“Zero?” asked the Teacher.
“You don’t just mount a telescope on a rifle and shoot a man at a thousand yards. No, I have to test it very carefully at that range and adjust the sight so the sight points exactly to the bullet strike. So when I fire at the real target, I am confident the bullet will go where I aim.”
“Excuse me, are you mad? You cannot do a shooting program up here. Yes, the Germans are gone, but for how long, and how many men have they left behind? With every shot you fire, they become more aware of where you are. Perhaps they have men up here, waiting for just that situation. Perhaps they’ve made arrangements with the Luftwaffe to send Stukas when they think they’ve isolated the site and dive-bomb it. Perhaps it just riles them up and they execute another two hundred or so hostages on general principle. You get one shot, and that is at the worm Groedl.”
“I only tell you the reality. You need a thousand yards, not one less,” said Petrova. “Do you see any thousand yards around here?”
They were silent.
The Peasant asked the Teacher to explain, which he did, and the Peasant listened and then responded.
“He says you could shoot from inside the cave here. That would dampen the noise. You could shoot downhill across the scree field at a boulder a thousand yards away.”
“As usual,” said Mili, “the Peasant is smarter than the intellectual.”
CHAPTER 43
The Carpathians
THE PRESENT
The mountains offered beauty in every direction, vistas of lyric perfection that touched primal memories of Eden. Neither cared. For each it was just pure ordeal, bathed in sweat, cinched in pain, driven by thirst.
Finally Swagger said, “Okay, let’s take a rest.” He sat down against a boulder, breathed heavily.
“You’re the expert,” she said, “but don’t you think if we rest, we get killed?”
“Good point,” he said. “But a thought just came to me.”
“Go ahead. We’ve got nothing but time.”
“She’s got to zero the rifle. Right?”
Reilly couldn’t help but issue a dry little spurt of a laugh. “As if I’d know? I don’t even know what ‘zero’ means. It’s all secret code to me.”
“Zero the rifle. Adjust the scope so that it’s indexed to the point of impact at the range you’ll be shooting at.”
“Is this the right time for a ballistics lecture?”
“Stay with me a sec. See, she’s got to zero at a thousand. How do you find a thousand clear yards in a forest? Do you just wander until it’s there? But maybe it’s never there.”
“Look,” she said, “it can’t be that hard.”
She pointed up the steep rock-strewn slope. “There, there’s one, right there.”
Indeed, a gap in the trees inclined upward from where they had come to rest. Here and there tall trees interrupted it, but basically there was too much stone on the ground to permit complete forest growth. It was like a scar ripped in the mountainside, as obvious as a nose on a face. How could he have missed it? And then she realized he hadn’t.
“All right,” Reilly said, “what gives? What game are you playing, Swagger?”
“She’s got a rifle. She has to zero it. She needs a thousand yards. This is a thousand yards, right?”
“All right.”
“This is what’s called a scree field. Meaning at some time in the past, a rock slide poured down the side of the mountain and ripped the forest up. Some trees grew back, as you can see, but imagine the place seventy years ago. It’s wide open.”
“So?”
“I was her, I’d be up there.” He pointed. “I’d shoot at a target down here. Maybe there’s a cave up there, she could shoot from inside, cutting down on noise. I’d track my shots and walk ’em into the target. A great shot, she wouldn’t need that many. I’d smear some color on one of these boulder faces about the size of a man’s chest. I’d keep adjusting until I could not only hit the chest at a thousand but put three into it inside ten inches.”
“So your idea is that we should stop fleeing men who are trying to kill us and look for a target? And if we find the target, what then?”
Swagger pointed to the boulder against which he was leaning. There was discoloration of some sort, roughly the shape of a man’s chest. It was faded and peeled, but it was there, definitely.
“Blood, I’m guessing. She or somebody with her killed a rabbit. They cut it open right here, drained its blood on the rock. Like paint. It dried, it stayed. Here it is. See any holes?”