These ruminations did Swagger no good at all and, if anything, amplified his need for vodka.
He tried to get away from the big picture. So his new strategy was to concentrate on the small picture. Go to Mili, he told himself. Think only of Mili.
Mili, in the Carpathian Mountains, with an assignment to assassinate a German administrator who had murdered, by strokes of a pen or orders to dictationists, thousands, tens of thousands. What happened to her? He tried to imagine it. But he had no luck. His best gift was useless in a train, when he hadn’t seen the area he needed to understand. That was the gift of looking at land and reading it for truth. If he could see the ebb and flow of movement across a terrain, he could make some sense out of it. He’d know where the shooter would have had to place him- or herself to get the shot, and that determination would come from a confluence of factors: first, clean angle to the target; second, concealment, obviously, cover if possible (she would have to weigh cover against concealment very carefully, if it came to that); third, a sense of the play of the wind, because even at five hundred meters, her longest possible shot with a M-N 91, scope or not, the wind could wreak havoc on the shot so she’d be best to shoot in the early morning, when it tended to be still, and if heat and humidity were to factor, they’d also be at their least influential; and finally, escape route. But he could not begin to imagine this, not without a landscape to search for possibility against.
His mind went numb. Beside him, Reilly dozed quietly. Where was I? Oh, yeah, Mili’s escape route. If she had one. It occurred to him that in that war, given the losses, given the immensity of the sacrifice, given all the times the bosses had sent rows and rows of young men marching or driving into machine-gun fire and artillery, possibly the nihilism that was so pervasive had infected Mili, too, and so she passed on escape. Maybe she took the shot, saw that she had missed, watched as the SS troopers ran to her, pulled out her Tok, and shot herself in the head. Since she’d been shielded by the villagers—or the SS assumed she’d been shielded by villagers—they burned the place and the people in it. That was the way they operated.
But why would she have been scrubbed from the Russian record? Why was she disappeared? More likely, since she was famous, they’d have used her sacrifice as a platform on which to build some kind of martyr campaign. Her beauty would help there, too. It was the way propagandists worked, he saw, in that the death of one beautiful girl could be more emotionally powerful than the death of four thousand Russian tankers on a single day at a place called—it was another one nobody had ever heard of—Prokhorovka.
Yet they had refused that possibility.
Why?
Reilly, stirred, shivered, yawned, came awake. She rubbed her eyes. “When do we get to Ocean City?” she asked.
“That’s a long way away. Enjoy the nap? Pleasant dreams?”
“Never,” she said.
Ding! Or maybe bong! Or possibly bing! It came from Reilly’s phone, which she fished out of her purse.
“That’s an e-mail incoming.”
Bob waited patiently.
“Well, well,” she said. “Now here’s something. It’s from Will.”
Will? Oh yes, Will, Reilly’s ever patient, enduring husband, her co-correspondent for the Washington newspaper, a guy of whom she talked now and then and revered as one of those real reporters who was more interested in getting it right and getting it fair than in getting it onto Meet the Press. Swagger somehow had never had the pleasure.
“He’s in Germany,” Reilly was saying. “I asked him to check on the divisional records of the Twelfth SS Panzer around that time. The Germans, as it turns out, and why does this not surprise, kept very precise operational logs. Will just dug something out.” She handed the iPhone over.
Hi, sweetie, Will had written. Aachen is a drab town. But I did find the 12th SS Panzer records and there are some interesting aspects. No. 1, there’s no account of any partisan activity, including assassination attempts, at any time between July 15th and July 26th. As you might imagine, it gets very busy on the 26th, because that’s when they had the Russian offensive started and they pulled out of Stanislav without firing a shot. There’s also a somewhat ambiguous run of entries from the 20th through the 23rd which are simply called “Security Operations.” What that means I don’t know, except that I don’t think it’s against partisans, because they have a special category for that, and they use it frequently. “Anti-bandit” operations, they call them. However, and I think this is new, there is an entry for the 15th. It simply says, if I read my German correctly, “Anti-bandit operation, Carpathian Mountains, Zepplin Force reports inflicting heavy casualties on Ukrainian Bandits presumably affiliated with Bak’s 1st Partisan Brigade. 35 enemy killed in action.”
