Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“It was leverage. So this whole thing is about protect your asset. Here’s what you geniuses never got. Strelnikov, like his father before him, because of his father before him, still wants to destroy the Jews. He was never a Communist, he was never a Nazi. He was only a genocide guy. He wants to live up to his dad’s heroism, be the man at the tip of the spear in the war against the Jews. He was really still working for RHSA fifty years after RHSA was dust and burned steel. You didn’t care, you even helped him, because the stuff he was giving you was so good. You made a deal with a guy, but you never looked at him carefully enough to realize he was the devil. And now he’s about to become trade minister. Now he’s even more vulnerable to the revelation that Daddy was a spy, which will lead to the fact that he’s a spy, and it all goes back to Basil’s need to bury Mili’s heroism to protect his own ass. She won the war, and yet she’s the one you birds are betraying.”

“Why does he want to be trade minister?” Reilly asked.

“They don’t know. It has them worried,” said Jerry. “It’s not in the main target area. The econ stuff he’ll get us is great, but they think it’s a loss of opportunity. They don’t want econ, they want strategic. But nobody could talk him out of it, and that’s what he’s going to do. Maybe it’ll pay off long-term. I can tell you, nobody’s going to get off the Strelnikov train yet.”

“Oh yeah. Well, I’ll tell you what you don’t know yet,” said Swagger. “Wake up, Agent Jerry, and see how the game is played. When she blows his cover in the Post, their intel people are going to pull Strelnikov’s ass in hard and fast. And they are going to take him apart. Every deal, every communication, every meeting, they’ll pull it out of him. You haven’t just lost an asset, you’ve turned a gold mine over to SRV. I’ll bet he’s got a package all set against this possibility, to keep him out of prison. He’s got tons of stuff on you guys, and all the good he’s done you goes away, and everything he’s figured out about your other sources, he gives that up. That’s the mess that’s about to land on you feet-first.”

Jerry said nothing.

“Too bad your leg’s all busted up,” said Bob. “Otherwise, you might have gotten the hit on Strelnikov. Sounds like fun to me.”

The Carpathians

The Yaremche Road

JULY 1944

It was another soggy morning at Ginger’s Womb. It looked like rain, with low clouds sealing in humidity, sweat rising quickly to the skin and just as quickly dampening the combat smocks of the parachutists. Fortunately there wasn’t much to do. Karl had his sentry rotation running efficiently; all the guns were cleaned, Blu-Oiled, locked, and loaded; Wili had gone over the Flammenwerfer-41 and made sure that a trigger pull sent a lick of hungry flame dancing forty meters through the air; all the Teller mines were laid, all the wire strung and camouflaged in greenery; both the machine guns were locked into their tripods for defensive fire in the heavy mode, but all the pins lubricated, so when the time came, they could be yanked free and turned into something more flexible in a second; all the ammo belts were rolled and stored, all the ammo to reload the FG-42 mags if necessary torn from boxes and collected in crates; all the grenades were out, all the pins examined so they wouldn’t hang up on some burr of metal when needed; all the canteens were filled; and all the latrine duties were taken care of.

“All right,” Karl yelled, “bayonet practice.”

The announcement was greeted with laughter, not only because the FG-42s had a spike bayonet that was stored under and pivoted outward from beneath the barrel and was largely considered useless by everyone, but also because nobody had practiced bayonet skills since 1939. No one in living memory had killed an Ivan with a bayonet, though if he thought about it, Karl could recall an episode in Italy when the spear of the blade was used to prong open a can of American tomatoes. “I’ll teach this tomato the meaning of German steel!” he remembered Wili Bober saying sternly as he pierced the thing.

At 0930, when Karl had his first pipeful going well and had settled in for the tonic of more melancholy over the death of Ziemssen in Mann’s great novel, a shadow interrupted what dim light fell from the cloudy sky, and he looked up to see his signalman.

“Zeppelin Leader on the radio. Wants you and you alone. Sounds all fucked up, even for an Arab.”

“He waited until I got my pipe going nicely, I know it,” Karl said, raising, stretching, willing his way through all the scrapes, abrasions, pulled muscles, strained muscles, tired muscles that always visited after a combat engagement, and went to the Commo Tent, where he took up earphones and spoke into the microphone. “Hello, hello, Oskar Leader here, go ahead.”

Over the earphone, he heard disturbance—chaos, screams, noises, hard to say exactly what. At the same time, just by chance, he saw a column of smoke rising from behind the foothills in a valley approximately where the village of Yaremche should be.

“Are your people in position, Herr Major?” Salid, the junior officer, hadn’t even bothered to go through the officer-officer-brotherhood bullshit of radio protocol.

“Yes, Captain, though I wasn’t aware I reported to you.”

“Von Drehle, she did it. She got him. The damned bitch made the shot.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t—”

“The White Witch shot Senior Group Leader Groedl through the throat ten minutes ago.”

“Is he dead?”

“She practically blew his head off. Half his neck is gone.”

“Good Christ. Is that why the town is burning? I can see the smoke.”

“These fucking Russians must be taught. Never mind that, I have my dog teams out—”

“I thought you had burned out all the cover so that she couldn’t hit—”

“I don’t know how. She must have shot from a thousand yards. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, we have the dog teams out, and I have the rest of my men in panzerwagens, and we will now travel to the road up to your position. Please put all your men on interception duty. This woman must be caught.”

“Wasn’t your explicit responsibility to protect—”

“I don’t report to you, either, Von Drehle. Now, I know the SS lieutenant general has had a chat with you, so if you value your men and dream of a postwar future, you will give this assignment your total commitment. I would put all my men out there in the net; this woman is obviously a tricky bitch, and I hope you are up to handling her.”

“I will do my duty, yes, as I am a soldier until peace is declared, Captain.”

“You radio me this channel the second you learn something or there has been a development.”

“Is that an order?”

“Goddammit, Von Drehle, don’t play games with me. I speak for the lieutenant general, the entire SS, the SA, so when I tell you to do something, that is the authority I bring to the conversation, and if you doubt that, you radio Muntz yourself for a clarification. End transmit.”

“End transmit, Ali Baba,” said Karl to a dead microphone.

He rose. By now a few men had gathered outside.

“Well,” he said, “the Russian woman sniper they call the White Witch has cast a magic spell on Dr. Groedl. She magically turned him into a corpse. That means I want you in the woods on picket duty, all of you, because I have been informed that she has been flushed by dogs and may be in transit to our picnic area. She has to be taken alive.”

“In the meantime, suppose the Russians attack and we are out there looking for a girl?” Deneker asked.