Karl took a quick look and saw what he expected; across the river, the town of Chortkiv, mostly shabby buildings and muddy streets, deserted in the early morning, though Red Army trucks had been parked here and there and presumably their inhabitants had taken shelter in the buildings. Nothing stirred. On this side of the river would be more but less of Chortkiv, its “outskirts,” if you will, a couple of buildings of whatever agricultural purpose, maybe some of those typical Ukraine steep-pitched, thatch-roofed huts. Again quiet, a few Red trucks parked here and there.
And up above, on the bridge itself? Couldn’t be much in the sandbag nest Ivan had built as a sentry post, more a place for the guards to sit and doze a quiet night well out of the combat zone. So it would be just a few seconds of helter-skelter to reach the sentries and, at least in theory, dispatch them silently.
At this point, communication was mostly by hand gesture. No chatter, and all the boys knew the language.
Four men, Karl signaled, sentry elimination. He and—he pointed to three really good boys, but all were really good when you got down to it—as the designated throat cutters. Then he indicated that two of those four would cross underneath the bridge and come up on the other side for whatever was there. All four would push across the bridge, which didn’t appear to have a sentry post at the other end, and set up with their FG-42s or STG-44s. If assaulted from that direction, they would serve as the first line of defense.
He designated four more as demolition party, with the explosives genius Deneker calling the shots. Nothing fancy here, nobody was going over the side by rope and pulley to wire Cyclonite under the arches. Instead, the four would gouge into the bridge surface with their entrenching tools and excavate as deep a cavity as possible. They would pound the Cyclonite—which in demolition form was a kind of gloppy dough carried in two five-pound canvas sacks—into the cavity and leave a No. 8 blasting cap shoved into it, wired with det cord. The package would be wrapped in det cord, the cord then run back across the bridge to safety, where it was crimped into another No. 8. At go time, Deneker would light the safety fuse into the No. 8, which would go off like a firecracker, ignite the det cord—PETN explosive packed around a wire, going kaboom at twenty-one thousand feet per second—the det cord would burn to the main charge in a microsecond and light off that No. 8, which would make the big wad of Cyclonite vaporize the bridge. It had worked all over Russia and Italy, there was no reason why it wouldn’t work today. The ten pounds should do the job nicely.
But the next part was a little dicey. The fourteen parachutists—Schenker still missing—couldn’t fall straight back along the road on foot, as they’d be intercepted by infantry closing from the flanks. Even as stupid as the Russians were, they’d figure the way out would be to exfiltrate along the riverbank, but they could also run an intercept on that plan and bring fire from the opposite side of the river. The only feasible escape method was to commandeer one of the trucks, disable the others, drive like hell in the aftermath of the blast, ditch it somewhere unseen, and slip back by night across German lines. Some plan. Von Drehle knew it stank, but there wasn’t much he could do except refuse to do it, which would get him shot. Even Von Bink would have to shoot him.
Hmmm, too much sun already, though it was still unseen at the rim of the wheat fields in the distance, announcing its presence only by its penumbra.
He nodded. He and his three co-killers slipped off their rifles and put their helmets on the ground. Each removed a gravity knife from a pocket, and with the push of a lever and a flick of the wrist, each popped four inches of the best Sollingen steel—Rostfrei, it said on the blade—into the cool air of morning.
Each, as a matter of fact, hated knifework. It was awful. It was always intimate and messy and left regret and depression and self-loathing. It wasn’t worth going through for any nutcase paperhanger from Austria, that was for sure, but only out of duty to some other thing, variously defined as the Fatherland or Greater Germany but really just the other guys in the unit, whom you didn’t want to let down.
