Sniper's Honor Read online

  “Very good,” she said. “Now, Teacher, intellectual, tell me something.”

  “The tracks. The Germans brought up half-tracks—”

  “How do you know they were panzerwagens?”

  “I could see the tire tracks crushed in tracks of the treads. The treads broke the tire cuts, not the other way around, which mean the tires preceded the treads. Panzerwagens.”

  “Sd Kfz 251s,” she said. “A huge armored beast of a thing. Very hard to kill, with a forty-two usually mounted up top. I saw them all over Stalingrad. How many?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Three.”

  “I’m sure you’re correct. Anyhow, that is puzzling, is it not? Why bring the huge things, crush them through the forest, to remove a team that is very good already at moving through the forest?”

  “The answer would be not for the team. For something else. And what would that be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The women’s bodies.”

  “Exactly,” said the Teacher. “Yes, it has to be.”

  “They knew there’d be women. In the confusion of the fight, they couldn’t possibly take time to discriminate in their targeting. It’s hard to discriminate with an MG-42 roaring through a belt at a thousand rounds a minute. So they’d have to collect the women. Why?”

  She already knew the answer.

  The bodies were damaged by blast and burn and bullet strike. The features were blurred or uncertain. They had to examine them carefully, scientifically.

  She understood: They didn’t just know. They were looking for me.

  CHAPTER 15

  Yaremche

  THE PRESENT

  This isn’t right,” said Swagger.

  It was somehow fraudulent. The buildings were all Ukraine mountain-style homes where wood was the prevailing element, the roofs pitched high to shed snow, the houses themselves of stoutly jointed logs, all of it festooned with expressions of the self and clan in bright ornamentation, fences separating neighbor from neighbors quite sensibly, and the yards well tended. The culture was called Hutsulian, and this was Hutsulianism at its purest. Flowers were abundant, spilling every which way out of boxes at the windows, in beds along the sidewalks, climbing up trellises, but it all looked as if it had been built last week.

  “Are we in the Wisconsin Dells?” asked Reilly.

  Before them stood another iron man on a marble pedestal, not as big as several others they had seen, but again in ruffled greatcoat, heroic, holding a stylized Red tommy gun above his head and waving his unseen iron men forward. It said simply “Bak,” and under that “1905–1944.”

  “No,” said Swagger. “All this is recent-built. But this ain’t the Yaremche we came to see.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Reilly.

  “Well, we know the Germans burned the place down. So when they rebuilt it, I guess they rebuilt here much farther down the main road. The people who moved in probably weren’t the original people, who were all dead. So the new Yaremche is built for the convenience of everybody who don’t remember, not for the convenience of anybody who does. But the old Yaremche was built, what, a thousand years ago? In those days, they built the village near a river—no river here—and near the woods and the foothills, so if attacked, the villagers could get into the woods and escape or hide out, as well as see their enemy coming down the valley beforehand. So the Yaremche we’re talking about, it had to be a mile or so farther down the valley, toward the mountains.”

  He squinted, looking around. “See, it ain’t just that. It’s the land itself. The valley is wide here. She had to be within five hundred yards, and the nearest crests are half a mile to a mile away.”

  It was true. The town was situated on a series of valleys that ran along the River Prut, and at this spot, the valley had opened up.

  “We don’t know it happened here. We don’t even know it happened, period.”

  “She was a sniper. If it happened, she sniped him. Long shot, take the man down. He’s probably guarded, there’s no way she gets close enough to use a tommy gun or a grenade if he’s here. There was an atrocity here on the twenty-eighth, something set it off, there was a sniper in the area, there was an ambush, it all pretty much adds up. Except this place doesn’t add up.”

  “And the fact that the Germans recovered her sniper rifle so she didn’t have one makes it even more difficult to understand.”

  “I know, I know, but I can only figure out one damn thing at a time. Today I am figuring out where it happened. Maybe tomorrow I figure out where she got the rifle.”

