Sniper's Honor(93)

The general explained that he had great faith in Von Drehle, even if he believed several of his men were subversive. He mentioned a particularly impertinent NCO under Von Drehle’s command. He would hate to order executions and would be far less inclined to do so if Von Drehle’s men performed their duty at Natasha’s Womb, especially in the matter of the woman sniper called the White Witch.

He went on: “If you are successful, once she is turned over to Police Battalion, I will forget all about Bober’s intransigence. Moreover, I will personally intercede with the general staff and see you and your men given two weeks of leave, then a transfer to the Western Front, where you can rejoin Second Fallschirmjäger. Then, Von Drehle, find a nice American patrol to surrender to, tell them how you loathe the hated SS, and survive the war. Are you reading this, Major?”

“I am, sir.”

“Excellent. Do we have an understanding? You help me, I help you, we both help the Reich, and everything turns out for the better. The bandit woman is to be taken alive.”





Interlude in Jerusalem V


Certain things worked, certain things didn’t. It turned out that platinum as a catalyst was so widely used in the world that its name alone implied thousands of possibilities, some of them potentially lethal or at least weaponizable, some of them not so much. To plow through them and test them against a potential act-of-terror template would be a colossal waste of time. You needed two points to draw a line, establish a direction, a destination. One point indicated nothing except the universe around it.

Routine low-level exchanges with other friendly intelligence agencies—and even some not so friendly ones, surprisingly cooperative with the institute—yielded nothing, either. That meant Nordyne GmbH was either harmless or so far below the radar that it had been expertly buried by the best pros in the business, but there was no other indication of professional involvement. The mere presence of armed guards, even if some were Islamic extremists who’d been to war against Russia, meant nothing. Whoever owned Nordyne GmbH may have been manufacturing lawn-mower engines with catalytic converters for the American market and wanted to protect his investment.

All right, smart guy, Gershon argued with himself, why would he go to such lengths to camouflage his operation? Why would he locate it in a spot conspicuously close to Israel’s greatest enemy, an enemy that hungered for destruction and death, and yet at the same time, why would he seem to have—no independent penetration had yielded it—no connection with Iranian intelligence or Hezbollah, Hamas, or any of the world’s too many professional Jew-haters?

On top of that, the report from Lausanne was that the “address” for Nordyne GmbH was a fraud, just a post office box of a franchise operation in a mall. There was no headquarters per se, yet somehow, from a certain Swiss bank, payments were regularly sent by wire to receiving entities.

And—new element in the puzzle of the plant itself—why was there no outflow? If something were being manufactured, why was it not being shipped? Why was it linked to no distribution system, why was it unrepresented by a marketing department, why was it not publicizing its product at trade shows, whatever its trade might be? Why was it completely disconnected, as far as Gershon could tell, and that was pretty damn far, from any government sponsorship or even linkage? Its civic connections consisted of local property taxes paid promptly, water and electricity bills paid promptly, safety inspections passed, probably in the sense that someone “passed” someone else a couple of thousand rubles and the inspector went away happy, never having gotten past the cyclone fence and the gun muzzles of the Chechen thugs.

It just sat there, doing whatever it did, going nowhere, seemingly producing no salable product. It seemed operational only at night, because an American satellite, otherwise picking up zero activity, managed to confirm an operating temperature at a certain sector of the plant of about 1400 degrees centigrade. Why did they need all that heat, or, since he knew nothing much about chemistry, maybe the question should be “Why did they need so little heat?”

“Sorry,” said a professor at the university, “fourteen hundred centigrade is nowhere near the limit of industrial possibility in chemical manufacture. It’s not so hot, it’s not so cool. It’s just sort of in the middle.”

“Which means it tells me—”

“Nothing, except that somebody’s cooking something to make something else.”

“I think that’s what we already knew.”

“Now you know it even more so.”

And that was the most satisfactory conversation he had.