stared grumpily out the window.

“Guess who I met last night? Go on. Guess, Captain.”

Leets complained instead. “Rog, you didn’t sweep up last night. This place isn’t the Savoy, but it doesn’t have to look like Hell’s Kitchen either.”

“Hemingway.”

“You could at least empty the wastebaskets once in a while.”

“Hemingway. The writer. Over from Paris, from the Ritz. Met him at a party.”

“The writer?”

“Himself. In the flesh. Big guy, mustache, steel glasses. You should have seen him pour the booze down.”

“You travel in flashy circles.”

“Only the best. I go to all the good parties. Don’t let my stripes keep me out of anything. After Bill Fielding, he’s about the most famous man in the world.”

The door flew open; Tony Outhwaithe swirled in as if the star of the play.

“Captain Leets, send this boy out to hit balls against a wall or something,” he commanded.

“Roger, out.”

Roger was off in a flash. “I’ll be at the squash club, you need me.”

Tony turned to Leets. “The news is bad. Bad for you. Rather good for me.” He smiled with great satisfaction.

“You love to top me, don’t you?” Leets said.

“Yes, but there are tops and tops, and this is a true top.”

Leets braced; was he being shipped to Burma to hunt Japs in jungles?

“Are you still banging away on that assassin matter?”

“Sort of. Not getting any—”

“Excellent. I can now prove you wrong. New data.”

“What?” Leets sat up, his heart beginning to excite a bit.

“My, interested so soon.”

“What?”

“All right. Last night I happened to run into a donnish sort from PWE. Know what that is?”

“Your Political Warfare Executive. Sort of like—”

“Yes. Anyway, it seems he can identify your phantom acronym. WVHA.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” Tony was richly satisfied. He was enjoying every minute of all this. “It has nothing to do with us. It doesn’t even concern the war. It’s not related to intelligence or espionage or the racket at all. You’re out of luck, I’m afraid.”

“What is it?” Leets demanded. Why was his heart going, why did he have so much trouble breathing?

“It’s a part of the administrative section of dear old SS. Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt Obscure, easy to miss among the more flamboyant organizations in Twelveland.”

Leets translated prosaically. “Economic and Administrative Department,” he said glumly, “that’s all. They do the payrolls. Clerks.”

“Yes. Not the sort of lads to go gunning after generals, eh?”

“No, no, suppose not.”

“They’ve got other concerns at the moment. Those clerks run one of the more interesting phenomena of the Third Reich, old bun,” Tony said, smiling brightly. “They run the concentration camps.”

5

Vollmerhausen not only knew that it wasn’t his fault the prisoner had escaped, he knew whose fault it was. It was Captain Schaeffer’s fault. The man was incompetent. Schaeffer was involved in most things that went wrong at Anlage Elf. He’d seen the type before, a real SS fanatic, sullen and stupid, a brutal, suspicious Nazi peasant. Vollmerhausen had explained this very carefully to anybody who cared to listen, though not many of them did.

Now he was going to explain it to Repp.

“If,” he began, “if Captain Schaeffer’s men had been adequately trained, had reacted quickly, had treated this whole enterprise as something other than a holiday rest camp, then the prisoner could never have escaped. Instead they blunder about like comedians in a farce, shooting at each other, screaming, turning on lights, hooting and tooting. A disaster. I thought the Waffen SS, especially the famed Totenkopfdivision, had a reputation for efficiency. Why, the most inept conscriptees—old men and youngsters—could have performed better.” He sat back smugly. He’d really told them. He’d really let them have it.

Repp sat, toying with something at his desk. He did not appear particularly impressed. He certainly could be a cold chap.

But Schaeffer, there too, rose to his own defense.

“If,” he replied, talking straight to Repp, “there had been no”—he pronounced the next words with special precision, knowing how they hurt—“machine failure, if Herr Ingenieur-Doktor had been able to get his gadget to do its job—”

Gadget?

“Slander! Slander! I will not be slandered! I will not be slandered.” He rose, red-faced, from the chair.

Repp waved him down.

“So that the Obersturmbannführer had been able to take out his targets as the mission specifications call for—”

“There was no machine failure,” screamed Vollmerhausen hysterically. He was always being slandered, lied about. He knew people called him a kike behind his back. “I deny, deny, deny. We checked the equipment until we were blue in the face. It had integrity. Integrity. Yes, problems, we work around the clock, the Waffen SS should work half so hard, problems with weight, but the machine works. Vampir works.”

“The fact remains,” insisted the young captain—some men just could not accept defeat gracefully—“the fact remains, and no Yid argument is going to change it, that Vampir displayed twenty-five targets and there were twenty-six subhumans out there.”

It was obvious. “He slipped away before, don’t you see?” said Vollmerhausen. “He slipped out on your men before. I’m told he was a Jew, an educated fellow. He must have realized something was up and in the moments—”

“He was seen leaving the field, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” Repp said quietly. “And fired upon.”

“Yes, well,” Vollmerhausen sputtered, “he’d obviously, well, it’s clear that he separated himself before and so he wasn’t within the range of the mechanism.”

“Herr Obersturmbannführer, the men swear he was standing among the corpses.”

“The main question must be,” Vollmerhausen bellowed, cork-screwing insanely out of his seat, “why wasn’t the area fenced? My people slave into the night over Vampir, yet the Waffen SS is unable to construct a simple fence to hold a Jew in.”

“All right, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” said Repp.

“A simple fence to stop a Jew who—”

Repp said, “Please.”

Vollmerhausen had several points yet to make and he’d just thought of five or six of them when Repp’s stare fell across him. Something quite frosty in it. Extraordinary. The eyes cool, almost blank. The demeanor so perfectly calm, almost unnaturally calm. Repp had an incredible talent for stillness.

“I was simply—but no matter,” Vollmerhausen said.

“Thank you,” said Repp.

Another silence. Repp was masterful with silences, and he let this one drag on for several seconds. The air in the room was dead. Vollmerhausen shifted in his chair uneasily. Repp kept it so hot in here; in the corner the stove blazed away merrily. Repp, in faded camouflages, made them wait while he took out and, with elaborate ceremony, lit one of those Russian cigarettes he smoked.

Then finally he said, “Of the Jew, I have decided to let the matter drop. He’s somewhere in the forest, dead. They are not a hearty, physical race. They have no will to survive. Doom is their natural fate, and in the forest he’ll locate his own quickly. Therefore, I’m recalling the patrols.”

“Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” said Captain Schaeffer. “Immediately.”

“Good. Now as for Vampir.” He turned to Vollmerhausen.

Vollmerhausen licked his lips. They were dry. His mouth was dry. He returned to a familiar, discomfiting litany: What am I doing here, locked up in a wild forest with SS lunatics? It was a long way from the WaPrüf 2 testing ground outside Berlin.

“As for Vampir, I’m afraid I must require another test, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor.”

Vollmerhausen swallowed. So that was it, then. Another load of Jews would be brought in, fattened up, shot down.

“More prisoners, Herr Obersturmbannführer?” he asked.

“That’s all finished, I’m afraid,” said Repp. “Which I’m sure makes you happy, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor.”

“It was unpleasant, yes, killing—”

“You must have a hard heart for these hard times,” said Repp. “You’d lose your uneasiness around death in a day in the East. But the Reichsführer informs me that the camps are no longer in the disposal business.”

“Animals, then,” said Vollmerhausen. “Pigs would do it. Or cows. About the—”

“I think not. Vampir must locate people, not animals, at four hundred meters’ range. And it must not weigh more than forty kilos. Those are the limits.”

Vollmerhausen moaned. Back to weight again. “I don’t know where I’m going to get ten more kilos. We’ve taken off all the insulation, we’ve got the lead sulfide down to a minimum without sacrificing resolution.” He looked desperate. “It’s that damn battery.”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way. After all, you’ve got the best men and equipment in the Reich. Far better than up at Kummersdorf.” As he spoke he’d begun to tinker again with a piece of metal or something on his desk, an innocent, entirely reflexive habit.

“We’ve tried everything. A smaller battery won’t put out the necessary current. A—”

“I’m sure a great miracle will happen here,” Repp said, taking great pleasure in the phrase.

Vollmerhausen, fascinated, could see the thing he worked in his fingers. It was a small black cube, metallic, with a spindle through it. But that’s all.

“Miracles cannot be requisitioned like machine pistols, Herr Obersturmbannführer.”

“You’ll do your best, I’m certain.”

“Of course, sir. But forty kilos is so little.”

“I just want to explain the importance here. I want to emphasize it. Our actions are only part of a larger campaign, involving agents in other countries even. Still, we are the most important; we are the fulcrum. Do you understand? Great and heavy responsibilities have descended upon us. This is a privilege rarely given soldiers. Think about it.”

He paused, to let the grave information sink in.

“And so for the test,” he said.

“Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” Vollmerhausen said.

“I think I’ve found an unlimited supply of targets for you. A whole world full of targets. I’ve just had word from Berlin. One hundred miles north of here, the Americans have crossed the Rhine. They’re on our soil, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. It seems that I must demand that you quickly find a way to knock those ten kilos off Vampir. And then you and I are going hunting.”

The asshead Schaeffer snickered.

Repp was smiling.

After they were gone, Repp reached into his desk and removed a silver flask. He was not a drinking fellow by habit but this night he felt a need. He unscrewed the cap and poured a few ounces of schnapps into a glass, and sipped it. He savored the fiery fluid.

The hour was late, time was slipping away, time, time, time the real enemy. Pressures from Berlin were mounting, that crazy goose the Reichsführer himself calling twice a day, babbling of what his astrologer and his masseur and his secretary and the little birdies in the sky were telling him. What had General Haussner said? “He has both feet planted firmly three feet above the ground.” Something like that.

Repp first met the Reichsführer in the 1942 season in Berlin, shortly after Demyansk, when he was the hero of the hour. Himmler had worn cologne that smelled like mashed plums and wanted to know about Repp’s ancestors.

Repp knew what to say.

“Common people, Reichsführer.”

“Very good. Our strength, the common people. Our mystic bond with the soil, the earth.” These words were delivered with unblinking sincerity in the middle of an opulent party in an industrialist’s mansion. Beautiful women swirled about—Margareta was one, he remembered. The room was filled with warmth and light. Sex was in the air and wealth and power and not seventy-two hours earlier Repp had been in the tower.

“Yes, the people,” the Reichsführer had said. He looked like an eggplant wearing glasses.

But Repp didn’t want to think about the Reichsführer right now. He took another sip of the schnapps and called Margareta up into his mind.

She’d been so beautiful that year. He was not moved by many things but he’d allowed himself to be moved by her. How had she ended up there? Oh, yes, she’d come with some theatrical people. He’d seen her before, back when he was a young lieutenant and too frightened to speak. But this time he walked up boldly and took her hand. He saw her eyes go to the Iron Cross he now wore.

“I’m Repp,” he said, bowing slightly.

“At least you didn’t snap your heels together like so many of them.”

He smiled. “I’ve been told anything in the city is mine. I choose you.”

“They meant hotel rooms. Restaurant tables. Seats at the opera. Invitations to parties.”

“But I don’t want those things. I want you.”

“You’re very forward. You’re the fellow in the tower, is that it? It seems I read something.”

“Three days ago I killed three hundred and forty-five Russians in the span of eight hours. Now doesn’t that make me rather special?”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

“May I present you to the Reichsführer? He’s now a patron of mine, I believe.”

“I know him. He’s dreadful.”

“A little pig. But a powerful patron. Come, let’s leave. I was in a very pleasant restaurant last night. I believe they’ll treat me nicely if I return. I even have a car and driver.”

“My first lover was killed in Poland. My next died in an air fight over London. Another was captured in the Western Desert.”

“Nothing will happen to me. I promise. Come, let’s go.”

She looked at him narrowly. “I came with a fellow, you know.”

“A general in the Waffen SS?”

“No, an actor.”

“Then he’s nothing. Please. I insist.”

She’d paused just a second, then said, “All right. But, please. No talk of war, Captain Repp.”

Pleasant. Yes, pleasant.

Repp finished the schnapps. He was tempted to take another, but a principle of his was to never yield to temptations.

He knew the Reichsführer could call at any moment; and he knew he needed his strength for what lay ahead.

He sealed the bottle.

6

Susan and Leets were wedged tight against the Claridge bar. It was late on a Friday night in mid-March, wall-to-wall uniforms, no V-2’s had fallen for a couple of days, and after a lot of trying he’d finally talked her into an actual date. They’d had dinner at the Hungaria and, on Roger’s recommendation, had dropped by this bright spot, where all the London beauties and big shots were said to camp out. So far Susan had seen two movie stars and a famous radio broadcaster. Leets had noticed instead other OSS officers in the smoky crowd and had fancied himself already slighted a couple of times, and once had even made a move toward one snide aristocratic profile, but Susan had tugged him back.

“No trouble. Remember. You promised.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled.

Now, several whiskies down him, he was feeling sweeter, the friend to all men. He had her to himself: no Phil, no Jews.

“Barkeep,” he hailed, trolling in one of the red-jacketed boys behind the mahogany bar, “two here, old bun.”

“No wonder they hate us,” she said.

Around them the talk was of the new offensive. Beyond the Rhine! It would be over by the blooming of the flowers, the coming of spring. This optimism had the effect of depressing Leets.

“You’re supposed to be enjoying yourself,” she said. “For God’s sakes, smile a little. Relax.”

“You’re damned cheerful,” he said with surprise. It was true. The whole evening, she’d bubbled. She was especially beautiful, even in the severe cut of the brown uniform; some women looked good in anything. But it was something else. Susan seemed to be her old self: sly, mocking, mildly sarcastic, full of mischief.

“You’ve decided to make a career of Army nursing. Congrats!” he said.

She laughed.

“You’re divorcing Phil. Right? Am I right?”

Again, laughter. “It’s a long story,” she said. “A long story.”

But before she could tell it, an elegant Brit voice crooned to them. “Darlings.”

It was Leets’s turn to make a face.

But Tony came ahead confidently, until he seemed to embrace the two Americans.

“One more of what these chaps are having,” Tony commanded the barman, and turned to press an icy smile on Leets.

“Sir,” Leets said evenly.

“Rather a long Thursday, eh?” Tony asked.

Leets didn’t say a thing.

“What, three, four hours? Or was it five?”

“Jim? What—” Susan said.

Leets looked bleakly off into the crowd.

“The captain had a rough go of it, I hear. Trying to get in to see—ah, who was it this time? Yours or ours?”

“Yours,” Leets finally admitted.

“Of course. Knew it all the time. Major General Sir Colin Gubbins, was it not?”

“Yes.”

“Thought so. Head of SOE. Pity he couldn’t see you.”

“I’m on the list for Monday, the girl said.”

“I’ll put in a good word for you tomorrow at lunch,” Tony said, smiling maliciously.

“You bastard,” Leets said.

“Now stop that kind of talk,” Susan commanded.

“Susan, would you care to accompany me to lunch with General Sir Colin Gubbins tomor—”

“Goddamn it, Major, knock it off,” Leets said.