Karl gave a last-second nod to each man, then turned to the two headed under the bridge. He held up two hands, six fingers, made an O with one, meaning sixty seconds, and then nodded a final time, and off they scooted.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, and on and on he went, just waiting in the cool morning air, in the soft breeze, in the gray light, licking his lips a little. It was always like this before the flag dropped, a dry swallow, a feeling of dread and excitement, too and then—
—fifty-nine-one-thousand, sixty-one-thousand, and he was pulling himself up the slope, his limbs filling with energy and purpose, around the bridge wall, and into the sandbag construction, where his noise and energy alerted a man at least enough to turn to face the death approaching him. An older fellow with a pipe and an innocent farmer’s look, even if he had a rifle; he wore a bandolier and a khaki side cap with black infantry piping and a red star and the pullover khaki shirt. His mouth came open as this wild apparition, blond of hair but black of face, with a knife gleaming in the light, closed down on him, his pipe bobbled, and Karl stabbed him in the throat.
It was horrible. Karl heard the gurgle as the blood filled the larynx, drowning any outcry, and then was on him totally, forcing him into the sandbags, stabbing him again and again in the throat and neck while at the same time having jammed his other hand into the mouth, just in case. In and out, in and out, in a killing frenzy, shutting him down, die! die! die! damn you!, feeling the blade sink in, occasionally glance off fibrous internal structures, occasionally slice something gelid and viscous, until the struggle beneath became tremors and the tremors became shivers and the shivers became nothing. Too close, close enough to see the poor bastard’s face, feeling the hot blood pour out, sometimes a sundered artery forcing a little bit of squirt. You couldn’t do it without Russian blood getting everywhere. And the poor bastard always squealed, wept, pissed, and shat as he died. Karl pulled back, let the man fall, and turned exactly as his partner in the pit finished sentry number one, having made exactly the same kind of mess, having besmeared himself with blood across arms and wrist and hands. There was a Degtyaryov light machine gun resting on the sandbag wall and a few Russian pineapple grenades, mostly, Karl guessed, for show. The gun might come in useful.
By this time the other fellows were up next to him, and someone handed him his FG-42 and helmet. No words were spoken, and he made some sort of follow-me gesture, nothing dramatic, and began to sprint across the bridge, feeling his three companions behind him.
It was utterly still. From the top of the bridge’s arch he could see fog still clinging to the river and some reeds in the river ruffling, and down the way some crude Ivan river craft were moored—they looked prehistoric, hewn from logs by stone tools—drifting on their tethers. He felt his Fallschirmjäger helmet slop around on its straps, his grenades and rucksack jostle, his shoulder harness of magazine pouches vibrate, his Belgian Browning 9mm pistol jiggle in the holster, his heavy boots dig into the softness of the roadway. Then he reached the bridge end, slid behind a nest of sandbags buttressing the stone wall, found a shooting position, and hoisted the FG to his shoulder.
No targets. Nothing. All quiet in Chortkiv. Now, if the guys would get the hole dug, the shit planted, they could trip the fuse, snatch a truck, and get the hell out of—
Where did the first shot come from? It was unclear and would never be known. It hit in the roadway, lifted a geyser of debris. The next thing, it seemed the air filled with light. The Reds were firing tracers, mostly, from the sound, out of their tommy guns, and a latticework of incandescence seemed to replace the weather, or rather, became the weather, and everywhere bullets struck they stirred a pulse of disturbance, blurring the air with their grit and whirl.
“Fuck,” Karl said. “Fire when you have targets,” he yelled, although pointlessly.
At the far end of the street, a brave Ivan tried to run to a truck and two Green Devils fired simultaneously, knocking him do
wn. The return fire became general. By protocol, the FGs and STGs were only fired semi-auto unless in close-up assault or street battle. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be fired fast and accurately, a parachutist specialty.
Indeed, the little fight became an argument of ballistics. Shooting the main battle rifle cartridge, the 7.92mm Mauser, the parachutists had the advantage of range and power, plus speed. If they could see it, they could hit it. The newer STG-44s, brought in because the FGs were getting harder to find, fired a shortened 7.92 round from an immense curved magazine and, if need be, could become real hosepipes; but at semi-auto they retained accuracy and a great deal of power. Too bad they were so goddamn big and heavy. The Ivans, on the other hand, had many of their tommy guns, and were able to put out enormous volume, but that was a pistol bullet, shaky on both range and accuracy. They could make a lot of noise, raise a lot of dust, crisscross the known world with strings of dust-puffs, but probably not hit unless lucky. So it was simple. Karl and his pals had to stay calm and cool and shoot well. No bursts, just well-aimed rifle fire, shooting at flashes and shadows and bringing people down. But mainly making it bad math on a cost-risk analysis basis to venture any closer.
