Sniper's Honor Read online

  What the hell? Never in hundreds of e-mails had the subject of firearms come up, and maybe that’s why he liked her so much. The possibilities more or less tantalized him, and for a time he thought it was a kind of joke. But no, she wasn’t joking about the Mosin.

  He played it straight, or as straight as he could with Reilly.

  It’s the rifle used by Russian troops from 1891 until, roughly, 19AK-47. Long, ungainly thing, looked like something the guards would carry in “Wizard of Oz,” but solid and accurate. Bolt action. Does Reilly get bolt action? “Handle” which has to be lifted, pulled back, pushed forward, then down again to fire. I could tell you why but you’d forget in three minutes. Trust me. It’s 7.62mm in diameter, shooting a cartridge that’s confusingly called “Mosin-Nagant 7.62,” though sometimes they add a “54,” which is the cartridge length in mm. Roughly a .30-caliber military round, the equivalent of our .30–06, not that Reilly knows what a .30–06 is. It was OUR WWI and II cartridge. What on earth does Reilly need with this information? Is she going on a reindeer hunt? Good eating I hear, especially the ones with the red noses.

  He waited, but the clarification was not forthcoming. Soon it was time to ride, and he got his lanky frame up, went to the barn, saddled up a new roan called Horse—he called all his horses Horse—and rode south, then west, then north again, three hours’ worth. It felt good to have Horse under him and the rolling meadows around him and the purple mountains on three sides blurring the horizon. You couldn’t feel sorry for yourself on a horse or you’d fall off. It was hot and sunny and that always improved his mood, and it helped that his imagination locked itself on the Mosin-Nagant and reviewed what he knew about it, what he thought he knew about it, what he assumed he knew about it. He knew, for example, that he had been shot at with it. First tour, platoon sergeant, Vietnam, 1964–’65, the later flood of Chinese AKs hadn’t begun so the VC were using anything they could get their hands on, and the Mosin from the Chinese was prominent. But they learned their lesson fast, realizing that the old warhorse, with its five-round mag and its slow bolt, was no match for the M1 carbines the southerners used, nor his own M14. Slowly the AKs and the SVDs began coming in, and you could feel the guerrillas learning the new tactical possibilities of the modern weapons. Good news for them, bad for us.

  He got back, put up Horse, took a shower, and repaired to his shop. Current project: a round called 6.5 Creedmoor, from the Hornady shop, super-accurate. Possible future sniper round? That filled his mind, as it always did, saved him from the self, gave him something to plan and anticipate. He reloaded 150 cartridges, using five different weights of powder (varying by .1 grain); he’d shoot groups to find the best through a custom 6.5 a gunsmith in Redfield, Washington, had built for him. Then he showered, greeted Jen, who had arrived, and they had a light dinner. He didn’t get back to e-mail until the sun had fallen.

  Reilly again.

  Okay, that’s the rifle, but what about in conjunction with something called a PU 3.5? What would that be? What place is this, where are we now?

  He got the ref to “Grass,” part of his World War I project from years back. Carl Sandburg: “I am the grass; I cover all. Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. . . . Two years, ten years and people ask the conductor, ‘What place is this? Where are we now?’ ” She didn’t know how appropriate it was and how not a joke.

  The place is sniperland, the place is Russia, and I can even tell you the time: 1939–1945. That’s the Soviet telescopic sight they mounted on their Mosin-Nagants, turning it into what I believe was a pretty good sniper rifle. The Russians really believed in the sniper as a strategic concept and sent thousands of them out against the Nazis. Much killing. The scope (3.5 means a magnification of 3.5) was solid, robust, primitive, nothing like the computer-driven things we have today. Range probably limited to under 500 meters and more usually way under that. Anyhow, if you see Mosin-Nagant 91 in conjunction with PU 3.5 in conjunction with any year between ’39 and ’45, you are most definitely in the sniper universe. I have to ask: What is Reilly doing in the sniper universe? It ain’t her usual neighborhood.

  It didn’t take long for the reply. Five minutes.

