Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

“I don’t set these priorities, but they have been set. And you can grumble all you want, but you have a stake in the outcome, too. I have been told by Brigadeführer Muntz that if we do capture her, once she is turned over to the SS, we are formally released from the hold-at-all-costs mandate. We can blow Ginger and get out of here. Next stop, Hungary. I’m told he’ll send us off on two weeks’ leave and have us reassigned to the Western Front with the rest of Two Fallschirmjäger. You may still die, but it won’t be by a Russian bullet, just a shiny American one from Hollywood or someplace like that. So do your goddamned duties. And if anyone sees Bober out there, send him in to me. Now do it, quick quick quick.”

An hour or so passed. The men in the woods on picket rotated so they didn’t get too bored. Wili Bober arrived, and Karl briefed him on the situation.

“So, catch this woman and we can get home in time for Christmas, eh?” Wili said. “I guess blowing up the bridge, plus all the other jobs, the seven Russian strong points, the railroad yards, the T-34 refueling yard, and several other things weren’t worth it, but this gal sniper wins us the class prize.”

“Wili, I can’t figure out how their minds work. Why this one is so important to them and they didn’t even notice the bridge is pretty mysterious to me, too. It must be some spy shit or something.”

“I guess for once, the game is working to our advantage.”

“I want to get you out of here before the SS sends you to Dachau. You’ve been daring them to for years. Sending people to Dachau seems to be the order of the day ever since that guy blew up the Austrian.”

At that moment both involuntarily flinched. Screaming came across the sky.

They turned and, from their vantage point four thousand feet up, could see the exhaust flames of seventy-two Katyushas rising from a point of the horizon, a fleet of radiant darts sent howling to the accompaniment of the banshee scream each emitted as it rose, and in the next second the whole horizon seemed to light up as the sound of thousands of the things hurling airborne filled the sky.

“Here they come,” said Karl. “Vacation’s over.”

“They’re still a long way away,” said Wili.

“We’ll be engaged by nightfall, if I don’t miss my guess. Through Yaremche and straight down the Yaremche road to Ginger. And if they get here, this is where we stay.”

“I hope the boys catch the White Witch. She’s our only chance.”

“I better talk to my new boss, the great and wise Captain Salid.”

Karl ducked into the commo tent, interrupted the signalman reading The Brothers Karamazov in the original Russian, and waited as the appropriate connections and protocols were made.

“Zeppelin Leader here, hello, hello.”

“Hello, hello, Zeppelin Leader.”

“Von Drehle?”

“Affirmative. As you have no doubt noticed, the Russians are coming. I have no idea how long they will take, but I wanted to inform you that if I have to, I will recall my men to defend my position. A maximum effort for one girl is militarily unjustifiable.”

“That woman must be caught!” said the voice on the radio.

“Catching her does none of us any good if we can’t get her anyplace because the Russians control this position. Surely you understand something that elementary.”

“Von Drehle, the Reich has set its priorities. The woman contains secrets of utmost importance. Whether a few Red tanks get through a gap in the mountains is largely meaningless. I will call the brigadeführer and he will set you straight.”

“I expect the old boy is rather busy now. He’s got a battle to fight. All of us have a battle to fight except, it seems, you.”

“I am fighting the real battle. Keep your men on picket duty until otherwise informed. I speak for the brigadeführer.”

But something caught Karl’s eye. He looked hard and then spoke into the phone. “Well, Captain, it’s everybody’s lucky day. We just broke the bank at Monte Carlo.”

Five figures had just emerged from the woods across the road. They were two Green Devils and three captives with their hands clasped behind their heads. One was a woman.

“You have them?” said the captain, and Karl could feel his excitement from miles away.

“A woman and two men. From here the woman looks to be something out of a French glamour magazine, except you don’t know what a French glamour magazine is.”

“Keep them alive. All of them. They are everything.”

The Carpathians

Natasha’s Womb

THE PRESENT

They could see the helicopter orbiting the crossroad before the narrow passageway that had to be Natasha’s Womb. All the housekeeping had been taken care of, the Stens ditched—“Damn good piece when it counted” was Swagger’s verdict—the phone call to Jerry’s backup team, via Jerry’s own phone, which was then quickly abandoned. Swagger took care of the Enfield No. 4 (T), meaning somehow to get it to the partisan museum.

So now it was a matter of a few minutes. And then Reilly’s phone buzzed. She fished it out of the bag, read the number, and said, “D.C.”

“No rush,” said Bob. “The chopper ain’t going nowhere without us.”

“Hello,” she said, and then, “Hi, Michael. Oh, actually very well. Long story, when I see you, I’ll tell you. I do, yes. Very interesting, and it seems to me you’d want to be involved. Oh, really? Oh, great, yes, yes, let’s hear what you have.”

She listened intently for several minutes, nodding. The smile on her face did not change at all, but at the same time it changed totally. The smile ceased to be a reflection of mood and became some kind of external edifice, supporting the face, which, three layers beneath the skin, in the deep subcutaneous tissue, went taut and hurt. She went from a smiling woman to a woman with a smiling mask on.

“Yes, yes, well, we knew it all along, and it’s the best ending under the circumstances. Yes, we’ll be back in Moscow in eight hours, I’ll call you, we’ll set something up. I agree, very good news, oh no, I had help, believe me, I had help. It wasn’t all me, not by a long shot. Okay, talk soon.”

She turned to Swagger and issued a total blaze of a smile, radiantly insincere. “Okay, all set. Let’s go.”

They walked to the Womb, where at last the chopper could put down.

Swagger said, “I’d say you seen a ghost, but not even a ghost would smack you as hard as whatever just did.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Not bad news, not really. Good news, you’d say.”

“You don’t believe that any more than you’ve made me believe it.”

“I had held out hope. And so had you. It was a one-in-a-million chance. But now it’s gone.”

“Okay, tell me.”

“Long boring background: in 1976, someone was interviewing Jewish survivors of the war. He never got around to writing the book. All of the transcripts went to the Holocaust Museum archives in D.C., where they were read and indexed. One of them was a recording of a guy who’d survived not only the concentration-camp system but then the gulags.”

“The Holocaust Museum in D.C.? How does that come into it?”

“Another long story, along the lines of old newspaper friend who married the national editor of The Washington Post , who becomes an executive at the Holocaust Museum. Small world, no? But absolutely true. So I called him. That is, my friend’s husband, a few weeks ago, to see if the museum had anything in its archives about Groedl. That was finally the response.”

“Okay,” said Bob. “I copy.”

“So this interviewer, remember, recorded a gulag survivor who’d been in Siberia. In the barracks was a man known to have fought with the partisans. The two became friends. Maybe both were Jews, though that’s not said anywhere. So our man passed on to the interviewer what the ex-partisan had told him about being in the forest with a woman Russian sniper, who had killed a big Nazi criminal.”