Tony laughed. “You’re getting a rather peculiar reputation in certain circles,” he cautioned. “You know, he tells anyone this mad scheme he’s dreamed up. Jerry snipers. Quite strange.”

Leets now felt fully miserable.

“It wouldn’t hurt a bit to listen to him,” Susan said. “You people have been told things all during the war you wouldn’t listen to. You never listen until it’s too late.”

Tony stepped back, made a big show of shock. “Dear girl,” he said theatrically, “of course we make mistakes. Of course we’re old fuddy-duddies. That’s what we’re paid for. Think how dangerous we’d be if we knew what we were doing.” He threw back his head and brayed.

Leets realized the man was quite drunk and beyond caring what he said, and to whom. But, surprisingly, there seemed to be in his act some affection for the miserable American and his girl.

“Listen, I know where there are some marvelous gatherings tonight. Care to come along? Really, I can offer Indian nabobs, Communist poets, homosexual generals, Egyptian white slavers. The relics of our late empire. It’s quite a show. Do come.”

“Thanks, Major,” Leets said. “I’d really rather—”

“Tony. Tony. I’ve taken to the American habit. You call me Tony and I’ll call you Jim. First names are such fun.”

“Major, I—”

“Jim, it might be kind of fun,” Susan said.

“What the hell,” Leets said.

Presently, they found themselves in a cavernous flat in a splendidly fashionable section of London, along with a whole zoo of curiosities from all the friendly nations of World War II. Leets, pinned in a corner of the room, drank someone’s wonderful whisky and exchanged primitive pleasantries with a Greek diplomat, while he watched as across the room Susan deflected, in rapid succession, an RAF group captain, a young dandy in a suit and tie, and a huge Russian in some sort of Ruritanian clown suit.

“She’s smashing,” Tony said to him.

“Yes, she’s fine, just fine,” Leets agreed.

“Is good very, no?” the Greek said, somewhat confusingly to Leets, but he merely nodded, as though he understood.

But after a while he went and got her, fighting his way through the mob.

“Hello, it’s me,” he said.

“Oh, Jim, isn’t it wonderful? It’s so interesting,” she said, beaming.

“It’s just a party, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

“Darling, the most wonderful thing happened today. I can’t wait to tell you about it.”

“So tell.”

“I say, guess who’s here now?” Tony said suddenly, at his ear.

“It’s Roger,” shrieked Susan. “My God, look who he’s got with him!”

“Indeed,” said Tony. “An authentic Great Man! That is the hairy-chested novel writer who kills animals for amusement, is it not? Thought so.”

“All we need is Phil,” said Susan.

“Phil who?” said Leets, as his young sergeant drew near, his eyes crazy with glee, pulling in drunken tow the great writer himself. The two of them weaved brokenly across the crowded floor, Roger guiding the blandly smiling bigger man along. The fellow wore some kind of safari-inspired variation on the Air Corps uniform, open wide at the collar so that a thatch of iron-gray hair unfurled.

“The famous chest, for all to see,” said Tony.

The writer had a pugnacious mustache and steel-frame glasses. He was big, Leets could see, big enough for Big Ten ball, but now he had a kind of drunken, horny benevolence, dispensing good fortune on all who passed before him. Several times in his journey, the writer stopped, as though to establish camp, but at each spot, Roger’d give a yank and unstick the fellow and pull him yet closer.

“Mr. Hem,” Roger declared when he got the big fellow near enough, “Mr. Hem, I want ya ta meet the two best friggin’ officers in World War Two.”

“Dr. Hemorrhoid, the poor man’s piles,” the writer said, extending a paw.

Leets shook it.

“I adored The Sun Actually Rises” said Tony. “Really your best. So feminine. So wonderfully feminine. Delicate, pastel. As though written by a very sweet lady.”

The writer grinned drunkenly. “The Brits all hate me,” he explained to Susan. “But I don’t let it bother me. What the hell, Major, go ahead and hate me. It’s your bloody country, you can hate anybody you goddamnwellfucking choose. Nurse, you’re beautiful.”

“She’s married,” Leets said.

“Easy, Captain, I’m not moving in. Easy. You guys, do the fighting, you have my respect. No problems, no sweat. Nurse, you are truly beautiful. Are you married to this fellow?”

Susan giggled.

“She’s married to a guy on a ship. In the Pacific,” said Rog.

“My, my,” said the writer.

“Hem, there’s some people over here,” Rog said.

“Not so fast, Junior. This looks like a most promising engagement,” the writer said, grinning lustfully, putting a hand on Susan’s shoulder.

“Hey, pal,” said Leets.

“No fighting,” Susan said. “I hate fighting. Mr. Hemingway, please take your hand off my shoulder.”

“Darling, I’ll put my hand anywhere you tell me to put it,” Hemingway said, removing his hand.

“Put it up your ass,” said Leets.

“Captain, really, I have nothing but respect. You’re the guy putting the hun in his grave. Putting Jerry to ground, eh, Maj? Any day now. Any bloody day. Junior, how ’bout getting Papa a drink? A couple fingers whisky. No ice. Warm and smooth.”

“War is hell,” Leets said.

“How many Krauts you kill?” Hemingway asked Leets.

Leets said nothing.

“Huh, sonny? Fifty? A hundred? Two thousand?”

“This is a terrible conversation,” Susan said. “Jim, let’s get out of here.”

“How many, Cap? Many as the major here? Bet he’s killed jillions. That Brit special-ops group, goes behind the lines. Gets ’em with knives, fucking knives, right in the gizzard. Blood all over everything. But how many, Captain? Huh?”

Leets said he didn’t know, but not many. “You just fired at vehicles,” he explained, “until they exploded. So there was no sense of killing.”

“Could we change the subject, please,” Susan said. “All this talk of killing is giving me a headache.”

“There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter,” recited Hemingway.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Leets. He remembered bitterly: the tracers spraying through the grass, kicking spurts out of the earth, the sounds of the STG-44’s, the universe-shattering detonations of the 75’s on the Panzers. “It was just a fucking mess. It wasn’t like hunting at all.”

“Really, I’m not going to let this nonsense ruin my evening. Come on, Jim, let’s get out of here,” Susan said, and hauled him away.

They walked the cold, wet London streets, in the hours near dawn. An icy light began to seep over the horizon, above the blank rows of buildings that formed the walls of their particular corridor. Again, fog. The streets were empty now, except for occasional cruising jeeps of MP’s and now and then a single black taxi.

“They say at High Blitz Hitler never even stopped the cabs,” Leets said abstractedly.

“Do you believe in miracles?” Susan, who’d been silent for a while, suddenly said.

Leets considered. Then he said, “No.”

“I don’t either,” she said. “Because a miracle has to be sheer luck. But I believe certain things are meant to happen. Meant, planned, predestined.”

“Our meeting again in the hospital?” he said, only half a joke.

“No, this is serious,” she said.

He looked at her. How she’d changed!

“You’re generating enough heat to light this quarter of the city. I hope there’re no Kraut planes up there.”

“Do you want to hear about this, or not?”

“Of course I do,” he said.

“Oh, Jim, I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re feeling awful. Outhwaithe was very cruel.”

“Outhwaithe I can handle. I just know something and I can’t get anyone to believe me. But don’t let my troubles wreck your party. Really, Susan. I’m very happy for you. Please, tell me all about it.”

“We have one. Finally. One got out. A miracle.”

“Have one what? What are you—”

“A witness.”

“I don’t—”

“From the camps. An incredible story. But finally, now, in March of 1945, a man has reached the West who was in a place called Auschwitz. In Poland. A murder camp.”

“Susan, you hear all kinds of—”

“No. He was there. He identified pictures. He described the locations, the plants, the processes. It all jibes with reports we’ve been getting. It’s all true. And now we can prove it. He’s all they have. The Jews of the East. He’s their testament, their witness. Their voice, finally. It’s very moving. I find it—”

“Now just a minute. You say this camp was in Poland? Now, how the hell did this guy make it across Poland and Germany to us? Really, that’s a little hard to believe. It all sounds to me like some kind of story.”

“The Germans moved him to some special camp in a forest in Germany. It’s a funny story. It makes no sense at all. They moved him there with a bunch of other people, and fed them—fattened them up, almost like pigs. Then one night they took him to a field and…”

“It was some kind of execution?”

“A test. He said it was a test.”

And Susan told Leets the story of Shmuel.

And after a while Leets began to listen with great intensity.

7

Vampir would work; of that Vollmerhausen had little doubt. He had been there, after all, at the beginning, at the University of Berlin lab in 1933 when Herr Doktor Edgar Kutzcher, working under the considerable latitude of a large Heereswaffenamt contract, had made the breakthrough discovery that lead sulfide was photoconductive and had a useful response to about three microns, putting him years ahead of the Americans and the British, who were still tinkering with thallous sulfide. The equation, chalked across a university blackboard, which expressed the breakthrough Herr Doktor had achieved, realized its final practical form in the instrument on which Vollmerhausen now labored in the research shed at Anlage Elf, under increasing pressure and difficulty.

It was a business of sorting out dozens of details, of burrowing through the thickets of technical confusions that each tiny decision led them to. But this is what Vollmerhausen, a failed physicist, liked about engineering: making things work. Function was all. Vampir would work.

But would Vampir work at forty kilos?

That was another question altogether, and although his position officially demanded optimism, privately his doubts were deep and painful.

Under forty kilos?

Insane. Not without radically compromising on performance. But of course one didn’t argue with the SS. One smiled and did one’s best and hoped for luck.

But forty kilos? Why? Did they plan on dropping it from a plane? It would shatter anyway, and shock absorption hadn’t been tied into the specifications. He’d gone to Repp privately:

“Surely, Herr Obersturmbannführer, if you could just give me some reason for this arbitrary weight limit.”

Repp, frosty, had replied, “Sorry, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. Tactical requirements, that’s all. Someone’s going to have to carry the damned thing.”

“But certainly there are vehicles that—”

“Herr Ingenieur-Doktor: forty kilos.”

Lately Hans the Kike had been having nightmares. His food bubbled and heaved in his stomach. He worked obsessively, driving his staff like a tyrant, demanding the impossible.

“Hans the Kike,” he heard one of them joke, “rather more like Attila the Hun.”

But he had come so far since 1933, and the journey was so complex, so full of wrong starts, missed signs, betrayals, disappointments, unfair accusations, plots against him, credit due him going to others. More than ever now, 1933 came to haunt him. The last year I was ever truly happy, he told himself, before all this.

A year of beginnings—for Vampir, for Kutzcher, for Germany. But also one of endings. It had been Vollmerhausen’s last year with physics, and he’d loved physics, had a great brain for physics. But by the next year, ’34, physics was officially regarded as a Jewish science, a demi-religion like Freudianism, full of kabala and ritual and pentagram, and bright young Aryans like Vollmerhausen were pressured into other areas. Many left Germany, and not just Jews either; they were the lucky ones. For the ones who stayed, like Vollmerhausen, only melancholy choices remained. Dietzl went into aerodynamics, Stossel back to chemistry; Lange gave up science altogether and became a party intellectual. Vollmerhausen too felt himself pressed into an extraordinary career shift, a daring, uncharacteristically bold one—and one he hated. He returned to the Technological Institute and became a ballistics engineer, rather than an exalted Doktor of Science. It hadn’t the challenge of physics, the sense of unlocking the universe, but everybody knew there’d be a war sooner or later, and wars meant guns and guns meant jobs. He threw himself into it with a terror, succeeding on sheer determination where once there’d been talent. It began to look as though he’d made the right decision when he was invited to join Berthold Giepel’s ERMA design team. ERMA, the acronym for Erfurter Maschinenfabrik B. Giepel GmbH, Erfurt, was at that moment in history the most fertile spot in the world in arms design, and from all over the world acolytes swarmed, young engineers out of the technical institutes, or off apprenticeships at the Waffenfabrik Mauser at Oberndorf, or for Walther AG in Munich, even a Swiss lad from SIG and an American from Winchester. All were turned down. For the brilliant team that Giepel had assembled was up to nothing less than revolutionizing automatic weapons theory by building a Maschinenpistole off the radical open-bolt straight-blowback principle, which made for greater manufacturing simplicity, lightness and reliability, yet at the same time permitted air circulation through breech and barrel between rounds with subsequent temperature reduction, jacking the rate of fire up to about 540 per minute cyclical. They were inventing, in short, the best submachine gun in the world, the MP-40, until it became better known under a different name.

These should have been extraordinary days for Vollmerhausen, and in a way they were. But his physics background, like a whiff of the Yid, clung to him. He could never shake it; the others gossiped behind his back, played small pranks, teased him unmercifully. They hated him because he’d once aspired to be a scientist; what scientists he now came in contact with hated him because he was an engineer. He grew into a somewhat twisted personality, with a tendency toward surliness, bitterness, self-pity. He was grumpy, gloomy, a great self-justifier and blamer of others. His head was full of imaginary compliments that he felt he deserved but that he never received, because of course the others were jealous of his brilliance. Out of all this was born the name Hans the Kike.

So when in 1943 he was offered a position at the WaPrüf 2 testing facility at Kummersdorf, he jumped at it. A new project was under way. The army had learned in Russia of the terrors of the night and had let a contract for Vampir 1229 Zeilgerät, the Vampire sighting device, Model 1229, based on the data that Herr Doktor Kutzcher, now dead, had developed back in ’33. Vollmerhausen had an extraordinary background for the undertaking: he knew both the physics of the project and the ballistics. It was a job made for him.

In its wisdom, Waffenamt had decided that the weapon best suited to mount Vampir was none other than the prototype Strumgwehr on which Hugo Schmeisser was so furiously laboring, then designated the MP-43. Thus Ingenieur-Doktor Vollmerhausen and Herr Schmeisser (for old Hugo had no degrees) found themselves uneasily collaborating on the project at the dictates of the Army bureaucracy.

From the start, Hugo was undercutting him.

“Too bulky,” the old fool claimed. “Too sensitive. Too complicated.”

“Herr Schmeisser,” Hans began, suffering the immense strain of having to deal politely with a fool, “a few design modifications and we can join your assault rifle and my optics system and achieve the most modern device of the war. No, it’ll never be an assault weapon, or for the parachutists, but in the years ahead will come battles of a primarily defensive nature. The great days of rapid expansion are over. It’s time to concentrate on protecting what we’ve got. In any kind of stable night tactical situation, Vampir will make our enemies totally vulnerable.” And as he spoke, he could watch the old man’s eyes frost over with indifference. It was a most difficult situation, especially since in the background was another undercurrent: Hans the Kike was from the ERMA team that had built the wonderful MP-40; but, strangely, that weapon had picked up the nickname “Schmeisser,” though the old goat had had nothing to do with it. But he’d never disavowed the connection either, mad as he was for fame and glory.

