Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 11

The Germans knew exactly where Bak’s unit would be, what time it’d arrive, they did it perfect,” said Swagger. “But the point isn’t that it’s early. It’s what ‘early’ signifies: betrayal.”

“Someone snitched them out. Can we determine who it was?”

They sat in a pleasant twilight in the old town square of Lviv, at a sidewalk café called the Centaur. The city itself had that old Austro-Hungarian empire style going on; they could have been in Prague or Vienna. Swagger half expected hussars in brass breastplates over red jackets with swords at the half-cock to come trotting along the cobblestones at the head of some emperor’s entourage. It was so cheerful, it was hard to think of betrayal. One thought more of fairy princesses.

“Let’s look at the possibilities,” said Swagger. “First: tactical betrayal. It happened because of a natural consequence of combat operations. Say, a German Storch recon plane saw the Russian plane that had dropped Mili take off. It was able to shadow the movement of the column. The Storch team radios time, location, direction; again by coincidence there’s a Police Battalion counterbandit team near enough to get set up, and the bandits just walk into it.”

“That’s not really betrayal,” said Reilly. “That’s just ‘stuff happens.’ ”

“Fair enough. Okay, local betrayal. One of the partisans is really a German agent. Or maybe some SS major has his daughter hostage so he’s forced to turn on his people. He manages to get the news out before they leave to pick up Mili. That gives the Germans plenty of time to get the Police Battalion into play.”

“So it’s a coincidence of timing that this happened when Mili arrived? Hard to swallow.”

“Try this. Bak himself is the Nazi agent. They’re building him up to win a lot of battles so he’ll be a hero and be taken back to Moscow, and when he’s back in NKVD headquarters, he can really give them the crown jewels.”

“But they seem to have killed him. After all, he disappears from the story.”

“It was an accident. Night ambushes are terrible things. Nobody knows what’s happening. He’s trying to blow the deal to give up the Russian sniper to protect Obergruppenführer Groedl, and he zigs that way when the linchpin on the MG42 tripod vibrates free, and the gun rotates another few inches, and bye-bye, Bak.”

“But wouldn’t his death be recorded in the operational diaries of Twelfth Panzer, regardless? Like the rifles, he was booty.”

“It would,” said Swagger.

“Okay,” she said. “Interesting possibilities. They’re all wrong, but they’re very interesting. Tomorrow I’ll tell you who betrayed them.”