Sniper's Honor(18)
His mind went numb. Beside him, Reilly dozed quietly. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Mili’s escape route. If she had one. It occurred to him that in that war, given the losses, given the immensity of the sacrifice, given all the times the bosses had sent rows and rows of young men marching or driving into machine-gun fire and artillery, possibly the nihilism that was so pervasive had infected Mili, too, and so she passed on escape. Maybe she took the shot, saw that she had missed, watched as the SS troopers ran to her, pulled out her Tok, and shot herself in the head. Since she’d been shielded by the villagers—or the SS assumed she’d been shielded by villagers—they burned the place and the people in it. That was the way they operated.
But why would she have been scrubbed from the Russian record? Why was she disappeared? More likely, since she was famous, they’d have used her sacrifice as a platform on which to build some kind of martyr campaign. Her beauty would help there, too. It was the way propagandists worked, he saw, in that the death of one beautiful girl could be more emotionally powerful than the death of four thousand Russian tankers on a single day at a place called—it was another one nobody had ever heard of—Prokhorovka.
Yet they had refused that possibility.
Why?
Reilly, stirred, shivered, yawned, came awake. She rubbed her eyes. “When do we get to Ocean City?” she asked.
“That’s a long way away. Enjoy the nap? Pleasant dreams?”
“Never,” she said.
Ding! Or maybe bong! Or possibly bing! It came from Reilly’s phone, which she fished out of her purse.
“That’s an e-mail incoming.”
Bob waited patiently.
“Well, well,” she said. “Now here’s something. It’s from Will.”
Will? Oh yes, Will, Reilly’s ever patient, enduring husband, her co-correspondent for the Washington newspaper, a guy of whom she talked now and then and revered as one of those real reporters who was more interested in getting it right and getting it fair than in getting it onto Meet the Press. Swagger somehow had never had the pleasure.
“He’s in Germany,” Reilly was saying. “I asked him to check on the divisional records of the Twelfth SS Panzer around that time. The Germans, as it turns out, and why does this not surprise, kept very precise operational logs. Will just dug something out.” She handed the iPhone over.
Hi, sweetie, Will had written. Aachen is a drab town. But I did find the 12th SS Panzer records and there are some interesting aspects. No. 1, there’s no account of any partisan activity, including assassination attempts, at any time between July 15th and July 26th. As you might imagine, it gets very busy on the 26th, because that’s when they had the Russian offensive started and they pulled out of Stanislav without firing a shot. There’s also a somewhat ambiguous run of entries from the 20th through the 23rd which are simply called “Security Operations.” What that means I don’t know, except that I don’t think it’s against partisans, because they have a special category for that, and they use it frequently. “Anti-bandit” operations, they call them. However, and I think this is new, there is an entry for the 15th. It simply says, if I read my German correctly, “Anti-bandit operation, Carpathian Mountains, Zepplin Force reports inflicting heavy casualties on Ukrainian Bandits presumably affiliated with Bak’s 1st Partisan Brigade. 35 enemy killed in action.”
They even listed the arms recovered. “37 Model 91 rifles, 1 Model 91 with sniper scope, 5 PPsH machine pistols, 28 grenades, 35 bayonets, 12 Tokarev pistols, 9 Luger pistols, 32 bayonets and assorted knives.”
“A Mosin-Nagant with scope. That’s Mili’s. They jumped Mili. But who the hell is Zeppelin Force?” Bob wondered out loud, and in the next second found the answer.
Zeppelin Force seems to be a unit seconded at Senior Group Leader Groedl’s request from 13th SS Mountain Division, in Serbia, which was the only Islamic division in the whole German army. I saw in the log that they had just come over a few days before. But it’s not just any guys, it seems to be a special force called Police Battalion.
CHAPTER 10
The Carpathians
JULY 17, 1944
It was a Police Battalion operation all the way, and Captain Salid handled his men extremely well. He had learned much in his years among the Germans.
His men were experienced. They had been seconded from the 13th SS Mountain Division “Scimitar,” operating in Serbia, where they had been fighting partisans—“bandits,” officially—for the better part of three years, and proudly wore the insignia of the scimitar on the left side of the collars of their camouflaged battle smocks, opposite and yet equal in pride of place as the double flashes of the SS on the right. They had left their fezzes at base and, like their commanding officer, capped their heads only in the camouflaged Stahlhelm of the SS.