  “Okay, how about this: I will feed you stupid questions. So stupid they get you even crankier. Maybe that way, you’ll stumble on a better idea.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay,” she said. “If it was your shot, how would you do it?”

  “I’d be in trees, overlooking. I could infiltrate through forest, find a lane through the leaves, look down, read the wind, build a position against a trunk, take the shot, then exfiltrate under the same tree cover. The Krauts couldn’t get their vehicles up the slope and through the trees, and I’d be gone by the time they climbed up with dog teams to track me.”

  “So it’s got to be somewhere else. Somewhere with high hills within five hundred yards, lots of forest cover.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Follow me.”

  They crossed into a souvenir shop—textiles, ceramic figures, photo albums, socks in bright patterns—and Reilly spoke to the lady behind the desk.

  After a while, she said to Swagger, “You were right. It’s up the road a bit. By the bridge over the waterfall. That’s where the village was until the Germans burned it down.”

  * * *

  They stood on the bridge. Fifty yards farther on, the River Prut pounded down a twenty-foot drop, throwing up a mist and creating a pulsing, wet roar. White foam burst from the wet rocks, and tumult ripped across the surface of the Prut where it settled. Ukrainians, in underwear, shorts, and swimsuits, sat on the rocks, enjoying the cooling spray. On either side of this picturesque little spot, at high ground along the banks, entrepreneurs had built more touristy bric-a-brac, a mock village of wooden booths where the usual crap—the same ceramic figures, the same textiles, the same socks, the same photo albums—was hawked at competitive prices. It seemed somewhat blasphemous, as it also marked the site of a massacre, but business was business, and the Ukrainians had a hard head for what was now as opposed to what was then. How much nicer if it had been a fallow field where high ragged grass blew in the breeze, the trees nearby also animated and rustling, their leaves shimmering in the sun, maybe a nice plaque commemorating the spot. But there were plenty of those, and the real estate here was too beautiful for a somber intrusion. Just stalls selling stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff, the universal stuff. A bluff carpeted in high pines loomed in one direction, but it was really the only elevation within shooting distance, except for, a thousand yards off, a mountainside, itself covered in the pines. It was too far.

  He stood, he looked up, down, sideways, front, and back. “She’d shoot from up there,” he said, pointing at the bluff. “He was down here, maybe on this bridge. The bridge would isolate him from his bodyguard. The range is no more than four hundred yards.”

  He stood, he looked at the trees on the bluff for a long time. “Okay,” he said, “I’m getting something.”

  “I just see trees.”

  “Yeah, just trees, but—but look at the colors. Do you see?”

  “Uh, green, followed by green, then more green, and finally some green. Is that it?”

  “Different tones of green.”

  She was silent. After a bit she said, “Yes. It’s like . . .”

  “Go on,” said Swagger.

  “What I’m seeing,” she said, “is that the green of these pines across the closest half of the bluff is somehow different. It’s almost like a line, bright one side, dull the other.”

  “That’s
it. What I’m seeing is that the trees on roughly half the bluff are somehow, uh, lighter. They’re not the dark forest green, they’ve got less density to the color, there’s more light, they seem almost lit up.”

  “That’s it. It signifies something. Newer, older, I don’t know, closer to water, in more sun, in more shade, something like that.”

  They completed the trek across the bridge, then took some wood-hewn steps down to the water’s edge and drew nearer to the Ukrainians in the water, whose children ran about eagerly, lost in games.

  “Does it give you the creeps?”

  “Thinking about what happened here, what the Nazis did, yes,” said Reilly. “Otherwise, no. It’s just a place. No signs of anything. Covered, gone, vanished. But your instincts are much better than mine. Maybe you feel something.”

  “Let’s not feel. Let’s look. Touch, rub, I don’t know, experience it really up close.”

  Swagger bent down. He stuck his fingers into the loam, probed, came up with nothing.

  She followed suit. She found nothing.

  They continued for half an hour. Nothing.

