Sniper's Honor Page 3

  “Tell her I’d never lie to a lady as sharp-eyed as she is. And I wouldn’t gamble against her, neither. She’d get everything but my undershorts.”

  Again she laughed.

  “She says you remind her of her first commanding officer. He was a wonderful man, very funny, very brave. Dead in Bagration. A great loss.”

  Swagger knew Bagration was the Russian offensive against Army Group Center in mid-1944, north of the Pripet Marshes, that drove the Germans out of Belarus.

  “I’ve lost many, too,” he said. “If you haven’t lost, it’s hard to understand how far the pain goes and how long it lasts.”

  She nodded, touched his hand.

  “In that war,” he said, “women were very brave.”

  “We were fighting to survive. Everybody had to fight. Even beautiful girls, who might normally marry a commissar or a doctor, they had to fight.”

  “I’m sure all the woman snipers were beautiful.”

  “That’s the story, at any rate. Myself, I was always a plain girl. I had no expectations and so no disappointments. I married a plain man and had plain children. All turned out well. Beauty, it can be a curse. Too much light is on the beautiful, too many are watching. Belayavedma was cursed that way.”

  She began to chatter on about this Belayavedma and Reilly lost the thread.

  “Bob, go to Petrova,” she said in English.

  “Ma’am, we want to remember all those valiant girls, especially one of them. My friend here wants to write her story. We believe she was killed. Beautiful girl, according to the picture. Ludmilla ‘Mili’ Petrova. Does that mean anything?”

  The old woman stirred, shook her head. She was clearly disturbed.

  “The names, they come and go. No, no Mili, no Petrova. I do remember a Ludmilla,” and from there she launched into a long story of the other Ludmilla, the not-Mili Ludmilla, and Reilly struggled to stay with her and couldn’t and soon was saying to Bob in quiet English, “I’m completely lost now. I thought we were in Belarus, but suddenly it’s the Baltics.”

  And on it went for another couple of hours, with Reilly and Swagger feeding her eager eye-cues and judging when to laugh by the tone and timing in her voice. Names came and went, stories mingled, battles were transposed. Reilly tried to keep up but couldn’t stay with it. But she heard more and more about this Belayavedma, who seemed to have come from nowhere.

  She disappeared after being sent to Moscow, the story went, and it was a third- or fourth-hand story, as Slusskya had never seen Belayavedma herself.

  “If she was as beautiful as I hear,” the old lady said, “a plain girl like me, I would have remembered it the rest of my life. But no, she was gone before I even became active.”

  “Do you have a year?” asked Reilly.

  “It’s all run together. My memory, it’s like I got hit in head by the bullet, not the German colonel. I can’t even—” She paused as some old thought poked her. “I don’t know why. Somewhere I heard someone say they sent Belayavedma to Ukraine and she never came back.”

  “When you say ‘they’—”

  “Bosses. The bosses ruin everything. We would have won the war fine without the bosses.”

  She told a long story about hiding in the trees while thousands of young infantrymen walked across a field into German fire and were cut down like hay. The boss kept sending them, row after row after row. At the end of the day, the field was strewn with bodies, all those fine young men wasted by this boss who wanted to impress his boss.

  She shook her head. “I am very tired now, my friends. Slusskya must sleep. It is not your fault, but I had forgotten all those young men, and now I remember them. I need to sleep again.”

  A nurse had been standing by and intervened to wheel Slusskya out, but not before she kissed each of them and grasped their hands with her firm old talons.

  They watched as she was pushed up the ramp and disappeared behind the doors of the bleak institution.

  * * *

  It didn’t happen right away. These things can’t be scheduled. But somewhere in Reilly’s mind the fog lifted and a shaft of light revealed that which was clear but not yet clear. They were in The Washington Post’s Chevy, driving back from their chat with the old sniper, trying not to get hit by moguls in Ferraris, when it broke through.

  “Belayavedma! Ah! No, no, I’m such an idiot, I forgot that there are no articles in Russian so there wouldn’t have been an equivalent to Die, as in Die weisse Hexe, the German nickname, remember, for Mili. But Belayavedma, it’s really belaya vedma, two words. The two words in English: white witch. That’s who she was talking about at the end.”

