Sniper's Honor(22)
A silence louder than gunfire enveloped the ambush zone.
All along the line, she saw men arise from so close it frightened her. It struck her that she’d slid into one such waiting croucher, evicted him from his spot, and gotten him killed for her trouble. But the remainder closed into the ruins of the column with dervish speed and meant to finish the engagement with their machine pistols at close range.
Mili ceased to observe. Instead, sniper quiet and sniper strong and too intent on survival for fear, she edged her way backward, managed to turn, and making surprising speed, put distance between herself and the kill zone. At a certain point she heard voices—not German but some other language, Slavic, possibly Serbian—and froze. Not far from her, men rose to begin their own approach to the kill zone.
Like the sniper she was, she had the sniper’s gift for disappearance, and now she employed it as never before in her months of battle.
* * *
Salid was on the Feldfu.b2 to 12th SS Panzer element, hunched next to his signalman, who carried the radio unit on his back. He spoke into the telephone-microphone.
“Hello, hello, this is Zeppelin calling Anton, answer, please.”
“Hello, hello, Zeppelin, Anton responding, I have you clearly.”
“Anton, request move panzerwagens up here fast. I don’t know if there’s anybody around, I don’t have enough men for security, I have taken casualties and we must load our catch and be gone before more bandits arrive.”
“Zeppelin, received. The panzerwagens are on dispatch and should reach you within the hour. Mission results, Zeppelin.”
“Received and acknowledged, Anton. Mission report: many kills, numbers to follow.”
The Germans! Salid thought. They want numbers on everything. They’d want numbers for the hairs on the devil’s ass!
“Will pass along, Zeppelin. End transmit.”
“End transmit,” acknowledged the captain.
Meanwhile, his men were mopping up. He gave the microphone to his signalman, rose, and joined the soldiers, entering the kill zone as he heard the grunts of his machine gunners breaking down their weapons for transport. He walked the line, gun smoke still rancid in the air. Everywhere partisan bodies twisted or relaxed as death took them. A horse or two still breathed, still thrashed, until the finishing shot stilled them.
He issued a quick order. “Second squad, on security perimeter a hundred meters out. The rest of you, carry on. Where’s Ackov? Damn him, he’s never around when—”
“Captain,” said Sergeant Ackov, “here I am.” Ackov was a hard man, a former police sergeant in reality, very good at the soldier’s tasks. His face blackened from the soot of the small-arms gases, the sergeant approached at a run from farther down the line. “I have numbers, sir.”
“Go ahead, Sergeant,” said Salid.
“Thirty-five bandits killed, at least nine of them women, but several too mangled by blast to determine identity. No blood trails. Hard to believe anyone survived the initial fusillade, but who can say. In daylight, we can look for sign.”
“In daylight, we must be long gone. Our casualties?”
“Two dead, seven wounded, one of the wounded critical and won’t make it until the half-tracks.”
Up and down the line, spatters of shots crackled in the heavy summer night air. Police Battalion personnel knew it didn’t pay to check the bodies from too close a range. You roll one over, and perhaps he has a pistol or a knife and isn’t quite dead and yearns to take you with him. Perhaps as he was bleeding out, he unscrewed the cap on a grenade and wrapped the lanyard about his wrists, so that when disturbed, the grenade drops, the striker ignites, and the grenade detonates. Instead, walking carefully, using torchlight beams to guide them, they kept their distance and fired a short burst into each body. It was safer that way, and worth the expenditure in ammunition; only when the column of corpses had been fully killed a second time did the men set aside their weapons and pull the dead out of their positions and into a more or less orderly formation, if flat and still, for more intense evaluation.
“Can you make an identification?” Ackov asked as the Arab captain walked the line of bodies, attending them carefully.
Salid examined each dead face. He felt little but the responsibility of duty and command and the ambitions passed on to him by the One True Faith. The death masks themselves meant little to him; he’d seen thousands in his time, and learned early on in the days of Einsatzgruppen D that it made little sense to dwell on any one face.
At a certain point, he pulled a file out of his camo tunic to make comparisons. “I can’t tell about the women,” he said. “We’ll have to clean them up to make a more precise identification. As for Bak, I had hoped to nab him tonight. What a nice bonus that would be, and earn me a week in Berlin. But unless he’s one of the ones with face blown off, I don’t see him. Maybe he wasn’t here.”