Sniper's Honor

by Stephen Hunter

  “The flaw in the plan is the parachutists. I had nasty words with their oberfeldwebel over the issue of the execution of Von Bink.”

  “They will do their duty, I will see to that. I will have Muntz call and explain things to them very clearly. They will obey or they will be dead. That is the only option they have. And if they hinder you, then it will mean nothing to me or to the Reich if you execute them. I am not ordering you to do so; I am telling you that is your prerogative if circumstances warrant. You have wide latitude.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Then you take the Yaremche road through the mountain to the airbase at Uzhgorod, where that FW 200 awaits you and the White Witch. Then you go straight to Berlin.”

  “Sir, I’ll hold the plane for you if the Soviets have started their offensive.”

  “No, no. You must leave with her instantly. The woman is everything. She is everything.”

  * * *

  There was one last thing to do, and Groedl did it the next day. He spoke at length to Muntz, Brigadeführer of SS 12th Panzer and now, upon the death of Von Bink, commander as well of 14th Panzer and all the units under its umbrella. Muntz, later that afternoon, went to his communications unit and had the men reach Oskar, as the Green Devil position was code-named, and ordered the signals NCO to reset to a different, much less used channel. Once that was accomplished, he ordered Oskar Signals to locate Oskar Leader, Von Drehle himself. It took a few minutes, but then Von Drehle took up the microphone.

  The general explained that he had great faith in Von Drehle, even if he believed several of his men were subversive. He mentioned a particularly impertinent NCO under Von Drehle’s command. He would hate to order executions and would be far less inclined to do so if Von Drehle’s men performed their duty at Natasha’s Womb, especially in the matter of the woman sniper called the White Witch.

  He went on: “If you are successful, once she is turned over to Police Battalion, I will forget all about Bober’s intransigence. Moreover, I will personally intercede with the general staff and see you and your men given two weeks of leave, then a transfer to the Western Front, where you can rejoin Second Fallschirmjäger. Then, Von Drehle, find a nice American patrol to surrender to, tell them how you loathe the hated SS, and survive the war. Are you reading this, Major?”

  “I am, sir.”

  “Excellent. Do we have an understanding? You help me, I help you, we both help the Reich, and everything turns out for the better. The bandit woman is to be taken alive.”

  Interlude in Jerusalem V

  Certain things worked, certain things didn’t. It turned out that platinum as a catalyst was so widely used in the world that its name alone implied thousands of possibilities, some of them potentially lethal or at least weaponizable, some of them not so much. To plow through them and test them against a potential act-of-terror template would be a colossal waste of time. You needed two points to draw a line, establish a direction, a destination. One point indicated nothing except the universe around it.

  Routine low-level exchanges with other friendly intelligence agencies—and even some not so friendly ones, surprisingly cooperative with the institute—yielded nothing, either. That meant Nordyne GmbH was either harmless or so far below the radar that it had been expertly buried by the best pros in the business, but there was no other indication of professional involvement. The mere presence of armed guards, even if some were Islamic extremists who’d been to war against Russia, meant nothing. Whoever owned Nordyne GmbH may have been manufacturing lawn-mower engines with catalytic converters for the American market and wanted to protect his investment.

  All right, smart guy, Gershon argued with himself, why would he go to such lengths to camouflage his operation? Why would he locate it in a spot conspicuously close to Israel’s greatest enemy, an enemy that hungered for destruction and death, and yet at the same time, why would he seem to have—no independent penetration had yielded it—no connection with Iranian intelligence or Hezbollah, Hamas, or any of the world’s too many professional Jew-haters?

  On top of that, the report from Lausanne was that the “address” for Nordyne GmbH was a fraud, just a post office box of a franchise operation in a mall. There was no headquarters per se, yet somehow, from a certain Swiss bank, payments were regularly sent by wire to receiving entities.

  And—new element in the puzzle of the plant itself—why was there no outflow? If something were being manufactured, why was it not being shipped? Why was it linked to no distribution system, why was it unrepresented by a marketing department, why was it not publicizing its product at trade shows, whatever its trade might be? Why was it completely disconnected, as far as Gershon could tell, and that was pretty damn far, from any government sponsorship or even linkage? Its civic connections consisted of local property taxes paid promptly, water and electricity bills paid promptly, safety inspections passed, probably in the sense that someone “passed” someone else a couple of thousand rubles and the inspector went away happy, never having gotten past the cyclone fence and the gun muzzles of the Chechen thugs.

  It just sat there, doing whatever it did, going nowhere, seemingly producing no salable product. It seemed operational only at night, because an American satellite, otherwise picking up zero activity, managed to confirm an operating temperature at a certain sector of the plant of about 1400 degrees centigrade. Why did they need all that heat, or, since he knew nothing much about chemistry, maybe the question should be “Why did they need so little heat?”

  “Sorry,” said a professor at the university, “fourteen hundred centigrade is nowhere near the limit of industrial possibility in chemical manufacture. It’s not so hot, it’s not so cool. It’s just sort of in the middle.”

