Think about those men. They lie still, making not a sound, while their comrades fire inches above their heads. Both elements know exactly the cutoff point; the execution squad has total trust in the gunners and leaps into action the very second the gunners cease fire. Not a split second is wasted.
Survivors? A freak of luck, maybe, a few out of fifty, herself among the lucky. But superb execution, perhaps rehearsed, so that each man knew his place and move. It didn’t feel like a serendipitous happening. These men knew. They had superb intelligence. They moved through partisan-controlled forest without a sound, they knew exactly the pathway, and they planned and executed beautifully. They were clearly of Waffen-SS caliber, maybe better. They represented—if she understood the situation here in the Carpathians, where a bitter kind of stalemate existed—the coming of a new energy via a new and specialized unit to the field.
What could it mean?
At that point, she was yanked from her concentration by a flash of motion. She looked sharply, dividing the visible world into sectors and examining each in its time, top to bottom, as methodically as a typist transcribes an interview.
Until she saw them.
CHAPTER 11
Lviv
THE PRESENT
The Germans knew exactly where Bak’s unit would be, what time it’d arrive, they did it perfect,” said Swagger. “But the point isn’t that it’s early. It’s what ‘early’ signifies: betrayal.”
“Someone snitched them out. Can we determine who it was?”
They sat in a pleasant twilight in the old town square of Lviv, at a sidewalk café called the Centaur. The city itself had that old Austro-Hungarian empire style going on; they could have been in Prague or Vienna. Swagger half expected hussars in brass breastplates over red jackets with swords at the half-cock to come trotting along the cobblestones at the head of some emperor’s entourage. It was so cheerful, it was hard to think of betrayal. One thought more of fairy princesses.
“Let’s look at the possibilities,” said Swagger. “First: tactical betrayal. It happened because of a natural consequence of combat operations. Say, a German Storch recon plane saw the Russian plane that had dropped Mili take off. It was able to shadow the movement of the column. The Storch team radios time, location, direction; again by coincidence there’s a Police Battalion counterbandit team near enough to get set up, and the bandits just walk into it.”
“That’s not really betrayal,” said Reilly. “That’s just ‘stuff happens.’ ”
“Fair enough. Okay, local betrayal. One of the partisans is really a German agent. Or maybe some SS major has his daughter hostage so he’s forced to turn on his people. He manages to get the news out before they leave to pick up Mili. That gives the Germans plenty of time to get the Police Battalion into play.”
“So it’s a coincidence of timing that this happened when Mili arrived? Hard to swallow.”
“Try this. Bak himself is the Nazi agent. They’re building him up to win a lot of battles so he’ll be a hero and be taken back to Moscow, and when he’s back in NKVD headquarters, he can really give them the crown jewels.”
“But they seem to have killed him. After all, he disappears from the story.”
“It was an accident. Night ambushes are terrible things. Nobody knows what’s happening. He’s trying to blow the deal to give up the Russian sniper to protect Obergruppenführer Groedl, and he zigs that way when the linchpin on the MG42 tripod vibrates free, and the gun rotates another few inches, and bye-bye, Bak.”
“But wouldn’t his death be recorded in the operational diaries of Twelfth Panzer, regardless? Like the rifles, he was booty.”
“It would,” said Swagger.
“Okay,” she said. “Interesting possibilities. They’re all wrong, but they’re very interesting. Tomorrow I’ll tell you who betrayed them.”
CHAPTER 12
Somewhere in the Carpathians
MID-JULY 1944
Two of them. Not Germans, definitely not Germans. But partisans, survivors of the Bak column, as was she? Hard to tell.
