Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

So now I’m interested. I’m poking around. Be neat to find out what happened to Mili, what she did to so infuriate the Red bosses that they redacted her from history. So that’s the piece, though I’m not having much luck with it, but in my dull Ohio way, I keep chipping away. I may have more sniper questions for you as I progress. Is that okay? Oh, and click on the attachment, I’ve scanned in that cover for you to see her.

He did as instructed, looked carefully at the woman.

Then he called his wife.

“I’m going to Moscow as soon as the paperwork clears,” he said.

Then he went to Amazon and bought about six hundred dollars’ worth of books on the Eastern Front.

Moscow

On the Way to Red Square

JULY 1944

“Iknow it’s hard to believe, looking at me,” the major said, “but I am an expert on beauty.”

Outside, the undamaged city rolled by, as the 1936 ZiL limo cruised down broad avenues under a scorching sun. Everywhere: neatness, tidiness, order, citizens about their business. Food seemed plentiful, the leaves of many trees rustled in a breeze, the sky was bright.

To her, cities were landscapes of ruins, inhabited mainly by corpses and rats and scrawny men crusted in filth. Survival was figured in units twenty-four hours long. The capital, by contrast, lay unscathed, though a few bombs had fallen in long-ago 1941. The Germans had gotten within eighteen miles and then the winter arrived, assisted by the 15th Guards Army. Not so Stalingrad, where she had spent the full six months of the battle. It was hard not to hate Moscow. One hated all headquarters towns, it was the soldier’s right and could not be helped in any case. Its wholeness was offensive. But such is war. Some survive, soldiers or cities; some do not.

“What is surprising,” he continued, “is that much beauty is banal. Yes, I know. An astonishment! Yet many a well-formed country girl is disheartened to discover how commonplace she is. When I was at Mosfilm—well, not professionally, but nevertheless there on semi-official business and not without influence, I don’t mind telling you, no, not without influence, I knew many key people. The point is, when I was there, every day, just like in Hollywood, beautiful girls from everywhere would show up. They believed their faces were their ticket to fame and, frankly, escape from the Motherland. Yet most ended up as prostitutes or mistresses. Do you know why?”

If he expected an answer, she did not give him one. The one star on his shoulder boards said major, and the blue piping and blue visor on his cap said secret police, night visits, disappearances, NKVD, but his face said what so many men’s faces said: I want you, I need you, I yearn for, dream of, hope and plan for you. It was a familiar message, and she had heard it many times in many formats. But in the hierarchy of men and women, she was a thousand ranks above him, no matter that she wore the insignia of only a sergeant. By laws older than politics, she did not have to answer.

Instead, she considered another matter. Was this about Kursk? Did he know? Did NKVD know?

“Because the camera tells a truth,” he went on hopelessly. “Or rather, too much truth. It does not enjoy the commonplace and will not linger for long. It finds openness offensive. It wants to be teased, seduced, tricked. I don’t know why this is, but even among beauties, only one face in ten thousand has the features the camera admires. That kind of beauty is quite rare.”

The car passed Lubyanka, where this fool presumably labored, and it was nothing but a huge block of concrete, nine stories tall, the color of a piece of cheese. But she didn’t see it. She saw Kursk. Burning men, burning tanks, a field of wreckage that seemed biblical in proportion, death in all its forms everywhere.

She had done the wrong thing at Kursk. But it still felt like the right thing, try as she had to convince herself it had been wrong.

Is this about Kursk?

“You see, I mention this,” said the idiot, “because I feel that yours is that special beauty. Your eyes, though large and deep and firm of purpose and focus, are occluded. They do not give up their meaning easily but suggest careful consideration, seriousness of purpose, lack of foolishness. And your record itself speaks of lack of foolishness. Sergeant Petrova is not a foolish woman.”

Another mile around the walled perimeter and at last the limousine turned left, through medieval gates, and onto the Kremlin grounds and the cobbles of Red Square. Though Moscow had never been truly violated, every one hundred yards or so on the broad parade ground, anti-aircraft guns pointed skyward, planted in nests of sandbags, and a fleet of barrage balloons tethered to their thousand meters of cable floated overhead, casting drifting blots of shadows. The faces of the Motherland’s great heroes hung from the buildings on immense banners, obscuring the architecture and suggesting the men were more important than the buildings. Comrade Stalin’s wise and benevolent features dominated, behind a mustache as large as a tank and eyes the size of a heavy bomber. Since he had murdered her father, she was not impressed.

Now and then a Yak-3 pursuit ship howled overhead at three hundred miles an hour, on some training mission, for now the war was far away. The airplane reminded her of the one man whose face had expressed not want but only kindness, her husband, Dimitri, crashed and burned somewhere in Belarus.

She blinked. She could not dwell on Dimitri. Or Papa or Mama or her brothers, Gregori or Pavel. Or Kursk.

The car pulled to an entrance guarded not only by the anti-aircraft crew but by four men in tunics with chestfuls of medals, whose easy carriage of their tommy guns suggested much experience.

“And so, my dear, I wanted to put it to you. If you let me, I can make certain phone calls on your behalf, arrange certain meetings. This war will not last beyond 1946, and with your record—I imagine the other girls who’ve performed as you have all look like peasant horsefaces!—and the right training, it seems as if you might have a future, a nice future, a future of travel, of luxury, a future no Soviet woman would dare dream of, it’s within your reach with my assistance, and you have only to—”

“I am the sniper,” she said. “I want to be alone.”

Moscow

THE PRESENT

It was the same city he remembered from a couple of years back: capitalism, dust, a throbbing rhythm, construction everywhere, Porsches and Beemers everywhere construction wasn’t, new skylines poking up all over the place, people in a hurry. He checked in to the Metropole, because he knew it, and had a nice room not far from the restored and gilded dining room and the ornate cage of the elevator.

A shower, a nap, then another shower, and he met Reilly at a restaurant that specialized in meat, where they had meat appetizers, meat entrees, and—no, not meat desserts but some kind of cherry tart whose red custard looked like glistening protein.

Same old Reilly. Smart, tart, and funny, she listened fully and considered an answer without any urgency to fill the air with noise, then came up, always, with the best one. She had an interrogator’s clear blue eyes that compelled confession, and a kind of secretly dry delight in the follies of the day. She saw through anything and everything.

No hooch for a dry old coot, and finally, after chatter of children and possibilities, jokes about politics, newspapers, the insanity of the North Koreans, they got to business.

“Why are you here?”