Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 10

It was a Police Battalion operation all the way, and Captain Salid handled his men extremely well. He had learned much in his years among the Germans.

His men were experienced. They had been seconded from the 13th SS Mountain Division “Scimitar,” operating in Serbia, where they had been fighting partisans—“bandits,” officially — for the better part of three years, and proudly wore the insignia of the scimitar on the left side of the collars of their camouflaged battle smocks, opposite and yet equal in pride of place as the double flashes of the SS on the right. They had left their fezzes at base and, like their commanding officer, capped their heads only in the camouflaged Stahlhelm of the SS.

In the Balkans, Police Battalion especially had borne the brunt of the patrol and assault work. Mostly Serbian Muslims themselves, they were all mountain people, skilled in mountain fighting arcana from a life in the high altitudes. They were silent crawlers, camouflage experts, superb marksmen, and especially keen on blade work, for theirs, after all, was a blade culture. They were at their best in anti-Jewish actions, for that was where the passion burned brightest. They did truly hate and despise bandits, not only an ancient enmity but also a recent one, for they had lost as many to those bandits as they had taken from them. But they were disciplined, high-level military, skilled and patient, used to stillness. They were not Arab pirates, thirsty for blood because they were thirsty for blood; in fact, there were few Arabs among them, after Captain Salid only two unteroffiziers and an odd private or corporal among the platoons.

Salid employed the classic L-shape technique of ambuscade, getting two angles of fire from his unit without endangering either echelon to the other, and much used by his forebears against generations of invaders, from Romans to Jews to Crusaders to other tribes, to the hated English, to Turks, to the later arriving Jews. His family had been in the war business for at least fifteen generations, and although he was only thirty-two, he knew a thing or two.

Yusef el-Almeni bin Abu Salid was the cousin of the grand mufti of Jerusalem. The august persona was, alas, retired from his position among the people by British importunings and now rusticating in Berlin, where his weekly broadcasts to the Arab world had made him even more famous and powerful. The cousin Salid had grown up under the lash of British rule in Jerusalem, aware that the British were surrogates for the true enemy of his people, international Jewry, via the hated Balfour Declaration of 1919, which mandated that Jewish subhumans would be accorded land in Palestine. When the mufti, an admirer of all things German, had evinced an early enthusiasm for the Third Reich, a German diplomat had reached out to the man and offered to take certain gifted Arab boys to Germany for technical training. From the age of eight onward, Yusef Salid was raised in the German method, among Germans, whose language he quickly mastered, first in the rigors of Realschule, then in cadet school, then in officers’ training at Bad Tölz, then infantry school, and finally in a series of specialized SS training programs. He stood out because of his brown skin and coarse dark hair, but his elegance of manner, his eruditition in German and love of German literature, and his excellence in all matters military soon made him popular no matter the venue. His ability to keep his head in tense situations, his coolness under fire, his knowledge of wine — which, being a Muslim, he never drank, but he made it his business to memorize labels and vintages for exactly the popularity it would earn him — and his twinkly dark eyes made him a hero in the SS officers’ mess. His assignment to Einsatzgruppen D in the early days of the July 22 invasion and his intense labors on behalf of that unit’s aims earned him accolade after accolade, both official and personal.

When the strategy of shooting and burying the Jews of Ukraine proved unrealistic in the face of their sheer numbers, and the unit was folded into the Waffen SS for general military duties, it was Dr. Groedl himself who made calls and pulled strings on the young officer’s behalf. Groedl considered himself to have an eye for talent. His mentees were scattered far and wide in the great crusade. It was he who arranged for Salid to be transferred to the 13th-SS Mountain, the only pure Muslim division in the Waffen-SS, where he knew the young man’s talents for locating Jews would be put to good use.

