Sniper's Honor(107)

“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.