  “Not bad,” said Swagger, which was as close as he got to admitting admiration.

  “It was before Slusskya’s time,” Reilly continued, riding her insight to the end, “but it was part of the collective memory of female sniper culture, USSR, 1944 to ’45. The women would talk and tell stories that weren’t in the official record, pass them along, one to the other. There’s always a real history that never gets into the books or the newspapers.”

  “Okay, we have some testimony on where they sent her. Fragile, from memory, otherwise unvalidated, but nevertheless, a place to look at.”

  “Sure, we’ll check out Ukraine. But first let’s think about who would have the power to pull her from duty wherever she was in Russia, give her a special mission, and send her on it with the whole apparatus making it happen. Who would have that much power?”

  CHAPTER 4

  Moscow

  The Kremlin

  EARLY JULY 1944

  It was largely empty, like a museum, and her boots clacked against the marble tiles, echoing against the eighteen-foot ceilings. They must have polished the marble floors every night and dusted the pictures and statues of long-vanished gods. It still spoke of tsars and dukes, not commissars. At last they led her to a conference room; she entered to find three high NKVD officers sitting in awkward obeisance next to a man in civilian clothes who had the diffident posture of a duke among dungsweepers.

  “Krulov,” he said, rising and nodding, not extending a hand or any welcoming gesture.

  Krulov’s name conveyed enough information on its own. He was called the boss’s right hand, in some circles the boss’s steel fist. Where trouble lurked, Krulov was dispatched, with his sharp eyes and handsome features, with his brutal charm and steel will, and he handled whatever that difficulty might be, whether it was a hang-up in machine gun deliveries or the recalcitrance of a certain general officer in the Baltics. He was a fellow known to get things done.

  But she thought: Why would a big shot be so interested in a matter like Kursk?

  “Comrade Sniper,” he said, “I see from reports that your leg has healed, I see that you have been serving dutifully in a staff intelligence position under General Zukov for a few months as you healed, and he says extremely encouraging things about your heroic duty in the Stalingrad shithole. And he requests again your commission to lieutenant.”

  “The general has treated me well,” said Petrova.

  “He should. After all, you have killed several dozen of his enemies for him. Do you have an exact number, Comrade Sniper?”

  “No, sir. I never kept count.”

  “The reports put your score well over a hundred. I would have thought a competitive athlete such as yourself”—she had been a tennis player, a champion, a thousand years ago—“would like to mark her place against the others.”

  “It is death,” she said. “I don’t enjoy it. I do it because it helps the nation, it helps our leader, and most of all because when a German goes still through my sight, I know he won’t kill that boy I saw in the mess line this morning.”

  “Yes, it’s true and well put. It’s that boy, after all, for whom we are fighting.”

  The three officers nodded sagely. They had the blue NKVD piping on their tunics and appeared to be two colonels and a lieutenant-general. They had the uniform, they had the shoulder boards, on the
table they had the hats, all lined with blue. You could not miss it. But if you did, they had something yet more powerful: they had NKVD faces—she’d seen them in the the blocking battalions NKVD placed behind troops about to assault—which were blunt, sealed, small to the eye, and prim to the mouth. You did not want to stare at them too hard, however; as career secret policemen, they did not like to be stared at. In this circumstance their only task was to express ardent admiration to Krulov. After all, he could have them disappeared at the blink of an eye. What was more, everyone in the room, from Krulov himself to the sniper sergeant, knew this to be the case.

  Krulov lit a Maxopka cigarette from a red and yellow pack, taking his time as if to express the idea that the world waited for him, not he for it. When he had the cigarette lit and had exhaled a huge billow of smoke into the room, he stared at her directly. He wore a dark civilian suit on his beefy frame and a tie without color and too much design. Nothing fit because nothing had to fit.

  “Ludmilla Petrova, a hard question. I put it to you directly out of respect for your considerable accomplishments.”

  Here it came. Kursk at last.

  But then it didn’t.

  “In the matter of your father, I must ask if you have anger still, and if so, whether that might cloud your judgment.”

