Sniper's Honor(27)

Nice to look at on both sides. But what they experienced more than anything was the roughness of the asphalt. Every two miles or so, it seemed there was a we-interrupt-this-highway-for-250-yards-of-bad-road bulletin. Driving was more like slaloming, as the drivers zoomed this way and that to avoid the many crevices that had gone unrepaired since Sputnik 1 ate up the Ukrainian infrastructure budget. It was quaint and rustic for a bit, then a pain in the ass or, more particularly, the head.

Still Reilly soldiered on. “What we haven’t focused on,” she said, “is that the whole Operation Mili Petrova isn’t just missing from the Russian records. That would be remarkable enough. It’s also missing from the German records. You have to ask why, how, by whom? What difference would it make to the Germans what happened to Mili? The whole Mili caper—which we’re assuming involved first a night ambush and a miss, then her survival in the mountains and her ability to come up with another rifle, then a climax in her failed attempt on Groedl, then her death or capture and removal for interrogation—isn’t there. But why would any of that be remarkable to field officers in the Twelfth SS Panzer charged with keeping a combat log? Why would they fail to record it?”

“Okay,” said Swagger, pulling around a gas tanker that placidly belched black exhaust into the air, getting his molars loosened for the efforts as he bounced the car through trenches and gullies cleverly inscribed in the road surface while the dust spat up behind him, “maybe the offensive is an explanation. At ten A.M. on the twenty-sixth, the Russian artillery kicked off and the Germans ran like hell. The Russians walked into Stanislav the next day and had pushed the Germans to the Carpathians and almost out of Ukraine except for the sliver that contained Uzhgorod, on the other side of the mountains. Hard to keep records straight in all the hubbub.”

“They had time afterward.”

“Okay,” said Swagger.

“So what we have here is an unusual circumstance where both the Russians and the Germans have wiped information off the record, independently of each other. Someone ordered this. Whoever he was, he had juice. He had power. He had influence. His position was very important. If he’s a German mole inside Stalin’s circle, he’s a man of high power, a commissar, Stalin’s boy, whatever, so he could order the eighty-sixing of Petrova from Russian sources, but he hates the idea that her tale still exists in one other place, that being the German records. He knows that after the war, it might be checked and give him up. So he explains to his Abwehr contact or his SS guy or whatever agency was running him, he explains that for his own security, the results of what he has brought off, which infer his existence, cannot be recorded. Again, he’s a big guy, get it? He’s a bigfoot, and what he doesn’t quite get is that erasing his footprints doesn’t leave nothing, it leaves an erased footprint, which can be read almost as well as the footprint itself.”

“Basil Krulov, Stalin’s Harry Hopkins. Since he’s the only big guy on the board, you’re saying it had to be him. That’s a giant assumption.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense if you look carefully at it.”

“Does it? What about motive? This guy is Stalin’s right-hand man. He’s one of the most powerful men in his country. He’s got to expect that once the war is over, he’ll be even bigger. He’ll have power, love, and a mansion. So why is he risking everything to rat out his own folks to the Nazis?”

“He was in Munich, remember. Maybe the Nazis got a picture of him sucking something he shouldn’t have been sucking in a public urinal.”

“Possible. But . . . you’re forgetting. He’s real smart. That’s why he gets so high so fast. He ain’t a likely candidate for that kind of trap. And if he got into it, he is a likely candidate for getting out of it. So whoever the traitor is, he had to really want to be a traitor. He was in the most screwball paranoid place in the world, the Kremlin under Stalin, where thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands, get wiped out for the merest whisper of a suspicion.”

“Motive screws up everything,” said Reilly. “Why can’t this be a movie? Movies forgot about motives thirty years ago!”





CHAPTER 14


The Carpathians


Site of Ambush


JULY 1944


Yes, there were rifles, almost thirty of them. But all the bolts had been removed. They were worthless. Her sniper rifle, with its beautiful scope, was also gone, a German trophy instead of her head. There were no PPSh’s, as the Germans prized that sturdy peasant submachine gun and snatched it up whenever they could. The Germans, in their methodical way, had been very thorough, leaving no grenades, no bayonets or knives, no pistols. The bodies, twenty-four of them, lay in a neat double row alongside the path, where they’d been dragged. Most bore the violence of modern small-arms trauma, some horribly, some not so horribly. They had been covered with lime for some reason, as if to shield the forest from them and not them from the forest, but it had worked, and in the intervening night and day, no scavengers had come to enjoy the meat of the predator’s kill.