Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 35

There’s not much to do in the Carpathians after the sun goes down.

“Get a good night’s rest,” Swagger said. “Tomorrow we’ll go up into the hills and I’ll see if I can find where she shot from. I want to see her angle from the edge of the burned zone and get a read on distance.”

He knew she had to shoot from beyond five hundred yards. She had to. She couldn’t be in the burned zone because she’d be wide open. But at the five-hundred-yard mark, where the trees offered cover, that’s where they’d put people. They’d have camouflaged guys there. They’d have dog teams nearby. That’s the trap, and they know they’ve got her, just as they know she has to go for it, because here he is, her target, this is the only opportunity she’ll get.

Swagger knew how a sniper’s mind worked. She’d shoot high to low, especially if she’s already high. How would she even get to low, the place is crawling with Germans? They built a real good trap. Groedl’s a smart piece of shit.

But it was the rifle that had him buffaloed. Not where she got it but why she did what she did. She could not have hit him with a Mosin, even with a scope. There was no record of a one-shot cold-bore kill at five hundred yards with a Mosin. If she fired, she was doomed. She was throwing away her life on a zero chance of probability. It was effectively a suicide, a sacrifice for the good of a tribe that denied it. But she had to do it. She had no choice.

He thought hard about the site. The bridge, the mist from the waterfall, the image of the shoot on the plate by some anonymous artist who probably hadn’t been there. The burned zone on the slope to the northwest, the only high space to shoot from. The slope barren to a five-hundred-yard line, and poor Petrova up there, as close as possible, taking the shot that would let the dogs out on her. Maybe she shot twice, took the one at the far-off Nazi, and then put the muzzle in her mouth and hit the trigger. No torture, no interrogation, just a case of the sniper giving all to duty. But then an image came into his head.

He first saw it as a golden wall. What the hell? It floated just beyond his knowing but close enough to tantalize him: a gold wall.

Then it came into focus. He recalled that beyond the hill whose slope overlooked the waterfall and whose foliage had been half burned away, to the southwest, there was the golden wall of another slope, so far off it was hazy in the distance.

It had to be a thousand yards out.

You could not hit a man at a thousand yards with a Mosin-Nagant.

You could only do it with a—

Bob had to laugh. Now, there was a funny idea. Somehow Petrova manages to get her hands on—

It was impossible.

Wasn’t it?

He thought a second and went to his e-mail on his iPhone. “You up? Need talk urgent. Can you call me at—” and he listed Reilly’s satellite number. A few seconds later, her phone rang. He took it. “Swagger.”

“Well, hello, chum. How’s the Yank?” It was his friend J. T. “Jimmy” Guthrie, the sniper historian from the UK.

“Hi, Jimmy, how’re you doing?”

“I’m swell. I assume you’re calling because you’re going to come to our Sniper Match at Bisley. The fellows will be so excited.”

“No, no, it’s something else. I need to rent your brain.”

“It’s yours for a penny. If you haven’t got a penny, then a ha’penny will do.”

“Last we talked, you were working on a book on the World War II British sniper rifle.”

“My favorite, the Enfield No. 4 (T) with the No. 32 scope. A classic.”

“Still working at it?”

“Chop chop, tap tap, got to keep churning them out, it’s what I do.”

“Can you verify any one-shot cold-bore hits with it at over a thousand yards?”

“Several times. In Italy, in northern France, and in Twelveland itself, near war’s end. The No. 4 (T) was the ace of sniper rifles.”

“Any other shots that long that you know of by other rifles?”

“Haven’t come across anything on record in Europe. The No. 4 (T) had a most helpful ballistic eccentricity. Out to 250 yards, it was quite ordinary. But British and Canadian snipers soon learned that there was something about the .303 Radford Arsenal 176-grain bullet, the No. 4 (T) as bedded and with scope mounted by the geniuses at Holland and Holland, and maybe the superb optics of the No. 32 telescopic sight, which, although it was only 3.5-power, had lenses that offered unusual clarity out to long distances. Somehow if the .303 deviated from trajectory, by a property to this day not understood, the in-flight bullets somehow adjusted, trimmed, I don’t know, ‘fixed’ themselves. So if they came back to the original trajectory and stayed spot-on, the result was unusually proficient long-range accuracy.”

