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The moon had risen high over the Massif Central, shining on the ancient pines, the silvery waterfall, the half-ruined stone castle, and the tall, round dome of the command center. However, it didn’t shine on the sniper; the sniper knew well how to hide in the shadows.
He settled on the ground behind a stack of logs – apparently left from the construction of facilities in the area. Silence was only broken by the rustle of branches above and, occasionally, the cries of night birds. From time to time, the rattle of a motorcycle or the rumble of a truck came from the distant road along the lake, but none of this troubled the sniper: the Germans had no reason to come this way. This was a minor outpost, hidden deep in the forest, unremarkable in every way – yet it lay directly on the sniper’s path from the mountain range to the railway.
Karl Fairburne was one of the best snipers in the OSS arsenal: cold-blooded, perfectly trained, consistently in the top percentiles with every type of weapon on the shooting range. During his years in Africa and Italy he collected a tally of more than a hundred kills. Well, his former comrades-in-arms would surely be astonished if they saw him now, Karl thought with an inward smirk.
He shifted slightly, easing his stiff legs from the long wait, careful not to rustle the leaves, and cautiously peered out from behind the stack. He could see the profile of the lone German soldier – who made up the entire garrison of this checkpoint – sitting by his campfire in front of the hut, writing something in a notebook.
Karl gripped the handle of the pistol in the holster at his belt. From ten meters away, he could easily put a bullet through the man’s skull before the soldier even realized from which direction his death had arrived. The shot would, of course, echo through the forest, but it would quickly fade amid the roar of the waterfall and the tank engines in the field. It was easy – Karl had done it dozens, if not hundreds, of times before.
But he had no intention of doing it now. He couldn’t. He hadn’t been able to for a long time.
Instead, he let out a barely audible sigh and retreated back into the shadows, settling once more on the ground to wait. He needed the soldier to stand up, step aside, and turn his back. It was no big deal though: Karl was well used to waiting, and these days he was doing almost nothing else.
It started when he was transferred from Italy to France in the autumn of 1943. As long as Karl had faced Italian fascists and German generals, he had felt no inner turmoil whatsoever; his hand had never faltered on the trigger as he methodically cleared out entire garrisons of coastal fortresses. He knew exactly what he was fighting for: the thin, piercing voice of Sophia di Rocco often disturbed his nights, and images of fascist atrocities in partisan villages rose before his eyes.
In France, though, his enemies were ordinary German boys. Unexpectedly similar to his childhood friends from Berlin, from fifteen years earlier: the same blond or light-brown hair, pale eyes, the familiar dialects from across the whole Germany – Saarlanders, Mecklenburgers, even Bavarians. Worst of all, unlike the Italians, Karl understood them. Lying in ambush, he couldn’t help overhearing that one was called Heinrich and another Uwe, that one planned to open a bakery after the war, while the second awaited a letter from his fiancée. Searching their bodies, he often found photographs of their parents and families that painfully resembled the neighbors at his Berlin apartment and the teachers at his school.
Naturally, it was only a matter of time before Karl started seeing Adrian in every one of those boys.
Not the adult Adrian – not the one who walked into the kitchen where Karl and his father were drinking coffee and listening to the radio one sunny May morning. That Adrian was wearing a black uniform with a tie, a badge with swastika, a fresh haircut, and fixed them both with a cold, keen glare before laying a crisp new party card on the table and raising his arm in the Nazi salute. His father was at a loss for words; Karl felt bile rise in his throat.
No, he saw the former Adrian: seventeen years old, laughter on his lips and a spark in his blue eyes, hair tousled from bicycle races and wet from swimming on the Spree beach. The one who used to blow on Karl’s scraped knees, went fishing with him, and taught him to shoot a slingshot, explaining everything properly: trajectory, angle, lead, and so on.
Karl knew Adrian had made his choice, and confirmed it again when he refused to go to London with their father, who was sent out of the country along with the entire diplomatic corps. The only time Karl heard from his brother was soon after the beginning of the war, when he entered an American military academy: apparently Adrian’s party bosses had found out. Adrian wrote with arrogance and contempt, advising him and the rest of the Brits to stop their futile resistance and surrender to the supreme Reich. That night Karl drank until morning with his roommate, and the next day he wrote a bitter, angry reply, renouncing Adrian forever.
