Sniper's Honor(30)

He stood, he looked up, down, sideways, front, and back. “She’d shoot from up there,” he said, pointing at the bluff. “He was down here, maybe on this bridge. The bridge would isolate him from his bodyguard. The range is no more than four hundred yards.”

He stood, he looked at the trees on the bluff for a long time. “Okay,” he said, “I’m getting something.”

“I just see trees.”

“Yeah, just trees, but—but look at the colors. Do you see?”

“Uh, green, followed by green, then more green, and finally some green. Is that it?”

“Different tones of green.”

She was silent. After a bit she said, “Yes. It’s like . . .”

“Go on,” said Swagger.

“What I’m seeing,” she said, “is that the green of these pines across the closest half of the bluff is somehow different. It’s almost like a line, bright one side, dull the other.”

“That’s it. What I’m seeing is that the trees on roughly half the bluff are somehow, uh, lighter. They’re not the dark forest green, they’ve got less density to the color, there’s more light, they seem almost lit up.”

“That’s it. It signifies something. Newer, older, I don’t know, closer to water, in more sun, in more shade, something like that.”

They completed the trek across the bridge, then took some wood-hewn steps down to the water’s edge and drew nearer to the Ukrainians in the water, whose children ran about eagerly, lost in games.

“Does it give you the creeps?”

“Thinking about what happened here, what the Nazis did, yes,” said Reilly. “Otherwise, no. It’s just a place. No signs of anything. Covered, gone, vanished. But your instincts are much better than mine. Maybe you feel something.”

“Let’s not feel. Let’s look. Touch, rub, I don’t know, experience it really up close.”

Swagger bent down. He stuck his fingers into the loam, probed, came up with nothing.

She followed suit. She found nothing.

They continued for half an hour. Nothing.

“Well, maybe I’m full of crap,” said Bob. “Maybe—”

But a child ran by them, trailing a fishtail of shedding water, one hand extended in triumph.

“That kid found something.”

They watched him head to a supine mother and father, pinkening in the sun on a blanket. They walked over, and Reilly spoke to them, discovering that the mother spoke enough Russian to get by.

Reilly handed something to Bob. “She says the children find these things all the time.”

It was black, half of it rusted or otherwise corroded away. Its remaining walls were paper-thin, the whole thing crumbly. But the rimmed head, where the brass was much thicker, was intact, and he turned it to read in the light. “I see a 5, a 17, an S97, and a D, circling the center, separated by segment lines.”

“What does that mean?”

“The water must churn ’em up every so often. German production code. If I knew more, I could tell you the year and the plant. It’s a 7.92-millimeter cartridge casing. A machine-gun shell.”

He thought a second.

“Somebody did a lot of shooting here.”





CHAPTER 16


The Carpathians


Yaremche


JULY 1944


Salid was a moral man. He understood obligation, discipline, obedience to God, cleanliness, hard work, the greater good, the greater cause of Palestine, of Islam, and he used those precepts as his guidelines.

But he hid this behind an armor of diffidence and duty, and what he did appeared undisciplined. It was SS theater conceived to convey the impression of random brutality as a way of encouraging fear and thus cooperation. So while he walked among the ranks of assembled villagers, he pretended arbitrariness while looking for specificity. He required certain indicators.

The first was nasal structure. Was the nose long, thickened, wide of nostril? Did it lead the face? Had it that prowlike profile so familiar from Hans Schweitzer’s chilling invocation on the movie poster for Der ewige Jude? Was the chin also small, behind the point of the nose? Were the lips thick? What about the skin? Was it sallow, yellowish, perhaps even Asiatic? And the hair, greasy, brushed back, contributing to the general verminlike profile so common in these cases?

Since these people of Hutsulian ethnicity lived on mud streets in wooden houses under thatched roofs and worshiped at a crude Orthodox church, it was unlikely that any of them were Jews. But some carried the genetic strain. It could have gotten intermingled at any time since the medieval ages, as the Balkans, Ukraine, and Central Europe were a genetic cesspool, so corrupted by crossbreeding that all purity had been eliminated. Semitic genetic expression could emerge, strident and manipulative, at any time. As the hidden moral principle to all Scimitar actions, Captain Salid made the discriminations off of much experience, having acquired a fine eye for such matters.