“It’s called a scree field,” said the Teacher. “I think this is the place. We came in from above, so it was not so bad. Now we climb.”
A thousand rough yards later they achieved a little shelf where they could sit and rest a bit. The Teacher said, “All right, here we are.” It took him a few minutes to locate, semi-hidden behind a large juniper brush, the entrance to the cave, not nearly as grand as the one that had shielded them the past few weeks.
They slid in through the small opening, blinked as the light disappeared, coughed as the dust from their slither rose to their noses, then lay still, the three of them, waiting for the dust to settle and their eyes to adjust. It was larger inside than the entryway promised, and in a bit of time, the shaft of light from the entrance permitted their eyes to find details.
“Here,” said the Teacher. He pulled and yanked something into the sunlight: a heavy metallic case, about five feet long, two wide, and three deep. A latched lid encapsulated it. He bent, unlatched the three fixtures, and then rotated the lid back on hinges placed along the length. Opened, the case revealed manna from heaven, accompanied by the odor of gun oiclass="underline" five pipelike objects, dully gray, wedged into the notches of a wooden frame.
She recognized a Sten gun, the cheap, crude, but effective British submachine gun. Steel pipe, a few screws, all the welds messy, stamped-out parts; the whole thing seemed improvised in a cellar workshop.
He pulled another piece of magic from the lid: a crenellated egg, with a lever tracing its oval curve from a central mechanism at the long end, in which a linchpin sporting a steel ring had been inserted to hold the thing together. It was a Mills bomb, the British pineapple grenade.
“The rifle,” said Petrova. “You said a rifle.”
He reached back in and struggled for a second to pry open another long box within the container, then pulled out, with some effort, a four-foot object wrapped in oilcloth, which he yanked off.
She took it, feeling its density, complexity, solidity, intensity. It was shorter than her Mosin-Nagant, yet weightier. She took it into the light, recognizing the common parts of the rifle, the trigger, the magazine just forward of the trigger, the bolt, the encasement of the long barrel in wood. It featured a kind of face rest, a sculpted form of wood screwed into the top of the stock, where her chin and face could rest when she was locked behind the scope. But it was the scope — or rather, the overengineered mechanism that clamped the scope to the rifle — that seemed so bizarre, even eccentrically English. It looked like something out of the Victorian Age, a railroad trestle over a deep gorge, with struts and turning knobs and screws and rivets enmeshed in a pattern too complex to be believed, to secure the black steel optical tube to the rifle by stout rings clamped tight. The scope was a whimsical gizmo with adjustment turrets indexed to ranges, screws everywhere to keep it from popping apart.
“It looks like it was designed by Lewis Carroll,” said the Teacher.
She slithered out the cave’s entrance with the rifle and assumed a prone firing position. The two men inside could hear the action working, the bolt closing, and the click of the trigger being pulled as she acquainted herself with it.
She came back in. “Now we have to zero it.”
“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 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.”