Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 34

It happened rarely enough, but sometimes there was good, deep sleep, dreamless. It exiled her fear, her fatigue, her predicament. It was pure bliss. Deep in the cave, buried in leaves, she finally found nourishment in sleep. It seemed to last forever, velvety and seamless, the utter pleasure of deep sleep and—

“What? What?”

“You must see this. Come, really, you must look at this.”

It was the Teacher. His voice was so strained that she did not bother to argue. Whatever it was, she had to see it.

It was the hour before the dawn. The night sky was like her sleep, velvety, dark, without depth or luster. But to the east, there was a strange glare.

“What is that? What is going on?”

“Come, see, it’s amazing.”

She followed him down the dark path through the forest, feeling the trees swaying in some kind of breeze, hearing the rush of the pine needles moving against each other, hearing the creaking and groaning as the heavy limbs moved reluctantly.

“Is it the offensive? Has the Red Army arrived?”

“No, something else. I don’t know what to make of it.”

He brought her to a promontory looking down through a notch between two mountains, and she recognized the landforms from the maps she’d studied, and knew she was looking into Yaremche. But the back slope of one of the mountains that obscured the village issued a glow above its crest that filled the sky, and even this high, this far, the acrid residue of smoke reached them. More strangely still, every now and then a tongue of flame could be seen in the darkness, though where it landed was behind the back slope.

“They’re burning it,” said the Teacher.

“Flammenwerfer-41s,” she said. “I’ve seen them before. They used them against us in Stalingrad. They’re systematically burning the slope of that mountain over the village, clearing it. But why?”

“That is what I meant to ask you. To do that much work that fast, they must have had to bring in every flamethrower in the area. Why? What on earth can it mean to them? And why do they do it now, when they know our troops are about to jump off and those weapons can halt or slow advances all up and down the line? Yet they gather them here for this madness. It makes no sense, does it, Sergeant Petrova?”

“You’re the intelligence assistant, Teacher. You tell me.”

“I have no idea. Well, except—”

“Go on.”

“They fear you.”

“What?”

“They have not yet caught you, and it drives them mad with fear. They do not know if you have a new rifle. Thus, to be safe, they denude the mountain of its forest cover surrounding a town. The point is to deny the White Witch cover from which to fire. But why would she come to this town, in this zone?”

“I can think of only one reason.”

“And that is?”

“Groedl himself, for some reason, will soon be in this town.’ ”

“How close do you need to be?”

“With an infantry rifle, I’d need to be within two hundred yards, and there’s no way I’m going to walk down a barren slope of burned hillside with a nice long rifle to within two hundred yards.”

“No, they’ll massacre you.”

She tried to think of herself making a long shot without telescopic sights. It was — impossible. At over three hundred yards, he’d be a speck, a tiny dot. Worse, she’d have to hold over him, and he’d be gone, hidden behind the wedge of the front sight, and she’d have nothing to index to, unable to read the distance. The wind would play, the humidity would play, every tremble in every fiber in her body would play.

You have to do it anyway.

It’s madness. It’s death. It’s folly.

But she was caught. She felt the only way to prove to an NKVD that concealed a traitor that she was not herself a traitor was to make the kill. But the range was too far, the rifle not precise enough now that the Germans had scorched the earth.

“I have to shoot from the edge of the burned zone,” she said.

“It’s too far. I see, it’s a trap. That’s where they want you to shoot from. Men will be there.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“You don’t even have a rifle.”

“I will get a rifle. Tomorrow that is our mission.”

“No, tomorrow we scrounge for food, because if we don’t find it, the day after, we will be too weak to find a rifle.”

The next day they took a chance. They had to eat. She was a mile or so away from the cave, in a nondescript glade of trees given not so much to the high white pines but more to spruce and juniper and the groundcover called snowball. It was in precincts such as these where the fungus thrived, though it took a good eye to spot it nestled in shade in the undergrowth or at the base of trees away from sun. She looked for a brown thing with black edging and fins along its stalk called a honey mushroom, which the Peasant had told her was edible. She had a sample and rooted like a pig, probing and sniffing for the dead white flesh of the things. But in one second, the world changed.

She melted. She slid down and, on the ground, squirmed as gently as possible deeper in the tangles and the tendrils of the snowball. She felt her heart begin to hammer. It was… what? An odd sound, a wisp of odor, a peripheral clue that flew straight to her subconscious. She lay, still as death.

