Sniper's Honor: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel Page 10

  In a few hours, he returned. He had an armful of the dry dead-white things, clusters of a Ukrainian berry that was small, red, and sweet, even a dead rabbit.

  “Very good work,” she said.

  This pleased the Peasant, who recognized the tone of warmth and reported in Ukrainian, which the Teacher dully translated. “He says he set ten snares,” he reported. “Tomorrow, first thing, he’ll inspect them. Rabbit tomorrow, he is sure.”

  “Do the Germans patrol this high?”

  “No. Not really, not aggressively,” said the Teacher. “Come, look, I’ll show you.”

  He led her out. At the mouth of the cave she could see the reality of the Carpathians: it looked like an ocean of green, that is, rippled with the ups and downs of capricious elevation, dozens of carpeted peaks in the three- to five-thousand-foot range, as random as waves, seemingly endless. It was all tall white pines, their soft, short needles each catching a speck of light, so that the whole mass seemed somehow alive with illumination as the wind animated them.

  “It’s a big place,” said the Teacher. “You can see why the Germans have no real need to conquer it. Controlling the lowland is enough for them.”

  He pointed, and indeed, if she followed his angle, she saw what looked like a cut through some of the farther valleys.

  “A road?”

  “Yes, the only one through from Yaremche to other, smaller villages called Vorokhta, Yasinia, and Rakhiv, ultimately Uzhgorod. It’s the only road through the mountains south of Lviv. If the Red Army attacks in force and the front collapses, the Germans in Stanislav may flee down it to get through the mountains to their next line of defense. So they patrol the road constantly, because it will have to be kept open when the day arrives. But they seldom come this deep in unless they’re acting on very specific intelligence. So we are safe.”

  “Enjoy your mushrooms, comrades,” she said. “We have to move before the Red Army attacks, or the prey may scamper. I’m not going to live on fungus and rabbit and sleep in a hole without at least killing the SS bastard for my troubles.”

  Interlude in Tel Aviv I

  Mossad

  THE PRESENT

  You hunt them in the jungle of stuff. Any stuff. Commodities, derivatives, cash transfers, currency manipulations, oil futures, pork (pork!) futures, blood diamonds, anywhere stuff is exchanged for other stuff.

  Gershon Gold knew the game, but you’d never guess him a hunter from the outside. He was in his mid-sixties, tending toward weight, very much commercial class of Israeli, a businessman, a financial planner, a retailer, what have you. He wore slacks and open-necked sport shirts, some of them attractive, most not. He wore square-framed black plastic eyeglasses, a Rolex knockoff (why spend all that money for a watch?), once combed his gone-to-gray hair over to the left, though of late had gone with more of a straight-back Meyer Lansky look that earned him all manner of ribbing from friends and wife. He liked black loafers with both wing-tip perforations and tassels. Of glamour, élan, pizzazz, grace, beauty, he had none, unlike the young Mossad high-speed operators who went in with blackened faces in camouflage tunics, suppressed Tavors at the ready. He was no Israeli fighter jock, those keen-eyed, Nomex-clad F-16 predators who prowled the skies, could down any MiG or put a rocket in a bull’s-eye from so close to the deck that the engine blasts riled up the dust.

  “Gershon, watch your calories,” was what his wife yelled to him every morning as he left his snug bungalow in Herzliya, the northern suburb of Tel Aviv, for the four-minute drive to what to him was known as the Institute while the rest of the world called it Mossad, also in Herzliya. It was a complex of buildings dominated by a black glass cube nine stories tall. It was full of cubicles, and Gershon’s was on the third floor, with a window that looked out to the sea a few miles away, though the view was better from the upper floors, which he knew he would never see.

  The third floor was the Anti-terror Section, and his subdivision was Economic Intelligence. In other words, the theory and practice of stuff.

