Sniper's Honor(113)
Karl ducked into the commo tent, interrupted the signalman reading The Brothers Karamazov in the original Russian, and waited as the appropriate connections and protocols were made.
“Zeppelin Leader here, hello, hello.”
“Hello, hello, Zeppelin Leader.”
“Von Drehle?”
“Affirmative. As you have no doubt noticed, the Russians are coming. I have no idea how long they will take, but I wanted to inform you that if I have to, I will recall my men to defend my position. A maximum effort for one girl is militarily unjustifiable.”
“That woman must be caught!” said the voice on the radio.
“Catching her does none of us any good if we can’t get her anyplace because the Russians control this position. Surely you understand something that elementary.”
“Von Drehle, the Reich has set its priorities. The woman contains secrets of utmost importance. Whether a few Red tanks get through a gap in the mountains is largely meaningless. I will call the brigadeführer and he will set you straight.”
“I expect the old boy is rather busy now. He’s got a battle to fight. All of us have a battle to fight except, it seems, you.”
“I am fighting the real battle. Keep your men on picket duty until otherwise informed. I speak for the brigadeführer.”
But something caught Karl’s eye. He looked hard and then spoke into the phone. “Well, Captain, it’s everybody’s lucky day. We just broke the bank at Monte Carlo.”
Five figures had just emerged from the woods across the road. They were two Green Devils and three captives with their hands clasped behind their heads. One was a woman.
“You have them?” said the captain, and Karl could feel his excitement from miles away.
“A woman and two men. From here the woman looks to be something out of a French glamour magazine, except you don’t know what a French glamour magazine is.”
“Keep them alive. All of them. They are everything.”
CHAPTER 53
The Carpathians
Natasha’s Womb
THE PRESENT
They could see the helicopter orbiting the crossroad before the narrow passageway that had to be Natasha’s Womb. All the housekeeping had been taken care of, the Stens ditched—“Damn good piece when it counted” was Swagger’s verdict—the phone call to Jerry’s backup team, via Jerry’s own phone, which was then quickly abandoned. Swagger took care of the Enfield No. 4 (T), meaning somehow to get it to the partisan museum.
So now it was a matter of a few minutes. And then Reilly’s phone buzzed. She fished it out of the bag, read the number, and said, “D.C.”
“No rush,” said Bob. “The chopper ain’t going nowhere without us.”
“Hello,” she said, and then, “Hi, Michael. Oh, actually very well. Long story, when I see you, I’ll tell you. I do, yes. Very interesting, and it seems to me you’d want to be involved. Oh, really? Oh, great, yes, yes, let’s hear what you have.”
She listened intently for several minutes, nodding. The smile on her face did not change at all, but at the same time it changed totally. The smile ceased to be a reflection of mood and became some kind of external edifice, supporting the face, which, three layers beneath the skin, in the deep subcutaneous tissue, went taut and hurt. She went from a smiling woman to a woman with a smiling mask on.
“Yes, yes, well, we knew it all along, and it’s the best ending under the circumstances. Yes, we’ll be back in Moscow in eight hours, I’ll call you, we’ll set something up. I agree, very good news, oh no, I had help, believe me, I had help. It wasn’t all me, not by a long shot. Okay, talk soon.”
She turned to Swagger and issued a total blaze of a smile, radiantly insincere. “Okay, all set. Let’s go.”
They walked to the Womb, where at last the chopper could put down.
Swagger said, “I’d say you seen a ghost, but not even a ghost would smack you as hard as whatever just did.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Not bad news, not really. Good news, you’d say.”
“You don’t believe that any more than you’ve made me believe it.”
“I had held out hope. And so had you. It was a one-in-a-million chance. But now it’s gone.”
“Okay, tell me.”
“Long boring background: in 1976, someone was interviewing Jewish survivors of the war. He never got around to writing the book. All of the transcripts went to the Holocaust Museum archives in D.C., where they were read and indexed. One of them was a recording of a guy who’d survived not only the concentration-camp system but then the gulags.”
“The Holocaust Museum in D.C.? How does that come into it?”