Target Hitler Read online

  SNIPER ELITE

  TARGET: HITLER

  Scott K. Andrews

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2012 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Editor-in Chief: Jonathan Oliver

  Desk Editor: David Moore

  Design: Simon Parr & Luke Preece

  Marketing and PR: Keith Richardson

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Copyright © 2012 Rebellion. All rights reserved.

  Sniper Elite™, Abaddon Books and Abaddon Books logo are trademarks owned or used exclusively by Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited. The trademarks have been registered or protection sought in all member states of the European Union and other countries around the world. All right reserved.

  ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-84997-374-8

  ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-375-5

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Any historian will tell you that primary sources are the only things that matter: documents, photographs, film, eyewitness accounts, these are the lifeblood of historical analysis.

  However, documents can be forged, the camera can lie, films can be staged, and eyewitnesses can be mistaken or dishonest. When the historian comes to consider the Third Reich and the events that occurred under its rule, the waters of truth are muddier than at any other time in history.

  The faked documents of Operation Mincemeat; the obscene fabrication of the Warsaw Ghetto propaganda film; the aerial photographs that depicted a non-existent British Army massing for an invasion of Pas-de-Calais – the Second World War produced forgeries and fakes of all sorts. This makes the historian’s job perilous, as the fools who authenticated The Hitler Diaries found out.

  Is it so far-fetched, then, to suggest that the eyewitness accounts of Hitler’s final days – accounts provided only by those people who shared the bunker with him, the people closest and most loyal to him and his cause, the people both most likely and best placed to construct an elaborate deception to protect their leader – should be doubted?

  Extract from Hitler: The Death Deception

  by Simeon Z. Goldblum

  A sad and deluded finale to an otherwise glittering and praiseworthy career, this collection of overbaked conspiracy fantasies should be quietly swept under the carpet lest it irreversibly taint the reputation of a great man...

  The Sunday Times’ review of

  Hitler: The Death Deception

  PROLOGUE

  IT IS THE most important shot this sniper – any sniper – has ever taken, but he will not allow the significance of this moment, the crucial importance of his target or the terrible consequence of inaccuracy, to distract him.

  This is what he does.

  Sight... steady... squeeze...

  The bullet leaves the barrel with a muzzle velocity of 2,850 feet per second, which is standard for the model of rifle from which it has been fired – the Russian Mosin–Nagant 1891/31.

  It is beginning a journey of 2,765 feet – give or take six inches – to its target. Its flight time, therefore, will be roughly a second. By comparison, the speed of sound is a sluggish 1,126 feet per second. This means the target will never hear the shot that kills him.

  There is a slight crosswind – just enough to ensure that the bullet travels in a gentle horizontal parabola on its way to the target. Gravity and drag pull the bullet down and back as it travels in its complex arced flight from its elevated starting point to the target, some thirty feet closer to sea-level.

  The bullet spins as it travels, a result of the rifling in the barrel. Not only does this improve its aerodynamic stability, it greatly increases its destructive power – it will scramble soft flesh as it burrows its way through.

  The sniper has done everything right.

  But this particular projectile, on this particular day, will not find its mark. Even the greatest sniper is a slave to the physics of ballistics and velocity, and today the scientific principles he relies upon conspire to thwart all his expertise.

  The shock front of a nearby explosion – the detonation of a shell hitting the ground two hundred feet to his left a millisecond after the hammer hit the cartridge and the bullet began its spiralling journey – intersects with the bullet’s flight, pushing it sideways.

  It misses its target.

  Instinctively, the sniper moves to reload before he remembers – that was his last bullet.

  The target is turning, running, dodging out of sight in the crumbling warehouses of the railway yard.

  The sniper curses under his breath and lays the rifle down.

  The hunt continues, but the nature of the kill has changed – the thing will have to be done up close, intimate.

  He shudders, involuntarily. He does not want to lock eyes with this target, does not want to stare into those pitiless orbs as he snuffs the life out of them. For the first time that day, he wishes this job could have fallen to someone else.

  But there is no-one else.

  He draws his sidearm, rises to his feet, begins to run. But his feet will not move, and the ground turns to quicksand beneath him, sucking hungrily at his boots. He tries to lift his legs but they will not respond. He hears a sound behind him – the soft clatter of tumbling brick. He spins, but is unable to bring his gun to bear as he sinks to his knees.

  The target is there, staring down at him... and suddenly he sees himself, his slowly sinking body, as the target sees him. He looks at himself through those awful eyes, meets his own gaze and sees the truth in it, the realisation of his own imminent demise.

  He sees the gun, noting clinically that it is a 9mm Luger.

  The bullet leaves the barrel with a muzzle velocity of 1,155 feet per second, which is standard for this model of pistol. Since it is only travelling roughly ten feet – give or take an inch – the journey takes no time at all.