  Petrova kept her eyes hooded and noncommittal. The first idiot was right, that was a true gift. Her eyes expressed only when she wished them to. Others leak their emotions into the world without care or caution. Petrova showed nothing.

  “The state did what it thought was necessary,” she said, willing herself to suppress the memory of the arrival of the Black Maria in 1939 and the removal—forever, as it turned out—of her father, a professor of biology at the University of Leningrad. “I trust that it acted in good faith, in the interests of the people. Once the war came, I endeavored to serve the people totally. I allowed myself to fall in love for one week, and to get married. My husband went back to duty and died shortly thereafter. I will serve as long as I am physically able. My death means nothing. The survival of the people is what counts.”

  “An excellent response,” said the commissar, and his acolytes nodded. “Entirely fictitious, I am sure, but delivered with heartfelt if fraudulent sincerity. You lie well, and I appreciate the effort it takes. It’s not so easy, as any commissar knows. I’m sure your father’s opinions on wheat yield had their own logic, and he believed them sincerely, and whatever they were, they did not warrant the fate that befell him. A warning in his file, a withheld promotion, perhaps, but death? Such a pity. The regime has made many mistakes, even the boss himself will be the first to admit. But he hopes, and I do, too, that after the war, when we get everything sorted out, rectification of some sort can be made. In the meantime, though I know the wound to be still bitter, your patriotism is without question. Do any of my colleagues from the intelligence section have questions for Comrade Sniper?”

  Here it comes, she thought. Kursk at last. Then it’s off to Siberia for me.

  But the questions were few and mild, and Petrova handled them easily enough. Born Leningrad, 1919, happy, athletic child of a professor, then his arrest, then the war, then Dimitri and her two brothers in the first two years, her poor mother gone early to a shell during Leningrad’s siege, and her own condition, now stronger, the two shrapnel wounds having healed.

  Nothing about Kursk or her assignment to the Special Tasks Detachment.

  She did not let her eyes betray her.

  Finally Krulov seemed satisfied. Glancing at his watch, he signified that it was time to move on; he had his usual eighteen-hour day and dozens more duties before him.

  “Comrade Sniper, please open the folder before you.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Moscow

  Offices of The Washington Post

  THE PRESENT

  Here’s how I found this guy,” said Reilly, sitting at her office computer in the annex to her apartment, both belonging to The Washington Post. “I Googled ‘Stalin’s Harry Hopkins.’ Up comes the name ‘Basil Krulov.’ I’ve checked into him. Of Stalin’s intimate circle, he is the only one who seemed to have the power to designate missions like that. He was Stalin’s troubleshooter, the way Hopkins was FDR’s.”

  From his long-ago immersion in the events that put his father on Iwo Jima in February 1945, Swagger knew of Hopkins, one of the powerful men who made—in good faith, it was hoped—the decisions that left the virgin boys dead in sands and warm waters all across the Pacific.

  “It makes sense,” said Swagger. “You need a guy who has the authority, can cut across service lines and bring people together who normally would never find each other in the swamp of a capital at war. He was the go-to guy. He had the power. He could make things happen. But his presence makes this thing all screwy.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “They didn’t operate that way.”

  For all their espionage experience and all their espionage success, the Russians didn’t do special ops in the classic sense of putting trained operators far behind enemy lines. They didn’t need to. The war, after all, was fought mostly on their territory through 1944. And in all that conquered territory, there were dozens of partisan units, cells, individual operators, all that, already there, so in any given locale, they had people on the ground and solid contact with them. So they never had to put together a crew, even one person, move him, her, it, a thousand miles and insert him, her, or it. But, Swagger reasoned, the only rule is, there are no rules. If they sent Mili to Ukraine, it would have been so far outside of normal operating procedures, so unusual, so much in the way of running into resistance from all the players, that it would have to be a guy with juice to make it happen, and that had to be Stalin’s Harry Hopkins.

  He summed it up for Reilly, who nodded and moved on to background Krulov for him: Second-generation Soviet official. Born in 1913. His father was a Soviet trade official to Germany in the late ’20s and early ’30s.