Both the FG and the STG were a hundred years ahead of their time. For the FG, it took great discipline to master the fierce recoil of such a powerful cartridge in such a light-framed weapon, but its straight-line construction, ingenious spring-buffered stock unit, and muzzle brake helped enormously. Its signature was the weirdly radical angle of its handgrip, almost 60 degrees to the receiver, a cosmetic trope that made it an instant classic, but it was said to be engineered that way for shooting while descending. It looked cool as hell, out of Buck Rogers by way of art deco. It had pop-up sights, fiendishly clever in design, folding bayonet spike, a built-in bipod, and a horizontal magazine feed system located for perfect balance right above the grip. Someone once called it a seven-pound MG-42. Fired at full rip it was a brutal beast to control, but the parachutists mostly operated it on semi-automatic, where its rifle round could be used for maximum accuracy and high rate of fire. The Green Devils had been using it for nearly a year and loved it dearly.
The poor fellows with the STGs were always trying to trade up to FGs, but their owners would not let them go, and kept them going with tender care and lots of Blu-Oil. The STGs were still very fine weapons, if hideous to look at by purists’ standards, with stamped metal and crude finish and aggressively ergonomic design principles turning them into the sort of ugly/beautiful construction that was entirely mystifying. Their issue was the difficulty one had firing from prone with that immense magazine, as well as the temptation of the selective fire, which could turn them into ammo-gobbling beasts and leave the poor parachutist empty of rounds in a minute if he didn’t exercise fire discipline.
Meanwhile, across the river all the other parachutists joined in, again the game being sustained by accurate singles, not magazine-eating bursts. Then someone had the intelligence to gather up the Degtyaryov and swing it into action. Whoever he was, he arched pan after pan of 7.62 x 54 over the advance guard and along the buildings and through the windows. He could afford to burn ammo because he had no plans to carry the damned thing out with him.
“Hurry up, goddammit!” Karl yelled, but he couldn’t really complain, for the guys digging the hole were wide open to fire, whacking away with shovels at a desperate pace, while all around them bullets struck and screamed off the bridge’s stone walls or off its roadway, unleashing gallons of energized dust. They had better things to do than listen to him.
He ran dry, carefully made the effort to return a used magazine to its pouch—also protocol, since the mags were increasingly hard to come by—and was inserting a new twenty when he saw it coming around the corner.
It was a T-34, Soviet main battle tank.
“What the fuck is that guy doing here?” Karl said.
CHAPTER 23
The Museum
Kolomiya
THE PRESENT
The last hall was lighter than the others, as a skylight let the sun’s illumination pour in through the roof. Swagger quickly saw why. It was an exhibition of paintings, grandly realistic things that seemed from afar compositions depicting various highlights in partisan battles against the Germans. He went to the first, called Our Fellows at the Bridge over the Ravokokov, and examined it.
It looked like a scene from an extremely expensive movie, everything in perfect focus whether it was ten feet from the painter or a thousand. In the center, a bridge split in two as a fiery blot of explosive took its center and it deposited into midair a German locomotive and several armored cars. Screaming German soldiers fell off of it, sure to die when they hit the rocks below. In the foreground a partisan dynamiter exulted as he looked at what he had wrought, having just plunged the handle on a detonating mechanism; around him, handsome men with Red tommy guns leaped and smiled in celebration at the defeat and destruction of the train.
“They call it socialist realism,” said Reilly. “Very big under Stalin. Art was for the purpose of celebrating and advancing the state. Many of the big moments are commemorated in artworks.”