  The projectile spins into his left eye, reducing the eyeball to mush before it progresses to shred the optic nerve and turn the soft tissue of the left hemisphere of his brain to little more than porridge. The back of his skull offers no obstacle and the bullet corkscrews out of his head, pulling a misty cloud of brain matter, blood and vitreous humour in its wake.

  The sniper opens his mouth to scream...

  ...and wakes in a sweat-drenched bed, tangled in the sheets, heart pounding, throat raw, cursing the clarity of the memories that have returned to haunt him after so many years of unbroken, dreamless sleep.

  He reaches for the glass of water on his bedside table and drains it.

  Beside the glass rests the book he should never have bought. He swings his legs out of the bed and stares at the dust-jacket for a long minute before a slight straightening of his back and the soft, deliberate expulsion of the breath he barely realises he’s been holding signify a decision made.

  The old soldier rises from the bed, full of purpose for the first time in many, many years.

  Today, for the second time in his long life, he is going to have to kill a nightmare.

  IT IS A measure of his intellectual ferocity that the man in the wheelchair still speaks in full sentences, albeit sentences broken by long pauses as he sucks hungrily at the mask connected to the oxygen cylinder by his side.

/>   “Please forgive me if... I do not rise to... greet you,” he wheezes. “I am... not as sprightly... as I used to... be.”

  The old soldier stands inside the library door, his ramrod posture a stark contrast to the hunched figure before him. It is hard to believe that he is the older of the two men, but he is, by a full decade.

  “Which of us is?” he replies kindly, gesturing to a nearby armchair. The man in the wheelchair nods feebly, waving for his guest to sit. He does not speak again, although whether this is because he cannot muster the puff or because he prefers to let silence act as his interrogator, is unclear. He fixes the sitting soldier with eyes that remain clear and sharp, shrewd even, despite the imminent collapse of the body that holds them.

  “I read your book, sir. The Death Deception,” says the soldier. His voice is deep and strong but gentle, undemonstrative; it is the voice of a man who has never had to raise his voice to assume authority, and has never felt the need to argue a point.

  Simeon Goldblum inclines his head, a gesture of acknowledgment and, perhaps, gratitude, then takes a fortifying breath.

  “It has not... I fear... been well received,” he whispers. “The critics think I... am losing my mind as... well as my... body.” Again he falls silent, waiting.

  “I also read that you are dying.”

  Goldblum shrugs and smiles as if to say well, of course, but what can you do?

  “In which case, I want...” The soldier breaks off, momentarily unsure whether he is doing the right thing. Goldblum lets the silence hang until: “I want to tell you, sir, that you are right. I was there. In Berlin.”

  Goldblum lets his face do the talking.

  The soldier smiles. “Yeah, I’m sure you’ve heard it a hundred times, huh.”

  Goldblum inclines his head again and shrugs. “Hitler is an... optician in Buenos Aires; he tested... my eyes! Hitler is a teacher... in Dunedin... he used to... cane me! I smuggled Hitler... out of Berlin... in a bomb casing! Hitler was... abducted by aliens... who stormed the... bunker!”

  The old soldier laughs softly.

  “Well, I will tell you my story. I think you deserve, before you die, to know that you were right... well, kind of right. Listen, you can decide for yourself whether you think I’m telling the truth or not. Okay?”

  Another nod, eyes narrowed now, assessing his guest with genuine interest. “What is... your name?”

  “I’d prefer not to say, if that’s alright with you. I’ll just tell my story and leave you in peace.”

  Another shrug and a wave that says continue.

  “I was a sniper in the war. Not attached to any regular unit. I was, you might say, deniable. All the jobs that nobody else wanted – at least officially – came my way. I was there in Berlin throughout April and into May ’45. Cleaning up loose ends, my Colonel called it.” He pauses again, takes a deep breath, and fixes Simeon Goldblum with a hard, certain gaze.

  “I have never told anyone what I am about to tell you, sir. If you repeat it to anyone else, I shall deny it. I am here to do a kindness to a dying man, that is all.”

  This time Goldblum remains motionless, but his eyes have become more open, more trusting.

  “One of the loose ends I was asked to tidy up was Adolf Hitler.”

  This time it is the soldier who lets the silence hang. Eventually, beaten at his own game, Goldblum capitulates and lowers his oxygen mask.

  “And did... you?”

  CHAPTER ONE

  I COULD HEAR the engines of Allied bombers fading into the distance as I braced myself in the doorway of the Lysander. I waited for the tap on the back that was the signal to bail out. My window of opportunity was small – the bombing had ended, and German soldiers would still be cowering in their bunkers and cellars for a few more minutes before they emerged to count the cost of the latest raid.

  There was hardly any gas left to fuel the tiny number of Luftwaffe planes that were still airworthy, and the ack-ack guns only had a handful of shells left to fire, so flying over Berlin was far less dangerous than it would have been a year earlier. But parachuting into the city was still basically suicidal.

