Sniper's Honor(24)

But his education was founded on a stern belief in Father Mendel’s genetics. Alas, in Ukraine, a peasant genius named Trofim Lysenko believed in hybrid genetics. He had Stalin’s ear and, soon enough, power. It behooved him to enforce his theories, first with letters to the journals, then lectures of admonition by way of faculty supervisors, and then through visits from secret policemen.

But her father would not be still.

One could not alter a wheat stalk in the lab and expect those alterations to be carried on in subsequent generations. Father Mendel made that clear a hundred years ago. It was a truth that could not be denied, and to base Soviet agricultural policy on fraudulent theories of hybridization was to ensure failure and doom millions to starvation.

It wasn’t that Fyodor Petrova was a hero. Far from it. He was a mild, calm man, decent to all, a loving husband and father of three. But he was compelled to speak the truth, and he spoke it until he was disappeared. Over wheat!

Now she had fallen into her other trap: bitterness. She tried to exile from memory the night she learned he had been taken, the long months without hearing a thing, and finally an unofficial but not quite by chance encounter between her mother and one of her father’s university colleagues, who reported unofficially. “He said they heard that Papa died of tuberculosis in a prison in Siberia.”

And that was that. The ugliness of grief is not for words. Nor the grief to come: for two brothers, a mother, a husband. Even the great Dostoyevsky, with all his haunted, tormented mutterers, could not find the words to express it. Survive. Try to forget.

Papa again: Get your sniper brain back. Focus, concentrate, see, understand. Show nothing, hide your beautiful eyes and body and become the earth, the wind, the trees, become the sniper, and pay them back, pay them all back.

Analyze. Assess. Understand. God gave you a brain, use it.

What do you know?

I know that we were ambushed by Germans. Most of us died. I escaped by—

No, no. Do not waste time on the self. Who cares by what means the sniper escaped. She escaped. On to larger issues. Characterize the German effort.

Extremely skilled. They have the best warcraft in the world and routinely kill us five to one in any engagement. They have better equipment, smarter officers, more creative soldiers. We only beat them only by sheer force of numbers. If they kill us five to one, we come at them six to one or ten to one and, in the end, shall prevail because, all things being equal, we can outbleed them. We can outsacrifice them. We can outgrieve them. We clear minefields, after all, by marching through them.

But even with those truths, the effort of the night was outstanding. It was beyond anything she had encountered in her six months in Stalingrad, her day of killing at Kursk.

Especially considering there were fewer Germans.

There had to be. A large force could not maneuver and emplace so silently; it would leave sign. Bak’s partisans were masters of the forest; how could they have been fooled except by those who were more masterful yet?

A small, silent, elite force. A few men.

How few?

Two heavy guns. She recognized the heavier concussions of the 7.92 rounds spurting from the unmuzzle at unattackable speed. The rest machine pistols, their lighter, crisper burr gnawing away in counterpoint to the heavy guns. The automatic nature of the weapons made it seem as if thousands attacked when it could have been but few. She did not believe that she heard any K-98 Mausers. All were armed with automatic guns. All. That was rare for them. If all these men had machine pistols, special arrangements had been made. This was some kind of team, some kind of special unit, not just a line platoon wandering the Carpathians hoping for kills.

She thought about it more. Twenty, twenty-five men. Four on the 42s, the rest with machine pistols and grenades. First the heavy guns fire. Then the machine pistols and grenades, but no more than four grenades. Then, on signal or as if rehearsed, all those gunners go quiet and the executioners spring from nearby—so nearby!—and are quickly among the wounded, the hiding, the dying, firing at close range.

Think about those men. They lie still, making not a sound, while their comrades fire inches above their heads. Both elements know exactly the cutoff point; the execution squad has total trust in the gunners and leaps into action the very second the gunners cease fire. Not a split second is wasted.

Survivors? A freak of luck, maybe, a few out of fifty, herself among the lucky. But superb execution, perhaps rehearsed, so that each man knew his place and move. It didn’t feel like a serendipitous happening. These men knew. They had superb intelligence. They moved through partisan-controlled forest without a sound, they knew exactly the pathway, and they planned and executed beautifully. They were clearly of Waffen-SS caliber, maybe better. They represented—if she understood the situation here in the Carpathians, where a bitter kind of stalemate existed—the coming of a new energy via a new and specialized unit to the field.