  “Well, maybe I’m full of crap,” said Bob. “Maybe—”

  But a child ran by them, trailing a fishtail of shedding water, one hand extended in triumph.

  “That kid found something.”

  They watched him head to a supine mother and father, pinkening in the sun on a blanket. They walked over, and Reilly spoke to them, discovering that the mother spoke enough Russian to get by.

  Reilly handed something to Bob. “She says the children find these things all the time.”

  It was black, half of it rusted or otherwise corroded away. Its remaining walls were paper-thin, the whole thing crumbly. But the rimmed head, where the brass was much thicker, was intact, and he turned it to read in the light. “I see a 5, a 17, an S97, and a D, circling the center, separated by segment lines.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The water must churn ’em up every so often. German production code. If I knew more, I could tell you the year and the plant. It’s a 7.92-millimeter cartridge casing. A machine-gun shell.”

  He thought a second.

  “Somebody did a lot of shooting here.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The Carpathians

  Yaremche

  JULY 1944

  Salid was a moral man. He understood obligation, discipline, obedience to God, cleanliness, hard work, the greater good, the greater cause of Palestine, of Islam, and he used those precepts as his guidelines.

  But he hid this behind an armor of diffidence and duty, and what he did appeared undisciplined. It was SS theater conceived to convey the impression of random brutality as a way of encouraging fear and thus cooperation. So while he walked among the ranks of assembled villagers, he pretended arbitrariness while looking for specificity. He required certain indicators.

  The first was nasal structure. Was the nose long, thickened, wide of nostril? Did it lead the face? Had it that prowlike profile so familiar from Hans Schweitzer’s chilling invocation on the movie poster for Der ewige Jude? Was the chin also small, behind the point of the nose? Were the lips thick? What about the skin? Was it sallow, yellowish, perhaps even Asiatic? And the hair, greasy, brushed back, contributing to the general verminlike profile so common in these cases?

  Since these people of Hutsulian ethnicity lived on mud streets in wooden houses under thatched roofs and worshiped at a crude Orthodox church, it was unlikely that any of them were Jews. But some carried the genetic strain. It could have gotten intermingled at any time since the medieval ages, as the Balkans, Ukraine, and Central Europe were a genetic cesspool, so corrupted by crossbreeding that all purity had been eliminated. Semitic genetic expression could emerge, strident and manipulative, at any time. As the hidden moral principle to all Scimitar actions, Captain Salid made the discriminations off of much experience, having acquired a fine eye for such matters.

  “That one,” he said to Sergeant Ackov, “and the boy.”

  “That one” had a bit of nasal bulge. Why take a risk? “The boy” had lively eyes, too lively for a dull nothing of a place such as Yaremche. You could see it in his eyes: defiance, intelligence, shrewdness, the defining Jewish characteristics. They had to be cleansed from the world.

  In the end, he settled on ten. Each had at least one prominent Jewish characteristic. He was well pleased. He had advanced both his causes, the immediate tactical and the longer-term geopolitical. It was a good day’s work. And it was only beginning.

  The ten were isolated at the riverbank, under the old suspension bridge. The waterfall continued its roar and splash. Above, on the plateau where the rude shacks of the village of Yaremche were gathered, peasants looked down. One of the panzerwagens bulled its way to the far bank and halted, overlooking the ragged formation.

  Salid felt they should know why this was happening. It was meaningless, for it didn’t matter and no one had bothered to explain to the Jews in Einsatzgruppen D’s pits why it was happening, but Salid wanted to cling to civil grace in spite of all the slaughter and violence of the war. It kept one’s mind clear. Maybe it was of more use to him than to them.

  He addressed them, unaware that they spoke Ukrainian, not Russian.

  “I know you are innocent, in the narrow meaning of the word ‘innocent.’ I know that you curse your luck, that you are bitter, that you do not see the larger picture. I know that you are frightened. Further, I do not think you subhuman. You are indeed human, not only in the biological sense of being able to procreate with other humans. That is why you are so dangerous and must be dealt with by the scientific mechanism of the Reich. I know you cannot see this and do not understand it, but it has to be. Your death is a sacrifice for the greater good of humanity.”