With Schmeisser against him, he was doomed. The STG modifications were never approved, funds began to vanish, technicians were siphoned off to other projects, the Opticotechna people had difficulty with the lenses—Schmeisser’s influence?—and much gossip and vicious humor raged behind Hans the Kike’s back. He had no connections, nothing to match the might of the adroit Schmeisser, who didn’t want his assault rifle associated with some strange “wish-machine” invented by an obscure scientist and supervised by a disreputable ERMA veteran.

Vollmerhausen, under pressure, felt himself becoming more repellent. Whatever chances he had as an advocate for Vampir disappeared when he ceased shaving and bathing regularly, when he began denouncing the secret cabal that conspired behind his back. Vampir never went beyond prototype, despite some promising initial test results. It failed to meet certain specifications in its field trial, though Vollmerhausen asserted that “the cabal” had stacked the test against him. In May of ’44 the Waffenamt contract was canceled, and Vollmerhausen was ordered sharply back to Kummersdorf to a meaningless job. He was let go shortly afterward.

They let him dangle for a bit, nudging him closer and closer to despair. Worries on top of worries. His career in total collapse. Questions were asked. People began to avoid him. Nobody would look him in the eye. He thought he was being watched. The Army called him up for a physical exam and pronounced him fit for combat duty, despite fallen arches, a bronchial infection, bad ears and severe nearsightedness. He was advised to get his affairs in order, for the notice would arrive any day. It appeared his final fate might be to carry a “Schmeisser” on the Ostfront.

One day he happened to run into a friend in a disreputable café where he’d taken to spending his days.

“Have you heard, is Haenel still taking on people? I’d do anything. Draftsmanship, apprentice work, modeling.”

“Hans, I don’t think so. Old Hugo, you know. He’d stand in your way.”

“That old fool.”

“But, Hans, I did hear of something.” The friend was extremely nervous. It was the first time Vollmerhausen had seen him since he’d been fired. Hans had in fact been startled to see him in this place.

“Eh, what?” Vollmerhausen squinted, rubbed his hands through his hair and across his face, noticing for the first time that he hadn’t shaved in quite some time.

“Well, they say some fellows in the SS are going to let a big contract soon. For Vampir. They may revive Vampir.”

“The SS. What do they care about—”

“Hans, I didn’t ask. I-I just didn’t ask. But I hear it has to do with…” He trailed off.

“What? Come on now, Dieter. What on earth? I’ve never seen you quite so—”

“Hans. It’s just another job. Perhaps the Waffen SS wants to put Vampir into production. I don’t—”

“What did you hear?”

“It’s a special thing. A special mission. A special most secret, most important effort. That’s all. It’s said to originate from—from high quarters.”

Vollmerhausen pursed his lips disgustingly, puzzled.

“I think they’re interested in you. I think they’re quite interested in you. Would you be willing? Hans, think about it. Please.”

The SS filled him with dread. You heard so much. But a job was a job, especially when the alternative was the Ostfront.

“Yes. Yes, I suppose I—”

A day or so later he found himself in conversation with a pale officer at Unter den Eichen, the underground headquarters of the SS administrative and economic section, in Berlin.

“The Reichsführer is anxious to let a contract on an engineering project, sited down in the Schwarzwald. Actually, I may as well be frank with you, he believes this Vampir thing you worked on might have applications with regard to the duties of the SS and he’s anxious to pursue them.”

“Interesting,” said Vollmerhausen.

The man then proceeded to discuss with surprising precision the history and technology of Vampir, especially as linked to the STG-44. Vollmerhausen was stunned to realize how carefully the project had been examined by—what was it?—WVHA, of which up until a day or so ago he’d not even heard.

“There’s no question of funding,” the man explained, “we have access to adequate monies. A subsidiary called Ostindustrie GmbH produces quite a lot of income. Cheap labor from the East.”

“Well, the budget would certainly be a factor in such a project,” said Vollmerhausen noncommittally.

“Do you know this fellow Repp?”

“The great Waffen SS hero?”

“Yes, him. He’s a part of it too. He’ll be joining the project shortly. We’ve given it a code name, Nibelungen. Operation Nibelungen.”

“What on earth—”

“The Reichsführer’s idea. He likes those little touches. It’s a joke, actually. Surely you can see that?”

But Vollmerhausen was baffled. Joke?

The officer continued. “Now, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor, here”—he shuffled some papers—“Vampir’s chief liability, according to the field results—”

“The test was planned for failure. They treated it like a piece of cookware. It’s a sophisticated—”

“Yes, yes. Well, from our point of view, the problem is weight.”

“With batteries, insulation, wiring, precision equipment, a lens system, energy conversion facilities, what do you expect?”

“What does the Vampir weigh?”

Vollmerhausen was silent. The answer was an embarrassment.

“Seventy kilos.” The man answered his own question. “At the very limits of movability.”

“A strong man—”

“A man at the front, in the rain, the cold, hungry, exhausted, is not strong.”

Vollmerhausen was again silent. He glared off into space. It was not safe to show anger toward the SS; yet he felt himself scowling.

“Herr Doktor, our specifications call for forty kilos.”

Vollmerhausen thought he had misheard. “Eh? I’m not sure I—”

“Forty kilos.”

“That’s insane! Is this a joke? That’s preposterous!”

“It can’t be done?”

“Not without compromising Vampir out of existence. This is no toy. Perhaps in the future, when new miniaturization technologies become available. But not now, not—”

“In three months. Perhaps four, even five, difficult to say at this point.”

Vollmerhausen almost leaped from his chair again; but he saw the man fixing him with a cool, steady glare.

“I—I don’t know,” he stammered.

“You’ll have the best facilities, the top people, the absolute green light from all cooperating agencies. You’ll have the total resources of the SS at your disposal, from the Reichsführer on down. I think you know the kind of weight that carries these days.”

“Well, I—”

“We’re prepared to go all the way on this. We believe it to be of the utmost importance to our Führer, our Fatherland and our Racial Peoples. I don’t see how you can say No to the Reichsführer It’s an honor to be chosen for this job. A fitting climax to your service to the Reich.”

Vollmerhausen deciphered the threat in this, more vivid for remaining unspecified.

“Of course,” he finally ventured, with a weak kike smile, “it would be an honor,” thinking all the time, What am I doing? Forty kilos?

The forty kilos now, months later, were within ten kilos; they’d picked and peeled and compromised and teased and improvised their way down, gram by painful gram. Vollmerhausen could almost measure the past days in terms of grams trimmed here and there, but these last ten kilos seemed impossible to find. After steady progress, the staff had stalled badly and another of Vollmerhausen’s concerns was whether or not Repp had noticed this.

It was a typical career development for him, he thought. He’d done so much good work, so much brilliant work, and never gotten any real credit for it. Meanwhile, once again, everything was coming unraveled over some nonsense that he had no control over.

Tears of black bitterness welled up in his eyes. Bad luck, unfair persecution, unlucky coincidences seemed to haunt him.

For example, for example, what thanks, what respect, had he gotten for his modifications thus far to the STG-44? He’d taken a clever, sound production rifle, albeit one with a hand-tooled breech and barrel, but still just another automatic gun, and turned it into a first-class sniper’s weapon. He solved the two most pressing problems—noise and accuracy at long range—in one stroke, devising a whole new concept of ballistics. The mission specs called for thirty rounds to be delivered silently and devastatingly to a target 400 meters out. So be it: now Repp had his thirty chances, where before he had nothing.

And what had been the response?

Repp had merely fixed those cold eyes on him and inquired, “But, Ingenieur-Doktor, how much does it weigh?”

Today’s meeting was not going well: a bitter squabble between the optics group, most of them from the Munich Technological Institute, and the power group, the battery people: natural antagonists in the weight business. Meanwhile, the people from Energy Conversion remained silent, sullen.

All at once the complexities seemed overwhelming. An incredible restlessness stirred through his limbs, as the eyes of his staff pressed into him, demanding answers, guidance, adjudication. Beyond them, more threatening, he could see Repp. His misery was intense, fiery.

“Gentlemen, please. I believe—” He halted, absolutely no idea what he’d meant to say when he began to speak. That had been happening often too, sentences that began in confidence, then somewhere in the middle veered out of control and trailed off into silence, the ideas they had sought to express vanishing. He felt the impulse to flee mounting in him; it fluttered in his chest like a live thing.

“I believe,” he continued, and was as amazed as they at the finish, “that I’m going to go for a walk.”

They looked at him in bafflement. He’d always been so driven, trying to beat the problem down by sheer intensity of will, flatten it with his energy, his doggedness. He read in several sets of eyes the suspicion that Hans the Kike was finally cracking on them.

“It’ll do us all some good,” he argued. “Get away from the problem for a few hours, get a fresh perspective on it. We’ll meet again at one.”

He rushed from them into the out-of-doors and felt a burst of clean spring air and the heat of the sun. It’s spring, he thought with surprise. He’d lost all sense of time and season, shut off in his exotic world of microns and heat curves and power sequences. Then he noticed how the installation had changed, having become now almost a fortification. He nearly stumbled into a trench that ran between cement blockhouses that were surely new since the last time he’d come this way. He picked out a path around sand-bagged gun emplacements and maneuvered through trellises of barbed wire. Were the Americans close by? It frightened him suddenly. Must remember to ask Repp.

But he wanted green silence, blue sky, the touch of the sun; not this vista of war, which merely stressed his problems. He rushed through the gate and headed down the road to the range a mile or so away; it was the only available openness in the surrounding woods. The journey wasn’t pleasing; the trees loomed in on him darkly, sealing off the sky, and there were spots after an initial turn where he felt completely isolated in the forest as the road wound through it. Not another living creature seemed to stir; no breeze nudged the dense overhead branches, which sliced the sun into splashes at his feet. But then a patch of yellow appeared at the end of the corridor after another turn. He almost ran the remaining distance.

The range was empty, a yellow field banked on four sides by the trees. He walked to the center of it, felt the sun’s warmth again build on his neck. It was March, after all, April next, then May, and May was said to be especially nice in these parts, on a clear day one could make out the Alps one hundred kilometers or so away to the south. He twisted suddenly in that direction, seeking them as one would seek a hope. Above the trees was only haze and blur. He looked about for symbols of life reviving, for buds or birds or bees, and shortly picked out a flower, a yellow thing.

He bent to it. An early fellow, eh? It was a spiky, not too healthy-looking creature, stained faintly brown. Vollmerhausen had never felt much for such displays, had never had the time for them, but now he thought he had a glimmer into the simple pleasures so many of his countrymen had crooned about over the years. He plucked the flower from the soil and held it close to study it: an interesting design, the petals really slivers of a disk sectioned to facilitate easy opening and closing, a clever notion for capturing maximum sunlight, yet not sacrificing protection from the night cold. A little sun machine composed of concentric circles, efficient, elegant, precise. Now there was engineering! As if to confirm this judgment, the sun seemed to beat harder on the back of his neck.

He felt extraordinarily pleasant. He really felt as though he’d discovered something. He must remember to find a book on flowers. He knew nothing about them but was filled with a sudden overwhelming curiosity.

These soothing thoughts deserted him abruptly when he realized he stood in the middle of the killing ground.

A memory of that night came quickly over him. When had he known they were going to shoot them? He couldn’t remember exactly, the knowledge evolved slowly, over the first few months. He could not identify an actual moment of awareness. It just seemed they all knew and didn’t find it remarkable. Nobody was upset. Repp seemed to think it quite unexceptional. He had no involvement in it in any way; it would simply happen, that’s all, when the prototype Vampir reached a certain stage. But the whole business left Vollmerhausen queasy, uncomfortable.

He remembered the beginning best, the double line of men standing listlessly in the dark cold. He could hear them breathing. They seemed so alive. He was wildly excited, nervous, his stomach so agitated that it actually hurt. The Jews stood in their ranks, waiting to die. He could see no faces; but he noticed at this penultimate moment a curious thing.

They were so small.

They were all small. Some mere boys, even the older men wiry and short.

After that, it moved clinically. The Jews were marched away and when he could not see them he no longer thought of them.

The preparations were laconic, calm. Repp fussed with the weapon, then dropped behind it and drew it to him, arranging himself into a strained pose, all bone beneath the rifle, no flesh, no muscle, nothing but a structure of bone to hold the weight.

“You have power, sir,” someone said.

“Ah, yes,” said Repp, his voice somewhat muffled in the gunstock, “quite nice, quite nice.”

“Sir, the guards are clear,” somebody called. “The targets are at four fifty.”

“Yes, yes,” said Repp, and then his words vanished in the thumping of the burst, one fast, slithering drum roll, the individual reports fusing in their rush.

It was just seconds later they realized a man had survived, and just seconds after that that all hell broke loose, the lights flashed on, two American fighter-bombers roaring down into the bright zone, spitting bullets into the field, running their earth-splitting hemstitches across the field, and the lights flashed out.

“Fuckers,” somebody said, “where the hell did they come from?”

Vollmerhausen shuddered. He stood now in the grass where the mangled bodies had lain. The Vampir rifle’s slugs had torn huge chunks in the flesh. Blood had soaked the earth that night, but now there was only grass, and sun, blue sky, a little breeze.

Vollmerhausen began to walk toward the trees. He realized the sun was behind a cloud. No wonder it felt cool all of a sudden.

The sun came out; he felt its heat across his neck again.

Yes, warm me.

Soothe me.

Clean me.

Yes, purify me.

Forgive me.

Then he knew where his ten kilos were coming from.

8

They made an odd pair: Susan in her dumpy civilian dress, and Dr. Fischelson, dressed in the fashion of the last century, fussy and ancient in wing collar, spats, a striped suit, goatee and pince-nez. We look like a picture of my grandparents, she thought.

She had him calmer now, but still was uncertain. He could go off dottily at any moment, ranting in an odd mixture of Polish, Yiddish, German and English, his eyes watering, licking his dry lips, talking crazily of obscure events and people. He was not an effective man, she knew; but when it came to one thing, his will was iron: the fate of the Jews. He seemed to carry it around with him, an imaginary weight, bending him closer to earth each day, making him more insane.

But now he was calmer. She’d soothed him, listening, nodding, cajoling, whispering. They sat on two uncomfortable chairs in an antiseptic corridor of a private clinic in Kilburn, a London suburb, outside the door behind which the Man from the East—Fischelson’s portentous phrase—rested.

The crisis of the evening was now over. It seemed that late in the afternoon some investigators had shown up at the clinic and asked rude questions. Fischelson had panicked. A rough scene had ensued. In frenzy, he’d called her. She’d begged off late duty and gotten out there as fast as she could—only to find them gone and Fischelson shaking and incoherent.

“Now, now,” she calmed. “I’m sure it was nothing. Emigration people probably, or security. That’s all. They have to check these things.”

“Rude. So rude they was. No respect.” How could she make this man see how armies—modern nations, for that matter—worked?

“It’s nothing, Dr. Fischelson. Nothing at all. They have to check these things.” She stole a glance at her watch. Christ, it was getting late: near midnight. She’d been here with the old bird since eight. She was due in at six tomorrow. “Perhaps we ought to leave. Everything’s quiet now.”

