Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 33

The grazing wound in the side never bled. But the elbow did, presumably cut on the gunman’s breaking teeth. Swagger had washed and bandaged it but was surprised by the stiffness and bruising that seized his whole left arm and made the lengthy ride by Bumpa-Car to the mountain village the next day quite uncomfortable.

He didn’t tell Reilly about it, not wanting to alarm her. Nor did he mention Stronski’s claim about “The Americans.” It was another screwball, which threw everything out of whack, adding a new dimension of conspiracy that could lead anywhere or nowhere. But it weighed on him over the distance of the drive. He turned it over and over in his head, trying to define an American interest or angle in obscure events in a sliver of Ukraine in the middle of another nation’s war seventy years ago, about which most Americans knew nothing.

Now they had met at and checked in to a hotel, rested, and were standing on the walking bridge over the River Prut, just beyond where the water tumbled off the rocks and hit below with a roar and a splash, filling the air with mist. This clearly was not the exact bridge as crudely etched into the plate, since it was buttressed, sunk in concrete, and of strong metal itself, heavily engineered. But a bridge had stood here, and if the drawing was right, it was about here that Groedl was when Mili took her hopeless, doomed shot at him.

“Trying to figure out where the shot came from,” he said, looking around, trying to read the data of the place.

He saw the falls before him, the low bluffs of the river, and to the right, way off, a mountain slope. In the crude drawing on the plate, the officers next to the man were pointing more or less in that direction. But Bob didn’t buy it. Clearly the artist hadn’t seen the event but was re-creating it from an oral tale. The shot couldn’t have come from way out there.

“See, that’s way too far. A thousand yards. Not with any rifle she had could she have hit him from there. It has to be pretty close.”

He looked at the closer landforms. Surely the Germans controlled the banks of the river. They would have possibly crowded the villagers down there, on a little shelf of land just under the bridge, where Swagger had found the machine-gun shell.

He rotated 180 degrees, passing over the faux Ukraine village of souvenir booths where the old village itself had stood, and continued to examine the lay of the land. More riverbank, controlled by the Germans, and above it, on the left, a vast two-hundred-yard-tall slope of white pines that extended for another half mile from the bridge, perhaps half of it the chunk of land where the pines were somehow lighter, as they’d noticed before.

“She had to be there,” he said. “But I don’t see how they controlled it. She could get close enough over there to hit with any rifle. Wouldn’t need no scope. How’d they bluff her into shooting from so far out she had to miss?”

They stared at the slope rising above them.

“She had to be up there,” he said. “Notice anything?”

“Just a lot of mountain.”

“Look at the trees. The color, remember?”

In the sun, the demarcation between the lighter timber and the darker was clear.

“I’m getting something, I’ve got a feeling. Damn, nothing. But maybe—” He paused, thinking it over, and yes, it made solid sense.

“What is it?”

“The lighter green?”

“Yep.”

“It’s green because it’s new growth,” he said. “It’s been grown since 1944.”

“All right, new growth.”

“I think I know what they tried to do.”