The Diamond Eye

A Novel

Kate Quinn

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780063144705
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062943521
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

Don’t miss the thrilling new novel from Kate Quinn, The Briar Club!

New York Times Bestseller

The bestselling author of The Rose Code returns with an unforgettable work of WWII historical fiction about a quiet bookworm who becomes history’s deadliest female sniper. Based on a true story.

In 1937 in the snowbound city of Kyiv, wry and bookish history student Mila Pavlichenko organizes her life around her library job and her young son—but Hitler’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia sends her on a different path. Given a rifle and sent to join the fight, Mila must forge herself from studious girl to deadly sniper—a lethal hunter of Nazis known as Lady Death in this gripping historical thriller. When news of her three hundredth kill makes her a national heroine, Mila finds herself torn from the bloody battlefields of the eastern front and sent to America on a goodwill tour.

Still reeling from war wounds and devastated by loss, Mila finds herself isolated and lonely in the glittering world of Washington, DC—until an unexpected friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and an even more unexpected connection with a silent fellow sniper offer the possibility of happiness.

But when an old enemy from Mila’s past joins forces with a deadly new foe lurking in the shadows, Lady Death finds herself battling her own demons and enemy bullets in the deadliest duel of her life.

Based on a true story, The Diamond Eye is a haunting piece of biographical fiction about heroism born of desperation, of a mother who became a soldier, of a woman who found her place in the world and changed the course of history forever.

The Soviet Delegation:
Day 1

August 27, 1942

Washington, D.C.

Chapter 5

If she’s ever held a rifle in her life, the marksman thought, watching the supposed girl sniper disappear into the White House after the First Lady, I’ll eat my damn hat.

The doors closed behind the Soviet delegation, and that was that. “When do we get a crack at the Russkies?” the Washington Post journalist wanted to know, riffling his notes. “They’re not going to make us wait until the student conference kicks off, are they?”

“There will be a press assembly tonight at the Soviet embassy.” The marksman dialed up his Virginia drawl, turning away from the White House in its rosy dawn glow. “Save your questions till then. Unless you scored an invitation to the White House welcome breakfast this morning.”

“You got one? Lucky son of a gun . . .”

The marksman smiled. Luck had nothing to do with it; the men who’d hired him for this job moved in high circles, and they’d made sure his name (the name on the immaculately falsified press badge, anyway) was on the list. “Why do you need to see the girl up close?” they’d grumbled. “You need to frame her, not date her.”

“I’ll need to know how to pull her aside when the time comes,” the marksman replied. “If she’ll be easy to distract or difficult. If I’ll need to bribe someone in her delegation to give me access to her, and if so, who. And I’ll only have a week, from the day the Soviet delegation arrives to the last day of the conference, to figure all this out.”

“Sounds like a lot of work” the answer had been, and the marksman shrugged. In truth, he’d always rather enjoyed the elbow grease involved in a new job: settling into a well-planned cover identity, backing that identity up with solid research, living the job if necessary. He remembered that time in 1932 when he’d worked four solid months in an insurance office to get access to a mark . . . sold a lot of honest insurance, too. Putting those hours in was work, no question—meticulous, frequently boring work. But he’d always figured there were two kinds of men in this business: good shooters who thought pulling a trigger was the job and only did enough work to research a skin-deep cover, sweating the whole time . . . and pros to whom the deep cover was the job, who put in enough hours and research that they didn’t have to sweat by the time it came to pulling a trigger.

He knew which type he was.

“Still a lot of trouble to take for a patsy,” his higher-ups’ flunky had complained.

Says the man who won’t end up in handcuffs if this all goes south, thought the marksman. “Just keep making sure my press-pass name clears all the security and ends up on all the necessary guest lists and travel passes,” he’d said, and at least there hadn’t been any trouble there. He could usually find his own ways to gain whatever access a job needed—after nineteen years, he had a stable of contacts and informants he could pay for just about any information or paperwork—but the men he was working for now could accomplish a great deal more with a little backroom hand-waving.

He had a meeting with his employers in thirty minutes, in fact—or rather, his employers’ flunky. It wasn’t necessary, but they wanted reassurances, and he had an hour or so to kill before heading back here for the welcome breakfast, where the bucktoothed First Lady would host the Soviets and a handful of press in the small dining room on the first floor of the White House. Idly, the marksman wondered what Mila Pavlichenko was doing now. Was she awed to be standing under that fabled roof or sneering at the capitalist Western decadence of it all? Was she reviewing her cover story about her supposed 309 Nazi kills, or feeling lost, floundering, far from home? He hoped the latter. Lonely women were easy to pick off. He’d targeted quite a few over the years.

He wasn’t sure yet whether he’d need to kill her or not. Whatever option proved simplest: all professionals knew that the simpler any plan was, the better. Because as soon as bullets began singing, even the best-laid plans went awry. A certain amount of improvisation was inevitable. Whether he ended up leaving her body as a suicide-note confession on the last day of the conference, or merely fixed a frame around her and let her Soviet-inflated reputation put the noose around her neck, one thing was certain.

When you planned to assassinate a president, you timed it when a Russian sniper was in town to take the fall for you.

The marksman jingled his pocketful of uncut diamonds as he flagged down a passing cab. “The Lincoln Memorial,” he told the cabbie, rolling down the window to appreciate the warm morning breeze. The forecast for the week ahead predicted nothing but blue skies, hot days, and perfect late-summer weather. Miss Pavlichenko, enjoy your first visit to America while it lasts.