“Sure, leave. You leave. Me, an old man, I’ll stay here.” The old Jews; they were all alike. Now he sounded like her mother. Manipulation with guilt. Most effective. Jesus, how long would this go on?

“All right. We’ll stay a little longer.” How could you get rough with Fischelson? He wasn’t some jerk who was pawing at you. But she was exhausted. They had the witness, curious man in the back room—an incredible story. A story that would be told now, at last. Even if it was too late. No, it wasn’t too late. In the camps were still many, near death. If the authorities could at last be convinced, who knew what was possible? Armored attacks driving toward the KZ’s, with doctors and medicine: thousands could be saved. If only the proper people could be convinced.

The doctor sat with hands folded, breathing heavily.

Then he took off his pince-nez and began to polish the lenses in his lapel. He had long, bony fingers. In the yellow light of the corridor, he looked as if he were made of old paper, parchment. Our Jewish general, she thought: half insane, half senile, furiously indignant. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

Fischelson had been here since ’39. When the philanthropist Hirsczowicz had converted to Zionism late in that year, his first act had been to establish a voice in the West. He was very shrewd, Hirsczowicz: he knew the fate of the Jews rested in the hands of the West. He’d sent Fischelson over first, a kind of advance guard, to set things up. But Fischelson became the whole show when the war broke out and Hirsczowicz disappeared in a Nazi execution operation. The old man proved to be horribly unsuited to the task: he was not delicate, he had no tact, no political sensibility; he could only whine and rant.

“His papers is good,” Dr. Fischelson said, in his heavy accent.

“Pardon?” she said.

“His papers is good. I guarantee. I guarantee. He has release from prison war camp. Our peoples find him in DP hospital. Sick, very sick. They get him visa. Jews help Jews. Across France he comes by train. Then the last by ship. Lawyers draw up papers. All good, all legal. This I tell you. So why investigators? So why now investigators?”

“Please, please,” she said, for the old man had begun to rise and declaim. A vein pulsed beneath the dry skin of his throat. “It’s some kind of mistake, I’m sure. Or a part of the routine. That’s all. Look, I have a friend in the intelligence service, a captain.”

“A Jew?”

“No. But a good man, basically. A decent man. I’ll call him and—”

She heard the doors at the end of the corridor swing open and at first could not recognize them. They were not particularly impressive men: just big, burly, a little embarrassed. Susan’s sentence stopped in her mouth. Who were they? Dr. Fischelson, following the confusion in her eyes, looked over.

They came silently, without talking, four of them, and the fifth, a leader, a way back. They passed Susan and Fischelson and stepped into Shmuel’s room.

My God, she thought.

“What’s this, what’s going on?” shouted Fischelson.

Susan felt her heart begin to accelerate and her hands begin to tremble. She had trouble breathing.

“Easy,” said the leader, not brutally at all.

“Miss Susan, what’s going on?” Fischelson demanded.

Say something, you idiot, Susan thought.

“Hey, what are you guys doing?” she said, her voice breaking.

“Special Branch, miss. Sorry. Just be a moment.”

“Miss Susan, Miss Susan,” the old man stood, panic wild in his eyes. He began to lapse into Yiddish.

“What’s going on?” she shouted. “Goddamn you, what’s going on?”

“Easy, miss,” he said. He was not a brutal man. “Nothing to concern yourself with. Special Branch.”

The first four came out of the room. On a stretcher was the swaddled form of the survivor. He looked around dazedly.

“I’m an American officer,” she said, fumbling for identification. “For God’s sake, that man is ill. What is going on? Where are you taking that man?”

“Now, now, miss,” the leader soothed. It would have been easier to hate him if he hadn’t been quite so mild.

“He’s ill.”

The doctor was denouncing them in Polish. “Please don’t get excited,” the man said.

“Where is your authority?” she shouted, because it was the only thing she could think of.

“Sorry, miss. You’re a Yank, wouldn’t know, would you? Of course not. Special Branch. Don’t need an authority. Special Branch. That’s all.”

“He’s gone, mein Gott, is gone, is gone.” The doctor sat down.

Susan stared down the hall at the swinging doors through which they’d taken the Jew.

The leader turned to go, and Susan grabbed him.

“What is happening? My God, this is a nightmare. What are you doing, what is going on?” Her eyes felt big and she was terrified. They had merely come in and taken him and nothing on earth could stop them. There was nothing she could do. She and an old man alone in a corridor.

“Miss,” the leader said, “please. You are supposed to be in uniform. The regulations. Now I haven’t taken any names. We’ve been quite pleasant. Best advice is to go away, take the old man, get him some tea, and put him to bed. Forget all this. It’s a government matter. Now I haven’t taken any names. Please, miss, let go. I don’t want to take any names.”

He stood back. He was ill at ease, a big, strong type, with police or military written all over him. He was trying to be kind. It was a distasteful business for him.

“Who can I see?” she said. “Jesus, tell me who I can see?”

The man took a nervous look around. Outside, a horn honked. Quickly, his hand dipped into his coat, came out with a paper. He unfolded it, looked it over.

“See a Captain Leets,” he said. “American, like you. Or a Major Outhwaithe. They’re behind it all.” And he was gone.

“The Jews,” Dr. Fischelson was saying, over on the chair, looking bleakly at nothing, “who’ll tell about the Jews? Who’ll witness the fate of the Jews?”

But Susan knew nobody cared about the Jews.

Leets, alone in the office, waited for her. He knew she’d come. He felt nervous. He smoked. His leg ached. He’d sent Roger out on errands, for now there was much to do; and once Tony had called, urgent with a dozen ideas, with several subsidiary leads from the first great windfall. But Leets had pushed him off.

“I have to get through the business with Susan.”

Tony’s voice turned cold. “There is no business with Susan. You owe her nothing. You owe the Jews nothing. You owe the operation everything.”

“I have to try and explain it,” he said, knowing this would never do for a man of Tony’s hardness.

“Then get it over with quick, chum, and be ready for business tomorrow. It’s first day on the new job, all right?”

Leets envied the major: war was simple for the Brits—they waged it flat out, and counted costs later.

He heard something in the hall. Susan? No, something in this ancient building settling with a groan.

But presently the door opened, and she came in.

He could see her in the shadows.

“I thought you’d be out celebrating,” she said.

“It’s not a triumph. It’s a beginning.”

“Can we have some light, please, goddamn it.”

He snapped on his desk lamp, a brass fixture with an opaque green cowl.

Because he knew he was dead to her, she seemed very beautiful. He could feel his cock tighten and grow. He felt a desperate need to return to the past: before all this business, when the Jews were little people in the background whom she went to see occasionally, and his job was simple, meaningless, and London a party. For just a second he felt he’d do anything to have all that back, but mainly what he wanted back was her. Just her. He wanted to know her again, all of her—skin, her hands and legs. Her mouth. Her laugh. Her breasts, cunt.

She wore full uniform, as if at a review. Army brown, which turned most women shapeless and sexless, made Susan wonderful. Her brass buttons shone in the flickery English light. A few ribbons were pinned across the left breast of her jacket. A bar glittered on her lapels, and a SHAEF patch, a sword, upthrust, stood out on her shoulder. One of those little caps tilted across her hair. She was carrying a purse or something.

“I tried to stop you, you know,” she said. “I tried. I went to see people. People I know. Officers I’d met in the wards. Generals even. I even tried to see Hemingway, but he’s gone. That’s how desperate I was.”

“But you didn’t get anywhere?”

“No. Of course not.”

“It’s very big. Or, we think it’s big. You can’t stop it. Ike himself couldn’t stop it.”

“You bastard.”

“Do you want a cigarette?”

“No.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I was there when they came and took him. ‘Special Branch.’ There was nothing we could do.”

“I know. I read the report. Sorry. I didn’t know it would work out that way.”

“Would it have made any difference?”

“No,” Leets said. “No, it wouldn’t have, Susan.”

“You filthy bastard.”

She seemed almost about to break down. But her eyes, which had for just a flash welled with tears, returned quickly to their hard brilliance.

“Susan—”

“Where is he?”

“In another hospital. A British one. He’ll be fine there. He’ll be all right. If it’s a matter of worrying about him, then please don’t. We’ll take good care of him. He’s quite important.”

“You have no idea what that man’s been through.”

“I think perhaps I do. It’s been very rough on him, sure, we realize—”

“You have no idea, Jim. You can’t possibly begin to imagine. If you think you can, then you’re fooling yourself. Believe me.”

Leets said nothing.

“Why? For Christ’s sakes, why? You kidnap a poor Jew. Like Cossacks, you come in and just take him. Why?”

“He’s an intelligence source. An extraordinary one. We believe he’s the key to a high-priority German operation. We believe we can work backward from the information he gives us and track it down. And stop it.”

“You bastard. You have no idea of the stakes involved, of what he means to those people.”

“Susan, believe me: I had no choice. I was walking down a London street a few nights ago with a woman I love. All of a sudden she unreels a story that struck right at the heart of something I’d been working on since January. You needed a witness? Well, I needed one too. I had no way of knowing they’d turn out to be the same man.”

“You and that bastard Englishman. You were the officers that came by the clinic yesterday. I should have known. Dr. Fischelson said investigators. I thought of cops. But no, it was you and that Oxford creep. You’d do anything for them, won’t you, Jim? Anything! To get in with the Oxford boys, the Harvard boys. You’ve come a long way from Northwestern, goddamn you.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t send the Jew to Anlage Elf in the Schwarzwald. I didn’t set him among the Waffen SS and the Man of Oak and Obersturmbannführer Repp. The Germans did that. I’ve got to find out why.”

“You bastard.”

“Please. Be reasonable.”

“That’s what you people always say. That’s what we’ve been hearing since 1939. Be reasonable. Don’t exaggerate. Stay calm. Keep your voice down.”

“Yell then, if it makes you feel better.”

“You’re all the same. You and the Germans. You’re all—”

“Shut up, Susan. You’ve got no call to say that.”

She stared at him in black fury. He’d never seen so much rage on a human face. He swallowed uncomfortably, lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking.

“Here, I brought you something.” She reached into her purse. “Go ahead. Look. Go ahead, you’re brave. I insist.”

It was a selection of photographs. Blurry, pornographic things. Naked women in fields, standing among German soldiers. Pits jammed with corpses. One, particularly horrible, showed a German soldier in full combat gear, holding a rifle up against the head of a woman who held a child.

“It’s awful,” he said. “Jesus, of course it’s awful. What do you expect me to say? It’s awful, all of it. All right? Goddamn it, what do you want? I had a fucking job to do. I didn’t ask for it, it just came along. So get off my back, goddamn it.”

“Dr. Fischelson has an interesting theory. Would you like to hear it? It’s that the Gentiles are still punishing us for inventing the conscience five thousand years ago. But what they don’t realize is that when they kill us, they kill themselves.”

“Is that a theory or a curse?”

“If it’s a curse, Jim, I extend it to you. From the bottom of my heart, I hope this thing kills you. I hope it does. I hope it kills you.”

“I think you’d better go now. I’ve still got work to do.”

She left him, alone in the office. The pictures lay before him on the desk. After a while, he ripped them up and threw them into the wastebasket.

Early the next morning, before the interrogations began, Leets composed the following request and with Outhwaithe’s considerable juice got it priority circulation as an addendum to the weekly Intelligence Sitrep, which bucked it down as far as battalion-level G-2’s and their British counterparts ETO-wide.

“Jesus, the crap we’re going to get out of that,” complained Roger.

9

It was clear the Jew was trying to accommodate them. He answered patiently their many questions, though he thought them stupid. They kept asking him the same ones again and again and each time he answered. But he could only tell them what he knew. He knew that Repp had killed twenty-five men at long distance—400 meters Leets had figured—in pitch dark, without sound. He knew that a mysterious Man of Oak had come to visit the project at one point or other during his time there. He knew that he’d been picked up near Karlsruhe, which meant he’d traveled the length of the Black Forest massif, a distance of one hundred or so kilometers, which would put the location of Anlage Elf at somewhere in that massive forest’s southern quadrant.

Beyond that, only details emerged. One day he identified the collar patches of the SS soldiers at the installation: they were from III Waffen SS Panzergrenadierdivision Totenkopf, the Death’s Head division, a group of men originally drawn from the pre-war concentration camp guard personnel that had since 1939 fought in Poland, France, Russia and was now thought to be in Hungary. Another day he identified the kind of automobile the mysterious Man of Oak had arrived in: a Mercedes-Benz twelve-cylinder limousine, thought to be issued only to Amt leaders, or department heads, in the SS bureaucracy. But as to the meaning or identity of this strange phantom, he had no idea. He did not even have much curiosity.

“He was a German. That’s all. A German big shot,” he said laconically in his oddly accented English.

Another day he correctly identified the STG-44 as the basic weapon of the Totenkopf complement. Another day he discussed the installation layout, fortifications and so forth. Another day he created to the best of his ability a word-picture of the unfortunate civilian called Hans the Kike, whose chemicals he’d tried to move.

Leets smiled at how far they’d come and how fast. From that first meeting in the hospital to now, no more than a week had passed. Yet a whole counter-espionage operation had been mounted. SWET effectively no longer existed; it had been given over entirely to the business of catching Repp… and he, Leets, would run the show, reporting only to Tony. He would have first priority in all matters of technical support: he could go anywhere anytime, spend any amount of money, as long as Tony didn’t scream too loud, and Tony wouldn’t scream at all. He had the highest security clearance. More people in this town knew of him than ever before, and he’d been asked to three parties. He had a car, though only Rog as driver. There was talk of a Majority. He knew he could get on the phone and call up anybody short of Ike; and maybe even Ike.

Yes, it was quite a lot.

But it was also very little.

“He can only get us so far. We are helpless until we find this place,” Tony said.

But Leets pressed ahead. It was his hope that somewhere in the Jew’s testimony a hidden clue would be uncovered, yielding up the secrets of Repp and his operation.

Black Forest? Then consult with botanists, hikers, foresters, geographers, vacationers. Look at recon photos. Check out library books—Tramping the German Forests, by Maj. H. W. O. Stovall (Ret.), D.F.C., Faber and Faber; The Shadowy World of the Deciduous Forest, by Dr. William Blinkall-Apney. And do not forget that trove of intelligence: Baedeker.

Man of Oak? Scan the British Intelligence files for German officers with wooden arms or legs or even jaws—it had happened to Freud, had it not? Check out reputations, rumors, absurd possibilities. Could a fellow walk stiffly? Could he be extremely orthodox? Very conservative? Slow-moving, losing his leaves, deep-rooted, dispensing acorns?

“It’s rather ridiculous,” Tony said. “It sounds like something out of one of your Red Indian movies.”

Leets grunted. Man-of-Oak? Jesus Christ, he moaned in disgust.

And what about equipment?

Hitting twenty-five targets dead center from 400 meters in the dark? Impossible. Yet here was the crucial element that had convinced Tony to call upstairs and make noise. For in a mob of dead Jews he could easily see dead generals or dead ministers or dead kings.

