Free The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter Page 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.