A heavy one, a light one. In the heavy one, she recognized the dignity and stolidity of the eternal peasant. He had no partisan affectations, no babushka hat, no crossed bandoliers of ammunition, no potato mashers stuck in his belt, no Red tommy gun. He wore only a shapeless black peasant smock and equally shapeless trousers over the thick boots peasants had worn for centuries. He moved with deliberation; you knew in a second that patience would never be a problem with this one. He could outwait God or the devil if it came to that and, as a hobby, watch mud bricks dry. He would be the one who knew a lot more than you thought, and if he gave you his loyalty, he was giving you everything. Everything about him was big: feet, legs, arms, hands. He could put in a thousand hours behind a plow. He was the man who would plant and harvest the wheat her father had tried to protect for him. He would feed the masses; he was the masses.
The other was leaner, quicker, a lithe man with goatee and glasses, under a frost of prematurely gray hair, wiry and tight. He looked somehow more refined, and if he moved easily through the woods, it was not out of heritage but out of learning. He, too, was as unwarlike as could be imagined, in a well-worn black leather jacket, some kind of bluish shirt, and a pair of threadbare trousers.
She watched as they picked their way along some fifty feet below her, the peasant leading, the thinner man—she had no insight as how to classify him and so would not make the mistake of conferring an identity upon him too soon—following. At a certain moment, the peasant raised a hand, and each halted, dropped to knees, and looked nervously around. After a bit, satisfied that no SS men were about to nab them, they rose.
“Hello,” she cried.
They reacted in terror, scrambling back, edging into panic.
She emerged from the cave, pulled herself upright, and started down the slope to them. “Greetings, comrades.”
The peasant babbled in Ukrainian.
“She’s the sniper!” said the thinner man, having made an immediate calculation.
“Belaya Vedma!” exclaimed the peasant. And added something else.
“He says you should be a princess,” said the thin fellow.
“There are no princesses these days,” said Petrova.
“He says your beauty is a gift from God.”
“I hope God is busy giving out other gifts, like mercy and long life. He shouldn’t be wasting time on St. Petersburg girls. Are you pursued?” she asked.
“No, madam. Like you, accidental survivors from the nasty business of last night,” said the thin man.
“You are with Bak? Why are you unarmed?”
“I threw my gun away,” said the thin fellow. “A practical decision. If I had a rifle, I would be shot on sight. If captured, tortured for information, then executed. Maybe if I didn’t have one, they’d just beat me for amusement, then dump me in the bushes. I ran into the big fellow in the dawn. We scared the life out of each other. We are simply trying to evade capture.”
“I don’t think the Germans are here in force,” she said. “Despite all the shooting, that was a small team. That’s how they moved so effectively through the forest. They had many machine guns, unusual for a German unit. Did Bak escape?”
“I confess cowardice,” said the thin man. “I don’t know, and not until you mention it did I even think of it. I have been thinking only of my own miserable skin.”
“Do you have food? I am famished.”
“Not a bite.”
“Ach!” She sat back. “What a pair of sorry dogs.”
Introductions were made, names quickly forgotten. The peasant was a Ukrainian farmer who had been a partisan for a year. His stoic face may have concealed tragedies, but he did not volunteer them. The scrawny man—younger than he looked under that gray hair and the goatee—was a former schoolteacher. He had been with the partisans only a few months.
“I am not much of a fighter,” he said. “But since I have good reading and writi
ng skills, General Bak used me as a clerk. I kept records, made reports.”
“So if the SS tortured you, you would have a lot to reveal.”
“Only that food is low, ammunition is low, communication with higher authority uncertain, and nobody’s happy. They know all this, but yes, they would enjoy beating me until I told them. Then it would be nine grams of lead for me.”
“Nine grams awaits all of us if we don’t make a sound decision now.”
“Tell us what to do.”
“First, tell me some stuff. I don’t know a thing about this area. I was flown here and dumped.”
The Peasant got the gist of her request. “Beyond us, perhaps eight kilometers, is a village called Yaremche,” he said as the Teacher translated. “It is built in ravines on the waterfalls of the River Prut. If a case can be made to the villagers, they might take us in or at least give us food.”
“What else?”
