Sniper's Honor(19)

In the Balkans, Police Battalion especially had borne the brunt of the patrol and assault work. Mostly Serbian Muslims themselves, they were all mountain people, skilled in mountain fighting arcana from a life in the high altitudes. They were silent crawlers, camouflage experts, superb marksmen, and especially keen on blade work, for theirs, after all, was a blade culture. They were at their best in anti-Jewish actions, for that was where the passion burned brightest. They did truly hate and despise bandits, not only an ancient enmity but also a recent one, for they had lost as many to those bandits as they had taken from them. But they were disciplined, high-level military, skilled and patient, used to stillness. They were not Arab pirates, thirsty for blood because they were thirsty for blood; in fact, there were few Arabs among them, after Captain Salid only two unteroffiziers and an odd private or corporal among the platoons.

Salid employed the classic L-shape technique of ambuscade, getting two angles of fire from his unit without endangering either echelon to the other, and much used by his forebears against generations of invaders, from Romans to Jews to Crusaders to other tribes, to the hated English, to Turks, to the later arriving Jews. His family had been in the war business for at least fifteen generations, and although he was only thirty-two, he knew a thing or two.

Yusef el-Almeni bin Abu Salid was the cousin of the grand mufti of Jerusalem. The august persona was, alas, retired from his position among the people by British importunings and now rusticating in Berlin, where his weekly broadcasts to the Arab world had made him even more famous and powerful. The cousin Salid had grown up under the lash of British rule in Jerusalem, aware that the British were surrogates for the true enemy of his people, international Jewry, via the hated Balfour Declaration of 1919, which mandated that Jewish subhumans would be accorded land in Palestine. When the mufti, an admirer of all things German, had evinced an early enthusiasm for the Third Reich, a German diplomat had reached out to the man and offered to take certain gifted Arab boys to Germany for technical training. From the age of eight onward, Yusef Salid was raised in the German method, among Germans, whose language he quickly mastered, first in the rigors of Realschule, then in cadet school, then in officers’ training at Bad Tölz, then infantry school, and finally in a series of specialized SS training programs. He stood out because of his brown skin and coarse dark hair, but his elegance of manner, his eruditition in German and love of German literature, and his excellence in all matters military soon made him popular no matter the venue. His ability to keep his head in tense situations, his coolness under fire, his knowledge of wine—which, being a Muslim, he never drank, but he made it his business to memorize labels and vintages for exactly the popularity it would earn him—and his twinkly dark eyes made him a hero in the SS officers’ mess. His assignment to Einsatzgruppen D in the early days of the July 22 invasion and his intense labors on behalf of that unit’s aims earned him accolade after accolade, both official and personal.

When the strategy of shooting and burying the Jews of Ukraine proved unrealistic in the face of their sheer numbers, and the unit was folded into the Waffen SS for general military duties, it was Dr. Groedl himself who made calls and pulled strings on the young officer’s behalf. Groedl considered himself to have an eye for talent. His mentees were scattered far and wide in the great crusade. It was he who arranged for Salid to be transferred to the 13th-SS Mountain, the only pure Muslim division in the Waffen-SS, where he knew the young man’s talents for locating Jews would be put to good use.

It was inevitable that Groedl would recall Salid. When he needed a group of specialists for the delicate mission before him, it took a great deal of wrangling to get Police Battalion, which was acquiring a spectacular record under Salid in the Serbian mountains, transferred en masse to the 12th SS Panzer Division, the umbrella unit for all SS operations in the West Ukraine–Stanislav area, although the connection was for paper-pushers only, and SS-13 Police Battalion Scimitar reported directly to and worked completely for Senior Group Leader–SS Groedl.

Salid estimated the bandit column to consist of at least fifty men and women, all heavily armed, all well experienced, most mounted on the sturdy-legged Carpathian ponies that made operations in the mountains feasible. He himself had only twenty-five, the best, from Police Battalion’s larger pool of mountain anti-bandit fighters. He knew a larger formation on horseback could not move silently through the forest and mountain; he knew they would leave sign and disturbance; this one had to be done with great precision. He also specified ammunition double loads and made certain each of his fighters was armed not with the slow bolt-action KAR-98k rifle but with the MP-40 submachine gun and a P-38 or a Luger pistol. Each man carried three M24 grenades, “potato mashers,” in the parlance. The point was to unleash maximum firepower when the column entered the kill zone. It had to be a single overpowering blast, because the targets were wily, would not panic, would return fire, and would quickly form maneuver elements and locate an egress and engineer some form of escape. Their ponies would give them mobility. But there could be no escapees. All must die: no prisoners, no worries, no regrets.