She laughed. He was so earnest. “Oh, Papa,” she said, “maybe I should take up the pipe, like you! All the time you fiddle with that pipe, all the cutting, the trimming, the stuffing, the lighting, the inhaling. Is that how you handle your excess energy?”
“Mili with a pipe!” Her younger brother Gregori laughed. “Oh, that’s what would attract the boys. You’d end up married to an engineer or a doctor if you smoked a pipe!”
“Mili, Mili, Mili,” shouted the even younger Pavel and did a loose-limbed interpretation of Mili sucking hard on an imaginary Sherlock Holmes meerschaum, all curves, fifteen pounds weight, with an obstruction in the stem so that the effort of inhalation hollowed his cheeks and bulged his eyes.
Dimitri, as always, sprang to her rescue. “You boys, you go easier on your big sister! You’re so lucky to have a beauty like Mili—”
“You’re pretty lucky yourself, Dimitri!” shouted Gregori, and all of them fell to the warm earth, laughing at the hilarity of it all, even normally reserved Mama.
Gone, all gone. Her father, into the Soviet gulag, lost forever for disagreeing over Mendelian genetics with a Stalinist toady and bootlicker who called himself a scientist. Gregori, burning in his T-34 somewhere in the Caucasus. Pavel, pneumonia over the hard winter, picked up in the hospital where he’d been sent after a severe leg wound in infantry combat. Her mother, shell, Leningrad, second year of the great siege. And last of all, Dimitri, down in flames somewhere in his Yak, not quite an ace but one of the very best, whose luck had finally run out.
Lost, lost, lost. Why am I spared, she wondered. I must survive for the memories I carry. If I die, who will remember Mama, Papa, Gregori, Pavel, and dear, dear Dimitri?
It had begun so joyously, but now the grief crumpled her and she knew it wasn’t a dream, it was too cruel to be a dr—
Suddenly the air filled with a sheet of light, an instant whirlwind of incandescent razor blades amid heat and noise, and the very universe itself shivered as malevolent energies were released into it, the energy from the machine-gun bullets tearing into the wood of the wagon, spraying splinters and dust in supersonic spurts wherever their randomness took them. It was a midsummer night’s nightmare of industrialized mid-twentieth-century violence.
Her first coherent image was the horse upright on two hind legs, its two forelegs clawing the air. It had been mortally struck and twisted sideways against its halter as it died and fell. It pulled the world with it as its weight overwhelmed the wagon and that vehicle spilled sideways. Mili rode it down, aware that fire poured in from several directions and the air was filled with the lethal debris of battle. Horses screamed and reared, some lurched off in a panic, others went down lumpily as the bullet went through them. All was chaos and death.
She hit earth, slithered backward off the path into the brush and watched as the machine-gun fire swept up the path and down it, a giant whiskbroom that stirred the dust to fill the air. From somewhere too close to be comfortable and too far to be dangerous, a grenade exploded, and with her experience of such things, she knew it was a Stielgranate 24, the German potato masher. Its abruptness beat her eardrums and lifted her from the earth an inch or two.
Six months in infantry battle in Stalingrad had taught her lessons; she identified the spastic ripping of the German machine guns, the slightly slower-firing rounds of their machine pistols, and the abrupt shear of light, pressure, and concussion from the M24s detonating at the end of their long tumble from hand to target. The Germans were well positioned, heavily armed and had no need to conserve ammunition. This was a total murder ambush, nothing delicate. They were here to kill everyone, kill the horses, kill the dogs.
She had no rifle. She had no weapon. But because she slept in clothes, she was fully dressed in the camouflage sniper tunic, and there was but one direction to go, only out, away, beyond, that was, to ease backward into forest. But she did, and a man was on her.
His legs clamped about her, in not the rapist’s rage but the killer’s. She saw his alien face, the dapple-camouflage of the SS battle-dress tunic — odd, the details that stick — and pure fury. He was slightly tangled in his machine-pistol sling, which retarded his freedom, but he was so much stronger it didn’t matter. He pinned her with a forearm as his other arm disengaged from the weapon and its twisted sling, reached to hip, and withdrew eight inches of steel blade — the torque of his body made his helmet pop off — and then raised the arm to strike, and at that point a bullet ripped through his face, tore his grimace, nose, and left eye from him and turned him to deadweight. He toppled off. Mili would never know where the savior’s bullet had come from, one of the surviving partisans or an errant SS shot, possibly a ricochet as ricochets followed no law of justice but only their own insane preference.
Now freed, she slithered backward. As she wiggled, feeling her way with boot toes, she heard the high-pitched spitting of the partisan tommy guns, as some had survived the initial blast of fire and were responding. More horses screamed. A beast, riderless, careened down the road until tracers pumped into its flank and it slithered, writhing, kicking dust, to the ground. Another blast came from along the line as the SS bastards tossed more grenades: the two German heavy guns continued to rip sheets of debris from the earth as their operators worked the column over and, less powerfully but still insistently, the German machine pistols sent fleets of bullets into the melee, unleashing jets of spray and splinter wherever they struck.
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.