But ballistics people said it was impossible. No man could shoot so well without being able to see. There must have been some kind of secret illumination. Radar? Unlikely, for radar, though still primitive, worked best in the air, where it could see only airplanes and space. There was some kind of sound business the Navy had—sonar, someone said. Perhaps the Germans had worked out a way to hear the targets. Supersensitive microphones.

“Maybe the guy can just see in the dark,” Rog suggested.

“Thanks, Rog. You’re a big help,” Leets said.

But even if he could see, how could he hit? Four hundred meters was a long way. If he was going to hit at that range, he had to be putting out a high-velocity round. And when it sliced through the sound barrier, krak! Leets could himself remember. And he knew the guy was firing a very quick 7.92-millimeter round. Could they silence it? Sure, silence the gun, no problem; but not the bullet! The bullet made the noise.

How the hell were they doing it?

It terrified him.

Who was the target?

Now there was the big one. With the who, everything else would come unraveled. Leets’s guesses went only to one conclusion: it had to be a group. Else why would this Repp practice up on a group, and why would he use a weapon like the thirty-shot STG-44, as opposed to a nice five-shot Kar ’98 rifle, the bolt-action, long-range instrument the Germans had been building in the millions since the last century?

Yet killing anyone would not seem to gain them much, except some hollow vengeance. Sure, kill Churchill, kill Stalin. But it wouldn’t change the outcome of the war. Kill the two houses of Parliament, the Congress and the Senate, the Presidium and the Politburo: it wouldn’t change a thing. Germany would be squashed at the same rate. The big shots still rode the rope.

Yet, goddamn it, not only were they going to kill someone, the SS was going to an immense effort, an effort that must have strained every resource in these desperate days, to kill a few more.

What could it matter? Millions were already dead, already wasted. Who did they hate enough to kill even as they were dying?

Who were they trying to reach out of the grave to get?

And that is where Shmuel’s information left them. Except for one thing.

Leets was alone in the office, working late into the night. That day’s work with the Jew had not gone well. He was beginning to balk. He did not seem to care for his new allies. He was a grim little mutt, grumpy, short of temper, looking absurd in new American clothes. He’d been returned to the hospital now, and Tony was off in conference and Rog was hitting balls against a wall and Leets sat there, nursing the ache in his leg amid crumpled-up balls of paper, books, junk, photos, maps, and tried not to think of Susan. He knew one thing that could drive Susan from his mind.

Leets opened the drawer and drew out a file. It was marked “REPP, first name ?, German SS officer, Le Paradis suspect,” and though its contents were necessarily sketchy, it did contain one bona fide treasure. Leets opened it and there, staring back at him through lightless eyes, was this Repp. It was a blow-up of a 1936 newspaper photo: a long young face, not in any way extraordinary, hair dark and close-cropped, cheekbones high.

The Master Sniper, the Jew had called him.

Leets rationed himself in looking at the picture. He didn’t want to stare it into banality, become overfamiliar with it. He wanted to feel a rush of breath every time he saw it, never take it for granted. To take this guy for granted, Leets knew, would be to make a big mistake.

They’d showed the picture to Shmuel.

He’d looked at it, given it back.

“Yes. It’s him.”

“Repp?”

“Yes. Younger, of course.”

“We think he was involved in a war-crimes action against British prisoners in 1940 in France,” explained Outhwaithe, who’d brought the file by. “A wounded survivor gave two names. Repp was one of them. A researcher then went through the British Museum’s back files and came up with this. It’s from the sporting-news section of Illustrierter Beobachter, the pre-war Nazi picture rag. It seems this young fellow was a member of the German small-bore rifle team. The survivor identified him from it. So we’ve a long-standing interest in Herr Repp.”

“I hope you arrest him, or whatever,” Shmuel had said. He had to be pressed into pursuing the topic of Repp, but finally said only, “A soldier. Rather calm man, quite in control of himself and others. I have no insights into him. Jews have never understood that sort. I can’t begin to imagine what he’s like, how his mind works, how he sees the world. He frightens me. Then. And now, in this room. He has no grief.”

Though Shmuel had no interest in knowing Repp, that was now Leets’s job. He stared hard at the photo. Its caption simply said, “Kadett Repp, one of our exemplary German sportsmen, has a fine future in shooting competitions.”

Another day passed, another interrogation spun itself listlessly out. Leets felt especially sluggish, having spent so much time the night previous with the picture of the German. Another researcher had been dispatched at Tony’s behest through the back issues of all German periodicals at the British Museum; perhaps something new would surface there. Whatever, that aspect had passed momentarily out of Leets’s hands; before him now, instead, sat the Jew, looking even worse than usual. He had rallied in his first days among the Allies, bloated with bland food, treated with unctuous enthusiasm; perhaps he’d even been flattered. But as the time wore on, Leets felt they were losing him. Lately he’d been a clam, talking in grunts, groans. Leets had heard he sometimes had nightmares and would scream in the night—“Ost! Ost!” east, east; and from this the American concluded things had been rough for him. But what the hell, he’d made it, hadn’t he? Leets hadn’t been raised to appreciate what he took to be moodiness. He had no patience for a tragic view of life and when he himself got to feeling low, it was with an intense accompanying sense of self-loathing.

Anyway, not only was the Jew somewhat hostile, he was sick. With a cold, no less.

“You look pretty awful,” said Rog, in a rare display of human sympathy, though on the subject of another man’s misfortune he was hardly convincing.

“The English keep their rooms so chilly,” the man said.

“Roger, stoke the heater,” Leets said irritably, anxious to return to the matter at hand, which this day was another runaround on the topic of the Man of Oak.

Roger muttered something and moped over to the heater, giving it a rattle.

“A hundred and two in here,” he said to nobody.

Shmuel sniffled again, emptied his sinuses through enflamed nostrils into a tissue, and tossed it into a wastebasket.

“I wish I had my coat. The German thing. They make them warm at least. The wind gets through this.” He yanked on his American jacket.

“That old thing? Smelled like a chem lab,” Roger said.

“Now,” Leets said, “could there be some double meaning in this Oak business? A pun, a symbol, something out of Teutonic mythology—”

Leets halted.

“Hey,” he said, turning rudely, “what did you mean, chem lab?”

“Uh.” Roger looked up in surprise.

“I said, what did you mean—”

“I heard what you said. I meant, it smelled like a chem lab.” It was as close as he could get. “I had a year of organic in high school, that’s all.”

“Where is it?”

“Um,” Roger grunted. “It was just an old Kraut coat. How was I to know it was anything special? I uh… I threw it out.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Leets. “Where?”

“Hey, Captain, it was just this crappy old—”

“Where, Sergeant, where?”

Leets usually didn’t use that tone with him, and Rog didn’t like it a bit.

“In the can, for Christ’s sake. Behind the hospital. After we got him his new clothes. I mean I—”

“All right,” said Leets, trying to remain calm. “When?”

“About a week ago.”

“Oh, hell.” He tried to think. “We’ve got to get that thing back.” And he picked up the phone and began to search for whoever was in charge of garbage pickup from American installations in London.

The coat was found in a pit near St. Saviour’s Dock on the far side of the Thames from the Tower of London. It was found by Roger and it did smell—of paint, toast, used rubbers, burnt papers, paste, rust, oil, wood shavings and a dozen other substances with which it had lain intimately.

“And lead sulfide,” Leets said, reading the report from the OSS Research and Development office the next day.

“What the hell is that?” Roger wanted to know. Shmuel did not appear to care.

“It’s a stuff out of which infrared components are built. It’s how they could see, how Repp could see. I find out now we’re working hard on it in ultra secrecy, and the English as well. But this would tend to suggest the Germans are at the head of the class. They’ve got a field model ready, which means they’re years ahead of us. See, the thing converts heat energy to light energy: it sees heat. A man is a certain temperature. Repp’s gadget was set in that range. He could see the heat and shoot into it. He could see them all. Except—” he paused—“for him.”

He turned to Shmuel.

“You were right,” he said. “God did not save you. It was no miracle at all. The stuff absorbs heat: that’s why it’s photo-conductive. And that’s why it’s such a great insulator. It’s why the thing kept you so warm, got you through the Schwarzwald. And why Repp couldn’t see you. You were just enough different in temperature from the others. You were invisible.”

Shmuel did not appear to care. “I knew God had other worries that night,” he said.

“But the next time he shoots,” Leets said, “the guys on the other side of the scope won’t be so lucky.”

10

Vollmerhausen is visibly nervous, Repp noticed with irritation. Now why should that be? It won’t be his neck on the line out there, it’ll be mine.

It was still light enough to smoke, a pleasant twilight, mid-April. Repp lit one of his Siberias, shaggy Ivan cigarettes, loosely packed, twigs in them, and they sometimes popped when they burned, but it was a habit he’d picked up in the Demyansk encirclement.

“Smoke, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor?” he inquired.

“No. No. Never have. Thanks.”

“Certainly. The night will come soon.”

“Are you sure it’s safe here? I mean, what if—”

“Hard heart, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor, hard heart. All sorts of things can happen, and usually do. But not here, not tonight. There’ll only be a patrol, not a full attack. Not this late. These Americans are in no hurry to die.”

He smiled, looked through the glassless farm window at the tidy fields that offered no suggestion of war.

“But we are surrounded,” said Vollmerhausen. It was true. American elements were on all sides of them, though not aggressive. They were near the town of Alfeld, on the Swabian plain, in a last pocket of resistance.

“We got in, didn’t we? We’ll get back to our quiet little corner, don’t worry.” He chuckled.

An SS sergeant, in camouflage tunic, carrying an MP-40, came through the door.

“Herr Obersturmbannführer,” he said in great breathless respect, “Captain Weber sent me. The ambush team will be moving out in fifteen minutes.”

“Ah. Thank you, Sergeant,” said Repp affably. “Well,” turning to the engineer, “time to go, eh?”

But Vollmerhausen just stood there, peering through the window into the twilight. His face was drawn and he seemed colorless. The man had never been in a combat zone before.

Repp hoisted the electro-optical pack onto his back, struggling under the weight, and got the harness buckled. Vollmerhausen made no move to help. Repp lifted the rifle itself off its bipod—it rested on the table—and stepped into the sling, which had been rigged to take most of the weight, made an adjustment here and there and declared himself ready. He wore both pieces of camouflage gear tonight, the baggy tiger trousers along with the tunic, and the standard infantry harness with webbed belt and six canvas magazine pouches and, naturally, his squashed cap with the death’s-head.

“Care to come?” he asked lightly.

“Thanks, no,” said Vollmerhausen, uneasy at the jest, “it’s so damned cold.” He swallowed, clapped his hands around himself in pantomimed shiver.

“Cold? It’s in the forties. The tropics. This is spring. See you soon. Hope your gadget works.”

“Remember, Herr Obersturmbannführer, you’ve only got three minutes—”

“—in the on-phase. I remember. I shall make the most of them,” Repp replied.

Repp left the farmhouse and under his heavy load walked stiffly to a copse of trees where the others had gathered. Frankly, he felt ridiculous in this outlandish rig, the bulky box strapped to his back, the rifle linked to it by wire hose, the sighting apparatus itself bulky and absurd on top of the weapon, which itself was exaggerated with the extended magazine, the altered pistol grip and the bipod. But he knew they wouldn’t smirk at him.

Tonight it was Captain Weber’s show. It was his sector anyway, he knew the American patrol patterns. Repp was along merely to shoot, as if on safari.

“Sir,” said Weber. “Heil Hitler!”

“Heil, Schutzstaffel,” responded Repp, tossing up a flamboyantly casual salute. The young men of XII Panzergrenadierdivision “Hitlerjugend” jostled with respect, though the circumstances seemed to prevent more elaborate courtesies. This pleased Repp. He’d never been much for ceremony.

“Ah, Weber, hello. Boys,” nodding to them, common touch, nice, they could talk about it after the war.

“Sir,” one of the worshipers said, “that damned thing looks heavy. Do you need a man—”

It was heavy. Even with Vollmerhausen’s last stroke of genius, the one he’d been laboring on like a maniac these last few days, Vampir, the whole system, gun, rack, scope, light source, weighed in at over forty kilos, 41.2, to be exact, still 1.2 kilos over, but closer to the specs than Repp ever thought they’d get.

“Thanks, but no. That’s part of the test, you see, to see how well a fellow can do with one of these on his back. Even an old gent like me.”

Repp was thirty-one, but the others were younger; they laughed.

Repp grinned in the laughter: he liked to make them happy. After it had died, he said, “After you, Captain.”

There was a last-second ritual of equipment checks to be performed, MP-40 bolts dropped from safe into engagement, feeder tabs locked into the machine gun, harnesses shifted, helmet straps tightened; then, Weber leading, Repp somewhere in the center, they filed out, crouched low, into the fields.

Vollmerhausen watched them go, silent line of the ambush team edging cautiously into the dark. He wondered how long he’d have to wait until Repp returned with the happy news that it had gone well and they could leave. Hours probably. It had already been a terrible day; first the terrifying flight in from Anlage Elf in the Stork, bobbing and skimming, over the trees. Then the long time among the soldiers, the desultory shellings, and the worry about the weather.

Would the sun hold till twilight?

If it didn’t they’d have to stay another day. And another. And another….

But it had held.

“There, see: your prayers have been answered, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor,” Repp had chided him.

Vollmerhausen smiled weakly. Yes, he had prayed.

Displaying a dexterity that might have astounded his many detractors, Hans the Kike had prepared Vampir for its field test. He quickly mounted the scope and the energy conversion unit with its parabola-shaped infrared lamp to the modified STG receiver, using a special wrench and screwdriver. He locked in the power line and checked the connections. Intact. He opened the box and gave it a quick rundown, tracing the complex circuitry for faulty wiring, loose connections, foreign objects.

“Best hurry,” Repp said, leaning intently over the engineer’s shoulder, watching and recording his rundown, “we’re losing it.”

Vollmerhausen explained for what must have been the thousandth time, “The later we charge, the later it lasts.”

Finally, he was finished. Sun remained, in traces: not a fiery noontime’s blaze—of furnaces or battles—but a fleeting late-afternoon’s version, pale and low and thin, but enough.

“It’s not the heat, it’s the light,” he pointed out.

Vollmerhausen yanked a metal slide off a thick metal disk spot-welded crudely to the top of the cathode chamber, revealing a glass face, opaque and dense. Its facets sparkled in the sunlight.

“Fifteen minutes is all we need; that gives us eight hours of potency for an on-phase of three minutes,” he said, as if he were convincing himself.

The problem with infrared rays, Vollmerhausen had tried to explain to Repp, was that they were lower in energy than visible light—how then could they be made to emit light rays of a higher value, so that images might be identified and, in this case, fired upon? Dr. Kutzcher had found a part of the answer at the University of Berlin those many years ago: by feeding high-tension electricity across a cathode tube, he’d caused the desired rise in energy level, producing the requisite visibility. But Vollmerhausen, improvising desperately at Anlage, had not the latitude of Kutzcher. His problem was narrowly military—he was limited by weight, the amount a man could carry efficiently on his back over rough terrain. When all the skimming and paring and snipping was done, he found himself a full ten kilos distant from that optimum weight; no further reduction was possible without radically compromising Vampir’s performance. And the mass of the unbudgeable ten kilos lay in the battery pack and its heavy shielding, the source of the high-tension electricity.

