Free The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter Page B

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
    V ampir 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 althoughhis 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 lovedphysics, 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