Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 8

It was better not to pay too much attention to the machine or the men flying it. After all, what difference did it make? Knowing the pilot’s name and what he called his airplane didn’t matter. The airplane would get her there or not, depending on a thousand factors over which she had no control. The Germans would shoot it down or they would not; they would have already taken the landing site or they would not have; the pilot found the right site or he did not. None of it had anything to do with her. She could not let herself invest emotion in the idea of this preposterous little kite being night-navigated to a tiny landing field on a mountain plateau surrounded on all sides by peaks and lit only by torchlight. She could not concentrate on the delicacy of the touch it took to set down, the play of the wind, how far the sound of the motors would carry, the whimsy of German patrols high in these mountains. For now she could only sit and feel the vibrations of the engines beat through the frame of the machine and into her bones.

The pilots were children, cheery teenagers, full of bravado. Her NKVD handler, the lieutenant colonel named Dinosovich, had been her companion, though he was neither loquacious nor warm and gave her no support and sat there like a piece of New Soviet statuary. It was known that he represented the special will of The Boss, so everywhere, doors were opened, men jumped to, the best meals were served, obeisance was paid. That was his only value.

Now the Yak-6 was airborne. It was a two-engined transport plane hurriedly designed under wartime conditions to provide the army with a light utility aircraft. It was not designed for comfort. Mostly linen and wood, it seemed more toylike than the heavy fighter her poor husband, the always witty, never depressed Dimitri, had flown.

Occasionally, finding a downdraft, the plane would fall a few dozen feet, leaving her stomach at the previous altitude. In the plunge from gravity, she felt giddy terror and clutched to the airframe, knowing it was a fool’s gesture. The airframe would shatter like a vase if hit. Then there’d be fire, and so she prayed for death by concussion rather than by flame. She’d seen enough men on fire to know it was no way to end. She hated death by fire.

The fall, the fear, the cold of the unheated cabin, all made her stomach roil. She had an urge to vomit but knew it would annoy the annoying Dinosovich, and she didn’t want to do that, because the less to do with him, the better. He sat facing her, a ramrod of rectitude without emotion on his flat, plain face, aware that he represented The Boss’s full authority and determined to carry that responsibility with dignity. No smile would curl his lips, no warmth would leak from his eyes. It was the way all The Boss’s boys were, especially the ones who had arrested her father.

The beating of the engines was too loud for talk, the quarters in the cabin too full of the nauseating stench of fuel, and beyond the smeared Perspex of the window it was too dark to see, except for the occasional illumination of a nearby flash as something blew up, men died, buildings turned into craters, towns into ruins. The war was hungry tonight, and destruction’s greed pawed at this part of the world. Meanwhile, the plane’s grip on the air was tentative, slippery; the machine seemed to slither and squirt ahead, just barely under control.

The cabin door — more a hatch, actually — opened, and one of the pilots, head capped in leather, leaned in. His human eyes were tiny beneath the gigantic insect-lenses of his goggles, which were held above his eyes by straps.

“Made radio contact, have a visual on the landing field, we’re vectored in,” he yelled over the engines. “The bump may be a bit hard when we touch down, but we’ll be fine. We’ll put the crate down, you can join your pals, and the whole thing will be over in minutes.”

Petrova nodded.

She had Tata Fyodor with her, as she called her rifle. It was a yard of Mosin-Nagant 91, in the caliber called 7.62mm x 54, with its PU scope held by a steel frame atop the receiver. The tsar’s troops had lost to the Japanese with it in ’05, and then to the Germans in ’17 and basically the Finns in ’39. It seemed like it was about to win its first war, but there was a lot of killing left to do. This one, built in 1940, was much blooded, as it had been used by Tatanya Morova and Luda Borov. Both were fine girls, both were dead, but the rifle had been a treasure for its unusual accuracy, particularly with Tula Lot 443-A ammunition, which Petrova hoarded. She’d used it over a hundred times, in snow and summer, in mud and dust, in ruins and mansions, in light or dark, in bright wheat fields amid tanks, in Stalingrad, at Kursk. It never let her down, and when it settled back out of recoil, always what she had held in its heavily etched sighting apparatus — three point-tipped bars, two horizontal, one vertical, defining a kill zone — was still. The rifle was wrapped in cloth and secured against her leg. She herself wore a one-piece issue camouflage sniper suit over a peasant’s loose dress over the crude cotton undergarments of the rural proletariat. She wore generic Russian boots.

A memory came to mind.

Her husband used to tease her. “If only people would see beyond all that ridiculous beauty,” he would say, “they might understand what a decent person you actually are. I’m so glad I did! It wasn’t easy, but somehow I managed.”