His stroke of inspiration—it took the form of the blisterlike dial welded to the scope, no, not pretty at all—was a solar unit. No less a power than the sun itself would provide Vampir with its energy; not an inexhaustible supply, but enough for a few minutes of artificial, invisible daylight at high midnight. Vollmerhausen could not totally abandon a battery, of course; one was still needed to provide juice for the cathode ray tube, but not nearly so much juice, for the phosphors in the chamber had been selected for their special property to absorb energy from sunlight and then, when bombarded by infrared rays, to release it. Thus instead of a 10-kilo 30-volt battery, Vampir could make do with a 1.3-kilo 3-volt battery, a net savings of 8.7 kilos while maintaining the intensity and brilliance of image within the specified limits. But not for long: for the phosphors had a very brief life in their charged state, and once exposed to the infrared lost their powers quickly. But for a good three minutes, Repp could peer through the eyepiece and there, wobbling greenly before him, magnified tenfold by a specially ground Opticotechna lens, undulated targets, visible, distinct, available, 400 meters out.

Vollmerhausen had checked his watch, snapped the face of the solar disk closed.

“There. It’s done. You’ve got your power now, until midnight.”

“Just like a fairy tale,” Repp had said merrily.

“And you’ve got the special ammunition?”

“Of course, of course,” and he had clapped the magazine pouch on his belt.

Now, in the farmhouse, Vollmerhausen looked out into a darkness that was total. Repp was somewhere out there, in his element. The night belonged to him.

I gave it to him, Vollmerhausen thought.

Repp slid into position behind the rifle, which rested on its bipod. His shoulders and arms ached, and the strap had cut deeply across his collarbone. The damned thing was heavy, and he’d come but three or four kilometers, not the twenty-three kilometers he’d be traveling the day of Nibelungen. He felt his breath coming unevenly, in sobs and gasps, and fought to control it. Calm was the sniper’s great ally, you had to will yourself into a serenity, a wholeness of spirit and task. He tried hard to relax.

Four hundred meters beyond him the tidy fields fell away into a stream bed, where a stand of trees and thicker vegetation grew, and here the land delivered up a kind of fold, a natural funnel that men moving over unfamiliar territory, scared probably, wishing themselves elsewhere, would be surely drawn to.

“There, Herr Obersturmbannführer, do you see it?” asked Weber, crouching beside him in the darkness.

“Yes. Fine.”

“Four nights out of five they come through there.”

“Fine.”

Weber was nervous in the great man’s presence, talked too much.

“We could move closer.”

“I make it four hundred meters, about right.”

“Now we’ve flares if you—”

“Captain, no flares.”

“I’ve the machine-gun team over on the right for suppressing fire if you need it, and my squad leader, a sound man, is on the left with the rest of the patrol.”

“I can see you learned your trade in the East.”

“Yes, sir.” The young captain’s face, like Repp’s own, was dabbed with oily combat paint. His eyes shone whitely in the starlight.

“They usually come about eleven, a few hours off. They think this is the great weakness in our lines. We’ve let them through.”

“Tomorrow they’ll stay away!” Repp laughed. “Now tell your fellows to hold still. No firing. My operation, all right?”

“Yes, sir.” He was gone.

Good, so much the better. Repp liked to spend these moments alone, if possible. He considered them very much his own minutes, a time for clearing the head and loosening the muscles and indulging in a dozen semiconscious eccentricities that got him feeling in touch with the rifle and his targets and himself.

Repp lay very still and warm, feeling the wind, the rifle against his hands, studying the dark landscape before him. He felt rather good, at the same time remembering that things had not always been so pleasant. A frozen February’s memory floated up before him, a desperate month of a desperate year, ’42.

Totenkopfdivision had been pushed into a few square miles of a pulverized city named Demyansk, in the Valdai Hills between Lake Ilmen and Lake Seliger in northern Russia—the Winter War, they later called it. In the city, all rudiments of military organization had broken down: the battle had become one huge alley fight, a small-unit action repeated on a vast scale, as groups of men stalked each other through the ruins. Young Repp, a Hauptsturmführer, as the Waffen SS designated its captains, was the champion stalker. With his Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5-millimeter mounting the 10X Unertl scope, he wandered from gunfight to gunfight, dropping five, ten, fifteen men at a throw. He was a brilliant shot, and about to become famous.

The morning of the twenty-third found him squatting wearily in the ruins of a factory, the Red Tractor Plant, sipping tepid ersatz, listening to the soldiers around him grouse. He didn’t blame them. The night had been one long fruitless countersniper operation: the Popovs were curiously silent. He was tired, tired down to his fingers; his eyes were swollen and they ached. As he examined the thin swirl of liquid in the tin cup, it was not hard for him to imagine other places he’d rather be.

Yawning, he glanced around the interior of the factory, a maze of wreckage, twisted girders, heaps of brick, a skeletal outline showing against a gray sky that promised more snow; the damned stuff had fallen again yesterday, must be six feet of it now, and all about the factory fresh white piles of it gleamed brightly against the blackened walls, giving the place a strange purity. It was cold, below zero; but Repp was past caring of cold. He’d gotten used to it. He wanted sleep, that was all.

The firing opened gradually. Shots always rattled around the city as patrols bumped into each other in alleyways; one grew accustomed and did not even hear them, or the explosions either, but as the intensity seemed to mount after several minutes, when contact might ordinarily be measured in seconds, some of the men around him perked up out of their whiny conversations.

“Ivan’s knocking again,” someone said.

“Shit. The bastards. Don’t they sleep?”

“Don’t get excited,” someone cautioned, “probably some kid with an automatic.”

“That’s more than one automatic,” another said. And indeed it was, Repp could tell too, for the firing then churned like a thunderstorm.

“All right, people,” said a calm sergeant, “let’s cut the shit and wait for the officers.” He hadn’t seen Repp, who continued to lie there.

After several minutes a lieutenant came in, fast, looked about for the sergeant.

“Let’s get them out, huh? A big one, I’m afraid,” he said laconically. Then he saw Repp, was taken aback by another officer.

“Oh? Say, what the hell, who the hell are—”

“Repp,” said Repp. “Damn! I needed sleep bad. How many? Big, you say.”

“It’s not clear yet. Too much smoke and dust at the end of Groski Prospekt. But it sounds big.”

“All right,” said Repp, “these are your boys, you know what to do.”

“Yes, sir.”

Repp picked himself up wearily. He flicked the ersatz out and paused for a moment. Men scurried by, clapping helmets on, drawing parkas tighter, throwing Kar ’98 bolts, rushing into the street. Repp checked the pocket of his snow smock, then tightened it. He was loaded with ammo, not having fired a round the night before. The Mannlicher-Schoenauer fired from a clever spool magazine, almost like the cylinder of a revolver, and Repp had a pouchful of the things.

He stepped into the street finally, with the rifle. Outside, the glare was fierce and the panic unleashed. He felt at storm center. At the end of Groski Prospekt an armored car blazed. Small-arms fire kicked up spurts of dust and snow along the pavement. The noise was ugly, careening. SS Panzergrenadiers came racing down the corridor from the wall of smoke, one of them dropping when a shot took him. As they fled by, Repp snagged one.

“No use. No use. They’ve broken through. Hundreds, thousands, oh, Christ, only a block—”

A blast drowned him out and a wall went down nearby, filling the air with smoke and dust. The panicked man squirmed away and disappeared. Repp saw the young lieutenant placing his men in the wreckage along the street. They all looked scared but somehow resigned. Totenkopfdivision had a reputation for staying put. Repp knew that reputation was to be tested again. Smoke shielded the end of the street from his eyes. Nothing down there but haze.

“Herr Repp,” someone yelled, for he already had a reputation, “kill a batch of the fuckers for us, it looks like we won’t be around to do it ourselves.”

Repp laughed. Now that was a man with spirit. “Kill them yourself, sonny. I’m off duty.”

More laughter.

Repp turned, headed back into the factory. He was tired of Ivans and wreckage and filth from blown-up sewers and rats the size of cats that prowled the ruins and crawled across your belly while you slept and he never expected to survive anyway, so why not go out today? It was as good as any day. A stairway left freakishly standing in one corner of the room caught his eye. He followed it up through the deserted upper floors of the factory. He heard men crashing in below. Totenkopf people, falling back on the factory. So that was it then, the Red Tractor Plant. He was twenty-eight years old and he’d never be another day older and he’d spend his last one here in a place where Bolshevik peasants built tractors and, more recently, tanks. Not the end he’d have picked, but as numbness settled over him, he began to feel it wouldn’t be so bad at all. He was in a hurry to be done.

At the top he found himself in a clock tower of some kind, shot out, of course, nothing up there but snow and old timbers, bricks, half a wall blown away, other gaps from rogue artillery rounds. Yet one large hole opened up a marvelous view of the Groski Prospekt—a canyon of ragged walls buried in smoke. Even as he scanned this landscape of devastation, it seemed to come alive before him. He could see them, swarming now, Popovs, in those white snowsuits, domed brown helmets, carrying submachine guns.

Repp delicately brought the rifle to his shoulder and braced it on a ledge of brick. The scope yielded a Russian, scurrying ratlike from obstacle to obstacle. He lifted his head warily and flicked his eyes about and Repp shot him in the throat, a spew of crimson foaming down across his front in the split second before he dropped. The man was about 400 meters out. Repp tossed the bolt—a butterknife handle, not knobby like the Kar ’98—through the Mannlicher’s split bridge, keeping his eye pinned against the cup of the absurd Unertl ten-power scope, which threw up images big and clear as a Berlin cinema. Its reticule was three converging lines, from left, right and bottom, which almost but did not quite meet, creating a tiny circle of space. Repp’s trick was to keep the circle filled; he laid it now against another Red, an officer. He killed him.

He was shooting faster, there seemed to be so many of them. He was wedged into the bricks of the tower, rather comfortably, and at each shot, the rifle reported sharply with a slight jar, not like the bone-bruising buck of the Kar ’98, but gentle and dry. When he hit them, they slid into the rubble, stained but not shattered. A 6.5-millimeter killed with velocity, not impact; it drilled them and, failing deflection at bone or spine, flew on. Repp was even convinced they felt no pain from the way they relaxed. He didn’t even have to move the rifle much, he could just leave it where it was, they were swarming so thickly. He’d fired five magazines now, twenty-five rounds. He’d killed twenty-five men. Some looked stupefied when he took them; others angry; still others oblivious. Repp shot for the chest. He took no chances. Nothing fancy.

They had spotted him of course. Their bullets thunked and cracked around him, chipping at the bricks, filling the air with fine dust or snow, but he felt magical. He kept dropping them. The white bodies were piling up.

Behind him now sprang a noise, and Repp whirled. A boy crouched at the head of the stairs with a pack.

“Your kit, sir. You left it down below.”

“Ah.” Yes, someone’d thought to bring it to him. It was packed with ammunition, six more boxes, in each fifty specially loaded rounds, 180 grains behind a nickle-tip slug. Berdan primers—the best—with twin flash holes.

“Can you load those for me? It works same as with your rifle, off the charger,” Repp said mildly as a Degtyarev tracer winked through and buried itself in the wall. He pointed to the litter of empty spool magazines lying amid spent shells at his boots. “But stay low, those fellows are really angry now.”

Repp fired all that morning. The Russian attack had broken down, bottled up at Groski Prospekt. He’d killed all their officers and was quite sure that had been a colonel he’d put down just an instant ago. He thought he’d killed almost a hundred. Nineteen magazines, and three rounds left in this one; he’d killed, so far, ninety-eight men in just over two hours. The rifle had grown hot, and he’d stopped once or twice to squirt a drop or so of oil down its barrel. In one two-minute period, he ran his ramrod with patch vigorously in the barrel and the patch came up black with gunk. The boy crouched at his feet, and every time an empty spool dropped out, he picked it up and carefully threaded the brass cartridges in.

The Popovs were now coming from other directions; evidently, they’d sent flanking parties around. But these men ran into heavy fire from down below, and those that survived, Repp took. Still, the volume of fire against the Red Tractor Plant was building; Repp could sense the battle rising again in pitch. These things had their melodies too, and he fancied he could hear it.

The grimy lieutenant from that morning appeared in the stairwell.

“You still alive?” Repp asked.

But the fellow was in no mood for Repp’s jokes. “They’re breaking through. We haven’t the firepower to hold them off much longer. They’re already in a wing of the factory. Come on, get out, Repp. There’s still a chance to make it out on foot.”

“Thanks, old man, think I’ll stay,” Repp said merrily. He felt schussfest, bulletproof, but with deeper resonations in the German, connoting magic, a charmed state.

“Repp, there’s nothing here but death.”

“Go on yourself,” said Repp. “I’m having too much fun to leave.”

He was hitting at longer ranges now; through the drifting pall of smoke he made out small figures several blocks away. Magnified tenfold by the Unertl, two Russian officers conferred in a doorway over a map. The scene was astonishingly intimate, he could almost see the hair in their ears. Repp took one through the heart and the other, who turned away when his comrade was hit, as if in hiding his eyes he was protecting himself, through the neck.

Repp killed a sniper seven blocks away.

In another street Repp took the driver of a truck, splattering the windscreen into a galaxy of fractures. The vehicle bumped aimlessly against a rubble pile and men spilled out and scrambled for cover. Of seven he took three.

Down below, grenades detonated in a cluster, machine pistols ripped in a closed space which caught and multiplied their noise.

“I think they’re in the building,” Repp said.

“I’ve loaded all the rounds left in the magazines now,” the trooper said. “Nine of them. That’s forty-five more bullets.”

“You’d best be getting on then. And thanks.”

The boy blushed sheepishly. Maybe eighteen or nineteen, handsome, thin face.

“If I see you afterward, I’ll write a nice note to your officer,” Repp said, an absurdly civil moment in the heat of a great modern battle. Bullets were banging into the tower from all angles now, rattling and popping. The boy raced down the stairs.

At the end of Groski Prospekt, the Ivans were organizing for another push before nightfall. Repp killed one who stupidly peeked out from behind the smoldering armored car. The rifle was hot as a stove and he had to be careful to keep his fingers off the metal of the barrel. He had touched it once and could feel a blister on his skin. But the rifle held to the true; those Austrians really could build them. It was from the Steyr works near Vienna, double trigger, scrollwork in the metal, something from the old Empire, hunting schlosses in the Tyrolean foothills, and woodsmen in green lederhosen and high socks who’d take you to the best bucks in the forest.

