Sniper's Honor(38)

Stronski was a former Spetsnaz sniper, a brother of the high grass and the long stalk. He’d done a lot of messy things in Afghanistan and Chechyna. The last time Swagger had been to Moscow, he and Stronski, put together by an American firearms journalist, had bonded immediately. Stronski made his living in highly questionable activities, but as Swagger now said, “Sometimes it was better to have a gangster on our side.”

They sat down at a table in the hotel’s outdoor bar, and Reilly fished out her notebook, found the number, and dialed it, then handed it to Swagger.

“Da?”

“Swagger for Stronski. He knows me.”

The phone went dead.

Two minutes later it rang.

“Son of a bitch! Swagger, what you doing? You old bastard, last time I see you, the Izzys were shooting at us in the garden of Stalins.”

“That was a fun day,” said Swagger. He went on to tell as quickly as he could why he was where he was and why he was calling now.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” said Stronski. “Stay in, don’t go anywhere. Don’t give the bastards another chance.”

“Nah, not worth your time. We’re not even sure it’s a game. Here’s what I need. Ask around. If someone’s trying to whack me way down here in Ukraine, he’d have left tracks. Calls, associates pushed through via connections, that sort of thing. Someone hiring a freelancer. If there’s any real business going on, let me know.”

“This number if I get anything?”

“Affirmative.”

“Also, allow me, I make some arrangements. Nice to have some way of getting out of there fast.”

“We’re just asking questions about stuff that happened seventy years ago.”

“Pal, look at the cemeteries. The flowers are fresh. Every day, they remember. In this part of the forest, the past never goes away. It’s forever.”





CHAPTER 20


The Cave


Above Yaremche


JULY 1944


Please don’t cut me,” said the trapped man.

“Explain or bleed,” demanded Petrova.

“Look, I’ll show you how cooperative I can be.” He squirmed, and his arm emerged from underneath him and tossed something a few inches away. It was a small automatic pistol. “Loaded and ready. I could have shot you. I give you the gun.”

Holding the knife harder against the pulsing blue line in his throat, she reached for and seized the pistol, some Hungarian miniaturized thing, managed to secure it against her leg and one-handedly pry back the slide just enough to make sure the brass of a shell glinted from the chamber.

“Try it. Shoot it off. You’ll see.”

She backed off, let him up. “Hands on head. Hands come off head, I shoot. Legs crossed. Legs uncross, I shoot.”

“Understood. Now I—”

“Cut the shit, Teacher. Too much of it already. You found me where the Germans couldn’t. You read the imprint of the tracks and concluded correctly that a panzerwagen left them. That’s advanced scouting, unlikely in a schoolteacher. Who are you? Or better, who do you work for?”

“Myself,” he said. “I am no agent. I have no affiliation. That is not to say I don’t have a secret. I have a very deadly secret. It would kill me in days anywhere I was.”

“And what is the secret? Tell me or die now, not in days. I cannot afford to make a mistake. Too much is at stake.”

“In the middle of the biggest pogrom in history, I am a Jew.”

“A Jew?”

“Yes, absolutely. My papers do not say it because they are not mine. My name does not reflect it because it is false. No one alive knows except you. Bak himself did not know.”

“Go on.”

“I am from Lviv, where the Germans did their big killing. My family, my relatives, my mother, my father, all gone. I was able to evade. I knew a man in town, a teacher of the Russian orthodox religion. It happened that we somehow resembled each other, being scrawny types with bad eyesight and no particular physical distinctions or assets and the beard further blurring the issue. While all the slaughter was going on, I made it to his house by scampering like a rat through the sewers, after cutting off my yellow star. He and his family had gone somewhere so as not to hear the gunshots of the action, and so I broke in, rummaged through his bureaus, and found an identity document. With that prize, I escaped. I lived by my wits, gradually moving west to the Carpathians, where I heard of Bak and his army. I managed, after several adventures and several near-misses, to join them, under the name on the document. There was no mechanism for him to check on the authenticity of the document. The war, you know.”

“Yet in safety, you continued with your deception.”