  For eight, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty hours a day, he methodically searched for stuff, and it was why he was as much a hunter as the special-forces op or the fighter jock. He lurked in the fringes of a thousand or so markets that could be monitored from cyberspace. The price of coffee in Jakarta, the fall of the yuan in China, the peach-harvest projections in Azerbaijan, the impact of Schwinn’s new “comfo-bot-m” seat on the bicycle market, particularly as it presaged Schwinn’s controversial decision to target-market the aging baby-boomer population, the cost of an RPG-7 in open trade in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan. That kind of stuff, all kinds of stuff. Melons, tennis balls, grenades, infrared sighting devices, Frisbees (a comeback? looked so for a bit, but today’s reports were depressing), Maytag dishwashers in Kuwait, American varietals in the South of France (taking coals to Newcastle!), Duncan yo-yos in South Korea, black-market Duncan yo-yos in North Korea.

  There was nothing arbitrary in his nosiness. International Terror fed on stuff. It needed, no matter the perpetrator, the ideological fervor or bent, a constant influx of money to keep itself on track. Money for training, money for travel, money for bribery, money for expertise, money for food and shelter; everything cost, and like General Motors, the conglomerate that was International Terror—he called it InterTer, Inc.—had been hurt badly by the recession, so it was ever on the hustle for a sugar daddy.

  Any time there was an aberration, a seeming random happening outside the parameters of the established, it was an indicator that someone was moving product somewhere in some market that would result in a payoff of stuff that would be translated into currency that would purchase plastic explosive, 5.45x39mm ammo, RPGs, or even more efficient and sophisticated instruments, electronics, missiles, long-range radios, artillery, atomic weapons, anything for the destruction of fellow humans. That aberration had to be looked at, analyzed, parsed, and evaluated. Almost always it was nothing, but nobody could be sure it would always be nothing, and so the game went on, 24/7, the world over.

  The intelligence agencies who fought the war had long known this, and Israel’s EconIntel unit was no different, really, than those fielded by any country, but for one respect: the Israelis had a secret weapon; and its name was Gershon Gold.

  Today, which was like every other day, turned out to be the day of COMEX. He selected his markets randomly, off a simple program he had devised that pulled names out of a big hat. It had to be random. It couldn’t be by pattern, because a pattern could be detected, and any savvy programmer counterplaying him could recognize him. Not that there was anywhere on earth an indication that such a counterprogrammer existed, but he wanted to be thorough, careful, diligent, patient. In the long haul, that was how you won.

  COMEX was the international commodities exchange, run by the New York Mercantile Exchange. It was a total universe of stuff. Gershon attacked it.

  He monitored each commodity’s performance over a week, quickly translating the figures into a line graph. In units of twenty he projected those lines in space, with time (the week) as the horizontal variable and percentage change as the vertical variable. In normal operations the twenty lines should look pretty much the same, because each line reflected the wisdom of the market in representing value over the same period of time, in the same play of psychological and external factors. That is, in normal operating process, if gold went up a bit, so would tin, lemons, pork futures, and magnesium. The twenty lines, though at different value sectors, would pretty much reflect one another. That was defined as normality, especially when Gershon incorporated his proprietary algorithms to factor in weather and other variables not under anyone’s influence.

  You could easily engineer a program to certain parameters, and it could mechanistically make this sort of examination and notify its keepers of something unusual, but it really needed a human eye, a human touch, a human instinct to make the final discriminations. That was Gershon.

  Twenty by twenty he went, and nowhere was ther
e any indication of abnormality. On and on until he was done and it all seemed okay, and finally it was time to put COMEX down and come up with another market for similar scrutiny.

  Except . . .

  He’d noticed a tiny little something, almost, not quite a blip.

  It was in a midrange cluster of twenty across the value/time index. He went back and called it up and looked very closely. It seemed fine.

  But . . .

  There was one line with a peak just a little bit out of scale with the echoing peaks above and below.

  Hmmm.

  Is this real? Is it anything? Could it be anything?

  He moused to that one line, selected it, and made the others go away.

  A single line zagged across the graph.

  He checked the legend.

  PL.

  What the hell was PL? The slightly higher value meant that someone had bought more PL than the market average. He went back through iterations, looking at the performance of PL over the past year, week by week, and in no single week had there been as big a leap.