He shivered slightly – perhaps, from the memories, or from the fresh night wind that rustled the treetops and carried the faint smell of smoke. The German soldier was still writing slowly, and the dancing flames were sending glints over his face. This was not Adrian, just another young blue-eyed boy. But Karl still had no intention of killing him.
He knew well that his brother was gone forever, yet his heart refused to accept it. He saw Adrian in every German he met; in every German phrase he heard that slightly mocking yet affectionate tone, drawling vowels in the distinctive Berlinisch way. And something inside Karl clenched with mad, irrational, idiotic hope: what if Adrian had finally come to his senses, torn the badge from his chest, shouted at the superiors giving him criminal orders – and had been punished by being sent to the front line? What if it was him inside that truck, which Karl could so easily blow up with a teller mine? What if it was him on the watchtower, behind the searchlight Karl had fixed in his crosshairs? What if it was his face Karl would see in agony as he stabbed a sentry under the shoulder blade from behind?
That was why Karl had stopped killing altogether, relying on his stealth skills instead. Tasks that once took minutes now took hours; what had taken hours now took days. Long, gray, tedious days spent waiting – lying in tall grass, on the attics of half-ruined houses under pouring rain or curled up on cold rocks beneath an indifferent moon.
He was watching patrols, searching for gaps in their shift schedules, then crept along hidden paths and dashed across wide roads. It would have been far simpler to take out an entire patrol with precise shots from his suppressed pistol loaded with subsonic bullets – but Karl refused. Instead, he learned to use low-power explosive charges and wax ammo, aiming to wound rather than to kill. His superiors constantly reprimanded him for the unnecessary risk, but Karl only stared grimly aside, repeating over and over that what mattered was the success of the mission, and the method was of no significance.
At headquarters, where Karl received his ammunition and rations, he also was regularly given propagandistic brochures. There were grotesque caricatures of ugly Germans, slogans of hatred for the enemy, and calls to crush them to the last drop of blood. Karl always passed those brochures to his comrades to roll cigarettes. He had never hated Germans. What he truly hated was the Nazi regime, this machine of terror and pain. He hated it for dressing those young men, each with their own dreams, in identical gray uniforms, brainwashing them, forcing them to kill and burn in the name of the Reich. For forcing Karl himself to take up a rifle. For taking his brother from him.
That was why Karl went on his missions, burning depots, blowing up railcars, disabling equipment. The new submarines, the pride of the Kriegsmarine, sank to the bottom of the ocean in molten heaps of metal. Radio towers sparkled and collapsed with a crash. Valuable cargo slipped from hooks; gun barrels burst from faulty shells, but people – people lived, and Karl slipped away unseen.
At last, the soldier by the fire sighed, closed his notebook, and tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt. Karl tensed and gripped the pistol handle tighter.
The German rose from his log, stretched a little, took his submachine gun, and walked slowly toward the edge of the forest, turning his back to Karl. In a few silent strides the sniper was behind him; the pistol butt came down hard on the back of the soldier’s head just behind the ear. The boy groaned and went limp; Karl caught him under the arms and gently lowered him to the ground.
“You’re lucky I was feeling non-lethal,” he muttered out of habit, patting the soldier’s pockets. What he found was a pack of cigarettes, one grenade, and a half-full magazine for the submachine gun – not much. Where was the notebook? Having glanced around, Karl picked it up from the edge of the fire pit, blowing ash from the pages. His eyes caught the words at the top: “Liebe Hanna…”
Karl carefully slipped the notebook back into the man’s breast pocket and dragged him into his modest hut, laying him on the bed. The soldier’s face was pale but calm, his breathing shallow yet steady: he would soon wake, and, God willing, might not even realize what had happened. Karl looked at him one last time and, before leaving, gently squeezed the young man’s hand. Who knows – perhaps after the war they might meet again in some Berlin café, this time as friends.
He slipped out of the hut like an invisible shadow and moved on silently, keeping to the tall grass wet with night dew. The path to the railway was clear. The night was still young, and the sniper had a lot of tasks ahead.