“Bak’s main camp is a farther march,” said the Teacher. “It is at least seventy-five kilometers through forest that is unclearly administered. Perhaps German patrols wander it, perhaps partisan units. It would be our bad luck to run into the former and good to run into the latter.”
“Next question: food. How do we feed ourselves?”
“He knows mushrooms,” said the Teacher. “These Ukrainians, they live on mushrooms. Mushrooms are the secret wealth of the Carpathians.”
“Mushrooms, then. After mushroom paradise, we’ll head back to the ambush site,” she said. “We can look for weapons, foodstuff, anything the Germans left behind. Is it going to rain?”
“By afternoon, yes. I believe,” said the Peasant in translation.
“Then we had better get there first and see what the tracks tell us. When it rains, it will wash away our tracks. Once we have gotten what we can, we will rejoin the war. Our little vacation is over.”
CHAPTER 13
Highway E50, Due South
THE PRESENT
To the east, wheat fields, classic Ukraine landscape. You could almost feel the Red Army chorus singing patriotic chants as framed in the eye of a New Soviet Cinema camera. To the west, the Carpathians, Ukraine-style, a formidable bank of mountain that curled across the promontory of Ukraine extending across what once was Poland or Hungary or Romania or all three and now was like a Ukrainian peninsula thrust into the sea of Eastern Europe. They were ancient mountains in the five-thousand-foot range, their foothills and lower altitudes mantled in a fetching green of meadow, giving way to a band of dense forest that could and had concealed armies. It was also famous as a haunt of vampires.
Nice to look at on both sides. But what they experienced more than anything was the roughness of the asphalt. Every two miles or so, it seemed there was a we-interrupt-this-highway-for-250-yards-of-bad-road bulletin. Driving was more like slaloming, as the drivers zoomed this way and that to avoid the many crevices that had gone unrepaired since Sputnik 1 ate up the Ukrainian infrastructure budget. It was quaint and rustic for a bit, then a pain in the ass or, more particularly, the head.
Still Reilly soldiered on. “What we haven’t focused on,” she said, “is that the whole Operation Mili Petrova isn’t just missing from the Russian records. That would be remarkable enough. It’s also missing from the German records. You have to ask why, how, by whom? What difference would it make to the Germans what happened to Mili? The whole Mili caper—which we’re assuming involved first a night ambush and a miss, then her survival in the mountains and her ability to come up with another rifle, then a climax in her failed attempt on Groedl, then her death or capture and removal for interrogation—isn’t there. But why would any of that be remarkable to field officers in the Twelfth SS Panzer charged with keeping a combat log? Why would they fail to record it?”
“Okay,” said Swagger, pulling around a gas tanker that placidly belched black exhaust into the air, getting his molars loosened for the efforts as he bounced the car through trenches and gullies cleverly inscribed in the road surface while the dust spat up behind him, “maybe the offensive is an explanation. At ten A.M. on the twenty-sixth, the Russian artillery kicked off and the Germans ran like hell. The Russians walked into Stanislav the next day and had pushed the Germans to the Carpathians and almost out of Ukraine except for the sliver that contained Uzhgorod, on the other side of the mountains. Hard to keep records straight in all the hubbub.”
“They had time afterward.”
“Okay,” said Swagger.
“So what we have here is an unusual circumstance where both the Russians and the Germans have wiped information off the record, independently of each other. Someone ordered this. Whoever he was, he had juice. He had power. He had influence. His position was very important. If he’s a German mole inside Stalin’s circle, he’s a man of high power, a commissar, Stalin’s boy, whatever, so he could order the eighty-sixing of Petrova from Russian sources, but he hates the idea that her tale still exists in one other place, that being the German records. He knows that after the war, it might be checked and give him up. So he explains to his Abwehr contact or his SS guy or whatever agency was running him, he explains that for his own security, the results of what he has brought off, which infer his existence, cannot be recorded. Again, he’s a big guy, get it? He’s a bigfoot, and what he doesn’t quite get is that erasing his footprints doesn’t leave nothing, it leaves an erased footprint, which can be read almost as well as the footprint itself.”