  What was going on with PL?

  Actually, better start somewhere else.

  What was PL?

  It was platinum.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Town Hall

  Ivano-Frankivsk

  THE PRESENT

  You had to hand it to the Poles: they really knew how to design an ugly building.

  In 1936 they had somehow come up with the atrocity of the Stanislav Town Hall, grotesquely angled as if in homage to some science-fiction idea of the future, which climbed cube by severe cube to ultimately a spindly if angular five-story tower, like a child’s ABC-block construction, but great for flying flags of bright national identification. It was a natural for the bloodred swastika flag that had rippled from its top between 1941 and 1944.

  “In ’43, they killed twelve thousand Jews in this town. Shot them all. Terrible, terrible,” Reilly said.

  Swagger had no comment. There was no comment to be made.

  “Then in ’44, when the Russians were pushing the Nazis out of Ukraine, this is where they came to nest as a last stopping point. Groedl’s Reichskommissariat office was here.”

  It was near nightfall. They’d returned from Yaremche and were now in Ivano, checked in to the Nadia Hotel, and out for a walk, looking and trying to imagine the Nazi banners, the Kübel and the Horch cars, the ranks of black-uniformed SS creeps, the dowdy civilians of the Reichskommissariat who had administered lebensraum for their leader, all of the theater of history.

  “Want to go in?” she said.

  “Don’t see no point.”

  “I understand. I don’t want to go in, either.”

  “We have to go back to Yaremche. Walk that town site more, get up on the mountain trails. You have hiking boots?”

  “Yes, and you still have to tell me where she got herself a new rifle.”

  “As soon as I know, you’re number one on the list. Dinner?”

  “Always.”

  They walked the few blocks to what was now Independence Street, which had been Stalin Boulevard, Hitlerstrasse, Warsaw Avenue, and Budapest Utcanev in its time, and found a sidewalk café among the many that had turned the now-pedestrian boulevard so pleasant.

  They ate meat, somewhat silently.

  “You know what?” said Swagger. “I ain’t got no ideas at all.”

  “Let’s do a game called ‘know/assumption,’ okay? What we do know against what we think we know.”

  “Sure. Know Mili disappeared in July 1944. Assumption: She was sent to Ukraine on a special mission, according to other sniper Slusskya. Assumption: Guy who sent her had to be this Krulov, Basil, Stalin’s Harry Hopkins, because he had the power. Known: Nothing. All circumstantial. Known: There was a Nazi ambush of partisans in the Carpathians above Yaremche, killing a lot, recovering weapons. Assumption: the partisan unit was betrayed; that’s based on my interp of the Twelfth SS war diary, which documents too big a haul for the meet-up to be by chance. Assumption: Krulov betrayed her. Because he was the only guy capable of betraying her, being the biggest guy on board. He was also the only guy capable of erasing her records in Russia, with the clout to have them erased in Germany, independently of each other. No motive yet. Next assumption: She escaped. Next week or so, nothing. Know: July 26, 1944, day big Russian offensive kicks off. Know: There was an atrocity in Yaremche, one hundred and thirty-five people killed. Assumption: That was retaliation for what we think was an assassination attempt, unsuccessful, on Groedl’s life. Assume Mili was killed or captured and later killed. Know: Germans hit the road, Groedl and the Police Battalion assholes were—okay, here’s something. I got something.”

  “Let’s hear.”

  “Krulov. Who was he? What happened to him? What would his motive have been? Maybe that’s where we ought to go next. Can Will handle that?”

  “I see nothing wrong with that, except that if I give him Krulov to investigate, he will divorce me. He does have a real job, you know.”

  “He’s a pro. Won’t faze him in the least.”

  “I’ll point that out to him tonight in an e-mail.”

  They paid and got up and headed down the street toward the Nadia. The town was pleasant, pinkish Georgian buildings, dapples of light overhanging the street of walkers, the cafés abustle. He thought of beer. Not a good idea. He turned elsewhere in his ruminations.