Slowly they emerged. No, they had not seen her. A roaming patrol, their own woodcraft exceedingly high, they were slipping through the white pines, hunting.

She had not seen SS men since Kursk. She lay motionless in the brush as the hunched, tense soldiers moved through. They were bent double, ready for action, camouflaged in the dapples of the summer forest, their weapons black and held easily in hand, unslung for fast action. She heard them shout to each other, though in Serbian, not German, and it was clear they were highly professional, good at quiet movement, men well experienced in the stealth of war.

A trickle of sweat came down her neck, then another and another. She could not move to squelch the discomfort, but instead tried to focus on it, reduce it to components, the wetness, the subversive irritation, the irrationality of her need to rub it hard and make it stop annoying her. Then a hundred other tiny infractions of order began to tickle her supine body, the pain of abrasions, the dry twitch of an itch, the further tracking of sweat, the nasal dryness of her reduced breathing, the agony of a finger trapped at an odd angle under her hand, which was in its place trapped under her body, the hum of small insects fluttering at her ears, drawn to her by the odor of that sweat, the brush of their landing, the miniature sting of their bites, not in themselves annoying but, as they multiplied in time, truly uncomfortable. To move would be to die.

Loud crushing. Boots trampled brush so close at hand. They raised dust, which drifted, floated to her dry nostrils, and settled their veil of grit within. More kicking; suddenly they were before her, black hobnailed things, well used, well worn, extremely comfortable to their wearer. He stopped, and though blurry through the slitted vision of her eyelids — she was afraid to close them, too much noise! — she recognized repose as the fellow stopped to pluck something from his pouch, diddle with it, adjust it, make preparations. A zip came from above, followed by the stench of sulfur in the wind, followed by the sound of a hard suck, followed by the odor of pipe tobacco as it took full ignition.

His right boot was less than a foot from her. He sucked hard on his pipe, enjoyed the mellow blast of the burning tobacco, and exhaled a cloud of smoke, which drifted over her like the raiments of sackcloth. The SS man was taking a nice little break from his hunt, presumably using the quiet to give his eyes full freedom to roam, to search for telltale sign, a track, a fractured bough, a scrape, whatever, that would lead him to his quarry.

His boot was so close. She remembered the SS boots at Kursk, as she had seen so many. Involuntarily the memories, which she had pressed so hard to forget, came over her as if in a sudden tide from her subconscious, where she had tried to lock them away.

It was called the Special Purpose Detachment, an ad hoc emergency assemblage of sharpshooters from all over the southern front, not just vets of Stalingrad but of Rostov, Sebastopol, Kharkov, Kiev, wherever the sniper had practiced his trade. Though most, like Mili, were army, this was strictly an NKVD operation. It was something only NKVD would think up.

“Tomorrow,” said the commissar, “July twelfth, two great tank armies will clash. Look at the map, comrades, and see that it is ordained. The Second SS Panzer Corps will send eight hundred Panzer IVs and Tiger Is and we will greet them with fifteen hundred T-34s from the Fifth Guards Tank Army. It will be the greatest tank battle in history, and you are privileged to fight in it.”

They were in a village called Prokhorovka, in the southern aspect of a salient that the German armored forces were trying to pinch off, then destroy, from two directions. Though a terrible melee on the ground, the battle was simple: the Germans would meet up, cutting off and surrounding the salient and turning it into an encirclement, then destroy the trapped hundreds of thousands; or they would not. It was up to the tankers of the 5th Guards to prevent that.

“At 0400 you will be distributed among the tanks as they rally and begin to move to the fields outside the village. There will be five of you per tank. You will ride them into battle, as our tank riders have done so heroically throughout the war. At a certain moment after daybreak, you will engage the German panzers. Those of you who survive the transit through the German artillery barrage will wait until the two tank armies are fully involved and then peel off and find some sort of shooting position, behind a ruined vehicle, in a copse of trees, in a scruff of vegetation, at the lip of a shell crater.

“You will see before you a field of ruin as the tanks begin to destroy each other on a massive scale. You have a specific job. You will note that when a German tank is hit and brought to a stop, it may or may not burn. That depends on the hit and a thousand other factors. If it does not burn, its crew will scamper out the hatch and head on foot back to German lines to acquire another tank and continue the fight. Your job, snipers, is to kill these men before they make it back. Shoot them down without mercy! Punish them for their cruelties, their atrocities, the evil of their invasion of the motherland, their destruction of our villages and towns. That is your holy mission.

