“One last question. Any info or insight on how the T was zeroed?”
“Ah, nothing there, but the normal kit sent to infantry units was a T in a pine chest, some tools and gizmos for maintenance, a guidebook, as it were, and the rifle combat zeroed to a hundred yards. Of course, the individual sniper would alter that to his needs.”
“So if she had to make a hit at a thousand, she’d have to zero it?”
“Absolutely.”
“Got it,” he said. “You’re the best, old man.”
“See you in October, then?”
“Yep,” Swagger said, but his mind was elsewhere, racing through certain possibilities.
“Good news?” asked Reilly.
“Yep,” said Swagger. “Mili got her gun.” He explained briefly.
“Ah,” Reilly said, “well, I suppose that’s—”
“You’re missing it, Reilly,” said Swagger, oddly still and concentrated. “Don’t you get it yet?”
“Get what?” she asked.
“If she had that rifle, and it sure looks like she did, the thousand-yard cold-bore shot wasn’t impossible. If she could find a way to zero it at a thousand yards, it was makeable.”
“So that she . . . you’re saying . . . I’m still not quite with you.”
“I’m telling you why the American army and the British army and the Russian army and the Israeli intelligence service could never find Groedl after the war.”
He paused.
“She killed him. She killed the son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER 42
Above Yaremche
The Carpathians
JULY 1944
So what are you doing with a British container of guns and bombs?” she asked as they shambled along.
The Teacher told her. He finished with: “We received three C-containers full of weapons and sabotage explosives, dropped nearby from a low-flying bomber during the night. Bak did not want any one man to know where all three were hidden. I took one team, he another, and one of his lieutenants the other.”
They’d come to an illuminated section of the path where an unblocked sun shone more brightly, as on either side of the path, no giant pines sealed off the sky, no juniper or snowball clotted the pathways between the trees. On the upward slope, some force had torn down a swath of forest, revealing a strip of barren ground—small trees had begun to reassert themselves but were not tall enough to be counted as trees—littered with boulders and scrub. This gash climbed the severe slope of the mountain until the raw stone broke from the swaddling of green earth a thousand yards or so up, then rose, raw and barren, even higher, to snowcaps.
“It’s called a scree field,” said the Teacher. “I think this is the place. We came in from above, so it was not so bad. Now we climb.”
A thousand rough yards later they achieved a little shelf where they could sit and rest a bit. The Teacher said, “All right, here we are.” It took him a few minutes to locate, semi-hidden behind a large juniper brush, the entrance to the cave, not nearly as grand as the one that had shielded them the past few weeks.
They slid in through the small opening, blinked as the light disappeared, coughed as the dust from their slither rose to their noses, then lay still, the three of them, waiting for the dust to settle and their eyes to adjust. It was larger inside than the entryway promised, and in a bit of time, the shaft of light from the entrance permitted their eyes to find details.
“Here,” said the Teacher. He pulled and yanked something into the sunlight: a heavy metallic case, about five feet long, two wide, and three deep. A latched lid encapsulated it. He bent, unlatched the three fixtures, and then rotated the lid back on hinges placed along the length. Opened, the case revealed manna from heaven, accompanied by the odor of gun oil: five pipelike objects, dully gray, wedged into the notches of a wooden frame.
She recognized a Sten gun, the cheap, crude, but effective British submachine gun. Steel pipe, a few screws, all the welds messy, stamped-out parts; the whole thing seemed improvised in a cellar workshop.
He pulled another piece of magic from the lid: a crenellated egg, with a lever tracing its oval curve from a central mechanism at the long end, in which a linchpin sporting a steel ring had been inserted to hold the thing together. It was a Mills bomb, the British pineapple grenade.
“The rifle,” said Petrova. “You said a rifle.”
He reached back in and struggled for a second to pry open another long box within the container, then pulled out, with some effort, a four-foot object wrapped in oilcloth, which he yanked off.