Blobs of light floated up to smash him. Tracers uncoiled like flung ropes, drifting lazily. Some rounds trailed tendrils of smoke. The bullets went into the brick with an odd sound, a kind of clang. He knew it was a matter of time and that his survival this far, with every Russian gun in the city banging away, was a kind of statistical incredibility that was bound to end shortly. Did it matter? Perhaps this moment of pure sniper war was worth his life. He’d been able to hit, hit, hit for most of the day now, over three hundred times, from clear, protected shooting, four streets like channels to fire down, plenty of ammunition, a boy to load spools for him, targets everywhere, massing in the streets, crawling through the ruins, edging up the gutters, but if he could see them he could take them.

Repp killed a man with a flamethrower on his back.

Forty-four bullets.

By thirty-six, it had become clear that the men below had either fallen back or been killed. He heard a lot of scuffling around below. The Russians must have crept through the sewers to get in; they certainly hadn’t come down the street.

Twenty-seven.

Just a second before, someone at the foot of the stairs had emptied a seventy-one-round drum upward. Repp happened to be shielded, he was standing in a recess in the brick wall, but the slatted floor of the tower was ripped almost to slivers as the slugs jumped through it. Wood dust flew in the air. Repp had a grenade. He pulled the lanyard out the handle and tossed the thing into the stairwell, heard it bouncing down the steps. He was back on the scope when the blast and the screams came.

Eighteen.

Tanks. He saw one scuttle through a gap between buildings several blocks away. Why didn’t they think of that earlier, save themselves trouble and people? Then he realized the Stalins had the same trouble the Panzers had had negotiating the wreckage-jammed streets. To get this far into the ruins at all, Russian engineers must have been working frantically, blowing a path through to him.

Eleven.

Repp heard voices below. They were trying to be silent but a stair gave. He stepped back, took out his P-38 and leaned into the stairwell. He killed them all.

Five.

One magazine. The first tank came into view, lurching from around the corner at the Groski intersection. Yes, hello. Big fellow, aren’t you? A few soldiers crept behind it. Repp, very calm and steady, dropped one, missed one. He saw a man in a window, shot him, high in the throat. One of the men he’d dropped behind the tank attempted to crawl into cover. Repp finished him.

One.

The turret was revolving. Not a Stalin at all, a KV-1 with a 76-millimeter. He fixed with fascination on the monster, watching as the mouth of the gun lazed over, seeming almost to open wider as it drew toward him. They certainly were taking their time lining up the shot. The tank paused, gun set just right. Repp would have liked at least to get rid of his last bullet. He didn’t feel particularly bad about all this. The hatch popped on the tank, someone inside wanted a better look, and the lid rose maybe an inch or two. Repp took him, center forehead, last bullet.

There was nothing to do. He set the rifle down. This was an execution. As if by signal, Russian troops began to file down Groski Prospekt. Repp, firing since 0930, checked his watch. 1650. An eight-hour day, and not a bad one. He chalked up the score in the seconds left him. Three hundred and fifty rounds he had fired, couldn’t have missed more than a few times. Make it ten, just to be fair. That was 340 men. Then the three on the stairway with the pistol. Perhaps two more in the grenade blast. Three hundred and forty-five kills, 345. Three hundred and fo—.

The shell went into the tower forty feet below Repp. The Russians had gotten fancy, they wanted to bring the tower down with Repp inside it, poetic justice or some such melodramatic conceit. The universe tilted as the tower folded. The line of the horizon broke askew and dust rose chokingly. Repp grabbed something as gravity accelerated the drop.

The tower toppled thunderously into Groski Prospekt in a storm of dust and snow. But its top caught on the roof of the building across the way and was sheared neatly off. Repp found himself in a capsule of broken brick deposited there, untouched, baffled. It was as if he’d walked away from a plane crash.

He walked across the flat roof of the building, waiting to get nailed. Artillery started up but the shells landed beyond him. There was smoke everywhere but he was alone. Across the roof, a shell had blown open a hole. He looked down into almost a museum specimen of the Soviet Worker’s apartment, and leapt down into it. He opened the door and headed down a dark hallway. Stairs. He climbed down them, and left through a front door. There were no Russians anywhere, though far off, he could make out small figures. Taking no chances, he headed down an alley.

That night he had schnapps with a general.

“The world,” the sentimental old man intoned, “will know you now.” Dr. Goebbels stood ready to make this dream come true.

“Sir,” somebody whispered.

“I see them,” said Repp.

Scope on. The screen lights. He saw the first one, a wobbling man-shaped blotch of light, against green darkness. Then another, behind him, and still another.

Germs, Repp thought. They are germs, bacilli, disease. They are filth.

He drew back the bolt and squirmed the black cross of Vampir’s reticule against the first of the shapes.

“Filth,” he repeated.

He took them.

11

“Vampir did quite well, I thought,” said Repp. He abstractedly counted off the reasons for his pleasure, each to a finger. “No sight picture breakup, good distinct images, weight not a factor. In all, easy shooting.”

Vollmerhausen was astonished. He certainly wasn’t expecting praise. Though he knew the shooting had gone well, for he’d heard two enlisted men chattering excitedly over it.

But Repp was not yet finished. “In fact,” he elaborated, “you’ve performed extraordinarily well under great pressure. I wish it were possible to arrange for some kind of official recognition. But at least accept my congratulations.” He was toying with the blackened metal cube Vollmerhausen had noticed earlier, a charm or something. “A great miracle has happened here.” He smiled.

“I—I am honored,” stuttered Hans the Kike. They were back at Anlage Elf, in the research facility, safe in the Schwarzwald after another harrowing flight.

“But then sometimes the most important assignments are those nobody ever knows about, eh?” said Repp.

Vollmerhausen felt this was a strange comment for a famous man, but merely nodded, for he was still stunned at Repp’s sudden burst of enthusiasm. And a sudden, still-resentful part of him wished that the asshead Schaeffer were here to listen to Der Meisterschütze himself heap on the praise. Yet, he acknowledged, he deserved it. Vampir represented an astonishing feat in so small a time, under such desperate pressure. Though even now it was hard to believe and take real pleasure in: he’d done it.

Still, certain details and refinements remained to be mastered, as well as some after-mission checks and some maintenance, and it was this problem he now addressed, aware at the same time how modest he must have seemed. “May I ask, Herr Obersturmbannführer, how soon you expect to go operational? And what preparations will be necessary on my part?”

“Of course,” Repp said smartly. “Certain aspects of the mission remain problematical. I’ve got to wait on intelligence reports: target confirmations, strategic developments, political considerations. I would say another week. Perhaps even more: a delicate job. It depends on factors even I can’t control.”

“I see,” said Vollmerhausen.

“I should tell you two things further. The weapon and I will leave separately. Vampir will be taken out of here by another team. They are responsible for delivery to target area. Good people, I’ve been assured.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you’ll have to prepare a travel kit. Boxes, a trunk, I don’t know. Everything should be lashed down and protected against jolts. It needn’t be fancy. After what you’ve handled, I shouldn’t think it would be a problem.”

“Not at all.”

“Now, secondly—look, relax. You look so stiff.”

It was true. Though seated, Vollmerhausen had assumed the posture of a Prussian Kadett.

“I’ve noticed that I make people nervous,” Repp said philosophically. “Why, I wonder? I’m no secret policeman. Just a soldier.”

Vollmerhausen forced himself to relax.

“Smoke, if you care to.”

“I don’t.”

“No, that’s right. I think I will.” He drew and lit one of the Russian things. He certainly was chipper this morning, all gaudy in his camouflages. “Now, may I be frank with you?” He toyed again with the black cube Vollmerhausen had noticed earlier.

“Germany is going to lose the war. And soon too. It’s the third week in April now; certainly it’ll all be over by the middle of May. You’re not one of those fools who thinks victory is still possible. Go ahead, speak out.”

Again, Repp had astonished him. He realized it showed on his face and hurriedly snapped his mouth shut.

“Yes, I suppose. Deep down. We all know,” Vollmerhausen confirmed.

“Of course. It’s quite obvious. They know in Berlin too, the smart ones. You’re a practical man, a realist, that’s why we chose you. But I tell you this because of the following: Operation Nibelungen proceeds. No matter what happens in Berlin. No matter that English commandos and American tanks are inside the wire here. In fact especially in those cases. You weren’t in Russia?”

“No, I—”

“No matter. That’s where the real war is. This business here with the Americans and the British, just a sideshow. Now, in Russia, four million fell. The figure is almost too vast to be believed. That’s sacrifice on a scale the world’s never seen before. That’s why the mission will go on. It’s all that generation will ever have. No statues, no monuments, no proud chapters in history books. Others will write the history; we will be its villains. Think of it, Vollmerhausen! Repp, a villain! Incredible, isn’t it?”

He looked directly at the engineer.

“Unbelievable,” said the engineer.

Vollmerhausen realized Repp was not giving a speech. He had none of the orator’s gifts and little of his zeal; he spoke tiredly, laconically, only in facts, as if an engineer himself, reading off a blueprint.

Another thought occurred to Vollmerhausen: the man is quite insane. He is out of his mind. It’s all over, still he talks of monuments, of consecrations. It’s not survival for him, as it is for me. There is no after-the-war for Repp; for Repp, there’ll always be a war. If not in a shell hole or on a front line, then in a park somewhere, at a pleasant crossroads, in a barn or an office building.

“Y-yes, unbelievable,” Vollmerhausen repeated nervously, for he was just beginning to realize how dangerous Repp was.

12

“They’re calling him, even here, right afterward, der Meisterschütze, not, I say again, not der Scharfschütze, the technical German for sniper. Which of you brilliant Americans will now explain the significance of this?”

Tony held in hand his scoop of the week: the March 5, 1942, issue of Das Schwarze Korps, the SS picture magazine, which the burrower who’d been sent to the British Museum’s collection of back-issue German periodicals had uncovered. Its lead story was Repp at Demyansk.

Leets cleared his throat.

“Meisterschütze: master shot. Literally.”

“Ah, see, chum, you haven’t entered it. You don’t feel it. However can you hope to track a man whose nickname you cannot fathom?”

“I wasn’t finished, goddamn it,” Leets snarled.

“Meisterschütze, yes, master shot, and since the context is clearly military, one may indeed say, as did the Jew, master sniper. A nice turn of phrase: the man has some talent. He is a writer though, is he not? At any rate, it’s a higher form of rhetoric, more formal, playing on the long Germanic tradition of guilds, apprentices and journeymen. It’s more, shall we say, resonant.”

His cold smile drove the heat from the room. Clever bastard: a Bloomsbury wag, only-my-genius-to-declare amusement smug on his face.

But the lesson was unfinished.

“It’s not hard to see why they made such a hero of him, is it?”

“It’s part of another war,” Leets explained. He was ready for this one. “Waffen SS against the Wehrmacht. Nazis against the old boys, the Prussians who run the army. Repp is perfect. No aristo, just a country boy who can kill anything he can see. The prize is first place in line—Hitler’s line—for the new-model Panzers coming out of the shops, the Tigers. They were in the market for heroes, right?”

“Right, indeed,” admitted Tony.

“But more to the point: from this we can see how important Repp will be to the SS. That is to say, from here on in, he’s not just one of them. He is them. That is to say, he becomes their official instrument, the embodiment of their will. He’s—” he struggled for language in which to make this concept felt, “—he’s an idea.”

Tony scowled. “You’re talking like a don. Dons don’t win wars.”

“You’ve got to see in this a higher reality. A symbolic reality.” Leets himself wasn’t sure what he was saying. A voice from inside was doing the talking; somewhere a part of his mind had made a leap, a breakthrough. “When we crack it, I can guarantee you this: it will be pure Nazi, pure SS. Their philosophy, given flesh, set to walking.”

“Wow, Frankenstein,” called Roger, across the room.

“You Americans have too much imagination for anybody’s good. You go to too many films.”

But Tony had more.

“I have found,” he announced, “the Man of Oak.”

Leets turned. He could not read the Englishman’s face. It was impassive, imperial.

“Who?” Leets demanded.

“It occurs to me that we knew all along. We knew, did we not, that our phantom WVHA has an address in eastern Berlin. A suburb called Lichtenfelde; but the place itself goes by an older, more traditional name. It is called Unter den Eichen.”

He paused, allowing the information its impact.

“Translate it literally,” he advised some seconds later when he saw the befuddlement on Leets’s face.

Leets worked it out into English.

“‘Under the Oaks,’” he said.

“Yes.”

“Goddamn it!,” Leets said.

“Yes. And this Jewish chap presumably heard reference to a man from ‘Under the Oaks,’ as one would say ‘A Man from Washington,’ or ‘A Man from London,’ meaning a man of authority. But his knowledge of the language was imperfect, since his Yiddish only allowed him access to the most basic German. He garbled it, perhaps inflated it somewhat for rhetorical effect. Thus, Man of Oak, as Shmuel overheard him say.”

“Goddamn it,” Leets said again. “It must have been some officer, some supervisor. But it tells us nothing.”

“No, nothing: Another disappointment. It tells us only what we know.”

It was true. During the hot week with Shmuel, information had seemed to surge in on them. There had been so much to do. A powerful illusion of progress made itself felt. But in the very act of mounting, it had peaked. Leets saw this rather sooner than the others; now Tony had caught on: that, though all kinds of context and background were being assembled, the real nut of the problem had not yet been cracked. They knew Repp, and of his rifle, rudimentary facts, but compelling nonetheless. But they had no idea of more crucial matters. Who would the German shoot? When? Why?

“Your idea that somewhere in his testimony was a clue has gone up in smoke,” Tony said.

“We’ve got to find Anlage Elf, that’s all. Could we increase air recon of that area? Aren’t there French armored units closing in? Could they be directed to penetrate the forest, in hopes of—”

“No. Of course not. It’s huge, over and over we’ve remarked on how huge it is.”

“Goddamn it. We need something. A break.”

It arrived the next morning.

“Well,” said Leets, ending the silence, “the fucking thing’s operational. They’ve worked out the bugs.”

“Rather,” said Tony.

“They can go anytime they want.”

Leets and Outhwaithe flew into the 45th Division’s sector early the next morning, landing in a Piper Cub not far from Alfeld, the divisional headquarters. Ryan’s shop, though, was farther toward the front. And here there was a front, in the classical sense: two armies facing each other warily across a bleak, crater-scaped gulf of no-man’s land, after the configuration of the last war. The Americans had gone across this raw gap many times, and each time, bitterly, they were driven back by the Panzergrenadiers of “Hitler-jugend.” So when Leets and Outhwaithe, in strange new combat gear they’d picked up for their trip to the line, approached the blown-out farmhouse in which Ryan’s G-2 outfit hung out, they were not surprised by the sullenness with which they were greeted. Outsiders, fresh, strange officers, one a foreigner, an exotic Brit, rear-echelon types: they expected to be hated, in the way locals always hate tourists; and they were.

“I never saw anything like it,” Major Ryan, a sandy-haired freckled man whose nose ran constantly, told them. “Center chest, one shot each. No blood. Patrol that found them thought they were sleeping.”

“And at night? Definitely at night?” Leets pushed.

“I said at night, didn’t I, Captain?”