It was inevitable that Groedl would recall Salid. When he needed a group of specialists for the delicate mission before him, it took a great deal of wrangling to get Police Battalion, which was acquiring a spectacular record under Salid in the Serbian mountains, transferred en masse to the 12th SS Panzer Division, the umbrella unit for all SS operations in the West Ukraine — Stanislav area, although the connection was for paper-pushers only, and SS-13 Police Battalion Scimitar reported directly to and worked completely for Senior Group Leader — SS Groedl.

Salid estimated the bandit column to consist of at least fifty men and women, all heavily armed, all well experienced, most mounted on the sturdy-legged Carpathian ponies that made operations in the mountains feasible. He himself had only twenty-five, the best, from Police Battalion’s larger pool of mountain anti-bandit fighters. He knew a larger formation on horseback could not move silently through the forest and mountain; he knew they would leave sign and disturbance; this one had to be done with great precision. He also specified ammunition double loads and made certain each of his fighters was armed not with the slow bolt-action KAR-98k rifle but with the MP-40 submachine gun and a P-38 or a Luger pistol. Each man carried three M24 grenades, “potato mashers,” in the parlance. The point was to unleash maximum firepower when the column entered the kill zone. It had to be a single overpowering blast, because the targets were wily, would not panic, would return fire, and would quickly form maneuver elements and locate an egress and engineer some form of escape. Their ponies would give them mobility. But there could be no escapees. All must die: no prisoners, no worries, no regrets.

Hauptsturmführer — that is, Captain — Salid put his first MG-42, settled on a tripod for steadiness, thirty meters off the line of march, giving it a good sweeping angle laterally along the length of the column. He placed his second down the line, the only weapon on the left side of the ambush axis, also on a tripod. It would work the back end of the column, with a fire cutoff point established so that it did not leak bursts onto the Serbs on the other side of the path. His submachine gunners and grenadiers were concentrated in the jag of the L and, after the first magazine expenditure, would move on to targets of opportunity. The key was a group of extremely brave men who would be sequestered along the march line. They would wait two minutes, then emerge, there within the confines of the column, and begin to shoot the wounded. It was important that the phases of the ambush — opening ambuscade, suppressive fire, and individual liquidations — happen promptly, without hesitation. It would go so fast that there would be no time for command direction; the fellows would have to do it as they had been instructed, by second nature.

The unit had been afield for three days. It had moved only on foot, only at night. No cooking fires, no latrine pits, no sleeping positions. The men during the day simply melted into the forest and went supine for the entire daylight hours. They carried meager rations and water and were instructed to leave no traces, an impossibility but an ideal toward which to strive.

After ambush, it would take an hour for the armored Sd Kfz 251 Schützenpanzerwagens to arrive, grinding through thick brush under the power of their tracks, while being steered adroitly by their front tires. Each half-track carried an MG-42, so once they were on site, the firepower would be sufficient to stand off an army. But until then, that would be the tensest time, for who knew what of Bak’s units were afoot in the forest tonight? Perhaps another was closer than expected and would come to the sound of the gunfire, to find Police Battalion low on ammunition and exhausted from the rigors of the ordeal. It was a gamble, but it was a gamble that had to be taken.

A cricket chirped. The cricket was a Serbian scout, ahead of the ambush site by one hundred meters. That meant the partisans — excuse, excuse, bandits! — were approaching down the path. Salid crouched, drawing his MP toward him. His would be the opening volley. He scanned again, saw nothing but stillness under the weaving of brush in the breeze, heard nothing but silence along the darkened forest path. Perhaps to his left he heard the squirming of the machine-gun team setting itself on the edge, rising behind the heavy gun with its endless belt of 7.92mm ammunition, but there were no clicks as guns were cocked or came off safe, for his good, trained Police Battalion fighters carried their weapons hot and ready to fire, to save tenths of seconds when it counted most.

