Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 14

Yes, there were rifles, almost thirty of them. But all the bolts had been removed. They were worthless. Her sniper rifle, with its beautiful scope, was also gone, a German trophy instead of her head. There were no PPSh’s, as the Germans prized that sturdy peasant submachine gun and snatched it up whenever they could. The Germans, in their methodical way, had been very thorough, leaving no grenades, no bayonets or knives, no pistols. The bodies, twenty-four of them, lay in a neat double row alongside the path, where they’d been dragged. Most bore the violence of modern small-arms trauma, some horribly, some not so horribly. They had been covered with lime for some reason, as if to shield the forest from them and not them from the forest, but it had worked, and in the intervening night and day, no scavengers had come to enjoy the meat of the predator’s kill.

“Bak is not here,” said the Teacher.

“That is one good thing.”

“He escaped. I would say it looks like a good ten or so made it away.”

“No,” said the Peasant through the Teacher. “You miscount, comrade. The number seems so small because there are no women’s bodies here.”

“The women’s bodies have been removed?” asked Petrova.

“It would appear so.”

“Why, I wonder?” she asked. “It’s not like the Nazis have a well-known respect for females. Usually they rape before they murder.”

The glade had a haunted feel to it. Now it was restored to the natural order, the white pines tall and majestic, the ground cover curly with small green leaves, the carpet of needles thick everywhere. But a tang of the fired gunpowder lingered in the air, perhaps to be driven away by the rain that threatened. Spent shells lay everywhere, as the fast-firing German guns ate ammunition voraciously. A small non-coniferous tree, close to an M24 blast, had been sheared down the middle, and already its leaves were beginning to brown. The wagon, on its side, lay riddled, almost comically shredded, as if by termites. A touch and it would disintegrate. The poor horse lay in its halter, its guts ripped open, its head at a grotesque angle. It had died kicking and neighing. Other horse carcasses, many split and spilling tripe, lay haphazardly about.

“Look hard, think, and come back to me, each of you, with a report.”

“A report on what?”

“On what happened here. Why, how? Give me interpretations I can use. Now, fast, we don’t have too much time before the rain, and I want the Peasant hunting mushrooms before that.”

“Yes, comrade.”

Each man did as he had been ordered, walking the ground of the kill zone back and forth, putting a great effort into it. In time they rendezvoused where she sat under a tree, not far from the wrecked wagon and the spot where the knifer had almost killed her before someone blew his brains out.

“It was a very good ambush,” said the Peasant. “These soldiers knew their business. That’s why we didn’t hear a thing until it was too late. I noticed a scarf tied to a tree at the halfway point, on the far side of the path, which was the marker for the rear machine gun so that it would not fire into the unit’s own men.”

“Very good,” she said. “Now, Teacher, intellectual, tell me something.”

“The tracks. The Germans brought up half-tracks—”

“How do you know they were panzerwagens?”

“I could see the tire tracks crushed in tracks of the treads. The treads broke the tire cuts, not the other way around, which mean the tires preceded the treads. Panzerwagens.”

“Sd Kfz 251s,” she said. “A huge armored beast of a thing. Very hard to kill, with a forty-two usually mounted up top. I saw them all over Stalingrad. How many?”

“I don’t know.”

“Three.”

“I’m sure you’re correct. Anyhow, that is puzzling, is it not? Why bring the huge things, crush them through the forest, to remove a team that is very good already at moving through the forest?”

“The answer would be not for the team. For something else. And what would that be?”

“I don’t know.”

“The women’s bodies.”

“Exactly,” said the Teacher. “Yes, it has to be.”

“They knew there’d be women. In the confusion of the fight, they couldn’t possibly take time to discriminate in their targeting. It’s hard to discriminate with an MG-42 roaring through a belt at a thousand rounds a minute. So they’d have to collect the women. Why?”

She already knew the answer.

The bodies were damaged by blast and burn and bullet strike. The features were blurred or uncertain. They had to examine them carefully, scientifically.

She understood: They didn’t just know. They were looking for me.