“The guy sure was careful,” said Bob. “There’s four cooling slots in the sleeve of a PPSh-41, and damned if he hasn’t got all four of ’em. Also, he’s got the bolt back, which is how they’d carry it for fast shooting, and that opens the ejection port on the top for the empties to fly out, and dammit, he’s got the bolt back and the port open. He may have been a tommy gunner himself.”
“I’m sure the Ministry of Culture and Moral Improvement provided him with one to copy. They may have even blown up a bridge and crashed a locomotive so he could get it right.”
Swagger walked on, encountering dozens of perfect little war scenarios as depicted by state-sponsored artists of the day. Each one boasted the same immaculate research, the absolute perfection in equipment—T34Rs, not T34Cs, when appropriate—and the same crew of happy, handsome partisans celebrating this or that triumph over the German beast. The artists—it all looked like it was painted by the same very busy guy, but indeed there were at least a dozen in this hall—had the same range of attributes: a good mechanical draftsman’s sense of machinery, weapon, aircraft, structure, and vehicle, and a good feel for weather. Skies were mottled with storm clouds, snow scythed down horizontally so that you could feel the ice pellets stinging your face, the wind was cruel and cutting. The illusion broke down slightly at the humans, who seemed to share pretty much the same face and posture. Hands good, particularly when gripping weapons, torsos a bit awkward, as if he didn’t quite understand the underlying struts of the body, legs seeming to get in the way.
There was no fear, no squalor, no fatigue, no filth, no sweat, no despair, all common to Swagger’s experience of war. Also the snow was pristine where depicted, and since Russia was a wintry sort of hell, there was a lot of it depicted. No dogs or men had pissed in it, there wasn’t a sense of the eternal stench of war, which was a miasma of burned powder, blood, shit, sweat, and various kinds of rot and decomposition. No blood was seen anyplace, nor were any blasted bodies, nor grievous wounds to face or head or limb or gut.
“It’s all kind of phony to you, I suppose,” she said.
“Yeah, but I get it. You don’t want to tell people how it was but how they wanted it to be. Maybe the kid got a bayonet in the guts and it pulled his entrails out and he died three hours later. You don’t want to tell his folks that. So you tell them he got it clean between the eyes as he led the squad up the hill. The kid don’t care. It’s for the parents, to ease their pain, so I think it’s okay in the long run.”
“Too bad there’s not one for Mili,” she said. “The White Witch Slays Obersturmbannführer Von Totenkopf in the Town Square at Stalingrad, something like that.”
“No snipers,” he said, “it ain’t that popular.” He was thinking, The truth is, after the war is over, people get sort of nervous about snipers. Unlike taking the hill or blowing up the tank
, the sniper works in cold blood. It’s murder. Yeah, I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago, and I never allowed myself to think of it that way, because it’s just the kind of doubt that’ll get you killed in war, but still and all, I know, I face it, it’s real, it’s just cold-blooded killing.
She nodded somewhat glumly.
“Okay,” he said, “that was a downer, wasn’t it? Let’s get out of here and get back to the hometown. Have a nice dinner. Then tomorrow we can go mountain climbing.”
“You got it.”
They turned and walked out, and then Reilly said, “You know what? That sort of sniper queasiness you just mentioned, that’s late, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean nobody felt that way after World War II. That was a Vietnam thing.”
“I suppose. After Vietnam, I got drunk for fifteen years or so, so I don’t exactly recall.”
“Maybe the same thing happened here after Afghanistan. Before, ‘partisan sniper’ was a popular subgenre, but as a new generation came along, the authorities or whoever decided to downplay it.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Maybe there’s a room in this very museum full of sniper art.”
“Well,” said Bob, “let’s find somebody to ask.”
CHAPTER 24
Chortkiv
The Bridge
JULY 1944
The tank lumbered closer, impervious to the clangs and prangs and dings of the parachutist bullets, which glanced off, harming only the dull green paint job. The T-34 was a monster, a thirty-six-ton concoction of steel domes resting on immense treads, capable of crushing anything it chose to roll itself over. Yet it, too, was vulnerable, with a tendency to burst into flame if appropriately pricked. But nobody had told this tank sergeant.