  That helps a lot. Thanks so much. It’s beginning to fit together. As to why, well, long story, work-related. I’m on deadline now, get back to you tomorrow with a long explainer.

  So another full day passed, then at last came word from Reilly.

  Let me apologize now. It’s really dull. Nothing to get excited about, just a feature. They’re always interested in feminist heroes, you know, the crooked lib press pro-feminist anti-male meme and all that stuff, so I pitched something to them and they bought it, and it gets me off the *&^%$))&! Siberian pipeline beat. I was in the Moscow flea market a few weeks back and I bought a pile of old magazines. I do that, looking for story ideas. I got one from 1943 called Red Star, a war thing, all agitprop as hell, all the pro-Joe stuff to make you throw up. Anyway there were four women on the cover, arms locked together, all in uniform tunics festooned with medals. Three looked like Pennsylvania Dutch lesbian cow milkers but the fourth was—you didn’t hear this from me—really a doll. As in knockout. She just blew the poor other three gals away. I read the story and the four were Russian snipers. Many kills, as you say, in Leningrad, two in Stalingrad, one in Odessa and all this stuff about the Mosin-Nagant and the PU 3.5. Anyhow got their names and the looker was called “Ludmilla Petrova” and she was the Stalingrad babe. Hmm, new to me. So I Googled “Russian women snipers” and got all kinds of dope and names—4,000 snipers, over 20,000 Germans killed, that sort of thing—but not a mention of Ludmilla Petrova. So I looked into it more and more, and though the other three survived the war and got fame and fortune, communism-style, out of the deal, there wasn’t a whisper about Petrova, whose nickname, from the ’43 mag article, was “Mili,” not “Luda,” as Ludmilla usually yields. So I dug deeper and deeper and indeed, sometime in mid-1944 it seems, Mili just disappeared. Not only as a person but as a personage. She ceased to exist. In fact, I found several other copies of the Red Star photo but she’d either been cropped or painted out. The Stalin people disappeared her. It happened back then. Orwell, remember: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

  So now I’m interested. I’m poking around. Be neat to find out what happened to Mili, what she did to so infuriate the Red bosses that they redacted her from history. So that’s the piece, though I’m not having much luck with it, but in my dull Ohio way, I keep chipping away. I may have more sniper questions for you as I progress. Is that okay? Oh, and click on the attachment, I’ve scanned in that cover for you to see her.

  He did as instructed, looked carefully at the woman.

  Then he called his wife.

  “I’m going to Moscow as soon as the paperwork clears,” he said.

  Then he went to Amazon and bought about six hundred dollars’ worth of books on the Eastern Front.

  CHAPTER 2

  Moscow

  On the Way to Red Square

  JULY 1944

  I know it’s hard to believe, looking at me,” the major said, “but I am an expert on beauty.”

  Outside, the undamaged city rolled by, as the 1936 ZiL limo cruised down broad avenues under a scorching sun. Everywhere: neatness, tidiness, order, citizens about their business. Food seemed plentiful, the leaves of many trees rustled in a breeze, the sky was bright.

  To her, cities were landscapes of ruins, inhabited mainly by corpses and rats and scrawny men crusted in filth. Survival was figured in units twenty-four hours long. The capital, by contrast, lay unscathed, though a few bombs had fallen in long-ago 1941. The Germans had gotten within eighteen miles and then the winter arrived, assisted by the 15th Guards Army. Not so Stalingrad, where she had spent the full six months of the battle. It was hard not to hate Moscow. One hated all headquarters towns, it was the soldier’s right and could not be helped in any case. Its wholeness was off
ensive. But such is war. Some survive, soldiers or cities; some do not.

  “What is surprising,” he continued, “is that much beauty is banal. Yes, I know. An astonishment! Yet many a well-formed country girl is disheartened to discover how commonplace she is. When I was at Mosfilm—well, not professionally, but nevertheless there on semi-official business and not without influence, I don’t mind telling you, no, not without influence, I knew many key people. The point is, when I was there, every day, just like in Hollywood, beautiful girls from everywhere would show up. They believed their faces were their ticket to fame and, frankly, escape from the Motherland. Yet most ended up as prostitutes or mistresses. Do you know why?”

