He left her on the road, churned ahead, driving into the strange city. Ha ha, there was the Easter-egg musuem with the giant Ukrainian egg in front of it. At least he got to see that.
He came to a large road, seemingly leading out of town, and without the faintest idea, pushed on, sailing along, as fast as he could — traffic was thin — but he tried to find the maximum speed at which he could avoid the various excavations in the road surface, the continual presence of repair zones, the occasional big truck hustling along.
He drove, he drove, he drove. He thought, he thought, he thought.
But not about who was trying to kill him. He wanted to, but his mind kept returning to something troubling about shooting at Groedl on the bridge. He had to face it: she missed.
The issue was range. If she was on that bridge, the best vantage point — seemingly the only vantage point — was that high bluff to the southwest, the one with the somehow “lighter” tone to half its leaves. That put her between one and, say, five hundred yards out. Now, if she had all day, with any rifle she could estimate, fire, record her hit, and walk the rounds into the target. She’d eventually get it. But not in the middle of a war. She must have made what’s called a cold-bore first shot. The only rifles available, and he didn’t even know for sure she got one of them, would have been a Mauser K98k and a Mosin 91, without scope, and a five-hundred-yard shot, say, with one of those without a scope — cold bore first shot hit — is pretty damned hard.
He realized what had happened. They’d lured her, knowing she’d take a long, impossible shot, knowing she’d give up her life for just a chance, a one-in-a-million long shot, of bringing it off. That was Groedl’s plan, that was his game.
They used the sniper’s honor against the sniper.
No sense getting upset about it now, was there? What the hell, it was seventy years ago. Then why did he feel so much old Bob at this moment? He had the killing fever.
Reilly sat alone in the backseat of the cab that was hauling her to Ivano. She, too, thought and thought and only came up with more questions. But then the phone in her purse rang. She snatched it up and answered. “Swagger?”
“Swagger? Who the hell is Swagger?” asked Marty, the foreign editor of The Washington Post, from his office at Fifteenth and K.
“Sorry, Marty, I was expecting a call from a friend.”
“What time is it there?”
“Near three A.M.”
“You keep long hours. It’s eight here. But I’m glad I didn’t wake you. We need a backgrounder for the website, maybe tomorrow’s late editions.”
“What?” said Reilly, thinking what every reporter thinks in such a situation, which is: Oh, shit.
“Remember Strelnikov? You interviewed him, remember? He’s just been appointed minister of trade by Putin.”
She knew that was big because this Strelnikov was hard right, very nationalist, much feared and hated by so-called liberal factions in Moscow. He was one of those billionaires who decided to get into politics, maybe the Michael Bloomberg of Russia. But this was a surprisingly meaningless position for him to take, so nobody was getting it.
“Can you give us a thousand off the top on Strelnikov? Who he is, where he comes from, what he does, all that suff you already know?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “I’m in transit right now, but I’ll be in shortly, and I’ll file in a couple of hours.”
She was secretly pleased. The best anodyne to anxiety, she knew, was work. She could bury herself in the arcana of the hopelessly preposterous Strelnikov, billionaire, poseur, fraud, and phony, one of those bizarre rich guys all reporters hated because they were allowed to turn narcissism into reality by virtue of their bucks. It took her mind off of Bob on the run.
Swagger pulled over in the dark — sun starting to creep up against the horizon, advancing itself with a trace of glow — and dialed.
“Da?”
“Swagger for Stronski.”
The phone went dead. Five minutes later it rang.
“What’s up?” asked Stronski.
Bob explained his situation.
Stronski said, “Dump the car. They have the numbers on the car, they’re looking for the car. Dump it in a village, take the next out-of-town bus that arrives. The car is death, but you may be all right if you separate from it now.”
“You think these guys are wired in to the police and all the cops are looking for the car?”
“It’s Ukraine, pal. Anything’s possible.”
“Okay, I got it.”
“I’m going to set up an escape for you. You need to get the hell out of town, and I mean it, Swagger. Like the last time.”
“But like the last time, I still have shit to do. Have to get back to Yaremche and look it over. Can you have me picked up there?”
“I’ll work on it. But don’t doodle around. Serious boys are after you.”
“So who?” said Bob, thinking, The gangs, the cops, some oligarch’s henchmen?
“I hear a certain fellow picked up five or six freelance tough guys on an out-of-town job. I was checking on it with police sources, and it just came through that the group went to Ukraine with big suitcases.”
“Who?” said Swagger.
“You’re going to love this. I know who the certain fellow works for. I know who’s behind this, who’s bankrolling it.”
“Who?”
“The Americans.”
CHAPTER 30
It’s not war per se,” said Wili Bober. “Nor is it the prospect of death or maiming. Or a life spent in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp on the far side of the Arctic Circle. No, none of that bothers me. It’s the latrines.”
“War would definitely be more fun without latrines,” said Von Drehle.
The two sat over rude holes in a rude bench over a rude ditch not a hundred meters from their new empire, itself quite rude. It consisted of six tents in a muddy field, each with room for four men. In the squalid heat of July in Ukraine, the tents were unendurable, even with the flaps pinned up. Many of the jägers preferred to sleep outside during the hot nights.
They ate at the mess of the 14th Panzergrenadier, whose vast tank maintenance facility they abutted. Such was the reward for the heroes of the Bridge at Chortkiv. At every minute of every day, the roar of Panzers and Panthers could be heard while Division Workshop struggled to keep as many of the machines in play as possible, which meant the beasts turned over their engines once every few hours to keep the hot-weather-thinned oil in circulation. All well and good for the war effort, but the practical consequence was the constant torrent of exhaust fumes at the 21 Para village.
“I thought we were heroes,” said Wili. “You have at least, what, fifteen or twenty Iron Crosses? You may even be a major.”
“Have to look into the major issue,” said Karl. “I do miss the glorious bathrooms of the Andrewski Palace. I miss the sheets, the decor, the sense of order. This is like a Hitler Youth camp in 1936. Next they’ll have us singing ‘Horst Wessel.’ ”
“You should have shot that little Arabian bugger,” said Wili.
“Think of the paperwork,” said Karl.
“Speaking of paperwork, I think I’m done with today’s operation. I mention it because I seem to lack paperwork.”
Without looking, Karl handed over the latest Signal. Wili paged through it quickly and came up with an article called “National Socialism: Its Spiritual Essence.”