They even listed the arms recovered. “37 Model 91 rifles, 1 Model 91 with sniper scope, 5 PPsH machine pistols, 28 grenades, 35 bayonets, 12 Tokarev pistols, 9 Luger pistols, 32 bayonets and assorted knives.”
“A Mosin-Nagant with scope. That’s Mili’s. They jumped Mili. But who the hell is Zeppelin Force?” Bob wondered out loud, and in the next second found the answer.
Zeppelin Force seems to be a unit seconded at Senior Group Leader Groedl’s request from 13th SS Mountain Division, in Serbia, which was the only Islamic division in the whole German army. I saw in the log that they had just come over a few days before. But it’s not just any guys, it seems to be a special force called Police Battalion.
CHAPTER 10
The Carpathians
JULY 17, 1944
It was a Police Battalion operation all the way, and Captain Salid handled his men extremely well. He had learned much in his years among the Germans.
His men were experienced. They had been seconded from the 13th SS Mountain Division “Scimitar,” operating in Serbia, where they had been fighting partisans—“bandits,” officially—for the better part of three years, and proudly wore the insignia of the scimitar on the left side of the collars of their camouflaged battle smocks, opposite and yet equal in pride of place as the double flashes of the SS on the right. They had left their fezzes at base and, like their commanding officer, capped their heads only in the camouflaged Stahlhelm of the SS.
In the Balkans, Police Battalion especially had borne the brunt of the patrol and assault work. Mostly Serbian Muslims themselves, they were all mountain people, skilled in mountain fighting arcana from a life in the high altitudes. They were silent crawlers, camouflage experts, superb marksmen, and especially keen on blade work, for theirs, after all, was a blade culture. They were at their best in anti-Jewish actions, for that was where the passion burned brightest. They did truly hate and despise bandits, not only an ancient enmity but also a recent one, for they had lost as many to those bandits as they had taken from them. But they were disciplined, high-level military, skilled and patient, used to stillness. They were not Arab pirates, thirsty for blood because they were thirsty for blood; in fact, there were few Arabs among them, after Captain Salid only two unteroffiziers and an odd private or corporal among the platoons.
Salid employed the classic L-shape technique of ambuscade, getting two angles of fire from his unit without endangering either echelon to the other, and much used by his forebears against generations of invaders, from Romans to Jews to Crusaders to other tribes, to the hated English, to Turks, to the later arriving Jews. His family had been in the war business for at least fifteen generations, and although he was only thirty-two, he knew a thing or two.
Yusef el-Almeni bin Abu Salid was the cousin of the grand mufti of Jerusalem. The august persona was, alas, retired from his position among the people by British importunings and now rusticating in Berlin, where his weekly broadcasts to the Arab world had made him even more famous and powerful. The cousin Salid had grown up under the lash of British rule in Jerusalem, aware that the British were surrogates for the true enemy of his people, international Jewry, via the hated Balfour Declaration of 1919, which mandated that Jewish subhumans would be accorded lan
d in Palestine. When the mufti, an admirer of all things German, had evinced an early enthusiasm for the Third Reich, a German diplomat had reached out to the man and offered to take certain gifted Arab boys to Germany for technical training. From the age of eight onward, Yusef Salid was raised in the German method, among Germans, whose language he quickly mastered, first in the rigors of Realschule, then in cadet school, then in officers’ training at Bad Tölz, then infantry school, and finally in a series of specialized SS training programs. He stood out because of his brown skin and coarse dark hair, but his elegance of manner, his eruditition in German and love of German literature, and his excellence in all matters military soon made him popular no matter the venue. His ability to keep his head in tense situations, his coolness under fire, his knowledge of wine—which, being a Muslim, he never drank, but he made it his business to memorize labels and vintages for exactly the popularity it would earn him—and his twinkly dark eyes made him a hero in the SS officers’ mess. His assignment to Einsatzgruppen D in the early days of the July 22 invasion and his intense labors on behalf of that unit’s aims earned him accolade after accolade, both official and personal.
