Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“I flunked high school chemistry in Passaic,” said Cohen. “Does that help?”

“Gershon,” said the director, “take a day off tomorrow and come back the next day with all the possibilities of platinum as a catalyst. You need to get out more, anyway.”

“I will, I will. I merely call your attention to the fact that a chemical manufacturing concern of unknown sponsorship and product involving a great deal of tradecraft and security expertise has been set up not far, by sea, from the Iranian port of Bandar-e Anzali. I consider that suspicious. Whatever product they are manufacturing could be of some threat to the state of Israel, and once in Iran, by either official or unofficial action, it could be deployed against us by any number of means. Moreover, as we know, our intelligence assets in that country are focused on Tehran, their nuclear facility, and certain military installations. As for the huge land of the interior, we have no feet on the ground, and if anyone in that vast region wants to cook up a nasty surprise, we might be the worse for it. As I say, a situation, not an emergency. But I would like to have a satellite flyby authorized for a closer look at this plant; I would like to assign consular personnel in Switzerland to investigate Nordyne GmbH; I would like to suggest that intelligence concerning Nordyne GmbH be sought in our barter sessions with cooperating agencies; and I would like to suggest that we all brush up on our high school chemistry, especially Cohen.”

The Carpathians

Above Yaremche

THE PRESENT

Though it wasn’t easy going, at a certain point they found a hiker’s channel, not quite a path but a kind of groove in the forest where others had traveled below, and in a shorter time than he expected, they hit a path that headed south by iPhone compass at about the three-thousand-foot mark. His hip began to throb, his elbow was already sore.

“Make the call,” he said.

She fished the satellite phone out of her bag, dialed. “Stronksi,” she said.

She handed the phone to Swagger, who waited a second for the callback.

“Yeah?”

“Okay,” Swagger said, “we have done got ourselves in it, bad. I do need a way out.”

“Where are you?”

“I am about three thousand feet up the east face of a mountain that more or less faces Yaremche. We’re at a path, we have to know which way to head.”

“Call you back. Stay put.”

“Let me emphasize we are in a kind of hurry. Guys with guns after us. We are unarmed.”

“I copy,” said Stronski.

The time ticked by.

Swagger said to Reilly, “I have to have a talk with you.”

“Go ahead.”

“The whole point of Jerry Asshole’s deal wasn’t to buy us off but to bluff us into coming up here. If they kill us down there, it’s a flap and a half. What story was she working on, what’s going on, what did they find out, who’s murdering reporters and old snipers? That’s the last thing they need, that’s why they didn’t do it down there, and believe me, we were easy.

“He wants us up here, he wants to whack us up here. We go into a hole in the ground or a cave, we are never seen again. It’s at least days, maybe weeks, before they come looking for us, months before they give up. The whole thing is defused. It’s a mystery. I’m thinking time is important to them, they have to stop you now, at this time, and whatever comes out in five years doesn’t matter.”

“I get it.”

“So you have to get your war mind on. You can’t be a reporter, not and survive. It ain’t fair, is it? Well, pardon my français, but fuck fair. Fair don’t exist no more.”

The phone rang. Bob answered, listened. Then broke contact. “Stronski’s got a chopper on hire. There’s no way he can pick us up out of the forest or on the slope of the mountain; he can’t get his rotors close enough to the incline and he doesn’t have a winch. He’ll hit it and go down. So what we have to do is make it toward something called Natasha’s Womb, a narrow canyon through a gap, but just in front of it there’s a nice clearing where the bird can set down. He thinks it’s about four or five miles, due south, but he says the path is pretty good and there’s no rough climbing or anything. He’ll move there in a few hours and look for us.”

“Can we outpace those guys? I don’t see how.”

“They’ve still got to come up, they’ve still got to decide which way to go, they’re city boys, probably in eight-thousand-dollar silk suits and Gucci loafers.”

“I can’t believe you know what a Gucci loafer is.”

“If it turns out they’re closing on us, I will try and figure out some way to hold them back and let you get to the clearing.”

The path was not treacherous, but neither was it a sidewalk. Gnarly roots protruded, rocks bulged upward demanding detours, the earth itself was not only uneven but uneven randomly, so a sudden misstep could put a hurtful strain on already stressed ankles.

Reilly’s satellite phone rang again.

“It’s for you,” she said, handing it over, and Swagger looked at the number and saw that it was Jimmy Guthrie.

The Carpathians

Ginger’s Womb

JULY 1944

Deneker the explosives genius plotted it out very carefully. He would place three 10-pound units of Cyclonite at one-third intervals about the base of the northern cliff. He would run det cords of equal length from each No. 8 detonating cap, so that when ignited, the det cord would ignite each chunk of explosive simultaneously. The cliff would topple and block the passage of any vehicle, at least until the Russians managed to get heavy construction equipment to the canyon, which he doubted they’d bother with.

“And I’ll plant Tellers beyond the fallen-rock zone. So if men come over the rocks, one will trip off a Teller, and kaboom, his legs are on the way to Moscow.”

“The Russians don’t care about mines,” said Wili Bober.

“Think of the psychology,” said Deneker, also the unit intellectual. “You have to consider psychology in all things. Russian peasants who are being driven by NKVD troops don’t care about mines, on the theory that the mines are uncertain death, depending only on random footfall, while defying the NKVD is certain death, of the Mosin-Nagant 7.62-millimeter kind. If boys get up here, they’ll be elite troops, parachutists, some sort of commando or special group of Ivan prima donnas. They’re already heroes, they value themselves highly, they have many tales to tell if they survive, as well as a happy postwar experience to look forward to. They do not want to get blown up crossing a mountain gap when they’ve already won the battle as well as the war. They’ll hold back and go round up some peasants to frog-march through the minefield. That’ll take hours.”

“I think he has a point,” said Karl.

“All right, then. Mines here but not in front of our positions,” said Wili.

“Hmm,” said Karl. “And he has a point.”

“Karl, you’re the boss. You have to decide.”

“I hate to decide,” said Karl. “That’s why I joined the parachutists. So I wouldn’t have to decide things.”

“Split the mines?” said Deneker.

“Sounds fine to me,” said Wili.

“There, see, you didn’t need me at all,” said Karl.

There weren’t many other decisions to be made. Sandbags were filled, mines planted, trenches with firing notches dug and connected by crawl alleys so the men could fall back out of sight, trees that interfered with the lanes of fire felled, water collected, the radio monitored. Log frames were built and strung with K-wire. The machine gunners found the best natural points to put the two MG-42s on tripods, then broke down the ammunition for quick use, being sure to set up several shorter belts for the drum-shaped belt carriers, lighter and easier to manipulate, so that if the gunners fell back, they could take the guns off the tripod, grab the drums, and use them in fire and movement situations, say, covering the other men as they retreated beyond the site of Deneker’s big explosion. Other men broke down the typically overengineered cardboard crates that each contained twenty boxes of twenty 7.92mm cartridges, and inserted each cartridge into the FG-42 mags, until all were filled; the surplus went into a pile contained in the emptied crate, so that men could dip in and help themselves to handfuls if the fight went on too long. The Panzerschrecks were loaded and spare rockets placed next to them. Grenades also were laid out, their screwcaps half unscrewed, all oriented uniformly so the man grabbing one could flick off the cap, pull the fuse cord, ignite the fuse, and toss the thing with no wasted motion. Bandages, splints, wound wrappings, sulfa, morphine needles, miles of gauze and tape, anything to save a man from bleeding out, it was all there in easy reach. Karl didn’t have to say a word. Someone even erected a sign in exquisite Gothic calligraphy: “Die Gebärmutter des Gingers” —Ginger’s Womb.