Was it a dream or a fantasy? It had to be a fantasy. Dreams follow their own mad course, welling from an underneath of surrealism, grotesquery, twisted images, strange colors, weird angles. Her dreams were nightmares, all set in ruined cities of dead children. No, this was a fantasy, an indulgence claimed at the very edge of consciousness but still controlled by a rational mind full of aesthetic distinctions.

The scene always a meadow somewhere in an idealized Russia. The weather always late spring, the breeze always soft, the flowers always bright, their smell always sweet. It was a picnic of Petrova’s lost family. All had assembled.

Her father was there. That kind and decent man, with his earnest way, and his steadiness, and his intellectual integrity. He always wore a tweed suit in the English style and had round black glasses, possibly French in origin. He smoked his ever-present pipe. His high cheeks and sincere eyes and gentleness of nature were what she felt, what she remembered, what she missed so terribly.

He was sitting on a linen sheet, sipping tea, and making conversation.

“No, Mili,” he said. “I would stay with your court game. You have so much talent, and a girl as intelligent as you needs some kind of healthy outlet. Though you are correct in asserting that there is no direct application of the strength and suppleness you develop, I think that it will eat up your excess energy. Believe me, I have seen too many an intellectually gifted woman ruin herself on men, tobacco, and vodka when she goes to university, simply because all her excess energy demands some kind of release or expression. The tennis will save you.”

She laughed. He was so earnest. “Oh, Papa,” she said, “maybe I should take up the pipe, like you! All the time you fiddle with that pipe, all the cutting, the trimming, the stuffing, the lighting, the inhaling. Is that how you handle your excess energy?”

“Mili with a pipe!” Her younger brother Gregori laughed. “Oh, that’s what would attract the boys. You’d end up married to an engineer or a doctor if you smoked a pipe!”

“Mili, Mili, Mili,” shouted the even younger Pavel and did a loose-limbed interpretation of Mili sucking hard on an imaginary Sherlock Holmes meerschaum, all curves, fifteen pounds weight, with an obstruction in the stem so that the effort of inhalation hollowed his cheeks and bulged his eyes.

Dimitri, as always, sprang to her rescue. “You boys, you go easier on your big sister! You’re so lucky to have a beauty like Mili—”

“You’re pretty lucky yourself, Dimitri!” shouted Gregori, and all of them fell to the warm earth, laughing at the hilarity of it all, even normally reserved Mama.

Gone, all gone. Her father, into the Soviet gulag, lost forever for disagreeing over Mendelian genetics with a Stalinist toady and bootlicker who called himself a scientist. Gregori, burning in his T-34 somewhere in the Caucasus. Pavel, pneumonia over the hard winter, picked up in the hospital where he’d been sent after a severe leg wound in infantry combat. Her mother, shell, Leningrad, second year of the great siege. And last of all, Dimitri, down in flames somewhere in his Yak, not quite an ace but one of the very best, whose luck had finally run out.

Lost, lost, lost. Why am I spared, she wondered. I must survive for the memories I carry. If I die, who will remember Mama, Papa, Gregori, Pavel, and dear, dear Dimitri?

It had begun so joyously, but now the grief crumpled her and she knew it wasn’t a dream, it was too cruel to be a dr—

Suddenly the air filled with a sheet of light, an instant whirlwind of incandescent razor blades amid heat and noise, and the very universe itself shivered as malevolent energies were released into it, the energy from the machine-gun bullets tearing into the wood of the wagon, spraying splinters and dust in supersonic spurts wherever their randomness took them. It was a midsummer night’s nightmare of industrialized mid-twentieth-century violence.

Her first coherent image was the horse upright on two hind legs, its two forelegs clawing the air. It had been mortally struck and twisted sideways against its halter as it died and fell. It pulled the world with it as its weight overwhelmed the wagon and that vehicle spilled sideways. Mili rode it down, aware that fire poured in from several directions and the air was filled with the lethal debris of battle. Horses screamed and reared, some lurched off in a panic, others went down lumpily as the bullet went through them. All was chaos and death.