“I have a warning as well. As I said, the German tanks will burn or not burn, depending on the placement of the shell. If the tanks burn, oftentimes their crew or some of their crew will make it out. These men will be aflame. Perhaps you have seen as much in your experience, and you know that watching a man burn to death is no easy thing.

“But your heart must be steel. You would not be human if you didn’t feel the impulse to put a mercy shot into that screaming, dancing apparition and end his agony. You are not permitted, under pain of execution, to shoot the flamers. You must concentrate on unwounded Germans. You are not permitted to waste time and ammunition on our own flamers. Order 270 will apply tomorrow on the killing ground. Remember: waste not one bullet on mercy.”

Order 270 was Stalin’s decree that the families of deserters or shirkers would be arrested as a consequence of their criminality. Mili snorted privately; her family was dead.

Within hours, she found herself clinging by a handhold to the hull of a T-34 (the commander was twenty and blond, reminding her a little of her dead brother Gregori) as it roared, amid a legion of its brethren, out of the village, deployed into a large wedge formation in the dawn light as far as the eye could see, and began its passage through the fields and the German artillery toward combat with another tank formation. The tanks scuttled and adjusted as they squirmed into the formation, cranking this way and that to find the right line and distance with regard to the others until all, more or less, had formed up. Like some kind of dinosaur army, they lurched forward, grinding across hill, dale, creek, tree, gully without regard, spewing smoke and grit, their long cannon barrels slightly upraised. They looked like beetles with a knight’s lance tucked into their mandibles.

They were on a plain under a dome of sky. All was flatness. It was an infinity of flatness under the towering clouds of the Ukrainian sky. It was a battle reduced to its essential elements with no distractions, almost an abstraction: the existential flatness of the plain to the horizon, the vaulting blue arch of cloud-filled sky, the sense of tininess of men and machines on this construction that only a mad god could have invented. The tanks lurched ahead.

The sensations attacked her nervous system: the overwhelming smell of engine smoke and gasoline, the cruel bouncing as the tank’s suspension absorbed and then passed along the shocks of its encounters with the rough ground, the shriek of the incoming artillery, the percussion of its detonation. Nearby, a tank was hit and, in a second, vanished into a shearing blade of light as its destruction issued vibration and shrapnel through the air, to beat and cut at what lay in its route. She clung desperately, trying to stay with the beast beneath her, but it was not easy. Another sniper, clinging to another handhold on the other side of the tank, slipped off, as if into a gritty sea, and was never seen again.

The tanks rolled through the storm and through an ocean of noise as each engine, each shell, each crack of a tree limb crushed beneath treads seemed to hang in the air, like a whole climate of noise, all of it beating at her senses until so powerful was the experience that it seemed to numb her out.

Then she saw them, a mile off, small and seemingly inconsequential. The machines of the 2nd Panzer Corps, three divisions’ worth, Das Reich, Totenkopf, and Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. From the distance, they were black shapes on the horizon, which rose and fell in accordance to their own tank’s course through the dips in the landform.

At a mile, the Germans opened up. It was simple strategy; any child could figure it out. The German armor was thicker, the German guns bigger and more powerful. Distance was the German ally. If it was only about shooting, the Germans — superb tank marksmen, superb battlefield maneuverers — would triumph. The tanks of the 5th Guards had to close the gap, get inside the German formation, find angles into the enemy that would let their lighter 76mm shells penetrate and kill. The cost of this adventure was paid in life. Sixty percent of the Soviet tanks would make it to the target; the other 40 percent would die in flame and high-explosive energy at the end of the 88mm trajectories. So it had to be. So it would be. The price would be paid. Who would pay it?

Around her, tanks began to light up. Some, hit squarely by the 88s, vaporized and, when the smoke abated, seemed not to have existed at all. But there were so many variations on death in that charging wave of vehicle and bravado. Hit, a 34 might be tilted askew, flames licking at it, until it suddenly blossomed, went to total fire. Or it might not burn at all, merely throwing a track and thrashing in roaring frustration as its treadless wheels ground away, spitting earth and buzzsawing itself more deeply into the ground.