  “Spy?” Bob wanted to know.

  “Sure. So Krulov actually grew up in Munich, and attended schools there, before Hitler took over. His dad, meanwhile, tried to build up trade relations but was probably really coordinating with the trade unions and the considerably large Communist Party in that part of Germany, until he was kicked out when the Nazis took over and began their purges with the German Communists. Krulov was a genius student with a gift for organizing, helped enormously by his father’s connections, joined the Politburo in ’36 and by ’38 had caught Stalin’s eye. During the war he was indispensable. He traveled with the boss’s orders to all the generals, to all the fronts, and he had considerable success after the war. He might have even been general secretary after Stalin, since Khrushchev liked him, but he seemed to fade from sight. He lost power, interest, I don’t know, and he faded from view. You could say he was disappeared.”

  “I guess he stepped on some toes when he was Stalin’s boy, and once Stalin was gone, whoever owned that foot, he stepped back. So let’s stick on Krulov and ride him to the end of the trail.”

  “So,” said Reilly, “have you any idea why Krulov sent Mili to Ukraine?”

  “Sure. Someone needed killing in a badass kind of way.”

  “But Ukraine,” Reilly pointed out, “although largely free of Germans by July ’44, had been a terrible battleground for three years. The Germans had literally killed millions. So among all these murderers, who could the number one murderer be?”

  “Another thought. The Reds had partisans in the Carpathians, in Ukraine, where all this takes place, right? So why fly a gal in from Stalingrad or wherever she was after Stalingrad when they could just order the partisan troops to attack the guy and kill him that way?”

  “He was heavily guarded?” asked Reilly.

  “Exactly. Any kind of straight-up attack was bound to fail in a heavily militarized zone. But she’s a sniper. One of the best. She kills people from a long way out, off in the high grass. She might be able to nail him out to, sa
y, five hundred meters. That might be the only way to get him.”

  “That would make him a Nazi hotshot, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hmmmm.” She went to Google and typed in “Nazi Official Ukraine 1944.”

  Click.

  They watched as the screen shimmered and blinked and then reappeared with the first twenty-five of 16,592 hits. The same name came up twenty-one times in the first twenty-five.

  “Groedl,” said Swagger. “Now who the hell is Groedl?”

  CHAPTER 6

  Stanislav

  Town Hall

  JULY 1944

  For a god, he was a pudgy little man. His face wore too much flesh and hung too loosely on his skull. His eyes drooped, his cheeks drooped, his lips drooped, his mustache drooped. He wore steel-rimmed glasses so thick they magnified eyes that were otherwise wan and pale, bloodshot from late nights.

  In personal tastes, he was diffident, as if in perfect match to that fallen face and the fallen body that supported it. Though by rank an Obergruppenführer-SS—that is, in the weird orthographics of that organization, senior group leader SS—and entitled thereby to wear the glamorous black with the silver double-lightning flashes and so many other of the gewgaws of decoration, insignia, and embroidery of the Armed Guard, he instead wore an undertaker’s shapeless dark suit and black shoes in need of polish. He looked like a professor of economics, which he was.

  It wasn’t reverse elitism; he wasn’t saying to the world, “I do not have to play the game of the uniform and so vast is my power that no one dare comment upon it.” No, it was the way his mind worked, seeing only essentials. If you asked him whether The Leader, at their last meeting, had been wearing uniform or suit (it changed daily, depending on The Leader’s mood), he would not know. If you asked him five seconds after he stepped out of the meeting, he would not know then, either. However, if you asked him what The Leader had said regarding Hungarian troop deployments in support of Army Group North Ukraine in the Belarus region in July, he would be able to tell you to the detail, for he had an extraordinary memory. He forgot no data. Everything figured into his decisions, every last mote of data, every report ever sent him, every file he ever consulted, every word he ever wrote. The universe was recorded on paper, in figures and in estimates. Actual flesh itself, in the form of human beings, was untrustworthy and could usually be ignored, with the exception of his beloved wife, Helga, thankfully returned to Berlin, and his beloved dachshund, Mitzi, who had accompanied Helga.