She hit earth, slithered backward off the path into the brush and watched as the machine-gun fire swept up the path and down it, a giant whiskbroom that stirred the dust to fill the air. From somewhere too close to be comfortable and too far to be dangerous, a grenade exploded, and with her experience of such things, she knew it was a Stielgranate 24, the German potato masher. Its abruptness beat her eardrums and lifted her from the earth an inch or two.

Six months in infantry battle in Stalingrad had taught her lessons; she identified the spastic ripping of the German machine guns, the slightly slower-firing rounds of their machine pistols, and the abrupt shear of light, pressure, and concussion from the M24s detonating at the end of their long tumble from hand to target. The Germans were well positioned, heavily armed and had no need to conserve ammunition. This was a total murder ambush, nothing delicate. They were here to kill everyone, kill the horses, kill the dogs.

She had no rifle. She had no weapon. But because she slept in clothes, she was fully dressed in the camouflage sniper tunic, and there was but one direction to go, only out, away, beyond, that was, to ease backward into forest. But she did, and a man was on her.

His legs clamped about her, in not the rapist’s rage but the killer’s. She saw his alien face, the dapple-camouflage of the SS battle-dress tunic — odd, the details that stick — and pure fury. He was slightly tangled in his machine-pistol sling, which retarded his freedom, but he was so much stronger it didn’t matter. He pinned her with a forearm as his other arm disengaged from the weapon and its twisted sling, reached to hip, and withdrew eight inches of steel blade — the torque of his body made his helmet pop off — and then raised the arm to strike, and at that point a bullet ripped through his face, tore his grimace, nose, and left eye from him and turned him to deadweight. He toppled off. Mili would never know where the savior’s bullet had come from, one of the surviving partisans or an errant SS shot, possibly a ricochet as ricochets followed no law of justice but only their own insane preference.

Now freed, she slithered backward. As she wiggled, feeling her way with boot toes, she heard the high-pitched spitting of the partisan tommy guns, as some had survived the initial blast of fire and were responding. More horses screamed. A beast, riderless, careened down the road until tracers pumped into its flank and it slithered, writhing, kicking dust, to the ground. Another blast came from along the line as the SS bastards tossed more grenades: the two German heavy guns continued to rip sheets of debris from the earth as their operators worked the column over and, less powerfully but still insistently, the German machine pistols sent fleets of bullets into the melee, unleashing jets of spray and splinter wherever they struck.

A silence louder than gunfire enveloped the ambush zone.

All along the line, she saw men arise from so close it frightened her. It struck her that she’d slid into one such waiting croucher, evicted him from his spot, and gotten him killed for her trouble. But the remainder closed into the ruins of the column with dervish speed and meant to finish the engagement with their machine pistols at close range.

Mili ceased to observe. Instead, sniper quiet and sniper strong and too intent on survival for fear, she edged her way backward, managed to turn, and making surprising speed, put distance between herself and the kill zone. At a certain point she heard voices — not German but some other language, Slavic, possibly Serbian — and froze. Not far from her, men rose to begin their own approach to the kill zone.

Like the sniper she was, she had the sniper’s gift for disappearance, and now she employed it as never before in her months of battle.

Salid was on the Feldfu.b2 to 12th SS Panzer element, hunched next to his signalman, who carried the radio unit on his back. He spoke into the telephone-microphone.

“Hello, hello, this is Zeppelin calling Anton, answer, please.”

“Hello, hello, Zeppelin, Anton responding, I have you clearly.”

“Anton, request move panzerwagens up here fast. I don’t know if there’s anybody around, I don’t have enough men for security, I have taken casualties and we must load our catch and be gone before more bandits arrive.”

“Zeppelin, received. The panzerwagens are on dispatch and should reach you within the hour. Mission results, Zeppelin.”

“Received and acknowledged, Anton. Mission report: many kills, numbers to follow.”

