Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 28

The patrols came closer and closer. Sometimes they went high, sometimes low. Sometimes they were very aggressive, moving loudly, making a big important-mission show; sometimes they were secretive, employing great woods skill, moving and hunting quietly. Sometimes they traveled circularly, sometimes vertically. Suppose they left trailers, listeners in the night? Suppose they left silent ambush teams? Suppose they left their own sly traps that could drive a stake through you or drop a boulder on you? Worst of all, suppose they left snipers?

With the fear of constant discovery, they could not get out to hunt for mushrooms without great anxiety, which had its psychological and nutritional effects. They were surviving at subsistence level. Days had passed.

“The Peasant will return,” she insisted. “He will have a rifle. You and he will escape deeper into the mountains, where it’s safe for now. The Red Army will liberate Ukraine. You will survive.”

“What happens to Petrova?”

“If he gets a rifle, then I will head down the mountain and into Ivano and find a place to shoot. If I can’t kill Groedl, I’ll just kill Germans until they kill me. I’ll die a sniper’s death, as so many have before me.”

“You are delusional, Sergeant Petrova. The Peasant is dead, obviously. We are lucky he didn’t rat us out under torture. He won’t be back. There is no rifle. The Serbs will find us, and that Arab will torture us, you more than me.”

“The Peasant is too sly.”

“I only wish. Here’s the reality. He’s gone.”

It was true. Where was he? Had he been caught in Yarmeche on his rifle-hunting expedition? No sign of him. Maybe he had simply lit out, used his skills to survive and evade, and abandoned them. But he would not do that. The Peasant was a strong man and would never yield to craven temptation. She could not believe he was gone.

Which wine went with which dish was far from Captain Salid’s mind. He yearned to return, if not to that very interesting wine cellar and whatever treasures it might still contain, then to a treasured volume in the original French, Varietals of the Loire River Valley, compiled in 1833. To know the present and expect the future, you had to know the past. But there was other business to attend to.

“Look, friend,” he said in good Russian to the man on the table, “this is getting us nowhere. We both know how it must end. It’s only a question of the journey to that spot. You would do the same to me were our positions reversed, so there’s no morality here, really. It’s war, that’s all, and duty. So why not make it easy on yourself?”

And me, he thought.

He finished his cigarette and stubbed it. The cellar of the inn made a rather poor torture chamber, but one did what one must. One adapted. It was the soldier’s way. As he saw it, he was not cruel, he was practical. Certain goals had to be achieved.

“Don’t bore me with the lost-peasant routine. Peasants don’t wander about, not in time of war. They understand the danger. You’d only be out and about on a mission, a job, and I think I know what that is. So please, tell me, and it’ll go so much easier on you.”

The man was spread-eagled, secured by ropes. He was largely naked, except for a crude wrap that provided modesty. How much longer would it last? His nose was crushed, his teeth smashed in, both eyes swamped in puffed-out, blood-filled tissue and crusted scab. Blood ran from a dozen or so slashes and contusions randomly placed on his limbs. His body was a festival of bruising, hemorrhaging, cuts and, worst of all, the angry red blossoms where they’d laid the torch against him. Fire was man’s most primitive fear, his most painful prosecutor, his cruelest adversary, and Salid had no compunctions about using it against his enemies.

“Let’s go over this one more time. We picked you up scurrying uphill, into the mountains, with three loaves of bread, a bunch of carrots, three potatoes, and a large piece of salted beef. Someone here in the village gave you the food. That we know. I’ll tell you what, I don’t even care. That’s fine. Petty heroism by some other peasant fool, no need to get all indignant about it. I don’t care, Himmler doesn’t care, nobody cares. That’s your victory, all right? You protected your allies, you gave no one to the hated Police Battalion torturer in the silly red hat, you are heroic and a tribute to the ideal of the new Stalinist Man. I’d kiss you for your bravery if I had the time.

“But you’re a bandit. Of course, what else can you be? You were getting food for other bandits hidden in the mountains, survivors of the gun battle some days ago. Possibly one of these survivors is a woman bandit known to be a sharpshooter. One of your missions surely was to abscond with a rifle so she can complete her mission. Now you mean to return, which means you know where they are. So this is all I ask. Tell us. Lead us. Turn them over to us. Do that, and I’ll let you survive. We’ll cut you free, get you medical aid, your people will be here in a few weeks, days maybe, you’ll go into a refugee center hospital and all the villagers will say, He did not give us up. He was a hero, that one. You’ll get some kind of red banner and, when all this is over, go back to your village with a chestful of medals and scars, a hero in the Great Patriotic War. Every June twenty-second, you’ll wear your medals to remind people of your bravery in the partisan war against Hitler.”