  It was a blur, the rush of darkness, maybe a little noise announcing acceleration, but somehow he picked it up in his peripheral, got a hand on her to pull her back and pivoted, all this in some kind of supertime where he hadn’t been in years, and then the car hit him.

  CHAPTER 18

  Town Hall

  Stanislav

  JULY 1944

  As instrumentality,” said Dr. Groedl, “I find it uninteresting. Guns have never particularly inflamed my imagination. I suppose the meaning is that she is now unarmed, she will need to seek another rifle, and this might be used against her, is that so?”

  “Yes sir,” said Captain Salid.

  The senior group leader–SS was holding the Model 91 rifle with the PU sight affixed by means of a solid steel frame that held the optic tube to the axis of the bore.

  “I would imagine ours are more graceful, more modern. It is my understanding that this weapon is over fifty years beyond its design, is that true?”

  “Yes sir. It was adopted by them in 1891.”

  “So it was already fourteen years old at the time of the RussoJapanese war,” said Groedl. “Please explain to me why we are losing to people as technologically inferior as these.”

  “There are so many more of them, sir. That’s all.”

  “All right, good point. We have the best machine guns in the world, and we can’t kill them fast enough even then.”

  As happened so frequently, Salid was not sure if a response was required; he didn’t know the etiquette here, another function of his exoticism among the rigorously rational, cold-blooded Aryans.

  “All right,” said the doctor, having lost all interest in the rifle, “data. Numbers. Please, precision in all, as I have said to you before.”

  “Yes, Dr. Groedl. In the ambush, twenty-four male and eleven female bandits. Then in six villages, ten hostages apiece. The villages were those along the Yaremche road through the mountains that have trails leading up to our ambush zone. We believe there were several survivors who would naturally turn to the villages for some kind of shelter. We further believe that we arrived before any survivor and established by example a serious argument against assisting them.”

  Captain Salid was nervous. He was positive his ambush had been a success, but he was afraid the escape of Die weisse Hexe would count against him, when clearly it was not his fault. It wasn’t even certain the woman was in the column, and no witnesses were alive to testify. Alas, none of the female corpses suggested unusual beauty.

  The doctor of economics wrote down Salid’s figures in a little book, his concen
tration complete. After a bit, he turned from his desk and slid his roller-borne chair a bit to the right, turned to a calculating machine on a worktable. He bent over it, punching the keys, and finally cranked the lever, unspooling, accompanied by a drama of clackity-clacking, a long strip of paper, covered with blue figures. He tore it off and examined it closely. Data, data.

  “You are like a lion who feeds off the fringes of the herd,” he said. “As long as he doesn’t take above a certain replaceable level, his attacks are fundamentally meaningless and the herd hardly notices him. At some level, instinctual I am sure, every social unit, man or animal, fears its own extinction. That is, it fears reaching a level where there are not enough surplus females to renew at a certain predictable rate that year; at that point, the tribe, the pride, the swarm, the herd, the platoon, ceases to exist conceptually. Thus it cannot cohere, thus anarchy, dissipation, abandonment, and abrogation of the natural impulse. Anomaly.”

  Salid nodded.

  “The smaller village, Yasinia, is of no concern,” continued Dr. Groedl. “But the other five, especially Yaremche, are of concern because they are large enough, theoretically, to harbor secret sympathizers for the bandits. Are you following me, Captain Salid?”

  “Yes sir. But what I do not understand is whether you are pleased with my first operation or if you believe I have failed. I have to know what attitude to convey to my men, and I need to have a feel for what satisfies you.”

  “What is ‘pleased’? Who is to say what is pleasing and what is not? How does one distinguish the threshold between that which is pleasing and that which is not? I have no idea. I prefer to deal in data. It’s pure and clean.”

  “Yes,” said the captain.

  “It’s all science, math. That is the scientific basis of our race purification philosophy and it is moral, therefore, because it is mathematically—that is, scientifically—based. We do what the data commands. Do you see?”