The Master Sniper Read Online Free Page B

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 ScotlandYard 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 WeaponsEvaluation 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