  If he expected an answer, she did not give him one. The one star on his shoulder boards said major, and the blue piping and blue visor on his cap said secret police, night visits, disappearances, NKVD, but his face said what so many men’s faces said: I want you, I need you, I yearn for, dream of, hope and plan for you. It was a familiar message, and she had heard it many times in many formats. But in the hierarchy of men and women, she was a thousand ranks above him, no matter that she wore the insignia of only a sergeant. By laws older than politics, she did not have to answer.

  Instead, she considered another matter. Was this about Kursk? Did he know? Did NKVD know?

  “Because the camera tells a truth,” he went on hopelessly. “Or rather, too much truth. It does not enjoy the commonplace and will not linger for long. It finds openness offensive. It wants to be teased, seduced, tricked. I don’t know why this is, but even among beauties, only one face in ten thousand has the features the camera admires. That kind of beauty is quite rare.”

  The car passed Lubyanka, where this fool presumably labored, and it was nothing but a huge block of concrete, nine stories tall, the color of a piece of cheese. But she didn’t see it. She saw Kursk. Burning men, burning tanks, a field of wreckage that seemed biblical in proportion, death in all its forms everywhere.

  She had done the wrong thing at Kursk. But it still felt like the right thing, try as she had to convince herself it had been wrong.

  Is this about Kursk?

  “You see, I mention this,” said the idiot, “because I feel that yours is that special beauty. Your eyes, though large and deep and firm of purpose and focus, are occluded. They do not give up their meaning easily but suggest careful consideration, seriousness of purpose, lack of foolishness. And your record itself speaks of lack of foolishness. Sergeant Petrova is not a foolish woman.”

  Another mile around the walled perimeter and at last the limousine turned left, through medieval gates, and onto the Kremlin grounds and the cobbles of Red Square. Though Moscow had never been truly violated, every one hundred yards or so on the broad parade ground, anti-aircraft guns pointed skyward, planted in nests of sandbags, and a fleet of barrage balloons tethered to their thousand meters of cable floated overhead, casting drifting blots of shadows. The faces of the Motherland’s great heroes hung from the buildings on immense banners, obscuring the architecture and suggesting the men were more important than the buildings. Comrade Stalin’s wise and benevolent features dominated, behind a mustache as large as a tank and eyes the size of a heavy bomber. Since he had murdered her father, she was not impressed.

  Now and then a Yak-3 pursuit ship howled overhead at three hundred miles an hour, on some training mission, for now the war was far away. The airplane reminded her of the one man whose face had expressed not want but only kindness, her husband, Dimitri, crashed and burned somewhere in Belarus.

  She blinked. She could not dwell on Dimitri. Or Papa or Mama or her brothers, Gregori or Pavel. Or Kursk.

  The car pulled to an entrance guarded not only by the anti-aircraft crew but by four men in tunics with chestfuls of medals, whose easy carriage of their tommy guns suggested much experience.

  “And so, my dear, I wanted to put it to you. If you let me, I can make certain phone calls on your behalf, arrange certain meetings. This war will not last beyond 1946, and with your record—I imagine the other girls who’ve performed as you have all look like peasant horsefaces!—and the right training, it seems as if you might have a future, a nice future, a future of travel, of luxury, a future no Soviet woman would dare dream of, it’s within your reach with my assistance, and you have only to—”

  “I am the sniper,” she said. “I want to be alone.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Moscow

  THE PRESENT

  It was the same city he remembered from a couple of years back: capitalism, dust, a throbbing rhythm, construction everywhere, Porsches and Beemers everywhere construction wasn’t, new skylines poking up all over the place, people in a hurry. He checked in to the Metropole, because he knew it, and had a nice room not far from the restored and gilded dining room and the ornate cage of the elevator.

  A shower, a nap, then another shower, and he met Reilly at a restaurant that specialized in meat, where they had meat appetizers, meat entrees, and—no, not meat desserts but some kind of cherry tart whose red custard looked like glistening protein.

