The Sniper's Kiss

Chapter Fourteen

Mia hunched in her coat on a steel bench in a Russian transport plane, her knees drawn up to her chin. In front of her lay bales of telephone wire, crates of guns and ammunition, and other boxes whose contents she couldn’t identify. Only the massive burlap sacks on both sides of her were marked RUBBER BOOTS MEN’S LARGE. Lend-Lease supplies, being delivered to the Novgorod front.

The moment she’d been picked up, she demanded to know if she was under arrest. “I have diplomatic immunity,” she’d insisted.

But they had ignored her until they reached the office of Lavrentiy Beria, Commissar of State Security, and he informed her, “No, no. Of course you are not under arrest. We simply feel that your investigation would profit greatly if you take part in one of our Lend-Lease delivery transports. As it happens, one is going out just today, and you will have the opportunity to see how efficiently it is done. We will of course inform Ambassador Harriman of your departure.”

“But I don’t wish to go, Commissar Beria,” she’d said. “Not on such short notice.”

“Oh, come, come. What kind of investigator does not jump at an opportunity such as this? The next flight is not scheduled for some time, so it is imperative that you accompany this one. We also feel it is a matter of honor to show you our work.”

He paused, evidently enjoying his mastery of the argument. “Besides, your message is already on its way to the embassy.” He turned to the two agents who had brought her in.

“Please escort Miss Kramer to the airport.”

The two goons had delivered her to the airport and handed her off to two others. The whole story was strange, and she didn’t like it one bit, especially not the coercive part. Was she being kidnapped? If so, what was Beria’s reason?

Presumably it had something to do with Nazarov’s fraud. Was Molotov involved? It was bewildering. If the Lend-Lease theft was at the core of her forced removal, and they feared exposure, how did sending her to Novgorod solve their problem? If her suspicions were correct, she could not be permitted to return. What did that imply?

She tried to reassure herself. Molotov and Beria knew her personally, had sat with her at the negotiating table and at the dinner table in the presence of Stalin. Would they actually go so far as to… she forced herself to think the terrible word… to murder her to conceal the crime?

Then she recalled that, following the Bolshevik program, Molotov had left millions of his countrymen to die of famine by seizing most of the grain of the Ukraine, had condemned thousands more to labor camps, and had played an active part in hundreds of purge-executions. Making her disappear would be like brushing away a fly.

She was free to move around on the plane, but it did her little good. It wasn’t like she could hijack it. She’d sized up the two men accompanying her and knew one was called Ilya and the other Yevgeny. They both smoked the usual crude mahorka tobacco.

She turned to Ilya, who sat closest to her. “We send millions of cigarettes to you, but you’re still smoking that horrible tobacco? Who gets the good ones?”

He scowled at her and turned away.

She persisted. “No, seriously. I’ve got a pack of American cigarettes. Here. Have one on me.” She slid the pack of Lucky Strikes from her jacket pocket and tapped one out into his hand. He glanced toward his colleague for approval, but Yevgeny looked away.

Once Ilya was well into his smoke, Mia brought her voice down to its softest, most casual level, as if they were all old friends simply stuck in a bad place together. “So, c’mon now, Ilya. Level with me. Are we really going to Novgorod?”

Yevgeny interrupted. “Of course we are. You think all this cargo is fake?” He kicked one of the bales of boots, and his foot bounced back.

“And what are you going to do with me? Leave me there to find my own way back to Moscow? That won’t go down well with the American State Department.”

“Leave you there? No, not like that.” Ilya snickered, and the dreadful thought crossed her mind that leaving her there free was not the plan.

Yevgeny picked his fingernails with a tiny pocketknife and glowered at him.

A sick feeling grew in the pit of her stomach. Her heart pounded, and with a dry mouth, she said, “Tell me the truth. What have you got to lose? Are you supposed to dispose of me?”

“Shut up, Ilya. Just shut up!” Yevgeny snarled.