“Yes, sir, it’s just that—”

“Goddamn it, if I say at night, I mean at night.”

“Yes, sir. Can we get up there?”

“This is a combat zone, Captain. I don’t have time to take people on trips.”

“Just point us in the right direction. We’ll find it.”

“Jesus, you guys are eager. All right, but goddamn it, get yourselves a helmet. It’s right smack in Kraut country.”

The Jeep could only get them so close; after that it was a walk in the sun. A sign in a shattered tree announced the sudden change in climate tersely and without fanfare: “YOU ARE UNDER OBSERVED ARTILLERY FIRE THE NEXT 500 YARDS” in standard GI stenciling, all the letters split neatly in two; but a wit had edited an improvement into the copy, replacing the word “artillery” with “sniper” in bold child’s scrawl. The war was everywhere up here, in the wary quick stares of the men who were fighting it, the hulks of burnt-out armor that littered the landscape, in the haze of smoke, heavy and lazy, that adhered to everything, and beneath it another odor that infiltrated the nostrils.

Leets sniffed.

“Ever been in a combat zone, Captain?” asked Ryan.

“Nothing stable like this. I did some running around behind the lines last summer.”

“I recognize the odor,” said Tony. “Bodies out there. Beyond the wire.”

“Yeah,” confirmed Major Ryan. “Theirs. Just let ’em try and come out and bury ’em.”

“My father,” said Outhwaithe, “mentioned it in his letters. The Somme, all that, ’14 to ’18. I read them later.”

They began to encounter the infantrymen here, just behind the line, relaxing around cooking fires, or simply dozing in the shadows of half-tracks and Jeeps. The still landscape actually teemed with men, though if there was a principle of organization behind all this casual cluster, Leets missed it. Who was in charge? Nobody. Who knew what they were doing? Everybody. But Leets did not feel himself the object of curiosity as he scurried along, self-consciously clean and unaccustomed to the crack of bullets aimed his way. Nobody cared. He was not German; he was not an officer who could send anybody out on patrol or launch an attack; therefore he was not significant. A couple of tired-looking teen-agers with BAR’s twice their size looked at him stupidly. It did not occur to them to salute, or to him to require it. Farther on, some wise man cautioned, “Keep your asses low.”

A final hundred yards had to be covered belly-down, without dignity, across a bare ridge, through a farmyard, to a low stone wall.

Here, settled in cozy domesticity, had gathered still more GI’s. Weapons poked through holes punched in the wall or rested on sandbags in the gaps of the wall, and a scroll of barbed wire, jagged and surreal, unreeled across the stones; yet for all these symbols of the soldier’s trade, Leets still felt more as if he’d crashed a hobo’s convention. Unshaven men, grousing and farting, clothes fetid, toes popping hugely out of blackish OD socks, lay sprawled about in assorted poses of languor. A few peered intently out through gaps in the wall or Y-shaped periscopes at what lay beyond; but most just loafed, cheerful and uncomplicated, enjoying the bright moment for what it was.

The platoon leader, a young lieutenant who looked tireder than Ryan, crawled over, and a meeting convened in the lee of the wall.

“Tom,” said Ryan, “these fine gents flew in special from London; they’re after a big story.” Newspaper lingo seemed to be Ryan’s stock in trade. “Not their usual beat at all, but here they are. And the story, in time for the late editions, is Third Squad.”

“Never knew who turned the lights out on ’em,” said Tom.

More precisely, thought Leets, who turned the lights on.

A sergeant was soon summoned who’d been at the wall the night of the patrol, evidently pulled from sleep, for the flecks of crud still clotted in his eyes. He affected the winter-issue wool-helmet cap, called a beanie and useless except for decoration in this warm weather, and he yanked hard on a dead cigar. All these men who lived in the very smile of extinction insisted on being characters, vivid and astonishing, rather than mere soldiers. They looked alike only for the second it took to categorize their eccentricities.

“Not much to tell, sir,” he said, not knowing which of the four officers to address. “You can see if you’re careful.” He gestured.

Leets took off his borrowed helmet, and eased a dangerous half a head up over the wall. Germany, tidy and ripening in the spring, spilled away.

“Just to the left of those trees, sir.”

Leets saw a stand of poplars.

“We sent ’em out looking for iron,” explained Ryan, not bothering to explain that in the patois, iron meant armor. “‘Hitlerjugend’ is technically a Panzer division, though we’re not sure if they’ve got any operational stuff. We didn’t run into it on our trips over there, but who had time to look? I just didn’t want any Bulge-type surprises coming into the middle of my sector.”

“Sir,” the young sergeant continued. “Lieutenant Uckley, new guy, he took ’em down that hill, then across the field, long way to crawl. They were okay there, we found chewing gum wrappers. When they got to those trees, they went up that little draw.”

Leets could see a fold in the earth, a kind of gully between two vaguely rising landforms.

“But you didn’t hear anything? Or see anything?”

“No, sir. Nothing. They just didn’t come back.”

“Did you recover Third Squad’s bodies?” asked Outhwaithe.

“Yes, sir,” piped the lieutenant. “Next day. We called in smoke and heavy Willie Peter. Went out myself with another patrol. They’d been dropped in their tracks. Right in the ticker, every last one. Even the last guy. He didn’t have time to run, that’s how fast it was.”

Leets turned to Ryan. “The bodies. They’d be at Graves Registration?”

Ryan nodded. “If they haven’t been shipped out to cemeteries yet.”

“I think we ought to check it out.”

“Fine.”

“Sir,” asked the sergeant.

Leets turned. “Yeah.”

“What did he hit ’em with?”

“Some kind of night vision gear. It was broad daylight for him.”

“You’re looking for this guy, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well,” said the sergeant, “I went looking for him too.” A tough kid, made his stripes at what, eighteen, nineteen? Good man in a fire fight, natural talent for it. “Had me a BAR and twenty clips.”

“But no luck,” said Leets.

“Nah, uh-uh.”

You did have luck, kid: you didn’t run into Repp; you’re still alive.

“I had friends in that squad, good people. When you catch this guy, burn him. Huh? Burn him.”

The Graves Registration section took the form of a forty-cot hospital tent some miles behind the front lines, and into this tent sane men seldom ventured. Leets, Outhwaithe, Major Ryan and an Army doctor stood in the dank space with the dead, rank on rank of them, in proper order, awaiting shipment, neatly pine-boxed. Everything possible had been done to make the location pleasant, yet everything had failed and the odor that had paused at Leets’s nostrils on the line hung here pungent and tangible, though one adjusted to it quickly.

“Thank God it’s still coolish,” said Outhwaithe.

The first boy was no good to them. Repp had hit him squarely in the sternum, that cup of bone shielding, however ineffectively, the heart, shattering it, heart behind and assorted other items, but also shattering, most probably, the bullet.

“Nah,” said the doc, “I’m not cracking this guy. You won’t find a thing in there except tiny flakes cutting every which way. Tell ’em to look some more.”

And so the Graves Registration clerks prowled again through the stacked corridors of the dead, hunting, by name off the list 45th Division HQ had provided, another candidate.

The second boy too disappointed. Repp was less precise in his placement, but the physician, looking into the opened body bag in the coffin, judged it no go.

“Nicked a rib; that’ll skew the thing off. No telling where it’ll end up—foot or hip. We don’t have time to play hide-and-seek.”

A success was finally achieved on a third try. The doctor, a stocky, blunt Dartmouth grad with thick clean hands and the mannerisms of an irritated bear, announced, “Jackpot—between the third and fourth ribs. This guy’s worth the effort.”

The box was dollied into the mortuary tent.

The doctor said, “Okay, now. We’re gonna take him out of the bag and cut him open. I can get an orderly over here in an hour or so. Or I can do it now, this minute. The catch is, if I do it now, somebody here’ll have to help. You’ve seen battle casualties before? You’ve seen nothing. This kid’s been in the bag a week. You won’t recognize him as human.”

The doctor looked briefly at each of them. He had hard eyes. How old? Leets’s age, twenty-seven maybe, but with a flinty glare to his face, pugnacious and challenging. Guy must be good, Leets thought, realizing the doctor was daring one of them to stay.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

“Fine. Rest of you guys, out.” The others left. Leets and the doctor were alone with the bagged form in the box.

“You’d best put something on,” the doc said, “it’s going to be messy.”

Leets took his coat off and threw on a surgical gown.

“The mask. The mask is most important,” the doctor said.

He tied the green mask over his nose and mouth, thinking again of Susan. She lives in one of these things, he thought.

“Okay,” the doctor said, “let’s get him onto the mortuary table.”

They reached in and lifted the bagged thing to the table.

“Hang on,” the doctor said, “I’m opening it.”

He threw the bag open.

“You’ll note,” he said, “the characteristics of the cadaver in the advanced state of decomposition.”

Leets, in the mask, made a small, weak sound. No words formed in his brain. The cadaver lay in rotten splendor in its peeled-back body bag on the table.

“There it is. The hole. Nice and neat, like a rivet, just left of center chest.”

Swiftly, with sure strokes, the doctor inscribed a Y across the chest, from shoulder down to pit of stomach and then down to pubis. He cut through the subcutaneous tissue and the cartilage holding skin and ribs together. Then he lifted the central piece of the chest away and reflected the excess skin to reveal the contents.

“Clinically speaking,” the doctor said, looking into the neat arrangement, “the slug passed to the right of the sternum at a roughly seventy-five-degree angle, through the anterior aspect of the right lung”—he was sorting through the boy’s inner chest with his gloved fingers shiny—“through the pericardial sac, the heart, rupturing it, the aorta, the right pulmonary artery—right main-stem bronchus, to be exact—the esophagus, taking out the thoracic duct and finally—ah, here we are,” cheerful, reaching the end of his long shuffle, “reaching the vertebral column, transecting the spinal cord.”

“You got it?”

The doctor was deep inside the boy, going through the shattered organs. Leets, next to him, thought he was going to be sick. The smell rose through the mask to his nostrils, and pain bounded through his head. He felt he was hallucinating this: a fever dream of elemental gore.

“Here, Captain. Your souvenir.”

Leets’s treasure was a wad of mashed lead, caked with brown gristle. It looked like a fist.

“They usually open up like that?”

“Usually they break apart if they hit something, or they pass on through. What you’ve got there is a hollow nose or soft point or something like that. Something that inflates or expands inside, I think they’re illegal.”

The doctor wrapped the slug in a gauze patch and handed it over to Leets.

“There, Captain. I hope you can read the message in it.”

Eager now with his treasure, Leets insisted on adding one last stop to the tour of the combat zone. He’d learned from Ryan that the divisional weapons maintenance section had set up shop in the town of Alfeld proper, not far from Graves Registration, and they headed for it.

Leets entered to find himself in a low dark room lined with workbenches. Injured American weapons lay in parts around the place, a brace of .30-caliber air-cooled perforated jacket sleeves, several BAR receivers, Garand ejector rods, Thompson sling swivels, carbine bolts, even a new grease gun or two. Two privates struggled to dismantle a .50-caliber on a tripod, no easy task, and in the back another fellow, a T-5, hunched over a small piece, grinding it with a file.

Leets, ignored, finally said, “Pardon,” and eventually the tech looked up.

“Sir?”

“The CO around?”

“Caught some junk last week. Back in the States by now. I’m pulling the strings for now. Sir.”

“I see,” said Leets. “You any good on the German stuff?”

“Meaning, Can I get you a Luger? The answer is, Can you get me thirty-five bucks?”

“No, meaning, What’s this?”

He held out the mashed slug.

“Outta you, sir?” asked the tech.

“No. Out of a kid up on the line.”

“Okay. That’s that new machine carbine they’ve got, the forty-four model. You catch SS boys with ’em, right?”

“Right.”

“Seven point nine-two millimeter kurz. Short. Like our carbine round.”

He took it from Leets and held it close.

“All right,” he said. “A hundred for the forty-four, five bucks apiece for any spare magazines you can get me.”

Oh, Christ, Leets thought.

“One fifty,” the tech upped his bid, “provided it’s in good condition, operational, no bad dents or bends. You get me one with the barrel-deflection device, the Krummlauf, and I’ll jump to two bills. That’s top dollar.”

“No, no,” said Leets, patiently, “all I’m interested in is this slug.”

“That’s not worth a goddamned penny, sir,” said the sergeant, offended.

“Information, not dollars, goddamn it!”

“Jesus, I’m only talking business,” said the sergeant. “I thought you was a client, is all, sir.”

“Okay, okay. Just look at the fucking bullet and tell me about it.”

“Frank, c’mere, willya? Frank’s our expert.”

Frank untangled himself from the struggle with the .50 and loped over. Leets saw that if the tech was the business brain, Frank was the esthete. He had the intellectual’s look of scorn; this was too low for him, he was surrounded by fools, more worthy ways of spending one’s life could certainly be found.

He picked the piece up, looked at it quickly.

“Let’s weigh it,” he said. He took it over to the bench and balanced it on the pan of a microscale, fussed with the balances and finally announced, “My, my, ain’t we got fun.” He rummaged around on the bench and produced a greasy pamphlet, pale green, that read “ORDANCE SPECIFICATIONS AXIS POWERS ETO 1944” and pawed through it.

“Yes, sir,” he finally said, “usually goes one hundred and twenty grains, gilding metal over a soft steel jacket. Inside this jacket is a lead sleeve surrounding a steel core. A newer type of powder is used. But this here mother weighs in at one forty-three grains. And there ain’t no steel in it at all. Too soft. Just plain old lead. Now that’s no good against things. Won’t penetrate, just splatter. But into something soft, meaning people, you got maximum damage.”

“Why would they build a bullet out of pure lead in wonderful modern 1945?” Leets asked.

“If you’re putting this wad through a barrel with real deep grooves, real biters, you can get a hell of a lot of revs, even on something moving slow. Which means—”

“Accuracy?”

“Yes, sir. The guy on the gun can put them on fucking dimes from way out if he knows what he’s doing. Even if the bullet’s moving real slow, no velocity at all. The revs hold her on, not the speed.”

“So it’s moving under seven hundred feet per second? That’s slow, slower than our forty-five.”

“Right. And at seven hundred fps or less, you’re under the sound barrier.”

“No pop. It’s better than a silencer, isn’t it?” Leets wanted to know.

“Yes, sir. Because any baffle system cuts down on feet per second, so you get a drop off in accuracy and range. Someone real smart figured all this out. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

So that’s how they did it, Leets thought.

“Hey, Captain, you get a line on this gun, you let me know,” said the tech. “It sounds nice. I’d go a thousand for it.”

When they got back to Ryan’s shop to wait for the plane that would take them back to London, the major asked an innocent question.

“Hey,” he said, “by the way, what’s Anlage Elf?”

That got Leets’s attention. He yanked up, staring hard, feeling the breath sucked from him.

“Your CO,” said Ryan, baffled by the intense reaction, “he bumped a high-priority telex through. It’s just down from Division.”

“CO?” said Leets.

“Colonel Evans.”

That son of a—

“He wants you back fastest. He says he found Anlage Elf.”