So powerful was the vibration of her vehicle, Petrova could see none of this clearly. Her eyes were teared up from the dust that had settled in them, her purchase on survival was focused entirely on the strength in her hands that clung to the steel rung preventing her from slipping off and away, her head pounded in pain from all the vibrations that shuddered against it, the fumes of engine exhaust, explosive residue, and the smell of cooking meat. Images seemed to fly before her and vanish, as if she were in a cinema where the projector was mounted to the back of a crazed horse and pitched its visions on the walls and ceiling. Burning men. The shear of light from a blast. The recoil when her own tank fired. The pressure from others. The far-off blisters of illumination from the Tiger 88mm muzzles, the rain of dust, the smack and sting of debris, it was all a kind of Dostoyevskian vision of hell.

Then it went away as her tank slid into a dip in the land and, with dozens of its co-attackers, was momentarily out of the view of German gunsights. It felt like an abrupt passage to heaven as the ground beneath became smooth, almost reasonable. The tanks were grinding through a wheat field; she looked back to see the long scars each vehicle inscribed into the undulating sheaves of wheat, that staple in which her father had invested his life and even, it could be said, died to protect.

I will not let you down, Tata, she thought. I will be as brave as you. I will protect the wheat.

At that moment they crested the slope, their momentary disengagement finished, and plunged into a storm of violence. The German tanks were close. She’d seen them before, crawling tentatively through Stalingrad’s wrecked streets, but not like this, columns and columns of the things, with their remorseless angularity, their pitiless precision, the somehow Teutonic-knight definition of their profiles. The Germans were beyond panic; they were beyond anything but pure, calm, relentless battle skill. The gunners chose and worked targets as the Soviet force closed, and even when it became obvious that there were enough survivors of the charge to breach the German formation and turn the battle into a melee, the German gunners simply lowered their trajectories, tracked their targets, and continued to fire.

The two forces closed.

Now it was tank on tank, almost like a naval battle as the vessels of each side maneuvered at speed for positional leverage, angle to unarmored vitals, accuracy, and firing speed, kicking up dust, spraying debris and mud as they adjusted. It had Trafalgar or Jutland or the Armada entwined through it. The smaller Russian vehicles juked, switched attack angles radically, feinted, and jitterbugged, looking for that elusive sideways angle into the slower, bigger vehicles, which, though not as maneuverable, had more able gunners and seldom missed a shot.

She was in a cauldron of blast heat and concussion, wondering how on earth she could get a clean shot off. At that point her own vehicle came to a halt, almost spilling her, and she heard a mechanical buzz and whirr as the twenty-year-old in the turret rotated. One hundred meters ahead, seen through the squalls of smoke that dominated the battlefield, a Tiger emerged from behind the burning wreckage of another Tiger, and her boy fired. She felt the rock as the tank discharged its shell, saw it hit the flank on the squared profile and detonate, casting a galaxy of sparks pinwheeling into the air. The German was not fazed; his own turret ground another few degrees and he fired, the shock of the blast ripping up the earth beneath the muzzle, and in the next nanosecond the impact tossed Petrova, light as a feather and frail as a sparrow, into the sky. She landed with a bone-jarring, concussion-inducing thud, her mind fragmenting into slivers as stars danced and planets crashed. In a second, alone and feeling naked on a battlefield full of raging monsters, she picked up enough sense to seek shelter behind the burned-out wreck of a tank, so melted and charred that its alliance could not be discerned. She crouched, looking back to the vehicle that had ferried her to this place, and saw it listed over, smoke issuing from its hatch, until it was engulfed in flame. Nobody got out, and of its other snipers aboard, none could be seen.

She disengaged her rifle from its sling, cinched up, and found a shooting position. She looked for targets. In time, her peripheral vision oriented her toward a blur of movement, and she saw a Tiger grinding through a glade of higher vegetation. It was hit, and a massive geyser of dust engulfed it. Then the cloud cleared and she saw that the thing had taken a shell in the tread, the tread snaked free, driven by the power axle, though the tank was immobile. Its turret hatch opened and she found her position, waited for a man to emerge at the tip of the post reticule in her scope. As he came, her finger killed him. His head jerked at the shot, and his body seemed to turn to liquid as he slipped back into the vehicle. Then a smear of incandescence erupted at the juncture of turret and hull, and in seconds the thing was leaking smoke like blood, then flames, and it was gone to inferno. The dead man had blocked the others from escape.