She took it, feeling its density, complexity, solidity, intensity. It was shorter than her Mosin-Nagant, yet weightier. She took it into the light, recognizing the common parts of the rifle, the trigger, the magazine just forward of the trigger, the bolt, the encasement of the long barrel in wood. It featured a kind of face rest, a sculpted form of wood screwed into the top of the stock, where her chin and face could rest when she was locked behind the scope. But it was the scope—or rather, the overengineered mechanism that clamped the scope to the rifle—that seemed so bizarre, even eccentrically English. It looked like something out of the Victorian Age, a railroad trestle over a deep gorge, with struts and turning knobs and screws and rivets enmeshed in a pattern too complex to be believed, to secure the black steel optical tube to the rifle by stout rings clamped tight. The scope was a whimsical gizmo with adjustment turrets indexed to ranges, screws everywhere to keep it from popping apart.
“It looks like it was designed by Lewis Carroll,” said the Teacher.
She slithered out the cave’s entrance with the rifle and assumed a prone firing position. The two men inside could hear the action working, the bolt closing, and the click of the trigger being pulled as she acquainted herself with it.
She came back in. “Now we have to zero it.”
“Zero?” asked the Teacher.
“You don’t just mount a telescope on a rifle and shoot a man at a thousand yards. No, I have to test it very carefully at that range and adjust the sight so the sight points exactly to the bullet strike. So when I fire at the real target, I am confident the bullet will go where I aim.”
“Excuse me, are you mad? You cannot do a shooting program up here. Yes, the Germans are gone, but for how long, and how many men have they left behind? With every shot you fire, they become more aware of where you are. Perhaps they have men up here, waiting for just that situation. Perhaps they’ve made arrangements with the Luftwaffe to send Stukas when they think they’ve isolated the site and dive-bomb it. Perhaps it just riles them up and they execute another two hundred or so hostages on general principle. You get one shot, and that is at the worm Groedl.”
“I only tell you the reality. You need a thousand yards, not one less,” said Petrova. “Do you see any thousand yards around here?”
They were silent.
The Peasant asked the Teacher to explain, which he did, and the Peasant listened and then responded.
“He says you could shoot from inside the cave here. That would dampen the noise. You could shoot downhill across the scree field at a boulder a thousand yards away.”
“As usual,” said Mili, “the Peasant is smarter than the intellectual.”
CHAPTER 43
The Carpathians
THE PRESENT
The mountains offered beauty in every direction, vistas of lyric perfection that touched primal memories of Eden. Neither cared. For each it was just pure ordeal, bathed in sweat, cinched in pain, driven by thirst.
Finally Swagger said, “Okay, let’s take a rest.” He sat down against a boulder, breathed heavily.
“You’re the expert,” she said, “but don’t you think if we rest, we get killed?”
“Good point,” he said. “But a thought just came to me.”
“Go ahead. We’ve got nothing but time.”
“She’s got to zero the rifle. Right?”
Reilly couldn’t help but issue a dry little spurt of a laugh
. “As if I’d know? I don’t even know what ‘zero’ means. It’s all secret code to me.”
“Zero the rifle. Adjust the scope so that it’s indexed to the point of impact at the range you’ll be shooting at.”
“Is this the right time for a ballistics lecture?”
“Stay with me a sec. See, she’s got to zero at a thousand. How do you find a thousand clear yards in a forest? Do you just wander until it’s there? But maybe it’s never there.”
“Look,” she said, “it can’t be that hard.”
She pointed up the steep rock-strewn slope. “There, there’s one, right there.”
Indeed, a gap in the trees inclined upward from where they had come to rest. Here and there tall trees interrupted it, but basically there was too much stone on the ground to permit complete forest growth. It was like a scar ripped in the mountainside, as obvious as a nose on a face. How could he have missed it? And then she realized he hadn’t.
“All right,” Reilly said, “what gives? What game are you playing, Swagger?”
“She’s got a rifle. She has to zero it. She needs a thousand yards. This is a thousand yards, right?”
“All right.”