“Why should I shut up? What’s the secret? She’s going know what’s happening sooner or later. You think if she knows now, she’s going to run away? Ha, that’s a good one!” He took another long toke on his cigarette, then leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

“I am sorry to inform you that you will be leaving us just before we land at Novgorod. You understand?” He turned away and resumed smoking, no longer interested in the conversation.

“You mean… you’re going to throw me out of the plane?” She couldn’t believe the words that came from her own mouth.

He didn’t reply, and she closed her eyes in silent desperation.

Suddenly the plane seemed to halt in midair, then tilt and drop, and she was sure now they’d run into a storm. The wind threw the plane violently up and down, and rocked it from side to side. Now the terror of crashing overshadowed the dread of being murdered.

Twenty minutes of such violence made her nauseous, and she feared vomiting. How grotesque, to vomit just before dying.

Yevgeny and Ilya were doing no better. Worse, even, for Ilya unbuckled his strap and lurched toward the toilet cubicle to empty his stomach. Only the roar of the airplane engine kept her from hearing the repulsive sounds of regurgitation, which surely would have set off her own.

He re-emerged, clawing his way along the crates as he staggered back to his seat, when suddenly another threat struck. The plane seemed to turn on its axis, raising one wing and lowering the other, as if to bank away from something. Then she heard it. The boom and crash of explosive fire.

Dear God. Why were they being attacked? The storm must have blown them into enemy air space.

Though her stomach rebelled and her mouth was dry with terror, a tiny, lucid part of her grasped the absurdity of being threatened with death by the NKVD, then a storm, and then the Luftwaffe. Something like panicked laughter erupted from her.

Then panic overtook her completely as the plane swerved in a wide curve, losing altitude, and she knew she was falling to her death. It was so unjust. For a brief moment she mourned that no one would miss her.

More explosions detonated outside the plane, though they seemed not to affect the wide spiral that took them inexorably to the ground. She curled up, sobbing, in the middle of a hundred pairs of men’s rubber boots and, upon impact, blacked out.

Her next sensation was of cold and blackness and a terrific headache. Rough hands dragging her. Shouting. Choking oily smoke. The sudden terror of burning made her realize she was alive, and she tried to open her eyes. She couldn’t. Something was wrong. Bits of color and light struck her, but no images formed, and something warm and wet sealed one eye shut. Hands slid her onto some kind of cloth and dragged her over slippery ground. Then she blacked out again.

She came to again on a wooden floor lying on her face, her head pounding. Still sightless, she tried to make sense of the sounds around her. Heavy footfall. Voices, and this time she could hear they were German. She was captured.

And the others? What had happened to the others?

“Ja ja,” someone said. Funny how Germans always said Ja ja. Three men? Four men? A chair being dragged. Shouting again. “Ruskie!” Did they mean her? No. They had someone in the chair. An interrogation. Who was it? The pilot? A crewman? Or one of the NKVD men? Fully conscious now, she listened.

“Heh, Ruskie,” the voice said again. A low moaning followed. The interrogator appeared to know a few words of Russian. “Where from? How many boom-boom planes?”

Now she understood. The retreating Germans wanted to know if more planes were on their way. They had probably already figured out that the Tupolev was merely transporting supplies but worried that bombers were to follow.

More shouting and the thumping of the chair legs told her the prisoner was being knocked about. He gave no information, though. And when he finally said in clear Russian, “Go fuck your mother’s ass,” she recognized the voice of Yevgeny.

Whether or not they understood him, the Germans resumed battering him, and his cries of pain told her their blows had become more brutal.

The torture continued for what seemed hours, and his reply to all of their shouts was a simple “Nyet.” Each Nyet was followed by a cry of pain, and each one was weaker. Yet his interrogators were getting nothing from him. He had been prepared to kill her, but at this moment, Mia felt a certain admiration for him, along with the terror of knowing she was next.

A final gunshot ended the interrogation, and another set of hands hauled her up into the same chair, her feet hitting the dead Russian as she fell back. Her eyes still didn’t seem to work, so she couldn’t see the tormentors, and her cringe was deep, animal-like.