  “Which means it tells me—”

  “Nothing, except that somebody’s cooking something to make something else.”

  “I think that’s what we already knew.”

  “Now you know it even more so.”

  And that was the most satisfactory conversation he had.

  It didn’t help that Israel had no assets on the ground in South Russia. Moscow, St. Petersburg, yes, Volgograd, even beyond the Urals and in towns of special strategic value, yes. But way down south in the ass-end of Russia, near the Caspian, no way. And since the assets they did have at closest proximity—Odessa, Kiev, Lviv—were so well watched, it made no sense to send someone over from, say, the Odessa consul to check out the plant as a casual tourist. That would be sending SVR a telegram that the institute had something going on, was watching somebody, and who knew how SVR would react and how that reaction would mess things up.

  “We know they’re making something; we don’t know what. We know they haven’t shipped it anywhere. We know they’re close to Iran, a night’s voyage by freighter. We know they have deep pockets and are highly paranoid about security. We don’t know who’s paying.”

  “Gershon, what I don’t get is: they rushed, they rushed, they rushed. And now . . . nothing?”

  “Odd, isn’t it? Represents a kind of mind that wants everything under control, overthinks, overprepares.”

  “Gershon, you’ve just described the director of the institute, the prime minister, the entire cabinet and, God rest her soul, Golda Meir.”

  “I know. Psychology gets you nowhere in this game, because everybody in this game is already crazy, including me and Cohen. But especially Cohen.”

  So it was odd that Cohen came up with an idea. “Gershon,” he said, “considering your platinum mystery.”

  “Yes.”

  “If we’re monitoring the plant by satellite and secondary intelligence sources and our friends at Precious Metals Industry Reporter, and there have been no large-scale, industrial-appropriate raw materials shipments to the plant, then would it not seem possible that whatever else they’re using in their manufacturing process would be available locally? Perhaps that’s why they located there, because whatever else they needed was abundant, and anyone ordering large supplies o
f it would not attract suspicion.”

  “What a horrible idea,” said Gershon. “So stupid, so useless. I wish I’d thought it up.”

  * * *

  What was abundant in Astrakhan besides fish eggs? It turned out only gas and oil; the Caspian Sea was a vast body of water sitting on a concentration of unpleasant-smelling substances that were of extraordinary value in the world’s energy market. Pipelines already ran from Azerbaijan to Turkey; drilling stations already dotted the coastline. The spindles and turrets of refineries already rose against the sky, and noxious fumes already clung miasmatically to all nine ports that ringed the world’s largest lake. How the fish survived to lay strings of the little black eggs that people gobbled on wafers with champagne seemed a minor miracle, one that perhaps did not bear investigating too closely. The caviar still tasted great, and the oil and gas still powered many of the civilizations that flourished in the fertile crescent.

  Gershon ended up with a list of raw materials, chemicals, enzymes, compounds, end products, by-products, and waste products that such aggressive siphoning of the planet was known to produce. Natural gas alone was not an industry but a mother of industries: its product list included engine oils, industrial coolants, compressor oils, bearing greases, endless varieties of fuel and energy, fertilizers, fabrics, glass, steel, plastics (endless), and paint. It went on and on. My head, why does it hurt so? My indigestion, why does it burn so? It was too much stuff. It was as if the stuff had won. He, mighty Gershon, defeated by the abundance of stuff!

  Since it was late and Cohen wasn’t around to provoke him, he tried a last exercise, the dullest form of investigation known to man, requiring no IQ, no education, no sensibility for the game, no experience: the good old random stab.

  He went to his good friend Dr. Google.

  He entered: “platinum.”

  Then he entered the name of a substance that the Caspian was known to produce in copious quantities. The result, for minute after minute, clicking drearily into the night, was gibberish, nonsense, pointless.

  I must be cracked, he thought.

  If I am, it’s all right with me.

  He tried one more. What the hell?

  PLATINUM + METHANE

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, more gibberish until . . .

  What on earth was ANDRUSSOW OXIDATION?

  Another question for Dr. Google.

  Ultimately, in Gershon’s mind, Dr. Google, the world’s greatest spy, loafed and dithered, took time for a shit and a nice bicarbonate of soda, and then answered. It must have been quite obscure, because it took Dr. Google .0742 seconds to answer, instead of the average .0181. Reading quickly, Gershon learned that the Andrussow Oxidation seemed to be a process invented by a Leonid Andrussow at IG Farben in the ’20s that enabled methane (Caspian-abundant) and ammonia (Caspian-abundant) in the presence of oxygen (world-abundant) at a temperature of about 1400 centigrade over (imported at great cost and under serious security) platinum to oxidize, if he understood it, into something called hydrogen cyanide, sometimes called Prussic acid, which, when combined with a stabilizer and an odorant, became . . .

