Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 16

Salid was a moral man. He understood obligation, discipline, obedience to God, cleanliness, hard work, the greater good, the greater cause of Palestine, of Islam, and he used those precepts as his guidelines.

But he hid this behind an armor of diffidence and duty, and what he did appeared undisciplined. It was SS theater conceived to convey the impression of random brutality as a way of encouraging fear and thus cooperation. So while he walked among the ranks of assembled villagers, he pretended arbitrariness while looking for specificity. He required certain indicators.

The first was nasal structure. Was the nose long, thickened, wide of nostril? Did it lead the face? Had it that prowlike profile so familiar from Hans Schweitzer’s chilling invocation on the movie poster for Der ewige Jude? Was the chin also small, behind the point of the nose? Were the lips thick? What about the skin? Was it sallow, yellowish, perhaps even Asiatic? And the hair, greasy, brushed back, contributing to the general verminlike profile so common in these cases?

Since these people of Hutsulian ethnicity lived on mud streets in wooden houses under thatched roofs and worshiped at a crude Orthodox church, it was unlikely that any of them were Jews. But some carried the genetic strain. It could have gotten intermingled at any time since the medieval ages, as the Balkans, Ukraine, and Central Europe were a genetic cesspool, so corrupted by crossbreeding that all purity had been eliminated. Semitic genetic expression could emerge, strident and manipulative, at any time. As the hidden moral principle to all Scimitar actions, Captain Salid made the discriminations off of much experience, having acquired a fine eye for such matters.

“That one,” he said to Sergeant Ackov, “and the boy.”

“That one” had a bit of nasal bulge. Why take a risk? “The boy” had lively eyes, too lively for a dull nothing of a place such as Yaremche. You could see it in his eyes: defiance, intelligence, shrewdness, the defining Jewish characteristics. They had to be cleansed from the world.

In the end, he settled on ten. Each had at least one prominent Jewish characteristic. He was well pleased. He had advanced both his causes, the immediate tactical and the longer-term geopolitical. It was a good day’s work. And it was only beginning.

The ten were isolated at the riverbank, under the old suspension bridge. The waterfall continued its roar and splash. Above, on the plateau where the rude shacks of the village of Yaremche were gathered, peasants looked down. One of the panzerwagens bulled its way to the far bank and halted, overlooking the ragged formation.

Salid felt they should know why this was happening. It was meaningless, for it didn’t matter and no one had bothered to explain to the Jews in Einsatzgruppen D’s pits why it was happening, but Salid wanted to cling to civil grace in spite of all the slaughter and violence of the war. It kept one’s mind clear. Maybe it was of more use to him than to them.

He addressed them, unaware that they spoke Ukrainian, not Russian.

“I know you are innocent, in the narrow meaning of the word ‘innocent.’ I know that you curse your luck, that you are bitter, that you do not see the larger picture. I know that you are frightened. Further, I do not think you subhuman. You are indeed human, not only in the biological sense of being able to procreate with other humans. That is why you are so dangerous and must be dealt with by the scientific mechanism of the Reich. I know you cannot see this and do not understand it, but it has to be. Your death is a sacrifice for the greater good of humanity.”

“I have done nothing, sir, oh God, please spare me,” a middle-aged man cried from within the formation. Immediately two of the Police Battalion guards rushed over, clearly intending to smash him to earth for his insolence, but Salid, who understood the meaning though not the words, froze them with a gesture.

“I explain to you. There are extremely dangerous people among the bandits in the mountains above you. They must be exterminated. We made a very good start last night, an excellent start. But it was not perfect. Some escaped. It is quite possible that they will leave their sanctuary and come to you for aid and sustenance. You must not even consider such a thing. To do so would doom your village. This is a fact I must impress upon you, for so many of you are slow and backward and incapable of learning such a simple lesson. I chose to do so with this demonstration. It is not meant to be cruel or humiliating. So your sacrifice may help ensure the survival of all those others who were not selected. When they see a partisan, they will refuse aid and report instantly to the first soldier or policeman they can reach. That way they vouchsafe the survival of Yaremche and all its villagers. You are serving humanity, sir. You are serving your village. You are serving the Reich. You should be proud to contribute.”

He stepped back.