She thought: If he could see me now, all rigged up like a babushka! What a hoot he’d have!

And then she remembered: Dimitri was gone.

“Brace yourselves,” one of the boys yelled back through the door, and she felt the plane begin to skid in the air as it lost altitude fast.

Outside, as the craft dipped beneath a certain altitude, the quality of darkness changed; it became a darkness without depth or texture, and she realized it meant they were not above the mountains but within them, in some twisty valley with the mountaintops above. Across from her, the lieutenant colonel’s face had gone from pasty white to deathly white, and his jaw clenched so tightly she feared he’d shatter his molars. Then the plane hit — or crashed horizontally, might be a better description — with such force that lights in her brain fired in the shock of vibration. It bounced, stuck again, and then seemed fully committed to the earth, rolling capriciously along, every shock transferred from the landing gear to the airframe to her body.

The plane ran out of energy and slowed to a halt. The door was pried open, and amid a wash of cold air and the smell of pines, hands reached in to help her out. Only then did the lieutenant colonel seem to come out of his trance. As she was pulled by him, he grabbed her by the arm and whispered fiercely into her ear, “Don’t fail, Petrova. Not like at Kursk.”

Kursk! They knew.

But then she was out of the plane, into another century. Men with beards, their bulky bodies crisscrossed with ammunition bandoliers, their tommy guns hanging across their chests, swarmed everywhere. Potato-masher grenades were stuck in every belt and boot, and their holsters dragged under the full weight of pistols that ran from ancient revolvers to Mausers and Lugers, to say nothing of Toks, all of them dangling and clanking and glinting in the torchlight. Also: bayonets, daggers, hunting and fighting knives, some almost swords, recumbent on straps, additionally adangle. Every man and every woman — there were several — had at least three weapons. They seemed happy because they lived on the edge of violence, each a part of its culture, a celebrant of its values, a survivor of its whimsy.

As she stood on shaky legs, on earth once again, hands reached to touch her, not sexually but as if in wonder.

“Die weisse Hexe,” came the call, the whisper, and all crowded close to see the famous sniper of Stalingrad, as known for her beauty as for her skill. Her hat came off and her hair tumbled free. She shook it, partly because her head was hot and itchy, partly because it was a gesture copied from the movies. It cascaded and, lit by torchlight, seemed to shiver; so blond, so silken, so dense. Her eyes narrowed and she turned to three-quarters profile to confront them and the weapon of her beauty hit them hard; they stumbled back. A man approached.

“I am Bak,” he said. “Welcome, Petrova. We are here to serve you in any way.”

Bak was the Ukrainian soldier who’d risen to partisan command by virtue of cunning and organizational ability. He had become totally a creature of forest ambuscade and slow night crawl. He was a general but mistrusted by Moscow, a man to watch, a man to fear.

The issue would always be: After the great victory, would he throw his forces against or to Stalin? Was he Nationalist or Communist? If the former, he could well earn nine lead grams from an NKVD agent’s pistol instead of a hero’s medal. So he carried himself with a certain doomed grace. The fallen lines of his face, she thought, seemed to say: This will end badly.

“I am honored, General.”

“Call me Bak. It’s enough. The ‘general’ is bullshit, that’s all.” He turned and yelled, “All right, get this crate turned around so it can get out of here and take this NKVD prick back to his bath.”

The men crowded to the tail of the light plane and managed to rotate it on its landing gear to face the wind while, at the same time, standing clear of the two whirling props. Petrova could see the white faces of the two young pilots behind their control panel, crouched over their steering mechanism, waiting as the plane was resituated. When that happened, they nodded, and the guerrillas faded back. The pitch of the engine rose to a shriek as one pushed a throttle, spitting flecks of grass and debris in the air as well as the stench of acceleration, and the plane began to move forward. With less cargo by the weight of a woman, it dipped, then rose and soon vanished.

“Petrova, come, we have a wagon.”

“I can walk. I am fine.”

“No walking here. We ride. Can you ride?”

“God, no,” she said. “I am a city girl, I’m terrified of horses.”

“The White Witch terrified of anything? Now I see you have a sense of humor, and I really like you. The wagon, then.”

“It’ll have to be.”

“Good, and it’ll help you save your strength for your job. For now, rest, relax, a long journey, still not complete. Some vodka?”

“Excellent,” she said, and took a canteen from him. One shot hit her nicely.

“Now, into the wagon. Sleep if you can. It’s four hours through the forest to the camp, and we have to make it before light so the Germans don’t spot us. They’re patrolling all the time, as per the orders of that bastard Groedl, whose hash I hope you settle.”

Gripping her rifle, she said, “Get me a shot, Comrade Bak, and I won’t miss.”