  “I have done nothing, sir, oh God, please spare me,” a middle-aged man cried from within the formation. Immediately two of the Police Battalion guards rushed over, clearly intending to smash him to earth for his insolence, but Salid, who understood the meaning though not the words, froze them with a gesture.

  “I explain to you. There are extremely dangerous people among the bandits in the mountains above you. They must be exterminated. We made a very good start last night, an excellent start. But it was not perfect. Some escaped. It is quite possible that they will leave their sanctuary and come to you for aid and sustenance. You must not even consider such a thing. To do so would doom your village. This is a fact I must impress upon you, for so many of you are slow and backward and incapable of learning such a simple lesson. I chose to do so with this demonstration. It is not meant to be cruel or humiliating. So your sacrifice may help ensure the survival of all those others who were not selected. When they see a partisan, they will refuse aid and report instantly to the first soldier or policeman they can reach. That way they vouchsafe the survival of Yaremche and all its villagers. You are serving humanity, sir. You are serving your village. You are serving the Reich. You should be proud to contribute.”

  He stepped back.

  In the armored hull of the Sd Kfz 251, Sergeant Ackov pressed the trigger of the MG42, which had already been laid on for the target zone. He fired for twenty seconds, about four hundred rounds of heavy 7.92mm ammunition. A blur of spent shells cascaded from the gun, and the gun itself, though restrained in the brace of its mount, bucked savagely in the drama of recoil and recovery. It was like some kind of hideous but brilliant industrial piston, manufacturing smoke, sparks, flame, and heat as it operated.

  Its stream of fire ate through the formation of hostages, seeming almost to swallow them in a melee of dust and noise. There was so much debris because, at that range, the high-velocity, high-energy bullets tore through the bodies completely and continued their downward trajectory into the earth, where each one kicked up a spurt of dirt that looked like a geyser. Taken collectively, the disturbed earth rapidly came to resemble a roaring cyclone.

  All the hostages—six men, two women, and two teenage b
oys—fell to the earth spastically, though since the sergeant was an excellent gunner, he kept the stream of fire below the necks of his targets, so the bullet damage was concealed by the peasants’ smocks and the copious blood quickly absorbed by the earth.

  “More medicine, Ackov,” said the captain.

  Ackov fired again. The dust danced in cyclonic disturbance as another 250 rounds pummeled the bodies.

  “Very well done,” said the captain. He turned. “People of Yaremche, learn from this. You must not assist bandit activities. The penalty is death, not only for you but for your wives and children. You will be wiped off the map if you do not comply. You do not want to be forgotten, like Lidice. For your own good, you must obey.”

  He gave the signal, and the men of Police Battalion remounted their three panzerwagens to move out. Salid felt he had done an exceptionally good job.

  He waited until his men had mounted the vehicles, then clambered aboard the lead panzerwagen. Ackov was there with the map.

  “Herr Captain, five kilometers down the road, through the pass called Natasha’s Womb, it’s called Vorokhta.”

  “On to Vorokhta, then,” said Salid, wincing, for it was beginning to rain.

  Four Thousand Feet Above Yaremche

  They climbed high, above the rain clouds. Beneath them, the world had vanished in a sea of cottony fog, penetrated only by farther peaks in the chain that stood out like islands of an archipelago. It felt safe, though they had no way of knowing whether it was. They found the mouth of a cave—the mountains were pocked with them—and slipped inside. It had to be several miles distant from the ambush site and several hundred meters above the line of the path.

  The cave was bigger than the last one and held enough room to sustain the three without closeness. The two men more or less disposed of fungus and spiderwebs and turned it marginally habitable for emergency duty. They settled in, the two city dwellers exhausted. But the Peasant was hardly able to sit still and soon left on a mushroom hunt.