Sniper's Honor

CHAPTER 50

Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajioon.

To him we belong, to him return.

Having spoken directly to Allah by means of a dua, as such direct declarations were called, Salid came out of his religious trance. It was still the same, only it was five seconds later.

The senior group leader SS lay on his side on the narrow width of the bridge, in a gigantic puddle of blood that soaked his clothes and gleamed in the dull light of the occluded sun; some of it slid through the slats and drained down to the swirling waters below. There was so much blood you could smell it. The corpse’s eyes were open, as was his mouth. Blood ran from his nose and welled into his mouth from his throat but had not overspilled its boundaries yet.

Where could the shot have come from?

It had to have come from a long, long way out, so far out that its noise largely dissipated before it so tragically arrived.

Salid blinked, hoping for the arrival of a clarification. Men looked at him in stupefied horror, waiting for orders. He himself wished someone were there to give crisp, concise, well-thought-out orders. But in the absence of Dr. Groedl, he was the senior officer.

He could think only of himself.

The man I was sent to protect is dead despite my best efforts. I will be blamed. I am, after all, the outsider, the one who does not belong. My greatest sponsor was Dr. Groedl, and now he is gone, the sniper has escaped, I have shamed my father, my grandfather, my cousin the Mufti, my family, my faith, my destiny. The Germans will shoot me for gross incompetence.

Allah, send me wisdom, I pray to Thee help your son Salid at his hour of maximum terror among the infidels, to whom he is nothing really but a nigger of no account who, given responsibility, has failed it utterly.

“Sir, what—”

It was Ackov.

Salid tried to think.

What? What? What?

The dogs.

“The dogs will find her. Nothing has changed. She is up there, somewhere above the burned-out line. No, no, the bullet hit him frontally. The shot had to come from there!” He pointed to a much farther flank of pine-carpeted mountain a full thousand yards distant.“Where’s the field telephone?”

Ackov waved over a man, who had a box containing the Model 33 field phone and the long cord. The field telephone, in its hard-shell Bakelite container, was the primary communications device of German ground forces, as it was far less fragile than the radio, far less temperamental, and wire could be laid quickly to put units at a great distance in contact. Its batteries were more reliable, it wasn’t as heavy, and it never blew a tube. Salid opened it, took out the phone, and turned the little crank to send a signal to the other end.

“Graufeldt here.” Graufeldt was a steady lance corporal, one of the few ethnic Germans in Police Battalion.

“Did you hear the shot?”

“Yes sir. It wasn’t from our area.”

“The dogs, Graufeldt.”

“Sir, I’ve already released the dog teams, and they’re headed in the direction of the shot. They will pick up any scent. Since the shot was so far away, I directed the men to dump their machine pistols and packs and proceed under armament of pistols. I thought they’d have to move quickly and stamina would be the determining factor and—”

“Yes, yes, good. How much wire have you got?”

“Two spools. Another half kilometer. Should I move with them?”

“Yes, stay as close as you can.”

“Yes sir.”

“Keep me informed. I will be moving soon and beyond the reach of the field phones. You will communicate by flare pistol if you catch her, and you will proceed along the high path to the choke point. If nothing else, your presence will drive her into the parachutists.”

“Yes sir.”

“Good man, Graufeldt.”

“Sir, how did—”

“I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What matters now is only that we apprehend the woman.”

“Yes sir. End transmit here, as I move to new position.”

Now Salid was thinking more clearly. He handed the phone back.

“Sir, should we mount up for the trip to the Gap?”

“Not yet, Ackov. Have the men roust all the villagers and lock them in the church.”

“Yes sir.”

“Then have a crew use the Flammenwerfer to burn all the buildings. I want the place razed. I want there to be no record of the place where Senior Group Leader Groedl was murdered. There will be no monuments here.”

“Yes sir. And the church, sir? With the villagers.”

“Burn it, Ackov.”

Mili would not abandon the rifle; she had it slung across her back. The Teacher had a Sten gun and kept checking back, looking to see if the Serbs had closed the trail.

“Look,” she said suddenly, pointing. “He’s burning the village.”

“Had to happen. It’s the way his mind works. Here or at Lidice, anywhere the partisans strike, the people pay.”

No details were available through the trees. Instead, columns of heavy smoke drifted upward and over the crest of the mountains, then mingled into a single miasma by the thrust of the winds. It didn’t take long for the odors to reach them, a mesh of crispy burned wood, the bloody tang of burned animal meat, a slight petroleum bite from the stench of the flamethrower’s Flammoil-19. No screams were heard, but how could they be from such a distance?

“Enough smoke,” said the Teacher through gasps of air as the oxygen debt put pain into his lungs. “He burned it down, the whole thing.”