When the strategy of shooting and burying the Jews of Ukraine proved unrealistic in the face of their sheer numbers, and the unit was folded into the Waffen SS for general military duties, it was Dr. Groedl himself who made calls and pulled strings on the young officer’s behalf. Groedl considered himself to have an eye for talent. His mentees were scattered far and wide in the great crusade. It was he who arranged for Salid to be transferred to the 13th-SS Mountain, the only pure Muslim division in the Waffen-SS, where he knew the young man’s talents for locating Jews would be put to good use.
It was inevitable that Groedl would recall Salid. When he needed a group of specialists for the delicate mission before him, it took a great deal of wrangling to get Police Battalion, which was acquiring a spectacular record under Salid in the Serbian mountains, transferred en masse to the 12th SS Panzer Division, the umbrella unit for all SS operations in the West Ukraine–Stanislav area, although the connection was for paper-pushers only, and SS-13 Police Battalion Scimitar reported directly to and worked completely for Senior Group Leader–SS Groedl.
Salid estimated the bandit column to consist of at least fifty men and women, all heavily armed, all well experienced, most mounted on the sturdy-legged Carpathian ponies that made operations in the mountains feasible. He himself had only twenty-five, the best, from Police Battalion’s larger pool of mountain anti-bandit fighters. He knew a larger formation on horseback could not move silently through the forest and mountain; he knew they would leave sign and disturbance; this one had to be done with great precision. He also specified ammunition double loads and made certain each of his fighters was armed not with the slow bolt-action KAR-98k rifle but with the MP-40 submachine gun and a P-38 or a Luger pistol. Each man carried three M24 grenades, “potato mashers,” in the parlance. The point was to unleash maximum firepower when the column entered the kill zone. It had to be a single overpowering blast, because the targets were wily, would not panic, would return fire, and would quickly form maneuver elements and locate an egress and engineer some form of escape. Their ponies would give them mobility. But there could be no escapees. All must die: no prisoners, no worries, no regrets.
Hauptsturmführer—that is, Captain—Salid put his first MG-42, settled on a tripod for steadiness, thirty meters off the line of march, giving it a good sweeping angle laterally along the length of the column. He placed his second down the line, the only weapon on the left side of the ambush axis, also on a tripod. It would work the back end of the column, with a fire cutoff point established so that it did not leak bursts onto the Serbs on the other side of the path. His submachine gunners and grenadiers were concentrated in the jag of the L and, after the first magazine expenditure, would move on to targets of opportunity. The key was a group of extremely brave men who would be sequestered along the march line. They would wait two minutes, then emerge, there within the confines of the column, and begin to shoot the wounded. It was important that the phases of the ambush—opening ambuscade, suppressive fire, and individual liquidations—happen promptly, without hesitation. It would go so fast that there would be no time for command direction; the fellows would have to do it as they had been instructed, by second nature.
The unit had been afield for three days. It had moved only on foot, only at night. No cooking fires, no latrine pits, no sleeping positions. The men during the day simply melted into the forest and went supine for the entire daylight hours. They carried meager rations and water and were instructed to leave no traces, an impossibility but an ideal toward which to strive.
After ambush, it would take an hour for the armored Sd Kfz 251 Schützenpanzerwagens to arrive, grinding through thick brush under the power of their tracks, while being steered adroitly by their front tires. Each half-track carried an MG-42, so once they were on site, the firepower would be sufficient to stand off an army. But until then, that would be the tensest time, for who knew what of Bak’s units were afoot in the forest tonight? Perhaps another was closer than expected and would come to the sound of the gunfire, to find Police Battalion low on ammunition and exhausted from the rigors of the ordeal. It was a gamble, but it was a gamble that had to be taken.
