He gave the signal, and the men of Police Battalion remounted their three panzerwagens to move out. Salid felt he had done an exceptionally good job.
He waited until his men had mounted the vehicles, then clambered aboard the lead panzerwagen. Ackov was there with the map.
“Herr Captain, five kilometers down the road, through the pass called Natasha’s Womb, it’s called Vorokhta.”
“On to Vorokhta, then,” said Salid, wincing, for it was beginning to rain.
Four Thousand Feet Above Yaremche
They climbed high, above the rain clouds. Beneath them, the world had vanished in a sea of cottony fog, penetrated only by farther peaks in the chain that stood out like islands of an archipelago. It felt safe, though they had no way of knowing whether it was. They found the mouth of a cave—the mountains were pocked with them—and slipped inside. It had to be several miles distant from the ambush site and several hundred meters above the line of the path.
The cave was bigger than the last one and held enough room to sustain the three without closeness. The two men more or less disposed of fungus and spiderwebs and turned it marginally habitable for emergency duty. They settled in, the two city dwellers exhausted. But the Peasant was hardly able to sit still and soon left on a mushroom hunt.
In a few hours, he returned. He had an armful of the dry dead-white things, clusters of a Ukrainian berry that was small, red, and sweet, even a dead rabbit.
“Very good work,” she said.
This pleased the Peasant, who recognized the tone of warmth and reported in Ukrainian, which the Teacher dully translated. “He says he set ten snares,” he reported. “Tomorrow, first thing, he’ll inspect them. Rabbit tomorrow, he is sure.”
“Do the Germans patrol this high?”
“No. Not really, not aggressively,” said the Teacher. “Come, look, I’ll show you.”
He led her out. At the mouth of the cave she could see the reality of the Carpathians: it looked like an ocean of green, that is, rippled with the ups and downs of capricious elevation, dozens of carpeted peaks in the three- to five-thousand-foot range, as random as waves, seemingly endless. It was all tall white pines, their soft, short needles each catching a speck of light, so that the whole mass seemed somehow alive with illumination as the wind animated them.
“It’s a big place,” said the Teacher. “You can see why the Germans have no real need to conquer it. Controlling the lowland is enough for them.”
He pointed, and indeed, if she followed his angle, she saw what looked like a cut through some of the farther valleys.
“A road?”
“Yes, the only one through from Yaremche to other, smaller villages called Vorokhta, Yasinia, and Rakhiv, ultimately Uzhgorod. It’s the only road through the mountains south of Lviv. If the Red Army attacks in force and the front collapses, the Germans in Stanislav may flee down it to get through the mountains to their next line of defense. So they patrol the road constantly, because it will have to be kept open when the day arrives. But they seldom come this deep in unless they’re acting on very specific intelligence. So we are safe.”
“Enjoy your mushrooms, comrades,” she said. “We have to move before the Red Army attacks, or the prey may scamper. I’m not going to live on fungus and rabbit and sleep in a hole without at least killing the SS bastard for my troubles.”
Interlude in Tel Aviv I
Mossad
THE PRESENT
You hunt them in the jungle of stuff. Any stuff. Commodities, derivatives, cash transfers, currency manipulations, oil futures, pork (pork!) futures, blood diamonds, anywhere stuff is exchanged for other stuff.
Gershon Gold knew the game, but you’d never guess him a hunter from the outside. He was in his mid-sixties, tending toward weight, very much commercial class of Israeli, a businessman, a financial planner, a retailer, what have you. He wore slacks and open-necked sport shirts, some of them attractive, most not. He wore square-framed black plastic eyeglasses, a Rolex knockoff (why spend all that money for a watch?), once combed his gone-to-gray hair over to the left, though of late had gone with more of a straight-back Meyer Lansky look that earned him all manner of ribbing from friends and wife. He liked black loafers with both wing-tip perforations and tassels. Of glamour, élan, pizzazz, grace, beauty, he had none, unlike the young Mossad high-speed operators who went in with blackened faces in camouflage tunics, suppressed Tavors at the ready. He was no Israeli fighter jock, those keen-eyed, Nomex-clad F-16 predators who prowled the skies, could down any MiG or put a rocket in a bull’s-eye from so close to the deck that the engine blasts riled up the dust.