Then came the sound of the dogs. The sound rose and ebbed, depending on whether the waves caught some freakish echo effect. But it was clear that the animals were howling with the excitement of the hunt.

For the longest time, as they headed along the path, the dogs seemed distant. At one point they even seemed to disappear. But the dogs were strong and the young men running them were strong. When Mili heard the barking again, it seemed much closer.

Then, somehow, it got closer still.

“We’re not going to make it,” she said. “We can’t outrun the dogs.”

Another few minutes passed. The barking grew louder. They broke into a trot, and then Petrova fell, chopping up her knee.

“All right,” she said, “closer. Give me the machine pistol. I’ll stay and kill as many as I can. Then I’ll spend the last bullet on myself.”

“Sorry, not possible,” said the Teacher. “I will be the one who stays behind. I hate dogs. To kill as many as possible will be a pleasure. Go, go.”

Then they saw them. Six muscular, tawny beasts, unleashed at last, coming like rockets, all muscle and speed, dashed into view, driven forward on that bounding hound run, a coil and uncoil action, as of a powerful spring or piston. On they came.

He shoved her. “Run,” he said. “Damn you, run!” and turned with his Sten gun to face the horde.

The smoke from the village obscured everything, so Salid moved his position about a half mile down the Yaremche road. From there he only saw a wall of smoke, drifting columns in the sky and the flames eating the odd building. It was better for his men, too, for they could not hear the screams of the villagers locked in the flaming church as the fire dissolved their bodies, although Salid himself did not really notice.

“Anything?” he barked in Serbian to Ackov.

“Nothing,” said the sergeant, who stood guard at the field telephone.

The captain shivered. He had to capture the woman. She meant more than anything. With her, he could turn his life into a triumph and his return to the sun and the sand of the desert into a mythic passage. It wasn’t ambition.

He did this all for Allah. At his core he believed in the primacy of Allah over all nations and men and that those who had not given themselves to Allah were infidels, unworthy of life and doomed to an afterlife in the fires of hell. As much suffering as they would endure in the forever, what difference did it make to them now?

O Allah, he prayed, humbly I beseech Thee to look with favor upon the enterprise of Your servant Yusef Salid, who seeks only to please and obey in his hope to earn the right to come to heaven in the afterlife. Please, please, can You give me this one gift, it is all I ask, it is all—

“Sir,” said Ackov. “It’s Graufeldt.”

Salid took the phone.

“Graufeldt reporting.”

“What is happening, man?”

“I believe they’ve made contact. It’s the dogs, sir. They yowl and yelp when chained, fighting and feeling frustrated by the chain, but when they’re released, their voices achieve the full throaty barking and are more widely spaced because they are running flat out. They wouldn’t have released them unless they’d made visual contact. The dogs, sir. The dogs are on her.”

On came the dogs, by now their white canines gleaming like SS parade daggers in the sunlight, foam flying from open jaws, throats undulating with the working of their larynxes as they growled, on to the kill.

The Teacher checked his as yet unfired Sten gun, positive that it was cocked, the bolt free and not engaged in the safety notch, sure that in one burst he could kill at least a few of the beasts, maybe get rounds into all six before they were on him. Then maybe he could pull the 6.35mm Frommer that had been his only protection until recently and kill or wound the others. But he knew he would be so slashed and bitten, and there was no way he could—

A screaming came across the sky.

It was a chorus of banshees or other dead creatures or ghastly apparitions: high-pitched, full of vibration, a howl, the yell of death, the fall of civilization, the hungry screaming of the harpies as they tore something into shreds. Then the high pitch went away, buried in a lower, more sibilant roar that spoke of fire and death.

The Teacher recognized it. It was the sound of a battery of seventy-two Katyusha rockets blasting from their truck-borne carriers to obliterate whatever resided in their scatter of random hits. The shriek was so intense it traveled for miles, a pronunciamento for the Red Army, a signifier of battle for the German. To the dogs, with their more refined hearing, it would be hideously loud.

The Red offensive had begun.

If the Teacher knew, the dogs did not. To them it signaled the approach of another predator, a mythic predator; it meant they were to be swept up in dinosaur jaws, crushed, ripped, gobbled. Their brains could not handle the fear.

Thirty meters shy of the quarry, they hit a wall. It seemed to be made of glass, but it was made of terror. They lost their grace and focus, they slid, slithered, slipped, rolled, each pounding into the other, each in the abyss of pure animal panic. And just that fast, they were gone, seeking survival in the cover of the deep woods.