A cricket chirped. The cricket was a Serbian scout, ahead of the ambush site by one hundred meters. That meant the partisans—excuse, excuse, bandits!—were approaching down the path. Salid crouched, drawing his MP toward him. His would be the opening volley. He scanned again, saw nothing but stillness under the weaving of brush in the breeze, heard nothing but silence along the darkened forest path. Perhaps to his left he heard the squirming of the machine-gun team setting itself on the edge, rising behind the heavy gun with its endless belt of 7.92mm ammunition, but there were no clicks as guns were cocked or came off safe, for his good, trained Police Battalion fighters carried their weapons hot and ready to fire, to save tenths of seconds when it counted most.
* * *
Was it a dream or a fantasy? It had to be a fantasy. Dreams follow their own mad course, welling from an underneath of surrealism, grotesquery, twisted images, strange colors, weird angles. Her dreams were nightmares, all set in ruined cities of dead children. No, this was a fantasy, an indulgence claimed at the very edge of consciousness but still controlled by a rational mind full of aesthetic distinctions.
The scene always a meadow somewhere in an idealized Russia. The weather always late spring, the breeze always soft, the flowers always bright, their smell always sweet. It was a picnic of Petrova’s lost family. All had assembled.
Her father was there. That kind and decent man, with his earnest way, and his steadiness, and his intellectual integrity. He always wore a tweed suit in the English style and had round black glasses, possibly French in origin. He smoked his ever-present pipe. His high cheeks and sincere eyes and gentleness of nature were what she felt, what she remembered, what she missed so terribly.
He was sitting on a linen sheet, sipping tea, and making conversation.
“No, Mili,” he said. “I would stay with your court game. You have so much talent, and a girl as intelligent as you needs some kind of healthy outlet. Though you are correct in asserting that there is no direct application of the strength and suppleness you develop, I think that it will eat up your excess energy. Believe me, I have seen too many an intellectually gifted woman ruin herself on men, tobacco, and vodka when she goes to university, simply because all her excess energy demands some kind of release or expression. The tennis will save you.”
She laughed. He was so earnest. “Oh, Papa,” she said, “maybe I should take up the pipe, like you! All the time you fiddle with that pipe, all the cutting, the trimming, the stuffing, the lighting, the inhaling. Is that how you handle your excess energy?”
“Mili with a pipe!” Her younger brother Gregori laughed. “Oh, that’s what would attract the boys. You’d end up married to an engin
eer or a doctor if you smoked a pipe!”
“Mili, Mili, Mili,” shouted the even younger Pavel and did a loose-limbed interpretation of Mili sucking hard on an imaginary Sherlock Holmes meerschaum, all curves, fifteen pounds weight, with an obstruction in the stem so that the effort of inhalation hollowed his cheeks and bulged his eyes.
Dimitri, as always, sprang to her rescue. “You boys, you go easier on your big sister! You’re so lucky to have a beauty like Mili—”
“You’re pretty lucky yourself, Dimitri!” shouted Gregori, and all of them fell to the warm earth, laughing at the hilarity of it all, even normally reserved Mama.
Gone, all gone. Her father, into the Soviet gulag, lost forever for disagreeing over Mendelian genetics with a Stalinist toady and bootlicker who called himself a scientist. Gregori, burning in his T-34 somewhere in the Caucasus. Pavel, pneumonia over the hard winter, picked up in the hospital where he’d been sent after a severe leg wound in infantry combat. Her mother, shell, Leningrad, second year of the great siege. And last of all, Dimitri, down in flames somewhere in his Yak, not quite an ace but one of the very best, whose luck had finally run out.