In the armored hull of the Sd Kfz 251, Sergeant Ackov pressed the trigger of the MG42, which had already been laid on for the target zone. He fired for twenty seconds, about four hundred rounds of heavy 7.92mm ammunition. A blur of spent shells cascaded from the gun, and the gun itself, though restrained in the brace of its mount, bucked savagely in the drama of recoil and recovery. It was like some kind of hideous but brilliant industrial piston, manufacturing smoke, sparks, flame, and heat as it operated.

Its stream of fire ate through the formation of hostages, seeming almost to swallow them in a melee of dust and noise. There was so much debris because, at that range, the high-velocity, high-energy bullets tore through the bodies completely and continued their downward trajectory into the earth, where each one kicked up a spurt of dirt that looked like a geyser. Taken collectively, the disturbed earth rapidly came to resemble a roaring cyclone.

All the hostages — six men, two women, and two teenage boys — fell to the earth spastically, though since the sergeant was an excellent gunner, he kept the stream of fire below the necks of his targets, so the bullet damage was concealed by the peasants’ smocks and the copious blood quickly absorbed by the earth.

“More medicine, Ackov,” said the captain.

Ackov fired again. The dust danced in cyclonic disturbance as another 250 rounds pummeled the bodies.

“Very well done,” said the captain. He turned. “People of Yaremche, learn from this. You must not assist bandit activities. The penalty is death, not only for you but for your wives and children. You will be wiped off the map if you do not comply. You do not want to be forgotten, like Lidice. For your own good, you must obey.”

He gave the signal, and the men of Police Battalion remounted their three panzerwagens to move out. Salid felt he had done an exceptionally good job.

He waited until his men had mounted the vehicles, then clambered aboard the lead panzerwagen. Ackov was there with the map.

“Herr Captain, five kilometers down the road, through the pass called Natasha’s Womb, it’s called Vorokhta.”

“On to Vorokhta, then,” said Salid, wincing, for it was beginning to rain.

They climbed high, above the rain clouds. Beneath them, the world had vanished in a sea of cottony fog, penetrated only by farther peaks in the chain that stood out like islands of an archipelago. It felt safe, though they had no way of knowing whether it was. They found the mouth of a cave — the mountains were pocked with them — and slipped inside. It had to be several miles distant from the ambush site and several hundred meters above the line of the path.

The cave was bigger than the last one and held enough room to sustain the three without closeness. The two men more or less disposed of fungus and spiderwebs and turned it marginally habitable for emergency duty. They settled in, the two city dwellers exhausted. But the Peasant was hardly able to sit still and soon left on a mushroom hunt.

In a few hours, he returned. He had an armful of the dry dead-white things, clusters of a Ukrainian berry that was small, red, and sweet, even a dead rabbit.

“Very good work,” she said.

This pleased the Peasant, who recognized the tone of warmth and reported in Ukrainian, which the Teacher dully translated. “He says he set ten snares,” he reported. “Tomorrow, first thing, he’ll inspect them. Rabbit tomorrow, he is sure.”

“Do the Germans patrol this high?”

“No. Not really, not aggressively,” said the Teacher. “Come, look, I’ll show you.”

He led her out. At the mouth of the cave she could see the reality of the Carpathians: it looked like an ocean of green, that is, rippled with the ups and downs of capricious elevation, dozens of carpeted peaks in the three- to five-thousand-foot range, as random as waves, seemingly endless. It was all tall white pines, their soft, short needles each catching a speck of light, so that the whole mass seemed somehow alive with illumination as the wind animated them.

“It’s a big place,” said the Teacher. “You can see why the Germans have no real need to conquer it. Controlling the lowland is enough for them.”

He pointed, and indeed, if she followed his angle, she saw what looked like a cut through some of the farther valleys.

“A road?”

“Yes, the only one through from Yaremche to other, smaller villages called Vorokhta, Yasinia, and Rakhiv, ultimately Uzhgorod. It’s the only road through the mountains south of Lviv. If the Red Army attacks in force and the front collapses, the Germans in Stanislav may flee down it to get through the mountains to their next line of defense. So they patrol the road constantly, because it will have to be kept open when the day arrives. But they seldom come this deep in unless they’re acting on very specific intelligence. So we are safe.”

“Enjoy your mushrooms, comrades,” she said. “We have to move before the Red Army attacks, or the prey may scamper. I’m not going to live on fungus and rabbit and sleep in a hole without at least killing the SS bastard for my troubles.”