One of them grabbed her hair and shook her, puzzled perhaps by her civilian clothing. Did he assume she was a politico of some sort? “Ruskie Kommissar?” he shouted into her face, and she could smell his foul breath. “Mit amerikanischen Zigaretten.” She heard the crumpling of paper and assumed he held up her pack of Lucky Strikes. Obviously they had searched her pockets.

Even if she could communicate with them, was there any point in trying to explain she was an American? Would that increase her chances of survival?

The question became moot when a distant shot sounded and her interrogator collapsed onto her lap and slid to the floor. The others, two or three, she couldn’t tell, scattered, she guessed to the windows to return fire.

She dropped to the floor between the two bodies, and it was another sort of purgatory to lie there, blind and helpless, waiting for the outcome of the gun battle.

It seemed to take hours, but after the first man, and then the second, grunted and thudded to the floor, she realized that the attackers were expert marksmen and had picked off the Germans one by one.

The victors had to be Russians, so she sat up, waiting for rescue, but when it came, she was amazed to hear female voices. Once again, someone tried to lift her to her feet, but from shock, exhaustion, and the head trauma, she lost consciousness again.

She awoke lying on her back on something soft. She still couldn’t see and her head pounded, and when she lifted one hand to her face, she found half her head and one eye bandaged. “Hello?” she called out in Russian.

A soft hand touched her shoulder. “Hello. I’m Galina, one of the medics here. Can you understand me? How do you feel?”

“Yes, I can understand. Head hurts like hell, and I can’t see. But I seem to be able to move my fingers and toes.”

“We washed all the cuts on your head, but it looks like you have a concussion. You had a deep gash through your left eyebrow so your eye socket was full of blood. We stitched the gash together and bandaged you up. You can’t see me with the other eye? That’s probably the concussion. We’ll have to wait to see what happens.”

Suddenly the events before her rescue came back to her. “Those Germans who captured me, someone shot them one by one. You must have a damned good sniper.”

The medic laughed. “We have several of them. The ones that saved you were Sasha and Fatima, but some of the lads were helping.”

“Sasha. Fatima. Can I talk to them? I want to thank them.”

“Of course. They’ll want to meet you, too. And so will our commander, Major Bershansky. He’ll have a lot of questions.”

Of course he will, Mia thought, and wondered what she would answer. Could she tell a field commander that his government had tried to murder her?

She had only a few moments to brood before another hand touched her on the arm. “Hello there. Sasha here. Glad to see you’re awake. You’re looking better than when we found you.”

“I’m feeling better, too. So you’re the expert shot that picked off my captors. You must be awfully good. Hearing them fall dead on the floor was very satisfying.”

“Thank you. I’m one of them. Fatima’s also here. She knocked off two.”

A voice spoke over her other shoulder. “It helped that the hut they dragged you into had so many holes. Those guys didn’t have a lot of wall to hide behind. The hard part was aiming at them through the rain.”

“Yes, the storm. Then the Germans shot us down. I don’t know much else.”

“Well, try to remember. Major Bershansky will want to know who you are and what the plane was doing in this sector. Oh, he’s just arrived. Good-bye for now. Perhaps we can talk to you later.” Hands pressed her shoulders from both sides.

The two friendly presences were replaced by one that sat down on her right. “How is our mystery woman?” a baritone voice asked.

“Doing much better, Major. Thanks to Sasha and Fatima.”

“It seems the storm blew you over into this air space, and your pilot was able to make a crash landing. Some of us saw it come down. Apparently the Germans pulled out only you and the NKVD man they killed. So can you tell me what the plane was doing and what you were doing in it?”

“It was a transport supposed to deliver supplies to Novgorod, but got caught by the storm. Then the fighter planes spotted us and shot us down.”

“And you? Who are you?”

