He pushed on for several minutes through the forest, not unaware of the beauty and serenity around him. After a time he came out of the trees into a high Alpine meadow, several dozen acres of grassland. The grass rolled shadowless in the sun.
Above, clouds lapped and burled against diamond blue, hard and pure. The sun was a cleansing flare. A cool wind pressed against his face.
Repp walked across the meadow. He took off his scrunched feldgrau cap and rubbed a sleeve absently across his forehead, where it felt a prickle of heat.
He walked on, coming at last to the end of the meadow. Here the grass bulked up into a ridge before yielding again to the trees. The ridge stood like a low wall before him, unruly with thistle and bracken and even a few yellow wild flowers.
He turned back to the field. It was empty and clean. It was so clean. It had been scoured clean and pure. It looked wonderful to him. A vision of paradise. Its grass stirred in the breeze.
This is where the war ends for me, he thought.
He knew he had a few more kilometers of virgin pine; then he’d be up top for a long, flat walk; then finally, that last plunge through the gloomy newer trees.
It was only a matter of hours.
Repp turned back to his route and started to trudge up the ridge. More yellow buds — dozens, hundreds — opened their faces to him. He paused again, dazzled. They seemed to pick the light out of the air and throw it back at him in a burst of burning energy. The day stalled, calm and private. Each mote of dust, each fleck of pollen, each particle of life seemed to freeze in the bright air. The sky screamed blue, its mounting cumulus fat and oily white. Repp felt giddy in the beauty of it. He seemed to hear a musical chord, lustrous, rich, held, held, ever so long.
Strange energies had been released; they bobbed and sprang and coiled about him, invisible. He felt transfigured. He felt connected with the order of the cosmos. He turned to the sun which lay above the ridge and from its pulsing glare he sought confirmation, and when two figures rose above him, on the crest line, drenched in light, he took it at first for the benediction he’d demanded.
He could not see them clearly.
He blocked the sun with one hand.
The big one looked at him gravely and the boy had no expression on his pretty face at all. Their machine pistols were level.
Repp opened his mouth to speak, but the big one cut him off.
“Herr Repp,” he explained in a mild voice, “du hast das Ziel nicht getroffen,” using the familiar du form as though addressing an old and dear friend, “you missed.”
Repp saw that he was in the pit at last.
They shot him down.
Roger edged down the ridge, changing magazines as he went. The German lay face up, eyes black. He’d been opened up badly in the crossfire. Blood everywhere. He was an anatomy lesson. Still, Roger crouched and touched the muzzle of his tommy gun gently as a kiss against the skull and jackhammered a five-round burst into it, blowing it apart.
“That’s enough, for Christ’s sake,” Leets called from the ridge.
Roger rose, spattered with blood and tissue.
Leets came tiredly down the slope and over to the body.
“Congratulations,” said Roger. “You get both ears and the tail.”
Leets bent and heaved the body to its belly. He pried the rifle off the shoulder, working the sling down the arm, at the same time being careful not to break the cord to the power pack.
“Here it is,” he said.
“Bravo,” said Roger.
Leets pulled out the receiver lockpin and the trigger housing pin. Taking the butt off and holding the action open, he held the barrel up to the sun and looked through it.
“See any naked girls?” Roger asked.
“All I see is dirt. It’s a mess. All those rounds he ran through it. All that pure, greasy lead. Each one left its residue. The grooves jammed. It’s smooth as the inside of a shot glass in there.”
“Yeah, well, he nearly threaded my needle.”
“Must have been your imagination,” Leets said. “At the end the rounds were veering off crazily as they came out the muzzle. No, the Vampire rifle was useless in the end. It amounted to nothing. A man with a flintlock would have had a better chance this morning.”
Roger was silent.
But something still nagged Leets. “One thing I can’t figure out. Why didn’t Vollmerhausen tell him? They were so good at the small stuff. The details. Why didn’t Vollmerhausen tell him?”
Roger knitted his features into what he imagined was an expression of puzzlement the equal of Leets’s. But he really didn’t give a damn and a more rewarding thought presently occurred to him.
“Hey!” he said in sudden glee. “Uh, Captain. Sir?”
“Yeah?”
“Hey, uh, I did okay, huh?”
“You did swell. You were a hero.” But he had other heroes in his mind at that second, dead ones. Shmuel the Jew and Tony Outhwaithe, Oxonian. Here was a moment they might have enjoyed. No, not really. Shmuel hated the violence; no joy in this for him. And Tony. Who ever knew about Tony? Susan? No, not Susan either. Susan would see only two beasts with the blood of a third all over them.
“Well, now,” said Roger, grinning, “you think I’ll get a medal?” He was supremely confident. “I mean it was kind of brave what I did, wasn’t it? It would be for my folks mainly.”
Leets said he’d think it over.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEPHEN HUNTER, the author of the acclaimed novel Dirty White Boys, was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1946. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1968, spent two years in the United States Army, and since 1971 has been on the staff of The Baltimore Sun, where he is now film critic. He is the father of two children, and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.