“An excellent response,” said the commissar, and his acolytes nodded. “Entirely fictitious, I am sure, but delivered with heartfelt if fraudulent sincerity. You lie well, and I appreciate the effort it takes. It’s not so easy, as any commissar knows. I’m sure your father’s opinions on wheat yield had their own logic, and he believed them sincerely, and whatever they were, they did not warrant the fate that befell him. A warning in his file, a withheld promotion, perhaps, but death? Such a pity. The regime has made many mistakes, even the boss himself will be the first to admit. But he hopes, and I do, too, that after the war, when we get everything sorted out, rectification of some sort can be made. In the meantime, though I know the wound to be still bitter, your patriotism is without question. Do any of my colleagues from the intelligence section have questions for Comrade Sniper?”
Here it comes, she thought. Kursk at last. Then it’s off to Siberia for me.
But the questions were few and mild, and Petrova handled them easily enough. Born Leningrad, 1919, happy, athletic child of a professor, then his arrest, then the war, then Dimitri and her two brothers in the first two years, her poor mother gone early to a shell during Leningrad’s siege, and her own condition, now stronger, the two shrapnel wounds having healed.
Nothing about Kursk or her assignment to the Special Tasks Detachment.
She did not let her eyes betray her.
Finally Krulov seemed satisfied. Glancing at his watch, he signified that it was time to move on; he had his usual eighteen-hour day and dozens more duties before him.
“Comrade Sniper, please open the folder before you.”
CHAPTER 5
Here’s how I found this guy,” said Reilly, sitting at her office computer in the annex to her apartment, both belonging to The Washington Post. “I Googled ‘Stalin’s Harry Hopkins.’ Up comes the name ‘Basil Krulov.’ I’ve checked into him. Of Stalin’s intimate circle, he is the only one who seemed to have the power to designate missions like that. He was Stalin’s troubleshooter, the way Hopkins was FDR’s.”
From his long-ago immersion in the events that put his father on Iwo Jima in February 1945, Swagger knew of Hopkins, one of the powerful men who made — in good faith, it was hoped — the decisions that left the virgin boys dead in sands and warm waters all across the Pacific.
“It makes sense,” said Swagger. “You need a guy who has the authority, can cut across service lines and bring people together who normally would never find each other in the swamp of a capital at war. He was the go-to guy. He had the power. He could make things happen. But his presence makes this thing all screwy.”
“How do you mean?”
“They didn’t operate that way.”
For all their espionage experience and all their espionage success, the Russians didn’t do special ops in the classic sense of putting trained operators far behind enemy lines. They didn’t need to. The war, after all, was fought mostly on their territory through 1944. And in all that conquered territory, there were dozens of partisan units, cells, individual operators, all that, already there, so in any given locale, they had people on the ground and solid contact with them. So they never had to put together a crew, even one person, move him, her, it, a thousand miles and insert him, her, or it. But, Swagger reasoned, the only rule is, there are no rules. If they sent Mili to Ukraine, it would have been so far outside of normal operating procedures, so unusual, so much in the way of running into resistance from all the players, that it would have to be a guy with juice to make it happen, and that had to be Stalin’s Harry Hopkins.
He summed it up for Reilly, who nodded and moved on to background Krulov for him: Second-generation Soviet official. Born in 1913. His father was a Soviet trade official to Germany in the late ’20s and early ’30s.
“Spy?” Bob wanted to know.
“Sure. So Krulov actually grew up in Munich, and attended schools there, before Hitler took over. His dad, meanwhile, tried to build up trade relations but was probably really coordinating with the trade unions and the considerably large Communist Party in that part of Germany, until he was kicked out when the Nazis took over and began their purges with the German Communists. Krulov was a genius student with a gift for organizing, helped enormously by his father’s connections, joined the Politburo in ’36 and by ’38 had caught Stalin’s eye. During the war he was indispensable. He traveled with the boss’s orders to all the generals, to all the fronts, and he had considerable success after the war. He might have even been general secretary after Stalin, since Khrushchev liked him, but he seemed to fade from sight. He lost power, interest, I don’t know, and he faded from view. You could say he was disappeared.”
“I guess he stepped on some toes when he was Stalin’s boy, and once Stalin was gone, whoever owned that foot, he stepped back. So let’s stick on Krulov and ride him to the end of the trail.”
“So,” said Reilly, “have you any idea why Krulov sent Mili to Ukraine?”
“Sure. Someone needed killing in a badass kind of way.”
“But Ukraine,” Reilly pointed out, “although largely free of Germans by July ’44, had been a terrible battleground for three years. The Germans had literally killed millions. So among all these murderers, who could the number one murderer be?”
“Another thought. The Reds had partisans in the Carpathians, in Ukraine, where all this takes place, right? So why fly a gal in from Stalingrad or wherever she was after Stalingrad when they could just order the partisan troops to attack the guy and kill him that way?”
“He was heavily guarded?” asked Reilly.
“Exactly. Any kind of straight-up attack was bound to fail in a heavily militarized zone. But she’s a sniper. One of the best. She kills people from a long way out, off in the high grass. She might be able to nail him out to, say, five hundred meters. That might be the only way to get him.”
“That would make him a Nazi hotshot, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Hmmmm.” She went to Google and typed in “Nazi Official Ukraine 1944.”
Click.
They watched as the screen shimmered and blinked and then reappeared with the first twenty-five of 16,592 hits. The same name came up twenty-one times in the first twenty-five.
“Groedl,” said Swagger. “Now who the hell is Groedl?”
CHAPTER 6
For a god, he was a pudgy little man. His face wore too much flesh and hung too loosely on his skull. His eyes drooped, his cheeks drooped, his lips drooped, his mustache drooped. He wore steel-rimmed glasses so thick they magnified eyes that were otherwise wan and pale, bloodshot from late nights.
In personal tastes, he was diffident, as if in perfect match to that fallen face and the fallen body that supported it. Though by rank an Obergruppenführer-SS — that is, in the weird orthographics of that organization, senior group leader SS — and entitled thereby to wear the glamorous black with the silver double-lightning flashes and so many other of the gewgaws of decoration, insignia, and embroidery of the Armed Guard, he instead wore an undertaker’s shapeless dark suit and black shoes in need of polish. He looked like a professor of economics, which he was.
It wasn’t reverse elitism; he wasn’t saying to the world, “I do not have to play the game of the uniform and so vast is my power that no one dare comment upon it.” No, it was the way his mind worked, seeing only essentials. If you asked him whether The Leader, at their last meeting, had been wearing uniform or suit (it changed daily, depending on The Leader’s mood), he would not know. If you asked him five seconds after he stepped out of the meeting, he would not know then, either. However, if you asked him what The Leader had said regarding Hungarian troop deployments in support of Army Group North Ukraine in the Belarus region in July, he would be able to tell you to the detail, for he had an extraordinary memory. He forgot no data. Everything figured into his decisions, every last mote of data, every report ever sent him, every file he ever consulted, every word he ever wrote. The universe was recorded on paper, in figures and in estimates. Actual flesh itself, in the form of human beings, was untrustworthy and could usually be ignored, with the exception of his beloved wife, Helga, thankfully returned to Berlin, and his beloved dachshund, Mitzi, who had accompanied Helga.