The Germans! Salid thought. They want numbers on everything. They’d want numbers for the hairs on the devil’s ass!

“Will pass along, Zeppelin. End transmit.”

“End transmit,” acknowledged the captain.

Meanwhile, his men were mopping up. He gave the microphone to his signalman, rose, and joined the soldiers, entering the kill zone as he heard the grunts of his machine gunners breaking down their weapons for transport. He walked the line, gun smoke still rancid in the air. Everywhere partisan bodies twisted or relaxed as death took them. A horse or two still breathed, still thrashed, until the finishing shot stilled them.

He issued a quick order. “Second squad, on security perimeter a hundred meters out. The rest of you, carry on. Where’s Ackov? Damn him, he’s never around when—”

“Captain,” said Sergeant Ackov, “here I am.” Ackov was a hard man, a former police sergeant in reality, very good at the soldier’s tasks. His face blackened from the soot of the small-arms gases, the sergeant approached at a run from farther down the line. “I have numbers, sir.”

“Go ahead, Sergeant,” said Salid.

“Thirty-five bandits killed, at least nine of them women, but several too mangled by blast to determine identity. No blood trails. Hard to believe anyone survived the initial fusillade, but who can say. In daylight, we can look for sign.”

“In daylight, we must be long gone. Our casualties?”

“Two dead, seven wounded, one of the wounded critical and won’t make it until the half-tracks.”

Up and down the line, spatters of shots crackled in the heavy summer night air. Police Battalion personnel knew it didn’t pay to check the bodies from too close a range. You roll one over, and perhaps he has a pistol or a knife and isn’t quite dead and yearns to take you with him. Perhaps as he was bleeding out, he unscrewed the cap on a grenade and wrapped the lanyard about his wrists, so that when disturbed, the grenade drops, the striker ignites, and the grenade detonates. Instead, walking carefully, using torchlight beams to guide them, they kept their distance and fired a short burst into each body. It was safer that way, and worth the expenditure in ammunition; only when the column of corpses had been fully killed a second time did the men set aside their weapons and pull the dead out of their positions and into a more or less orderly formation, if flat and still, for more intense evaluation.

“Can you make an identification?” Ackov asked as the Arab captain walked the line of bodies, attending them carefully.

Salid examined each dead face. He felt little but the responsibility of duty and command and the ambitions passed on to him by the One True Faith. The death masks themselves meant little to him; he’d seen thousands in his time, and learned early on in the days of Einsatzgruppen D that it made little sense to dwell on any one face.

At a certain point, he pulled a file out of his camo tunic to make comparisons. “I can’t tell about the women,” he said. “We’ll have to clean them up to make a more precise identification. As for Bak, I had hoped to nab him tonight. What a nice bonus that would be, and earn me a week in Berlin. But unless he’s one of the ones with face blown off, I don’t see him. Maybe he wasn’t here.”

The week in Berlin was purely command theater for the perpetually excited Serbs, who loved to rape as much as kill. Salid’s own personal tastes were aesthetic: given a week’s leave, he would return to his prayer rituals — a luxury quickly abandoned on the Eastern Front — five times a day, and dream of the severe beauty of his beloved Palestine with its groves of date and olive trees, its sun-bleached sandstone hills, its bounty concealed in its near abstraction, its warmth, its bright sun, its needful people.

“Intelligence predicted Bak would be here,” said Ackov.

“ ‘Predict’ is too scientific a word, Sergeant. They’re just guessing, like the rest of us. Under normal circumstances I would call this a most excellent operation. More bodies than Von Bink’s Panzergrenadiers have managed to collect in one place in over a year. But the operation was so special, I am not yet sure if we succeeded, and I am not yet sure what sort of report to make to Senior Group Leader Groedl.”

“Captain,” came a cry from nearby, and an excited man approached. He held a rifle, which he presented to Ackov, who presented it to Salid.

