Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“They had standards, those boys,” said Mikhail. More vodka. Eye contact, Jun. She seemed to be available. He winked. She came by and sat on his lap. She licked his ear and whispered something he found quite interesting, then she stood up and undulated away, trailing come-hither glances, perfume, and jiggly ripeness everywhere.

“Pretty girl,” said Will. “I see why you like her.”

“Now and then I contribute to her college fund,” Mikhail said, finding his own joke hilarious. Will did not, because he had looted his own daughter’s college fund for tonight’s fun, but he pretended like he did.

“This file, anyone I know?”

“Doubtful.”

“If he’s a big man, he should be in the archives of the other places,” said Mikhail.

“See, that’s the deal. Someone erased him, I think.”

“Lots of erasing goes on in Russia,” said Mikhail. “People make some money, then they erase themselves and start a new life. Happens all the time. Some stories I could tell you.”

“I’m only interested in one man’s story,” said Will.

“So what’s the offer?”

Will held his hand up. Jun came over. She smiled at Mikhail. Mikhail smiled back, then noted that Will’s hand was still in the air. Magda, the Czech, came over. She smiled at Mikhail. The she licked the inside of Jun’s ear, and Jun ground her pelvis once or twice into Magda’s hip. But wait. The hand was still up. Eva inserted herself between Magda and Jun. She put a tongue in each gal’s ear, one and then the other. All three of them smiled at Mikhail.

“You’ve made an arrangement, I see,” said Mikhail. “Will you be joining me?”

“Ah, I think you can find your way without my guidance,” said Will, thinking, God, I hope I can get this party past the Post ’s expense account mavens, or daughter number two is going to Prince George’s Community College next year.

“What file?” said Mikhail, rising.

Will already had it written down: “Basil Krulov, Stalin’s assistant, 1942 to 1954, disappeared sometime in mid ’50s.”

Mikhail didn’t even look at it. “I’ll have it for you day after tomorrow.”

The girls led him away.

“Better make that day after the day after tomorrow,” he called back.

Headquarters, 14th Panzergrenadier Division

Outside Stanislav

MID-JULY 1944

For their command appearance, Karl and Wili brushed out their bonebags, scraped the mud off their boots, shaved, and bathed, even fished out the white summer cap they, as Luftwaffers, were entitled to wear. If they said so themselves, they managed to look pretty spiffy. You could never predict who you’d run into, so spiffy was always the wise move.

Not being assigned a Kübel themselves, they were driven to the HQ building, a mansion under some trees from an earlier century. If there was a mansion, the staff found it; 14th Panzer had found a beautiful old house set in some trees on the far side of the tank park. Actually they’d found the house first and established the tank park next to it. The dwelling, of Georgian grace and with an aristocratic background until the Reds had turned it into some kind of potato collective in ’39, was festooned with gaudy National Emblem banners and 14th Panzer flags, surrounded by security behind spools of K-wire and MG-42 posts, the lawns and shrubbery all cut and smashed by the treads of the armored beasts.

Inside, it was all business, as about all the division’s needs were serviced by a Panzer cadre who scurried about, administering a twelve-thousand-man/four-hundred-tank military entity, in the field, in constant contact with the enemy. Communications rooms, a huge study where a topographic map was being examined by officers while enlisted men pushed little painted blocks around it, and other rooms turned into offices where ammunition was ordered, tracked, and stocked, fuel levels monitored, supplies listed, living quarters assigned, mess supplies provided. There was hardly ever time for tea.

But today General von Bink made time for tea. Von Bink, his white shirtsleeves rolled up, his Knight’s Cross with oak leaves displayed not at his neck but in a drawer somewhere, his riding breeches with their red stripe for general officer disappearing neatly into his highly polished riding boots, his gray hair bristly, was one of the old guys. He was Panzer Aristocracy: he’d fought in the Great War, then Spain, and rolled his machines across the flat countries of both Europe and Ukraine. He’d been shot at a million times, wounded half a dozen, and was still full of pep and vigor. He really did enjoy the hell out of war.

“Nice of you fellows to come by,” he said, as if an issue of free will had been involved. “Sergeant, you’re the one with six wound stripes, is that so?”

“Yes sir. Almost as many as you,” said Wili Bober.

“Sir,” said Karl, “I’d like to get him sent back to Germany. He’d make a superb training NCO. The new boys could use his wisdom.”

“An excellent idea. If we were winning the war, I would say yes, yes, immediately. But as you know, we are losing, and the situation is somewhat different. Oh, and Sergeant, I have six, too, but I was sitting down when I got most of mine!”

That brought a laugh. Yes, sitting down in a burning Panzer IV with Ivan 76s whizzing through the air! Anyway, he poured each parachutist a little more tea. He was nothing if not a stickler for ceremony.

The office was huge, with a wall map of the immediate operational area obscuring one whole side. Otherwise, it was the kind of room where piano recitals may have taken place, and coming-out parties and all the social niceties that filled the work of Tolstoy but not Dostoyevsky. Compared to the frenzied activity on all other floors, this room was serene. The outward wall was given to broad sheets of window, out of which could be seen a terrace, cherry orchards, Panther tanks, and mountains.

“Well, you know you’re here for a job.”

“Yes sir.”

He led them through the glass doors to the patio beyond. It was a cooler day than normal, and for once the oppressive humidity wasn’t melting everything. A breeze kept the exhaust miasma in circulation, so the air seemed fit to breathe. It was a good day to be alive, even if too many like it weren’t left, both the “good day” part and the “alive” part.

“Come, over here,” the general said. He pointed. “The mountains.” Not so far away, the bulk of the green Carpathians humped up against the western horizon.

“We used them to navigate our way back to the lines after the bridge job.”

“Good, then you’re familiar with them. A road runs through them, called the Yaremche Road, for the biggest village along the way. It’s too steep and too unstable, the engineers say, for tanks. At most it could support a Panzerwagen, but no more.”

“Yes sir,” said Karl.

“The road takes you through them, and then to Uzhgorod. At a certain point, four-point-six kilometers beyond Yaremche, it rises and passes through a gap, high stone cliffs on each side for about a hundred meters, which is called Natasha’s Womb. No one know who Natasha was, but the point is, we need to hold her private parts.”

“Yes sir.”

“Ivan has a partisan army in those mountains. He may order them to the Womb. He can land several platoons of paratroopers not far away. He might infiltrate a special group, commandos like yourself, overland, through the forests. If he closes it off, he cuts down what I think many see as a last-minute escape, the shortcut to the next operating area behind our newly established lines. I cannot move a tank army or an infantry division through it. But there are many who could make use of it, men who want a quick, sure way out, our staff, the other divisional and regimental staff, the intelligence people, the signal people, anyone too valuable to join the long, slow-moving escape north of Lemberg and link up with what’s left of Army Group Center, subject to strafing, bombing, artillery, do you see?”