“This is what’s called a scree field. Meaning at some time in the past, a rock slide poured down the side of the mountain and ripped the forest up. Some trees grew back, as you can see, but imagine the place seventy years ago. It’s wide open.”
“So?”
“I was her, I’d be up there.” He pointed. “I’d shoot at a target down here. Maybe there’s a cave up there, she could shoot from inside, cutting down on noise. I’d track my shots and walk ’em into the target. A great shot, she wouldn’t need that many. I’d smear some color on one of these boulder faces about the size of a man’s chest. I’d keep adjusting until I could not only hit the chest at a thousand but put three into it inside ten inches.”
“So your idea is that we should stop fleeing men who are trying to kill us and look for a target? And if we find the target, what then?”
Swagger pointed to the boulder against which he was leaning. There was discoloration of some sort, roughly the shape of a man’s chest. It was faded and peeled, but it was there, definitely.
“Blood, I’m guessing. She or somebody with her killed a rabbit. They cut it open right here, drained its blood on the rock. Like paint. It dried, it stayed. Here it is. See any holes?”
She looked. Three pockmarks were etched in the stone face in the blood zone, two four inches apart and a third perhaps six inches from them but still in the target.
“She or someone with her knew where there was a British C-container with a No. 4 T, five Sten guns, twenty-five grenades, and two thousand or so rounds of ammunition. My guess is, it’s up there. A thousand yards up that scree field in some kind of cave or other.”
“So we have to climb—”
“I’m afraid so. But as you say, we ain’t going to make it outrunning them. Up there is the one thing that’s going to get us out of this jam.”
“And that would be?”
“Same thing that got Mili out of her jam. Same ones, in fact. Guns.”
CHAPTER 44
Stanislav
The Town Hall
JULY 1944
It’s quite humorous, actually,” pointed out Senior Group Leader Groedl in his office late that evening with Sturmbannführer Salid, “here I’m the one trying to talk you into it, and you’re the one trying to talk me out of it! Don’t you see? It should be reversed.”
But the humor was theoretical rather than actual, and neither man laughed.
They sat on the leather sofa in Groedl’s office. Before them was a Mouton Rothschild from 1927, which the senior group leader was in the process of finishing while the young Sturmbannführer was merely sniffing occasionally. That meant they were equally drunk. Dr. Groedl had even loosened his tie.
“It’s just that the senior group leader is so inspirational,” said Salid, “has touched so many with his passion and his logic, has reached across generations, it terrifies me that he risks himself in such a way.”
“War is risk, Yusef.”
“But certain risks are a part of making war, such as attacking a hill or dropping a bomb or being under artillery fire. This one you assume is arbitrary. It has no meaning in the war. It puts you in great danger for no gain at all.”
“Immense gain. For reasons I should not divulge to you, the White Witch is enormously important. She may not even understand her value, though perhaps she does. Without realizing it, she has it in her power to reveal the identity of a certain agent within Stalin’s inner circle. Oh, I shouldn’t be telling you this. My wife watches my drinking, but you come here with a fine bottle, and two glasses into it, I’m talking my head off! Yusef, you must swear to me. I will tell you more on only one condition. That is, if you swear on that desert god of yours that you will not be taken alive. This is too precious a secret to be spent stupidly. Save the last Luger cartridge for yourself, do you understand?”
“By Allah, I swear,” said Yusef.
“Then hear me and understand. I owe a particular debt to this man. And his intelligence is very valuable. It wasn’t in the manner of brigade movements and timetables. That material is much overrated. No, no, he was with us in our other war, our war, Yusef, working not for military intelligence or the high command or anything like that, but working for and reporting directly to IV-B4, RSHA. He was their agent. His reports went directly to Müller and were turned to action by Eichmann. He was their own private intelligence network against the Jews of the Soviet Union. How do you think we knew when we got to a Soviet city where the Jewish quarter was? How do you think we knew who the Jewish leaders in that city were, who the intelligentsia were, who the merchants were? How were we able to round them up on the first night and see that they got what they deserved? Those long lists of names and addresses, Yusef, that guided your actions when you were a part of Einsatzgruppen D in the early years, and all the other Einsatzgruppen actions, A, B, and C as well, and took the thousands to the pits and buried them there. Not only because they were Jews but because they were leaders. We had to cut the head off the Jewish beast, Yusef, that was the key to the whole thing, and that will be our legacy that the world, which holds us in contempt now, will recognize later.”
