Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

But why would she have been scrubbed from the Russian record? Why was she disappeared? More likely, since she was famous, they’d have used her sacrifice as a platform on which to build some kind of martyr campaign. Her beauty would help there, too. It was the way propagandists worked, he saw, in that the death of one beautiful girl could be more emotionally powerful than the death of four thousand Russian tankers on a single day at a place called—it was another one nobody had ever heard of—Prokhorovka.

Yet they had refused that possibility.

Why?

Reilly, stirred, shivered, yawned, came awake. She rubbed her eyes. “When do we get to Ocean City?” she asked.

“That’s a long way away. Enjoy the nap? Pleasant dreams?”

“Never,” she said.

Ding! Or maybe bong! Or possibly bing! It came from Reilly’s phone, which she fished out of her purse.

“That’s an e-mail incoming.”

Bob waited patiently.

“Well, well,” she said. “Now here’s something. It’s from Will.”

Will? Oh yes, Will, Reilly’s ever patient, enduring husband, her co-correspondent for the Washington newspaper, a guy of whom she talked now and then and revered as one of those real reporters who was more interested in getting it right and getting it fair than in getting it onto Meet the Press. Swagger somehow had never had the pleasure.

“He’s in Germany,” Reilly was saying. “I asked him to check on the divisional records of the Twelfth SS Panzer around that time. The Germans, as it turns out, and why does this not surprise, kept very precise operational logs. Will just dug something out.” She handed the iPhone over.

Hi, sweetie, Will had written . Aachen is a drab town. But I did find the 12th SS Panzer records and there are some interesting aspects. No. 1, there’s no account of any partisan activity, including assassination attempts, at any time between July 15th and July 26th. As you might imagine, it gets very busy on the 26th, because that’s when they had the Russian offensive started and they pulled out of Stanislav without firing a shot. There’s also a somewhat ambiguous run of entries from the 20th through the 23rd which are simply called “Security Operations.” What that means I don’t know, except that I don’t think it’s against partisans, because they have a special category for that, and they use it frequently. “Anti-bandit” operations, they call them. However, and I think this is new, there is an entry for the 15th. It simply says, if I read my German correctly, “Anti-bandit operation, Carpathian Mountains, Zepplin Force reports inflicting heavy casualties on Ukrainian Bandits presumably affiliated with Bak’s 1st Partisan Brigade. 35 enemy killed in action.”

They even listed the arms recovered. “37 Model 91 rifles, 1 Model 91 with sniper scope, 5 PPsH machine pistols, 28 grenades, 35 bayonets, 12 Tokarev pistols, 9 Luger pistols, 32 bayonets and assorted knives.”

“A Mosin-Nagant with scope. That’s Mili’s. They jumped Mili. But who the hell is Zeppelin Force?” Bob wondered out loud, and in the next second found the answer.

Zeppelin Force seems to be a unit seconded at Senior Group Leader Groedl’s request from 13th SS Mountain Division, in Serbia, which was the only Islamic division in the whole German army. I saw in the log that they had just come over a few days before. But it’s not just any guys, it seems to be a special force called Police Battalion.

The Carpathians

JULY 17, 1944

It was a Police Battalion operation all the way, and Captain Salid handled his men extremely well. He had learned much in his years among the Germans.

His men were experienced. They had been seconded from the 13th SS Mountain Division “Scimitar,” operating in Serbia, where they had been fighting partisans—“bandits,” officially—for the better part of three years, and proudly wore the insignia of the scimitar on the left side of the collars of their camouflaged battle smocks, opposite and yet equal in pride of place as the double flashes of the SS on the right. They had left their fezzes at base and, like their commanding officer, capped their heads only in the camouflaged Stahlhelm of the SS.

In the Balkans, Police Battalion especially had borne the brunt of the patrol and assault work. Mostly Serbian Muslims themselves, they were all mountain people, skilled in mountain fighting arcana from a life in the high altitudes. They were silent crawlers, camouflage experts, superb marksmen, and especially keen on blade work, for theirs, after all, was a blade culture. They were at their best in anti-Jewish actions, for that was where the passion burned brightest. They did truly hate and despise bandits, not only an ancient enmity but also a recent one, for they had lost as many to those bandits as they had taken from them. But they were disciplined, high-level military, skilled and patient, used to stillness. They were not Arab pirates, thirsty for blood because they were thirsty for blood; in fact, there were few Arabs among them, after Captain Salid only two unteroffiziers and an odd private or corporal among the platoons.

Salid employed the classic L-shape technique of ambuscade, getting two angles of fire from his unit without endangering either echelon to the other, and much used by his forebears against generations of invaders, from Romans to Jews to Crusaders to other tribes, to the hated English, to Turks, to the later arriving Jews. His family had been in the war business for at least fifteen generations, and although he was only thirty-two, he knew a thing or two.

Yusef el-Almeni bin Abu Salid was the cousin of the grand mufti of Jerusalem. The august persona was, alas, retired from his position among the people by British importunings and now rusticating in Berlin, where his weekly broadcasts to the Arab world had made him even more famous and powerful. The cousin Salid had grown up under the lash of British rule in Jerusalem, aware that the British were surrogates for the true enemy of his people, international Jewry, via the hated Balfour Declaration of 1919, which mandated that Jewish subhumans would be accorded land in Palestine. When the mufti, an admirer of all things German, had evinced an early enthusiasm for the Third Reich, a German diplomat had reached out to the man and offered to take certain gifted Arab boys to Germany for technical training. From the age of eight onward, Yusef Salid was raised in the German method, among Germans, whose language he quickly mastered, first in the rigors of Realschule , then in cadet school, then in officers’ training at Bad Tölz, then infantry school, and finally in a series of specialized SS training programs. He stood out because of his brown skin and coarse dark hair, but his elegance of manner, his eruditition in German and love of German literature, and his excellence in all matters military soon made him popular no matter the venue. His ability to keep his head in tense situations, his coolness under fire, his knowledge of wine—which, being a Muslim, he never drank, but he made it his business to memorize labels and vintages for exactly the popularity it would earn him—and his twinkly dark eyes made him a hero in the SS officers’ mess. His assignment to Einsatzgruppen D in the early days of the July 22 invasion and his intense labors on behalf of that unit’s aims earned him accolade after accolade, both official and personal.

When the strategy of shooting and burying the Jews of Ukraine proved unrealistic in the face of their sheer numbers, and the unit was folded into the Waffen SS for general military duties, it was Dr. Groedl himself who made calls and pulled strings on the young officer’s behalf. Groedl considered himself to have an eye for talent. His mentees were scattered far and wide in the great crusade. It was he who arranged for Salid to be transferred to the 13th-SS Mountain, the only pure Muslim division in the Waffen-SS, where he knew the young man’s talents for locating Jews would be put to good use.