It was a Mosin-Nagant 91 with a PU scope sight and a complex shooter’s sling for mooring it to the body at three points.

“She was here,” said Ackov. “No doubt about it.”

Sniper’s luck: a cave.

Sniper’s luck: a cave without a bear, a wolf, a badger, some wild thing already in attendance, ready to fight her for squatter’s rights.

Sniper’s luck: a stream through which she could run for miles, leaving no tracks. More, when she finally exited it, she exited over rocks and climbed a rocky path to get up to stable, dry ground. Again, no tracks.

She huddled within, watching the sun filter its way through the Carpathian forest as it rose. All was still. The scene was exquisite if you had time to appreciate such things, the verticals of the seventy-foot-tall white pine trunks, the horizontals of the pine boughs, the harmony of green and brown, the falling away of the land, the green cloverlike undergrowth, the slanting rays of sun where it penetrated the forest. There was perfume in the air, the sweetness of the pines. So serene was the view that she had to wrench herself from it; it suggested that peace and security were possibilities when clearly they were not.

No Germans came her way, though her visibility was limited. At the same time, no partisans seemed to be searching for her, either. She had no rifle, she had no map, she had no idea where she was. It had happened so fast in that modern way, one moment you’re in one universe, on the edge of sleep, dreaming of your loved ones, and the next in another universe, everyone and everything trying to kill you with very loud violence.

Just about every part of her ached. The longer she lay, the more signals of pain came from various body parts as they realized they were no longer obligated to perform at maximum output but now had the leisure to report their discomfort. She had fallen, bruising and scraping a knee. The pine needles had cut her face and hands as she pushed her way through them. It seemed she’d pulled muscles along one rib, and that pull reported its agonies with some urgency. There was the lesser issue of a sprained ankle, but ankles had a way of loafing through the first day, then crying out loudly the next. A hundred scrapes, bumps, tears, pricks, cuts clamored for attention. Meanwhile, she was desperately hungry. How would she eat?

She was no forest dweller. She was a city girl. Her life before the war had been the cinemas and coffee shops of St. Petersburg; like many St. Petersburgers from old St. Petersburg families, she could never think of the place as Leningrad. It was a white city, beautiful in its pale northern light with its great churches and palaces, its abundant waterways and bridges. It was Dostoyevsky’s city, literature’s city, the most European city in Russia. Nothing about it had prepared her for this.

She knew she needed a plan. Her father, wise and wily, had already figured it out. She heard his voice. Wait another night here in the cave, then tomorrow at late afternoon begin to ease your way downhill. You will be lucky or not, running into peasants who may help or Germans who will kill. But you cannot simply lie here awaiting death.

Now assess. Use your brain. Papa said you were smart, all the teachers said you were smart. Figure this out.

Analyze, analyze, analyze. You must know the nature of the problem before you can solve it. This is as true in physics as it is in war, politics, medicine, or any advanced, refined human behavior. You must determine that which is true rather than that which you want to be true.

That was Papa’s truest belief. That was what killed him.

Her father was an agricultural biologist, and his task, like all those in his specialty, was to find some way to increase the wheat harvest. The motherland lived on her wheat; from wheat came bread, and from bread, life. Someone once said bread was the staff of life. Her father had laughed at that. No, he’d said, there’s no staff involved; bread is life.

But his education was founded on a stern belief in Father Mendel’s genetics. Alas, in Ukraine, a peasant genius named Trofim Lysenko believed in hybrid genetics. He had Stalin’s ear and, soon enough, power. It behooved him to enforce his theories, first with letters to the journals, then lectures of admonition by way of faculty supervisors, and then through visits from secret policemen.

But her father would not be still.

One could not alter a wheat stalk in the lab and expect those alterations to be carried on in subsequent generations. Father Mendel made that clear a hundred years ago. It was a truth that could not be denied, and to base Soviet agricultural policy on fraudulent theories of hybridization was to ensure failure and doom millions to starvation.

