Sniper's Honor(72)
“Groedl himself, for some reason, will soon be in this town.’ ”
“How close do you need to be?”
“With an infantry rifle, I’d need to be within two hundred yards, and there’s no way I’m going to walk down a barren slope of burned hillside with a nice long rifle to within two hundred yards.”
“No, they’ll massacre you.”
She tried to think of herself making a long shot without telescopic sights. It was—impossible. At over three hundred yards, he’d be a speck, a tiny dot. Worse, she’d have to hold over him, and he’d be gone, hidden behind the wedge of the front sight, and she’d have nothing to index to, unable to read the distance. The wind would play, the humidity would play, every tremble in every fiber in her body would play.
You have to do it anyway.
It’s madness. It’s death. It’s folly.
But she was caught. She felt the only way to prove to an NKVD that concealed a traitor that she was not herself a traitor was to make the kill. But the range was too far, the rifle not precise enough now that the Germans had scorched the earth.
“I have to shoot from the edge of the burned zone,” she said.
“It’s too far. I see, it’s a trap. That’s where they want you to shoot from. Men will be there.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You don’t even have a rifle.”
“I will get a rifle. Tomorrow that is our mission.”
“No, tomorrow we scrounge for food, because if we don’t find it, the day after, we will be too weak to find a rifle.”
* * *
The next day they took a chance. They had to eat. She was a mile or so away from the cave, in a nondescript glade of trees given not so much to the high white pines but more to spruce and juniper and the groundcover called snowball. It was in precincts such as these where the fungus thrived, though it took a good eye to spot it nestled in shade in the undergrowth or at the base of trees away from sun. She looked for a brown thing with black edging and fins along its stalk called a honey mushroom, which the Peasant had told her was edible. She had a sample and rooted like a pig, probing and sniffing for the dead white flesh of the things. But in one second, the world changed.
She melted. She slid down and, on the ground, squirmed as gently as possible deeper in the tangles and the tendrils of the snowball. She felt her heart begin to hammer. It was . . . what? An odd sound, a wisp of odor, a peripheral clue that flew straight to her subconscious. She lay, still as death.
Slowly they emerged. No, they had not seen her. A roaming patrol, their own woodcraft exceedingly high, they were slipping through the white pines, hunting.
She had not seen SS men since Kursk. She lay motionless in the brush as the hunched, tense soldiers moved through. They were bent double, ready for action, camouflaged in the dapples of the summer forest, their weapons black and held easily in hand, unslung for fast action. She heard them shout to each other, though in Serbian, not German, and it was clear they were highly professional, good at quiet movement, men well experienced in the stealth of war.
A trickle of sweat came down her neck, then another and another. She could not move to squelch the discomfort, but instead tried to focus on it, reduce it to components, the wetness, the subversive irritation, the irrationality of her need to rub it hard and make it stop annoying her. Then a hundred other tiny infractions of order began to tickle her supine body, the pain of abrasions, the dry twitch of an itch, the further tracking of sweat, the nasal dryness of her reduced breathing, the agony of a finger trapped at an odd angle under her hand, which was in its place trapped under her body, the hum of small insects fluttering at her ears, drawn to her by the odor of that sweat, the brush of their landing, the miniature sting of their bites, not in themselves annoying but, as they multiplied in time, truly uncomfortable. To move would be to die.
Loud crushing. Boots trampled brush so close at hand. They raised dust, which drifted, floated to her dry nostrils, and settled their veil of grit within. More kicking; suddenly they were before her, black hobnailed things, well used, well worn, extremely comfortable to their wearer. He stopped, and though blurry through the slitted vision of her eyelids—she was afraid to close them, too much noise!—she recognized repose as the fellow stopped to pluck something from his pouch, diddle with it, adjust it, make preparations. A zip came from above, followed by the stench of sulfur in the wind, followed by the sound of a hard suck, followed by the odor of pipe tobacco as it took full ignition.
His right boot was less than a foot from her. He sucked hard on his pipe, enjoyed the mellow blast of the burning tobacco, and exhaled a cloud of smoke, which drifted over her like the raiments of sackcloth. The SS man was taking a nice little break from his hunt, presumably using the quiet to give his eyes full freedom to roam, to search for telltale sign, a track, a fractured bough, a scrape, whatever, that would lead him to his quarry.