Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

But…

There was one line with a peak just a little bit out of scale with the echoing peaks above and below.

Hmmm.

Is this real? Is it anything? Could it be anything?

He moused to that one line, selected it, and made the others go away.

A single line zagged across the graph.

He checked the legend.

PL.

What the hell was PL? The slightly higher value meant that someone had bought more PL than the market average. He went back through iterations, looking at the performance of PL over the past year, week by week, and in no single week had there been as big a leap.

What was going on with PL?

Actually, better start somewhere else.

What was PL?

It was platinum.

The Town Hall

Ivano-Frankivsk

THE PRESENT

You had to hand it to the Poles: they really knew how to design an ugly building.

In 1936 they had somehow come up with the atrocity of the Stanislav Town Hall, grotesquely angled as if in homage to some science-fiction idea of the future, which climbed cube by severe cube to ultimately a spindly if angular five-story tower, like a child’s ABC-block construction, but great for flying flags of bright national identification. It was a natural for the bloodred swastika flag that had rippled from its top between 1941 and 1944.

“In ’43, they killed twelve thousand Jews in this town. Shot them all. Terrible, terrible,” Reilly said.

Swagger had no comment. There was no comment to be made.

“Then in ’44, when the Russians were pushing the Nazis out of Ukraine, this is where they came to nest as a last stopping point. Groedl’s Reichskommissariat office was here.”

It was near nightfall. They’d returned from Yaremche and were now in Ivano, checked in to the Nadia Hotel, and out for a walk, looking and trying to imagine the Nazi banners, the Kübel and the Horch cars, the ranks of black-uniformed SS creeps, the dowdy civilians of the Reichskommissariat who had administered lebensraum for their leader, all of the theater of history.

“Want to go in?” she said.

“Don’t see no point.”

“I understand. I don’t want to go in, either.”

“We have to go back to Yaremche. Walk that town site more, get up on the mountain trails. You have hiking boots?”

“Yes, and you still have to tell me where she got herself a new rifle.”

“As soon as I know, you’re number one on the list. Dinner?”

“Always.”

They walked the few blocks to what was now Independence Street, which had been Stalin Boulevard, Hitlerstrasse, Warsaw Avenue, and Budapest Utcanev in its time, and found a sidewalk café among the many that had turned the now-pedestrian boulevard so pleasant.

They ate meat, somewhat silently.

“You know what?” said Swagger. “I ain’t got no ideas at all.”

“Let’s do a game called ‘know/assumption,’ okay? What we do know against what we think we know.”

“Sure. Know Mili disappeared in July 1944. Assumption: She was sent to Ukraine on a special mission, according to other sniper Slusskya. Assumption: Guy who sent her had to be this Krulov, Basil, Stalin’s Harry Hopkins, because he had the power. Known: Nothing. All circumstantial. Known: There was a Nazi ambush of partisans in the Carpathians above Yaremche, killing a lot, recovering weapons. Assumption: the partisan unit was betrayed; that’s based on my interp of the Twelfth SS war diary, which documents too big a haul for the meet-up to be by chance. Assumption: Krulov betrayed her. Because he was the only guy capable of betraying her, being the biggest guy on board. He was also the only guy capable of erasing her records in Russia, with the clout to have them erased in Germany, independently of each other. No motive yet. Next assumption: She escaped. Next week or so, nothing. Know: July 26, 1944, day big Russian offensive kicks off. Know: There was an atrocity in Yaremche, one hundred and thirty-five people killed. Assumption: That was retaliation for what we think was an assassination attempt, unsuccessful, on Groedl’s life. Assume Mili was killed or captured and later killed. Know: Germans hit the road, Groedl and the Police Battalion assholes were—okay, here’s something. I got something.”

“Let’s hear.”

“Krulov. Who was he? What happened to him? What would his motive have been? Maybe that’s where we ought to go next. Can Will handle that?”

“I see nothing wrong with that, except that if I give him Krulov to investigate, he will divorce me. He does have a real job, you know.”

“He’s a pro. Won’t faze him in the least.”

“I’ll point that out to him tonight in an e-mail.”

They paid and got up and headed down the street toward the Nadia. The town was pleasant, pinkish Georgian buildings, dapples of light overhanging the street of walkers, the cafés abustle. He thought of beer. Not a good idea. He turned elsewhere in his ruminations.

It was a blur, the rush of darkness, maybe a little noise announcing acceleration, but somehow he picked it up in his peripheral, got a hand on her to pull her back and pivoted, all this in some kind of supertime where he hadn’t been in years, and then the car hit him.

Town Hall

Stanislav

JULY 1944

“As instrumentality,” said Dr. Groedl, “I find it uninteresting. Guns have never particularly inflamed my imagination. I suppose the meaning is that she is now unarmed, she will need to seek another rifle, and this might be used against her, is that so?”

“Yes sir,” said Captain Salid.

The senior group leader–SS was holding the Model 91 rifle with the PU sight affixed by means of a solid steel frame that held the optic tube to the axis of the bore.

“I would imagine ours are more graceful, more modern. It is my understanding that this weapon is over fifty years beyond its design, is that true?”

“Yes sir. It was adopted by them in 1891.”

“So it was already fourteen years old at the time of the RussoJapanese war,” said Groedl. “Please explain to me why we are losing to people as technologically inferior as these.”

“There are so many more of them, sir. That’s all.”

“All right, good point. We have the best machine guns in the world, and we can’t kill them fast enough even then.”

As happened so frequently, Salid was not sure if a response was required; he didn’t know the etiquette here, another function of his exoticism among the rigorously rational, cold-blooded Aryans.

“All right,” said the doctor, having lost all interest in the rifle, “data. Numbers. Please, precision in all, as I have said to you before.”

“Yes, Dr. Groedl. In the ambush, twenty-four male and eleven female bandits. Then in six villages, ten hostages apiece. The villages were those along the Yaremche road through the mountains that have trails leading up to our ambush zone. We believe there were several survivors who would naturally turn to the villages for some kind of shelter. We further believe that we arrived before any survivor and established by example a serious argument against assisting them.”

Captain Salid was nervous. He was positive his ambush had been a success, but he was afraid the escape of Die weisse Hexe would count against him, when clearly it was not his fault. It wasn’t even certain the woman was in the column, and no witnesses were alive to testify. Alas, none of the female corpses suggested unusual beauty.

The doctor of economics wrote down Salid’s figures in a little book, his concentration complete. After a bit, he turned from his desk and slid his roller-borne chair a bit to the right, turned to a calculating machine on a worktable. He bent over it, punching the keys, and finally cranked the lever, unspooling, accompanied by a drama of clackity-clacking, a long strip of paper, covered with blue figures. He tore it off and examined it closely. Data, data.