It wasn’t that Fyodor Petrova was a hero. Far from it. He was a mild, calm man, decent to all, a loving husband and father of three. But he was compelled to speak the truth, and he spoke it until he was disappeared. Over wheat!

Now she had fallen into her other trap: bitterness. She tried to exile from memory the night she learned he had been taken, the long months without hearing a thing, and finally an unofficial but not quite by chance encounter between her mother and one of her father’s university colleagues, who reported unofficially. “He said they heard that Papa died of tuberculosis in a prison in Siberia.”

And that was that. The ugliness of grief is not for words. Nor the grief to come: for two brothers, a mother, a husband. Even the great Dostoyevsky, with all his haunted, tormented mutterers, could not find the words to express it. Survive. Try to forget.

Papa again: Get your sniper brain back. Focus, concentrate, see, understand. Show nothing, hide your beautiful eyes and body and become the earth, the wind, the trees, become the sniper, and pay them back, pay them all back.

Analyze. Assess. Understand. God gave you a brain, use it.

What do you know?

I know that we were ambushed by Germans. Most of us died. I escaped by—

No, no. Do not waste time on the self. Who cares by what means the sniper escaped. She escaped. On to larger issues. Characterize the German effort.

Extremely skilled. They have the best warcraft in the world and routinely kill us five to one in any engagement. They have better equipment, smarter officers, more creative soldiers. We only beat them only by sheer force of numbers. If they kill us five to one, we come at them six to one or ten to one and, in the end, shall prevail because, all things being equal, we can outbleed them. We can outsacrifice them. We can outgrieve them. We clear minefields, after all, by marching through them.

But even with those truths, the effort of the night was outstanding. It was beyond anything she had encountered in her six months in Stalingrad, her day of killing at Kursk.

Especially considering there were fewer Germans.

There had to be. A large force could not maneuver and emplace so silently; it would leave sign. Bak’s partisans were masters of the forest; how could they have been fooled except by those who were more masterful yet?

A small, silent, elite force. A few men.

How few?

Two heavy guns. She recognized the heavier concussions of the 7.92 rounds spurting from the unmuzzle at unattackable speed. The rest machine pistols, their lighter, crisper burr gnawing away in counterpoint to the heavy guns. The automatic nature of the weapons made it seem as if thousands attacked when it could have been but few. She did not believe that she heard any K-98 Mausers. All were armed with automatic guns. All. That was rare for them. If all these men had machine pistols, special arrangements had been made. This was some kind of team, some kind of special unit, not just a line platoon wandering the Carpathians hoping for kills.

She thought about it more. Twenty, twenty-five men. Four on the 42s, the rest with machine pistols and grenades. First the heavy guns fire. Then the machine pistols and grenades, but no more than four grenades. Then, on signal or as if rehearsed, all those gunners go quiet and the executioners spring from nearby — so nearby! — and are quickly among the wounded, the hiding, the dying, firing at close range.

Think about those men. They lie still, making not a sound, while their comrades fire inches above their heads. Both elements know exactly the cutoff point; the execution squad has total trust in the gunners and leaps into action the very second the gunners cease fire. Not a split second is wasted.

Survivors? A freak of luck, maybe, a few out of fifty, herself among the lucky. But superb execution, perhaps rehearsed, so that each man knew his place and move. It didn’t feel like a serendipitous happening. These men knew. They had superb intelligence. They moved through partisan-controlled forest without a sound, they knew exactly the pathway, and they planned and executed beautifully. They were clearly of Waffen-SS caliber, maybe better. They represented — if she understood the situation here in the Carpathians, where a bitter kind of stalemate existed — the coming of a new energy via a new and specialized unit to the field.

What could it mean?

At that point, she was yanked from her concentration by a flash of motion. She looked sharply, dividing the visible world into sectors and examining each in its time, top to bottom, as methodically as a typist transcribes an interview.

Until she saw them.