Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

She watched as they picked their way along some fifty feet below her, the peasant leading, the thinner man—she had no insight as how to classify him and so would not make the mistake of conferring an identity upon him too soon—following. At a certain moment, the peasant raised a hand, and each halted, dropped to knees, and looked nervously around. After a bit, satisfied that no SS men were about to nab them, they rose.

“Hello,” she cried.

They reacted in terror, scrambling back, edging into panic.

She emerged from the cave, pulled herself upright, and started down the slope to them. “Greetings, comrades.”

The peasant babbled in Ukrainian.

“She’s the sniper!” said the thinner man, having made an immediate calculation.

“ Belaya Vedma! ” exclaimed the peasant. And added something else.

“He says you should be a princess,” said the thin fellow.

“There are no princesses these days,” said Petrova.

“He says your beauty is a gift from God.”

“I hope God is busy giving out other gifts, like mercy and long life. He shouldn’t be wasting time on St. Petersburg girls. Are you pursued?” she asked.

“No, madam. Like you, accidental survivors from the nasty business of last night,” said the thin man.

“You are with Bak? Why are you unarmed?”

“I threw my gun away,” said the thin fellow. “A practical decision. If I had a rifle, I would be shot on sight. If captured, tortured for information, then executed. Maybe if I didn’t have one, they’d just beat me for amusement, then dump me in the bushes. I ran into the big fellow in the dawn. We scared the life out of each other. We are simply trying to evade capture.”

“I don’t think the Germans are here in force,” she said. “Despite all the shooting, that was a small team. That’s how they moved so effectively through the forest. They had many machine guns, unusual for a German unit. Did Bak escape?”

“I confess cowardice,” said the thin man. “I don’t know, and not until you mention it did I even think of it. I have been thinking only of my own miserable skin.”

“Do you have food? I am famished.”

“Not a bite.”

“Ach!” She sat back. “What a pair of sorry dogs.”

Introductions were made, names quickly forgotten. The peasant was a Ukrainian farmer who had been a partisan for a year. His stoic face may have concealed tragedies, but he did not volunteer them. The scrawny man—younger than he looked under that gray hair and the goatee—was a former schoolteacher. He had been with the partisans only a few months.

“I am not much of a fighter,” he said. “But since I have good reading and writing skills, General Bak used me as a clerk. I kept records, made reports.”

“So if the SS tortured you, you would have a lot to reveal.”

“Only that food is low, ammunition is low, communication with higher authority uncertain, and nobody’s happy. They know all this, but yes, they would enjoy beating me until I told them. Then it would be nine grams of lead for me.”

“Nine grams awaits all of us if we don’t make a sound decision now.”

“Tell us what to do.”

“First, tell me some stuff. I don’t know a thing about this area. I was flown here and dumped.”

The Peasant got the gist of her request. “Beyond us, perhaps eight kilometers, is a village called Yaremche,” he said as the Teacher translated. “It is built in ravines on the waterfalls of the River Prut. If a case can be made to the villagers, they might take us in or at least give us food.”

“What else?”

“Bak’s main camp is a farther march,” said the Teacher. “It is at least seventy-five kilometers through forest that is unclearly administered. Perhaps German patrols wander it, perhaps partisan units. It would be our bad luck to run into the former and good to run into the latter.”

“Next question: food. How do we feed ourselves?”

“He knows mushrooms,” said the Teacher. “These Ukrainians, they live on mushrooms. Mushrooms are the secret wealth of the Carpathians.”

“Mushrooms, then. After mushroom paradise, we’ll head back to the ambush site,” she said. “We can look for weapons, foodstuff, anything the Germans left behind. Is it going to rain?”

“By afternoon, yes. I believe,” said the Peasant in translation.

“Then we had better get there first and see what the tracks tell us. When it rains, it will wash away our tracks. Once we have gotten what we can, we will rejoin the war. Our little vacation is over.”

Highway E50, Due South

THE PRESENT

To the east, wheat fields, classic Ukraine landscape. You could almost feel the Red Army chorus singing patriotic chants as framed in the eye of a New Soviet Cinema camera. To the west, the Carpathians, Ukraine-style, a formidable bank of mountain that curled across the promontory of Ukraine extending across what once was Poland or Hungary or Romania or all three and now was like a Ukrainian peninsula thrust into the sea of Eastern Europe. They were ancient mountains in the five-thousand-foot range, their foothills and lower altitudes mantled in a fetching green of meadow, giving way to a band of dense forest that could and had concealed armies. It was also famous as a haunt of vampires.

Nice to look at on both sides. But what they experienced more than anything was the roughness of the asphalt. Every two miles or so, it seemed there was a we-interrupt-this-highway-for-250-yards-of-bad-road bulletin. Driving was more like slaloming, as the drivers zoomed this way and that to avoid the many crevices that had gone unrepaired since Sputnik 1 ate up the Ukrainian infrastructure budget. It was quaint and rustic for a bit, then a pain in the ass or, more particularly, the head.

Still Reilly soldiered on. “What we haven’t focused on,” she said, “is that the whole Operation Mili Petrova isn’t just missing from the Russian records. That would be remarkable enough. It’s also missing from the German records. You have to ask why, how, by whom? What difference would it make to the Germans what happened to Mili? The whole Mili caper—which we’re assuming involved first a night ambush and a miss, then her survival in the mountains and her ability to come up with another rifle, then a climax in her failed attempt on Groedl, then her death or capture and removal for interrogation—isn’t there. But why would any of that be remarkable to field officers in the Twelfth SS Panzer charged with keeping a combat log? Why would they fail to record it?”

“Okay,” said Swagger, pulling around a gas tanker that placidly belched black exhaust into the air, getting his molars loosened for the efforts as he bounced the car through trenches and gullies cleverly inscribed in the road surface while the dust spat up behind him, “maybe the offensive is an explanation. At ten A.M. on the twenty-sixth, the Russian artillery kicked off and the Germans ran like hell. The Russians walked into Stanislav the next day and had pushed the Germans to the Carpathians and almost out of Ukraine except for the sliver that contained Uzhgorod, on the other side of the mountains. Hard to keep records straight in all the hubbub.”

“They had time afterward.”

“Okay,” said Swagger.

“So what we have here is an unusual circumstance where both the Russians and the Germans have wiped information off the record, independently of each other. Someone ordered this. Whoever he was, he had juice. He had power. He had influence. His position was very important. If he’s a German mole inside Stalin’s circle, he’s a man of high power, a commissar, Stalin’s boy, whatever, so he could order the eighty-sixing of Petrova from Russian sources, but he hates the idea that her tale still exists in one other place, that being the German records. He knows that after the war, it might be checked and give him up. So he explains to his Abwehr contact or his SS guy or whatever agency was running him, he explains that for his own security, the results of what he has brought off, which infer his existence, cannot be recorded. Again, he’s a big guy, get it? He’s a bigfoot, and what he doesn’t quite get is that erasing his footprints doesn’t leave nothing, it leaves an erased footprint, which can be read almost as well as the footprint itself.”