The Master Sniper Read Online Free Page A

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 aGermany 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 playedat 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