The man said nothing. He stared grimly at the low ceiling in the room. His consciousness fluttered in and out and waves of pain came and went, each seemingly more intense than the one before. He was not a heroic man, and his horizons had been limited by his education, of which he had none; his culture, which demanded total obedience; and his workplace, which was the earth and demanded only sixteen hours a day in toil to nurse a living from, assuming the Stalinists did not take too much grain that year. There was only one metric by which he could be considered “free”: he would not talk.

“I think it’s the fire that gets you the most,” Salid said. “Peasants fear fire. It can wipe out a crop, burn down a hut, scatter the cattle, alert the Cossacks, and in a single night everything is lost. So the fear of fire is deep in you. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time having you beaten. That was foolish on my part. You can beat a Jew, he has no resistance to pain, a little of it lights off his imagination, and soon enough he’s selling out his family, his parents, his rabbi, his children. Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of it. But your life is so harsh that pain means nothing. We could beat on you until we were exhausted and then you’d ask, What’s for dessert? Foolishly, I wasted time and effort from my fine Serbian colleagues here.”

There were two of them, in boots and trousers, their muscular chests and thick arms glinting in the torchlight. Not a lot of pity and even less interest showed on their faces. They were professional torturers and had seen a lot of things themselves, so nothing this fellow underwent had much meaning to them.

“So again. Please. Speak. Water, food, comfort, morphine, schnapps, or that awful vodka shit you people like. Then you take us for a nice walk in the forest and point out where these bandits are hiding or your rendezvous, whatever is your next step. Then for you: more of everything, more than you’ve ever had in you whole life.”

The man stared at the ceiling through his swollen eyes. He said nothing.

Salid turned. “The torch. Again, in burnt and unburnt areas.”

He went upstairs and outside to sit in the sun and have another cigarette. He could see clouds of mist floating up from the waters of the River Prut. The roar of the water tumbling drowned out the screams.

He sat, smoking, thinking.

The man would break. Soon. No one could stand up to determined torture; that was an operational value shared by both SS and Arab nationalists actively plotting war against the British, whose ranks Salid would lead after the war was over and at last bring purity to Palestine. The Arab revolt of ’36 to ’39 was nothing! Why, the next time—

He glanced about. Today’s stroke was masterful. Instead of rolling into the village in his three panzerwagens, he halted a kilometer outside and sent fast-moving lightly armed flanking patrols around to see what they could flush. Indeed, they’d flushed this peasant. Now it was a matter of time. He would lead them, they would net the girl, and it would be another triumph for the great Salid. More important, it would get him sent out of this hellhole, with a huge Ukrainian Guards Army about to jump on him, and back to the Balkans, from whence, when the time came, escape was not only simpler but set up under the auspices of a certain section of the SS. He would get out, get back, and reemerge in his own world, though now a legend; he would be a great weapon in that war, the next one, and he would win the peace on the terms he thirsted for so voraciously.

He just needed this bastard to break now! Time was growing short. The offensive could break at any time, and who knew what that would unleash? That was why having permanent possession of the three panzerwagens was so important. With them, he could get his men up the mountains and over the Yaremche road to Uzhgorod. Without them, he might be another fool in a six-mile parade of hapless victims headed north to Lviv for the Red Air Force to strafe and bomb at will.

And this other thing: now Groedl had decided on a risky plan to catch the sniper. He would submit himself to her marksmanship, albeit from a good distance out. He would bet his life that she could not hit him, just as he would bet his life that she would have to try. Groedl had decided to make a visit to the delightful village of Yaremche. The White Witch would be lured into a trap, which he, Salid, would spring. But what if he failed? That thought petrified him. Allah would not let him fail. But it would be so much better if this bastard would crack and lead them to her—

“Captain, come quickly. He has—”

It was one of the torturers, and from the look of alarm on the face of the man, Salid understood the news could not be good. He rose and followed the man into the inn and down the cellar steps.

The peasant was still alive on the table. But… both of his eyes had been gouged out. They bled profusely. He shivered in pain, writhing against the binds of the rope.

“Why on earth would you do such a thing?” Salid demanded of his torturers. “For God’s sake, what use is he to us now?”

“We didn’t do it, Captain. He got his right hand loose, I don’t know how. And in a second when I had turned away to acquire a new torch, he used his thumb on each eye.”

The man said through his pain, “Be quite happy to guide you now, sir.” Then he laughed.

“Cut his fucking throat,” said Salid.