  Same old Reilly. Smart, tart, and funny, she listened fully and considered an answer without any urgency to fill the air with noise, then came up, always, with the best one. She had an interrogator’s clear blue eyes that compelled confession, and a kind of secretly dry delight in the follies of the day. She saw through anything and everything.

  No hooch for a dry old coot, and finally, after chatter of children and possibilities, jokes about politics, newspapers, the insanity of the North Koreans, they got to business.

  “Why are you here?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “It always is, isn’t it?”

  “I saw something in her face I liked.”

  “She was beautiful, no doubt about it.”

  “Yeah, sure. But something else. Reilly, I want to know more about this girl. I really do.”

  “I used to think heroes were always an illusion, a PR stunt. But you proved me wrong, so maybe she’s not an illusion. Wouldn’t that be nice? Let’s go after her hard. Let’s find out what was done to her and why.”

  And by who? Swagger thought, though he didn’t say it.

  “Here’s today’s news. I’ve found a woman sniper,” said Reilly. “Very old, as you might imagine. She talks to me, but she’s in and out. I have trouble staying with her. And I really don’t know enough to engage her. Maybe if you came along, I could introduce you as a famous sniper, a comrade in arms, and if you asked her technical things, it would get her focused. What do you think?”

  “I can’t think of no better idea,” he said.

  * * *

  At ten the next morning, in the shadow of a vast building of no identifiable architectural style except to communicate mass—it was built by engineers, not architects, like so much of the Stalinist legacy—Swagger found himself with Reilly and Katrina Slusskya. Slusskya, in her mid-nineties, lived in a ward in this veterans’ home in a far Moscow suburb. She sat in a wheelchair under a birch tree, shielded from the sun, while the two Americans sat across from her, all of them drinking tea.

  Slusskya had a photo in her hands. When she was told that the Great Swagger was a sniper hero of America, she proudly passed it to him.

  He looked. It was clearly her, in some war year, beaming in pride. It was black and white, so the color was unknowable, but she wore a high collar similar to that of the Marine Corps dress-blue tunic, with a row of brass buttons down the front.

  “Look at her medals,” Reilly said. “She’s very proud of them.”

  An array of decorations hung on her left breast in the photo, under her square, earnest, duty-to-death face.

  “She should be,” said Swagger.

  “This man has medals, too,” said Reilly in Russian.

  Guessing the content, Swagger asked Reilly to add, “But not as many. You must be a true hero. I was just a lucky fellow. Can you ask her what the medals are?”

  Reilly narrated: �
�Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Lenin, the Order of the Red Banner, the Caucasus Defense Medal, two orders of the Red Star, and the Order of the Patriotic War.”

  “That’s a lot of combat she saw,” he said.

  “She says she’d do it again, not for Stalin, whom she loathed and is finally seen as the monster he was, but for Russia and its millions of good and decent people.”

  “I salute her.”

  The old lady smiled and reached out and touched his hand.

  “Okay, we’ll try shop talk. Tell her in Vietnam I worked with a spotter mostly. But the ranges were longer and finding targets more difficult. I’m wondering if, in the city battles, a spotter was necessary.”

  Slusskaya considered, then answered.

  “She says not only not necessary but not practical. We girls, she says, we were scrawny little rats and could squeeze into odd spots where no man could, and bend ourselves into positions no man could. In those circumstances a spotter would have been a hindrance. She also believes women have naturally more patient temperaments. She said she once waited three and a half days for a shot on a German colonel.”

  “She made the shot, I take it?”

  Slusskya tapped herself on her forehead to mark where she hit him.

  “The Mosin 91, did she find it an adequate rifle?”

  “She loved her 91. Later in the war, they tried to take it away. She was given a rifle of an automatic nature called an SVT-40, with a telescope. She didn’t like it as much. It squirted bullets, but of what use is that to a sniper?”

  “I agree,” he said. “I used a bolt-action.”

  “She said she had fifty-nine targets eliminated. How many did you have?”

  “Fifty-eight,” said Swagger.

  The old lady laughed.

  “She says that is a very good answer even if she bets you’re lying to be polite.”