Текст книги "The Master Sniper"

Автор книги: Stephen Hunter

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DER MEISTERSCHÜTZE

When he hit them, they slid into the rubble, stained but not shattered. A 6.5-millimetre 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 very 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….

Books by Stephen Hunter

FICTION

Pale Horse Coming

Hot Springs

Time to Hunt

Black Light

Dirty White Boys

Point of Impact

The Day Before Midnight

Tapestry of Spies

The Second Saladin

The Master Sniper

NONFICTION

Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem

For Jake Hunter and Tolka Zhitomir

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A good many friends and colleagues assisted the author in the preparation of this manuscript, though they are in no way responsible for its excesses. But they should be thanked nevertheless. They are James H. Bready, Curtis Carroll Davis, Gerri Kobren, Henry J. Knoch, Frederic N. Rasmussen, Michael Hill, Binnie Syril Braunstein, Bill Auerbach, Joseph Fanzone, Jr., Richard C. Hageman, Lenne P. Miller, Bruce Bortz, Carleton Jones and Dr. John D. Bullock. Two special friends deserve their own sentence: Brian Hayes and Wayne J. Henkel. Lastly, the author would like to pay tribute to two extraordinary people: his wife, Lucy, and his editor, Maria Guarnaschelli, of William Morrow, without whom all this would not have happened.

Marksmen are not limited to the location of their unit and are free to move anywhere they can see a valuable target….

—Instructions for use of S.m.K. cartridges and rifles with telescopic sights, 1915

Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue

he hits you with leaden bullets his aim is true

–PAUL CELAN, “A Death Fugue”

PART ONE

Schützenhaus

(Shooting Gallery)

January-April 1945

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.