Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 5

Here’s how I found this guy,” said Reilly, sitting at her office computer in the annex to her apartment, both belonging to The Washington Post. “I Googled ‘Stalin’s Harry Hopkins.’ Up comes the name ‘Basil Krulov.’ I’ve checked into him. Of Stalin’s intimate circle, he is the only one who seemed to have the power to designate missions like that. He was Stalin’s troubleshooter, the way Hopkins was FDR’s.”

From his long-ago immersion in the events that put his father on Iwo Jima in February 1945, Swagger knew of Hopkins, one of the powerful men who made — in good faith, it was hoped — the decisions that left the virgin boys dead in sands and warm waters all across the Pacific.

“It makes sense,” said Swagger. “You need a guy who has the authority, can cut across service lines and bring people together who normally would never find each other in the swamp of a capital at war. He was the go-to guy. He had the power. He could make things happen. But his presence makes this thing all screwy.”

“How do you mean?”

“They didn’t operate that way.”

For all their espionage experience and all their espionage success, the Russians didn’t do special ops in the classic sense of putting trained operators far behind enemy lines. They didn’t need to. The war, after all, was fought mostly on their territory through 1944. And in all that conquered territory, there were dozens of partisan units, cells, individual operators, all that, already there, so in any given locale, they had people on the ground and solid contact with them. So they never had to put together a crew, even one person, move him, her, it, a thousand miles and insert him, her, or it. But, Swagger reasoned, the only rule is, there are no rules. If they sent Mili to Ukraine, it would have been so far outside of normal operating procedures, so unusual, so much in the way of running into resistance from all the players, that it would have to be a guy with juice to make it happen, and that had to be Stalin’s Harry Hopkins.

He summed it up for Reilly, who nodded and moved on to background Krulov for him: Second-generation Soviet official. Born in 1913. His father was a Soviet trade official to Germany in the late ’20s and early ’30s.

“Spy?” Bob wanted to know.

“Sure. So Krulov actually grew up in Munich, and attended schools there, before Hitler took over. His dad, meanwhile, tried to build up trade relations but was probably really coordinating with the trade unions and the considerably large Communist Party in that part of Germany, until he was kicked out when the Nazis took over and began their purges with the German Communists. Krulov was a genius student with a gift for organizing, helped enormously by his father’s connections, joined the Politburo in ’36 and by ’38 had caught Stalin’s eye. During the war he was indispensable. He traveled with the boss’s orders to all the generals, to all the fronts, and he had considerable success after the war. He might have even been general secretary after Stalin, since Khrushchev liked him, but he seemed to fade from sight. He lost power, interest, I don’t know, and he faded from view. You could say he was disappeared.”

“I guess he stepped on some toes when he was Stalin’s boy, and once Stalin was gone, whoever owned that foot, he stepped back. So let’s stick on Krulov and ride him to the end of the trail.”

“So,” said Reilly, “have you any idea why Krulov sent Mili to Ukraine?”

“Sure. Someone needed killing in a badass kind of way.”

“But Ukraine,” Reilly pointed out, “although largely free of Germans by July ’44, had been a terrible battleground for three years. The Germans had literally killed millions. So among all these murderers, who could the number one murderer be?”

“Another thought. The Reds had partisans in the Carpathians, in Ukraine, where all this takes place, right? So why fly a gal in from Stalingrad or wherever she was after Stalingrad when they could just order the partisan troops to attack the guy and kill him that way?”

“He was heavily guarded?” asked Reilly.

“Exactly. Any kind of straight-up attack was bound to fail in a heavily militarized zone. But she’s a sniper. One of the best. She kills people from a long way out, off in the high grass. She might be able to nail him out to, say, five hundred meters. That might be the only way to get him.”

“That would make him a Nazi hotshot, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Hmmmm.” She went to Google and typed in “Nazi Official Ukraine 1944.”

Click.

They watched as the screen shimmered and blinked and then reappeared with the first twenty-five of 16,592 hits. The same name came up twenty-one times in the first twenty-five.

“Groedl,” said Swagger. “Now who the hell is Groedl?”