Sniper's Honor(95)

He gulped, he swallowed, he reached for the phone to call his department head because the situation had just become an emergency and he wondered how soon it would become a catastrophe.

The end result was Zyklon B, the killing gas of Auschwitz.

Someone was making a lot of it.





CHAPTER 45


The Carpathians


Above Yaremche


THE PRESENT


They climbed the scree, picking their way among lumps of rock, twisted juniper bushes, the occasional stunted and un-stunted pine, and at about the two-thirds mark, despair set in.

“Suppose we get up there,” she said, “and there’s no cave. Then what?”

“There’ll be a cave there.”

“How do you know? Maybe the container is a mile away. She just carried the gun up here to get the thousand yards, shot it, zeroed it, and then walked the mile back.”

“This was a good place to hide ’em. If they dug a hole, they had to figure out some way to mark it and register it on a map. This place, easy to ID, being at the top of the scree, and if you’re a young partisan, instead of two broken-down old cripples, it’s easy to get to.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said.

I do, too, he thought.

She fell twice, cutting her knee badly the second time. She had gone from gray to ashen to something like the color of wax. He helped her over some of the rougher spots, but it disturbed him that her fingers were cold to the touch.

“How’s your hip?” she asked.

“It’s fine, no problem,” he lied. His hip hurt like hell. It hurt more than his lungs did, but it felt better than his throat did; he could feel the gunk of phlegm drying into something like pottery on his lips. Then there was his elbow, which was bleeding again. Goddamn that bastard’s sharp teeth! Then he thought, I am too old for this shit, for about the thousandth time.

“Maybe they’ll miss us,” she said. “Maybe they’ll keep going.”

“They won’t. They have a dog.”

“Oh, that’s right. That kid said so, didn’t he.”

“They think of everything,” Swagger said.

“Well, do me a favor.”

“Sure.”

“Please kill the dog,” she said.

“Ain’t the dog’s fault. He’s just trying to make a living.”

“Kill him anyway. On general principle.”

It was rocky and slippery, and the incline decided to get serious at a certain point and jutted more pugnaciously vertical. The new angle slowed them even more, but they never saw any pursuers. If there was a view—and there was—they didn’t see it. If there was beauty—and there was—they didn’t see it. If there was the same huge blue lake of Ukraine sky that overwhelmed the world out to the horizon anywhere you looked—and there was—they didn’t see it.

“Maybe they’re not following us?”

“Oh, they are. They won’t let us see them. They will have reached the edge of the scree, hung back, and got us marked by binoculars. They’ll come up through the trees on the right, out of sight. Tougher climbing because there ain’t no handholds and the footing is much less stable, but they’re young guys.”

They climbed, they climbed, they climbed. It ached, it hurt, it distracted, it disoriented, it robbed vision and imagination. Nearly everything hurt.

“I can’t go much farther.”

“You don’t have to go no farther. We’re here.”



* * *



Reilly lay against the incline, breathing hard, resting on what appeared to be the track of an old stony path, maybe centuries old, maybe trod by the original tribe of Russ a thousand years ago. She breathed, sucking in the air. She was covered in sweat and abraded in a dozen spots, all of which burned fiercely. But she looked and said, “I don’t see a cave.”

Swagger collapsed next to her.

“If there isn’t a cave here,” she said, “I’m just going to lie down until they come and shoot me. I can’t go another step.

“Your body won’t let you give up. You’re too tough.”

“I feel like a powder puff, I look like a homeless person, I hurt everywhere, and you tell me I’m tough.”

“I’ll put a gun in your hand. Then you’re tough as any man alive. That’s why they call it the Equalizer.”

“I don’t see any guns.”

He pointed at the path. “Look over there.”

About ten feet along its track, a groove had been cut into it, not more than six inches wide.

“So?”

“If she had to shoot downhill and wanted to do it from the cave, they’d have to do something about the path. See, it’s in the way of the line of sight to the boulder they shot at. So they somehow dug, cut, scraped that groove in it so she could get the angle downslope a thousand yards.”