Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“Yet in safety, you continued with your deception.”

“Nowhere on earth, it seems, are Jews welcomed anymore. These Ukraines, particularly of the rural proletariat who form the bulk of Bak’s group, are no friend of the Jews. Many have joined Nazi legions and become the Jews’ worst persecutors, at Nazi bidding but based on their own brutal nature. I did not care to make myself known to them. Brave men, yes, as you can see in our friend the Peasant, who does not know or even suspect. He has no idea I am circumcised. Not an easy deception to bring off, I might add.”

She considered, then said, “I need more convincing. You still know too much, are too keen, quick, observant, like a trained intelligence operator. I can tell, I’ve been around them.”

“You note that which is my greatest gift and my greatest curse. Yes, it turns out, I am gifted. Because I was smart, weak, not obviously a warrior type, Bak assigned me as his own intelligence officer’s aide. He was NKVD, highly professional, and I learned much from him. At the same time, I had what might be called a ‘feel’ for the work. I come from a fur-trading family. We didn’t trap, we didn’t sell, we were the middlemen playing both ends against each other while keeping both in the dark. Believe me, it’s a business of bluff and feint, fast reactions, quick recognition of the real, timing, timing, and oh yes, timing. Perfect training for intelligence, and I learned quickly. It happened that this officer was killed in a bridge raid, and Bak trusted me in his service, and so I became his new intelligence officer. And that is what you encounter when you see through me, not an NKVD agenda or a GRU loyalty. You’re just seeing a frightened Jew.”

“I suppose I could believe that story,” she said. “It’s crazy enough to sound real. No one would dare make up such nonsense.”

“I’m trying to serve, that’s all. To do my little bit.”

She threw the pistol down, but he did not take it up.

“All right,” she said, “employ this ‘gift’ you claim to possess. Impress me with an insight.”

“I know through late radio reports from Red Army intelligence that the unit that ambushed us was the Police Battalion of Thirteenth SS Mountain, known as Scimitar. Specialists in anti-partisan warfare, especially in forest and mountain climes. Run by a monster named Salid, an Arab, no less, who learned his trade killing naked Jews in pits for an outfit called Einsatzgruppen D. We puzzled over the significance, and now I see it. They weren’t here by coincidence. They were brought in a week ago. Specifically to catch you. What that means is the Germans knew before Bak did that you were coming.”

“They knew before I did.”

“Yes. And how could they know if no one here, including Bak and myself, knew you were coming? They also knew that a specialist unit with advanced skills was appropriate to the ambush. They didn’t trust the local lunks.”

She knew the answer. She just couldn’t say it.

He did. “You were betrayed from Moscow.”

“I understand that.”

“Yes, and it means, very simply, at the highest of levels, one of us works for them. Whoever, this person, or so I infer, knew that the monster Groedl was a favorite of Hitler and that Hitler’s irrationality would demand that Groedl be protected at all costs. Which led to special efforts to ambush not Bak, who is of little consequence, but you.”

“I think I have suspected all of this,” she said.

“Perhaps so. But have you considered that your escape is now a major threat to whomever the traitor is? You are the living proof that he exists, and he is trapped in a very small pond. That means the Germans will make a concentrated, labor-intensive effort to capture you. They need you alive to take you to Berlin and work on you and see what you know and to whom you have communicated your suspicions. You are enemy of the Reich number one. But it gets much worse. You are also the traitor’s enemy number one. He will use his power to destroy from his end, via Russian means, to crush you. He will use NKVD, GRU, and SMERSH.”

“Dear God,” she said.

“You see now, as both sides conspire to kill you, that you have already in your young life managed an impressive accomplishment.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You are the most hunted woman on the face of the earth. You have managed to get the two most violent governments in human history obsessed and totally committed, out of state necessity, to your destruction. That takes talent.”

Ivano-Frankivsk

THE PRESENT

The leg never bruised. But the next morning it announced that it preferred to take a day off. It ached dully from ankle to knee to steel ball in hip, which might have annoyed the steel ball, so it started hurting, too. Bob took six ibus and felt a little sick. But today was not going to be a day of running up hills. He met Reilly in the lobby with his first, most urgent question.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to drop you at the station and you can go back to Moscow?” he asked her. “We may be in danger.”

“No, not at all. It’s my story. I’m on it, I will follow it. Now it’s even more interesting. What could it possibly be linked to, seventy years later, that would matter?”

They slipped into the restaurant, where a breakfast buffet was set up, and went heavily into yogurt, fruit, juice, and coffee. Then they slipped out to the secluded open-air dining section and sat in leafy splendor.

Swagger had seated himself to watch the entrance; he noted the exits, he examined the waitstaff to make sure each was familiar and dressed identically to the others, he checked everything that moved. He also secretly wished he had a gun and felt very vulnerable without one.

“No climbing today,” said Reilly. “All right, there’s a city not far away called Kolomiya, about thirty kilometers to the south. They have a famous Easter-egg museum.”

“Great idea,” Swagger said.

“What’s interesting about it is that it’s also got something called the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. A great collection, the guidebook says, of stuff from the war—they never forget, it never goes away, it’s Ukraine, Stronski told you the flowers on the graves are always fresh, remember? Maybe there’s something there that’s worth seeing.”

“Yeah, that’s good, I like that. Plus, on the highway we get to see what’s coming, what isn’t. Nobody sneaks up on us.”

The museum was another melancholy hall of sacrifice and valor. The partisan movement against the German invasion had been relatively successful but monstrously expensive. It was a war without prisoners, mercy, or hesitation, with atrocity common on each side. The Germans wouldn’t dignify their opponents with the term “partisans” and officially called them bandits. They specifically determined that the rules of war were not to be obeyed in the matter of bandits, which let the leash off their counterterror troops for ad hoc massacres.

Walking the halls was looking into a tunnel in time, the end of which was a sepia rendition of the gallows, where the Germans hanged so many, or the pits, where they shot so many more.

“It’s pretty awful,” she said after another exhibit on the subject of a razed village, a community slaughtered. “It’s Yaremche times a thousand, so big that there’s nothing of Yaremche here. Eight hundred, six hundred, five hundred, gone in an afternoon. Yaremche’s puny hundred and thirty-five don’t get a mention.”

One of the halls turned to the Germans and exhibited uniforms, weapons, communication gear, boots, all of it safely behind glass. Swagger stared at a dummy SS man in the spotty-leopard dapple of the late-war camouflage-pattern smock, heavy jackboots, with an MP-40 in his hands and all the right equipment in place, the bread bag, the entrenching tool, a holstered Luger, a foot of wicked bayonet, the haversack, that instantly recognizable helmet with the medieval steel flare that covered the ears and back of the neck and made every Landser somehow look like a Teutonic knight out to slaughter the inferior. Next to the double lightning flashes on the collar of his tunic, the emblem of a curved sword was displayed.