Sniper's Honor(8)

“Ludmilla Petrova, a hard question. I put it to you directly out of respect for your considerable accomplishments.”

Here it came. Kursk at last.

But then it didn’t.

“In the matter of your father, I must ask if you have anger still, and if so, whether that might cloud your judgment.”

Petrova kept her eyes hooded and noncommittal. The first idiot was right, that was a true gift. Her eyes expressed only when she wished them to. Others leak their emotions into the world without care or caution. Petrova showed nothing.

“The state did what it thought was necessary,” she said, willing herself to suppress the memory of the arrival of the Black Maria in 1939 and the removal—forever, as it turned out—of her father, a professor of biology at the University of Leningrad. “I trust that it acted in good faith, in the interests of the people. Once the war came, I endeavored to serve the people totally. I allowed myself to fall in love for one week, and to get married. My husband went back to duty and died shortly thereafter. I will serve as long as I am physically able. My death means nothing. The survival of the people is what counts.”

“An excellent response,” said the commissar, and his acolytes nodded. “Entirely fictitious, I am sure, but delivered with heartfelt if fraudulent sincerity. You lie well, and I appreciate the effort it takes. It’s not so easy, as any commissar knows. I’m sure your father’s opinions on wheat yield had their own logic, and he believed them sincerely, and whatever they were, they did not warrant the fate that befell him. A warning in his file, a withheld promotion, perhaps, but death? Such a pity. The regime has made many mistakes, even the boss himself will be the first to admit. But he hopes, and I do, too, that after the war, when we get everything sorted out, rectification of some sort can be made. In the meantime, though I know the wound to be still bitter, your patriotism is without question. Do any of my colleagues from the intelligence section have questions for Comrade Sniper?”

Here it comes, she thought. Kursk at last. Then it’s off to Siberia for me.

But the questions were few and mild, and Petrova handled them easily enough. Born Leningrad, 1919, happy, athletic child of a professor, then his arrest, then the war, then Dimitri and her two brothers in the first two years, her poor mother gone early to a shell during Leningrad’s siege, and her own condition, now stronger, the two shrapnel wounds having healed.

Nothing about Kursk or her assignment to the Special Tasks Detachment.

She did not let her eyes betray her.

Finally Krulov seemed satisfied. Glancing at his watch, he signified that it was time to move on; he had his usual eighteen-hour day and dozens more duties before him.

“Comrade Sniper, please open the folder before you.”





CHAPTER 5


Moscow


Offices of The Washington Post


THE PRESENT


Here’s how I found this guy,” said Reilly, sitting at her office computer in the annex to her apartment, both belonging to The Washington Post. “I Googled ‘Stalin’s Harry Hopkins.’ Up comes the name ‘Basil Krulov.’ I’ve checked into him. Of Stalin’s intimate circle, he is the only one who seemed to have the power to designate missions like that. He was Stalin’s troubleshooter, the way Hopkins was FDR’s.”

From his long-ago immersion in the events that put his father on Iwo Jima in February 1945, Swagger knew of Hopkins, one of the powerful men who made—in good faith, it was hoped—the decisions that left the virgin boys dead in sands and warm waters all across the Pacific.

“It makes sense,” said Swagger. “You need a guy who has the authority, can cut across service lines and bring people together who normally would never find each other in the swamp of a capital at war. He was the go-to guy. He had the power. He could make things happen. But his presence makes this thing all screwy.”

“How do you mean?”

“They didn’t operate that way.”

For all their espionage experience and all their espionage success, the Russians didn’t do special ops in the classic sense of putting trained operators far behind enemy lines. They didn’t need to. The war, after all, was fought mostly on their territory through 1944. And in all that conquered territory, there were dozens of partisan units, cells, individual operators, all that, already there, so in any given locale, they had people on the ground and solid contact with them. So they never had to put together a crew, even one person, move him, her, it, a thousand miles and insert him, her, or it. But, Swagger reasoned, the only rule is, there are no rules. If they sent Mili to Ukraine, it would have been so far outside of normal operating procedures, so unusual, so much in the way of running into resistance from all the players, that it would have to be a guy with juice to make it happen, and that had to be Stalin’s Harry Hopkins.