Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

The Teacher took her by the arm, to help her to move, and the next thing he knew, he was blinking stars from his head while feeling the press of something hard and keen-edged against the precise part of his throat where, less than a quarter inch away behind a thin screen of flesh, his jugular throbbed.

She had turned his weight against him, dumped him swiftly to the ground, and pounced, pinning him there by force of knee jammed into his back and arm wrapped around his forehead that now held a small knife with a sharp blade against the soft, vulnerable part of his neck.

“You know much too much for a teacher, sir,” she whispered. “You found me too damned easily for a teacher. Now, sir, tell me who you really are, or I’ll cut the big one and watch you spurt dry, kicking, in seven seconds.”

Ivano-Frankivsk

The Street

They wanted to take him to the hospital, but it seemed pointless.

“Tell him,” he said to Reilly for the policeman, “he didn’t hit me. Not really. He brushed against me, I spun, I lost my balance, I fell.”

An ambulance had arrived and several witnesses had gathered.

Reilly explained laboriously in Russian that, thankfully, the Ivano policeman understood.

“He wants you to tell him again.”

“It was just a sloppy driver. He thought he could beat me to the space and accelerated.” Swagger waited for her to catch up. “I caught him coming out of the corner of my eye and stepped back. The car didn’t hit me. Its side sort of pushed against me, I felt the pressure, spun, and lost my balance. He probably didn’t even know it happened.”

It went on for a few minutes. No, they couldn’t identify the make or color of the car, no, they didn’t get a plate number. None of the witnesses cared to contribute, either, though they were curious to see how the policeman ended it with the two Americans.

As it happened, he ended it by handing Bob a carbon of a report in Ukrainian off his tablet. It appeared to be some kind of incident record, which Bob took and thanked him for, then watched him walk away. The small crowd also melted off into the night, looking, presumably, for other dramas to distract it.

They walked to the hotel, a multicolored slab of building from “Communism: The Perky Years,” across the street.

“You sure you’re okay? He hit you harder than you told the cop.”

“Really, it’s nothing,” said Swagger. “I expect I’ll be stiff tomorrow.”

“No mountain climbing for you.”

“I guess not.”

“So? Did someone just try to kill us?”

“It’s just on the line between murder and accident.”

“But why would anyone care about something that happened in Ukraine seventy years ago with all its survivors and witnesses gone?”

“How would they even know we’re looking?”

“It’s not like I’ve been discreet. It never occurred to me. I’ve just done what I always do: I call sources, I check on the various Web archives of the various Russian ministries, I talk to people, I go places.”

Bob pondered. “Well,” he finally said, “we may have spilled somebody’s vodka. Let’s call Stronski.”

Stronski was a former Spetsnaz sniper, a brother of the high grass and the long stalk. He’d done a lot of messy things in Afghanistan and Chechyna. The last time Swagger had been to Moscow, he and Stronski, put together by an American firearms journalist, had bonded immediately. Stronski made his living in highly questionable activities, but as Swagger now said, “Sometimes it was better to have a gangster on our side.”

They sat down at a table in the hotel’s outdoor bar, and Reilly fished out her notebook, found the number, and dialed it, then handed it to Swagger.

“ Da? ”

“Swagger for Stronski. He knows me.”

The phone went dead.

Two minutes later it rang.

“Son of a bitch! Swagger, what you doing? You old bastard, last time I see you, the Izzys were shooting at us in the garden of Stalins.”

“That was a fun day,” said Swagger. He went on to tell as quickly as he could why he was where he was and why he was calling now.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” said Stronski. “Stay in, don’t go anywhere. Don’t give the bastards another chance.”

“Nah, not worth your time. We’re not even sure it’s a game. Here’s what I need. Ask around. If someone’s trying to whack me way down here in Ukraine, he’d have left tracks. Calls, associates pushed through via connections, that sort of thing. Someone hiring a freelancer. If there’s any real business going on, let me know.”

“This number if I get anything?”

“Affirmative.”

“Also, allow me, I make some arrangements. Nice to have some way of getting out of there fast.”

“We’re just asking questions about stuff that happened seventy years ago.”

“Pal, look at the cemeteries. The flowers are fresh. Every day, they remember. In this part of the forest, the past never goes away. It’s forever.”

The Cave

Above Yaremche

JULY 1944

“Please don’t cut me,” said the trapped man.

“Explain or bleed,” demanded Petrova.

“Look, I’ll show you how cooperative I can be.” He squirmed, and his arm emerged from underneath him and tossed something a few inches away. It was a small automatic pistol. “Loaded and ready. I could have shot you. I give you the gun.”

Holding the knife harder against the pulsing blue line in his throat, she reached for and seized the pistol, some Hungarian miniaturized thing, managed to secure it against her leg and one-handedly pry back the slide just enough to make sure the brass of a shell glinted from the chamber.

“Try it. Shoot it off. You’ll see.”

She backed off, let him up. “Hands on head. Hands come off head, I shoot. Legs crossed. Legs uncross, I shoot.”

“Understood. Now I—”

“Cut the shit, Teacher. Too much of it already. You found me where the Germans couldn’t. You read the imprint of the tracks and concluded correctly that a panzerwagen left them. That’s advanced scouting, unlikely in a schoolteacher. Who are you? Or better, who do you work for?”

“Myself,” he said. “I am no agent. I have no affiliation. That is not to say I don’t have a secret. I have a very deadly secret. It would kill me in days anywhere I was.”

“And what is the secret? Tell me or die now, not in days. I cannot afford to make a mistake. Too much is at stake.”

“In the middle of the biggest pogrom in history, I am a Jew.”

“A Jew?”

“Yes, absolutely. My papers do not say it because they are not mine. My name does not reflect it because it is false. No one alive knows except you. Bak himself did not know.”

“Go on.”

“I am from Lviv, where the Germans did their big killing. My family, my relatives, my mother, my father, all gone. I was able to evade. I knew a man in town, a teacher of the Russian orthodox religion. It happened that we somehow resembled each other, being scrawny types with bad eyesight and no particular physical distinctions or assets and the beard further blurring the issue. While all the slaughter was going on, I made it to his house by scampering like a rat through the sewers, after cutting off my yellow star. He and his family had gone somewhere so as not to hear the gunshots of the action, and so I broke in, rummaged through his bureaus, and found an identity document. With that prize, I escaped. I lived by my wits, gradually moving west to the Carpathians, where I heard of Bak and his army. I managed, after several adventures and several near-misses, to join them, under the name on the document. There was no mechanism for him to check on the authenticity of the document. The war, you know.”