She’d already decided the best lie was one that was 90 percent true. “My name is Mia Kramer. I’m the assistant to the head of the Lend-Lease program that supplies so much of your material and food. We make occasional visits to Moscow to monitor the program, and this time I… uh… came alone to talk to your foreign minister, Mr. Molotov. He thought it useful for me to accompany one of the deliveries. The rest you know. If it didn’t burn up, the cargo could be very useful to you, too. I saw crates of rifles and lots of rubber boots. I think maybe the rubber boots saved my life.”

“I’ve already sent out a squad to see what’s salvageable. I’ll report to STAVKA that we found you, and they’ll decide what to do with the cargo. In the meantime, we’ll move you back with the other wounded to our field hospital in Novgorod. From there they’ll transport you by train to Moscow, where you can contact your embassy and arrange passage home.”

“Moscow? Uh, yes, I understand,” she said, but her mind buzzed trying to find a way to escape the wrath of Molotov. If she were to suddenly reappear, he would surely see to it that some new accident, perhaps even in the hospital, would get her out of the way. And as long as she was sightless, she was at his mercy.

“The medic says my blindness, at least in my good eye, is from the concussion. If I can stay here and rest a day or so, it may improve. Already I can see light and shadows.”

“I’m sorry. We’ve just taken this town but will advance as soon as our sappers clear away the mines and my men are rested. We can’t carry wounded with us.”

Someone called him so he stood up and marched away. She needed to think. Would she be able to contact the embassy from Novgorod? Her head began to pound again and she lay back, defeated.

Exhausted, caked in mud, but with several more “hit” cartridges in their pockets, Alexia and Kalya reported to their commander. “The riverbank is cleared, Comrade Major. Some of their infantry is still scattered around, but most seem to have retreated.”

“Thank you, Senior Corporal. I’ll have the sappers go out in the morning to look for mines, and you can cover them while they search. If the Fritzes have any snipers left, that’s where they’ll be.”

“Yes, Comrade Major. Will that be all, Comrade Major?”

“For the time being, yes. Report to the quartermaster and see if he has any dry uniforms left. You look like hell.”

“Thank you, Comrade Major.” Both saluted and did an about-face.

The quartermaster’s truck had caught up with the advancing rifle division only that morning and had set up close to headquarters in one of the other still-intact farmhouses. To remain mobile, the sergeant was careful to unload only those supplies that were needed immediately. That would be ammunition, hand grenades, gun oil, upon request by the men, food as requested by the cook, footwear, clothing, soap, and additional weaponry, only upon order by the major.

As Kalya and Alexia entered, Sasha was already in discussion with the quartermaster sergeant. Alexia clapped her on the back. “Well, look at you, all shiny and dry while the rest of us are drenched. How’d you manage that?”

Sasha turned sideways and laid a hand on her hip in mock petulance. “For your information, it’s a hero’s reward. Fatima and I just dispatched four Fritzes and saved a hostage, and the major sent me here. But now I’m trying to convince the sergeant to grant me a little extra soap.” She ran her fingers through her pixie hair. “I can’t stand the way this feels.”

Kalya poked the sergeant on one arm. “Come on, comrade. You can spare just a little for a hero to wash her hair, can’t you?”

At that moment, three men barged in carrying crates. “Look what we’ve got,” they said, setting them on the floor and prying off the lids. One of them held hundreds of cardboard boxes of rifle shells, and the other, dozens of liter-sized square tins. She couldn’t read the writing, but the picture on the label was of meat. Spam.

“Where did all this come from?” Alexia asked.

Sasha scrutinized one of the tins. “From the plane that crashed just north of here. The same place where I knocked off those Germans and saved their hostage.”

“Hostage? Who did they capture? One of our men?” the sergeant asked.

“No, a woman. An American. The Germans pulled her and another man out and tried to interrogate them, that is, until we got there. They shot the man, and she’s in the infirmary with some kind of head injury.”

“What are you talking about? How can it be an American?” Alexia frowned in disbelief.

“I’m telling you, it was an American woman. Galina overheard her talking to the major. Go check for yourself. She speaks Russian.”