“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.
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.
In a few hours, he returned. He had an armful of the dry dead-white things, clusters of a Ukrainian berry that was small, red, and sweet, even a dead rabbit.
“Very good work,” she said.
This pleased the Peasant, who recognized the tone of warmth and reported in Ukrainian, which the Teacher dully translated. “He says he set ten snares,” he reported. “Tomorrow, first thing, he’ll inspect them. Rabbit tomorrow, he is sure.”
“Do the Germans patrol this high?”
“No. Not really, not aggressively,” said the Teacher. “Come, look, I’ll show you.”
He led her out. At the mouth of the cave she could see the reality of the Carpathians: it looked like an ocean of green, that is, rippled with the ups and downs of capricious elevation, dozens of carpeted peaks in the three- to five-thousand-foot range, as random as waves, seemingly endless. It was all tall white pines, their soft, short needles each catching a speck of light, so that the whole mass seemed somehow alive with illumination as the wind animated them.
“It’s a big place,” said the Teacher. “You can see why the Germans have no real need to conquer it. Controlling the lowland is enough for them.”
He pointed, and indeed, if she followed his angle, she saw what looked like a cut through some of the farther valleys.
“A road?”
“Yes, the only one through from Yaremche to other, smaller villages called Vorokhta, Yasinia, and Rakhiv, ultimately Uzhgorod. It’s the only road through the mountains south of Lviv. If the Red Army attacks in force and the front collapses, the Germans in Stanislav may flee down it to get through the mountains to their next line of defense. So they patrol the road constantly, because it will have to be kept open when the day arrives. But they seldom come this deep in unless they’re acting on very specific intelligence. So we are safe.”
“Enjoy your mushrooms, comrades,” she said. “We have to move before the Red Army attacks, or the prey may scamper. I’m not going to live on fungus and rabbit and sleep in a hole without at least killing the SS bastard for my troubles.”
Interlude in Tel Aviv I
You hunt them in the jungle of stuff. Any stuff. Commodities, derivatives, cash transfers, currency manipulations, oil futures, pork (pork!) futures, blood diamonds, anywhere stuff is exchanged for other stuff.
Gershon Gold knew the game, but you’d never guess him a hunter from the outside. He was in his mid-sixties, tending toward weight, very much commercial class of Israeli, a businessman, a financial planner, a retailer, what have you. He wore slacks and open-necked sport shirts, some of them attractive, most not. He wore square-framed black plastic eyeglasses, a Rolex knockoff (why spend all that money for a watch?), once combed his gone-to-gray hair over to the left, though of late had gone with more of a straight-back Meyer Lansky look that earned him all manner of ribbing from friends and wife. He liked black loafers with both wing-tip perforations and tassels. Of glamour, élan, pizzazz, grace, beauty, he had none, unlike the young Mossad high-speed operators who went in with blackened faces in camouflage tunics, suppressed Tavors at the ready. He was no Israeli fighter jock, those keen-eyed, Nomex-clad F-16 predators who prowled the skies, could down any MiG or put a rocket in a bull’s-eye from so close to the deck that the engine blasts riled up the dust.
“Gershon, watch your calories,” was what his wife yelled to him every morning as he left his snug bungalow in Herzliya, the northern suburb of Tel Aviv, for the four-minute drive to what to him was known as the Institute while the rest of the world called it Mossad, also in Herzliya. It was a complex of buildings dominated by a black glass cube nine stories tall. It was full of cubicles, and Gershon’s was on the third floor, with a window that looked out to the sea a few miles away, though the view was better from the upper floors, which he knew he would never see.
The third floor was the Anti-terror Section, and his subdivision was Economic Intelligence. In other words, the theory and practice of stuff.
For eight, sometimes ten, sometimes twenty hours a day, he methodically searched for stuff, and it was why he was as much a hunter as the special-forces op or the fighter jock. He lurked in the fringes of a thousand or so markets that could be monitored from cyberspace. The price of coffee in Jakarta, the fall of the yuan in China, the peach-harvest projections in Azerbaijan, the impact of Schwinn’s new “comfo-bot-m” seat on the bicycle market, particularly as it presaged Schwinn’s controversial decision to target-market the aging baby-boomer population, the cost of an RPG-7 in open trade in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan. That kind of stuff, all kinds of stuff. Melons, tennis balls, grenades, infrared sighting devices, Frisbees (a comeback? looked so for a bit, but today’s reports were depressing), Maytag dishwashers in Kuwait, American varietals in the South of France (taking coals to Newcastle!), Duncan yo-yos in South Korea, black-market Duncan yo-yos in North Korea.
There was nothing arbitrary in his nosiness. International Terror fed on stuff. It needed, no matter the perpetrator, the ideological fervor or bent, a constant influx of money to keep itself on track. Money for training, money for travel, money for bribery, money for expertise, money for food and shelter; everything cost, and like General Motors, the conglomerate that was International Terror — he called it InterTer, Inc. — had been hurt badly by the recession, so it was ever on the hustle for a sugar daddy.
Any time there was an aberration, a seeming random happening outside the parameters of the established, it was an indicator that someone was moving product somewhere in some market that would result in a payoff of stuff that would be translated into currency that would purchase plastic explosive, 5.45x39mm ammo, RPGs, or even more efficient and sophisticated instruments, electronics, missiles, long-range radios, artillery, atomic weapons, anything for the destruction of fellow humans. That aberration had to be looked at, analyzed, parsed, and evaluated. Almost always it was nothing, but nobody could be sure it would always be nothing, and so the game went on, 24/7, the world over.