  The cloud base was low and it was a moonless night, so when the tap came, and I pushed myself out into space, I fell blind.

  In the brief weightless moment between jumping and deploying my chute, I broke through the bottom of the clouds and saw a shadowed patchwork of ruined buildings, far closer than I’d have liked. The sky to the east was alive with fire as the Red Army mopped up the Seelow Heights, and below me in the city were the growing flames of the recent air raid, but it was still eerily silent. It was as if I was falling towards the ghost of a city. Perhaps, I thought, this might be easier than I’d anticipated.

  As the silk canopy opened above me, slowing my descent, and the canvas straps dug hard into my sides, I heard the first rifle shot. Someone below was paying attention after all. I was a floating duck.

  The irony was that the people of Berlin were desperate for the Allies to parachute into their city. They were already completely encircled by the Red Army, whose advance across the shattered east of Hitler’s Greater Germany had been one long orgy of rape and retribution; the civilians trapped inside the city knew what was coming. Their one remaining hope was that the Allies would drop from the sky and secure Berlin before the Russians decided to attack. And that army was ready and waiting; hundreds of Allied paratroops were on standby not a hundred miles from here, eager to get the drop on the Reds. But by this point in the campaign, even the Berliners should have realised that the order would never come – Churchill and Eisenhower had been beaten to the enemy’s lair and, unwilling to openly challenge Uncle Joe, they were going to leave Berlin to him, at least for now.

  The lone gunman taking pot shots at me would probably have put down his weapon and cried with relief, had a hundred more chutes followed mine. But confronted with only one, he obviously felt duty-bound to have a go.

  The chute I’d been given was a straightforward mushroom canopy, so I had no means of steering. The best I could do to help myself was to swing my legs back and forth, start rocking in the hope that it would make me harder to hit.

  Another bullet whistled past me, too close for comfort. I’d bailed out low, but by my reckoning I still had a minute or so before I hit the deck, and each second brought me closer to a shooter who obviously knew what he was doing, and was getting my range. I stopped swinging my legs and reached across to pull my revolver from its holster. The chute straps restricted my movement, hitching my shoulders up around my neck; there was no way to bring my hands together at the right angle.

  I heard a whistle and then a soft thud behind me – the bastard had hit my backpack!

  But I’d seen the muzzle flash about two hundred feet to my right, at a downward angle of roughly forty degrees. Knowing that his next shot would likely find its target, I aimed the revolver and took a shot. My chances of hitting him were slim, but maybe I’d discourage him long enough to drop leeward of the tall brick building shell that I was falling towards, screening myself from him.

  I caught a flash of movement, little more than an impression of blurred shadow, where the muzzle flash had been, and I took another shot.

  The essence of the sniper’s art is preparation – observe, plan, execute. Find the best vantage point, secure the position, set up the weapon, know the terrain. It’s meticulous and precise, and I had mastered it long ago. If you absolutely must make a quick kill, then stealth and silence are the watchwords; your target shouldn’t ever see your face, shouldn’t ever know who killed him.

  Shooting one handed, wildly, from the hip, dangling from a glorified handkerchief in pitch darkness, at a target I couldn’t see, was not my style. I felt foolish and exposed.

  I was still the best marksmen in the unit, though. I heard a grunt and then a clatter of bricks and floorboards as the shooter fell down through the ruined building. If my bullet hadn’t killed him, the fall surely would have.

  Not b
ad at all.

  I dropped below the roofline, down into the hollow shell of a bombed-out hotel. I would almost certainly be landing awkwardly on a pile of rubble. The standard drop-and-roll wouldn’t be an option, and there was a good chance that I’d snap my ankle in two if I didn’t make a clean landing. I pulled my feet together and swung them forward, ready to slide down the hill of wreckage that I could just about make out beneath me... and I stopped dead.

  The impact knocked the wind out of me as the straps cut deep. I felt something in my shoulder pop as I slammed sideways into the wall, biting back a yell. It took a moment to gather my senses and assess my situation.

  One side of the chute had snagged on the jagged, broken point of a protruding crossbeam, leaving me hoisted on a makeshift gallows. My swinging slowed and I came to rest against the cold, damp brick. I pulled the torch from my pack and risked a quick flash of its shuttered light below me. Dammit. The drop was too great for me to disengage the harness and fall – I’d definitely break at least one leg.

  Someone would be coming to investigate the shooting; I had very little time.

  Okay, I thought, if I can’t go down, I’ll go up. I turned to face the wall, brought my boots up and braced myself against it. Then I reached up, used my right hand to take hold of the cords by which I was suspended, then used my left to pop the harness open. With pack and rifle I was heavy as hell, and I almost lost my grip, especially when a sharp ache in my right shoulder told me the popping sound had been caused by a slight dislocation. I cursed under my breath – the shoulder had snapped back into place immediately, but the soft tissue was already starting to swell. Gritting my teeth, I began to climb.