Sniper's Honor(71)

“See, that’s way too far. A thousand yards. Not with any rifle she had could she have hit him from there. It has to be pretty close.”

He looked at the closer landforms. Surely the Germans controlled the banks of the river. They would have possibly crowded the villagers down there, on a little shelf of land just under the bridge, where Swagger had found the machine-gun shell.

He rotated 180 degrees, passing over the faux Ukraine village of souvenir booths where the old village itself had stood, and continued to examine the lay of the land. More riverbank, controlled by the Germans, and above it, on the left, a vast two-hundred-yard-tall slope of white pines that extended for another half mile from the bridge, perhaps half of it the chunk of land where the pines were somehow lighter, as they’d noticed before.

“She had to be there,” he said. “But I don’t see how they controlled it. She could get close enough over there to hit with any rifle. Wouldn’t need no scope. How’d they bluff her into shooting from so far out she had to miss?”

They stared at the slope rising above them.

“She had to be up there,” he said. “Notice anything?”

“Just a lot of mountain.”

“Look at the trees. The color, remember?”

In the sun, the demarcation between the lighter timber and the darker was clear.

“I’m getting something, I’ve got a feeling. Damn, nothing. But maybe—” He paused, thinking it over, and yes, it made solid sense.

“What is it?”

“The lighter green?”

“Yep.”

“It’s green because it’s new growth,” he said. “It’s been grown since 1944.”

“All right, new growth.”

“I think I know what they tried to do.”





CHAPTER 34


Above Yaremche


The Carpathians


MID-JULY 1944


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?”