Notes by the First Lady

As I show the Soviet delegation up the White House stairs to their guest rooms, my mind is still lingering over Franklin’s words to me this morning after his fall: “They’d pray I never got up.” An extra twist on the word they, beyond his usual amused irony. Bitterness? Worry? I ponder that as I usher Lyudmila Pavlichenko to the rosy chamber that will be hers during her visit.

My husband has detractors and rivals, of course. Every president is hated. The man who has won an unprecedented third term is hated by more than most. He usually laughs such hatred off . . . but he was not laughing this morning.

Is there a particular cabal of enemies which has him worried?

I blink, startled out of my thoughts as the young Russian woman—who has so far said not a single word—moves across the bedchamber to the window, where the morning light shines through the glass. For an instant I think she is going to exclaim over the view of the gardens flowering below, but instead she yanks the shades down with a snap. “Is something wrong, my dear?” I ask.

She says something in Russian, looking composed enough as she folds her hands at her waist, but I sense discomfiture. “She says she prefers not to have uncovered windows at her back, Mrs. Roosevelt,” the interpreter translates helpfully.

Ah. They say she is a sniper—I didn’t know what to make of that. In truth, I still don’t. But she thanks me for my hospitality through the interpreter and I examine those opaque dark eyes, I wish I could ask her: How do you know when an enemy is lurking? How do you know if it is just nerves or genuine danger?

How do you know if there is a target on your back?

Fourteen
Months Ago

June 1941

The Odessa front, USSR

Mila

Chapter 6

My memoir, the official version: Every woman remembers her first.

My memoir, the unofficial version: Those words mean very different things for me than most women.

“I SEE YOU’VE managed to get PE sights for that rifle.” Lugubrious-looking Captain Sergienko nodded at the weapon now registered in my name. “Have you fired it yet?”

“Yes, Comrade Captain.” I kept my eyes forward, wondering why I’d been called to the command post in the long, slanting light just before dark.

He studied me. I shifted in my boots, realizing my lips were dry enough to crack, that my chopped hair was filthy. The Chapayev division had reached the Tiraspol fortified district and dug in. Not a bad place to turn and fight: earthworks, reinforced concrete, and stone firing points; dugouts; deep trenches; machine guns and artillery of our own. The line of Russian defense, strung like a necklace across the throat of Alexandrovka, Buyalyk, Brinovka, Karpova, Belyayevka . . . Had I really been at war less than six weeks? I blinked that thought away.

Sergienko’s voice brought me back to myself. “Have you hit anyone you’ve lined up in those sights?”

“I don’t know, Comrade Captain. It hasn’t been that kind of shooting.” I’d fired like a good soldier—when I was told, blindly, over the lip of trenches and behind trees, as the Chapayev division continued its retreat. You couldn’t see what you were firing at in such moments; you fired because you were being fired on, not because you had anything in your sights. I didn’t know if I’d hit anyone; I knew only that I was less afraid when I had the comforting weight of a rifle in my hand. Nonsensical, really—having a weapon didn’t make me invulnerable—but I felt less helpless. I couldn’t push my fear away, but I could push it into my weapon.

“Come with me,” Sergienko said, and I followed him out of the command post through the mess of crates and tents, makeshift desks and earth plowed into bulwarks, some ways distant to a bombed-out peasant hut where he could point toward the far end of Belyayevka. Among the distant overgrown trees was a large house with a ridge-roofed porch, gleaming in the setting sun. “You see?”

I nodded. Two officers in sandy-gray uniforms came out onto the porch; I could see the gleam of their insignia, their pudding-basin helmets. Not Hitlerites; Romanians—Germany’s ally. So close. I had not yet seen an enemy so clearly; until now they had all been shadowy shapes on the other side of trenches, helmeted outlines in the cockpits of planes strafing overhead. These two men weren’t even half a kilometer away. Standing there on a porch in the sunshine, scratching themselves, having a laugh. Our invaders.

The fear banked constantly in my stomach began to curl again. I usually felt the fear cold and blue-violet as a shaving of tungsten twisting under a lathe, but this time the metal of it was forging from blue to red. Fear to rage.

“That’s likely their staff headquarters,” the weary-looking Captain Sergienko was saying. “You showed me your certificates; from our records you’re the only one yet who’s come in with an advanced marksmanship course already under her belt. Now that we’ve a moment to breathe”—between retreats, he didn’t say, but he might as well have—“let me see what you can do.”

I was already unslinging my rifle.

Sergienko stood back, watching. I felt the pulse beating under my jaw as I began setting up to shoot at the two men. Targets, I told myself, but couldn’t ignore the reality that these weren’t painted circles on a range or glass bottles in cleft sticks.

They are enemies, the anger inside me said, stoking higher as I moved through my preparations. Invaders. I hadn’t asked them to come here. I hadn’t asked them to ally with Germany, to make grandiose plans for renaming Odessa Antonescu once they captured it; to purge any territory they captured of Jews and Gypsies, Ukrainians and Russians, because we were racially undesirable. I hadn’t asked for any of this. I wanted to stay home, cuddle my son, finish my damned dissertation. I didn’t necessarily want the other side dead; I only wanted them gone. But they weren’t going, and so help me, I would settle for dead.

I never stopped movin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Map
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue
• Five Years Ago
• The Soviet Delegation: Day 1
• Fourteen Months Ago
• The Soviet Delegation: Day 1
• Eleven Months Ago
• The Soviet Delegation: Day 1
• Nine Months Ago
• The Soviet Delegation: Day 1
• Five Months Ago
• The Soviet Delegation: Day 1
• Epilogue
• Author’s Note
• Historic Photographs
• Further Reading and Entertainment
• About the Author
• Praise for The Diamond Eye
• Also by Kate Quinn
• Copyright
• About the Publisher