“Is there any way one of those rifles could have showed up in the Carpathian Ukraine in July ’44? It don’t make no sense because we’re five hundred miles or so from the nearest British troops, which would probably be in Italy. Does it make any sense at all?”

“Not a lick,” said Jimmy. “Not a whisper. Which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I have the Holland and Holland records, I have the British army records, I even have some still-classified stuff from clandestine hugger-mugger done by something called the Special Operations Executive, whose charge was to set Europe ablaze. Possibly they could have set Ukraine ablaze while they were at it.”

“Can you check? Sooner would be better than later.”

“Yes, well, I’ve got the stuff here and I’ll get on it straight away. By the way, I’m doing a chum a favor, I’m hoping he’ll do one in response.”

“You got it. I’ll be at the match, when, October, was that it?”

“Swell! Yes, it would mean a lot to the boys. Okay, I’ll get cracking.”

Will sat on the floor of the KGB file depository on the ninth floor of the Lubyanka. The ordeal before him at least got his mind off the mysterious adventures his wife was having in Ukraine and his sense of longing for a nice quiet night in the apartment. Wearing a surgical mask and tight rubber gloves, plus a sweater because the room was kept so cold, he paged through the lengthy mass of Krulov papers, reading by flashlight because the light in the vast green room packed with files was so poor. He had to hurry, as Likov could guarantee him only six hours. Anything else and there could be trouble.

He paged through, scanning the well-typed onionskin, reading the Russian swiftly, and thanking his torturers at the Monterey Language School, who had beaten Russian into him and Kathy fifteen years ago. He confirmed much that he already knew about Basil Krulov: four years in Munich, ’29–’33, in Munich with references to NKVD file Archangel 78-B11256 (Arkady Krulov), presumably documentation on his father, who was the supposed trade representative of the Russian Export Ministry but was really coordinating with the German communists and trade unions as they were jockeying for power with the boys in the twisted-cross hats. The boy attended German Realschule, as they call it, vigorous German high school, very fine education. Learned German quickly, which is commensurate with a high IQ. Then he enrolled at University of Munich and was there for two years before Hitler came to power and kicked all the Reds out, even the diplomatic ones. God, NKVD was thorough: they even had his syllabus and grades at that university. Will guessed it was part of German pedantry; they never throw anything out, the syllabuses, the report cards, the notes to Mom about dunking Peggy Sue’s pigtails in the inkwell, the Dueling Society scars. Yes, the boy was brilliant, all 1’s, meaning A’s, and Will’s eyes ran quickly over the ancient information dredged out of a dead world. Then he noticed something that made him blink twice.

Jesus Christ! he said to himself.

It was the first of what turned into a night of Jesus Christ! moments.

They awoke, took a hearty breakfast — the hotel’s specialty — and then drove to the waterfall site. They parked and moved quickly to the halfway point of the bridge.

He pointed over the faux village to a wooded slope golden in the sun. Its details were murky at the distance, at least a thousand yards, but he stared hard at it, finding it so provocative.

If she had fired from there, he thought, with a decent rifle—

“So what’s the plan?” Kathy asked.

“It would be better if I had a range finder, if I had a compass, if I had a pair of binocs, but I don’t. So I’ll just sort of mark some potential firing sites from here, and we’ll see if we can find them up there. Then I can satisfy myself as to what kind of rifle she had to have.”

“Oh, look,” she said. “Another American.”

She pointed. At the far end of the bridge, a young man stood, smiling at them, posing as if in a hip commercial for a soft drink. He was wearing a yellow Baltimore Ravens cap, a polo shirt, a pair of jeans, and some trendy hikers. He looked like any young dad in a mall. He wore wraparound tear-shaped sunglasses and a big smile. He walked over to them.

“Hi,” he said. “Jerry Renn. It’s a pleasure to meet Bob Lee Swagger, Bob the Nailer. You’ve been a hero of mine for a long time. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”