  He gulped, he swallowed, he reached for the phone to call his department head because the situation had just become an emergency and he wondered how soon it would become a catastrophe.

  The end result was Zyklon B, the killing gas of Auschwitz.

  Someone was making a lot of it.

  CHAPTER 45

  The Carpathians

  Above Yaremche

  THE PRESENT

  They climbed the scree, picking their way among lumps of rock, twisted juniper bushes, the occasional stunted and un-stunted pine, and at about the two-thirds mark, despair set in.

  “Suppose we get up there,” she said, “and there’s no cave. Then what?”

  “There’ll be a cave there.”

  “How do you know? Maybe the container is a mile away. She just carried the gun up here to get the thousand yards, shot it, zeroed it, and then walked the mile back.”

  “This was a good place to hide ’em. If they dug a hole, they had to figure out some way to mark it and register it on a map. This place, easy to ID, being at the top of the scree, and if you’re a young partisan, instead of two broken-down old cripples, it’s easy to get to.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said.

  I do, too, he thought.

  She fell twice, cutting her knee badly the second time. She had gone from gray to ashen to something like the color of wax. He helped her over some of the rougher spots, but it disturbed him that her fingers were cold to the touch.

  “How’s your hip?” she asked.

  “It’s fine, no problem,” he lied. His hip hurt like hell. It hurt more than his lungs did, but it felt better than his throat did; he could feel the gunk of phlegm drying into something like pottery on his lips. Then there was his elbow, which was bleeding again. Goddamn that bastard’s sharp teeth! Then he thought, I am too old for this shit, for about the thousandth time.

  “Maybe they’ll miss us,” she said. “Maybe they’ll keep going.”

  “They won’t. They have a dog.”

  “Oh, that’s right. That kid said so, didn’t he.”

  “They think of everything,” Swagger said.

  “Well, do me a favor.”

  “Sure.”

  “Please kill the dog,” she said.

  “Ain’t the dog’s fault. He’s just trying to make a living.”

  “Kill him anyway. On general principle.”

  It was rocky and slippery, and the incline decided to get serious at a certain point and jutted more pugnaciously vertical. The new angle slowed them even more, but they never saw any pursuers. If there was a view—and there was—they didn’t see it. If there was beauty—and there was—they didn’t see it. If there was the same huge blue lake of Ukraine sky that overwhelmed the world out to the horizon anywhere you looked—and there was—they didn’t see it.

  “Maybe they’re not following us?”

  “Oh, they are. They won’t let us see them. They will have reached the edge of the scree, hung back, and got us marked by binoculars. They’ll come up through the trees on the right, out of sight. Tougher climbing because there ain’t no handholds and the footing is much less stable, but they’re young guys.”

  They climbed, they climbed, they climbed. It ached, it hurt, it distracted, it disoriented, it robbed vision and imagination. Nearly everything hurt.

  “I can’t go much farther.”

  “You don’t have to go no farther. We’re here.”

  * * *

  Reilly lay against the incline, breathing hard, resting on what appeared to be the track of an old stony path, maybe centuries old, maybe trod by the original tribe of Russ a thousand years ago. She breathed, sucking in the air. She was covered in sweat and abraded in a dozen spots, all of which burned fiercely. But she looked and said, “I don’t see a cave.”

  Swagger collapsed next to her.

  “If there isn’t a cave here,” she said, “I’m just going to lie down until they come and shoot me. I can’t go another step.

  “Your body won’t let you give up. You’re too tough.”

  “I feel like a powder puff, I look like a homeless person, I hurt everywhere, and you tell me I’m tough.”

  “I’ll put a gun in your hand. Then you’re tough as any man alive. That’s why they call it the Equalizer.”

  “I don’t see any guns.”

  He pointed at the path. “Look over there.”

  About ten feet along its track, a groove had been cut into it, not more than six inches wide.

  “So?”

  “If she had to shoot downhill and wanted to do it from the cave, they’d have to do something about the path. See, it’s in the way of the line of sight to the boulder they shot at. So they somehow dug, cut, scraped that groove in it so she could get the angle downslope a thousand yards.”

  “They?”

  “Sure. She had friend
s. I don’t know who, I don’t know how. But someone had to know these rifles were here, someone had to guide her to them. Maybe another survivor of the ambush. We’ll never know, but someone got her up here, someone dug that groove. And I’m guessing someone went back down and called her shots for her as she zeroed. She’d shoot and someone would mark the spot. She’d adjust, shoot again, and he’d mark that spot. Until she was on. It was a team effort.”

  “Someone who—”

  “Someone who knew what he was doing, I’m beginning to feel. Come on, let’s see what we done dug up.”

  He lifted himself, went to the spot where the groove was located, turned to the scrub vegetation clustered behind it, pulled out a scraggly bush, and started to kick at seventy years’ worth of dirt and sediment. Dust flew, both coughed, and it did their lungs no favors, but in a little while he had opened a man-sized hole.

  “You’re a genius,” she said.