Sniper's Honor(25)

What could it mean?

At that point, she was yanked from her concentration by a flash of motion. She looked sharply, dividing the visible world into sectors and examining each in its time, top to bottom, as methodically as a typist transcribes an interview.

Until she saw them.





CHAPTER 11


Lviv


THE PRESENT


The Germans knew exactly where Bak’s unit would be, what time it’d arrive, they did it perfect,” said Swagger. “But the point isn’t that it’s early. It’s what ‘early’ signifies: betrayal.”

“Someone snitched them out. Can we determine who it was?”

They sat in a pleasant twilight in the old town square of Lviv, at a sidewalk café called the Centaur. The city itself had that old Austro-Hungarian empire style going on; they could have been in Prague or Vienna. Swagger half expected hussars in brass breastplates over red jackets with swords at the half-cock to come trotting along the cobblestones at the head of some emperor’s entourage. It was so cheerful, it was hard to think of betrayal. One thought more of fairy princesses.

“Let’s look at the possibilities,” said Swagger. “First: tactical betrayal. It happened because of a natural consequence of combat operations. Say, a German Storch recon plane saw the Russian plane that had dropped Mili take off. It was able to shadow the movement of the column. The Storch team radios time, location, direction; again by coincidence there’s a Police Battalion counterbandit team near enough to get set up, and the bandits just walk into it.”

“That’s not really betrayal,” said Reilly. “That’s just ‘stuff happens.’ ”

“Fair enough. Okay, local betrayal. One of the partisans is really a German agent. Or maybe some SS major has his daughter hostage so he’s forced to turn on his people. He manages to get the news out before they leave to pick up Mili. That gives the Germans plenty of time to get the Police Battalion into play.”

“So it’s a coincidence of timing that this happened when Mili arrived? Hard to swallow.”

“Try this. Bak himself is the Nazi agent. They’re building him up to win a lot of battles so he’ll be a hero and be taken back to Moscow, and when he’s back in NKVD headquarters, he can really give them the crown jewels.”

“But they seem to have killed him. After all, he disappears from the story.”

“It was an accident. Night ambushes are terrible things. Nobody knows what’s happening. He’s trying to blow the deal to give up the Russian sniper to protect Obergruppenführer Groedl, and he zigs that way when the linchpin on the MG42 tripod vibrates free, and the gun rotates another few inches, and bye-bye, Bak.”

“But wouldn’t his death be recorded in the operational diaries of Twelfth Panzer, regardless? Like the rifles, he was booty.”

“It would,” said Swagger.

“Okay,” she said. “Interesting possibilities. They’re all wrong, but they’re very interesting. Tomorrow I’ll tell you who betrayed them.”





CHAPTER 12


Somewhere in the Carpathians


MID-JULY 1944


Two of them. Not Germans, definitely not Germans. But partisans, survivors of the Bak column, as was she? Hard to tell.

A heavy one, a light one. In the heavy one, she recognized the dignity and stolidity of the eternal peasant. He had no partisan affectations, no babushka hat, no crossed bandoliers of ammunition, no potato mashers stuck in his belt, no Red tommy gun. He wore only a shapeless black peasant smock and equally shapeless trousers over the thick boots peasants had worn for centuries. He moved with deliberation; you knew in a second that patience would never be a problem with this one. He could outwait God or the devil if it came to that and, as a hobby, watch mud bricks dry. He would be the one who knew a lot more than you thought, and if he gave you his loyalty, he was giving you everything. Everything about him was big: feet, legs, arms, hands. He could put in a thousand hours behind a plow. He was the man who would plant and harvest the wheat her father had tried to protect for him. He would feed the masses; he was the masses.

The other was leaner, quicker, a lithe man with goatee and glasses, under a frost of prematurely gray hair, wiry and tight. He looked somehow more refined, and if he moved easily through the woods, it was not out of heritage but out of learning. He, too, was as unwarlike as could be imagined, in a well-worn black leather jacket, some kind of bluish shirt, and a pair of threadbare trousers.

She watched as they picked their way along some fifty feet below her, the peasant leading, the thinner man—she had no insight as how to classify him and so would not make the mistake of conferring an identity upon him too soon—following. At a certain moment, the peasant raised a hand, and each halted, dropped to knees, and looked nervously around. After a bit, satisfied that no SS men were about to nab them, they rose.