“Okay,” said Swagger, pulling around a gas tanker that placidly belched black exhaust into the air, getting his molars loosened for the efforts as he bounced the car through trenches and gullies cleverly inscribed in the road surface while the dust spat up behind him, “maybe the offensive is an explanation. At ten A.M. on the twenty-sixth, the Russian artillery kicked off and the Germans ran like hell. The Russians walked into Stanislav the next day and had pushed the Germans to the Carpathians and almost out of Ukraine except for the sliver that contained Uzhgorod, on the other side of the mountains. Hard to keep records straight in all the hubbub.”
“They had time afterward.”
“Okay,” said Swagger.
“So what we have here is an unusual circumstance where both the Russians and the Germans have wiped information off the record, independently of each other. Someone ordered this. Whoever he was, he had juice. He had power. He had influence. His position was very important. If he’s a German mole inside Stalin’s circle, he’s a man of high power, a commissar, Stalin’s boy, whatever, so he could order the eighty-sixing of Petrova from Russian sources, but he hates the idea that her tale still exists in one other place, that being the German records. He knows that after the war, it might be checked and give him up. So he explains to his Abwehr contact or his SS guy or whatever agency was running him, he explains that for his own security, the results of what he has brought off, which infer his existence, cannot be recorded. Again, he’s a big guy, get it? He’s a bigfoot, and what he doesn’t quite get is that erasing his footprints doesn’t leave nothing, it leaves an erased footprint, which can be read almost as well as the footprint itself.”
“Basil Krulov, Stalin’s Harry Hopkins. Since he’s the only big guy on the board, you’re saying it had to be him. That’s a giant assumption.”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense if you look carefully at it.”
“Does it? What about motive? This guy is Stalin’s right-hand man. He’s one of the most powerful men in his country. He’s got to expect that once the war is over, he’ll be even bigger. He’ll have power, love, and a mansion. So why is he risking everything to rat out his own folks to the Nazis?”
“He was in Munich, remember. Maybe the Nazis got a picture of him sucking something he shouldn’t have been sucking in a public urinal.”
“Possible. But… you’re forgetting. He’s real smart. That’s why he gets so high so fast. He ain’t a likely candidate for that kind of trap. And if he got into it, he is a likely candidate for getting out of it. So whoever the traitor is, he had to really want to be a traitor. He was in the most screwball paranoid place in the world, the Kremlin under Stalin, where thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands, get wiped out for the merest whisper of a suspicion.”
“Motive screws up everything,” said Reilly. “Why can’t this be a movie? Movies forgot about motives thirty years ago!”
CHAPTER 14
Yes, there were rifles, almost thirty of them. But all the bolts had been removed. They were worthless. Her sniper rifle, with its beautiful scope, was also gone, a German trophy instead of her head. There were no PPSh’s, as the Germans prized that sturdy peasant submachine gun and snatched it up whenever they could. The Germans, in their methodical way, had been very thorough, leaving no grenades, no bayonets or knives, no pistols. The bodies, twenty-four of them, lay in a neat double row alongside the path, where they’d been dragged. Most bore the violence of modern small-arms trauma, some horribly, some not so horribly. They had been covered with lime for some reason, as if to shield the forest from them and not them from the forest, but it had worked, and in the intervening night and day, no scavengers had come to enjoy the meat of the predator’s kill.
“Bak is not here,” said the Teacher.
“That is one good thing.”
“He escaped. I would say it looks like a good ten or so made it away.”
“No,” said the Peasant through the Teacher. “You miscount, comrade. The number seems so small because there are no women’s bodies here.”
“The women’s bodies have been removed?” asked Petrova.
“It would appear so.”
“Why, I wonder?” she asked. “It’s not like the Nazis have a well-known respect for females. Usually they rape before they murder.”
The glade had a haunted feel to it. Now it was restored to the natural order, the white pines tall and majestic, the ground cover curly with small green leaves, the carpet of needles thick everywhere. But a tang of the fired gunpowder lingered in the air, perhaps to be driven away by the rain that threatened. Spent shells lay everywhere, as the fast-firing German guns ate ammunition voraciously. A small non-coniferous tree, close to an M24 blast, had been sheared down the middle, and already its leaves were beginning to brown. The wagon, on its side, lay riddled, almost comically shredded, as if by termites. A touch and it would disintegrate. The poor horse lay in its halter, its guts ripped open, its head at a grotesque angle. It had died kicking and neighing. Other horse carcasses, many split and spilling tripe, lay haphazardly about.
“Look hard, think, and come back to me, each of you, with a report.”
“A report on what?”
“On what happened here. Why, how? Give me interpretations I can use. Now, fast, we don’t have too much time before the rain, and I want the Peasant hunting mushrooms before that.”
“Yes, comrade.”
Each man did as he had been ordered, walking the ground of the kill zone back and forth, putting a great effort into it. In time they rendezvoused where she sat under a tree, not far from the wrecked wagon and the spot where the knifer had almost killed her before someone blew his brains out.
“It was a very good ambush,” said the Peasant. “These soldiers knew their business. That’s why we didn’t hear a thing until it was too late. I noticed a scarf tied to a tree at the halfway point, on the far side of the path, which was the marker for the rear machine gun so that it would not fire into the unit’s own men.”
“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?”