Meanwhile the artillery, a thousand guns at least, maybe two thousand, commenced, a rush of noise swallowed in detonation, a whistle of shells obeying the laws of gravity and descending from their rainbow arcs to vaporize all that lay within their blast zones. It was so loud that the dust fell from the trees, the ground shivered, and the world seemed on the tippy-tippy edge of destruction.

But the Teacher understood it was still miles away to the south, as far as Kosiv, which had been the closest Russian strong point and clearly would be the offensive step-off site; it simply proved an old point — destruction is loud. He turned, hoping to see something through the screen of trees that stood between him and the valley four thousand feet beneath, but he could see nothing.

He turned and headed up the path. Without dogs, the Germans would be helpless. He would catch up with the woman, and the two of them would diverge from this path to the brush, where tracking them by eye would be impossible. Maybe in time the Germans would round up the dogs, get them calmed down, but it would be hours before they found the scent again.

He rounded a slight turn and saw the sniper walking ahead. She turned, feeling his eyes on her, and waved. He raced to her, breathing hard in the thinner air.

“You’re alive!” she said.

“Scoundrel’s luck once again. The noise of the Katyushas. It terrified the dogs.”

“It scared the hell out of me,” she said.

“Come on, this is our golden opportunity. We must get off the path, we must progress overland, through the brush and trees. It’ll take hours to find our trail.”

“Yes.”

“But dump that rifle. It slows us.”

“No, no. You can never tell. Come on, we’re wasting time.”

It took another two hours, but in all that time, they heard no sign of their pursuers. The journey quickly resolved itself into pure ordeal, the two fighting through thorns and bracken and the needles of the pines, some very sharp, all at an uphill angle, going primarily on faith. They were washed in sweat, which drained into their eyes, as the branches whipped backward to catch them in the faces, or roots tugged and twisted their ankles.

“I think it’s just ahead,” said the Teacher.

They reached a familiar glade.

“COMING IN!” yelled the Teacher, and he and Petrova eased ahead.

“Why can we not stay here?” asked the Peasant in Ukrainian. “Our army will arrive soon, a day or two. We can just wait and—”

“No, no,” said the Teacher in the same language. “The Germans will gather their dogs in a while. They’ll come after us. Eventually they’ll pick up the scent. They’ll find this cave. We must be long gone when they get here.”

That was true. But there was more. What the Teacher didn’t say was that he wasn’t eager to simply walk to the Red Army with hands upraised. He had no idea how good these troops would be and if they were of poor quality — many were — they might shoot anything that moved. Then there was the issue of Mili Petrova, quite possibly hunted by her own people. He had to get that settled.

“We have a long journey, at least three miles to the canyon they call Natasha’s Womb. It’s a choke point holding us in this sector. We’ll get through it and find a cave or a glade on the other side. Once the Red Army has driven the Germans out of the mountains, we’ll figure a safe way to return to our side.”

They walked, they walked, they walked. It took close to two hours to make it to site of the cave at the head of the scree field where the canister was hidden. It was not far from the Womb.

“Here, rest,” said the Mili, “but only for a moment.” She gave the Teacher her rifle. “Replace it now. Your weapon, too. I will strip off my camouflage, and from now on, we are peasants fleeing the battle.”

The Teacher took her weapon and his own and ducked into the cave, replacing the two guns and all the ammunition, then latched the container tightly.

He emerged, finding them both ready for what lay beyond. They were so close.

“Just a little farther,” she said. “Another few miles. When we get close to Natasha’s Womb, we’ll go to ground, and I’ll squirm forward and make certain we’re all right.”

“Petrova, that should be my job,” the Teacher said. “Who knows what lies ahead, better I go than you, who’ve already accomplished so much.”

“You’re an idiot,” she said.

“Certainly,” he said, “but we should take just that little precaution.”

With faith and vigor renewed, they set out along a higher trail, which seemed to take a downward track as it worked its way to the gap in the mountains at a significantly lower altitude. Still they bent against the incline and felt their thighs fight for strength as the walk became difficult with the need to defy gravity. They went down in silence, except for the sound of their labored breathing, the far-off detonation, the hum of insects attracted to the salty sweat that lubricated their skin and dampened their clothes.

As yet unseen, Natasha’s Womb came closer. So did the sense of other, larger mountains abutting them, which was why the formation afforded a gap, while the others demanded mountaineering.

At one point, Mili called a halt. “All right,” she said, “here’s where you’ll lay up. I’m going to work my way ahead and get a glimpse, just to make sure there’s no mischief up here. And—”

“Sergeant, please,” said the Teacher. “This should be my duty, and I—”

“HALTEN SIE!” came a sudden cry.

Two men stepped out of the brush ten yards away, weapons leveled.