“Basil Krulov, Stalin’s Harry Hopkins. Since he’s the only big guy on the board, you’re saying it had to be him. That’s a giant assumption.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense if you look carefully at it.”
“Does it? What about motive? This guy is Stalin’s right-hand man. He’s one of the most powerful men in his country. He’s got to expect that once the war is over, he’ll be even bigger. He’ll have power, love, and a mansion. So why is he risking everything to rat out his own folks to the Nazis?”
“He was in Munich, remember. Maybe the Nazis got a picture of him sucking something he shouldn’t have been sucking in a public urinal.”
“Possible. But . . . you’re forgetting. He’s real smart. That’s why he gets so high so fast. He ain’t a likely candidate for that kind of trap. And if he got into it, he is a likely candidate for getting out of it. So whoever the traitor is, he had to really want to be a traitor. He was in the most screwball paranoid place in the world, the Kremlin under Stalin, where thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands, get wiped out for the merest whisper of a suspicion.”
“Motive screws up everything,” said Reilly. “Why can’t this be a movie? Movies forgot about motives thirty years ago!”
CHAPTER 14
The Carpathians
Site of Ambush
JULY 1944
Yes, there were rifles, almost thirty of them. But all the bolts had been removed. They were worthless. Her sniper rifle, with its beautiful scope, was also gone, a German trophy instead of her head. There were no PPSh’s, as the Germans prized that sturdy peasant submachine gun and snatched it up whenever they could. The Germans, in their methodical way, had been very thorough, leaving no grenades, no bayonets or knives, no pistols. The bodies, twenty-four of them, lay in a neat double row alongside the path, where they’d been dragged. Most bore the violence of modern small-arms trauma, some horribly, some not so horribly. They had been covered with lime for some reason, as if to shield the forest from them and not them from the forest, but it had worked, and in the intervening night and day, no scavengers had come to enjoy the meat of the predator’s kill.
“Bak is not here,” said the Teacher.
“That is one good thing.”
“He escaped. I would say it looks like a good ten or so made it away.”
“No,” said the Peasant through the Teacher. “You miscount, comrade. The number seems so small because there are no women’s bodies here.”
“The women’s bodies have been removed?” asked Petrova.
“It would appear so.”
“Why, I wonder?” she asked. “It’s not like the Nazis have a well-known respect for females. Usually they rape before they murder.”
The glade had a haunted feel to it. Now it was restored to the natural order, the white pines tall and majestic, the ground cover curly with small green leaves, the carpet of needles thick everywhere. But a tang of the fired gunpowder lingered in the air, perhaps to be driven away by the rain that threatened. Spent shells lay everywhere, as the fast-firing German guns ate ammunition voraciously. A small non-coniferous tree, close to an M24 blast, had been sheared down the middle, and already its leaves were beginning to brown. The wagon, on its side, lay riddled, almost comically shredded, as if by termites. A touch and it would disintegrate. The poor horse lay in its halter, its guts ripped open, its head at a grotesque angle. It had died kicking and neighing. Other horse carcasses, many split and spilling tripe, lay haphazardly about.
“Look hard, think, and come back to me, each of you, with a report.”
“A report on what?”
“On what happened here. Why, how? Give me interpretations I can use. Now, fast, we don’t have too much time before the rain, and I want the Peasant hunting mushrooms before that.”
“Yes, comrade.”
Each man did as he had been ordered, walking the ground of the kill zone back and forth, putting a great effort into it. In time they rendezvoused where she sat under a tree, not far from the wrecked wagon and the spot where the knifer had almost killed her before someone blew his brains out.
“It was a very good ambush,” said the Peasant. “These soldiers knew their business. That’s why we didn’t hear a thing until it was too late. I noticed a scarf tied to a tree at the halfway point, on the far side of the path, which was the marker for the rear machine gun so that it would not fire into the unit’s own men.”