She looked over her sight, preferring to immediately abandon that image and let her eyes adjust after the brightness of the flame, and scanned the battlefield, seeing vehicle after vehicle conflagrated, all the smoke rising, drifting skyward to form a pall over the battlefield, a low, dark sky that portended the world’s end. Noises — screams, detonations, the rip of metal tearing — filled the air, and waves of heat and grit rode blast zephyrs into her face and eyes. Ashes floated, blotting skin where they landed.

Another tank emerged from the haze, already leaking a tendril of smoke. Who knew what hell it concealed. She planted the rifle against her shoulder, steadied on the turret — not a long shot, less by far than two hundred yards — and felt her trigger stack. He came out — aflame. He rolled back across the hull, over the engine cooling grate, kicking, his arms flailing, nothing left but his agony. Her finger killed him with one shot. Another flamer crawled out and she killed him before he could roll off the turret.

Once she’d committed the unpardonable sin, she could not stop. The plan was ill conceived because the visibility on the battlefield was so limited that scampering panzer crew could not be seen at all, but the dancing flamers, their garish ignition fluttering brilliantly through the drift of smoke and ash, were easy to spot. She shot them all. It didn’t matter.

She made a shot at five hundred yards, holding half a man high; she made one at fifty yards, drilling him as he leaped out of the half-track that already had turned into a bonfire. She shot not at men but at flames, for the men were largely indistinct in their cloaks of flaring brilliance. Russian, German, peasant, aristocrat, who knew? Their insane jerkiness contained their suffering; she could not abide it and she put them down into stillness.

It was almost ritual. When the rifle fired dry, she slid another stripper into the breach and thumbed five more cartridges into the magazine well, then tossed away the empty stripper and rammed the bolt home, and remounted the rifle against the tension of the strap. Through the circle of the optic, she saw it all, death at the apex of industrial application, but by now her ears were numb, so it was silent cinema, the same thirty feet of film over and over in an endless loop, the flamer clawing at the pulses of energy that consumed his flesh in agony and then the arrival of the message of mercy as his blazing body went slack and he tumbled down. Cock and look anew for a target. In the end, she killed more than fifty unrecorded men that day, only the first one without the flames.

It abated around five. The few surviving tanks limped back to their own lines. It was clear that while the Russians had lost far more, they had stopped the Germans. In fact, it was clear that the war was now technically over. Only a thousand miles of mopping up remained, and though that would be a hideous task and claim millions or more lives, the shattering of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps ended Hitler’s invasion. He would, he could, never be on the offense again.

If she knew this, it didn’t matter. She was exhausted and somehow ashamed. She felt no glory. Around her there lay a wilderness of dead machines, half of them burning, amid a stench of gas and blood, the occasional loud blast as a shell was lit off by flames, but nobody was shooting anymore. Everybody was too tired to shoot. The setting sun burned through the haze of smoke and ash in the air, and it went all red on the world, on this hunk of field outside Prokhorovka, as if to signify the shedding of so much blood. All was red in the light, the gray German tanks, the green Russian tanks, the dun-colored wheat, the green trees, the white flesh: all suffused in the red of blood.

She disengaged her water bottle, unscrewed the cap, and put it to her mouth. A warm swish of water cut through the phlegm of ash that encased her lips. She took off her hood, felt her hair cascade free. She looked around again.

Remember it, Petrova, she instructed herself. Infinite destruction. Ruin to the horizon and death everywhere. Stalingrad in the wheat fields without a ruined city to hide the ripe slaughter.

A whistle, loud and urgent, came from close by, jerking her from the field of ruin and death at Kursk to the German boot a few inches from her face. She heard him grunt as if cursing. He tamped his pipe against the receiver of his machine pistol. Burning tobacco from the emptied pipe fell to the ground a few inches ahead of her. His boots finally lurched forward. She heard a few shouts, the exchange of Serbian curse words, and some crude laughter. The boots vanished.

She raised her head just an inch or two and opened her eyes fully.

The German patrol had vanished in the woods.

Someone had recalled them — urgently.

She waited another half an hour, then picked herself up.

The boots. She remembered the boots. A thousand burned corpses lay about the flatness of Kursk, some licked by flame, some just blurred chars. Yet almost all had their boots still on, because for some reason, while the flesh burned, the leather didn’t. Everywhere she saw nothing but the boots of the dead.