Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 9

The train from Moscow was something out of an old detective novel, an Orient Express without an Orient for a destination or an express as a mode of operation. It was old and filthy, separated into compartments where wooden benches sat beneath wooden bunks, the whole car itself a collection of compartments, all the upholstery and curtaining faded red. It rattled along, never surpassing forty, the track itself somehow rough and improvised. It gave him a headache, as did the inefficient air-conditioning. Vodka, please. Oh wait, no, no vodka. On wagon. On train, on wagon.

He forced himself instead to reread in sobriety the only account of the fighting in West Ukraine in July 1944 in English (barely) as translated from the German, a book of intensely professional history called To the Bitter End: The Final Battles of Army Groups North Ukraine, A, Centre, Eastern Front 1944–45. It was hardly a heroic poem, being restricted to the battalion-level maneuver, and somewhat distant and rational for a process as improvisational as war. There was no sense of “What the fuck do we do now?” that Bob knew so well.

Still, it provoked him. Who knew? Who knew anything about the East? He’d spent a few weeks reading every damn book Amazon had on the subject, most of them claiming to have found the real “turning point,” when the only turning point had to be June 21, 1941, the day Hitler sent his men off on an insane mission. It was like invading space. There was so much of it, endless, rolling, thousands of miles, millions of people. There was nothing but there there. Who could begin to understand it? Facts, sure: Stalingrad, Leningrad, Karkov, Kursk, each with a nice neat date, each charted on a neat construct called a map that showed arrows moving this way, opposed by arrows moving that way, superimposed on a tapestry decorated in unpronounceable names like Dnipropetrovs’k and Metschubecowka and Saparoshe, yielding now and then to vast emptiness where there were no names but only, by inference, grass or wheat. But there was so much more. Forgotten fights that were as big, really, as Normandy, where fleets of tanks threw themselves against each other and men in the thousands died in flames or were torn to shreds by explosions. Or perhaps even worse, the daily grind, a combat environment where men hunted men every fucking day of the year, 24/7/365, a million firefights fought, a billion shells launched, a trillion rounds fired. Over and over, year after year after year, the death toll incomprehensible. Those fights were too obscure to have names. There was a sadness to it. People should know about this stuff. People should care about the sacrifice, the pain, the death that convulsed the world; yet here was a whole huge piece of it so obscure that no one in the West had even acknowledged it. What place is this, where are we now? I am the grass, I cover all.

These ruminations did Swagger no good at all and, if anything, amplified his need for vodka.

He tried to get away from the big picture. So his new strategy was to concentrate on the small picture. Go to Mili, he told himself. Think only of Mili.

Mili, in the Carpathian Mountains, with an assignment to assassinate a German administrator who had murdered, by strokes of a pen or orders to dictationists, thousands, tens of thousands. What happened to her? He tried to imagine it. But he had no luck. His best gift was useless in a train, when he hadn’t seen the area he needed to understand. That was the gift of looking at land and reading it for truth. If he could see the ebb and flow of movement across a terrain, he could make some sense out of it. He’d know where the shooter would have had to place him- or herself to get the shot, and that determination would come from a confluence of factors: first, clean angle to the target; second, concealment, obviously, cover if possible (she would have to weigh cover against concealment very carefully, if it came to that); third, a sense of the play of the wind, because even at five hundred meters, her longest possible shot with a M-N 91, scope or not, the wind could wreak havoc on the shot so she’d be best to shoot in the early morning, when it tended to be still, and if heat and humidity were to factor, they’d also be at their least influential; and finally, escape route. But he could not begin to imagine this, not without a landscape to search for possibility against.

His mind went numb. Beside him, Reilly dozed quietly. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Mili’s escape route. If she had one. It occurred to him that in that war, given the losses, given the immensity of the sacrifice, given all the times the bosses had sent rows and rows of young men marching or driving into machine-gun fire and artillery, possibly the nihilism that was so pervasive had infected Mili, too, and so she passed on escape. Maybe she took the shot, saw that she had missed, watched as the SS troopers ran to her, pulled out her Tok, and shot herself in the head. Since she’d been shielded by the villagers — or the SS assumed she’d been shielded by villagers — they burned the place and the people in it. That was the way they operated.

But why would she have been scrubbed from the Russian record? Why was she disappeared? More likely, since she was famous, they’d have used her sacrifice as a platform on which to build some kind of martyr campaign. Her beauty would help there, too. It was the way propagandists worked, he saw, in that the death of one beautiful girl could be more emotionally powerful than the death of four thousand Russian tankers on a single day at a place called — it was another one nobody had ever heard of — Prokhorovka.

Yet they had refused that possibility.

Why?

Reilly, stirred, shivered, yawned, came awake. She rubbed her eyes. “When do we get to Ocean City?” she asked.

“That’s a long way away. Enjoy the nap? Pleasant dreams?”

“Never,” she said.

Ding! Or maybe bong! Or possibly bing! It came from Reilly’s phone, which she fished out of her purse.

“That’s an e-mail incoming.”

Bob waited patiently.

“Well, well,” she said. “Now here’s something. It’s from Will.”

Will? Oh yes, Will, Reilly’s ever patient, enduring husband, her co-correspondent for the Washington newspaper, a guy of whom she talked now and then and revered as one of those real reporters who was more interested in getting it right and getting it fair than in getting it onto Meet the Press. Swagger somehow had never had the pleasure.

“He’s in Germany,” Reilly was saying. “I asked him to check on the divisional records of the Twelfth SS Panzer around that time. The Germans, as it turns out, and why does this not surprise, kept very precise operational logs. Will just dug something out.” She handed the iPhone over.

“A Mosin-Nagant with scope. That’s Mili’s. They jumped Mili. But who the hell is Zeppelin Force?” Bob wondered out loud, and in the next second found the answer.