“This man provided all that?”
“Yes, he fought the real war.” Groedl laughed giddily. “Not the business of generals and tanks but the far more important business of racial purity, of cleansing the pollutants and the toxins from the human strain. When you look at Russia, you and I both see a vast carnival of German death. The millions! Think of the boys from Heidelberg and Hamburg and Dresden and Munich and little farm towns you never heard of, who came to Russia to find their bitter end under the snow, in the rubble, in the wheat fields. Those millions of German dead must have some meaning, or life is not worth living or clinging to. And that is what has made the sacrifice worthwhile and made our legacy worth building upon.”
“I see,” said Salid, taking another delicious whiff of the Mouton Rothschild, its subtleties pressing the hairs of his nostrils.
“Yes, yes,” said Groedl. “He was able to give IV-B4 invaluable information that informed our operations. It may have been the biggest intelligence operation in history, because this man realized that his obligations to his race transcended his obligations to his country. As he rose and acquired power—helped by gifts of intelligence from our own people—he got us more and more. Under the guise of a ‘survey,’ he was able to provide us with names and numbers in the thousands. A whole Soviet department actually worked for IV-B4! Can you imagine? And when he learned that this woman had been sent to kill me at the personal order of Josef Stalin, he took action to save my life at great risk to his own. That is why he must be saved and the information of his true loyalty controlled. We must find out if this woman has any suspicions, if she has figured out his identity, and if she has communicated her thoughts to anyone. Do y
ou see now why I risk my life? Not only to protect a hero but to protect our cause!”
The slightly drunk SS captain nodded.
“Not only that, she cannot hit me.”
“She cannot hit you?”
“Not with a Soviet rifle, and that is the only rifle she could have. I had the master sniper Repp, Lieutenant Colonel Repp, hero of Demansk—”
Salid was mightily impressed. “Repp! Repp of SS–Death’s Head Division! He killed a hundred Russians in one day and lived to laugh about it.” Repp had even been on a postcard.
“Yes, that Repp. He is a friend of mine. At my request, he ran tests using a captured Russian rifle with its sights. Even the great Repp could not hit a target beyond five hundred yards with that rifle. Repp, the Reich’s greatest marksman!”
“That is very good news.”
“So let us go over it one more time.”
“Yes sir.” Salid took another sniff. Explosions and thunder and lightning. Craziness. Clarity when the noise had ceased.
“You will arrive by military convoy, in a staff Horch car from SS-12 Panzer and two panzerwagens. It should be obvious to anyone in the mountains who is paying attention that the senior group leader is arriving. Nevertheless, you will halt at our command position outside the village for an hour or so, giving her ample time to move into a position. But she cannot get within five hundred yards, because that burned space is open and being patrolled by Police Battalion personnel. She’ll have to shoot from somewhere in the forest at five hundred yards. We have noted all the spots in that cone of territory that yield a vantage point on your activities in the zone. We will infiltrate two-man teams in heavy camouflage to monitor each one. If and when she approaches, they will let her settle in, let her concentrate on her job, then take her alive. Upon the sound of shots, if shots are necessary, the other two-man teams will converge rapidly on the site. In case, a half mile out of the zone, we have two dog teams. If she should evade immediate capture, the dog teams will close on the locality in a matter of a few minutes and pick up her trail. The dogs will run her down. The dogs are very good. At the very worst, the very worst, they will drive her toward Natasha’s Womb, where the parachutists of Battlegroup Von Drehle will intercept her.”